Hunger's Brides (156 page)

We walk out along the aqueduct. Steps reversed hush undone breathless echoes reverting to the world
human voices wake us …

Your father is a diplomat? you are with the embassies? There are many here for weekends. To get away from the city. I knew many, I cleaned their sheets.

No? Then here,
señorita …
I have maybe something else to show you who have come so far … See? So many
condominios
each with a swimming pool. So much
water
. You see, Daughter, and no one swimming. Come closer. You too
señorita, si no le molesta
. Let me show you why, I think. No, it hasn't changed—You see the surface of the pools. These scales? They come from the trees. All the pools are the same.

Do you not think these look like human skin?

All night on buses up into the mountains the drone of echoes in their drowning fall …

You have come alone, señorita?

So far from home, your family.

Are you not very lonely?

It is not often we meet in a place like this.

But wait, it looks like skin no?

Will you stay the night with us? Our hotel is poor but we have room.

I can't I have to go … on
.

You think this is why no one uses the pools? I always wanted to ask them.

You have come alone, so far from home?

You know Moctezuma and Cortés both came here for the waters? Not together of course.

You have places like this everywhere in Canada?

You know there are only two statues of Cortés in all of México?

It is not often we meet in such a place
.

Our new home is a desert.

You know México City was once in the middle of a mountain lake?

Like burnt skin.

You know the Spanish soldiers wept to see the Aztec capital? Wept through the gold coins in their eyes
.

Your father is a Spanish diplomat?

There are other things I can show you if you like—

Will you stay the night?

Human skin. Eyes of gold. Faces like birds.

Dreams …

C
ODEX
: F
ORGER
        

I C
OPY HER WORDS
like a parrot incapable of grasping their meaning. And now its mindless mimicry has brought the parrot's master to her knees. Don't blame Juana, blame
me, this is my doing
.

This is to be my punishment. How perfectly it fits. How neatly … in this too, she spoke true—
it fits me like my shadow
. Isn't this what she once wrote? Now I'm left to fill the void of her voice's silencing. Parrot's imitation of the nightingale—a mockery all the crueller for its sincerity.

I, Antonia Mora, copyist, whore, have read every word you've written these past five years, Juana Inés de la Cruz, every verse, every letter. There is not one of your sonnets I can't recite. How I have slaved to make myself indispensable to you, who raised me up out of the gutter, taught me to think, to give those thoughts form, to write, imitating your flourishes, striving to become your instrument, a projection of your voice, to have you clutch me as tightly as the quill between your fingers.

All I asked was to hear your terms dictated, to catch your thoughts in quivering flight and soar with them an instant aloft. Saint Thomas had five secretaries—I would be the only one you'd ever need!—to be for you a dozen, as you strode across the room spouting verses like a dragon—rhymed arguments yoked to flame.

I pored over your writings, how you formed your letters, each letter a gesture, tracing in their whorls your turns of mind, conforming mine to yours, becoming your forger, a hunched Vulcan to your Venus—
you, Juana, taught me these stories
. This is what you've made me. I am your creation.

At night I would read and reread each day's work aloud to make my voice more like yours, to hear it as I wrote. At night, I dreamed those soaring thoughts were mine, your grace my own.

How many of your correspondents knew—how many?—where your words ended and mine began? Soon only the most delicate of letters did you even bother to reread. How many times did I finish a phrase, a paragraph you'd started, start a letter for you to polish only to have you say: “Go ahead, 'Tonia, finish it. You write more like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz than I do…. You'll be a poet one day, Antonia.”

No. Not even you could make it so.

It got so I could see your every thought written in your face—your arching brow for me an entire paragraph, your wry smile a sharp riposte,
your pallour a
defence
, a heartfelt plea. I made myself your paper forgery—deceiving hundreds but the one I made a fool of was me. Listen to me!—even here I echo you. The vulgar wry-necked chatter of Echo's errant daughter.

Parrot mind in a scarecrow skull—I've ruined everything, understood nothing, not a single thought my own….

Thank God Carlos is back today from Florida, just when everything seems lost, back to help me now, lead me by the hand, explain it all to me like a witless child, show me how to make it all better.

But he's afraid too. I can feel it in his note to her, feel its urgency. Only thinking about him now, so near, do I realize how quickly things worsened once he'd left. What could they possibly have offered to get him to Florida—in
his
health? Did the Bishop take a hand in it? Is there anything
that monster
doesn't have his filthy paws in?

And all of it beginning with the Bishop of Puebla's sick, secret orders, interrogating me:
At what times of day did Sor Juana write? Was she visited by temptation—did she chasten herself? How rigourously, how often? Does she ask for your help Antonia?

Do you watch?

And now this new interest in me, in my scribblings, after all these months. Who is really behind it? If it's Núñez, is he testing the sincerity of her petition for him to return, or is he gathering testimony for the Inquisition? As an oblate, my one vow is holy obedience. Obey or they keep my dowry and return me to the streets.

I would never see her again
.

And just what is it they want me to explain? They don't need me!—every woman in here is watching Juana's every movement. Do they think she still confides in me? If only I could make it so, but I'm the last one she should risk talking to after everything I've done.

Or is it the Bishop behind all this after all? They say he now has every nun in Puebla scouring her soul for fresh transports to record for his correction. For him to ‘decipher and organize'—as though a convent were a grotto of raving oracles. He thinks after betraying her by my stupidity I can be ordered to do it again deliberately.

He knows I'm a liar! He trained me himself. Is it a forger's handbook he wants to see? It's lies he wants, knowing how I ache to tell the truth. I
have to
lie—but what lies can he use against her? Which
truths condemn, which absolve her? Which lies protect and which endanger her?

And do I really believe I can't be made to give information against her if they want it? Santa Cruz would only have to threaten to tell her how long the reporting really went on….

So I keep two handbooks again—one true, one false. One version to deceive and one to protect. One to mislead, one to bear witness. But when the time comes will I know which one is which?

And what if she doesn't want absolution? And what if she doesn't want what's best for her? They all say they want what's best for her.
You're just like the rest, copyist
.

Don't make me speak for her … again.

C
ODEX
: T
EMPTATION