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abogado!
—
¡imagínate, Juanita!)
they are in truth led and guided by a woman the Mexicas had sold to the Mayans as a slave. Now she has returned to bring her people, the chosen ones, a very different destiny.
    â€œThe unstable margins of things, indeed—eh, Angelina?”
    The unstable margins of things…. The feature that gives Nepantla its name stands to the east: across the entire east, where the ground is heaved and rutted as by a titan’s wheel of quakes and slides and lava floes. The country of my birth lies across the foothills of two white-tipped volcanoes. Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl. WhiteLady and SmokingStone. One dormant, the other murderously active. As the legend goes, they are lovers from rival tribes. She lies in a drowse of stone—struck down by a wizard’s curse—while he, distraught, stands fuming over her, in a tower of ice and the black rock the Egyptians first called basalt.
    Their slopes are the dark green of pine and cedar. After a rain in the afternoon, which falls as snow at the peaks, the fresh-glazed ice dazzles in the sun’s decline, as the rains drift beyond them like a blue-black scrim. The effect is theatrical yet they are real—one deadly real—and from real stuff fashioned: rock, rain, ice, the very earth. Two immense actors up on the East’s solitary dais. There in the setting sun they blaze up as if footlit by colossal lanterns. In autumn, when the rains come daily, rainbows are commonplace, prosaic as the tremors. And so it is not uncommon for them to be framed, quite perfectly, quite implausibly, under an immense rainbow. As though she has fallen in a bower of shimmering iris …
    Ever since I can remember, ever since making a childish pledge to always live within sight of them, they
are
those lovers, more than they are mountains; they
are
that play, and the play can only be reality itself. This theatre has been my grandfather’s gift to me.
    I craved more time with him. But he took any excuse to be out, away from the place in Nepantla, which he conceded his daughter ran more ably than he ran the hacienda up in the pass. She could outwork any man, as Grandfather sometimes said to reassure himself. She was a force of nature, everywhere at once, startlingly so, like the first burgeoning of spring. Giving orders to Xochitl in the kitchen, riding out to the orchards and cornfields, butchering calves, fretting over lambs, shouting instructions to the
charros
as they bred the horses. All this, the work of a day.
    Father’s company, on the other hand, was too rare a delicacy to crave, which did not keep me from brooding on his absences. Grandfather one day referred to him as an adventurer, and this struck me as a calling of the highest sort. He was like a handsome ghost, a restless paladin of old whose occasional visits were so very vivid and memorable that all the rest seemed a fabrication. One spring day—I might have been four—felt particularly real. He had thrown open the portals and called in to all the girls to come out for horseback rides. They ran happily after him, but I’d been watching from the roof as he had put a fiery roan stallion, stamping and backing and screaming, through its paces. It was that horse he would now have us ride.
    Josefa, and even María who was almost an adult, balked at being hoisted into a saddle that bore every sign of becoming a catapult. Though frightened I sprinted down from the roof, but by then there was Amanda, in my place, looking tiny and demure and being led about so placidly she might as well have been on the back of an enormous roan lamb.
    I felt someone behind me at the door, and turned to find Isabel. In that proud face I thought I’d seen every variation on anger, but this one shaded swiftly into hurt. Which on her I had never seen and did not see for long before she turned away and walked across the courtyard to her room.
    Father had seen her face too. So