Hunger's Brides (125 page)

And now I must tell you I am withdrawing too from my efforts at publishing. I retire with unfinished business.
Las letras a Safo
. They meant so
much to us. You said the time was not right then and it is not right here now, but there was a moment, I thought, when all seemed possible. Yet with Tomás ill these past two years, I could not have managed more. Your
Second Volume
I will have shipped in three separate sailings and, God willing, at least one shipment shall soon be reaching you. Although this is a stronger collection even than the first, the endorsements did not come easily. There were moments I feared we would not get the Holy Office's licence at all. I must warn you there were only eight theologians willing to lend their names to this, even though your letter on the Vieyra sermon is well thought of privately. Someone has even written from Majorca or somewhere for permission to publish it separately. But officially I am told the Spanish Inquisition stands with Mexico's, even though its judgements often seem unnecessarily harsh to us in Spain. If the Holy Office here is quiet just now, it is not resolve that lacks but prey. In these times no one is eager to offend, still less for a sermon written over fifty years ago. The great Antonio Vieyra has left many scars in his battles.

So, there are not many endorsements, but the quality of the people is high, as is their praise. It is a considered opinion among the leading figures here that you have, in this one volume, matched the greatest poem of our century's greatest poet, the prose of our peninsula's greatest stylist, and the theology of the greatest predicator of the age. I know you, and I know you will take this praise hard, and the encomium as irony. Phoenix of America, Pythoness of Delphi, Sum of the Ten Sibyls. I ask that you take it simply for what it is, and perhaps also for the truth.

You have said that little lasts, but we Manriques believe in the few things that might. So I prefer to think of my own efforts as having had a small hand in that rare thing. It is as close as I have come.

You will think I have abandoned you, but if money can be of any help to you now, know you have it, or a word or a letter.

I prefer to do my grieving here alone. But in the fullness of time I expect to enter a convent. Then you and I shall be sisters together.

There are things I shall miss. I shall miss my Tomás. I shall miss your letters of times past, of weddings and great banquets, and War's end. You.

    With love,
    María Luisa.

T
here came the illusion that after the flooding and the revolt the world outside might be again as it had been. The lake returned the city to us, street by street, though as lake bottom. It would be for us to make them streets again. The dikes came down. Some were used to rebuild houses, though this work went slowly—for so long as there had been such habitations of adobe, they had been built by work parties, but many neighbours were lost or had walked back into the country when the causeways rose up. Trading houses went under and did not rise up. Shippers, feedlots, shops. This time there could be no help from Europe. The Viceroy could be replaced, but it seemed certain the empire and the illusions it rested upon were never to be restored. He himself may have sensed this, for the killings stopped. Ten thousand executions would not have been enough. The Church alone was stronger than before. Never had the Church here seemed so powerful, the world of princes so weak.

There was much praise for Archbishop Aguiar. He had been decisive, though his decision to turn the women from his gates, twice, did much to spur the riot. The Archbishop was strong, because he was not the luckless Fray García, because he had been the voice of Wrath all along, because he had not fallen. The Archbishop was strong because the Viceroy was weak, strong because we needed him to be, strong because from that day forward he would be unopposed. Everywhere the Church's power, incarnate in the person of Archbishop Agiuar y Seijas, was in the ascendent. His coffers were full. His men had much success in the bookstores exchanging
Consolations of the Poor
for the texts of comedies. But I have misjudged many things, among them the Archbishop's magical hat, which in those days was said to be working great wonders for the sick. This was not superstition. Again I had been too hard on Carlos. The object of the hat was not to cure, the object was to bring consolation to the suffering. And in this, it had been more successful than all my learning.

History I had always sensed as a wind that moved just beyond these walls, to be brought inside only through the portal of books. But repeatedly these past two years, History had come to me and I had not known
how to answer. History was all around us, trying the gates, rattling the bars, tapping at the shutters. And when the world did finally enter here—the responsibility, yes, I felt, but I found no use in my great gift. In the face of so much suffering, I had lost the purpose. My city had been tearing itself apart. How had I answered?
Caracol
unfinished, a few carols. With the Empire collapsing all about him and the Vandals at Hippo's gates, Augustine
had
written—kept writing, to restore the faith of the world in the world.
City of God
, the
Confessions
. John's
Canticles
written between sessions of torture … Campanella in prison, feigning madness to write the
Scelta
.

On the worst night, I had thought only of myself, feared only for myself, yet could not think for myself. No purpose, I had had no vision. A vision of nothing at all. In our valley we were once a people of poetry, and to its Speaker there had come a judgement more to be feared than the enemy, a presence more troubling than the poetry within: its end. The revelation of an emptiness, the end of a music.

September brought its own questions and judgements. There arrived the first of three shipments of the
Second Volume
of the collected works of Juana Inés de la Cruz, a nun professed under vows at the convent of San Jerónimo. Whatever its reception in Europe, the reappearance here of the letter on the Vieyra sermon was as gall, the theologians' endorsements bright
banderillas
to goad the bull. A bull that loathed bullfights. The letter had been retitled.“Crisis of a Sermon.” More impudence. The dangerous proposition of God's negative
finezas
had not been withdrawn, and the criticisms of Vieyra's positions on Christ's greatest expressions of love for Man had not been softened by so much as a word. A priest had already been condemned for defending that criticism and the nun's right to offer it, though still the sentence had been neither published nor executed. I had been among the few privileged with knowledge of this.

Towards the end of September, a visit from the Holy Office. A requisition, signed by Master Examiner Dorantes, for an inventory of all books, monographs and manuscripts in my possession. To the Inquisition familiar who had brought the requisition I answered that the Archbishop already had such a list. But I was forgetting myself, for they knew that.

Not long after we had submitted our new inventory the Holy Office requested another, and warned that omissions from both lists could only be considered deliberate, if an unlisted book were subsequently traced
back to me. This we had anticipated. Antonia had kept duplicates of all our lists. Then came another missive: certain manuscripts already known to be in my possession were missing from both lists. Yes? If Master Examiner Dorantes would describe them in detail—titles, author, contents—we would be sure to conduct a thorough search. There were two small victories in this, and against the Inquisition this was no small thing: the first, to have it even partly confirmed that not so very much was known about these manuscripts; the second, that the Holy Office did not immediately pursue the matter, meaning Dorantes was far from sure I in fact had them. So if I thought the victories small, it was in knowing the much that he could yet do to reassure himself.

My
Second Volume
had arrived in time to be added to the inventory. There had been three thousand four hundred twenty-seven books. Then, twenty-eight. It had been childish to count them, for it was only the list that was required, not the count, but it had been the ambition of my girlhood to have four thousand. At this rate I would have them collected in five more years. This, though the titles were not always easy to obtain, or to hold on to. I had arrived in Mexico thirty years ago with two hundred favourite volumes and fifty pesos, and it was then, in my uncle's house, when I let slip something of my ambitions, that I had first been told of the book collector Pérez de Soto.

Now, as the days and weeks passed, I felt myself coming to a better understanding of his case. Born in Cholula, son of a mason. Cathedral architect, astrologer. A practical man, a man of numbers and plans, but with imagination, as I have, and with many friends at the cathedral, as I had. A man knowing himself largely innocent, holding out reasonable hopes for his release. The collection of Pérez de Soto totalled sixteen hundred sixty-eight books, all but eighteen returned to his widow, from which it was plain that the evidence against him had been slight. He had gone before the Tribunal, given a full and frank accounting of his activities, stoutly declared himself innocent. Though of charges unknown to him. And then, without even bothering to question him, the Tribunal sent him back to his cell: that he might make a full and complete recollection of his trespasses. A bad shock to a man who had braced for an interrogation. He was given time to recollect. He was given weeks. He was given months.

He was killed trying to murder the mulatto cellmate they had just that day given him for company. It happened in total darkness, when the
lanterns in the hall were put out after the supper. I have been told there are no windows there.

Toward the end of November a possibility came to mind, stayed for some time: Pérez de Soto was already mad. Because, long before he was arrested, the rumours had half broken him. And then, as arrest became imminent, every conversation ended as he entered a room, a tavern, a workshop. The other half was broken when the rumours stopped.

There were always other possibilities … the solitude of his confinement, the Tribunal's indifference to his testimony, the impossibility of a full recollection, his confessions to an escalating series of false crimes—if only so he might be lightly convicted of charges he could at least know the basis of. All were possible, any of them sufficient if Time in the Inquisition's prisons was as I imagined it.

This was how it might have happened with him, but Pérez de Soto's was a different life. He did not live in an echo chest; neither was he called to worship eight times a day, there to face his neighbours. For my part, I did not go to taverns, though I had once, in disguise, during my time at the palace. One did not go far disguised as a nun. Our cases were not the same. And though each case was special in its own way, mine must be conducted carefully. This had been explained. There would be time. I thought it best nonetheless not to walk into so many rooms without knowing who was in them. This would have been a harder thing for Pérez de Soto to manage. Few friends came for me now, so another difference. Gutiérrez and Santa Cruz, to name two, but since I was not sure they had ever been friends I did not think their staying away counted. Carlos I no longer saw, though this I could blame on myself. He still occasionally came to give a class for Antonia, and once when he learned of the book inventory. Since he had not asked specifically to see me, I told her to go back down and tell him not to worry, his manuscripts were safe for now. Scientific treatises, tables of celestial observations, studies of the old Mexican calendars … Antonia and I had worked long hours, late nights, had recopied them, hidden the originals in the convent archives, disguised as account books and registries, sent copies in separate packets under assumed names to distant friends. The next time, I told myself, he could go to his friend the Archbishop's office for secretarial services.

I came down for prayers, less often for walks. In the orchards, one or two trees had to be cut down, their roots pulled up, the gardens restarted.
It was work Antonia was keen to do. Vanessa and Concepción worked long hours beside her.

Briefly there was the illusion that the world outside was returning to normal. It was painful, but now is gone. Inside we had fewer illusions. It is the work of convents to take on the sufferings and prayers of the neighbourhoods, but we had been marked by this, had taken many sufferings and written them into our backs and onto our knees and the convent was a darker place for it. By December there were nightly processions around
el gran patio
. Mother Andrea had tried to maintain rules against excesses of mortification but the rules had given way. The factions now were against their reinstatement—had the floods not abated, the riots and executions ceased? The flails had always been of braided hemp, to be knotted at the ends if a sister wished, but never to be pierced with tacks. Ever more of the sisters came to the refectory and choir wearing barbed crosses, iron gags and branks. The younger sisters had had no experience of this. Many were frightened, a smaller number were lit from within. I had seen it before. It is a sort of enthusiasm. And unless we are fortunate, it is the start of what no earthly force can stop, once it has begun.

When it might still have made a difference I had undermined Andrea in a dozen ways. I had so resented the slightest infringements on my liberty. How easily I had given up even the duties I had loved, the academy, the music classes for the youngest children.