Aunt Bertha had prepared his favorite dish: chicken with green sauce. — You look unwell, she said.
That’s Adela’s fault.
So I’ve heard. That stinking little puta! I’ve been praying for you.
Thank you, aunt. And how’s your health?
Oh, the same. I know some fine girls your age. Would you like me to introduce you?
Never mind, aunt. I’m busy with my research.
I know a young girl who’s quite interested in La Llorona. An extremely pretty young girl, although her blondeness does come out of a bottle. Her mama says she’s never had a boyfriend, which is practically a miracle, Ricardo; nowadays you wouldn’t believe the sluts in this neighborhood. There are exceptions, thank the saints! The one I’m talking about keeps her skirt clean. I think you’d like her, because she watches paranormal episodes on the television. And she lives right around the corner.
Thank you, aunt. Maybe when I feel better. I think I’ll lie down now.
Of course you’ve had a very long trip. How many hours was it?
Well, fourteen, more or less. Thank you for dinner, aunt.
You’re sure you won’t have any more? No? Then you must be unwell! I’ll pray for you. By the way, do you remember that bruja I go to, Doña Esperanza? She always asks after you. I informed her about Adela, of course, and she said she was going to do something about her. She promised me that within a month, or six months at the most, that bitch’s womb is going to dry up.
Thank you, aunt. I’ll see you in the morning.
At dawn, anxious to escape his dear aunt’s ministrations, the young man took a bus to the river, and from there a taxi to the root-wrapped arches of the Casa de Cortés, where everything was the same tan, the open chamber half strangled by roots which flowed across the floor like a great lady’s dress. For some reason this reminded him of traitorous Adela, and he ground his fingernails into his palms. Ricardo had last come here while his mother was still alive. He had half forgotten the place, and found himself now strangely impressed by the long drapings of that crepe dress of roots which flowed down the broken walls from the green-leafed sky, white light shining in between them like unearthly pleats. In one coral-studded corner hung shards of pale blue plaster which the taxi driver said was only twelve years old and the tour guide proudly asserted to be original. There was folklore for you! Through this narrow-bricked arch, Malinche must have passed with her lord. Ricardo touched it. He gazed up into a great tree-branch. Slowly he wandered through Cortés’s roofless house, passing the arch whose curve was outlined with many narrow bricks stood on end. He approached another corner which was grown with roots as flat and wide as the abandoned clothes of pollos* crushed into the dirt. The shade of these ceiba trees refreshed him, but the slow strangulation which their roots were accomplishing horrified him.
Strange to say, although he had always thrived in this climate, the humidity now wearied Ricardo, and before noon he decided to return to Aunt Bertha’s to lie down. He caught a taxi to the bus. Perhaps he was getting ill. Gazing dully out the bus window, he saw from behind a narrow-waisted woman with a white ribbon in her long black hair, walking down the road, her skirt darkly slit just above the ankle. In spite of his rage against women, he felt desire. Resolutely he closed his eyes, only to be afflicted by an afterimage of roots and flagstones both the color of the reddish dirt.
All the way back to Veracruz, Adela haunted him. How could he make that she-devil weep with remorse? Someday she would come groveling to him, and he would say: Malinche. No doubt he ought to apply to the university for a travel grant; it would profit his dissertation to visit that house in Coyoacán where Malinche once lived with Cortés, in company with the three daughters of the murdered Moctezuma; there she gave birth to the conqueror’s son Martín just before the arrival of his Spanish wife, who soon died in that house with black bruises around her throat. Had Cortés done that, or someone else? Ricardo would have liked to see Malinche’s face on the night the wife appeared! That way he could imagine Adela’s expression in that same situation. Better yet, if he could drink in Malinche’s pain on that afternoon when, somewhere near Orizaba, Cortés married her off to Juan Xaramillo de Salvatierra, who as I have said was intoxicated while uttering his vows, then history would finally serve his purpose! His headache was getting worse. He longed to kill Adela, but only if he wouldn’t get caught. He could not decide whether his forehead was hot or cold.
Before they had returned to Veracruz, Malinche was delivered of her new husband’s offspring, a daughter named María, who at age sixteen would be kidnapped and forcibly married by the Viceroy’s nephew. Cortés had long since carried away Martín to Spain, to legitimize him at court. No one knows whether Malinche died of plague, or heartbreak, or whether Juan Xaramillo had her put out of the way, in order to get himself a fresher wife. In any case, Malinche, the so-called Mexican Eve, whom the Tlaxcalans identified with a jade-skirted volcano goddess; and who also apparently incarnated or represented Malinalxochitl, Wild Grass Flower, the woman who founded the city of Malinalco and became a deity, was now charged with being Adela as well; and Ricardo most definitely had business with that female; he would recall her to punishment, just as a domineering little boy pulls his mother back by her pink apronstring.
When he had implored Adela to have hope for them both and to believe that they could live together, she paused, then evenly informed him that she was considering and reconsidering; and when he inquired how long it might take her to reconsider, she informed him that she had no idea and therefore declined to discuss the matter, a proceeding which, she easily admitted, might not be entirely fair, but she happened to be annoyed by other worries, such as how to pay for her car. Ricardo proposed to hope and assume that he and Adela would love each other always, to which she indifferently assented, after which, since she said no more, he began to feel ever more anxious and sick; and the longer she avoided the subject, the more hurt he became. Adela presently explained that of course she loved him; the reasons for her coolness had nothing to do with love. — How true! he bitterly thought. Nothing to do with love! — It was not until she left him three months later that he began to hate her.
Aunt Bertha was in her room snoring. Ricardo opened one of his Veracruzan books of legends. In the engraving, a pair of Spaniards scourged an Indian tied to a post. Closing his tired eyes, he seemed to see the narrow-waisted woman walking down the road again, but this time she was dressed in dark green. What had she actually been wearing? It had not been green. Her long hair was as black as the zócalo’s palm trees at night, when the white bell tower rises and narrows into the purple sky. What made her memory so alluring? When he closed his eyes, seeking to remember Adela, he could see her turning toward him, commencing her half-smile, but then she faded away.
Ignoring his headache, he sat in the back yard beneath a palm tree, footnoting various known correspondences between Malinche and the Woman-Serpent called Cihuacoatal, whose naked, decapitated, cast down and violated stone semblance appears in many ancient tableaux; she is the original one who weeps for her children by night, and La Llorona may well be the same entity, renamed by the people in order to gain toleration from the Church. So he drew his analogies tight, and began to hope that the university would award him high honors. But presently, although he strove to fight it off by means of rage, he began to feel still more unwell, his desires and other feelings now insinuating themselves like those new tree-arms slowly cracking apart the threshold of the Casa de Cortés. The pressure at his temples and in the small of his back felt ambiguous; he could not decide whether a woman’s fingers were massaging him, pushing the flesh inward, or whether he might simply be bloating. Fluid would soon burst out of his skin, or else the bone would fall away beneath the woman’s fingers; either way, it might not be so unpleasant because he felt warm and almost still, as if he were riding that single wide breaker on the wide sea, that wave a trifle redder and greener than ultramarine, toward that hill called the Indian’s Headdress where there used to be many palms; a man bought it and cut some of them down when his mother was still alive; and Ricardo stared bewildered along the avenida of body shops, automobile glass, yellow walls, laundromats, strip malls, trucks and bricks and gratings, sunshine, concrete, and the shaded military zone; while in his eyes the blood vessels glowed as brightly as the doorway of that pharmacy with ever so many colored packages on the shelves.