Hunger's Brides (56 page)

“But then,” Leonor says, her eyes glittering, “they say he set the fire….”

She has known the greatest artists and writers of the empire. She met Lope when she was only five, Quevedo at fifteen, Tirso at eighteen. She grew to know Calderón intimately, and met with him frequently after he was made King Philip's chaplain. And while Quevedo was often crowned the Master of Wit in Madrid, she is not at all sure he would have such an easy time of it here in Mexico. Not that my gifts caught her completely by surprise. The greatest improviser the Spanish court has ever seen was from the Indies, too. The poet Atillano could make up the most astounding verses—learned or salacious, or both at once—according to the whimsies of his audience.

And so it is in this that I am keenest to impress her. She can recite the wittiest passages from dozens of comedies, to which, when we are alone, I improvise new speeches and dialogues to divert her from her loneliness.

Finally the court life she and Mariana dreamt of. Mariana, she says, would envy her now.

Leonor confesses to having dreamt of coming to New Spain ever since meeting the great American Ruiz de Alarcón, when she was only nine. We should go one day to his birthplace. Is this Taxco far? She is casually proud of her gift for languages—German, French, two dialects of northern Italy. The Castilian spoken here in the New World enchants her, the pleasant turns of phrase, the warmth and charm of our terms of endearment.
Mi alma, mi espejo, mi conquistador …
She delights in finding in my speech some expression or other that had been Alarcón's. I do recall that she had only been nine, but am nonetheless flattered. The seductions of the powerful are seduction to a second power.

Now that the renovations are quite done, Leonor is rarely seen outside the Vice-Queen's wing of the palace but is everywhere within it. For two more years the
hojarasca
whirls harder, as if by the hour. Every day a saint's day, a prince's birthday, a wedding, a confirmation. Rousing displays of horsemanship and jousting with cane lances beneath her balcony. So many occasions to be commemorated with poetry, so many gifts and prizes to be accompanied with a verse. Nights of masquerades,
carnival processions, mock battles in the square with flaming arrows, Roman candles. The dances. I have so many dances to learn I am grateful for each single one of the dozen I know. The dignified pavanes, la Chacona, la Capona, and others less decorous—none less so than the Canary and the Folly. But now there are dances to be sung to, and even a few to improvise poetry to. The best by far for poetry is the Rattlesnake. But the revels cannot really be said to be in full swing until the shocking and shockingly popular
bailes bacanales
are announced—the sarabande from India, for one, and an African dance so lascivious it has never been danced at court. Until now.

So much laughter—Beauty's consort too is everywhere. And knows no borders either, it would seem. Leonor has the idea of releasing a crate of snakes into the Hall of Comedies one night during a play. Only with the greatest difficulty do I dissuade her. No?—not even harmless ones?

Parties at the merest pretext or, of late, the rarest: the celebration of a Spanish military triumph. We celebrate, one whole night, the forty-sixth anniversary of the famous surrender of Breda; the women play the Spanish, the men the beaten Netherlanders. Not long after the King's death, there is a party with a secret theme, only later confided to me in greatest secrecy. We fête the loss of Portugal, eight thousand Spanish soldiers lost in eight hours. It is only once Philip dies that I understand how much she has despised him.

But she forgives me my elegy on the King. Because it is beautiful, she says, because I am beautiful, because I am seventeen.

There are some things it is time for me to understand about our late sovereign. His infidelities, his actresses, his obsession with nuns. Even in the Queen's company he made no effort to keep it to himself. The fortunes of a nation rise and fall on the spirit of its queens, and it is the married queen who bears the most terrible burden of all—supreme responsibility without power. So it is the duty of the Queen's ladies to cheer her, minister to her spirits. Mariana arrived at fifteen but each month thereafter aged her a year. Leonor did everything in her power. How terrible to stand by, to watch Mariana's spirit broken.

Our salons of jests and jousts only gain in ferocity, and at first I glory in it. And how it unnerves these men to listen to the verses the cavalier owes to the lady of the Hall—verses of a refined passion—but written by a woman now. Ah, to see their faces. To see hers.

Such was the shock, one might have heard a pin drop.

More ferocious, too, the rumours and speculations about this
person
winning almost every night at rhymes; and even the laurels for learned discourses go to almost no one else, unless the topic is mathematics, which I avoid, or is astronomy and Carlos has come. Carlos too is brilliant but a man. Carlos too is poor but has a distinguished name, if not exactly noble. Yes, great things are expected of Carlos. Just not at the palace.

And Carlos at least has a father's name that is his to use.

But this other one,
la Monstrua
—I've heard them whisper it—how can anyone, a girl so young, acquire such learning in the wilds of that demonic countryside? No, there is something too uncanny about it. Nepantla?
Is
there such a town—and what must it be like, if
los nepantlas
are the local word for rabble? This bit of local intelligence comes courtesy of Teresa.

It is just a matter of time. Late one evening a cultured gentleman makes bold to impugn in rhyme an unnamed maiden's paternity—to which, before striding from the room, she rhymes something to this effect: Not being born of an honourable father would indeed be a defect, but only if she'd given him his being, rather than receiving hers
from
him. Whereas the cultivated gentleman's mother was much the
more magnanimous (in having him follow such multitudes) so that he might just as freely follow the suit and choose the father who best suits him….

Have I gone too far? But not at all. Leonor is all assurances afterwards. In Madrid, the rough and tumble is more savage by half. I should have heard Quevedo's squibs on Alarcón's hunched back. Truly?—she hadn't mentioned his deformity before? But
no
, Alarcón was not wounded by the cut, any more than my Perico would be. And in administering it, Quevedo had no more dishonoured himself than Velázquez had by frequenting dwarves. No watcher of this curious compendium that is Man must ever close her eyes to this—this is life, life in its entirety. These were geniuses. It may hurt the man, but life nourishes the genius. I, more than anyone, must learn to see this.

The next night she sets the opening topic: the intellectual superiority of the white European born in the New World. In a salon full of gentle-born Castilians she herself takes the affirmative, taking me, Carlos, and the new Jesuit confessor at the palace as her prime examples. Relentless, she chooses for our second topic the effect of African breast milk on the Creole male. Carlos is stewing, has come to talk with me about something. I see him regretting it.

Is it true, she muses, as is held, that the Creole's affection for the source long outlives his infancy? And is this hardy milk, dispensed in such charming vessels and in such abundance, not perhaps the secret source of the greater potency and vigour of his body and mind?—

But Juanita was raised on
Indian
breastmilk
.

Teresa.

I see them all watching me. Carlos, Fabio, Perico, the courtiers. Leonor. I have not told her this. Teresa is trying to cause a rift between us.

“The Academy would now hear,” Perico leaps onto a chair, “how
la Giganta
answers the charge. Indian milk—
is it true?”
He has said this gently. I know it is in jest, and an opportunity to respond in kind. He'd be the last to care.

I could have spared her. A friend. Is it even true, what I say next? Rumours like this make the rounds about all of us. She is impulsive by nature and not a little giddy at the approach of her wedding. I know in my heart there is no malice in it. I see the ropes of pearl glowing in her hair, her hopes glowing at her cheek. Things will not be the same for her.

Carlos comes the next day, under the pretext of taking his leave yet again, and in truth Puebla de los Angeles has not been graced with his presence for a while. He gives himself airs, as though he were above the Academy, but he comes often enough—verily does one wonder if the seminary is ever
in
session. I know he has come to admonish me, as he does so often lately. From no one else do I take this, and from him it has begun to pall. But I am dreading today—could anyone find recriminations more bitter than those I found for myself during the night?

I am afraid he might.

In the Vice-Queen's patio I wait for him where we are least likely to be overheard. Under the trees runs a chain of bowers—flowering hedges, head high, cut in interlocking els all along the bottom of the garden, from the Hall of Comedies to the palace library. Twice I catch sight of Carlos wending his way toward me. I have no particular affection for the new French fashions for men. The tiny jackets as though shrunken up the rib cage, the beribboned shoes and canes, the petticoat breeches, the fur muffs. And I am not so finally reconciled to Paris's latest rulings on what is divine in women's beauty—Heaven knows, they caused trouble enough in Troy. As we women put on our livery, with its
décolleté frôle aréole
, the latitude of our neckline makes it very hard not feel like pages, platter, and peaches all trussed up in an expedient parcel.

But any particular style has to be preferable to this new outfit of his.

Carlos has never needed a riding habit to go to Puebla before, a leisurely ride of thirty leagues. It occurs to me to be grateful: else I might not be able to face him at all. Bucket-top calfskin boots, netherstocks and leather breeches, a basque short-skirt with points at the waist, over which a short sword has been belted. Unfortunate, assuredly … calamitous is barely adequate. Apocalyptic might do—not Elysian, not Parisian, but a mix of all the sins of style of all the ages brought to stand together and be judged. A lace falling band
and
a lace cravat, both frayed to a hoary fringe, and both plainly second hand. Which only makes
sense—the Plains of Judgement being evidently at the used clothing market, and how much easier to strip the dead where you find them standing. I see fashions from the eras of at least three Spanish kings, a French one, and perhaps a Caesar. Has Perico helped him shop?

By now I am happy Carlos has come. The velvet of his dark green doublet is bare enough in patches to pass for black satin. Across his frail chest a faded orange baldric and over one thin shoulder a heavy buff coat. The ensemble is capped off with an ostrich plume so bedraggled on a wide-brimmed beaver hat so battered I wonder if the ostrich was not captured wearing it during one of its cerebral inquisitions into a dune. As for how the beaver was taken … it does not bear thinking about.

He is twenty-two now—and even in a travelling outfit, this is no way to make one's way in the world. The overall effect is like a vision from Isaiah, where the beaver and the buffalo, the ostrich and the goat, the lion and the fatling lie down together. I have not quite lost the last of my nervousness, yet at this range I can no longer ignore his poverty, his unworldliness … and am flooded with the strangest emotion, equal parts pity and tenderness. He is so dear. A small frail military adventurer.