“Yes.”
“Presto, obstruction unblocked. So I guess their main problem, and ours, is waiting out there right now.”
“The press.”
“Beautiful young girl from a good family, a distinguished immigrant family. Desperate call to a news desk implicating unnamed university professor—oh and some day, Professor, when this is done, maybe you can explain to me why she did that. Thought they had a juicy society scandal, did our journalistic friends. Grad photo of victim now lying near death.
“A picture like that in the paper touches a nerve. It gives the body politic a toothache. The people want an accounting. But how is it possible, they ask, that there’s been no crime? The cops are already in a tight spot. Even before they maybe turn up rumours about the father they don’t want to follow up on.”
“You’ve heard something.”
“Nothing I’d want you to know.”
“He’s asked the police to drop the investigation.”
“No need. That’s what I’m telling you—nothing but bloody noses—”
“And bad press.”
“There’ll be a column or two about lax enforcement, slippery lawyers, liberal laws. But what more can they do? Stir up the local hard-line-on-crime zealots, I guess. Take some tougher angles on crime stories for a while.” Eric Heffner shrugged and spread his hands complacently. “Basically, they’re out of angles.”
“It just blows over.”
“On one condition—she recovers. A coma’s a precarious thing.” He looked apologetic. To this point I’d done everything he’d asked of me, if reluctantly. He rose and started shuffling files into his briefcase. “So, let’s go meet our friends in the media.” I hadn’t moved. He shot a glance in my direction.“I’ll do what I can to snub their leash.”
“The Foothills Hospital called yesterday.”
He eyed me warily. “Why the hell would they call you?”
“Her doctor.”
“The girl’s? We agreed you were not to go there.”
“A Dr. Elsa Aspen. Beautiful voice.”
“Did we have an agreement or not?”
“I haven’t gone since we talked.”
“Then how?”
“A nurse was there when they brought her in. Brought Beulah….”
“Go on.”
“She mentioned me to Dr. Aspen for some reason.”
“What did they want?”
“The doctor’s been following things in the papers.”
His left hand made a cycling gesture: speed up the reel. “Make this simple for me, will you Professor?” His head jutted forward, mouth slightly open, a frown directed at my lips.
“She thought I might have some familiarity with Beulah’s diaries.”
“A shrink? No!—you see, this’s exactly the kind of thing—”
“Would I be willing to get together for a few minutes?”
“As your lawyer I am advising you against this.”
“In complete privacy.”
“Formally advising you.”
“A chat.”
“Emphatically no.”
“Away from the hospital.”
“I’m telling you. Listen to me.” He shifted as though to block my exit.
“They need my help.”
CODEX: TEMPTATION 2
WHAT MORE CAN I FIND TO SAY TO SOMEONE who doesn’t want to go on speaking? Find something!
What can I bring to bring her back to me? Dreams, memories, news of the world—echoes from the streets.
Check the cellars. Make a list.
A scrap of paper on the floor by a shelf—whatever it says, it’s in Nahuatl … Carlos has suggested I ask her to read it for me. Another of our pathetic temptations.
So, a scrap of verses in her handwriting. When was it written, hours ago or months?
Her stained fingers. There are a hundred and eighty-nine books and manuscripts hidden in the archives. I wonder for the thousandth time, is she writing again—or still? And in the language of her girlhood? Is there ink concealed beneath the dirt? Is she working in the gardens to conceal it? Again no answers.
Eyes enormous now, luminous, whites stark in their sockets. Glossy ridge of cheekbone, drawn thin, like her clavicles, her sickle-boned hips—skin stretched tight like a canvas before the brush’s first shy kiss. Keyed in ivory and bone like a clavichord too delicate to play.
Cheekbone ridge drawing down to tanned hollows. Her jaws’ muscular swell. Curved, cracked lips. Hairshirt fustian like a tamarind pod. She looks each day more like an Indian, a gaunt fieldhand.
Strong still, I thought. Only an occasional unsteadiness after climbing stairs.
I told myself.
This morning she has trouble getting out of bed.
Asunción is bringing the poultices. I will spread them out like grape leaves across her cicatrices.
Dreams. I can tell that she really is listening to me whenever I tell her my dreams.
Dreams must seem as real to her as anything in this nightmare.
Through dreams I will reach you then. First telling you mine, then making mine yours. I will reach you, I will fight through to you. I will make you see me, hear me.
Hunger scrimshaws your ivory form. Some long-dead navigator’s graven altar—a map, some enchanted isle, its rough topography in bone.5
Not a good day. She cannot get up at all. Feverish, she asks to hear me play. Sweating and cursing our weakness, refusing help, Vanessa and I drag the clavichord all the way from the locutory across the convent up to her.
From now on I will play every night, as she lies down to sleep. Whether she’s listening or not.
But she always seems to be listening to something—a voice, a melody?—if almost never to me….
Today much better. Everything back to normal, if that’s what this can be called. Only the slightest unsteadiness in her hands.
Núñez is coming! Next Sunday—the report reverberates through the convent cells like a shot. As though it’s been confirmed—it hasn’t been confirmed?! My growing desperation. He will be here next week, ten days … then it’ll be too late, it will have started.
To bring Juana news of the world I need to leave this place! … just an hour or two each day. Nothing has ever prevented me. Permission of course I need. The Prioress has already awarded me a lot of liberty, but this?
Enter the womanly conspiracies of kitchens: Vanessa calls on me to join Asunción for the shopping when old Concepción pulls up lame. A recurrence of gout is blamed….
As we approach the market, Asunción turns to me and asks, well what are you waiting for?—just be back in two hours.
Free!—that’s how it feels, though I know it really isn’t. The eyes of men all over me, the oldest game still awaiting me like a dog lolling at the door.
That first day I just walk and walk, hardly seeing, just feeling the wind all over me.
Carlos says I must make your America sing to you like a siren. Just as you’ve made it sing for me. But what does someone like me have to offer you? What clumsy lyrics can I lay at the feet of someone who has brought the world so much beauty?
I offer you every sunny morning since the day we met …
Every rain-laved dawning these past five years. Each high-waisted noon, each stooping dusk. Five years of full moons high-risen. Five years of brief-locked eyes and stolen glances quickly broken. Of breathless grazings, staged accidents and soft collidings. Of slow-drawn baths, petals swanning across a tile-bound tub. The plump pad and whisper of languid towellings.
Antonia Mora, you will make a poet one day. No Juana. Not even you can make it so.
At the market I buy a little bracelet for her wrist. Will she accept, will she refuse to wear it? A string of little silver bells and the shells of tiny snails, a talisman to chime and charm and faintly mutter, to fill the silence as she works.
The bracelet was my second choice. I knew she would never wear the brooches I saw the Mayans selling: live scarab beetles, pierc
ed and tethered to a pin by a thin, golden chain….
According to Carlos, in the rituals of the ancient Mexicans the brush of certain words across the vocal chords can be more important than their meaning, and the soft shush of shell anklets more significant than a word—gesture translated into sound, word into thing. Meanings that change, subject to the occasion.
Núñez’s approach, murmurs massing like clouds. Ten days, now five. Five years of our lives telescoped down through these five remaining days. I refuse to let her out of my sight for one instant. And even as I feel her drawing away from me, I touch her at every opportunity.
For the first time in two years I sleep in her bed, sleep there each night, holding her. She strokes my hair.
Tell me another Carlos … another engine of torture. The cap they call the Cat’s Claws. Carlos submits to describe it.
Another morning. Another day gone. A rising tide of panic. And fury—what is left to say? What’s left that she’ll still listen to from me?
And so the game begins. A game she seems to find touching in a way I can’t quite grasp. Each day back from my staged outings to the marketplace, I tell her a series of lies—fables, say, with at least one containing a grain of truth.
The game: guess what I saw today. Heard, said, did, touched, smelled, tasted. Guess which life I lived, bore witness to.
(For you, I mean.) This part goes unsaid.
Close your eyes….
… The wobble of a newborn colt …
A single thread of tobacco smoke rising fine, then fanning into a plume that bulges and checks and eddies as my finger passes through …
The starched whisk of a black-pinioned bird past the window, fan tips across stone …
Cold stone floor against my back, pulquería air a fermented stew, raucous songs, taste of pulque wrapped viscous right round the tongue, like a burnt milk’s clotted skin….
Holding out my closed hand as if to drop a little coin into hers, I ask, guess Juana, which of these things I’ve brought back for you.
Three days. I can’t think, can’t see properly, a kind of film before my eyes. I can’t help her, can’t help anyone like this! We’re running out of time—hundreds of possibilities to try. Find the word that breaks the spell. Makes her look up and see….
Carlos help me! His face haggard, drained of colour. The last few days of waiting are harder on him. At least I get to see her. All he can do is come to me, every day now, and wait.
Maybe the problem, Antonia, is that you’re looking for a single truth. Juana said something to me once—this should be interesting to you, who play the clavichord so beautifully. Look at the clavichord’s harmonics. We approach the truth not head-on but in tangents, he says.
What’s that supposed to mean?
Press the keys. The metal tangents strut across the fretted strings, producing not a single note but a chord. The same set of strings, depending on where the tangents strike them, can be made to play several different chords at once….
Tangential truths. Harmonics keyed to chord and discord. Gradually comprehensible to the patient ear….
No. I am running out of time.
Guess, Juana. Guess what happened on the way to the marketplace. What took place, fell beneath time’s relentless sway.
The gravel rasp of scissors slicing through a plait of hair.
All the colours called green.
The sensations called pain.
Shark-skin roughness of a young guard’s emery cheek, there at the top where a woman’s thighs first swell to meet.
Sound of a fist opening, frisk of fingernails across a callused palm.
Smell of poverty and darkness, low-ceilings. A public executioner sitting, leaning over his mother’s bed, alcatraz lilies crushed in a pale, muscled fist, rust-red loam beneath his broken nails. The soft plat of white petals striking the stone floor.
Against a hill in the middle distance, a torch flickering forgotten under the noon-day sun.
Guess.
How can you bear to have Father Núñez be your confessor again? To have the same confessor as the Archbishop?
A ghost of a smile crosses your lips—you think it’s ironic, don’t you. Well I call it sickening! Do you want to have to tell him your innermost thoughts, your dreams, your every project—about Isis? Tonantzin? About … but you’ve just seen I can’t quite bring myself to mention Sappho’s name. Not after what I’ve done.
Juana you know he’ll go running straight to the Archbishop with everything you say. I’m shouting now: So when Núñez arrives from confessing you, will the Archbishop smell you on him, over the odours of their own so-piously-unwashed bodies?—stench of sulphur and cheese. Will Núñez use the scent of you to stir that madman into a helpless frenzy? Goat eyes rolling back toward his heaven, nostrils quivering with dragon-stench—the groin-thickening odour of Eve—his own scabby back the dragon’s scales—
Flail, Jesuit, flail.6
Seven to eight, the longest hour of the day, the hour of attending to our special penances and mortifyings. First the evening bath, its fragrant joys for me, if not for her, bound up now in the agonies to follow.
What am I becoming?
She seems to have lost all sense of privacy. Lets me see everything. Is it because she feels all America watching? Lets me draw her bath, dry her back and minutes later watch it lacerated anew. And then cover it with poultices.
It’s hard to admit this, harder still to write it, but for all the horror I feel at the spectacle—for all the nightmare rhythms I will later rap out in my sleep to the flail’s evensong melodies—for all my UNSPEAKABLE DISMAY … the sight is now less pitiful to me than seeing the other sisters doing the same thing.
In all the panic and confusion and desperation of these last few days—so strange it feels to being saying it, another little betrayal—but I find the sight now almost calming.
So what kind of monster does this make me?
Her floggings are as severe as any of the others’ here, if anything, harder. And harder by the day. The blood just as red, on that frail back. It’s not that I’m not afraid for her. I am, I’m terrified. But unlike hers, and more heart-breaking—I don’t know why—the light I see in their eyes is rapture, a rapture of the spirit, stoked by each stroke, each barbed cut.
Hers is a kind of cold fury, not rapture, a fire of will or reason that nothing of this world can dominate.
Her soul’s rapture I’ve seen at other times—out in the gardens, and at night under the stars.
Why should I find hope in this?
Hardly sleeping, nocturnal, she sits at the window to await the sunset. And at the door to watch the moon rise smoothly away from the tower above the chapel dome.
And I, hovering a few feet back from her.
The last full day, do something….
Morning. Shutters thrown back, warm breeze sifting through the cool rooms.
A dragonfly’s high clicking like the snap of twigs, or pebbles against a window.
Sorting through the remaining manuscripts of her poetry hidden in the archives, cloaked now in dust and neglect, searching for anything to trigger any reaction. Reckless now—what’s left to lose? I copy a scrap from her Empeños to read back to her. A fragment she wrote for the occasion when the Archbishop was first welcomed to Mexico City.
The arrival of our joy
Was the joy of his arriving
I’ll try even cruelty. I can justify anything. So I read it out for her.
Record it then, the flinch, the rueful twitch of cheek.
So who’s her jailer now—them or me?
Noon. Through the trees, the slippery glimmer of fountains shaped like crosses, surface broken by the preening of noisy birds.
I can think of nothing to say. Nothing to do.
Dusk. Along the south wall at the main-floor windows, the level where the envied servants sleep, unannounced visitors slump against the bars … a lover’s coaxing lean, cajoling fingers trace the black iron that
bars him from the sister of his dreams.
Did you never once sleep down on the main floor, Juanita, before I came to live with you?
Guess. Please. I went farther this time. Out into the country for you.
Close your eyes….
Lying on your back, looking at the sky … the instant when you wonder if it is the mountain drifting, not the clouds.
The hour spent registering all the fickle changes in the wind—pressure, direction, urgencies, temperatures, constancy.
A warm wind’s soft worry as it eddies past the ear.
Smell of moss-cloyed clay, dense, a carpet.
Guess.
Waking from a nap to a faint thrumming, a pressure, the faintest snapping, like fingers calling a distant servant to attention—the hummingbird’s reclining hover, shimmer of dawn like oil across green feathers. Head-dipping shift from hover to dart—
Aerial collision of the hummingbird with dragonfly daubed the same shimmering green, turquoise tail, green-chalk patina of its tiny skullcap…. Both aerialists stunned by the collision, alighting on adjacent flowers—one red, the other shell-pink.
Guess.
Report of a cannon shot like tight twine fraying along a jagged mountain face, then shredding, gutted, across a swaying treetop reef.
I look at you and see the years we’ve been together, all the vanished things rendered and surrendered … but, now, at least you’re listening. Gently …
Guess.
The eager clamber of baby crocodiles towards a piece of meat.
One small bird’s convulsive chirping, its song a hiccup, a wracking birth contraction. Head’s ducking, knees’ splayed flexions, pivoting on tiny brittle feet ninety degrees—a quadrant at a chirp. One whit fiercer would surely jerk it headlong from its perch….
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