“About this manuscript you have called The Sapphic Hymns….”
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
Alan Trueblood, trans.
Verde embeleso de la vida humana,
loca Esperanza, frenesí dorado,
sueño de los despiertos intrincado,
como de sueños, de tesoros vana;
alma del mundo, senectud lozana,
decrépito verdor imaginado;
el hoy de los dichosos esperado
y de los desdichados el mañana:
sigan tu sombra en busca de tu día
los que, con verdes vidrios por anteojos,
todo lo ven pintado a su deseo;
que yo, más cuerda en la fortuna mía,
tengo en entrambas manos ambos ojos
y solamente lo que toco veo.
Green allurement of our human life,
mad Hope, wild frenzy gold-encrusted,
sleep of the waking full of twists and turns
for neither dreams nor treasures to be trusted;
soul of the world, new burgeoning of the old,
fantasy of blighted greenery,
day awaited by the happy few,
morrow which the hapless long to see:
let those pursue your shadow’s beckoning
who put green lenses in their spectacles
and see the world in colours that appeal.
Myself, I’ll act more wisely toward the world:
I’ll place my eyes right at my fingertips
and only see what my two hands can feel.
LORD PROSECUTOR
The craft of the forger is weaker far than Necessity.38
Date unknown, year 1693 …
… charges that in clandestine distribution from America even unto Europe, and in conspiration with Lady María Luisa Manrique de Lara, Countess of Paredes, with the Creoles Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Jesuit Prefect of the Brotherhood of Mary, and with the aid of the mulatta Antonia Mora, the nun has trafficked in heretical tracts, monographs and forbidden translations, including those of the Franciscan Manuel de Cuadros, already consigned to eternal damnation on related charges.
Ask the nun’s response.
The heresiarch will state a response for the record.
A: Before the Lord Judges I freely confirm that manuscripts were copied and sent, but there was no traffic, no profit, no distribution ring. Further, the orthodoxy and character of the manuscripts are still to be determined here before this very Tribunal—but if even a single one were deemed heretical, I do not doubt, Lord Judges, that all the parties named here would willingly—
Tell the nun again to address herself only to the Lord Prosecutor.
A: I have only addressed myself to whom addresses me as an expression of respect.
Should the Tribunal require expressions of the heresiarch’s respect, we will extract them.
Reverend Lord Judges, our Office begs the Tribunal’s indulgence: that it abide the heresiarch’s impudence a little longer. The next days’ testimony will show her to be descended on both sides from a long line of false Christians; to be infected with Judaic and pagan abomination from her earliest years; to be weaned on necromancy and superstition. A sworn statement will be presented, and attested to tomorrow before the Tribunal, to the effect that her own wet nurse was a sorceress descended from an Indian insurrectionist condemned by the Holy Office long years ago.
Proceed.
Núñez was not wrong. I could not help myself. Rebellion. It was this—the falsity of my courage, the weakness in my defiance—that I wondered if he had wanted me to see on the day he came, to see this as a danger to us both.
For his part he had not been so foolish as to threaten me with Magda before knowing how badly I could hurt him in return. I had so few advantages—that he was forced to be careful of not revealing more than he learned, and his fear of being spied upon in the locutory. How much easier for him to question me in a prison cell. My one hope had lain in drawing him out, letting him lead me to where he feared to go. Instead he had only to scratch at the surface, rasp a little at the vein of defiance in me, and within five minutes we were already at manuscripts. I would not have Sappho to divert him a second time. His next such visit would be his last, and my next gesture of rebellion the thing most certain to lead us both back to those chambers.
But no longer would I permit myself to doubt he would come at least once more. It were better that he not delay too long, but I shall tarry, Father, until you return. Neither would I let myself wonder when, or about his motives. Even about the web of his alliances, I would try not to care. Like this, I could only destroy myself, tilting at every shadow.
Not an hour after Núñez left and already late in the evening, I was allowed to take delivery of a letter from Lord Bishop Angel Maldonado, informing me of his visit, though Father Núñez had told him he was wasting his time. But since Maldonado had not been dissuaded, and since the journey was not just long but dangerous, I wondered yet, would he come just for this, does he come as a friend, why would he have written of me to Núñez to begin with? It was painful to be reduced to this. It was Maldonado who had my carols on Saint Catherine of Alexandria sung at his cathedral when Santa Cruz had refused them.
The morning after the letter, the Archbishop’s secretary came in person to explain about my new cell.
“It is on the northwest corner of the gran patio, where Sor—where the postulant Juana will be more comfortable with the other novices, though they are somewhat … younger.” I forced myself to take an interest, at last to be seeing him, a sleek and officious man with a long nose, over which he was studying me for some reaction.
There would be a great deal more noise, voices, cries in the night, the nightly turbulence of the processions. The secretary might see the new arrangement as a hideous coming down in the world, but my concerns had nothing to do with either noise or privilege—I would be one step closer to the convent prison cell, a barred door opening from a cellar onto the southwest corner of that courtyard. I pointed out to him that I had a cell, for which he himself had signed the bill of sale. Ah yes. A careful review, however, of the contents since removed had shown the current cell to be too large for my future needs. They continued to play at their games of irony. And I to fly to the lure, at each slow swing, though I had had weeks to see this coming.
The new cell they had found for me proved to be half as large, and there was no stairway to the roof. Superintendent of Works … I had persuaded myself to believe Núñez had intercepted only one—but in that one letter, I had mentioned the hidden stairway.
… next, the Reverend Lord Judges are asked to consider how the heresiarch has made her nest in corruption, and with corruption feathered it. Over the course of decades and in flagrant violation of her own vow of poverty, she had, by the performance and peddling of various favours, amassed a collection of curios, instruments and books lately confiscated and valued at thirty thousand pesos. Most recently she has attempted to suborn Bishop Angel Maldonado of Oaxaca for the purposes of gaining illicit foreknowledge of the present proceedings against her. Previous to this, she had induced another Prince of the Church, since stripped of his charges and titles, to publish under his licence an insolent suite of verses on the holy virgin Catherine of Alexandria, therewith subverting the veneration of a saint of the Church in order to draw the thinnest of masks over the true intent, being to praise and exalt a pagan sorceress, also of Alexandria, and a mortal enemy of our Holy Roman and Apostolic Church. In another letter to the former Bishop, the heresiarch praises this Hypatia’s learning overtly and belligerently. And it is a perversity no doubt fulfilling the heresiarch’s perverse designs that even as a pagan once corrupted the Prefect Orestes, so also has this paganist of our day corrupted the Prefect of the Brotherhood of Mary, not least in the trafficking of documents. Leading to the question of how long the heresiarch’s own collection might take to burn.
A: Lord Prosecutor—
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Instruct the nun to wait to be addressed.
The heresiarch will wait to be addressed, or will be gagged until her responses are called for. All of the foresaid, Reverend Lord Judges, being of a piece with other writings by the heresiarch sympathetic to various heretics and schismatics from the early Church. Which returns us to the heretical proposition of the finezas negativas of God, this also published under the Bishop of Puebla’s licence, and the charge which the heresiarch still guilefully avoids addressing….
Get the nun’s response.
The heresiarch will make a response.
A: Lord Prosecutor, any confusion of Catherine of Alexandria with Hypatia does not originate with me but has persisted for some centuries, and for good reason if, as seems the case, the pagans in their treatment of Catherine took inspiration from the Patriarch’s work with Hypatia. As to corruption, the destruction of the synagogues across Egypt coincided with the takeover, by Christians, of the Jewish monopoly on the grain trade between Alexandria and Constantinople. Corruption comes in many forms. As to the burning of my own collection, it is a technical question, but one traditionally within the competence of this Church to answer. Certainly the destruction of the Serapiana was a test and precedent available to Caliph Omar as he made ready to burn the main library. But let us say, if indeed the Lord Prosecutor requires my response, less than six months.
Instruct the nun to answer specifically to the finezas negativas…. The Tribunal awaits its answer.
A: The Lord Prosecutor has not yet conveyed to me the Tribunal’s instructions.
The heresiarch will answer to the finezas negativas….
The day’s warmth had not yet ebbed from the column at my shoulder as I stood, unnoticed, at the door of our new home, looking down over a courtyard lively with activity. On the gran patio I would not have expected laughter of the sort I so craved to hear, to share, based in neither fear nor anger—not these torments of irony.
It was as the Archbishop’s secretary had said. The sisters for the most part were younger, many wealthy, with one foot still planted firmly in the world, the wealthiest with their favourites, then the novices, the slaves and servants, the young girls from the convent school.
Lying as it did on the far side of the chapel and refectory, the workshops and orchards, the gran patio was another world though I had once imagined I knew it well enough. Like the others, I came for the torchlight processions; and after quakes I had often come to supervise the masons. While the colonnades around the first and second storeys had been preserved, to anyone acquainted with the original plans, the place was a bewilderment. Each according to her means and whimsy, various residents had made modifications, all being expansions of one sort or other—a third storey kiosk on pillars in a vaguely Turkish style, or ground-floor additions shambling a third of the way into the plaza. Flat roofs with crenellations, peaked roofs of thatch or of canvas, all more than likely propped on untreated uprights. Walls were of adobe brick or simply mud over wattle, some painted, a few limed, most left bared to the elements. Then another extension is built to abut on a wall that may or may not survive the next tremor … leaving more or less at hazard, blind alleys, light shafts and hidden recesses, and balconies giving onto blank walls. In appearance it was as I imagined a bazaar of Persia, or a market town at the edge of a desert. Our Santa Paula’s first convents in the Holy Land might have looked thus.
Late afternoon was becoming a favourite time, for though the blood-sport of the processions was to begin again in a few hours, there was no sign of this yet. The nights were as written in sand. By the first light of each fresh morning, el gran patio was itself again. In the looseness of this order lay a resiliency one had to live here to notice. The fuss and fluster of chickens darting under foot, the call of songbirds from their cages … throughout the day, servants gossiping at the fountain, hanging laundry, fine articles of silk, others of cotton, and among them, ranged indifferently, hairshirts torn and darkened. Schoolgirls strolled in pairs, novices and lay favourites sat on the stone benches in the passageways.
Our new neighbours had grown used to us. At the outset there was bound to be resentment. Though small, it was still a corner cell with two storeys, and views to the north and west. More, my presence threatened to mean more scrutiny from the other patio and beyond. But when Antonia and I arrived, barefoot and tonsured, all our belongings in our two hands, perhaps the resentment grew a little less.
I wondered if it was not another dangerous fantasy but I let myself imagine Antonia and I might grow to like our new home … though so far she was having the more difficult time, to find her place. The nun’s return to the noviciate for her Jubilee is provided for in the statutes; a good deal rarer is the secretary to a novice forbidden to write.
After Núñez had come and quickly gone again, there came a change. The Church began to authorize the visits of friends to the locutory once again. For the longer walk, one of several minutes, I was grateful though it was an occasion for more gossip, as I now had to walk past the entire convent.
San Jerónimo had not had a bishop’s visit in over two years. His Excellency Angel Maldonado kept his promise, and I let myself believe he did indeed make the long journey from Oaxaca for me. Save for the bright blue eyes and the purple cassock, he might have been taken for a native of this country, his cheekbones high, his nose prominent, fine-bladed at the bridge. He seemed surprised that I was aware of the beata trials—but he knew María de San José well and though he disliked Santa Cruz, he did not believe there was any immediate threat to her. He did not mention any rumours concerning our convent as the site of the next trial, and it was a relief not to have to discuss it. What he had made the six-day journey to tell me was that the Holy Office was mere days away from publishing charges against Father Xavier Palavicino, whom I must know well, given that he had risked so much to defend my letter on God’s negative finezas. Very gently he asked if even Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz did not have a few small sins she could freely confess for her Jubilee?
Bishop Maldonado was a decent man. It would have served nothing to point out that Oaxaca was very far away from the affairs of Mexico, that Father Núñez had been withholding his intercession for months, that I hardly knew Palavicino at all—and to tell the Bishop he was bringing me news of charges I had known of for almost two years, this would have been callous while leaving me to appear all the more intransigent. There was little he could do to help me here, but I preferred to think I might still have a good friend in Oaxaca, who before he left did his best to impress upon me the precariousness of my situation—certainly I must accept Father Núñez’s offer of protection, at least from the Archbishop. The progression of events was in the bishop’s view methodical, and his main concern was with what or who should logically follow now that the Palavicino affair was coming to a head. We parted on my promise to give our discussion my most urgent consideration.
… that for three generations the family Ramírez de Santillana, of the province of Andalusía, has here in the New World intermarried with other families of false converts for the purposes of perpetuating secret worship of the laws of Moses. And that of this third generation, the nun calling herself Juana Inés de la Cruz has not ceased in her open defiance of our Holy Roman and Apostolic Church even while exploiting the trust owing to her position within it in order to publish various pseudo-theological tracts purporting to defend the Sacred Canons but which covertly undermine them. And that the nun has been recently so emboldened as to go beyond even this, publishing a tract (and within this, the proposition of God’s finezas negativas) vehemently suspected of heretical Quietism and the Illuminist heresy that so persistently springs from the ranks of her cohort: new Christians, false converts, false Christians, crypto-Judaizers.
Ask the nun’s response.
The heresiarch will make a response for the record.
A: To the first charge: it is false, inspired by pure malice. Charges of this sort shame Holy Mother Church. To the second: i
f the Lord Prosecutor adduces particulars I will answer to each. To the third as to the first: false. This is not my cohort. But I remind the Lord Prosecutor that from it have come not only saints Ignatius de Loyola and Teresa de Ávila but Juan de la Cruz—a year under torture, three times his writings denounced before the Inquisition. The torture was the shame of his century, the denunciations, of ours. The latest being so recently as 1668, even during the proceedings leading to his beatification. I repeat, those who make such denunciations before the Holy Office abuse it even as they shame our Church.
Instruct the nun that not Juan de la Cruz nor any saint or beatific person is here charged; that she has not properly answered the third charge; that she desist from presuming to make pronouncements imputing shame—to this Church above all; that it is not her place; that this is not her place.
I could not bear to ask it—to be brought by such as these to ask: Was it possible that my grandfather had been a secret Jew? Could a truth and fear so vast have hovered, sensed yet unseen, over all our years together—could we have shared so much, yet not that truth, that pride, that fear? However much I searched my memory, I scarcely recalled his mentioning the Jews at all, even while he had talked so often of the other great peoples, those of Cathay and Egypt, the Persians and the Moors, the Spanish and the Mexica.
But if ever there was a fact, a truth, a pride he found painful above all others, it was that the Spain he so loved had once had a special gift, an example to all Europe. The gift was tolerance, and the Moors had given it. Under the Almohads, in their capital on the Guadalquivir, the city of Córdoba alone fathered, in the span of eight years, two universal geniuses: a Moor who would go on to write the great commentaries on the Greeks, and a Jew writing treatises on medicine and philosophy in Arabic. In Córdoba, the Jews had embraced Arabic, writing only their poetry in Hebrew, the secret language of the heart. The phrase had been my grandfather’s. And among the early Christian kings, some had been inspired to lead by the Almohad example. But the inspiration did not last; the gift withered on the vine, and the expulsion of the Jews began, under Isabela. A great queen, Abuelo said, and a great error. Here was the true Spanish heritage that the Conquest had betrayed, the great hybrid that Christian Spain had failed to coax into flower. And yet, for all this, Maimonides was the sole Jewish writer I ever heard mentioned by name, his Guide for the Perplexed the only text, and this only in passing: a work of paradoxes on the unknowability of God, denounced as heretical by the Jews themselves—or rather, Abuelo added with that sad smile, by the still perplexed.
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