Hunger's Brides (84 page)

“That the King and his new wife have a shared love of poetry?”

Carlos is being particularly obstructive today, given that the guest is his. The Viscount seems not to have noticed. Perhaps the wit at Versailles was too quick for our young émigré.

“Tell us what matters, René Henri.”

“Gladly my lady. Louis' great interest in the lessons taught us by Spain have led him to emulate her in proclaiming our own golden age. And what better model for a palace life than that of our uncle Philip's
Palacio del Buen Retiro?
A great patron of learning, Louis has empowered me to offer don Carlos a singular commission.
Royal Cosmographer!”

“A
gallant offer.”

“He's serious, I assure you, sir. Your income would be handsome. Your skills as an astronomer are well known to him—to all of Europe, after your besting of the famous Father Kino.”

“Skills not much esteemed here, sir, I assure you. Notably by our local poets.”

“So often the case, don Carlos, with prophets in their own land. And Sor Juana, we've convents too in France …”

“Yes, some quite near the palace, I've heard.”

“If my king had the faintest hope you might be persuaded—”

“Nonsense!
She can no more leave than I. We're Mexicans, our place is here.”

“Yes of course,” the Viscount looks slightly bewildered. “I intended—”

“No offence given, René Henri, it's an old debate,” I say soothingly. “After all, you will have noticed with what equanimity Carlos ponders his own departure, if not yet mine. Tell me, is it true they've taken to calling your cousin the Sun King?”

“Perhaps because he throws about so much gold,” Carlos mutters.

“Spoken like a true astronomer, Carlos.”

“Indeed they have, my lady. It is a title which doesn't displease him.”

“Might the title fit so well,
Vicomte
, because his new home is a palace of light?”

“Ah le Palais de Versailles! Mais c'est une merveille!
Which is not to say Mexico—Mexico City outgleams even Paris. But Versailles! Apollo's palace of the dawn
a du luire ainsi a l'aube du temps!”

“I hear he's lavished almost as much on the palace,” says Carlos, “as on the artists he stables there.”

“Louis does seem at times to love his artists more than their art. He's spoiled Boileau beyond redemption and
Racine
—
mais
what a
pauvre type
I am! Sor Juana I've brought for you from France—” says our young visitor, reaching into the leather pouch at his feet, “Don Carlos wrote … that no gift could be more precious to you than books. You've read Molière I'm sure. And Corneille? Yes? I must be making a terrible impression—blathering away like an idiot.”

“Not at all, René Henri. The candid is one of my favourite modes. You wear it well.”

“I had only wanted to say that to gaze on Racine today, once the brightest light of all, is to make one fear our brief golden age is already in its sunset years. The horizon contains none with his talent now. Ah, what a colossus he was!—clawing his way up out of the ooze
des origines des plus obscures
to command centre stage in Paris and defend it against all comers. A sensation at twenty-eight—younger even than Corneille.
When as a boy I first met him, you should have seen the man. But, already at thirty-eight—”

“Not quite your age, Juana.”

“Carlos's sympathies remain with Deiphobe.”

“But no! Were it not for your air of gravity and—”

“Ah,
my gravity,” I
say, unable to resist, “another little reminder of time's swift transits and steep descents. Carlos will be grateful to you.”

“Forgive me, my lady—” he stammers. I feel myself blushing now at the pleasure of seeing him blush, as he struggles gamely on. “I express myself poorly. It's just that if you could see Racine now—hero of my youth—a genius, now grown docile enough to accept the King's commission to write nothing but the Royal Historiography.”

“I suddenly see my existence there as Royal Cosmographer.”

“Have you forgotten, Carlos? You've already refused our guest's offer. Or does it suit you to do so twice in the same hour?”

“Don Carlos may be right, Sor Juana. When I see you both here working at the height of your powers … He might well find the spectre too haunting.”

“If you'll permit me, René Henri, perhaps I might restore some small part of the regard you once held for your Racine. For although it doubtless helps to have served perhaps all Europe's last great king, it will not have escaped an artist of Racine's stature that the burden of service grows heavier these days to the precise extent that the king himself loses the gravity of substance. Though they command realms and empires larger by far than any of the old principalities, how our kings today envy the humblest Asiatic princes the strut of their unthinking despotism, their thoughtless hold on power. How much less need have these little satraps for painters and plays and soaring panegyrics, whereas even the Sun King grows desperate for any art magnifying the faint lustre of his divine right … rather than simply reflecting it as the Moon cannot help reflecting the Sun.”

The Viscount, flushed, struggles in the grip of some beautiful emotion. He seems about to stand. “Clearly, my disappointment has made me ungenerous, my lady. I
am
grateful to you—I think you've come very close to the mark. For it has always seemed to me his collapse began with the failure of his
Phèdre
. By far Racine's greatest work, and not one that much glorifies kings. I've summoned up the nerve to bring you a translation I've made into Castilian, for Mexico's author of
Love is a Greater
Labyrinth
. What a masterpiece,” he says, passing the book through the grille. “They had it in for him. The most famous, the most gifted, the most brilliant—he was too …”

“Superlative?”

“Antonia, will you get Carlos a refresher of the cordial? Perhaps not the lime … something sweeter. And another for the Viscount.”

“But yes, exactly, don Carlos. Superlative. Just half a glass. Thank you, Alexandra. Is it futile to hope my proposed translations of your Iberian classics might help”—he asks this as though it could be anything but futile—“bring a fresh blush of dawn to our French letters? Beginning, as Carlos and I discussed yesterday, with a few of the lesser known poems of his own illustrious progenitor, the great Góngora. And, if this does not come as both premature and presumptuous, some of your own, Sor Juana?”

“Certainly of the obscure variety,” I say pleasantly, “you'll find many more of mine to choose from than among Góngora's.”

“What an oaf you must think me!” Again the beautiful blush.
“Justement
, the whole point I was about to make is that the one luminous quadrant in the French literary firmament is the irrepressible vitality of our women of letters, clearly one thing we share with New Spain. I've brought you a sampling of my favourites. Louise Labé. You'll find in her a kindred spirit. Perhaps you'll give this little volume,” he says, producing it with a flourish,“a small place in a collection fabled throughout Europe. How often have I pictured you, America's Phoenix, in her nest spiced and feathered with books….”

“Candied jalapeños, señor?”

“Why yes, thank you, I have been wondering what these were. Candied, are they. Your servant here—”

“Antonia's an oblate here at San Jerónimo and a friend.”

“Je vous prie pardon, chère demoiselle…
.”

“Oh, I'm sure she's already forgotten it, René Henri. You'll no doubt find women's memories as short here as they are in France.”

“I was about to say she probably saved me from another indiscretion, but perhaps that would have been too much to hope for. It's just that meeting you in person, it's just so …”

“Fabulous?”

“Antonia … save a pepper or two for Carlos.”

“Peppers, you say?” the Viscount asks, having just bitten into one.
“Let me—oh, oh yes, so they are. Perhaps some of that cordial, Alexandra?

“Antonia.”

“Eh?”

“Antonia.

“Of course.
Antonia.”

“The
lime,
señor?”

“Yes, yes, Antonia, any kind at all.”

“You were telling us,” Carlos puts in before he can take a drink, “about France's women of letters.”

“Yes—Labé,
bien entendu
, but we have more than just
femmes poètes.”

“Though what could be more exalted than lady poets,
verdad?”

“More beet cordial, don Carlos?” Antonia asks, eyes merry.

“There is Christina of Sweden—who was of course not one of us but wrote French like a Frenchwoman. There are those among our women of letters who have been in mourning for months—but perhaps I should be extending my condolences. The world's two most learned women—you two must have corresponded.”

“No.”

“Truly what a pity, for you both. She maintained quite a lively correspondence with France. Including with Anne Lefèvre Dacier, daughter of the distinguished classicist, and a formidable poet and scholar herself. But among our contemporaries is one still more notorious. Madeleine de Scudéry is making a new kind of literature, very novel. Poor Boileau waxes apoplectic on the new genre. Women's writing, he calls it—love letters, naked passions …” The Viscount launches into an enthusiastic defence. “What Boileau will not see is France's women writers offering the delicate folds of their inner landscape as an intimate response to the swell and thrust of the great massed forces of History as written since Herodotus—”

“The Viscount,” Carlos observes, “fairly peppers his speech with vivid metaphor.” Although the tone is still dry Carlos seems somewhat anxious about the turn in the conversation.

“So wide is her renown,” the Viscount presses on as though he hasn't heard,“so broad her popularity and so great the respect for her erudition, all France has begun calling her Sappho—as I believe you yourself, Sor Juana, are called the Tenth Muse here … how curious! Her first book of letters takes Sappho for its heroine—”

“After Ovid.”

“Precisely, yes … Antonia.” He has glanced at her more than once, and who could blame him, but does so now with a more complex interest. “And though the style has evolved, this, the tenth book of her great inner epic,” he says, extracting another volume,“makes Sappho her protagonist once again. She's very subversive.”

“Sappho?” asks Antonia sweetly.

“No—well yes, but de Scudéry I meant. If Louis read her more carefully he might be less enamoured. Though excessive at times, my regal cousin is fundamentally conventional.”

“Subversive in what sense, René Henri?”

“She makes Sappho the daughter—the offspring
plutôt
, of Scamandrogine, an androgynous entity. To her discerning readers it's very clear that all creators—all humanity really, not just artists—
sont au fond bisexués.”

“Monsieur,”
Carlos sputters,
“estamos en un convento!”

“You're entirely correct,
señor
—as a nun, such ideas must be repugnant to Sor Juana. But surely,” adds the young aristocrat, eyeing me appraisingly, “to the scholar and the poet, they cannot be so entirely offensive.”

Such an amusing child. Does he expect with such a pallid challenge to get me to raise my colours for him?

“Carlos has spent enough time at convents to know they are less an island of virtue than an isthmus. The heart,
Monsieur
, is the same, no matter how tightly bound the breast. No word or idea is in itself offensive to me. It's a question of intent.”

“If I have expressed my intent poorly …”

“If you have, you must feel free to express it more precisely. Please, go on.” And how my strange young visitor does go on. I had been willing to help Carlos discover what the Viscount was up to, and whether the offer from Versailles should be considered sincere. For if it is, Carlos is in no position to be dismissing it so lightly. But I have begun to sense where this is leading—let him at least get there quickly.

“De Scudéry's Sappho inverts the conventional picture. De Scudéry has Phaon propose marriage—Phaon is—but of course you know. Sappho accepts his suit but not his proposal. She will instead co-habit with him, but only if he consents to follow her and live among the Amazons. Instead of being ruined, the androgyne's daughter dictates
the terms, and continues to write every day! She will not submit to what she charmingly calls the
long slavery of marriage
. …”

“Now there,
Vicomte
, is a subject fit to discourse upon at length. Carlos will bring you another day, perhaps …?”

“I do hope we may, for I know you will not fail to be fascinated by what Mlle de Scudéry is attempting, with an artistry capable of transforming even the basest passions—the insatiate inversions
du saphisme
—into pure elegance. The signs are all there for those willing to probe a little—Louis would never stand for open talk of
l'amour lesbien
—”

“Señor!”
barks Carlos.

“Sor Juana, do you not think this might be the singular gift of women's art? To ennoble yearning, and imbue with a kind of grace the grotesque impulses of our inner life …?”

“You seem to insist, Viscount, on the grotesque and the debased,” says Carlos heatedly. He can at such moments be very dear. “Clearly this is neither the province of women's art nor the special province of art itself.”

“Yet is Sor Juana herself not at this very moment making a poetical study of Sappho …?”