Hunger's Brides (32 page)

But I look so surprised. I need not. He leaves me in the hands of another. There is a book he has treasured since the days of his youth … He looks, for an instant—it's almost embarrassment. Reverend Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda claims to find a greatness in me. A beauty of the soul that for all his searching he does not find in himself. He brings out a book, but does not pass it to me. He says he leaves me to the care of a great companion, one who has also read the words of Sarpedon to Glaucus, for he has written that
with great gifts come the greatest responsibilities
.

Augustine. Our Holy Mother Church's greatest writer, greater even than Jerome. There is a saying. Who claims to have read all of Augustine … lies. But this, Juana Inés, I
have
read.

And these were the dishes wherein to me, hunger-starven for thee, they served up the sun and the moon…
.

This book I have read many times, child, and offer it to you now as a guide. With chapped hands trembling as with ague, Father Núñez opens my fingers and places
The Confessions
in my hands.

I open the cover. And under his eyes take in the chapter titles as the parched take water, as the famished, bread. Adult Cruelty and Folly, The Attraction of Shows, A Twofold Prize, A Passion to Shine, A Year of Idleness, The Two Wills, The Anatomy of Evil, A Soul in Waste, The Wreckers, Faustus the Manichee, The Teacher as Seducer, The Death of a Friend, The Problem of Forgetting …

All the helpful titles, the edifying rubrics. But I had not read it yet. They were as the chapters of my own life. And as I read, the thirst only grew.

Here was a companion who had journeyed far. From the lands beyond the pillars of Calpe and Abyla. Who had lived a life in the world, yet married
to
the world. With his voice a secret in my ear I read of his boyhood among the Afri in Numidia, on the shores of Africa. His studies and dissipations in Carthage, capital of Roman Africa. His lusts. His lusts. Foaming over with lust in Rome and Milan. His years defending the heretical Manichees, his conversion to the Lord of
totus ubique.
⁹
After the Vandal ransom of Rome, enemies on every side, for thirteen years he sat writing
City of God
. … To shore up the faith of the world
in
the world.

His mission and destiny were no less than this. I read of his reluctant accession to the bishopric, and even as the Vandals gathered at the walls of Hippo I watched as the Bishop sat quietly in the library, writing against time, writing to Saint Jerome in the desert in Egypt, putting the finishing touches upon
City of God, On Nature and Grace, On the Spirit and the Letter …

Here was someone who had humour—
give me chastity and constancy—but not yet!
Who had discovered in the intimate connection of physical love the very source and wellspring of friendship. Who knew beauty—
too late I came to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh …
who had tasted of the sweet joys of the secret mouth in the heart, probed the narrow entrance to the soul, who saw what it is to be in love with love, to know the horrors of going too far—and yet be unwilling to turn back.

Whence this monstrous state …?

At the age of nineteen Augustine found and was forever changed by a single book, a pagan book since lost. Cicero's
Hortensius
, an exhortation to search for wisdom. And so in Augustine I had found someone who understood, as no one else, this craving for wisdom. Even wisdom in loss.

For the bare search for wisdom, even when it is not actually found, was preferable to finding treasures and earthly kingdoms…
.

Here
is
a friend, to turn to when I no longer know whom to trust, a companion for a path in the desert on the road to
City of God
. Here is a soul that has greatness. A heart to serve, a spirit to sing praises, a hand to write them.
The Confessions
. The greatest of books. A meditation on greatness itself.

Had anyone delved more deeply into the mysteries of the mind? struggled more greatly to resist his greatness? surrendered to passion so utterly? remembered so completely—and survived it?

My infancy is dead long ago, yet I still live…
.

Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda is a subtle man. And though I shall never know for certain how he intended to serve in giving it, this gift to a lonely spirit I do not forget, nor ever shall. To have such a friend, to swim in such intimate waters, to learn of even distant events and episodes in the life of our friend, these we do not simply hear or read, but know and feel and live as once before. To be given a great book is to be given a second life.

So a question now for the subtle man. To give, even in evil intent, a great book to one's enemy—so that he may see the truth of himself, so that the walls of his life may be pulled to the ground … can this truly be called an evil at all?

Tolle lege, tolle lege.
¹⁰
Augustine heard it spoken in the voice of a child. Take up and read….

Perhaps, one day, I may yet hear it answered, in the small voice of a man.

A
manda and I were planning to climb back to Ixayac that morning. We woke especially early, well before dawn. It was windy. There were no stars and no sign of the moon I had fallen asleep to. I smelled the smoke but half-asleep imagined it was Xochitl, already grilling tortillas. And then I knew that it wasn't, as Amanda and I climbed to the watchtower.

A vast wildfire seethed up the far north slope of Iztaccihuatl. Already it was turning the corner to the western face, not far from Ixayac. For a long while we couldn't tear ourselves from the sight of a conflagration rising over two thousand
varas
into the sky. Then Amanda shook my arm and we rushed down to find Xochitl standing in the kitchen, speaking rapidly in Nahuatl with three men, woodcutters on their way to warn the people of the town.

“Go get your mother,” she said, which I did at a dead run but when I banged her door open I found her almost dressed.

“Wake your
abuelo
, Inés,” Isabel said, without even glancing up. “And knock first.” She looked at me now as she reached for her cloak. “Don't frighten him. Can you do that?”

I heard the evenness in her voice.

“Sí, claro,”
I said, and walked steadily to his room feeling very grown up.

When I brought Abuelo to the kitchen, everyone else was there. The workers were just outside, all crowded around the door. Isabel had gotten Amanda to translate as many of the details as the woodcutters seemed to possess. There had been lightning, but the men were not denying the possibility that they had sparked the fire themselves. Seeing Abuelo come in properly dressed, his hair neatly combed, Isabel seemed very close to giving me a smile.

“Papá, buenos dias
. It's good you've come,” Isabel said. “With this wind, your
molinos
†
can be a great help to us now. The men will dig the trenches where you say. The woodsmen will stay and help. I'll ride in to warn the town and be back in two hours.”

Grandfather was a colossus.

He set two men to fashioning leather buckets and two more men, extra mattocks. He directed the remaining workers, with such picks and
mattocks as we already had, towards the places to start digging. Amanda stepped forward and I did too, though there were not yet implements enough to go around. “No, no,” he said, “for you two I have the most important job of all. We need you up in the watchto wer to look for spot fires, and any cinders on the roof—call out right away.” Amanda and I would not have let ourselves be coddled. The spot fires I might have thought a ruse to keep us out of the way, but with almost no rain in a month, surely the shingles of the house and outbuildings really could catch fire. And from the tower, it was soon clear how true this was: the shingles were cracked like kindling beneath moss tinder-dry.

And there we spent the rest of the day, Ixayac close yet out of sight above us in the smoke. In the ochre light we could see both windmills where they stood above the river, one at each end of the maguey. Blades spinning dizzily in the rising wind, the nearer of the two stood just past the stand of evergreens where Amanda and I often went to read in the shade of a giant cedar. From the base of the windmill a ditch ran through our little strip of trees, then along the north side of the cornfields and out to the orchards. Grandfather was fixing something at the far
molino
. From right beside him, a second ditch cut across the maguey, along the south side of the cornfields and into the watering troughs next to the paddocks. The air was increasingly thick with ash, smoke, and now dust.

The fieldhands worked in three parties, a half-dozen men in each—and so quickly that I realized the ditches they were excavating had already been there, filled with loose gravel and overgrown with grass or corn. This was not the first fire Grandfather had found a way to master here—and with the volcano smoking away above us, how could it be otherwise? By the time his daughter was back, a trench encircling the house had been linked up to the water troughs and was filling with water. From the well in the courtyard, workers were filling the leather buckets and passing them up to two men soaking down the roof.

Once the ditches had been scraped out, half the men set to work cutting down the blue-violet fields of corn. With so little rain this spring, the stalks and leaves were too dry, so near the house. The remaining men set up a brigade to relay up buckets of freshly dug earth for spreading over the rooftops—first of the house and chapel, then of the outbuildings. Now, a few splashes from a bucket every hour would be enough to keep things moist.

Maybe luck did come first to the well-prepared, or some days were simply luckier than others, for by nightfall it had begun to drizzle, then rain, then pour. But no one seemed to the think the day's work wasted, still less a shame.
¹¹

For three days straight the rain came down. During the hours when Amanda and I were normally out exploring, we did little else but read—at first from a frustrating volume of selections translated from Plutarch's
Moralia
. His other book, the parallel lives of Greek and Roman heroes, had been a great success with Amanda. And this new one started well enough with its wicked diatribes in the style of Menippus, and with fine touches in his advice to brides, but his dialogues on morals were mostly dull and though he'd been a priest at Delphi, his famous essay on the failure of the Oracles was left
out
. At least in the afternoons alone at the table outside the library—and evenings now, with the firepit rained out—I was free to pore over Reverend Athanasius Kircher's
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
. Egyptian Oedipus. I knew of the Greek Oedipus who had solved the deadly riddle of the Sphinx—and reading I found myself returning to something that had always puzzled me. How a riddle in Egypt had somehow become a monster in Greece. Had the other monsters, like the Chimera, begun as riddles too …?

Ancient Egypt of the enigmatic forms … priests and priestesses with the heads of dogs or bulls or birds, like ibis-headed Thoth, inventor of writing and guide of souls into the western deserts. Avidly now I read about the teachings of a great sage who lived in the Egyptian desert at the time of Moses: Hermes Trismegistus, divine messenger! His secret texts had been only recently rediscovered but surely the riddles veiled therein contained great natural magic and the highest wisdom. If my excitement was burgeoning, Magister Kircher's was truly palpable. Reading him now was almost to be present as the greatest scholar of the modern world hailed his great forerunner:
I, Athanasius Kircher, and the new sages of Europe salute you from afar
. He was hopeful—on the verge, one could feel it—of recovering the most powerful Hermetic formulas. Light from darkness … attraction at a distance … a jar so tightly sealed as to exclude even air…. Was it really true that the Reverend Kircher had had himself lowered into Vesuvius to study its crater right after an eruption? How he would love Panoayan. Such marvels he could teach us. And what a master of decorum he must be to preserve the dignity of the cassock amidst such updrafts.