Mail is lighter than plate, but stronger only if it can be made more supple. There are so many unknowns. Does Núñez control Magda, or only think he does, or pretend to, and what if Dorantes in the meanwhile finds the very manuscript I only pretend to have, or hope to? And what if I cannot manoeuvre Núñez into betraying what it contains before he detects that I do not have it? And what of Panoayan? For unless I learn to play at his game more deftly than I so far have, and unless Fortune takes a friendlier hand, the ways of the false dilemma and the true lead to the same terminus, and the shades and judges of the dead will have their bowls of blood. Down the path of confession it is Núñez who waits at the pyre to extract my contrition. Down the path of defiance it is Dorantes, with Núñez lashed beside me. The paths are not separate. For one way or the other Magda would have her chapter—and while I may succeed in destroying Núñez, it is a resolution—even should my courage not fail me—not a solution, not an escape. At the end, Manuel de Cuadros did not escape his fate, and far braver than I, could not even cling to his defiance, but changed his mind before the brushwood even fully caught fire. If I am to go there, at least let me have found one resolution I can keep.
For himself, Núñez has a solution—more dangerous than if I had collapsed, yet a path with at least one acceptable outcome. For once I have submitted myself to his power and protection, if it seems I have evidence that may be used against him, it is within the setting of an ecclesiastical trial that he can have the Archbishop negotiate immunities with an Inquisitor General pleased to let His Grace take the lead. And then Núñez will have solved, once and for all, the problem of the missing manuscripts.
I have shared no more of this than I thought strictly necessary to persuade Antonia. But it is myself I have thought to spare most of all, for it can be more disturbing to see her frightened than to face some things myself … she has been my Camilla. She was upset, pale, but on the whole I thought she had taken it well. On even this subject I can be persuasive after all. But well after Matins, when I think she has surely fallen asleep, she comes upstairs in her nightdress to see the new candle. I am caught, sitting at the table by the bed. The flame flutters lightly next to the window open to the west. For the breeze I have left the door open on the upstairs colonnade over the patio.
We talk quietly for a moment or two. She seems tired. There is not much fight left in those hazel eyes. But as she turns to go she looks at my hands and asks if I am starting a new collection. Her face is drawn, the faint white scar from eye to mouth more noticeable. She does not wait to hear my answer.
Good-night, Antonia.
Through the room moves the scent of flowers from the trees by the fountain and the smell of horses from the corrals to the south. I look out over the Merced canal, low now, a solitary canoe slipping under the Monzón bridge, rippling the quarter moon. The dry season is ending. With a little rain, but not too much—one hesitates to ask—and cooler days, the smell rising from the canal will not be so bad. There is a young family on the upper floor of the old house across the street. I think they have just moved here too. I will have to ask one of the sisters on this side. The flower market below is interesting to watch. Funerals, festivals, young lovers. The time, long or short, will pass quickly enough.
With the idle hands that are a source of such anxiety here and new hope to Antonia, I have fashioned from common garden clay a puzzle much as I made once as a girl. The puzzle offers a test of dexterity. The object is to roll a small clay ball, against its natural inclination to fall, up the spiral. A simple spiral tower in miniature, modelled on a diagram of such a puzzle from the territory of Persia. I believe, somewhere in that land I shall not see, one may make a pilgrimage to climb the spiral ramps of temples following this design. Nothing is easier to build, nothing is harder to climb. I climb it now.
Such rousing contortions—such hip sways, such elbow fluxions and wrist rolls. Then as now, just such were mine, that day in the shady spot by the granite cross in Panoayan, as I gave myself over to the puzzles that cannot be solved—or if they can, not with hand and eye but heart and soul. Where I tried so hard not to choose by choosing … everything.
Then, failing, I had thought to put all such childish notions out of my mind. Now it seems incredible that I thought it all behind me. The riddles and puzzles, the alphabets and anagrams, the forms hidden in the land, the house divided against itself, the wars of the past. The lost ages of Man. And I would not have liked to think—no, not at all—that the destiny I had always looked forward to could be woven merely of these, of such emblems and patterns and habits of mind. Just behind me.
Refuse or recant, erasure or silence. Consider well, choose carefully. Perhaps one begins to answer by wondering if it’s been a mistake to think such puzzles only childish things and by asking if the Persians were so very different, and if their spiral temples were only for children.
Down by the river Panoya, windmill blades turn sleepily like pinwheels on a breeze. The shadow of a cedar branch nods over the arm of a granite cross. The sun’s warmth lays a soft sash across my back. Over at the water troughs, the driver stirs, wakes from his nap under the ox cart. A cluster of fresh-picked wildflowers leans against the cross beside me. Beyond it, I notice a clump of weeds, freshly pulled up. The long mound of earth is pocked, subsided in places like bread left out in the rain, like an old hut covered in sod. A green rabbit satchel lies at my knees, its contents spread out among the cones and dried needles before me.
I take up an old book. With a forefinger I bend the corner of a page. It arches like a cat stretching after a nap, trembles in the slight breeze and tugs at me, a sail eager to be launched. At the outer edge of the maguey field a movement catches my eye, my mother’s chestnut mare spinning out trains of dust behind her.
I no longer believe it is fate that brings us to meet here, or not fate in the way I had once understood it, but it is a moment of decision. For Amanda and me it may already have been too late: the nun-ensign did not always triumph. And in spite of everything that went wrong between us, everything we needed to know had been there all along. Amanda and I were cuates, cuates were enough.40 Nor is it any longer so clear that the destiny I chased was so unlike the fate I did too little to help her escape.
Perhaps the two things are only the same—one we see in looking ahead, with hope, the other in looking back.
I feel a kind of peace, letting my eyes wend and stumble in the way of bees over a field of wildflowers—bumbling comets trailing pollen—who in their windings weave a fine canopy of yellow muslin against the sun. The weight in my lap is a comfort. The book, mildewed and waterlogged, opens to where it always does. And yet now I read in the shapes arrayed about me that the keepsakes were not precisely evidence, or not only that—not proof that I had not forsaken the past. Not evidence against a charge, but charms in a magic against loss itself.
And for this, for us, it is still not too late. Mother passes quite near, riding hard. Her hair and the horse’s long tail run together on the wind gusts, like rain driven through a fountain. The ox cart rattles and groans along the side of the house.
What has changed is not so much the evidence but that I let myself remember it. I have heard her sing to Diego’s baby. I know this voice, and that it is not only Xochitl who has sung for me in the night. My father’s granddaughters … I have heard this, too, such an odd way of putting things. I have the fresh flowers at my side, the fresh-picked weeds. It was my mother who chose this spot for him because I could not bear to choose. Even angry and hurt I knew she had chosen perfectly. If there has been a piece of evidence still lacking, it is perhaps knowing a little more of how a woman can need a man, and the need to be fearless to make another proud. And now I have my letter back from Uncle Juan. The swarm of thoughts, the memories that have returned me here, even as they had once driven me down from Ixayac, ease … Past the sentry box the spokes falter and at the grassy stream, almost stop. The driver snaps the traces twice down hard on the oxen’s backs. The I
nquisition cortège waits for it to cross. The wagon staggers on, makes its laggard way over the bridge. No, for this, it is not too late. And for us, that moment is now.
I gather up my things. I get to my feet.
I go into the house … to discover some small part of what my mother knew of love.
Brother Francisco Manuel de Cuadros came to the locutory only once, a few months before his arrest. Carlos had given me some warning of what to expect. They had not seen each other for almost five years. He was small even next to Carlos as they came in, Carlos in black, he in his faded brown cassock, ragged with the quantity of its mendings and his poverty. Fine sandy hair, what little hair he had, scorched white at the tips, his skin mottled by the sun. The impression that has lingered was of sand—the hair, the skin, the cassock lightened by the elements. Carlos had been shocked by the change in him. I remember his quiet, the slight tremor in his hands. But perhaps Carlos meant the eyes, a colour one would have said once blue, as of an unclouded sky whitened ahead of a dust storm or fire. Or this is how I remember them now.
He and his fellow Franciscans had been two years among the Maya, earning their trust before being allowed to meet the priests of Votan. “It was an archive,” he said quietly. “Thousands and thousands of manuscripts. Like those we know here, but more detailed, more intricate, as if the work of great painters, but these were painting canvasses of text. Speaking figures….” It took two more years to learn the basis of reading them.“It felt like watching not just all of a literature but all of an art burn at once.”
His whitened eyes in the mottled face had a staring quality even when averted. The painted books piled in the square in Valladolid had been like a small mountain, a pyramid. He had broken faith with his order and hidden a hundred, for what use was the science of reading them if there were no books to practise it upon. But choosing them had proven worse than watching them burn.
After the Franciscan’s death, and when it seemed at last safe for Carlos to make his way back to the city, he and I vowed to each other that should any of those manuscripts ever come into our hands we would defend them with our lives. It was twenty years ago. We were younger. It was an emotional time.
During most of that visit Fray de Cuadros had kept his eyes just slightly down, as if something moved on the floor behind me. I am accustomed to such things in one form or other. They all perhaps learn this at seminary. But I was sure then it was neither in fear nor in distaste, as I like now to think it was not in shame. It seems to me tonight that simply because Manuel de Cuadros expressed contrition as the smoke was rising to his eyes, this does not mean, after all, that he did not keep to some secret decision or pledge. I cannot know what it was, but I like to imagine that for him too there was a place that had inspired it. A place from his youth, or somewhere in the mountains of the south, a waterfall, a village of faces, a text on the wall of a ruin.
But a resolution made in strength and not against himself.
There are two small crosses now at the base of the cedar tree. The cross of granite I have seen, the one of obsidian I have only pictured there. Even five years ago, though I had a bishop’s dispensation to go, I did not see why I should, with everything I had loved there gone. The site I chose because she chose it for him. And because it is the place I would choose also for myself. It is a place where with every step you take, you walk in halls of jade.
But the stone—this I chose for her. A stone that is also a glass. It is one of an uncommon beauty, native to our region. We do not always get good-bye.
Among the last of the shades to come to the bowls was Achilles. There, Odysseus began to sing his praises, of his fame among the living and the glorious fashion of his death, but Achilles silenced him, with this: It were better to serve as slave to the poorest of the Living than rule as king among the Dead. Recant. And yet, as I turn this puzzle in my hands, I wonder if I have returned to relinquish a notion that I have too long held, or just perhaps, to detect the fable in theirs.
At the margins of the living world there is a secret spring, the origin of all things, and some have called it Oceanus. And Oceanus … the ocean river that forms the outermost rim of Achilles’ shield, flows in reverse. One does not look back leaving Hell. But being there, one looks back if one ever hopes to emerge.
And among all the living, the one Achilles looked to was Odysseus, for news of his son.
Erasure or silence, defiance or submission. There are puzzles to which the hardest answers last, the earliest endure. At Xochitl’s knee I had once learned that Time itself could be looked upon as a spiral. Hold it up, turn it in the hand. Time as a spiral, memory as a cutting plane: the truths it reveals follow from where and how one begins. Roll the ball up the spiral again: the sum of all possible angles is as true as a fable, but the One Truth in the sum is not for the reckoning of Man. Much is lost upon us, a few things remain. Remember these—with pleasure, remember again … my mother firing off an arquebus during a jaguar attack in the dead of night … the angels in the library. And there was a moment after a dinner, when together we almost laughed.
As it is with magic charms, so is it also with good-byes. Or with refusing even choice itself, so as not to lose the path not taken. But if I have not lost him, and not lost them, it is not because there is something I have not let the holy officers strip from me, or even because the sod remains undisturbed in a shady spot beneath a cedar tree. We do not always get good-bye, but moments such as these. And who is to say if Time itself can take these back from me.
Heraclitus has written that one never enters the same river twice. But the greatest of rivers and the smallest streams share a destiny, however obscure it may remain as they run to the sea. Though their currents be muddy or clear, shallow or deep, though they run swift in the shadow of their rives, yet do they bear up, in the trains of their passing, gold and ochre and russet leaves. To spin slowly, dreamily, on their surfaces.
And even as the Nile brings the cargo of her seasons in tribute to the sea, these, all these have come down to me through the intervening years, and down through this night … as afterthoughts.
It is almost light, the square of sky pales beyond the window. Beneath it on the table, my collection of two. The newest, the most ancient; the oldest, the first. One I have made with my hands. The other I have brought from the convent archives. A battered book, the husk of its bindings split. I take it into my lap one last time before returning it to its hiding place in the shelves. I close my eyes….
What is a childhood but the end of all past times forgotten, beginning again? And to leave the highlands of childhood for the valleys and currents of one’s own time is to lose something akin to prescience, to lose sight of the far ranges at our life’s end. Now I cannot see ahead an hour and yet, looking back, how curious to remember, only now, the place where I was born at the hacienda in Nepantla: the gaps in the walls, the breezes blowing through, the stars … a hut of pale fieldstone that the people of our region sometimes called the cell. Remember with pleasure, remember it all again, for yourself, remember for them.
More than by the little of the world I knew, my mind has been shaped by books. So it is not so strange that I had come to think of my own life as a book, strongly bound, beautifully made. I had never doubted I would find there my legend and my destiny, and even if its end escaped me until the last page, the last day, I had never doubted it would on that day feel necessary, even familiar, the page already marked. And though I now see at last the briefest glimpses of that text, its language I know well. I learned it as a child. A broken book is still a book. To be mistaken in this is to make of it another kind of destiny, to succumb to the patterns already woven there, even of broken threads. Or, I had thought them broken, but the body offers up its own evidence. For as night ends, I feel that ache even now, so fresh … and in my legs, a honey-gold thread of pain.
What is the path that is no path, to an end that is a return? Each time without precedent, to an embrace that is a relinquishment.
>
What is the collection that cannot be taken, the text that cannot be erased? The silence that cannot be broken.
In the silence in the darkness there is a spiral stair. It leads up and out and into the night, where at a crossroads in the desert, at a secret spring, an unknown god waits, hidden even as the soul is from itself.
And offers us water.
But here I let fall the invocations of the famous poets, the herbs and the potions, the magics, the charms and enchantments, the brilliant feasts and the sable rams. And this last charm with the battered spine, which has been my life, this too do I lay aside. For there is other work, and it will soon be light.
To this alone do I commend me.
This alone do I invoke,
truly,
that in a world of living,
this world knew not
its deity.
I REED
IN THE YEAR 1 REED, it is told, the precious twin came down to live among the people of the centre, he who would one day be called Our Dear Prince Topiltzin 1-Reed Quetzalcoatl.
In that time they say the manner of his coming was a thing of great wonder; wondrous and mysterious was his advent. His mother, LadySerpentSkirt, lay dreaming. Dreaming of her king and husband, Mixcoatl, doing battle in the west. And in that dream he sent her an emerald. She woke to find it on her tongue.
Waking she swallowed it.
For four years did Topiltzin grow within her like a promise. For four more did he struggle to come forth. But when at last he had succeeded, when at last he had broken free of her she was already dead.
As though he were her own, another serpent raised him. And though he could not know it yet, she raised him an orphan: for in the night of his mother’s dreaming, his father had died in the western desert, betrayed by his brothers. So also was Topiltzin called Son of the Lord of the Dead Lands.
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