You know there are only two statues of Cortés in all of México?
It is not often we meet in such a place.
Our new home is a desert.
You know México City was once in the middle of a mountain lake?
Like burnt skin.
You know the Spanish soldiers wept to see the Aztec capital? Wept through the gold coins in their eyes.
Your father is a Spanish diplomat?
There are other things I can show you if you like—
Will you stay the night?
Human skin. Eyes of gold. Faces like birds.
Dreams …
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
chorus
Let Heaven’s gates be both flung wide,
for Christ to descend, his bride to rise;
to permit one Sacred Majesty
entry, the other to leave,
let the portals of Heaven be drawn aside.
verses
Rose of Alexandria—
a loveliness transplanted
to gardens of eternity,
of winter ever free:
piteously, for you we weep.
Fragrant waterlily,
flower of the Nile’s inundations,
on whose frondy margins
you shine forth triumphant—
mirror of Heaven, its like in purity.
Morning star,
precursor of the sun,
those elevations that its rising gilds,
your own splendour illumines
with a light more tranquil, nearer the divine.
Ever shining moon,
whom palustral mists
have risen up to darken in eclipse,
but whose Faith, unshaken,
discovers even in her waning, plenitude.
Provident Egyptian,
garland ever blossoming,
descended of enlightened branch
and glorious line,
in sum: beautiful, divine Catherine!
These, oh lovely maiden,
are the emblems that living memory
has impressed upon the legend
with your own gentle seal: you who are
rose and water lily,
moon and morning star.
CODEX: FORGER
Sor Juana’s secretary, Antonia Mora, finds herself ordered to write her own journal. But she has done this all along. For the Bishop of Puebla, she made dutiful report. Except, her reports were deliberately falsified. Like a duplicitous accountant, she has always kept two versions of her books.
I COPY HER WORDS like a parrot incapable of grasping their meaning. And now its mindless mimicry has brought the parrot’s master to her knees. Don’t blame Juana, blame me, this is my doing.
This is to be my punishment. How perfectly it fits. How neatly … in this too, she spoke true—it fits me like my shadow. Isn’t this what she once wrote? Now I’m left to fill the void of her voice’s silencing. Parrot’s imitation of the nightingale—a mockery all the crueller for its sincerity.
I, Antonia Mora, copyist, whore, have read every word you’ve written these past five years, Juana Inés de la Cruz, every verse, every letter. There is not one of your sonnets I can’t recite. How I have slaved to make myself indispensable to you, who raised me up out of the gutter, taught me to think, to give those thoughts form, to write, imitating your flourishes, striving to become your instrument, a projection of your voice, to have you clutch me as tightly as the quill between your fingers.
All I asked was to hear your terms dictated, to catch your thoughts in quivering flight and soar with them an instant aloft. Saint Thomas had five secretaries—I would be the only one you’d ever need!—to be for you a dozen, as you strode across the room spouting verses like a dragon—rhymed arguments yoked to flame.
I pored over your writings, how you formed your letters, each letter a gesture, tracing in their whorls your turns of mind, conforming mine to yours, becoming your forger, a hunched Vulcan to your Venus—you, Juana, taught me these stories. This is what you’ve made me. I am your creation.
At night I would read and reread each day’s work aloud to make my voice more like yours, to hear it as I wrote. At night, I dreamed those soaring thoughts were mine, your grace my own.
How many of your correspondents knew—how many?—where your words ended and mine began? Soon only the most delicate of letters did you even bother to reread. How many times did I finish a phrase, a paragraph you’d started, start a letter for you to polish only to have you say: “Go ahead, ’Tonia, finish it. You write more like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz than I do…. You’ll be a poet one day, Antonia.”
No. Not even you could make it so.
It got so I could see your every thought written in your face—your arching brow for me an entire paragraph, your wry smile a sharp riposte, your pallour a defence, a heartfelt plea. I made myself your paper forgery—deceiving hundreds but the one I made a fool of was me. Listen to me!—even here I echo you. The vulgar wry-necked chatter of Echo’s errant daughter.
Parrot mind in a scarecrow skull—I’ve ruined everything, understood nothing, not a single thought my own….
Thank God Carlos is back today from Florida, just when everything seems lost, back to help me now, lead me by the hand, explain it all to me like a witless child, show me how to make it all better.
But he’s afraid too. I can feel it in his note to her, feel its urgency. Only thinking about him now, so near, do I realize how quickly things worsened once he’d left. What could they possibly have offered to get him to Florida—in his health? Did the Bishop take a hand in it? Is there anything that monster doesn’t have his filthy paws in?
And all of it beginning with the Bishop of Puebla’s sick, secret orders, interrogating me: At what times of day did Sor Juana write? Was she visited by temptation—did she chasten herself? How rigourously, how often? Does she ask for your help Antonia?
Do you watch?
And now this new interest in me, in my scribblings, after all these months. Who is really behind it? If it’s Núñez, is he testing the sincerity of her petition for him to return, or is he gathering testimony for the Inquisition? As an oblate, my one vow is holy obedience. Obey or they keep my dowry and return me to the streets.
I would never see her again.
And just what is it they want me to explain? They don’t need me!—every woman in here is watching Juana’s every movement. Do they think she still confides in me? If only I could make it so, but I’m the last one she should risk talking to after everything I’ve done.
Or is it the Bishop behind all this after all? They say he now has every nun in Puebla scouring her soul for fresh transports to record for his correction. For him to ‘decipher and organize’—as though a convent were a grotto of raving oracles. He thinks after betraying her by my stupidity I can be ordered to do it again deliberately.
He knows I’m a liar! He trained me himself. Is it a forger’s handbook he wants to see? It’s lies he wants, knowing how I ache to tell the truth. I have to lie—but what lies can he use against her? Which truths condemn, which absolve her? Which lies protect and which endanger her?
And do I really believe I can’t be made to give information against her if they want it? Santa Cruz would only have to threaten to tell her how long the reporting really went on….
So I keep two handbooks again—one true, one false. One version to deceive and one to protect. One to mislead, one to bear witness. But when the time comes will I know which one is which?
And what if she doesn’t want absolution? And what if she doesn’t want what’s best for her? They all say they want what’s best for her. You’re just like the rest, copyist.
Don’t make me speak for her … again.
CODEX: TEMPTATION
Carlos receives a letter from Antonia and rushes back from his mapping expedition in Florida. Sor Juana will not see him. She will take no more visitors. Needing as much as Antonia to understand, ever th
e scientist, Carlos too urges Antonia to take careful notes for them to interpret together.
I ASK CARLOS FOR HELP, what does he give me?—he reminds me of our classes, the Mexican painted books. I don’t care about books. The books of the Red and the Black, of knowing and death. I want her to speak to me. The ancient codex is more than a text composed of images. It is like a shorthand notation for a performance that goes beyond speech. Speech is quite enough for me. Carlos tells me I mustn’t be like the Franciscans—me! That I shouldn’t be so hungry to change her that I don’t really see. He can only help me if I will be his eyes and ears. If we’re to understand a phenomenon, have a controlled effect upon it, then he and I must observe it carefully, describe it faithfully. Faithful to what, to whom? To the one I’m to spy on? To the truth, he says. And just what is that, I’m about to ask, when he waves me off: he understands.
Yes he understands but nothing’s changed. They’re all still asking me to speak for her, still asking me for signs to decipher.
Gestures, times of day, colours, scents, weather, situation … but Carlos, how will I know what’s significant?
“When in doubt, record. Get it all. The codex must attempt a complete reckoning. Texts can be burned, contexts … die harder.”
All right I will. Everything. But won’t she see me? Won’t her knowing what I’m doing change what she lets me see?
“One thing I did learn among the Franciscans, Antonia, is that the observer is always under observation.”
She returns from the garden, fingers stained as they had once been with ink. Is she still writing?? Using gardening to cover the traces? Writing secretly in the middle of the night?
Carlos asks if it didn’t look like ink because I wanted it to. He says this calls for a hard-eyed observer.
Juana, what kind of observer do you need? What kind of eyes….
If I’m to record everything, then that includes her words.
Can it hurt to try to make her speak to me? Carlos says not, as long as I continue recording everything else faithfully. But he knows me unable to resist this temptation, this craving to hear her speak.
I’ve started bringing her books, ones Carlos has chosen for me. I told her I couldn’t bear the empty shelves grinning at me like a mouthful of missing teeth. She knows better. What I’m doing is perverse, a test. It’s one thing to stop reading when there are no books left.
Carlos is teaching me, again, I tell her. Can I store the books here? How long can Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz contain her appetite for books Carlos thinks even she has not read?
Not all unread: the first one I bring is Tirso de Molina’s El vergonzozo en palacio. Isn’t this the play with the maid called Serafina and the secretary named Antonio? Have you foreseen all this? Her warm eyes, wry smile. Is that the only answer, a smile? How do I record that? A thousand variations on a smile, a million unsaid subtleties. I CAN’T DO THIS!
I’m not up to this.
Snatches of conversation wrung like diamonds from a mop.
If not a lot, you still speak to others—cooks, masons, gardeners—why not to me? Sure a few words, now and then. Thrilling confessions like: “Good-night, Antonia.” Your eyes glitter with … is that amusement? You know I’ve started watching you while you sleep. A few nights ago, just after three, you find me slumped against the wall next to your open door, sound asleep, notebook in my lap. Some spy!
Carlos, what does red mean? I rush into the locutory overcome by the sensation of seeing her just now in the orchard, standing on a crate, the red, red juice of ripe plums running, intemperate, between her fingers, down the backs of her hands, staining her slender wrists. Juice welling from the corners of her red lips, plum-red runnels like liquid ruby along the cheeks of her laughing face, head thrown back, jubilant … a veiny tracery under the pink shell of her ear and down her nape. Plum-red soaking into the hairshirt’s rough brown wool.
Red, Carlos! What does it mean?
He answers with some dry thing about Mexicans and Egyptians.
I try again. Have I helped you get here?—maybe this is where you want to be. Did you use me then—would you do it again—manipulate me to deceive your enemies?
Do you know I’m keeping two versions of these handbooks?
Do you know which I’ll show to my confessor?
Can the observer change the observed? Does the observer have a right?
Carlos wonders if you wanted me to finish Sor Seraphina, wanted me to send it. To sever your last ties to the Bishop for you. If I’ve been sick with guilt for nothing. Am I a character in a play. Juana? Is my role to betray you? Would you let me do that to you? Do you want them to think you’re some kind of saint? I think at last I will bring her to speak.
“I’m just flesh and blood and breath, Antonia. You, of all of them, should know.”
“But how are they to?”
“I’m counting on you….”
“For what?”
“To tell them.”
Another conversation that never really happened. Words never spoken, never exchanged. At least not her part, this isn’t what she said. But I said my lines and saw her eyes fill with pain. What she’d really said was: Yes, Antonia, you’ve been sick with guilt for nothing.
Should I have recorded this? Conversations that never happened, but they did take place, filled the space behind my eyes while I watched her sitting near me. Is it still a lie?
Does this lie belong more in one version of these notebooks than in the other? Do the observer’s feelings count? Do they change the observer’s eyes, who forever after observes everything otherwise….
Throwing myself against the blank wall of her silence.
Father Arellano asked to see my handbook today, Juana. What should I do?
There’s your vow of obedience….
You want me to show him, then.
An almost imperceptible shrug.
Is she trying to say she doesn’t care? I don’t believe you!
What do I owe her, how am I responsible? Once yes, but still? For how much longer, how much more? Does she need a hard-eyed observer or a soft-fingered heart? Can I give her both …? What does she want, what does she need from me? Are they the same—can’t they ever be?—or always two different things?
Are the people who love her supposed to just respect her silence or interpret it? To fill it in or make her break it? Is understanding it not just another invasion?
Always questions. Ever the answers I make up.
The shades, degrees, gradations of your silences. Silence of the sun spilling across a darkened doorway. Silence behind my eyes, below your belly. Behind sealed lips, what they never say.
At the base of a mountain in the depths of the sea. At the bottom of a flooded mineshaft … a silent, soot-spent coal-seam on a cloud-cast night.
You … the blaze just one unspoken word could ignite.
CODEX: INCANTATION
I AM SUPPOSED TO RECORD only where she goes, what she does. What about where she no longer goes, things she won’t ever do again? Locutory, library, choir …
Am I to do these things in her place? Laugh, read, write, sing. Paint her movements through sacred space … for now a kind of space has opened up around her. The strict routine of places and times that rules the rest of us parts wide now like the Red Sea as she moves through the courtyards to the orchards, the kitchens, the workshops.
And to a degree I am allowed to move with her in that parted space. Less freely, less visibly, but still….
The others scurrying along on their appointed rounds in ruler-straight flights and crossings, while, path eccentric, she wanders among us like an island of ice, the kind Carlos says number as grains of sand in the northern seas. Cool, self-possessed, immense, visible for leagues.
Even in a courtyard criss-crossed with bell-summoned sisters and novices, she is the one the eye now finds and follows.
Carlos tells me what it is that the Bishop is so avidly mining the convents of Puebla for these days: the
biographies of nuns approaching death. Silver or gold, iron or lead?
And what lessons would he have this dying teach? What little treasures is it to yield?
Afternoon, heat abating. She waters plants I’ve installed before her open door for privacy, as our fellow inmates still stroll by so casually. Knowing this, Carlos has given me a rose of Jericho to add to the screen. This is the one she tends most carefully.
We stand together. A moment’s stillness. Suddenly, pigeon wings flap like sheets snapping in the air.
Waking others now. Warbles, frail rumbles … a whole brood of bird calls, unfledged, tries the cooling air—its speed, its draft—fading faintly past.
How could I have ever thought to take refuge in this swamp? Juana mutters, bent frowning over the convent’s architectural drawings. After each rainy season it seems the lines of pillars and beams yaw farther out of true…. Of all her old duties here, the one she’s not relinquished, in fact refuses to, is supervising the construction and renovation works by crews of Indian masons. The Indians are preferred, as the least likely to force themselves upon a nun.
I took a vow of enclosure, I heard her say once to the Prioress, I did not promise never again to speak to a man. And so each day for two or three months each year they come to her. The men huddle, cap in hand. Then—the same thing I saw happen in the kitchens—when she begins to speak to them in their native tongue, dark faces beam, excited glances fly among the new men, bowed shoulders draw a little straighter….
Today, with the season’s rains abated, an old workman I’ve never seen before, tiny, bent, face of leather, kneels before her. The same confusion in both their faces as she hastily bids him stand. The foreman barks something out at him. She helps him to his feet.
The first time I’ve ever seen her uncomfortable among them….
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