She said, "It would be of no use, Tenamáxtli. Too often, the rainy season brings such terrible storms that they scour these islands bare of anything movable. Even the strong trees, many of them are blown down each year. So we make our shelters under the fallen ones, that we may not be blown away. We build nothing that cannot easily be rebuilt. That is also why we do not try to grow crops of any sort. But the sea gives us abundant food, we have good streams for drink, coconuts for sweets. Our only harvest is of the kinúcha, and we trade them for the other things we need. Which are few," she concluded and, as if to illustrate, swept her hand down her all but naked body.
The word kinúcha of course means "pearls." And there was good reason why the island women needed little from the world across the sea. All except the youngest girls spent every day hard at work, which tired them so that they passed their nights in deep slumber. Barring the brief intervals they allowed themselves for eating and obligatory functions, they worked or they slept, and they could imagine no other activities. They were as indifferent to the ideas of diversion and leisure as they were to the lack of male mates and boy children.
Their work is certainly demanding—and unique among feminine occupations. As soon as the day is light enough, most of the girls and women either swim out into the sea or push out on rafts made of vine-lashed tree limbs. Each woman carries looped to her arm a basket made of loosely woven withes. From then until the light fades at dusk, those women dive repeatedly to the bottom of the sea, to pry loose the oysters that abound there. They surface with a basket full of the things, empty them onto the beach or their raft, then dive to fill it again. Meanwhile, the girls too young and the women too old to dive do the drudgery of opening the oysters—and throwing away almost all of them.
The women do not want the oysters, except for the comparatively few they eat. What they seek are the oysters' kinúcha, the hearts, the pearls. During my stay in the islands, I saw pearls enough to have paid for raising an entire modern city there, if a city had been wanted. Most of the pearls were perfectly round and smooth, some were irregularly bulbous; some were as small as a fly's eye, some as large as my thumb end; most were of sizes varying between those extremes. Most, also, were a softly glowing white, but there were pinks and pale blues and even an occasional kinú the silver-gray color of a thundercloud. What makes pearls so esteemed and so valuable are their rarity and difficulty of acquisition, though one would suppose that if any oyster has a heart, they all should.
"They all do," said Cricket. "But only a very few have the right sort." She tilted her pretty head, gazing at me. "Your own heart, Tenamáxtli, it is for feeling emotions, yes? Like love?"
"So it seems," I said, and laughed. "It thumps more noticeably when I love somebody."
She nodded. "As does mine, when I look at my little Tirípetsi and feel love for her. But oysters do not all have hearts that know emotion as human hearts do. Most oysters just lie inert, and wait for the water currents to bring them nourishment, and aspire to nothing more than oyster-bed placidity, and do nothing but exist as long as they can."
I started to remark that she might be describing her own island sisters or, for that matter, the majority of humankind, but she went on:
"Only one oyster in many—perhaps one in a hundred hundreds—has a heart that can feel, that can want to be something more than a slime in a shell. That one oyster among so many, that one with a feeling heart, well, his is the heart that becomes a kinú, visible and beautiful and precious."
Surely that nonsense could be believed nowhere except in The Islands of the Women, but it was such a sweet fancy that my own heart would not let me dispute it. And, now that I think back, that must have been the moment when I fell in love with Ixínatsi.
At any rate, her belief in questing for unoysterlike oysters seemed to console her on those days when she might dive a hundred hundreds of times between first and last light, and bring up whole nations of oysters without a kinú among them. So she never once—as I would have done—cursed the oysters or the gods or even spat angrily into the sea when a whole day's work was done in vain.
And cursedly hard work that is, too. I know, for I tried it one day, in secret, in waters the women were not then working—staying underwater long enough to pry just one oyster off a rock down there. That was as long as I could stay. But the women begin their diving when they are mere children. By the time they are grown, they have so developed in the upper body that they can hold their breath and remain submerged for an astonishingly long time. Indeed, those women of the islands have bosoms more remarkable than I have ever seen elsewhere.
"Look at them," said Cricket, holding one of her magnificent breasts in either hand. "It is because of these that the islands have come to be the domain of women only. You see, we worship the big-bosomed goddess Xarátanga. Her name means New Moon, and in the arc of every new moon you can see the curve of her ample breast."
The similarity had never occurred to me before, but it is so.
Cricket continued, "New Moon long ago ordained that these islands should be inhabited only by females, and all men have respected that commandment, for they fear that Xarátanga would take away the oysters—or at least their valuable kinúcha—if any but women tried to harvest them. Anyway, the men could not do that. As you confessed to me, Tenamáxtli, you proved your own ineptitude at it. We women are fitted by New Moon to be superior divers." She jiggled her breasts again. "These help our lungs to be capable of holding much more air than any man's can."
I could not divine any connection between milk-giving and air-breathing organs, but I was no tícitl, so I did not argue the matter. I could only admire. Whatever extra function the women's breasts might or might not serve, their superb development and ageless firmness indubitably add to the women's handsomeness. And there is another thing that makes the islanders differ from mainland women, and makes them attractive in a striking way, but to explain that aspect I must digress slightly.
There are on those islands many other inhabitants besides the women. Various kinds of sea turtles lumber from shore to sea and back, and there are crabs everywhere, and of course there is a multitude of birds, raucous of voice and promiscuous of droppings. But the most distinctive creature is the animal the women call the pukiitsí, which is to say a sea-dwelling version of the beast called cuguar in Náhuatl. The name must have come down to them from their Michihuácan ancestors, for none of the islanders could ever have seen a cuguar.
The pukiitsí does vaguely resemble the mountain-dwelling cuguar, though its expression is not fierce, rather winningly mild and inquisitive. A pukiitsí is similarly whiskered about the muzzle, but its teeth are blunt, its ears tiny and its finlike paws are not killer-clawed. We of Aztlan saw these sea animals only rarely—when an injured or dead one washed up on our shores—because they do not care for sandy or swampy places, but prefer rocky ones. And we called them sea-does, simply because of their big, warm, brown doe eyes.
There might be hundreds of the sea-cuguars about The Islands of the Women at any one time, but they live on fish and are not at all to be feared, as real cuguars are. They would gambol in the waters right alongside the diving women, or lazily sun themselves on the offshore rocks, or even sleep floating on their backs in the sea. The women never killed them for food—the meat is not very tasty—but occasionally a sea-cuguar would die of some other cause, and the women would hasten to skin it. The glossy brown pelt is valued as a garment, both for its beauty and for its water-shedding properties. (Ixínatsi made me an elegant overmantle from one of the skins.) That coat of hair is dense enough that the sea-cuguars can live in the sea without their bodies ever getting cold or waterlogged, and the sleekness of the coat enables them to arrow through the water as swiftly as any fish.