The Hummingbird's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

great meals. Wobbly-looking clay tanks full of evil pulque and mezcal. Huge aromatic tobacco leaves wrapped in cloths that looked like big diapers.
    A huge crystalline block of sea salt.
    Among the other small boxes, bags, and crates, Tomás found his prize. A boxed set of Jules Verne’s great adventures:
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers,
and the newest,
Voyage autour du monde en quatre-vingts jours.
    “You will translate,” Tomás told Aguirre, who was trying to chew through a sheet of jujube.
    “Claro que sí,” Aguirre replied as Cayetana’s siren call of agony rose and fell, making the ears of the horses swivel. Far in the distance, the carefully wrapped bride of Swayfeta raised one hand and waved.

    Huila vigorously rubbed her hands together to make her palms hot. You had to have hot hands in this line of work if you were going to do any good.
    Cayetana was lying there naked, her belly run all over with red marks like dead rivers in a desert. Huila had seen two thousand like Cayetana. She put her hot hands on the girl’s belly, and Cayetana gasped. Huila rubbed.
    “There,” she said. “Does that feel good?”
    Cayetana could only grunt.
    Huila nodded.
    “Calma,” she said. “No te apures.” You had to talk to them as if they were skittish horses. “No problems,” Huila assured her. “No worries at all.”
    “My sister,” Cayetana gasped, “calls me a puta.”
    “A puta!”
    “She says I’m a whore.”
    “Hmm.” Huila reached behind her and took a soggy mass of cool wet leaves and pressed it into Cayetana’s opening. “Too bad you aren’t. You’d have some money. A better house to live in than this!”
    “Then I’m not a puta?”
    “Do you believe you are a puta?”
    “No.”
    “Then you are not a puta. Push.”
    “Ay!”
    “Push!”
    “Ay, ay!”
    “Rest.”
    “But Huila —”
    “Rest now.”
    “Huila—I have been bad.”
    Huila snorted.
    “Who hasn’t?”
    “The priest said I was a sinner.”
    “So is he. Now rest.”
    These girls, when the pain started, how they babbled! Huila preferred the old women of twenty-nine or thirty, those pushing out their sixth and seventh babies. They were mostly quiet. Pain was no discovery to them. These little girls, they thought they were the first to ever feel a twinge! It made them go insane. Ay Dios. Huila was getting old and tired of all of it.
    They heard uproar outside, male voices laughing, singing. The wheels of the wagon going by. Cayetana craned up.
    “Just men,” said Huila. She patted Cayetana back down. “Just those damned men. Pay them no mind.” She heated her hands again, and moved them in circles upon the child’s belly. “One day,” she said, “the world will be ruled by women, and things will be different.”
    This comment shocked the two observers more than the birth itself.
    “Forgive me!” Cayetana wailed.
    “For what?”
    “For my sins.”
    “I’m no priest. Go to confession for that. Now let’s have a baby.”
    “Huila!”
    Huila put her hands beneath Cayetana, and thought for the two-thousandth time that it was like catching a fresh egg coming from a hen.
    “Your child,” she said, “is here.”
    And in a moment that seemed like forever and no time at all, Teresita came falling into the world. She did not cry. As Huila wiped her face, she looked, as she always must, very closely. She had seen few signs of late, and she didn’t expect a sign here in this poor shack with this poor little Hummingbird. Yet the infant had a red triangle on her forehead. Red triangles, Huila knew, were reserved for the powerful ones. She herself had been so marked.
    Teresita opened her eyes and stared at the old woman.
    “Hello,” said Huila. “Go to your mother.”
    She laid cloths soaked in herbs between the young mother’s legs. The cloths shaded pink and Huila pulled them away and put a new pad in their place. She had manzanita tea to clean out Cayetana’s birth canal. She had a flask of cotton-root tincture to