Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna,

  Madrid, España

  Dearest María Luisa,

  Sweet friend, beautiful Thetis of the Seas, you seek to fashion me a peerless armour at the glowing forge of your cares. How I love that you would protect me still. First, to let you know we are alone. Antonia has gone out on an errand. Please know that we will always have these moments, these letters written in my hand. But the simple fact of being alone does not leave me free to speak. And things we said here in this cell, just we two, I am not free to write, when the mails may be opened at any time by the Holy Office or the Crown. I know you know this—I want you to hear me say it. Still other things may be written to be read obliquely, as one reads fables written by a friend who has read and loved the same stories, as have you and I. And then there are lines that may only be spoken in the theatre you and I make here, that no longer resonate in the world outside, as with an instrument whose sounding board is split. If together we could not create such a place where the instrument could be heard again, what use would writing be, what use theatre?

  Last, let there also be things I may say in these letters that I could never say with you here with me, sitting so near. We must always make a place for these, as I will before I stop tonight.

  But if I am to keep my promise to write often, I will need help. To burden you with tedious plaints in the too brief hours we had alone together in this cell would have been too graceless even for me. Even now I hesitate, but hope you will give me leave….

  You write to warn me that these seven years of quiet I celebrate as a truce are in truth a siege. So I tell you now that Father Núñez has indeed caught wind of our plans and has begun to rail against our Castalia before she even reaches here. It is as if he believed Sappho’s lyrics were in it—but how can that be, if the source of his information is the Holy Office there? Surely he knows they would have mentioned any verses on Sappho had they been there. And if he has some other source so early—who?

  And yet, sweet Lysis, even with these fresh worries, what I most suffer from has little to do with Núñez or Archbishop Aguiar. Not a siege but a blockade—and I am that grain ship, that silver galleon straining at its hawsers to run the line, anxious, chafing to put to sea before I sink beneath the worthy new duties they heap on me almost daily. These will keep me from any work I might call mine more surely than any Church injunction can.

  The daily Masses, the Friday chapter of faults, the public acts of contrition that bring the envious among my sisters so much satisfaction … yes, these weary me a little more. But there is yet much more than these. The prayers of the Divine Office I barely mention—these you yourself have grumbled about often enough in my stead. The very thought of being woken mid-night for the prayers of Matins (with those of Compline still on our lips), you find hideous; but I sleep little anyway. Often as not I am reading or writing when the chimes call us, and these at least I do not mind. Have we not always found them among the loveliest bells of the capital?

  I have been elected convent accountant for the third straight term. Few convents in the city have ever earned six percent per annum. Of course we must first have money to invest, so by far the task most prodigal of my time lies in hosting the convent’s many patrons. To do this effectively, though, means rehearsing our niñas and novices in skits and our choir in musical entertainments. Then there is the writing of these—if something better suited really cannot be found. And because I have not been clever enough to conceal my familiarity with Nahuatl, I am become a sort of Solomon of disputes among the three hundred servants here, though far from all speak Nahuatl. Worse, because one set of apartments or another is always being renovated to accommodate still more servants, I very often find myself Superintendent of Works:20 most of the workers are also native Mexicans, whose overseers are seemingly selected for their inability to let them work in peace.

  Other charges I take in turn with three or four other sisters. Besides the classes I wrote you of, four of us see to courses in reading, music, dance and arithmetic for thirty young girls. Then there come occasional turns in the infirmary, the cellars, the archives, the library—this last, as you can imagine, I do not resent so much.

  Having now quite exhausted myself (and surely you) I pass over a few other, minor tasks, to close with the sermons and arguments I am consulted on by various monks, priests, bishops and inquisitors, never forgetting the carols, lyrics and plays I am asked to write for the churches and cathedrals—these I do on my own time, though the commissions go chiefly to the convent coffers.

  Perhaps you will understand after all this complaint why I can almost not bear the thought of doing without Antonia now that I have found her. I was thoughtless not to explain all this to you first in a letter in my own hand. (Even as sensing your hurt has made me see, if belatedly, how the similarity of her hand to mine only made things worse, and troubles you still.)

  You have always been anxious about my friends. Gently you remind me that Hypermnestra’s husband, the sharp-eyed Lynceus, by showing kindness at first, killed more Danaïdes in the end than did all his forty-nine brothers combined. But I depend on so many people for so many things; I would be consumed with anxiety if I felt I could trust only the friends I did not need. This would be no way to inspire alliances anyway, but this you know better than I. A spirit of mistrust entrains its own surprises.

  The Inquisitor Gutiérrez I admit to needing as much as liking, though I liked him instantly … he of the bland looks and feigned bemusement that clothe a sharp mind in an almost childlike frankness. Scarce a fortnight over from Spain, he first ambled into my locutory to register his disappointment that so many otherwise serious individuals in this city were making fools of themselves with ridiculously exaggerated praise of a certain nun in a certain convent. He stayed three hours.

  On his next visit we worked through some of the briefs he was preparing; I took a no doubt wicked pleasure in suggesting corrections he might make to a certain priest’s newest manual of devotion for nuns. Later, when one detailed argument in particular was singled out for commendation, Gutiérrez openly acknowledged my help—at the Holy Office, before a roomful of his colleagues! Everyone was talking about it. Can one even imagine it, the impertinence of the thing? The Jesuits and the Dominicans disliked him about equally for it, with the result that—we laugh about this—he’s now seen as something of an honest broker. One wry Augustinian to keep the Dominicans and the Jesuits from each other’s throats.

  My prickly friend Carlos, for his part, made a terrible start with you—con ese asunto del arco.† Certainly you of all people owe him nothing, not even the gift of your comprehension, having stayed your husband’s hand and kept my slightly seditious friend out of irons. You scarcely knew me then, yet heard my petition—which said so much for your openness of mind and heart. But if Carlos had made a better beginning I know you’d have seen under all that awful pride and irritability a beautiful mind and such a generous spirit. Yes I do take his employment with the Archbishop as a betrayal, but of our principles, not of me. In the matter of serving His Grace, Carlos has little choice. The University’s stipend is a mean provocation—among his relations he has a dozen mouths to feed—and you’ve seen for yourself how profitlessly he conducts himself at the palace. Almost any extra income he gets is at the Archbishop’s sufferance: his chaplaincy at the hospital, his commission to write the history of the convent of the Immaculate Conception (and you cannot begin to know how galling his newfound ‘expertise’ in convent life can be), and now this post of Almoner.

  It is only fitting that your questions turn to Antonia’s origins, for the defence of our good name is our best guarantee, however imperfect, of honourable conduct. What’s more, it is entirely in keeping with your own nobility of spirit that you have been able to forget the towering elevations separating your origins from mine. You will be angry even to hear me mention this again; but that I have never forgotten it is entirely in keeping with the natural laws of p
erception. From the depths of the lowest valleys, one cannot forget the majestic altitudes of the summit; whereas at the summit one is struck by the grandeur of what one sees, not where one stands.

  I was born a natural daughter of the Church. My father was an adventurer barely of the hidalgo class whose name I do not even have the right to take. Antonia’s origins are not much different from mine, and if she has been so very much less fortunate, it serves to show me, as nothing ever has, how things might have gone with me. She too was born in the countryside. East of Puebla, not far from San Lorenzo de los Negros. Her father was a military physician who retired to the country to sire a score of daughters on the mulattas and negresses in his employment there. His less common passion, though, was educating them, and thereby proving to his satisfaction a theory of his that women, even of mixed race, may become gente de razón,† if thoughtfully trained. I cannot decide if this lets me like him a little more, or a very great deal less. And yet I profit by his results.

  Dearest Lysis, I know you will not let yourself be repelled when I tell you she was once forced to sell her body as a courtesan. In the better houses the men would ask for the educated one, the tall one—for White Chocolate, as though to order a hot beverage from a palace steward. But it is clear that in the beginning she was not in such fine houses.

  There is the frailest line of scar—by glass, or sharpest steel—that runs from the corner of her left eye all down her pale cheek to the corner of her smile. Yet it has neither disfigured her face, nor maimed her spirit. She has been willing to tell me much more, but I do not want to know—while unspeakable, it is not quite beyond my capacity to imagine it. I have seen them in the streets. For years I heard their screams at night. We hear them even here.

  Knowing that the situation of those dearest to her is precarious, I have begged Bishop Santa Cruz, who has done this much, to do whatever else he can. She has become a friend to me. You cannot know my loneliness when you left, my thoughts during this cold year. Until I met you I was content to stay in here, within the walls of this cell, with these friends who are my books my only company. But since you left how I hunger to see the streets again, to walk in them just one hour….

  I have forfeited that liberty, but at least I have Antonia—a warm salt breeze, salt in speech, strong as the sea. She is tireless in my service, sleeps almost as little as I, though rather better, and though she is not yet twenty-two to my forty, fusses over me like an anxious mother hollow-eyed with worry and nights of care. (And as you are always chiding me for not making copies of the verses I give away as gifts, here is someone now for that work, too.) Know that in her you have the strongest ally, for she is always trying to warn me against one prideful folly or other. She has been my Penthesileia—no, like the Angolan warrior princesses of her grandmother’s ancestors, such strength, to see her in the orchards and the gardens they say … the quiet rage in her that must find its release somewhere.

  If I have never seen her there, it is because I do not go…. For you see, dear friend, the flowers in the orchards, the smell of the earth, the hard rain that lays bright bracelets of coin on each blade of grass, all these

  things bring too near the absence of another time. And of a kind of poetry now lost to me.

  As the years go rushing, rushing by, in things absent I feel a presence as of stone—your absence as of a stone in my breast; your distance the darkness behind it, and all that holds it in are these letters from you: the presence of your absence. Absence—yours, others’—is become a presence ever before me, an ever constant pressure, the mass of a stone I am afraid to roll back. Always for me lately, this absence, this dance. This too is a kind of siege.

  I have been afraid to speak to you of all this, amada dueña de mi alma, for fear I will not know how to stop, or when I must.

  There was the day you first came to this convent….

  Sweet Lysis, I too regret, bitterly, every hour together we could not have. With this letter I enclose a few verses that, hesitant yet, reach for your hand….

  I send you all my love and anxiously await word.

  día 6 de enero del año 1689

  de este convento de San Jerónimo,

  de la Ciudad de México,

  Nueva España

  †‘that business of the arch’—the triumphal arch of 1680

  †creatures of reason

  HELEN

  [2nd day of April 1689]

  Her Excellency, Lady María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga

  Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna,

  Madrid

  Mi querida Lysis,

  Our daughter has safely arrived. Castalia has reached the New World. I have our collection under my hand now as I write, as I have written for thirty years, so many countless hours, with serried rows of books in friendly ranks, standing watch close at my back. Something else I have never said to you, I say it now. That a man I loved more than the sun, my kinsman, loved your kinsman with all his great heart. How beautiful it would have been, and how strange, to have known so very long ago that today—under the aegis and seal of the House of Paredes—I would reach up to shelve my own first book only to discover that it fits between his two best loved authors. Between these two books I still have of his, between Homer and Manrique I stand: Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor.

  I exist.

  This book. Our first. I open it. I cradle her, this child of ours, run my ticklish nose down her bumpy spine, snuffle out her newborn’s scents. I hold up a world in my palm. A life entire.

  I laugh a little through the springs in my eyes at the saucy title you have found. Castalian Flood. Run, ye mockers and sinners and poetasters, run for the arks!

  Such a feeling of dangerous peace creeps over me, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. Between Manrique and Homer, between peace and fight. One book—isn’t one enough? Why do we have to struggle so much not to be crushed? Surely now all the fighting could stop. And yet I know it does not.

  For a long time after my girlhood ended it was hard to love the Iliad as before. Even now I prefer the Odyssey, and there are parts of his Iliad I dislike still. For a while after leaving Panoayan I disliked it all, every chapter. As a young woman at the palace, what I saw in those chapters was the endless waste and horror of all that is most beautiful in men. The finest flowers of an age cut and trailed through gore and dust. This epic of deflowering men. And then just when it all becomes too much, a Homer transformed writes a kind of miracle for us, an interlude, as though by a different pen, as though the Homer of the Odyssey drops by for a turn. The working of Achilles’ shield at Vulcan’s forge.

  On that shield, as Thetis of the silvery feet stands tiptoe at his shoulder, anxious yet marvelling, the smith Hephaistos works the heavens and beneath them two cities. In one, a civil peace: festivals and marriages, through the streets wind bridal processions by torchlight; women crowd doorways to watch the maidens pass. A marketplace wrought in silver, sober heralds and arbitrators sit in open court … sage elders in session on benches of stone slow-worn to gloss.

  The other, a city under siege. Outside its walls not one but two contending armies ring the ramparts in glittering bronze. Beyond, Hephaistos works soft fields triple-ploughed … teams of oxen till in the sun, to each teamster a man brings sweet wine in gold flagons. Under a silver tree a feast is spread. Women scatter white barley for the workers to eat. Beside a fire a brass ox lies jointed and trimmed. Copper reeds sway in a silver stream, sheepflocks gleam. A player with his lyre refreshes the harvesters, as with light dance steps—for their fardels were light—they keep time…. And enclosing all, the deep gyres of the Ocean River running at the shield’s outermost edge.

  Why has Homer given us this shield, this paradox of an object of war, yet a refuge from it? Is his an act of defiance, or does he merely tease out the moment, an idyll before the bloody climax? Whatever his purpose, it is an interlude of all that is beautiful and fine, all that is worth living, striving for, all that made that war terrible and cursed.
All this was lost, the Poet suggests, over Helen. We should despise her, even when the Trojans themselves cannot. This daughter of Zeus and Leda, Delusion and Nemesis, hatched from an egg to a beauty unbearable to men. But which Helen? For there were two….

  The poet Stesichoros was struck blind and his sight restored only once he had admitted that Helen was never in Troy, that she had instead been spirited to Egypt by Hermes and replaced with an illusion fashioned by Hera from a swath of cloud. It is an illusion so real as to trigger a war, a myth so real to us now it may as well have happened. A myth wrapped in an illusion cradled in the hull of a dream.

  Among those who have been to Ithaca and know its coast are some who believe that Odysseus never made it home. That the coast described at his landing was not Ithaca at all, but Leucas, Isle of Whiteness, Isle of Dreams. And that his return, therefore—or the Odyssey entire—was a journey in a dream, real as a city on a shield.

  The last of Helen’s husbands was Achilles. According to one who claims to have visited the White Isle himself, Achilles and Helen were married after their deaths and lived together there. And so we wonder if the shield was to protect Achilles from Hector or Helen. And which Helen was this and which was war and which one love? Two cities on a shield, two Helens, each looking out to sea. One over the plains before Troy, one over the shores of Egypt. Helen of Sparta, Helen of Troy. One the illusion of a possession, one the dream of a release, both of an impossible beauty.

  Since my childhood I’ve known, as one knows an old dream, how the fires and floods and storms conspire with the illusions of the years to keep us from Ithaca.

  Sweet Lysis, let our daughter be the siege raised, let this book be our shield, let these pages be our dream of release from all cares of consequence, all delusions of possession, all the torments of absence. Let us make of this book—this shield, this dream we have shared—the place where we come from so far to meet, I from the west and you from the east. To our island of dreams, our dream of an impossible beauty, and in it, together, we walk the white shore.