Hunger's Brides (31 page)

I could not forgive Quevedo, and yet within a year or two at court I was doing it also. I said things like this:
Louis did more for Copernicus than Galileo ever did—while Philip did for Ptolemy. Single-handedly
.

Did I really tell myself it made any difference that I was more than half in earnest—all the while knowing they would laugh twice as hard?

Philip IV. Who kept his dwarves like princes; kept by his princes a dwarf
.

This was how I had come to serve the servants of the sovereign. Having forgotten all about my elegy and about the service of princes.

I may have forgotten this, but there is nothing wrong with my memory. Even to those closest to me I say the little that I can. It seems I have only to meet someone to find myself asked about my past. Yet I do not like to look back. Still less to have my childhood made the subject of my confessions.

Who is this Jesuit, Antonio Núñez de Miranda? Who comes to the palace yet is not of the palace, who does not live among us, yet is never far. Who confesses us all: the Vice-Queen, the Vice-King and most of his administration. All are a little afraid of him. He is not old, being of a generation hardly older than my father's. Small bones, small head, the skin dry as parchment, the stooped nodding walk … Maybe this is why so many say he seems ancient. They speak of his hatred of pride, of his humility … of the grey eyes meekly downcast, the thick lids heavy, as if in mirth—until opened wide the eyes blaze with rage, staring into yours. They speak of how it takes some getting used to.

This subtle man, among the most brilliant I have yet met, whose memory is uncanny, perfect, better even than my own. He has urged me to meditate on the past, and has listened to my confessions attentively. This soldier who bears no arms, yet is commanded by a general in Rome for whom he would gladly die. And yet with me, Father Núñez begins with none of the harshness and choler for which he is so well known. With not a little poetry, he speaks to me of Loyola, founder of the Company, son of a Basque nobleman born in the ancestral castle. Father Núñez speaks of how the young Loyola loved music, how he won his knighthood in the service of Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke of Nájera and Viceroy of Navarre.

Ignatius Loyola, first General of the Company of Jesus, who wrote so movingly of his spiritual awakening, a man who until then cared only about martial exercises, with a
great and vain desire to win renown
.
Crippled in battle, Loyola lay for months on a convalescent's bed in an empty castle. Among the few works accessible to him were the writings of a certain monk. Over and over Loyola read them, absorbing the vision of this Cistercian who depicted the service of Christ as a holy order of chivalry and saw, in the lover of Christ, a chevalier plighted to the service of his liege.

Of course I am not told all of this at once. Father Núñez works patiently, over the weeks and months. In fact his greatest skill lies in what he does not say. He does not mention that the Manriques are Spain's greatest military family, nor that Rodrigo Manrique was Queen Isabela's great defender and first grandmaster of the Order of Santiago. My spiritual adviser gives no sign of knowing that the grandmaster's son wrote perhaps the finest poem of our language, at the death of his father. And so, only obliquely, does he remind me of my grandfather and what I have forgotten about service.

From his own purse, Father Núñez pays for my instruction in theology, since certain of my ideas in this area he deems dangerously inventive. The tutor he provides is merely the Dean of Theology at the Royal University. Father Núñez does this for me. He knows not a little about my childish dreams.

Who is this man who puts at my service his perfect memory of
my
memories? of a past of which it seems I've begun to speak so very freely. And asks me now, Who is it, Juana,
you
would serve, and how? Thus am I brought to ask myself a most curious question:
Where
best to serve, where to serve
best
—from a palace or a convent cell?

It would not have come to me of itself. And yet the question seems the sum of all the questions I have been asking myself. Have I come all this way from little Panoayan just to be a rhyming servant? What did I come so far to do? Write
comedies?
Is this truly
all?
he asks. What might a girl with such gifts not accomplish? Might she not also compose simple carols to console the hurt and the hungry?

Palace or convent. Solve the riddle, untangle the knot. Of course I do not use such childish terms, not openly, not at nineteen. But from what I remember of riddles, the solution often consists in finding false oppositions. Palace or convent—why it is hardly a choice at all. For each contains a library, does it not. Father Núñez only nods. Fate has fashioned for me a keeper who knows also how to turn the keys of silence.

He sits quietly across from me, as I tell myself we spend most of our
days here cloistered from the men anyway, entertaining ourselves with plays and books and convent gossip. We knew that the Empress María lived in a convent in Madrid, a situation which nonetheless could not keep her from visiting half the capitals of Europe. Philip's true spiritual adviser was an abbess. His sister had entered a convent. He took half his meals there, the Queen almost all of hers. And it was common knowledge that the King's lovers—married or single, mothers or barren, it mattered not—were to enter a cloister as soon as he had finished with them. Just as a horse ridden by Philip was never to be ridden by another.

We women talked frequently of someone else as well. Christina of Sweden. Who had abdicated her throne for the Spanish Ambassador, the Count de Pimentel. Of course, the lover I still prefer to imagine at her side is Descartes. She travelled all over Europe, often dressed as a man, went anywhere, said anything she pleased—in eleven languages. Every year or so there was a new rumour that she planned to tour America. When she announced her intention to visit Madrid, every convent in Spain was put on alert, for Christina never failed to visit all the convents in her path, and liked nothing better than to lodge there, with all her train and baggage, parrots and monkeys. Female monkeys only. At first I thought this curious, but how else was one to lodge in convents, after all?

Her library in Sweden once exceeded fifty thousand volumes, but the number she took into exile to travel with was not inconsiderable.

Fourteen thousand.

Christina was the great sponsor of Descartes, Bernini, Scarlatti, Corelli; Christina was the Learned Queen, founder of the Arcadian Academy; but more, I see that Christina was the nun-ensign, my favourite heroine, one who embodied every fantasy I'd ever had, had lived adventures I'd not yet
dreamed
of having—

Nun-Empress
.

It is Father Núñez himself who points this out to me.

He knows a good deal about our late King, too. He has come to know what I know, and a few things of his own. Of Philip, slave of lust, and his abiding fantasy to seduce a nun. The King grew so desperate to possess one sister in particular, he commanded her abbess to arrange an assignation. When she let him into the convent by a secret subterranean passageway, the King rushed in to find his prey awaiting him, stretched out on a slab, bled white, to all appearances dead by her own hand. Philip staggered out,
horrified, whereupon she was revived and spirited to a new convent at the far frontiers of Spain. To protect her daughters, so far will Mother Church go. Yet is there a Lord to whom even she is but a handmaiden.

And so, again obliquely, am I reminded of more recent incidents at the palace. Things I would give anything to forget. Head or heart, heart or soul, soul or flesh. Palace or convent.

At this point I might have noticed my tendencies running away with me, for I decided now that really, for a woman, palace was to convent as
gallinero
⁸
was to
caballerizo
†
—cote to stall. Hardly a choice at all. Truly I had come far. From false opposition to false comparison to a choice between illusions. Perhaps what I was running away from was myself. Or perhaps I only thought myself an empress.

No, he insisted, the choice is real.

Who is this man to ask me to choose? I have dreaded just such choices all my life.

Choose—I chose, to reduce my choices to
which
convent, and even this was no choice at all. The convent of San José of the Discalced Carmelites. The most rigorous, of course. Teresa de Ávila's Order. He casually suggested one more lenient. This I chose to take as a challenge. And when I came to see that my choice was in fact a house of torment, I fought my way out again and came back to the palace, only to walk among the courtiers and ambassadors as if back from the dead. And it is true that I have returned from a place few return from. More strange even than the giant, is her revenant. If I felt monstrous in their eyes before, their scrutiny has become for me a purgatory.

Father Núñez admits to having made mistakes with me … such as letting me enter a convent too harsh for my temperament. While I may doubt this, he has become in other respects disarmingly candid. Father Núñez calls my position, now, untenable.

“The essential was to draw you out of the palace. Your friendship with the Vice-Queen will go on, but not as before.”

He says this with such authority I cannot decide if I am being given my instructions or if he is conveying something the Vice-Queen has told him in confession. “Your haste in leaving her protection has embarrassed her….”

He has manipulated me, allowed me to deceive myself, and makes no apologies.

“It is your soul I am concerned with.”

“Only this?”

His eyes are no longer downcast, no longer heavy-lidded, not veiled and meek. He despises coquetry, I see. Fears it, perhaps. Now am I invited to find his candour chivalrous. “I am here, Juana Ramírez, to make war on you. To make war on the Evil in you and against the Enemy, for the dominion of your soul. And if only because I now consider you a house divided in all you do, I am optimistic of victory.”

I thank him for the
mise en garde
.

To want the best for my soul
is
to want what is best for me. He says this very sincerely. There will be times ahead when I do not know whom to trust—this need in him, I can always trust. He means this, and I believe him. Thus am I encouraged to believe he loves me. And looking into his face I do believe.
He loves my soul
. Is this a small difference, I wonder, or an abyss?

“Should this seem harsh, Juana Inés, try to remember: Once I have beaten you, I will carry your soul to God. And if it helps, you may think, child, of a bright angel and a dark….”

I am beginning to see that Father Núñez may one day be capable of cruelty.

“Only believe that it is not the bright one that I detest.”

Quite openly he explains my options to me, which are few … for a penniless bastard from the hills with so few friends at the palace. Or, apparently, in any other quarter of our city. He observes that I entered the first convent with a certain urgency. Since I am soon to be out on the streets again, I should make a more practical choice this time. That is, if I am really so disinclined to the institution of marriage as seem the other women in my family. Were I prepared to alter my disposition, there are men whom he might persuade that a spotless virtue is not everything in an obedient wife.

Choose. How desperately I did not want to, and confessed to him instead. Until he knew enough of me to shape his questions perfectly, like a key.

Marriage in the world, or marriage
to
the world.

Sincerely, he asks how he may next serve my soul. He arranges for me to visit other, more lenient convents, assures me the problem of a nun's dowry might just be surmounted again.

The day goes agreeably, with cakes and teas. Everywhere he is well known, everywhere he is revered. I see that he confesses many of the
prioresses. He sings to high heaven the praises of the nunnery of San Lorenzo as we leave. Towards the end of the day, he takes me to San Jerónimo, under the patronage of the widow Santa Paula and the learned virgins of the Holy Land, under the protection of Saint Jerome and the rule of Saint Augustine. It is a convent renowned for its programs of music and theatre, and for the quality of its library.

On the way back to the palace he takes me to a
recogimiento
. A place for prostitutes, a place of personal reflection and recollection, where the windows are bricked shut. To enhance concentration. Not just those on the outside, but those giving onto the courtyards, too. And the doors barred. My next step I really should take carefully. I will not be able to return to the palace after another fiasco. There are countries one does not return from twice.

He has to go away for a time. To Zacatecas. No, he does not know for how long. Not days, months maybe, at least a few weeks. He looks forward to hearing what my choice has been.