And then she followed her husband home, walking two paces behind him, eyes downcast.
He caught fish for their wedding supper while she finished the new piece of cloth on her loom, trying to recall the habits of a dutiful wife. Silent, patient, obedient ... she had not been any of those, to her stranger-husband, until now. She must please him, now, and learn to make the best of it.
But as the evening passed she felt his irritation at her awkward deference, and, not understanding, she tried harder; felt her tension grow, and her resentment.
“Damn it, Amanda, what’s the matter with you!”
She looked up at him meekly. “Forgive me, my husband. Have I displeased you?”
“Yes.” He frowned from his seat at the table. “What the hell is this silent treatment? And why wouldn’t you walk beside me today?” His hand covered his cheek, unconsciously. “Are you that ashamed to be married to me?”
“No!” Tears of exasperation blurred her eyes. “No. You’ve honored me greatly, in the eyes of my family. But it’s proper for a woman to defer to a man, in speech, in actions ... in all things.”
“Even if he’s wrong?”
“Yes.” Her hands clenched on the cloth of her dress. “But, of course, a man is never wrong.”
“Mother of God, Amanda—you don’t believe that?” He looked at her. “I’m a man. Up until now I’ve made plenty of mistakes, and you haven’t been afraid to let me know about them.”
“I—I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve lived alone for so long…but I’ll change. I want to be a good wife to you.” A tear burned her cheek, caught on her veil.
“You can be; just stay the way you were. Do what you want, talk when you feel like it. Don’t hang on me! I haven’t got the patience for it. I—I think I’ve lived alone for a long time, too, Amanda, and I don’t want to have to change my habits; I don’t expect you to change yours. We’re sharing space in time, that’s all. Let’s do it as painlessly as possible.”
“If that is what you wish, my husband ...”
“Amanda!” His anger slapped her. “None of this ‘my husband,’ ‘my wife.’ It’s just Cristovao, and Amanda. And in the future, walk with me, not behind me; I felt like I owned a servant, a slave…” He rubbed his head, staring into space.
“But it’s the custom; every wife follows her husband.” She felt a terrible relief begin to loosen her knotted muscles.
“Not your sister Teresa.”
“She’s crippled. José has to help her walk.”
“She does fine on a crutch. I don’t think that’s why he does it at all. I think it’s because he wants her there.”
Amanda wiped her eyes, startled, amazed. “But—but, you and I, people would…laugh at us.”
“So what? After a while they won’t even notice us anymore.” He stood up, came toward her; her heart beat faster. “And the veil—”
She jerked away from him, appalled. “Would you humiliate me so, before every man in town—?”
“No.” He caught her arm. “No, Amanda. But in our home you can let me see your face, can’t you? You are my wife, now.” He drew her veil down gently, pulled the cloth from her hair. Her hair came undone, spilled loose over her shoulders; he filled his hands with it. “Like spun copper…spun gold…like flame. ...” She stood very still. His hands found the laces of her leather vest, untied them; his voice was husky. “I…just want you to know that, in town today, you were the most beautiful woman I saw.”
Like flame…She heard nothing more. On her wedding night she lay at last with her husband, and dreamed that the man who made love to her was someone else.
The days passed, and the weeks, and the months; Sanpedro entered the gentle season of winter. Amanda did as her husband wished by doing as she always did, self-consciously at first, but easily and gratefully again, in time, as she came to realize how much her independence had grown to be a part of her, a source of pride and integrity, a defense against the indignities of life.
As he had promised, Cristoval worked hard, sharing the endless tasks of her daily existence and freeing her to make the cloth that was their only item of trade for the village market. He walked with her, too, for miles along the sea’s shining edge, on the days when she gathered the tiny fluted shells she used to make lavender dye. He questioned her about her discovery; she told him how she had boiled them in salty water, desperate with hunger; how the tiny sea snails had been inedible, but how, because they turned the water purple, she had never been as hungry again. Cristoval had looked out across the bay, where Dog plunged beside them, shattering the foam. “You’ll never be hungry again, Amanda; we’ll never be hungry, if I can help it.”
Farther along the beach they had come on a dead fish mired in a clot of greasy black scum. Cristoval squatted down beside it, took some on his fingers and sniffed it, fascinated.
“It’s the sea filth, that fouls the water’s surface and can kill fish and birds.’’ She waved Dog back. “It happens farther up the coast, too; at Santabarbara.”
Cristoval wiped his fingers on the sand. “Does it?” His voice was wondering. “But that’s good! It’s oil, Amanda; don’t you know what that means? It means they can establish a major outpost here, they can put in wells…they can mine metals with—with gook labor. ...”
“Who can?” she asked, frightened.
He stopped, staring at her strangely. He touched her arm for a moment, as though to reassure her, or reassure himself of her reality. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “Nobody, I hope.”
Late in the winter he had gone to her father and asked permission to till a part of the grassy pastureland adjoining the wheat fields in return for half the crop. Amanda had protested unhappily, saying they could glean enough to get by on and that it was too much extra work. But he had said it would be an investment in the future and worth it a hundredfold: “You were right in what you told me once, Amanda. With a man like your father, you don’t tell him things. You show him…”
And when the wheat grew up past her knees, past her waist, almost up to her breasts, she had begun to understand the method in the madness of tilling fresh ground. And the method had not escaped the merchant’s eye of her father, either, for he began to ask Cristoval questions, rewarding them with a cow and, in time, even asking them into his home.
Amanda had blossomed with the spring, the ache of hunger forgotten, and the aching weariness that had aged her before her time. She would never be plump and comely like her sisters, but she took a secret pleasure in the new soft curves that she discovered in the broken mirror on the wall. Cristoval fished and worked their field; she wove and tended the green sprouts in the garden patch; the work was still unending, but now it filled her with hope and pride instead of hopeless despair. At night she no longer lay sleepless hearing the midnight bells, but fell into dreams quickly and easily. And if in her dreams she sometimes found a face that she reached for with longing and could never forget, she knew that her regret was nothing to her husband’s in his longing for the things he might never remember. He was a thoughtful and satisfying lover; he brought peace and fulfillment to her body, if not her soul.
The sudden fits of haunted sleep that took him through the locked doors of his mind to walk in his forgotten past grew more and more infrequent; though his hair grew in pure white along the seam of the scar. As the dreams faded, his interest in them seemed almost to fade as well. He no longer grew angry because she couldn’t describe their details to him, and the projects and problems of his new life left him little strength or time for seeking after the old one.
But as he stopped pressing to remember, more and more bits and fragments of his life began to rise unbidden to the surface of his mind. A rare animation would take him, and carry her with him, when he remembered a place he had traveled to see and described to her the brief, bright flashes of its terrifying wonder: A forest of tree and shrub that grew so densely that he had hacked his way through it with a hatchet, to find a gleaming mound of shattered glass, stitched with vine, embroidered by fragile blossoms in the colors of dawn…A ruined city filled with bones, on a treeless plain beneath a sullen, metallic sky; a wind so bitterly cold that the rain froze into stinging pellets…The shadow of a man long dead, imprisoned by some ancient sorcery forever in the surface of a building wall…