Hunger's Brides (79 page)

“HELLO?”

“Ms. Limosneros?”

“Lee-mos-NEHR-os.”

“Sorry. Uh, good news. We've just received two books for you on inter-library loan.”

“Octavio Paz?”

“And another in Spanish. Something about psychoanalysis of a ‘Juana Inés.'”

“I'll be right down.”

“No real hurry. We can hold them for you if you'd prefer to come in during the week.”

“I said I'll be right there….”

Or so someone reading Beulah's research notes might imagine the call. Though her diary entry tells a slightly different story, her notes here mark the end of an eternity of waiting for Octavio Paz's book to come. Arriving with it was a book she would come to loathe: Fredo Arias de la Canal's
Intento de psicoanálisis de Juana Inés…
. From the title alone, Beulah must have had an inkling: the unctuous familiarity of calling the subject by her given names, as if to say, our Juana Inés, or his, to do with as he pleased. And of course Beulah's antipathy towards psychoanalysts will already be clear.

Sunday at the public library. A first foray into new territory—smaller, and less anonymous than the university's MacKimmie Library. People unaccustomed to her appearance and less harried than the university crowd would be turning to look at her. At a desk to one side of the check-out counters, a man, perhaps the same clerk as on the phone, placed two forms before her.

“Why has everything taken so long?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why has it been so long?”

“The books can come from anywhere in North America. Sometimes they have to be put on recall.”

“But it shouldn't take
this
long.”

“Miss, if you would like the books, please fill out the forms. If not,
we'll send the books back. Which will it be?”
Prepared to stomach any humiliation, she filled out the forms.

“You understand they're due back in three weeks unless a patron of the original library recalls them sooner?”

“I read your forms, didn't I?”

“Do you understand this?” he asked, placing a restraining hand on the books.

“Yes.”

It would have been all she could do not to snatch them out of his thin-fingered hands. In other circumstances she might have stopped to savour the heft and solidity of Octavio Paz's
Sor Juana;
she might have inspected more closely Arias's cheap glue-bound edition and discarded it right there.

[25 Apr. 1993]

… tumult of sunlight and wind. False spring. Four days a warm chinook wind arcs down over the mountains. Sky a swift hovering without wings, warm mother's breath too-close, exultant. Citizens shuffle outside obedient, muddled—stand in the wind, turn, walk this way and that, rise up on hind legs blink stupidly at the sun.

Walk down along river
. One rodent-thought crackling through a thousand edgy brains—they stroll like regular prairiedog titans beside a stream deceived by false hopes of spring. SeaCow too walks down to the river flesh jiggling with each sodden step. Stands an instant above the water shot through with sunlight / disembodied clean. Ice-bound banks. Liquid rill of cool mint-green. The path bends through a stand of birch leafless and stark / fractures of shadows darkshards and light. A rutted mound of slush slumps across the path, tilts to the river's unsteady brink. Black plane of ice—a skew a crash to knees near toppling down the otterslide—hand outthrust—pudgy outrigger mulched in slimy leaves / thaw of mud and dogshit. This hatred of dogs. Massive heaving lurching to her feet—wipe it clean
wipe it clean
. Scrapes the stinking mess off with a stick. Looks down.

Wedged below—ajostle in ice blocks, green rushing water—a young doe's battered carcass. Modest feet tucked to a bloated belly, forelegs frail as insect wings. Neckflesh chafed bare, a marblepink finish / high gloss and raw. Draw queasy lungfuls of air, quell it quench this urgent thirst / to slip to the water's edge lay hot cheeks against the cool cool
marble—someone might see someone might see. One last linger and glance at the bloated carcass … SeaCow moves on.

Ahead the Eau Claire mall-called-Market / this riverside regatta this redsea on rollers—bikes skateboards babystrollers. But parting them now, lofty, stately, slow-haloed in sunlight a golden couple. SeaCow stands an instant watching him, stupidly happy to be near. A bearded god beside his swollen-bellied lioness turning—smiling at some goddish jest he's made—to kiss the grey-streaked beard. Her belly an egg's perfect curve, breasts majestic full to suckle unborn heroes.

He leans so close, mastered by love. See her at last so blond beautiful so perfect with him—
look at them
together—don't look away—it was just a crush anyway—feel the heartswell eggshell ache of shattering ribcage. Swift flensed eyeflayed SeaCow turns away yet across a flaming gulf a mind's-eye-wide still sees, sees the lioness reach down / draw from between perfect lion thighs the baby hero. Lifts him the child by the feet—high Tantalus! severs the fateful cord with gleaming feline teeth. Licks her son's bloody stump with a roughtongue flick. Amniotic sap she sucks from the stout little lungs / holds him up laughing steaming lustily in the sun … lifts slick lips to kiss the bearded god-sire rough on the mouth.

O perfect trinity! O circle self-sufficient—bonded tight the family thermonuclear. At last, she, the-profane-watcher-who-contaminates-and-defiles, blinds her sightless eyes, retakes the sodden body returns to a mind stripped to one Truth: To everything she must submit. And so submits. And so endures. Everything.

No more make believe.

T
here is a house from whose top floor, and looking south, one may see the last of the arches of the aqueduct where it spills into the basin of the Salto de Agua. The house is large, one of only two on that block, and without adornments of tilework or cornices or coats of arms to call attention to itself. The two gates leading to its courtyard are backed with heavy canvasses, to deny the passerby so much as a glance of the interior. Carriages come and go frequently, but at night.

The servants' entrance is deeply recessed, down a passageway tunnelled with an ivy oddly untamed for a house so well kept. A tall, strongly built woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in the plain brown
sayuela
of a convent or hospital domestic, has walked swiftly yet indirectly to the house: east, past the convent of San José of the Discalced Carmelites, then several blocks south, weaving gradually west among the corrals and outbuildings of the city stockyards and stables. Once, she briefly halts and reaches between the rails of a corral to feed two crab-apples to a colt that comes to the fence at first sight of her. She hurries on along the canal of the Merced, crossing west over a bridge three blocks south of San Jerónimo, wending north and now west again to enter this passageway. A door opens at the first knock. She is taller by half a head than the elderly porter, and seems taller still by reason of a wild mane of waist-length hair tamed at the nape with several turns of orange ribbon.

She is shown upstairs. He is standing a step back from the window, the drapes drawn back just sufficiently to see the pure water of the aqueduct fall in a long clear muscle, a fold of silk. In contrast the room is dark. Turning, he beckons her to the plain wooden chair and seats himself comfortably upon the purple velvet divan facing it. The plush is of a shade very close to the piping and cincture of his Lenten cassock. She sits without moving, looking slightly past his face, as unhurriedly he studies her. His hair is a pale brown, the forehead high and broad, the crown of the head slightly flattened. His features are fine, the long slender brows slightly knit, as with a hint of temper. The eyes are large and dark. The nose is strong, the cheekbones wide. The jaws taper to a frail point of chin beneath a small-lipped mouth. Above it, a charcoal line of
moustache. The pinkish icing of a burn scar shows just above the high collar. Only after several moments does he speak.

The voice is a sweet tenor.

“Convent life seems to agree with you. Who would have thought? In other ways too, I feel you coming along nicely. Your handwriting is more like hers all the time. And your style—she has been working with you to improve it, hasn't she….”

She does not respond.

“Let's not begin awkwardly. Has she or has she not?”

“Yes.”

“It is only right that someone with so many correspondents, and of such calibre, should have a secretary. Someone discreet for her messages, someone for delicate purchases, books…. What was the purpose of your outing today?”

“To come here.”

“No, what did you
tell
her? Come. Tell me.”

“Something I needed to do for my family.”

“Not untrue. Clever. And she asked you no more about it….”

“No.”

“Excellent. Trust and consideration. I would say she has begun to like you. Would you say she has begun to like you?”

“Don't.”

“Does she
trust
you?”

“I don't know.”

“Of course she does. May I see the list of books she has had you purchase this month? It was not in your last letter.”

“I forgot.”

“But you have it now.”

“I haven't made it up yet.”

“Now you see? this is the problem. The handwriting is good, the style is more literate all the time, but the reports themselves have become … disappointing. They lack detail. They are not concrete. Detail is exactly what I ask of you.”

“I can't do this.”

“But you can. You have more than proved yourself capable with many others.”

“That isn't—”

“You can't do this
anymore.”

“No.”

“You can't do this to her. Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“To her
anymore…
. Answer me.”

“Yes.”

“Those things which you have, nonetheless, done until now.”

“Yes.”

“You are too hard on yourself. I have no doubt that you still can. It is the only reason you are here now, in Mexico, after all. Where your duties in this regard are, overall, less onerous than in Puebla …?
Are they?”

“Yes.”

“It is good that you display loyalty. To earn her trust you must have this quality. Do display it. Just not here. For me, to me, but do not display it
with
me.”

“Manuel, I—”

“You do not help your cause by calling me that. We have an agreement, and that part of it is finished. We do still have an agreement? Unless your feelings for your dear sisters have changed. Have things changed?”

“How
could
they have?
¿En este mundo de la chingada, las cosas—cómo van a cambiar?”

“I
am prepared to endure a little petulance, because I value your sincerity. A useful quality. Perhaps not much frightens you, after the life you have led. Though you must admit it was more frightening before we met. But
they
do frighten. I think they
are
frightened. I have explained to them that they may not be able to stay in Puebla much longer. They are doing very well in school, though they may falter a bit now. I have brought their letters, as I agreed to. You may read everything here before you leave. I think you will find them enjoyable. Even the little one traces out her letters quite charmingly. And can sing out her whole alphabet, too. If you could see them, there is such a bloom on their innocence just now…. So. Our agreement stands, nothing has changed.”