But with Santa Cruz nothing is obvious. I had been careless. A painter too is a watcher—Santa Cruz was telling me he was Apelles. Was I the beloved, then? But that would make Christ our conqueror, Alexander, and the two of them competing in their love for me. This made little sense—or I could conceivably be Santa Cruz’s conqueror but surely not Christ’s. What was it, what was I missing? This, this, this. The beloved, the Lover, was love itself: the love of Apelles, discreet, deep, a love that does not insist, a love that is only inferred. Sublime in its finesse, the discreet, Christlike, suffering love of Santa Cruz.
For me.
… 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 …
For how long had he wanted me to see him as Philothea, to love as he loved, as Christ loved? Philothea was powerless to resist such a love, and yet Santa Cruz had so valiantly resisted the enormous temptation to declare it. If I could only see that. But Philothea’s love had changed. Precisely because I had not grasped, seen, contemplated his sublime restraint—and since that love was not purely spiritual, it could not forever resist the arrows of my heartless, blind ingratitude.
And yet how could he be sure that I had not seen his love from the beginning—that I was not returning it just as discreetly, as two astronomers contemplating each other from afar? What did he see—what incontrovertible proof that his restraint was a matter of total indifference to me? Truly, could it have been that day with the Viscount? In that one instant of a monstrous, wounded vanity … of the boyish man faced with the masculine beauty of a youth. He had never before seen me look at a man as a man. I could not have denied I felt desire then. And in truth it did not so much as occur to me to conceal it—from whom?
Yes Santa Cruz was powerful, and wounded in the power of his pride, but the secret heart of his vanity lay in the immense power he exercised over his own temptation, restraining it, withholding the immense liberality of his affections. But since I had proven incapable of seeing this, now let me see instead a more negative benefit. This was the message he had been returning to me in the preface to my own letter.
And yet even if I had now seen it, finally solved it, how to let him know after all this time—how was I to answer, to steer a path between false sentiment and utter surrender?
At San Jerónimo the stories that held the greatest sway over the mind of the convent were those of the beatas, not witches but false saints and holy women held in the Inquisition’s secret prisons, soon to be secretly tried and burned at certain convents across the city. The rumours were repeated in the work rooms, the gardens and orchards, at the water basins and in the refectory. Rumours became near certainty, confirmed in letters from sisters and cousins and friends in other convents, in other cities. The number of letters multiplied. Eighteen convents in the capital alone, three thousand nuns—all writing and reading letters, all circulating the same stories in endless permutations. The letters flew like flights of startled doves.
There came an item of news from this time that I could not help believing. It had come in a letter from our sister convent in Puebla. Bishop Santa Cruz had asked la mística, Sor María de San José, to put to paper for him an account of her spiritual journey. It was a singular sign of favour for a countrywoman from Tepeaca he had once all but kicked headlong down the cathedral steps.
Eleven months had passed since the publication of my Letter Worthy of Athena, eight months since my reply to Sor Philothea, three since I had sent Santa Cruz the villancicos he had commissioned on Saint Catherine. Four weeks remained until they were to be sung on her feast day at the cathedral in Puebla. I had begun to let myself believe that he had no further wish to bring out the mística in me, had found his Teresa. Perhaps, as Antonia had hoped, he was truly finished with me.
Friendship was impossible now—truly he was capable of anything. But if I had caused him pain, I could acknowledge it, if I could find a way. Who would not try to keep an old love from turning to fresh hatred? What would I not give to be forgiven certain things, to have back the friendships I have lost, to take back the hurt I have caused to the people who have loved me?
Esteemed Philothea,
The love upon which you close your letter, on the kiss of the hand, I received as no less than the sweet wounding that you hoped and wished I might one day have the joy of enduring. I am enduring it now. I have meditated long hours on the heart’s truth of your letter of loving correction, and have finally realized what should have been as clear as it was true and constant from the outset: that the kiss of Christ’s hand has for some time been the very emblem of the illuminative path, active in learning, passive in love—love of a kind not quite unknown even in times since Alexander. And known perhaps even down to this day of ours.
You and I have often spoken of the learned Reverend Athanasius Kircher. Was it not his disciple who entered, through the intermediary of a mutual friend not unlike the discreet Philothea, into a correspondence with Galileo under the pseudonym of Apelles? ‘Masked Apelles,’ ‘Apelles behind the painting.’ This masked Apelles, the Jesuit Scheiner, was the very figure of vigour in learning and discretion in love, for who could doubt that love motivated his earliest overtures to Galileo on sunspots? It was, after all, Galileo’s early publications of his findings in the heavens that had inspired Scheiner to purchase his first telescope. And yet for years Galileo did not know with whom he was dealing: for masked Apelles had begged that their shared friend, their Philothea, not disclose his identity. In truth, then, Apelles had corresponded with Galileo long before the first quill was put to paper.
Apelles and Alexander both looked with love upon Campaspe, even as masked Apelles and Galileo looked up with love upon their Beloved in the heavens. For truly did both men love God above any other. But where Galileo saw only the Beloved, Scheiner saw also their shared love. This is the kiss of Christ’s hand, this is the love He would have us bear one other. For twenty years the masked Apelles persisted in his love, even through all the bitterness that had come between them and, restraining his passionate pride, published his own great work, in it conceding that indeed his figures now confirmed that the sun inclined on its axis, precisely as Galileo had argued, and that Venus indeed revolved around the Sun. These were the words, but had Galileo taken the time to ponder the gesture, in it he would have seen Apelles inclining towards Galileo. How could one with the eyes of Galileo be so blind, we wonder; how could the son of a great musician be deaf to the discord he himself had created?
And yet we could almost believe that he was not quite insensible, or regretted, or repented, for here is what Galileo wrote to their shared friend the magistrate Welser, their Philothea, who was no doubt wounded for them both that the correspondence had turned out so badly:
Nevertheless I shall not abandon the task in despair.21 Indeed, I hope that this … will turn out to be of admirable service, in tuning for me some reed in this great discordant organ of our philosophy—an instrument on which I think I see many organists wearing themselves out trying vainly to get the whole thing into perfect harmony …
Might Galileo have been sending a message, this one of regret, to Apelles through Philothea? Even if that was not the message Galileo intended, we may still hope the passage contains one, and the message is this: Know thyself. This is the highest wisdom bequeathed to us by the ancients, a wisdom that should have been well known to Alexander, for Aristotle surely once communicated it to him. And it was also known to Reverend Kircher, who had taken it directly from Hermes Trismegistus and without doubt communicated it to Scheiner, his disciple. Know thyself. Is this not the highest wisdom imparted by any teacher to his acolyte?
Galileo had failed to know himself, to see himself through the eyes of others, see the other in himself. In refuting the Jesuits, the followers of Aristotle, he had forgotten himself.
What
happens to friendships, how do we forget the immensity of what we share, our love of love itself; how do we fall out of sympathy and into discord once we have corresponded? Why does our playing become so bitter to us?
Still more tragic is the hidden sympathy never detected. How much better to have proceeded as did Catherine of Alexandria, sensing how much she shared with the pagan scholars who debated her, finding the basis of their sympathies in shared ideas, our shared debt, and a shared capacity to correspond in a great love.
Galileo forgot himself, forgot his debt to Aristotle, and acted brutally, like a pagan conquering other pagans. There is no room for doubt that Galileo’s difficulties with the Inquisition’s magistrates grew from his lack of civility, nor that the growing enmity of the Jesuit scientists stemmed from the seed of a neglected regard. And still did the masked Apelles try one last time to communicate a secret correspondence, sub rosa, under the title of Scheiner’s work of twenty years: Rosa Ursina. Dedicated to the Duke of Orsino, an Alexander of our time, the symbol common to the two Apelles is the rose of Alexandria: the very emblem of a passionate restraint, a silent, unspoken love—love of God, of the heavens, of love itself. The masked Apelles had demonstrated such patience and discretion, such finezas. How bitter, then, the disappointment of his love.
After long contemplation I have decided that the similarities between our times cannot be cause for surprise, once we have understood that these were loves of the spirit. For as the discreet Philothea has herself written, spiritual love does not admit of change.
With this, and from the convent of San Jerónimo, I return the kiss of Christ’s hand.
Your devoted servant,
If music can be seen as our most perfect idea of Time, then perhaps History too is a musical science. The mutation to a higher key felt inevitable when it came: soon the talk in our letters and the locutories was of not just one beata but several, then not just beatas any longer but nuns, adulterous nuns. And there were other campaigns and speculations more to be dreaded. Any day it might begin, with leaflets condemning a sin that in Mexico had never before been spoken of: sodomy between nuns, parties of sodomy among us. It had all happened in Venice, as everyone knew, where the convents had become brothels and their parlours nests of spiders, and was not Mexico the Venice of America? I had begun to wonder if my own learning was a help to me now. But … had not the people been saying that the cause of these calamities was instead the eclipse? This was only asking to be told that fornication had brought on the eclipse.
Carlos and I had not spoken in the three months since, though he still came to the locutory for Antonia, for their classes of mathematics and science, and history. She left sheepishly to go to him, while I tried to let her know I did not mind, without ever quite saying why. I did not want her to misunderstand, lest I hurt her too. Her friendship with Carlos was real, and growing, the gallant preoccupation of the older gentleman with a beautiful young woman at a delicate age. For her part … no, those thoughts were for the privacy of her heart.
And yet for all this, when he came for her, I knew he came for me; what had come between us that day had never really been about the eclipse. In all the turmoil of the day’s events, the last thing either of us was thinking about was a quarrel. Antonia and I did not even know when we would see Carlos next or in what state we might find him, but he came that afternoon. He found us in the locutory with Gárate, the convent chaplain. Chaplain also of the Metropolitan Cathedral, Gárate had been there at the appointed hour, and had just been telling us of the Archbishop’s immense satisfaction with the turn of events—had an archdiocese ever served more effectively in an hour of sudden calamity? There had been a great cleansing in the capital. Many a lax Christian saw his faith forever renewed, many a secret Jew saw his faith in the law of Moses shattered and forever forsaken. And then there was the rate at which alms had been pouring in all day, to the cathedral, to our own temple, no doubt to every church and cloister in the city. Gárate had heard about the Archbishop’s requisition of an inventory of my cell, and wondered now if His Grace might feel less need to resort to auctions to raise funds for his charities. I was determined not to entertain false hopes, but found my mind racing, nonetheless, to the other consequences that the Church’s great success might have, for me particularly.
Gárate rose to salute the man of the hour with a ceremonious bow. Carlos shook his head. “I only thank God for having put me in the way of a conjunction of events so rare and about which so few observations are dispassionately recorded.” Never had I seen Carlos look happier. I held my tongue. This was the fulfilment of a dream, his no less than Galileo’s—of science in the service of the Church.
Carlos was too excited to sit, but rather stepped stiffly about the locutory closely inspecting things on the walls he’d seen many times before and today was clearly not seeing at all—almost a bust of himself, stiff-necked, stiff-jointed all over, heaped in glory. There was something in the long face, in the long, broad-bridged nose and the huge dark eyes, that reminded one of a terrifyingly intelligent fawn, grown ancient—bending arthritically now to examine a map as the chaplain continued to sing his praises, marvelling at the precision of his art.
“Science, sir,” Carlos corrected, still facing away from us, hands clasped at his back. “Merely the rigorous application of a method.” Half turning toward the chaplain, he added, “And we still missed the prediction by two hours.”
Here he remembered his old telescope and asked Antonia if the moment had been worth all the preparation. In no time they were leaning close to the grille, Antonia by half a head the taller, conferring volubly and leaving me with Gárate sitting at the window, listening more to them than to our chaplain discussing the weather, which, yes, was holding. It was the first fair afternoon in months. The sun was all benevolence, the sky a radiant blue. Across the room, Antonia was asking Carlos how it could be that the moon had fit so perfectly over the sun.
“Do you hear, Juana? Such a natural philosopher we have here in our Antonia!” At this angle, few gaps showed in the grille. His face ducked into view as I sat back to see him more clearly. He turned back to her. “And yet what you so accurately observed, Antonia, is merely a stupendous coincidence.”
Again I bit back a reply. If the phrase ‘stupendous coincidence’ had any meaning whatever, it was surely an invitation to probe more deeply, instead of an irrelevance—which I knew Carlos had not meant—for, with so many bodies in such a busy heaven continually swinging in front of one another from some perspective or other, an eclipse did not exist without a point of view. And what was a perspective separate from our experience of it?
Just then Gárate ventured how helpful it might be if, after such a universal display of penitence, the rains were now to cease and the city were given a reprieve. I could hold my peace no longer.“Tell me, Carlos, how does glossing over the stupendous improbability that produces a total eclipse allow us to properly account for its most significant effect—the power it exercises upon our minds and upon our times? Were there ever odds more properly called astronomical, that the angular distance for the sun and moon—their apparent diameters—should prove identical, two bodies so vastly unequal in size and in their distance from us? Doubtless you can fill in the trigonometry for yourself, but pull the little moon in closer by a few thousand leagues and suddenly the eclipses that have for dozens of centuries moved admirals and histories and kings fade to a pallid glow in the darkness; nudge the little moon out another twenty thousand and in a flash—no totality at all, but rather a small dark smudge against the glare, a bit of soot on lantern glass. Instead, what we are given—in this coronet of ice in the heavens—is the overwhelming impression of Design and Intent. But whose design and what intent?”
At the gap in the grille the smile faded, succeeded by the bemusement of someone who has bent to inspect the contents of a cage and found something unexpected. But if the chaplain had not taken it upon himself to defend him, our quarrel still might have ended there
.
Surely Sor Juana must admit don Carlos had performed a great service. And who could say what might have happened if he hadn’t. Initial reports were of two children killed by runaway wagons, a few drownings in the canals, but though the distress had been worse than anything in memory, the Church had been prepared, had withstood the flood, brought the faithful safely into fold and harbour.
Carlos said nothing. How convenient to let others answer for him, how delicious to have the Church itself uphold the righteousness of one’s scientific principles and not have to speak to how they are used.
“Is this also your view, Carlos? Your vision of the new science? To terrify people in churches even as the Jesuit Kircher used to do with his magic lantern—projecting devils into the air! And what of the science of history to which don Carlos has dedicated his many monographs? Are the fatal events of this day too insignificant to merit the historian’s notice?”
“Juana, don Carlos, I …” Antonia began, bewildered.
“It’s all right, Antonia.” Carlos came to stand where he could speak to me without raising his voice.“An eclipse is many things, Juana. But surely it is also a rare opportunity to test hyphotheses of the sun’s composition, to refine estimates of its mass and, yes, distance, and to theorize on the properties of light.” His tone was grave, dignified, as he then asked if I might care to discuss my own observations of the event. I could still have stopped. I had only to be evasive.
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