Hunger's Brides Read online

  And is it true, as the holy officers now suggest, that my own father was one too? For it is among the Basques and Portuguese that the Inquisition finds so very many of its secret Judaizers. And indeed was there not a faint echo, in the auto-da-fé of 1656, of that great spectacle of 1649? The arrests began the following year and took place throughout the early 1650s. When Father rode away from us for the last time, I was five years old. It was the spring of 1654.

  Did he stay away from us, so often, so long—and then abandon us—to keep us from harm? The Inquisition brought my childhood to an end during a carriage ride. It remains for me to know if they had already taken my father.

  So many questions they have. I too have questions now. If it’s an accounting they want, I too seek a settling of our accounts.

  Magda asked about him. Did I think he was ever coming back? To be cruel, I thought, but perhaps to be doubly cruel. If she knew. And if she knew, it was because Aunt María did also. Grandfather had introduced my father to Isabel. But who introduced María to Uncle Juan? Were Juan and my father friends? My eldest sister and Magda were about the same age….

  How painful it can be to see where one has not looked, into places one has not dreamed of. How very differently I might have looked upon my aunt María, if I had grasped the worst of her fears. And what if I had known from the beginning that Uncle Juan had been my grandfathers friend? I liked him already—he might have become a second father to me. How I needed one then. And I would have feared, not pitied, Magda, had I known what she was. It is from her stock that the Inquisition’s familiars are drawn.

  Gaps will not be tolerated by the holy officers—gaps are all around us. I too was once frightened of them. But no longer. Yes, I will give them a reckoning of sorts. But for this, let there be another art, with eyes to see the gaps through lenses of clemency. With ears to hear their music, and hands to turn the instrument that plays it. Let there be others, too, for this work.

  We will play on drums and spinets, on barrels and pins, on time’s very axle. We march under the Ensign of the Trout with trident tongue. When they hear our chiming jingling tune of links and the gaps between, the holy armourers may find, as others have, that mail is lighter, suppler, stronger than plate. That each of us carries part of the score, and that we are all linked in surprising ways and strong. Strong despite ourselves, surprising in spite.

  And even as night is the lace around each star, yet there is nothing frail in that dark. Of this night lace now may we fashion a shimmering net and cast it. And let us see if not a few fishers of souls are caught.

  †a traditional dances

  †knight-matador

  †a stiff, peaked cap; a dunce cap

  LUÍS DE CARVAJAL

  “Heretic’s Song”

  B. Limosneros, trans.

  The brother of Ana de Carvajal, a woman condemned to the stake after a forty-eight-year stay of execution, wrote at least one sonnet while awaiting his own sentence in the Inquisition’s secret prisons. It is not known whether the heretic Luís de Carvajal was already a poet before his trials, or became one.

  I sinned, Lord, but not because I have sinned

  do I your clemency and love relinquish.

  For my wrongs I tremble at being punished,

  yet dream of being through your goodness pardoned.

  I accuse myself, even as You have waited on me,

  of being abhorrent in my ingratitude,

  and so my sin of being all the viler,

  for your being so worthy of all love.

  Were it not for You, what would become of me?

  And from myself, without You, who would deliver me

  if your hand withheld its grace from me?

  And but for me, my Lord, who would fail to love You?

  And but for You, God, who would suffer me?

  And to You, without You, my Lord, who would carry me?

  HALL OF MIRRORS

  DETECTIVES CURTIS AND GREEN have had to leave, after going to the trouble to sleuth out the location and then putting up with all the dust and switchbacks to get up here. It is a bright, spring day in the mountains. They left so soon. But they’ve got their work to do, their statements to take, their musical rides. I wasn’t that sorry to see them go. I was afraid they might have heard I was going away for a while.

  That night, she’d placed on her desk a box of journals, papers and a few souvenirs of our time together, carefully laid them out for me to find. Of this I’m certain now.

  It is all such an infuriating, terrible waste. … Such a wrenchingly inadequate word, for a career, a life. I can call it a calamity, I can call it whatever I want, but the word changes nothing. This could have been prevented. This is not what advisers are for. This was my carelessness. And now I want to believe there is some way still to snatch something from the wreckage.

  She sits by a window on the tenth floor of the library tower. Its book racks radiate out from the elevators that run up the tower core. The study carrels ring the floor, all along the windows. The views can be superb, but at least one person cares nothing for them: reflected in a window glass is a young woman poring over a volume in which her own ideal is depicted as being deeply fascinated with mirrors. But why should that matter to her so much?

  What does Beulah see as she looks into the mirror, where the mind’s images collide with those of the eye?

  I sort through these journals and wonder where she lost her way. And try to find some evidence that it happened before we met.

  … As a child she perches on a chair before the vanity in her mother’s darkened bedroom and peers intently into a mirror, which consists of a fixed centrepiece and two side panels on hinges. By realigning the mirror’s panels, she can create an infinite retrogression, an endless light relay of planar reflections curving gently away to a bottle-green dusk. To touch either panel even slightly is to launch a dragon’s tail arcing through a two-dimensional sky, or to fold it up again just as suddenly, like a trick with cards. Amazed, she crouches there, indifferent to the distant cries of other little girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalks or hobby horses on the lawns.

  How many times has she longed to climb into the looking glass and disappear, threading her way through its endless runs, its brittle windings and darkening alleys? To become a two-dimensional Alice exploring a wonderland where each thing flows to and from its opposite: left hand into right, self into other—order from chaos, a candescence from flesh.

  Her journals also show that she felt grateful for the horrors mirrors conceal.

  Her research is unorthodox; its methods begin now to lead her into a deep maze. And much of what she is on the verge of discovering about mazes she has already seen in a bedroom mirror: mystery, concealment, deception, horror. Maybe it’s in the library tower that she first experiences the sensations that become both companion and guide: a sudden tightening in the chest, a glimmering of shapes falling into line on a distant horizon of the inner eye, the seashell roar of the sea….

  At the next bend, her maze takes on the aspect of a funhouse: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, too, has an abiding fascination with mirrors, and Beulah—disoriented, a little at sea—is amazed by the happenstance of her discovery. She needn’t have been.

  Juana Ramírez was raised among the remnants of a people for whom the mirror held great significance. Mexican cosmology, as Beulah’s research so vividly records, manages to be at once complex and breathtakingly poetic. The night sky, the stars, the very concept of the divine all partook of the demonic, the ravening and the terrible. No god better exemplified this than Tezcatlipoca, one of the most haunting visions of divinity ever conjured by the collective imagination.28

  In the darkness of a night stalked by apparitions and spectres, people felt the Smoking Mirror particularly near. It was the jaguar, and it waited at each crossroads. The god dwelt in his House of Mirrors—a hall of concave, eerily reflective surfaces that enshrined a statue of black obsidian. This statue, the Lord of the Mirror, was worshippe
d in awe and cursed in despair as the master of inversions and sudden reversals of fortune. Though possessed of a matchless power, typically he chose to act through deception, misdirection and sleight of hand. The statue’s pectoral mirror was a scope through which Tezcatlipoca could see others—into their very hearts—while himself remaining invisible. An obsidian mirror replaced one of his feet, torn off in some primordial combat with a demonic earth mother.

  He was known also as Broken Face, He-who-causes-things-to-be-seen-in-a-mirror. The Smoking Mirror summoned visions and brought them rolling through smoke across vast stretches of space and time. To peer into it was an hallucinatory source of enchantment, terror, paralysis….

  His date marker in the Aztec calendar cycle was 1 Death.

  Sor Juana certainly knew something of these legends. She may even have been marked by them. But her curiosity could just as easily have been purely intellectual, as of any seventeenth-century thinker reflecting the enthusiasms of her era. In seventeenth-century science, mirrors held renewed interest as refractors and reflectors of light. Newton fitted mirrors to his telescopes to improve upon Galileo’s. For the philosophy of knowledge, a mirror’s distortions were a troublesome source of altered perceptions—calling into question, in the age of Descartes, even man’s faith in the data of his senses.

  Finally, Sor Juana, a beautiful woman, could be permitted a little mirror-gazing.

  I’ve been trying to show why Beulah needn’t have read any great mystery into all this. To be fair, she was unlucky in a number of ways: in her adviser, evidently, but fatally so in her area of research, since it amplified so powerfully her own worst tendencies. The Baroque was besotted with myth and tricks of perception—the ceilings painted as if open to the sky, the cornices that turn out to be a painting, itself made to look like a sculpture, ad nauseam….

  Beulah was also right about certain things. About my distaste for all things baroque, obviously. She was even right about why. All my lofty reservations aside, in the Baroque’s lack of restraint there is something offensively, dangerously … unchaste. To some of my former students and colleagues this will come as something of a howler. But had I been more forceful in impressing the dangers upon her earlier I might have saved a career, at the very least.

  If the Renaissance was the first new budding on a branch the Middle Ages had thought barren, the Church’s reactionary Counter-Reformation was a flask—a fiasco, slipped over that branch. The odd-shaped fruit of this suppression was the Baroque, like a pear grown into a bottle whose too-rich liqueur shocks the austere palate of the monk who uncorks it. An era of monstrous vitality and tension, of florid camouflage and violent contradictions—of unbridled licence and brutal censure. Of a craving that yields to disgust. And in Spanish America, it derived an added intensity from the systematic suppression of indigenous cultures.29

  Yet as if by miracle, in the verses of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the American Baroque30 found by far its finest and most graceful expression: a grafting of Greco-Roman myth to contemporary politics; of aboriginal vocabularies to European forms. In the play The Divine Narcissus, for instance, Sor Juana wrote a dramatic poem of astonishing originality and daring.

  A nun writing in a convent cell at the end of the 17th century, Sor Juana treats Ovid’s tale as allegory, with Narcissus as Christ, Echo as the fallen Angelic Nature (Satan), and Human Nature as Christ’s own reflection in the spring. Echo, evil and jealous, afraid that Narcissus will fall in love with Human Nature, continually disturbs the reflecting surface with sin. Human Nature is so disfigured by the turbulence of sin that Christ is unable to see that what he loves in that image is really his own reflection, and thereby falls in love with it.31

  Christ as Narcissus is so startling, even today, that it’s easy to overlook the subtle portrait of Echo as Lucifer, the fallen star of morning. Sor Juana’s creation, Echo, is an altogether human figure, who cannot endure the indifference of a self-absorbed young god and slowly wastes away. In the process, her gift of speech comes to seem a parody and punishment—and here is the Baroque in all its perverse splendour: the most passionate speeches of Sor Juana’s Echo resonate clearly and beautifully of the Song of Solomon.

  Sung, as it were, by Mephistopheles.

  Our time is not without splendours of its own: according to one feminist reading of the Bible, the Song of Solomon (or the Song of Songs) is ‘the Goddess’s correction of Genesis.’32 Oh my.

  It is all such a distressing mess. And not just for its deplorable taste.33 What we are facing is first and foremost a sickness of temperament. Out of this … mythomania, Beulah let herself be turned into yet another scholar projecting her own fetishes into the work. Mirrors, myth, the Baroque, and now the Goddess. It wasn’t completely her fault, I’ll admit. Such a mix would have been lethal to a saint. Here one has only to imagine a monstrously florid garden … myths, their reflections, distortions—twining, tangling—like so many limbs in a bathhouse, sending tendrils back and forth in time.

  Today, though, it is no longer acceptable to judge these things by external, even eternal, standards. Today we must infiltrate the subject’s own value system, probe from within the matrix of her influences…. Alas, this also means insinuating ourselves into her story.

  All right, why did Beulah freely choose to give myth such a central place in her work? First off, it must be admitted that myths were vital to Sor Juana herself. Echo, Isis, Phaëthon, St. Catherine—these became emblems for her, not just of her work but of her very life. Today this must seem aberrant to us, even bizarre. It would be like Sylvia Plath fusing her identity with Ariel or Lazarus;34 or T.S. Eliot at least half-seriously taking himself for the Fisher King. But Sor Juana was a child of her time.

  She was also, arguably, the most mythologized mortal in human history.

  During her own lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic, she was hailed as the Mexican Athena, Sum of the Ten Sybils, Phoenix of America,35 Pythoness of Delphi—to list just these. She was looked upon, from near and far, as a creature of fable, a beautiful monster. A freak of nature on a diabolical continent. Today we automatically filter out the hyperbole; the Baroque did not, indeed could not—the two arcs were not separable. It is impossible for us to imagine calling anyone—say, Sontag or Atwood—‘Isis’without the ghost of a smile. Similarly with Simone Weil as St. Catherine, Anne Carson as Echo, Paglia as Lucifer, H. D. as Helen of Troy….36

  The paradox is that it makes Sor Juana an oddly modern figure, the prototype of larger-than-life fame. And in this one respect, her century is perhaps more modern than our own: the Baroque would have had no trouble comprehending, and then wildly embracing, our bizarre obsession with global celebrity.37

  Modernity has been described as an annihilation, an abolition of the past.38 In this, its self-absorption, the ‘modern’ is also apocalyptic (in a mumbling, minor key) in considering itself an end time. Which may be why Eliot, modernism’s early theorist, saw a need to re-establish the importance of tradition in the poetic program—that the past is not dead. Beulah would have said this of myth. Neither was it for her quaint, in the postmodernist sense: an amusing theme park, a Chinatown in the shadow of skyscrapers, as it is in our home city.39 Our century’s most demoralizing discovery has been the methodical, technological and largely cynical exploitation of myth and archetype.40 Here Beulah and I did not disagree. But she believed the genie could not be stuffed back—and should not be, since it derives its power from repression.41

  And here was one of the things we disagreed upon, sometimes violently. It can be stuffed back into the bottle. It must. And manning the frontier between fiction and truth is decent, honest work—unspectacular, painstaking, and yes, occasionally tedious. But it is the Great Wall; because beyond it, the barbarian says things about us that should never be said or heard or known.

  So, granted, there were reasons to take an interest in myths. But why in the world would she take it into her head to modify them?

  Here she might point to Ovid.
In fact, this Roman poet writing eight centuries after Homer has done more than anyone to shape our notions of what a Greek myth feels like. Sor Juana was just one in a long line of poets to follow him. A century or so after her death, Keats’s concern, in reworking the great myths, was to bring them ‘intimately alive’ again, and in this might be found an echo of his medical training.42 A more recent touchstone in this work of resuscitation was Camus, who wrote that myths exist for each new generation to breathe life into them—something he himself did so brilliantly for Sisyphus. The impulse, I believe, was to keep myth supple and vital, to keep it from ossifying into fixed meanings and museum pieces.43

  But I think Sallust, the Roman historian, came closest to what Beulah was after. Her notes show she was enamoured of something Sallust once said of myth, bandied about as an epigraph for the two thousand years since: These things never happened, but are always.

  I think it is in this ‘always’ that Beulah felt she could most closely approach her poet: taking up the same myths that had so impassioned and finally engulfed Sor Juana—and by turning them in her own hands, enter into them completely and step through the looking glass. Through the Smoking Mirror.

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  THE DIVINE NARCISSUS

  Alan Trueblood, trans.

  … Díganlo las edades que han pasado,

  díganlo las regiones que he corrido,

  los suspiros que he dado,

  de lágrimas los ríos que he vertido,

  los trabajos, los hierros, las prisiones