Hunger's Brides (129 page)

“And that is …”

“That unless you turn over those papers, I'd just be taking your money. I don't mind losing, but I
hate
losing bad. Half these charges the cops threatened you with are chickenshit and they know it—breaking and entering—
theft under!
for Christ's sake. So if everything happened that night the way you told me …”

“I told you the truth.”

“But you don't know the whole truth yourself, do you? Or there's something you're not telling me about. Doctor Gregory, is there anything more I have to know? Abortions. Miscarriages—missed periods. Answer me carefully, now. Anything?”

“No.”

“I hope not. 'Cause then there's definitely no grounds for a charge of attempted murder. And we say the drugs were her idea of an anaesthetic, and we call the wounds self-inflicted … though painkillers or not, a pretty determined girl, your friend. Counselling to commit—
hard charge to prove. So unless they're going to find a whole raft of letters from you telling her, say … life is hard and ugly, her thesis is fucked, her career dreams are dead … You know.”

“No I don't think they will.”

“Think …?”

“No I have never written anything to her. Not a letter, not a note, not a card.”

“Good. A bit cold but good. We're halfway home. And we're pretty much out of motives, aren't we, Professor. But I want to warn you—people here remember murder charges. This isn't Houston or Detroit. They remember the guy even if the charges are dropped. If you hope to keep living in this area code, all this'd better be the truth. And pray she makes it.”

I
had not paid sufficient attention. My mind had not been clear. There were messages in the days, months. Years. It was in the dates. The visits, the rulings. The judgements. One could see the orchestration, the patience, the planning. I had missed so much, been careless. Days of sun, days of cloud—I must pay more attention now. Every minute of every hour.

January 26th, 1693. Word came that Examiner Gutiérrez of the Holy Office was in the locutory. He was leaving for Manila. His work was finished here. A bright clear day, warm for January. During his last few visits, not suspecting him had become impossible. And now his work here was finished?—I had
been
his work. I had forbidden him ever to come again—leaving, he'd vowed that should he ever return, the visit would be official. I had not seen him for fourteen months.

Was it official now?

In September of 1691 he had brought word of the denunciation of Palavicino's sermon and the names of two Inquisitors assigned to investigate. That October he came with the news the carols on Saint Catherine were to be licensed and published—but
when
in September,
when
in October? November 12, 1691, he arrived with the identities of two of the three examining magistrates appointed to try the case. November 12th, my birthday. I apologized that the convent had so little to offer visitors now. A few sliced apples, a green mango Antonia diced and sprinkled with chillies. Gutiérrez thought us lucky to have our own food supply in these trying times. The magistrates were Master Examiner Agustín Dorantes and Examiner Nicolás Macías, two Dominicans. To maintain the appearance of objectivity, there were to be no Jesuits, Gutiérrez said. In this case the proprieties were paramount. I had misunderstood. Why should the Jesuits be thought partial to Palavicino?

“Not partial, Sor Juana,
hostile.”
He paused to finish the unripe mango before turning with satisfaction to what remained of the apple, soft and withered and worm-eaten. He did not seem to mind a little calamity. “And this seems no longer about Palavicino.”

He glanced down to produce his latest piece of intelligence from the folds of his black robe.

Strange that a script so crabbed, so hard to read or even in that instant to see, should prove so hard to clear from the mind.

“But this reads like a sentencing….”

“Unusual, no?—for Prosecutor Ulloa to have already written it out … since the judges have not yet made their rulings.”

“But Gutiérrez, something here is not right. Why would a prosecutor—even if he's written it—
file
his sentencing request, if there is such concern for the proprieties?”

In times of old, the smile might have seemed less forced, the answer less hasty. These were not times of old. “It appears the Prosecutor is overly eager.”

What had Gutiérrez let slip?—either they did not care so much about appearances as he had suggested, or the sentence had not been forwarded to the eventual judges at all, and if it had not been, then it was not part of the official record. Which meant Gutiérrez had not retrieved it from the files but had been shown it by the Prosecutor, who either trusted Gutiérrez or was feeding him information. It was Gutiérrez now who seemed overly eager.

“Do you remember, Gutiérrez, the first time you asked about the spiritual journals I had once written for Núñez, so long ago? I see that you do. I asked how you knew. The Holy Office was aware of them, you said. A reasonable answer. But it was not your first. Tell me the first answer that came to you.”

“I said you must have told me about them once yourself.”

“But I never did that, did I.”

What came into his pale blue eyes then I would not have expected, not anger, or triumph, or guilt or even shame. Relief, it was relief. That came as a comfort to me.

I would not have been surprised if my dear friend had simply never returned, but it had turned out otherwise. The date of his last visit was
not difficult to remember. It was two weeks later, the Feast of Saint Catherine. November 25th, 1691.

Rain fell each day that month—the waters gaining on the streets, puddles joining to form ponds. Painful for as many years as I was willing to recall, Novembers reached their lowest ebb at my birthday on November 12th, their high point near the end. November 25th. It seemed heartless in a time of such hardship and distress to wish for even an hour of happiness. But once one gave in, gave oneself over to it, the thing might prove irresistible. Not for a day, just for an hour. This was all I hoped for the celebrants that day in a city thirty leagues to the east. After I had long since given up hope, it seemed my carols were to be sung after all.

I had never seen Puebla but knew its cathedral was thought beautiful, up a short flight of steep steps from a shady central plaza much smaller and more intimate than our own. The cathedral choir was considered excellent; I had met the choirmaster. And so I could not help myself—the joy I felt to close my eyes and imagine the people filing in, to hear the music Ribera and I had written rising through the vault, the voices in the choir … to see the girls from the schools coming to hear verses on the learning of a girl, reading them afterwards in the libretto on the way home, reciting her story in the convent schools all across Puebla.

Three centuries after the Crucifixion, when the
Acts of Pilate
were drawn up to promote hatred of Christians, a girl of eighteen went before a Roman emperor, to denounce him, and to refute his paganism with arguments. In Catherine of Alexandria there was much to love, and to fascinate. Her courage, her audacity—a Christian, a young girl, going before Maximinus, persecutor and mutilator of Christians; then, her victory over the forty pagan sages the emperor sent to refute her…. Or some said fifty. With a saint so well loved the story ever ramifies—finally to a second emperor whose cruelties were instead attempts to seduce her and force a marriage. Since then she had been reverenced for her patience, her fortitude, and above all for the restraint of her passions. Many believed she had achieved as her reward a mystical marriage with Christ, some said first consummated on Mount Sinai.

Burnings and marytrdom, a serpent and a sacred ring, a bladed wheel, a beheading, a headless trunk flowing milk … Catherine had proved irresistible. Among the girls of the valley of Anahuac, the first saint we love is most often Teresa, for her strength and humour, for the palace of
her soul, for her writings in a language and from a time so close to our own. Teresa was my second love. Among all the saints my first was Catherine …

We went in to church from Panoayan scarcely six times a year, and one extra time at Pentecost when Father was there. Each of us had a favourite occasion. In the spring came the feast of the Annunciation—this, for Grandfather, Good Friday for our mother, and Easter for my sisters. In December came Christmas and Gaudete. And in November, the Feast of Saint Catherine, for me. First the slow torture of the ride in to Amecameca, then taking a turn around the
manzana
before Mass … the special gaiety of the girls that day, and in the church itself, for Catherine was the patroness of cloisters for maidens and female scholars, and of young women at risk in the world. She was known to be one of the fourteen most helpful saints, and that a girl's learning could be thought useful struck a blow against a certain faction at the hacienda. Always, then, this day of the learned saint opened with excitement—vindication, too, should I happen to catch the eye of the lay sisters and of one in particular. A Sister Paula.

But by the time the homily was delivered—and to give a poor one on this day was an embarrassment priests worked long hours to avoid—a sadness would have tempered our elation. Martyrdom, of course, was sad, with a drop of gall, for martyrdom was mixed with a special draft of injustice; just so with Catherine's beheading, a vindictive insult, an outrage of her mind. The scourging had been hard too, but the sweetest of balms then came in the vision of the angels lofting her up to Sinai. The turning point in the homily was the shattering of the wheel. Yet a mystery lay within the marvel, and a cruel one—that the miracle had not saved her at all, and that there should follow upon it such insult and desecration.

In the Church afterward, we were given time to spend at her altar, a little statue of white marble not much bigger than a doll, quite overhung by the bushels of roses hemming her in—roses of Alexandria, or so they were for me. During the cart ride home it was not Catherine's martyrdom I worried over, but the fate of those she had persuaded by her learned arguments. Those scholars who had admitted their defeat to the emperor had been burned, but it was even worse somehow with the empress and the general Porphyry, who had gone to her terrible dungeon to convince her to renounce her faith and save herself by embracing the
worship of idols. And by Catherine's great learning, the empress and Porphyry had been saved from idolatry, to live as Christians for barely an hour, before they too were martyred by the idolators.

In those years it had been difficult to keep separate in my mind the idols of Egypt from the little statue in Amecameca and the dolls of Panoayan. For many years afterwards I thought the path of learning the more dangerous, the path of mysticism the more burdensome. Until the years came when I wondered if it might not be the other way around. It was Teresa who reminded us—through her acts, her books and her trials—that the paths were not separate at all, nor were these incompatible with friendship. I was twenty before I understood that the intellective vision was not an operation of reason but an inner lecture, a reading of the Presence within, and so the highest form of mystical vision. In the pages of our great mystics I had been offered a vision not of the senses but beyond them, a glimpse behind the mask. I had never lost trust in visions but in myself as a vessel for them and for that Presence. These were the doubts of a girl who had taken too long to resolve them. I had left the palace, only to grasp, with such a scalding of irony, that I had been on the illuminative path for some time:
active in learning, passive in love
. But by then I was in a convent. San José of the Discalced Carmelites, the order Teresa had suffered so much to found. What had happened, what had gone wrong? Where had the spirit of her humour gone?—of a woman who spoke to God in loving friendship, who, complaining of her trials, heard Him answer, ‘But Teresa, this is how I treat my friends.'