and from the ravel of your bowels unwinds;
for, once your Science perverse
conceived on her its monstrous stillbirth,
your favourite I became, of all the vices,
that you deploy by so many exercises,
panting ceaselessly after
war unrelenting waged on Heaven….
SNAKE WOMAN
19th day of October, 1667
Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de Dolores
Juana Inés,
Another letter from you on the heels of the last, and after so much silence. Your words come to relieve me in my torment. Each night I sit down to write you and fill the page with such trash. It seems I have nothing to write that I can bear to have you read. Then your letter arrives and my head teems with things to say.
Truly am I honoured by this sonnet on Guadalupe. You said you would write it for me one day and you have. These lines I love:
La compuesta de flores Maravilla,
divina Protectora Americana,
que a ser se pasa Rosa Mexicana,
aparaciendo Rosa de Castilla;
la que en vez del dragón—de quien humilla
cerviz rebelde en Patmos—huella ufana,
hasta aquí Inteligencia soberana,
de su pura grandeza pura silla … †
But do not think you have thrown me off the trail: I know how easily this kind of elegance comes to you.
You ask if I am truly interested in the Indians’ salvation, if I am not perhaps more concerned with my ‘Americanist project,’ as you refer to it. The world’s myths, as you say, are treasures of the imagination, not to be plundered for worldly advantage. Is this what you suspect we are doing? But even if it were true, could one not answer that the gains go far beyond politics, to the healing of the American soul? Then, you ask if the Franciscans are not more devoted to taming Eve than to venerating Guadalupe. Point taken.
And you are right of course—to ‘have powers over the serpent’ does not necessarily mean she must use them to destroy it.
But proceed more carefully now. You intimate that the Church has modelled the Blessed Virgin on the Egyptian Isis even while stripping her of her godhood. Then you argue persuasively—and dangerously—that the Church has struggled as much to prevent her regaining the divine plane as it has Lucifer.
As a friend I repeat the question: Are you not afraid of them making you our Queen of Wisdom? I do not think the fear an idle one.
It is becoming imperative that we develop a code so as to express these thoughts more safely. Indeed like a dragon in its death throes, the Inquisition is these days at its most dangerous, flailing out in all directions … at perversions, heresies and false gods. At women falsely claimed to be saints, and at female poets who make Mary into Sophia, a seductress of Christ, but cloak her in the costume of a Greek wood nymph…. Be very careful, Juanita, with this rash plan of yours to finish your Divine Narcissus after all. Be more careful still to whom you show it.
un abrazo, Carlos
12th day of November, 1667
Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de Dolores
Juana,
I wish you the happiest of birthdays. To think that I have known you almost four full years. To think you were barely fifteen…. And is it really possible I shall soon be twenty-three? My senescence may even now be revealing itself to you in the gaps in my reasoning and the infirmity of my hand.
Still not one word of the palace. Each day you become more mysterious. I cannot shake this stubborn hope of mine that you have left that den of fops. But no, as you have said, where would you go? I readily admit that for one with neither means nor connections, life in Mexico is quite difficult enough, even for a man. You could of course come here, without prejudice or conditions. A woman’s reputation is not a thing to be surrendered lightly—not even as the price of her independence—but can yours truly survive their palace so much longer than my jungle? I take you at your word: you have written how much you envy me the collegial atmosphere and the freedom of this place, the soberness of this work—my mind flashes to you on your way here and my heart races for an instant. But no, enough. We have each chosen our place, and this one, for all its satisfactions, is not palatial.
If you will say nothing of your present life, let me tell you of mine. The monastery has been astir with a discovery that lends credence to the rumours that brought Fray Cuadros here in the first place. In the jungle a full day southwest of here we’ve discovered a village, Pital, at the edge of a ruined city. Although their ways and manner of dress are unfamiliar to Brother Cuadros, the villagers do speak a dialect of the Mexican language and have moreover made themselves the custodians of a large codex, an ancient Mexican book that they venerate in one of the old temples.
We are expecting a native interpreter to arrive any day from the Indian College in Tlatelolco, but the difficulty here, as Brother Cuadros explains it, is not strictly one of language. These painted-books, which we misleadingly call histories, are only the pictorial notation, not unlike a musical score, for a performance. It is not enough to read the glyphs; they are just the cues. The performers once carried within them the script, and when they needed to, redrafted it. I am learning that history was for the ancient Mexicans a dramatic art. Nor do they seem to insist there be one sole version: it falls to each people to continually create and recreate its own. (To us, the Creoles, who find ourselves orphaned by history, how could this fail to bring inspiration?) While for the European, the age of myth ends and history begins with the birth of Christ, for the Mexican, the frontier between myth and history is fluid and the influence reciprocal. Time is both linear and cyclical, and so history is also prophecy and pattern, but nevertheless admitting of a series of variations on central themes.
You have perhaps learned all this at your wet nurse’s knee; but for me it remains most difficult to grasp that the Mexicans not only use the past to interpret the present, as we do, but the present to reinterpret the past. Am I right, then, in concluding that they see Time’s effects flowing not just forward but also backward? How strange to contemplate, as if to reverse the river of causes, make it flow uphill, see the sun setting in the east.
They keep their codex in the temple of their war god, at the western edge of this ruined city. The book rests on a stone altar the length of a man. Cut into the altar is a series of channels draining to a stone basin embellished with a relief of skulls and flowers. In the shadows, overgrown with moss, is a statue with a woman’s face, one side fleshed, the other side peeled back to reveal a death’s head. As for the codex, it is well cared for, and the villagers are protective of it. We now believe their ancestors were not just left with the book but also with the story. Someone in this village still carries that story within him … Though we have been allowed only cursory readings, Fray Cuadros is sure it comes from Cholula and deals at least peripherally with the Conquest. Most intriguingly images of Cortés’s interpreter Malintzin appear on almost every page.
Sleep well,
Carlos
8th day of December, 1667
Pital
Juana,
I am sorry to take so long to reply. Your letter took longer to reach me here.
Today Pital is just a fishing village on a lake, one of many linked in a network of canals and streams. The beaches are black, laced by the runnels of freshwater springs—some steaming, others deliciously cool. The shore lies shrouded in jungle and studded with curious hillocks; but on closer inspection one sees these arranged along straight broad avenues starting out from the shore. Only those building mounds immediately surrounding the village have been kept clear of the encroaching jungle.
Your letter might have taken longer still, had not Brother Cuadros’s interpreter brought it in from the monastery on his way down from the capital. We thought he had come too late, but it turns out he is just in time. Just as we were preparing to return to the monastery last week, a village youth came to offer his help with the codex.
Altho
ugh Fray Cuadros seems perfectly fluent to me, this new science, as practised by the Franciscans, requires that the Indian testimonies be recorded with rigorous precision. Which means, in this case, two interpreters—one whose mother tongue is Castilian, the other a native speaker of Nahuatl. The two must constantly check each other’s assumptions and understandings, which are in turn tested against the testimonies of others.
This former student of his is most impressive. Brother Cuadros tells me Juan de Alva Ixtlilxochitl has become their foremost translator of the Bible into the Mexican language. Their secret project is to prepare together a version of the Song of Songs for the day when the Church deems it safe to translate. Incredibly enough, Juan’s direct ancestor was Nezahualcoyotl himself, the legendary poet-emperor. I indulge in the hope that this might finally be incitement enough to bring you here—this is your grandfather’s work we are at. As for myself, I feel at last that my life might be close to acquiring a more weighty purpose. Surely at twenty-three it cannot be too late for me? I am like a man from the mountains first finding the sea.
And yet for all the combined skill and vast knowledge of our interpreters, the work proceeds haltingly. We suspect the boy either knows more than he lets on, or has not been completely initiated. “Did someone send you?” we ask but get no reply. At least we now have full access to the codex.
Juan de Alva and Fray Cuadros now concur: The book travelled here with a party of Mexican priests fleeing after the sack of their capital. Our codex begins where, after the kidnapping and subsequent death of Moctezuma, Cortés’s army—routed and driven from the capital—returns battered and bloody to Cholula, a city swirling with rumours. Everyone, including the Spaniards, is desperate to understand what has just happened. Then, as now, so much depends on the translation. The conquest of our New Eden hanging in the balance …
The picture script shows us the wife of a Cholulan general, who goes to meet Cortés’s beautiful interpreter in the market—the Spaniards have not eaten for three days. Each woman angles for information. The interpreter Malintzin apparently wins the contest, since at some point her new friend, thoroughly captivated, first warns then begs her not to go back to the compound where the Spaniards are housed. An ambush is planned. Malintzin is able to spin out their talk for long enough to piece together all the details of the attack. She then returns to the compound on the pretext of salvaging her personal affairs and forewarns the Spaniards.
This codex, then, contains the gossip she left with the general’s wife, an account of Moctezuma’s last days as a captive in the very heart of his own empire.
As I sit here among the ruins and conjure up the scene of these two women gossiping amiably in a marketplace, yet with such deadly implications, I think of Scheherazade. And of you, the palace’s most enchanting songbird singing for her life.
ever yours, Carlos
2nd day of January, 1668
Pital
Dear Juana Inés,
I wish you a prosperous new year. I truly hope you celebrated it surrounded by friends, as I have.
Cuadros is kind and learned and generous, and our Juan de Alva looks every bit the Indian prince in face and bearing yet conducts himself in all humility. He is without a doubt the most handsome man I have seen. A mestizo, and therefore more an exile in America than even we are, he works ceaselessly, speaking with the natives, learning details of their dialect, patiently listening, gaining their trust. He and Cuadros are teaching me some of the Mexican language. So you and I shall be able to converse a little in the language of your childhood when I get back to Mexico….
For my part I have been unwell, too feverish to concentrate long. At the fever’s highest pitch, their healer came to sit with me. He examined me closely for evidence of bites, then, presumably to join me in my delirium, ingested quantities of a dried toadstool in order to complete his diagnosis. I give Brother Cuadros great credit for permitting his visit. It appears my condition was precarious and Cuadros had seen native healers work wonders with fevers similarly severe. My recovery has been equally wondrous. I am being treated for a loss of soul.
Cuadros smiles and tells me the diagnosis is only natural, since the native Americans have three souls to the Christians’ one.
With the worst over now, I divide my time between short, shaky walks around the village and visits to the healer, where I strip naked to be swept clean of noxious spirits by egret’s wings. I then drink a bitter broth and, perspiring rivers, sleep a peaceful siesta beneath leaves the size of parasols.
My walks have been fascinating. More than once have I heard the Indians’ capacity for work praised in the same measure as their short lifespan is lamented. But then, I had never seen an Indian settlement not in service to the Crown. While I do see great industry, I see also many old white heads….
What strikes me most forcibly is what I can only call a genius for fashioning fine tools and materials from this wild place. Cylindrical fish traps of woven reeds, three-pronged spears tipped with horn and bone. All manner of baskets and platters and ladles. Polished and painted gourds. Spinning drills for piercing jewellery, and a sort of tarabilla: by pulling at handles mounted on a drum one drives an axle that in turn twists fibres of hennequen and agave into ropes fabulously strong. The principle of the wheel, Juana, they seem to have mastered quite nicely on their own.
On the twentieth, we helped the people of Pital mark the winter solstice. Even in the ruins, they preserve the ancient knowledge of the heavens. How this gladdens my astronomer’s heart! Four days later we celebrated Christmas Mass. I should not have been surprised that these villagers have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the sacraments. Christians have after all passed through here from time to time. But Juanita, to see a native American so willingly taking the host into his mouth …
I know you are not a little disdainful of this theory of ours bringing Saint Thomas to the New World. Much more troubling to me is your observation that our theory risks making the spiritual glories of the Americas mere mimicry, and the Indians incapable of getting the details straight. But consider for a moment the Mexican conception of the Eucharist. For the centrepiece of their most holy festival, their priests grind seeds and grains into maize flour, then, stirring in quantities of blood, make out of this dough a man-sized figure. After which, at the close of a month of processions an arrow is shot through the figure’s chest by an archer whom they equate with the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl. Each member of the community then receives with great awe and weeping a portion of the body and, having swallowed its flesh, cries out—Teocualo! God is eaten.
God is eaten, is this the savage hunger of a cannibal or the hunger of the human spirit for communion with its god? They even possess an equivalent to our Holy Wafer, in the form of little idols of dough, which they call ‘food of our soul.’ Who could help but recall the Gospel of John?
Whosever eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life….
The great glory of the Mexican spirit is to have perceived as well as any Christian theologian the deepest intent of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. We ourselves might well have worshipped exactly as they did, had Christ not revealed to us He wished otherwise. Indeed, the Mexicans understood this alternative perfectly, for it was from the Feathered Serpent that they had chosen to turn away, their god-prince who forbade the sacrifice of men and yet sacrificed himself.
You knew, perhaps, that the Mexicans baptized their infants as we do, and that they practised confession leading to absolution. That their earthly paradise was lost when a woman ate of a forbidden fruit. Heresy, the Inquisition will call it, but how can it be heresy when we have so miserably failed to communicate a deeper understanding of our Faith? Monasteries and convents, the symbol of the Cross, and a young man-god who willingly sacrifices himself while promising to return—so much our peoples already shared! So much in fact that the Dominicans have convinced themselves Satan, no less, must have visited America to propagate a perversion of the Gospels. Who, indeed,
could blame them?—to cross an ocean and find a faith in many ways more similar to ours than that of the Jews or the Moors.36
No, Juana, it is undeniable. An overwhelming series of correspondences exists between the Old World and the New—if, as you have often argued, Egypt shaped our beliefs as much as did Greece, perhaps we should really be looking much further back than Saint Thomas. Lucian writes of grain ships of two thousand tons’ displacement leaving your beloved Alexandria. If the Egyptians could sail around Africa, and the Phoenicians dispatch fifty ships to colonize its west coast, then why not here?
Such similarities in weaving, pottery and metal work. Both architectures developing spiral staircases, sculptured doorways and lintels—pyramids and hieroglyphs. The same insignia of kingship—sceptres, canopies, palanquins, the conch shell as royal trumpet …37
I walk through the ruins of this city that encompasses the village and see glimpses of these things. A long colonnade … pillars weeping lichen and lime. Fragments of fresco under moss, itself bright as paint—a face in profile, a bundle of reeds, daubs of hectic red, cobalt. Pale lintels carved with stone flowers and leaves. Sprouting from the midst of these, living rose-pink polyps, sprays of orchids and other leaves green and alive.
I have come to see this city laid out around me as a text, a living palimpsest slowly being rewritten by older scribes of Time and Vegetation—and deciphered at hazard now as I turn, wander, glancing this way and that, as if to follow the waver of a finger down a page….
So now I turn your question back to you: If not through the visit of an Old World apostle how to explain such bewildering similarities in the New? We have been talking here about little else lately. Fray Cuadros can go on relentlessly reciting the lists he’s compiled. Still more wondrous to me than these twinned inventions of the world are those of the spirit. In both the Mexican and Egyptian skies, a hero is birthed from the waters of darkness, beset by dragons, forges a hazardous passage through the heavens, is devoured at dusk in the Western lands of death … then is resurrected.
Hunger's Brides Page 43