I have prayed that He dim the light of my reason, leaving only that which is needed to keep His Law, for there are those who would say that all else is unwanted in a woman … I deemed convent life the least unsuitable and the most honourable I could elect if I were to ensure my salvation. I believed I was fleeing from myself, but—wretch that I am!—I brought with me my worst enemy, my inclination, which I do not know whether to consider a gift or a punishment from Heaven…. it seeming necessary to me, in order to scale those heights, to climb the steps of the human sciences and arts for how could one undertake the study of the Queen of the Sciences if first one had not come to know her servants? How without Geometry, could one measure the Holy Arc of the Covenant and the Holy City of Jerusalem, whose mysterious measures are foursquare in all their dimensions, as well as the miraculous proportions of all their parts? … And without being an expert in Music, how could one understand the exquisite precision of the musical proportions that grace so many Scriptures, particularly those in which Abraham beseeches God in defence of the Cities, asking whether He would spare the place, were there but fifty just men therein; and then Abraham reduced that number to five less than fifty, forty-five, which is a ninth, and is as Mi to Re; then to forty, which is a tone, and is as Re to Mi; from forty to thirty, which is a diatessaron, the interval of the perfect fourth; from thirty to twenty, which is a perfect fifth, and from twenty to ten, which is the octave, the diapason….
In this practice one may recognize the strength of my inclination…. What have I not gone through to hold out against this? Strange sort of martyrdom, in which I was both the martyr and my own executioner.
Often on the crest of temples are placed as adornment figures of the winds and of fame, and to defend them from the birds, they are covered with iron barbs … the figure thus elevated cannot avoid becoming the target of those barbs; there on high is found the animosity of the air, on high, the ferocity of the elements, on high is unleashed the anger of the thunderbolt, on high stands the target for slings and arrows. Let the head that is a treasure-house of wisdom expect no crowning other than thorns…. Seeing so many varieties of crown, I was uncertain what kind Christ’s was. I think it must have been obsidional, which (as you, my Lady, know) was the most honoured and was so called from obsidio, which means siege…. The feat of Christ was to make the Prince of Darkness lift his siege, which had the whole world encircled….
I confess that I am far removed from wisdom’s confines and that I have wished to pursue it, though a longe. But the sole result has been to draw me closer to the flames of persecution, the crucible of torture, and this has even gone so far as a formal request that study be forbidden me …12
[And yet] I find a most wise Queen of Saba, so learned that she dares to challenge with hard questions the wisdom of the greatest of all wise men, without being reprimanded for doing so … I see many illustrious women; some blessed with the gift of prophecy, like Abigail; others of persuasion, like Esther; others with pity, like Rahab …
If I again turn to the Gentiles, the first I encounter are the Sibyls, those women chosen by God to prophesy the principal mysteries of our Faith, and with learned and elegant verses that surpass admiration … I see the daughter of the divine Tiresias, more learned than her father. An Hypatia, who taught astrology, and read many years in Alexandria … I find the Egyptian Catherine, studying and influencing the wisdom of all the wise men of Egypt …
Then if I turn my eyes to the oft-chastized faculty of making verses—which is in me so natural that I must discipline myself that even this letter not be written in that form—I might cite those lines, All I wished to express took the form of verse. And seeing that so many condemn and criticize this ability, I have conscientiously sought to find what harm may be in it, and I have not found it, but, rather, I see verse acclaimed in the mouths of the Sibyls, sanctified in the pens of the Prophets, especially King David…. The greater part of the Holy Books are in metre, as in the Book of Moses; and those of Job … are in heroic verse. Solomon wrote the Canticle of Canticles in verse; and Jeremiah his Lamentations….
And if the evil is attributed to the fact that a woman employs them … what then is the evil in my being a woman? I confess openly my own baseness and meanness, but I judge that no couplet of mine has been deemed indecent. Furthermore, I have never written of my own will, but under the pleas and injunctions of others … That letter, lady, which you so greatly honoured … I believe that had I foreseen the blessed destiny to which it was fated—for like a second Moses I had set it adrift, naked, on the waters of the Nile of silence, where you, a princess, found and cherished it—I believe, I reiterate, that had I known, the very hands of which it was born would have drowned it … for as fate cast it before your doors, so exposed, so orphaned, that it fell to you even to give it a name, I must lament that among other deformities it also bears the blemish of haste … If I ever write again, I shall as ever direct my scribblings towards the haven of your most holy feet and the certainty of your most holy correction, for I have no other jewel with which to pay you …
†published only posthumously, five years after Sor Juana’s death
CARACOL
By spring, the fears of winter had faded, yet the atmosphere had scarcely changed—the winds might change from excitement to anxiety to giddy folly, but unrest and shifting alliances had become our constants. It felt as if we might wake any day to a new state where stones would rise up and floating bodies fall. One had only to glance away for the kettle to come to a boil.13
She should not have sent our Seraphina letter, but it had taken Antonia to rouse me if even a little from my latest bout of melancholic humours. In fanning sparks Antonia had struck, I found the flame flickered up and fed itself a while—the letter ran to over fifty pages, which I had only just sent off when Carlos at last published his panegyric on the Spanish naval victory over French perfidy and piracy—a testament writ on water to Spanish valour and overwhelming numerical superiority. To thank me for my verses of dedication the Viceroy came in person. Our relations were entering, it seemed, an unusually cordial phase, even as mine with his wife had decidedly cooled. The Count de Galve left his guard to take up positions in the street and came in without attendants, a small man under a small hat on a massive periwig, which only made him seem all the younger, more forlorn. Not without humour, he praised the lines inspired by our weather, and was interested to hear me confirm that the cloud serpent of the verse took its source from Mixcoatl, FeatherSerpent’s father.
… Así preñada nube, congojada
de la carga pesada,
de térreas condensada exhalaciones,
sudando en densas lluvias la agonía
—víbora de vapores espantosa,
cuyo silbo es el trueno
que al cielo descompone la armonía—14
The rain had not stopped since the naval battle, nor indeed at any time during the dry season. It been raining for ten months. And in the Viceroy’s face the strain showed. He’d acquired the habit of gnawing at the inside of his cheek, and by his winces I gathered it had become cankerous. The flooding in the outlying neighbourhoods was grave enough that Carlos had agreed to lend a hand designing new diversion schemes, though he knew the risk as well as anyone, a risk he had made clear to the Viceroy. Floods in our valley and the failures to control them had been ruining careers for as long as anyone here could remember. Corruption scandals, bankruptcies, colossal earthworks of shifting blame and dirt. Each viceroy at his inauguration was beseeched in verse, implored in speeches to please deliver us, as each year the lake shrank a little and yet the floods grew worse—the waters sluicing swiftly down denuded stretches of mountainside. This year was already the worst since ’29, and the wet season had scarcely started.
Then a new danger. During the dredging operations, the men working under Carlos had discovered in the foul ooze at the bottom of the canals thousands upon thousands of small clay dolls in European dress, men and women in various postures o
f torment—pierced by lances, cleft at throat and chest. Though there was no saying how or when these effigies had found their way into the canals, Carlos had promptly warned the Viceroy that an Indian uprising might be imminent, thus dredging up the oldest fears of our colony.
The blight had continued its spread through the wheat. Bread prices had doubled for loaves halved in size. If the same were ever to happen with corn … But the growers did not even want to sell at the official price, which the officials had been rightly afraid to let rise. And yet that he, the Viceroy, was blamed for the onset of the rains seemed the height of injustice, was it not? A king’s wedding was an occasion to be celebrated! Even the Church raised no objection for a year. And yes, Excellency, the Countess’s parties were said to be stunning. The longer the Count de Galve stayed in the locutory, the more it seemed we sat together as two people who no longer knew who our friends were.
I had never stopped writing carols for the humble—on the Nativity and the love of a child, on fishermen and the miracles of abundance, on temples of bread. But for a year, almost none of these had been sung or published. All that had been heard from me were praises of a childless king’s potency and the beauty of an unseen queen. It was Antonia, on her errands in the city, who first detected that my verses on the Viceroy’s dash and competence were nowhere warmly received, unless by His Excellency. No matter that Carlos had devoted an entire book to Spanish naval prowess—he at least was not making cruel pagan rhymes on rain and thunderclouds.
Not long after the Viceroy’s last visit to San Jerónimo, the Cantor de Ribera brought two pieces of news from the Cathedral. The surprising: that he’d persuaded the cathedral dean to allow my carols on Saint Peter to be sung after all, to the music Ribera and I had written. The theme of Peter the fisherman had proved irresistible this year. I managed not to ask Ribera if Master Examiner Dorantes, who had volunteered to rewrite my carols, had lost the knack. The second piece of news was a simple delight. We’d often spoken of a manuscript I had started during my years at the palace and subsequently lost. Caracol. Now he’d finally convinced the dean that in these anxious days the cathedral needed something rare and unusual, an eight-day cycle devoted to sacred music. I would set down my ideas for Caracol again and together Ribera and I would develop the companion lyrics and musical illustrations. I had written so many verses on music that it might simply be a matter of adapting the existing ones. There would not be much money but enough for three. Three? Yes, he had persuaded Sálazar, no less, to join us.
Certain to be Ribera’s successor, Sálazar was already the finest composer in the empire and in his better moments the only one able to approach the great Italians, Monteverdi and Scarlatti. Where Ribera was at his best with a simple melody, Sálazar was a master of the polyphonic. My friend was the first to admit that by Sálazar he was quite outstripped.
As Ribera sat across from me I remembered that when he and I had first met some fifteen years earlier, I’d composed in his honour a sonnet painting him as a swan, sacred bird of Apollo and Orpheus. In truth he did resemble a bird, which had almost made the sonnet come off, but the bird one thought of with Ribera was another. He was lanky and tall, grey-headed for as long as I had known him and beardless, though never quite clean shaven. His neck was thin; and as with long thin necks, his Adam’s apple protruded and bobbed, but more like a peach pit than an apple on a bough. Though the nose was too short to be thought beaked, and was from that point of view disappointing, his heronness lay—and bounced and dipped—in the long black brows, glossy and sweeping. Still, while one might compose all manner of sonnets on the singing of swans, herons were a stiffer challenge.
His eyes searched mine, his brows signalling antically. Did I share in his excitement?
If his idea had been to cheer me, it was a magnificent success. I felt a rush of warmth and was happy not to have to worry for once about seeming ungrateful.
June 29th. The children have a game here in the capital, one I arrived too late to play myself but of which I had often made good use in class. In this game the city itself was the music and each church and temple, each cloister and monastery, was a saintly instrument on a musical map, each ringing at a certain pitch. The lowest of these was the bell of San José—Ut, our C. San Bernardo, three blocks north, got Re. Mi, Mi, Mi, was for our most elegant, Jesús María, whose bell was said of pure gold. The cracked brass bell of Santo Domingo got the semitone, Fa. Sol went to the convent of Santa Teresa. And the highest of these was our own, La. The low note on the overlapping hexachord gave us an Ut in F, and so on. Depending on whose bell first struck the hour, the map gave a different melody of pitches and chords—time running through the city as Re, Mi, Sol, Fa—or Ut, Fa, Sol, La, Mi, etcetera, children leaping up when their note was struck, a good deal of laughter …
At first I heard the ringing, then Ribera’s music from the cathedral. As the bells died out I could almost hear the words. The rain had nearly stopped, the sky almost cleared. I leaned far out the window over Calle de las Rejas, startling my neighbours across the way. Saint Peter Fisherman … did I hear my verses, or only imagine them?
… Pescador de ganado,
o ya Pastor de peces,
la red maneja a veces
y a veces el cayado,
cuyo silbo obedece lo crïado …15
After the music had faded away, I stayed by the window, my eyes roaming the bases of the hills beneath the low cloud. I had been hesitating to do Caracol. If anything, recognizing how badly I wanted to do it made me more hesitant. What I resolved to do instead was write a second birthday poem for the Vice-Queen. The one written on her birthday, when she’d come unannounced with her entire retinue, I had composed not merely in haste but in anger. Not with her for once but with one of the handmaidens, who had begun gossiping about the affairs in the palace dovecotes with the express purpose of making a slighting allusion to stories of my own nights on the upper floors. I had written the poem on the spot, while they listened and watched, lacing it with ironies, one or two dangerous. A line referred to the Countess’s sequel as ‘mondongas.’ Little used, it was a word she could be counted on not to know, yet someone would eventually point out that it could mean ladies-in-waiting but had once meant prostitutes.16
It was during my time in the dovecotes that I had lost the manuscript of Caracol. Speculative harmonics. The beauty of the world as a music cascading from the mind of God. I had not been that far along. I could have started again, and yet I let the idea go, something so beautiful. For the first time in all these years I wondered if I had perhaps believed that I’d tarnished it in the puffery and the vaunting of my examination at the palace. Or that in the dovecotes I had perhaps tarnished myself.
Why, Señorita, if you are beautiful, is there so little harmony in you?
And why, Soul, dost thou know so little peace?
I saw what taking up Caracol again could be for me, and wondered how much of this Ribera had seen. Not a commission, but a second chance. A chance to say good-bye to the girl who had been seen out through the Hall of Mirrors.
To set the proper tone for Caracol, our eight day cycle required an opening note of cheer. I well remembered how dark and cold the cathedral felt when it rained. Something striking, new astonishments, fresh hopes. For it seemed to me that what we found most dispiriting just now was this sense that everything was being stripped from us, by Spanish incompetence, by French predation, by blights of pirates and weevils, by the waters themselves that gnawed away at our island.
And yet there was so much here that we might yet accomplish. What Ribera and I would offer them was the example of a musical clock, another project I had left unfinished years ago.
Ladies and gentlemen, compañeros, compatriotas …
It is often said these days that the age of discovery has ended. And yet Europe has never seemed farther away. But the age of discovery never truly ends, for it is always starting somewhere else: and it is time for us here to make discoveries for ourselves.<
br />
No empire has had more to gain or lose than ours in the question of longitude, for on this depends Spain’s claim to all the lands lying beyond a certain meridian line imaginatively traced north-south on the sea in 1493. The trouble being that in the two centuries since, we have still found no method for tracing such a line out of sight of land. So while we have long been fond subjects of the Spanish kings, we here in Mexico may yet wake up one morning to find ourselves Portuguese….
No country in Europe began with a greater advantage than did our Spain of the Two Faiths, for our learned Moors once had access to the writings of the mighty Persians—the astronomers of Baghdad, venerable Al-Tusi and Abu’l-Wafa, and the geometers of Kabul, Mansur and Al-Biruni.17 How circuitous are the tracts of history: It seems one has only to digest the problem, in 1493, to discover one has just expelled the solution, in 1492.
Perhaps this is why it was our Spanish kings Philip II and III who first envisioned a great prize to the solver of the problem—six thousand ducats outright, and two thousand a year for life! And still, we in Mexico await the solution as anxiously as ever. What city suffers more grievously than our own the losses in mercantile shipping on the world’s two greatest oceans? or the pillage of our silver in the Caribbean? or depends more upon a healthy Spanish treasury to fund its own defence?
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