Hunger's Brides (54 page)

I saw her only a few more times that year, 1993, mostly off campus. By then it was clear that I had quite abysmally failed to get through to her about her methods and their dangers. Folk etymologies, metaphorical free association, a madness for synthesis unchecked by the slightest analytical scruple. In her raptures of research she was the professional sceptic's worst nightmare, the empiricist's anti-Christ in miniature. It had been my responsibility to counsel her against all this—more aggressively. Or no, not more aggressively, but earlier.

She did register for graduate studies in comparative literature in the fall of 1993, as I had urged her to do. As far as I can determine, she never showed up. But before she quit school and then vanished into Mexico a year later, she took what remained of her waning interest in the twentieth century and transferred it to me. Pretty much exclusively.

I had only wanted a quiet life lived in scepticism, infidelity and doubt. But as she had intended, my simple life started to take its own sharp turns. She was building a bear pit to my size, baiting me with morsels I was sure to find choice, daring me to step inside. But even when I realized this, I still hadn't the slightest inkling I might one day follow her to Mexico. My flight would reach Mexico City, via London, from the northeast. Months earlier Beulah's flight had come in from the northwest….

D
ELTA
        

[10 Dec 94]

O
N BEHALF OF OUR
C
APTAIN
and cabin crew, thank you for flying Delta. Delta for change. Miss, don't forget your tourist card, we'll be landing soon.

Focus the nozzle feel coolness jet over this, my friendly face in these our open skies. I am your companion your sister your Canadian neighbour, I am just like you. Peace, sleep, hope, delta for destiny. A new beginning, a return to the aleph, the whole universe a tiny ball an atom-wide inside my mind. Infinitesimal perfect point I see you.

fixed.

  Unmoving

    axial.

      whole.

Look. Aztec country, Aztlan, ancestral home of the Chichimeca … this cold barbarian desert … jut and thrust of burnt-sugar breakers and ashen washes, lapping a smoke-blue shore.

Horizon spectrum-shifts from smoke blue to dirty purple to brown. Begins the city, endless adobe ruins tonsuring the hillcrowns. Below, the imperial city of Mexico … twenty minutes, now thirty of jet commute and still no downtown … the scale of staggering sprawl, all the world's most ancient shanty towns—ringing Cairo, Babylon, Troy, Tollan—all bulldozed stunned ajumble. No light, pavement, water, plan—a million hovels fed on pure proximity to empire.

Ladies and gentlemen we are coming in to land….

Turn.

Level.

Down.

Airport taxi.
¿Á dónde, señorita?
To a hotel. See his rearview sneer. We have many hotels in Mexico. Cheap, near the centre, you choose I don't care.

Keep the change—no you can't come upstairs.

He's brought me to a brothel, Welcome my international friend! Funhouse of the most antic guild—hark to midday whorehumping through the guilty walls to left and right. So this is
la siesta
, Mexico City style.
Olé
. Overhead TV ever-tuned to the Playboy channel no subtitles no subtleties for bilingual lubricities in stereo.

5
P.M
. Take a plankwalk through the teeming streets. Return room key to the evening deskclerk, startle-eyed, concerned. Do you know where you are
señorita?
This is not a hotel for you. Moanrush of air through the doors / traffic blare. Walk left or right?—what difference will it make in 2294?

Walk down the road past idling rushhour cars, bumper to bumper, through backstreets choked with the parked, double parked—their purgatorial pretense of motion / a life-sentence to commute.
¿Taxi jovencita?

I walk these streets people calling out to each other, to me.
I know I must be here—people stop and talk to me.
²⁴
How sweetly strange to hear to speak my fathertongue after so many silent aeons in the Dominion of Forgetting. Our White Eden of Pretend.

How strange a thing it is to speak aloud sing along shout take words out of the ear into the mouth. To share them out, like bread.

How different here—you must speak and speak and speak, be by your own tongue remade. No selfserve no takeout no safeway to supermarket. Eat in. Speak and be served.
Háblame, dime, diga señorita. Para servirle, a sus órdenes, mi amor. At your service, my love …
how unlike servitude they make it seem. What a joy to speak like this—sweet tongue I remember you. I want to speak to talk to everyone. I will know you all, all 100 million souls—headcount of America before Cortés.

Walk to the corner, a juice vendor, her emporium one mangled shopping cart. Tiny leatherfaced indian, four feet tall, tired her eyes but warm.
Juguito, mi hija?
A little juice, my daughter? Her juice bar just a long-handled hand-press nailed to a plank. Three sallowgreen oranges left in the cart. Half-price if I sell these I can go home, I live far from here. Thank you, young Miss, you are kind, if you come tomorrow I will give you two for one.

Deft draw and slice / swift hemispheric pivot of the world-is-her-orange / pressclank and hissquish / wristed discard of pip and pith / filtered and flourished martini pour.

These sad sallow-cheeked oranges burst with bright sweet
juice
.

Her eyes see my eyes' surprise. Impassive plank wipe of dignified hygiene, white rag returned to bleach. Delicious. Solemn nod at this my tribute. Another,
por favor …
si será tan amable
.

Are you here for the day of Our Mother, Guadalupe?

Yes
señora
, my quiet answer.

Then go with god tomorrow,
mi hijita
.

Y
es, she promised her protection—the protection of a monarch—yet what could I possibly need protecting from here? For surely there could be nothing left to fear as the favourite, the indispensable handmaiden to the Vice-Queen of the Imperial Court of New Spain….

Every winter, elegant ambassadors from the capitals of Europe set sail, ears ringing with tales of New Spain—Mexico City! streets paved with silver, its poorest beggar better fed than the King of France.

The story is well-known: Cortés's men weeping at first glimpse of the city that now lies beneath these stones. These same men on the eve of the Conquest then toured as Moctezuma's guests the wondrous place they were about to sack. And though they had already seen many marvels in many lands, still more men wept to see the central market. For its variety and colour, its cleanliness and order, for the sheer generosity of a soft continent offering herself at their feet.

Today it cheers me to imagine those hard-handed conquerors sobbing like little children; for now, at the height of the shipping season from the Philippines, weekly mule trains from Acapulco totter into market under fragrant loads of pepper and clove from the Isles of Spice. Bolts of silk, crates of porcelain and bright lacquerwork from Cathay. From the south, the last delicate figurines of gold from Chile and silver from Perú. Then by December the first shipping sails in from the East. From Africa, ivory and diamonds, slaves and hides, Arabian incense, balsam and carpets. From Europe, wines and knives, fabrics and olive oil … All these distant wonders come now to contend with the local wares: here blankets, turquoise and walnuts, there cotton tapestries and quilted jackets, cloaks woven of iridescent quetzal plumes, jars of Yucatan honey—scented of orange, papaya, mango—bubbling black chocolate, blazing bushels of flowers, broad baskets of spiced and roasted grasshoppers …

Scarcely can humankind have known such an intermingling of colours and flavours, scents and textures—and sounds. Today as I wander one last time lost and as though drunk through the winding alleys of plunder, the air fairly ripples with the soft murmur of Indian voices, the
cries of hawkers, squawking parrots and caged songbirds, a donkey's bray, an aristocrat's mocking laugh, the tocsin of an anvil …

Within weeks of crossing over from Spain some of our courtiers, accomplished veterans of the amatory combats of Europe, can be heard in public declaring—with a sincerity astonishing in professional flatterers, astonishing even to themselves—that nowhere are there women so beautiful as those of Mexico; and overheard in private lamenting that never again will they enjoy the same surfeit of sensation, never again the same intensity of desire as here, in America. They have known such hungers.

Here at court the new envoys marvel indulgently that the fashions of Mexico should lag so little behind those of Paris, even down to the cork-soled slippers with the half-moon buckles that were all the rage less than a year ago, and marvel that the necklines should dip deeper than in Madrid, that the lace should be so fine. But while our gallants flatter the Europeans with their evenings, their nights they consecrate to the negresses, the mulattas, and particularly to the
zambas
†
—cinnamon-skinned, the most exotic of all. Through the shops and avenues they glide like dark swans, trailing scents of Nubian civet and Syrian spikenard, swans collared in jade and lapis, braceletted with garnets from Ormuz, rubies from Ceylon and Sicilian coral. Dark swans alighting from mahogany carriages they themselves have bought—along with their freedom—through the wicked application of their special virtues.

And so it is that here at the palace the emissaries of the Old World to the New consider it part miracle, part scandal, when the rare priest dies attestably a virgin.

So beautiful herself, and as exotic, with her pure white hair, her blue eyes of an Orient cat, the new Vice-Queen too is fascinated by these creatures. She acknowledges the most exquisite as we pass them in the street, on a whim summons one of the most elegantly attired to the palace for an audience. The Vice-Queen clears the reception hall.

She wonders—her curiosity does not seem entirely idle—if a titled courtesan might make her way here, as a certain down-at-heels Duchess has been able to do in Madrid. They talk, while I put in not so much as a word. Practical matters of prices and services, of domestic arrangements and security, now medicines … Leonors smiling blue eyes never leave mine long—my face is hot, my head spins to hear the questions she matter-of-factly asks.

“Oh there is money enough,” she yawns when the woman has been shown out, “but there are as yet too few gentlemen in your lovely Mexico with whom to consort not-too-dishonourably.”

I do not know which to find more breathtaking, the questions or the cool calculus in her findings. But at fifteen I come too quickly to two conclusions of my own: that a palace exists precisely to be a place like no other on earth, and that I exist to live in one.

In the beginning everything fascinates her. And in her company, for the first time in so many years I am free to move through the streets. The Vice-Queen, twenty maids- and ladies-in-waiting, and her guard of cavalry and pikesmen. Our progress raises a furore wherever we pass, often afoot with the carriages in tow. San Francisco Street for gold, San Agustín for silk. The barrio of San Pablo for pottery, Tacuba for iron and steel. Weekly we stop in at the tobacco merchants of Jesús María and, just across the plaza from the palace, at the elegant shops of the Parian, which its Filipino merchants have so proudly styled after the famed Parian of Manila.

One area I do know, between Mercaderes and Calle Pensadores Mexicanos. The booksellers' district. Here too we go often, at first. Here, I lead.

Usually it is Teresa who guides us, the saucy daughter of a wealthy silver merchant of our city and engaged now to a gentleman of Castile. One day for the Vice-Queen's diversion Teresa takes us to the used clothing market, most of whose articles have been stripped from the dead. The day after, we go to El Baratillo, the market for stolen goods and contraband. At the entrance, the Captain of the Vice-Queen's guard balks. Teresa coaxes, flirts and finally cajoles him in but later, as we approach the zone of las Celestinas, the houses of the courtesans, his objections are not so easily overcome. The accounts of the good man's public dressing-down by our Vice-Queen swiftly make the rounds.

On the way back, we pass a convent where a
sopa boba
†
is being ladled out before a long file of indigents circling the walls. Leonor stops and ladles soup for two hours, busies us handing out cups, sends kitchen scraps every day for a month.

The people laugh to see, one Sunday at the cathedral, a servant fetching a flagon of wine back to her screened box. At her side I laugh, too—at the minor miracle of laughter in a cathedral. But not everyone finds this so delightful. For some, inviting a
zamba
to the palace was already the last straw—a prostitute, her crime punishable by death. The whispers of
outraged civic virtue reach us even here now—whispers, Leonor remarks, from the thin lips of those women among the Creole gentry who got there through marrying up, and who give as little satisfaction at court as they are accustomed to giving in lower quarters. And so they have turned—dire and severe—to the Church:
These harlots of Babylon must have their wings clipped, lest Mexico become a modern Gomorrah …
&c., &c.