Hunger's Brides (144 page)
“Fatherâ”
“IâSor Juana, I am not the one!âthis is not
poetry
, now. He has been with you all along. Your Prince has stood so near by and watched you.
With such pain
. You say nothing. Could it really be you had not seen it? If you will not answer plainly even now, there is no pointâ¦.”
“Father, don't leave. Please. Not yet.”
“It is too late for this. I am old.”
“Can it be too late if He wishes it?”
“My faith in you ⦠in us, is spent.”
“I would do anything to restore it.”
“Nothing you could ever say. Actions, Sor Juana. Actions.”
“Anything I can giveâ¦.”
“No, give it to your Husband, not to me. For me no one thing can be enough. I am rather smaller of spirit, rather lacking in Charity. Somewhere within myself I would have to find at least a faint ember to rekindle, a spark of faith. And even then I would come only if my Provincial ordered it. Nevertheless ⦠there is a certain pagan manuscript. If finally you see how inconsistent all such matters are with your profession, a nun's vocation, if this manuscript were to make a miraculous and silent reappearance, your secret could remain between us, and you might begin to gain my trust.”
“Butâ”
“Do you try now to back out?âit is you who have been hinting at this.”
“Your Reverence ⦔
“What I
will take
your word for, is that by then you will have destroyed all the outstanding copies. Then, were I to hold that manuscript in my hands, it might be possible for us to make a beginning.”
“Fatherâ”
“That is,
if I
am ordered to come againâ¦. In the meanwhile, your friend the Bishop of Puebla has told you what you must do. Take his friendly advice. Sor Juana, you are already forty-five. On insignificant
trifles you have spent more than
twenty-five years
. Contemplate the mysteries of our Faith. Nothing else matters now. The cleverness, the comedies, the double-talk, the lies of omission. These go, these end here. The inventory and record of all your crimes and sins must be
complete
. No evasions.”
“But Your Reverence, I don'tâ”
“Gaps will not be toleratedâdo you
hear
me?”
“Of course, Father.”
“Are you prepared to surrender that manuscript,
today?
âdo not even pretend not to know which.”
“Yes, Father. Father?”
“What is it.”
“I
have
heard you, and there is something I have told no one else. It should not wait.”
“Go ahead, Juana Inés.”
“About this manuscript you have called
The Sapphic Hymnsâ¦
.”
UANA
I
NÃS DE LA
C
RUZ
Alan Trueblood, trans
.
Verde embeleso de la vida humana
,
loca Esperanza, frenesà dorado
,
sueño de los despiertos intrincado
,
como de sueños, de tesoros vana;
Â
alma del mundo, senectud lozana
,
decrépito verdor imaginado;
el hoy de los dichosos esperado
y de los desdichados el mañana:
Â
sigan tu sombra en busca de tu dÃa
los que, con verdes vidrios por anteojos
,
todo lo ven pintado a su deseo;
Â
que yo, más cuerda en la fortuna mÃa
,
tengo en entrambas manos ambos ojos
y solamente lo que toco veo
.
Green allurement of our human life,
mad Hope, wild frenzy gold-encrusted,
sleep of the waking full of twists and turns
for neither dreams nor treasures to be trusted;
 soul of the world, new burgeoning of the old,
fantasy of blighted greenery,
day awaited by the happy few,
morrow which the hapless long to see:
 let those pursue your shadow's beckoning
who put green lenses in their spectacles
and see the world in colours that appeal.
 Myself, I'll act more wisely toward the world:
I'll place my eyes right at my fingertips
and only see what my two hands can feel.
ORD
P
ROSECUTOR
The craft of the forger is weaker far than Necessity.
38
Date unknown, year 1693 â¦
⦠charges that in clandestine distribution from America even unto Europe, and in conspiration with Lady MarÃa Luisa Manrique de Lara, Countess of Paredes, with the Creoles Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Jesuit Prefect of the Brotherhood of Mary, and with the aid of the mulatta Antonia Mora, the nun has trafficked in heretical tracts, monographs and forbidden translations, including those of the Franciscan Manuel de Cuadros, already consigned to eternal damnation on related charges.
Ask the nun's response.
The heresiarch will state a response for the record.
A: Before the Lord Judges I freely confirm that manuscripts were copied and sent, but there was no traffic, no profit, no distribution ring. Further, the orthodoxy and character of the manuscripts are still to be determined here before this very Tribunalâbut if even a single one were deemed heretical, I do not doubt, Lord Judges, that all the parties named here would willinglyâ
Tell the nun again to address herself only to the Lord Prosecutor.
A: I have only addressed myself to whom addresses me as an expression of respect.
Should the Tribunal require expressions of the heresiarch's respect, we will extract them.
Reverend Lord Judges, our Office begs the Tribunal's indulgence: that it abide the heresiarch's impudence a little longer. The next days' testimony will show her to be descended on both sides from a long line of false Christians; to be infected with Judaic and pagan abomination from her earliest years; to
be weaned on necromancy and superstition. A sworn statement will be presented, and attested to tomorrow before the Tribunal, to the effect that her own wet nurse was a sorceress descended from an Indian insurrectionist condemned by the Holy Office long years ago.
Proceed.
N
úñez was not wrong. I could not help myself. Rebellion. It was thisâthe falsity of my courage, the weakness in my defianceâthat I wondered if he had wanted me to see on the day he came, to see this as a danger to us both.
For his part he had not been so foolish as to threaten me with Magda before knowing how badly I could hurt him in return. I had so few advantagesâthat he was forced to be careful of not revealing more than he learned, and his fear of being spied upon in the locutory. How much easier for him to question me in a prison cell. My one hope had lain in drawing him out, letting him lead me to where he feared to go. Instead he had only to scratch at the surface, rasp a little at the vein of defiance in me, and within five minutes we were already at manuscripts. I would not have Sappho to divert him a second time. His next such visit would be his last, and my next gesture of rebellion the thing most certain to lead us both back to those chambers.
But no longer would I permit myself to doubt he would come at least once more. It were better that he not delay too long,
but I shall tarry, Father, until you return
. Neither would I let myself wonder when, or about his motives. Even about the web of his alliances, I would try not to care. Like this, I could only destroy myself, tilting at every shadow.
Not an hour after Núñez left and already late in the evening, I was allowed to take delivery of a letter from Lord Bishop Angel Maldonado, informing me of his visit, though Father Núñez had told him he was wasting his time. But since Maldonado had not been dissuaded, and since the journey was not just long but dangerous, I wondered yet, would he come just for this, does he come as a friend, why would he have written of me to Núñez to begin with? It was painful to be reduced to this. It was Maldonado who had my carols on Saint Catherine of Alexandria sung at his cathedral when Santa Cruz had refused them.
The morning after the letter, the Archbishop's secretary came in person to explain about my new cell.
“It is on the northwest corner of the
gran patio
, where Sorâwhere the postulant Juana will be more comfortable with the other novices, though they are somewhat ⦠younger.” I forced myself to take an interest, at last to be seeing him, a sleek and officious man with a long nose, over which he was studying me for some reaction.
There would be a great deal more noise, voices, cries in the night, the nightly turbulence of the processions. The secretary might see the new arrangement as a hideous coming down in the world, but my concerns had nothing to do with either noise or privilegeâI would be one step closer to the convent prison cell, a barred door opening from a cellar onto the southwest corner of that courtyard. I pointed out to him that I had a cell, for which he himself had signed the bill of sale. Ah yes. A careful review, however, of the contents since removed had shown the current cell to be too large for my future needs. They continued to play at their games of irony. And I to fly to the lure, at each slow swing, though I had had weeks to see this coming.
The new cell they had found for me proved to be half as large, and there was no stairway to the roof.
Superintendent of Works â¦
I had persuaded myself to believe Núñez had intercepted only oneâbut in that one letter, I had mentioned the hidden stairway.
⦠next, the Reverend Lord Judges are asked to consider how the heresiarch has made her nest in corruption, and with corruption feathered it. Over the course of decades and in flagrant violation of her own vow of poverty, she had, by the performance and peddling of various favours, amassed a collection of curios, instruments and books lately confiscated and valued at thirty thousand pesos. Most recently she has attempted to suborn Bishop Angel Maldonado of Oaxaca for the purposes of gaining illicit foreknowledge of the present proceedings against her. Previous to this, she had induced another Prince of the Church, since stripped of his charges and titles, to publish under his licence an insolent suite of verses on the holy virgin Catherine of Alexandria, therewith subverting the veneration of a saint of the Church in order to draw the thinnest of masks over the true intent, being to praise and exalt a pagan sorceress, also of Alexandria, and a mortal enemy of our Holy Roman and Apostolic Church. In another letter to the former Bishop, the heresiarch praises
this Hypatia's learning overtly and belligerently. And it is a perversity no doubt fulfilling the heresiarch's perverse designs that even as a pagan once corrupted the Prefect Orestes, so also has this paganist of our day corrupted the Prefect of the Brotherhood of Mary, not least in the trafficking of documents. Leading to the question of how long the heresiarch's own collection might take to burn.
A: Lord Prosecutorâ
Instruct the nun to wait to be addressed.
The heresiarch will wait to be addressed, or will be gagged until her responses are called for. All of the foresaid, Reverend Lord Judges, being of a piece with other writings by the heresiarch sympathetic to various heretics and schismatics from the early Church. Which returns us to the heretical proposition of the
finezas negativas
of God, this also published under the Bishop of Puebla's licence, and the charge which the heresiarch still guilefully avoids addressingâ¦.
Get the nun's response.
The heresiarch will make a response.
A: Lord Prosecutor, any confusion of Catherine of Alexandria with Hypatia does not originate with me but has persisted for some centuries, and for good reason if, as seems the case, the pagans in their treatment of Catherine took inspiration from the Patriarch's work with Hypatia. As to corruption, the destruction of the synagogues across Egypt coincided with the takeover, by Christians, of the Jewish monopoly on the grain trade between Alexandria and Constantinople. Corruption comes in many forms. As to the burning of my own collection, it is a technical question, but one traditionally within the competence of this Church to answer. Certainly the destruction of the Serapiana was a test and precedent available to Caliph Omar as he made ready to burn the main library. But let us say, if indeed the Lord Prosecutor requires my response, less than six months.
Instruct the nun to answer specifically to the
finezas negativasâ¦
. The Tribunal awaits its answer.
A: The Lord Prosecutor has not yet conveyed to me the Tribunal's instructions.
The heresiarch will answer to the
finezas negativasâ¦
.
The day's warmth had not yet ebbed from the column at my shoulder as I stood, unnoticed, at the door of our new home, looking down over a courtyard lively with activity. On the
gran patio
I would not have expected laughter of the sort I so craved to hear, to share, based in neither fear nor angerânot these torments of irony.
It was as the Archbishop's secretary had said. The sisters for the most part were younger, many wealthy, with one foot still planted firmly in the world, the wealthiest with their favourites, then the novices, the slaves and servants, the young girls from the convent school.