Hunger's Brides (162 page)

Seven to eight, the longest hour of the day, the hour of attending to our special penances and mortifyings. First the evening bath, its fragrant joys for me, if not for her, bound up now in the agonies to follow.

What am I becoming?

She seems to have lost all sense of privacy. Lets me see everything. Is it because she feels all America watching? Lets me draw her bath, dry her back and minutes later watch it lacerated anew. And then cover it with poultices.

It's hard to admit this, harder still to write it, but for all the horror I feel at the spectacle—for all the nightmare rhythms I will later rap out in my sleep to the flail's evensong melodies—for all my UNSPEAKABLE DISMAY … the sight is now less pitiful to me than seeing the other sisters doing the same thing.

In all the panic and confusion and desperation of these last few days—so strange it feels to being saying it, another little betrayal—but I find the sight now almost calming.

So what kind of monster does this make me?

Her floggings are as severe as any of the others' here, if anything, harder. And harder by the day. The blood just as red, on that frail back. It's not that I'm not afraid for her. I am, I'm terrified. But unlike hers, and more heart-breaking—I don't know why—the light I see in their eyes is rapture, a rapture of the spirit, stoked by each stroke, each barbed cut.

Hers is a kind of cold fury, not rapture, a fire of will or reason that nothing of this world can dominate.

Her soul's rapture I've seen at other times—out in the gardens, and at night under the stars.

Why should I find hope in this?

Hardly sleeping, nocturnal, she sits at the window to await the sunset. And at the door to watch the moon rise smoothly away from the tower above the chapel dome.

And I, hovering a few feet back from her.

The last full day,
do something…
.

Morning. Shutters thrown back, warm breeze sifting through the cool rooms.

A dragonfly's high clicking like the snap of twigs, or pebbles against a window.

Sorting through the remaining manuscripts of her poetry hidden in the archives, cloaked now in dust and neglect, searching for anything to trigger any reaction. Reckless now—what's left to lose? I copy a scrap from
her
Empeños
to read back to her. A fragment she wrote for the occasion when the Archbishop was first welcomed to Mexico City.

The arrival of our joy

Was the joy of his arriving

I'll try even cruelty. I can justify anything. So I read it out for her.

Record it then, the flinch, the rueful twitch of cheek.

So who's her jailer now—them or me?

Noon. Through the trees, the slippery glimmer of fountains shaped like crosses, surface broken by the preening of noisy birds.

I can think of nothing to say. Nothing to do.

Dusk. Along the south wall at the main-floor windows, the level where the envied servants sleep, unannounced visitors slump against the bars … a lover's coaxing lean, cajoling fingers trace the black iron that bars him from the sister of his dreams.

Did you never once sleep down on the main floor, Juanita, before I came to live with you?

Guess
. Please. I went farther this time. Out into the country for you.

Close your eyes….

Lying on your back, looking at the sky … the instant when you wonder if it is the mountain drifting, not the clouds
.

The hour spent registering all the fickle changes in the wind—pressure, direction, urgencies, temperatures, constancy.

A warm wind's soft worry as it eddies past the ear
.

Smell of moss-cloyed clay, dense, a carpet.

Guess.

Waking from a nap to a faint thrumming, a pressure, the faintest snapping, like fingers calling a distant servant to attention—the hummingbird's reclining hover, shimmer of dawn like oil across green feathers. Head-dipping shift from hover to dart—

Aerial collision of the hummingbird with dragonfly daubed the same shimmering green, turquoise tail, green-chalk patina of its tiny skullcap…. Both aerialists stunned by the collision, alighting on adjacent flowers—one red, the other shell-pink
.

Guess.

Report of a cannon shot like tight twine fraying along a jagged mountain face, then shredding, gutted, across a swaying treetop reef
.

I look at you and see the years we've been together, all the vanished things rendered and surrendered … but, now, at least you're listening. Gently …

Guess.

The eager clamber of baby crocodiles towards a piece of meat
.

One small bird's convulsive chirping, its song a hiccup, a wracking birth contraction. Head's ducking, knees' splayed flexions, pivoting on tiny brittle feet ninety degrees—a quadrant at a chirp. One whit fiercer would surely jerk it headlong from its perch…
.

The fine, angular distinction between a cricket song and its echo, at dusk before the dewfall, and the cricket's coppery trill from the frog's croak of tin
.

I've
done everything I can, everything I know, everything to bring you back. To make your America sing back to you. All that's left now, all that remains, is to hear your echo's last receding….

Guess.

In the instant before a clean incision begins to bleed, a pause, like a fallen child reading her mother's eyes for pain
.

Guess.

Out of a darkened barn into the light a mosquito's ruby lumbering under the weight of blood drawn from my throat. Like an osprey hooked into a fish too large to raise. I can't let go, can't swim
.

Guess.

The wobble of a whetted razor bumping slow across the ridges of the tongue
.

The tongue's severed slap against a wetted granite trough.

It's just a game. Guess which, I ask holding out my closed hand to slip the answer in your palm. What have I brought for you, what have I seen? What's true, what's real? Guess for me. Please.

Your eyes welling at last, with too much of everything, hands cupped out before you as though to catch it all, you say to me:

All of it 'Tonia, it's all real, you don't need me to make it real for you. Can you see?

Night. Humid dark like a large beast breathing. Cicada battery ribs the utter black.

Eyes snap wide. You are not beside me. Or sitting at the window or the doors. Body coated in nightsweat, I look for you. The stillness of a gathering rain. I look for you outside—patios, orchards, garden. Faithless I look for you even in the chapel. Running barefoot silently,
desperately back to the room to see if you've come back—blank panic—have you run away without me? Left me? It can't be!
Please
. Tilting wildly out the windows into the cloud-blackened streets—west, south—volcano looming invisibly in the blackness to the east, are you going back home? I can't see anything!

First few drops of rain, bloated spatter against the dusty window ledge. Then a movement on the roof across the courtyard as the sky splits—a flash of lightning trailing sparks, lighting you, sweat-drenched, naked, running in the dark away from me. The roof!—your draftsman's drawings memorized, some walled passage or false ending—some secret way.
How long
, how long have you known, been free up there, how often, free of everything, of me? How many nights?

Núñez is coming TOMORROW
.

You could have shown me! I'll make you still! One shout, one scream from me could betray you. Another flash—you stand now, gleaming body arched back like a viol, panting mouth to the sky. I bite my tongue—
bite hard down
—till the taste of iron fills my teeth and my face is slick with salted rain.

And suddenly, more certainly than I have ever known any other thing, I know you will never run up on that roof again.

I wake late. Air mocking bright … salt parchment stretched across my eyes.

Today is Sunday.

C
ODEX
: R
ENUNCIATION
        

S
UNDAY BELLS' INCESSANT TOLLING
from across the city. Each hour from the belfry topping the red-tiled dome of Saint Jerome, the chapel bell clangs hollowly from doom's brass throat.

She walks back to the cell, eyes blazing, from seeing Núñez. Once inside she strips to the waist—
in the middle of the day
, I think stupidly. It's the wrong time of day….

I feel it going on and on forever with the whole convent listening, breathlessly … how long, how many strokes I can't say.

So in the end the record will be incomplete.

I walk out to the orchards, out to where she would normally be, and begin shearing branches indiscriminately, cropping flowers, plucking leaves.

And now something else is clear to me: I can't stay for this.

The past days' rhythms lie shredded to ribbons all about me. In the deepening dusk I pass by the convent prison—door ajar—just to look, at the cell reserved for me. Prison within a smaller prison, like the blacker shade inside us on the darkest night.