THE CONQUEST

 

By

 

Yxta Maya Murray

 

Rayo

An imprint of Harper Collins Publishers

10 E. 53^rd Street

New York, NY 10022

 

Hardcover, ISBN 0-06-009359-5

291 pages, $24.95

 

Previously published in Bloomsbury Review

 

 

 

Yxta Maya Murray s The Conquest tells the tale of two loves in two different times, woven within a literary mystery. The narrator Sara Gonzales is a book restorer, and she s haunted by her mother s attempt to steal back her Aztecan heritage, destroyed by Cortez and now locked within museum walls. Sara, too, is locked within a museum, partly due to her own self-determination, partly to find something in the past her mother never found. She toils in the Getty in Los Angeles, restoring a manuscript ascribed to a 16^th century monk about an Aztec princess brought to the Vatican by Cortez. The monk, as the alleged author, is notorious for other lascivious stories. But Sara has a different theory. The monk didn t write the book. The Aztec princess did:

Centuries ago a tawny figure dipped her pen into an inkwell and wrote these words long after the soldiers and bondsmen had given her up for dead. Later, the eons bit their teeth into this book. In a few years it will die unless this hinge is reglued and the tattered parts of the leaves are patched.

 

Piece-by-piece, Sara repairs the manuscript as the magic of the story within it is revealed. Aztec jugglers toss balls into the air and turn them to rain, to rainbows, and command the moon like a falcon on a leash. A beautiful nun with eyes as green as a jaguar, like the eyes of Montezuma s wife, seduces the princess in a garden in the Vatican a forbidden marriage of new and old worlds amidst the lethal dangers of the Inquisition. Here the old story of Eden is made new:

After we bathed in rose-strewn water, she would command me to close my eyes then lay me down on that silk (or the grass patch in the Vatican garden, or a friendly marchioness gold-encrusted bed in Milan) and put her tender mouth to me. What proceeded was the most delicate voyage, I swear, into heaven itself. After two hours with her lips on my skin my body s borders dissolved and I became as incorporeal as the ancestors who had glimmered at me from the shadows. I was a ruby on her tongue, is that it? I felt myself as honey and saffron in her mouth? Can I describe the lightning in my breast? Her white fingers finding red pleasure? All I can tell you is that I was dead and resurrected with her expert charms and soft breath and then, as I panted, my taskmaster patiently, strenuously instructed me in these same skills.

Oh, her golden hair on the pillow. Her eyes glinting.

 

Murray uses the technique of separation with skill, and when circumstances part the lovers for years (as inevitably they must in this plot design), the reader is compelled to chase the story like a rider on a fast horse. No less compelling is the parallel theme of Sara s struggle to break free of stories to find solid ground in real life. The hold the old book has on her is palpable. The further she enters the princess life in the manuscript, the further she travels from her own lover, Karl, a marine pilot who seeks his own voyage of discovery to gain a toehold in the space program as an astronaut. Their relationship is akin to Sara s work on the manuscript the process of a sweetheart reconstructing a destroyed love letter. For brief periods of time, she holds sway over him by whispering fantastic stories in his ear as a prelude to love, and, in turn, his pragmatism is all that grounds her in reality. But in a modern paradigm, both find themselves incapable of giving part of their own dreams for the sake of one another or themselves as a larger whole. In a one scene evocative of their random and inspired flights of passion, they fly above the desert in a glider:

We were weightless inside the naked weather. The desert spread below us like a bronze prairie that rumpled and rose in our wake. Pocket sandstorms traveled through the plain and I clutched Karl, shouting about the colors in the sky. Thin glades of pink rained through blue oxygen and a mantle of ocher rested over the spines of the surrounding mountains. Clouds like giant dahlias flung mist in our eyes while invisible paws whacked at the glider s wings I imagined great Dakota beasts breathing below us, like the galling sea serpents drawn in the corners of sixteenth-century maps.

 

This beautiful interlude crashes with Karl s insistence that they stop all this funny business and settle down and have a bunch of kids and bite the bullet. Sara can t do it, trapped in the conventions of modernity, career, and a self-willed independence; and Karl drifts away, soon to marry a colonel s daughter. As he leaves, he tells Sara:

I have every part of you memorized, did I ever tell you that? There ve been times, when I d be stuck someplace on a base, with all these people I didn t know too well holidays are the worst for that. And if I felt low, there was this one thing I d do to make myself feel better. I d draw you in my mind. I d picture you. This swirl of hair here, the pattern of it. The shape of your lip. Your neck, how long it is. Your small little hands. And it would make me feel better, knowing that I had you inside of me like that. It was a real comfort to me. His mouth twists. That s just something I wanted you to know.

 

Paradoxically, the Aztec princess must learn to live in a country that destroyed her culture while, at the same time, loving a daughter of that same country. And Sara, searching for truth in old stories, in her own heart, must discover whether she can find her own story, whether she can claim love before it s too late, whether her heart is as big as this giant world that belongs to you as well as to me.

 

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