Hunger's Brides (53 page)

This past fortnight I have found myself retracing the journey that brought me here, the route of the Conquest in reverse. And in a sense for me it has been a conquest reversed. I cannot claim to have liberated the lands I have crossed; instead they have conquered me. I have you to thank for this, for teaching me to see through your grandfather's eyes. The Conquest has entered into our past, but that other America is not dead. She lies as if in a fever dream while these foreign parasites feast on her prostrate body. This is my homeland. How can I bring myself to leave her? I may not go to Europe, after all—there is so much work to be done here. I know this now.

Made desperate by the infernal hunting and my wasting purse, I decided to give up the house and, with great reluctance, threw myself upon the mercies of a local monastery.

The Jesuits were clearly out of the question for me. The Augustinians nearly destitute. After two days with the Dominicans (nearly as hard up as the Augustinians) a friar meekly asked if I had ever visited the lovely Franciscan monastery not a league south of town….

I am only now getting the chance to finish, having arrived just this afternoon, but you can write me here if you care to. I will be staying on here as long as they will have me. They have invited me to collaborate with them, but more on that later.

Enough for now. It has been a long day …

Carlos.

17th day of September, 1667

Convento de Nuestra Señora de Dolores

Veracruz, New Spain

Juana,

I am sure you have been on tenterhooks to know about my new home. Some years back a rich patron donated a tract of fertile property to these Franciscans, which they have cleared and cultivate judiciously. The land reliably yields three crops yearly if properly rotated. The monastery itself is spacious, surrounded by trees, and constructed to take advantage of breezes from the sea.

My first impressions—of a place more concerned with cultivating the earth than the mind—were quite mistaken. Rather than giving way to luxury, the comfortable conditions here permit these men to carry on the admirable work of their great Franciscan father, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. He has, I can confidently state, invented a new science of Man. It undertakes to map systematically the constellations of these American societies, the patterns of their superstitions and attendant practices. Without him and a few others (I am convinced your grandfather was one of them in spirit), the Conquest would have extinguished this alien sky, which may yet be blotted out by smoke from the Inquisition's fires. Sahagún's writings were twice confiscated as tending to mar the glorious portrait being painted of the Conquest back in Spain. Yet the Franciscans only chart these systems the better to guide the Indians to the safe harbour of our Catholic Faith, by the light of
their own innate reason
and not by the torchlight of fear.

Brother Manuel Cuadros, the most learned man here in the things of the New World, has himself only just arrived from the Indian college at Tlatelolco, where he claims to have learned more theology from his students than ever he taught them. He believes the native Americans to be natural Christians, and cites as an example Our Lady of Guadalupe's chapel on the Cerrito de Tepeyac, the same hill where the Mexican goddess Tonantzin was once worshipped. Tonantzin,
Our Mother
. Tepeyac, from the Mexican—
stone that crushes the serpent
.

Meanwhile, how often do we ourselves portray the Mother of Christ as a new Eve protecting her Child, crushing the Serpent beneath her heel? And did you yourself not tell me you have heard Guadalupe pronounced as Coatlalocpeuh?—
she who has dominion over serpents
.

My Franciscan friends now regard the fast-growing veneration of Guadalupe throughout New Spain as an illustration of how the natives can be led naturally to the worship of Christ. But our fellow Creole, Fray Cuadros, has made me see much more: Guadalupe shall be the mother of our liberation. As he puts it, the Spanish have made orphans and bastards of us all,
criollos, indios
and
mestizos
alike. Guadalupe is fast becoming—though we might be only beginning to grasp it—the Mother Protectoress of all America's peoples. The mother of our sorrows. And this is why Fray Cuadros and a few others fear the Church will try to discredit her: precisely because it is now widely held that Guadalupe
is
the new Eve, who has come to protect this new Eden. Imagine my
excitement, after
the journey I have just made, to take part in such work.

Interesting times here, and dangerous.

And you. Tell me you have finally quit the palace and I will be there to fetch you in a week, I will set a new record reaching you.

Juanita, good-night.

25th day of October, 1667

Convento de Nuestra Señora de Dolores

la Nueva Veracruz

Dearest Juana Inés,

At last a letter! What a pleasure it is to read whatever flows from your agile quill, even if you disclose nothing of your life these days. If it is tact, do not worry, I no longer delude myself. Still, I cannot stop dreaming that you will one day tire of the palace and join us here. Brother Cuadros has complimented me on my knowledge of Indian customs, which I have
been quick to explain are but scraps picked up from you. He has heard a great deal about you, of course, and has confided he hopes one day to meet you. If you were to come, I know you and I would find a way …

I am dismayed you find our project here so objectionable. Yes, it is dangerous, but in these benighted times what ideas are not? You are right to remind me the Church's greatest fear here in the New World is still that the ancient beliefs will be rekindled to ignite a revolt. The Indians still vastly outnumber us, after all. But the Church has no cause for suspicion: What these Franciscans are attempting is to restore the ancient bridge between our Mother Church and the native Christianity of America. Brother Cuadros assures me that among the Indians the conquered accept it as their duty to worship the stronger gods of their conquerors alongside their own. And what better evidence of God's strength and will, for both victors and vanquished, than the bloody miracle of a conquest against all human odds?

Clearly the policy of forced conversion, as prosecuted through our extermination of their gods and priests, has been a failure. Fray Cuadros has convinced me the Indians convert willingly once it is demonstrated that our Catholic faith is indeed universal and encompasses their own.

Rightly you warn against manipulating symbols to release forces we cannot possibly understand. But did not the early fathers of our Church run a similar risk at Ephesus, grafting the veneration of Mary onto the cult of Diana? And yes, the common people are bound to invent a lot of superstitious nonsense. Meanwhile others try to make the New World a repository for the unsolved mysteries of the Old—El Dorado, Atlantis, the Amazons …

And some of this nonsense is not so innocuous. Like the Beast of the Apocalypse etched in the terrain around Mexico City—the lake of Chalco its head and neck, its wings the rivers of Texcoco and Papalotla, four lakes formed from its spittle. Fie!

But you know how I despise this sort of thing. The Dominicans see devils everywhere as it is. Rightly do you remind me of the resemblances between our portrayals of Guadalupe and the woman of the Apocalypse,
a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars …
But this only shows how deeply these soul-sick and weary times of ours crave an Apocalypse. And in this the Indians are more like us than in any other thing. How our age yearns for the Kingdom of God to be restored in this New Eden.

And how the Spaniards fear and resent this American virgin who begins to escape their control! Guadalupe is the mother we orphans of America desperately pine for. Is it possible your objections to our project are of a more personal nature? The Viceroy's cousins told me that the aristocrats have taken to calling you Our Mexican Athena …

I leave you, then, with a question.

Carlos.

F
RIENDS
        

P
ROFESSOR
C
HRIS
R
ELKOFF
stood next to the rental. I had a hand on the steering wheel, the other on the key in the ignition. He bent forward just far enough to make eye contact. I'd never asked myself till then if my old colleague and I were even friends. Yet that Friday afternoon in the faculty parking lot, with the news drifting across campus like the stink of sewage, there he stood—stooped, diffident—forehead creased with concern, offering me keys to a family cabin near Cochrane. As a retreat. He also offered their second vehicle, an old Jeep beater.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the keys to the cabin, “but I'll feel a little less your ward by hanging on to my rental.”

“Sorry to hear about you and Madeleine.”

“Yeah.”

“The cabin's a special place for Mariko and me.”

“Great of you to let me stay there.”

“Long as you like.”

We went over the directions again. I started the car. He stood back, hands jammed into the pockets of a worn pair of walking shorts. A checked grey woollen shirt under a red hunting vest rounded out his professorial ensemble, along with the grey wool socks and leather sandals. He appeared to be leading up to something. “Don, did you ever …” his weight shifted slightly from one foot to both, “with Mariko?”

“Since I'll be sleeping out there in your bed.”

“Something like that.”

He leaned down suddenly and braced two big raw hands on the unretracted slice of glass above the door frame. An impulse toward intimacy gone awry, lightly skewed toward menace. Rather than stare straight down into my face now he looked off into the distance beckoning from just over the roof of the Ford.

“No, Chris, I can't say that I have. Thought's crossed my mind, though,” I added, slipping it into gear. “About a thousand times.” I backed the car out of the stall. “Since you ask, how about you and Madeleine?”

A slight reddening of the craggy Slavic mien. “Once.”

“Mariko know?”

“Madeleine told her right after.”

“Just once. Not so bad then.”

“Years ago. They worked things out.”

Who were he and I to do any less?

“Guess with the cabin then, we're even. Huh Chris.”

A new plateau in our friendship. Funny, his timing, though it made a kind of sense. As much as anything did.