The Ways of Walls and Words, page 1
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Solitreo
“If it were not for Thee, what would become of me?”
She’s not speaking to me when she says this. Her poetry nests behind a prison’s walls. I am an unknown noise on the other side of her door—the only spot where sound enters or exits her world—a sweep of bristle against wood, some transitory trace of life that has nothing to do with her.
She and her people are in cells lined along a corridor in the deepest reaches of the convent. On occasion the mentally disturbed have been kept here, tended to and made safe by walls so thick they are more than an arm’s length. These people, however, are all one family: a mother; an adult son; four older daughters; and this one, who has spent nearly half her life in here.
That was all the information the Dominican Brothers shared with me the day I started. Except that I must not attempt to speak to the girl or her family through their doors. The Brothers made me swear this before I swept even one stone.
In the language I share with jailer and jailed, my name is Bienvenida, though my Nahuatl name is different. By the Brothers’ reckoning, it has been 1,562 years since the death of God.
As I sweep in front of the locked doors, I don’t really think of who is behind them, or why. I think of my traps and whether they are filled or empty of food. I think of the lessons my mother teaches me, because I am the eldest and must care for my siblings if something happens to her. I think of how many chambers are left for me to clean before I can get back to the turquoise and emerald of our world. A world filled with living gods, not dead ones.
Though that, like everything else, is changing.
But if the timing is just right, if I’m by the door as the girl recites her poems, I wonder about her then.
Is she like me, alive for words? Someone who believes in offers of beauty? Who trusts that a perfect couplet will prompt the gods to fulfill its meaning?
I sweep. I wonder. I think about the ways of walls and words.
This Day, For It Is Your Day
I say the names aloud, so I won’t forget, and so the walls know who we are: Francisca, Luis, Isabel, Leonor, Catalina, Mariana, and Anica.
My name is Anica but I bear others too: one from the land my forebears claim as home; one for our hidden heart; one for the many times that heart has been betrayed.
I was born where the water shapes the coast of New Spain, the only one of us natural to this New World. Eight generations of our family lived along a different coastline—the Iberian one my mother still talks about—so the sea is part of us. I learned young to mix salted water into dough and knead it with a rhythm that pulls and crests.
When we moved inland to the greatest city in New Spain, my mother shed enough tears to harden the crusts of many loaves.
It was a shift from the domain of one element to another. This city is guarded by mountains that open their mouths to spew fire. After she wiped away her tears, my mother taught me to consign a piece of dough to the flame before baking. Though it might seem so, it is not a concession to our new home nor its governing element.
What my mother teaches is deeper than element or place.
We are behind these walls because we sweep the house clean on Fridays. Because we light two new candles before sunset, and bless our wine and bread at the table. Because, when we are done, we hide what none but family may see behind locked wardrobe doors.
When we say Dyó, we mean one, not three.
Someone took our tale to the Holy Office. That is what my mother thinks. My brother believes it was not a story but success that betrayed us, and my sisters accuse each other’s husbands. In Old World or New, the outcome of attention from Inquisitors is the same. In a plaza full of people, we were ordered into captivity. To renounce and reconcile.
Conversos. New Christians. Judaizers. Marranos. Anusim. There are many names for us. I hardly know myself what name to use. Except family.
At first I tried to do as the priests commanded. But I cannot go days on end without saying prayers the way I was taught, and I do not believe my mother would go even one. On the first anniversary of our imprisonment, after hours on the rack, my eldest sister Isabel confessed what everyone already knew: forced conversion is not faith. What resides where no human hand can touch it cannot be forsworn.
I look out my window now and, instead of an empty sky caged by bars, I imagine the leaves of our fig, pomegranate, and lemon trees fluttering there. My mother bought them dear, right off one of the Spanish ships, then planted them in our courtyard so that they would rub lovingly against one another when the wind blew. None had yet given fruit when we were taken from our home, but I picture globes of brilliant red, ovals of green, and sweet, dark teardrops hiding among their leaves. I pretend I am swallowing the sparkling, rubied seeds of the first, and reaching for the scion of the last amid its fragrant greenery.
And for a moment, by the power of memory and imagining, the sun pours down on my shoulders as it does on those of the free.
There are many hours in a day. When my imaginings turn sour, I fill the emptiness with the cantigas my mother and sisters and I used to sing together, for these are made for women’s voices and women’s work—the work of keeping things alive. When evening falls, the songs turn into to my brother’s words: prayers once celebrated in literary societies, praised for their clarity. “Las palavras klaras, el Dyó las bendize,” we say, and I hope it is true.
Let the harsh chains be smashed;
this day, for it is your day,
has to be the day of forgiving.
Only I change the last word. Instead of forgiving I say escaping, and in my mind, I grow wings.
We Unwind the Jewels
The slab and block with which the Spanish have hidden our ancestral city is full of fault: it does not fit together without seams. The gaps between the stones of the cells are sealed with a paste that cures hard, but begins to crumble with time.
The mortar between the stones near the girl’s cell door needs a bit of coaxing. I work at it with my broom until I clear a small gap. I squat to look through, then whistle to get her attention.
“Aquí,” I say. Here. The edict that the Spanish should learn Nahuatl still stands in the city, but the reality is that most of them won’t. There is power in words, and they want that power to be shaped to their speech, not ours.
The girl gets up from her bedding, follows her ears.
She is my age, or perhaps a bit older, but not too many years after first blood. Her hair is curly, even around the mats. She is no beauty by Nahua standards, but the Spanish seem to admire skin like hers—lustrous like the inner chamber of a shell. Her garments are filthy, but except for her hair everything else about her is tidy. It must take her a long time to scrub clean with the water the Dominicans provide for drink.
She drops down so her eye meets mine through the hole.
“Your poems are beautiful,” I say.
“They are prayers,” she answers.
“Of course. Our Nahua poems are too,” I say. “Would you like to hear one?” I recite it in Nahuatl, then translate it: “We take, we unwind the jewels, the blue flowers are woven over the yellow ones, that we may give them to the children.”
In the quiet that follows, I hear her hitched breathing. All of them breathe that way. Breath caught between walls is what my mother calls it when the Nahua who work in the city’s mills come to her for treatment. She can’t cure it, only lessen it with anacahuite.
“I miss the moonflower and morning glory vines my mother planted so they twined all around our courtyard,” the girl says. “Are there many flowers where you live?”
“No,” I say. “But sometimes the trees fill with blue and yellow butterflies, and then it is as if they are in bloom.”
She closes her eyes to picture it behind her lids.
“How is it you speak Castilian so well?” she asks when she looks at me again.
“My mother says I was blessed with a quick mind just to torment her.”
“My mother says that to me too.” Then, “Used to say it.”
“She is in the cell next to yours,” I say, motioning at the wall to her right. “If she is taken to be questioned you will be able to see her pass by through this hole I’ve made.”
Her face twists. “I must hope never to see her, then.”
“How is it you are here?” she asks after a time.
“I was recently considered converted enough to clean for the Brothers.”
“Are you?”
“The Dominicans are mostly concerned that we repeat exactly what they say in exactly the way they say it. My mother tells me I sound like a parrot.” When the girl doesn’t smile, I add, “My real words come from her.”
I can tell my answer troubles the girl because she turns her face away from the gap and says s
When she turns back, her face is hard. “If you come again and recite more of your poems for me, you must not include mention of any pagan gods. Are we agreed?”
I nod even though I suspect she knows a poem doesn’t have to mention the gods to be meant for them. “You liked my poem then?” I say.
“I like that it brought the outside in with it.” Then, “You know what I miss even more than flowers and trees?”
“What?”
“My mother used to spend an hour running a comb through my hair every night before I went to sleep.”
“I have something you can use,” I say. I take the small comb from where I stick it in my nest of braids and push it through the gap.
“Thank you,” she says, “but that’s not really what I meant.”
“Take it anyway,” I say.
“It is so small and my hair is so snarled. It’ll probably break.”
“No, it won’t,” I say, getting to my feet so I can start my work again. “The turtles around here are tough, and so are the combs I make from their shells. Still, if you want, I can give you a charm to say so your hair untangles as easy as water pours from a gourd.”
I hear her nervous laughter. “No. No magic.”
I want to tell her it’s all right. That magic, like poetry, is a gift from the gods. But then I remember where I’m standing. Neither gods nor gifts abide between these walls.
With the Keys of Abraham
Bienvenida’s daily visits have become everything to me.
She brings more than just the images that form in my mind when she recites her poetry. Despite the meals the silent priests bring twice a day, I am always hungry, so she secrets morsels of food in the folds of the sash under her tunic. She passes the day’s tidbit through the gap between the stones with such reverence, I bite my lip to stop myself from laughing at her odd ways.
“Food can be as strong a magic as poems,” she tells me, when she notices my facial contortions.
I nod, even though magic, as we know it, is the province of men. My mother cannot leap from bread-making to alchemy, nor from siddur to kabbalah, though she is accounted nearly as wise as my father was.
What Bienvenida brings with her is strange fare: Grasshoppers roasted crisp and dusted with a salty, spicy ash; cactus fruit with lurid flesh; even a small, greenish steamed pudding made of corn, pumpkin, and honey, wrapped in a leaf. I turn down the chunks of dark turtle meat she brings me though.
When I push the unclean meat back at her, she takes it, pops the chunk into her mouth and starts chewing it loudly. It occurs to me that this isn’t just an expedient way to get rid of it. She’s really hungry.
“Of course I am,” she says when I ask her. “After the encomendero takes our tribute, there isn’t much, and some days my traps are empty. I have three siblings.”
Before I can say anything, she adds, “Plus, turtle meat is like no other. Yesterday Fray Antonio said I had left dirt pushed into the corners of the refectory so he grabbed a stick but, because I had eaten turtle meat the day before, his blows rained off my back as if from a shell.”
At my snort, she gives me an obstinate, hard look. I’ve learned that when she gets angry she doesn’t raise her voice or huff away, as I would. Instead, she goes quiet and everything about her seems to turn darker. She scares me a bit.
The silence between us draws out until I ask about her progress in creating gaps in the other cell walls. She hadn’t intended to create any, but I’ve asked her to. Because these are the thoughts I worry most between her visits: if my family is alive; if they stand; if they are still themselves.
“A small hole in the wall to your mother’s cell,” she answers. “And an even smaller opening in another, which houses one of your sisters. The other walls are too freshly sealed.”
“Which sister?”
“The one they say has eyes like water.”
“Mariana,” I say. “Have you been feeding her and my mother as well?”
“No. Are you asking me to?”
I remember the hungry look when she gobbled down the turtle meat and still I say yes. She is my friend and, some days, all that keeps me from despair—but that is no bond compared to the one among family.
“I have to go back to work,” she says after a moment, and gets to her feet.
She’s told me that along with sweeping the hallway of cells, she’s responsible for cleaning the Brothers’ whole convent, from top to bottom. Except for the chapel. She says she’s fortunate it is only a convent and not a full priory or her cleaning would burn all the hours of sunlight.
“What does your mother owe that she would agree to let you be worked this hard?” I say. It’s half query, half sympathy.
Bienvenida shakes her head as if she doesn’t understand. “We owe everyone. We’re a rope of people, all woven together. Even the Brothers are part of the rope now.”
After a moment, she continues. “My mother’s knowing is a debt owed to the gods. She cannot turn her back on those who come to her—sometimes on their knees—begging a cure. And when Fray Bernardino comes to her to learn herb lore, that teaching is owed too.”
“But she could still do what she does elsewhere, and more happily if she were farther from the priests. Couldn’t she?” I ask after a moment. Maybe in saying this I’m really wondering why my brother and mother chose for us to stay here, even after my father died and his brother asked us to join him in Nuevo León, far from the threat of Inquisitors.
“I already walk a long way to get to my work here,” she says. “More than an hour according to Fray Bernardino, though maybe his long legs make it shorter for him than for me.”
“I meant even farther away,” I say. “Days and days away from here.”
“Tonalxochitl. Cuachachalate. Tlachichinole,” Bienvenida recites. It sounds like her first poem, the one she had to translate for me.
“Those are only some of the plants that root my family where we are,” she says. “We would never abandon them.”
“Things of the earth,” I scoff. “They’re created for us, not us for them.”
The look she returns is full of disdain. She takes some steps down the hall, out of my sight line, then I hear her stop.
“The rest of you are like mosquitoes swarming over our mother’s earthen skin. But we are her blood, Anica. Without us, she dies. Without her, we die.”
The steps resume, then fade away.
I wish Bienvenida back, wish it as if it were a prayer. I have told her a bit about our customs—mostly to better control the sort of food she brings me—but what I want her to understand now goes beyond custom. I want her to know that we are not like the others either. We, too, cannot be parted from what we love best. We carry it with us in law and ritual and cantilation. Without us, it dies; without it, we die.
Hours later, as the sun ducks beneath my barred window, I hear Bienvenida at our gap. “Put your hand under the hole,” she says after I kneel to the spot.
She rolls three black berries into my palm. “Don’t eat those,” she says. “Smash one between pebbles that have fallen from the walls. Use this to write with.” She pushes a single bristle of her broom through to me.
“I have nothing to write on,” I say. “And what am I supposed to write?”
“Your mother will not take food from me,” she says. “If you tell her that you trust me, she might be easier about it. Write on this.” She drops a pale bean through the hole.
Small, curved surface; flexing stylus; clumpy ink—has there been a greater test of will? I manage to trace one Hebrew letter.
As soon as I pass the bean through to Bienvenida, she disappears with it. When she comes back, she instructs me to put my palm up to the gap and a seed tumbles onto it. I turn it over on my palm. It carries the word “strength” in tiny, perfect solitreo.
“Your mother only took half a morsel,” Bienvenida says. She shakes a loosely clenched hand in front of the gap, and I hear the sound of crunchy things rattling against each other. Grasshoppers. My stomach grumbles and she pokes several of them through the opening to me.
“Next time she’ll eat more,” I say after I’ve finished chewing. “What about Mariana?”
She shakes her head. “The unseen harries her. She circles her cell, and the spirits compel her to scratch at her face and draw blood. She did not even hear me whistle for her attention.”
