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  praise for HUNGER’S BRIDES

  Winner of the Writers Guild of Alberta

  Georges Bugnet Award for Novel

  A 2005 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book

  Nominated for the Regional Commonwealth

  Writers’ Prize for Best First Book

  Nominated for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize

  “Hunger’s Brides is an instant collector’s item.” —Toronto Star

  “This is an extraordinary debut, with depth of detail and narrative skill presented effortlessly throughout its staggering length. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Hunger’s Brides is a beautiful monster that resists, often with brilliance, the unforgiving logics of myopic inquisition.” —Calgary Herald

  “Hunger’s Brides realizes its ambitions, taking the reader on a journey spanning 350 years and bringing to life one of the greatest literary figures of the 17th century.” —Publishing News (UK)

  “Hunger’s Brides, one of the biggest gambles in Canadian publishing, is one of the most remarkable books in recent memory…. A taut, challenging novel of ideas. The dozen years Anderson spent on the book are readily apparent on each page. Even at over 1,300 pages … Hunger’s Brides never feels too long…. Anderson’s debut stands proudly alongside such works as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy.” —Quill & Quire

  “Calgary writer Paul Anderson is after far more than an imagining of the hidden life of a writer. The novel attempts nothing less than an apocalyptic anatomizing of modernity … Both the Juana and Gregory narratives contain some fine, memorable scenes, but what the author does with the Beulah sections is let language loose, and the result is startling, at times frightening and often beautiful. Everything and everyone Beulah encounters becomes raised to epiphany by the caustic intensity of her vision…. It becomes clear, through the verbal energy of these passages, that the greatest achievement of Anderson’s novel (and perhaps its true subject) is in the evocation of the teeming, sordid pageant of Mesoamerica: its mythic, blood-soaked history, its geography of extremes, the holocaust of its cities and its people. Through Beulah’s eyes, Mexico becomes emblematic of Western civilization, and what we have done to ourselves by inheriting the ethos of the conquistadors and becoming technological masters of the planet.” —The Globe and Mail

  “Like Molly Bloom on peyote. Anderson has an uncanny knack for writing believable female characters filled with both self-love and self-loathing. Sitting helplessly by while the remarkable Beulah tears her own heart out made for one of the most harrowing reading experiences I’ve had in a while…. Anderson writes as the best painters paint—with clarity, finesse and infinite suggestion…. All this beauty is worth the trip. The many trips.” —Vancouver Sun

  “The grace and the poetry of the presentation draw readers in and introduce them to the world of 17th-century Mexico—not just the Spanish world, but the Indian. It is, among other things, a short course in Mexican Indian mythology. It is also, at the beginning, the story of a brilliant little girl and the beloved grandfather who nurtures her intelligence…. An astoundingly beautiful book.” —Canadian Press

  “Hunger’s Brides is one of those rare novels—there are no more than a handful of them in the modern history of the form—that will reshape our notions of what it is possible to do with fiction and history, with myth, legend and language; and, above all, with character…. And, as with every good novel—and Hunger’s Brides is much more than simply good—this book will change your life.” —Winnipeg Free Press

  for Satsuki

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Echo BOOK ONE

  Isis BOOK TWO

  Sappho BOOK THREE

  Phoenix BOOK FOUR

  Horus BOOK FIVE

  Phaëthon BOOK SIX

  Epilogue

  Timeline

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Hunger’s Brides

  This is the patent age of new inventions

  For killing bodies, and for saving souls …

  BYRON,

  Don Juan

  PROLOGUE

  WHEN THE DOCUMENTS that have become this book came into my hands, my first thought was not of evening the score. I felt panic—and removed a manuscript about to implicate me in the carnage in that room. But as I began to see what a very small part I played in her story, dread and agitation gave way to relief. Then, to a certain indignation.

  Beulah Limosneros had been a brilliantly accomplished protégée of mine, even as she spent her every spare moment researching the great seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695). That Beulah became obsessed with Sor Juana is understandable. Of all the giants of world literature, her story is among the most captivating. A child prodigy who taught herself to read at three, she went from a farm in the wilds of Old Mexico to the very pinnacle of Spanish literature, emerging as the last great poet of its golden age. As a teenager she dazzled the New World’s most sumptuous court and lived as an intimate of its vice-queen. Proto-feminist and slave owner, theologian and musical theorist, fabled beauty and nun—for twenty-five years she championed, against the unrelenting attacks of Church patriarchs, a woman’s right to a life of the mind. Sor Juana defended also a nun’s right to compose exquisitely sensuous and lucid poetry. And in doing so herself, she repeatedly defied her confessor, the Chief Censor for the Holy Inquisition. Her writing career unfolds between the mystery of a sudden flight from palace to cloister and the enigma of a final spiritual testament signed in blood.

  A worthy research subject. But during Beulah’s time with me, her notes, historical oddments and lyrical fabrications concerning Sor Juana came to look less and less like scholarship until, at the end, the work was more like a lurid cross between novel of ideas and tell-all biography. In this, my part was not so small. Now, with nothing but time on my hands, I’ve decided to edit and emend her unfinished manuscript. I’ve done it to set the record straight, perhaps to right a few wrongs.

  At the outset, though, my intent had been to set her little pearl in such a way as to reveal all its eccentricities. Even she thought of it as baroque. Taking my cue from Beulah’s own early work, I settled on the format of literary biography, finding this suited to my own, more modest, talents. I’ve extended the story’s reach, however, to embrace not just Sor Juana but Beulah too. I have used every resource at my disposal and many that should not have been: Beulah’s diary, her dream record, her diet journals.

  And of course there was the manuscript itself: a mangy stack of papers of assorted sizes and colours, dog-eared, stained and spattered. Scripts ranging from scrawl to type to childlike printing that ignored the lines. Napkins, gas bills and manila envelopes. Clean white sheets started fresh in a full and fluid hand become by page’s end a pinched and graphic twitching from which I could decipher only the occasional letter. The typed pages, a total of 457, were not necessarily the easiest: Beulah’s hand would sometimes slip from ASDF to SDFG or even from JKL; to YUIO. I could read certain passages only by decoding painstakingly, letter by letter.

  Overall, I’ve felt compelled to temper the wildness of her tone and the extremism of her conclusions, to bridge the gaps in her research and to abridge her lyrical flights. To draw just the occasional line between truth and fantasy. And then, to find an ending. The task has not been without its challenges, and not without its diversions. Yet my attempts to recreate myself with these materials would never have seen the light of day were it not for what I have found here. It is a sort of true-crime story, a document for an insatiable time.

  But now I wonder if all this feels too impersonal. Perhaps knowing where it end
s, with Beulah on her way to a sanatorium. Yes, a more intimate start.

  Here, meanwhile, my own drama begins, with me making sense of retirement at forty-two. I’m sure I feel as many retirees do. We are like poets in exile on unfashionable islands. We are the tiny emperor appealing to history. We are the last living alchemist.

  Getting up from the desk, I raise the blinds and stand a moment staring into the west. A sea of stone heaves up before these windows, a slab of Cambrian time. From the pilings beneath my feet, a wide trough slopes away deep and slow, then out to the Rockies’ massive cresting. Most days I see a rib cage there, upthrust, transected by a glacial blade. It carves clean to the bone, laying bare a jagged spine of peaks that arches south along the broken curvature of the earth. This, it seems, is to be my consolation: to rediscover a landscape once lost to me. Days I spend walking the foothills above Cochrane, twenty-six miles from Calgary. My nights I spend quietly, in a vast, vaulted affair of varnished logs and endless windows euphemistically called a cabin by the former colleague who has lent it to me. My retreat stands like a cathedral on the last high tableland before the foothills. Below, a patchwork of leafless poplar, and thick spruce spilling in soft folds to the valley floor. The Bow snakes flat and white among the bluffs. Beneath the thinning ice the river quickens. The end of winter comes late up here.

  I look out the north window at a pumpjack nodding away like a relentless rocking horse, while in the distance the wheels of justice grind slow and inhumanly fine. From where I now stand I see them—yoked, as Sor Juana might say, to the blind circlings of an ass.

  So. A beginning.

  Donald J. Gregory, Ph.D.

  Cochrane, Alberta

  May 9, 1995

  Echo BOOK ONE

  Some friendly promise in your face I view;

  You stretch your arms, when I stretch mine to you,

  Smile when I smile, and answer tears with tears …

  OVID,

  Metamorphoses1

  CONTENTS

  Rose of San Jerónimo

  Rose, heaven’s flower versed in grace

  Unstable Margins

  Stay, elusive shadow …

  Abecedario

  Anagrams

  Trout

  The Hunt

  I love Theseus, and thus

  Four-Year Fast

  Arts of Armoury

  Bullfighter

  Echo, finding Narcissus on a mountaintop

  Auto Tour

  Heretic’s Song

  Hall of Mirrors

  To this the ages passing testify

  Echo

  Yet still the passion in her heart which drew

  ROSE OF

  SAN

  JERÓNIMO

  17th day of April, in the year of Our Lord 1695

  A NUN OF THE HIERONYMITE ORDER slips out of the room to inform the Prioress, who will notify the Archbishop of Mexico. Who will in turn send word to the Viceroy of New Spain, and he finally to his monarch in Madrid. While I just stand by—raging, as Juana Inés de la Cruz lies stricken with plague. And I, Antonia Mora—betrayer, forger, whore—know exactly who to blame. Let the official record show that in these last, darkest days, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz emerged from the safety of her seclusion and toiled unstintingly, impervious to the swelling pandemonium—with me, her oh-so-loyal secretary and companion at her side—ministering to the sick of this convent, even down to its servants and slaves.

  The end began two months ago. Late February, 1695. It is become now a year to remember.

  The first whispers sifted in like smoke: a strange pestilence, burning like a brushfire through the Indian population of nearby Xochimilco. Soon neighbours all across Mexico City were reminding each other of a terrible plague said to have reached the coast on a slave ship in from Africa last year. Killing hundreds, then vanishing. Leaving villages without a living soul. Fathers and husbands gone mad: home from a week’s hunting to find their thresholds strewn with bloated bodies lying in the sun where dogs had turned away from them. Buzzards too sated to fly … rumours too horrible to be anything but true.

  Here in the capital it has always started among the poor. This time is no different. Out of every ten Indians, it strikes nine and kills eight, depopulating an overcrowded slum in as little as a week. Among the Europeans, our city’s densely packed religious communities offer up the ripest pickings. By the time the sickness takes hold in the convent of Jesús María, a few short blocks away, our own cloister is ablaze with tales—not so wild, it turns out—of nuns vomiting fire, of bodies swollen black, hunched, horridly misshapen.

  All but a few here have succumbed to the rising hysteria, and I have felt it in me, in the pit of my stomach, a fluttering like young love. I have seen it wavering like firelight in my neighbours’ eyes … and it is a temptation difficult to resist. I resist another day or two by writing this.

  I write as she taught me, I write because she no longer can.

  Three separate strains of disease, shipmates now ashore and travelling the same road.

  Sometimes they attack simultaneously, but more often each culls its own prey—wolves dividing up a flock. The first favours the body’s hollows and joints, spawning grotesque swellings at the neck, under the arms, between the legs. Death is slow but survival, if in a greatly diminished state, is at least a possibility.

  The second—el Dragón, or so we in whispers now call it—covets the lungs, drawing from its tortured interlocutors carmine flames of arterial blood that scorch the air for several feet about the deathbed. Llamas de carmina everyone says, never red, never vermilion or scarlet. Carmine. What is it we sense in this tint just short of purple—the dye of the cloak that protects, or the mantle that none may resist?

  How I wish I could ask her … this, and trescientas cosas mas.2

  The third killer, the deadliest, we call la Flojera. The Lazy One. A name that chills me to my very soul. La Flojera fancies her meat predigested, liquefied. Savaging its victim’s moist linings, her softest tissues … within hours a friend, a woman, is reduced to a moaning sac of overripe fruit leaking thin blood from her body’s every opening.

  Three nights ago, dark rites of propitiation for the deadly sins that surely brought on this plague flared into orgies of frenzied mortification. Chanting, flickering tapers, the swaying glow of censers … hairshirts black with blood and moonlight. Thirty nuns crawled that night on flayed knees over the convent patio, and with excoriated tongues licked its paving stones clean in the shape of a glistening cross.

  We are the Brides of Christ, heads teeming with dreams of a lover resurrected as the plague claims us in our bloodied beds one by one.

  It has been a consummation of appalling violence.

  In this place of women, men now are everywhere, scuttling stooped and harried through the rooms and passageways, shovelling lime into now-vacant cells. Litter bearers and gravediggers, priests bending reluctantly to hear gasped confessions, handkerchiefs pressed to pale faces against the meaty stench. Any servants not yet stricken stay away. So few able-bodied women now remain that surgeons and priests do double duty supervising the labourers as they burn the dead women’s garments.

  Any man caught fondling a corpse or looting it of jewellery will be, by order of the Viceroy, drawn and quartered in the public square; and by order of the Archbishop, excommunicated from God. But we have discovered that neither decree is necessary. From best to worst, all of us have at last been delivered from sin.

  It seems we have gone dead inside. Emotions, appetites, even the senses.

  The screams echoing through these stone corridors are horror-filled and agonized—children’s voices crying out for Lord and mother in equal measure, while we the living communicate in brief shouts, as though to the deaf.

  We move, day and night, through a kind of roaring twilight welling up from the corners of our eyes. And everywhere now this sullen smudge of smoke fed on sodden cloth. In some insidious way it is indistinguishable from the drone of bottle fli
es buzzing above the jumble of unburied bodies beside the bonfires. Few of us notice anymore that everything, every surface—plaster, porcelain, stone, skin—glistens with a fatty sheen of suet and ash. Until the evenings, when by lamplight we all scrub furiously and wonder if the oily clinging of it will ever leave us.

  Yesterday morning I struck an Indian full in the face for handling a body too roughly. Convent discipline verged on total breakdown. Mass hysteria, even violent madness, hovered about us, very near….

  Then, after the blackest night of all, just when it seems every last one of us must be taken, a clear morning breaks. An hour of eerie calm settles over this place. Though we cannot know it yet, the plague has withdrawn just as suddenly as it came.

  There will be only one death today.

  The stench too has lifted—and the flies, scattered now on a breeze that wafts the delicate fragrance of tangerines into Juana’s cell. The nuns and novices who have assembled here, as though at a summons, exchange looks hungry for miracles. It is already beginning. They will say your body smelled of tangerines.

  Oh yes, Juana, you’ve scripted your little dialogue with Greatness but do you know how I feel? To sit by and watch you—all these days and weeks. It didn’t have to happen this way. This is my fault, my doing.

  And now you watch me watching you play the sainted martyr. Ever the valiant sister: “Burning my body won’t be so bad,” you murmur. “Better here than on the Other Side….”

  Each time your beautiful eyes close, my heart leaps into my throat. Then they open once more.

  “So, Antonia, it seems I won’t have to lie next to Concepción after all, and listen to an eternity of her gossip.”