Hunger's Brides (158 page)

How could I have ever thought to take refuge in this swamp? Juana mutters, bent frowning over the convent's architectural drawings. After each rainy season it seems the lines of pillars and beams yaw farther out
of true…. Of all her old duties here, the one she's not relinquished, in fact refuses to, is supervising the construction and renovation works by crews of Indian masons. The Indians are preferred, as the least likely to force themselves upon a nun.

I took a vow of enclosure, I heard her say once to the Prioress, I did not promise never again to speak to a man. And so each day for two or three months each year they come to her. The men huddle, cap in hand. Then—the same thing I saw happen in the kitchens—when she begins to speak to them in their native tongue, dark faces beam, excited glances fly among the new men, bowed shoulders draw a little straighter….

Today, with the season's rains abated, an old workman I've never seen before, tiny, bent, face of leather, kneels before her. The same confusion in both their faces as she hastily bids him stand. The foreman barks something out at him. She helps him to his feet.

The first time I've ever seen her uncomfortable among them….

In the kitchens just before New Year, the five of us—Juana, Vanessa, Concepción, Asunción and I—a Creole, a Spaniard, two Indians and a mulatta (I feel just now like I should be telling a salacious joke)…. High spirits all round, general merriment. We are making one of Vanessa's desserts for a banquet the Vicereine is giving:

Concepción unthinking licks her thumb and reaches up to wipe a daub of pale flour from Juana's cheek, tanned from the orchards. Her gleaming thumb raised, flour-daub still intact, Concepción hesitates, murmuring: Your skin is dark, like Our Mother, Guadalupe. Then laughs a little and wipes the flour away.

They will say that in the end your skin was like Guadalupe's
.

How
do I know this? I would bet my life.

Juana and I spend the afternoon with Vanessa, copying out her recipes for an edition to be bound and sold to raise money for the convent.

I weep, to be sitting here at a stained and rough-hewn table in a fragrant kitchen. To see her writing again! To be sitting next to her. As always, copying….

Her handwriting is changing
. The bold masculine hand everyone here claimed to find so scandalous is giving way—‘masculine' because the lettering was once firm and full, and beautifully-formed; ‘scandalous' because beauty of any kind in a nun is an incitation and a temptation. Handwriting.

Who to, an incitation to what poor, pathetic creature …?

As I look over at what she's written her script now seems both more elaborate and more … hesitant. Go ahead, write it: feminine.

Isn't it here then I should also mention that, speaking so infrequently, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is developing the slightest stutter?

Isn't it here I try to say how this makes me feel?

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
⁴

You in the orchards, a wind through the pomegranates, figs and apples.
Ariel
—a crystal crash among the apple boughs. Pale undersides of leaves, wind-canted: the startled modesties of petticoats.

Comfort me with apples
.

And am I supposed to copy out too the angry script of lash-strokes across her naked back? Record their obscene utterance? The colour is pink—soon, blue-welted like berries—a flailing alliteration: why not make merry on our way to damnation? The slender lash-lines straight though not parallel. Welted quill-strokes of different lengths and thicknesses—

The way the braided cord hisses through the quilted air.

In a convent, this too is considered manual labour.

Is this the kind of hard-eyed observation that will save her? Then, decipher this.

Cloud-burst, exploding thunder, torrent of rain. Then just as suddenly it stops, sun battering the gleaming stone again like waves against a cliff. Little tendrils of mist rising from the patio's volcanic flagstones.

Nuns in every doorway, staring out, eyes sceptical or filled with rueful wonder. Beneath a startled blue sky Juana crosses the misted yard like a lonely ghost, to see how the garden has fared. Water cascading from the roof's carved waterspouts in clattering, prismed arcs. All eyes upon her as she nears—if she's not careful!—hands balled into little fists, elbows bent, shoulders slightly hitched she walks briskly through the sheet of tumbling light—all eyes upon her—our collective gasp—and calmly disappears, soaked to the skin, through the arched passageway….

Her little joke.

The same dream, again. Write it; the record must be complete.

You, far ahead of me on a high rolling plain, green yet bare of trees. After following you so far, so long, my legs—now a weary child's—ache from so much walking. I can't keep pace, can't bear falling farther and farther behind. For a moment I panic, losing sight of you behind a hill.

Cries of racing gulls—is this the sea you've never seen? Where you turn your face back to me, smile a smile of sweet release that only leaves me bound still more savagely….

The kitchen's lost Poetics:

Asunción washing up, Concepción putting water in an
olla
to heat for mint tea. Darkly beautiful, compact, determined, fiercely blushing now, expression critical, Vanessa stands off to one side of a table spread with sculpted dishes heaped with colour.

Juana's forty-sixth birthday. Our little surprise party, just the five of us. Caught off guard, trying to deflect our attention, Juana says to the room at large that Vanessa's such a genius it would take an eight-day week,
un octavo dia
, to make another like her. I feel a pricking of unworthy jealousy….

Chicharrón
salad—baked pork rind, fresh basil, picked by Juana's own hands, vinegar.

Plato fuerte
—sauce of ripe Manzanillo mangoes, freshly puréed, uncooked. Chicken stock, flaked chillies. Sauce served cold. Fresh-caught whitefish, amaranth seeds floating in a clear, dark sauce round a mould of bulgar wheat flecked with chilled cucumber….

Dessert—the smell of baking peaches wafting through the low vaulted room—how I love this room, it seems the only place we can be happy now….

Another private masterpiece that will never grace the refectory's communal tables.