But for clues, it is to the objects spread before me in the shade of that tree I look now, more carefully than at fifteen when in my distraction I felt more than saw them. Corncob doll. Bird’s nest lined with a blue-green down. Cornflower crown, pressed between the leaves of an old book. The beginnings of my first collection. They were never mementoes, nor did that collection, so much grown, ever serve me in this way. It is closer to the truth to say that I had carried them back home from Mexico as keepsakes, or as evidence against an accusation, though I cannot say what charge I most feared—of having forsaken the past, perhaps, or of emptiness itself. I had not forgotten, but had carried them away precisely so I would not have to remember.
Here it is tempting to see so many lines converging and patterns laid. A wedding tree and a turtle pail, a shady spot in which to sit with Amanda, and to read from Ecclesiastes and the poet Manrique, on the day I first met Magda.
Of Necessity, the imagination of the ancient Greeks fashioned a net, of Fate, a thread. Then what is Destiny?—of the many riddles I’d set myself as a child, this was one of the earliest. And to this, I did arrive at a solution of sorts. If fate is a thread, necessity a net, then a destiny must be found in the weave, in the gaps between. So it seems I have not come so very far since then. It would be better to remember this from now on. Had I done so earlier, it might have come to me why I found Gutiérrez sympathetic from the start—though the rodent chin was but the faintest hint, for in fact my grandfather’s chin was quite prominent. But each had a habit when amused of scratching at the beard below it, and Abuelo’s had once, very long ago, been more red than grey. And if any of what Magda has said is true, there were other things too that might have occurred to me, about my own family, the secrecy in which my uncle’s parents lived, my grandfather’s friendship with them; and to ask what my mother and María knew about the secret poetry of his heart, and the language it was written in.
So if anything was to prove fateful, it was my resolution, leaving Panoayan, never again to look back, at the age of fifteen.
So many fine reasons I had found for this in the works of the famous poets and philosophers. Life is an ever-living fire kindling in measures, being extinguished in measures. Heraclitus. Nothing lasts, says the poet Manrique, and all our lives flow to the sea that is death, such that we may wonder if the past ever was. But it was the story of the poet Orpheus that exerted the decisive influence, for it was precisely by looking back that he had lost the one thing most precious to him.
Here. If there is an answer, still some way out, it is here.
The convent chaplain’s visit this morning brings it back, my doubts, how frail my defences and all my resolutions seem. He had gone to the cathedral for me, to learn what he could about the new developments Bishop Maldonado had warned of. A warning now confirmed. It continues to be harder with friends, harder to pretend. After Vespers Antonia comes into my room and asks me to go for a walk with her. It is so hot, she says casually. It is hot, the heat of mid-summer, and before May is fully out. I am about to suggest it would be cooler in here, but relent and get up from the table at the window.
Down in the courtyard the heat radiates from every stone and column. Down here, at least, one does not smell the canals: a light breeze agitates the smoke of a dozen fires. It is too hot to eat inside. Tables of different heights and sizes have been laid under the trees around the fountain. As we cut across the patio Antonia shifts to that side as though to guard me. I am not sure she even notices. Most of the women have finished eating, the servants moving among them clearing, the young girls chasing each other about, playing at hopscotch, skipping. Strumming a vihuela quietly by the water is a girl I recognize. She could not have been more than five or six at the time but was soon good at her scales. Wearing the habit of a postulant now. Our path takes us quite near.
“Sor Juana.”
Others glance up. Nuns, novices. Not all the looks are hostile. Some sympathetic, a smile or two.
“Sor Juana.”
“Sor Juana.”
“Dando un paseo, Sor Juana….”
“¡Qué calor de infierno! eh Sor Juana?”
I say to Antonia they should not be calling me that. I am a novice now.
“Of course you are.”
I see she is taking me to another part of the convent, through a long arched passageway that leads from the patio. At the end of it the orchards and gardens stand off to one side. A breeze blows here, gains strength as we advance. All down the passageway, along the ledges, clay vessels of water stand; from the ceiling hang water bags for cooling. Simple convection—cool orchard air rushing through to replace the hot, rising from the patio. It is as if, just ahead, someone has opened a door onto the sea.
An arch of soft light before us, more light behind, in the passageway it is all but dark. I pause a moment, to stand in the breeze, lift the rough woollen cowl from my neck. “These things are itchy in the heat. I’d forgotten.”
Wordlessly Antonia turns to take the lid from a large clay jar sweating on the ledge, lifts back the cowl from my head, sprinkles cool water over my scalp. In three months the hair has come back slowly, straight, black, like bristles.
“I feel like a porcupine.”
“You look like one.”
“You’re one to talk. Take yours off.”
Swiftly she stoops to lift the hem of her shift, stops at her thighs. A few years ago, the faint light of the patio well behind us, she would not have stopped at a threat. I reach up to remove her headpiece. She inclines her head. I free her hair.
It is like a roper’s workshop, little finger-length drills and twists of cord. On tiptoe now, I reach up slowly to take down a smaller water jar and in one motion pour it over her head. She gasps. I feel her strong hands at my wrists, watch coils and rills spin from her hair to fall against the light.
“Where are you taking me, ’Tonia?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“So was that.”
“So we’re even.”
“I’m not very good with surprises today.”
It is not too dark to see the change in her expression.“Of course—I’m sorry.”
“No … it’s just this heat.”
“I’m taking you to Vanessa and Concepción for supper.”
I know it is not the whole surprise, and that it has to do with the chaplain’s news, but I had been afraid she was taking me to the locutories. It is not a question of trust. The dread is never far.
“Show me your herb garden while you dry off.” I need a moment, and the detour I know will please her. It is where she grows the herbs and essences she puts in our baths. “If we go to those two like this, who knows what pranks we’ll put them up to.”
We skirt the edge of the orchard along the infirmary wall, faint grey, texture of muslin. The branches nearest us are heavy with blossoms. Something is always in bloom. Now it is the pomegranates. After the herb garden we take the long way around, drawing out the hour, before the quarrel we each know is coming starts up again. Plots of beans and squash, jícama and chayote, past the trellises. I do not know how to say good-bye. But for weeks I have been trying to persuade her to leave. I have some money put by for her and for my nieces, an attachment on the convent accounts. It is not an inconsiderable amount. I have shown her the location of the codicil in the archives, and though she did not want to listen, made her promise at least to inform my nieces of its existence, in the event I should be taken.
We turn at the water tank below the windmill on the roof, blades spinning, water knifing from a clay pipe angled just over the surface, the tank nearly filled.
She must see that it is more difficult for me that they can still threaten her here. Can I not see, she’s asked in return, how cruel it is to say this when I know she is not leaving? No what was cruel was the delusion we could be happy here. There is nothing here for her—there is nothing for her anywhere else. But that is no reason—it is, but I’m not listening. We could start again in secre
t. No, she has her own vocation to follow now. Then name a better place for a woman to write poetry than here—certainly not the house she came from.
But we do not continue. The evening is warm, the first stars are out, and Venus and a sliver of moon. Bats flit through the branches, their cries a glimmer of sound less heard than imagined. And so I walk in the quiet with my not quite sister, not quite daughter, barefoot in the soft, deep earth, sandals in one hand. Left again at the chapel wall, past the refectory, toward the kitchens. Vanessa’s slim form in the doorway. Concepción’s round bulk appearing behind her.
It has been thirty years since my carriage ride with Magda, thirty-eight since the hex in the classroom of Sister Paula, thirty-nine since my father left us. I have resented, hated, then feared the Holy Office of the Inquisition for almost a lifetime, even it seems before I knew what it was, and even now I suspect I may yet find new reasons why. But it seems that there are times when to look back is to see more clearly ahead, for precisely there, where Magda and I neared the end of our first and final journey together, I see another about to begin. A cortège, duly consecrated at the rose-coloured church, sets out from the Plaza de Santo Domingo. In all, four outriders, a wagon and a carriage whose coat of arms bears a rough wooden cross that matches the banner above the iron gates through which the convoy departs. In the wagon, otherwise empty for the outward passage, are implements for digging. In one of the trunks lashed to the carriage roof is a quantity of sambenitos. Inside the carriage will be at least one senior official of the Inquisition. I cannot prevent myself imagining it to be Dorantes, though I have never seen him. But Magda I see clearly enough. And over the past few days and nights, her journey is like a waking dream.
The holy officers with their shovels and sambenitos will not be embarking from Mexico in canoes as I did. But departing from the village on the far shore, where the deadheads lie high on the strand—dry now amidst the flood wrack—the path is the same. There is only one way for carriages and carts to take. At this time of year they should have no trouble fording the river at Mexicaltzingo, to arrive in Chalco by nightfall. Even setting out well before dawn, the cortège will not enter the highest valley before mid-morning. When they turn off the main road, they will be heading east, the mountains towering high above, seeming almost to lean down over the path. Beyond the oaks along it lie orchard rows. Apples and mangoes, peaches, pomegranates. By mid-day the first rays of the sun reach this side of the hacienda, with its square watchtower on the north. And in the watchtower a little bronze cannon. If the day is clear, the sun strikes a stained-glass rosette set high in the chapel face, and in the rosette the image of the angel Uriel framed in gold. It was my grandfather’s idea that should the little cannon fail, the hacienda should be defended by a higher, purer fire.
My grandfather’s first child was born here at the hacienda, and here she was baptized, Isabel. So it is here that the first of the sambenitos is to be raised, up behind the glass, to take the light. And as with the firstborn, so it shall be done with my aunts, and finally a sambenito will be hung in the church in Chimalhuacan where I had my baptism. But there is other work to do here first, once the outriders have unloaded the digging implements.
Recant or refuse. Choose well, choose carefully. The letters are the same, but the sentence now is changed. Recant, and protect the place while betraying its spirit. Refuse, and preserve an idea of justice but see its site desecrated. It is not a dilemma to be solved by a simple defiance. I have come back for a clue, a way to relinquish a fable of truth that once lived here, or that I brought back with me at fifteen. Perhaps I am to find it in a story I ignored then, for I had not let the Poet himself have his say.
When the enchantress Circe sent Homer’s Odysseus into the underworld to know his fate—if he would ever make his way back to Ithaca—she gave precise instructions. Beyond the stream of Oceanus, which forms the outermost limits of the living world, they would find a level shore. Enter Hades’ house by the groves of Persephone. To call the one you seek, the blind seer of Thebes, you must sacrifice a black ram there at the entrance and fill bowls for the bloodthirsty shades who assuredly will come. Odysseus was to stand just within the gates, the ram’s head facing into the Underworld. But as the beast’s throat was slit, he was to cast his eyes back, to Oceanus. Don’t look back is not the injunction of poets, but against one poet by the Judges of the Dead.
After the meal under the trees outside the refectory, as Antonia and I are making ready to leave, comes the moment for the surprise I have been expecting. With a nod at Vanessa, Concepción disappears inside, to return a moment later with it held out solemnly before her: a candle easily the thickness of her wrist and the length of her forearm. To cover my emotion I ask what such a thing could be for, a sure occasion for the sort of ribaldry Concepción tries to shock us with. But the two of them are as solemn as children with a handmade gift—and this gift they have made for me themselves.
“Madre Juana is permitted a candle a week,” Concepción offers. Clearly they have heard something of the chaplain’s news. Knowing them to be my friends, perhaps he has told them, to make me see sense. They are trying to keep me from giving up.
Vanessa too has rehearsed an offering. “Maybe now, Juana, you’ll take the time to learn Basque.”
“How far is Concepción ahead of me?”
“Leagues.”
“For Madre Juana we can make one bigger next week.”
“No this will be big enough. I don’t think Basque so difficult.”
I am eager to be away. We say our good-nights. There is no mistaking Antonia’s elation. I am regretting not having pursued our quarrel in the orchard, now to have to dash her hopes. She carries the candle for me like a spear or a standard clutched in her fist, a gesture of defiance to a patio almost deserted; the women are preparing for Compline.
“You could carry that more discreetly.”
She begins to ask how it would look to be caught with it underneath … then sees that I am serious. I tell her that nothing has changed, that what I said was for Vanessa. For Vanessa, she says, but not for her.
“No ’Tonia, you don’t understand.”
She detests hearing this from me. By the time we reach the cell we are each close to saying things we would regret, and are fortunate to be called by the bells to prayer. She argues now with a kind of desperation, perhaps senses that tonight will be her last chance. What can I still find to say to help her now, how will I explain? It is not so much giving her reasons to leave, but to convince her that she leaves for the right reasons. Once, I had been more persuasive.
The vigil after prayer is less bloodthirsty than it can be. It is too hot for the extremities of piety. Our argument is not long in starting up when we return—I am barely halfway up the steps. It is Antonia who has found a new tack. She agrees to leave—but only if I will. An opening that permits her to take up all the past weeks’ arguments in reverse and turn my own against me. We should be at it most of the night. And so, although she has been accusing me of being cruel to drive her away, it is only tonight that I explain what Bishop Maldonado was anxious to make clear, that my hatred of the Holy Office risks blinding me to the more immediate and perhaps greater danger: an ecclesiastical tribunal, its rules of evidence and procedures entirely at the discretion of the convening bishop, or in this case, archbishop. Unlike the Holy Office, the Archbishop has little in the way of contacts or reputation to cultivate across Europe, so the Inquisitors here are pleased to allow His Grace to take the lead, and will limit themselves initially to deposing evidence. Only after what remains of my own reputation has been destroyed will the Inquisition instigate its own proceedings. It is the tribunal’s composition that Archbishop Aguiar summoned Bishop Maldonado from Oaxaca to discuss. His Grace wants one judge of the Audiencia, to represent the Crown, and wants Church representation at the level of bishop and provincial, particularly since His Grace hopes evidence will be heard that implicates a bishop. Maldonado’s cold relations with
the Bishop of Puebla make him a leading candidate but as my friend hastened to add, they have also given him leeway to decline.
The tribunal will be constituted to investigate errors of doctrine, insubordination, alleged violations of the nun’s vows and the holy sacraments, but also—and most worrisome to my friend Maldonado—accusations of secular and political abuses committed within the walls of a holy sanctuary. What sort of abuses? I wondered. In such times as these, he said, hints of sedition are heard with the same hostility as is the mere suggestion that the Crown has ever been susceptible to private influence. Surely a rarity, I put in, the tribunal constituted to hear, in the same proceeding, not just charges of sedition but also the peddling of influence. A point Bishop Maldonado willingly conceded, to make his own: The Crown, too, will be pleased to let the Archbishop proceed. Evidence, grievances, denunciations of every possible stripe will be entertained—and what will emerge, as much as any particular crime or sin, is a portrait.
And so, I tell Antonia, whatever my success against the other charges, breaking my vow of enclosure is the one I would find impossible to contest.
“Only if you’re caught—we could just disappear.”
“I can disappear in here, ’Tonia.”
“No, Juana. You only think that.”
I answer that the threat of an ecclesiastical trial is what Núñez holds in reserve. He too is fond of surprises. So I have become cruel, it seems.
Maldonado insists Núñez is my only chance. For while Núñez cannot claim to control the Inquisition, he holds sway over the Archbishop. It cannot be stopped once begun. A general confession is the one way to keep it from starting. Bishop Maldonado seems to know nothing about the manuscripts of Manuel de Cuadros.
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