Is it true, she muses, as is held, that the Creole’s affection for the source long outlives his infancy? And is this hardy milk, dispensed in such charming vessels and in such abundance, not perhaps the secret source of the greater potency and vigour of his body and mind?—
But Juanita was raised on Indian breastmilk.
Teresa.
I see them all watching me. Carlos, Fabio, Perico, the courtiers. Leonor. I have not told her this. Teresa is trying to cause a rift between us.
“The Academy would now hear,” Perico leaps onto a chair, “how la Giganta answers the charge. Indian milk—is it true?” He has said this gently. I know it is in jest, and an opportunity to respond in kind. He’d be the last to care.
I could have spared her. A friend. Is it even true, what I say next? Rumours like this make the rounds about all of us. She is impulsive by nature and not a little giddy at the approach of her wedding. I know in my heart there is no malice in it. I see the ropes of pearl glowing in her hair, her hopes glowing at her cheek. Things will not be the same for her.
Teresilla, you may be a slip of a thing
but you’ve given your poor Camacho quite a whirl …
Those branches on his brow’ve grown so towering,
he stoops to enter even a vestibule …27
Carlos comes the next day, under the pretext of taking his leave yet again, and in truth Puebla de los Angeles has not been graced with his presence for a while. He gives himself airs, as though he were above the Academy, but he comes often enough—verily does one wonder if the seminary is ever in session. I know he has come to admonish me, as he does so often lately. From no one else do I take this, and from him it has begun to pall. But I am dreading today—could anyone find recriminations more bitter than those I found for myself during the night?
I am afraid he might.
In the Vice-Queen’s patio I wait for him where we are least likely to be overheard. Under the trees runs a chain of bowers—flowering hedges, head high, cut in interlocking els all along the bottom of the garden, from the Hall of Comedies to the palace library. Twice I catch sight of Carlos wending his way toward me. I have no particular affection for the new French fashions for men. The tiny jackets as though shrunken up the rib cage, the beribboned shoes and canes, the petticoat breeches, the fur muffs. And I am not so finally reconciled to Paris’s latest rulings on what is divine in women’s beauty—Heaven knows, they caused trouble enough in Troy. As we women put on our livery, with its décolleté frôle aréole, the latitude of our neckline makes it very hard not feel like pages, platter, and peaches all trussed up in an expedient parcel.
But any particular style has to be preferable to this new outfit of his.
Carlos has never needed a riding habit to go to Puebla before, a leisurely ride of thirty leagues. It occurs to me to be grateful: else I might not be able to face him at all. Bucket-top calfskin boots, netherstocks and leather breeches, a basque short-skirt with points at the waist, over which a short sword has been belted. Unfortunate, assuredly … calamitous is barely adequate. Apocalyptic might do—not Elysian, not Parisian, but a mix of all the sins of style of all the ages brought to stand together and be judged. A lace falling band and a lace cravat, both frayed to a hoary fringe, and both plainly second hand. Which only makes sense—the Plains of Judgement being evidently at the used clothing market, and how much easier to strip the dead where you find them standing. I see fashions from the eras of at least three Spanish kings, a French one, and perhaps a Caesar. Has Perico helped him shop?
By now I am happy Carlos has come. The velvet of his dark green doublet is bare enough in patches to pass for black satin. Across his frail chest a faded orange baldric and over one thin shoulder a heavy buff coat. The ensemble is capped off with an ostrich plume so bedraggled on a wide-brimmed beaver hat so battered I wonder if the ostrich was not captured wearing it during one of its cerebral inquisitions into a dune. As for how the beaver was taken … it does not bear thinking about.
He is twenty-two now—and even in a travelling outfit, this is no way to make one’s way in the world. The overall effect is like a vision from Isaiah, where the beaver and the buffalo, the ostrich and the goat, the lion and the fatling lie down together. I have not quite lost the last of my nervousness, yet at this range I can no longer ignore his poverty, his unworldliness … and am flooded with the strangest emotion, equal parts pity and tenderness. He is so dear. A small frail military adventurer.
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:
Place along a line
a half, a third,
a quarter, fifth, and sixth—
fractions geometry uses.
Convert these into solids
and proceed to weigh them
Choose an object of some weight
and in like fashion
to the line’s divisions,
set out the counterweights.
These may be made to sound in harmony
as in that very common
experiment with the hammer.
Thus Beauty is not only
surpassing loveliness
in each single part
but also proportion kept
by each to every other.
Hence nothing represents
Beauty half so well
as Music …28
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?’
†‘zamba’: woman of mixed Indian and African blood.
†simpleton’s soup
†commoners
†Because your lineage is so broadly known, you profess to all, Alfeo, that through your veins runs the blood of kings, and yes it must be of purest vintage, methinks; for it is said you outdo the best of those prickly potentates, who vexed by being merely Kings in Arms, yearn to be Titans of the Tankard.
††Dear friends, I give you Don Alfeo of the Dagger!—steeped in glory, soaked in brandy, cloaked in drapery.
‡hombres de placer—the human menagerie assembled to divert the sovereign: dwarves, jesters, the misshapen, the insane
†adviser to King Philip IV
†‘backslider,’ who sets back the cause of racial purity by breeding with one of the inferior castes
†disenchantment, disillusionment
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
B. Limosneros, trans.30
… And though among all Princes,
a custom widely found
offers freedom at Easter
to all those prison-bound:
within the sweet bonds
of your sacred lights,
where, to be precise,
lies a prison willed,
(where gold is the chain
that adorns my time and binds it,
and hasps of diamond
the padlocks that secure it,)
I live, dear Lady
that you, with inhuman pity,
not strip me of those jewels
which so enrich our souls,
but captive hold me,
that I might freely throw,
for you, my freedom
out the window.
And to the sonorous harmonies
of my beloved shackles,
while others weep torrentially,
my blessings ring—clear and tranquil:
May no one keen for me,
seeing me lashed to a stave,
for I would trade being Queen
for being made your slave.
PALACE GAMES
At 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.
Women’s hands meet, fingers over wrists as vipers mating twine. He turns his face to me, smiles, as I stand frozen there.
You wanted to see me …
Yes, I have come for more.
Leonor is not like the rest. Does she not tell me how much she and I are alike?—and I am not like them. We spend hours together in her gallery, just we two, sitting at different benches, sketching. Hardly a word passes between us over whole afternoons. What need have we for talk, when all around us such brushes speak? Originals by Murillo, Rubens, and one name new to me, of a Greek living in Toledo. Superb copies of Gracian, Botticelli, Titian. She has devoted an entire wall to Velázquez. He brought her to her love of art. They saw each other almost every day near the end. She, the Queen’s most trusted lady-in-waiting; he, the King’s chamberlain. She loved him like a father, grieves him still. In these half-dozen years since his death, his reputation has not ceased to grow. Madrid talks of no one else. Rubens, they have quite forgotten. Everyone sees his greatness, now.
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