Hunger's Brides by W. Paul Anderson Read Free Book Online

known, and let me answer.
    Blinking, Xochitl looked from Amanda to me, to Amanda again. “Daughters,” she said gently, “you make my face wide.”
    â€œIt means she’s proud,” said Amanda quietly. Indeed Xochitl’s face was wide and smiling, and her eyes were very bright. And what else did I see there—relief?—but how could Amanda and I have been anything but the greatest of friends?
    Amanda spoke our tongue hesitantly. In her mother’s tongue she was another person—she had come to speak Nahuatl with a fluidity I now lacked. Our family’s language, Castilian, was a sweet deep river of breath, clear water over a streambed of smooth even stones. Nahuatl in the ear was all soft clicks and snicks and collidings of teeth and tongue, like the secret language of sibyls. In the mouth, the canals of the cheeks, Nahuatl was rich, like
atole
—and thick like
pozole!
—yes, that was it, a thick stew. With chunks of the world bobbing in it like meat, and you wanted to
chew
it—but gingerly—anticipating a hardness, a stone or bone shard, against the molars, and …
    But no, that wasn’t quite it either. Until I had tasted
pulque
I would never quite find it.
Pulque
, which wrapped itself like a film, clinging, viscous, to the palate and molars and tongue. That was the sensation of Nahuatl in the mouth. Finding this new love right under my nose was like finding Amanda again.
    More proverbs, more riddles
.
    If I was PolishedEye and Amanda NibbleTooth, what was Grandfather?
    Xochitl barely hesitated.
He had achieved the four hundred
, he had accomplished many things.
    And Xochitl herself? She shook her head. What about Isabel, then.
WoodenLips
.
    What did that mean?—
one of firm words, who cannot be refuted
. Ah. Well. And Father?
    No.
    Please?
No, it was not her place. But Amanda and I badgered her relentlessly. All right, enough.
    Aca icuitlaxcoltzin quitlatalmachica
.
    What?
    Aca icuitlaxcoltzin quitlatalmachica
.
    One who arranges his intestines artistically
. I suspected she had used it ironically but I would put this away as a keepsake, in a quiet place, and work out its meaning myself one day.
    Most of the heat had gone out of the afternoon. I watched the horizon for a while, the colour slowly draining back into the sky. I had glimpsed that a people’s riddles were roads into its world, and our language the mask our face wears. And I now knew riddles to cure seasickness. It was a secret I wondered if the old Basque whalers knew, and if there was hidden somewhere a riddle in my father’s leaving us.
    The road rose and fell more steeply now. I caught a glimpse of two farmhands at the top of the last rise. “What about them,” I said to Xochitl. “Is there a saying for them?”
    She thought for a moment.
“Ompa onquiza’n tlalticpac.”
    â€œThe world … spills out.”
    â€œFor the poor, yes. Spills. From their pockets. And from the rags they wear, they themselves spill….”
    At nightfall we halted in the churchyard in Chimalhuacan. Everything in the carts was caked in a fard of fine white dust, including us, as though we had been made up for a play or some ceremony. Grandfather was on friendly terms with the priest here, which was surprising enough since he was always fuming about the priests he rented the haciendas from. But directly he finished his fulmination, he would cast a guilty eye my way to add, “Do not let that keep you from readingyour Bible, Juanita. It is another El Dorado.” The priest, Father Juan, was a distant relative and had baptized me.
Natural daughter of the Church
. That’s what he put on my baptismal certificate, just as he had for María and Josefa.
    We stayed a day to rest a little and bathe. Amanda and I set off exploring, leaving Josefa and María to wail about the state of their hair. We ducked into the church. It was built of a pinkish-brown
tezontle
cut from