Hunger's Brides (115 page)

It was evening, after Vespers. The storm outside was worsening. At dinner, beneath closed shutters, the candle flames dipped and quivered to each big gust of wind. After the meal we moved into the library. Antonia was taking dictation for
Caracol
as I paced about the room to various tempos, here and there a pause to pick up instruments and curios, pull musical texts down from shelves. Over five months since she sent our letter to Bishop Santa Cruz, and in that time I'd refused to let her unburden herself to me. She had tried—had gotten as far as saying our Seraphina letter was to blame for everything. Ah, the vainglory of writers. But that night during the wildness of the storm, there was no stopping her. The weather explained everything now if we wished. Perhaps I could blame my cruelty too on this.

I had already guessed at half of it, or not quite the half. I understood that it had to do with her sisters, but her hatred of him had less to do with the ones he had not helped than the ones he had, the little ones in the convent school of Santa Monica. She and Santa Cruz as lovers would have seemed common—but he had never touched her, she had only watched him disciplining himself, and afterwards tended his back. Here, too, there was more, but I deflected her by asking where she had gone to meet him. A house near the Salto de Agua, at the end of the aqueduct. It was a relief to her to describe it, though I had not asked as a kindness. And since that night, the room has come into my mind many times—always clear but with slight variations. Santa Cruz wearing the black cassock of Lent, or a violet mozetta. On a desk by the window there are cigarettes or flowers, chocolate or wine. Oddly the one constant is a detail she did not give. The view from the window of the Salto de Agua, where the water of the aqueduct falls in folds, like clear silk….

But when I asked Antonia if he had read out my letters there, I saw how close I had come to breaking her heart. She had never shown him a single letter—nor ever discussed a single one. The truth was he never asked, and if he had she didn't know what she would have done.
What
then? Reports—but I had to please believe that not a word she told him had been true. Reports … She had to tell him something, but lied about everything. He said all he cared about was the state of my soul. This sounded like Santa Cruz. He asked if I still kept a spiritual journal for
myself, he asked once if I had any manuscripts not my own. He said he didn't care about doctrine or secret books. He said it wasn't for the Inquisition, that they had someone else watching—someone in here—and that only he could protect me from them. Unless she thought she could. So if I was reading X she told him Y, if I was writing one thing she told the son of a wayward bitch another. But most often what he asked for had been details, personal things. Where I brushed my hair at night, brush or comb, left hand or right, if she had ever seen me disciplining myself … and so she lied, had been lying for three years and the bastard knew—she was sure of it. This was part of the game, that he made her lie—once he asked which she thought might place me in greater danger, a lie or the truth. And she was terrified—she didn't know, it was true how could she know that? And then he came that day for my arguments, the day I beat him at chess. My pages for him were the one letter she almost didn't post—but if she hadn't, what then? She didn't know how to protect me. He was the only one who could. I had to see, I had to believe her …

The truth was that I did, and yet I was not sure she would ever let herself believe
me
. So I told her things, about myself, my past. I spoke to her simply and quietly, as though she were a child, for she was quite childlike by then. About my own years in Mexico as a young girl, about how frightened I had been. I spoke to her of how happy I had been to know her, and have her here with me. That it had been too long since I had seen her laughing, the mischief in her. Yes, I'd known there was more, flashes of darkness and trouble. But she had been like a secret book I had never wanted to leaf through, a sort of miracle that she had made such a difficult journey to me intact. Well not quite intact. She smiled then. And I told her that I had always known there was more between her and Santa Cruz, that it had been a point of pride that if I treated her with love and friendship I needed never worry about any of that, and I had been right after all. That even friends have secrets, that friends could risk hurting each other.

And so we lay on my bed and I stroked her cheek and kissed her hair, as the sky paled in the windows in the east. We missed the prayers of Lauds and again at Prime, even knowing not a few of my sisters would be saying that it was for sins such as these that it did not stop raining anymore.

She told me how frightened she had been for me. She had never seen me as I was after the letter from Philothea. Not writing—not even to María
Luisa, hardly reading, melancholy, sarcastic—who? not me … yes, you. How she hated him, how she had wanted to die when she came into my room and saw the fragments of the
Letras a Safo
in the ashes on my desk.

I had thought of Seraphina as our first work together, but she had felt those verses had been ours. She and María Luisa were the only ones ever to have read them. Though it had been six months, it was still painful to talk of them so I asked what she thought—what we might do for her sisters.

There was no place safer for her sisters than where they were, in the convent of Santa Monica, nowhere he could not reach them if he chose to. And nowhere he could not reach her. He had threatened once to take her away from me and put her back where he had found her. But she thought Santa Cruz was finished with her now. She had not been summoned to the house by the Salto de Agua for over a year.

But has he finished with you, Juana? she said, after a little while. Is it love? she asked. Could it be he is in love with you?

I asked her if she knew what the Mexicans say about someone who takes a gift back, for she has been a gift to me. What do they say of persons such as these?

Oppa icuitl quiqua
.

They eat their excrement twice.

  Caracol …

We take up again the case of the spiral shell, cut now with a very fine saw not cross-wise but at a parabolic angle. The section yields not the orbit of a circle but an ellipse. And if, as we have just argued, the celestial harmony were conceived not as Pythagoras did, as a circle of fifths, but as a spiral, a winding stair, ever widening in its compass, then we should soon see each turn on the stair offering a mutation on the scale with respect to the position just beneath it. As a symbol then we may say the winding stair is Grace and detect, in the very properties of the spiral, its
structure and agency. For as we have seen in the properties of the speaking trumpet and caracol, the spirals of the ellipsoids propagate sound, lending it strength and amplitude.

On this voyage, Mind is the guide, Grace is the strength we are given to rise.

Music is the Mind of God brought into Time, spiralling down through the Creation. The spiral shell is the voice from the depths of the sea, that silence from which the echo springs, the instrument through which we speak to the sky. Here in Mexico the Lord of the Wind wore a conical hat and here in this city his temples were round, with no sharp angles to stand against the wind. He was called Ehecatl. Here, the wind was the breath of heaven; the storm, the music of the sky—the thunder his drum, the wind his strings, the rain and the snow and hail on the ground were his water sticks. And the caracol was his wind-jewel …

And so we find in the caracol the hidden emblem of our soul, the secret shape of Grace, the echo of a celestial correspondence; even as we hear in ourselves, if we listen, a distant echo of God.

July 5th. The composer Sálazar came, alone. Would Cantor De Ribera be joining us later? First one musician was missing, then the other. The world of course revolved around musicians, but if we were serious about setting the
Caracol
to music we really should meet all together, very soon.

Ribera was ill. Truly?—please say it was not serious. No, a cold was all. The cantor was only a little hoarse. Sálazar was smiling now and I found myself glad he had come, even though we could get little work done. Cantor De Ribera was always hoarse, the irony being that a musician whose title derived from chant and song should have such a raucous voice. This was his speaking voice; his singing was a truly pitiful thing to hear. But with perfect pitch. He was particularly hoarse when excited—which, when speaking on musical subjects, was often. He was good, Ribera, and a good musician, and knew Sálazar to be a great one.

There had always been something stiff in Sálazar's demeanour toward me—perhaps it was only the younger artist thoroughly sick of hearing about the older one. He was making a special effort to be cordial today. To both of us the Heron Ribera was especially dear. And yet I had the distinct impression Sálazar was considering a withdrawal from our
Caracol
. Though we had talked but a few times, he and I had known each other much longer than he realized. Almost thirty years ago he had come to the
palace as a boy of six to play the violin for the court. He had spent a horrible day waiting to be called upon, had sat for hours with his violin in an adjoining room. Finally a page was sent for him, only to return saying the child seemed too frightened to play. As the youngest member of the court I was dispatched, one child to another, to coax him out. I found him sitting on the floor in a corner, lonely and over-awed, and angrily hurt now that someone had finally condescended to talk to him—though what could there be for
us
to discuss. And so we had a talk about being a prodigy.

Today I considered asking him if he had any memory of this, but did not want to spoil it with worries, mine or his, that I was trying to influence him to stay with our project.

Sálazar had just been saying, with some delicacy, that the cathedral had never seemed a promising venue for
Caracol
, but neither he nor Ribera had expected the Palace's patronage to be in doubt. Until yesterday. The Viceroy began by expressing his untiring admiration for Sor Juana … but the year had been difficult. Sálazar was explaining this to me as though perhaps I had just arrived from Perú. Very difficult for the Viceroy. Yes, I saw that. Hastening to reaffirm his favour for me and friendly feelings, the Count de Galve joked that the past year of our association had been dogged by ill-luck. The Vice-Queen, never a friend, had been pleased to begin a list and sent a servant for writing materials so that it might be taken down. Others chimed in from among the courtiers on the couches and cushions around the dais. Much drink had been consumed. Sálazar was at pains to attribute our setback to the hazard of the moment. The hour was late. They were in the Hall of Realms. The fire had been allowed to burn low, dry firewood being at a premium. Firelight flickered dimly over the maps and charts on the walls, long shadows cast up from the busts on the mantle. The tone at first was rueful, then mock-dreadful and dire, as when one eggs on the teller of a ghost encounter. Blight, flooding, pirates, rumours of insurrection, the Viscount's disappearance, the French, the French, the threat to the silver fleets, the dolls in the canals…. Before long the Count de Galve, his thin face already anxious and careworn, was visibly frightened. It had been clear from the first he was not a strong man, but he had once wanted to be.