But calmly, gently, now.
And when she has taken him prisoner, when she has taken his life in her mouth, when it is time when the time is right, she will bite right through it, will cut him off from his life.
And once it is over, she will walk slowly not hurrying to the toilet and lock it carefully. She will check, it is locked. Smile into the mirror, wipe the serum from her chin her lips, from throat to chest. Turn on both taps full sink then tub. And alone in her little cave of rushing welling water SeaCow will let it come SeaCow will let it run. There will be enough. She will get it all. And she will be calm and cold and still as stone, once more.
At last, sides aching from the tight twist of her quiet retching, lips and gums all warm and glowing, she goes to him gratefully, her knees weak, head pounding clear and fresh. He asks her drowsily Why do you always go in and run the water after? La bucca dentata smiles through blood-shot eyes, smiles unafraid now he will see her teeth and says I got it all didn’t I. Last drop, sleepyhead smiles. You were pretty rough.
You know, for a minute there I thought you were about to
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
B. Limosneros, trans.
Este, que ves, engaño colorido,
que del arte ostentando los primores,
con falso silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido;
este, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido
excusar de los años los horrores,
y venciendo del tiempo los rigores
triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,
es un vano artificio del cuidado,
es una flor al viento delicada,
es un resguardo inútil para el hado:
es una necia diligencia errada,
es un afán caduco y, bien mirado,
es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.
She rejects the flattery visible in a portrait of herself
This painted semblance you so admire,
of an art flaunting its mastery
with false syllogisms of colour,
that smoothly mocks the eye;
this face—in which flattery pretends
to still the horror of the racing hours,
to stay the hand of ravishing time,
and spare us ageing and oblivion—
is only panic’s thin disguise,
is a garland to bar the hurricane,
is a cry in the wilderness,
is a token gesture made in vain,
is wasted toil and—through these eyes—
is Corpse. Dust. Shade. Nothingness.
THE CONFESSIONS
I had forgotten this. Now the memory brings no pleasure.
Even here, he said, even in America, we serve the Sovereign of Two Worlds.
We were at the firepit, just the two of us, and had spent the day together reading. The air was crisp and cold that night—up from our lips drifted curls and waves of mist but we stayed late by the fire. There were too few such days, such nights.
Abuelo rarely spoke about the war. The House of Austria, stretched thin between Vienna and Madrid … Turks and Moors to east and south, Bourbons and Protestants to west and north. Three hundred dukedoms and principalities tangled up in an impossible snarl of loyalties and betrayals. Catholic France sponsoring the Protestant Union, Lutheran Saxony fighting alongside the Catholic League…. Four hundred armies swarming over Europe like locusts, like packs of dogs turning on each other. The populations of Europe slashed by a third in barely a generation, thirty years of war …
“Half again as long as Troy, Angelina. And we fought for no better reasons … every duke craving a kingdom, every king an empire. No wonder Homer went blind, straining to see to the end of it.”
My grandfather volunteered in 1618. The truce with the low countries was expiring. Losing Portugal seemed just a matter of time. Everyone remembered that year, he said, for the comets. Three in the span of a few months, swords of flame over the horizon. This would be the Armageddon, the war to end the world. The important thing was to be fighting for the right side. They were just boys.
“No sooner had I survived the first campaign but I was praying for the war to end. The death, the rotting bread, the pestilence … Each Horseman had a season. Summers of war and fire—the cities went up like torches. Autumns of plague. And winters, winters were the harvest of the famine sown each spring, when the farmers were plucked from their planting and pressed into uniform.
“The land was exhausted anyway, not at all like here. Even when a field was sown, for every seed planted you were lucky to harvest six. One to replant, one to save, one to trade, the rest to armies and kings.”
It grew worse.
He had always dreamt of travelling. He travelled, now. Through the Spanish possessions of Italy to Vienna they rode, thence to Bohemia, across Bavaria and through the Palatine. Then up the Spanish Road towards the low countries, the United Provinces. In Westphalia he had watched mobs begging offal from the slaughterhouses. In Prague thousands had simply starved … tens of thousands more dying on battlefields and in lazaretos† all across the continent.
“In ’21 we thought it might be over, after White Mountain. There were such high hopes for the new king, though he was himself just a boy. I left in ’24. Almost an old man already at thirty-five. And even then I was lucky … Lucky not to have seen a thing like Magdeburg, where twenty thousand townspeople were massacred in a day.”
What he said next surprised me, for I knew he considered it his great good fortune just to have survived.
“And yet, Angel … I never fought under Spínola.”† He lifted his chin just a little. “It would have been good to have served a prince in the field. But had I stayed for Breda, how many Magdeburgs might I have witnessed?”
With the tip of his traveller’s staff he raked at the embers. I was not sure I’d understood him, and went hunting for the lines of Sarpedon, Zeus’s mortal son, to Glaucus.
Glaucus, say why are we honor’d more
Than other men of Lycia …
The shores of Xanthus ring of this: and shall we not exceed
As much in merit as in noise? Come, be we great in deed
As well as look, shine not in gold but in the flames of fight,
That so our neat-arm’d Lycians may say: “See, these are right
Our Kings, our Rulers: these deserve to eat and drink the best;
These govern not ingloriously; these thus exceed the rest.
Do more than they command to do….6
When I had found this and read it for him, I saw I’d understood him well enough. He didn’t speak for a moment, but I knew he would go on now.
“The whole way back I walked with a bloodied bandage around my head, and when I think of that walk I still hear the flies buzzing at one ear. Ahh,” he said, “I see you hear them too. I walked back to my village, but the want and the sickness were too terrible there. Everyone was gone. I kept on, following the south bank down to the mouth of the Guadalquivir, stood up to my hips where the brown of the river ran to brine. My boots were more like sandals by then, but upside down, so worn were they at the soles. I went barefoot down the shore all the way to land’s end, walking and thinking and arguing with the flies. I looked across the straits to Africa, past el peñón de Calpe to Mount Hacho, and past that one to where I was sure I glimpsed the Atlas range.7
“I stared at those mountains and thought hard about walking right down through Africa to land’s end there. Angelina, I was standing at the pillars of Calpe and Abyla! Hardly a hundred years before, and for the two thousand before that, this had been the end of the world. But it felt in that instant as if its end lay not ahead but at my back—and I had escaped it.
“I unwrapped the bandage, and tossed it into the sea. I was not ready to be an old man quite yet. No, I would come to America and see for myself if the New World had an end at all. Los Portugueses were evasive as always. ‘Tierra del fuego’ … ice and fire, seas of fog, earth disa
ppearing into thin air. What was anyone to make of that, eh? But when a Portuguese† tells a Spaniard about the sea,” Abuelo bent forward confidingly, his elbows on his knees, “you can be sure he is keeping the best parts to himself.”
Nodding assent, I fed another stick to the fire as he talked. The flames roared up.
“Then I met my Beatriz on the boat across,” he said, brightening, “a girl from the south bank, the village right next to mine. There was the end of one dream, but the beginning of a happier one…. And yet, and yet, who could ever have imagined it? That the horror I had volunteered for as a young man would not end until the year a certain granddaughter of mine was born.”
“Me?”
“You, mi hijita, you….”
How proud he was to have served, even an empire bankrupt and broken. Of all the epithets attaching to the Spanish king—Catholic Monarch, Planet King, &c.—the one my grandfather pronounced most proudly was this, Soberano de los Dos Mundos. So yes, proud, and sad, and with a fascination for the death of empires that stayed with him to the last day of his life.
Sovereign of the Two Worlds.
When I moved from my uncle’s house to the Viceroy’s court, so eager to serve, I wrote an elegy for a king, the young king my grandfather had served under. Courtiers who had known that king sniggered behind their handkerchiefs—even those who had been with him at the Alcázar† as he died. Even my friends smiled and thought me naïve, made excuses for me. She is only seventeen.
At the hour of his death, it is said, every eye in Madrid was dry. It is also said that just three people cried—Queen Mariana, and no one could name with any certainty the other two. One wag at our court averred that it was not three people but three eyes: the last shopkeeper in Madrid to extend the palace credit, and his one-eyed wife.
I weep for the king who dies unmourned, I wept for that one, Philip IV—to have presided at the ruin of Europe’s greatest throne. I wept for the prince born to lead but never shown how, an Alexander without an Aristotle, unable to unravel the knot in the thread of his greatness. For the dying empire does not prepare its princes for this. Olivares did everything to keep him from the field, built for him a country pleasure palace, the envy of all Europe until Versailles. El Palacio del Buen Retiro.† A palace fit for our century of ten thousand comedies. Such merriments the comedians made on his retreats.
Quevedo, for one. Our king is like a hole. The more land they take from him, the greater he becomes. I could never quite forgive Quevedo this one.
Philip was just sixteen when he ascended the throne. Planet King! they proclaimed him, that centrepiece about which all lesser bodies revolve like hungry courtiers tabled in their epicycles. Lesser bodies such as his future son-in-law, the young French Sun King, Louis XIV.
As I sat to write his elegy I thought of how he had been mocked, by history and by the stars. Forty years on, he must have seen this himself, as death approached, so elliptically. And seen also how he had been mocked by his own courtiers from the start. For, just a few years before the western Hapsburgs had acclaimed him Planet King, centre of the universe, the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna had been studying astronomy. With Kepler.
Such a gift I have for seeing the emblems woven into other lives.
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.
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