Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  It became hard to remember the purpose; then, to hear the music; soon, to imagine these could exist.

  Though Father Escaray was a Franciscan, the Viceroy and Vicereine had begun frequenting the Franciscan monastery, a place of refuge in a time of need perhaps not far off. From their choice it was clear they feared the poor more even than the wealthy Creoles, for it was the Franciscans who were closest to the people, and could best protect them from the people. Six men were said to have died in knife fights in the pulquerías in just the first week of June. On Friday, June 6th, an uproar broke out at the public granaries on the rumour that they now stood completely empty. A restless mass surged about the granary doors, thrusting a pregnant Indian woman up against the nervous troops. They clubbed her to the ground. She miscarried there on the stones. A way was cleared; a delegation of fifty Indian women and twenty men bore her up to the Archbishop’s palace where the women were turned back, were always turned back. And again from the gates of the Viceroy’s palace they were turned away. There were several hundred by now in the square—men and women. At nightfall they dispersed in knots and clusters of twenty or more, toward the taverns and pulquerías. Shouting and fights were heard through the night.

  On Saturday nothing happened, though the pulquerías were said to be thronged with insurrectionists, with people drinking and hatching plots outside in the streets. Here at San Jerónimo, Concepción came with a dozen of the older servants, most of whom I had given religious instruction in Nahuatl. They were wounded by the stories: Yes, there had been many drunk at the granary yesterday—but not half were of the people—and none from among the women who had attempted to get justice for the brutality of the guards. The drunkenness was a slander, for as I surely knew, pulque was once a sacred drink. Not the actions of drunkards—but of women, and had it not always been thus in the face of injustice? Had not Our Mother one day challenged the war god to nourish the people on milk not blood? And maybe Madre Juana had heard of the time …

  The title they used for me was one of respect but it felt uncomfortably formal now, for they were very much at ease, visibly proud of what the women had done. I suspected that some of the convent’s servants, Concepción in particular, had been among them. I thought of telling them a nickname I had once had as a girl. But to persuade them to use it would have required a long story, and they had so many of their own and some of these were new to me. How the women of this valley, in their defiance, had always given the people their new destiny.24 There was Coyolxauqui, the war god’s sister, who opposed him, and whom he slew to inaugurate war. Even Malinalli, who had translated for Cortés, was only avenging upon her own people the injustice of being sold by them into slavery—was that not true? And so we passed the afternoon quietly in my sitting room, nodding as each began a story the others knew, Antonia trying to make them comfortable with cold tea, these women unused to being served.

  On the morning of Sunday, June 8th, a large assembly of women had waited for the Viceroy after Mass and had insulted him openly in Santo Domingo square. A mob was milling in the central plaza. It was said they were a drunken rabble and Indians. It was also said that the Viceroy had come to the balcony to speak to the people and been felled by a paving stone. But though we did not know it, the Viceroy had already slipped away to the Franciscan monastery, disguising himself in the robes of a monk. In the late afternoon, as a mob numbering in the tens of thousands pushed toward the palace gates, another woman, an Indian, was bludgeoned to the ground. The crowd was chanting México para los Méxicanos, and for one more hour, it seemed, we were a people in our suffering.

  The woman, near death or now dead, was taken up by the crowd—many women—and brought down the street to the Archbishop’s palace, as had happened before, where they were again turned back without a chance to be heard. At dusk a paving stone was thrown up at the Vice-Queen’s balcony, then another. Abandoned by the Viceroy, an outmanned palace guard assembled before the gates to face the mob, which turned briefly to looting the stylish shops of El Parian. The guards charged the looters. The mob charged back with stones. As the guards retreated a few opened fire, taking a hail of paving stones in answer. Two soldiers were knocked down—the mob fell upon them.

  Others tore apart the market stalls for torches. The ayuntamiento was first. Then the palace. Through the barred gates, fire was set to the doors, then to the window shutters; then firebrands were thrown up at the balconies. The latticework of the Vice-Queen’s balcony caught.

  With flames already raging through the administration offices, Carlos led a party of students inside to retrieve the city’s collection of Indian documents and histories.

  Then, at the height of the revolt, the cathedral doors swung open. A priest flanked by a guard of altar boys emerged bearing the tabernacle of the Holy Sacrament. Seeing it raised on high, the crowd—blood-lust in their eyes, paving stones still clutched in split-nailed hands—fell to their knees while the procession traced the slow perimeter of the square. The young priest spoke for a few moments to the crowd in Nahuatl and Castilian. There the uprising ended for the day. When the rioters had left, many dead lay untended in the square.

  Distressing to me in a way I could not grasp was the idea of the balcony itself, burning. True, I had spent many hours there, but few happy. Was it the image of the paving stones breaking through the lattice, or the rosewood in flames—what was this, grief?

  That night we stood in the courtyards, near the locutories, took turns there, exchanged word. The rumour came at dawn that Puebla had been destroyed, that Malinche itself had opened and engulfed Puebla in fire—Iztaccihuatl too had woken, a thing that had not happened in all the histories of the valley. It was not credible, and yet hard to disbelieve. In the half-light, a fine grey ash was falling, the hills obscured by cloud.

  All day, the story persisted. Surely the ash was from the Smoking Mountain and the fires in the plaza. And even if Puebla had been destroyed—how would we have heard so quickly? But our role seemed simply to echo the others, as throughout that day the people of the barrio stopped to tell what they had heard and to hear what others had said before rushing out again. By nightfall the effect of the rumours reaching in through the walls had become uncanny, as when by candelight one first hears a hidden choir in a darkened church, voices sourceless in the air, hidden behind a wall or a curtain or a lattice….

  And yet we were that choir, we were that chorus, a chorus that was blind.

  In the night, Monday, the arrests began. It was a night for the settling of grievances, parties of armed men in the streets. This, one could see from any window. There was no cause to believe the Inquisition would choose this night to make its arrests, for the Inquisition was accountable to no one and needed no pretexts. And yet it was hard to disbelieve, hard not to look for faces in each clot of men coming down the street. Hard not to run to the window at each shot fired, each flicker against the ceiling, each shout. I could not stay in my cell any longer.

  Don’t let them come for me, don’t let them find me in here, behind so many walls. Let them take me in the open, not from my bed, let them take me from among the others.

  Chaplain de Gárate sent word he would lead special prayers in the chapel, deserted except for us in the upper choir. Not a Mass, no vestments, a few candles on the altar. I did not know what he should read—he sent for me, he could not think. I could not either, I could not let myself. What should he read? The Lamentations of Jeremiah, I thought. But these would bring neither calm nor comfort.

  Is this the city that men call the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth …? Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee … false burdens and causes of banishment …

  It was while we were filing out of the upper choir afterwards, crowding at the top to take the winding stair. A sister just going down turned back to another, above her, and said something. It was in her tone, or rather that there was no tone at all. “Unless we are already dead …”

  It was perhaps this,
as much as anything.

  I joined in all the prayers that night. No longer could I hold myself as one apart. I moved in all the processions, out in the open—women on their knees, ash falling, blackening us, our foreheads and faces, the makeup of actors, court clowns. Steam from a torch, mud and cloth, sharp stone, a knee gashed. Frightened novices, a young nun. Nothing separate, none of us separate now—all the fragments collected, one.

  At the end of the night, with the sky gone grey, we went in to the prayers of Lauds. When we emerged at first light I thought to look one last time, truly look, to see for myself. To lay to rest the stories, the destruction of Puebla, the old volcanoes burning. La Malinche, Iztaccihuatl. To know, perhaps, that none of this night had been true, that we had been in no danger at all. I moved the shelf from the wall and lifted back the tapestry, reached in and felt for the latch. Stiff with disuse the hinges shrieked—I stopped, listened for Antonia, who might only be pretending to sleep. On the rooftop in the early light of morning I looked into the east, out over the grey lake to the volcanoes, the sky behind them blue-black. If I could just see, with my polished eyes. Iztaccihuatl lay dormant, as always, as she had since my earliest memory. A pale grey plume rose from the cone of El Popo. And yet for all the violence in that cauldron I saw such a majesty—how little touched by events, how still.

  If I could but see to the camber of its hills, to the roots of its ravines, to the boughs of smoke holding up the sky. With polished eyes. Yet how changed the world below that horizon, the grey flooded fields, the vales of mud, the flood wrack floating all about the city as the chinampas had once done. Oh my city, white city of the sun, the lake in among your buildings now, the long mooring cables of your causeways gone. City of Empires, Venice of America.

  White Sunflower. How solitary now.

  I looked down over the dikes in the streets, the beggars crowding as ever at the gates of San Agustín. Beyond that, up Calle de las Rejas, to the charred timbers and scorched stones of the municipal building tumbled into the square. To the palace blackened to the parapets, the corner closest to the cathedral gone, carrion birds above the plaza. And to the sun, a sickly slug of tin.

  There were verses I knew of consolation, that had given and brought it. And there were lamentations, and I sought them out, this time for myself.

  Woe to the bloody city! and from the eyes of Ezechiel fled desire….

  And the Lord came as an enemy, and devoured her palaces….

  And David stretched out his hands in his affliction, and cried….

  And the flesh and the skin of Jeremiah were made old, and his bones broken,

  and his liver was poured upon the earth….

  But it seemed then the prophets of old spoke for their own people, and not to me. I thought of the heron Ribera, and many things besides. But the closest I could come to giving voice to that anguish was this. It was as if Music itself had died.

  THE FURIES

  This is my prayer: Civil War

  Fattening on men’s ruin shall

  not thunder in our city. Let

  not the dry dust that drinks

  the black blood of citizens

  through passion for revenge

  and bloodshed for bloodshed

  be given our state to prey upon.

  Let them render grace for grace …25

  On Tuesday came the first executions. It began slowly; for we had learned that during the rioting someone had put a torch to the public gallows. Four Indians given death for insurrection. Three lived to be executed; the fourth killed himself. At each corner of the central plaza a pair of hands was stuck on pikes. Concepción came to ask, for the others were asking her, why their hands. On Wednesday, the Viceroy moved into the residence of the Marquis of the Valley, the title and the palace Cortés had been awarded. Six more Indians executed, one mestizo. It did not rain. On Thursday, a man from Madrid. No one had expected this. Insurrection from a Creole perhaps, but not from a Spaniard.

  If even ten thousand had risen up in the plaza on Sunday, there was work to last a thousand days. It was hard to find a limit to what to believe, hard not to be drawn into imagining what was to come. Without the anchor of the Church, it did not seem impossible that the Viceroyalty might be swept away and all trace of Europe with it. What was to become of us—were we a people?

  Work began on a new gallows. By Friday came the news that the Viceroy had ordered the hanging of twenty-nine negroes in the zócalo. The men had not been involved in the riot, but on Tuesday had lost control of a herd of pigs they were driving from one of the barrios to the slaughterhouses. The pigs had stampeded just beneath the Viceroys barred and shuttered window at the palace of Cortés. The Viceroy ordered his troops into the streets, his nerve being insufficient to bring him to the windows. It was said he was hanging the herders now to silence the jeers and restore the dignity of his office. The charge was to be sedition.

  I did not believe the rumour, but the stampede and the hangings had happened—after the unnatural events leading to Fray García’s death, the sudden vacancy of the posts of Archbishop and Viceroy. In 1611. Such confusions were not surprising. We had acquired a hunger for strange events, portents of end-time and what must come next. Only the previous week there had been the story of the Viceroy coming to his balcony and being struck down by a paving stone. This too had happened, but to Moctezuma, in 1521.

  In truth these were echoes of older stories. The fear of sedition, the war on the enemy within, these were as old as the valley itself, as the stories of the dragon twins. I thought I heard in their resurgence now a kind of rhyming.

  The people of our valley were once a people of poetry. Their leader was the Speaker. Those who had not learned the people’s tongue were mutes, and so the enemies to be feared came from within, for how could the Mexica be overthrown by a people lacking even speech? When the translator Malinche found her way to Cortés, the enemy was no longer mute.

  In the week of the riot in our plaza there had been an uprising also in Tlaxcala. Here, it was remembered, uneasily, that for many years prior to the Conquest the Mexica had permitted Tlaxcala its freedom so as to keep a ready supply of war captives within the frontiers of the empire. When the moment came, the Tlaxcalans had fought beside Cortés. The enemy within.

  These stories had not been easy to keep from my mind; within them I heard still other echoes of an older tongue. The volcanoes WhiteLady and La Malinche had not come to life, but the women of the valley had. And though Puebla had not been destroyed as we had heard, there had been a kind of rebellion, and there too the enemy within had spoken. For when the Viceroy sent men to commandeer Puebla’s grain stores, it was the Bishop of Puebla who barred the way. In Puebla, Santa Cruz was the supreme authority and for weeks before the crisis had been buying grain at high prices and selling at a loss, precisely to pre-empt all talk of hoarding and speculation. Facing down the Viceroy’s troops he vowed, before an anxious crowd at the granaries, that the grain of Puebla would not be taken before his vestments were soaked to the last drop of his own blood. I did not doubt his readiness. To sacrifice his martyr’s blood before a multitude would have been such an ecstasy. A few days after the riot, the Viceroy addressed to the Bishop of Puebla a public letter of apology.

  How it must have haunted the king’s representative, that moment when ten thousand Mexicans of every race and class fell to their knees as if with one mind at the sight of the Sacrament. A moment the Count de Galve did not see, having slipped away in the dress of a monk. One cannot know what goes through a mind at such times. Perhaps he had most feared being dragged to a balcony and stoned.

  In the week after the uprising, a crude sketch was affixed to the gates of the deserted palace and beneath the drawing a caption. For Rent: Coop for Local Cocks and Spanish Hens. This piece of sedition was authored neither by Indians nor by rabble but by the Creoles—even here their wounded pride showed, for at the palace in fact there were never many local cocks but not a few local hens. I knew this, for I
had been one. Everywhere throughout the capital, the Count de Galve was the butt of jokes portraying him as a dandy, a coward, a cuckold. Without the Archbishop he could not govern. His Grace moved vigorously to guarantee public order by threatening hoarders and speculators with anathemas and excommunication, but in truth there had been little to hoard. Within a month and in the Church’s hands, the worst of our fears passed, just as they had after the eclipse. If recently the incidence of irregular births had truly risen throughout the parishes, the obvious cause was the months of privation endured by pregnant women, not the work of the Enemy within the womb. But the Church was quick to respond to our hunger for strange events. Neither was the insurgency of the women in the plaza forgotten. From the pulpits came warnings against insubordination, exhortations to obedience, of daughters to their fathers, women to their husbands, sisters to their older brothers, servants to their masters.

  For a time, the star of Dean de la Sierra burned brightly. It had been his inspiration to send the young priest and altar boys into the midst of the rioting. Now he sent word through Chaplain de Gárate to ask that I write the carols again this year for the Feast of Saint Peter. He was sorry it was no longer prudent to come himself. I might have tried writing a cycle to placate the Furies, to pronounce words of grace. But this was not what was wanted. I wrote them quickly, hymns to Saint Peter. Father of light, man of the sea, master of the air. New Caesar, great lover of Christ.

  Much was said in this time, much was false. Little was said of the Inquisition. I had no reason to expect them. And yet there were days I could not quite face the idea of being in the locutory if they came. I preferred to be where I was happiest, among my books and collections, and my thoughts. Perhaps I still imagined these to be a form of rebellion. I looked through the shelves, shaking my head at the deterioration there, taking inventory of the damage. The Italians were in a bad state, above them in the ceiling a hairline crack we had not seen. Many volumes waterlogged, the Commedia falling to pieces. Purgatorio, the journey up that mountain, unreadable. Sitting by the window, I thought of Dante, his part in the fratricidal fighting of his youth. Civil war … his betrayal by the Neri, his banishment from Florence on pain of death by fire. It was not long before I remembered that Galileo had once given two mathematical lectures to the Academy of Florence on the configuration of Dante’s Inferno. I was not certain, but I thought the figure had been a spiral. That evening in the library I came to see the Inferno, too, as a sort of instrument. Devised for the amplification of suffering.