Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  There is a moment, something from that afternoon … But am I recalling it or planting it now, in the light of what has happened? The Bishop has just entered, the Viscount rises to greet him. Something comes into the Bishop’s face. Even as it strikes me that the Viscount’s beauty, for all his youth, is masculine, it crosses my mind that with the stickle of moustache shaved, and with it the little ridgeback of bristles that runs to the chin, Bishop Santa Cruz in a cowl could quite easily pass for one of us. Sor Philothea …

  No, this memory I do not trust at all. But neither am I quite certain that somehow I did not see too much that day, as well as too little, and showed too much of what I saw….

  No, no and no. I do not accept this. All this for some thought of mine he might have guessed at? Ridiculous. This is just not good enough. Whatever happens next, I want to know why a friend has done this to me. And I want to know why now. That was Easter. It is almost Christmas. Why wait seven months? Easter, Christmas …

  The Archbishop’s cancelled sermon, his trip to Michoacan. It can’t be about this.

  “Antonia! Get Gutiérrez for me, please. Quickly? If you hurry you can be back by Vespers.”

  I will not be going down for Vespers either. Let them think I am afraid. Let them think I am scheming. Let them think what they will.

  Why now?

  If Gutiérrez had not been an officer of the Inquisition the turnkeeper would have challenged him, arriving after Vespers unannounced. Antonia shows him into the locutory. She lights a lamp over on his side of the grate and hurries down the corridor, through the porter’s gate and back in, fusses with the lamp on ours….

  One does not expect cheer from a visit by an Inquisitor but in the three years I have known him, this is often exactly what I have been given. A funny gnomish face, the sparse little beard, as though the entire scraggle were attached to his lower lip. I have liked him from the first, having from the first an intimation of our secret bond. He has precisely as great a vocation to be an Inquisitor as I to be a nun. He has his ideas on faith and Faith and how to serve them, but that he should find himself in his present profession still seems wildly improbable to him.

  He has come quickly. Everyone has seen the letter by now. A sheen glistens on his freckled forehead. With just two lamps lit I am reminded of Núñez’s visits.

  Has Gutiérrez heard anything?

  “His Grace is ‘home’ in Michoacan. He hadn’t made a formal announcement but the topic of the sermon he was to have given was no great secret either.”

  “You’re not telling me, Gutiérrez. Is it bad—is it as I thought?”

  “Another sermon by Antonio Vieyra, yes. He must have decided to deliver this one himself, Núñez’s having gone over so well.”

  “He had no idea what Núñez did at the college rectory after….”

  “I think we can suppose not. But His Grace of course has many … distractions.”

  “Is he really so unstable? Could Santa Cruz believe this might unhinge him?”

  “Who is to say it hasn’t? They might be able to tell us in Michoacan tonight.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “We’ll know soon enough, I suspect. But yes, I might find something out. This letter, Sor Juana. Very neatly done. It was also an enormous risk.”

  “You do understand, this was to be about Núñez. It is Philothea’s letter that makes it seem otherwise.”

  “Yes, now that you have pointed it out. Publishing it is incomprehensible, as you say. In fact, I can see him finding the phantom letter, as you put it, even more maddening. But Antonio Vieyra … His Grace has been nothing if not loyal.”

  “If one were to exempt everyone in Europe the Archbishop imagines he knows, one could not discuss anyone but phantoms. And you do see that not having heard about Núñez will have skewed his perception from the outset—”

  “Clearly, clearly. And His Grace has been nothing if not a bit embarrassing. To hear him trading on his contacts—”

  “He seems never to have grasped the basic point that one already expects an archbishop to have them. Like someone who cannot stop auditioning—”

  “For the job he already has, yes. But I hardly think Vieyra qualifies as one of His Grace’s many phantoms.”

  “How so?”

  The watery blue eyes blink owlishly. He seems almost to be about to tell a joke, then frowns, lightly clears his throat. “Juana. I assume you have your own copy of Vieyra’s sermons.” I do. He asks to see them. Summoning the patience to indulge him his bit of theatre, I turn to send Antonia up, and find her already at the doorway….

  She comes back with a single volume. Gutiérrez asks if I don’t have both. I explain that as far as I know the Portuguese edition collects the complete sermons in a single volume. My heart is sinking. There is something unpleasantly familiar in this turn of conversation.

  “I’m sorry. I was referring to the Spanish editions. Could you have her bring them down?”

  “I don’t have them.”

  He thinks about this for a moment. “But surely you’ve seen them.”

  “Any reader of Castilian should really make the effort and read Vieyra in the Portuguese.” As I was saying to someone else a few months ago. “What is it, Gutiérrez?”

  His eyes are of a childlike roundness. “I’ll let you see for yourself.” He gets up to go.“I’m sorry to drag this out but there are a few things I want to look into before it gets too late. I’ll be back first thing tomorrow.”

  Antonia sleeps downstairs tonight. She has been quiet since Gutiérrez’s visit, as have I. After clearing away the dishes of a light cena, she stokes the fire and goes downstairs. Though it is dark, I find myself as often as not looking out one window or other. One to the south, from the library, another east from the bedroom, two looking east from the sala. I am awake when the chimes call us to Matins. It is not fully light. When Antonia does not meet me at the bottom of the stairs I go into her room, thinking she has slept through but she has gone on ahead.

  In the past I have not spent much time dwelling on Archbishop Aguiar. There are unseen prospects and faces that it is as well not to contemplate too often, lest they begin to set themselves like hooks in the imagination. As has happened, apparently, in the mind of the Archbishop himself.

  But now the stories of his near madness run endlessly through my mind. His famous bed of vermin … the bedding he has not allowed to be changed since his installation at his palace. His fear of poisoning. His refusal to eat food cooked by a woman’s hand or to eat the meat of any female animal. His furious hatred of a woman’s traces—our bodies, our perfumes, our voices, our singing. His loathing for cats. There was the time he had the flagstones of his palace replaced on the rumour a woman had walked across them while he was away at the Cathedral. The story of how his mother gave him up as an infant to be raised by the Church at the death of his father. The countless, laughable pretexts to boast of the antiquity of his family. And, of course, there is his vast acquaintance.

  But now it seems I am the one who may have let her mind be overrun with fictions. It seems he has become my phantom, and with this letter I am now made his. A figment, a demon, and yet unlike the others, this demon is real, has a name, has a place, has taken a woman’s voice and form. And now this Sor Juana incites others to follow her example, such as Sor Philothea.

  But this is idle brooding. I have a more active brooding to do. These past few years the Archbishop has acted as if I did not exist, for reasons not unlike mine no doubt: for the horrible aspect the fact of my existence presents. God, O God, after the insult of this letter, after the discovery of this intrigue of an attack on Vieyra, and on top of this, the mockery these direct toward him … he will loathe and detest and abominate my very name.

  The night has not been a pleasant one. Gutiérrez returns, but not first thing. It is mid-morning, windy. The sky is white, the light carries tints of faintest orange.

  “Fires,” shrugs Gutiérrez. “An infestation of some kind
in the crops. Mira. Nothing yet about the Archbishop’s state of mind. I do know Núñez has left for Zacatecas and will not be back before the new year. The Spanish editions,” he says, handing them through the grille. “The ’76 and the ’78. See for yourself.”

  “Yes?”

  “The first page,” he says, watching me intently.

  The first page. 1676 …

  “Go on, now the other.”

  1678 … Both Spanish editions of the sermons of Antonio Vieyra … ‘are dedicated by the author with respect and affection to don Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas … Then, Bishop of Michoacan, now His Illustrious Grace the Lord Archbishop of New Spain.

  Gutiérrez and I sit in silence for a while. I hold the books, closed, on my lap.

  The connection is real. But it is not a connection it is a friendship, and the friendship is deep. Once one contemplates the thing seriously, they do not altogether lack for things in common. The younger Jesuit who seeks a bishopric in New Spain writes to the greatest Jesuit in the New World. Now the one is Jesuit Inspector General for Brazil, the other Archbishop of Mexico. Both hated by the local authorities, though for very different reasons. But because a man is widely disliked it does not mean he has no friends. It may even be that His Grace is loved. By one man, a great man. Of an age to be his father….

  “I am informed,” says Gutiérrez, “that they have been close correspondents for almost twenty years.” He scratches the red tuft under his chin but for once the effect is not comical. “His Grace’s secretary is in deep shock, and will be spending the Christmas season in Michoacan condoling with the Archbishop. Sor Juana, I cannot for the life of me tell you why, but the how is clear enough. Bishop Santa Cruz saw you did not know.”

  “The whole afternoon remains gallingly unclear but I do remember we had a nice long digression. What did I think of the Spanish translation? I said one should really read him in the Portuguese. And then he used almost your exact words. ‘But the Spanish editions, you have seen them.’”

  “To make absolutely certain.”

  “And then he tested me. To see if I’d correct him, if I knew of their correspondence. Santa Cruz let it slip that the Archbishop had never so much as met Vieyra. It must have been then. The haziness could really, I think, make me scream. He claimed he had just learned of it…. He had it on unimpeachable authority,” I add, my face beginning to flush. It sounds like an excuse.

  “It might even be true,” Gutiérrez says graciously.

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “I reread it last night. My copy.” He shakes his head. “Unpublished it could have been so effective. But this, this is about something else entirely. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’m at a loss. I’ll keep checking around. But I don’t want to stay too long.”

  “It was good of you to come. Don’t make that face. Truly, I’m in your debt.”

  Gutiérrez gets up to go, checks himself, turns back. His freckled hands come to rest on the back of the chair.

  “Just a thought … This business of haziness, vagueness. It would be better if you did not talk about this too much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re familiar with the guidelines for assessing mystical visions. Well, the principle is the same. The main criterion of distinction between a God-gifted vision and an intervention by the Enemy is exactly this. Clarity. Heaven forbid, but you may eventually be called to give testimony about this day. No shadows, no diabolical vagueness, only clear recollections…. Whatever you say, say it with your usual clarity.”

  I shouldn’t keep him but suddenly do not want to see him leave.

  “Gutiérrez … which sermon was the Archbishop to give?”

  “Heraclitus Defended,”he says, a smile swimming into the watery blue of his eyes. “The printers at Santo Domingo have a thousand copies they are not so sure they will be paid for. I can get you as many as you like. The price, I’m sure will be reasonable.”

  Philothea’s letter is neither a mistake nor a misunderstanding, neither lesson nor pique. These are not just provocations and threats, this is a betrayal—not even in the heat of anger but deliberate, premeditated for years, or months, or at least weeks. If the Archbishop’s connection to Vieyra is a deep and abiding friendship, then without question Núñez would have known. And even he, even acting under Jesuit orders, would not have exposed himself and his career to Archbishop Aguiar’s rage without seeking assurances. The rebuttal of a Jesuit by a Jesuit, a gesture made moreover in a Jesuit college rectory, marked the boundaries of their support for Vieyra and for the Archbishop himself. Of what Santa Cruz had led me to see, that much had been true. But the gesture sent two signals. The audience for the first one being the Holy Office itself and the Dominicans within it—but the second embedded within the first had a separate audience. The message was personal, from Antonio Núñez to Santa Cruz. Far more than offering his services as he had in the past, Núñez was indicating his readiness to switch allegiances from the present Archbishop to his clear successor—perhaps even to work, as Aguiar’s confessor, to hasten the man’s collapse. Responding to the signal or to the risk taken in sending it, Santa Cruz had come to Mexico to hear Núñez’s proposition.

  Arduous and pleasing holocaust for slaughter on the altars of Religion. This may as well be from Núñez’s latest circular. Philothea speaks like Núñez far too often for it to be hazard. There can be no more escaping it. She is speaking for him, from him, of him. The Apostle Paul on women’s learning … Augustine on gifts and responsibility, the whipping of Saint Jerome—beauty, obedience, the galleon …

  It has happened. The thing I have worked so many years to prevent. Núñez has won Santa Cruz over. As Philothea has in so many ways been telling me. And if it happens to be true that Vieyra and the Archbishop have never met, Núñez will have known of this too. Santa Cruz’s unimpeachable authority in my locutory that day was Núñez himself.

  Núñez and Santa Cruz have found a common enemy.

  I will be clear, I must. Núñez and Santa Cruz. I should be flattered they have laid down arms, lain down together, the ox and the dog. The beast has two heads now. I will stop being such a fool. I will stop asking and asking why.

  Why?

  Why ask me for theology—why are sacred verses no longer enough? Why praise sacred verses, if they are not enough? … not so harsh a censor as to condemn verses … a skill Saint Teresa and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus have sanctified…. As examples of skill in verse, why use these? Why Teresa—whose skill as a poet was secondary—and not John of the Cross whose mastery was sublime? And if it is because she is a woman why mention Nazianzus at all? A vulgar poetaster, a dog in the manger who gave the order to burn …

  It cannot be. All of this cannot be about the Letras a Safo—just because I did not leap at the chance to have Santa Cruz read my lyrics? For this, I was ungrateful?—and all this is just a bout of pique? But his face showed none of this. I see him getting up to leave that day…. He asks if I do not have something for him to read during the long carriage ride back to Puebla. “Something other than our Father Núñez’s Shriven Communicant.” I offer to send Antonia for the Vieyra sermons in Portuguese. He smiles, asking if he might not read instead some of these lyrics for Sappho he has been hearing about. Antonia pales, as I remember Carlos had earlier with the Viscount. I say the verses are not quite ready yet to be read. He accepts readily enough, saying something about the perfectionism of poets, and that he looks forward to reading the transcription of my negative finezas very soon.

  He didn’t even try. Who could be that petty? No. Not even Santa Cruz could be so vain. He had what he came for, the promise of my written arguments. Or was it that he resented having to hear of her lyrics from someone else? Someone more vulgar, someone who does censor verse, who does speak of them to everyone. Someone like Núñez…. Are Las letras a Safo Núñez’s price? His prize. No. No. It can’t be this.

  The night is cold. Tired of pacing from window to window to des
k to bed, I move into the sitting room. Antonia comes out of the library, where one has more room for pacing, and lights a fire in the hearth. She goes out and leaves me to my thoughts.

  Gutiérrez is right. The haziness is not amusing, and ‘dreamlike’ is not comical. It is dangerous, for many reasons.

  This is certainly a betrayal, but there is something else here, something more. I can’t help thinking the preface that introduces it is only secondarily about my letter, or how Santa Cruz feels about it, or me, or even about telling the Inquisition why he publishes a tract so dubious. No, here too is a gesture. To show the world what he has done, and tell me what he may yet do.

  In one stroke Sor Philothea publishes the nun who bests both the Archbishop’s idol and Núñez, his captain. Pronouncing herself a follower of this nun, Philothea shows His Grace how his horror of Woman is become an object of general merriment even as Philothea slays the dragon herself. In binding all this up in the skullduggery after the sermon, Philothea flushes Núñez from cover, who has been working at cross-purposes behind the scenes. In this she drives a wedge between Núñez and the Archbishop, or rather burns Núñez’s bridges and his ships, for in now speaking for Núñez she signals to all a switch in his allegiances without having to name the beneficiary. Any criticisms Philothea makes of the traits that the nun displays in her letters—want of humility, excess of worldliness, ingratitude, insubordination—apply equally to Núñez’s conduct towards the Archbishop. Indeed should that final apoplectic crisis come now, let it be on the heads of Núñez and the nun.