Thrall (2 page)

           with the Good Book's

    frontispiece—his own name

inscribed on the page.

After a series of
casta
paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, c. 1715

 

1. DE ESPAÑOL Y DE INDIA PRODUCE MESTISO

 

The canvas is a leaden sky

    behind them, heavy

with words, gold letters inscribing

    an equation of blood—

 

this plus this equals this
—as if

    a contract with nature, or

a museum label,

    ethnographic, precise. See

 

how the father's hand, beneath

    its crown of lace,

curls around his daughter's head;

    she's nearly fair

 

as he is—
calidad.
See it

    in the brooch at her collar,

the lace framing her face.

    An infant, she is borne

 

over the servant's left shoulder,

    bound to him

by a sling, the plain blue cloth

    knotted at his throat.

 

If the father, his hand

    on her skull, divines—

as the physiognomist does—

    the mysteries

 

of her character, discursive,

    legible on her light flesh,

in the soft curl of her hair,

    we cannot know it: so gentle

 

the eye he turns toward her.

    The mother, glancing

sideways toward him—

    the scarf on her head

 

white as his face,

    his powdered wig—gestures

with one hand a shape

    like the letter C.
See,

 

she seems to say,

    
what we have made.

The servant, still a child, cranes

    his neck, turns his face

 

up toward all of them. He is dark

    as history, origin of the word

native:
the weight of blood,

    a pale mistress on his back,

 

heavier every year.

 

2. DE ESPAÑOL Y NEGRA PRODUCE MULATO

 

Still, the centuries have not dulled

the sullenness of the child's expression.

 

If there is light inside him, it does not shine

through the paint that holds his face

 

in profile—his domed forehead, eyes

nearly closed beneath a heavy brow.

 

Though inside, the boy's father stands

in his cloak and hat. It's as if he's just come in,

 

or that he's leaving. We see him

transient, rolling a cigarette, myopic—

 

his eyelids drawn against the child

passing before him. At the stove,

 

the boy's mother contorts, watchful,

her neck twisting on its spine, red beads

 

yoked at her throat like a necklace of blood,

her face so black she nearly disappears

 

into the canvas, the dark wall upon which

we see the words that name them.

 

What should we make of any of this?

Remove the words above their heads,

 

put something else in place of the child—

a table, perhaps, upon which the man might set

 

his hat, or a dog upon which to bestow

the blessing of his touch—and the story

 

changes. The boy is a palimpsest of paint—

layers of color, history rendering him

 

that precise shade of in-between.

Before this he was nothing: blank

 

canvas—before image or word, before

a last brush stroke fixed him in his place.

 

3. DE ESPAÑOL Y MESTIZA PRODUCE CASTIZA

 

How not to see

    in this gesture

 

the mind

    of the colony?

 

In the mother's arms,

    the child, hinged

 

at her womb—

    dark cradle

 

of mixed blood

    (call it
Mexico
)—

 

turns toward the father,

    reaching to him

 

as if back to Spain,

    to the promise of blood

 

alchemy—three easy steps

    to purity:

 

from a Spaniard and an Indian,

    
a mestizo;

 

from a mestizo and a Spaniard,

    
a castizo;

 

from a castizo and a Spaniard,

    
a Spaniard.

 

We see her here—

    one generation away—

 

nearly slipping

    her mother's careful grip.

 

4. THE BOOK OF CASTAS

 

Call it the catalog

    of mixed bloods, or

 

    the book of naught:

           not Spaniard, not white, but

 

mulatto-returning-backwards
(or

    
hold-yourself-in-midair
) and

 

    the
morisca,
the
lobo,
the
chino,

           
sambo, albino,
and

 

the
no-te-entiendo—
the

    
I don't understand you.

 

    Guidebook to the colony,

           record of each crossed birth,

 

it is the typology of taint,

    of stain: blemish: sullying spot:

 

    that which can be purified,

           that which cannot—Canaan's

 

black fate. How like a dirty joke

    it seems:
what do you call

 

    
that space between

           the dark geographies of sex?

 

Call it the
taint
—as in

    
T'aint one and t'aint the other
—

 

    illicit and yet naming still

           what is between. Between

 

her parents, the child,

    
mulatto-returning-backwards,

 

    cannot slip their hold,

           the triptych their bodies make

 

in paint, in blood: her name

    written down in the
Book

 

    
of Castas
—all her kind

           in thrall to a word.

After the painting by Diego Velázquez, c. 1619

 

She is the vessels on the table before her:

the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher

clutched in her hand, the black one edged in red

and upside-down. Bent over, she is the mortar,

and the pestle at rest in the mortar—still angled

in its posture of use. She is the stack of bowls

and the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hung

by a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundled

in it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand.

She's the stain on the wall the size of her shadow—

the color of blood, the shape of a thumb. She is echo

of Jesus at table, framed in the scene behind her:

his white corona, her white cap. Listening, she leans

into what she knows. Light falls on half her face.

After a chalk drawing by J. H. Hasselhorst, 1864

 

Whoever she was, she comes to us like this:

    lips parted, long hair spilling from the table

 

like water from a pitcher, nipples drawn out

    for inspection. Perhaps to foreshadow

 

the object she'll become: a skeleton on a pedestal,

    a row of skulls on a shelf. To make a study

 

of the ideal female body, four men gather around her.

    She is young and beautiful and drowned—

 

a Venus de' Medici, risen from the sea, sleeping.

    As if we could mistake this work for sacrilege,

 

the artist entombs her body in a pyramid

    of light, a temple of science over which

 

the anatomist presides. In the service of beauty—

    to know it—he lifts a flap of skin

 

beneath her breast as one might draw back a sheet.

    We will not see his step-by-step parsing,

 

a translation:
Mary
or
Katherine
or
Elizabeth

    to
corpus, areola, vulva.
In his hands

 

instruments of the empirical—scalpel, pincers—

    cold as the room must be cold: all the men

 

in coats, trimmed in velvet or fur—soft as the down

    of her pubis. Now one man is smoking, another

 

tilts his head to get a better look. Yet another,

    at the head of the table, peers down as if

 

enthralled, his fist on a stack of books.

    In the drawing this is only the first cut,

 

a delicate wounding: and yet how easily