Hunger's Brides (202 page)

We stand at the top of the cellar steps. The scene strikes the eye like a vision called Despair. She is afraid, I know, if she does not do this now she will not be able to. I follow her down. I follow only her.

In the cellars, on the slippery stairs, in fluid halfway to our knees, I fight not to add my vomit to the putrid soup we walk through. How I would have fought to withhold my tears if only she had been able to stop hers. I watch them stain the pale fold of cotton she has wound about her face, another around mine. Thin shield against the reek clawing at our heads, searing our eyes.

How can he let this happen to his brides?
Fury dims my eyes—is it so dark, can he not see? Can he not feel? This sacred heart of his, why does it not break? This? this is his sacred mystery—
misery?

That's not what I see. I see bloated bodies swelling in the murk—a jumbled pyramid of meat. At its periphery rat corpses float like bloated little barges. I see this hallowed earth soaked in vomit and blood and pus. Out in the patio as we drag the bodies up, one of us stands guard to drive the carrion birds off—are these your dark attendants then, that we defend our sisters from? She accepts your silence.
I do not
.

Where has the light gone that once was in their eyes?

No one should ever have to touch what we touched, what our sisters have become. To feel unwilling fingers tearing through skin riven like sodden paper, sinking through the puttied, putrid flesh beneath, finding purchase only at the bone.

What have you done to us?

It's no use. There are no words to express the horror of those hours. There are no tongues for this.

Weeping, sliding, stumbling, we begin dragging the corpses from the cellars up into the light. She needed my strength, her lumbering Amazon. She needed my strength.

When I see how many have rushed to our aid—familiar faces, names for those hours erased—all my resentments for all the years of slights and spites and jealousies just fall away.

After, we stand together in the light … slimy, fly-blown, sick with horror. And tonight I swear by all I can still find holy that for a moment I felt, we felt
clean
.

But he did not wash me. His hands never touched me.

The negroes in the sanitary detail sent by the city had been refusing—even on pain of imprisonment and excommunication, even under the lash—to enter those cellars. And no whip or cane or iron in the world
could ever have forced me down there either. But now, out in the open, the bodies can be washed and blessed, taken away for burial.

A mass grave has been dug at the bottom of the orchard in ground greatly esteemed for its flesh-eating properties.

When night fell we rested in the darkness, unable to bear the world by torchlight. And while we rested, more died.

11th of March

I feel Juana jostling me awake at first light. Mind numb from a sleep like death, I still know, even before I open my eyes, yesterday was no nightmare, at least not one I will ever wake from. In every aching joint and muscle burns the memory of yesterday's heartsickening cargo. My back is a column of fire. As Juana's frail form precedes me through the dim passageway, I wonder how she can even walk.

Without a light, we make our way across the convent grounds towards the infirmary. At our approach a low droning fills the space between our footfalls, the space between my indrawn breaths. Just inside the door we pause as our eyes adjust to the room's near darkness. Two torches flicker weakly at the far end of the room. The drone resolves itself into the buzz of bottleflies and the low moaning of two rows of figures twisting in the gloom.

So many varieties of horror still to discover. Suddenly, that today might be worse than yesterday is no longer unthinkable. My pace slows as we make our way up the aisle between the rows. Juana has stopped a few paces short of a robed figure bent low over a bed, while above it, a novice I recognize holds a lantern over a woman's bare torso.

A blade flickers in swift descent to the woman's neck—darkness spurts from a swelling the size of an egg. As the robed figure straightens my blood runs cold—
is it all a nightmare after all?
A giant, beaked bird with glittering eyes turns and comes toward us. I hear a woman's strangled scream—the patient whose neck has been slashed?

Juana grips me by the shoulders.

The robed figure hastily removes the mask to reveal a young man's earnest face. “It takes some getting used to, I know,” he begins, then falters as he recognizes who is with me.“Sor Juana? What you
did
yesterday … I cannot begin to express my admiration.” The mask dangles from one hand like a hunting trophy.“I've been trying for the past two days to get that vile mess cleaned up, but couldn't get a soul …”

“There were several of us,” Juana says.“Antonia, I imagine you've met our new chaplain, Father Medina?” By the way she says this I know she approves of him. The little gesture of an introduction amid the mounting misery makes me want to cry. I don't trust myself to speak.

“Our chaplain, as you see, is wearing the very latest in Italian fashion.”

With a trace of embarrassment, he starts to explain. “Antonia, yes?—the robes here are of a waxed linen,” he says, holding up the hem. “Quartz eyepieces…. The beak is stuffed with spices, to counteract the plague's miasmas.”

“What they
may
counter,”Juana puts in, “are the smells. Our next task should be to set out braziers to incense these rooms.”

As the ill come in ever faster, Juana brings me to a grim appreciation of the chaplain's system for clustering the sick according to their symptoms. Those with only fever are held apart in case their illness is not plague at all. Those with buboes, who are the most numerous and the slowest to die, are brought to the main hall. If the swellings can be brought to suppurate within a week, some of these patients may yet live, though their hearts will be seriously weakened, the doctor explains.

“As will all ours be,”Juana says gently.

Those in the clutches of the Dragon or
la Flojera
are confined together in the room nearest the chapel. Neither group lives long enough to catch the other's disease. And no one survives. The doctor almost never enters here to face his never-ending defeat, undisguised.
⁴

12th of March

Today amid all the torment and darkness I am happy to be at your side, to do this simple, hopeless work. Our years together have come down to this. We will end here.

So little we can do to stem this sea of suffering. The kind chaplain's treatments are not just inadequate but seem almost to substitute one sort of suffering for another: man's for God's. Purges. Cauterizations. Emetics to induce still more vomiting, blood-letting to further swell the
tide of blood, caustic vesicants to further blister the patient's blotched and burning skin, treacles of herbs to bring the buboes beneath to suppurate. Pain as an antidote for pain.

Still, the chaplain's energy and scientific presence bring comfort to the women who lie dying all around us.

Juana and I discover the finest treatment of all: cool water trickled across blackened lips and furrowed brows.

15th of March

Of the priests still courageous enough to stay among us, one spends most of his time among the victims of
el Dragón
and
la Flojera
, administering last rites.

I admire this bald little man for his gentle cheer. That he still finds the strength at times to smile. Sometimes I hold a lantern for him and listen to last confessions gasped over blackened tongues, feel shadowy pulse-beats at the neck or wrist flutter and still. I have seen him weep.

I never learned his name.

17th of March

Under Juana's supervision a few of us feed the braziers with spices, recharge the lamps, fetch water, tend the fires beneath great vats simmering in the courtyard.

The dead we lift by the corners of the sheet she died upon. We have neither the strength nor sufficient hands any longer to dress the dead nuns in their bridal costumes and shroud. But on each nun's head we still place the crown of wildflowers she wore at her profession. From the grave in the orchard, the sheets come back to be placed in one vat for boiling. From another, boiling water is drawn and the empty bed and floor beneath it are swabbed with lime.

To this work there appears no end.

Juana can be seen now all over the convent, among the nuns and servants equally. Lancing buboes with a skill she learned in dissections, applying hot and cool compresses, bathing the bodies of the dead.

Comforting the dying is the hardest thing of all, smoothing their tortured brows. As death approaches, she's the one they ask for. Most often it falls to her to signal to a priest and assist him in the ceremony I've come to detest.

My daughters, on your knees, pray to Our Lord God so that He may
extend His mercy and His Grace to this sick woman, while I, His servant, give to her the unction of the holy sacrament.

Taking the oil from Juana's hands, the priest approaches the dying sister and anoints her, tracing the sign of the cross, first over the eyes—
close them, I bid thee—
then over the ears—
unstop them
—over the nostrils—
draw breath
—across the mouth—
seal it
—across the hands—
open them
—along the shoulders—
lay them bare
.

And so Christ's brides arrive before him, attentive, mute, blinded, barechested. Open-handed.

20th of March, Spring

In one room they die spread-eagled in agony, in the other they go quietly and quickly, blood rushing from their faces and secret openings. For many it begins with the mockery of a knotting pain low in the belly and the groin. What a black brood they are about to deliver.

Excruciating headaches, flashes of intense heat and chills. For some, the sudden gush of nosebleeds, a thin bloody fluid leaking from the eyes and ears. For most, the sinister rashes we call poseys, the wracking convulsions, the dry, black tongues. And the blood—vomiting blood, coughing blood, voiding bloody clay.

And the worse this madness gets, the harder it is to remember their names. They have names. We have names our fathers gave us. We have the names our mothers used.

We have names
.

Tomasina, María, Asunción, Araceli, Candelaria, Concepción …

More terrible even than the agony is the confusion in their faces.

The horror, the prostration too, but worst is this anxious confusion. Their eyes glow with the purest humanity we see in the face of a suffering beast.

Who will explain this mystery? Will he? Will I? Will she?

28th of March