“I suddenly see my existence there as Royal Cosmographer.”
“Have you forgotten, Carlos? You’ve already refused our guest’s offer. Or does it suit you to do so twice in the same hour?”
“Don Carlos may be right, Sor Juana. When I see you both here working at the height of your powers … He might well find the spectre too haunting.”
“If you’ll permit me, René Henri, perhaps I might restore some small part of the regard you once held for your Racine. For although it doubtless helps to have served perhaps all Europe’s last great king, it will not have escaped an artist of Racine’s stature that the burden of service grows heavier these days to the precise extent that the king himself loses the gravity of substance. Though they command realms and empires larger by far than any of the old principalities, how our kings today envy the humblest Asiatic princes the strut of their unthinking despotism, their thoughtless hold on power. How much less need have these little satraps for painters and plays and soaring panegyrics, whereas even the Sun King grows desperate for any art magnifying the faint lustre of his divine right … rather than simply reflecting it as the Moon cannot help reflecting the Sun.”
The Viscount, flushed, struggles in the grip of some beautiful emotion. He seems about to stand. “Clearly, my disappointment has made me ungenerous, my lady. I am grateful to you—I think you’ve come very close to the mark. For it has always seemed to me his collapse began with the failure of his Phèdre. By far Racine’s greatest work, and not one that much glorifies kings. I’ve summoned up the nerve to bring you a translation I’ve made into Castilian, for Mexico’s author of Love is a Greater Labyrinth. What a masterpiece,” he says, passing the book through the grille. “They had it in for him. The most famous, the most gifted, the most brilliant—he was too …”
“Superlative?”
“Antonia, will you get Carlos a refresher of the cordial? Perhaps not the lime … something sweeter. And another for the Viscount.”
“But yes, exactly, don Carlos. Superlative. Just half a glass. Thank you, Alexandra. Is it futile to hope my proposed translations of your Iberian classics might help”—he asks this as though it could be anything but futile—“bring a fresh blush of dawn to our French letters? Beginning, as Carlos and I discussed yesterday, with a few of the lesser known poems of his own illustrious progenitor, the great Góngora. And, if this does not come as both premature and presumptuous, some of your own, Sor Juana?”
“Certainly of the obscure variety,” I say pleasantly, “you’ll find many more of mine to choose from than among Góngora’s.”
“What an oaf you must think me!” Again the beautiful blush. “Justement, the whole point I was about to make is that the one luminous quadrant in the French literary firmament is the irrepressible vitality of our women of letters, clearly one thing we share with New Spain. I’ve brought you a sampling of my favourites. Louise Labé. You’ll find in her a kindred spirit. Perhaps you’ll give this little volume,” he says, producing it with a flourish,“a small place in a collection fabled throughout Europe. How often have I pictured you, America’s Phoenix, in her nest spiced and feathered with books….”
“Candied jalapeños, señor?”
“Why yes, thank you, I have been wondering what these were. Candied, are they. Your servant here—”
“Antonia’s an oblate here at San Jerónimo and a friend.”
“Je vous prie pardon, chère demoiselle….”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s already forgotten it, René Henri. You’ll no doubt find women’s memories as short here as they are in France.”
“I was about to say she probably saved me from another indiscretion, but perhaps that would have been too much to hope for. It’s just that meeting you in person, it’s just so …”
“Fabulous?”
“Antonia … save a pepper or two for Carlos.”
“Peppers, you say?” the Viscount asks, having just bitten into one. “Let me—oh, oh yes, so they are. Perhaps some of that cordial, Alexandra?
“Antonia.”
“Eh?”
“Antonia.
“Of course. Antonia.”
“The lime, señor?”
“Yes, yes, Antonia, any kind at all.”
“You were telling us,” Carlos puts in before he can take a drink, “about France’s women of letters.”
“Yes—Labé, bien entendu, but we have more than just femmes poètes.”
“Though what could be more exalted than lady poets, verdad?”
“More beet cordial, don Carlos?” Antonia asks, eyes merry.
“There is Christina of Sweden—who was of course not one of us but wrote French like a Frenchwoman. There are those among our women of letters who have been in mourning for months—but perhaps I should be extending my condolences. The world’s two most learned women—you two must have corresponded.”
“No.”
“Truly what a pity, for you both. She maintained quite a lively correspondence with France. Including with Anne Lefèvre Dacier, daughter of the distinguished classicist, and a formidable poet and scholar herself. But among our contemporaries is one still more notorious. Madeleine de Scudéry is making a new kind of literature, very novel. Poor Boileau waxes apoplectic on the new genre. Women’s writing, he calls it—love letters, naked passions …” The Viscount launches into an enthusiastic defence. “What Boileau will not see is France’s women writers offering the delicate folds of their inner landscape as an intimate response to the swell and thrust of the great massed forces of History as written since Herodotus—”
“The Viscount,” Carlos observes, “fairly peppers his speech with vivid metaphor.” Although the tone is still dry Carlos seems somewhat anxious about the turn in the conversation.
“So wide is her renown,” the Viscount presses on as though he hasn’t heard,“so broad her popularity and so great the respect for her erudition, all France has begun calling her Sappho—as I believe you yourself, Sor Juana, are called the Tenth Muse here … how curious! Her first book of letters takes Sappho for its heroine—”
“After Ovid.”
“Precisely, yes … Antonia.” He has glanced at her more than once, and who could blame him, but does so now with a more complex interest. “And though the style has evolved, this, the tenth book of her great inner epic,” he says, extracting another volume,“makes Sappho her protagonist once again. She’s very subversive.”
“Sappho?” asks Antonia sweetly.
“No—well yes, but de Scudéry I meant. If Louis read her more carefully he might be less enamoured. Though excessive at times, my regal cousin is fundamentally conventional.”
“Subversive in what sense, René Henri?”
“She makes Sappho the daughter—the offspring plutôt, of Scamandrogine, an androgynous entity. To her discerning readers it’s very clear that all creators—all humanity really, not just artists—sont au fond bisexués.”
“Monsieur,” Carlos sputters, “estamos en un convento!”
“You’re entirely correct, señor—as a nun, such ideas must be repugnant to Sor Juana. But surely,” adds the young aristocrat, eyeing me appraisingly, “to the scholar and the poet, they cannot be so entirely offensive.”
Such an amusing child. Does he expect with such a pallid challenge to get me to raise my colours for him?
“Carlos has spent enough time at convents to know they are less an island of virtue than an isthmus. The heart, Monsieur, is the same, no matter how tightly bound the breast. No word or idea is in itself offensive to me. It’s a question of intent.”
“If I have expressed my intent poorly …”
“If you have, you must feel free to express it more precisely. Please, go on.” And how my strange young visitor does go on. I had been willing to help Carlos discover what the Viscount was up to, and whether the offer from Versailles should be considered sincere. For if it is, Carlos is in no position to be dismissing it so lightly. But I have begun to sense where this
is leading—let him at least get there quickly.
“De Scudéry’s Sappho inverts the conventional picture. De Scudéry has Phaon propose marriage—Phaon is—but of course you know. Sappho accepts his suit but not his proposal. She will instead co-habit with him, but only if he consents to follow her and live among the Amazons. Instead of being ruined, the androgyne’s daughter dictates the terms, and continues to write every day! She will not submit to what she charmingly calls the long slavery of marriage. …”
“Now there, Vicomte, is a subject fit to discourse upon at length. Carlos will bring you another day, perhaps …?”
“I do hope we may, for I know you will not fail to be fascinated by what Mlle de Scudéry is attempting, with an artistry capable of transforming even the basest passions—the insatiate inversions du saphisme—into pure elegance. The signs are all there for those willing to probe a little—Louis would never stand for open talk of l’amour lesbien—”
“Señor!” barks Carlos.
“Sor Juana, do you not think this might be the singular gift of women’s art? To ennoble yearning, and imbue with a kind of grace the grotesque impulses of our inner life …?”
“You seem to insist, Viscount, on the grotesque and the debased,” says Carlos heatedly. He can at such moments be very dear. “Clearly this is neither the province of women’s art nor the special province of art itself.”
“Yet is Sor Juana herself not at this very moment making a poetical study of Sappho …?”
Carlos goes pale, Antonia positively flinches.
“Does everyone on both sides of the Atlantic,” I ask looking at each in turn, “think they know what I am now working on?”
“Juanita, I’m sorry. It just slipped out—in the spirit of yesterday’s free exchange of ideas.”
“Such a rarity, Carlos, the free and equal exchange. Your generosity gets the better of you at times. And Vicomte, you should bear in mind that as a confidant Carlos is something of an amphora—straight necked, wondrous capacity, but susceptible to gushing forth suddenly on all sides.”
“Please don’t blame don Carlos. I know I shouldn’t have been the one—but might we not speak of this? I was so hoping to bring us around to it. It is precisely this work I hope most to translate.”
“You do, Vicomte, seem rather to insist. An insistence that leaves your intent looking decidedly unnatural. And were I ever to devote a work to Sappho, I would avoid the grotesque and the debased altogether. Of this you may be sure. If you insist so on the names of de Scudéry and Labé, Sappho and Christina—is it to intimate that one might find in France, or is it Versailles itself, toda una comunidad Sáfica? Am I then to take this Sapphic community to be a refuge, or just one more exotic birdhouse for the palace grounds? And is there some point to this? Does one hope to incite me to some brazen action or blushing declaration?”
It is as I thought. The mask of shyness, the blundering and blushing are gone. The Vicomte d’Anjou sits smiling through the grille, world-wearily amused. Is there more, I wonder? What lies beneath this next mask?
“Perhaps, Monsieur, a man of your beauty believes he may speak with no particular purpose at all. Just what sort of translation is it you hope to make to France—of my poetry, my person, or do you merely hope to make a diverting report of me? Or perhaps you serve your King not as his procurer but as his proxy, making your mission the inversion of what you say it is: to translate France rather to me, by way of the salacious flirtations of a bored king who has proclaimed himself nothing less than the state itself. This is the Sun King’s notion of a golden age?—to interrogate a bride of Christ on her sensual inclinations? Or is this what passes for wit at Versailles …”
Were it not for the anger that a jaded smile from one so beautiful and so young strikes up in me, I would be the weary one. Once I thought I would suffocate without the diversions of this locutory. Now I am suffocated by them. Was Carlos right after all? Have things really been too quiet?
Tomasina rushes into the room, “—excuse me, Sor Juana—the Bishop’s carriage. It’s here.”
†listeners’ assigned to each locutory to report eventual improprieties to the Vicaress
†‘What hornet’s nest have you stirred up now?’
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ,
“Carols for Saint Bernard: the House of Bread”
B. Limosneros, trans.
chorus
To the new Temple
come all and find
how its stones are made Bread
and its Bread made of Stone.
Ay, ay, ay, ay!
verses
If there in the Desert
He refused to transform
stones into bread for
His sustenance,
Here, for our own,
He saw fit to conceal
the foundation, which is Christ,
in the Bread of His Substance.
Now on this, His new altar,
to us He reveals,
that He is of His Temple
the cornerstone,
and since he would sustain
us with a delicacy,
the sweetness he feeds us
is a Honey of Stone.
LYSISTRATA
[22nd day of June, 1690]
Lysis,
It is a giddy time. One notices we have been celebrating the king’s wedding to the new queen for over a year now, though we hadn’t quite intended it. A sort of accident. With the first queen’s sudden passing and the haste to secure another upon which to sire an heir, the dates we’ve been getting to celebrate were all long past; and since we have never known when the next occasion was coming, except to hear we’ve missed out, we have never really taken the banners down. First we improvised a Festival of the Seeking of the New Queen’s Hand (last May there—here, in July), followed by her marriage by proxy in Neuburg, then her departure on that leisurely seven-month tour de soltera through Europe (this, the most exhausting part—we fêted the iron nerves with which, each fresh day, the virgin queen combatted her impatience to join her mate). And now this year there has been her arrival on Spanish soil in the spring (here, last week), then this week the Spanish wedding, the royal entry into the capital …
The new Viceroy had been desperate to set the tone for his administration, and in those festivities has found it, while the Vicereine has found it is not a party until she has broken something—a heart, a treaty, a treasury. Together the two set off the first volley of scandalous balls and lavish banquets. And never have we seen so many weddings, or so few new entries into the convents. At the price of a dowry one may offer up one’s daughter to the Son of God any day, but these past months are as close as any burgher here will ever get to marrying a daughter to or for or with the King of Spain.
And so it almost seems we find ourselves transported back to the Mexico City of my early years, for through the streets and late into the night flood upwards of seven thousand coaches drawn by silver-shod horses—coachmen in gold lace, their hatbands struck with pearls—wedding bells and serenades, bullfights and bawdy festivals, wild rumours of fertility rites held at the outskirts of the capital … but then we at San Jerónimo are at the outskirts here and have seen little of this for all our vigilance.
A giddy time and a desperate one, for it is not only the Viceroy and the Creoles who would make their mark. The Church initially joined in with special Masses and midnight orisons, but lately the theme from the pulpits is more often the hoary one of Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps it is only the lost dowries that has them vexed, but I believe our year may be ending—
On your side of the Atlantic everyone, you say, is clamouring for a second collection. Five Spanish editions now of our Castalia’s flood—your printer weeps Castalian cataracts of gratitude each time he hears your name or mine, or talk of a second collection. Your friends in Mantua are ready to translate our Castalia to Italy, your friends in Vienna, to Germany, and a fresh new friend of mine asks nothing more than to bring her to
Versailles.
I glean from your teasing that you’ve had nearly enough of my timidity. Since Las letras a Safo are an open secret and since Núñez rails against them anyway, why not publish and at least silence the speculation? What is it that so exercises Núñez, you ask, in not finding Sappho’s verses in our collection? Does he read in their omission not respect for him but weakness? Cowardice … though you are too kind to say this. I know how it must look to a Manrique. Please, María Luisa, please do not give up on me. I need to believe too that Sappho’s time may come soon, even as Castalia’s has.
Yes, these verses are an open secret, more open than you perhaps realize, given that Núñez now roves from pillar to pillory pronouncing darkly against this new and unprecedented wickedness. Here in Mexico—where so much may be spoken, and spoken almost freely if not open sedition or undisguised heresy—to publish is quite another proposition. In this respect we are not like Spain, and so it has been difficult to make this difference clear. What is written is not just better evidence for the Inquisition, the written is Writ: it occupies another realm of existence entirely.29 Picture Cortés reading his Requerimiento in Latin over the heads of the Indians he is about to attack. There, you have it. Things since then are not so much changed.
But I also need to help you to see that in another respect things are already not as they were when you were here. I ask you to read me now obliquely, in the way we have spoken of before. Think of Aeschylus and the art of lyric tragedy, in which an entire story may be told though almost none of it happens onstage. So …
The Inquisition has asked Carlos to furnish a complete list of the reading materials in his possession. In Spain I know this is rarely done any longer but the Holy Office here is its own beast and master. Carlos blames me. Which is only fair, since any blame I can remotely connect him to, I do. He has decided the demand for a book inventory is linked somehow to Núñez’s campaign against me and what he, Núñez, insists on calling The Sapphic Hymns. Very sanguine is dear Carlos about my publishing difficulties, as he reminds me of how many of his own manuscripts go unprinted. So while he understands my frustration, and yours, as no one else does (he will tell you he understands most things as no one else does), every risk I take makes his caution seem, well … cautious. Caution beseems the woman, and as a complement to her modesty can never be excessive; whereas in a man it is, in anything but the quantities required for his barest survival, a disgrace.
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