Hunger's Brides Read online

  Inside, we met a group of Magda’s friends, a girl and three young gentlemen. “Magda, why haven’t we met your cousin before? You didn’t tell us she was so beautiful … and that dress, what a splendid hue! You should try that colour yourself.” Magda’s evening was proving visibly less transcendent than mine.

  Although the vicinity of the private boxes was perfectly dignified, looking down into the pit I could see why the public theatres were called corrales, and this one, El Coliseo, no less. I had not expected so much hooting. The idea of calling out to the players, warning them of an intrigue or ambush, well, that was perhaps the best part of the show. The entractos were also popular affairs and in parts delightful. There was a Mexica mitote† with ancient instruments, but I was glad it ended quickly as I had no intention of being homesick. Between acts one and two was a farcical skit that went over well, and a later interlude of ballads. The play itself was a local production stealing shamelessly from Ovid’s version of the tale of Narcissus, and yet I was strangely fascinated.

  Afterwards, in the milling and stir in the forecourt, I spotted a poster for last week’s show: The Nun-Ensign. The awful play I had read a hundred times. This was my fellow prisoner and hero—fugitive nun, duellist and lady muleskinner. How I would have loved to see her just once outside my head.

  On the way home all I could find to talk about was the play. Though I knew it to be no masterpiece, I was thrilled to hear for the first time poetic texts from the lips of trained actors, to see passions so nakedly expressed. On and on I chattered like a songbird between two ravens—countenances growing ever darker—about how certain lines seemed to weaken this effect or that, how the themes had been muddied, the symbols clumsily worked. I was talking now to work this out for myself, for during the slower moments in the theatre I’d had an idea for my own version of Echo and Narcissus. There’d be a prologue featuring two couples, one European, the other native Mexican. The Mexicans would be America and Occident….

  I would make Echo the brilliant angel who had fallen from Paradise—then rebelled. That was important. And at first sight of Narcissus it’s as if she’s always known him, who is after all as beautiful as any angel. In love, she takes him to a mountaintop and offers him a new paradise, a new world, if only she can tempt him to stay with her….

  I didn’t have it all worked out. What little I did manage to say probably didn’t make much sense to Magda and María anyway. But instead of looking bored or annoyed, they were watching me carefully. Thus encouraged, I even managed to find fault with Ovid’s own vision of Narcissus, which had always seemed too harsh, simplistic. I saw Narcissus more as the victim of his yearnings for perfection, as Christlike—

  “What?” croaked Aunt María, across from me, “What did you just say?” She leaned forward till her nose nearly touched my face.

  “I said—”

  “Is that what they teach young girls out in that godless countryside—to blaspheme?”

  “I’m sorry, Tia,” I stammered, “but I didn’t blas—”

  “The Son of God, narcissistic! You heard her, Magda.”

  “She said it.”

  “I did not.”

  “Did Isabel teach you to call your elders liars, too?”

  “I was only trying to correct—I did not call Christ narcissistic. Narcissus, in his pain, was Christlike—there’s nothing wrong with saying this. The teachings of the Greeks anticipate His Gospel. The Church has accepted—”

  “What the Church teaches—at least here in this city, Juana Inés, is humility. Here, what we expect of ourselves is only the most careful soul-searching. Here in our city, we would never allow a child, still less a female child, to run riot through the pagan texts of antiquity spouting blasphemies on the Passion! Evidently you are one of those who have no respect for the Holy Office—”

  “Have you ever seen an auto, Juana?” asked Magda suddenly.

  “No,” I said, grateful for what I thought was a change of subject. We had pulled up in front of the house but Aunt María, resting her hand on the handle, made no move to get down.

  “We have. Several,” she said coolly. “The effect has been lasting.” She glanced at Magda. “Perhaps we may still broaden your marvellous education in some small way. You seem to enjoy riding in our carriage. Tomorrow I think we shall take you on a little tour. Magda has been a very enthusiastic student of our local history. There is much in this city you have yet to see….”

  In the morning, Aunt María wore her usual black silk, and a black veil. We all had on our heavy crosses. Magda’s dress was of a purple velvet and suited her slight frame. Over her crucifix she wore a string of warped pearls of a fashion called barruecas, much prized in the city.

  She was almost pretty. Her hair was a dark, flat brown. Her profile was not so prepossessing as her mother’s. Her one unfortunate feature was her eyes: very small and deep-set, the irises so large as to leave scant room between her lids for the whites. The colour was an attractive one, a nut brown, but one could not help thinking of the polished pips of small, soft fruit, the cherimoya, perhaps, or the lychee from Cathay. Her nose was of a normal size but—between those tiny, beady eyes—betrayed a certain thickness at the bridge.

  Sundays we usually ate little before mid-afternoon, but this day’s breakfast was whipped chocolate, pork hocks and eggs fried in lard. As we left the house my escorts each carried a small assortment of fresh roses, out of season now and brought in at great expense from the south each year for Guadalupe’s festival. Whites and yellows and reds … the effect was quite gay. In the coach they insisted on sitting on my bench, on either side of me. It was my first inkling that this was not to be a ride like the others.

  What they’d said was true: I liked the coach rides. I loved the horses, the rasp and chiselling of silver-shod hoofs over the flags. María had once confided her belief that their collection of coaches, gigs and carriages was the finest in the New World. “We choose our things,” she’d announced then, “on the basis of elegance, not vain show.” The carriage cab was small and of a hardwood finished in black lacquer. The spokes were a lacquered grey. Inside, there was opulence: the walls were surfaced in the finest Chinese silk, deep brown and embroidered with gold dragons. The seats were thickly upholstered in velvet of a matching brown. The door handles, painted black outside, revealed themselves to be of bronze, as were the door bolts, gleaming and heavy. Fore and aft were sliding panels. The rear one was bolted shut, the one forward was open to allow communication with the driver. The heavy wooden side panels were drawn back for our tour.

  We were not going to church.

  When this dawned on me I was stunned, unable to imagine what might deflect Aunt María from the cathedral on a Sunday morning.

  Aunt María and Cousin Magda were taking me over the route and to the stations of the last great auto de fe of 1649. Thirteen people burned at the stake, a hundred more in effigy.

  Magda could only have been five or six at the time of the auto, yet fifteen years later the sheer volume of ghastly detail she’d retained or had since learned was appalling. While I was to learn that to hear a story told can be more terrible than seeing the horror itself.

  Our carriage had barely reached the corner when Aunt María said, “It started here. A neighbour came to tell us the Proclamation was being read through the streets. We rushed out of the house, Magda beside me, running on her chubby legs to keep up. Everyone was moving towards the casas de la Inquisición, where the processions began.”

  “I remember them,” said Magda, in a tone of reminiscence. “Minstrels coming down the street in bright colours, trumpets blaring, fifes piping …”

  “Every block or two,” said Aunt María, “the procession would pause for the chief constable to dictate the Proclamation to the crier.” He called out to all the nobles and their families an invitation to attend, wearing their finest, a general auto de fe on the eleventh of April.

  Since I was now a noted Poetess, it might interest me to know that
María had always preferred the Portuguese ‘auto-da-fé.’

  “Our Castilian phrase means simply ‘act of faith.’ But for the Portuguese, Juana Inés, it means ‘the act that gives faith.’ We will give you some help with this today.”

  The coach clattered towards the Monastery of Santo Domingo. A light rain fell. The streets were quiet, with everyone at Mass at one of the fifty churches throughout the city. My aunt and cousin began to describe the days leading up to the auto, when at least thirty thousand celebrants made their way to the capital, swelling its population to four hundred thousand. The city’s fifteen thousand carriages, most now in use at once, found room to pass only with difficulty even at three in the morning. All the plazas stood brightly lit, packed with people come to refresh themselves with glasses of atole or chocolate or pulque. On almost every corner Indian ladies were selling tortillas and tamales. Every inn in the capital was full. Each morning found thousands of revellers rolled up in blankets, asleep in the plazas and under the arcades, or in doorways and alleys.

  Our carriage lurched to a halt beside the canal—we had nearly run down a beggar, a man of about fifty, with the aspect of a Gypsy or a Moor. Barefoot, in grimy rags, he carried a little bundle slung over his shoulder as if he were travelling, yet with nowhere to go, as he wandered back and forth across the road. The stench from the canal was overpowering. A carcass must be floating there, and the canal silted in. Magda and María had not brought the roses for colour or cheer but as nosegays. They fed at them now like ghastly hummingbirds.

  Magda asked if I ever heard from my father, if I thought he might ever come back. It was the first word anyone in that house had ever spoken of him. I could not meet her gleaming, hateful eyes as she then turned to me and recounted the stories that were in circulation all that year of 1649—tales of new and hideously effective tortures and of the vast sums wasted on bribes to Inquisition officials … who were of course utterly incorruptible.

  “Some of the accused had been turned in by their own children,” said Magda, glancing past me at her mother. “Others by neighbours or in-laws or friends. They said the familiars of the Inquisition were everywhere gathering testimony.”

  Aunt María spoke, not turning from the window. “One neighbour whispered that the admiral of the Leeward Fleet had been arrested for Judaizing. Another said no it was the proveedor general of the Windward Fleet. His wife had grown so arrogant as to demand that all requests for appointments with her be made in writing.”

  “Mother even knew her a little, didn’t you, Mother?” Before María could answer Magda exclaimed, “One woman was arrested—you know what for? Just smiling at the mention of the blessed Virgin!”

  I remembered then that my cousin had been the one to serve me breakfast, and the pleasure she had taken. I felt my stomach lift as we lurched through a pothole. The closeness in the cab was becoming unbearable.

  I caught a glimpse of the cathedral. We jarred over the rough paving for another two blocks, then turned east and came to a little square. María called for the driver to stop—we were getting out. Gracias a Dios. Aunt María held the door as I stepped down. Opposite us on the north side of the square was a small pink church built of the rough tezontle blocks I knew from the mountains. Early Mass had just let out, and over the heads of those streaming through the tall doors I could see a rose-coloured altar and pillars of pink marble spirals. The windows must have been stained in the same colour, for pale rose diagonals fell through the smoke in the nave.

  The square looked festive at first. Indian musicians with their pipes and drums. A company of mummers calling to the passersby to gather round. Running the full length of the plaza’s west side was a string of workshops, which I was surprised to see open. But then with Guadalupe’s feast day coming on Wednesday, perhaps they were rushing to finish a special commission from the temple. Out in the open air, I looked about for the courage to tell María I’d had enough.

  Occupying the entire block across the street to the east was an austere building with none of the flourishes for which the city’s masons are noted. And it was towards that building we now walked. The iron gates were on the southwest corner. Two girls my age were giggling and flirting with the guards stiffly standing one to each side of the entrance. Overhead hung a banner on a silver staff, but angled in such a way that I could not read it until we were at the gates.

  I had thought the building had three storeys; it was two—each no less than four times our height. I could see the banner’s emblem now. It was a wooden cross, rough and unplaned, knots like the swellings of lesions all down its sides. Just inside the gates were several counters and offices arranged around a small patio, achingly bright in the sun. Running east and north were two long corridors. There was an impression of coolness. A cool draft of air flowed past my ankles. I thought of a deserted hospital.

  A scribe scuttled by with an armload of heavy cases. Aunt María pointed out the warder with his keys heading down the eastern corridor. He had a blanket rolled under his arm.

  Here were the Palaces of the Inquisition. In these palaces there were many rooms. He went to prepare a place in one.

  I backed away.

  They made no move to stop me. I walked blindly into the plaza. I could feel Magda and María close behind, one to each side. An Indian lady was selling herbs and cures, her white hair coiled at her nape just as Xochitl wore hers. This curandera clearly had faith in her exemption from the Holy Office’s jurisdiction, and I was afraid for her. The mummers looked to be university students and though I did not stop, by the direction they were facing and by the twisting and clowning and groans, I knew their skit to parody what happened across the street. And I was afraid for them, too, but did not stop until I had passed the musicians and reached the workshops and stalls.

  There was a little apothecary, with his stoppers and funnels, alembics and spouts. A printing press and bindery, its stamps and dies. Then a shop with inks, quills and papers for scribes. A candlemaker, and the smell of fats reducing in the back, and on tables his candles in ranks of white, black and green. Next door was the engraver, his vitriols and acids and etching tools in neat ranks on a shelf. Standing at a high bench with his heavy needles was the maker of awnings and sacks. Then a carpentry, with all the planks and rigging, screws and vises. Here was a supplier of surgical equipment: scalpels, forceps and specula, beaked masks.

  Next door a Sunday crowd had gathered to watch a smith at his forge. Behind me the music drummed and piped jarringly to the hammering at the anvil. I could feel María and Magda standing close.

  A row of humble craftsmen at their shops. Scents of pine and glue, solvents and printers’ inks. I thought of Grandfather, tried to summon the feelings that being with him brought. I so wanted to lose myself in them now, to make an escape in my mind. Watching the farrier at his forge, it seemed he was indeed a prince among these journeymen. Young and narrow-hipped, bent to his anvil, he was cased in sweat like a warhorse, his naked torso armoured against flame and shards by a scorched apron of ox hide.

  I took in all the terrible power of shoulder and veined forearm and yet the delicacy in his wrists as he angled the tongs and banked and rolled the hammer. The art is in the wrists, Angelina. Yes Grandfather, you were so very right, for smiths and armourers and the jinete-matador†—a kind of empathy in the wrist, to capture the very image of life. It is a craftsmanship of temper and temperance and temperature. Of edges, brittleness and breaking points, of heating, folding and collapse. A building up, a grasping, a hammering at stresses—relief, release, relaxation.

  Such a flurry of enterprise on a Sunday, special commissions for the Church. And now I understood, and knew what this place was. These were the busy, fussy craftsmen who forged the pears and branks and gags, who built the gambrils and gibbets and gallows, who raised the bleachers and rigged the scaffolding. Supplied the inks and quills, laid out the instruments and the restraints, saw meekly to the fit.

  I knew all about this—for Grandfather I
had distilled all the essential qualities. I wanted very much to find again comfort in these: measurement, contour, surface, articulation…. I tried hard to picture Abuelo’s face, any face at all—even the mask of Amanda’s features when she was hurt. I tried to make my thoughts fly straight, my eyes bend neither right nor left, to hold to all the faces I had lost, to solve the riddle hidden there. Fear was the riddle now, the thing I had not known.

  Subdued, I took my place next to Magda in the cab, with María coming in after me. I made no protest. Only to be away from that music, that ringing, that craft. The horses’ hooves rasped and chiselled over the flags.

  Five companies of the Soldiers of the Bramble were picketed all night around the square, to guard the Green Cross and the Palaces of the Inquisition. The streets around them for once were bright with torchlight. The eleventh day of April, 1649.

  The drama starts in the darkness two hours before dawn, as the Archbishop’s carriage approaches the Holy Offices. The night’s revellers, both afoot and in the many well-stocked carriages, pause in their debauches to cross themselves as the black carriage passes. Whispers of the Archbishop’s arrival fly like startled swallows through the cells of the Inquisition’s secret prison.

  His Illustriousness, the Archbishop don Juan de Mañozca, is the Inquisition—forty years’ service in the tribunals of the Holy and General Office, member in perpetuity of its Supreme Council and second only in rank to the Inquisitor General in Spain. It was Juan de Mañozca who in his younger days had brought the Holy Office to the wild slave port of Cartagena. It was the then famous don Juan de Mañozca who detected and grimly prosecuted the Great Complicity in Perú. And it is his nephew, Juan Sáenz de Mañozca, who under his famed tutor has risen to become the Inquisitor of this auto.