The rosca de reyes is hardest to make: the cake called Ring of the Kings, using white-flour dough, the same as for Baby’s Crupper tortillas. A blob of dough fit for a king, rolled out on the table, as long and fat as a sea slug. Como pene. Poking it and laughing: Como bato. Leandro is normally much more pious.
Weiner! Jaker!
Pachango!
Thing! Thing of the King!
Leandro had tears in his eyes and said Mother would kill us. He crossed himself and prayed for both souls. He made the cake into a ring by putting the thing-of-the-king in a circle and pressing the ends together. The token goes inside, a small clay baby Jesus that looks like a pig. Leandro said really it’s not even Jesus, it’s the boy-god Pilzintecutli. He dies when the days grow dark in December, then rises again on February 2, which is Candlemas. The ancients were concerned with light and darkness. We are in the dark days now, he said. Whoever finds the token in the cake will have good luck, when the light returns.
All the rest of the year, the clay token sits in a jar in the cabinet waiting to go into this cake. Leandro took the little pig Jesus out of the jar and kissed it before putting it in the rosca. Round jellied fruits go on top, but he put a square piece where the token was inside, his secret way of marking it. Reach for that one, he said, when the dish of cake is passed around.
Is it still lucky if you cheat, instead of getting the token by chance?
Mi’jo, Leandro said. Your mother can’t even remember the day she gave you birth. If an orphan boy is going to have any luck, he will have to make it himself.
What kind of orphan has two living parents? You said everyone has family even if they are ghosts. Or forget your cumpleaños.
Leandro took the orphan’s cheeks in his hands and kissed him on the mouth, and then spanked his crupper like a child, not a boy as tall as a man. A boy with terrible thoughts of kissing a man as a man. Leandro meant nothing by it. A beso for a child.
Leandro went home after the feast. All servants have fled, leaving kitchen scraps, bad moods, and dust. What is the use of good luck in an empty house?
2 February, Candlemas
Leandro was gone nineteen days, now back. He has to make a hundred tamales for Candlemas, without his sergente. It’s better to hide in the amate tree all day reading, a book won’t run off to its family any time it wants. Leandro can’t even read. Let him make tamales all day.
Today begins a year of perfect luck protected by Pilzintecutli, the clay-pig Jesus.
13 February
Today the lacuna appeared, a little below the surface. It’s near the center of the cliff below a knob where a hummock of grass grows out. It should be easy to find again but best to look early, with sun just up and the tide low. Inside the tunnel it was very cold and dark again. But a blue light showed up faintly like a fogged window, farther back. It must be the other end, no devil back there but a place to come up on the other side, a passage. But too far to swim, and too frightening.
One day Pilzintecutli will say, Go ahead lucky boy. Vete, rubio, swim toward that light. Go find the other side of the world where you belong.
The strangest thing. Mother believes in magic. She went back to the village of the giant stone head. After sending Natividad away with the carriage, she said, “This time we both go.” She took off her shoes again to cross the footbridge, then followed a path through the forest right around the edge of a lake. Yellow-winged jacanas flapped up from the water and an alligator rested at the edge, covered with waterweed up to its bulging eyes. Then back into the jungle, under giant trees. We were going to see a brujo, she said finally, because someone has put a bad eye on us both, and that’s why she can’t get another baby. Probably it was Don Enrique’s mother.
The brujo’s bamboo hut stood in a clearing, inside a circle of stones. It might have been made a thousand years ago. The door was a curtain of snail shells strung together that made a wooden tinkling sound when his hand pulled it aside. Inside was an altar covered with little clay figures, and branches with leaves standing in jars, and cockleshells of burning copal gum, the same incense as in the church. He said to take off our shirts, which Mother did immediately, down to her silk underthings. The brujo didn’t look at her, his eyes went to the roof of the hut and he began to sing, so he truly was a brujo, not just a man.
He seemed as old as a person could be, and still living. His chant was quiet and fast, Echate, echate. He walked all around Mother first, swatting her body gently with a branch of leaves dipped in a jar of leaf-water, shaking drops of it on her hair, breasts, and belly, then everything else, son included. Then he blew smoke over her, from the cockleshell of burning gum. With his knotted old hands he held up a figure cut from thin paper, a small catlike man-shaped thing, and burned it in the flame of a candle. Some of the carved figures on his altar looked like a man’s thing, his organ. Stone pachangos.
When he finished Mother paid him in coins. She didn’t speak until after crossing the bridge back to the village. The square was deserted, except for the great stone head. Natividad hadn’t come back. “Enrique can’t be told about this,” she said. “You know that, of course.”
“Does he want you to get a baby?”
She straightened her dress and pulled at the back of her stocking. “Well. It would change things, wouldn’t it?”
Leandro’s baby girl died in January after Feast of the Kings, and no one here knew. Cruz told Mother today. He was gone three weeks, not because he was angry with his sergente, but to bury a child. The two small grapefruit heads in church: only one now. Cruz had a fight with Mother because what Don Enrique pays is not enough for feeding a chicken. She said Leandro’s wife couldn’t get her milk, and the baby died.
How can he go home to a family with nothing to eat, then come to this house to make one hundred tamales? He behaves as if he had no dead children. The real Leandro never comes here. He only pretends.
9 March
Today the lacuna is gone. Directly below the knob in the cliff, nothing. If it is there, then buried below too much ocean. The grass hummock on the cliff face is very low to the water now. Or rather, the sea is higher.
Don Enrique is away in the Huasteca, and Mother has taken up kitchen knives. She waved one around this morning. Not to chop onions but to show she means business about keeping her secrets. Not just the brujo, but also Mr. P. T. Cash. So, no mention here about another surprising visit from him, while the master was away. Anyway Mother is too lazy to lift up a mattress and find this little book.