Antonio Vieyra is a flawed man, and a great one. The New World has not had such a holy instrument of Christ’s true conscience since Bartolomé de Las Casas. And the writing is the least of his greatness. It is one thing for me to be impulsively foolish, quite another to be rehearsed in it. How have I come to this place? How do I find myself on the wrong side, with the buzzards circling a great, embattled, eighty-year-old man? I too am flawed, I too am not humble. And I have not fought all my life for others as he has, accepted prison and torture. For others. Yes, I have made other choices.
And now I remember something I should have remembered then, from a time that is gone…. My grandfather speaking of Sahagún and Las Casas, with that fierce pride of his that was itself like firelight. These two, he said, and Vieyra, were the proudest sons of the Iberian Peninsula. For all the horrors perpetrated by us since Ferdinand and Isabela, not another race in Europe would have produced three such men. He spoke to me of this at the firepit, the last night we spoke of anything.
Bishop Santa Cruz assumes an expression of absorption. And as I prepare to begin, I would be anywhere but here, saying anything but this, thinking any thoughts but these. Weakly I ask why he even needs my arguments.
“Whatever Núñez is up to, Juana, if he plays the jack again, as Jesuits do, quietly behind the scenes, we answer with a queen.”
Amused, he asks Antonia to bring the chess set over. I could easily reach it myself but I suppose he wants her to stop playing so we may concentrate. She looks like she might have been crying. It’s so selfish of me to have forgotten she is ill. As we are shifting the candy tray to make room for the little chess table I touch Antonia lightly on the shoulder and tell her she should go. Santa Cruz has the idea she should take notes for me to help with the dictation later. Instead of asking why write any of this down, though the answer is obvious, I am saying she is not well and agreeing to write it out for him myself. And there I have promised it, with not so much as a demur. There is no turning back. But instead of letting her go he asks her to stay anyway. Antonia has a temper and coldly now insists that no, she really would like to stay, as though he’s instead given her permission to leave. The scar in her cheek stands out pale against her colouring.
“Excellent, Antonia. If you are quite up to it.” Indulgently, the Bishop includes her in the conversation. “A few details, so that you may be useful later. In the service of your mistress, what counts are the details. Fineza, Antonia, in its theological sense refers to the subtleties of love at work throughout Creation. Such is the love of Christ, masked, reserved, discreet, and above all, Antonia, watchful …”
Conceding the advantage, Santa Cruz accepts Black. White takes his pawn, Black takes mine. And then I am beginning in this language I am not far from despising, the language of canonical lawyers playing at theology, “First, don Manuel, the Jesuit Vieyra boasts that he will contest the findings of not just Augustine, but Aquinas and Chrysostom too, then improve upon their positions, finding a fineza no one can match. Augustine holds that Christ’s greatest sacrifice for Man was to give His life for us. Vieyra responds that since Christ loved Man more than life itself, the greater sacrifice was to absent himself from Man. But to this, we must answer that Christ is not absent at all but is present in the wafer and the wine.”
Bishop Santa Cruz nods in satisfaction. He has been over this point carefully with me, has corrected me quite gently, as a friend. But I am not at all satisfied. It is not just the language—for the sake of this argument I go against everything I most intimately feel. “Present not only in the Eucharist but also in His Word.”
I take another pawn, Santa Cruz takes mine. “Next, the Reverend Vieyra treats the Host as a remedy—a substitute for His presence rather than being that living presence. A confusion as fundamental as between metaphor and analogy….”
“¡Vale!” approves Santa Cruz,“Augustine vindicated.”
In his enthusiasm he reaches out to sample a sweetmeat, falters, then gives in, but this time with deliberation. “I know you are loyal Augustinians here at San Jerónimo, but will you only intercede,” he wonders, “for one saint and not the other two?”
Black takes my pawn with a knight. I take Black’s knight with mine. “In claiming to refute Saint Thomas,” I say, “Vieyra illogically argues from genus to species; in attacking Chrysostom, he confuses cause with the expression of its effect….”
I carry on in this fashion until I feel I have refuted myself, and Antonio Vieyra only incidentally. Santa Cruz takes my knight. “But surely,” the Bishop suggests, “complete victory lacks one final step. Proposing a fineza greater than Vieyras.”
I answer that what makes this whole matter vain is that among so many sublime demonstrations of love we insist on deciding which one is best. We are like children picking blackberries. With our jars filled to overflowing with a harvest of such sweetness, we set to squabbling over who has picked the most. For Chrysostom it lies in the washing of the feet, even the feet of Judas. For Aquinas in the wafer and the wine, for Augustine in the Passion. We should give thanks to all who have discovered such richness in the Mysteries, then find what sweetness we can in our own little jar of blackberries.
“What Vieyra has found,” I add, “is undoubtedly rich and lovely. So if I seem now to repeat Vieyra’s mistake it is only to say he should not speak of besting the finezas of three maximal Doctors of the Church when a simple nun might find one, if not better then at least not worse than his….”
White queen, with a glance of triumph, takes his rook. Black pawn, with a glance of amusement, takes my queen.
“Look at it this way, Juana,” he says, queen in hand. “Vieyra’s faring no better here today.”
“And here,” I continue, more cautiously, “I direct my attack not at Vieyras logic but instead at his imagination. But since in all matters theological, errors of the imagination are infinitely more dangerous than errors of logic, you must promise, don Manuel, to correct instantly the slightest unorthodoxy in my position—anything that, by sheer inadvertence or feebleness of mind, might exercise the Inquisition. Errors in art, after all, are rightly answered by mockery and contempt”—he must have known my reluctance was not feigned—“but errors in theology must be answered before the Holy Office, and for all eternity.”
“Of course, of course.” His frown is one of impatience.
Clinging to the slim purchase of that promise—his promise—I press on. Black queen takes my castle.
“Christ’s greatest finesse, Vieyra claims, was that He loved humanity without wishing that we return His love. Unless it be for the good that loving Him does us. Here Vieyra’s greatest fault lies not in confusing wishing with needing—though this he does peerlessly—but in reducing love’s rich dominions to a single impoverished colony….”
I wonder if it is really possible that Santa Cruz has not seen his own queen in danger. In taking mine he has left his unprotected. The sense of unreality only deepens. I have never beaten him. I feel my annoyance and self-disgust dissolve to a slow-rising elation. White knight takes black queen.
For just a few hours it’s as though I am waking not from but to a dream, to find myself a citizen of Plato’s submerged Atlantis … speaking the language of Atlantis, flooded by Atlantean cares and intrigues in a parlour at the bottom of the sea. Antonia’s pallor, the Bishop’s languor—the slight displacement between his gestures and his words—all seemingly the natural consequence of our submersion … occasional echoes of speech rising to the surface of my recollection in tremulous bubbles.
“Surely if Our Father’s house has so many rooms,” I am proposing now, “it is because there are so many ways to love and as many dispositions. What shall we call loving for the good that being in love will do you? Let’s call this amor egoista. Loving for the good your love will do your beloved? Call it amor magnánima. For the benefits accruing to you from the return—the requital of your love? Call that love mercantile. Loving for loving’s sake, with no desire that it b
e returned? Vieyra’s amor fino—selfless love. And truly, this is beautiful, but in this he only follows Saint Bernard. Loving without desire is perhaps a feat the greatest among us may manage. Whereas loving for loving’s sake, but without any need that it be returned—this we may truly call a divine or sovereign love, for such a love lies beyond us…. God alone is not completed by His love’s return. His love is already complete. Divine Love is for Him alone.”
White rook mates black king. The Bishop has lost his first game to me, gracefully. His face is curiously open, with a nakedness that in a simpleton we take for Good.
“The queen sacrifice was particularly nice.”
“You taught it to me once.” I no longer feel particularly triumphant. Against a more experienced opponent he would have seen it for what it was.
“I thought your mind elsewhere…. But as Vieyra and Father Núñez before me have discovered, humility is a most democratic virtue whose benefits apply equally to all. The mortification you bestow upon me in my defeat is a favour.”
With my loctutory crowded after the sermon a fortnight earlier, this was as far as I had gone. These were the arguments Santa Cruz had come to hear for himself. But now he has said, with the most disarming simplicity, this curious thing: ‘my defeat is a favour.’What I say in reply is spontaneous precisely where my other foolishness has been rehearsed, for here is an idea that touches a genuine chord in me. If I could just say one true thing today, one thing I feel….
“But in Christ, don Manuel … in Christ we feel this mortifying Love drawn and tempered to a fine and lacerating edge. Of such a gift we have already a thousand times proven ourselves unworthy. So to chasten us for our unworthiness of His finezas is also a fine thing, for He chastens whom he loves. But God’s greatest fineza is a still more negative favour—to release us from his hand, to spare us his finezas, to grant us no favour at all.”
The Bishop—startled from his languor—asks for an explanation.
Of errors in judgement and character I was already a hundred times guilty, but my single sin that day was speaking aloud thoughts that should have remained silent. For if the Word made flesh is God’s greatest gift, then returning that gift to God—in the soul’s gift of silence—is our most sacred offering, the highest of which we are capable. Our holiest prayers are those addressed in His secret Name, as the Hebrews taught so long ago. Our most sacred offering is a silence beyond naming …
And yet I do not keep silent.
“As I have said, don Manuel, God is not completed by our requital of His love. But by making us incomplete, he gives us the chance to choose completion. By leaving us free, he makes it the highest expression of our free will to choose love. How beautiful this is. But when He asks that we respond to the boundless favour of His love by loving as He loves us, the most faithfully we are able to reciprocate is by loving Him especially for the favours He does not bestow upon us. His greatest gifts we shall surely crucify. Withholding them, God spares us the opportunity to commit the most diabolical evils. So you see God’s greatest benefaction, his subtlest finesse, contains in its belly another: the gift of not having to revoke our freedom.
“And what is its highest expression? The freedom to choose love, as we have seen. But which love—to love, yes, but how? Loving, not without need, not without desire—these are both beyond most—but loving without hope. This we may call loving heroically. This, even the worst of us at the best of times can do…. To love without the slightest hope of being worthy of our love’s Object, or of His love’s return. And to exercise our free will as if with hope, as if we were in fact capable of good, of love, of being loved, in the terrifying absence of His Grace….”
I sit here in Atlantis replaying that dreamlike hour in a mind filled with a silent roaring. Is this deafness—a roaring we can no longer distinguish from sound? Swelling to drown out all other sounds and then receding, the mind no longer able to hold to the featureless din. Caught up in the moment, I go further in ten minutes with my friend the Lord Bishop Santa Cruz than in twenty years of confession.
ZEALOT
ANY FOOL KNOWS there are things a man does not tell his lovers. Still other things an adulterer conceals from his wife. Conversely, the disclosure of certain confidences may prove a tactical asset. Any fool knows this too. The trouble, at times, is knowing which is which.
Towards the end of our brief intimacy I submitted to the tedium of a puerile game Beulah imposed on me. It was literally a game of truth or dare. I now see that on this particular day, and others, I gave up more than I got in return. I tell the story now as I told it to Beulah then, with the same innocence….
I have an aversion to religion.
My grandmother lived in Manitoba, a zealous member of the local Pentecostal congregation, a church of charismatic preaching, of speaking in tongues. Still, zealot is too strong a word.
She was a nurse. She saved my life when I was six. My parents had brought me twenty hours by train across the Prairies. In three more hours I went from charging through her sprinkler to kneeling at death’s door. She nursed me day and night, the pneumonia soon so tangled in my lungs that the sole life sign was the slightest fogging on a spoon placed against my lips.
She had watery blue eyes, and favoured paisleys. She baked rhubarb pies like an angel. She smelled like lavender, liked to laugh. She detested drink, abhorred Sunday sports and commerce, and knew Catholics to be idolators. Her bunions, forcing an end to a forty-year nursing career, utterly deformed the soft slippers she was by then reduced to wearing, even to Church, where she played the organ. Really played, a genuine holy roller. I can see the tiny grey and russet curls that wriggled free of the severe bun she wore. A heathenish coiling at her nape and temples as she banged out those same gospel hymns for me on the piano at home. Any day of the week, not just Sunday. She loved the music.
Zealot is too strong a word.
I owed her a life. I wanted to make it for her a life truly saved: Grandma, I felt the baby Jesus enter my heart last night, I whispered, and believed. She cried, and as she wiped her eyes, my own searched for something neutral to settle on: the kidney-shaped hollows on either side of the bridge of her nose, which over the years her glasses had scalloped out.
My conversion was as fleeting as it was shallow. When we came back the following summer I had to tell her I couldn’t believe anymore. I waited until the last day, but I was taught to tell the truth.
So taught, I’m obliged to state that there was no miracle cure. No breakthrough in nursing science saw me through either, but rather a hodgepodge of folk remedies that may or may not have abetted a child’s natural resiliency. This was the Prairies in the early sixties. For pneumonia, burning hot mustard plasters applied every hour around the clock, the nostrum of preference in southern Manitoba. My father claimed she’d drawn the phlegm from my chest through a tube down my throat, drawn it from my nostrils with her lips. I didn’t know whether to believe him.
Maybe she hadn’t really saved my life after all. Maybe, for a while, she had only watched over it.
ADVENT
On the island of Mexico, from the old barrio of Nacatitlan, a street goes north through the new streets intersecting it, running west and east straight down to the lake. Here, where the shacks and shanties and huts are low, one may see the white volcanoes to the east, the southmost gouting steam above the other, white and still. A whiteness washed faint copper in the smoke of scores of small fires set in the western hills.
North of the barrio of Nacatitlan, the street is called Calle de las Rejas where it approaches the porter’s gate of the convent of San Jerónimo, and from there past the slaughterhouses and butcher shops to the monastery of San Agustín, the richest in all Mexico. Here, in the days after the first Sunday of Advent and leading up to the festival of Our Lady of Guadalupe and in the fortnight beyond this to the Nativity, the beggars gather in great numbers at the monastery gates. The street passes them by and proceeds along the west face of the convent of San Berna
rdo to arrive at the zócalo, a vast plaza bounded on the south by the edifices of the city administration and on the east by the long façade of the Viceregal Palace. On the north stands the massive yoke of the Metropolitan Cathedral, its second tower at last nearing completion. It is the hour approaching sunset in this season of festivals and the end of rains. As though upon a living coat of arms, the central plaza of the Imperial City of Mexico lies embossed and embroidered and crisscrossed and braided with tens of thousands of people, afoot, on mule-back and horseback, and in litters and carriages.
Over at the Cathedral and unconstrained by the solemnity within, celebrants have hemmed its walls about with exuberant bouquets the violet of Advent—irises, jacarandas, violets, hyacinths. Along the blank west wall the bouquets lie tumbled at its base like the sprays of violet breakers, while standing lost and awash among the flowers, here at the customary place, wait a few score unemployed carpenters and masons still hoping to be collected for the late, last work of the busiest season.
Three blocks farther north, the street reaches a smaller plaza at whose southeast corner agents stream in and out of the Customs House, its west windows reflecting a sky orange with the approaching sunset. Hemmed too in violet bouquets stands the small rose-coloured temple of Santo Domingo, on the north edge of the plaza itself. Across Calle Puente de la Aduana to the east stands the edifice of an austere authority: two tall storeys, a stone coat of arms, a cloth banner above the tall front gates at the southwest corner. There the sky blazes red-orange in the glass; farther along, the light slanting over the plaza leaves some windows in shadow on the upper floor. In one of these, six north of the gates, a lamp burns.
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