The next move is of course mine. Which the Holy Office, now called publicly to attention, will be watching. Philothea does not even fear to raise the head of Cerberus.
One move. The breathtaking beauty of it. All question of causes and effects aside—and speaking only of the beauty of the game, for beauty’s sake—how often can even a consummate player, even one such as Santa Cruz, expect to be offered such a move?
When?
But can I not let this go? Surely it doesn’t matter now, to know when my friend of seventeen years decided to do this. Or whether he came from Puebla to Mexico with at least some of this in mind. Perhaps he had sensed his opening in Núñez’s latest overtures, a chance to humble me and capture Núñez in one move. Or maybe it was only in my locutory that he began to contemplate the possibilities. Coming to collect my letter and Núñez’s manuscript as one does minor pieces; then Núñez’s proposition, a slightly more important piece. Discovering next that a fiction planted by Santa Cruz himself had taken root in my mind: that I was unaware that the Archbishop’s friendship with Vieyra was neither pretence nor another delusion. Sensing, in this, the most tempting hint of an ironic symmetry: my scorn of Núñez’s manuscript dedication to a knowing bishop, my ignorance of Vieyra’s to the Archbishop, a man he’d never met.
And now Santa Cruz has Núñez, too. It seems to be what Núñez wanted. Well then, they have each other. But Santa Cruz’s fury over Saint Bernard would not have been feigned—he was afraid Núñez and I, in our resumption of hostilities, would spoil things before it was time and rearrange the pieces on the board. What ecstasies of anticipation Santa Cruz must have suffered!
Now I have at least an answer. All the answer I will likely ever have. And it is a mercy to see something clearly, if even just this one instant, during our chess lesson that day, something suggested to him by the game itself…. This is the moment. The most spectacular gambit of all.
Bishop Santa Cruz has sacrificed his queen.
The gambit he himself taught me, an extension of our lessons, brought now into the world for all to see. We are not to take this as a betrayal but as a sacrifice. It is one thing to do it on a board. How many can execute it in the flesh?
I see the hour. The late afternoon light angles through the window bars, strikes a painting on the north wall, filters through the boughs and leaves of the rosewood grille. Tomasina and Ana moving back and forth, refilling bowls of chocolate, replacing half-empty trays of sweets and fruit. The light falling across the board, the chess pieces clustered in one corner. Black has just retired, its king mated. I have never beaten him. Santa Cruz is being gracious, but clearly had I been a more experienced player he would not have mistaken my queen sacrifice for inattention.
“I thought your mind was elsewhere,” he said simply. “But … humility is a most democratic virtue, whose benefits apply equally to all. The mortification in my defeat I take as a favour.”
It is the sort of thing I expect him to say with irony. But his dark eyes are liquid and full. Neither anger nor hurt, not mortification. Almost … gratitude. But for what? Of course—I have released him from the scrupling of his conscience, whatever that might be. But no, it is not that. His boyishness has never been more manifest than in that instant. He is leaning back … crumbs of sugary crust lie in the purple folds of his cassock, sugar crystals in his small moustache. I had never thought of him as anything but relaxed, but all the tensions in his face I see now are gone.
In his eyes, all the affection and goodness of a child after the most severe punishment, and yet deserved. A guilt not purged but absolved.
And then the moment passes without my quite seeing it. Seizing upon this idea of defeat as a favour, to ease his embarrassment at being beaten by a novice, I launch into my own earnest effusions on the negative expressions of God’s love, the withholding of his favours, which we shall surely abuse and for which we show the foulest ingratitude. And permitting Santa Cruz to glimpse it—just the possibility of answering my insufficient gratitude for his many favours with a salutary correction, a negative fineza so sublime …
Is it possible that the affair turns on the fortunes of a moment? A stroke of hazard: the conjunction of a game and a chance remark. Is it possible that one without the other might not have been enough?
Six months later the opening presents itself. The Archbishop lets it quietly be known that he will follow the Maundy Thursday with a Vieyra sermon of his own. In this, Santa Cruz must indeed have seen the hand of Providence, a blessing, a sign of favour for his strategy, the negative fineza of his sacrifice. For the great players, there are days when one plays with such a brilliance. It is as if the game is guided by another hand….
Then the game is up. It was just a game: the consummate player lives to play his queen again. For I am more in need of his favours than ever. Now he will teach me a deeper gratitude. Favours I will not take so lightly. Favours I shall crave desperately. My very life is in his hands. My teacher teaching me still the ways of the game.
A lifetime of shoring up defences. A bishop blocks a priest, a vice-queen holds an archbishop in check. Then she leaves, the bishop wants promotion, it all collapses. No one expects an accounting, no one demands to hear your excuses. Just a game you lose, then disappear.
But it is not a situation that lacks for humour. One has only to work at it a bit. One may of course win a battle and lose the war. I find myself entering a new stage, exploring a more extreme hypothesis. That I, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, can win every battle and still lose everything.
For the game is not up at all. And he is a fool if he thinks he can control the Holy Office. He only thinks he knows where this may lead, and my redeemer may soon have to look to himself. No one controls them once they begin. It is why even kings do everything they can to give them no reason to start. Even the Sun King. Insubordination to popes is one thing, but Bishop Bossuet keeps him from offending against the Sacred Canons.
On Friday, the first leaflet appears. It is the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception, the eighth of December, 1690. Yes, Gutiérrez, let us be clear. The moment is chosen to heighten the outrage. The leaflet rants, the leaflet raves. It is signed ‘the Soldier.’ Not long after, a second leaflet by the Soldier. It refers to a certain nun’s Sapphic Hymns. Núñez. The phrase was first his, a deliberate distortion of the title, but he has been speaking against them for years. These things take on a life of their own. Their life now is blasphemy.
The leaflet inveighs against the only verse I recall having published that refers, alludes to or in any way hints of Sappho. Sáfico, I shall tell them, is a dactyl.
Elación, arrogance in a woman, disobedience, ingratitude.
Now the hay cart starts to run downhill. Next come the sermons of attack. My friends scrambling to plan a defence. Better, I say, to give no answer at all. Let it lie, let it rest. So far there have just been threats. By the Feast of the Epiphany, the furore may have died down; the people will have had Christmas. It is the people the Holy Office will not see troubled. But I fear there is no stopping it.
It is the work of convents to pray for the well-being of the community that supports us. For the surrounding neighbourhoods, to take their sin and suffering upon ourselves. But now Mother Andrea calls for special prayers to be said for the convent of San Jerónimo itself, for deliverance from the threat that hangs over us, the shadow that has fallen across our good name. My fellow sisters file past the door of my cell with looks askance. They seem to find me somewhat unlucky these days. But what do they want from me?—to waste my life gossiping mindlessly at the convent grate? Is this so becoming of a nun? The whole convent savours seeing me stumble—ah maybe her life is not charmed, after all, her intelligence not quite divine. Seems like she was over-reaching … perhaps she would have seen this coming if she’d lifted her head out of her books for once. So it took the Bishop of Puebla to put her in her place. At last! She wouldn’t dare defy him now. She needs his protection more than ever….
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nbsp; I’ve done everything they ask! Entertain the Viceroy?—I do it weakly, meekly, weekly. She’s too worldly. I remain in seclusion. She’s too good for us, standoffish, selfish—I hold classes, direct plays, direct the convent’s finances—she’s trying to take over. Just like the Spaniards—she prefers them, you know. Like Malinche did, Cortés’s whore—so I write Mexica tocotines, reams of popular verses in dialect. Now I’m pandering to the rabble. Her mother’s half-Indian they say.
Yes, write verses, says Philothea. But write on theology. And here is a taste of how it is for women theologians, how it is when the Muse takes up the quill. Can Santa Cruz not see what Núñez has known all along?—if I take up theology they’ll have me a heretic by the end of the week.
Theology was the last thing Núñez wanted. It is why he burned my journals fifteen years ago. It is how I finally escaped his command that I write for him. If Santa Cruz speaks for Núñez now, how can he ask this of me? How can they even want the same thing? What is it? What do they want from me?
They implicate me in order to attack each other. They reconcile in order to see me punished.
Without a doubt the Archbishop wants me destroyed. The Holy Office is now at least curious, and Santa Cruz cannot be sure he can stop it. Núñez, on the other hand, has given me fair warning. He said I would destroy myself. Is this is what they want?—to see me destroy myself?
How? What would permit them to orchestrate it? What little manoeuvres and adjustments? Something I will write, something rash, ill-conceived? Something I’m writing now. Is the Saint Catherine commission a trap? Or is it something I have already written? What would hurt the most, humiliate best, give the most satisfaction, what would be their most negative finesse? Something I might refuse to give up, too intimate, too painful to let them paw over. And in refusing to hand it over, to repudiate it—and in the writing itself—all will see how the arrogant nun has brought this upon herself.
To prove their correction is just, what might I be asked to surrender? … as the ships of the alliance fill the horizon. An armada of men schooled in the affairs of the world, who send a message, who bring a lesson. To teach us our abecedario, to bring us our primers. Egypt taught us our first letters, but Athens is our first school. Lesson number one. No one stands apart. There is no neutral ground. Lesson number two. Give way to the greater force, that takes itself for a force of nature—the volcano, the quake, the flood. Lesson number three. Loyalty and justice are only questions among equals. The rest must choose. Slavery and criminal cowardice on the left. Or annihilation on the right.
Left. Or right. Decide. But we are children who know not our left from our right. Where is Athena, wise Athena now? Does she hover still over Athens, as the Dove broods upon the abyss? They come to set the dice upon us, and the dogs. Whom shall I call to defend us? Perhaps Antonio Vieyra, who saw the needs of others as no impediment to his pursuit of greatness…. Is this the irony they want me to see at the end?
EXTRACT FROM SISTER PHILOTHEA OF THE CROSS (II)
Trusting to this analysis, I do not intend that you curb your genius by renouncing books; only that you elevate it by reading from time to time in the book of Jesus Christ….
Was there ever a more learned people than Egypt’s? With them began the first letters of the world and the marvels of their hieroglyphs. Such was the wisdom of Joseph that the Holy Scriptures call him a past master of Egyptian learning. Nonetheless, the Holy Ghost plainly states the Egyptian people are barbarians: for at best their learning penetrated to the movements of the stars and heavens, but did nothing to rein in the disorder of the passions. Their science aimed to perfect Man’s political life without enlightening his journey toward the eternal….
Study not ultimately consecrated to the Crucified Christ and Redeemer is wicked folly, sheer vanity. Human letters are mere slaves that may occasionally be used to serve the Divine….
Angels scourged Saint Jerome for reading Cicero and for having preferred, as if a bondslave and not someone free, the seductiveness of eloquence to the solidity of Holy Scripture; yet this Saintly Doctor of the Church did at last come to make exemplary use of secular learning and letters….
What a pity that so great a mind as yours has stooped to a base acquaintance with the world without desiring to know what goes on in Heaven; but sullying itself on the earth, let it not descend yet further, to discover what goes on in Hell. And, if that mind should ever crave for sweet and tender demonstrations of love, let it direct its apprehension to the hill of Calvary, where, observing the finezas of the Redeemer and the ungratefulness of the redeemed, your intellect should find a limitless scope to examine the excesses of infinite love and to derive, not without tears, fine formulas of atonement at the very summits of ingratitude. Or, at other times, indeed let the rich galleon of your genius sail freely, but on the high seas of the divine perfections. I do not doubt that it would go with you as it did with Apelles who found, while painting the portrait of Campaspe, that for every brushstroke he applied to the canvas, love sent an arrow into his heart, thus leaving, in the end, a portrait painted to perfection and a painter’s heart mortally wounded with the love of his subject….
I am quite certain that if, with your great powers of understanding, you formed and depicted a concept of the divine perfections (to the limits permitted within the shadows of faith), you would find your soul illustrated with such brilliance, your will in an embrace of fire, your heart sweetly wounded by the love of its God, so that this Lord, who in the sphere of nature has so abundantly showered you with positive favours, does not feel obliged to rain purely negative ones down upon you in the supernatural….
This is desired for my lady by one who, since kissing her hand so many years ago, lives still enamoured of her soul, a love which neither time nor distance has any power to cool, for a spiritual love admits not of change, nor grows save in purity….
From the Convent of the Holy Trinity of Puebla de los Angeles, on this the 25th day of November, 1690.
Your devoted servant kisses your hands.
Philothea de la Cruz
DUMPING DONALD
[31 Aug. 1993]
ROW ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN LAKE, tubby Pocahontas in the lead, Hiawatha steering. Just like golden olden times happy times with Gavin, brother dear. Soaring sky’s stillness mountains’ pendant mass—pure abstracted fact. Unapologetic. Mute. Ice and granite’s crystal union—white a brilliant blinding smooth. Monolithic skirts a scaly cuprous green. Iron neckline plummeting unmoved / in still collision with a lake of doctored blue.
Glacial like his eyes.
Far shore a goat trail spun through spare tenacious pines, one thin scar fierce along the rockface sheer and pale. This way he says, Hiawatha lord of nature takes the lead, a wheezy Pocahontas trailing. A thousand feet above the lake a crow’s nest chiselled from palest stone. Lichen’s cool flickering across a stony screen.
Log railing, picnic table clefted in the rock. DO NOT LEAN AGAINST RAILING—Parks Canada. Safe intercourse with shaggy nature shake a paw, roll over. Play dead. In the fabled distance another golf course.
How’d you know about this place, Beulah?
How Hiawatha? Family camping trips—me Gavin Mummy Jonas, the immigrant way familial bliss.
Lean against the railing cinematic vertigo … Disneyed drop a thousand feet. Feel the loft and draw of empty space. Far below … sandpaper riverbanks emery riverbeds … the coiling pause and glint of polished jade. A lone hawk drifting with the stream … Confluent tongues of jade and turquoise. The lilt of stone …
Why bring me here, Donald? asks Pocahontas. Hiawatha’s answer mock surprise his eyes reflecting bright a turquoise mask of ancient blue. But you brought me here first Beulah, didn’t you?
Why today.
It’s your birthday ’case you’d forgotten. Donald what if someone from the conference—No it doesn’t start for four more days. But if someone comes up early? Who’s gonna see us way up here? Such a joker such a comic, Why aren’t you wor
ried they’ll see? I know why I’ll tell you why—you’ve brought me here to end it. What on earth would make you think—why didn’t you tell me she was pregnant Donald when were you going to get around to that? It’s been months—HOW LONG were you going to keep lying to me? How long have I been waiting to hear one word of truth from you?
Ah the tricky joker’s pause mid-flight / crestfallen peacock, turquoise eyes bedimmed.
How did you—What the fuck do you care how? You didn’t tell me she was so beautiful, Donald—Beulah you’re beautiful—STOP LIAR get back, You didn’t tell me you’d started fucking her again. Liar do you / did you ever stop? Why go to so much trouble Don? Why not end it with a phone call leave a message—letting me down easy is that it—one last time a blaze of mountain glory a savage little sympathy fuck for me to cling to? Is all this getting too messy for you too unscholarly Doctor Gregory?—cutting your losses—so what’s plan B?
Far down the valley storms sift the hills a pall of incense ash.
You’re so fucking pathetic—she’s beautiful and you’re in love with me. And you don’t even know it WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU—
Truth or dare Donald. Beulah get down from there! Truth or dare fact or fiction I can make it easy for you Donald easy as falling off a log. One small step for manKind—one giant step for Woman. Come Hiawatha, come on up. I can make you a poet, right here.
All right Beulah that’s enough get down come on.
To earn your muse you’ve got to suffer a little isn’t that right Doctor Gregory isn’t that what you want from me—gonna myth me Donald, isn’t that it, just a little abyss? Why so pale bright eyes? The falling never kills but O the sudden stopping!—now, just a bit more railing from the railing and I can hand you back your complicated conscience. Guilty little clockworks all wound up. Just look at you now. You protestant boys find guilt such WILD MEAT. Beulah please come down!—you want to own a muse Donald? earn her! she’s a high maintenance high altitude date Show her some guilt doctor—and if she wants you to really see her she’s got to disappear. She can change your life right here—priest to shaman—small-town-boy-made-good to wolfman in one easy step—Oh Grey Owl, you should see your eyes right now.
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