The rains had continued through November of 1691 and into the following month. Before December ended I had furnished the Archbishop’s secretary with the inventory and a statement of means. The other deadline, the other statement, I had allowed to pass. I would not be taking any commissions from the Inquisition that year. The first days of the new year went by anxiously. But as January wore on, I saw I had been foolish to fear the Inquisition would come for me so soon, for Gutiérrez had promised it would not be like this—that there would be time, a great deal of time. And I could neither believe nor discount what he had said. On January 26th, 1692, came the first anniversary of Palavicino’s sermon at the Feast of Santa Paula. As promised, for two months he had kept his freedom, precisely because I had made no move to alert him. Or so I was to believe, that it was I who let him have his life, another day, another hour, though it was not my right. Tried, convicted and condemned, all in secrecy, he would be permitted the illusion of a normal life while his activities and alliances were more deeply probed into. Giving his sermons, having his dreams, making plans.
On February 1st the Archbishop’s contractors completed his new beaterio, on time despite the weather. This was fact. The beaterio was built and consecrated. This could not be denied. People had seen it, entered there for the inauguration. The date was February 24th … the anniversary of my profession. The timing was a reminder from the enemy that everything was orchestrated; every thought had been given to my discomfort. They were trying to involve her too in my fate, her fate in mine, in my mind. Six weeks later, on April 7th, Father Escaray went to the Cathedral to denounce the price-fixing by the Viceroy’s intimates, and the hoarding of grain. Escaray had been to my locutory two days before. Fact. Coincidence—no not coincidence, he had come to seek my advice. There was nothing wrong with my mind. And then in the last months leading up to the riots we forgot our own concerns for a time, for this was a moment when the fate of a people was being decided.
Not all was true, not all was false. But these had become facts and observations in another science, conceived not to lessen uncertainty but to increase it, not to remake a world from first principles but to tear one down, in time. Its instruments of spirit were not admiratio, inventio, divinatio, contemplatio, but doubt and isolation, bitterness and suspicion, dread. Its instruments of sense were not astrolabe, compass, vacuum flask or pendulum, its instruments—that is, the work of the senses in this science—but no, these did not bear thinking about, these should be avoided by the imagination. But if I had let him, Gutiérrez would have agreed to describe them for me, in time. And with instruments such as these, with this new science, somewhere they were building a new cell for me.
This was the game of the Enemy. These were the paces through which Gutiérrez had been instructed to lead me all these years. One part truth, one part lie, the third made up of what was missing—not seen, not said, not imagined or expected, not properly read. A kind of triangle, and this third side, this edge of the blade, was by far the most terrible. Events conspired—events were now arranged—to make each day, each hour rich in possibilities, abundant with hypotheses, each single moment inexhaustible. And now it was very important to have missed nothing, if I was to face him again—not to give him hope, a sign. For the date of his coming again, this was no accident, no more than the last time had been, and not a coincidence. January 26th, 1693, the Feast of Santa Paula, the second anniversary of the sermon—so either the visit was official now, or his departure was a lie. Before going down I sat fidgeting at the studio window, the sun bright, looking across at the farrier’s, the cartwright’s, trying not to notice Antonia watching me collect myself.
Perhaps it was only the conjunction of two things I had not thought of together since my childhood, though I had had many occasions to contemplate each separately over the years. Events of the past few months had brought them together again. The carols for Saint Catherine, the Letter Worthy of Athena. With his two commissions, Santa Cruz had meant to link them from the start—Alexandria and heresy. Could this truly have been his game all along, was it humanly possible, such cunning? But how could he know … who among the living knew so much about my past? Núñez, Carlos, Antonia—my nephew? Who knew that much even in my family. No one. Everyone together, then? No, they were not all together.
I had been careless. There were messages. And now Gutiérrez was in the locutory. Why had he come—was it official? What had I missed? I could not get Palavicino out of my mind. January 26th, 1693 … Palavicino was fine, still unaware his sentence had been written. Time yet for one more dream, another plan, for a life to which he had already died, a life he would still be in love with. I told myself it was not bad to imagine him in love with his life, that this one thing was not a lie, and that they would not move against him until they felt close to having what they wanted from me, or until they had it already. One difficulty had been in keeping a firm grasp on what this was, if there was any limit to this, if it would ever end. How. Another difficulty in all these months was in keeping myself from wondering without let or cease, if I was already dead to mine. But I should not think so much about this—if I was not to give them a sign of weakness, submission, collapse. Palavicino, María de San José, the beata in chains, Catherine of Alexandria—reminders all, all together, not coincidence but signs, of what I had refused for as long as I could bear to recall. The charge and care of another’s life, of any life save mine. A convent was the safest place, a place with walls, safer for both sides, and yet I could not protect them all, or myself, not even from inside.
And now I would go down to him. He was leaving for Manila. New Spain was finished. His work was finished. On the 27th day of January of this year, Antonio Gutiérrez, still with the Inquisition or not, left for the Philippines, or did not. They came the next morning. The sun was shining.
CAREER MOVES
I LET MYSELF BELIEVE my friends at the Calgary Police Service might not lay charges. And so far there’d been none. At that moment getting out of town looked very good. The lawyer was right. The trip Madeleine and I’d been planning together, I could take alone. Plenty of money in the bank. I’d move up my flight. I drove in to Calgary to clean out my desk towards evening, when the office staff and tenured faculty would be home. My decision was made.
By way of career transitions I gave brief consideration to a speaking tour trading on my quarter-hour of infamy, my assorted lectures to offer a moveable feast of provincial scandal, from the wilds of antediluvian Alberta to Iowa, East Anglia, Lille, Tübingen … “The Liar Paradox, an Epilogue,” “The Postmodern Minotaur (a Victimology),” “The Timeless Topos of Tupping Tutees …”
Scholar, get thee to a nunnery.
As a longer-term prospect, pariah scholar was a role I might inscribe with a certain fugitive cachet. There were pariah states: I could apply to represent them at scholarly conferences in unfriendly places. The main drawback being the prospect of meeting old colleagues—the few who’ve heard nothing; the many who’ve heard a little, or wrong; the sophisticates who chat warmly as if nothing has changed, before catching someone’s eye and slipping away. And the handful to be avoided at all costs—who quietly extend their support, even friendship. Moments of stunned commiseration, a forehead pressed to yours, a hand gripping your shoulder. Buck up now, this too shall pass. One or two would have friends running little English schools in Korea or Dubai. Did I need somewhere to get my legs under me?
A sunset smouldered somewhere behind the university Art Parkade as I finished packing up my office. Into a battered leather briefcase bought cheap years back in Colombia—what had the pre-Colombian briefcase looked like? can’t recall—I packed a few papers I’d been working on, and anything of a remotely personal nature. Of a remotely personal nature. Even friends might think this an apt character sketch, a career epitaph. I stepped out into the hallway.
I’ve made my share of mistakes, remotely personal. One of them was now clicking down the hall toward me. Briefcase bulging open I stood
witlessly patting my pockets for the office keys. Looking anywhere but at the approaching Department Head.
When I’d arrived two hours ago the entire floor seemed deserted. Computer screens snuffed in the secretarial station, dark grey doors closed all along the hallway. From the pavement below, the lonely scuff and whallop of a skateboard. Above my head the ashcan clank of a ventilation fan out of true.
She would come to stand slightly too close, smelling of strawberries. My options were unpromising. Dart back into the office. Or turn to contemplate the fiery sunset and let her walk by. More desperate still the imposture of staring—lost in monkish contemplation—at the floor’s piebald marbling.
Red and white knotted scarf. Navy blue power suit, the skirt two brazen extra inches above the knee. Small, neat figure, good legs. Pale brown hair, straight, shoulder-length. Anita Stanwyck was bright, tough, wary. About my age, she’d fought the wars. Not fatally beautiful, she’d stayed sexy even when this had been impolitic for a woman in her position. Which was no position from which to be judging me now: She liked men, and liked them young. She’d risked some strife of her own to tear her pleasures through the iron gates of campus life.
Our department was superbly run, our funding fiercely defended, the cuts ably distributed. She had made it her mission to shield us from the ministerial wrangling—chiefly concerned with keeping the vanguard of dissent busy filling out efficiency reports—and to cope with the savaging of our course offerings. A task I knew she detested. My early departure was creating a few new administrative headaches. Final exams to invigilate and grade. Understandable that she would insist on taking over the marking herself. Any mistakes in allocating grades now would be a disaster compounded.
She stopped in front of me, face serious. Her eyes were a striking blue, bright with an author-photo sort of alacrity that people often mistook for glaring. I’d thought it myself more than once.
“Hello, Anita.”
“Need a hand?”
“Carrying my books home?”
Something stirred in her eyes, something unexpected.
“The rest of this junk,” I said, quickly nodding at the taped boxes, “I’ll send for later. You don’t need the office right now do you?”
“Too many empty already.”
“With me gone, you might not have to empty another next year.” A thought: Who was next in line?
“Your friend, Relkoff.”
“Works out, then.” Now my landlord and I were even.
“You know it gives me no pleasure.”
“No, Anita, I don’t believe that it does.”
“Still going to London?”
“Probably.”
“Call when you’re back and settled.”
“Right.”
Absolutely time to go.
“Don?”
This is where the sad, sorry character should just keep walking.
“You did some fine work for us here over the years. For what it’s worth.”
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ,
THE SCEPTRE OF SAINT JOSEPH
B. Limosneros, trans.
IDOLATRY:
So long as rage endures,
never, Faith, shall you accomplish your designs
whereby—though dispossessing me (for all my loving cares)
of a Crown I had worn peaceably for an aeon—
you imposed your tyrant dominion
upon my Imperial Realm
and installed a Christian Rule
to which ends violent arms have hacked clear your path;
and though Natural Law,
which with me was somewhat
violent in these lands,
has knelt down before your ensign;
and though virtually all my peoples
to the force of your persuasion
have been made thralls
and embraced your Dogmas;
for all that (I repeat)
you had no need for such force
as to tear up so heartlessly
the most deeply rooted of my customs!
And so, though you see me submitted,
be it never so far as to quell my resistance
to all who would demolish the Altars whereupon
the sacrificial victims
are human.
FAITH:
Just who is this, who opposes
our intentions,
and with such sacrilegious boldness?!
IDOLATRY:
For all your outrages against me,
I am still one who knows how to defend
her ancient codes;
I am, that is, Allegorical Idea,
abstract Reason,
which virtually all of this kingdom
still collectively embraces …
KILLING FLOOR
… viviendo en tanto pavor
y esperando como espero,
muérome porque no muero …29
All one day and then a second, the cell was stripped. Eight men, three in the Archbishop’s livery. I wondered what the other five did when not doing this, I wondered where they lived. Not stripped. Some furniture was left, many pots and plates. Two beds. Upstairs a table. The glass cases, especially, had to be taken down, the bookshelves broken out. I begged them to leave the folding screens. Instructions left no room for doubt.
The table under the window, then … the tapestry at the top of the stairs.
This also they took down, but showed no interest in the door behind it. Instructions did not extend beyond these rooms, to the locutory downstairs, or views from the roof. I expected Antonia to be hurt, but she gave no sign of having seen it there. I had not known anyone could be so discreet.
The sisters of our small patio were considerate, standing pale in their doorways. Though we take a vow of poverty, we are each attached to our cells. We come to think of this place as our home, of each thing as our own. Our belonging. The cell itself is mine now: the men brought a bill of sale.
One of the men in livery I knew, the one with the kind eyes. He had come before, to bring news that the sale had been approved. I had wondered then, how a kind man could succeed in the Archbishop’s service. But I had made this mistake before. When he came into my cell now with the others, he did not look up from his work. I watched him carrying out boxes and bundles, delicate instruments rolled into rugs. And watching, I was given to wonder whose eyes had been averted these many years. The Archbishop’s coat of arms … I had seen it frequently. A family among Spain’s most ancient. An ancestor had been a knight attached to the court of Julius Caesar, had met the Apostle James on the Spanish shore. A story if true, incomplete. Hearing it, I had once asked how an apostle of Jesus might feel, to be met by a Roman officer after Judea.
On a maroon ground, within a silver border, the Archbishop’s shield encloses five seashells set against a cross.
The smallest things, at times. Of these do they build a new cell for me.
Antonia took their coming so bitterly, imagining this to have been some fault of hers. As well to say she brought the floods. Shhh, Antonia. Emptiness has many positive qualities. A caracol makes no sound at all, until it has been emptied out. And then you can hear the sea. Shhhh. There, can you hear? The difficulty can be in persuading the animal who lives inside to leave.
Tonia, hush … John of the Cross was asked, repeatedly, severely, Since God is Light, how can the approaches to God be dark? Even in a soul purged of its attachments and impurities.
The poet’s answer was ingenious. Listen.
Imagine a room with nothing in it. Two windows, facing each other, the Light of God streaming through, one window to the other. One never sees the light, only what it strikes. As a hand lifted between the windows is lit, or as motes of dust whirl as if sparks in a wind. Do you see? It is why a cell must be stripped.
We obstruct the light.
In all these months, in the refectory, the workrooms, the choir, the sala de devociones, the one rumour that had not ceased was o
f the beata, the trial. It was a prospect some of us dreaded, but not all. I knew when the sisters were telling it by the way they looked over at me. There was little doubt why our convent had been chosen.
I had been supplied with details the others did not have. That she was half-Indian, that she had been a midwife, arrested years ago. Gutiérrez claimed never to have seen her, but said that he had walked many times past her cell; that its door had been more recently replaced, its newer braces and rivets glowing softly in the torchlight of the halls; that the trial was to take place at night. He did not say why, but the possibilities were obvious. It made for better theatre. Gutiérrez was a liar.
I had been weak then. I had asked him if he truly did not know who she was, if she existed at all—or if the beata … if I were she.
Then in a letter from our sister convent in Puebla, word of Sor María de San José, that Bishop Santa Cruz had read her Vida, the spiritual journal he had commanded her to write, and turned it over to the Inquisition. But this I already knew, and here also had I been given knowledge the others did not have. She was to be examined by the General Inquisitor himself.
Were the visions frequent, were they actively sought or passively received? Did they follow the path of previous mystics? Did the visions uphold or break with doctrine? Were they frenetic or calm? Were the recollections hazy or clear … did they bring a sense of peace? Did they lead to God or toward the Enemy?
This was how beatas were to be examined. Now Sor María would have to find her own way to answer. I had asked myself what Santa Cruz had ever wanted from her, wanted from us. I wondered if it was merely to raise her up and make me fall. Or to make the writer a mystic, the mystic a writer. To reverse our fortunes. But it was clear now, what Santa Cruz wanted. He simply wanted what we do not. He had never wanted Núñez to join him, but by turns favoured and thwarted him to divide him from the Archbishop. He had not cared if the Archbishop were mad, only to drive him mad with the possibility that everything he touched was poisoned. And then to teach this to me.
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