Hunger's Brides (3 page)

It seems we have gone dead inside. Emotions, appetites, even the senses.

The screams echoing through these stone corridors are horror-filled and agonized—children's voices crying out for Lord and mother in equal measure, while we the living communicate in brief shouts, as though to the deaf.

We move, day and night, through a kind of roaring twilight welling up from the corners of our eyes. And
everywhere
now this sullen smudge of smoke fed on sodden cloth. In some insidious way it is indistinguishable from the drone of bottle flies buzzing above the jumble of unburied bodies beside the bonfires. Few of us notice anymore that everything, every surface—plaster, porcelain, stone, skin—glistens with a fatty sheen of suet and ash. Until the evenings, when by lamplight we all scrub furiously and wonder if the oily clinging of it will ever leave us.

Yesterday morning I struck an Indian full in the face for handling a body too roughly. Convent discipline verged on total breakdown. Mass hysteria, even violent madness, hovered about us, very near….

Then, after the blackest night of all, just when it seems every last one of us must be taken, a clear morning breaks. An hour of eerie calm settles over this place. Though we cannot know it yet, the plague has withdrawn just as suddenly as it came.

There will be only one death today.

The stench too has lifted—and the flies, scattered now on a breeze that wafts the delicate fragrance of tangerines into Juana's cell. The nuns and novices who have assembled here, as though at a summons, exchange looks hungry for miracles. It is already beginning. They will say your body smelled of tangerines.

Oh yes, Juana, you've scripted your little dialogue with Greatness but do you know how I feel? To sit by and watch you—all these days and weeks. It didn't have to happen this way. This is my fault, my doing.

And now you watch me watching you play the sainted martyr. Ever the valiant sister: “Burning my body won't be so bad,” you murmur. “Better here than on the Other Side….”

Each time your beautiful eyes close, my heart leaps into my throat. Then they open once more.

“So, Antonia, it seems I won't have to lie next to Concepción after all, and listen to an eternity of her gossip.”

You could have held back, not leaned so near—taken even a few hours' rest. The chaplain offered you his plague mask, and you just smiled.

I will not say good-bye to you. I will not be part of your chorus.

Oh, Juanita … look at you
.

Leaf shadows play over the far wall as though reflecting off water. Juana turns her face towards the low window above her bed of planks. Rust-red daubs and handprints, violent smears along the whitewashed wall and windowsill above the bed. They appear to me now—in this one insane instant—grim as hieroglyphs, gay as a child's finger paints.

“Would you like me to bring your telescope?” I ask. Stupidly. I will either speak or lose my mind. “Mother Superior has kept it in her chambers.” Juana shakes her head weakly, no, but I persist. “You were never forbidden to use it. Not officially.”

“Yes, Tonia, that's true,” she answers softly. Some of the novices in this vault-like room have never heard her voice. “And Galileo Galilei was never forbidden to write poetry….”

To those who have known Juana the longest, to one who has just bathed her lingeringly … she has never been more beautiful. Pale as parchment, her body like a girl's, disincarnate, feather-light, unadulterated … purely and completely her own. The fever has left her now, its work done. Gone from her face are the lines these past days had etched there.

Through the low window, sunlight streams into her unflinching black eyes. Only now do I understand she is blind.

“I feel the sun. Is it a clear morning?” Juana asks.

“Yes it's clear … very clear.”

“What can you see—can you see the volcanoes?”

“Yes,
mi amor,”
I answer finally. “They are white and splendid. If I were that bird, that eagle soaring up there …”

I am not sure how to go on.

“… I could see your mother's hacienda.”

“Others?” she asks.

“Can't you hear them, the
urracas?
And
there
, a parrot …”
You are doing this for me, to distract me
.

“And flowers?”

“Juanita,
hundreds!
The jacaranda trees are still blooming in the streets.
Y las flores de mandarín
—you must smell
them
at least. There are roses, too….”

I look up at the women gathered about the bed. I think every last one—some weeping openly now—must know by heart Juana's lyric on the rose. Sister Eugenia looks decidedly unsteady, one of the few to be nursed back to health, and by Juana herself.

Then the Mother Prioress, our desiccated paragon of gravity, enters the cell. We make way as she approaches the bed.

“Sor Juana? Can you hear?” The Prioress leans nearer, putting out a hand to steady herself. “I've just received word. From the
Archbishop
. Juana …? He says he wants you to leave the convent. For your own safety …”

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz lies unmoving, eyes closed, her breath a stuttered rustling in her chest … then stirs, as the faintest hint of a smile caresses her dark lips.

I
took her maiden name, Ramírez de Santillana. She gave me
Juana
and
Inés
. The year was 1648: Isabel was beautiful, spectacularly pregnant again and still defiantly unwed. She took her confinement in what everyone called the cell, a hut of dry-laid fieldstone serving as tool shed and sometime way-station to any Dominicans stopping the night on their missions among the Indians. And so it was that even at my life's beginning, my cell was haunted by the Dominicans and their good works.

Of course I've heard it described. Gables thatched with dried agave spikes … in a child's imagination they loll like leathern tongues. From the ridgepole, the cane-stalk bassinet hangs just inside the door, at eye level set beyond the reach of snakes and scorpions. Walls left unmortared for ventilation, and in the evening breeze the slight basculations of the bassinet. If I have a memory all my own it's a modest one: of loose-chinked stone … a wall of shells pale as canvas, pegged in place by wands of light. And beyond, panes of jade vegetation and turquoise sky.

The shed stood at the upper reaches of Grandfather's hacienda in Nepantla. In the poetry of the ancient Mexicans, Nepantla means ‘the unstable margins of things,' and according to family legend I'd surely have been raised there, in my shaky palace of shells, had not Grandfather, who was riding the fence line on a tour of inspection, glimpsed my seraphic head through the doorway. Naturally he relented, and ended his daughter's exile.

I'd one day learn that my mother's exile had been largely self-imposed, a dramatic gesture directed at my father because he was not there. Adults, it seemed, were complicated. And none more than she.

The chief thing, for me and for our
Siglo de Oro's
latter, better half, was that she did emerge from our cell—either by Grandfather's leave or at his beseeching.
³
Whereupon she refused first the offer of his horse, then the offer of his help with the hollow-boned bundle of cherub she held.

She stalked down (here I imagine Grandfather riding meekly behind), little moved by the view. Just above the ranch house the path bends north over a hill. Straight ahead lay the city on the lake, its far shore a frail glitter in the distance. The bearish shoulders of Ajusco Hill
would have blocked her view of the island where Mexico rests on the charred stones of the city it supplanted. For that is the custom of this place, to build on the ruins of the vanquished.

Below her lay the ranch house, a one-storey horseshoe barred to the west by a high corral of
ocotillo
thorns. Once down, she returned to running the hacienda, having handed me over (“fastened me,” as she put it) to a wet nurse she called Sochee. In my version it was to preserve her figure; in Isabel's, to preserve her nipples from the predations of an infant cannibal. I once ventured to ask, If I was so much worse than my sisters, why was it that Xochitl never once complained? A question answered with the barest shrug, leaving me to conclude all on my own that a descendant of the Mexicas
†
could have no objection to nursing an infant of my sort.

From about that time, the frequency of Father's visits dwindled to roughly once a year. He still came faithfully for the breaking of the yearlings but only on rare occasions now for the breeding of the mares. It seemed attending the birth of daughters was no longer in his routine. My sister Josefa told me, with malign satisfaction, that he used to come
much
more often before I was born. This only made it all the more like a royal visit for me, and not just because of his family's remote and lofty origins. There was the unmistakeable nobility of his bearing, there was the civility of his manners—and he was so
handsome
. With black, black hair, and a manly chin, and big soft brown eyes like a horse's—no wonder even the wildest ones bent to his wishes.

And tall, taller than Grandfather, even. When he stooped from the saddle to scoop us each up for a hug good-bye, it was like being lifted into heaven.

Then he was gone.

We caught our breath.

The seasons resumed their turning.