Hunger's Brides (76 page)

Strange to think that I have never once laid eyes on him, on whom so much now depends.

The Bishop of Puebla, meanwhile, has proved in almost every respect the Archbishop's opposite. And while the Archbishop of Mexico has never been to San Jerónimo or any other convent in his city, the Bishop of Puebla rarely misses a chance to call. He comes to the capital so often lately it's said Mexico has two archbishops. Though there is little he may do to soften the Archbishop's anger, there is much he may do behind the scenes, as he does now. And so at long last it seems there is help for me.

As an oblate Antonia is bound to the rule of our convent by every vow but that of enclosure. In the way of the Indian cooks and the servants of the wealthiest sisters here, Antonia, our sole oblate, is freer than we sisters are, if only in this one regard. So trivial it must seem to them, this liberty, and yet so enormous to me. She insists on doing everything within her power, from the cooking here in our rooms down to the most repellent of chores. She persuaded me finally to divest myself of my one servant, who had become pregnant—which started up all the speculations again about just what sort of errands Sor Juana sends one on. She swore the conception was immaculate, and while I did not doubt that it
seemed so to her, I sent her nevertheless to my sister Josefa, who will treat her kindly.

A secretary is of course a source of vanity, mortifying in a nun—and in employing five secretaries simultaneously, truly the Learned Aquinas must have been an Angelic Doctor not to succumb; so it would be ungracious of me to reproach my friend the Bishop for not having arranged something like this years ago. In his own defence he might simply answer that there are not five Antonias in all the New World. In addition to taking dictation and writing out fair copies, Antonia arranges for their delivery, wears a penitential groove into the flagstones between my bookshelves and the convent library, treads out still other channels from the porter's gate to the city's printers and booksellers.

And yet she persists in vexing me with complaints that she would prefer to stay here, when a walk in the streets is for me a dream slow to fade. She might not go out at all, could I not bribe her with a few classes in poetry. In exchange for which she pretends to enjoy helping me with two new duties I have been given. Nominally similar, one I dislike as much as the other I enjoy. Leading religious instruction in Nahuatl for the servants is the first, but the second is preparing classes purely of my own devising for a dozen of our more promising novices. With respect to the former, I well know how their thoughts bend our Faith to flow in courses more natural to them, and who am I of all people to say they should not bend? It makes me feel like a Jesuit. But as for our academy, bending our thoughts is precisely the object of our academic devotions, even as one bends both in penance and in pleasure.

Once again it is the Bishop's intercession I have to thank—and Mother Andrea's newly tractable mood, but even here Santa Cruz presents her with an argument worthy, in its cunning, of a certain Florentine counsellor to princes.
¹⁴
‘My dear Mother Andrea, while so many of our leading citizens come to consult the myriad wise and learned nuns throughout the capital, and come to be edified by still other sisters skilled in music and poetry, San Jerónimo—in competing for patrons—depends more than do all the city's other convents on so very few of its gifted sisters….'

Sly enough on the face of it. It also quietly reminds her we must work doubly hard to repay his favours here, with the new convent of Santa Monica taking up so much of his time in Puebla. And lying beneath this reminder is one not so gentle. For while Father Núñez is vain about his
humility, Bishop Santa Cruz is supremely serene in his considerable vanity—unless the compliment of his favour is returned with too little gratitude.

In evidence I give you a recent sample of the gossip that the sisters bring by my cell in any unoccupied instant. If there is one treat of which we are insatiate it is news of our sister convents, and this particular story even I cannot resist, since it concerns not only ours and the new convent of Santa Monica, but a young woman from near Tepeaca, about a half day's travel from Puebla. (Antonia's eyes have gone wide—she is from near Tepeaca herself, a town with which I have associations of my own.)

The young woman of our story, having one sister already professed at the convent of San Jerónimo in Puebla, had been trying for twelve years to take the veil. Living in an outbuilding on the family hacienda, mortifying her flesh, praying in her solitude, fasting and having visions. The people of the town had taken to calling her the Hermit—with scorn by some, no doubt.
¹⁵
But among the
campesinos
of the haciendas were those who revered her as a
beata
.
†
A vocation that the Holy Office has been making more than perilous. So this and a terrible loneliness, I suspect, gave her excellent reason to seek the protection of the veil. Bishop Santa Cruz had initially found sufficient cause to take her. She was of a good family that after the death of the father fell into straitened circumstances. Despite her emaciation she must have been pretty, for it is common knowledge that Santa Cruz favours pretty nuns. For obvious reasons, I have never quite found a way to ask him if this is true, or why it should be so. Does he imagine a plain woman needs no protection, or is there no pleasure in a secret possession unless others, knowing, would covet it? In any event he was disposed to take all seven remaining sisters into the college that was about to become the convent of Santa Monica.

What, then, could possibly have happened that even months later she had still not been granted entry? She was further away from it in fact—as far away as could be imagined. The scene I'm about to present is still almost unimaginable to me … Santa Cruz has just celebrated Mass. A half-starved girl throws herself at his feet, begging admission to his newest convent, as she has done every day for weeks. And indeed, though she has done nothing differently today, he loses his temper, shouts at her to stop harassing him, and thrusts her angrily away. The cathedral of our second greatest city was filled that day with worshippers. He still wears the chasuble, the dalmatic, the stole. Stunned, anguished, in a weakened
state, as the girl makes her way from the cathedral she stumbles and falls heavily down the steps.

This from a man usually in such complete possession of himself. A man I like and respect.

Here is what I believe led to this. When first learning of the Bishop's plans for his family, the brother of the poor hermitess protested. He had just taken over the family hacienda, was about to lose all his sisters at once, and was now faced with not just losing their aid and company but somehow finding the means to pay seven dowries. (For once I am able to put Carlos's laments about his university stipend to some use: each dowry equalled some fifteen years' salary; the seven together would be enough to pay 105 professors of Mathematics and Astronomy for one year.)

And yet this was only the material component of the objection, and the lesser, I suspect. For here is the rough crux of our story:
the punctilious pride of these men
. Apparently the girls' college had been, before Santa Cruz took it over, a house of reclusion for prostitutes. Complicating the matter further, the Bishop had the idea of naming it the College of Saint Mary of Egypt, after the prostitute who had signed on to the sea voyage from Alexandria to the Holy Land. How does the
Lives
put it?—not for the pilgrimage
‘but in the hope that life on board ship would afford her new and abundant opportunities of gratifying an insatiable lust.'

The brother balked at the blemish such a name (even of one who on that voyage became a saint!) would leave upon his own. The fortunes of seven women turned on this—and for one woman in particular, the hopes of a dozen years. For his part, Bishop Santa Cruz, incensed at the slight to his honour (or to his tastes in nomenclature), had refused to so much as speak to her again (and refused also to pay her elder sister's convent dowry, allegedly breaking his solemn promise). Matters would have rested there, if the Bishop's own spiritual director hadn't intervened after the scandal at the cathedral. Santa Cruz was finally persuaded to reconsider, and the Provincial of the Dominican Order went himself into the country to collect her.

Having ears to hear, Mother Andrea needs no help to grasp that the only thing worse than the Archbishop's enmity is compounding it with the Bishop's. Thus, in the matter of our new classes for novices, it now pleases Andrea no less than it does me that in our refectory once a week I am training a whole
generation
of my own replacements.

How I would love for you to be our honoured guest and, should you so incline, guest lecturer too at our academy—this week especially. I had thought to do a close study of the
Ars Amatoria
as a farewell to Ovid, but then, with Antonia's anxious assent, took a more prudent tack. And yet if I tell you we will be studying
Heroides 15
, perhaps you will not think me quite so much the coward.

(Wait, I've thought of a way to have you present, or rather bring our echoes to you, as you shall presently see….)

And as for our collection of verses, I promise to think about a name suitable to an introductory volume. All year I have felt myself slowly sinking beneath the weight of a thousand unasked tasks and cares; as a consequence, the titles that have come to mind are quite ghastly. My ideas run to such as the Danaïdes: the fifty granddaughters of Poseidon and the Nile condemned unfairly by the judges of the dead to haul water in sieves for having murdered (but in self-defence!) the fifty sons of Aegyptus. From which tender reflections spring such inspiring titles as
Hypermnestra's Sieve, Lernaean Lake …
I had almost settled on
Amymone's Spring
, as it is a source that never runs dry even during the cruellest droughts on the driest of plains. But since the water springs from holes in the stone where the trident's tines went in, just before Amymone's ravishment by Poseidon … Well, you will see the problem instantly.

If a nun absolutely must be pagan, she should at least be chaste.

All my love, and to your two men my warmest embraces.

día 28 de agosto, Anno Domini 1688
  del convento de San Jerónimo
,
de la Ciudad Imperial de México
,
    
Nueva España

SCENE I: After
Nones
, hour of siesta. A convent refectory, between the convent kitchens and the temple. The refectory is thirty varas long by nine wide, its ceiling ten varas high; just beneath the ceiling are windows, a clerestory of three at equal intervals along the north and south walls; high up on the chapel side, a screened lattice behind which appear, from time to time, figures in vague outline. Behind a closed double door, the kitchens, from which now come the sounds of pots and dishes being washed. From the kitchens to the rostrum, two long oak tables run in parallel, the full length of the room, to where two women sit. One in a rough brown shift, the other in the Hieronymite habit: white tunic (silk) with full, tapering sleeves, black scapular, white coif, parchment escutcheon high at the breast, black cincture at the waist, rosary extending to the knees…
.

  
[Antonia holding a book]
Juana, tell me you haven't.

  I have.

  But
why?

  You thought
Heroides 15
rash.
†
So I prepared something else.

  But the
Ars Amatoria?
—a banned book!

  You're sure.

  No, but I've been reading it, haven't I?—a book like this
must
be.

  Mightn't you be thinking of Ovid's own banishment? Which I suspect was more about the conduct of Ovid's relations with the emperor than about the
Arts of Love
. You don't imagine Roman emperors were so easy to shock.

  But why teach it
now?

  You mean why here. The
Amores
I would teach as the first pedestal of courtly poetry—with which a nun, if she is to entertain the courtly in her locutory—

  But this—
[lifting the book]

  Whereas the
Ars Amatoria
, I would teach as a manual of self-defence.

  
But—

  
But
I will not be teaching it, after all—ever eager as I am to please you, 'Tonia. Which leaves us with the
Heroides
, since they'll be here in ten minutes.

  You never planned to do the other at all.

  Antonia!

  It was so I wouldn't argue anymore about doing the
15
. But Juana, the
Archbishop
—