Gods of Jade and Shadow - Silvia Moreno-Garcia Page 0,31

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.

“To the busiest, most crowded part of the city,” he replied.

A sea of revelers greeted them, thicker than the throng they had passed. It was a chaos of horns and drums, people dressed as devils and angels, the scents of tequila and perfume mingling together. Above them, people in balconies threw confetti and children tossed eggshells filled with glitter, while a few men, either drunk or full of spite, emptied a bottle of rum onto the pedestrians.

There, in the midst of this mess of feathers, sequins, and masks, Hun-Kamé stopped.

“Walk around here,” he told her, handing her the rope, “and remember to tie his hands when you have the chance.”

When Casiopea’s father died, her mother attempted to make a living for them doing odd jobs. For a while she tried her hand at macramé and taught her daughter the trade. Casiopea could tie several knots, but she did not know if they would be fit for supernatural beings, even though Hun-Kamé had assured her any simple knot would do.

“Where are you going?” she asked, because he was turning away from her.

“He shouldn’t see me with you.”

“But—”

“I’ll be watching and I will follow you. Whatever he says, do not release him and do not leave his side either.”

“How will I know what he looks like?”

“You’ll know.”

“Wait!” she said as he stepped away.

He stopped, his cool hand brushing hers, and her hold on the rope slackened.

“I’ll be behind you,” he said. It wasn’t an attempt at reassurance, it was a fact.

With that, he was gone. She was scared, abandoned among all these strangers. In Uukumil, the biggest event of the year was the peregrination of the local saint, which was hauled from the church and carried around the town. This, this was so much bigger! There were women in terrifying masks and a boy who kept banging a drum, and Casiopea thought of simply running off.

She tightened her grip around the rope and bit her lower lip. She’d said she’d do