Hunger's Brides (200 page)

But by the time I reach the convent of San Jerónimo, my ripe news of Núñez is half-forgotten. The streets are filling with the first whispers. People have gathered outside the convent of Jesús María, and again at the approaches to San Jerónimo—why do we come to the convents first?

The news is of a horrid pestilence that flared up on the coast a few weeks ago then disappeared, smouldering now in the Indian communities of Chalco and Xochimilco. Seemingly overnight, a grim market of tattered awnings and gnarled tent poles has sprouted in the shadow of each convent's walls. Stalls selling amulets to be worn as pendants: walnuts filled with quicksilver. Charms, poseys, and fragments of holy scripture copied out and tightly scrolled, to be placed beneath the tongue. Nosegays of spices and medicinal herbs. My eyes dart everywhere. I take note of everything, to make you explain it all to me. Talismans, crosses, images of Guadalupe. A row of copper palladiums engraved with the number
4
. Xylographies in another row—small woodblocks inscribed with pious scenes—to be swallowed whole, the vendor tells me. At the next stall, an old woman sells phylacteries: pouches stuffed with sacred verses, or else the powdered flesh of scorpions, spiders and toads. Seeing my interest, she whispers that during the Black Plague in Italy, Catherine de Medici had her pouch made from the skin of a newborn infant girl. Only as I walk away do I think to ask the cause of death.

At the
portería
, they open the gate for me without a word, as though I had only been away on one of my trips to the market…. I have been away a year. It feels like centuries.

As I come down the long corridor, the mood in the
gran patio
is sombre, the figures there strangely seized, like statuary—all across the patio, sisters stand in tense clusters of two or three, as if the muscles of a single torso straining at a block. Many of the faces are familiar.

But upstairs, she is different. After the interrogation, after a year, should I have expected any less? She seems not at all surprised to see me, as if she'd been waiting for me to arrive. Her wide black eyes are grave, and in them the barest flicker of what I choose to see as pleasure to find me standing at the door of her cell. What is it that has changed? I remember that awful inward gaze, the blaze of tremendous energies focussed on the wavering tip of a flame, as though to still it.

You have stilled it. Should I be happy for you?

On the outside, people keep saying she has taken a vow of silence. Others, that after forty days of interrogation she can no longer speak. But the silence came first.

And now as we are discussing the plague she speaks freely to me. What does it mean, doesn't it matter anymore—what has happened? I can no longer restrain myself.“When did you start … speaking again?” I ask, feeling cheated. She tells me she never stopped.

“You know what I mean.” Now no answer—
is it only me she does this to?

“Because Núñez is dead, Juana?—or because I've come …?”

I don't really believe this, but give her the opportunity to be cruel to me. The one who abandoned her here.

“No.” She says this gently.

She waits for me to press her for more but I know this is all the explanation I will get. It's a relief when she turns away from me those black eyes that see everything. For this one moment I do not have to pretend to be still angry with her. She looks out the window over the rooftops…. Her chin is so small—the wimple, I know, is what does this, and makes her neck look so long.

“The Church has known for two weeks. It's been an open secret here, but no one is sure if it's one disease or three. One strain produces buboes. Another they call the Dragon, which can kill in a week or as little as an hour. Those two we knew. But the third may be new here.
La Flojera
, some
are calling it.
La Flojera
likes her prey half-digested before she sits down to eat….”

She turns finally to look at me. “Don't think I don't know why you've come.”

“Juana—we can start
again
, now that Núñez is dead.”

“You didn't expect the news to bring me pleasure.”

“You didn't expect me to conceal mine!” Our eyes lock, then in her eyes the shadow of a smile.

“No.”

“Carlos says the Archbishop has weakened.”

“How is Carlos?”

“He wants to see you. He believes you
could
start again. With the Archbishop's confessor gone….”

“We hear His Grace has ordered the building of an amphitheatre.”

“The carpenters have already started.”

“In the Plaza del Volador, I imagine.”

“Carlos says the Archbishop wants you to write carols for the inauguration.”

Finally I have the satisfaction of seeing a glimmer of surprise in her eyes.

The Mother Prioress enters as we're sitting by the window and without even glancing at me begins.

“Sor Juana, I've come to remind you of our understanding. Present circumstances notwithstanding, you are to continue to keep your contact with the others to a strict minimum.”

Only now do I notice how the Prioress has been withered by the years. Her watery blue eyes stare out from a net of wrinkles. Liver spots dot the patrician face. Her hands are unsteady, but the voice is firm.

“Over these next days it will be difficult to keep order. Your presence here, now more than ever is an incitement to …” She searches a moment for the word, then continues.“If you have recommendations to make, if there are measures to be taken against the contagion, which is in all likelihood already among us, then you will communicate them to me only. We have no need of any heroism from you. It has been hard enough over these past months to reverse the influence you have had here. Your martyrdom would be a calamity for the order and spiritual well-being of this convent. This affliction, as with all things, must pass.
And for the survivors, things will go back to being as they were. I hope I have made myself clear.”

Without waiting for an answer, the old wraith turns on her heel and totters dizzily out.

Juana stares after her a long moment. “We'll see how long their good order lasts.”

Before very long the news comes from down in the kitchens that Concepción is dead. Dear old friend.

She had just finished making lunch. Feeling a little tired, she had gone to lie down. Vanessa was trying not to disturb her. She reached over her for a jar of flour. It slipped and came crashing to the floor next to that dear, grey head. She did not wake. She will not, again.

It is among us.

I tell Juana I'm staying. She does not argue. There's work to do, I say. She does not argue.

I tell Carlos, who has come to wait for me down in the locutory.

“We've been over all this!”

A flush spreads up from his collar to his cheeks. I know he has allowed himself the hope that she herself might come down. “We lost her a long time ago, Antonia. There's nothing more to do here.”

I try to tell him there is, but he does not hear. He tells me they don't need me for this, that suffering is their vocation—what can one more person add but more suffering? More gently he adds, “Anyway nothing can be done. You have not worked in a hospice, no one even pretends to have a cure for
this
. And even if there were you'd still be doing it for her, and she for God knows what—do you think I've nothing better to do than pass my days waiting in the locutories of this
maldito claustro
—for her, now you …?”

His face is flushed.“I thought it was Juana who was always leading me into these little tantrums….” He cocks his head as if scanning the room. He is getting so grey. It makes his brown eyes look even bigger through the thick lenses of his glasses. “Maybe it's something in the air in here.”

21st of February

I divide my time between her and attending to the sick. She is ever more frustrated to be confined to her cell. Her questions about what is being done have come to sound like criticism.

I ask Carlos to bring more news so I have something else to tell her about. After a year I thought I'd be grateful for any words from her at all.

In the street tonight beneath her windows and hers alone, the neighbours hold a silent vigil. I recognize a few faces, eerily lit by the upcast shadows—a candle held at the height of each chest. Hollowed eyes, a nose's triangle of shadow across each forehead. The look of silent, haunted carollers.

“Is it the same at the other convents?” she asks, standing at the window.

“They expect the convents to do their suffering for them,” I answer. “You taught me that.”

23rd of February

Carlos brings word that the Bishop of Puebla has refused to take over as viceroy for the Count de Galve, who has been recalled to Madrid. After demonstrating to everyone his political genius during the grain crisis, after having betrayed his friend Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and leaving her exposed to her enemies and inquisitors, Santa Cruz claims to have withdrawn from worldly affairs. He must feel he has done enough.

Juana says it's his insane vanity. By retiring now he's punishing all of New Spain for his humiliation at not having been named Archbishop—instead of Aguiar—by universal acclaim.

Carlos comes every day. One of New Spain's most famous men. I know it's as much for me as for her. He endured a lot to let me stay with him. The scandal among his family and colleagues and neighbours—that a woman should leave a convent for a bachelor's house. Even if she was just an oblate and not a nun. At least they didn't know about my past.

He comes in the afternoon and waits in the locutory, waits till end of day then goes away again, to put in another long night working at the hospice. These past few days I've not been able to go down to him for even a moment. Yesterday from her window I watched him walking home, bent into the dusk as though into a stiff wind.

More and more I seek comfort in the learning that seems to allow Carlos and Juana to remain calm while the hysteria simmers down below, in the streets and the convent patios. I tell Carlos about the vigil, he tells me how it is in the city. With no trace of irony New Spain's finest historian says he's glad to be able to perform this small service at least.