Four Hundred Rabbits
On the night they married, Aurelio fed her pulque from his own mouth, sour and faintly green, and told her the maguey had wanted her long before he ever did.
Isabel swallowed, because a bride swallows.
The drink slid down thick and milky, still working in itself, and it settled low in her belly like a second pulse. Her husband watched her with his black eyes and his soft mouth.
She’d been bought, then, for a price nobody had shown her yet.
The Quiñones land lay on the dry plain at Apan, where the maguey marched in grey ranks to the foot of the hills. By day the fields smelt of cut grass and iron, with something sweeter beneath, a rot that had sugar in it. At night they breathed.
Isabel lay awake that first week and listened to the long leaves scrape and settle, ten thousand fleshy blades turning in a wind she couldn’t feel, while Aurelio slept against her with one heavy arm across her waist, sweet-breathed, content as a man who’s eaten his fill.
Her family had owed money. Now they didn’t. That was the whole of the marriage as her father had explained it, and Aurelio was handsome enough that she’d not argued, with a slow smile and gentle hands.
On the third morning he took her out among the plants before the heat came up. A barefoot man named Procopio knelt at the heart of an old maguey, where the central spike had been cut away years before to leave a hollow bowl in the living flesh. He scraped the bowl with a curved blade until clear liquid welled, then drew it up through a long gourd by sucking at one end, his cheeks gone hollow, and spat the aguamiel into a wooden pail.
Sweet sap, faintly warm from the body of the plant.
Aurelio dipped a finger and held it to her lips. She licked it without thinking, and he gave her the slow smile, pleased with her again.
“It ferments by itself,” he said. “Nobody has to teach it. You leave the aguamiel in the tinacal and by evening it’s turning, by morning it’s pulque, and it never once stops wanting to turn. That’s the gift of this place. Other haciendas work twice as hard for half so good.”
“And why is it so good here?”
He looked at the old plant, at the wet bowl in its breast.
“Because we feed it,” he said.
Doña Engracia ran the house from a chair on the cool side of the courtyard, a thin old woman with a girl’s small hands. She’d liked Isabel at once, or had at least looked her over as a buyer looks over a mare and found nothing to send back. “Good hips,” she’d said, to Isabel’s face, on the first day. “She’ll do.”
She kept Isabel beside her in the evenings and gave her the best of the household pulque, the curado flavoured with prickly pear and pine nut, and she talked about the family.
There’d been a girl before her, the old woman said one night, the moon up and the fields hissing. Pilar. A pretty thing, darker than Isabel, with a laugh that carried across a field.
Aurelio had loved her past all sense.
The maguey lives a long life and flowers only once, at the very end, when it throws up the quiote, that great pale stalk taller than a man, and after the flowering it dies.
La Madre, the ancient plant at the centre of the field, hadn’t flowered in forty years.
It chose the spring of Pilar.
The stalk came up overnight, thick as a thigh, crowned in yellow bloom, and the family did what the family always does. Doña Engracia turned her small hands over in her lap.
“We gave it a companion,” she said. “To go down sweet into the ground with the old Mother, so the young plants would keep their gift. Pilar drank till she couldn’t stand, and we walked her out under the quiote, and she lay down in the grey leaves laughing. By morning there was only the smell of her, sweet, all through the field. The pulque that year was the finest in the memory of the valley.”
Isabel set her cup down with care. “Aurelio. He let you.”
“He chose her,” said doña Engracia, almost kindly. “A man can only give what he loves, or the field knows it’s been cheated and the gift goes thin. That’s the whole secret. You give it something you can’t bear to lose.”
The quiote came up that very week, overnight, pale and thick at the heart of the field, and the household went quiet with a held excitement Isabel could taste in her food.
Aurelio came to her gentle and often now, mouth and hands, sweeter than he’d ever been, and she let him, and lay afterward with her eyes open in the dark, working it through.
He’d not married a debt. He’d married a thing he could love quickly and give cleanly while the loving was still bright. That was why the old woman had looked at her hips. Not for children. He’d looked at her to measure how sweet she might go, how bright a grief she’d make.
She didn’t weep, and she didn’t run, because the plain was wide and the nearest town a day’s ride on a mule she didn’t know how to ask for.
Instead she went to Procopio at the heart of the field, the scraper, the one man who touched the plants with his whole hands, and asked him to teach her the gourd.
He showed her how to set her mouth to it and draw, how the sweetness comes up sudden and floods the tongue, and how you spit before you swallow or the field gets into you.
She practised until her cheeks ached, drawing aguamiel from the youngest plants and the oldest, learning where the sugar ran heaviest, and Procopio watched her in silence, for the poor of that place had long since stopped expecting to be told things.
On the night of the flowering they dressed her in white and gave her the curado, the sweetest they had, pine nut and prickly pear and something underneath she’d taught herself to taste for now.
She drank a little and tipped the rest down her sleeve when doña Engracia turned to the candles. She kept her steps small and let her words slur.
Aurelio walked her out under the quiote with his arm warm round her waist, his breath sweet against her hair, telling her how he loved her, and the dreadful part was that he did. She could hear the catch of true grief already in his throat. He’d worked himself up to losing her as a man works up a thirst.
She lay down in the grey leaves and pulled him with her, laughing, and he came easily, drunk on his own sorrow and on the cup she’d kept filling for him all evening from her own untouched share.
She held him with both arms while the sweetness took him and his eyes went soft and far. The field hissed round them, patient, hungry for the one brought to it unbearable and loved.
She put her mouth to his ear. “You should’ve married a woman you only liked,” she said.
By morning there was only the smell of him, sweet, all through the field, and Isabel walking back barefoot through the grey ranks with her white dress dragging behind her, to a house that was hers now, and an old woman in a chair who looked at her once, understood everything, and said nothing.
The field had been fed.
The gift would keep.
And the family does what the family does.
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