But when Casiopea looked in the mirror and saw her bangs and her short hair grazing her cheek, she thought she looked like the whores they’d warned her about. And yet her hair seemed quite nice. This might mean that the whores were not as bad as they’d said. Or maybe it meant something else entirely. Like most questions that had assaulted her during her journey, Casiopea had an impressive ability to mark them down as topics she should process later, but that she could not be bothered to consider at the time.
She exited the hairdresser’s shop and for a block or two, she walked very slowly, fearful that people would point at her, even ridicule her new hairstyle. But the pedestrians kept walking, the policemen directed traffic, the motorists banged their palm against the horn. Mexico City was too busy to notice a young, provincial girl with her black hair cut short. She gave a beggar a smile and asked a woman for directions, and neither person seemed shocked by her appearance.
Casiopea let out a sigh of relief, realizing no one was going to stop her because she looked different. Just as she was smiling, however, a heavy hand fell on her shoulder.
“Casiopea, we have to talk,” a voice said.
She knew that voice well. It was her cousin Martín.
Our Father, who art in heaven, he told himself, repeating the Lord’s prayer inside his head. But then he switched from prayer to curses, and back again. The curses were all destined for Casiopea.
He kept his eyes closed tight, fearing he might fall and dash his body against the ground, and the owl flapped its wings quickly. It was a gigantic creature, its talons large enough to lift a man in the air, and Martín kept thinking it would either throw him off his back or rend him with its beak and devour him whole.
The night wind toyed with the young man’s hair and he squeezed his eyes harder, he held tight to the feathers and the flesh of this supernatural creature. When the owl landed on the roof of a building, Martín could hardly contain his joy. He almost burst into tears.
“Your cousin will be at the Hotel Mancera,” the owl told him.
Or at least he thought it was the owl who had spoken, although it might have been Vucub-Kamé making himself heard through the animal, since the bird’s voice had a flintlike quality that made Martín bow his head, respect instinctive in the presence of the unnatural.
“You will tell the girl the Lord of Xibalba wishes to speak with her,” the owl said. “But do not scare her. It is best to make an ally than an enemy.”
“Of course,” Martín said, although he frankly thought it might be better to slap some sense into his cousin. “What if she refuses?”
“Then we will determine another way to proceed. Do nothing else without the Supreme Lord’s consent,” the owl said, before it batted its wings and flew off into the night.
Martín was left alone on the roof of a building he did not know, in a city he had never visited before. It was the middle of the night, and he was afraid of being robbed by ruffians. He was also dreadfully cold; the trip on the owl’s back had left him sniffling and tired. Martín checked himself into a hotel near Casiopea’s lodgings and went to sleep because there was little he could do until the morning and he needed a pillow under his head and a hot bath.
He hoped for good dreams. Instead, he dreamed of Uukumil, his childhood, and his hateful cousin.
* * *
—
In dreams, she hit him with the stick and Grandfather laughed.
Martín Leyva was indolent, proud, and cruel. His faults were not solely the result of an inherent nature. They had been honed and coaxed by his family, through explicit action and through lapses in judgment.
As a man he already saw himself as worthy of praise. As a Leyva, child of the wealthiest family in town, his ego grew inflated. There was little he could not do, from berating the servants to lording over his female cousins and his sisters as if he were the ruler of a principality. His grandfather was a bitter tyrant, and Martín copied his mannerisms, feeling disappointed with his father, who was a much more placid fellow, meek, gray, and subdued by the patriarch. Rather than imitate the father, then, he took after the grandfather. He considered himself the future Man of the House, the undisputed macho of the Leyva clan.
Nevertheless, sometimes cracks showed in his narcissistic façade. Martín was sent off to a good school but expelled. He’d had a hard time fitting in at the institution. Not only were the intellectual demands too much for his limited, closed brain, but he could discern scorn in the faces of the other pupils. The Leyvas were kings of Uukumil, but not kings of Mérida. He felt like an outsider, diminished. Unable to be the center of attention, he managed to get himself packed back to his hometown and refused to return to the school.
But home did not offer the respite he might have expected, mainly because Casiopea was living with the family.
At first, Martín had not quite known how to react to the girl, who was two years his junior. He was aloof, but his cool indifference turned to outright anger the more he observed her. First of all, there was Casiopea’s personality, which irritated him.
The day he returned from school, the letter narrating his expulsions clasped between his hands, she’d been with Grandfather to observe his humiliation…
His sisters and his other girl cousins were mild, quiet creatures who knew better than to defy him. But Casiopea was made of sterner stuff. She did as she was told, but sometimes she’d protest. She’d rebel. And even if she said nothing, he read mutiny in her eyes.
Then there was the matter of her intelligence. Martín thought books were for fools. If a man could do long division and read the headlines of the newspapers, that was all that was required. For a while he had read the paper for his grandfather, stumbling over big words, until the man, exasperated, assigned the task to the younger girl. Lo and behold, she could read well, could write in a neat hand, and did her sums with surprising quickness. Her mother had taught the child, and then the child continued to teach herself more. Martín believed this was suspicious, unfeminine.
“Why couldn’t you be a boy?” Grandfather said, eyes on Casiopea, and Martín almost broke into tears…
Hostile, he circled around the girl, issuing orders, seeking to dominate her, finding pleasure in this power. Yet he held back an inch. There was the slim veneer of civility to his actions. He spoke unpleasantries, but in the tone of a gentleman.
This changed when she hit him. He had been goading her for a while and did not think she’d break. But then Martín told her that she was almost a bastard: her mother had been pregnant when she married, round with child. Casiopea grabbed a stick and swung it against the boy’s head.
She almost took out his eye. In pain, hollering, thinking he had been dramatically injured, Martín had wept until his mother and the other members of the family ran out to see what was wrong.