Hunger's Brides by W. Paul Anderson Page B

Here I let my head loll about like a boggled newborn, at which Grandfather laughed wheezily.
    â€œI’ve been reading for
three years
already, Abuelo, did you know that?” My average was a book a week, and lately more like two. So that made over two hundred now, and I began to recite them for him in alphabetical order. Thus was the matter quickly settled.
    And next fall was an eternity away….
    I was not quite as confident of my advantage as I let on. Through each siesta I read furiously while the others slept. Beside me, Grandfather snored his bliss for an hour in a hammock strung between the arcade’s columns before the library door. I sat at a small table, his hammock beside me, an armspan away. Under one window, on the inside table, was a chess set. Reaching through the wrought-iron bars we could have played, my imaginary opponent and I, like contented prisoners whilingaway the years. But I had a library to conquer, book by book. And so at the little table crowding the door, I sat—
stuck
. For this was the threshold I had not yet won Isabel’s permission to cross.
    â€œI said no, Inés. The library is a man’s place. It is not for little girls too accustomed already to having their way.” She had said this not even looking down, with me trotting alongside her on the way to the paddocks. “I don’t care what he said. He spoils you.” She was splendid, I had to admit, striding out in the sun, tucking that thick chestnut hair under her sombrero. In her riding boots she was almost as tall as I remembered Father, taller than Abuelo. I hadn’t known anyone could cover so much ground just walking—it was a wonder she bothered with horses at all. She walked the way I talked—would she stop for a minute, wouldn’t she care to explain?—we could negotiate. She laughed, then. A laugh deep like a man’s. Warm. Brief. I couldn’t remember ever making her laugh. I would try to be funnier the next time. But she still didn’t stop or even look down.
    Neverthless, that day and the next and until she stopped bothering to reply, I got some inkling of her reasons. Women and books had no place in this country; a woman’s place was out in the world, in the fields and grain exchanges and stock markets, if she was prepared to fight for it. And if she wasn’t, she would be at the mercy of men all her life. Not all the wishing or fighting in the world put women in libraries.
    We would see about that. Time, I thought, was on my side. And since she had been so obliging about school, I laboured mightily at patience.
    In the meantime, Grandfather brought me out each day a heaping tray of books to choose from—and a fine, adult selection, too. Each afternoon he shuffled through that doorway, and in his face was the quiet pride of a baker with a tray. In just that way did he place the books before me.
    And through those days and weeks, it was as though I had broken open a vast garner. But I was no granary mouse. I ate like a calf, like a goat—everything at once. Herodotus, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Thucydides—here, at last I had reached the source of all learning. Our great poets, Lope de Vega and Góngora—the
early
Góngora, Grandfather stressed with a certain severity. Our Bible, of course, and now Juan de la Cruz † and his love lyrics to Christ.
    And tales—of hungry picaroons erring through the Spanish countryside. While reading
Don Quixote
, I woke
mi abuelito
in the Hammock of the Sacred Nap almost every afternoon to protest the cruelties ofCervantes, who, Grandfather conceded, had suffered sufficient indignities himself to know better.
    This is probably why, the day I reached for Homer’s
Iliad
, Grandfather placed his hand over mine. There was something we should talk about first. An attack by Apollo—
¡el emboscada más cobarde
! † —against Achilles’ noble friend Patroklos. Though Abuelo sketched out