“Of course, don Francisco, of course. We are aware Sigüenza is a friend of yours”—the Master Examiner raises a weary hand—“and that this can of course have no bearing on your deliberations. But your concerns are temporal. We take a longer view. Fifteen years is but a heartbeat.”
“Unfortunately, messieurs, like don Francisco here, I do not have an eternity either. And if you have been hearing the same reports I have about an unfortunate and ill-considered alliance between great Spain and a certain insignificant enemy of France, time is scarce indeed. I would really rather not have to make arrangements to smuggle a subject of the Spanish Crown out of Spanish territory in time of war. Unless you have further need of me this evening, I will leave you to get on with things. For my part, I leave reassured that you do not have enough to be arresting him any time soon.”
The Viceroy’s representative rises to follow the Viscount out. “In the morning I make my report to the Viceroy. Keep us apprised.”
When the two have left, the Calificador runs his fingers through the red tangle at his throat. “Did he say keep us surprised?” he asks, of no one in particular.
“Coming late to this case,” Prosecutor Ulloa frowns over the open folder, “I do not yet see why the foreigner has been brought here tonight. How do we know this Francés,”Ulloa says with distaste,“will not run and tell Sigüenza everything he has just heard?”
“If only he would.”
The Prosecutor considers this.
“You see, Prosecutor Ulloa, the good don Francisco and the Viscount,” explains the Calificador, “are part of the pressure.”
Dorantes looks up from pondering the scratch on his desk. “Were the foreigner to do just as you suggest, Ulloa, although it is almost too much to hope for, Sigüenza might, in a panic to destroy the evidence, lead those watching him directly to the documents. What we can be sure of is that he will not leave New Spain until they are destroyed, since he cannot doubt that we may reach him even in France. So as long as he is here, there is still a chance. All the better if he has both reason and opportunity to leave. But where are those manuscripts? The most likely thing is that they are not in the city.”
“Still,” says the Calificador, glancing about him, “what if these papers were here? A question interesting to contemplate, no? One place would be a convent. Almost impossible to enter without giving warning. Too many corridors, too many escape routes, too much time. San Jerónimo, for example, is just such a warren. The difficulty with manuscripts, from our point of view, and His Excellency will appreciate the irony, is that they are so much more easily destroyed than books. We have only to arrive at someone’s door, and if a fire is burning in the hearth, loose leaves are up a chimney in seconds. With books, even after half an hour, one might retrieve enough evidence to condemn half a dozen men. Writer, printer, smuggler, buyer, seller, accomplices …”
“But has the publication of this letter,” Ulloa asks, “not put her on her guard?”
“It’s hard to say with her. She has so very many interests—her poetry and her little fables, her locutory and her library. It is touching. And the few things that do not intimately concern her … hardly exist at all. His Excellency knows her better than I, but I would say she knows nothing of the world—has she ever lived in it, I wonder?”
The Bishop looks at him, his eyes glowing darkly.
“What the Calificador is taking so very long to say, Lord Bishop, is that she has no reason to connect the letter’s publication to our interest in the missing manuscripts.”
“Forgive me, Master Examiner,” says Ulloa, “but we do have sources at San Jerónimo. Before taking the risk of alerting her, would it not have been wise to at least try to reassure ourselves she does not have the manuscripts right now? Could a way not have been found?”
“A way has been found,” says Dorantes.
“I have been wondering …” This time the red-bearded magistrate does not look at the Bishop, who has turned his attention back to the plaza, but addresses himself to Master Examiner Dorantes, “just how reliable we consider this ‘way’ to be.”
With a scowl at his confrere Dorantes says soothingly to the Bishop, “With a little more experience, the new Calificador may come to understand that even when the end result is assured, there are no certainties in the moment. The nun or the Frenchman may lead us to the manuscripts. The manuscripts will give us Sigüenza or even give us Núñez. Núñez will give us what we need against her—he can hardly hide behind the sacramental Seal now. Or in the matter of this letter, the Archbishop—that is, should he be well enough to continue—moves against her on his own. Or, finally, we press this question of heretical quietism in her finezas negativas and clean up at least one mess the Jesuits have made.37 Dejada, alumbrada, gnóstica … she has given us options.”
“Excuse me,” the Calificador offers, “but have we not missed a step? How are these manuscripts to give us Núñez? Is he not more likely to be taken in the event that he has failed to burn her journals?”
“There are other proceedings, Calificador. Many others, which you have no present need to know about.” Dorantes runs the heel of a small pale hand wearily across one brow. He leans forward, weight on his elbows, and places his interlaced palms on the desk. “You may go now, Calificador.”
When he has left, Ulloa asks, “As to the sequence, does the Lord Bishop have a preference?”
“Who falls first?” The Bishop turns from the plaza. “No. I do not much care.”
“We take our exemplum in patience, then, from His Excellency. Anything before we adjourn?”
“Master Examiner, Lord Bishop …”
“Yes, Ulloa.”
“While I, for one, am satisfied that the case holds promise, one final worry occurs to me. Bringing don Francisco here was prudent—he now knows himself to be the prime suspect if don Carlos is warned. But are we prepared to have the foreigner go to her with what he has heard?”
“It is as you yourself have said, Ulloa. Pressure at as many points as possible. He would be doing us a favour. But he has not the slightest chance of getting her out if we do not wish it.”
“And we do not wish it?”
“We do not wish it.”
The Bishop seems about to rise. The others tense to rise with him. For the past half hour he has seemed unaware of the tray of sweetmeats on the table beside him. His hand sways idly now over them, stops, settles on a choice. A slice of candied squash. Raising it to his lips, he stops. The heavy rings glow in the lantern light. It is full dark outside.
“Not knowing quite what he expects to get,” the Bishop says softly,“the Viscount may indeed go to her, as he has once already. At first he will find himself enjoying again this power he has over her, which lies precisely in her not knowing that he has it, and this knowledge that she does not really see him. But since he cannot get in, and since he cannot get her out, he will see that this is all there is for him.
“I do not think he will go again.”
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
“Divine Love”
B. Limosneros, trans.
Something has been troubling me, a care
so subtle, so fleeting, it appears,
that for all that I know of the feeling
I scarcely know how to feel it for me.
It is love, but a love
that, failing to be blind,
only has eyes to inflict
a more vivid punishment.
For it is not the terminus a quo
that afflicts these eyes:
but their terminus being the Good,
so much pain in the distance lies.
If this feeling that I harbour
is not wrong—but what love is owed,
why do they chastise one
who pays on love’s account?
Ah, such finezas, so rare, so subtle are
the caresses I have known.
For the love we hold for God
is one without a counterpart.<
br />
Neither can such a love,
ever meet with oblivion,
since contraries are not
to be conceived upon pure Good.
But too well do I recall
having loved in a time now past
with a quality beyond madness,
exceeding the worst extreme;
yet since this love was a bastard,
of oppositions wed,
swiftly was it undone,
by the flaws with which it was cast.
But now, ah me, so
purely is this new love enkindled,
that reason and virtue
are further fires to feed it.
Anyone hearing this will ask,
why then do I suffer?
Here an anxious heart responds:
for this very cause, and no other.
What human frailty is this,
when the most chaste and naked spirit
may not be embraced
except in mortal dress?
So great is the longing
we have to feel loved,
that however hopeless it becomes
we are helpless to resist.
Though it adds nothing to my love
that it be requited,
though I try to deny it—
O how I crave this.
If it is a crime, I avow it,
if a sin, now it is confessed,
but however desperate my attempts,
I cannot bring myself to repent.
Who sees into my secret heart
will bear witness
that the thorns I now endure
are my own harvest.
And that I am the executioner
of my own desires, fallen
among my longings,
entombed in my own breast.
I die—who will believe this?—at the hands
of what I most adore,
and the motive of my death is
a love I cannot bear.
Thus, nourishing my life
on this sad bane, I find
the death on which I live
is the life I am dying for.
But courage, heart,
however exquisite the torments
through whatever fortunes heaven sends,
this love, I swear never to recant.
DEIPHOBE
[27th day of November, 1690]
la excma. María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga
Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna,
Madrid, España
Queridísima María Luisa,
For weeks I have no news of you. And now your letter opens saying you will not be able to write for some time. Were this not agony enough—there is the why. I beg you, write even two lines the first instant you can, just to say your Tomás is recovering. How galling for you to hear his physicians changing their diagnosis like so many weathercocks. And how very selfish I have been to burden you—can I have forgotten you might have cares of your own?
I continue to believe Tomás’s recent difficulties with our new Queen are temporary. If she so far continues to overlook his qualities, we may be certain it is the work of that same claque that has orchestrated his brother’s removal as the King’s Prime Minister. It saddens me to be so far away and so ignorant of matters there that I can now offer such thin comfort and no advice at all except, believe all will be well even as you act all the more resolutely to make it so.
Let me at least try to allay fears I myself have raised so unkindly, with regard to the recent activities of the Inquisition here. The time for reading obliquely, as one reads Aeschylus, has passed. As soon as Carlos duly supplied them with a book inventory, the whole business faded away. The Inquisitor Dorantes was only sending a message to our distinguished Chair of Mathematics and Astrology. No, not just a message, a reminder. For it is ten years ago now that Dorantes censored a set of observations Carlos had published on the phases of the moon. (Twenty years ago Dorantes even censored Núñez—for ‘an excess of enthusiasm over the immaculacy of the Virgin Mother’s conception.’ Truly, one hesitates to imagine what this could have meant …)
I am sorry to have alarmed you unnecessarily. You once said you thought my fear of the Inquisition exaggerated. These days, anyone in the capital will tell you that the Holy Office’s power is on the decline. That if you are circumspect and curry favour with the authorities, do not rise too fast among your neighbours or speak out too frankly among strangers, do not think the wrong thoughts or read the wrong books, that if you miss no opportunity to express your enthusiasm for the Faith, you have nothing to fear from the Inquisition.
At any rate, if the Holy Office had launched a proceeding against Carlos I would have heard—first the whispers of the well-informed, then a great murmuring among the ignorant. And soon after that he would be a guest of the Tribunal.
There has been nothing of this. So I hope to have laid your doubts (and most of all your loving fears) to rest, if by this somewhat gloomy avenue.
Things have been otherwise calm. Right now, all the talk at the cathedral is of the Archbishop’s sermon for the Vigil of our Lord’s Nativity, or perhaps it was for Gaudete Sunday, I’m not sure which. The point being that he seems to have decided not to give it. I will send Antonia out this morning to find out what she can. The affair has occasioned as much mirth as curiosity among the clerics here, since it has become an open secret that the Archbishop, who never misses an opportunity to trade on his intellectual connections in Europe, has become all but incapable of delivering much less writing a sermon, such is his near-constant state of upset.
As I wrote you recently, the Bishop of Puebla has followed through on his promise to secure for me the one commission from the Church that I have truly coveted in recent years. A suite of carols on Saint Catherine of Alexandria, to be sung in the cathedral in Puebla. In a few more weeks I hope to have finished, but I may say with a small shudder of poet’s superstition that they are on their way to being my best work since First Dream.
I am not quite over my bitterness. I have written you about my lyrics for Saint Bernard, that Núñez had his way in the end and that they were not sung. This has brought more hurt than anything in the years since you left. And yet because in all these months you have not mentioned it, I cannot help suspecting you’ve not received that letter either. No matter, it’s over now. I brought much of it upon myself. Such squabbles over theology are no place to speak one’s heart. I do not much care for loose talk of God.
You asked last year about my grievance with Father Núñez. I gave you what it is built on, the circumstances, but what lies at its heart, what lies on its altar is simple beauty itself. Though Núñez might fulminate against this or that formulation of mine, and insists on seeing attacks against him any time I encroach upon his holy exclusivities and prerogatives, in the end it is about this. His positions on the Holy Mysteries lack for neither learning nor subtlety. What they lack is beauty. He sees it, and it enrages him that this should enter into it at all. But from the simplest peasant to the most exalted sovereign of the world, we are swayed by beauty, we turn in its orbit. Womanish thoughts! Paganist poetry! he fumes, yet sees the evidence all around him. Even he. For it is said that at the Jesuit college Father Núñez has built with his own hands an altar to the Virgin that only he is permitted to tend. They say that the altar of Rector Núñez is very beautiful, that its beauty is of an Asiatic extravagance. When I remember this altar, my thoughts wander to a day in the distant past when things grew so bitter between us that I asked he be replaced as my director. It was your husband’s uncle, don Payo, who tried to mend things between us. In refusing my request, he let slip a small detail I would never have guessed at, but without which I would find the altar incomprehensible. That as a novice, the boy Antonio Núñez wrote beautifully, of a beauty reminiscent of Saint Jerome’s. As a result his noviciate with the Jesuits was made especially hard; his punishments were of a cruelty almost fantastic, until he ha
d stripped the least marks of grace from his thoughts and writings. Is it for this, I wonder, that I could never quite bring myself to hate him? Oneness, Goodness, Truth. The transcendental attributes of God. But there is a fourth. It is in Her; it is in Her Son. Our souls sway to a fourth transcendental.38 Beauty. The poets overrunning theology! he cries, but I am only following Saint Jerome, the Ciceronian. And Núñez, better than anyone, knows this.
Obedience, forbearance, humility, resistance to suffering. This is what he answers with. In Núñez’s Church of the Holy Infantry, to have a gift is indeed a great burden—the burden of annihilating it. No favours, no special gifts or sacrifices. To be an ordinary infantryman is more than burden enough.
I understand our sacraments as well as he, if differently, and while I find them of a majesty and depth that goes beyond our comprehension, they do not console me. I am not fed, I am not filled, by this bread.
He has made himself our authority on the Eucharist, but if others could only read the monographs Carlos will never publish on the ancient Mexican sacraments. The Reverend Father has made himself our authority on communion, and takes the finezas of Christ to be his exclusive province. He treats the fineza like a demonstration, a proof, an axiom of love. Yet the finesses are an expression from which we infer love. They derive from our gift for inference. Love is not a truth that insists. We infer, Christ does not insist. And so Núñez’s positions are never beautiful—they insist, they prove and reprove. And against the love of beauty and the beauty of love he knows he cannot win.
A love of Christ that is passionate, yet pure and disembodied—we both claim to believe in it. I believe that to develop the capacity for such a love here on earth, here in the flesh, would only make our love for Christ all the deeper and truer. Núñez cannot believe that any such love may exist among us, and reviles my need to feel it. I believe in this Love with every fibre of my being, yet from Him I do not feel it and so can find no way to return it.
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