Hunger's Brides (123 page)

Other nations were born for trials. Israel was one. Such were Israel's sufferings that John draws upon the prophets Jonah, Job and Jeremiah, and David, royal poet of the
Psalms
, to speak to us of the night of the soul. The people of this valley of Anahuac were another born to trials, for this was a land of plenty in which the heart of the earth trembled, flash floods struck from a cloudless sky, mountains groaned and burst into flame. The last of the valley's peoples was the Mexica of the Triple Alliance. They too thought of themselves as chosen for a special destiny. And even to such a people come times when it is asked to endure more. The days of sea and fire ending in the year of the caravels on the lake was one such time; also the year 1611; and now. Our valley was filled with a babbling, of waters, of fables, of demons, of the confusions of the soul in darkness.

For a time it had seemed that in our suffering we had become one, that the fates of the peoples of the valley were not separate. But how much can one people take before it breaks apart and its soul falls into discord, before it bursts, and its heart.

On April 7th of the year 1692 the sermon at Easter Mass was given by Father Antonio Escaray. Two years had passed since a pleasant day in a
locutory when those assembled had discussed the Maundy Thursday sermon. Father Escaray had been among us. It might have been two centuries.

With the Viceroy, Vicereine, and all the magistrates of the Royal
Audiencia
in attendance, Father Escaray decried the scandal of the scarcities. He hinted openly, baldly, at the rumours of hoarding and price speculation among the Viceroy's favourites. Rumours as true as they were persistent, and in their persistence lay their proof.
Vox populi, vox Dei
. Father Escaray's too was sacrilegious abuse of the solemnity of the pulpit for profane ends; yet he was applauded—roundly, deafeningly, in the Metropolitan Cathedral during the most solemn of Masses.

In the days following, people talked openly of uprisings in the provinces, and revolts on the plantations led by the runaway slaves based in San Lorenzo de los Negros. And yet such stories, if they were not invented here, would have had to come to us by canoe. The boatmen, who fed us and nourished us and had little time for gossip, themselves came to be feared and resented, for upon them we were as dependent as children. And had anyone forgotten the dolls in the canals, and the pagan rites still practised in the mountains? Whispers came now against the Indians of the countryside who were surely hoarding their crops, which was a cruel injustice since any crops they tended were not theirs.

The Indians did not lack for grievances. Remembered from the days when there was food were the wealthy Spaniards and Creoles who had helped themselves to whatever tempted them in the markets without a thought to paying for it. Now there were the fourteen-hour days of hard labour without rest; now the half-
real
of pay that bought almost nothing when prices were low, not even tortilla to replenish a man's strength; now the cold and sickness, the infections and fouled water, the drownings and foundered houses; now the breasts that would not draw, and much death among the new corn.

But we did not know what was said in those houses and in the streets unless the people there came to tell us. In the convent there was helplessness, that we could do so little, see or know so little for ourselves, and frustration that even so recently as Teresa's time, the sisters might go among the people and be of some use. The Franciscans were busy in these days among the Indians who had been brought in from the villages in work gangs. But the people of the nearest barrios did come, to the chapel, and to all the locutories; this was work all of us could do for the
people who could not read, and for the women who came after the worst of all losses. Some came for answers, answers I no longer had; some came to know how others had suffered, that others had lived through such trials. There were books and verses for this. Most of all the work was to sit with them … Filipinos and Africans, Creoles and Spaniards. But for the Indians who turned to us, the poorest of the poor, I felt I could do a little more, listen to their stories of how they had come to live in the city, remember little songs to sing with them. The same scriptures brought comfort, though never enough. Perhaps the Indians appreciated especially the Lamentations. In Nahuatl, the voice of Jeremiah could seem familiar, not unlike verses they had heard as children.

In our valley, the burial songs had been not so very different from the songs for births. I was surprised to remember so many of the words. But I did not know enough of them, and there were few elders. Our capital was made up of many peoples, yet none quite whole any longer. And though many of the instruments lacked, and the music in its movements was perhaps no longer vast, many simpler melodies remained, beautiful in their own right. For only when the last of a people is gone, in its language, its way in joy and suffering, can the music be properly said to have gone out. Then may we take up a fragment, a bit of pottery or a shell and hold it to our ear.

It became hard to remember the purpose; then, to hear the music; soon, to imagine these could exist.

Though Father Escaray was a Franciscan, the Viceroy and Vicereine had begun frequenting the Franciscan monastery, a place of refuge in a time of need perhaps not far off. From their choice it was clear they feared the poor more even than the wealthy Creoles, for it was the Franciscans who were closest to the people, and could best protect them from the people. Six men were said to have died in knife fights in the
pulquerías
in just the first week of June. On Friday, June 6th, an uproar broke out at the public granaries on the rumour that they now stood completely empty. A restless mass surged about the granary doors, thrusting a pregnant Indian woman up against the nervous troops. They clubbed her to the ground. She miscarried there on the stones. A way was cleared;
a delegation of fifty Indian women and twenty men bore her up to the Archbishop's palace where the women were turned back, were always turned back. And again from the gates of the Viceroy's palace they were turned away. There were several hundred by now in the square—men and women. At nightfall they dispersed in knots and clusters of twenty or more, toward the taverns and
pulquerías
. Shouting and fights were heard through the night.

On Saturday nothing happened, though the
pulquerías
were said to be thronged with insurrectionists, with people drinking and hatching plots outside in the streets. Here at San Jerónimo, Concepción came with a dozen of the older servants, most of whom I had given religious instruction in Nahuatl. They were wounded by the stories: Yes, there had been many drunk at the granary yesterday—but not half were of the people—and none from among the women who had attempted to get justice for the brutality of the guards. The drunkenness was a slander, for as I surely knew,
pulque
was once a sacred drink. Not the actions of drunkards—but of women, and had it not always been thus in the face of injustice? Had not Our Mother one day challenged the war god to nourish the people on milk not blood? And maybe Madre Juana had heard of the time …

The title they used for me was one of respect but it felt uncomfortably formal now, for they were very much at ease, visibly proud of what the women had done. I suspected that some of the convent's servants, Concepción in particular, had been among them. I thought of telling them a nickname I had once had as a girl. But to persuade them to use it would have required a long story, and they had so many of their own and some of these were new to me. How the women of this valley, in their defiance, had always given the people their new destiny.
²⁴
There was Coyolxauqui, the war god's sister, who opposed him, and whom he slew to inaugurate war. Even Malinalli, who had translated for Cortés, was only avenging upon her own people the injustice of being sold by them into slavery—was that not true? And so we passed the afternoon quietly in my sitting room, nodding as each began a story the others knew, Antonia trying to make them comfortable with cold tea, these women unused to being served.

On the morning of Sunday, June 8th, a large assembly of women had waited for the Viceroy after Mass and had insulted him openly in Santo Domingo square. A mob was milling in the central plaza. It was said they were a drunken rabble and Indians. It was also said that the Viceroy had
come to the balcony to speak to the people and been felled by a paving stone. But though we did not know it, the Viceroy had already slipped away to the Franciscan monastery, disguising himself in the robes of a monk. In the late afternoon, as a mob numbering in the tens of thousands pushed toward the palace gates, another woman, an Indian, was bludgeoned to the ground. The crowd was chanting
México para los Méxicanos
, and for one more hour, it seemed, we were a people in our suffering.

The woman, near death or now dead, was taken up by the crowd—many women—and brought down the street to the Archbishop's palace, as had happened before, where they were again turned back without a chance to be heard. At dusk a paving stone was thrown up at the Vice-Queen's balcony, then another. Abandoned by the Viceroy, an outmanned palace guard assembled before the gates to face the mob, which turned briefly to looting the stylish shops of El Parian. The guards charged the looters. The mob charged back with stones. As the guards retreated a few opened fire, taking a hail of paving stones in answer. Two soldiers were knocked down—the mob fell upon them.

Others tore apart the market stalls for torches. The
ayuntamiento
was first. Then the palace. Through the barred gates, fire was set to the doors, then to the window shutters; then firebrands were thrown up at the balconies. The latticework of the Vice-Queen's balcony caught.

With flames already raging through the administration offices, Carlos led a party of students inside to retrieve the city's collection of Indian documents and histories.

Then, at the height of the revolt, the cathedral doors swung open. A priest flanked by a guard of altar boys emerged bearing the tabernacle of the Holy Sacrament. Seeing it raised on high, the crowd—blood-lust in their eyes, paving stones still clutched in split-nailed hands—fell to their knees while the procession traced the slow perimeter of the square. The young priest spoke for a few moments to the crowd in Nahuatl and Castilian. There the uprising ended for the day. When the rioters had left, many dead lay untended in the square.

Distressing to me in a way I could not grasp was the idea of the balcony itself, burning. True, I had spent many hours there, but few happy. Was it the image of the paving stones breaking through the lattice, or the rosewood in flames—what was this, grief?

That night we stood in the courtyards, near the locutories, took turns there, exchanged word. The rumour came at dawn that Puebla had been
destroyed, that Malinche itself had opened and engulfed Puebla in fire—Iztaccihuatl too had woken, a thing that had not happened in all the histories of the valley. It was not credible, and yet hard to disbelieve. In the half-light, a fine grey ash was falling, the hills obscured by cloud.

All day, the story persisted. Surely the ash was from the Smoking Mountain and the fires in the plaza. And even if Puebla had been destroyed—how would we have heard so quickly? But our role seemed simply to echo the others, as throughout that day the people of the barrio stopped to tell what they had heard and to hear what others had said before rushing out again. By nightfall the effect of the rumours reaching in through the walls had become uncanny, as when by candelight one first hears a hidden choir in a darkened church, voices sourceless in the air, hidden behind a wall or a curtain or a lattice….

And yet we were that choir, we were that chorus, a chorus that was blind.

In the night, Monday, the arrests began. It was a night for the settling of grievances, parties of armed men in the streets. This, one could see from any window. There was no cause to believe the Inquisition would choose this night to make its arrests, for the Inquisition was accountable to no one and needed no pretexts. And yet it was hard to disbelieve, hard not to look for faces in each clot of men coming down the street. Hard not to run to the window at each shot fired, each flicker against the ceiling, each shout. I could not stay in my cell any longer.

Don't let them come for me, don't let them find me in here, behind so many walls. Let them take me in the open, not from my bed, let them take me from among the others.

Chaplain de Gárate sent word he would lead special prayers in the chapel, deserted except for us in the upper choir. Not a Mass, no vestments, a few candles on the altar. I did not know what he should read—he sent for me, he could not think. I could not either, I could not let myself. What should he read?
The Lamentations of Jeremiah
, I thought. But these would bring neither calm nor comfort.

Is this the city that men call the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth …? Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee … false burdens and causes of banishment …

It was while we were filing out of the upper choir afterwards, crowding at the top to take the winding stair. A sister just going down turned back to another, above her, and said something. It was in her tone, or rather that there was no tone at all. “Unless we are already dead …”

It was perhaps this, as much as anything.

I joined in all the prayers that night. No longer could I hold myself as one apart. I moved in all the processions, out in the open—women on their knees, ash falling, blackening us, our foreheads and faces, the makeup of actors, court clowns. Steam from a torch, mud and cloth, sharp stone, a knee gashed. Frightened novices, a young nun. Nothing separate, none of us separate now—all the fragments collected, one.