Hunger's Brides (157 page)

I A
SK
C
ARLOS FOR HELP
, what does he give me?—he reminds me of our classes, the Mexican painted books.
I don't care about books
. The books of the Red and the Black, of knowing and death.
I want her to speak to me
. The ancient codex is more than a text composed of images. It is like a shorthand notation for a performance that goes beyond speech.
Speech is quite enough for me
. Carlos tells me I mustn't be like the Franciscans—me! That I shouldn't be so hungry to change her that I don't really see. He can only help me if I will be his eyes and ears. If we're to understand a phenomenon, have a controlled effect upon it, then he and I must observe it carefully, describe it faithfully. Faithful to what, to whom? To the one I'm to spy on? To the truth, he says. And just what is that, I'm about to ask, when he waves me off:
he understands
.

Yes he understands but nothing's changed. They're all still asking me to speak for her, still asking me for signs to decipher.

Gestures, times of day, colours, scents, weather, situation … but Carlos, how will I know what's significant?

“When in doubt, record. Get it all. The codex must attempt a complete reckoning. Texts can be burned, contexts … die harder.”

All right I will. Everything. But won't she see me? Won't her knowing what I'm doing change what she lets me see?

“One thing I did learn among the Franciscans, Antonia, is that the observer is always under observation.”

She returns from the garden, fingers stained as they had once been with ink. Is she still writing?? Using gardening to cover the traces? Writing secretly in the middle of the night?

Carlos asks if it didn't look like ink because I wanted it to. He says this calls for a hard-eyed observer.

Juana, what kind of observer do you need? What kind of eyes….

If I'm to record everything, then that includes her words.

Can it hurt to try to make her speak to me? Carlos says not, as long as I continue recording everything else faithfully. But he knows me unable to resist this temptation, this craving to hear her speak.

I've started bringing her books, ones Carlos has chosen for me. I told her I couldn't bear the empty shelves grinning at me like a mouthful of missing teeth. She knows better. What I'm doing is perverse, a test. It's one thing to stop reading when there are no books left.

Carlos is teaching me, again, I tell her. Can I store the books here? How long can Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz contain her appetite for books Carlos thinks even she has not read?

Not all unread: the first one I bring is Tirso de Molina's
El vergonzozo en palacio
. Isn't this the play with the maid called Serafina and the secretary named Antonio? Have you foreseen all this? Her warm eyes, wry smile. Is that the only answer, a smile? How do I record that? A thousand variations on a smile, a million unsaid subtleties. I CAN'T DO THIS!

I'm not up to this.

Snatches of conversation wrung like diamonds from a mop.

If not a lot, you still speak to others—cooks, masons, gardeners—why not to me? Sure a few words, now and then. Thrilling confessions like: “Good-night, Antonia.” Your eyes glitter with … is that amusement? You know I've started watching you while you sleep. A few nights ago, just after three, you find me slumped against the wall next to your open door, sound asleep, notebook in my lap. Some spy!

Carlos, what does red mean?
I rush into the locutory overcome by the sensation of seeing her just now in the orchard, standing on a crate, the red, red juice of ripe plums running, intemperate, between her fingers, down the backs of her hands, staining her slender wrists. Juice welling from the corners of her red lips, plum-red runnels like liquid ruby along the cheeks of her laughing face, head thrown back, jubilant … a veiny tracery under the pink shell of her ear and down her nape. Plum-red soaking into the hairshirt's rough brown wool.

Red
, Carlos! What does it
mean?

He answers with some dry thing about Mexicans and Egyptians.

I try again. Have I helped you get here?—maybe this is where you want to be. Did you use me then—would you do it again—manipulate me to deceive your enemies?

Do you know I'm keeping two versions of these handbooks?

Do you know which I'll show to my confessor?

Can the observer change the observed? Does the observer have a right?

Carlos wonders if you wanted me to finish Sor Seraphina, wanted me to send it. To sever your last ties to the Bishop for you. If I've been sick with guilt for nothing. Am I a character in a play. Juana? Is my role to betray you? Would you let me do that to you? Do you want them to think you're some kind of saint? I think at last I will bring her to speak.

“I'm just flesh and blood and breath, Antonia. You, of all of them, should know.”

“But how are
they
to?”

“I'm counting on you….”

“For what?”

“To tell them.”

Another conversation that never really happened. Words never spoken, never exchanged. At least not her part, this isn't what she said. But I said my lines and saw her eyes fill with pain. What she'd really said was: Yes, Antonia, you've been sick with guilt for nothing.

Should I have recorded this? Conversations that never happened, but they did take place, filled the space behind my eyes while I watched her sitting near me. Is it still a lie?

Does this lie belong more in one version of these notebooks than in the other? Do the observer's feelings count? Do they change the observer's eyes, who forever after observes everything otherwise….

Throwing myself against the blank wall of her silence.

Father Arellano asked to see my handbook today, Juana. What should I do?

There's your vow of obedience….

You want me to show him, then.

An almost imperceptible shrug.

Is she trying to say she doesn't care? I don't believe you!

What do I owe her, how am I responsible? Once yes, but still? For how much longer, how much more? Does she need a hard-eyed observer or a soft-fingered heart? Can I give her both …? What does she want, what
does she need from me? Are they the same—can't they ever be?—or always two different things?

Are the people who love her supposed to just respect her silence or interpret it? To fill it in or make her break it? Is understanding it not just another invasion?

Always questions. Ever the answers I make up.

The shades, degrees, gradations of your silences. Silence of the sun spilling across a darkened doorway. Silence behind my eyes, below your belly. Behind sealed lips, what they never say.

At the base of a mountain in the depths of the sea. At the bottom of a flooded mineshaft … a silent, soot-spent coal-seam on a cloud-cast night.

You … the blaze just one unspoken word could ignite.

C
ODEX
: I
NCANTATION
        

I A
M SUPPOSED TO RECORD
only where she goes, what she does. What about where she no longer goes, things she won't ever do again? Locutory, library, choir …

Am I to do these things in her place? Laugh, read, write, sing. Paint her movements through sacred space … for now a kind of space has opened up around her. The strict routine of places and times that rules the rest of us parts wide now like the Red Sea as she moves through the courtyards to the orchards, the kitchens, the workshops.

And to a degree I am allowed to move with her in that parted space. Less freely, less visibly, but still….

The others scurrying along on their appointed rounds in ruler-straight flights and crossings, while, path eccentric, she wanders among us like an island of ice, the kind Carlos says number as grains of sand in the northern seas. Cool, self-possessed, immense, visible for leagues.

Even in a courtyard criss-crossed with bell-summoned sisters and novices, she is the one the eye now finds and follows.

Carlos tells me what it is that the Bishop is so avidly mining the convents of Puebla for these days: the biographies of nuns approaching death. Silver or gold, iron or lead?

And what lessons would he have this dying teach? What little treasures is it to yield?

Afternoon, heat abating. She waters plants I've installed before her open door for privacy, as our fellow inmates still stroll by so casually. Knowing this, Carlos has given me a rose of Jericho to add to the screen. This is the one she tends most carefully.

We stand together. A moment's stillness. Suddenly, pigeon wings flap like sheets snapping in the air.

Waking others now. Warbles, frail rumbles … a whole brood of bird calls, unfledged, tries the cooling air—its speed, its draft—fading faintly past.