The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [154]
“Well!” he said. “Let’s see what we have!”
He marched to the pantry with great manly strides.
“A can of peaches,” he called.
“Sounds good.”
“What is this?” he said, holding up a can.
“Plum pudding.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. It’s from England.”
He studied the can.
“It says here there’s rum in it.”
“You like rum,” she said.
“I certainly do!”
He took the can to the big metal table and went after it with a can opener. The rich aroma of plum-and-rum pudding filled the kitchen.
“Do you think the coffee is still warm?” he asked.
“I doubt it. Besides, Father, you don’t want to drink coffee at midnight.”
“Perhaps not.”
“Have milk.”
“Gack!”
“Milk is good for you!”
“Milk,” he informed her, “is disgusting!”
The milk in her glass was watery and nearly blue in the candlelight. “I don’t see anything wrong with it,” she said.
“It squirts,” he said, “out of a cow.”
She laughed. He plopped the pudding into a glass bowl and sniffed it. He took a canister of cream and poured some of it on the pudding. He sat.
“That squirted out of a cow, too,” Teresita pointed out.
“I’m not drinking it, I’m eating it. And the rum improves it. Look”—he held a spoon up to point at her —“drinking milk is like drinking blood.”
She took a big gulp of milk to wash down a sweet wad of chewed calabaza.
“You have gone insane,” she noted.
“You should know.”
They laughed.
He took a small spoonful of the pudding and worked it in his mouth.
“Oh yes,” he said. “Tasty.”
“Father,” she said, “I didn’t know you had things that bothered you.”
He waved his spoon.
“A million things!”
“Like?”
He shrugged.
“Like, let me see. If I am eating a fish, and I bite a bone, it makes me ill.”
“Really!”
“Or a pebble in my beans. In fact, any unexpected thing in my food makes me want to vomit!”
She laughed.
“You are so delicate!”
“Oh really! And I suppose you have nothing that you hate to eat?”
“I don’t like beer.”
“Beer! Beer is life itself.”
“Spoken like a true drunkard.”
“Show some respect, you.”
The rum was making his nose run.
“I always thought,” Teresita continued, “that beer would taste sweet. But it was bitter. I thought tobacco would taste like chocolate.”
He scraped the last of the pudding out of the bowl with his spoon. “It seems to me your problem lies with your expectations.”
She ate some more calabaza.
“I was never realistic.”
“Idealism will kill you,” he said. “I’m still hungry.”
“There is ham in the wall.”
Aguirre’s last act at Cabora had been to create a cooler deep in the wall farthest from the fireplace. A water cistern sunk in the adobe enclosed the cooler slot and kept the clay from getting warm. Tomás dug out the ham and found some crusty bread and a big knife.
“Wine?” he said.
“I don’t really like wine, thank you.”
“Another revelation.”
He poured himself a stout glass of burgundy.
“All right,” he said. “I have something bothering me.”
“What?”
“Why must you smell like roses?”
Teresa looked at him blankly.
“I smell the roses,” he said. “On you.”
She sniffed herself.
“I can’t smell it anymore. Is it strong?”
“No.”
“That’s a relief.”
“I have always wondered—why roses?” he insisted.
She smiled at him as he sat.
“I suppose,” she said, “all saints smell that way.”
“I have looked in my books,” he said. “A few have smelled like you.”
“The Holy Mother likes roses.”
“Ah! Well! That explains everything. The Holy Mother.”
“The Virgin of Guadalupe brought roses to Juan Diego.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “I know who the Holy Mother is.”
“But, of course, you don’t believe.”
He spread his palms at her.
“Read history, my dear. That hill where she appeared, Tepeyac. Aztecs had been ‘seeing’ their own goddess there for years. Tonántzin, wasn’t it? A virgin? The priests just laid one fairy tale over another, and they used the same spot for the same kind of fairy.”
She squinted at him.
“The world of reason must be a lonely place,” she said.
This startled him.
“Father,” she said,