Hunger's Brides (203 page)

The second priest comes to the infirmary only when sent for. Father Landa. Yet at least he comes, unlike so many others. I try to remind myself of this to lessen my dislike of him, to not see the shadow of gloating in his fat, clean-shaven face. With such a beard he must have to shave twice a day. But how can that be—when is there time, and where …?

It is late evening. I see him on a stool next to a cot, rounded shoulders hunched over the Bible in his lap, rocking strangely. I draw near, though I am reluctant to. Over the prone figure before him, he is reciting something. It sounds like Revelations:

Can this really be Revelations? He isn't even
reading
.

He's making this up. It isn't like this—

“Are you trying to frighten her to death?” I cry grasping at his shoulder, glaring into his mad eyes. “Get away from her!—Juana!”

She hurries over. The small, neat form beneath him is cool and lifeless. She's been dead an hour. Thank God, I murmur.

Vanessa …

This face we know. This name I have no trouble remembering. Vanessa.

I will remember your bright eyes, your graces, your body: small and slender and strong. Your mastery in the kitchens, Juanita's birthday party … I will remember.

I feel Juana's arms encircle me.

The next day, the little bald priest comes to tell us our fat Father Landa has been called away to duties at some monastery or other.

Our little priest, the one for whom I have no name, turns back to his work. I see a glint of satisfaction in his kind eyes.

2nd of April

Although the Dragon is more terrible,
la Flojera
more horrifying, it is the buboes I come to loathe. The very word … knotting first into clusters like tiny garlic heads, then swelling flower bulbs, then, ripe and soft and seedy. Huge, rotting figs.

Many of the corpses awaiting burial are so blackened that all distinctions of race are now erased. And so we go forth, hand in hand, equal before our God, waiting on his grace.

I find Juana in the infirmary, holding an old woman's hand. Her
name …
her name is … Ana.

The end approaching, Ana turns her face to Juana, a question in her eyes, in her face a century. “Is there something I can bring for you, Mother?” Juana asks anxiously. “Is there something you need?”

“No daughter. Only to die.”

A minute or two later, the Prioress comes, roused from her own sickbed by the news of Ana's dying. Ana is the convent's most ancient nun, an old woman already when the Prioress first took her vows.

For a moment, Juana and the Prioress sit side by side. A moment of grace.

3rd of April

Juana tells me she too is losing the power to discriminate. At times the droning of a fly seems as loud as a scream, as terrible as a death rattle.

Sometimes, she says, I can think of no words as beautiful as
agua …
gracias
.

5th of April

Carlos no longer comes every day, but when he can. His own hospice is filled to overflowing. With what time he has, he is experimenting with an idea Juana once had many years ago for making ice. To bring comfort to those with fevers. He has mounted a series of fans on a drum over shallow pans of water. If the rate of evaporation could be increased sufficiently … but he lacks the strength to turn the drum with enough speed. Perhaps something could be done with gears, he asks, beside a swift stream? Juana sends me back with the idea of driving the drum with steam. She tries to explain the mechanism to me, but I cannot follow.

6th of April

The chaplain has been urging the Prioress to permit that the corpses themselves be burned. Most of the bodies reach a sickening state of decomposition within hours, and there is little ground left in which to bury them. Juana agrees. But the Prioress cannot bring herself to issue the order.

“Burial in this convent's consecrated ground …” Mother Andrea de la Encarnación draws herself up and squarely faces him. Despite the strain in her face, her voice is calm.“This is not just a nun's most fervent dream, young man, it is her sacred
right.”

7th of April

A pause amid the carnage. Seeing the surgeon's young face filled with exhaustion and dismay, Juana teases him into a debate on disease transmission, a conversation he soon engages in with great absorption. Plague atoms, the reigning view, versus her champion Kircher's theory: living infective corpuscles he claims to have seen through a microscope in his laboratory in Rome.

“The waxing of our chaplain's linen, Antonia,” she says turning to me, “is thought to keep the plague atom from attaching itself. A very sticky sort of atom, it seems. In my view, Doctor, the only thing those robes will keep out is fleas….”

In a moment they will forget I'm even here.

We are sitting outside the infirmary toward the end of day. She and the surgeon had been discussing the possibility of laying the most feverish patients in a shallow water pan. But before he leaves they agree there are too many ill, too few hands.

A year ago I would have clung to my anger that she should speak so freely with the surgeon and have so little to say to me. But for the past quarter hour she has been talking swiftly, intently, only to me. And yet these stories of her childhood, which I would have been overjoyed to hear a year ago, I am suddenly afraid of.

“… I remember it so clearly, the day we arrived. There was such a light … Branches hung low over the road and the sun was setting red in the hollow beneath them. The
campesinos
were unloading the mule carts.

“How we loved the trees, Amanda and I. Once we spent a whole
morning planting pines … in a churchyard—yes,
in Chimalhuacan
. I remember. How tall are they now, I wonder….”

Juana turns to me to explain, but I know who Amanda is. She has told me before, though only once. Has she forgotten this?

Here in the courtyard tonight the light is so soft. We could almost forget what is going on inside. We sit on a stone bench at the edge of the orchard. Her face is pale, her round black eyes are lustrous with that intensity that still sometimes startles even those of us who think we are used to it. Her wimple is pulled back. Her black hair has grown back thick and straight, and above where it tucks under her robes, flares out like a satin cowl, framing her face.

At dawn from the colonnade above the courtyard I stare into the eastern sky. White smoke from Popocatepetl, though the mountain itself I cannot see. Is the entire world and heaven too now ablaze? Has your hero's bright chariot run wild, Juana, drying up the lakes and seas, scorching even heaven?

What was it in her stories yesterday that troubles me? Stone lovers cursed, demonic serpent children haunting mountain meadows, a lost tribe disappearing after the Conquest into an underworld, over whose entrance sits the smoking mountain …

The mountain is in each one.

I remember something in a poem. Evading another day of horror before me, I grasp at this glimmering … this sweet release of verse.

A poem of hers—the only one, she claimed, that ever really mattered to her.
First Dream
. I go to its hiding place in the archives, deserted these past weeks. I return to the cell with it, light a candle, find the passage.

I read page after page of these lines, the rhymes, the visions always too difficult for me to do anything but marvel at—and that in this prophetic Dream of hers she has seen so clearly, even down to the counterpoisons we have used against the plague. And suddenly I know why I am
frightened by her stories. One after another with hardly a pause between. Not just that they should tumble out after almost two years of silence. It's how they come. They ramble. She has never been unclear in her life.

It is time to return to work.

I wake her.

8th of April

Some of the sisters have gone mad. Three run wildly about. I can barely bring myself to write. One stands outside the infirmary screaming in answer to each scream she hears inside. No one bothers to quiet her, what is one more scream?

The last shred of convent discipline unravels now, the vow of enclosure. Men everywhere coming and going. Here now in a convent, here in our dying, most know more easy freedom with men than ever while they lived. At last I have this to share with them.

And even as we still live, the last differences between us fall away. Old and young, poor and rich, learned and ignorant, sensuous and ascetic, talkative and silent. All engaged now in an unceasing inner dialogue of questions and silences. Look at these faces.

What have you done to their beauty?

If I could be granted the power to accomplish one thing, in this final hour, one single wish—O pardon me my wistfulness—
I would restore to them their beauty
. I would have them see themselves, some now for the first time ever in her life, as simply … beautiful.

Who dares call this a lie? This beauty of girls.

Does he—is our Eternal Author well satisfied with His creation now? With the grace of His loving union….

9th of April

A wind has been clawing all night at the shutters. In the morning I wake