Hunger's Brides (118 page)

The rain had stopped. Sálazar had gone. I sat at the clavichord working out some notions Ribera had once had for
Caracol
. From the courtyard, quiet now, I heard water running in the gutters, droplets falling into puddles from the rose bushes, without blossom in this season. Those leaves that remained had gone yellow.

Did you ever wonder where the princess went, Antonio? Don't you ever wonder where they go?

I think Sálazar had remembered after all. The advice. I was happy he had taken the time to know Ribera, to love and keep him. Ribera was proud of that love, of the younger man's gift, not at all like a rival.

I had had a thought for Cantor de Ribera that morning, two hours before. To have been there. Though in a convent one grows used to friends dying elsewhere. I could not quite picture him then, or quite hear. On other days, yes. The hoarseness in his voice, as he announced he
had secured for us this last commission. The long neck, the big Adam's apple, the long black brows darting up, dipping down. I wished I had tried that sonnet on a heron, so many years ago. My problem had not been entirely poetic. In praise of a cantor, a song heralding his voice as a heron's could not help but be suspected of irony.

It could not be good to be a heron and called a swan. In truth if the swan was the emblem of Apollo and Orpheus, it was as likely for the graceful curve of its neck. For Apollo and Orpheus were lyrists, first of all. An injustice to herons … the swan's neck was graceful, the heron's just long. And yet I wondered if the heron's song was any more raucous than the swan's … save its last.

Who could live a life anticipating how every act, every step, every gesture, good or bad, might be remembered one day? Every line said or written in earnest or anger or jest. Who could live this way?

After our father Saint Jerome, maximal Doctor of Holy Mother Catholic Church, we may see Beauty in terms of the three transcendental attributes of God: Oneness, Goodness, Truth. Beauty is the transcendental perfection of God in time. Beauty is God's plenitude, an overflowing—vast yet in nothing superfluous—pouring down in a cascade of music through the orders of Creation, through the stars and heavens, through the whole sublunary world—human, animal, vegetal, mineral—down to the smallest of atoms. Since the Fall, so is it also with our human senses: each being an instrument crafted to resonate differently. In full possession of our senses we are like unto a prism breaking beauty into its spectra and gamuts and separate registers—red, blue, gold—mi, fa, sol—sight, hearing, touch—that scatter in tints and tones and hints and hues, in flocks, in flights, in schools, through water, into air, over ground.

But to return us whence we have fallen is a long climb and arduous. And in assembling our provisions for this ascent, it is not enough to lay the evidence of the senses side by side. These instruments of mind must be fused, in the sense that Lope tells us the painting of Rubens is a poetry for the eye. Imagine poetry, then, as painting for the ear. It is the mind that slowly teaches us to weave together these separate elements into a score, and in this sense we rightly call Theology the Queen of the Sciences, for it is she who enters the final chamber, the abode of the Beloved.

Even as to the lover every aspect of the Beloved is beauty … the turns and pauses of His mind, the fragrance of His skin, the warmth of His breath as if the radiance of a perfect fire … but here one must not go on too far. In recollecting these, the Queen in her actions is like a lover straining to learn every small and separate thing of her Beloved. These are the notes, and she strives to show us how to compose them in their very fullest arrangement, to fuse them in perfect union, making full use of each and every instrument.

Mind is the shepherd, Mind is the falconer, Mind is the net that recalls and collects, Mind is the guide that shall one day bring them all home to rest. Our mind is an instrument of collection, and a collection of instruments.
Logica, inventio, divinatio
, and the finest of all is
admiratio
,
for it is this gift of marvelling at the world that brings us most closely on its own to our condition before the Fall.

But it is the soul in Grace that plays them. The soul is in the grace of the orchestra, the Soul is the orchestra of Grace. And its Music is Love.

U
nnumbered times had the capital been warned, a dark day was to come. Make ready. It would be for all to see, a terrible majesty written in the sky.

It was Carlos's plan to prepare everyone this time. With the mood in the city now, could one even imagine it, the pandemonium?—to which I wondered why the authorities feared our panic so much more than our fury.

With the Archbishop's blessing, Carlos had spent the past weeks going to the churches to explain what was to come. Forecasts of doom and darkness from the pulpit were hardly a departure. The predicators were agreeable, pleased at last to have a date and that date so near. And even an approximate hour. Sermons were polished and studded with quotations from the books of Revelations and Amos, dark references to the breaking of the seals, and to Nineveh. The forecasts propagated from the churches and spiralled out through the plazas, amplified by doomsayers in the streets and echoed in the marketplaces. The people were frightened, the people were prepared. They had no sense that the source of this foreknowledge was in any way different from prophecy. All had the date now and an hour and the hour was drawing nigh. August 23rd, 1691.

There were small flaws in the plan, but chief among them: no one is ever quite prepared for a total eclipse of the sun.

Carlos had only just purchased a new telescope and with a generosity typical of him gave the old one to Antonia. He explained to her, and again with diagrams, how the parabolic mirror had greatly enhanced the quality of the sightings since Galileo's day. He came to San Jerónimo several times to instruct us in its features, and the day before the eclipse spent all afternoon with me reviewing patiently, despite his growing agitation, the geometric formulas I would be using in
Caracol
. Before leaving that evening he fitted several layers of dark brown glass over the telescopic eyepiece and stressed that they must not be removed until the sun's eclipse had reached its totality. The plan was that Antonia
should set up the telescope in the very centre of the patio, for there were numerous events to watch for in every quadrant of the sky.I did not think the chances particularly good. It had been raining for a year.

Thursday dawned cloudless. On this of all mornings, a clear blue sky was itself an uncanny sign, but particularly for those who still doubted. The sun shone over the city on the lake and the lake within the city, scintillating in ten thousand places, in the sloughs of the streets and in garden puddles and cattle troughs. Just before nine o'clock in the morning, two before the hour fixed by the prediction, the street dogs disappeared from the alleys of the barrios. Not long after, five thousand Indians along the canals stepped from their traces—to be restrained by neither shouts of threat nor curses, by whip nor iron goad—and according to the witness of their overseers, melted away like wraiths. At nine o'clock on August 23rd the sun died.

The imperial capital of Mexico, city of the centre of the earth, was cast onto an otherworldly plane of night as the Sixth Seal was opened, and the
Sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the Moon became as blood
. Swiftly, with the bellringers standing by, the bells of the city began their tolling from fifty belfries and campaniles. Many who had lived through the comet of 1680 said this was far worse, the fear, the wretchedness, the loneliness in the violent milling darkness, as the streets filled and the light failed. To four hundred thousand people came the moments of greatest terror they had known.

Moving as though blind, stumbling falling through the dark, the people of the city made for the sound of the bells. Beneath the belfries lay shelter. In the movement of the bells lay life and hope of Life. The churches were lit by thousands of candles, the churches were Light. The plazas before the churches were thronged with the bereft, crying out for succour, calling out for comfort.

Before the sermons ended—indeed before they had quite begun—the light was already returning to the world, though the people did not seem directly to notice it.

By noon, processions of ascetics groaned their way through the streets, like carts heavy burdened, from the churches and temples past the convents and monasteries, and echoed within the walls by smaller processions moving round the patios like larger wheels of penance and within them cogs.

It was to have been a moment of triumph for human learning and science. We had been prepared, to prevent panic. There were small flaws in the plan. Yet the Grand Plan had emerged triumphant.

When he came to San Jerónimo afterwards, shortly past noon, Carlos and I quarrelled bitterly, but it would never have occurred to me I might not see him again. This is not to say I had no sense of approaching danger. It was never far if we were not careful, and I at least was not—how pleased he was that the plan had proven useful. The Church had not been caught off guard.

There is a peasant science of prediction that has not yet been fathomed, one that links eclipses to earthquakes. When the first quake came three days later we half expected it—the half who did not dread it. The quake itself was not violent. Anyone raised here had experienced worse. More unusual were the aftershocks, their intensity, undiminished from first to last over the course of a week, but most of all their number: I had not thought to count, but it came to be said there were forty, forty exactly.

It seemed that a people in distress was versed in an older learning, its holy texts in the scripts of stillbirths and deformities, in the flights of birds, in the spill of fresh vitals in the dust…. Known to this ancient wisdom is that eclipses exert malignant influences—stillbirths and live births of disharmonious proportions, deformities of ominous shape and configuration—infants with limbs shaped like stars, the heads of animals. It was a Mexica word that was used.
Coatepoztles
. Serpent's children, born without souls. In Europe these were the
monstra
catalogued by the magus Paracelsus.
²⁰
Inaminatis, lemures, umbragines, gnomi, gigantes, silvestres, vulcanales
—in the locutories we began to hear talk of these, though the source of this learning here in Mexico was not clear to me. Portents of end-time and disasters yet to unfold, creatures conceived in illicit couplings, born
ex negativo
—apart from Creation, from a life out of Time, away from God's eyes. The common people had become learned in Paracelsus, but then, he had learned this from them.

It was not long before there appeared an anonymous leaflet plastered to walls in the plazas and public markets, near the prayer niches and places of worship—and all around San Jerónimo. Were women
monstra
, the text began, were they too without souls—like the stillborn and malformed they brought into the world? The author had assuredly read Paracelsus. The leaflet might simply be the latest in the series of attacks
on me, a warning or some kind of crude slur. But it might be something else, for in just this manner did the Inquisition sow its seeds to determine what fears might find congenial soil. In Spain the fear of witchcraft had never taken, whereas in France that horror and its harvest seemed inexhaustible. Here in the New World, elements within the Church still viewed the Indian rites and customs as a parody of our Faith propagated by the Enemy, Corrupter of Worlds. Despite this, the knowledge of the midwives and healers, their skill with plants and medicines, usually seemed, to the common people, more wondrous than malignant. But the climate was much changed, and the new leaflet could be seen as an attempt to gauge it. The author had taken up this theme and twisted it, for though the
monstra
were from Paracelsus, the idea of Woman as
monstra
was not. How was one to oppose this, unless with Paracelsus himself? Woman was part of the Creation. God was the first world, Man the middle; but Woman was the last, her matrix the smallest world. The baleful influences in her womb were not from congress with the Devil but from conjunctions of planetary influences called the Ascendents—to which Woman was naturally more susceptible, for we carried a planet within us. Paracelsus did not believe in witches, considered women too soft-headed for heresy and believed the greatest calamity that could befall us was chastity, which, if persistent, predisposed Woman to a deep and dangerous melancholy. So while a certain nun was torn between her predispositions and a diabolical temptation to defend her sex, this seemed precisely the trap. What new pamphlets and sermons of defence and counterattack might this not spur? Who would be the next hurt?