“Back to work,” she said, without taking her eyes from his. The workers vanished. Eventually he looked away, as I knew he must. Beaten, he turned and went out, the sword arm hanging loosely at his side. In a moment or two we heard his horse gallop by.
I set the bucket down and went, legs wooden, to Xochitl, to discover what had been happening. While we had been out, a man had rushed in from the fields to spread the news. Out in the maguey field a campesino had found Diego’s mastiff at the killing floor, suspended by its hind legs from a cross-beam supporting the roof thatch. A heavy bludgeon lay by its head. It had been clubbed to death. Gutted. Skinned and dressed. The hide was staked out, to be made into saddle bags one day, a scabbard, a woman’s boots.
I had been three months in the convent of San José when I sent for my uncle. It was mid-winter, then as now, 1669. At San José, visits were rarely permitted, except in cases of greatest urgency. I had written out a message, a letter I could trust no one else to deliver. And I knew without a doubt that it was that letter Madga now held in her lap. I had written it to my mother, a call for help. Only Juan could deliver it, because he would have to read it to her, because above all Diego could not be the one for this. Would she please come for me, would she let me come home? I had nowhere left to go. San José was a house of anguish and agony, a place of blood and instruments of torment, a place without light, without books, or laughter or wonder. She had been right all along, she had been right about me.
And now I saw my cousin’s eyes shining with the knowledge of those lines, with her knowledge of me and the memories of her hatred. How many years had Magda known—the years since Aunt María’s death, or for all the years since Juan’s? All the years I had been in here, at San Jerónimo, waiting for my mother’s answer.
I had guessed the essentials. Magda gave the details as she handed my letter back after twenty-four years. And for this also there would be no charge. But by then she had my information, and I had from her the real reason she had brought the Bishop’s message with the letter. A simpler reason. To remind me that I had once refused his dispensation to leave the cloister, to be with my mother as she was dying.
“So, Cousin, you have your letter back. I would have returned it anyway, even without your information. I loved him. He loved her. And now you know why my father would have been such a willing messenger. Do you want to know the rest? Are you ready to hear? Don’t just nod—tell me you are.”
“Yes.”
“Aunt Isabel told my mother she had already guessed about your father and the Indian. But what broke your mother’s heart was a name. Did you realize she had been planning to call you just Inés? But hearing that other name, she named you after my father instead. This part he told me when you were leaving for the palace. And for the past many years I have known the rest. Amanda. Would an Indian choose such a name on her own? No, Amanda was your father’s choice. Amanda, loving, conceived in love. So then, Cousin, whose choice were you—and what were you conceived in? I know your mother wondered.
“You and the cook’s daughter were sisters, Juana. And your father was a Jew. And you are welcome. For the dresses….”
The night of trials contains a good deal of pain, we cling so to things. Our illusions of sense, our instruments of mind, our memories, we would cling to these even when they hurt us. We forget we are another’s instrument. Our grasp must be prised open, our fingers parted. All affections and attachments and faculties must be burned away, like a log in a fire, like grime and rust encrusted to base metal. And the soul is to be its crucible.
It is said the sensations are as of one lying beyond the walls of a familiar city—one’s own, perhaps, forbidden to enter, forced to keep watch, tracing lovingly from afar the shadows of the parapets, the chapels and towers. Or the longing is as of a lioness who goes forth in the night to seek her cubs, who have been taken from her. It is said she cannot long endure this state, and must soon recover what she has lost or die. On other nights it is like being released by a hunter to be hunted again.
And again.
Again.
Again.
And in the deepest dark in the last watch of that night, there is a crossroads.
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
Alan Trueblood, trans.
Fate, was my crime of such enormity
that, to chastise me or torment me more,
beyond that torture which the mind foresees,
you whisper you have yet more harm in store?
Pursuing me with such severity,
you make your heartlessness only too plain:
when you bestowed this gift of mind on me,
you only sought to aggravate my pain.
Bringing me applause, you stirred up envy’s ire.
Raising me up, you knew how hard I’d fall.
No doubt it was your treachery saddled me
with troubles far beyond misfortunes’ call,
that, seeing the store you gave me of your blessings,
no one would guess the cost of each and all.
FEEDING THE SUN
8th day of February, 1693
Carlos,
One letter, the most difficult, the last. Then I can get on with what there is left to do. I send this through your friends at the monastery in Veracruz, and hope they will find some way to make this reach you—I must risk it. If it’s intercepted by my holy censors here we are lost, but if I do not try to warn you, Carlos, and you are taken, I am the one lost.
I have told them, about the manuscripts—not all, and the papers are safe yet—but that you brought them here, that we had quarrelled months ago, that I turned you away. How fortunate my coldness to you just this once has proven. I told them I did not know what the packet held, but that I thought they were scientific treatises.
So upon your return you must not be manoeuvred into thinking they know more than they do—and while you are away you must contrive an accident, with witnesses, so you may say the manuscripts were destroyed or lost. I have thought and thought and thought through everything I have told them, and this is the one thing that poses great danger.
You are asking yourself how I could have done this. Or it may be that from me it comes as no surprise. They came so soon after you left….
The almoners brought a bill of sale—as if to say I had purchased these things from myself, only to donate them again. It was as if they were taking them from me twice.
Only now as it all sloughs away like scalded skin do I realize how deeply, bitterly angry I’ve been, and how unjustly. Not coming to you when you came to say good-bye now leaves me sick with remorse. I know you didn’t betray me. Life is not so simple, so symmetrical. The friends of my enemies are not my enemies, any more than your friendship with me makes the Archbishop my friend. Might it be that day he broke your cheekbone with his cane, you were defending me? But what I have also come recently to learn is that neither does being the enemy of my enemy make that someone my friend.
And now, what I have come so late to see is that if you’ve left your most precious possessions with me it’s because from this fool’s errand to Florida you never expected to return. What made you think you would be the first to die?31 Too proud to refuse the commission which may end your life, too sentimental to accept the one which might have saved it. Who is to say you might not have made a life at Versailles? You just can’t leave her, can you, this New Eden of yours? After all these years, this is how you still see her. The ever faithful suitor you see her as she was, not as she’s aged. Faithful generous suitor, you share whatever you’ve learned of her with every passing scholar—a lifetime of discoveries reduced to footnotes in the books of lesser writers.
I have recopied carefully each of these letters of yours from Veracruz invested with so much tenderness, and blush at how much less was returned in mine to you. So critical was I of your Americanist project—why invest your life, risk a career on a pursuit so unpromising? To find political virtues in the Mexicas’ tyranny, to make FeatherSerpent out to be the
twin of Christ—doubting Thomas, the most sceptical of all the saints. Christ had a brother, Carlos, but his name was Satanael.
Yet you were unworried by consequences, and unwilling to believe me indifferent. How could I be? you asked. These were the stories of my own childhood. Do you have any idea how it felt for me to watch you take possession of those stories, one by one, when I’d let them go?
And now I hold the last remaining account of Moctezuma’s last days even as my own conqueror approaches. All my strength it takes now to look forward without blinking. Carlos, I have sent a plea that Father Núñez return as my confessor. I will not even try to explain. Through Arellano, he has demanded a sign that I at last see the enormity of my transgressions. A sign. I see nothing but signs. I have written for him the one he seeks. Mine, I do not seek.
You think you’ll be the first to die. You may be right. For see how death eludes one who desires it—even death, when in demand, will rise in price. The Archbishop’s auction raised a good part of the ransom, but not all, for they knew I had something left to sell….
How can I ever make you see how I could have thought—for half the span of an hour—that you had brought these things to implicate me? Who has sent him? Does even Carlos know? Who has brought us here, to this pass? How can he do this—after all that has happened, to Fray de Cuadros, to us? I could not understand it—to remind us of what might have been? Of what cannot be brought back, what we failed to prevent?
You who knew me—surely you could see how dangerous their stories were. The Mexica. The most rigorous and unsparing, unblinking, glaring straight into the sun … people devouring their idols, a people swallowed by the sun. And now Fray de Cuadros is dead. Carlos, I am not indifferent. Carlos, I have not forgotten. Stark, the invitation: Who will feed the sun. How dangerous all the little love stories we tell ourselves of god. The conqueror approaches, see his footprints in the rock …? After each slow step a dust of dreams trails up. The Emperor of Dreams awaits his destiny, awake. He tries to flee, to hide himself within a cave, but the earth will not harbour him. He returns in shame. Desperately he consults the sorcerers, the oracles, the ancient texts—the ones not burned by his own father’s order. Through dream-plagued days and sleepless nights, prodigies, portents, ill omens drift like smoke through the capital. All who dream of the end of the world, all must come before him. The capital is made to pay a tribute of dreams. The Massacre of the Dreamers is what one day they will call it. So many dreams … Moctezuma sifts them, immersed in one vast dreaming.
Tell me your story.
“I saw a strange bird with feathers like ashes. Its head was a mirror. I looked into it and saw the sky full of stars at midday. I looked again upon a plain full of armed men surging forward on the backs of deer….”
Tell me your story.
“Last night I saw a smoking star dripping fire, like an ear of corn bleeding fire. The night sky was filled with blood and smoke….”
Tell me your story.
“The temple on the great pyramid burst into flames. Lightning struck it from a clear blue sky. Even now it’s burning. We keep throwing water on it, great quantities of water, we cannot put it out. We cannot put it out….”
Tell me your story.
“Everyone in our precinct heard her again last night. Weeping for her lost children. Weeping for the city….”
Tell me your story.
“On the lake I saw a waterspout as high as a mountain and through it saw the gods descending….”
Tell me your story.
“Last night the streets were filled with two-headed dwarves and hunchbacks asking for the king….”
Tell me your dreams—who will feed the sun?
Destiny approaches him who knows the histories. The histories he knows himself condemned to repeat, for this history is prophecy.
Tell me your dreams.
The jails are full of sorcerers. But all those brave enough to tell their dreams, the Emperor of Revery has had put to death. The flood of dreams that left the prisons awash in dreamers now runs dry, and more terrible to him than all the dreams is the moment of their ceasing.
“This Christ of yours,” he’ll one day soon now ask the startled chaplain, “he died to save his father? He gave his heart to feed the sun?” The beautiful interpreter smiles and shakes her head.
Tell me your story. Tell me your story of the end.
Dreamers given death, sorcerers grown still, seers lost from sight, jailed prophets, shrouded, silent … slowly silence falls.
Drums booming, flutes piping … the last sounds from the outside world to reach his ears. Soon even the dreams of the Emperor, the last to dream in all the world, fall silent.
Soon enough, soon with great relief he elects the warrior’s death. Death at his captor’s hands. The nobility of the captor vouchsafes the nobility of his dying.
Who will feed the sun? the captive asks, but gets no answer.
I am sorry, Carlos. Can you ever find it in your heart to understand.
Your friend,
Juana Inés Ramírez de Asbaje, la peor de todas …32
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ,
MARTYR OF THE SACRAMENT
B. Limosneros, trans.
Delicious prison!
whose irons,
seeming torments,
ornament an existence
that makes pearls of fallen tears,
a jewel box of a prison cell.
Such consolation I find in Thee,
seeing myself stripped of everything,
not least of all, my burdens,
and thus lightened left more apt
to dare to launch intrepid
flight from earth unto the Heavens.
By events, the royal purple
is made the morrow’s garish sackcloth;
the hand that gripped, imperious,
the sceptre in its fist,
in fetters offers direst demonstrations
of how tenuous the glories of this suffering earth.
Yesterday was I obeyed
everywhere the Guadalquivir bathes
fertile Andalusía,
the greater part of Spain;
today beneath a brutal Bailiff’s
boot am I held prostrate:
Yea, there exists in human realms no sure estate …
…. Such reflexions my brooding
brings, and yet, these spur on no fresh tortures:
since whatever is lost has been for Thee
it causes me no sorrow:
but rather joy
that for Thee all shall now be forfeit!
Thou alone hast given
what from me Thou hast taken.
Be praised ever,
for Thou wouldst that I possess
every benefice, so that for Thee
I could relinquish these.
The sole heresy I still embrace,
is to cherish e’er this one true faith.
Yet, in this, in no way is it tarnished—
since in its own crucible it is purified.
Time to lay aside the noble Gothic laurel,
for to have kept one’s faith is to have conquered all …
MESSENGER
… y abatime tanto, tanto,
que fui tan alto, tan alto,
que le di a la casa alcance …33
In the evening, I went to find Xochitl, still hoping to convince her to let Amanda come to Mexico. In the kitchen the door to the fields stood ajar. Moths whirled at the lantern glass, throwing shadows over the packed dirt of the yard. I remember that it was a clear night, the moonlight a burnish on the blades of corn. We sat at the small table, the evening’s unwashed dishes piled behind us on the blue-tiled counter. Xochitl had said no for the second time, and for the second time I had asked why. Instead of answering she began to tell me of her youth, as a girl respected by her people, a fish of gold. But I had heard this. Though young, she had been a healer, was soon to be a midwife, as Amanda would be one day
. I had grown impatient, for this was precisely what she had never wanted to teach me. Xochitl talked then of first meeting my grandfather, when he came to her village on the far slope of the volcano. Soon after, something had slid, and she was no longer honoured. Tla alaui, tlapetzcaui in tlalticpac. Fish of gold, what happened to you?
She had been returning late to the village. It was after dusk. She was pregnant. The horse, going fast, had stepped into a toza burrow. I saw so clearly then how my grandfather would have blamed himself for the accident, though it was something that might befall even the finest horsemen. It was only afterwards that she came to Nepantla to nurse me. Xochitl had been trying to tell me the one story I had always dreamed true, yet I was hardly listening at all, and afraid, just perhaps, to hear that she and my grandfather had done something improper. I had always thought of her as his age, her hair had been white even before his.
Something had slid, but she did not mean her fall from the horse. Something had broken but she did not mean her hip. This something had broken months before. Two Spaniards, not one. Pedro Manuel de Asbaje, Pedro Ramírez de Santillana. Two don Pedros, a father and a grandfather. Two superb horsemen, two horses … The horse was not my grandfather’s. The horse Xochitl had fallen from was my father’s. Pedro Manuel de Asbaje. Aca icuitlaxcoltzin quitlatalmachica. Who arranged his intestines artistically.
I had heard this as a child, on a cart ride from Nepantla to Panoayan, and had vowed to resolve it for myself one day. And so I had. And now another from that time—I believed Magda: Xochitl had been trying to tell me Amanda was my father’s daughter.
Even as Magda said it, smiling through the grille, I knew it to be true. Because she knew how it would hurt me to know this, now. Amanda was my sister.
Four years after I had left for Mexico I made the long return journey by ox cart only to discover Amanda and Xochitl had been sent to another hacienda. They never arrived. It was from Diego’s lips I had had to hear this, and that he had sent men searching for them everywhere.
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