Hunger's Brides (177 page)

Ah a bilingual play how clever is cleverness left to itself. Spanish and English narrators, amusing Punch and Judy duelling to tell the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as stand-up comedy for the end of the 20th century—quick fujifilm this somebody, this making of comic history—but wait why not S and me?

PUNCH: The year is 1692. Eclipses—

JUDY:
Cometas
—

PUNCH: Occult sciences and unexplained sightings—

J:
Del cielo, extrañas criaturas chupadoras—
*

PUNCH: Quacks and miracle cures—

J:
Horribles epidemias; una obsesión por lo grotesco y lo deforme—
†

P: Storms and assassinations—

JUDY:
Hambre e insurrección—
‡

P [GRIM]: Oh it's the nineties alright.

Cue titters from the orchestra pit
.

P: Today, just this year, the Archbishop of Mexico is attacking Nobel laureate Octavio Paz from the pulpit.

J:
Si el Arzobispo de México quiere atacar a Octavio Paz, debería quedarse en la

fila y esperar su turno, como el resto de nosotros
.
§

Peal and clap of hysterical laugh—this is more like it, all turn to see how Paz reacts. Does the playwright see how it's his own play he's sapped? The show's let loose in the audience. All now looking at the great man but who wasn't anyhow? Quick get it back, playwright, right your leaky scow now.

Enter the tall dancer. How am I supposed to feel? My first big test—chin up soldier, tighten that gut it's not her, just an actor, that's all. An actor, this is only reality, nothing more, just the last filmreal electric eel, reel it in reel it. In.

P: In the 17th-century, an archbishop attacks Mexico's greatest living poet for defying Father Núñez—

J: In the 20th, an archbishop attacks Mexico's greatest living poet as the principal obstacle to the campaign for Núñez's canonization.

They want Núñez canonized?—S is this true?

Shhh B shhh
.

J: In 17th-century America, even Cortés's dispatches to the king were on the index of banned writings.

P: We like to think publishing is a risky, dirty business today—

Faint laughter severed on a siren wail. From outside a slow risen flood of yelping dog, rumble of trucks gearing down … A child's first trumpet class down the block … Beautiful stage voices whisked off—

on acoustical

    sleighrides

        of snowy reception.

Brilliant actors reduced to near pantomime … feel a stab of pity for the so-much-better they deserved. Focus sliding like sand out of a glass, like a playwright slumping in his chair, into his socks. Even he is watching Paz—if he walks out now—Octavio Paz can set us free!

S, it's true about those doors
.

¡Caray! B tonight is the worst—qué pesadilla—what? now a helicopter? Dios mio I'm going to be sick—how will I face them after this?

Chopchopchopchopchopchop—so playwright,
make this clever in Mexican
.

The director up and pacing now in and out of shadows his chiaroscuro of fiasco. The playwright contorting in his chair and I want to shout down to them Enough!—Actors you have done her honour and your art, you have come so far tried so hard but the times have beaten us all.

Enough.

Will I watch her be silenced again—right here in front of me?—
I want out
—how can I leave S who would never leave me? Just then S touches my arm handsome don Carlos says something to Juana who is pacing too, striding power, then stops—and Octavio Paz leans to hear—

… to see time as a spiral is to see history as prophecy … as a delicate ecology at the brink of collapse—a double helix of mythic strands recycled and recombined until time itself winds down to die …

S grips my wrist and leans to me
we have a play on our hands again—
look
. Feel it feel the stillness in the audience even through the din, see it in Juana's face in her body of a dancer.

The helicopter comes back—is there a riot outside, a student mob gone all Tlateloco?—and as another scene begins the tall blonde enters without her cowl, dressed in suede skirt and blouse of violet silk. Now Father Núñez in sweater and jeans. Are they quitting? The whole cast entering, the playwright agog turns to the director who sees—he sees it and his face is filled with something, they have improvised. They are speaking this strange text in streetclothes as though to save all our lives while the helicopter hovers hovers hovers like a hawk and Núñez smiles at the dogbarks and hornblasts and children celebrating a
tremendous soccer goal
—Paz saw it first but the whole audience knows and I have never felt anything like this—Sor Juana unafraid, a speech that goes—has she made it up? this wasn't the end at all was it, Juana?—while the Spanish narrator echoes her, ever so slowly, to savour it to give me time to get it all down to honour them with this as she honours us—I will write this down for you I will make this mine:

Dawn, fog. Sky the colour of time. This place is filled with ghosts! I live with one—no, five hundred. I look out into the time-swept streets and see still others—past or future? Streets filled with mists, miasmas, phantoms. Spectres of vanished instruments and books, and cruel levers of iron and timber soon, now, to come
.

The ghosts of young men playing a ball game against the massive convent walls. And on those grey walls others sketching bright, crude symbols with strange cylindrical brushes. A few words I recognize: Crisis. PAN. México para los Mexicanos …

San Jerónimo: the crumbling ghost of a ball court, an altar, an ancient book
.

Tremulous blue light in the rooms across the street
.

Thank you, sweet actors. For you, I will write this.

Applause a roar of water through the choir drowning out the siren wails and I turn to S, is it always like this are they always so warm generous?—No B, once in a very long while. S's black eyes very full. Your countrymen have honoured us. Her. Will you meet them, B will you thank them in their tongue, speak a few words for me? Come to the reception. Please. This too is part of your story. We'll make la Directora sweat a bit. You two the most beautiful women there and you and I the smartest. Please? We'll sit with the actors.

OK, S, OK but just for a minute….

Actors mill in the corridor outside the patio. Everyone?—meet Beulah, Sor Juana scholar and a countrywoman of yours and dear dear friend of mine. Warm smiles, tired hellos and no one asks where are you from East or West? Suedeskirt Sor Juana friendlysmiles. Her actor eyes searching for a reaction and I want so to tell them tell her how they made us made me feel but don't know how. Not yet not now.

In through the towering doors into
el patio de los gatos
, in past the cold cuts and champagne buckets. Tables ranged all round the arcades—how many faculty work here S?—oh, many, B many. And all rise at the head table as we enter this banquet of Seth my eyes searching out the jewelled casket / procrustean bed not yet revealed to us.

All the scholarly arcadians and their spouses ringing the patio rise to follow the salute head-tabled, but none takes a step, no one speaks, all frozen in attitudes of lost certainty. Instant that lasts sempiternally—Pompeii tableau set in aeons of igneous/lunch. Then the tall tall blonde Sor Juana starts forward strides across the patio—emptiest of all the world's stages—steps to the headtable frieze says hello my name is Denise … puts out a hand and we are all released into high relief set free returned to our professorial faculties / who gather round enfold us as we straggle up to be greeted touched shyly in welcome welcome
bienvenidos!

Soon toast after toast of You have given us back Sor Juana given her back her voice given us a Sor Juana who can weave like a dancer through time and space, who speaks to us in your
idioma
but our idiom, yet remains herself entirely. Thank you, friends from Canadá. We will not forget this soon. We say this with all sincerity.

And they do. As sincerely as each toast we answer—S and B and all the actors with glasses swapped from passing platters—S whispering this is becoming hysterical. Sweet S of the quick black eyes and deepthroat laugh.

Hello my name is Fabiola and this is Tomás. He also is from Canadá. We drove all day from Guadalajara. Are you an actor also we did not see you up there, did we?

Valiant S into the breach of etiquette, no she is a visiting scholar from Canadá, a SorJuanista like us. Fabiola's long ahh, I have been one too, since my first published poem to Sor Juana when I was thirteen. Your
compatriotas
were superb. Two different stories two languages in one single play, I
did not know this could be done. And the doubling of actors—one playing both Father Núñez and that disgusting Silvio—
que maravilla!

But where is Paz? asks Fabiola the awkward question everasked—and S laughs he's over in
el gran patio
, do you know his coming to the play was a mistake? His wife thought it was part of their party for Paz's magazine
Vuelta
—do you want to go over?—come let's all go.
Vuelta's
20th anniversary! I can get us in.
Estoy segura
. I know a friend of Paz's. I have given him favours.

And we are
in
, through the ivory gates—inserted in someone else's dream vision—convent patio as Bedouin encampment—tent caravan of white awnings arcades hung in tapestries, goats slowturned on spits. Chamber orchestra playing, anemones swaying under a night so clear even a few stars fall—igniting in fountains, trembling the moon …

Her absence in every stone.

Whirl and waiterswarm of white tuxedos brandishing cocktails party favours canapés. S and B and all the gatecrash actors toasting Paz! toasting Drama! toasting convent life to end the 20th century. The actors making believe this party is for us. Only the playwright nursing the drink / the grudge / the sting of being the last to see the moment of epiphany. In his own play. And now stepping forth in all theatricality! the goateed actor of Núñez who made us see his humanness—even his, even me—toasting the greatest night that felt like a century of their careers that felt like the end of the world, didn't it old friends?—slopping glass on high, wiping goatee agleam with martini dry very dry—toast! one more toast—to you, my family—if I'm around for the end of the world let it feel like
this
, with all of you … rousing thespiate cheer from the company … this crazed hilarity effervesces fireflies in this space where once she moved and dreamed.

Would she approve? who so loved to laugh—are you watching, Juanita, can you hear the music here? though we are made deaf to you…. See all the cells now? empty and dark. They're classrooms. Your sisters have all gone home. To their rest. To sleep now….