Hunger's Brides (71 page)

“A
nd yet you have made an application to purchase your cell. How is it I am only just learning of this?”

“Perhaps, Father Núñez, you might ask the Mother Prioress, since she's held my application for two years.”

“She may have wanted you to reflect upon the kind of cell you are buying yourself.”

“Meaning?”

“Is it a convent cell you want, Sor Juana—or the prison cells you so exalt in verse?”

“Whatever is the matter now?”

“The life in here corrupts you with its ease.”

“Ease?
Am I softened by the barbs of envy and intolerance and vicious gossip that beset me within these walls? The Prioress now schemes to correct even my handwriting—‘too masculine,' she calls it.”

“Mother Andrea claims you called her a
silly woman
, to her face.”

“Your superior dealt with this, Father.”

“How he spoiled and pampered you. A little more each year.”

“You say this now that don Payo's gone.”

“Don Payo, don Payo
. A country nun on a first-name basis with a Prince of the Church. And yes, Juana, he
is
. Gone to meet his cousin, our new Viceroy. To tell him all about you, I have no doubt. How fashionable it has become for every rake in Madrid to have a nun confidante. What am I saying?—for one's personal mystic.”
†

“I think I can forego the raptures of discussing mysticism with viceroys, if that's your concern.”

“Once here in Mexico, don Payo's cousin can be offered the most famous nun in Christendom to comfort him during his trials among us here in the wilderness. He will not fail to find her irresistible. She will prove a marvel of comprehension who knows, as if by miracle, our new viceroy's every intellectual interest and spiritual need, can quote at length from all his favourite poets.”

“I suspect don Payo has done much the same for you.”

“And with your future here secured, don Payo sails for the Alcázar—
that nest of nuns
—with a trunk full of your plays and poems and treatises. Souvenirs of his travels, is that it?”

“He asked for a few trifles, yes.”

“Verses for a few friends.”

“Not forgetting his family, Your Reverence. After seven years in the New World who would want to go back to one's family empty-handed?”

“Ah you mean his
other
cousin.”

“Yes, Father, the King's Prime Minister.”

“And do you really believe he can protect you from there?”

“Protect me.”

“Did you think your don Payo would not show it to me before he left?”

“Show you wh—ah, I see you'll be telling me.”

“That abomination!
Martyr of the Sacrament.”

“How could I think he'd dare not to? He was only our Archbishop and Viceroy after all. But I assume your abomination of my play does not quite extend to Saint Hermenegild himself?”

“So now we have martyred you here—”

“Father, you persist in reducing everything I write to self-portraiture.”

“Because it is—or no, you do not make portraits anymore, your plays contain whole embassies. The Greeks, the Visigoths, Saint Hermenegild, civil war, faith, magic, apostasy, Isabela of Castile, Columbus—”

“All that, Father. In one play? You're certain.”

“You think we are in one of your little comedies?”

“Just once, before you save my soul for all eternity, how I would love to see you laugh.”

“You may not enjoy the moment as much as you imagine.”

“In truth I cannot imagine it at all.”

“You think yourself back at the palace, perhaps. But as I remember it, you were not always laughing then.”

“Just once, to see you come here without a grievance.”

“Could your intent
be
more manifest? You salute not just the Queen and Queen Mother but the entire administration—you have a character addressing them from within the play itself!”

“So you've come to correct my art.”

“Is there to be no end to your worldly intriguing? You are a nun, a bride of Christ, buried alive, dead to the world—”

“This, from an officer of the Company of Jesus.”

“But such a clever nun—a jesting, writing nun. A nun magician. How you dazzle us with your theatrical sorcery—or do you call it science that so holds us in its thrall? Soldiers, souls and spectators all suspended
between New Spain and Old, you take us back a thousand years to the Spain of the Visigoths—and not content with this, back
another
thousand to the ancient Spain of Geryon! Two continents, two centuries, three or four millennia all on one rather crowded stage. Why, Sor Juana, you are a veritable
sorceress
of space and time.”

“The doctors of the Church, as you know perfectly well, Father, have defined magic as nothing more than the power to uncover natural marvels. That's all the magic I care to know about. The magic of Columbus was merely that of human genius.”

“Of which you have an abundance, should Madrid still be needing any—”

“Human genius, even in abundance, is but a pale reflection of the mind of God.”

“And since the natural marvel of the New World always existed, its discovery was the triumph of that genius over our own pious ignorance. You remind a bankrupt Queen of how much Spain has owed to the bold spirit of discovery,
²
a spirit just such as yours. Not enough for you merely to play the magician, the alchemist, no you are all the silver of the Indies, all the wonders of America rolled into one. Let us all bow down now to this prodigy of piety—the writing nun who makes rhymes on the rebel martyr Hermenegild.
You try to drive a wedge between Church and Crown.”

“And who was it, just now, lamenting the influence of nuns at the palace in Madrid?”

“You have Columbus's marines shout
Ne Plus Ultra, Ne Plus Ultra
, Here ends the Universe! only to hear their echoes rebounding from the unseen shore—but no,
from the future
. Where we sit and smile down at them from the new certainties of this very clever future. How you use Time to mock at us, the ignorance of our simple faith.”

“I find nothing simple about your faith, Father.”

“So limited, so straitening, so narrow for one so bold—”

“Nor was I the one who made Hermenegild a saint.”

“No, Juana, Pope Urban did. And thus you cunningly remind us of his unfortunate protégé Galileo Galilei—another sainted rebel in a prison cell. You would have us confuse this Galilei's impudence with the daring that once so enriched Spain and expanded its dominions! You think your hieroglyphs cannot be deciphered. You think to send don Payo with the key. To supply him with the pretext for an audience with the Queen.”

“As always, Father, your learning is a wonder.”

“As always, Sor Juana, you offer up a false surrender. It might shock you to know how much help I have had. There are many of us watching, more closely every year. How slyly you allude to a navigational technique you could only have read in Columbus's journals—also on the Index, as it happens. As Censor for the Holy Office, I might ask who has brought them to you. I could insist, we could make inquiries…. And yet you do not stop even at this. You simply cannot resist, even when you cannot hope to benefit—is all this rebellion truly in the name of liberty? Or is your own ambition even more vainglorious than the Florentine's?”

“And who, Father, cannot resist?—banning a navigator's journals when there can be no imaginable harm in reading them. Banning even the letters of Cortés to his King—under Royal Seal, but only here in America. Who, if not you, requested the seal here? And who spends his days extirpating books I could read freely as a child?”

“And look where they have led you. You might as well have written
eppur si muove
.
†
And so you mock at the science of the Jesuits, just as Galileo did, our Columbus of the skies! Is that your ambition, Sor Juana—to be the Columbus of a new Heaven?”

“You seem to think I have imagined a Spain—
at the time of Herakles
—teeming with Jesuit scientists.”

“I think there is no end to where your imagination may lead you.”

“It does
not
lead me to confuse the Earth's flatness with its centrality or its motility. Even before Galileo's death—”

“Of course, of course, the Church permits discussion of the Earth's motion. As a
hypothesis.”

“To want more was unnecessary. Signor Galilei's mistake was—”

“But not his worst, Sor Juana, not his worst. Yes, our scientists in Rome opposed him and are now divided—”

“Since you simply will not let this go, tell me what
was
worse, for the soldiers of a geocentrist Pope—”

“So dangerously you tread with me.”

“Which was the greater heresy for the Jesuits, Galileo's heliocentrism or his insubordination?”

“Many in the Company of Jesus thought Pope Urban too lenient, yes, just as your play makes Hermenegild's father, the heretic king, too lenient.”

“Now it is your imagination that misleads you.”

“One has only to scratch a little at the surface to find the vein of heresy in you.”

“No, Father, I wrote only of Hermenegild. As you say, of a thousand years ago.”

“Precisely so you could cast us in the role of your heretic bishop, the Arian from whose hand the martyr Hermenegild refuses the wafer and the wine. How guilefully you show our Queen how time turns traitors into martyrs, Arians into heretics, boldness into riches, water into wine. No, do not bother. Save your rebuttal for the proper time. But take this as a token from a father who has been too lenient for far too long. You think to split us from the Church by meddling in a question upon which the whole Church is divided. Yet it is not the Jesuits, but quite another target you are striking at. And Galilei's example contains many lessons, Juana. One such is this: Not even a Pope can save us from ourselves. The vain and insubordinate—”

“Revolve around themselves …?”

“I see, everything amuses you now. All is fit material for your laughter. In the figure of Columbus's marines you make clowns of the faithful and the fearful. This art of yours makes fear so comical. And makes
you
bolder every year. But then, I see you are right after all. I did come to correct your art. Indeed consider this, while there is still time. That today a single work of Galileo Galilei remains on the Index. It is not a work of science but of
art
—a play, Sor Juana, a dialogue. Three good Christians—and how strange that you should use the same device—debating planetary motion. Your fellow playwright makes one of them a simpleton of faith. For comic effect. And into whose mouth Galilei puts an idea cherished by a pontiff who has spoiled and coddled our vain and insubordinate natural magician, and now is mocked for his pains. What is the simpleton made to say? That a God who has the power to create the universe—”

“Would also have the power to make its laws and regulations, its causes and effects, appear to us quite other than they truly are.”

“I
knew
it.”

“An idea more promising perhaps than Galileo realized.”

“You just could not help showing me you have read even this most infamous of tracts. Or keep from showing us how clever you are—more clever even than the Florentine. You have seen all his errors. You will play the same game but play it rather better, you too will write a play but conceal your game from all of us, even as you announce it to be an allegory and so defy us to divine it. And see how this
promising
new idea turns God
himself into a great magician, revealer of natural marvels—and you, into a goddess in her theatre, a veritable fountainhead of inspiration!”

“Truly Father it is you and your collaborators who are inspired—to fit an ocean's worth of inspirations into the shallow basin of one woman's mind, a lowly country nun, as you say. No wonder they all flock to work with you.”

“When they should flock to you? It is worse with you than even
I
could have believed. It is as bad as they say. So anxious to show off your cleverness at any risk. How much better to have pretended never to have read it—instead you
quote
from it.
To me—
an officer of the Inquisition. And even here you direct the conversation to exactly where it should not go.”

“And that would be?”

“Towards water, Sor Juana. Water. Your new theology, your new sacrament. Which, yes, may very well martyr you….”