Hunger's Brides (37 page)

There was a kind of solemnity in our nakedness now as we bathed or swam or lay on the dark slate by the waterfall to dry off. Amanda no longer lay splayed to the sun but kept her ankles joined and her arms crossed over the slight swelling of her breasts.

“Have mine changed?” I'd asked anxiously a few days before. I didn't think so at all, whereas her nipples stuck up like raw little chessmen.

“They
have
, I think,” she not-quite insisted. “A little….”

Lunch was almost always on the upper bench, next to the teardrop pool. It was cooler with the mist and more comfortable to sit, where the stone was worn smooth. And when we did grow too warm we made dashes through the icy jet of water bursting from the dry rock face. The game had been Amanda's invention, as the game with the honey cream had been mine. But today she didn't want to play. She said she wasn't feeling well, though she'd been eating like a goat. Yesterday she'd had a nose bleed that wouldn't stop for half an hour. Still, we did not lack for things to do—the falcons from last year were back. We had been watching them for hours each day. Their nest was in a niche above the upper bench, three or four times our height up the face. Soon there came a batch of chicks. We could hear them—even over the crash of water the clamour was riotous whenever one of the parents would swoop back with lunch. A dove, a grouse, a crow, occasionally a water bird. Once, we thought, a kingfisher. What a sight it would have been to see a falcon take a kingfisher as it swiftly skimmed the river.

At first one of the parents would perch at the lip of the rock niche and tear its catch apart for the other, which brooded almost constantly over the nest. We were sure this must be the female, even if falcons didn't seem much like chickens. From the rock she would gather with a precise delicacy gobbets of rent flesh or guts and feed them down into the nest. After a few weeks we could see the chicks, their beaks at least, reach up to take the meat. We thought there were three, and once they were bigger we could see we'd been right. How curious to discover they were entirely white, as though tarred and dipped in fluffy clumps of cotton. Which lent them the most tender, confused expression. They looked like lambs—we had to laugh. But what savage lambs these must grow to be.

By now both adults were constantly bringing these lambs their meat. More than once over the course of our own lunch we'd see each of the parents swing by the niche with a crumpled bird and simply drop it whole into the nest, then fly off again. Within a few more weeks the young presented a reasonable likeness of their parents. Their faces grew fierce and barred, and but for some cottony tufts on their heads,
they were real falcons. They took turns now leaping up to the lip of the niche and spreading their wings in great shows of falcon daring and vainglory…

Amanda and I were almost eleven. María was sixteen, Josefa fourteen. Isabel was spending more time with them now, evenings of sewing and embroidery. Twice a week she took them into town for
la manzana
, with their personal military escort riding along beside them on his dappled gelding. As for this guest of ours, Diego Ruíz had been reaching the hacienda a little earlier each time, often now before Isabel was back from the fields. The lance-captain would let his dog run out with him from the garrison for exercise, a heavy-headed mastiff. If we happened to come in not through the kitchen but through the main portal, the dog's yellow eyes did not stray from us, though the thing never stirred from its master's side unless released.

One evening I went the short way into town with the others. It was the day before Isabel was to take my sisters on a journey to Chalco. Delighted to be getting the hacienda all to ourselves, I agreed to go in and see this legendary
manzana
. But only if Amanda could come. Even Abuelo decided to join us.

Our mother drove, with my sisters next to her, foundering in their farthingales. Amanda and I rode in the cart-bed on a heap of fresh straw and the blankets we would need for the chilly ride home. She wore a white
huipil
, and a green sash and skirt, its hem delicately embroidered, and a heavy cotton
rebozo
. She looked beautiful, a shy queen riding in the bed of our rugged cart. Diego rode his pied grey horse just at Isabel's left shoulder; Grandfather rode behind to keep us company, though such was our rising excitement (or mine) he could hardly get a word in.

For once I would have to agree with my sisters. The
manzana
of Amecameca was the most extraordinary sight, though I'm not sure María or Josefa saw it quite the way I did. We arrived just before sunset.

The little
zócalo
was already crowded. In the arcades about the perimeter all the shops were still open, their lanterns lit. Amazingly, this was a nightly affair, the atmosphere less of excitement than of expectancy. At the plaza's heart pulsed a fountain among the fig trees, beneath whose green eaves spread an array of
tianguis
offering
elotes
and tortillas, tacos and
atole
. The crowns of the trees were filling with
urracas
come to the fountain to drink, then squabble and gossip and roost for the night. The
fountain basin formed a hexagon, and around it were benches, two to a side. Distributed across these—posed like rock formations or mineral accretions—were the village elders, among whom we had arrived in time to find Abuelo a seat. Finding an open seat was not the problem. Getting him to it was. “Don Pedro,
¡qué milagro!
Don Pedro,
tanto gusto en veros.”
At first the men, then the women too, came to pay their respects as he settled in, these seamed and grey-headed ancients in black. They crowded in till he sat as beneath a small, stooped porch of goyles and caryatids.

It started out as a trickle, but soon what must be the region's every last unattached male—anyone able to walk unassisted—had joined all the others in circling the plaza's outer perimeter. Gradually fleshing out a ring just within the bachelor's circle came an almost equal number of their female counterparts. And behind each virgin walked the family, proud and vigilant. In our group María and Josefa went first, holding hands, then Isabel and her lance-captain, then Amanda and I a good long way behind them.

The outer ring,
los machos
,
†
advanced right to left, cross-grain to the setting sun. The inner circle of
las hembras
circled left to right, or viewed from the top—north, east, south, west. It was as if each ring were a cog, but then what was the mechanism? At first I was reminded of the great Ptolemaic
¹⁵
machineries of heavenly congress. Or no, a press, perhaps, for extracting cider
†
… And then it came to me. Here was just such a machine as Pascal had invented only a short time ago, the automatic arithmetical machine whose fame was spreading like a wildfire all across Europe, and even to us. Ha! Now I was truly beginning to enjoy myself, for it was clear that our own Iberian genius had long predated the new Gallic invention. In short, our
manzana
must certainly be a very ancient arithmetical machine for the calculation and apportionment of dowries.

Not just that. Here was a living breathing demonstration of double conic sections just such as I had seen diagrammed by the Alexandrians and emerging now from the swirl like an hourglass—yes, the double conic was
just like an hourglass
, why hadn't I seen it? Two cones joined at their apex as though mirrored but in fact traced by the sightlines—fore and then aft—of any individual on the outer circle as he obsessively follows the progress of a special someone on the inner … follows her from the tangent of her appearance to that of her agonizing, if temporary, vanishing.

And I had seen enough of our lance-captain's dowering to guess at the basic motives and parameters. We may call these Focus, Locus, Vertex, Directrix. F is the dowry—the focus. The directrix (D) is an obtuse, oblique or generally tangential pursuit of F by making a beeline to the means, that is, to the woman in view. The vertex (V), then, will be the true measure of the woman's charms; and the locus (L) will equal the distance between the truth (V) of said charms and any statement praising them in the pursuit of F.

On the elliptical side of the field lies any understatement. But by far the more common of course will be the hyperbolic. Our lance-captain's strategy usually consisted in paying the same compliments to all the females of our house. This, I now realized, executed a cunning double or even triple arc—hyperbolic toward us, and folded within that, a subtle ellipticism toward my mother. In my view, his praises of her beauty, if only from a poetic perspective, had for all his gusto fallen well short of their object. But then what of the parabolic? I wasn't quite certain—surely even the great geometers did not work everything out at once.

To give rhetorical precision to all this romance, one may say that the elliptical comment, parting from the plane of the vertex at an angle shallower than the generator (the angle of first or last glance), will always be too soon, or too late. The hyperbolic comment, on the other hand, cuts the plane of the vertex along the axis at a sharper angle than does either the generator or the elliptic. The maximal amount that can be communicated by the seeker along the outer circle (where it intersects the directrix) will depend upon how close after tangency the woman is sighted, as well as upon distance, relative velocity, her hearing's acuity and, above all, the man's readiness of wit as conveyed by his speed of composition and clarity of elocution. This is speaking in the raw quantitative sense. Qualitatively of course, one word, one glance might suffice.

Though this particular wording may not have come to me then, the images did with very great precision as we went round and round the
manzana
of Amecameca. Eventually I found myself coming to an appreciation
of roulette
, another invention of this devilishly clever Pascal and of which I had only read vague descriptions. I now wondered if that cunning French monk was not a parodist as well, one who had closely studied the Iberian dowry machine in action in Spain, and had thus been led from mere mechanics to certain conclusions about the marriage of geometry, chance and finance in affairs of the heart.

By this time I found myself stopped inside the ladies' circle, with Amanda tugging at my sleeve and the fortunes of so many lovers whirling in the
camera combinatoria
of my head, beginning to open out into an Archimedean spiral …

“You look drunk,” she whispered. “We'd better sit down.”

Our mother took Josefa and María off to Chalco in the morning. We could stay up at Ixayac as long as we liked. After failing to spear a fish in six tries each we generally agreed to return our spear to its hiding place and move on. But today something was holding me there.

The trout
were
, as Xochitl had said. Just not
there
. But maybe they were not there
twice
. If the new geometers were right, light was bent by its entry into a medium of different density, water being obviously denser than air…. And if
I
was right and the vent at the pool bottom was hot, then we had water at two different temperatures and densities. But though Aristotle argued that light followed the shortest route between two points, a refracted trajectory was obviously longer than a straight one. So either he was wrong about the geometry or wrong about the properties of light, or there was something I'd missed…. Had he actually meant shorter in
distance?
Couldn't he have really meant shorter in
time?
If the light travelled at different rates—it might be like a traveller destined to arrive at a certain hour no matter what route he took. And though I knew I hadn't quite unravelled it, I was irresistibly drawn to this riddle of something like Destiny in light….

“Ixpetz, come
on.”

For the second time in less than a day here was Amanda tugging at my arm. My shoulder ached, my whole arm in fact. I must have thrown the spear twenty times and not given her a turn at all. But two throws back I was sure I had nicked one.