Daughters of Babylon (9 page)

“Ooh, Madame, do calm yourself. Working up a froth will solve nothing.” The Lady Jocelyne placed a fishing crate against the far wall and covered it with tarpaulin. “This is hardly a throne, but sit. You’ll feel better.”

“Thank you,” the queen said, and continued her circuit from the doorway of the
chatillionte
to the back wall, knuckles pressed to her chin. Arturo did not understand the word
chatillionte
, but he had committed it, as he would every word of this conversation, to memory.

Arturo knew from his early years, having been scrubbed and tutored in a household of women, about the world’s monarchs. Louis VII was king of the Franks and his queen was the illustrious Álienor or Eleanora, as they called her in Galicia. Their royal court lived most of the year at Poitiers in Bordeaux, many leagues north of here, but here she was, on her own land. He, Arturo de Padrón, was resting his eyes upon the Duchess of Aquitaine, in the very cove that his uncle had selected as the site for conger eels. And in that moment of illustrious pleasure, the queen swung round and saw him through the window. Her face froze, all colour drained, and she screamed.

Her royal shock ignited his. Arturo spun on his heels and tore from the hut across rocky ground toward the beach. Arms pumping, he leaped over boulders and plowed through sandy patches.
Tío
Benicio might call his decision to flee cowardice, but at the moment, he didn’t give a fig’s pip what his uncle thought. He skidded through puddles and surely would have outrun Queen Eleanora and her ladies in their ponderous gowns, had it not been for the grassy knoll he attempted to jump over.

He landed short, and the quicksand grabbed hold of him like a succubus, snaring first one ankle and then the other. The watery sludge squelched and pulled at him. Caught to the knees, his struggling accelerated the sinking, his legs splayed, mid-run, like a wishbone.

Arturo clawed at the air. He spat out every curse and prayer the fishermen and priests had taught him. Stretching his arms, he tried to wriggle toward a clump of bulrushes, and every effort threw him further out of reach.

The sucking accelerated, pulling him deeper the harder he fought. His shoulders slipped beneath the surface of the quicksand, then his neck, chin, mouth. Arturo’s last breath was squeezed out of his lungs by the pressure of sand and sea. Salty ooze filled and burned his nostrils, the insides of his ears, even the shameful places where’d he soiled and peed himself in terror. His final thoughts rose and bubbled out: there would be no feast of big juicy
bígaros
to please
tío
Benicio and Plutarco de Padrón would return home with no son, with only the satisfaction of having been right about his progeny’s ineptitude. With a final muddy pop, Arturo thought no more.

The village of Las Cuevas,
Veracruz, Mexico
1972

The colonists of Virginia in the 1600s, long before there was a United States of America with gringos hungry for oil and copper and sulphur and gold, long before teenage kids were smoking, snorting, dabbing tongues to dots on paper, anything to fly out of the emotional coffins that back-to-back world wars had nailed them into—those colonists called the vines that crept so pretty along split-rail fences, devil’s weed. They also called it jimson, after Jamestown, where the first apothecaries, who couldn’t yet communicate, if they’d even tried, with the Algonquian or Iroquois medicine men, were learning by trial and error how not to kill asthmatic, neuralgic, and hemorrhoidal patients with the seeds and leaves they called
Stranomium
. Thornapple, stinkweed, devil’s trumpet,
manzana peruana
—there were more names for datura than Lupo Sanchez bothered to cram into his head; here, in Mexico, they called her
toloache.

The
casita de toloache
, little house of datura, was the outermost dwelling at the far end of Las Cuevas, furthest from the sugarcane plantation, closest to the caves. Apart from the fact that the walls and roof were covered year-round by the flowering vine, the structure was no different than any other two-room adobe. The patch of land against an ancient stone terrace had been part of Lupo’s mother’s family since before the Conquest, with stewardship passing from mother to daughter and occasionally son, when sons-in-law, hepped up on the aggressive effects of datura, blew themselves up in revolutions, sometimes after committing bigamy with mules and launching assaults on armies of cacti. Lupo had owned the house since his mother died. None of his sisters, who were married and scattered across Mexico, wanted anything to do with the place. Until a few weeks ago, he’d succeeded in keeping the
casita
empty and the toloache calm.

One day, having returned from a festival in Veracruz, Lupo decided to check in on his new tenants. It was a pretty little house, impossible to whitewash except for the front wall or to patch the adobe, except from the inside. The door and shuttered windows were painted aqua, a pastel shade of serenity and good fortune. The vines and branches of toloache encased the dwelling that stood against an ancient stone terrace with a tangle of spiky leaves and spectacular white trumpet blossoms.

Lupo was about to knock when he noticed two rubber balls beside the front door, lying half buried in straw and burro hair. One was blue with red and white bands around the center; the other, solid red. They looked as though they’d been lying there for years. Lupo picked the balls up and squeezed them. The rubber gave pleasantly in his hands; they hadn’t been there long. He dropped the balls from shoulder height. The blue one hit a cobblestone, bounced straight up, and he caught it; the red one hit dirt and arced down the road, bouncing up a series of little dust storms before landing at the base of a prickly pear. He retrieved the red ball, blew the dirt off, and approached the house a second time.

The shutters on both windows were closed, so no one from the street could peer inside. Not that anyone would. Appearing to suppress curiosity was a high-ranking talent for the villagers of Las Cuevas, even though the professor and his “
señorita
”, whom the more disparaging called “
la
”, a female “the”, were the spiciest topic of conversation since the Nagual Lupo Sanchez and his witches set up housekeeping. Karin Albrechtsson, eighteen and “white as a potato bug”, came from a place called Sweden, which was near the North Pole. Bill “Call me Guillermo” Carver, at forty-four, was old enough to be a grandfather, but he too, scandalously, was unmarried. People knew from the sounds that leaked through the
casita
after dark—and sometimes in the afternoons—that he was no
maricón
, but given that someone paid him to follow honest working folk with a machine that steals voices, asking questions even priests had the decency not to ask, well, it made one glad for a half-acre of land and a good hoe.

Lupo stood at the door, juggling the balls. From inside the house, he could hear short aggressive clacks of typewriter keys, interspersed with silence. He had warned the professor before leaving with Dely and the baby for Veracruz to get plenty of fresh air every day. “Yep, sure thing,” Bill had promised. “We’ve just finished the first set of interviews. As soon as I’ve collated this data...”

Karin, thankfully, did not enjoy being glued to a desk chair. When she wasn’t accompanying Bill on interviews or compiling field notes, she spent long hours with the witches. Dely noted she had a knack for herbs and beehives, and while Tita kept a wide berth from “
la vikinguita con
ojos de iceberg
”, the little Viking with iceberg eyes, Malvine didn’t mind Karin tagging along to gather medicinals from the scrubland and caves.

“She’s good company,” Malvine said, one evening over supper. “I enjoy hearing her backpacking stories.”

“But why has she come to Mexico?” Dely asked, spooning
lomito con mole
verde
on her own plate after having served the others. “And to Las Cuevas? No one comes here, not even the bishop.”

“Some musician in Stuttgart broke her heart.” Malvine was cradling Dely and Lupo’s newborn son Ívano, while scooping up sauce with a folded corn tortilla. “Karin has an aunt who works at U Penn. The professor’s previous assistant backed out, and Karin wanted to get as far away from Europe as she could. Poor kid, she’s just trying to figure things out.”

“The same might be said for the professor.” Lupo sprinkled dried habanera seeds on his
mole
, eyes tearing, both from the hot peppers and to see Malvine nestling her cheek against his son’s downy black hair. “He makes a career out of lists, can you imagine? They even get published—of course, they’re only read by other list makers.”

“Don’t complain,” Dely said. “His money doesn’t bite.”

“Dely’s right,” said Tita, “and he’s the worst haggler of any gringo I’ve met.”

“I’m going to have to give him lessons,” Lupo said. “Even Paquito, the shoeshine boy, is fleecing him.”

The day Lupo agreed to rent the
casita
to Bill and Karin, the pair had been living in the VW camper, newly reconditioned by Tita, near the village well. Mid-afternoon temperatures were reaching their usual low hundreds with humidity when angry voices shook the air. Lupo was dozing on his front porch, enjoying Mariachi Vargas on the transistor radio with Ívano, five days old, sleeping in a bassinette beside him.

Karin’s normal speaking voice was a lilting delight, but that afternoon her shrieks were those of a hydrophobic coyote. “If I have to spend one more minute in this fucking tin oven, I’m taking the next boat to Stockholm, and you can bet your fat ass I’ll find my way to the Gulf!” The van door slid open, and backpack, shoes, and scanty bits of clothing flew into the town square, followed by Bill’s plaintive, “Not the field notes, pleeeease!”

Karen stomped, beet-faced and sweating, to the nagual’s porch followed by Bill who was a more purply shade under his Philadelphia Flyers baseball cap and gasping for breath. In a staccato duet of interruption and strained civilities, they begged him to lease that shady little—
pretty
little—vine-covered house standing empty at the edge of town—it’s not quite at the edge—I’ve walked past, there’s nothing beyond—before one of them ended up strangling the other. While Lupo listened, his head moving side to side while the pair lobbed their shots, he gestured to the street urchins who’d witnessed everything and slipped them a few pesos to retrieve Bill’s field notes.

When the two had argued themselves out, Lupo invited them to sit on the two empty cane chairs. He turned off Mariachi Vargas.

“The house may look empty,” Lupo said, “but it’s not what it appears to be.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bill, who’d taken the seat nearest the baby and was chucking Ívano under the chin.

“Well, for one thing, it belongs to Toloache. I would have to obtain her permission.”

“Who? Everyone tells me it’s your place, and who is this Tolo-whatever? Have I met her?”

“I don’t know. She’s never mentioned you.”

Karin snorted and crossed one bare, creamy white leg over the other. “You’re not talking about a person, are you?”

“Not exactly, no,” Lupo said.

She turned to Bill and tipped her head in the manner of I-told-you-so’s everywhere but in a pretty way. “If you insist on refusing to read Castaneda, you could at least brush up on Carl Linnaeus, Swedish botanist, 1707-1778. Toloache, indigenous term for angiosperm of the order
Solonales
, genus Datura. Am I right, Señor Sanchez?”

“I can’t speak for the Latin, but yes, you have correctly identified the owner of the house.”

Bill scratched underneath his ball cap. “But datura is a hallucinogen, and I thought you naguals weren’t into that stuff.” He’d Anglicized the Nahuala-Mixtec word, a practice strangely common to English-speaking academics, as
nag-walls
. Lupo was slowly learning not to wince.

“A few of us are not, but toloache is also a medicine, and we have
curanderas
in my household.”

“Datura is part of my culture too,” Karin said, “part of the Old Ways, that is.”

“What old ways are those?” Lupo asked. He knew from the playful flick at his left earlobe that Toloache had already made her decision, but the couple didn’t know that, and there was no hurry in telling them. Main thing was, they were both calming down.

“Herbals and magicks, communication with the awareness of all things. The Swedish government and church forbid such practices, but we all know they’re real.”

“So, are you saying this house is haunted by the plant?” Bill asked. Drops of sweat were plinking off the end of his nose like a rain gutter after a storm. There were no dry patches left on his khaki shirt and shorts.

“Plants do not haunt,” Lupo said, “any more than emissions from a sulphur plant or a coal mine haunt. That doesn’t mean you won’t be affected by sleeping and living in its vicinity.” But Karin, he could see, wanted to know more, so Lupo told them of the man who eloped with his mule and a few other stories, toned down to sound more believable until Ívano started to fuss. He lifted his son, swaddled in white cotton, out of the cradle. “
Oy, oy,
mijito,
I shouldn’t tell you these stories, should I?”

“I think they’re great,” Bill said. “Authentic folkways, credible eyewitnesses…we can sign a waiver, take full responsibility, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Bill turned to Karin. “You okay with that?”

“As long as we’re not in the camper, it’s fine by me.”

“Very well,” said Lupo. “You can write up the waiver however you like. I will need three months’ rent in advance.” He named a figure about ten times the going rate for a two-room, cold water adobe, with the friendly expectation that haggling would follow. Neither of them blinked. Bill Carver pulled out his wallet and slapped cool crisp U.S. greenbacks on the table beside the radio. That was five weeks ago, and so far, to the best of his knowledge, no one had run off with a mule.

Lupo was all set to knock when a thick, foetid smell, a cross between rotten potatoes and orange blossom, thwapped him, full-frontal, as if the gnarly-trunked, flowering toloache that caged the house had sneezed. The propulsion pushed him back half a step and caused him briefly to see stars. He nudged his sombrero off his forehead and said to the plant, “That was rude. What’s your problem?”