Hunger's Brides (120 page)

If music can be seen as our most perfect idea of Time, then perhaps History too is a musical science. The mutation to a higher key felt inevitable when it came: soon the talk in our letters and the locutories was of not just one
beata
but several, then not just
beatas
any longer but nuns, adulterous nuns. And there were other campaigns and speculations more to be dreaded. Any day it might begin, with leaflets condemning a sin that in Mexico had never before been spoken of: sodomy between nuns, parties of sodomy among us. It had all happened in Venice, as everyone knew, where the convents had become brothels and their parlours nests of spiders, and was not Mexico the Venice of America? I had begun to wonder if my own learning was a help to me now. But … had not the people been saying that the cause of these calamities was instead the eclipse? This was only asking to be told that fornication had brought on the eclipse.

Carlos and I had not spoken in the three months since, though he still came to the locutory for Antonia, for their classes of mathematics and science, and history. She left sheepishly to go to him, while I tried to let her know I did not mind, without ever quite saying why. I did not want her to misunderstand, lest I hurt her too. Her friendship with Carlos was real, and growing, the gallant preoccupation of the older gentleman with a beautiful young woman at a delicate age. For her part … no, those thoughts were for the privacy of her heart.

And yet for all this, when he came for her, I knew he came for me; what had come between us that day had never really been about the eclipse. In all the turmoil of the day's events, the last thing either of us was thinking about was a quarrel. Antonia and I did not even know when we would see Carlos next or in what state we might find him, but he came that afternoon. He found us in the locutory with Gárate, the convent chaplain. Chaplain also of the Metropolitan Cathedral, Gárate had been there at the appointed hour, and had just been telling us of the Archbishop's immense satisfaction with the turn of events—had an archdiocese ever served more effectively in an hour of sudden calamity? There had been a great cleansing in the capital. Many a lax Christian saw his faith forever renewed, many a secret Jew saw his faith in the law of Moses shattered and forever forsaken. And then there was the rate at which alms had been pouring in all day, to the cathedral, to our own temple, no doubt to every church and cloister in the city. Gárate had heard
about the Archbishop's requisition of an inventory of my cell, and wondered now if His Grace might feel less need to resort to auctions to raise funds for his charities. I was determined not to entertain false hopes, but found my mind racing, nonetheless, to the other consequences that the Church's great success might have, for me particularly.

Gárate rose to salute the man of the hour with a ceremonious bow. Carlos shook his head. “I only thank God for having put me in the way of a conjunction of events so rare and about which so few observations are dispassionately recorded.” Never had I seen Carlos look happier. I held my tongue. This was the fulfilment of a dream, his no less than Galileo's—of science in the service of the Church.

Carlos was too excited to sit, but rather stepped stiffly about the locutory closely inspecting things on the walls he'd seen many times before and today was clearly not seeing at all—almost a bust of himself, stiff-necked, stiff-jointed all over, heaped in glory. There was something in the long face, in the long, broad-bridged nose and the huge dark eyes, that reminded one of a terrifyingly intelligent fawn, grown ancient—bending arthritically now to examine a map as the chaplain continued to sing his praises, marvelling at the precision of his art.

“Science
, sir,” Carlos corrected, still facing away from us, hands clasped at his back. “Merely the rigorous application of a method.” Half turning toward the chaplain, he added, “And we still missed the prediction by two hours.”

Here he remembered his old telescope and asked Antonia if the moment had been worth all the preparation. In no time they were leaning close to the grille, Antonia by half a head the taller, conferring volubly and leaving me with Gárate sitting at the window, listening more to them than to our chaplain discussing the weather, which, yes, was holding. It was the first fair afternoon in months. The sun was all benevolence, the sky a radiant blue. Across the room, Antonia was asking Carlos how it could be that the moon had fit so perfectly over the sun.

“Do you hear, Juana? Such a natural philosopher we have here in our Antonia!” At this angle, few gaps showed in the grille. His face ducked into view as I sat back to see him more clearly. He turned back to her. “And yet what you so accurately observed, Antonia, is merely a stupendous coincidence.”

Again I bit back a reply. If the phrase ‘stupendous coincidence' had any meaning whatever, it was surely an invitation to probe more deeply,
instead of an irrelevance—which I knew Carlos had not meant—for, with so many bodies in such a busy heaven continually swinging in front of one another from some perspective or other, an eclipse did not exist without a point of view. And what was a perspective separate from our experience of it?

Just then Gárate ventured how helpful it might be if, after such a universal display of penitence, the rains were now to cease and the city were given a reprieve. I could hold my peace no longer.“Tell me, Carlos, how does glossing over the stupendous improbability that produces a total eclipse allow us to properly account for its most significant effect—the power it exercises upon our minds and upon our times? Were there ever odds more properly called
astronomical
, that the angular distance for the sun and moon—their apparent diameters—should prove identical, two bodies so vastly unequal in size and in their distance from us? Doubtless you can fill in the trigonometry for yourself, but pull the little moon in closer by a few thousand leagues and suddenly the eclipses that have for dozens of centuries moved admirals and histories and kings fade to a pallid glow in the darkness; nudge the little moon out another twenty thousand and in a flash—no totality at all, but rather a small dark smudge against the glare, a bit of soot on lantern glass. Instead, what we are given—in this coronet of ice in the heavens—is the overwhelming impression of
Design
and
Intent
. But whose design and what intent?”

At the gap in the grille the smile faded, succeeded by the bemusement of someone who has bent to inspect the contents of a cage and found something unexpected. But if the chaplain had not taken it upon himself to defend him, our quarrel still might have ended there.

Surely Sor Juana must admit don Carlos had performed a great service. And who could say what might have happened if he hadn't. Initial reports were of two children killed by runaway wagons, a few drownings in the canals, but though the distress had been worse than anything in memory, the Church had been
prepared
, had withstood the flood, brought the faithful safely into fold and harbour.

Carlos said nothing. How convenient to let others answer for him, how delicious to have the Church itself uphold the righteousness of one's scientific principles and not have to speak to how they are used.

“Is this also your view, Carlos? Your vision of the new science? To terrify people in churches even as the Jesuit Kircher used to do with his magic lantern—projecting devils into the air! And what of the science of history
to which don Carlos has dedicated his many monographs? Are the fatal events of this day too insignificant to merit the historian's notice?”

“Juana, don Carlos, I …” Antonia began, bewildered.

“It's all right, Antonia.” Carlos came to stand where he could speak to me without raising his voice.“An eclipse is many things, Juana. But surely it is also a rare opportunity to test hyphotheses of the sun's composition, to refine estimates of its mass and, yes, distance, and to theorize on the properties of light.” His tone was grave, dignified, as he then asked if I might care to discuss my own observations of the event. I could still have stopped. I had only to be evasive.

Instead I told him the truth, that I had not looked through his telescope at all.

At this, Carlos turned his enormous sad eyes on Antonia. “You see, it is just as we feared, Antonia. No, it is worse. Not only does the artist challenge our empirical observations with poetic cavils—she makes this poetry on what she has not even bothered to
see
. It is forever this way with Sor Juana. As with mathematics in the past, as with virtually everything else, she has lost all interest in science now …”

What happens between even true friends, why do we not take more care—indeed insist on being careless with our most dear? Are we hoping to prove our friendship indestructible? That morning as if by a miracle the sky had cleared long enough for him to take detailed sightings with a fine new telescope, one of the finest in the world. And I begrudged him this. For weeks Carlos had toiled long hours selflessly and all but pointlessly over the infernal dredging projects at the canals; the disappointments in his life were not few. Then, one day of glory, a day when for once the deepest of his passions had no need to be hidden, from me or from the Church, when his faith could be served by the depth of his learning and his love for astronomy openly declared. How could I have let this happen—how many times have I turned it over in my mind? Even after I had accused him of letting himself be used by the Church, the argument did not quite tilt out of control. Only when he heard me telling him what I could so easily have kept to myself, that I had not so much as looked through the telescope, only then did the last of his restraint fall away. And yet we could have stopped there, avoided the worst, had I not let myself be goaded—and shamed, on a day of such appalling events—into feeling a petty stab of jealousy, of Antonia.

I asked Chaplain Gárate to leave, and then Antonia.

How dared he say I had lost interest in science
—in everything!—in front of them? Did he have any idea how many people Gárate might tell, to what uses they might put such information?

Carlos's face was pale as always, but the eyes behind the spectacles were enormous and angry: this was a formidable fawn. How dared
I
impugn his feelings for this city, this country—and truly, he wondered, was my first concern the people's plight or my own? And was this compassionate concern of mine quite historical—or was it for how a day of triumph for the Church might diminish my precious liberty? And was the heart of my interest truly Mexico, or only in those parts of it that affected
me?
As always, with me—everywhere a conspiracy.

Conspiracy. How interesting to hear don Carlos sound more like a Jesuit with each passing year. On the subject of conspiracies, what could he tell me about the Archbishop's demand for an inventory of my cell? Ah, so don Carlos was truly claiming to have no knowledge of this—perhaps one does not see everything in a telescope after all. But such concern in his face now, and would that be for me or the fate of his own manuscripts? Equally curious that
in
some of these manuscripts were recorded the Mexica testimonies of comets and eclipses, yet among us here and now such things were only superstitions entirely devoid of interest.

Indeed yes,
superstition—
this childish notion of a destiny inscribed in the sky between a comet and an eclipse. Sor Juana's distresses had all the seriousness of astrology, a weak excuse for persistent melancholy—

He could speak to
me
of astrology? Not only did our Chair of Mathematics and Astrology consent to teach the skills of a science he detested, but he then complained of being
underpaid
for them.

A thirty-year-old quarrel is itself a natural wonder. This was the only man in the New World who could ask when I had last done work the equal of my talent, and chide me now for my loss of interest in the passions we had once shared. But for years it had been clear to me if not to him that we could never practise here a true and free natural philosophy. Most of Carlos's colleagues in Spain had forsworn the practice of science altogether. But he had persisted for the love of it, though we could only follow distant developments, confirm conclusions made in freer places, and in places not so much freer. He and I had quarrelled more than once over Galileo, whose fate, Carlos insisted, owed to an excess of pride, chief
among his many character flaws. Over Descartes we argued less harshly, over the change in him—unflinching in the
Discourse
, conciliatory two decades later in the
Meditations
. For Carlos this softening was a sign of maturity, a judgement that he pronounced with all the dignity of someone whose best work would always be unpublished.

In a quarrel of decades, each thing said echoes with the hundred said before. So when he said ‘melancholy' I heard his laments that in me the masculine virtues—intelligence, analysis, curiosity, independence, scepticism—were forever undermined by the feminine vices—moodiness, willfulness, faithlessness, inconstancy, duplicity. Particularly the last three, which for him were the true reasons I had not married him. But hearing these in turn cut me so deeply not because he was saying ‘marriage' but because I was hearing ‘betrayal.' Of a friend, of an ideal, of a love, of a gift. These past years the few moments of sweetness Carlos and I had found were when discussing our various ideas for inventions. Musical clocks and maps, wind harps and steam clocks. When I thought of all these whimsical creations, it seemed we had begun to find a poetry together for what could not be done here, could never be published, for the great synthesis that would always float just beyond our grasp. And so perhaps the heaviest blow to our friendship had come only recently, in a book by a Lutheran with a good biblical name, but then, they loved their Bibles. Isaac. We still had not read it, but had read formulas and arguments copied into letters from Carlos's correspondents in Europe. From what I could see, this Newton had accomplished it—fused the Archimedean infinitesimals with the Cartesian translation of geometry into algebra, next integrating these into the Galilean equations on falling bodies, all to solve the riddle of Hermes Trismegistus: universal attraction at a distance, expressed now in the language of mathematics. Just such an enterprise had been my great dream as a child. Carlos and I had been outstripped. We would never catch up, and now to follow even the rest of Europe meant to be left ever further behind. This was something I had never been able to endure. To hear him say I had lost interest in mathematics was to hear him say I had betrayed a gift. What he could never understand was that I had not betrayed it but had failed that gift terribly, and so, abandoned it.