Hunger's Brides (75 page)

“How many times have
I
found
your
words and your commandments
exceedingly
repugnant yet held my peace? But after so many years my breast overflows with the injustice.
I have done nothing wrong
—nothing criminal, nothing sinful. If sin there be it is only pride—our shared affliction, Father. I am
not
humbled as might be other daughters on whom your instruction would be so much better lavished. Your opinions in these minor matters are just that, and unwelcome.
They are not Holy Writ
. If you cannot find it in your heart to favour me, and to counsel me calmly or even harshly, but in in the privacy of confession—a sacrament
you
defile whenever it suits you—then I beg you think of me no more. Release me from your hand and grant me no more favours, for I am doomed to disappoint you.”

“Think, now, what you ask.”

“God has fashioned many keys to Heaven—which contains as many rooms as there are different natures. Do you not think my salvation might be effected through the guidance of another? Is the dispensation of God's mercy limited to just one man, no matter how wise or righteous?”

“And just whom did you have in mind?”

“Father Arellano.”

“That ecstatic?”

“Your disciple.”

“Your
worst
possible choice! Someone who will indulge you, who will let you make him a fool.”

“You claim that's exactly what I've made of you. Choice, Father. Choice is what you are always exhorting me to. Arellano understands passion, he understands faith, and penance best of all.”

“You have said nothing of reason.”

“Reason,
I
understand.”

“Too well. Or, just possibly, not quite well enough…. Reason carefully then, child. You have called me here for this. Your Countess has given you the nerve. But calculate well. This thing is not easily undone….”

“That much I know. After so many years.”

“Do you wish a short time to reconsider?”

“Father I ask only that you commend me to God, which I know in your charity you will do with all fervour.”

“So be it then. I commend you. To your God.”

T
HE
G
OOD
L
IFE
        

C
UE THE NEWSREEL
to the mid-1980s. Here flowers the good life, in Calgary. Here it springs eternal, from the genteel wildernesses steeping in the compost box. There it is—just back of the barbecue pit. Lately I've had some trouble keeping track of it….

If in this country Toronto plays the spinster aunt to Vancouver's kohl-eyed flower child ageing sad, then Calgary is the good life's tow-headed majorette. A Toronto whose plumbing still works. Let's see, that would make Montréal the bitter divorcée …
mais non, ça suffit
. Certainly the future belongs to Calgary. The next big score's just three first downs away. A whole new ball game out there, a world of enterprise. High tech jobs, plans for a new convention centre and casino, big event hospitality. Volunteer armies raised by racketeers.

We have green spaces and rising real estate. We have country stores in the inner city. We ski to reading weekends in mountain cabins, breed pure dogs, grow organic gardens …

It was a good life. But all during those years, when people would exclaim over my wife's beauty I felt a kind of puzzlement. Alluring, yes, seductive, most days. But
beautiful
… the word sometimes came from a man lip's as a rebuke, from a woman's as something abject, a sigh of capitulation. And over those same years, even as our shaggy pride of university dons slouched soft-bellied about the backyard barbecue pit, slipping into the clichés of our lechery and hockey scores like a well-worn pair of mules, our wives—in the kitchen, the bedroom, the gym—were becoming each day more tawny, more trim, more lion-eyed. Particularly mine.

So that now, in the '90s, our wives emerge for us as creatures of not just flesh and blood but bone—at their cheeks, their jaws, their clavicles. And just when we in our stifled desperation see they could be our mantle, the laurel staff of our high office, they are no longer ours to wield.

They run their own consulting firms, and four miles every morning. They wear their hair shorter than ours. Their shoulders are more cleanly defined, their wrists more richly veined. Our hands are soft and white and smooth, theirs are the hands of carpenters from handling hoes and rakes.

They are elemental in the garden, we are pallid in the shade.

Beneath straw hats they glow with the rude health of an honest tan. Hats, they wear beautifully—men's hats, and with an authority perplexingly denied us. Stylish in berets, bowlers and fedoras; cosmopolitan in leather pillboxes and felted fezzes; striking in sandals strapped up the calf—embroidered vests, gladiators' skirts on gladiators' thighs—they are a tribe, fierce and golden.

What are we? A troupe … a troop? Surely not a pride. Pride's too proud a word.

She's teaching herself piano, so one day she can teach our Catherine.

So simple to be superwomen, so hard to be just men.

28th day of August, 1688
,
Mexico City

la excma. señora doña María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga
Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna
,
Madrid

Queridísima María Luisa
,

I
thought to fast from news of you.
¹²
Yet it is not a fast if the hunger is not chosen. Better said, then, when you set out for Madrid, I had thought to starve. I confess this Lenten faithlessness now, as one so deliriously fed since your letter arrived. You vowed you would not forget; yet so weak is my capacity for faith, at times I could not quite believe. And even summoning belief, still I could not
hope
—so very much lies beyond our control.

The year has been a bitter one. Your leaving, and then within a month my mother's death. (But could it be you have not received my last two letters …?) I did not even know of her illness.

Carlos went, thinking I suppose to represent me, though even had I wanted to, I could not have kept him here. Panoayan, it seemed, was always on the way to anywhere Carlos was going. It is hard for me to see them as friends, and yet he had known her twenty years. For nearly as long as I had not seen her.

This time he found Bishop Santa Cruz there, who had come all the way from Puebla and had stayed to celebrate her Mass—for me, but especially for my nephew, Fray Miguel now, who is devoted to him. Greatly do I doubt the honour would have meant much to her—she had little use for churchmen, or for her grandson Miguel, I gather—but it meant a great deal to me, and I was happy for the town. I doubt the church in Amecameca had seen a bishop in quite some time.

How coldly this all rings in the air as I say it aloud. As you know, Isabel and I were not reconciled.

In his visits here since, Bishop Santa Cruz has skirted the issue with great delicacy, as is his way. He has been such a friend, and with you gone
I am more than ever in his care. Still, I was stunned to learn he had been there at the end, been the one to administer her rites. Something in the scene unsettles me. Strain enough to imagine that she had confessed—yet what?

But how can I answer your first letter with such chill gloom?

You have
written
, you are safely returned, your son thrives, and your dear Tomás's prospects for advancement look more shining all the time. You even mention you have looked a little into publishing our collection, and from the way you write of it I will follow your lead and not let my hopes rise too high. As you say, securing the support of the Church there when I do not have it here will be difficult. But since you ask me for a title, perhaps I may still hope a little?

To that small bright thought I venture to add others, and kindle myself a small new fire here in the hearth. I share its little glow now with you: the Bishop, you see, has brought not just support but help and company. A secretary, who should be taking this down even now.
No 'Tonia, that's what a fair copy is for. Take down everything. We decide what to cross out afterwards—and you, we do not cross out—

Would I, the Bishop asks, have any use for a young woman, with little fortune but with a good orthography, a decent Latin he himself has seen to, a passable style in Castilian, a rough familiarity with Italian and Portuguese—and who, if that were not enough, plays the clavichord beautifully? I have since learned she has a fair and improving knowledge of Nahuatl, too, and she is in return teaching me phrases of an Angolan dialect taught her by her mother. What's more, in the privacy of our cell Antonia has been sharpening my fluency in curses, which she spouts with more flair—should she dislodge a book or drop a plate—than a seafaring apostate.

She is also lovely, with a brambly thrum and tangle of tresses such as I have never seen.

My Most Excellent Lady Countess, I take great pleasure in presenting Antonia Mora,
my godsend and salvation
—
did you just cross that out?
—until recently resident in Puebla and now an oblate here in San Jerónimo. Officially her dowry was paid by me, though Bishop Santa Cruz arranged for everything. She lodges here and half her time may be spent working at this table. Henceforth, you shall never have cause to complain of the brevity of my letters. In fact I promise amply to repay (if not in quality then in lines) each line you find the time to write.

The Mother Prioress raised few objections to the Bishop's arrangements. Four thousand pesos is not an inconsiderable sum for a dowry, even were Antonia a nun. The Bishop shifts the credit to me, arguing that I bring the convent treasury many times that amount in donations and commissions. But I have been doing that for years. No, if Mother Andrea is more tractable now, it is for the same reason that she acquiesces in the Bishop's wishes: That nothing short of seeing every nun in Mexico barefoot
¹³
will placate Archbishop Aguiar. In the past few years the Prioress has discovered that in the Archbishop's eyes whatever good we do is little, whatever ill incalculable. I cannot help but laugh remembering that first day he came from the backcountry after his surprise election, the hasty plans you and I laid to win him over with an evening at the palace. Not knowing of his hatred of theatre you made him our comedy's guest of honour; not knowing of his hatred of worldiness in nuns, I dared to write it. Win the Archbishop over—what a fiasco. And remember how we laughed (what else could we do?) over his contortions to avoid you at official functions—so dire, so very grim, the reports of your beauty! How wonderfully you mimed the sudden swerves, the myopic glaring—it was as if I saw him there myself.