Hunger's Brides (107 page)

Z
OMBIE
        

W
E RETURN BRIEFLY
to my own little life. The first day of 1995 offered the usual bleary hours of unwelcome reflections. Maybe it wasn't the career of high academic adventure I'd once dreamed of, but I felt I was learning at last how to settle into my future, into what it might no longer hold. The dramatic mists of my own early promise had begun to thin, revealing the berms and hummocks of a more regular professional landscape. To thin? The verb, I believe, is dissipate.

Even so, the lamp of ambition smouldered bravely on like a censer, flickering with some recent successes. A new line of publications well-received, nomination to the committee organizing an important cycle of conferences slated for Calgary—‘the Learneds' were the scholarly equivalent of the Olympic Games but with more bloodshed. There was an invitation to guest lecture at a good school in Britain. Madeleine and I were talking about a European vacation with stops in the U.K. for meetings. As we are about to see, I was working in what was for me a new area. One, in fact, that Beulah had put me on to. One more thing I have to thank her for.

But the charges of academic theft, one does not give thanks for. The official penalties pale next to the unofficial. The tainted party is, academically speaking, a pariah. Once the stain sets, it's almost impossible to remove. The stain has set.

So yes, perhaps a motive for serious countermeasures—but not this degree of violence. Shattered glass everywhere, blood smeared on the walls, sprayed across a ceiling, a bed. Sane, educated people do not do this. It is counterproductive.

And for anyone prepared to consider that I might care, I believe there are moral issues.

If I had to guess when she decided to drag me personally into her apocalypse I would have to trace it to the weekend of the craft fair, the weekend of my fortieth birthday in May of 1993. But over the course of our last summer together, I handed her the tools to do the job more professionally. If our weekend adventure had begun rancorously it was only because I'd insisted, where I usually made no effort at all. I had taken a genuine interest in an aspect of her work. Yes, the first ideas were hers. This is not theft. This kind of cross-pollination
happens all the time between students and their advisors. I've already conceded that my work had gone somewhat stale. If I had a vocation it was Scepticism. Postmodernism had been a career accident—a fact of which she tirelessly delighted in reminding me. But in the spring I'd said something off-handed about the Baroque, to which she'd replied that the Postmodern was just the Baroque with its heart torn out. How had she put it? “Bled—bones cracked, marrow sucked. Your Postmodern is a zombie.”

The remark got me thinking. About using the Baroque as a way of getting at the Postmodern. This too, I admit, was her idea first—though I'd always had the impression that for her it was more about getting at me. I believe subsequent events justify me in this completely. Or incompletely.

But this is not theft either. She had no interest in the Postmodern, which was part of her charm, while I had none in the Baroque, per se, had in fact to overcome a certain squeamishness. I had conquered a similar antipathy towards things Latin American, initially by telling myself that the great master of the maze, Borges, was really one of us, his mother being English. It was a start. Surely I could do as much for the Baroque, by means similarly primitive if necessary. So when shortly after my birthday weekend she slipped through my office mail slot a copy of a Baroque play, I read it with attention.
Love is a Greater Labyrinth
. Partway through it I saw a connection, saw in the idea of a labyrinth something I could use. It was a fresh avenue by which to go beyond the usual: of pointing up to what degree the postmodernist repudiation of authority relied on quotations of their own godlike authorities; of pointing out that deconstruction was a construct like others, that Foucault was dead—indeed had always been—and that his texts and intentions were the flotsam of power discourses to the same extent any other author's were. This was where I had begun with
The Liar Paradox
.

But what I glimpsed in this conjunction of the Baroque and the labyrinth was a way of looking at the new that was itself very old. I had a hunch that the very antiquity of mazes would show up pomo as old hat. But I found more as the maze research progressed. I am only speaking now of what I had glimpsed. It was embryonic; some were good leads, others not. If this were about me and not about how I was once perceived, I might try to give some idea of where the trail has finally led.

In the Baroque and the Postmodern we had two periods obsessed with end-times: one bent on fulfilling the conditions for Apocalypse, the other in proclaiming itself the End of History. Two periods obsessed with games and their rules—but for the Baroque it is the game of Life and Death, while for the Postmodern the real game is to spot the trick in the magic, and thereby dispel it. (Which is to say, if the trick makes the illusion, spotting the trick makes the illusion unreal.) Construction, deconstruction. Basically, Derrida turning Descartes on his head. But the next step is an odd one, if we substitute ‘the construct of Reality' for ‘illusion.' Having spotted the tricks in our construction of Reality, the Postmodernist goes on to treat the very notion of the real as if it were a magic. Performed by a charlatan.

What could produce such a fantastic leap? Maybe a few interrelated things: a long habit of safety; a complacent illusion of magic as mere parlour trick; the presumption that while illusions may be dangerous, dispelling them is play.

For the Postmodern, the game is not true, not therefore real, and neither are its consequences—what matters is getting to the end. Which is where the Baroque comes in. For the Postmodern, mind is error, truth in the eye of the beholder, and beauty irrelevant. The untrue is unreal. For the Baroque, Truth is given, beauty is in the mind of the beholder, and in the eye is error. The Untrue is fatal.

The thinkers of our period taunt power from a position of privilege and the habit of safety; those of the Baroque serve absolute power from a position of ambivalence—of, say, fear and longing and contempt. Ergo mazes. The Postmodern's experience of the maze could be said to be from above, the Baroque's from below and within. But there were mazes of other kinds too. The terrain was extraordinarily rich.

These were all architectural metaphors of knowledge and experience. I had been publishing on the subject since Beulah was twelve. She knew my work, as only now I have come to know hers. How can they say the development wasn't mine? How does someone with no track record make me a pariah among my colleagues?

The answer is not complicated: By being prepared to go far enough.

I might instead have hoped she would be delighted by my renewed interest—though I only mentioned it to her after she was technically no longer my student. It had barely crossed my mind to point out that
she had not listened to me and now her project was going nowhere, or rather everywhere at once; whereas I had picked up a small corner of it and turned it to account, by working with method and discipline. But this was our summer of cruelty. I have admitted my conduct toward her in other respects was unsavoury. Still, I thought of this as something entirely separate. I thanked her for her input, gave her regular updates over the summer. All part of a healthy model of cross-fertilization. If it is fair to say I had come to a dead end in my work, it is also fair to thank Beulah for providing me with a way out of it, a kind of rebirth. Any sane person sees we are speaking metaphorically. What Beulah saw, or heard, rather, was a call to rip a hole in the bright shiny fuselage that was my life. My Lie.

A little less than two years later, I would be buying a last-minute ticket for one, one-way to London.

T
wo long months had I been given to consider my situation. Sor Philothea's preface to the letter so worthy of Athena was dated November 25, 1690. The first leaflet denouncing it appeared on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The leaflet was signed simply
the Soldier
, who fairly wrung his spleen dry. And though he used phrases I was sure he had heard from Núñez, truly was the good soldier all but deranged—raving, emotional, unable to follow a train of argument, and I could not help wondering if the author was not His Grace the Archbishop himself.

On the third Sunday of Advent, a new series of leaflets appeared, all signed
the Soldier
. Polished, learned, theological. Sane. Now there were two soldiers. This one's denunciations branched out, amplifying on the hints Sor Philothea had obligingly given the Holy Office. The negative
finezas
were clearly and foully heretical. As for Sor Juana, the list of her heresies was long, and would grow.
Illuminist. Gnostic. Arian
.

The inventory was unnerving enough. Surely we had to do something, my many friends urged—write a response, mount a defence. But so far the Inquisition's involvement was unofficial. It would be undignified for them to display the least sign of haste, in moving against a mere woman especially. The people themselves must be seen to clamour for protection, yet the
vulgo
had thus far been quiet—no, not quiet but Decembers offered much else to talk of.

January was a quieter month. Though the days were lengthening, the nights were longer.

The day after Epiphany another run of leaflets flared up, these ones signed. Manuel Serrano, Franciso Ildefonso—two non-entities from Puebla, along with five other complete obscurities.
My seven slanderers, my impugners, my persecutors.
⁸

On the second Sunday in January the sermons of attack began all over the city. There was no stopping it now, and no stopping my friends, who had taken to meeting without me, since I would do nothing to help myself. They had to have Father Xavier Palavicino. Palavicino was ambitious, brave, eloquent, and a great admirer of the much slandered nun. Here in the temple, before the month was out, my attackers would have our answer.

Most Sundays, the only threats to the calm of a solemn Mass are the neighbourhood delinquents who have made a sort of ball court of the plaza. The double doors giving onto the ball court, while thick, are in such poor repair as to let bright brawling day sift in through the rifts and splits in the thick oak panelling. On a crisp Sunday morning in January there may be two dozen children outside, and it can sound as if there are twice that number. As Xavier Palavicino waded ever more perilously into his discourse, I found myself praying for another hundred young scufflers to drop by for a game outside.

Father Palavicino chose his moment carefully if not his words. The date being the feast day of the learned widow Santa Paula. Our convent chapel had received distinguished visitors before, but rarely in such numbers. Front row, centre, kneeling on cushions, were the Viceroy and Vicereine, the Count and Countess de la Granja. On her right the Archbishop's Vicar-General. On the Viceroy's left a nobleman from the highest ranks of the Spanish aristocracy, exiled to Manila and sufficiently forgiven since then to make his way back as far as Mexico. Beside him the fallen angel of Versailles, le Vicomte d'Anjou. Three rows back is a Creole suspected of sedition on whose behalf I had once interceded with María Luisa, to secure his early release from prison. Though he perhaps meant well, his presence was not a comfort.