Hunger's Brides (78 page)

  All right, what's your question—whether it's plausible that a poet might fall in love with her own creation? Or, maybe you're asking if when any of us falls in love it is with our own creation.

  Be serious!

  
Bueno, Belilla, me esfuerzo
. ‘Phaon'—tell me what that means and I'll give you a serious reply. Guesses? Anyone …?

  Is it like ‘Phaedra'…?

  Or ‘Phaëthon'?

  
And just when I was congratulating myself for not being able to teach you Greek—yes, Antonia, a little like Phaedra and yes Belilla, like Phaëthon.‘Bright,' like the moon, and bright like the sun. So were the lovers Sappho and Phaon, or Aphrodite and Phoebus Apollo, or perhaps earliest of all, the rise and fall of the moon and the sun?

  You
promised
.

  Here it is then, my most serious answer, Belilla. Not a little violence has begun with a myth deliberately passed off as a substitute for history. In which case we might wonder if perhaps posterity's war on Sappho begins here, with her myth. But we might also ask ourselves if there is not an equal violence waiting to be unleashed if we mistake what history brings us for the more complex truths myth helps animate—as the sap does the tree. To those who would ignore this, the living forest of myth becomes invisible even as the tree of truth desiccates and hardens. And in the heat of battle we might even succumb, ourselves, to fashioning spears and arrow shafts from its boughs. In Sappho's case the battle is brought by those who would confuse Sappho with …?

  Her poetry?

  Yes, María. We could study for a lifetime the tales the name Sappho has been tarred with, but I would not add another feather's weight to the speculations clinging to her life.

  So Ovid just made it all up.

  But Belilla, why should we expect art to be so simple—so much simpler than our own lives? Yours or mine, much less Ovid's. As a man condemned to exile maybe Ovid was more concerned with preparing his own leap into legend. So perhaps it's wisest to leave the myth of Sappho where Ovid leaves it: poised on a great rock standing like a portal, a white veil between this world and the next, an angry sea reverberating up the sheer cliffs of Leucas like the steel of Damascus dashed upon shields … Here we stop for today.

  Maybe he made Sappho up too.

  We'll take up some of these threads again next time.

  But what about Sappho? Her
poems
—her voice, her
loves
.

  
Next week, the letter of Paris—who none too wisely preferred Aphrodite to Athena, beauty to wisdom—

  And your poems to Sappho, Sor Juana—what about those?

  
[Antonia, furious]
How could you possibly know about that Belilla? Are you listening at our door? Do you have any idea how much danger—?

  What about you, Antonia? You're like a pet! A fat, spoiled house cat. Not six months here and you walk around like Juana's your property! ‘Sor Juana says this. Sor Juana's writing that….'

  Juana, I've never said a word!
[near tears]
Not one word.

  Everyone? Would you let me have a word with Belilla alone? See you all next week. Antonia, you too please …?

[11th day of September 1688]

la excma. señora María Luisa Manrique de Lara y
Gonzaga Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna
,
Madrid, España

Lysis,

A
second letter—so quickly. (I have your letters of the 1st and now the 13th of July.) As Antonia placed the envelope in my hands I knew it couldn't be the answer to my last to you, which will be weeks reaching you—crossing uncounted mountain passes, one Atlantic and all the vicissitudes of storm and tide and fog and faulty charts that this implies. And then besides, two sets of censors, one on each side—as if from Veracruz to Cadiz they faced across a functionary's desk, to make the sea of faith for censors but a pond.

And yet even knowing all of this, when I saw how slender your letter I could not help feeling some careless phrase of mine had angered you. In this frame of mind (askew) I read and read once more the opening line.

Send me a title, Juanita. Our daughter needs a name
.

How have you managed it so quickly? Licences from the Holy Office, thirty letters of support from theologians. Thirty!—have you so much as unpacked your travelling cases?

You say the printers have
started?
A title then, a title … to do with the Muses? but no, one hears far too much talk of Muses over here. Wait.

There is a spring on Mount Parnassus, sacred once to Ares. It lies a little north and east of Delphi. But that was Ares' day, and then there was a nymph and then it was Apollo's time to shine. Castalia. (Pagan,
and
chaste, Castalia.) To escape Apollo's attentions she plunged from a cliff to a spring far below, a small spring at the bottom of a deep rock basin. Here in the tale, the spring transforms into a source of inspiration, to both Apollo and the Muses, who were for this reason called (if rarely) the Castalides. All this is quite fine, and the idea of our Castalia as the Muses' muse quite gratifying, but what amuses me not a little is a glimpse of Apollo's ‘inspiration' as his quarry launches herself from the heights and dissolves into a shower of silver.

So, yes, ‘Castalia,' but what?
Fuente de Castalia? Manantial Castálida? Salto de las Castálides?—Chubasco, Aguacero, Chaparrón, Diluvio—Haz Castálida?
I am at a loss. May I surrender the decision to your most exquisite discretion?
Hazme este favorcote?

Of a sudden, nervousness consumes me. Nymph. What
sort
of nymph—naiad, dryad, nereid, hamadryad—which? This is not some backwater we are publishing in, this is
Madrid
. Some wag is sure to suggest our collection's namesake was instead a rash Oread
†
who sank to the bottom like a stone. Or like a certain ill-considered tome …

Ah what a pendulum of anxieties I am become. Anxious first not to get my hopes too high that it might be published, next, feeling just as fearful that it
will
be. Fearful of there, dreadful of here—the very image of Castalia as she leaps. So for our title, we could not have chosen better. But as for the other … I know I have not answered you. You have hinted that the printers, who are holding the first signature till you hear from me, would have room in it to print my
Letras a Safo
.
†
How it thrills me to know you have not forgotten them. If I say ‘not yet,' will I break your heart?

I lack the courage still. I am afraid to break this truce. Núñez has kept to his word, and for these last seven years I have not heard a word of his against me. You will lose patience with me for being cowardly. And yet in these quiet if not peaceful years I have been able to work, much bad, some good—but some of that work we are publishing now. If honesty forces me to concede it is not yet my great work, modesty does not stop me thinking that in
First Dream
, at least, I have given something of my measure. There is not a poem quite like it in our language.
¹⁷
(You have said precisely that of
Las letras a Safo
, I know.)

But if the Inquisition here can ban Montalbán's albeit terrible play (seen throughout Spain without pleasure perhaps, but also without censure) for the blasphemy of having a character
pray God hasten the course of the sun
, then the holy officers would not hesitate to ban our Castalia for a dalliance with Sappho. And even in the unlikely event that their decision be overturned someday by the Holy Office in Madrid, it could take years. I do not know whom it would bring more pleasure to see our collection seized and held till then—Father Núñez or Fray Dorantes. Both consulted on the Montalbán case. For Núñez, any brief pleasure he took
would surely have been in banning a play by the author of
The Nun-Ensign
—an old favourite of mine. Dorantes was, meanwhile, the more vociferous in his ruling and would take pleasure now in seeing Núñez chastened for his past association with me or for any lack of zeal in condemning our collection as soon as it appears.

Already, then, it takes all the courage I can summon to have you publish, along with so many love poems,
Martyr of the Sacrament
and
The Divine Narcissus
, knowing as I do how angrily Núñez views these. Sappho's hour for the stage is not yet nigh. Infinitely worse than the frustration of holding back this one suite a little while longer is the pain of imagining the whole collection seized.

Can you forgive me, then, if I send you another rarity in its place?—to fill the signature, and if you approve it and accept it as a portrait, might you let it open the collection …?

The other night well past Matins, after reading your letter for the dozenth time, the verses I enclose came all in the most marvellous flood. I pray you read them as token of my love and gratitude, a tribute in seventeen quatrains. Sálazar has written something using this structure of dactyls, but I have strengthened it and even bettered it, I think, after a practice poem or two. Even after these, if someone had offered as a wager that a poem of sixty-eight lines each beginning in a dactyl
†
could come out any better than the beating of a beggar's drum to the thin jingling of his purse, I would not have taken it—would fain have taken the purse.

Though I had tried to give it something of the tabor and pipe, yet does one hear in this tribute to you the fife and drum … there is a stirring on the plains of Troy, for it seems a fighter of great moment has joined the fight; only it is not Achilles but Helen who moves among us. Or one as beautiful.

You are a Manrique. It is your way to face the field and if there must be a fight to force it, choose the day, the place, the arms. Only wait a little longer, wait a little more. They are strong and many, and you are so very far.

And farther still with the hurricane season descending full upon us. The wait for your answer will be an agony.

With all my thanks, with all my heart.

día 11 de septiembre, Anno Domini 1688
   
del convento de San Jerónimo
,
  
de la Ciudad Imperial de México
,
     
Nueva España

If we consider that distinguished female writers, poets, researchers, and thinkers in general, exalt the megalomania of their female colleagues in order that they might develop a dynamic to compete with the masculine version of the human being, for which version they express a latent, and occasionally manifest, hatred; if we consider these facts, I say, we will associate bisexuality with every thinker's oral neurosis, and anti-masculine aggressivity with a symptom of hysteria, understanding that the defence of feminine aggressivity is only a reaction against an unconscious infantile adaptation to a passivity that is unbearable to a homosexual being, that is, to a being who acts like a man while being a woman …

Let us take the example of the Mexican poetess, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz….

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