“You said you’d bind him. How?” Casiopea asked.
“A piece of ordinary rope.”
“A piece of ordinary rope,” she repeated. “Will that work with a god?”
“It’s the symbolism that matters in most dealings. I’ll speak a word of power to the cord, and it will be as strong as a diamond. It will hold him, and I will do the rest. Do not be frightened,” he concluded.
“It is easy for you to say. I bet gods don’t need to fear many things while regular people have an assortment of fears to choose from,” she replied.
“You are not a regular person, not now.”
For how long, she wondered. And she had to admit to herself that part of what kept her next to him was not just the promise of freeing herself of the bone splinter or a sense of obligation, but the lure of change, of becoming someone else, someone other than a girl who starched shirts and shone shoes and had to make do with a quick glimpse of the stars at night.
“Do not be frightened, I say,” he told her and took her left hand with his own.
It was not a gesture meant to provide comfort, at least not the comfort that can be derived from the touch of another person. This would have required a trace of human empathy and affection. It was a demonstration, like a scientist might perform. And still her pulse quickened, for it is difficult to be wise and young.
“Feel here, hmm? My own magic rests in your veins,” he said, as if seeking her pulse.
He was right. It was the tugging of a string on a loom, delicate, but it ran through her, and when he touched her it struck a crystalline note. Upon that note, another one, this one much more mundane, the effect of a handsome man clutching a girl’s hand.
She pulled her hand free and frowned. She was not that unwise.
“If your cousin frightens me, I’ll run off, I don’t care,” she swore. “Angry macaws bite, you know?”
“I shall have to take my chances.”
She tapped her spoon against her glass, summoning the waitress, who poured more coffee and milk for them.
“Do you like it? This drink?” he asked her after the glass was refilled, a frown upon his brow.
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“It’s too thick and awfully sweet. The milk disrupts the coffee’s bitterness.”
“We must not disrupt the purity of the coffee bean,” she said mockingly.
“Precisely.”
She chuckled at that, and he, of course, did not find it amusing. Not that it would be likely that a god of death would be very merry, not even in Veracruz, where no one must wear a frown, and not even during Carnival, when every trouble must be thrown to the air, left to be carried off by the winds.
Thus they sat there, together in the café, the dark, serious god and the girl, as the night fell and the lights were turned on in the streets.
How short their hair was! Casiopea watched all the fashionable young women with their hair like the American flappers, serving as “ladies in waiting” for the Carnival queen. In Casiopea’s town no one dared to sport such a decadent look. Even face powder might be cause for gossip there. In Veracruz, during Carnival, there were plenty of painted faces and rouged cheeks and unabashed looks to go around. If her mother had been there, she’d have told Casiopea that such shamelessness should be met with scorn, but seeing the girls laughing, Casiopea wondered if her mother was mistaken.
The queen, after being crowned, waved at the crowds, and thus began the formal masked balls at the Casino Veracruzano and other select venues. But the revelers were not confined to the insides of buildings, and those who could not afford the masked ball tickets made their own fun in the streets and parks, drinking, dancing, and sometimes engaging in mischief. Lent would arrive soon, the moment to say farewell to the flesh. So now was the time to throw caution to the wind and carouse. No one would sleep that first night of Carnival, and sometimes they wouldn’t sleep for days, too preoccupied with floats, parades, and music to bother heading to bed. A thousand remedies would be available the next morning to fix the hangover many locals would suffer from. One local solution was the consumption of shellfish for breakfast, although others contented themselves with aspirins.
The buildings down Cinco de Mayo Street were decorated with streamers and flags, and the cars that ventured into the streets sported flowers and colorful banners. Revelers set off firecrackers and shared bottles of booze. Inside restaurants and hotels, folkloric dancers twirled their skirts and musicians played the danzón, a Cuban import that was wildly sensual but also wildly popular.
Veracruz had an African legacy. In this port, the slaves had been hauled off the European ships and forced to toil in sugar plantations. Descendants of these slaves clustered in Yanga and Mandinga but had influenced the whole region, leaving a mark on its music and cuisine, and like everyone else they attended Carnival, flooding the streets. There were black-skinned men dressed as skeletons, indigenous women in embroidered blouses, light-skinned brunettes playing the part of mermaids, pale men in Roman garb. Once Carnival was over, the fairer skinned, wealthier inhabitants of the city might look with disdain at the “Indians” and the “blacks,” but for that night there was a polite truce in the elaborate game of class division.
Casiopea watched all this with amazement and trepidation as they joined the crowds of masked and disguised revelers. Hun-Kamé had rented two costumes for an exorbitant price that morning. He was decked soberly in a black charro suit, with a silver-embroidered short jacket, tight trousers decorated with a long line of buttons on the sides, and a wide hat upon his head. He cut a dramatic, attractive figure and looked as though he were ready to leap upon a stallion and perform the typical tricks of these horsemen, especially apt given that he carried a rope on his right arm. She matched him, attired as a charra, with a jacket and a skirt and a great deal of silver embroidery, except her clothing was white. Unlike him, she lacked a hat.
Earlier that day, at the guesthouse, she had pressed the embroidered jacket against her chest and curiously stood in front of a mirror. “Have you never seen your reflection?” he’d asked her.
Thus she looked at herself. Not the quick, darting glance Casiopea was allowed in the mornings, but a long look. Vanity, the priest in Uukumil had warned her, was a sin. But Casiopea saw her black eyes and her full mouth, and she thought Hun-Kamé might be right, that she was pretty, and the priest was too far away to nag her about this fact. Then she grabbed a brush and pinned her hair neatly in place.
Casiopea and Hun-Kamé walked together down the busy streets, the earthy sound of the marimba spilling out from a nearby building, urging her to dance.
“Where are we headed?” she asked.