Hunger's Brides Read online

  You could have held back, not leaned so near—taken even a few hours’ rest. The chaplain offered you his plague mask, and you just smiled.

  I will not say good-bye to you. I will not be part of your chorus.

  Oh, Juanita … look at you.

  Leaf shadows play over the far wall as though reflecting off water. Juana turns her face towards the low window above her bed of planks. Rust-red daubs and handprints, violent smears along the whitewashed wall and windowsill above the bed. They appear to me now—in this one insane instant—grim as hieroglyphs, gay as a child’s finger paints.

  “Would you like me to bring your telescope?” I ask. Stupidly. I will either speak or lose my mind. “Mother Superior has kept it in her chambers.” Juana shakes her head weakly, no, but I persist. “You were never forbidden to use it. Not officially.”

  “Yes, Tonia, that’s true,” she answers softly. Some of the novices in this vault-like room have never heard her voice. “And Galileo Galilei was never forbidden to write poetry….”

  To those who have known Juana the longest, to one who has just bathed her lingeringly … she has never been more beautiful. Pale as parchment, her body like a girl’s, disincarnate, feather-light, unadulterated … purely and completely her own. The fever has left her now, its work done. Gone from her face are the lines these past days had etched there.

  Through the low window, sunlight streams into her unflinching black eyes. Only now do I understand she is blind.

  “I feel the sun. Is it a clear morning?” Juana asks.

  “Yes it’s clear … very clear.”

  “What can you see—can you see the volcanoes?”

  “Yes, mi amor,” I answer finally. “They are white and splendid. If I were that bird, that eagle soaring up there …”

  I am not sure how to go on.

  “… I could see your mother’s hacienda.”

  “Others?” she asks.

  “Can’t you hear them, the urracas? And there, a parrot …” You are doing this for me, to distract me.

  “And flowers?”

  “Juanita, hundreds! The jacaranda trees are still blooming in the streets. Y las flores de mandarín—you must smell them at least. There are roses, too….”

  I look up at the women gathered about the bed. I think every last one—some weeping openly now—must know by heart Juana’s lyric on the rose. Sister Eugenia looks decidedly unsteady, one of the few to be nursed back to health, and by Juana herself.

  Then the Mother Prioress, our desiccated paragon of gravity, enters the cell. We make way as she approaches the bed.

  “Sor Juana? Can you hear?” The Prioress leans nearer, putting out a hand to steady herself. “I’ve just received word. From the Archbishop. Juana …? He says he wants you to leave the convent. For your own safety …”

  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz lies unmoving, eyes closed, her breath a stuttered rustling in her chest … then stirs, as the faintest hint of a smile caresses her dark lips.

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  B. Limosneros, trans.

  Rosa divina que en gentil cultura

  eres, con tu fragrante sutileza,

  magisterio purpureo en la belleza,

  enseñanza nevada a la hermosura.

  Amago de la humana arquitectura,

  ejemplo de la vana gentileza,

  en cuyo ser unió naturaleza

  la cuna alegre y triste sepultura.

  ¡Cuán altiva en tu pompa, presumida,

  soberbia, el riesgo de morir desdeñas,

  y luego desmayada y encogida

  de tu caduco ser das mustias señas,

  con que con docta muerte y necia vida,

  viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas!

  Rose, heaven’s flower versed in grace,

  from your subtle censers you dispense

  on beauty, scarlet homilies,

  snowy lessons in loveliness.

  Frail emblem of our human framing,

  prophetess of cultivation’s ruin,

  in whose chambers nature beds

  the cradle’s joys in sepulchral gloom.

  So haughty in your youth, presumptuous bloom,

  so archly death’s approaches you disdained.

  Yet even as blossoms fade and fray

  to the tattered copes of our noon’s collapse—

  so through life’s low masquerades and death’s high craft,

  your living veils all that your dying unmasks.

  UNSTABLE MARGINS

  I took her maiden name, Ramírez de Santillana. She gave me Juana and Inés. The year was 1648: Isabel was beautiful, spectacularly pregnant again and still defiantly unwed. She took her confinement in what everyone called the cell, a hut of dry-laid fieldstone serving as tool shed and sometime way-station to any Dominicans stopping the night on their missions among the Indians. And so it was that even at my life’s beginning, my cell was haunted by the Dominicans and their good works.

  Of course I’ve heard it described. Gables thatched with dried agave spikes … in a child’s imagination they loll like leathern tongues. From the ridgepole, the cane-stalk bassinet hangs just inside the door, at eye level set beyond the reach of snakes and scorpions. Walls left unmortared for ventilation, and in the evening breeze the slight basculations of the bassinet. If I have a memory all my own it’s a modest one: of loose-chinked stone … a wall of shells pale as canvas, pegged in place by wands of light. And beyond, panes of jade vegetation and turquoise sky.

  The shed stood at the upper reaches of Grandfather’s hacienda in Nepantla. In the poetry of the ancient Mexicans, Nepantla means ‘the unstable margins of things,’ and according to family legend I’d surely have been raised there, in my shaky palace of shells, had not Grandfather, who was riding the fence line on a tour of inspection, glimpsed my seraphic head through the doorway. Naturally he relented, and ended his daughter’s exile.

  I’d one day learn that my mother’s exile had been largely self-imposed, a dramatic gesture directed at my father because he was not there. Adults, it seemed, were complicated. And none more than she.

  The chief thing, for me and for our Siglo de Oro’s latter, better half, was that she did emerge from our cell—either by Grandfather’s leave or at his beseeching.3 Whereupon she refused first the offer of his horse, then the offer of his help with the hollow-boned bundle of cherub she held.

  She stalked down (here I imagine Grandfather riding meekly behind), little moved by the view. Just above the ranch house the path bends north over a hill. Straight ahead lay the city on the lake, its far shore a frail glitter in the distance. The bearish shoulders of Ajusco Hill would have blocked her view of the island where Mexico rests on the charred stones of the city it supplanted. For that is the custom of this place, to build on the ruins of the vanquished.

  Below her lay the ranch house, a one-storey horseshoe barred to the west by a high corral of ocotillo thorns. Once down, she returned to running the hacienda, having handed me over (“fastened me,” as she put it) to a wet nurse she called Sochee. In my version it was to preserve her figure; in Isabel’s, to preserve her nipples from the predations of an infant cannibal. I once ventured to ask, If I was so much worse than my sisters, why was it that Xochitl never once complained? A question answered with the barest shrug, leaving me to conclude all on my own that a descendant of the Mexicas† could have no objection to nursing an infant of my sort.

  From about that time, the frequency of Father’s visits dwindled to roughly once a year. He still came faithfully for the breaking of the yearlings but only on rare occasions now for the breeding of the mares. It seemed attending the birth of daughters was no longer in his routine. My sister Josefa told me, with malign satisfaction, that he used to come much more often before I was born. This only made it all the more like a royal visit for me, and not just because of his family’s remote and lofty origins. There was the unmistakeable nobility of his bearing, there was the civility of his manners—and he was so handsome. W
ith black, black hair, and a manly chin, and big soft brown eyes like a horse’s—no wonder even the wildest ones bent to his wishes.

  And tall, taller than Grandfather, even. When he stooped from the saddle to scoop us each up for a hug good-bye, it was like being lifted into heaven.

  Then he was gone.

  We caught our breath.

  The seasons resumed their turning.

  It was harvest time—I would have been nearly two—when I discovered the roof. I was in the courtyard confecting mud delicacies in the flower beds when there began a faint but incessant knocking at the great double doors. Eventually Xochitl hobbled over to open them for a dozen or so fieldworkers saddled under immense baskets of maize. Very quietly the first worker asked if la patrona was in, and when Xochitl shook her head, their faces brightened.

  I had edged closer to determine for sure that these baskets, higher than each man’s head and tapering to a point behind his knees, were indeed attached by straps—or was this some sort of centaur of the fields?

  Xochitl waved them in. The baskets must have been crushingly heavy, to judge by how the straps cut into each brown shoulder. And still the men lingered at the door, asking after her, and very respectfully. Her health, her hip, her daughter Amanda, who was sleeping in the rebozo strapped to Xochitl’s back.

  Xochitl said to hurry up, before doña Isabel returned to find them all standing around.

  “Yes, hurry up,” I parroted, eager to see what might happen next with those baskets.

  “You have taught her our tongue?” one asked.

  “She learned. Same as Amanda.”

  “Doña Isabel does not mind?”

  The first few men through the doors were all looking at me now.

  “Go on up,” Xochitl said more sternly, and drew the screen aside.

  For over a year I had played in that courtyard with only a folding screen of woven straw between me and the sacred science of the stair. I had seen the ascending rectangles begin halfway up the wall and had—to the extent I noticed at all—thought them ornaments. It seemed my older sisters had not been interested; but then, they could go outside and wrestle for their lives with the coyotes and eagles and panthers and jaguars—and who knew what else—that we heard at night.

  One by one the corn men lumbered up. Then, from down below where I swayed in wonder, I watched them turn and, from the topmost rectangle, step straight into the sky.

  Xochitl shifted to block my ascent and redrew the screen, but the next day at siesta, I clambered up—with all the grace of a turtle, an indignity foisted on me by the thoughtless wretch who had built the steps so high.

  At first all I took in was a wobbly carpet of cobs baking in the sun, and the hot, moist smell of the world as a drying oven. All I had known was the compound. I was splendidly unprepared for what I now saw.

  Even a very short girl could see for nearly ten leagues† all around.

  To the southeast was a jumbled crust of sharp hills and spent craters like heaps of burnt sugar subsiding in a pan of caramel. To the southwest, as though warped on a loom, rough-woven panels of sugar cane stretched, and all through them the silver threading of irrigation ditches. An Aztec feather-cape of greens fanned west and north—deep groves of limes and oranges, and blue-green plantations of what I eventually learned were Peruvian pineapple. Closer in, ranks of spindly papaya and the oily green oars of banana trees transplanted from the Philippines.

  It may have been then that I had my earliest intimation of the links running from form to knowledge to power, for it was not long afterwards I began to draw. Maybe if I drew a thing I might learn to look for what I had not yet seen. And no sooner had I taken up my first piece of charcoal, than my eye found the pyramid in Popocatepetl. It took longer for my mind to trace the paradox hidden underneath: that volcanoes should mimic the simplest, stablest polyhedron, the pyramid—five sides to the cube’s six. To picture that smouldering mass up there as stable was like a gentle tickling right behind the eyes.

  For the next year I went up to the azotea every day, once I’d endured the first few spankings and then the dire injunctions to stay well back from the ledges.

  Out onto the plain—as day after day I sketched their progress—the long dun caterpillars of aqueducts edged forth on their tiny arches … and on cold winter mornings I traced the little teapots of hot springs that riddled the join of plain and hill. Farther off stood a lonely tableland, and on it what Grandfather felt was certainly the ruined city of the House of Flowers. If only I looked hard enough I might make out the huge stained stones through the tangle of overgrowth … and then I would draw them for him.

  I had discovered a world!—entire and new.

  And now my old world was about to discover me. For I’d started trailing after my sister Josefa, who was not going out each day to wrestle jaguars after all, but to attend a school for girls. Though her teacher, Sister Ada, would not at first let me into the classroom, as I was only three, she indulged me, allowing me to look on through the window at their lessons of reading and writing. On the third day, as though by magic, a small bench of fresh white pine, sticky still with fragrant resins, stood under the low window. It was tranquil there beneath the arches, bees whirring among the bougainvillaea and geraniums, the gurgle of a little fountain echoing as from within a cave…. But I felt a great mystery about to be revealed. Far from nodding off as Sister Ada must have expected, I fairly bristled with concentration. The way my mouth was watering, one would have thought I was observing a lesson in cookery.

  “I must learn to read,” I pleaded that third day. “Please don’t tell my mother—please?” Sister Ada consented not to tell for a little while, versed as she was in the attention span of three-year-olds. But when two more weeks had passed she insisted I ask my mother’s permission, and in exchange she would find me a seat in the classroom, where I might learn a little of the alphabet. And what good would a seat inside do anyone spanked by Isabel? “No, no,” I said, “I like your classes very well, but I can read now.” She laughed—no, brayed. Which annoyed me, so I proceeded to treat her to samplings from the many little mottoes pinned up about the classroom walls. I had just the rudiments of reading but my memory was prodigious, and in combination these were enough to make her cross herself and go quite pallid. In our region, when one learns swiftly it’s said, The sorcerer has passed there. Anyway her gesture was to me a very satisfactory form of applause. I thanked her for the lessons and left.

  Grandfather was away in Mexico City visiting my aunt and her rich husband. A day or two later he returned with his latest trove of books and a few childish texts to serve me as primers, but he found it was too late for these.

  That same week the parish priest made a rare visit to my mother. At its conclusion Padre Luis, himself a man of scant education, confided, “Your Juanita has much promise. God must have designed her for great exploits.”

  Isabel had little time for either priests or the Church. “Well then,” she replied, “he should have designed her as a man.”

  From that day forward, Padre Luis went about suggesting, to anyone who would listen, that there was an unholy character to my hunger for learning. Priests.

  I stopped eating cheese, though the queso de campo of the region—stringy and sharp and sour smelling—was a great favourite of mine. It was said that cheese made one stupid, and I already learned too slowly to appease my appetite. Though I missed the cheese sometimes, I did find that within a few months I could read nearly anything. Now when I needed to ask the meaning of an unfamiliar word, often only Grandfather could give it. If he was away for more than a week, we might spend an hour or two like this, with him helping me vanquish my collection of strange new foes.

  First among the cherished memories of my childhood is that big sun face, round and tan, a thick red-grey ruff lining his jaw and tufting his chin. My abuelo’s was the first serious portrait I sketched. His hair was reddish brown, the hairline high and well back from his temples, which lent a furthe
r roundness to the cheeks and forehead. His eyes were green, and clear as gems. After seeing him next to Father, I could no longer confidently call him tall; he was thick-set, with rounded shoulders. And down the years, to line up my sketches of him side by side was as if to chart the progress of ageing in the cinnamon bear.

  Grandfather rented two haciendas from the Church. Ours in Nepantla, which Isabel ran, and another he looked after, higher up, just below the pass. In that house was a library I had only heard him speak of, but that shimmered in my mind as the real and true El Dorado. And it was from that great larder of books that Grandfather regularly restocked his shelf in Nepantla. Architectural studies, treatises on Euclid and Galen, and—still maddeningly inaccessible—the Latin poets. Virgil and Lucretius, Lucan and Catullus, Seneca and Juvenal. The names alone were as the metres of a mighty epic.

  By the time I was five I had sworn an oath on the little ruby pricked from my thumb to learn Latin without delay. This was to be the first of my great failures, for as it turned out I would not master the godlike speech of Romans for almost ten years.

  In translation, mercifully, was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and of course Grandfather’s beloved Iliad and Odyssey. And the great classic of our Castilian tongue, Baltasar de Vitoria’s The Theatre of the Pagan Gods. But the book he perhaps treasured most was by a soldier who fought under Cortés. The True History of the Conquest of New Spain is an old man’s chronicle of the campaign, a story of the sufferings and deceptions inflicted on the common soldiers the author had fought beside as a youth.

  “Books are powerful,” Abuelo said. “This single book is why, en mi opinión, the many generations of us who followed Cortés have raised not a single monument to him.”

  Books were powerful, irresistible even: the scent of mildew they brought down from the mountains was for me like fresh bread, a bakery laid out between each set of covers.