The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [123]
When she was through, she sat on a flat stone and undid her hair. She kept it tightly braided when others could see her, but here, with only the crows and the mockingbirds and the mad squirrels watching her, she let her hair fall and blow. The breeze eased through the long tresses and crept over her scalp. She shivered and thrilled to it. She pulled up her skirt and her hated petticoats and let the sun burn her bare legs.
A snake-thin creek meandered through her grove, and she put her bare feet in the water. Watched the sun form wobbling lines and triangles of light on her skin. Watched tiny clouds of silt escape from between her toes and carry down the weak current, moving over the bright gravel like small rain clouds. She dreamed she was flying with brother crow, above a June storm as it passed over the land.
She wanted to strip off her hot clothes, lie naked and let the water run over her body. This was not allowed, of course. No woman would be forgiven an act as brazen as that. Girls might bathe together in the river, in a group, with angry aunties posted on the rocks and among the trees, ready to beat spies to death with their canes. But that nakedness would have been strictly for the bathing, not for joy. A woman naked, naked for the delight of her own flesh . . . even if no one could see her, Teresita knew such a thing would remain forever unforgiven.
Ah, well. Beetles swam in the water. Wasps and bees alighted on the small black banks of the creek and nipped up daubs of mud, sipped water. Butterflies touched down on the gravel and slowly opened and closed their wings, unreeling their coiled tongues into the wet. Teresita chewed clover stems, felt the wild tang of sour juices on her tongue.
Millán watched her. Watched her back, stared at her bottom as it was made wide by the ground pushing up against it, cupping it. Watched the way her bottom formed circles, oblongs, fruit shapes as she wiggled back and forth.
Millán liked to say: “Mexican women are dogs, but Indian women are cows.”
Tomás sipped his coffee and watched Gabriela eat. She carefully sliced an orange half-moon out of her melon and took it between her lips. Her soft tongue darted out and took the cool flesh of the melon and pulled it into her mouth. He couldn’t believe she was real. She was like some dream, some story old men told youngsters. She made a fool out of him with the slightest grin or pout. She slept in his bed, not beside him, but around him, her aromatic legs and arms wrapped around him, her mouth against his throat, her beautiful thundercloud hair over his face, his chest. He kissed her hair. Took it in his fist and kissed it, breathed it. He held her underwear to his face and kissed it, too. When she bathed, he smelled her clothes.
She looked up at him from her small chewing and crinkled her eyes at him. Oh my God! he thought. He didn’t know what it was about her that made him more insane: her belly or the pale friction of her thighs; the small of her back or her armpits.
Huila staggered in from the garden and dragged a chair away from the table with a loud screaking.
“Good morning,” Tomás said.
“Hnf,” Huila grunted.
“Buenos días,” Gabriela said. “Cómo amaneció usted?” she asked.
Huila shrugged.
“Café,” she said.
The cooks hurried to bring her a cup. Tomás looked up at Gabriela and raised an eyebrow. Gabriela smiled.
“Feeling chatty, are we?” said Tomás.
“Ay, Gordo,” Gabriela chided.
Huila slurped her coffee. Her hand shook.
“Where’s my damned bread?” she said.
“You already had some,” the cook said.
“I want more.”
“Coming,” called one of the girls.
“Huila,” said Tomás, “I am in love.”
Gabriela blushed.
“Love,” Huila said, “and burial shrouds both come down from Heaven.”
Tomás and Gabriela looked at each other.
“Well,” he said. “Good point.”
He sipped his coffee.
Huila said, “Every monkey to his own rope.”
“I see,