Hunger's Brides (57 page)

I rise to greet him, a little taller in my heels than he in his. He struggles manfully to hold my eyes. We learn here to wield the hourglass, as it were, like a rapier. At times it amuses me to observe the power this simple geometrical figure has over men, this body I have inherited from Isabel. But when I am alone with Carlos, when we are truly free to speak, it is as if we had no bodies at all … two spirits entirely free to jouney to any country, to fly anywhere the mind may go. How furious he is when he first hears this from me, and refuses to see in any part of it a compliment. Why?

He stands before me—the eyes made enormous by his thick glasses, bleary from too much reading, and angry, obviously, at the mere sight of me. I notice finally that he has cut his hair. He has left a little hank, a lovelock pulled forward over his shoulder like a chipmunk's tail, bound in a small black ribbon.

This good-bye does not feel like the others. He does not stay long. He has been reading my face, no doubt. But I no longer know how I am feeling. I think to ask him if the sword is a genuine original of the Roman Empire. I think to ask what sort of weather he is expecting on the road to Puebla…. I can think of nothing to say at all. I know he is in love with me.

He is in no mood for preliminaries.

“I simply cannot see how you can bear this snakepit another day.”

The first harsh words he has spoken to me—no, we have disagreed. It is the tone that is new. How can I, he demands to know, have remained for so long blind to the jeering cruelty of this place—to the racist sneers, this fanatical obsession of theirs with pure blood? Have I not heard them whispering, ‘Was her grandfather a
salta atrás
†
?'

I have told only Carlos anything about him, and have begun to regret it. “And what other place is there,” I ask, “for a poet
but
here? Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón. Secretaries, chaplains, chamberlains all.”

“Is
she
the one poisoning you?”

This is so like him.

“What point is there for people like us to be envious of someone like Leonor?”

“Lope, Quevedo, Alarcón never had this kind of rival. They never had to be beautiful. I always believed it was
her
, but seeing you last night … I'm afraid what may ruin you, Juana, is not her beauty but your own.”

He has taken his glasses off and—strange sensation—he seems nearer, as if I were the one having problems with my vision. His face wears the oddest look. As his lips part, I have the panicky feeling he is about to kiss me …

“Even as you have ruined Teresa.”

Now these letters.

He judges me from afar just as when he was here. Surely he does not imagine a woman could simply go to him—wherever he is now—even if I wanted to.
Why didn't he tell me he was really going away?
Does it have to be love—does friendship mean so little to him? One long perfect night gazing through a telescope together—pouring out our hearts, our souls, into the vessels of the other's eyes—were those hours not marvel enough without bringing Love into it? Was our time together not enough as it was?

And these outlandish projects of his. What business would he have seeing Isabel? Impertinent. Of course she is beautiful. What would he expect? And this great new enthusiasm for the countryside, for what is past. I write Carlos sonnets to tell him I'm sorry—he accuses me of insincerity! Then of disloyalty, even while he writes letters filled with sedition to me,
here
.

And through what strange geometries he pursues me, this future holder of the Chair of Mathematics. Running from the arms of the
Jesuits toward me, then right past me to a monastery. Then from one Indian village to another, where—ledger propped on bended knee—he composes arguments desperate to persuade where they cannot seduce. He asks me to contract to a life of charming escort, intellectual helpmeet, mother to a litter of children poor as church mice and nearsighted like a thin-skinned father whose talent merits rewards reserved for the
gachupines
. A father whose indignation renders him unfit for any lesser employment. He asks me to share a lifetime of slights.

Yet though he offers it to me, he doesn't even see it's not this existence he wants for himself. The respectable lot of a Jesuit scholar is all Carlos really wants. Not me.

And this other fantasy he conjures—my great Examination before the Scholars.

Forty scholars—why does everyone say forty?
Even Carlos. Does he so need to see a Catherine against the forty sages of Maxentius, a Christ before the forty learned Pharisees? Can it not just be me?

When the Viceroy calls a halt, his face does not beam with triumph as Carlos imagines it. Replies like mine will do nothing but fire the very rumours the Viceroy wants quelled. He has called for this examination to put an end to the speculations about my learning's origin, which are becoming worrisome. The last thing the palace needs is the Inquisition sniffing about.

Not forty, not sages. A handful learned, none too well prepared. And no one is at all prepared to be answered in verse.

“Now would
la docta doncella,”
asks the Professor of Music, “care to share with us her views on the relation of harmony to beauty?”

I begin by proposing that the limits of the senses mean that each, obviously, measures properties in different registers: touch, taste, &c. But not the soul. The soul knows there is but one true proportion. Sirs …

Here's an everyday example:

As its import sinks in, he sinks to his seat, his lips working slightly, like gills. In answer to the question in his eyes, I press on …
And as you sir, so plainly see, Pythagoras calculated the harmony of the celestial spheres to be a circle of fifths, the music of a silence of such perfection we hear the voice of God in it
.

Sing
.

Yet what if, gentlemen, this circle were instead a spiral—picture a figure winding up a cone poised upon its apex, a staircase if you will. Let us imagine a music of not spheres but spirals, whose section is not the circle of fifths but the cutting plane of an ellipse, as in the new studies of planetary motion…. A new notation, then, for a new vision of the heavens. A measure not closed, but spiralling like a staircase from the realm of man, up through those of Nature, thence to God. And yet as we climb, so small and so frightful, up that vast winding stair built to such a titan's foot, we find ourselves rising up the scale of that silent concord within which, could we but hear it, the soul finds its rest…
.
²⁹

The Viceroy frowns, his mien darkening, and it is on this flattened note that the grand examination ends. But does it occur to none of them that many of my answers were in verses already written? Why doesn't it—because I am so young, or so female, or because one does not, in one's spare time, compose poetry on questions of speculative music?

And since that day, the mill and mongery of rumours grows ever worse. The Viceroy is more to blame than anyone.
After
the fact he is
pleased enough with my replies, because the day makes for a good story. He tells the new ambassador from Milan that watching me dealing with my questioners was
like watching a galleon fending off a fleet of canoes
. Greatly pleased with his analogy, he repeats it too often. Too sure of my place, I complain of this to Leonor, of being foisted on the Milanese Ambassador like the Viceroy's favourite talking toy. She answers curtly that my gifts are an asset of the Crown. Velázquez understood this perfectly, without needing anyone to explain it to him.

Wounded, I take it out on the Viceroy, though of course I am not quite fool enough to say any of this aloud.
‘Galleon'?—our chocolate-loving Viceroy has become a bit of one himself, comfortably in port, portly now in comfort.
El gran galeón de la Mancerina
. Does the Marquis de Mancera not see the satire in our naming a chocolate platter after him?

Sweet Carlos, loyal, honest friend … the fruits of the victory he recalls to me contain the seeds of the bitterest defeat. There were Pharisees enough to spare,
but no temple this
. Christ in the temple didn't debate with a heart puffed up with vanity, with this insane need of mine to hold up my learning like a fist and shake it in their faces…. What Carlos does not understand is the
desengaño
†
I discovered that day, and which invades me now. The University had been my most cherished hope—hope for a theatre of universal ideas nobly declaimed and defended, hope for a place where I would at last find my teacher. When that afternoon ended, I knew not on this side of the Atlantic, nor perhaps on the other, would I find a teacher to guide me, to trust enough to follow … to one day hope to walk beside.

Faithfully the letters come. To gently shame me, remind me of our talks. Of Panoayan, of my dream of seeing Tuscany, of the Academy of Florence—
Academy
, what a mockery. Botticelli, Da Vinci … I have heard them snicker at even Leonardo here, at how he squandered his talent on trifles.
He
, on trifles! Accused by such as these….

But the day I read Carlos's version of the examination, I see the question the Chair of Music should have put to me. And I do not know how I am to answer.
Answer
. I am called but I do not know how. No less then than now. Answer. If I am called, how do I answer?
If
I am called, I do not know
how
. Answer now.

‘Why, señorita—if you are beautiful—is there so little harmony in
you
?'

‘And why, Soul, dost thou know so little peace?'

A
t a turn in the hallway I come upon the three of them, brought up hard against the door of his chamber. The Ambassador of Milan and two of the handmaidens, in a wing of the palace no woman should visit. He dangles a cluster of black grapes—obscenely plump—above red mouths gaping with the blind hunger of new-hatched birds, bids them suck each grape whole—one passes from mouth to mouth to mouth. A crush of silks, a thigh wedged between two thighs spread wide, a knee lifts … Teresa. He turns to kiss Imelda, cups hard her breast, presses the tip clear of the bodice, pinches, a hard dark grape … Bites down and splits it, grape juice running down. Chafes it with a fingernail.