Gutiérrez waited until I had looked up from the page.“Henceforth, Sor Juana, anything concrete I say will be regarding Palavicino’s case, whereas anything regarding a hypothetical case against you will be precisely this, hypothetical. I have persuaded Dorantes to let me bring you an offer. I would like you to consider it seriously. A statement from you, ideally an expression of contrition and conformity, but in fact discussing anything you like—any manuscripts that might still come to light, or your negative finezas, or responses to the leaflets attacking you—even a denunciation of Bishop Santa Cruz, though I would recommend against this. Technically, the statement would be entered into the proceeding against Palavicino, which is ongoing—we have begun to look into his other activities. Your statement, however, may be on any matters likely to come to our notice, before they do … in the event, for instance, that damning pages of your spiritual Vida should be found in the possession of anyone who had failed to report them. As you write your statement of contrition, you might construe such earlier writings as indiscretions of youthful pride, since regretted—an excuse not available to your spiritual director. Any deposition freely given before a notary of the Holy Office will be scrupulously accurate—you can count on this—every word you say, every pause, every expression of your face, every gesture of your hands. There are one or two precedents for this, and advantages. Conversely, an interrogation would leave you considerably less latitude in your replies, less still in the choice of topic. And in your gestures, no choice at all. Similarly, the Holy Office can at any time simply order you to write a new Vida—a recapitulation of what you had written for the Jesuit Núñez—with great insistence on its completeness, and to be then scrupulously examined for evidence of evasion, culpable imprecision or falsification.”
“When you speak of an interest in my Vida, you are speaking hypothetically….”
“It is the only way I may speak—and even this is the most dangerous thing I shall do today. The penalties for discussing an actual proceeding with its subject are extreme.”
“But we have had many such conversations.”
“If you will examine your memory, Sor Juana, you will note any mention I have ever made of your theological views made no reference to the Holy Office, and any mention of the views or cases of others only ever pertained to the interest these might hold for certain individuals within the Inquisition, never to the actions of the Holy Office itself. Now, you may remember things differently, and I could not hope to match your memory or the mind that contains it, but if, hypothetically we are ever asked to compare our accounts, I will be consulting not my memory but the field notes signed, dated, and filed with my superiors after each of our meetings over the years. It is not personal, Sor Juana. Most of us do it, even when we are not encouraged to. It is the path of success at the Holy Office. Generally we fear each other more than we do outsiders. Please do not reject out of hand this olive branch. I went to some trouble to convince Dorantes. It will be offered to you only once….”
No. I could not give a statement—it would not be the end but a way to begin. The Inquisition needed no help with the end. I could not afford to trust him.
“How clumsy of you, Gutiérrez. This should have been left to someone else. This can’t have been your idea. Are they trying to humiliate you? You’ve been the third examiner for some time now—the time to tell me was when you first knew.”
This won me a change of tactics, all pretense abandoned now. And it came as a relief, it came as a consolation. Was it too late to tell Sor Juana that her mulatta had been meeting for almost four years with Bishop Santa Cruz? That she had come to me as his spy? Yes, Gutiérrez, you should have told me that last year. Did I really believe she had stopped? Liar. And was it too late now for him to tell me she had been delivering my letters to the Holy Office for inspection before posting them? Liar! And was it too late to mention that once a month for the past four years the Holy Office had held meetings on the circle of those closest to me?
Then, though I had not asked and would rather not have had it enter my mind, he described many of these evenings in the Master Examiner’s office across from the rose-coloured church. Who had attended. Santa Cruz many times. The French Viscount twice. And so Gutiérrez took pleasure next in anticipating for my benefit the conduct of a plenary session of the Holy Office, nine days hence, when the Dorantes verdict would be read, along with the other examiners’ rulings. Yes, including his own. Prosecutor Ulloa would then be allowed to read the sentence he had already written a month before the verdicts were handed down, not being able to help himself. To which, on December 4th, he intended to add a further request: that Palavicino be excommunicated, banned from receiving the sacraments anywhere in the archdiocese, defrocked and banished from New Spain. He might be permitted to go to Quito or Manila—but never again to Spain. Palavicino’s sermon would be recalled—the entire print run to be accounted for and burned in the plaza before the chapel doors of San Jerónimo. This was the best that Xavier Palavicino could hope for.
On the other hand, the matter lay largely in his hands, for the way ahead was straightforward, if narrowing. Should he refuse to abjure, all available methods of persuasion would be brought to bear. In any event, before he departed he would be forced to give information on his other associates and activities, after which, the path of his salvation was clear: The appellant should state his guilt with expressions of sincere humiliation, declare himself convicted, beg in all earnestness for pardon in appealing to the judges for special leniency, express his sincere and vehement desire to purge his sin and offence, beseech the saints to intercede in his behalf….
Gutiérrez asked next if it was also too late to tell me my carols would not be sung in Puebla that day, in the cathedral, or anywhere near it, or on any other day. This, I had guessed without his help. It was foreseeable. So why did this hurt so?
Whatever Santa Cruz’s true purpose in publishing my carols, the result of not allowing them to be sung was foreseeable also, that those verses touching upon Catherine’s audacity, her defiance of imperial authority, her pride and learning—all published in my name—could not but further madden all those shocked by my Letter Worthy of Athena. Even the printer was the same, if anyone needed reminding. A year of pressure, a year of leaflets and quiet warnings from every imaginable quarter had done no good at all. She would not be stopped. Catherine, Athena. Alexandria, Athens. The names might change and the places, but not Sor Juana’s impudence, her willful pride and disobedience. And this time there was no preface of kind admonishment from a loving friend. Here was a difference, not in my attitude before God but in the Bishop’s toward me. A shift Santa Cruz could not have signalled more clearly than by barring my carols from his cathedral.
“Sor Juana is pensive. She will want time to think. The Holy Office’s time is limitless, but its charity is not. The offer, as I say, expires on December 31st.”
Two visits on November 25th, two deadlines of year’s end—not everything was a sign, but neither was everything a coincidence. For if it were I would have to call coincidence the next piece of information Gutiérrez brought: the date of the judgement filed by Master Examiner Dorantes, and which I had just read. November 25th, 1691. Yes, Gutiérrez, today, the Feast of Saint Catherine. I was quite aware. No, he was afraid it was not quite that, or not just—but rather one year to the day from the publication of the Letter Worthy of Athena by Bishop Santa Cruz in Puebla. This I had not seen.
Santa Cruz had been planning to forbid the singing of my carols for a year, had awarded the commission purely to cancel it, and Dorantes by dating his ruling on that anniversary was telling all, telling me, the Holy Office had been part of this all along. The Palavicino case at the Inquisition and the publication of my letter had one sole object. The interests of the Master Examiner of the Holy Office and the Bishop of Puebla had one sole object. The same hypothetical object, one point of convergence: one Juana Inés de la Cruz. One hypothetical nun. Not everything was a coincidence. The
se were signs. And the visit from the Archbishop’s man on the same day was another—but of what? Santa Cruz wanted my annihilation and my adoration, Núñez my subordination, Archbishop Aguiar my public humiliation, preferring this even to my private destruction. And their wishes were not the only ones in play. Núñez was accountable to the Archbishop, but also to the Jesuit Provincial, his Inspector General. Dorantes to the Dominican Provincial, perhaps to Santa Cruz, and both Núñez and Dorantes to the General Inquisitor. Yet now I was to believe that they had laid down arms and were working together—fist in glove—in a miraculous convergence of hostile and competing interests. All joined now in a sort of fraternity, along with a dozen scurrilous and anonymous pamphleteers, and Velasco of the Brotherhood of Mary, the denouncer of the sermon. And at least one Augustinian. Most of them detested each other—what could possibly bring all of them together? I did not believe it. I would not. Why would they want me to believe this? I could not bear to.
“Tell me Gutiérrez, if the Inquisition has so much time at its disposal, why do you look like someone with so little? Is the Inquisition’s time, perhaps, measured by the rise and fall of its functionaries? If I have been the path of your success, then perhaps I may yet serve your failure just as liberally….”
Showing now in his cold blue eyes was the frustration of having so nearly succeeded. For if he was out of time, I was clearly weak—after all, I had not yet asked him to leave. He had to know how close I had been to giving in, giving him something, giving him anything.
“You look more and more the desperate rat, my good friend. Do you face penalties at the Holy Office for your insufficiencies?”
The convent had seen a lot of rats as the waters rose. I’d been thinking of their morality, but I could not help seeing how Gutiérrez might take the remark as a reference to his appearance—how near both the sublime and the tragic cleave to the childish. From the first, Gutiérrez had been funny to look at even when he didn’t intend it—scratching under his chin, accentuating his chinlessness, as he had just been doing. The next few minutes were quite out of character but then I did not really know what his true character was. He became vulgar, spoke of heresy as an illness, one that did not end with death—just as banishing Palavicino unbroken would not so much be to expel an ordure but pass along an infection. And as for the Inquisition’s use of time, I might profitably study its employment now with Palavicino. The Holy Office was disinclined to move against him until its inquiries were completed, and would only do so if Sor Juana attempted to warn him, though she should feel free. As the only person outside the Holy Office who knew, let her choose—let her give him the truth or leave him with the illusion. So I would feel the blow twice, twice watch him fall, be in no doubt where the responsibility lay. Twice.
But if Sor Juana wanted to know why she should expect the Inquisition’s patience in her case—did she want to hear? Then he would tell her.
There was always a certain anxiety with heresiarchs.
Since by definition they were adjudged to have the power to corrupt princes, the cases had to be handled delicately. Such investigations were likely to cost a prince or two along the way. Executions of that kind poisoned relations at court for decades. The case of the Florentine was taken up early enough, yet so leniently as to merely aggravate the problem. There had loomed a real danger of having to open proceedings against not only a Medici Grand Duke but the Archbishop of Siena, and some feared for a time for a certain Jesuit scientist named Scheiner. By which Gutiérrez was telling me Santa Cruz had shown to him—and who knew to how many others, and given them pleasure and laughter and much jollity—my letter on Apelles….
But Sor Juana was not paying attention.
Further, and as he had been saying, the corruption of the heresiarch did not necessarily end at death. One could only guess how long the Lutherans would use the Galileo matter to discredit not only the Holy Office but Catholics everywhere—making a martyr out of a monster of vanity, crying Injustice, publishing their Areopagiticae, invoking the just tribunals of old. In the Vieyra case, whereas, the problem was caught too late. How the Jesuits ever allowed an insubordinate—and an ecstatic into the bargain, with these visions of a Fifth Empire—to confess the King of Portugal was a mystery and a scandal. But it had happened, and now Mexico was embroiled in the sequels to a sermon written on the other side of the Atlantic how long ago? One heresiarch, it seemed, begat another and then who knew how many others over time? At least in her case the potential for a problem was caught early—
Meaning. Hypothetically speaking? Yes, Gutiérrez, yes. The Holy Office had been receiving reports on a certain case for … years. From whom—how many years. If he would not give me a name—a year then, when, 1675, 1670? Oh, earlier. At the palace? Oh, no, before.
Before.
Consider the year 1663. But perhaps he had already gone beyond his brief. To sum up, then. Time, the Inquisition had a great deal of, a very powerful advantage. With the heresiarch, not an advantage to be surrendered too easily. Care should be exercised. This one had quite ruined one priest, with two more likely to follow, had corrupted royalty—just how many viceroys now, and vicereines?—had seduced one prince of the Church and set two more at each other’s throats. It had come to poisonings. Spying with France.
To take on such a case without a measure of reluctance was a thing only the very ambitious or the foolhardy would do. Master Examiner Dorantes did not seem to be one of the latter. He was determined that the Holy Office in Mexico make its own mistakes and not repeat those of the Inquisition in Lisbon or Rome. But no one was so sure of his theology as to oppose her in print. Everyone had seen what she had done to the Prince of Catholic Orators. Proceed slowly, indirectly for as long as possible, and only with force as a last resort. Until her mind was broken. Hypothetically. It would not happen straight away. It would take time. It was the safest path. She shouldn’t take it personally. He was sorry to have upset her, but she had asked. Still, she was entitled to her doubts. He admitted he had often lied to her, and was perhaps no longer credible. She would want to draw her own conclusions.
Sor Juana should study, next, the Inquisition’s way of proceeding against the beatas, which there was every chance now she would be able to do at close range. The rumours long abroad were correct, a trial was pending, and a sentencing: a woman had been in the Inquisition’s prisons for some years now. The campaign against false sanctity was to receive more resources. There had been two secret trials in just the past few years. When? February of 1688. March of last year. I had heard nothing of this—why were we hearing about these now?
A glint of amusement. This was why they were called secret trials.
But this next one was to be different, special. There were other locations yet San Jerónimo was felt to be promising … spacious, the orchards, the gran patio, the home of Sor Juana. No, a date had not been set, and would not be before the Archbishop’s new beaterio was completed. A place for unattached women of fervent faith to have their visions under a watchful eye, under lock and key. And so the trial should prove useful to His Grace in his drive to fill the new places with women of quality. Until then, Sor Juana was free to write. Indeed, please. Statements freely given, as many as she pleased. Speaking of which, did Sor Juana perhaps remember Sor María de San José, Bishop Santa Cruz’s hermitess? Certain irregularities had emerged in the relation of her Vida. Years of visitations from the Enemy, who came to her in the form of a naked mulatto—came still, apparently. Quite prodigious. It was not at all clear to the Lord Bishop Santa Cruz that she hadn’t sought these visions actively. Clearly the quality of recruits was everyone’s problem.
Now if Sor Juana had nothing further for him, he should be going …
Not everything was a sign, not every sign was of a conspiracy, not every conjunction was in the stars, not every influence heavenly, not every irony was a coincidence, not every coincidence a sign.
That poor girl—struggling to be allowed to live as a holy woman in
a cave, prepared to sacrifice everything to be with her Beloved, dreaming of nothing more than admission to a cloister, denied it—again and again, while for twenty years I had dreamed of escape. Had they decided to connect our fates in some way, to make examples of us? But examples of what—we were so unalike. One of us saw the Enemy as a naked mulatto and rebelled against his touch, the other had first seen him as Lucero, shining, Prince of Scholars, divided against the light within himself. And as his demon assistants read him the verses I dreamed of one day writing on the Nativity, he saw prefigured there the story of his fall.
But who in the depths of the night had not heard his mockery? Would she and I have heard him so differently? Truly, how different were we? One who dreamed of nothing but knowing the touch of His graces, the other to touch the grace of His mind. A hermit’s cave, hers, a magician’s, mine. Both born in the countryside on a hacienda, both families fallen, indebted, impoverished. For her the danger was a charge of false sanctity, for me, heresy. Via mística, via intelectual. Write freely, write a Vida, as had been commanded of Teresa. For how many months had even Teresa’s Interior Castle been torn apart line by line by her enemies at the Holy Office? The paths were separate only if we let them be. It was Teresa who had shown us this. We walk the same path, María de San José. I must warn her. Could I write?—no, send word to her through her sister at San Jerónimo in Puebla. But I could only guess what terrors she was enduring now. I might only terrify her more—in a time like this, in this frame of mind—in hers, in mine—I might only make her see in me another demon trying to deflect her from the path. Had I not heard what Gutiérrez said about warning Palavicino? They would move against her if I tried, because I had tried. This was the trap—the special trap for me. Two fates in my hands, and yet neither, for one was already condemned, the other I could do nothing but harm. Stay away from her.
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