Clash of Star-Kings Read Free Page A

the night and vanishing off to Rome to serve mass there before daybreak! Well!” She rose to her feet and seized her scissors. “I’m not going to rest a minute, I’m cutting rue and rosemary, both so good against witches — and
cordones de San Francisco
: may it bind them hand and foot! And even the little rosebuds, like drops of blood from the Sacred Heart — we will dip them all in holy water and place them all around….”She paused a second at the doorway and looked back at her sister. “For Heaven’s sake, Josefa,” she cried, “don’t just sit there doing nothing:
Pray!
”
    • • •
    It was quite different keeping house in the United States, Sarah thought, for the manyeth time. There it was all so simple. There was hot and cold running water, O-cello sponge mops, detergents, Comet Cleanser, Campbell’s Soup … all the conveniences of modern science.
Here
there was nothing but a barrel of water so cold that it burned like fire and a sort of concrete sink without a pipe (there
was
a pipe, elsewhere in the patio, but it lacked a sink) and a fiber pad. You had to dip the dirty dish all greasy cold into the ice-cold water and scrub it with the pad and your fingers froze and then you put the dish, which looked no cleaner at all, in the sink and dipped some more melted snow out of the barrel and poured it out and it ran and splashed all over your legs — “
Ow!
” screamed Sarah. “OW — OW!” The dish slipped and shattered.
    Sarah swore. If it weren’t for the few bits of flowers and herbiage still left in the patio she would have wept….
    No use telling Jacob. Not him. That stinker. That bastard. Would he offer to light a fire and try to make hot water, let alone once
help
her? No. He wouldn’t. Not him. She knew his rotten, selfish moods … just let her put her head in the door of his workroom and
tell
him about mean, selfish, ungrateful Lupita and he would, without doubt,
yell
at her! As though it were
her
fault they had only five pesos left and he had to meet a deadline with the damned story he was working on.
He
wouldn’t care that tootsie little Evans had run away or been catnapped or something! And here she had thought Mexico was going to be such a
fun
thing, all loyal smiling hardworking native servant girls and lovely tropical beaches like Puerto Vallarte in that picture with Liz Taylor. Tropical! Here she stood, risking frostbite and only a few sprigs of herbs and a few stalks of little purple flowers and one bush with tiny-tiny rosebuds on it —
    At which, in stomped Señora Mariana and, without so much as
looking
at Sarah, began to cut all the rest of the green stuff and the flowers! The grease congealed, Sarah’s fingers got stiffer and redder and colder. “All right for
you
, Richard Burton!” She wept….

II
    Luis Lorenzo Santangel knew well the networks of little paths which led through the woods and rocks above even the highest pastures, led eventually to the small
milpas
where grew the life-sustaining corn of the Moxtomi Indians, who raised no cattle, not even so much as a goat. Milk, they held — and it seemed logical — was for infants; and if it came ever to pass that the small brown
tetas
of a Moxtomi mother had no milk for her infant, why, there was always the milky pulque, good for young and old alike. And, if despite this benevolent liquor made from the fermented nectar of the maguey cactus the infant died, why, how sad — only not very sad — it was
destinado
that the tiny soul become a tiny angel in Heaven.
    The townspeople were, as a matter of course, scornful towards the Moxtomi, calling them
cerrados
— closed ones — because their minds were closed to all things modern and innovating. They laughed at the Moxtomi, so meek and so mild, at their bare feet and naked legs and blue-black serapes, their ignorance of proper Castilian speech and at their poverty and pagan ways. Townspeople had, over the course of centuries, alienated the greater part of the