Convent, palace, prison. The worlds in these. Firepit, pantry, library. Prolix memory. Cornfield, river, killing floor. Prolix memory, what did she want from me, for me? Her lamb. Your eyes are good, Inés, for seeing far. But up close, you are as blind as the rest of us. Isabel. How must it have felt for you to hear me call you that? To watch me—driven by this hunger—turning away from you, turning to Xochitl for the things she could teach? And to be deserted by my father, only to see your own father turn to me for the one thing you could not offer him?
Window, night, cloud. Three, the chapel bell. Ink, paper, quills. Take one up. Feel free. Remember …? Delicate scratch of quill over parchment. The quill’s cool, lacquered shaft … unvarnished tabletop, worn to the roughness of petals. Again, more softly with ink, its pitch on the page a little lower. From the canals an ever fainter croaking. Stench of black water. Scent of flowers faded in a vase. Faint, sharp sizzling of candlewick … bare footsoles on stone slab, rough wool on skin. I sit here unmoving, a ghost haunting its body, and yet how far these senses are from extinction, keen to every fading sound and texture. Taste. Smell. Sight. Study the quill tip, its bead of ink. Not yet?
Horses. A coach crashes blindly through the streets toward some unspoken assignation.
Once I thought I had a gift, a special gift, a greatness within me. Why. Why give me a mind that devours my heart, enslaves me to my pride? Words—why this curse of easy eloquence? I choke on it. It has choked this cell on its wages. Books, instruments, curiosities—loyalty for trinkets. I have lent my voice to every passing cause until it no longer recognizes me. When did I agree to barter greatness for fame? Show me the contract—where have I signed it? Show me my name.
Show me my name.
Is it for this that my work has not served? Why must so many others suffer for me, so pointlessly? How do you see me—do you see me? Will you not lift, Bright Lover, your shining face to me? Beloved of my life, so happy and so new, I run to you—lover of my life, in the darkness of the night, so high and so wide … I do not find you. Where have you run? Why is there so much pain in this love you offer us? Why must we be broken to love, and crushed—why may we not love as lovers—with a love that is our own, even one willful and rich and turbulent? Surely there is One with a heart to answer such a love. What woman ever brought a lover to love—or having lost him won it back, by waiting on her knees? Why can I not suffer this, to lie with my face in the dirt of the yard?
Four. See, you have me counting now the hours. Below, hear the tamalera, palms slapping flatly at the masa. Inspect the tip, closely, bead of ink, small globe of night. How little left to surrender. How much.
Five. For the third night running I hear the piping. Is it a festival? A day of feast on the calendar of some unfamiliar subject tribe? For three madrugadas running he pipes against the dawn. Three notes rising and falling, shrill—shattering insanely against the empty stones. He must be in the street just below. I lean to see. The turquoise basin slips from the table edge. I leave the shards where they lie. There is not much time. You gave me a sky to conquer—a night I now cower beneath. Why give me these gifts, then not allow me to use them? Why shower them upon me only to let me forsake them, turn them against me, upon me, abandon me to my self, my Enemy? Court freak, mujer de placer, menina. You bring me to the brink of this black prospect only to turn your face from me—didn’t I sacrifice, didn’t I try, who is the sower of discord, who is the enemy of both sides if not I?
Or am I not … me?
If I must be another, then let me be another’s—if I may not be mine, make me yours, not theirs. Manipulate me magnificently, make me round and roll me in your palm, dance me and sing me divinely, let me make you laugh.
Let me make you laugh.
Hera’s lunatic, God’s clown. Christian Herakles, who cannot lift a feather to let the madness out.
You mock my eyes. To make them see what I have not been—and yet see nothing of what you have in store for me. He mocks these eyes. Take up the quill. Prepare to sign for him with Night. Two beads, each a small globe. Shoulder them, now, whole worlds. Take them up. Feel how light, the lightness one feather brings. What shall I write … how. Guide my hand. A sign.
Silence. The piping has stopped. Still no word. Still I must wait. As I thought … you remain hidden. More silence.
False dawn … dawn. Rest … false peace. The first light coppers the cathedral spire. Hear the map of bells.
Lauds.
Where does the piper sleep?
So I had lost, and soon enough he would know. This path, this ecstasy was not mine. I could not make myself one even to defy him. The ecstatics have an answer, and I only questions. No face in the darkness, no sudden illumination. I do not know who the beata is, or even if she exists. But whatever comes I have found an answer of sorts, a kind of negative answer lit as by a small ray of darkness. The beata is not Amanda.
My faith in this is unshakeable, because I choose to make it so. It is a kind of certainty.
Whatever else I may be brought to doubt or fear it will not be this. Whatever else they still wanted from me, whatever the action, whatever the surrender, if they had Amanda, and knew whom they held, they had only to show me her face and I would have done anything they asked. Until the moment she is brought before my eyes, with this love shall I be purged of this fear of the face hidden from me.
It is perhaps with such a love that the angels are purged of ignorance.
Núñez will never come.
PLEA
Plea, in forensic form, entered before the Divine Tribunal, in entreaty for forgiveness of her sins.34
I, Juana Inés de la Cruz, the most worthless and ungrateful of all the creatures fashioned by your Omnipotence, and the most obscure of those created by your Love, appear before your divine and sacred Majesty, in the sole manner and form permitted by right of your Mercy and infinite Clemency; and prostrate with all the reverence of my soul before the most august Trinity, I do hereby affirm:
That in the proceeding before the Tribunal of your Justice, against my grave, enormous and unequalled sins, of which I acknowledge myself convicted by all the witnesses of Heaven and Earth and by all that is alleged by the Criminal Prosecutor of my own conscience, which sentences me to eternal death, and even this will be treating of me with leniency—that I were not sentenced to infinite Hells for my unnumbered crimes and sins; and whereas of all this do I find myself convicted, and recognize that I merit neither pardon nor so much as to be heard, in spite of all, knowing your infinite Love and immense Mercy, and while I am still alive to this life and before they have closed off from me all avenues of appeal … I beseech you to admit this plea in the name of that intense and incomprehensible act of love by which you suffered so terrible a death …
… You well know that for many years now I have lived in religion without Religion, even as a pagan would; as a first step in the purgation of these faults, in faint proportion to my derelictions and yet in token of my desire to assume again those very obligations that I have so poorly met, it is my wish to take up once again the Habit and submit myself to the postulant’s year of trial under the examination of your Minister and the father of my soul, acting as your Prosecutor and testing the will and liberty by which I am disposed to these trials; and as concerns my dowry, I offer the alms I have begged of the Community of the Blessed; and if there should be any shortfall, I count on the intercession of my Mother and yours, the most holy Virgin, and of her husband and my father, the glorious Saint Joseph, who will (as I commend myself to their pity) undertake to pay said dowry, candles and gratuity.
Wherefore, I implore Your Sacramental Majesty to grant all the Saints and Angels your permission, licence and leave to readmit me to the good graces of the Celestial Community; and this being granted—as I might hope of their pity—that I might be given again the sacred habit of our father Saint Jerome, upon whom I count as my advocate and intercessor, not merely that I be received into his saintly Order, but also that in
the company of my mother Saint Paula he entreat you to grant me the perseverance and increased virtue that I have always asked of you … All of which I shall receive by the good and charity of your infinite misericordia, provided in the appropriate degree. And for all these do I beg mercy, &c.
SOVEREIGN
What is destined for Zeus but endless rule?
Ask not, neither set thy heart on knowing.35
After Vespers, Father Arellano brought a message. The Prefect was coming. Coming? Tomorrow. At dusk. Possibly, yes, Sor Juana.
Arellano was sweating still from the streets, though it was cool inside. Was there more? His lips had begun to move before the words tumbled out—his relief to be finished this penance, evident.
“Prefect Núñez will determine for himself the sincerity of Sor Juana’s dispositions, whether, having been given the tip of his golden sceptre to kiss, she could truly settle now for such humble burdens—to lead the choir, instruct the servants, keep the books. Superintendent of Works. Or whether she still seeks to serve her prince by a more wandering path, farther afield. Blind poet, prophetess, seer …”
But why now? Sor Juana could ask the Prefect herself, tomorrow. And now he, Arellano, would leave her to her doubts.
What sign had I given, what sign had he read—none. But after some hours I saw. That for four months I had misunderstood completely all the taunts—it was not these I was to draw his lessons from. All the messages were one, made of the events of my life, of what I have known, one message that explains everything. Explains everything—why, all this time, he had even pretended to want to shield me. For I am not the one he comes to keep from the rack. I had not seen….
Why come after so many months? Because I am exhausted. But why tomorrow, why not two more days’wait, three more days’ exhaustion? He could come without warning—why the annunciation?—and if he is coming, why the message, why a message so much like the last? Because I have missed something. Try again, Juana Inés, try harder.
Superintendent of Works. He is telling me he has intercepted my letters to María Luisa. But something more. Blind poet. How this amuses him, the wandering … farther afield. Service. A prince in the field—the poet Homer. This is about my grandfather—something I am to be made to remember. This. He saves the most painful for last.
“Even in America, Angelina, even here we serve the Sovereign of the Two Worlds….” It was the last night we were together.
Even now the fund of Núñez’s derision is not spent. This blind man who hails my new career as blind poet, mocks my threat, applauds my decision—there being so few poets who know how to write for our kind—who afflicts me now with the one confidence I would give so much not to have disclosed to him. But oh how I do grow weary of reading my past through this man’s eyes, seeing only what and whom and how he wishes.
It is in the darkness after the last prayers, Father, that the visions come most clearly. I see you now in the only way you may now see me. I close my eyes, I open them. And you are the same. Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Master of the Collections, the Sources—now the Visits. My Turnkey. And was it not you who arranged my uncle’s permission to visit the convent of San José? This I had forgotten. And were you not the one who’d guided me there? But first through a recogimiento—a place of recollection, for prostitutes—with every window bricked shut. Do you remember it Father as I do, or do I remember it now, as you? Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Controller of the Book, that I might have one, approved by you, thereby concentrating its effects, as a point of sun beneath a lens—all brilliance at one point of focus, half-light all around it—a map of light and shadows spread before you, knowing it to be unfolding within me. So that you might study it for fresh points of ambush, for the cardinal points of your Direction … How studiously you read—and I was the book whose pages you would cancel and correct. And as it was with books, do you attempt this now with my own memory?—you are the lens, I am the map, and my own life the light that scores and scorches the path. Antonio Núñez, Master of the Recollections, keeper of the keys to the palace of my memory. Who maps the rooms, the halls, registers their contents perfectly, then slides the bolt and bricks the windows shut.
Who is this Jesuit, who does not live among us but is never far, who speaks to me through silence and absences, who still asks whom I would serve—and where and how? Head or heart, heart or soul, soul or flesh. What vast wrongs have I done, that Fate has sent him to me—and what has this man done that he should appoint himself my judge? I who have wrought paeans on naval victories over foes poorly armed and overwhelmingly outnumbered, raised arches of triumph to the failing, worked hollow magic with theatre sets, drafted scripts to make gods of the king’s representatives and make kings of God’s. Thus have I served—two popes, two kings, three queens, four viceroys, three vicereines, two archbishops—count the counts and countesses, all the dukes and marquises. All for them, all the couplets for gifts.
Yet not everything do I repent. I have composed things for people I have loved, for the hurt made carols, and for the hungry. Even as he once suggested. And I have never been ashamed of my elegy for the king, though they laughed even then. Planet King. And since those days I have wished the son of the Planet King a happy birthday many times. Invalid, incoherent, impotent—Carlos the Bewitched, descended from Juana the Mad. He is thirty-two now. Sovereign of the Two Worlds. It has been hard for him, and I am sorry for that, but I am glad the Monster survived.
So there are certain things it were better not to deride, certain friends it were better not to attack. It is unnecessary, when he has won; it misjudges its effects.
Or might Antonio Núñez de Miranda be nostalgic? Does there perhaps remain one piece of information he had always wanted to have—to see his inventory of windows and doors completed before the palace is pulled down? No. A man with such a memory does not feel nostalgia.
He does not know he has won.
Tomorrow he brings one final brutal revelation to finish me, warns me to expect it, transmits the subject to amplify his effects—ever my magnifying lens.
I am come to make war on you, Juana Inés, against the Evil in you, against the Enemy, for the dominion of your soul. And because you are a house divided in all that you do, I am confident of defeating you.
He comes to tear the palace down himself.
But it seems even the Prefect errs. He had only to wait. The time to come here is when the admission of my cowardice is before us both. Then, how much more easily do the palace walls crumble. Misjudgement, tactical error … what is this that I am feeling? Is this hope? There is time yet to find some advantage—what is it about that last night with Abuelo, what has Núñez discovered since, that he would threaten me with it now? How much did I tell him then, in what words, about this night I have not mentioned since, scarce returned to in my mind for a quarter of a century? He would remember as if it were yesterday. What is it, Father Núñez, that you would have me remember, what fresh horror do you bring—or is it hope?
Princes, golden sceptres, blind poets, wanderers …
I think I remember … fireflies. The night was cold. We had stayed up late by the fire, leaning close, pausing now and again to poke at the coals. He had rarely spoken about the war, this war half again as a long as the siege of Troy. No wonder the Poet had gone blind, he said, straining to see the end. My grandfather’s war had begun in a year marked by three comets, hanging over the horizon even as the Soul of Caesar once had over Rome. Summers of fire, autumns of plague, winters of hunger. A war to announce the coming of the end. He had always dreamed of travelling; he travelled then. Westphalia, Prague, White Mountain. He left in ’24, happy to have missed Magdeburg. And yet he was proud to have fought for the young king.
The stars were fading to the last constellations…. I was leaning toward the fire, my elbows resting on a book in my lap that I had hurried into the library to retrieve. Abuelo had been speaking of the chivalry of Spinola at the raising of the siege at Breda, and regretted never hav
ing served any such prince in the field. Iliad…. I had found it quickly, on his desk, to read for him the speech of Zeus’s mortal son to Glaucus. It was to be years before I could read the Iliad again.
… He leads his people. As ye see a mountain lion fare, Long kept from prey, in forcing which his high mind makes him dare Assault upon the whole full fold, though guarded never so With well-arm’d men and eager dogs—away he will not go But venture on and either snatch a prey or be a prey …
Alone and hurt my grandfather walked home from the front, through half-empty villages to his own on the bank of the Guadalquivir, but everyone was gone. His family, the friends he had known. He followed the river to where it ran into the sea, then kept walking, to land’s end, to the pillars of Calpe and Abyla. And as he talked over his plans for explorations here, in America, his eyes glowed green as emeralds, as they had not in many years. And so it was that he began to speak of the end of the Mexica and the last sorcerer, Ocelotl.
“As I have followed his trail, Angelina, it has sometimes seemed to me that there went the last honest man….”
Kings and princes … service and counsels … honest men … Ocelotl, Vieyra … Vieyra defending the Jews … condemnation, to wander to the end of the world. The Wandering Jew—
Magda. Magda will testify Abuelo was a secret Jew.
No—Núñez does not need to do this—why? to show me the full measure of my cowardice? Would you tear the palace down, Father, or rally its defences? He cannot think even me such a coward, to recall this of all nights to my mind and then expect me not to fight. If I know you, Father, your motives are not these. If these are your motives, I do not know you.
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