Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  Juana….

  día 2 de abril del año 1689

  de este convento de San Jerónimo,

  de la Ciudad Imperial de México

  CHRISTINA

  [29th day of June, 1689]

  María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga

  Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna,

  Madrid, España

  Lysis …

  So the incomparable Christina of Sweden is gone. As your letter arrived, the first rumours had only just begun. It is true, then; she was interred at Saint Peter’s Basilica. The Pope forgave her every excess after all. In abdication, poverty, obloquy, even in death, she commanded a queen’s respects.

  For another moment after finishing your letter I could not quite believe—in the sense that one could hardly ever believe she really was alive, so very alive was her legend. Here at the convent, as it had been at the palace, the talk was often of Christina, just as she was fascinated by convent life. (For Christina, it was the married woman who was truly a slave; nuns were only prisoners, and even the queen was not free….) They are probably talking of her now in half a dozen cells around this patio. All the rumours that she would come, was coming, was in Seville, then in Cadiz itself, waiting for a proper embarkation. For an entire fleet, more likely. From my earliest days here—and perhaps it never quite stopped—I had the notion she would come to stay a while with us at San Jerónimo, with her menagerie of parrots and apes, with her equipage of fourteen thousand books, and we might sit together and while away the days. I would tell her of our academy, of Antonia and Tomasina, María and Belilla, and she would tell me of hers, of Bernini and Corelli and Scarlatti. And we would talk of Descartes and astronomy, of languages and the fighting spirit of queens, of horsemanship and marksmanship, of a life of the mind and men’s breeches.

  When they asked her about this—her loves and her pistols and her breeches—do you know how she answered them? The soul has no sex.

  You write me gently of her death, but it is I who should be consoling you. You had much higher hopes than I that we might one day win her patronage for a nun in the wilds of America. It was a cruel twist that the emissary of your friend the Grand Duchess of Aveyro was due to leave for Rome the following day. How much less cruel for me to have read of it across this time and distance, than for you—when not a week earlier, you had placed our collection in the messenger’s hands. And with it a manuscript copy of Las letras a Safo. How could our Castalia fail, you wrote that day in such high spirits, how could Sappho’s lyrics fail to enchant Christina of Sweden? By the time I read those words, she was two months dead, and only now the news is confirmed. How cruelly time and distance work at the edges of irony: one edge they blunt, its opposite whet.

  Her influence was enormous, you write trailing off…. Between the lines I read what you do not quite say: If Sappho’s lyrics had been in Castalian Flood, Christina might already have read it and taken up our cause.

  The collection has gone through two print runs in two months. You write that we should be thinking about another collection—surely there is something to be done about Núñez. What is it, really, that fuels this grievance of ours, you ask, that it blazes up from embers banked long ago? Can he not somehow be persuaded to tolerate Las letras a Safo in our next collection, when that bright day comes? By which I take you to be asking if there is anything you can say to overcome my fears. In answering the first, perhaps each of us will find our answers to the second.

  While you were here, your protection sufficed, but the House of Paredes is back in Spain now. My relations with the Viceroy are cordial but not warm. The Count is decent enough, but it does not help to know he is part of the faction that has brought such grief to your husband’s brother. As for the Countess de Galve, if it did not so inflame the Archbishop to hear of her visits here, she would not come at all any longer.

  Do you know what she has just done? She put on Amor es más laberinto, knowing full well from what happened to us that he would not come to any play, least of all this one. All this may bring her a childish satisfaction, but I do not see what good it can do her or me, and though I cling to my love of comedy more grimly each year, it is not exactly why I stayed up from Matins to Lauds for two months writing it.21

  The Archbishop persists in his refusal to serve as her spiritual director, even as he did with you. Unlike you, she takes it personally, though he would gladly do as little for any woman. Since His Grace will not minister to her, the Viceroy stays with Núñez as well. Father Núñez is happy to oblige. You kept him as your director because in your life you had found so few with the nerve to challenge you—better the adversary one sees, you said, as befits a Manrique. But it was you who convinced me to find another director precisely because I did have much to fear. Now you wonder if I have not become ‘more timid in my rebellion than I was in my submission.’

  The question is a fair one. As I say, in the answer to your first, perhaps we’ll find our answers to the second and now this third.

  Twenty-one years ago the Reverend Father Antonio Núñez led me to see the service of Christ as Loyola himself first had, as a mission of chivalry. The verses of Juan de la Cruz speak of the soul’s longing to be ravished by Him, a prospect Núñez can just countenance. But that in the verses of Juana Inés de la Cruz a nun should speak to Christ as to a courtly lover … no, this Núñez cannot bear. (Even if there’d been a hundred Teresas, such raptures would still for Núñez be intolerable in a nun.) How he must have suffered until he had me in his power. For so soon as I was safely locked away, gone the chivalry, gone the cavalry. The virtues of the footsoldier are entirely other. Obedience, forbearance, humility, suffering.

  For all that, things had not acquired the bitterness you have yourself witnessed between Núñez and me until near the end of what was already a dark time. In 1674, the Marquise Leonor Carreto died suddenly in Tepeaca, on her way home to Spain. The incoming Viceroy lasted four days before he too expired. I had narrowly escaped death myself—having lain at its door for nearly a month through an attack of typhoid. It was during my illness that the Holy Office sentenced a Franciscan—Carlos’s dear friend—to burn at the stake for his activities among the Maya in Yucatan. Father Núñez had not yet reached his position of eminence at the Holy Office and has always claimed he was not intimately involved. Until the end. For he was one of two Jesuits assigned to bring the condemned to contrition. The harshness in my relations with Father Núñez dates from that day.

  Much of the rest you know, but for a detail or two. Almost immediately after Bishop Santa Cruz’s election was overturned (almost certainly with the connivance of the Jesuits), Santa Cruz took an interest in a text by an Irish Jesuit whom I had known in my locutory. Father Godinez had been highly critical of the Jesuits here as spiritual directors, the gist of his criticism being that they too often clipped the wings of their penitents for fear that our mystical flights might soar too perilously high, commending us to penitence rather than love, to obedience rather than communion.22 The Society of Jesus refused to publish it.

  Highly irregular, then, for Bishop Santa Cruz to have his Dominican secretary edit and publish a Jesuit text that the Jesuit Order had disapproved. It seemed obvious that Godinez was speaking of Núñez in particular. Many at the time thought I had been the one to bring the text to the Bishop’s attention. But while Núñez is himself a veritable apostle of self-mortification, I know that he believes such extremes and rigours are not for women, for we fall easily prey to the ultimate wickedness of ecstasy. It is his view (and having endured six months among Teresa’s Discalced Carmelites, I have never been much inclined to protest) that excesses of physical mortification are in women the shortest path to the demonic loves of Loudun.23 That it is so very different with men, I leave for others to decide.

  But to compensate for the relative moderation of our physical trials, Núñez would substitute a cruelty of the heart. I give you your former spiritual director, and a sampling from his latest circular t
o us….

  I very much desire, for the alivio and decoro of your convent and the estimation of your persons, that you avail yourselves of all good tokens and qualities, from the infinitesimal firsts to the supreme and ultimate … and, finally, that you gather unto yourselves all the good works and talents that you can.

  And why, you might ask? To use them for ostentation and proofs of your efforts? Not in the least: that you might keep them protected and ready to hand, and only take them out and use them when and as the convent may have need of them…. That you raise and fatten and spoil the plump flesh of your talents and commitments, but in order to slit their throats and bleed them with the knife of Mortification, on the altars of Charity, in the temple of Obedience. This is sacrificing to God your thanks; the other, is offering your talents to the idol of Vanity.24

  You will perhaps recall the sentiments.

  And so it frequently amuses me to note how many of the churchmen under his direction have become just such extáticos. His Paternity don Pedro de Arellano, now my nominal director, was a Núñez disciple. During his time with Father Núñez, don Pedro acquired a most holy fear of sin, most notably his own—as he found himself stabbing the patron of an inn after a twenty-four-hour gambling binge. Domingo Pérez de Barcia, another Núñez acolyte and more ecstatic still, had to be replaced recently as the head of the Archbishops new women’s prison: the cat, I gather, had been set among the very pigeons of ecstasy. And we have the Archbishop himself, who now takes to his bed in murderous rages a few days each month. Even though Núñez is the only one who can so far control him, he controls a depreciating asset, for everyone here watches with malign anticipation for the day when the most unpopular Archbishop in living memory reaches that apoplexy of wrath from which there can be no recovery.

  But now, in the span of a few months, Father Núñez has dedicated to Bishop Santa Cruz first a rehash of a text he wrote years ago on the reforms of the Council of Trent,25 and then recently some new text—I am still trying to get the details, but I hear it is another tome on penitence. So Núñez has begun courting my most powerful ally within the Church. It seems he was only waiting for you to leave.

  Finally I have admitted it, you will say. What more evidence do I need that this is no truce? But at least he does not defame me, and his courtship does not succeed. I will not let it. (One cannot walk two blocks in Mexico without tripping over a theologian. Bishop Santa Cruz has only one of me—indeed is the only one in the Church who can now claim to have me in his collection. He has known me for fifteen years, and yet however often I tell him the via mística is simply not in my temperament, Santa Cruz has never given up hope that he will one day find the mystic in me. The risks of (my) ecstasy he is prepared to run, for the nun’s transports are the oil that lights the altars of the Church, the blood of renewal, the blood of Christ himself. So you see, Núñez detests the very thing the Bishop has never given up hope of finding in me. But finding it, what then? I suspect that Santa Cruz, the great resolver of Biblical contradictions, has this idea that he will one day shape my holy ravings, or play John to my Teresa. Or perhaps it is the reverse….)

  It occurs to me tonight that since the first rumours of Christina’s death, I’ve been half dreading Núñez would come to bring me the news himself. The Nun-Empress, he used to call her, with that sarcasm, that Philistine tone and that memory he wields like a scalpel, with which I know he has made you suffer, too. ‘Beware of her, Juana. Christina of Sweden did more to silence Descartes than we ever could.’26

  Silence Descartes? If Núñez ever does come to gloat I will offer him this—from among those letters of hers she had published, here is her note to a Descartes who had recently expounded his ideas on the infinite amplitude of the Universe.

  Monsieur …

  If we conceive the world in that vast extension you give it, it is impossible that man conserve himself therein in this honourable rank, on the contrary … He will very likely judge that these stars have inhabitants, or even that the earths surrounding them are all filled with creatures more intelligent and better than he; certainly, he will lose the opinion that this infinite extent of the world is made for him or can serve him in any way.27

  Who can doubt that Christina, who had negotiated the Peace of Westphalia and knew the hearts of men and the tides of politics no doubt better than he, imposed upon Descartes a quiet moment or two of reflection then?

  There it is. Now you know the circumstances that fuel the fires of our old grievance. Núñez has taken up too much of our time this night. It is late, soon it will be day. Antonia is asleep.

  I want to tell you a secret. As you know I am widely envied the location of my cell, for its sunny mornings, its views of the mountains. You are among the few from the outside world to have seen those views. But there is quite another reason I would not trade this cell. Behind a tapestry, there is a small door opening into a stairway. A century ago many of our cells had such doors, as one may see from the architect’s designs (to be Superintendent of Works has its compensations). But not long after the convent was finished, the stairways were ordered walled over, for the nuns had begun to congregate on the roofs at the slightest pretext, at street festivals, religious processions—there is no end of things to watch in the streets once one begins to take an interest.

  A convent has many secrets, and this is among our best kept. I am not the only one to have restored my cell to the original design. There are three of us, as far as I can tell. We know who we are. We do not go up by day for fear of being seen, even though the archbishop who ordered the stairwells sealed has been dead half a century.

  But very late at night, when I cannot sleep, or a scream in the street or in a cell has woken me, such things in a telescope I have seen…. Some nights it is only the stars that bring relief. The stars were always distant, the stars do not change. Looking up at the night sky—unchanged since in the childhood of our race we first traced their constellations—have you ever felt your spirit mounting to those heights up through your eyes?

  The Twins, the Fire-Bow, the Great and the Little Bear, Cassiopeia … And is it not with a child’s eyes that we trace again in letters of wonder this starry alphabet, and through those eyes feel our own childhood reaching back down to us?

  When it is very clear and the magic lantern of the night glows brightly, when the horizons stand traced in stars like figures cut from black and laid on lantern glass, I swear to you, even when it is cold, I smell fresh-picked corn baking in the sun as I once did in Nepantla. That, for me, is what these moments on the roof have come to mean.

  Eight years I have waited for the Archbishop’s permission to buy this cell and I wait anxiously still. For in these rooms, so long as they are not mine, even this secret doorway can be taken from me.

  And now, as I say good-night, I promise you before this ink is dry to slip up to the roof and think upon the infinite expanses of the universe, the limits on the hearts of men, the closeness I feel to you despite the distances that separate us … and to look into the east to you, for you.

  Love …

  día 29 de junio, Anno Domini 1689

  del convento de San Jerónimo,

  de la Ciudad Imperial de México,

  Nueva España

  Post Scriptum. Mid-morning: remembering last night’s stars, I have yet one more favour to ask. I should tell you right out, it is less for me than for Carlos. All his studies and observations, his proofs and calculations—it breaks my heart a little these past few years to see him so freely sharing all this with visiting scholars (while rounding on the local ones like a wounded stag). He has understood that he can never publish most of his work, and so tries to advance the work of those who perhaps one day can. For six months now he has been attempting to obtain a copy of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a new work of natural philosophy. Technically speaking it is not banned, but since this Newton is a Lutheran and apparently goes further than Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes combined—indeed pulls
together and builds upon their studies—most booksellers here sensibly assume his text will soon be on the next Index and want nothing to do with it. Apparently the holy officers at the port in Veracruz are of the same view and have confiscated at least one copy that we know of. If, however, as happened earlier this year, a nobleman from Madrid happened to be travelling to the Indies with a parcel under seal of the House of Paredes, it would not likely be opened. I hasten to repeat that he would be committing no infraction. Technically.

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  Alan Trueblood, trans.

  I, like the innocent child,

  who, lured by the flashing steel,

  rashly runs a finger

  along the knife blade’s edge;

  who, despite the cut he suffers,

  is ignorant of the source

  and protests giving it up

  more than he minds the pain;

  I, like adoring Clytie,28

  gaze fixed on golden Apollo,

  who would teach him how to shine—

  teach the father of brightness!

  I, like air filling a vacuum,

  like fire feeding on matter,

  like rocks plummeting earthward,

  like the will set on a goal—

  in short, as all things in Nature,

  moved by a will to endure

  are drawn together by love

  in closely knit embrace …

  But, Phyllis, why go on?

  For yourself alone I love you.

  Considering your merits,

  what more is there to say?

  That you’re a woman far away

  is no hindrance to my love:

  for the soul, as you well know,

  distance and sex don’t count….