Hunger's Brides (137 page)

But though she might be an asset to Dorantes and to Santa Cruz, as her files had been to Gutiérrez, Núñez had never needed Magda. Father Núñez had other assets. And so in the night after the first candle burned down I saw Núñez come to stand vaunting over me, brandishing his war tools, felt the rasp of his mockeries, heard him boasting of his advantages, of the perfection of his memory. It would be as with the second inventory of Dorantes—I would need to remember all I had told him, every confidence in a dozen years of confession—even
how
I had told him, and everything I had not, beginning twenty-five years ago. I could face the Inquisition or else Núñez; I could face the Dominicans or my own conscience. This was the challenge in the message, which he had always believed me too cowardly to accept. At least before the Holy Office I could protest my innocence.
Vexation … no new thing under the sun … remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth
. Three times Núñez had recalled Ecclesiastes, and in doing so, warned me of where we might make a beginning….

On the day of the service, the old men of the town had come out. The priest from Chimalhuacan read gently from the Gospel of John; then Brother Anton from Texcoco came forward and recited beautifully from Ecclesiastes. My grandfather would have liked it. It made me think of Hesiod. Uncle Juan had not come. I had not met him yet, and had not imagined they had been friends. Across the hole in the ground stood Magda, behind her my aunts and other cousins, my sisters beside my mother. I had been furious to have been asked to choose the place, had refused to—
choose?
I choose that he still be here with us. Amanda cried quietly beside me, her arm about my shoulders. Xochitl sighed once, and stroked my hair. There came my turn to read, from an old book with a broken spine. Kneeling in the fresh-turned earth I read the first four stanzas without crying or so much as pausing, it seemed, to breathe. But when I did pause, I did not go on.

By that evening the last of the guests had left. My aunts were not guests, as my mother pointed out, but had grown up in this house. They were to have my sisters' room, which had once been their own. Josefa and María were to be in my room with me. It was just for one night.

Late that night I was still in the library, asleep in the corner armchair where he had used to sleep. I thought it a dream, at first. I saw my mother standing before me. The lantern guttered, its oil run down. Her veil was drawn back. I thought it strange she had not changed, though the dress was beautiful. She had bent slightly, then seeing me awake, seemed to hesitate.

“I wanted to be sure it wasn't him.” She smiled faintly, embarrassed. It might have occurred to me, she had bent to pick me up.

“I thought you never came in here.”

She straightened, the swelling of her belly formidable, pronounced.

“Who do you think put him to bed all these years?”

It was the kind of hidden knowledge that I had always known lay all about me, and had always sensed about to rush in at me from some unexpected quarter. “Your eyes are clear, Inés, for seeing far. But up close you're as blind as the rest of us.”

I looked away, to the floor, the cold hearth, the desk in the shadows behind her, unshelved books in a jumble on the near side. On the other, stacked neatly, the four books he had been reading, on them a thick envelope.
A mi hijita Isabel
My eyes had lit dully upon it that morning, but it
had lain there for the week since. Embarrassed, I slipped past her and went quickly to the desk.

“This was for you.”

It did not occur to me to offer to read it for her. She started down the aisle toward me, casting shadows over the ceiling ahead of her. I could not see her face against the flicker of lamplight. She would be angry that I had forgotten. It would seem typical of me. “I don't know when Abuelo put it there. It wasn't there … that night.”

She came to stand very near, very tall, waiting perhaps on a better explanation. Her fingers touched the envelope but did not quite grasp it. I did not know what she was feeling, but craning up with her so near I saw it was not anger.

“Did you really paint those angels for him …?”

Startled, she looked up into the shadows of the cross-beams, which divided the composition into three, the figures crudely painted but finely drawn. Cherubs, seraphim—the thrones and principalities, the seven choirs …

She stood a long moment, remembering. “Your grandfather loved angels, like a child. I was a child myself. I thought it was … nice.”

Unable to stop, I asked why she had given up drawing. Her eyes left the ceiling, glanced over the desk covered in books, at the map above it of the southern oceans. She looked at me finally, in their hollows her eyes large in the unsteady light. She drew in a long breath. “Inés … no matter how clever you are, no matter how—”

“A library is no place for a woman—you've told me.”

“That's not what I was going to say.”

It was only partly because of what she said then, that I told her about the last night with him … to give her something more of him than a letter. And so we sat up late, and I told her the stories he had told, how animated he had been, how his eyes had seemed like emeralds once again. How I had woken up as he put me to bed. I told her because of the angels, and because he loved her. I told her because I needed to tell her, more than anyone. When I had said that the library was no place for a woman, she had started to replace her veil, but then gently placed her hands on my shoulders.

“No matter how clever you are,
hija
, no matter how hard you work or you try, you can never bring them back.”

Núñez would not care why my father had left. Núñez would not ask me about the
auto
of 1656. He would demand to know why I had left her—left refusing to speak to her, twice. He would ask why things were not better between us, even after this night. He would ask how in a rage, just three months later, I could accuse her of driving my father away and ask if she had ever loved anyone.

Quen uel ximimatia in teteocuitlamichi. Things slip, things slide in this world
.

Fish of gold, what happened to you?

I sent for Arellano on February 23rd when Núñez had still not come. I had given a statement of my guilt, agreed to the terms, and I had requested—no, I had been hoping that he might come for the 24th of February, for the twenty-fourth anniversary of my profession, that we might begin my noviciate together, my year of trial. Why had he not come?

Father Arellano was sorry, but he did not decide for Prefect Núñez, nor did Sor Juana. He would come when it was time, when there were signs that she had truly understood what she had been given to read, had truly
heard
this time. I reminded Arellano that he and I had spoken of Juan de la Cruz in confession not so very long ago. His Paternity might remember the rain. Did he have some new direction for me now?

“Sor Juana, that is the day I was referring to, when I communicated to you a final warning from Prefect Núñez … that while there was yet time, you should study the writings of John of the Cross for a path to God that still included a little poetry.” Even so recently as then, the Prefect had indicated he was prepared to confront the Archbishop and defend Sor Juana's practice of poetry on purely devotional topics. “But the Prefect's warning went unheeded, and that time is now past.”

Unheeded? No, Father, I had not heard. Would it have made any difference, you ask? How, Father, could either of us know that? And
why
had I not heard?—because His Paternity had been unable to bring himself to meet with me in the locutory. So why, I wondered, did he come now? Was it not true he had been forced to, as a punishment? And how could Father Arellano make accurate report of me, if he could not look at me, if he did not examine me? Why would anyone send a messenger to give messages I could not hear, or who warns me that I might next come in for a discipline ‘more rounded' when Father Núñez had in fact said
circular?
Was that not true—yes? Why, then, should anyone rely on such a messenger?

As he rose, he glanced at me without wishing to, his eyes round and dark. They looked as mine might. He had not slept, looked more frightened than I, or I hoped he did. It was as I had guessed, that he was being sent for his negligence. And if they so chose, his penalty could be the same as mine. And it could be death. He had confessed a heretic for almost a dozen years without raising the alarm. To defend himself he would have had to admit what I had guessed all along. That he had been unable to bring himself to
listen
, had been too frightened to.

I sat for a time when Arellano had gone, and looked out into the garden. What could it
mean
—that I had tried on my own to take the very course of action Núñez had urged upon me through Arellano that day, two years ago? What was it they thought I had not heard, had not yet grasped? I understood that the poet I had loved, whose echoes in my own poetry Núñez had most despised, whose voice was never far from my mind, was to be turned against me. For the one book I was to be permitted, now, was of the night of trials, not the poems. I understood also that this was to be done to demonstrate that everything could be turned against me, to make an enemy of a friend, to remind me of how much Juan de la Cruz had endured not for his poetry but for his faith.

Núñez would say that God had guided his hand in this choice of book, but then why had I not heard his messenger—had I been guided not to hear the warning? If He has guided the hand of Núñez to triumph, has mine been guided to fail? Was I to be returned to the beginning only to be shown that the night of trials never ends, but only opens into deeper trial? I had looked down that path, into a darkness that Juan had made beautiful. I had drawn from the springs of his sources to bring comfort to others, to bring some sense to their suffering, but I could not make that path my own.

If only Núñez had come, we could have talked together. With him I would have spoken my heart, I would have tried again, in a manner more sincere than with Arellano. Father, why have you offered this path now, you who warned me from it, the path of the ecstatic, you who said it would lead me to destroy myself? Why send Arellano to me, when for twelve years he and I have been as strangers? It would be better to have left me to myself, to turn on myself, than to send such as these to me, who are afraid even to look upon rose bushes without startling.

But Núñez had not come. And to this last question at least I knew the answer. We had been sent to punish each other, Arellano to me,
for his concupiscence and fear of sin, and I to Arellano, to mortify my pride.

The next day, for my twenty-fourth anniversary, I put on again the rough
sayuela
of the novice, much as Antonia wore, and cropped my hair. I chose the evening, after Compline, so as to have some hours before being seen. My vanity cost me much of the week's candle.

I was afraid Antonia would try to stop me. She was stronger, angry. I explained that it had been shorn thus twice before—surely harder on those who would have to look upon it than it was for me. I could not stop her cutting her own in turn. I was not strong enough. I had loved her hair.

We helped each other, in the end. The places farthest back were hardest to reach.