Hunger's Brides (126 page)

If a convent could be said to be possessed of a soul, San Jerónimo's had changed. Could we have withstood together the tide of events outside? I did not help them try. This had been a good place, precisely what I thought it would be. I had not been deceived. But it was a convent. Instead of blaming it for my own failings, I should have been grateful for the excuse.

In the refectory, at our Friday chapter of faults, I went to the rostrum before a hundred and fifty of my sisters and pledged what I had always refused, never again to miss our communal prayers, for the rest of my life.

1693. Early in January a novice came to say don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora was waiting in the locutory.
Please
, will you come? Antonia asked. But he and I had reached a place where there was too much to say. I had no wish to see him—for it was seeing him that always softened me. I had heard the story of his quarrel with the Archbishop, had at first thought it exaggerated, but though it had happened weeks ago,
Antonia assured me the marks were still hideous and pitiful. During a discussion, Carlos, never one to tolerate another's inattention, had asked if His Grace could please make an effort to concentrate, since he was being spoken to. The Archbishop rose in a rage, walked across the room and struck Carlos full in the face with his cane, smashing his glasses, cutting him deeply. The cheekbone, crushed, had set badly. The scar healed jagged, livid, the full width of his eye, an eye he must have come very near to losing. Of course an astronomer has two.

I had generally found it difficult to hate anyone I had never seen, but though I had felt many things for the Archbishop—pity, fear, disgust, contempt—hatred I managed the day Antonia described the injury.

This in no way lessened Carlos's capacity for infuriating me. At the end of his last visit, he had managed to give Antonia a few parting words of advice to pass along. That though the Archbishop's ways were strange, Carlos was sure there was still a way forward—if I could just let a few months pass without some fresh provocation. A
way forward?
Only he could say something like this with his face disfigured by that man. I had no wish to repeat the experience of the day of the eclipse. We had counted on each other for so much. How we had wearied ourselves, our friendship, with these quarrels. The best it seemed we could manage was not to speak them.

In a few moments Antonia was back.

“He's asked for you.”

“Has he.”

“He is leaving today—
para la Florida.”

“Another dramatic exit.”

“He wants to say good-bye, he says it might be
a year
this time. Please go to him. You know it's you he comes for.”

The regrets would start before he had even left the room. Today it would be his scarred face, the sight of him in his travelling clothes again. The ancient buff coat, the spyglass tucked into a baldric, the belt with pouches dangling—a notebook, magnifying lens, powder horn. A small military adventurer.
Don't go again. Don't leave me behind
. Then I would remember the times I had said good-bye to him like this before, once at the palace … the many injustices I had done him over the years. I had punished him in so many silent ways for becoming a traveller, but not like my father; for becoming a scholar of our past, but not like my grandfather—and especially for never letting heartbreak stop him. Yet he was
sufficiently like them that I resented him each time he left. And how I'd resented his friendship with my mother, that he had insinuated himself into my past.

No, I would not go down to him.

Anger served Antonia best—better certainly than melancholy and regret served me. She was only mildly angry when I first refused to go down to him, somewhat less mildly when I refused a second time even knowing he had come to say good-bye. But her anger was as much with Carlos as with me by the time she returned with his manuscripts.

“How can he leave these things with you?”

Still at the top of the stairs, she stood as though unwilling to enter without a satisfactory answer. She held the bundle hanging at her side as one would hold a brick. But I did not know which manuscripts she held. And when I did know, I knew also that for once I had made the right decision, not to see him. This time the argument would have been inescapable—bitter, and still more bitterly regretted—the damage irreparable, for I would have voiced then what I had never said: that though he cherished the memory of Fray Cuadros and the memories of their times together in the jungle, he would abandon even these and suffer a thousand deaths himself before he would blame the fate of Manuel de Cuadros—or mine—
on a single defect of Our Faith
.

Antonia spread the papers out on the table beneath the library window. Precisely the sort of documents Examiner Gutiérrez had once been fishing for, the very ones perhaps: a translation of the Song of Solomon into Nahuatl, which had been expressly forbidden; land titles Carlos had rushed into a burning building to retrieve, belonging to his friend the translator Ixtlilxochitl; my letters to Carlos in Veracruz, several verging on heresy; three letters of his, unsent, to me. And at the bottom of the pile, the most dangerous. The recitation of a painted book they had discovered there: Moctezuma's last days as Cortés's captive, and the outlines of a theological discussion between the Speaker and Cortés's ignorant chaplain. But I suspected Manuel de Cuadros was the author of this text. It was the sort of work he had gone to the stake to protect.

My greatest fear in that time had been that Carlos might be implicated. His friend Cuadros I scarcely knew, had met just the once, a few months before the trial. And by then, Carlos said, he was not himself. Perhaps Fray Cuadros, too, I understood better now than I once had. Thirty-four years he had spent among the Indians, first as a student then a teacher of
their languages, then as an instructor at the Indian College of Santa Cruz, then finally as the leader of an ill-fated mission to the Mayan highlands. Carlos said Cuadros was never the same after the Church ordered burned a lost cache of ancient Mayan books and artefacts he'd been instrumental in unearthing. A year later there came the Franciscan's turn. At first light, they stripped the balding heretic naked, smeared him with honey and daubed his body with feathers. All day in the punishing sun he perched—a heaving mass of wasps and flies and stinging ants—wavering barefoot on the thorny palm of a
nopal
. The pyre was lit at sunset.

And now Carlos had made me responsible for the fate of his friend's manuscripts. Was this to be punishment for all my injustices, to suggest that I too had had even a small role in what had happened to Cuadros—in that my stories of the countryside had set Carlos on his path? But the question was not how or even quite why, but why now?—when it was these very legends that had been so much on my mind. But in the end Antonia had the better question.

What are we to
do?

Lysis,

I cannot simply send this without a word, so if circumstances dictate that I answer your letter only now, months late, I am sorry.

I am sorry.

I had thought not to write again, to let your last letter be our final one, to have answered it only with the verses I wrote the night it arrived. There was nothing then to add—it was so wrong of me to think I could guess at the feelings of one who has lost a husband, and yet for those few hours while I was writing for you, I thought …

I am sorry also about the pseudonym, and that you will have received this package that you will not want, signed with a stranger's name and delivered by a stranger's hand. It is only that I do not know whom else to entrust it to. I have bound these manuscripts under a separate seal for your protection, though you must please feel entirely free to open them, or to destroy them, seal unbroken—the choice and the responsibility will be as unwelcome to you as they have been to me.

For my part, I will not do the holy officers' work for them, or Time's. What I fear most is not their power to silence us, but to erase. Here, they have the power to erase whole centuries; before long they will have erased ours, as already they have blotted the boldest pens of Spain.

The climate here is not favourable to ice, and will not be for a very long time.

But though there are troubles here and fears, at least are we spared the sadness at court in Madrid, spared what you have seen, the sight of our king—spared the news that arrives from the other corners of the Empire.

Yet here in Mexico too, the French circle nearby, as though we were already dead.

Or, perhaps we are, perhaps we have long been—and this, our golden century, was merely the soul of an age making ready to depart. Who can say that this is not all that a golden age ever was? … a sort of afterlife, a golden shade hovering above the carcass of empire. We are left here, we are left behind, to watch a greatness that has dimmed. Had the heart of the Velázquez you knew as a girl been smaller or harder than it was, he would not have been the one for that work. Athens and Alexandria, Florence and Madrid. Mexico. Versailles. When finally the French breach our fortifications here to tell us we are dead, we will explain it to them—that what they scent on the air is not their glory, but the fresher vigour of their own decomposition.

Lysis, I will never see Athens. But we have many ruins here, built into living monuments of shops and churches, city gates and bridges. Our stones here are used again, as was the custom once in Alexandria. So it is also with our stories. Those of our valley are ever with me now, their murmurings in the night are little serpent's tongues licking at my ears.

Lately the convent's servants have reminded me of a lesson I had once learned and since forgotten. Here, there are not so many Helens. The women of our valley are more like Iphigenia, when they are not like Clytaemnestra, the other hatchling, the other city on the shield.

One last tale, then, though it ends with no wedding, though it brings little peace.

Malinche. Tell me about her, Antonia asks, to draw me out, as we sit copying together at a table, like two children over spelling lessons. Her bell-clear voice, my reluctant, mumbled answers, the scrabbling of quills, their clattering in the inkpot. Conversation of the ordinary sort has become almost unbearable to me. I feel my jaws, the string beneath my tongue, grow each day more stiff and strained, like curing meat. Another day, another turn on the vise, another turn on the cleat. Antonia says I've become cruel so as to have no one weeping over me. Perhaps it will be for my cruelty, in the end, that I am remembered here.

For the woman called so many names in life, history has reserved just one. Malinche. All call her that now. Born a princess near Veracruz, named after the sister BlueHummingbird slew to propel the Mexica toward their destiny, sold at the death of her father into slavery to the Maya. Malinalli, Malintzin, Marina…. Her beauty spares her the numbing drudgery of the fields; her gift for languages lifts her from the foetid anonymity of the brothels. Precisely these gifts of hers make her the perfect gift for the foreigner, Cortés, when he arrives. More than just a consort, she speaks for him, tempers FeatherSerpent's vengeance, interprets his actions. Do the Mayas have an idea of what they have just loosed against the Mexica?

On the night Moctezuma is felled by a paving stone, Cortés and his men are attacked and driven from the capital. They flee to Cholula. There in the marketplace, Malinalli meets the wife of a commander. Each seeks information, each attempts to beguile the other. Malinalli tells a story of the Emperor. In turn the commander's wife says there will be an attack on the foreigners—Malinalli should save herself. The Mexica reinforcements are due at any moment.

Two women sit in a marketplace on the eve of a battle, two others over their orthography at a kitchen table recopying the story, two more over one letter a thousand leagues and a thousand years apart, and in it, a fable. Malinalli's mastery of tongues brings to life the strangest friendship in all the world, and the shortest. She conjures two interlocutors—without her, they would not even have known how to find each other interesting. Only she knows what Moctezuma and Cortés are really saying to each other.

Love or hate? Antonia asks. What …? You haven't been listening, she so gently chides. She wants to know why Malinalli returns to the Black Room even after the chaplain begins to stay away. Perhaps she is troubled that her lover has abandoned Moctezuma just as he begins to fascinate. Cruelty or kindness, love or hate. Is she drunk on love? seduced by power? bent on revenge—has she gone to gloat? She is there for what they share. He'd thought himself untouchable, she'd thought herself loved. She cradles Moctezuma's head to her breast, comforts an emperor who's mistaken himself for a god, been seduced by an imposter and cast aside. Both now feel the burden of their choices. He, the Fifth Sun's divine priest, she, the woman of discord, come to lead the Mexica to their destiny. How Moctezuma aches to submit to it, to what is
ordained … if only she will help him determine what it is. This she consents to try, for in Moctezuma's fate she has a foretaste of her own. He, the scapegoat for a god, she, the stand-in for a bride.