Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  “And do foreign noblemen come expressly to such houses, as in Lope’s day, to shop for a suitable fool to return home with?”

  “They do.”

  “And you’ve seen them at palaces other than Madrid’s?”

  “In fact, yes.”

  I left off pacing, making my way somewhat absent-mindedly to my seat by the grille. Of course the House of the Messenger was a madhouse famous throughout Europe, fools and gold being Spain’s last remaining exports. But it was the way he stressed its location … I racked my brain for the rather-too-much I knew of Toledo—eighteen Church councils, capital of the Visigoths, of Saint Hermenegild and the Arian heresy—the royal seat of Alfonso, Emperor of the Two Faiths … of El Cid, El Greco, La Mancha and Quixote, the ancestral castle of the falconer López de Ayala …

  Seeing me at a complete loss the Baron bent to extract a small packet from his satchel.“I had planned to present this once we knew each other better. But I think this is the moment after all.” He took the book from a soft wrap of oiled leather.“I have heard that you read Italian.”

  “From whom, Baron, may I ask?”

  “Perhaps the most original and most daring poetry written in this century. On our peninsula, at least.”

  The Scelta. Campanella’s Scelta was written in an Inquisition prison cell after a plot to expel the Spanish from Calabria.

  Thanking him, I rose quickly and placed the book on the shelf farthest from the grille. Would there be a message tucked in its pages? From María Luisa, perhaps? But no, this was the worst sort of book to conceal a message in. The message had to be the book itself—but what?

  There was so much to consider, I was relieved to see him rising to go. When he had taken leave of us, the chaplain took the opportunity to see him to the street.

  “Someone has sent him from Madrid,” offered Ribera.

  “Or even Sicily,” added Carlos dryly.

  “Or else Rome,” said Gutiérrez. He had not asked about the book. The tone was casual.

  In the silence after ‘Rome’ was let fall, Palavicino sat stewing. De la Sierra had been standing by the bookcase nearest the exit for half an hour, and I had begun to wonder if he would be back. As Dean of the Cathedral and the Archbishop’s Vicar-General, his presence here before today had already been barely tenable. Father Xavier Palavicino was the next to find an excuse to leave, a plea for forgiveness in his eyes, a man with much on his mind. Well, no matter, it was good of him to come.

  Who were these men in my locutory? Which were foes, which friends? And which had the capacity to do me greater harm—maleficence, accident or foolish acts in my defence? It was dawning on me that a fate might be decided by questions such as these, and by such men, as much as by my own actions. I could not quite decide whether to feel fury first or make straight for terror.

  I had had enough of company. It was time to clear the room.

  Reverting to my disquisition on lunacy and cheer, I reminded them it was always like this. Each time a new Viceroy arrived. You make too much of it, dear friends. Remember? The threats, the manoeuvres, the betrayals … it goes on for years. You’ve just forgotten. Things looked so much darker ten years ago, and yet for these ten years, have I not seen my freedoms multiply? I am not free to travel, but yet the world freely comes to me. Half the gentry of Europe files through this locutory; half the books we here are not free to buy, they bring over as gifts. The thoughts I am still not free to write openly, I have only to ply in parables and allegories; while whatever I am too cautious to publish gets published for me. Even the learned Inquisitors bring their proofs and arguments now for my candid opinions, too freely given.

  Gutiérrez, slightly flushed, edged for the door.

  Come again, Gutiérrez, come again soon.

  The dean chose that moment to give me the news that my commission for the Feast of Saint Peter had been cancelled. And this with barely an apology, though I knew the final decision on this was at least technically his. What Dean de la Sierra wished to impress upon me instead was that the Archbishop did not even bother to consult him before announcing it.

  I answered that, as the Dean himself had admitted, while approving my lyrics, the common people needed a voice for their hardships and grievances, which were proving especially painful this year. Returning his book to the shelf, he was good enough to concede this again, before slipping out. Once he had, Ribera told me Agustín Dorantes had dropped by yesterday with an offer to help him rewrite my lyrics on Saint Peter. Dorantes was a passable rhymer and before my time had been the man most often favoured with such commissions.

  Agustín Dorantes was also Master Examiner of the Inquisition. The man most likely to preside over a process against Palavicino’s sermon.

  Many came to the chapel that day, but Dorantes was not among them. Many explanations were possible but the most likely was this: he was already involved. It would not do for the Chief Magistrate to be present where and while evidence was being gathered. There could be little doubt the Holy Office’s involvement was now official. But the case could not yet have been Palavicino’s—

  No. Though there might be a file opened against him soon, the Holy Office did not move so quickly. The case was not Palavicino’s, the case was mine.

  But Núñez, Father Núñez had come. Could that mean he was not involved? How very curious the sensation, seeing him in the chapel. He had not changed so much these past ten years, not so much as I might have thought. It was clear the young monk walking with him was less assistant than guide, but other than in the decline of his sight, he seemed no more ancient than he always had. Ten years earlier, almost to the day, we had spoken of Hermenegild in prison—Núñez had never been so threatening.

  Choose, he said, a convent or a prison cell. I answered then with Herakles. How should I answer now?

  Why neither, Father. There are as many thralls among the free as there are follies among the sane. Just so many mad slaves to honour, romance, lust, necessity. But not you nor any other shall ever make a prison of my mind. Irons are not all iron, yet they hobble. Bars are not all wrought, yet ring and girdle. Stays are not all of whalebone, but detain us only if we let them.

  How like empty bravado this sounded, ten years on.

  “You think this one of your little comedies, Sor Juana, but this sacrament of water may well matryr you,” Father Núñez had said, exactly ten years ago. “Just how far are you willing to go, Juana? As far as Galileo?—or plus ultra, as far as Bruno.”

  It was late in the locutory. All but two of my guests had left. The escuchas were washing up behind the arras, speaking in whispers. Ribera had been working at something quietly on the clavichord. He rose to leave, promising to return soon. He had an idea for a new musical project for us but had to go straightaway to consult someone. Only Carlos remained, leaning quietly against the wall, over by the window. He had secured a commission to write a chronicle of our Viceroy’s great naval victory in Santo Domingo. We were sure the actual news of it must arrive any day. Carlos was trying to persuade me to write a dedicatory poem to open the chronicle. A show of loyalty to the Crown should be a welcome opportunity, for both of us. Things had never been easy between the new viceroyals and me, with her especially. They arrived with the presumption that I would serve them as enthusiastically as I had served past viceroys and vicereines, and rather more blindly.

  “What can it hurt now?” Carlos asked, coming to sit across from me.

  I had been thinking there was at least one other message in the Scelta: the perils of a person of the cloth meddling in worldly matters. But after today’s events I had begun to wonder if doing nothing was a luxury I had.

  “So tell me please about his great naval triumph. Is it fair to say the French in Santo Domingo—and where else?—would have been rather heavily outnumbered?

  “Tortuga. And yes, heavily.“

  “You have a title?”

  “Trophy of Spanish Justice in the Punishment of French Perfidy.”

  �
�Stirring. We might actually win.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t bear her.”

  “The Vice-Queen.”

  “I assume her husband did little more than relay Madrid’s orders to the fleet?”

  “Correct.”

  Another commission. The very thought…. Such a lassitude I felt. Even the carols to Saint Catherine, which I had wanted so badly, I was barely a week from finishing and yet could not. I could only dread what use Bishop Santa Cruz might yet put them to.

  Antonia had made her way finally through the portería and along the corridor to join Carlos on the visitors’ side. Quietly, listening to every word, she went about the room collecting dishes and depositing them where we on our side could reach them. I envied her the freedom in this humble task, a freedom she would say meant nothing to her, who wanted only to be on the other side, with me.

  “Was I so very arrogant, Carlos, or too weak? Should I have forced the issue ten years ago, while don Payo was still Archbishop? Would I be better off now?”

  “Or incomparably worse.”

  “Truly, things did look so much darker then. Don Payo gone, then news of the auto in Madrid, then the comet….”

  “A nice test of your scientific principles.”

  My principles. In all this time I had never apologized to him about the comet … the poem in praise of his adversary. Each time I had wanted to, I felt as if it were really Núñez wringing it from me. It would feel no less so now.

  “Listening to the Sicilian today, as we talked about nuncios and madhouses—and then that remark about Toledo, I was thinking that for some games one may know too much.”

  “Too much …”

  “Too much to solve it, to bear not finding the answer, or finding one. Too many answers to bear.”

  “Such as?”

  “Things, facts … That the onset of the Thirty Years War was remembered for the three comets of that year. That while all Europe watched them through his telescope Galileo was too ill to get up and look at them. That his troubles with the Jesuits began with the one event he did not see, with the facts he did not observe.”

  “Yours sound like facts in search of a hypothesis.”

  “That at the death of Caesar, who had declared himself emperor, a comet hung over Rome for six months—and who is to say the Archbishop does not owe some facet of his election to the effect of a comet?”

  “I ask you again, are you so sure it would be better if Bishop Santa Cruz were Archbishop now?”

  He was right, of course. Such a curious instrument was this chronoscope that is memory. One had only to look through it a second time to see the whole world inverted. And yet a third glance did not right things.

  Núñez, who was surely my enemy now—could it be that day he had still been acting as a friend? Ten years ago it looked like madness to stay with him. Was I to think now it had been madness to dismiss him? Better or worse, then, to have refused every commission … and watched every special privilege I have won in here evaporate. Watched the thousand leaden chores and communal tasks here close over my head like the sea … accountant, peacemaker, Superintendant of Works and Masonry, paymaster, catechist. Explaining the sermons, chiding the novices, leading the choir.

  And now I sat here envying Antonia’s freedom to pick up dishes.

  Curious inversions these.

  Next to the window, Antonia’s gatherings accumulated on the little table that spanned the grille. Glasses and decanters, flasks and cups, a city of glass in the setting sun—smudged glass towers and crystal minarets, inverted cones and earthen domes … a city of the sun on its own plateau, rising up against a plain of roses crossed in shadows.

  Answer the question, decide.

  I got up to help Antonia with the dishes. Carlos bade us good-night.

  As we finished, the last light fell across the rose bushes outside the window. The little courtyard lay in shadow. The Prioress came to stand at her balcony, looked down a moment at the locutory, then faded into her apartments to light the lamps. I set the Ambassador’s gift on a chair by the doorway. I would send Antonia to him tomorrow, ask that he return at his earliest convenience. It had come to me, what I had been trying to remember since the Sicilian left.

  After the rebellion in Calabria, Campanella feigned madness to save his life.

  †Byzantine emperor and lawgiver

  †the sane

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  B. Limosneros, trans.

  For an hour, sad thought,

  let us pretend

  I am happy

  though I know I am not:

  since they say what afflicts us

  has its conceiving in the mind,

  to imagine ourselves blest

  is to be a bit less wretched.

  Oh that my mind this once,

  should serve to bring me peace,

  that it not always run

  counter to my ease.

  The whole world holds convictions

  of such divergent kinds

  that what one deems black,

  another proves white.

  What entrances some

  enrages others;

  and what this one finds irksome

  adds to that one’s comfort.

  He who is sorrowing says

  the happy man is heartless;

  and he who is joyful smiles,

  to see the sufferer in his toils.

  Those two thinkers of Greece †

  long pondered the matter:

  for what brought the first to laugh,

  to the second brought grief.

  Famous has their opposition

  been these twenty centuries,

  yet without a resolution

  that can so much as be divined;

  to their two banners even now,

  the world entire is drawn,

  with the colours that we follow

  determined by our disposition.

  Democritus claiming that our one

  worthy answer to the world is laughter;

  Heraclitus that the world’s misfortunes

  are cause for lamentation …

  †Democritus, Heraclitus

  SERAPHINA

  Sunday January 28th. The bells of three o’clock, two hours more to Lauds.

  On the Friday night after Xavier Palavicino’s sermon, I did finally sleep. Antonia woke me at daybreak or I would have slept through prayers. During† these, the coldest nights of winter, when we woke to frost on the flagstones and ice on the tinacos, she would often sleep on a cot by the fire in the library. At midnight I sent her in to sleep in my bed, preferring to read the Sicilian’s gift with my back against the chimney. I doubted she would sleep much either, but she liked it there.

  It had not been easy to be with her these past two months. She took the letter, the pamphlets, the sermon, hard—raged at him—quite refused to see that Santa Cruz had done anything at all for her sisters, and she was very close to rage with me for doing too little to defend myself. It was true, I’d done little but brood. Yes, brooding I was doing rather a lot of.

  In the hours since the sermon I had been going over the entire day, the Sicilian’s visit, the gift …

  After writing his City of the Sun, after the uprising in Calabria, Campanella lived twenty-seven years in the Inquisition’s prisons, feigning madness to stay the proceedings against him. But reading his Scelta I wondered what kind of madness this could have been, and what kind of prison, that he could write such poetry there. How did his madshows seem? Were they ever the same, or different each time: did he laugh, did he cry, did he tear his hair, bring himself to grief? I wondered if he ever, for an instant, lost his mind, I wondered if he ever, for a moment, forgot his lines. I wondered, if I were to feign madness, what kind I might try. There were so many kinds.

  There was the lunacy of the court buffoon; there were the rages and fears of His Grace the Archbishop, his hatred of us, of all things that give pleasure; there was the
sad and yet laughable madness in his choice of Heraclitus for the Gaudete Sunday sermon. Gaudete, ‘rejoicing.’ Heraclitus, ‘the weeping philosopher.’ Which is to say, if one may not laugh on this of all days, then one must weep ever. Or brood.

  In June they had cancelled my lyrics for the sisters of Saint Bernard, in December my lyrics on the Nativity. Now those for Saint Peter, fisherman. How was the poet to feel about this, what was she to say? It was not so very far from madness—but whose? That of Democritus who finds comedy where there is confusion, and puts out his eyes to preserve his vision? That of the geographer, the dizzy simpleton bestowing his simple blessings on the globe as it spins by too fast?—or perhaps it is his head that spins too fast.

  It felt like illness, it tasted like bile. Was the geographer seasick, did he need to rest awhile? Perhaps the geographer was only lost. No, it felt like falling. It truly did. A sickness not of floating bodies but of falling ones. Which only made sense after all. The sane objection to the world as globe was always that at bottom one must fall off. And yet even the mad geographer couldn’t have it both ways, he had to decide: round or flat, floating or falling, convent cell or prison cell—

  Or madhouse. For the sensation now was very much like falling—up. This madness of mine, this madness of the mind that spins too fast, that finds comedy where there is none, yes, but also threads of mystery everywhere and signs, always signs and holy messages. Where there were none. As here, in the coincidence of Democritus and Heraclitus, about whom I myself have written … in my first volume for María Luisa. Two holy messengers—I found myself swinging from one to the other now like a kind of pendulum for marking time: the philosopher who laughs, the one who cries. Two holy authors: Vieyra and Campanella. Two thought mad but not: Campanella and Democritus. Two gifts: a painting and a book. Two Vieyra sermons.

  Too many twos, one too many coincidences … but wait. Madness is not the message, for the messenger is not mad.

  The messenger is not mad …

  “Antonia!”

  Just as I’d thought—she was in the doorway almost at once, pausing there, hollow-eyed, to slip her nightshirt on.“Bring me Vieyra’s sermons, please? Down at the end. I know you know where. Red leather. Next shelf up—left. There.”