Hunger's Brides (85 page)

Carlos goes pale, Antonia positively flinches.

“Does everyone on both sides of the Atlantic,” I ask looking at each in turn, “think they know what I am now working on?”

“Juanita, I'm sorry. It just slipped out—in the spirit of yesterday's free exchange of ideas.”

“Such a rarity, Carlos, the free and equal exchange. Your generosity gets the better of you at times. And
Vicomte
, you should bear in mind that as a confidant Carlos is something of an amphora—straight necked, wondrous capacity, but susceptible to gushing forth suddenly on all sides.”

“Please don't blame don Carlos. I know I shouldn't have been the one—but might we not speak of this? I was so hoping to bring us around to it. It is precisely this work I hope most to translate.”

“You do,
Vicomte
, seem rather to insist. An insistence that leaves your intent looking decidedly unnatural. And were I ever to devote a work to Sappho, I would avoid the grotesque and the debased altogether. Of this you may be sure. If you insist so on the names of de Scudéry and Labé, Sappho and Christina—is it to intimate that one might find in France, or is it Versailles itself,
toda una comunidad Sáfica?
Am I then to take this Sapphic community to be a refuge, or just one more exotic birdhouse for
the palace grounds? And is there some point to this? Does one hope to incite me to some brazen action or blushing declaration?”

It is as I thought. The mask of shyness, the blundering and blushing are gone. The Vicomte d'Anjou sits smiling through the grille, world-wearily amused. Is there more, I wonder? What lies beneath this next mask?

“Perhaps,
Monsieur
, a man of your beauty believes he may speak with no particular purpose at all. Just what sort of translation is it you hope to make to France—of my poetry, my person, or do you merely hope to make a diverting report of me? Or perhaps you serve your King not as his procurer but as his proxy, making your mission the inversion of what you say it is: to translate France rather to
me
, by way of the salacious flirtations of a bored king who has proclaimed himself nothing less than the state itself. This is the Sun King's notion of a golden age?—to interrogate a bride of Christ on her sensual inclinations? Or is this what passes for wit at Versailles …”

Were it not for the anger that a jaded smile from one so beautiful and so young strikes up in me, I would be the weary one. Once I thought I would suffocate without the diversions of this locutory. Now I am suffocated by them. Was Carlos right after all? Have things really been too quiet?

Tomasina rushes into the room, “—excuse me, Sor Juana—the Bishop's carriage. It's
here.”

[22nd day of June, 1690]

Lysis,

I
t is a giddy time. One notices we have been celebrating the king's wedding to the new queen for over a year now, though we hadn't quite intended it. A sort of accident. With the first queen's sudden passing and the haste to secure another upon which to sire an heir, the dates we've been getting to celebrate were all long past; and since we have never known when the next occasion was coming, except to hear we've missed out, we have never really taken the banners down. First we improvised a Festival of the Seeking of the New Queen's Hand (last May there—here, in July), followed by her marriage by proxy in Neuburg, then her departure on that leisurely seven-month tour
de soltera
through Europe (this, the most exhausting part—we fêted the iron nerves with which, each fresh day, the virgin queen combatted her impatience to join her mate). And now this year there has been her arrival on Spanish soil in the spring (here, last week), then this week the Spanish wedding, the royal entry into the capital …

The new Viceroy had been desperate to set the tone for his administration, and in those festivities has found it, while the Vicereine has found it is not a party until she has broken something—a heart, a treaty, a treasury. Together the two set off the first volley of scandalous balls and lavish banquets. And never have we seen so many weddings, or so few new entries into the convents. At the price of a dowry one may offer up one's daughter to the Son of God any day, but these past months are as close as any burgher here will ever get to marrying a daughter to or for or with the King of Spain.

And so it almost seems we find ourselves transported back to the Mexico City of my early years, for through the streets and late into the night flood upwards of seven thousand coaches drawn by silver-shod horses—coachmen in gold lace, their hatbands struck with pearls—wedding bells and serenades, bullfights and bawdy festivals, wild rumours of fertility rites held at the outskirts of the capital … but then
we at San Jerónimo are at the outskirts here and have seen little of this for all our vigilance.

A giddy time and a desperate one, for it is not only the Viceroy and the Creoles who would make their mark. The Church initially joined in with special Masses and midnight orisons, but lately the theme from the pulpits is more often the hoary one of Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps it is only the lost dowries that has them vexed, but I believe our year may be ending—

On your side of the Atlantic everyone, you say, is clamouring for a second collection. Five Spanish editions now of our Castalia's flood—your printer weeps Castalian cataracts of gratitude each time he hears your name or mine, or talk of a second collection. Your friends in Mantua are ready to translate our Castalia to Italy, your friends in Vienna, to Germany, and a fresh new friend of mine asks nothing more than to bring her to Versailles.

I glean from your teasing that you've had nearly enough of my timidity. Since
Las letras a Safo
are an open secret and since Núñez rails against them anyway, why not publish and at least silence the speculation? What is it that so exercises Núñez, you ask, in
not
finding Sappho's verses in our collection? Does he read in their omission not respect for him but weakness? Cowardice … though you are too kind to say this. I know how it must look to a Manrique. Please, María Luisa, please do not give up on me. I need to believe too that Sappho's time may come soon, even as Castalia's has.

Yes, these verses are an open secret, more open than you perhaps realize, given that Núñez now roves from pillar to pillory pronouncing darkly against this new and unprecedented wickedness. Here in Mexico—where so much may be spoken, and spoken almost freely if not open sedition or undisguised heresy—to publish is quite another proposition. In this respect we are not like Spain, and so it has been difficult to make this difference clear. What is written is not just better evidence for the Inquisition, the written is Writ: it occupies another realm of existence entirely.
²⁹
Picture Cortés reading his
Requerimiento
in Latin over the heads of the Indians he is about to attack. There, you have it. Things since then are not so much changed.

But I also need to help you to see that in another respect things are already not as they were when you were here. I ask you to read me now obliquely, in the way we have spoken of before. Think of Aeschylus and
the art of lyric tragedy, in which an entire story may be told though almost none of it happens onstage. So …

The Inquisition has asked Carlos to furnish a complete list of the reading materials in his possession. In Spain I know this is rarely done any longer but the Holy Office here is its own beast and master. Carlos blames me. Which is only fair, since any blame I can remotely connect him to, I do. He has decided the demand for a book inventory is linked somehow to Núñez's campaign against me and what he, Núñez, insists on calling
The Sapphic Hymns
. Very sanguine is dear Carlos about my publishing difficulties, as he reminds me of how many of his own manuscripts go unprinted. So while he understands my frustration, and yours, as no one else does (he will tell you he understands most things as no one else does), every risk I take makes his caution seem, well … cautious. Caution beseems the woman, and as a complement to her modesty can never be excessive; whereas in a man it is, in anything but the quantities required for his barest survival, a disgrace.

So yes, you are right to ask. I have withheld my favours for eight years now, and what has it brought me? What I offer these Churchmen I am now scarcely in a position to withhold. Núñez has me almost completely encircled. I can no longer sit by and watch him undermining me.

I
know
you are right. And so since April I have been pressing a number of counterattacks, but obliquely—as Aristophanes resorted to comedy so as to beard the tyrant Cleon. How else are we to answer the tyrants, how else to raise their siege? Here is how the campaign stands.

Picture, María Luisa, a stage set by Aristophanes, from
The Wasps
or
Lysistrata
. A whole little Troy town on a mountaintop—Mount Eryx, or the Hill of Ares, or better yet the sanctuary of the Erectheum on the Acropolis. Yes, the very thing. A great hive then, with dozens of locutories, open in profile to the auditorium. A play of comic comings and strange goings on. Let us set it during a siege, but in a castle with honeycomb walls and the soldiers of both sides—paper wasps in red, honey drones in gold and lilac—all slipping in and slipping out for the honey of the harlots of the hive … all the while the harried queen crouches off to one side laying eggs in moments of privacy as fantastic as brief. Her cell too is open to the gallery.

Enter in stunning array the thirty theologians of Castalia's preface to a fanfare of ram's horn trumpets, a stately pavane across the boards and
then another blast to rival Jericho as once again they exeunt by thirty different exits.

Enter two platoons of holy officers carrying torches, Jesuits and Dominicans jostling. Our defenders of the ramparts against the Saracens, Jews and Lutherans, and yet for these keepers of the wall, no glorious fanfare of shofars.
†
The Theological Thirty have made them look quaint—keepers of a mighty fortress over a mere mill race. So far, these stalwarts will not quit the stage, though they stand near the exits and get in the way.

Enter Núñez declaiming, as he moves from cell to cell to cell, three lines of Castalia's poetry, over and over, the three having remotely to do with Sappho.

Enter Dorantes reminding the audience that Sor Juana was trained in theology by none other than Núñez.

Enter Bishop Santa Cruz, bent on rescuing all pretty nuns from perfidy.

Enter the Creole delegation paddling out of rhythm, a longboat at their waists, its figurehead a carven effigy of Guadalupe. And yet who is it they ask to intervene with the Vice-King to stay their charges of sedition? Not Guadalupe, certainly. How curious they seem: they hate the Viceroy's administration and yet, were someone to make him a king, like puppies would they follow the humblest of his clerks.

Enter Carlos carrying the Archbishop's magical hat—the mathematician and natural philosopher as archepiscopal mendicant bartering alms for miracle cures. And this one once called
me
a fable beggar.

Enter an officer wearing the coat of arms of which Archbishop Aguiar never stops boasting, of a family so ancient they trace their name back to the Centurions. The venerably outfitted officer tows a trundle of books to the booksellers. See him wheedle and threaten until they surrender all their comedies, which he exchanges for his copies of
Consolations for the Poor
.

Enter other officers fanning out to close down the
palenques
and
cosos
.
†

Enter the Vicomte d'Anjou who may be the next King of England or Spain, or even of France, or he may be here to translate me, or he may be here to spy on us.

Close Act I with the Archbishop walled in by stacks of comedies by Quevedo and groping myopically for an exit….

How I weary of these silly wars and the siege they lay upon our thoughts.
³⁰
Even as Lysistrata and the lusty women's assembly so
wearied of it all they were willing to withhold their favours (O supreme sacrifice!) until their husbands made peace. A sacrifice, Aristophanes tells us, made all the more stark by a war scarcity of Milesian comforters to help them bide their loneliest hours.
³¹
So you see, these comic women of Aristophanes were serious. As are we.

Tonight my thoughts turn to the end of war, to the weddings and the banquets that seal the peace—and to the difference between the false peace and the true, the siege and the truce. Thoughts that form the basis of
este entracto
and the parabasis for Act II. Picture next, dear Lysis, a stage set for a series of banquet scenes. As for some other antic comedy by Aristophanes, but to be read remembering the art of Aeschylus. Prudence calls for us to practise this art of lyric comedy for the next letter or two….