Hunger's Brides (121 page)

And then just the day before the eclipse, had I not swallowed my pride and finally asked him to verify the formulas I'd used in
Caracol?
He had been generous as usual, and gentle. No simple business, this, he said, frowning over my calculations for cross-sections cut by various spirals winding through cones of differing amplitude. It was a good afternoon in the locutory, a good journey without moving, with the rain falling in the courtyard past the window bars. I noticed his threadbare clothes, the skinny legs and patched hose, the little chest and shoulders under the great faded cloak. The conversation had turned from the conic sections to the Cartesian vortices, to Christina of Sweden and back to her famous tutor. There had been much gentle talk and laughter. How grey his hair was becoming. How thin I was, like a girl again. How pleased he was that we had at last built a model of my musical clock. And so for once I gave no utterance to my faithlessness, my doubts that the essential Catholic doctrines, which Carlos so tranquilly expected to confirm through his new telescope, could ever be construed as having foreseen not just a sun-centred heaven, but a cosmos of infinite extension crowded with an infinitude of suns like ours, and spiralling through these, the turbulent music of the starry vortices. Infinite worlds, infinite presents and pasts and futures, coincident—all things number, the number infinite.

It was one thing to know this about our Faith, another to make him admit this. But having hurt Carlos on his happiest day and so grandly placed History on the winding staircase reaching up to God, was I not then bound by conscience to turn the instruments of that science upon myself? As opposed to viewing an eclipse through a tube, the challenge of a historical science lies not in the rarity of observations but in not being engulfed by them.

And it was true my faith was not so great, my science not quite like his. But I was not so inconstant, Carlos. I had not lost interest in everything, had not betrayed the loves of years, or not so completely. I watched the eclipse, it came to our convent too….

We had made our preparations at San Jerónimo. While there could be no contesting that this was a Sign from God, Mother Andrea did permit it to be said at our weekly chapter of faults that eclipses did not always portend disaster. As far as I could establish, the chief danger was blindness, and while prayer at such moments was only right and natural, I asked the sisters to please pray in the manner usually pleasing to God—eyes closed. For there was every reason to believe staring at the sun
would be as harmful then as on any other day. I had spent some days rereading the old accounts of eclipses. It was hard to winnow the truth from the exaggerations: there was the suddenness, the total darkness; there were descriptions of birds falling from the sky. I arranged for lamps to be primed in the convent patios and in the infirmary in case of need. Our preparations seemed sensible.

There were small flaws in the plan.

The sisters around our little patio had been standing just inside their doorways, casting dark looks at Antonia and the telescope, and over at me, who had surely put her up to it. I was standing just inside, like the others, waiting for a sign. At the first indication I intended to light the lantern from the breakfast fire we had left lit in the kitchen.

I knew what an eclipse was, yet I felt the nervousness, too. There was nothing wrong with the sky. So calm, so blue, the sun sovereign, unassailable. The darkness came upon us. I was prepared for the suddenness—it had to be like a thundercloud drifting across the sun. I knew the cause yet the temptation to look up was all but impossible to resist. It was for this that blindness was such a danger in the old accounts. But the darkness itself, I was not prepared for at all. The moon's edge was at first invisible against the sun's glare, fast diminishing. There
was
no cause, no moon, no cloud—and through this no-cloud passed no light at all. Something unseen was wrong with the sun—then a scythe moved against the fields of light.

The sisters came through their doorways and fell to their knees as one, and from them as one a groan of prayer went up. The onset was so sudden, the reactions as if rehearsed—the sisters of our patio streaming into the open—half-moon faces turned toward heaven—a practised play set swiftly into motion. I had forgotten to light the lamp. I too found myself in the courtyard, calling out that they should please close their eyes. Though I could scarcely see by then, I felt they must be looking up, even as I was. At the sound of my voice Antonia bent to the eyepiece. A chill fell upon us with the darkness, as if we had stepped into an icy room, the room that was the world. The screaming started with the chill—I could not distinctly hear the screaming in our own courtyard though it was all around, but felt I heard it in the
gran patio
and blankly started forward, to be away from where I was. Howling dogs in the streets and plazas—if they had run off, it was toward us.

Full dark came upon me as I was crossing toward the orchard thinking, not-thinking, to take the quicker path. I had a rueful thought for the lantern, then another to think of the little good it would do unlit. My steps faltered, a dizziness coming over me, as I had sometimes felt in an earthquake. It was not so much to see the stars at that hour, or even their breathless number, but seeing them
coming out
before my very eyes. An eclipse does not need a telescope, Carlos. The eclipse within a tube is one thing, and the eclipse without, another. The spectacle above is only the stage: the drama is below and spreading through the theatre. Rapidly.

The chill was of draft, of premonition, of the devil and death. The warmth still lay on my left shoulder as if I had turned away from a fire, as if the sun had just gone out. I stopped just at the trees. It was too dark to go forward. The sensation was of blindness, the impression of total dark, yet it was not—no, the eye saw and what it
saw
was darkness. Then a stirring, darkly, in the branches. Hundreds upon hundreds of grackles were roosting in the trees. At dusk the clatter they raise is ungodly. But here was utter silence, and in that instant I felt it, sheerest terror—the still panic of a groundling hunted from the sky. I had the thought that they were blind, countless chattering birds silent now, helpless, too frightened to cry out in their blindness.

Design. Intent. Terrible flaws in the Plan.

I looked into the branches, stood staring but did not understand it, like a child, all science transcended.

With time, the senses seeped back through their prism. Venus and Jupiter glowing red as blood. The howling of the dogs, subsiding. The braying of a donkey. Crickets nearby, it seemed all around. The crow of tentative cocks in the
gran patio
—was it dawn, midnight, dusk? Nine o'clock in the morning—midnight dark, but for the frail pink of a sunset in every quadrant of the sky. Chaplets of rose, shimmering coral rings in the puddles in the mud. Then a pearl light on the walls of a convent I had come to understand I hated and in equal measures loved. Nuns crying, whispering, though I saw none about. My eyes clearing. Vanessa and Concepción standing outside the kitchen, a flicker from the fire behind them, Concepción's arm over Vanessa's shoulders.

Bells tolling in the churches, a summons, a sounding, a song. San Jerónimo, San José, Santo Domingo, Jesús María—Sol-Fa-Fa-Re-Fa-Sol-La—Sol-Sol-Sol-Fa-Sol-Fa-Re-La—Sol-Mi-Sol-Mi-Sol-Re-La—a
babble like baby talk, more and more bells joining now throughout the capital, its map crumpled and convulsed. Dancing across the city now, not Time but the echoes of its stop.

As if a dreamer has forgotten to breathe and woken up.

I too had written verses on the night, the finest I had ever made, had thought her a friend, had found the glory of the day sky blinding. I thought in that moment of John of the Cross, our great poet of the night, of his love for her beauty, of the verses that had inspired mine.

Yet first was there Night, then Terror, only then did Science and Beauty and Holiness come.

The Jesuits who stop over in Mexico, coming home from Cathay, tell us that in the Middle Kingdom eclipses are suns seized in the jaws of vast dragons. In the tenth century, Al-Biruni and Abu'l-Wafa used the happy event of an eclipse to chart the slight difference in longitude between the cities of Baghdad and Kath. Fifteen centuries earlier, the Medes and the Lydians listened to the wisdom in their hearts—that there are few wars we are not better off without, and any war we can stop we must—and a peace was sealed in that place with a double wedding.

And yet the courses of wisdom are less easy than eclipses to predict. Only fifty years later, when calm Thucydides tells us eclipses and earthquakes were more frequently reported, the most cautious of the Athenian admirals neglected his own counsel after an eclipse of the moon. Nicias had been against the fated expedition to Sicily all along, had quickly called for reinforcements, had now decided on a withdrawal from Syracuse. But the sailors were fearful of putting out to sea, and the soothsayers were foretelling calamity for any sailing within the four weeks of the eclipse. The fate of Athens hung on this delay. The result was the annihilation of the world's greatest navy—those who made it to
shore numbered forty thousand, hunted from Syracuse, herded like deer by the tens of thousands and brought down.

… of all the Hellenic actions which are on record, this was the greatest—the most glorious to the victors, the most ruinous to the vanquished; for they were utterly and at all points defeated, and their sufferings were prodigious. Fleet and army perished from the face of the earth; nothing was saved, and of the many who went forth few returned. Thus ended the Sicilian expedition
.

The heart of Thucydides just this once moved with his pen.

Dearest friend, I should have listened, I did not mean to hurt you. It is you I should have written to. You built the first telescope I looked through; my stories of the land first coaxed you to leave the highways between the cities. This land that has become your life, that you love as I once did. Our love is a difficult one. But if we love each other is it not because we love the same stars, the same land? Please let us be friends, let us stay friends forever, let us not always fight. This was what I should have said.

The account of an eclipse, without us, is like a play without actors, a story half told. I did not betray the loves of years or our principles today but only failed them a little. I will try not to be ashamed of losing my head, of standing as a child who did not know the night; and you must not be shamed by astrology, whose proper study and wisdom should be, perhaps, coincidence itself—to see that we look through the telescope from both ends, taking note that the views do not quite match, and taking wisdom where we find it, where they overlap. The courses of the planets, bird flights, stars—if we read these for clues to our destinies, is it not because first they are written in the heart?