“We will sort it out. As we always do.”
“I am glad to hear it. Because the spectacle of New Spain’s two brightest children squabbling is less than inspiring. You of course are entitled, you are only thirty-two, but Carlos is old enough to know better. How like you to turn on an old friend.”
“But such venom, Your Reverence. Is it really over me? or still over your slip about the election. The Archbishop-elect will be intrigued.”
“Your poor Carlos, how confused he must be. Privately, you share his view that the comet is a natural event, yet write a sonnet glorifying his adversary’s position. A position Carlos has risked much to denounce as superstition, and is being attacked for it even now. These natural philosophical debates are filled with such—”
“Vitriol, Father?—spleen? Yes how ill-humoured these natural magicians, and in comparison how benign the gentle quibbles of theology must seem.”
“I have noticed how amusing you can be precisely—”
“So Your Reverence may catch his breath.”
“No, Sor Juana. Precisely when you are in moral difficulties. You seem to be distancing yourself from don Carlos lately, who is, unlike you, hopeless at diplomacy. His arco caused the Viceroy precisely as much annoyance as yours gave delight.”
“He was lucky not to be arrested.”
“Perhaps this makes Carlos a hindrance to you now, or perhaps you feel justified after he insulted you. What was it he called you afterwards? Una limosnera de leyendas!”
“Mendiga de fabulas.”
“Fable beggar, yes, thank you. A sharp quill, your friend has. It might have been better to keep him as a friend.”
“Why do the Jesuits not reinstate him?”
“You seek to ease your conscience, Juana, by taking up his cause. But I will tell you. We prefer to have don Carlos looking in. He does more to restrain himself this way. The Company would be too small for one such as he, whereas you, for all your attempts at caution and secrecy, your deepest impulses are—”
“After all the petitions he has made, it is pure cruelty.”
“You want us to solve your problems for you. How many petitions of marriage has he made to you? Have you no loyalty? Are you proud of what you have done to your friend—by siding with his adversary?”
“I … no.”
“Was it wrong?”
“I said I was not proud of it.”
“Yet your conscience does not trouble you. It has been weeks and I have heard not one word of this in confession.”
“You have often been away. Zacatecas, I imagine.”
“That is why this convent has a chaplain. For the times when your spiritual director must be absent. But you have not confessed this to him, either.”
“You sound certain.”
“False confession, Sor Juana, is a most serious matter. I know also why you have sent for me.”
“Do you.”
“You have been planning this for weeks.”
“And if you know—how do you?”
“For weeks and yet you have delayed, and delay even now. I will help you one last time. Tell me what you are writing.”
“If you think you know, Father, why do you delay—why not just be forthright?”
“That a nun, a woman in my charge, is now called Tenth Muse from Cadiz to Lima to Manila is already utterly repugnant to me! Had I known you would waste your convent life on verses I would have married you off!”
“You think me a dog or a slave to dispose of.”
“But with this latest, you make it impossible for me to defend you, Juana.”
“Defend me! You think I do not hear of them—the reproaches you make against me to anyone who’ll listen? You call my conduct a scandal, you make the substance of my confessions a public matter. Defend me—there’s not a man in New Spain to stand up to you. Even the Marquis himself—Regent of half the world—fears you. The last viceroy still writes from Spain to ask your guidance. Now I ask you, Your Reverence, to tell me what I have done to so infuriate you this time.”
“In which role have you conspired to make me look the greater fool, as your confessor or New Spain’s Censor?—in the plays or in the verses? Tenth Muse. Can you not grasp how obscene that epithet is for any Catholic, let alone one of my nuns?”
“Even the Holy Virgin has been called the Tenth Muse lately—would you censor her too?”
“Do not push me too far.”
“Is that prospect so fantastic—when your Office has just banned the Mystical City, a set of parables on the Virgin’s life?”
“Not parables, Sor Juana, prophecies. For some nuns it is not enough that María should be the Mother of God. No, they must make her into something more.”
“But this still isn’t it, is it Father. They have been calling me Muse for some time. This is not quite what makes you so … passionate.”
“A bride of Christ under my direction composing love poetry—”
“Yes?”
“On Sappho.”
“At last.”
“What could possibly be more of a—”
“Humiliation?”
“A disgrace! I am your spiritual director, charged with the safe conduct of a nun’s soul to her Husband’s embrace. I should know every single detail of your life, every thought, every dream. The contents of your soul should be spread wide for me to inspect. And now—yet again!—you’ve defiled the sacrament of confession by your lies of omission.”
“I defile it, Father? And what of the sacramental seal? And if my privacy means nothing to you, how long am I to conceal from María Luisa the contempt in which you hold hers?”
“‘María Luisa.’ Only your Countess could make you think to get away with this. Sappho. Who could even have imagined this outrage—poetry to a Lesbian puta!”
“You forget yourself, Father, you forget where you are, you forget who is the true Master of this house—and make it abundantly clear you have no idea what you are talking about.”
“But I will know. You will bring these … things to me and we will read them together, then burn—together—each and every one, down to the last scrap, the last strip of paper!”
“No, Father, we will not.”
“Now you defile your vow of obedience and revel in it!”
“No, Father, I do not. But saintliness is not a thing you command. No being of free will—I, last of all—can be brought to God by coercion. If it could be commanded, my soul would have already ascended to Heaven a hundred times. Tell me, does my correction fall to Your Reverence by reason of obligation or charity? I too have my obligations. If it be charity then proceed gently. I am not of so servile a nature as to bend to such mercies, as you well know—”
“I see we reach the part you have been rehearsing.”
“Any sacrifices I make are undertaken to mortify my spirit and not to avoid censure, no matter how public. From you—such has always been my love and veneration—I could bear anything, any amount of injustice, in private. But these public humiliations, these extravagant … exaggerations unjustly tar this convent’s good name.”
“What little remains of it.”
“Everyone in the capital listens to your words and trembles at their stern import as though you were a prophet of old, as though they were dictated by the Holy Ghost—”
“Go carefully.”
“How many times have I found your words and your commandments exceedingly repugnant yet held my peace? But after so many years my breast overflows with the injustice. I have done nothing wrong—nothing criminal, nothing sinful. If sin there be it is only pride—our shared affliction, Father. I am not humbled as might be other daughters on whom your instruction would be so much better lavished. Your opinions in these minor matters are just that, and unwelcome. They are not Holy Writ. If you cannot find it in your heart to favour me, and to counsel me calmly or even harshly, but in in the privacy of confession—a sacrament you defile whenever it suits you—then I beg you think of me no more. Release
me from your hand and grant me no more favours, for I am doomed to disappoint you.”
“Think, now, what you ask.”
“God has fashioned many keys to Heaven—which contains as many rooms as there are different natures. Do you not think my salvation might be effected through the guidance of another? Is the dispensation of God’s mercy limited to just one man, no matter how wise or righteous?”
“And just whom did you have in mind?”
“Father Arellano.”
“That ecstatic?”
“Your disciple.”
“Your worst possible choice! Someone who will indulge you, who will let you make him a fool.”
“You claim that’s exactly what I’ve made of you. Choice, Father. Choice is what you are always exhorting me to. Arellano understands passion, he understands faith, and penance best of all.”
“You have said nothing of reason.”
“Reason, I understand.”
“Too well. Or, just possibly, not quite well enough…. Reason carefully then, child. You have called me here for this. Your Countess has given you the nerve. But calculate well. This thing is not easily undone….”
“That much I know. After so many years.”
“Do you wish a short time to reconsider?”
“Father I ask only that you commend me to God, which I know in your charity you will do with all fervour.”
“So be it then. I commend you. To your God.”
†bookswallower
† my scholastic rasp
SAPPHO OF LESBOS,11
“Sapphic Fragment”
Guy Davenport, trans.
Early in the 20th century, a portion of Sappho’s work, long thought lost, was rediscovered in Egypt, where her poems had been recycled, torn into vertical strips and used as the papyri in which bodies were wrapped and mummified.
THE GOOD LIFE
CUE THE NEWSREEL to the mid-1980s. Here flowers the good life, in Calgary. Here it springs eternal, from the genteel wildernesses steeping in the compost box. There it is—just back of the barbecue pit. Lately I’ve had some trouble keeping track of it….
If in this country Toronto plays the spinster aunt to Vancouver’s kohl-eyed flower child ageing sad, then Calgary is the good life’s tow-headed majorette. A Toronto whose plumbing still works. Let’s see, that would make Montréal the bitter divorcée … mais non, ça suffit. Certainly the future belongs to Calgary. The next big score’s just three first downs away. A whole new ball game out there, a world of enterprise. High tech jobs, plans for a new convention centre and casino, big event hospitality. Volunteer armies raised by racketeers.
We have green spaces and rising real estate. We have country stores in the inner city. We ski to reading weekends in mountain cabins, breed pure dogs, grow organic gardens …
It was a good life. But all during those years, when people would exclaim over my wife’s beauty I felt a kind of puzzlement. Alluring, yes, seductive, most days. But beautiful … the word sometimes came from a man lip’s as a rebuke, from a woman’s as something abject, a sigh of capitulation. And over those same years, even as our shaggy pride of university dons slouched soft-bellied about the backyard barbecue pit, slipping into the clichés of our lechery and hockey scores like a well-worn pair of mules, our wives—in the kitchen, the bedroom, the gym—were becoming each day more tawny, more trim, more lion-eyed. Particularly mine.
So that now, in the ’90s, our wives emerge for us as creatures of not just flesh and blood but bone—at their cheeks, their jaws, their clavicles. And just when we in our stifled desperation see they could be our mantle, the laurel staff of our high office, they are no longer ours to wield.
They run their own consulting firms, and four miles every morning. They wear their hair shorter than ours. Their shoulders are more cleanly defined, their wrists more richly veined. Our hands are soft and white and smooth, theirs are the hands of carpenters from handling hoes and rakes.
They are elemental in the garden, we are pallid in the shade.
Beneath straw hats they glow with the rude health of an honest tan. Hats, they wear beautifully—men’s hats, and with an authority perplexingly denied us. Stylish in berets, bowlers and fedoras; cosmopolitan in leather pillboxes and felted fezzes; striking in sandals strapped up the calf—embroidered vests, gladiators’ skirts on gladiators’ thighs—they are a tribe, fierce and golden.
What are we? A troupe … a troop? Surely not a pride. Pride’s too proud a word.
She’s teaching herself piano, so one day she can teach our Catherine.
So simple to be superwomen, so hard to be just men.
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
Alan Trueblood, trans.
Year: 1688. The Viceroy and his wife, the Countess of Paredes, have remained in Mexico two years beyond their second term of service. At last María Luisa can postpone their departure no longer.
Kept from saying farewell
sweet love, my only life,
by unremitting tears,
by unrelenting time,
these strokes must speak for me,
amidst my echoing sighs,
sad penstrokes never yet
more justly coloured black.
Their speech perforce is blurred
by tears that well and drop,
for water quickly drowns
words conceived in flame.
Eyes forestall the voice,
foreseeing, as they do,
each word I plan to speak
and saying it themselves.
Heed the eloquent silence
of sorrow’s speech and catch
words that breathe through sighs,
conceits that shine through tears …
HYPERMNESTRA
28th day of August, 1688,
Mexico City
la excma. señora doña María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga
Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna,
Madrid
Queridísima María Luisa,
I thought to fast from news of you.12 Yet it is not a fast if the hunger is not chosen. Better said, then, when you set out for Madrid, I had thought to starve. I confess this Lenten faithlessness now, as one so deliriously fed since your letter arrived. You vowed you would not forget; yet so weak is my capacity for faith, at times I could not quite believe. And even summoning belief, still I could not hope—so very much lies beyond our control.
The year has been a bitter one. Your leaving, and then within a month my mother’s death. (But could it be you have not received my last two letters …?) I did not even know of her illness.
Carlos went, thinking I suppose to represent me, though even had I wanted to, I could not have kept him here. Panoayan, it seemed, was always on the way to anywhere Carlos was going. It is hard for me to see them as friends, and yet he had known her twenty years. For nearly as long as I had not seen her.
This time he found Bishop Santa Cruz there, who had come all the way from Puebla and had stayed to celebrate her Mass—for me, but especially for my nephew, Fray Miguel now, who is devoted to him. Greatly do I doubt the honour would have meant much to her—she had little use for churchmen, or for her grandson Miguel, I gather—but it meant a great deal to me, and I was happy for the town. I doubt the church in Amecameca had seen a bishop in quite some time.
How coldly this all rings in the air as I say it aloud. As you know, Isabel and I were not reconciled.
In his visits here since, Bishop Santa Cruz has skirted the issue with great delicacy, as is his way. He has been such a friend, and with you gone I am more than ever in his care. Still, I was stunned to learn he had been there at the end, been the one to administer her rites. Something in the scene unsettles me. Strain enough to imagine that she had confessed—yet what?
But how can I answer your first letter with such chill gloom?
You have written, you are safely returned, your son thrives, and your dear Tomás’s prospects for advancement look more shining al
l the time. You even mention you have looked a little into publishing our collection, and from the way you write of it I will follow your lead and not let my hopes rise too high. As you say, securing the support of the Church there when I do not have it here will be difficult. But since you ask me for a title, perhaps I may still hope a little?
To that small bright thought I venture to add others, and kindle myself a small new fire here in the hearth. I share its little glow now with you: the Bishop, you see, has brought not just support but help and company. A secretary, who should be taking this down even now. No ’Tonia, that’s what a fair copy is for. Take down everything. We decide what to cross out afterwards—and you, we do not cross out—
Would I, the Bishop asks, have any use for a young woman, with little fortune but with a good orthography, a decent Latin he himself has seen to, a passable style in Castilian, a rough familiarity with Italian and Portuguese—and who, if that were not enough, plays the clavichord beautifully? I have since learned she has a fair and improving knowledge of Nahuatl, too, and she is in return teaching me phrases of an Angolan dialect taught her by her mother. What’s more, in the privacy of our cell Antonia has been sharpening my fluency in curses, which she spouts with more flair—should she dislodge a book or drop a plate—than a seafaring apostate.
She is also lovely, with a brambly thrum and tangle of tresses such as I have never seen.
My Most Excellent Lady Countess, I take great pleasure in presenting Antonia Mora, my godsend and salvation—did you just cross that out?—until recently resident in Puebla and now an oblate here in San Jerónimo. Officially her dowry was paid by me, though Bishop Santa Cruz arranged for everything. She lodges here and half her time may be spent working at this table. Henceforth, you shall never have cause to complain of the brevity of my letters. In fact I promise amply to repay (if not in quality then in lines) each line you find the time to write.
The Mother Prioress raised few objections to the Bishop’s arrangements. Four thousand pesos is not an inconsiderable sum for a dowry, even were Antonia a nun. The Bishop shifts the credit to me, arguing that I bring the convent treasury many times that amount in donations and commissions. But I have been doing that for years. No, if Mother Andrea is more tractable now, it is for the same reason that she acquiesces in the Bishop’s wishes: That nothing short of seeing every nun in Mexico barefoot13 will placate Archbishop Aguiar. In the past few years the Prioress has discovered that in the Archbishop’s eyes whatever good we do is little, whatever ill incalculable. I cannot help but laugh remembering that first day he came from the backcountry after his surprise election, the hasty plans you and I laid to win him over with an evening at the palace. Not knowing of his hatred of theatre you made him our comedy’s guest of honour; not knowing of his hatred of worldiness in nuns, I dared to write it. Win the Archbishop over—what a fiasco. And remember how we laughed (what else could we do?) over his contortions to avoid you at official functions—so dire, so very grim, the reports of your beauty! How wonderfully you mimed the sudden swerves, the myopic glaring—it was as if I saw him there myself.
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