Hunger's Brides (161 page)

Núñez is coming!
Next Sunday
—the report reverberates through the convent cells like a shot. As though it's been confirmed—it hasn't been confirmed?! My growing desperation. He will be here
next week
, ten days … then it'll be too late, it will have started.

To bring Juana news of the world I need to leave this place! … just an hour or two each day. Nothing has ever prevented me. Permission of course I need. The Prioress has already awarded me a lot of liberty, but this?

Enter the womanly conspiracies of kitchens: Vanessa calls on me to join Asunción for the shopping when old Concepción pulls up lame. A recurrence of gout is blamed….

As we approach the market, Asunción turns to me and asks, well what are you waiting for?—just be back in two hours.

Free!—that's how it feels, though I know it really isn't. The eyes of men all over me, the oldest game still awaiting me like a dog lolling at the door.

That first day I just walk and walk, hardly seeing, just feeling the wind all over me.

Carlos says I must make your America sing to you like a siren. Just as you've made it sing for me. But what does someone like me have to offer you? What clumsy lyrics can I lay at the feet of someone who has
brought the world so much beauty?

I offer you every sunny morning since the day we met …

Every rain-laved dawning these past five years. Each high-waisted noon, each stooping dusk. Five years of full moons high-risen. Five years of brief-locked eyes and stolen glances quickly broken. Of breathless grazings, staged accidents and soft collidings. Of slow-drawn baths, petals swanning across a tile-bound tub. The plump pad and whisper of languid towellings.

Antonia Mora, you will make a poet one day
. No Juana. Not even you can make it so.

At the market I buy a little bracelet for her wrist. Will she accept, will she refuse to wear it? A string of little silver bells and the shells of tiny snails, a talisman to chime and charm and faintly mutter, to fill the silence as she works.

The bracelet was my second choice. I knew she would never wear the brooches I saw the Mayans selling: live scarab beetles, pierced and tethered to a pin by a thin, golden chain….

According to Carlos, in the rituals of the ancient Mexicans the brush of certain words across the vocal chords can be more important than their meaning, and the soft shush of shell anklets more significant than a word—gesture translated into sound, word into thing. Meanings that change, subject to the occasion.

Núñez's approach, murmurs massing like clouds. Ten days, now five. Five years of our lives telescoped down through these five remaining days. I refuse to let her out of my sight for one instant. And even as I feel her drawing away from me, I touch her at every opportunity.

For the first time in two years I sleep in her bed, sleep there each night, holding her. She strokes my hair.

Tell me another Carlos … another engine of torture. The cap they call the Cat's Claws. Carlos submits to describe it.

Another morning. Another day gone. A rising tide of panic. And fury—what is left to say? What's left that she'll still listen to from me?

And so the game begins. A game she seems to find touching in a way I can't quite grasp. Each day back from my staged outings to the marketplace, I tell her a series of lies—fables, say, with at least one containing a grain of truth.

The game: guess what I saw today. Heard, said, did, touched, smelled, tasted. Guess which life I lived, bore witness to.

(For you, I mean.) This part goes unsaid.

Close your eyes….

… The wobble of a newborn colt …

A single thread of tobacco smoke rising fine, then fanning into a plume that bulges and checks and eddies as my finger passes through …

The starched whisk of a black-pinioned bird past the window, fan tips across stone …

Cold stone floor against my back,
pulquería
air a fermented stew, raucous songs, taste of
pulque
wrapped viscous right round the tongue, like a burnt milk's clotted skin….

Holding out my closed hand as if to drop a little coin into hers, I ask, guess Juana, which of these things I've brought back for you.

Three days. I can't think, can't see properly, a kind of film before my eyes. I can't help her, can't help anyone like this! We're running out of time—hundreds of possibilities to try. Find the word that breaks the spell. Makes her look up and see….

Carlos help me! His face haggard, drained of colour. The last few days of waiting are harder on him. At least I get to
see
her. All he can do is come to me, every day now, and wait.

Maybe the problem, Antonia, is that you're looking for a single truth. Juana said something to me once—this should be interesting to you, who play the clavichord so beautifully. Look at the clavichord's harmonics. We approach the truth not head-on but in tangents, he says.

What's that supposed to mean?

Press the keys. The metal tangents strut across the fretted strings, producing not a single note but a chord. The same set of strings, depending on where the tangents strike them, can be made to play several different chords at once….

Tangential truths. Harmonics keyed to chord and discord. Gradually comprehensible to the patient ear….

No. I am running out of time.

Guess
, Juana. Guess what happened on the way to the marketplace. What took place, fell beneath time's relentless sway.

The gravel rasp of scissors slicing through a plait of hair
.

All the colours called green.

The sensations called pain
.

Shark-skin roughness of a young guard's emery cheek, there at the top where a woman's thighs first swell to meet.

Sound of a fist opening, frisk of fingernails across a callused palm
.

Smell of poverty and darkness, low-ceilings. A public executioner sitting, leaning over his mother's bed, alcatraz lilies crushed in a pale, muscled fist, rust-red loam beneath his broken nails. The soft plat of white petals striking the stone floor.

Against a hill in the middle distance, a torch flickering forgotten under the noon-day sun
.

Guess.

How can you bear to have Father Núñez be your confessor again?
To have the same confessor as the Archbishop?

A ghost of a smile crosses your lips—you think it's ironic, don't you. Well I call it sickening! Do you want to have to tell him your innermost thoughts, your dreams, your every project—about Isis? Tonantzin? About … but you've just seen I can't quite bring myself to mention Sappho's name. Not after what I've done.

Juana you know he'll go running straight to the Archbishop with everything you say. I'm shouting now: So when Núñez arrives from confessing you, will the Archbishop smell you on him, over the odours of their own so-piously-unwashed bodies?—stench of sulphur and cheese. Will Núñez use the scent of you to stir that madman into a helpless frenzy? Goat eyes rolling back toward his heaven, nostrils quivering with dragon-stench—the groin-thickening odour of Eve—his own scabby back the dragon's scales—

Flail, Jesuit, flail.
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