Daughters of Babylon (10 page)

From inside the house came,
clackety-clack, clack-clack, clack, clackety clack-clack…

“I see,” he said, giving his moustache a vigorous rub. “So much for the waiver.”

Until the thought, “I am not dead”, wrapped around his wrists, Arturo may have been dead. He didn’t know. Compressed and sinking in salt water sludge, the quicksand had forced his eyes and lungs shut, and yet a second thought affirmed the first, rippling like an air bubble from impenetrable darkness that two hands had reached him, slender, feminine hands, and he knew who she was and he fought to let her know:
I can feel you, I’m alive!

Her voice descended through stuttering, disconnected sounds that traveled the length of his arms to his shoulders to meet up in the center of his chest where they solidified and formed into words. “You mu-must relax,” Queen Eleanora was telling him. “Do not attempt-tempt-tempt to kick your way ou-ou-ou-out.”

I’m relaxing, I’m relaxed! I can’t breathe, hurry!

She tugged sharply as if he were a puppy on a rope, while the bubbly words echoed. “You’re not listening. Let yourself loosen, or you will start to pull, pull, pull me in too . . . you’ll drown all of us.”

Arturo’s lungs burned like a blacksmith’s forge; salt water and sand scoured the lining of his mouth and throat and eyelids, as if trying to erase him out of existence. Everything in him yearned to struggle, but her voice held a sinewy strength that he trusted, so he pushed back his instincts, absorbing the sounds that translated as, “My ladies are here with me. We’re going to ease you out slowly. Think of yourself as fine rope, silken ribbon, you bend and curve, nothing breaks you—that’s it, rise, rise, nothing slows your flight. Breathe from the belly, the way you did before you were born, born, born…”

In the space between echoes, space grew…the more he allowed himself…he relaxed, he became…and relaxed, he became relaxation from inside the muscles, from inside his bones and the center of his chest, outward to belly and bowels, to thighs, calves, the tips of his toes; he imagined his arms linked with beauty, unbreakable cords, better yet, he and she, they were serpents, twins of the sea, conger eels, fluttering with ease through jags and hollows of an ancient wreck where the seamen stood guard. Meandering, he saw the mire as clear, turquoise ocean—imagined the two of them, weaving serene figure eights around the masts of broken ships whose seamen went down, sending messages through time. He felt his limbs flutter, torso, smooth as silk. He was rising, flowing toward her—

Splash!

—and his head broke through what felt like a tempest of broken glass and blood. With the first suck of air, his sand-filled lungs revolted. He shook his head, and the painful sting of salt in every mucus membrane nearly pushed him right out of his body; and perhaps he did leave, for the fight was gone, and she was laying him out, limp as wet laundry, saying, through tears, “Well done, my sweet one, well done.”

Arturo could have hovered forever in that place, midway between sense and oblivion for the pleasure of riding the undulations of that voice. Were his eyes even open? He couldn’t tell, but he could see her, bending over him, attendants on either side.

“You’re safe now,” she said. “I’m going to roll you to your side. You’ll feel wretched, I’m afraid, but let the sick come out, let it all—”

His coughing and gagging drowned out her words. He expelled clots of mud and mucus that tasted like blood and rotting fish, but between all of that, there were parts of him breathing and alive. It was awful, but goddamn, he was alive!

And when the vomiting slowed and Arturo could draw a series of ragged half breaths, she pulled him onto her lap with the tenderest of movements and called him her brave young soldier.

His burning eyes still closed, he traveled in his mind the paradise of fine-spun wool being rubbed along his cheeks, his nose, eyes, ears, neck, arms, hair. When enough tears had flowed that he could risk a peek, the first colour he saw through sunshine was mulberry.

And then he met her eyes. They were sea green, flecked with amber, and she stared at him, gaze pressing like twin swords. “Who are you? You look so much like him. You scared us all half to death.”

Arturo shook his head, not knowing how to answer. “
Eu non son ninguén
,” he said in Galician, with a scratchy voice that shamed him with its weakness. “I am nobody…your Ladyship, y-your Majesty.”

She frowned, more in surprise than disapproval, and answered in the same tongue. “
Estou Eleanora.
I am Eleanor. The house on the hill is mine, I used to live here.” She cupped his face in her muddy hands and drew him close to study him. God had poured the sea into her eyes. Curls of gold and copper framed a heart-shaped face and tumbled loose over her breasts and shoulders. She was muddy and pale with fright; he had never seen skin so flawless.

“Jocelyne, Marie-Therèse,” she said, setting Arturo to sit close beside her, “hasten to the castle. Fetch wine and food, some clean clothes.” The ladies, their bejeweled gowns not nearly as shambled as their queen’s, struggled to their feet. “Now tell me your name,” she said to Arturo. “No one is a nobody.”

“I am Arturo of Padrón, Madame.”

She shook her head, as if something unwanted still rattled inside. If he knew what she’d rather hear, he’d have gladly said it.

“My brother was William…Guillermo. He was four when the quicksand took him, nearly on this very spot.”

So that was it. She thought she’d seen a ghost through the
chatillionte
window.

“How old are you, Arturo?”

“Eleven, Madame, soon to be twelve.” He braced himself, expecting her to say, as everyone did, that he was small for his age. But she didn’t, and she stroked his sodden hair.

“If William were alive today, he would be fifteen. He was four years younger than I.”

“I am sorry, Madame, that you lost your brother…and that I can’t be him.”

Eleanor looked at him, then laughed gently. He now had a collection of memories of the sound of a queen’s laughter—and then he remembered. He looked up at the sun; it was fully visible above the castle. He looked toward the cove; the tide was coming in and bringing with it his father and uncle, poachers, in the rowboat. The queen saw them too.

“Madame, please, whatever you do, do not punish my father and
tío
Benicio. They are noble Galicians, fallen on hard times. We’ve been out to sea for months. They allowed me to come ashore for
bígaros
, and I—” He looked down at the soggy burlap mass still tied to his waist. “I have ruined them.”

“Don’t worry, there are plenty more of those to be found in this cove.” Eleanor rose to her feet and held out her hand for him to do the same. “You are blessed to be Galician, Arturo of Padrón. If you were of these lands, your soul would now be dangling above the fires of Hell. Come, introduce me to your family, and we shall negotiate a price for whatever they have caught or intend to catch.”

Benicio had climbed out of the boat first and was swaggering toward them. Father had removed his hat and was holding it to his midsection, walking with small uncertain steps. Arturo noticed that his uncle had combed his salt-encrusted hair and changed his shirt to one less stinking. Arturo adored
tío
Benicio and, until this moment, would have done anything for him. Now he felt the first angry stirrings of manhood.

Toloache, now that she’d snagged Lupo’s attention, wasn’t letting go. The nagual was aware of some kind of turbulence but had no images to go with it. He walked around to the side of the
casita
where the oldest trunks grew thick as a man’s thigh. He lifted one of the white trumpet blooms with his index finger and lowered his face to it.

Datura shivered at his touch. She would not shiver for just any human, of course, but a plant knows when she is heard and seen. With multi-generational roots plunging deep to subterranean swamps and rivers, toloache
,
who owned this house, lived in a constant state of bloom, fruition, decay, and seed; her nations of dendrites, some no more than a molecule thick, extended to the tectonic plates of Mother Earth herself and kept up with events, could record and retrieve them as proficiently as an X-ray technician in a modern hospital. But there were so few to whom she could convey the depths of her affection. She was a lonely plant. Responding to Lupo’s soft warm breath, to the perceptivity of his gaze, which, in itself, threw out tendrils, the six powdery tips of the filaments that grew from the bloom’s ovary vibrated and blushed to a deeper shade of pink. Toloache loved her pleasures.

Lupo set down his satchel. “So how are our guests doing? Are you being gentle with them?”

He formed the questions and offered them; he did not speak aloud. A person walking by on the street would see an ordinary man admiring a flower. Recognizing Lupo, they might even exchange the flip-flop hand signal, universal symbol for
poquito loquito
, a little crazy, but only because real men do not smell flowers or change diapers—that such a man could find three women to live with him, it just wasn’t fair.

Lupo had been deaf as a post when he began slapping tortillas and hating every minute. “How do you listen to something that has no mouth?” he griped once to La Pantera.

“A bow to violin has no mouth,” she said. “Wind through trees has no mouth, but you can hear both. You have tiny hairs inside your ears as sensitive to vibration as the butterfly’s antennas, long rivers of nerve behind your eyes that flow to brain and backbone and deliver the most succulent messages to your gut.

“Problem is, most people have sold their backbones, like burros for hire to bosses and wives and husbands, so their spine can’t talk to their gut. They become like drunkards, kicked out of their own house. With no conversation between gut and backbone, we think we’re abandoned… poor me, poor me. These tortillas are lumpy. My customers will shoot you. Roll out the dough and start again.”

Lupo laughed at the memory, slapped a palm against his left ear, and said to Toloache, “Could you repeat that, please? I wasn’t paying attention.”

I said, they are not my guests, they’re yours. I hardly notice them. She has potential—sometimes I think she even hears me, but him? I’ve seen more cojones on a wheelbarrow.