Gods of Jade and Shadow(3)

Finally, knowing she could not wait any longer, Casiopea went into the house, crossed the interior courtyard, and delivered the provisions. She saw her mother in the kitchen, her hair in a tidy bun, chopping garlic and speaking with the servants. Her mother also worked for her keep, as the cook. Grandfather appreciated her culinary abilities, even if she had disappointed him in other respects, mainly her marriage to a swarthy nobody of indigenous extraction. Their marriage produced an equally swarthy daughter, which was deemed even more regrettable. The kitchen, though busy, was a better place to spend the day. Casiopea had helped there, but when she turned thirteen she had hit Martín with a stick after he insulted her father. Since then, they’d had her perform meaner tasks, to teach her humility.

Casiopea stood in a corner and ate a plain bolillo; the crusty bread was a treat when dipped in coffee. Once Grandfather’s meal was ready, Casiopea took it to his room.

Grandfather Cirilo had the largest room in the house. It was crammed with heavy mahogany furniture, the floor decorated with imported tiles, the walls hand-stenciled with motifs of vines and fruits. Her grandfather spent most of the day in a monstrous cast-iron bed, pillows piled high behind him. At the foot of the bed there lay a beautiful black chest, which he never opened. It had a single decoration, an image of a decapitated man in the traditional Mayan style, his hands holding a double-headed serpent that signaled royalty. A common enough motif, k’up kaal, the cutting of the throat. In the walls of old temples, the blood of the decapitated was sometimes shown spurting in the shape of snakes. The image etched on the lid, painted in red, did not depict the blood, only the spine curving and the detached head tumbling down.

When she was younger, Casiopea had asked Grandfather about that singular figure. It struck her as odd since he had no interest in Mayan art. But he told her to mind her own business. She did not have a chance to ask or learn more about the artifact. Grandfather kept the key to the chest on a gold chain around his neck. He took it off to bathe and to go to church, since the priest was strict about forbidding any ornamentation during his services.

Casiopea set her grandfather’s supper by the window and, grunting, he stood up and sat at the table where he had his meals every day. He complained about the salting of the dish, but did not yell. On the evenings when his aches particularly pained him, he could holler for ten whole minutes.

“Do you have the paper?” he asked, as he did every Friday. The two days when the railcar stopped by the town, they brought the morning daily from Mérida.

“Yes,” Casiopea said.

“Start reading.”

She read. At certain intervals her grandfather would wave his hand at her; this was the signal that she should stop reading that story and switch to something else. Casiopea doubted her grandfather cared what she read, she thought he simply enjoyed the company, although he did not say this. When he was fed up with her reading, Grandfather dismissed her.

“I heard you were rude to Martín today,” her mother told her later, as they were getting ready for bed. They shared a room, a potted plant, a macramé plant hanger for said plant, and a cracked painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her mother, who had been Grandfather’s most darling daughter as a child.

“Who said so?”

“Your aunt Lucinda.”

“She wasn’t there. He was rude to me first,” Casiopea protested.

Mother sighed. “Casiopea, you know how it is.”

Mother brushed Casiopea’s hair. It was thick, black, straight as an arrow, and reached her waist. During the daytime she wore it in a braid to keep it from her face and smoothed it back with Vaseline. But at night she let it loose, and it cloaked her, hiding her expression. Behind her curtain of hair Casiopea frowned.

“I know he is a pig, and Grandfather does nothing to curb him. Grandfather is even worse than Martín, such a mean old coot.”

“You must not speak like that. A well-bred young woman minds her words,” her mother warned her.

Well-bred. Her aunts and her cousins were ladies and gentlemen. Her mother had been a well-bred woman. Casiopea was just the poor relation.

“I want to tear my hair out some days, the way they talk to me,” Casiopea confessed.

“But it’s such pretty hair,” her mother said, gently setting down the hairbrush. “Besides, bitterness will only poison you, not them.”

Casiopea bit her lower lip. She wondered how her mother ever gathered the courage to marry her father, despite her family’s protestations. Although, if the nasty rumor Martín had whispered in her ear was true, the marriage had taken place because her mother had been pregnant. That, Martín declared, made her almost a bastard, daughter of a worthless Pauper Prince. And that was why she had hit him with a stick, leaving a scar upon his brow. This humiliation he would never forgive her. This triumph she never forgot.

“Did you go over that reading I marked for you?”

“Oh, Mother, what does it matter if I can read or write or do sums?” Casiopea asked irritably.

“It matters.”

“I’m not going anywhere where it would matter.”

“You do not know that. Your grandfather has said he’ll give us one thousand pesos each upon his passing,” her mother reminded her.

In Mexico City, a shop worker at a reputable store could get five pesos for a day’s wages, but in the countryside half of that, and less, was more realistic. With one thousand pesos Casiopea might live in Mérida for a whole year without working.