Thus was I about to send myself to the stake still upholding my negative finezas, in defence of free will, I who have always hated making choices. This was not the calculation of longitude at sea. There were no prizes for making discoveries such as these—or that the ostrakis aneilon used in Hypatia’s death were likely to have been the tiles of ostracism, that the infallibility of Caesar Pontifex was modelled on the Egyptian cult of the living God Serapis, that doubt itself has become heretical and that the punishments of Hypatia and Galileo were less for witchcraft or heresy than for a new kind of treason. One from within. And with each passing night it was becoming harder to imagine standing my ground before the holy officers, because through Magda they might know things even about my own life that I did not. Even as I dreaded how these would be revealed to me, when, in what tones of irony and triumph, it became more urgent to anticipate what might be coming. Truly frightening was the eagerness with which my mind returned to that room, to confront the false witnesses, who were now almost always Magda, examining me. And in the midst of my rousing defence of heretics, it was Magda the scholar who had drawn the link from oyster shells to turtle shells—and I had stood revealed then as a hypocrite, as she forced me to admit it: I had always seen that Amanda had my father’s eyes, that she had been his choice, and that what I had most envied of Amanda was not her secret knowledge, nor merely her grace, nor even her gift with a gesture. It was her heart. I am not a child anymore—certainly I could bear this coming from one such as Magda, but only for so long as I can cling to my faith that they will not bring Amanda before me in chains.
After I had slept a little, I saw how far things had gone. They had made of me an officer of the prosecution.
It is my friends who have shown me this. For if it had become a new torment to answer to those who clearly wished me well, surely this means I had given my adversaries too much credit, for intuition, for special knowledge of me, for the genius of a cruel empathy. Much of what they know of me holds true for all—and what I fear, everyone must. There is a curious remark Núñez has made more than once. Gaps will not be tolerated—and well do I know that the fear of these can be intolerable. I have already sensed it in Núñez’s vaunting of the perfection of his memory. Nothing is ever lost beneath the eyes of God—before the eyes of God, perhaps, but beneath them, much is lost upon us. The weakness I have smelled was fear—but hardly mine and his alone. For it is precisely what the holy officers do not know and cannot see that is a torment, for them as it has been for me. I detect it in the careful reports Gutiérrez had filed of our every meeting, against some future treachery among his compeers. This same fear abides in the inventories of Dorantes, in the careful comparison of the first with the second. It lies in the method of their interrogations, scribes trained to record in teams so as to miss nothing—they have made a special lexicon for the language that goes beyond speech, a shorthand to mark the crack of bone, the sinew’s snap, the long vowels without consonants or stop. And if I permit myself a memory of my tour with Magda to the workshops of Santo Domingo, I see it even in the instruments their smiths and forgers make—the branks and gags and pears—for the plugging of gaps.
These sealers of windows, these cloisterers, with their mortar and shutters and locks, they too fear all that escapes them. They cannot rest until they have seized it, known all, had this allness tallied, until they have entered into their logs all the testimonies. Until the record is complete and buried in the archives. Just as I had once made myself trace the constellations, to make a friend of Night, they are as children afraid of the dark, who cannot bear to see the sky until they have made an inventory of all the stars. How many stars does Núñez remember, I wonder, when he closes his blind eyes at night? How many more than I can—and is the difference enough for him? In this, I have come to understand him, and through him, them. It was not empathy or cunning, on my part or theirs. It is this fear we share. Through it, I had become one of them.
And so as if by a long ride in the desert was I returned to the dilemma of my confession and perhaps, I thought, to the beginnings of a solution. A confession not full, for there can be no such thing, but of a fullness that yet gave the enemy no comfort, no rest, no peace—for whose conscience did not trouble him in the night, whose mind did not contain an inventory of secret doubts? Who is to say what Núñez feared most, a missing manuscript or darkness, or what he dreaded—if there was a dread we shared—more than the images conjured in the scent of smoke.
Gaps will not be tolerated, yet are everywhere. It would be for me to forge a confession of these, and let the holy armourers see what I had glimpsed, through long trials in the night, that mail is lighter and just perhaps stronger than plate.
But this was the solution to a false dilemma. The true one is a question of not armour but armaments. And in the wait to face the Holy Office, I have come to see the mind itself as a sword. The more one knows and the more keenly one remembers and sees what one has missed, the more sharply cuts the edge. It is whetted on knowledge, it lies between you and your adversary. We either take the haft or are taken by the blade. But even the rapier’s hilt is a parabola; and some nights, how heavy its handle lies in the hand. I have not found any higher purpose for my gifts but if such a mind as mine has any purpose at all, surely it is not to wound me—needlessly conjuring images such as Abuelo’s papers burning before my eyes. Lately, these come no longer as taunts nor even innocent fears I must learn to avoid but flails I have summoned willingly to hurt myself. Nor am I the only one wounded thus. I have only to look at the change in Antonia these past months, who is so eager to learn from me, who has already learned too much. My cheeks flush as I remember what I have taught her about self-pity and three-sided blades. But I will try to lay shame aside with their other instruments and not make of this too a gift to my adversaries. And this also have my friends taught me.
Yes, there is some knowledge of me in the punishments and torments the holy officers inflict, but how much, and how much of this is from me? What brought Galileo Galilei to his knees? It was not that they had found someone more clever—a Jacobi Topf, some anti-Galileo of the Soul—nor that Galileo was old, or ill, or almost blind. It was not even quite the pain and the fear imposed on an old man’s mind, but the special shape he alone could give these. More likely, Rome and Florence supply the same crude materials as are furnished here. Time. Doubt. Fear. With these, we forge the instruments ourselves, from our own faculties, and yes, the soul is to be the crucible.
It is not that a fated few bear within them some secret flaw—neither is this to be found in a single trait or faculty. It is not that we contain the seeds of our own fall, but that the shape of that fall—forced upon us—takes its imprint from us, our whole selves. Not only our conscience but our reason, memory, heart. Our imagination. And also our defiance, freely willed and chosen. So many olive branches Galileo was offered. What is a heretic, even one who recants, and why could he not take the olive branch? Why could he not curb his strength in strength, and not wait to have it broken? And what was it that brought a book collector and astrologer to attack the mulatto with whom he shared his cell, to try to murder him with his bare hands in total darkness? What had he seen, what had been summoned for his sight, if not the most appalling vision of himself?
But, then, I could not be sure if these were fantasies at all … or rather prophecies a mind in that dark had driven me to fulfil.
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
B. Limosneros, trans.
When Pedro, as a man of the sea,
finds himself denying
Freshets, Springs and Streams—
all run down to the sea,
they laughingly
and Pedro to weep.
verses
The Freshet does not forget
its beginnings in the spring,
the font of all its being;
since from the silvery rills
of its laughter springs forth
the most pleasing of confessio
ns
to the Source:
but if Pedro denies all this
with ungrateful evasions,
Freshets, Springs and Streams—
all run down to the sea,
they laughingly
and Pedro to weep.
The Spring laughs on
as it crashes from the summits—
in an oblivion without sorrows—
recollecting on the lowlands
the Flashing Eyes, the Lucid Matter
of its earliest existence:
but if Pedro denies all this,
though with a mortal shudder,
Freshets, Springs and Streams—
all run down to the sea,
they laughingly
and Pedro to weep.
The mightiest stream, unswervingly,
with impetuous fire
surrenders unreservedly
to the sea, meeting there
its Final Destiny,
finding there its quietus:
but if Pedro denies even this,
turning his eyes from such glimmerings,
Freshets, Springs and Streams—
all run down to the sea,
they laughingly
and Pedro to weep.
EPIMETHEUS
The heresiarch will cease her denials and respond fully to the third charge, concerning the so-called negative finezas of God, and then recant them.
A: Lord Proscecutor. God is a superabundance surpassing every category, even that of divinity, flooding the three transcendental qualities of Oneness, Goodness, Truth, overflowing these as Beauty, cascading in a Music down through the Creation in Time. We have called this Mystery, we have called this Night. And well we might, for its darkness is not dark nor absence of light but the mystery of an immense plenitude overwhelming our small faculties, as the brilliance of noon floods the pupil of an owl.
So when I say that the restraint of such a superabundance may come to us as a favour and mercy, language itself is found wanting. To my persecutors I say the negative is in the eye of the beholder … as when we close our eyes on a scene brightly lit and find projected against our lids the brightest things dark, the darkest light. To my slanderers I say that if there is darkness, it lies not in God but in the overturning of our categories. The negative lies in the reversal, but the negation lies in us.
Is the negative bad, the positive good? This is heretical Manichaeism that the pamphleteers beneath the mask of their pieties are near to practising. Good Evil, God Devil, Light Dark. This is the very heresy that first seduced Augustine until such time as he had seen the teacher Faustus with his own eyes, heard him for the first time. A negative favour is still a favour, God’s restraint is not a negation but a finesse, the finesse is not evil for being indirect, and this very hostility to the negative, the oblique, and the hidden is itself a kind of childishness, superstition abetted by language. Yes, Good; No, Bad. Even Odd, Straight Bent. The thinking of infants, who do not know night from day, their left hand from their right. Are these any less superstitious than the beliefs of the country of my childhood, whose practices are called diabolic, their sacred images idolatrous? It has been claimed by those whose offices are holy that I have held myself to be above faith as a thing no better than ignorance, paganism, superstitious visions, as beneath contempt. It is simply not true, it is not simply true—for I have felt contempt for none of these things. As a child I was taught that the face of God was unknowable, and its masks only mirrors in which the peoples of the world might find themselves.
And so to my attackers, my slanderers, my persecutors among the pamphleteers I say that even if it were my authority alone that Xavier Palavicino had cited, my authority is not mine alone, as the figure of the pupil of the owl is not mine but John’s, as the ray of darkness that strikes the eye is from Saint Dionysus—these are my authorities. John, Jerome and Augustine, Dionysus and Hermes Trismegistus, FastingCoyote and Maimonides … poets of the flood of superabundant Mystery.
… Sé ser tan caudalosas sus corrientes,
que infiernos, cielos riegan, y las gentes,
aunque es de noche …39
Whether I could recant. The one question left, for me. The rest I leave for others.
Truly, who can say what secret springs and silent vectors have carried us to any given moment, and what hidden currents had brought me to speak of the negative finezas on a moment’s impulse that for two years I had found myself unable to repent by choice, and left me unable to imagine anything I would not say—no matter the danger—to evade the judgements of the holy officers upon them? What is it now that I still cling to, through great pain and perhaps tragedy, like a child to a fable? Is it to the fable of trout, there and not there, at the bottom of a pool, or to a certain wise way Xochitl had of making me laugh? Or I wonder if it is to the gesture of two trout speared, together on a platter, or to some notion of justice written in an anagram.
Or only the weight of my grandfather’s hand I’ve felt on mine, all these years, each time I took up a pen to write.
But surely I who have gone to such lengths, who once took such elaborate steps not to look back, cannot now find it so difficult to turn my back on that past, again. Not after I have been given so many fresh reasons to remember old regrets.
Recant or refuse. This choice is not false, not a fantasy, though dangerous, nor is it complicated. Once the question is put and the decision commanded, any third option—silence, indecision—is merely an illusion, to be dispelled by a torture that is not at all a figment. And then the question is put again. I who have lost so many, to come so far, for all I claimed to care for—is it all to end here in a battle that cannot be won? Recant or refuse, a simple dilemma but the true one. I know this in my heart. What is it I cling to?
It is only a gesture.
I may never hear the exact charges I am convicted of, but heresy is not always punishable by death—the unrepentant are. A statement of error: brief, no longer than a sentence. If I cannot resolve this, compose it—now, in my mind—the choice will be made and the sentence written for me. The outcome is not in doubt. And if I am to find a way forward, I can only hope I find it in choosing to look back. For if it is to some fable of truth itself that I still cling, or to a sentence spelling ruin in a child’s anagram, if I am to rewrite it, there is one journey to be made again, to a place where the paths begin and to a moment where they intersect.
On the landing above the canal Uncle Juan said good-bye and sent his respects to my mother. I did not trust myself to answer. He apologized for María and Magda, asked when I would be returning. I did not know how long it would be. The boatman pushed off. We were soon out of the canals and out on the lake. Flotsam and deadheads bobbed at the surface. Most of the streams and rivers feeding the lake had been in flood. The sun was briefly out, and hot, thinning the mists that lay in the valleys. I had hardly slept the night before, and through drowsy lids thought I saw a seal ahead of the canoe. Then two, which could not of course be seals. Two … three … six … The canoe surged powerfully under me with each paddle stroke. The sun was warm. Into my mind swam the sea calves of Proteus and among them Menelaus, disguised in sealskins on the shore of Egypt. Homecomings … how long had he been away from Sparta, and Odysseus from Ithaca? Little shards of sun glinted on the water.
It was mid-morning of the second day as we entered the highest valley. The lower slopes were shrouded in a drab mist—shifting, softening landmarks. The young ox driver grew more animated, asked a hundred questions. He had never been so close to the mountains. As we turned off the main road onto the track running up to the hacienda I looked back, though I knew there were no other turn-offs to mistake ours for. And yet while the landscape had seemed changed, it began to seem as though the changes its tenants had made had somehow never taken. There were no workers in the orchards. Close beside the road the plots of tomato and squash had been ploughed under and no one worked there.
We rolled over the brook and pa
st the sentry box. The black cedar shingles on the house faintly glowed with pale green moss. Around back, the cart pulled to a stop. The mist had begun to clear. The cone of Popocatepetl floated above the earth upon a plane of white billows stretching south. In the calm air a white plume of steam went up as if pouring through an inverted funnel, an upturned hourglass of cloud. Fresh snow gleamed in the sun like fields of white obsidian. I got down, stiff, hesitant….
Up on those slopes is a place with a waterfall, and a rooster tail of water bursting from a dry rock face. But for all its beauty it is not Ixayac I would give the most to visit again for an hour, nor even our library, but a shady spot at the base of a giant cedar among the pines. On the banks of the river Panoya, between the cornfield and the plot of maguey. In hindsight it is not always from the highest point that one sees farthest. From here one sees the orchards and the green rows of vegetables, the house itself with its watchtower and chapel, the corrals and the mountains, the windmills, and in the mind’s eye at least, the trout pool and the waterfalls of Ixayac.
And here, next to the granite cross, was a place in which to have solved some of the mysteries that had always surrounded me. And who is to say that my destiny—a butterfly pursued as by a toddler—would not have altered its course? Solving one of these at eleven I might have refused to leave my real and true half-sister in Panoayan and, like my mother, never left for Mexico in spite of all my plans. Solving it at fifteen, when I returned to find Amanda gone, I might have set out to pursue her through the wilds of the New World as the nun-ensign would surely have done.
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