The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [100]
“South,” she said.
They felt themselves drift south, as if carried by a fresh spring in a grove of trees.
“Now look.”
They opened their eyes.
The library was rich with shades of red, gold, brown, flickering in the glow of oil lamps.
“I am in love,” Tomás told Huila.
“Tell me something new,” she said.
She took one of his cigars from its humidor and lit it without asking. He was beyond complaining about Huila’s actions.
“No, I am serious.”
“You were serious about the tortilla girl and the milkmaid before her.”
“That, that was not love.”
“Yes, I know,” Huila said.
“What do I do now?”
“Be a man.”
“Eh?”
“Be a man. If you love her, stand up for her. Face her father and face your wife. Stop whining like a pinche little girl and stand up like a man. If you want to claim the girl, claim the girl. Then learn to be a better man than you were before.”
He nodded.
“Because, frankly,” Huila continued, “you are a total failure as a man in my opinion.”
She left the room.
He sat. The girls were quiet upstairs. The woman he wanted was lying in bed with his bastard daughter.
Tomás sighed and closed his eyes. If there was a God, he might just be going to Hell.
When their eyes opened, they were looking up into the giant tide of stars. Gaby turned her head and saw the edge of a small cloud as it drifted past her. The girls somersaulted slowly in the air until they were facing the earth.
The Sierra rose and fell in soft blue undulations of stone. Snow on its ridges burned pale violet in the moonlight.
“Look.”
A scatter of silver coins to the west was the Pacific Ocean.
Clouds swallowed them. They passed through misty cold towers and burst back into clear air. Their eyelids glowed with moonlight.
They drifted south, south, so high they could see villages pass beneath them like small stains of light on the ground, as if a cup full of candle glow had spilled on a ruffled tablecloth. A wedge of migrating birds passed far from them, tiny as butterflies, gray against the deeper darkness of Mexico. Into more clouds and then, as the cloud banks parted, they saw a vastness of glitter. Dizzying expanses of light. A thousand, ten thousand small lights in lines and avenues stretching to the black mountains.
“Streets,” Teresita said.
Yes, streets. They saw now the carriages clopping down the boulevards. Buildings, houses, dark parks. Boats in canals.
Music rose from a far plaza. Cooking smoke. Song lifted to their ears. Voices. Trumpets. They fell to earth ensnared in the scents of the city: perfume, cigars, charcoal, steam, garbage, water, horses, carne asada.
Their feet touched wet cobbles.
“Mexico City,” Teresita said.
My Friend, Cantúa . . .
No, that wouldn’t do.
Cantúa, You Bastard!
No! No! Perhaps a letter to Aguirre! But not to Cantúa!
He dipped his pen again and bent to the task.
My Esteemed and Gracious Friend, Honorable Señor Cantúa,
I sit here in my library, haunted and worried by the inexplicable directions in which life and the human heart often travel. Believe me when I tell you I never meant any disrespect to you or to your lovely daughter when I began to visit you with regularity. I did, I confess, have my eye on the girl. Forgive me! You would be a saint to forgive me! But my dear maestro, master of the green chile burrito and the carne adobada tacos! You, sir, are the father of an angel! And I, your humble servant, have fallen under her spell.
Oh, virginal untainted maidenhood! I will defend it to my dying breath! I urge you to understand that I am a father, too!! I will never touch a strand of her hair, before God and the Virgin I vow it!!!!
Oh, how my head throbs and my heart grieves me. If it were only not so, but it is so. I love her, Sir. I love Gabriela! I do.
Forgive me this indiscretion.
But you are not only a father, Sir, you are a man!
May we meet at the soonest possible moment to settle this matter?
I will, of course, defer to your judgment,