Hunger's Brides (62 page)

She warned us that if we took this book from her she might very well go mad, and it is as if she has. I could cite other examples, but suffice it to say that the rigours of our Order have plainly unseated her too-sensitive nature. Her pain is patent, her need is real. But, however great her need, it is unacceptable that this girl, extraordinary though she is, raves of ‘Naustic unions' and
venerates an Egyptian goddess within the walls of our cloister
!

I must ask that you prepare to receive her at your earliest possible opportunity. Once again, please allow me to express my deepest regret
that she has not been able to find here with us the rest and solace she so badly needs.

    Your obedient servant,

Madre Felipa de Navas

    Convent of San José of the Discalced Carmelites.

No, the Reverend Mother will have none of her novices cooking up Naustical unions in their cells. She would not know a Gnostic union from a nauseous onion. And, yes, the woman is ignorant, but
you
are the fool. Your tactics are hardly less crude than hers, and far less subtle than the Enemy's. You could bully the woman into acknowledging Kircher's orthodoxy in the eyes of the Holy Office and that Isis is a blessed prefiguration of the Virgin. But you would only be compounding your own errors, the errors of which these journals must be the unflinching testament.

The austerity you imposed on this girl is really the one you covet for yourself. Grown fat on so many easy successes are you now to meet with your greatest failure
just when it matters most?
To lose the greatest mind on the continent to pagan madness?—a woman hand-delivered to you by Providence?

No
. A thousand times, no …

Perhaps as a spiritual director you
have
no true vocation. But you have a
will
. To bring the great ship of her soul into port may have become your career's crucial campaign, its greatest challenge and danger, its turning point. You must put this right. You
will
right this ship …

But more gently, more patiently. A soul like crystal, lucent and brittle, must be polished. Polished, not broken. Ground down like a lens.

Let her return to the palace. Her life there is more untenable than ever. When she comes to you again, as she must—who else is there for her now?—sooner or later you two will talk of San Jerónimo, a convent known for its loose discipline and worldly pursuits…. And if marriage is truly reprehensible to her, or indeed no longer practicable, then a convent is the last respectable option. Bring her to see it as the only path from the palace that does not lead to perdition, to the ignominy of a
beaterío
,
†
or the infamy of a
recogimiento
,
^††
a place of reclusion so complete that the windows themselves are to be mortared in.

Arrange a visit, if necessary. If our young poet thinks the convent of San José severe, give her a glimpse of life without sunlight.

(E
NTER INTELLIGENCE, SCIENCE, ENVY, CONJECTURE, LUCERO
.)

S
NAKE
W
OMAN
        

19th day of October, 1667

Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de Dolores

Juana Inés,

Another letter from you on the heels of the last, and after so much silence. Your words come to relieve me in my torment. Each night I sit down to write you and fill the page with such trash. It seems I have nothing to write that I can bear to have you read. Then your letter arrives and my head teems with things to say.

Truly am I honoured by this sonnet on Guadalupe. You said you would write it for me one day and you have. These lines I love:

But do not think you have thrown me off the trail: I know how easily this kind of elegance comes to you.

You ask if I am truly interested in the Indians' salvation, if I am not perhaps more concerned with my ‘Americanist project,' as you refer to it. The world's myths, as you say, are treasures of the imagination, not to be plundered for worldly advantage. Is this what you suspect we are doing? But even if it were true, could one not answer that the gains go far beyond politics, to the healing of the American soul? Then, you ask if the Franciscans are not more devoted to taming Eve than to venerating Guadalupe. Point taken.

And you are right of course—to ‘have powers over the serpent' does not necessarily mean she must use them to destroy it.

But proceed more carefully now. You intimate that the Church has modelled the Blessed Virgin on the Egyptian Isis even while stripping her of her godhood. Then you argue persuasively—and dangerously—
that the Church has struggled as much to prevent her regaining the divine plane as it has Lucifer.

As a friend I repeat the question: Are you not afraid of them making you our Queen of Wisdom? I do not think the fear an idle one.

It is becoming imperative that we develop a code so as to express these thoughts more safely. Indeed like a dragon in its death throes, the Inquisition is these days at its most dangerous, flailing out in all directions … at perversions, heresies and false gods. At women falsely claimed to be saints, and at female poets who make Mary into Sophia, a seductress of Christ, but cloak her in the costume of a Greek wood nymph…. Be very careful, Juanita, with this rash plan of yours to finish your
Divine Narcissus after
all. Be more careful still to whom you show it.

un abrazo
, Carlos

12th day of November, 1667

Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de Dolores

Juana,

I wish you the happiest of birthdays. To think that I have known you almost four full years. To think you were barely fifteen…. And is it really possible I shall soon be twenty-three? My senescence may even now be revealing itself to you in the gaps in my reasoning and the infirmity of my hand.

Still not one word of the palace. Each day you become more mysterious. I cannot shake this stubborn hope of mine that you have left that den of fops. But no, as you have said, where would you go? I readily admit that for one with neither means nor connections, life in Mexico is quite difficult enough, even for a man. You could of course come here, without prejudice or conditions. A woman's reputation is not a thing to be surrendered lightly—not even as the price of her independence—but can yours truly survive their palace so much longer than my jungle? I take you at your word: you have written how much you envy me the collegial atmosphere and the freedom of this place, the soberness of this work—my mind flashes to you on your way here and my heart races for an instant. But no, enough. We have each chosen our place, and this one, for all its satisfactions, is not palatial.

If you will say nothing of your present life, let me tell you of mine. The monastery has been astir with a discovery that lends credence to the
rumours that brought Fray Cuadros here in the first place. In the jungle a full day southwest of here we've discovered a village, Pital, at the edge of a ruined city. Although their ways and manner of dress are unfamiliar to Brother Cuadros, the villagers do speak a dialect of the Mexican language and have moreover made themselves the custodians of a large codex, an ancient Mexican book that they venerate in one of the old temples.

We are expecting a native interpreter to arrive any day from the Indian College in Tlatelolco, but the difficulty here, as Brother Cuadros explains it, is not strictly one of language. These painted-books, which we misleadingly call histories, are only the pictorial notation, not unlike a musical score, for a performance. It is not enough to read the glyphs; they are just the cues. The performers once carried within them the script, and when they needed to, redrafted it. I am learning that history was for the ancient Mexicans a dramatic art. Nor do they seem to insist there be one sole version: it falls to each people to continually create and
recreate
its own. (To us, the Creoles, who find ourselves orphaned by history, how could this fail to bring inspiration?) While for the European, the age of myth ends and history begins with the birth of Christ, for the Mexican, the frontier between myth and history is fluid and the influence reciprocal. Time is both linear and cyclical, and so history is also prophecy and pattern, but nevertheless admitting of a series of variations on central themes.

You have perhaps learned all this at your wet nurse's knee; but for me it remains most difficult to grasp that the Mexicans not only use the past to interpret the present, as we do, but the present to reinterpret the past. Am I right, then, in concluding that they see Time's effects flowing not just forward but also backward? How strange to contemplate, as if to reverse the river of causes, make it flow uphill, see the sun setting in the east.

They keep their codex in the temple of their war god, at the western edge of this ruined city. The book rests on a stone altar the length of a man. Cut into the altar is a series of channels draining to a stone basin embellished with a relief of skulls and flowers. In the shadows, overgrown with moss, is a statue with a woman's face, one side fleshed, the other side peeled back to reveal a death's head. As for the codex, it is well cared for, and the villagers are protective of it. We now believe their ancestors were not just left with the book but also with the story.
Someone in this village still carries that story within him … Though we have been allowed only cursory readings, Fray Cuadros is sure it comes from Cholula and deals at least peripherally with the Conquest. Most intriguingly images of Cortés's interpreter Malintzin appear on almost every page.