Authors: Barbara Kingsolver
The
rosca de reyes
is hardest to make: the cake called Ring of the Kings, using white-flour dough, the same as for Baby’s Crupper tortillas. A blob of dough fit for a king, rolled out on the table, as long and fat as a sea slug.
Como pene
. Poking it and laughing:
Como bato
. Leandro is normally much more pious.
Weiner! Jaker!
Pachango!
Thing!
Thing of the King!
Leandro had tears in his eyes and said Mother would kill us. He crossed himself and prayed for both souls. He made the cake into a ring by putting the thing-of-the-king in a circle and pressing the ends together. The token goes inside, a small clay baby Jesus that looks like a pig. Leandro said really it’s not even Jesus, it’s the boy-god
Pilzintecutli. He dies when the days grow dark in December, then rises again on February 2, which is Candlemas. The ancients were concerned with light and darkness. We are in the dark days now, he said. Whoever finds the token in the cake will have good luck, when the light returns.
All the rest of the year, the clay token sits in a jar in the cabinet waiting to go into this cake. Leandro took the little pig Jesus out of the jar and kissed it before putting it in the
rosca
. Round jellied fruits go on top, but he put a square piece where the token was inside, his secret way of marking it. Reach for that one, he said, when the dish of cake is passed around.
Is it still lucky if you cheat, instead of getting the token by chance?
Mi’jo
, Leandro said. Your mother can’t even remember the day she gave you birth. If an orphan boy is going to have any luck, he will have to make it himself.
What kind of orphan has two living parents? You said everyone has family even if they are ghosts. Or forget your
cumpleaños
.
Leandro took the orphan’s cheeks in his hands and kissed him on the mouth, and then spanked his crupper like a child, not a boy as tall as a man. A boy with terrible thoughts of kissing a man as a man. Leandro meant nothing by it. A
beso
for a child.
Leandro went home after the feast. All servants have fled, leaving kitchen scraps, bad moods, and dust. What is the use of good luck in an empty house?
2 February, Candlemas
Leandro was gone nineteen days, now back. He has to make a hundred tamales for Candlemas, without his
sergente
. It’s better to hide in the
amate
tree all day reading, a book won’t run off to its family any time it wants. Leandro can’t even read. Let him make tamales all day.
Today begins a year of perfect luck protected by Pilzintecutli, the clay-pig Jesus.
13 February
Today the lacuna appeared, a little below the surface. It’s near the center of the cliff below a knob where a hummock of grass grows out. It should be easy to find again but best to look early, with sun just up and the tide low. Inside the tunnel it was very cold and dark again. But a blue light showed up faintly like a fogged window, farther back. It must be the other end, no devil back there but a place to come up on the other side, a passage. But too far to swim, and too frightening.
One day Pilzintecutli will say,
Go ahead lucky boy. Vete, rubio
, swim toward that light. Go find the other side of the world where you belong.
The strangest thing. Mother believes in magic. She went back to the village of the giant stone head. After sending Natividad away with the carriage, she said, “This time we both go.” She took off her shoes again to cross the footbridge, then followed a path through the forest right around the edge of a lake. Yellow-winged
jacanas
flapped up from the water and an alligator rested at the edge, covered with waterweed up to its bulging eyes. Then back into the jungle, under giant trees. We were going to see a
brujo
, she said finally, because someone has put a bad eye on us both, and that’s why she can’t get another baby. Probably it was Don Enrique’s mother.
The
brujo
’s bamboo hut stood in a clearing, inside a circle of stones. It might have been made a thousand years ago. The door was a curtain of snail shells strung together that made a wooden tinkling sound when his hand pulled it aside. Inside was an altar covered with little clay figures, and branches with leaves standing in jars, and cockleshells of burning copal gum, the same incense as in the church. He said to take off our shirts, which Mother did immediately, down
to her silk underthings. The
brujo
didn’t look at her, his eyes went to the roof of the hut and he began to sing, so he truly was a
brujo
, not just a man.
He seemed as old as a person could be, and still living. His chant was quiet and fast,
Echate, echate
. He walked all around Mother first, swatting her body gently with a branch of leaves dipped in a jar of leaf-water, shaking drops of it on her hair, breasts, and belly, then everything else, son included. Then he blew smoke over her, from the cockleshell of burning gum. With his knotted old hands he held up a figure cut from thin paper, a small catlike man-shaped thing, and burned it in the flame of a candle. Some of the carved figures on his altar looked like a man’s thing, his organ. Stone
pachangos
.
When he finished Mother paid him in coins. She didn’t speak until after crossing the bridge back to the village. The square was deserted, except for the great stone head. Natividad hadn’t come back. “Enrique can’t be told about this,” she said. “You know that, of course.”
“Does he want you to get a baby?”
She straightened her dress and pulled at the back of her stocking. “Well. It would change things, wouldn’t it?”
Leandro’s baby girl died in January after Feast of the Kings, and no one here knew. Cruz told Mother today. He was gone three weeks, not because he was angry with his
sergente
, but to bury a child. The two small grapefruit heads in church: only one now. Cruz had a fight with Mother because what Don Enrique pays is not enough for feeding a chicken. She said Leandro’s wife couldn’t get her milk, and the baby died.
How can he go home to a family with nothing to eat, then come to this house to make one hundred tamales? He behaves as if he had no dead children. The real Leandro never comes here. He only pretends.
9 March
Today the lacuna is gone. Directly below the knob in the cliff, nothing. If it is there, then buried below too much ocean. The grass hummock on the cliff face is very low to the water now. Or rather, the sea is higher.
Don Enrique is away in the Huasteca, and Mother has taken up kitchen knives. She waved one around this morning. Not to chop onions but to show she means business about keeping her secrets. Not just the
brujo
, but also Mr. P. T. Cash. So, no mention here about another surprising visit from him, while the master was away. Anyway Mother is too lazy to lift up a mattress and find this little book.
13 March
The lacuna came back. In the afternoon the rock opened its mouth and swallowed the boy down its gullet. But it was hard to swim, the water was rushing out. It was the same as before, lungs bursting, turning back too soon. Leandro’s brother whispering,
Come live with me here
, but a brain hungry for oxygen loses courage and wants air.
Tomorrow will be the day.
Last Will and Testament
Let it be known. If HWS drowns in the cave, he leaves nothing
to anyone. His earthly possessions are stolen things: pocket
watch. This book. One year of good luck.
He leaves his body for the fishes to eat.
He leaves Leandro to wonder where he has gone.
He leaves Mother and Mr. Produce the Cash to enjoy the company
of the devil
.
Dios habla por el que calla.
14 March
The cave has bones inside. Bones of humans! Things on the other side.
This is how it feels when you are nearly drowned: the brain pounds like a pulse in red and black. The salt water burns your eyes, and you nearly go blind following the light until you come to the air, breathing.
At the end of the tunnel the cave opens up to light, a small saltwater pool in the jungle. Almost perfectly round, as big across as this bedchamber, with sky straight up, dappled and bright through the branches.
Amate
trees stood in a circle around the water hole like curious men, gaping because a boy from another world had suddenly arrived in their pool. The
pombo
trees squatted for a close look, with their knobbly wooden knees poking up out of the water. A tiger heron stood one-legged on a rock, cocking an unfriendly eye at the intruder. San Juan Pescadero the kingfisher zipped back and forth between two perches, crying, “Kill him kill him kill him!”
Piles of stone blocks lay in a jumble around the edges of the pool, a broken-down something made of coral rock. Vines scrambled all over the ruin, their roots curling down through it like fingers in sand. It was a temple or something else very ancient.
The light through the trees was shadowy at midday, but the water was clear. Belly-dragged up on a flat stone, sitting at the edge looking back in, it was plain to see the bottom of the cave dropped down to make a sort of room down there, huge and deep. Stones were piled like a sand castle underwater, with bits of shining things mixed into the pile. Maybe yellow leaves, or gold coins. It was like coming up inside a storybook. An ancient temple in the forest, and a pirate’s treasure below. The treasure was mostly shells and broken pottery covered with sea moss, mostly too deep to dive down and reach.
It took hours to explore everything. Some of the broken blocks of the ruin had designs carved on them, a script of lines and circles or perhaps the portraits of gods. One looked like a skeleton, its arms
flung open, the skull smiling wide. A water snake slipped off a rock and made a sliding S shape across the top of the water. The jungle vines were tangled like fishing nets. It was the type of forest with a watery floor, and no good way to walk out of there. And no good way to swim back out of that cave, either. No way back from this story, it seemed. Nothing left to do but slide like a turtle into the pool, sink down, and sit on slime-covered rocks and the treasure of ancient times.
That is where the bones were! Leg bones, wedged in the rocks. It made for such a shock, it was hard to breathe after seeing them. Floating in the pool was also not very easy because now the tide pulled downward, dropping lower and sucking against the stones around the edge of the hole, hissing a song of drowning:
ahogarse, ahogarse
. The ocean pulled hard, dragging a coward explorer back from the secret place, sucking him out through the tunnel and spitting him into the open sea.
Out there again gasping, it was plain that the tide had turned and gone out. Now it was extremely low. Coral knobs poked out like heads. A great round moon hung on the eastern horizon, just coming out of the sea, white as an oyster.
Then it seemed the bones and temple could not have been real, and this cave would vanish again. Only the moon was real, as big and whole as breathing.
A book in Don Enrique’s library says the pagans of old built their castles on this island. Not as tall as the great pyramids of the Azteca, but small stepped temples with platforms for sacrifice. They carved pictures of their gods, which were many in number. The book said the same things Leandro says, that the ancients watched light and signs to tell them when to plant corn, when to get married. But it also told more terrible things: they made sacrifices by throwing gold and sometimes girls (alive) into water holes in the forest. The cave must be that kind of hole, a
cenote
. Because of the bones.
The book was written by a priest, not very good, but interesting at some parts. Hernán Cortés sent an expeditionary force to destroy the pagan city here and build the cathedral in town. If the ruin in the jungle is really part of that ancient city, then for certain the cenote has gold and treasure in its depths, along with the bones of unlucky girls. Leandro might know something about it, but can’t be asked. There is no trusting his allegiance, he might tell Mother. So he will never know about going inside the lacuna.
24 March
First, the cave wasn’t there today. Or so it seemed. But really it was, nearly two meters down from the surface, buried by tide, with a strong current flowing out of it.
The last time, it was morning when the current inside the cave pulled inward toward the jungle-hole. During the hours of exploring the tide must have turned, so at evening it was easy to swim out. The moon was just rising then. The tides are the cause. The time to go in is just before the tide turns. Otherwise, more bones on that pile.
25 March
The tide was wrong completely, the current flowed out of the cave all day. On the day of the full moon, everything was right.
Don Enrique says a full moon pulls up the highest tides of the month, at midday and midnight. And it pulls them down to their lowest ebb when it is rising or setting. So says a man in a frock coat and breeches who, if he tried to row a boat, would fall out instantly and drown. But Leandro said the same thing about the moon and high tide, so it might be true.
How can you know if the moon is going toward full, or disappearing?
This evening the moon was half, and Leandro said it’s dying away. You can tell because it’s shaped like the letter C, not curved forward
like D. He says when the moon is D like Dios, it is growing to fill God’s sky. When dying away it is C, like Cristo on the cross. So, no good tides again for many days.
12 April
Today was the full moon, perfect tide, and the bad luck of slicing the end of a finger with the kitchen knife. Blood everywhere, even in the masa, turning it pink. It had to be thrown out.
Oh no, let’s serve it to Don Enrique and Mother! A
clayuda
of her son’s blood, like the Azteca sacrifices to their gods.