Hunger's Brides Read Online Free PDF Page B

beside me now, how could I regret that miracle? I was up in the pass riding on a narrow trail when I met him. A natural horseman!” This was a thing Grandfather knew how to admire. “Your father is descended from the great Basque whalers. They crossed many times, you know, before Columbus ever thought of it.” He found it deeply honourable that Father had come to America to restore his family’s noble fortunes.
    â€œIt was always my great hope that they would marry. The love at first was obvious. But when your father did not come back for Isabel’s lying-in this last time …”
    Was that the time when Abuelo came to bring us down from the cell? Yes it was, and yes, my head was
very
angelic.
    â€œI am not sure my daughter has yet abandoned her hopes. But never mention this. She would rather die than confess it.”
    The great current of his talk faltered then. Isabel called, and for once I skipped gladly down to the house. All that day I was in high spirits, playing on the patio with the others—my sisters and Amanda, and the younger children of some of the field hands. Usually I found such play difficult, though I loved to observe the others from the roof, admiring their capacity to invent new games on the spot, then enjoy those games well past the point when I might have stopped.
    That day, Father was sitting at a table under the arches in the shade of the laurel. Beside his hand on the table rested a little
cántaro
of cool water, its top covered by a lace mantilla, its clay sides sweating in the heat. Hehimself had brought it from a journey to a land called Guadalajara. The flask was made of
barro comestible
, the speciality of potters in a village far to the west. One could
eat
the clay when the water was gone, a notion that enchanted me.
    Even slouched in a chair, he seemed coiled to spring onto the back of a horse. He had a quick mind and was often amused by my little offerings, but the trick was holding his attention. I thought to ask him how the
cántaro
was able to keep the water so much cooler than the surrounding air. The thing was somehow to connect this to horses. Did he think, as I did, that by allowing the sides to sweat, like a horse, it dispensed its heat faster than the air could replace it? Or was there something about evaporation itself that cools? Since dogs didn’t sweat in the heat but panted, were they panting sweat?
    I was an idiot—what did he care about dogs?
    But phantoms were perhaps formed of vapour after all, as was sometimes said. For when one entered a room did not everyone feel cold? So why oh why did I now stand before this one, flushed and sweating and babbling? I was about to ask, but my paladin of smoke was so
absorbed
in watching Josefa and Amanda playing with spinning tops beside me at the well. And yet I had no sooner observed the patterns being traced on the flagstones than—impelled by this madness of mine for hidden forms 4 —I called for some flour to be scattered there in order to better apprehend the effortless
motus
of the spherical form; whose impulse, persisting even when free and independent of its cause, 5 should—it seemed to me then—be mathematically describable….
    Exactly how I conveyed all this, I can’t recall. He only blinked those great brown eyes at me and shook his head a little, like a horse adjusting to a bridle.
    But later that day he did take me out for a short ride on his big roan. So I supposed I was partly successful. When he swung me down, I curtsied.
“Gracias, señor caballero.”
    â€œOh, but it was my pleasure,” he said and bowed. “And anyway,
señorita
, I owed you a ride….”
    He remembered
. He remembered.
    That night I lay awake well into the night, sitting up finally to watch the slopes of the volcano glisten in the moonlight and thinking about the geometry of pyramids.
We were going to the mountain. We were going to the library
. Perhaps Father