Hunger's Brides (124 page)

At the end of the night, with the sky gone grey, we went in to the prayers of Lauds. When we emerged at first light I thought to look one last time, truly look, to see for myself. To lay to rest the stories, the destruction of Puebla, the old volcanoes burning. La Malinche, Iztaccihuatl. To know, perhaps, that none of this night had been true, that we had been in no danger at all. I moved the shelf from the wall and lifted back the tapestry, reached in and felt for the latch. Stiff with disuse the hinges shrieked—I stopped, listened for Antonia, who might only be pretending to sleep. On the rooftop in the early light of morning I looked into the east, out over the grey lake to the volcanoes, the sky behind them blue-black. If I could just see, with my polished eyes. Iztaccihuatl lay dormant, as always, as she had since my earliest memory. A pale grey plume rose from the cone of El Popo. And yet for all the violence in that cauldron I saw such a majesty—how little touched by events, how still.

If I could but see to the camber of its hills, to the roots of its ravines, to the boughs of smoke holding up the sky. With polished eyes. Yet how changed the world below that horizon, the grey flooded fields, the vales of mud, the flood wrack floating all about the city as the
chinampas
had once done. Oh my city, white city of the sun, the lake in among your buildings now, the long mooring cables of your causeways gone. City of Empires, Venice of America.

White Sunflower. How solitary now.

I looked down over the dikes in the streets, the beggars crowding as ever at the gates of San Agustín. Beyond that, up Calle de las Rejas, to the charred timbers and scorched stones of the municipal building tumbled into the square. To the palace blackened to the parapets, the corner closest to the cathedral gone, carrion birds above the plaza. And to the sun, a sickly slug of tin.

There were verses I knew of consolation, that had given and brought it. And there were lamentations, and I sought them out, this time for myself.

But it seemed then the prophets of old spoke for their own people, and not to me. I thought of the heron Ribera, and many things besides. But the closest I could come to giving voice to that anguish was this. It was as if Music itself had died.

O
n Tuesday came the first executions. It began slowly; for we had learned that during the rioting someone had put a torch to the public gallows. Four Indians given death for insurrection. Three lived to be executed; the fourth killed himself. At each corner of the central plaza a pair of hands was stuck on pikes. Concepción came to ask, for the others were asking her, why their hands. On Wednesday, the Viceroy moved into the residence of the Marquis of the Valley, the title and the palace Cortés had been awarded. Six more Indians executed, one
mestizo
. It did not rain. On Thursday, a man from Madrid. No one had expected this. Insurrection from a Creole perhaps, but not from a Spaniard.

If even ten thousand had risen up in the plaza on Sunday, there was work to last a thousand days. It was hard to find a limit to what to believe, hard not to be drawn into imagining what was to come. Without the anchor of the Church, it did not seem impossible that the Viceroyalty might be swept away and all trace of Europe with it. What was to become of us—were we a people?

Work began on a new gallows. By Friday came the news that the Viceroy had ordered the hanging of twenty-nine negroes in the
zócalo
. The men had not been involved in the riot, but on Tuesday had lost control of a herd of pigs they were driving from one of the barrios to the slaughterhouses. The pigs had stampeded just beneath the Viceroys barred and shuttered window at the palace of Cortés. The Viceroy ordered his troops into the streets, his nerve being insufficient to bring him to the windows.
It was said he was hanging the herders now to silence the jeers and restore the dignity of his office. The charge was to be sedition.

I did not believe the rumour, but the stampede and the hangings had happened—after the unnatural events leading to Fray García's death, the sudden vacancy of the posts of Archbishop and Viceroy. In 1611. Such confusions were not surprising. We had acquired a hunger for strange events, portents of end-time and what must come next. Only the previous week there had been the story of the Viceroy coming to his balcony and being struck down by a paving stone. This too had happened, but to Moctezuma, in 1521.

In truth these were echoes of older stories. The fear of sedition, the war on the enemy within, these were as old as the valley itself, as the stories of the dragon twins. I thought I heard in their resurgence now a kind of rhyming.

The people of our valley were once a people of poetry. Their leader was the Speaker. Those who had not learned the people's tongue were mutes, and so the enemies to be feared came from within, for how could the Mexica be overthrown by a people lacking even speech? When the translator Malinche found her way to Cortés, the enemy was no longer mute.

In the week of the riot in our plaza there had been an uprising also in Tlaxcala. Here, it was remembered, uneasily, that for many years prior to the Conquest the Mexica had permitted Tlaxcala its freedom so as to keep a ready supply of war captives within the frontiers of the empire. When the moment came, the Tlaxcalans had fought beside Cortés. The enemy within.

These stories had not been easy to keep from my mind; within them I heard still other echoes of an older tongue. The volcanoes WhiteLady and La Malinche had not come to life, but the women of the valley had. And though Puebla had not been destroyed as we had heard, there had been a kind of rebellion, and there too the enemy within had spoken. For when the Viceroy sent men to commandeer Puebla's grain stores, it was the Bishop of Puebla who barred the way. In Puebla, Santa Cruz was the supreme authority and for weeks before the crisis had been buying grain at high prices and selling at a loss, precisely to pre-empt all talk of hoarding and speculation. Facing down the Viceroy's troops he vowed, before an anxious crowd at the granaries, that the grain of Puebla would not be taken before his vestments were soaked to the last drop of his own blood. I did not doubt his readiness. To sacrifice his martyr's blood before a multitude
would have been such an ecstasy. A few days after the riot, the Viceroy addressed to the Bishop of Puebla a public letter of apology.

How it must have haunted the king's representative, that moment when ten thousand Mexicans of every race and class fell to their knees as if with one mind at the sight of the Sacrament. A moment the Count de Galve did not see, having slipped away in the dress of a monk. One cannot know what goes through a mind at such times. Perhaps he had most feared being dragged to a balcony and stoned.

In the week after the uprising, a crude sketch was affixed to the gates of the deserted palace and beneath the drawing a caption.
For Rent: Coop for Local Cocks and Spanish Hens
. This piece of sedition was authored neither by Indians nor by rabble but by the Creoles—even here their wounded pride showed, for at the palace in fact there were never many local cocks but not a few local hens. I knew this, for I had been one. Everywhere throughout the capital, the Count de Galve was the butt of jokes portraying him as a dandy, a coward, a cuckold. Without the Archbishop he could not govern. His Grace moved vigorously to guarantee public order by threatening hoarders and speculators with anathemas and excommunication, but in truth there had been little to hoard. Within a month and in the Church's hands, the worst of our fears passed, just as they had after the eclipse. If recently the incidence of irregular births had truly risen throughout the parishes, the obvious cause was the months of privation endured by pregnant women, not the work of the Enemy within the womb. But the Church was quick to respond to our hunger for strange events. Neither was the insurgency of the women in the plaza forgotten. From the pulpits came warnings against insubordination, exhortations to obedience, of daughters to their fathers, women to their husbands, sisters to their older brothers, servants to their masters.

For a time, the star of Dean de la Sierra burned brightly. It had been his inspiration to send the young priest and altar boys into the midst of the rioting. Now he sent word through Chaplain de Gárate to ask that I write the carols again this year for the Feast of Saint Peter. He was sorry it was no longer prudent to come himself. I might have tried writing a cycle to placate the Furies, to pronounce words of grace. But this was not what was wanted. I wrote them quickly, hymns to Saint Peter. Father of light, man of the sea, master of the air. New Caesar, great lover of Christ.

Much was said in this time, much was false. Little was said of the Inquisition. I had no reason to expect them. And yet there were days I
could not quite face the idea of being in the locutory if they came. I preferred to be where I was happiest, among my books and collections, and my thoughts. Perhaps I still imagined these to be a form of rebellion. I looked through the shelves, shaking my head at the deterioration there, taking inventory of the damage. The Italians were in a bad state, above them in the ceiling a hairline crack we had not seen. Many volumes waterlogged, the
Commedia
falling to pieces.
Purgatorio
, the journey up that mountain, unreadable. Sitting by the window, I thought of Dante, his part in the fratricidal fighting of his youth. Civil war … his betrayal by the Neri, his banishment from Florence on pain of death by fire. It was not long before I remembered that Galileo had once given two mathematical lectures to the Academy of Florence on the configuration of Dante's Inferno. I was not certain, but I thought the figure had been a spiral. That evening in the library I came to see the Inferno, too, as a sort of instrument. Devised for the amplification of suffering.

In August a letter. This handwriting I knew so well. A letter from a friend on a day when it was needed. I felt my spirits rise as I turned it in my hands. If we were already dead, it was at least a place where letters were delivered … if slowly, for as I opened it I could see the date: April 22nd. There was no saying whether it came directly from the mails, or from some other source. No one had seen the deliverer. Of the three nuns assigned to the porter's gate that day, it was the third who brought the letter up but she had found it already there at the beginning of her turn. With all that was happening, anyone could have accepted a letter without noticing. It would have been better to leave it at that, for eventually the idea came to me that if someone had delivered it on that day in particular, it was because he had been instructed to.

22nd day of April, 1692

Seville

My dearest Juanita,

I shall permit myself to forego the histrionics with you. You were a friend, he was a friend to you. Tomás is dead.

The first great benefit of widowhood is asperity, the second, that it allows me to retire from court life. Even after all we have endured these past two years I cannot quite say it killed him, but Tomás never fully recovered from his early difficulties with the new Queen. Yet I pity her—the King cannot conceive a child. She has said she knows she is
intact but is no longer sure she is quite a virgin. These things are never a secret at court. The watch on his efforts has been like watching a three-legged calf lurching about in a barn. He can scarcely walk or hold his head up. You can imagine the jokes this has tended to, but it is too sad now even for the courtiers. The mirth is quite wrung out of them. And so it is in sober tones that the latest makes the rounds, that the King has begun to consult certain nuns in Oviedo known to be possessed by demons. One has informed him that his impotence was induced when he was fifteen by a potion of dead men's privates mixed into a cup of chocolate by Queen Mariana. One could weep. Because the King and Queen Mother are involved, the Holy Office pretends to consider a distinction offered by the King's confessor: that is, between Satanic divination of the future and now these of the past.
²⁶
In the end someone will likely burn for this, the King's confessor, or a nun.

We have had news of troubles in Mexico and of floods. If I do not quite bring myself to hope all is well with you, I may at least send my hopes that you are safe. The Council of the Indies has received complaints against the Viceroy and chances are he shall be recalled. If he has not been thus far, it is only that there are few men left here to send into a bad situation, and bad news arrives from all over the Empire. And now to have the French sniffing at its carcass, after all the battles my family has fought. I should let myself off too easily to say ‘had I only been a man.' I have seen good men fail here, men like Tomás, and men more capable. Tomás was also a little unlucky, prone to gaffes; some of my advice he listened to, but it was not uniformly good. You have made much of my family's greatness but it is unclear to me what we have accomplished since the Manriques took the field to fight for Isabela. We have had two great centuries, but what does the Order of Santiago stand for now?

Yet even as our hopes have failed all around us, there has at least been the glory of our art. This century has been of a brilliance only France even dreams of matching. They have the playwrights but not the poets, Italy more sculptors but fewer painters—it would take all Europe, or as you have shown me, it would take the court of the old Medicis. Yet for all this time we have been failing. As a girl I saw Velázquez knighted, but by then his heart was already broken. I do not understand it. I wish I could have you here, to help make sense of it for me.