Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  POSTCARDS FROM THE CLOISTER

  [22 Dec. 1994. Mexico City]

  If I can’t find her here, at least let me restore his eyes to loss….

  Dear Don,

  Donald Donald it’s all so clear I can see your house from here, so safensound—I just spent my first day in her convent. Her claustro is a university now! … how could I not think of you …

  no.

  Don Wanton,

  The weather is here, wish you were beautiful—

  How I wish you weren’t.

  fuck.

  Donald,

  Excuse the scrawl, I may have to learn to write to you always with this left hand of darkness. But nevermind that—I have slept in Juana’s bed! at the hacienda in Panoayán. I’m friends now with the caretakers there, friends everyplace, the whole country especially here in this huge Mexico a city to walk anywhere at all hours of the night and find nothing but friends now that I have eyes to see … spectres of kindness, friendly shapes circling in the gloom …

  Dear Dear Donald, suddenly the work is going so splendidly it’s clear to me now, there were so many things I couldn’t understand, but here … her convent it’s not a T-shirt shop mausoleum of maudlinity but a real place where people work—cafeterias a library, carpenters plumbers secretaries—they said it would be closed a month but yesterday the gates were gaped and again today for Christmas parties. And maybe they’re drunk the same two guards as before they don’t care who gets in anymore. Even me.

  I’ve been afraid to come here after the things I’ve seen done to her—you’d call it Claustro-phobia, wouldn’t you—but this is a university for women’s studies and Sor Juana studies! and four hundred thousand books Núñez will never get to censor—so let the bookswallower choke, let them clog shut his gluttonthroat. And her chapel is a theatre now—plays to make the Archbishop’s worms turn putrid in his grave.

  She is everywhere! Everywhere I turn. I am desperately happy here. Have you ever been? Can you understand what it means?

  To me.

  A wind I let blow unblocked—unstopped unstoppable—through the hole in my chest.

  [23 Dec. 1994]

  Estimado Profesor,

  I come to a convent and find a university. I come for her and get you. You are welcome at every one, but not here—any university but this. You come here to me unbidden unwanted. Once I gave you power over me, now how do I get it back, dispel this spell I’ve cast? Let these letters conjure you like a voodoo doll that I can finally bury in the palustral ooze. My little salamander doll, axolotl—fin-tailed, feathergilled. Salamander do you breathe water or air or fire? Do you walk or crawl, or fly or dive? Where do you really live? What can you still see through those nictitating lids?

  But oh I can give you back your eyes your second sight! lost potency of your squandered seed. When it’s finally and completely over I’ll bind these letters all in a bow—enwrap involve enfold, my little amphibian, and send them all to you. So you see yourself through my eyes for a spell. A privilege I promise you. Something special.

  Then, you can bury them yourself. Bury you, bury us. In the rosegarden of your Euclidean showhome. Or maybe under the jacuzzi deck where we lay one whole night through, watching the stars spin slowly over us.

  Remember us?

  I want to be the one to give you back your eyes.

  When it’s too late.

  Gentle Reader …

  So how then shall I write thee? What will be the tone for the four hundred letters never sent—our lost correspondence. Did you know all but two of Juana’s letters are lost? Out of thousands…. How could this happen? She wrote to everyone, constantly—Europe’s leading minds and they to her.

  As I have you.

  So shall I not play Héloïse to your Abelard? Let us in secrecy wed the epistolary to the apostolic—our scarlet inks swiftsped

  on wingbeats of systole and diastole

  coursing o’er the earth in the hearts

  sparrow chariot

  Does it really matter now, Abelard, who is whose vesicle and is there such a vas differenz? Shall we not cut through the chaste?—as a Samurai slices through peasants, to test his edge—but this time we’ll bury deep, so very deep, the hatchet’s double-blade that it never never comes loose again.

  [24 Dec. 1994]

  Gentle Reader,

  I can admit it now, Donald. Even to you. I have failed. Failed her, so utterly. There that wasn’t so hard but can I make myself mail this to you? You told me so, didn’t you. All along.

  But you didn’t tell me how it would feel.

  All that’s left me now is poetry … to you. I lied. I didn’t come to find her, can no longer hope for that. But what I didn’t want, didn’t expect to find was you. Here. Of all places, you, in all places. I wasn’t ready yet. For this last cruelty.

  I have looked for her in books, and museums and now this convent—in the patios, the corridors, the cells. Even in the kitchens. I do not find her. In the fountains, on the roof, in the stars.

  I do not find her.

  I go into her chapel … where she must have prayed and raged … a hundred shades of grey this place, so beautiful and dark and cool. And images of her all over, paintings centuries old a hall of mirrors reflecting her back to me in oils everywhere I turn I turn.

  I do not find her.

  I have lost the melody. The precious voice I always heard so clearly in my ears. As I wrote for her. Why has this been taken?—what does why matter now?

  I have come to learn. To find her silence beautiful. Hear her absence with my eyes of wonder.

  She stood here—kneeled I know on this X marks the cross of nave and transept. Here on this icy floor where now I lay me down at last before her altar beneath her dome my upturned face—rising up and up from out this open chest a mothgrey shade.

  And echoing faint and thin, a little thread of melody … one bow, one frayed string … that I kindle, kindle, on the blue, curled excelsior of breath.

  [26 Dec. 1994]

  Gentle Reader,

  I’ve made a new friend at convent camp! she’s a friend of Guido-the-guard who found me, flagged—just fit to toe-tag by the chapel altar. She’s a medical historian a doctor a Sor Juana scholar and so beautiful! So gentle with a scalpel she asks what did they put on my hand in the mountains—no no in Panoayán—was it a compress of spiderwebs? she thinks maybe it saved my arm—and why isn’t gangrene green?

  She wouldn’t let anyone take me to a hospital. I’m staying at her house—Christmas almighty, she won’t let me go back to the hotel—una merry caridad—and I lie in her bed afloat in a fever sailing on a gull’s dream, wanting to believe. And she takes the most careful care of me—on San Jerónimo Street! yes the same as the convent, just down the next block. Across the Merced Canal, long gone now. Quiet calm and shadytreed … a house in her family for over a century, except for her now, empty …

  I know she too is desperately happy.

  Her office is downstairs. Her patience her virtue her patients are women from the Claustro mostly. She laughs calls it the convent infirmary. Treating Sor Juanitis has become a medical specialty with me, and laughs at this because she needs to. So badly. I know she is lonely, lonelier even than me, Gentle Reader, lonely maybe as you.

  We’ve talked for two days straight about everything. Her name is—no I won’t share her, not with you. Call her ‘S.’

  But don’t be hurt I won’t tell S about you either. Fair’s fair—for you are my voodoo doll my Gregory my volcanic godling of sticky seed, not hers.

  [27 Dec. 1994]

  Gentle Reader

  Last night S and I watched the notorious lesbian film on Sor Juana Y yo la peor de todas† in her bedroom. S insists I, B, open my mind to what film could be. And she is amazed and so kind at the same time I don’t know the documentaries of Studio D—what? how can I not know these Canadian women filmmakers with the NFB? Never heard of them. But how can that be?—not even The Burning Times, bewitching witch
hunt trilogy? But S still has no idea how ignorant B can be.

  We have a copy in our library, B we must watch it together soon. I have watched it a dozen times. The witch hunts, the trials. If women working together can take back literature, then why not film as they do? Okay why not I say and we’re talking about writing a screenplay—I’ve started it for her in my head I think I could start writing again. I’ve lost the music but I can still see / can read the score of the Limping Kings—Horus Quetzalcóatl Oedipus Achilles—thorns in their paws, nails through their feet.

  Maneating savagery for S and B to capture for the first time on film. For Mutual Life of Omega.

  She is working on a film project—the story of plague told through the lives of history’s great women. She’s asked me to work with her she teaches me about film and I talk and talk like never in years … about myths and Nietzsche my favourite comedian. Amor fata!—love your fate, he cries on his pale lips of a ravished bride. I want to make her love him as I do—how he hates stodgy Plato for making the ideal realer than real, whiter than white. Are we God’s greatest mistake or is God ours? asks funnyFreddy. Of course we mean Nature not God but the joke is still on us. We are the vacuum Nature abhors. An ice age in the flesh. And O how we spread.

  Next B asks S then whom—Hume?—do we blame for making abstractions unreal? As if the contendings of image and word / mind and heart—warring twins LadyLord 2—severed at the ankle at birth weren’t real, just true.

  But alright S if the Fifth Sun must end with the apocalypse of the disembodied image victorious—hail, winged victory Nike!—then let our swan song, our last horror flick go beyond film’s brute dumbshow to a new hieroglyphics: the codex of our nemesis—just us, S and B—knit ourselves a mail of pure abstractions, filmically.

  We’ll make the filmglyph for Progress, let’s see … the razed forest. For Hubris, the golf tee. For Duplicity, the slave ship. A g-string for Victory. Accidia—the parabolic antenna.

  And for the most abstract and ethereal Purity, a gaspowered shower.

  So much much more than symbols, these are the shapes of abstractions in the flesh.

  [28 Dec. 1994]

  Gentle Reader,

  Better much better today. Strong enough to stand, walk a short way. Ring around the block, down to the convent. Help S a little around the house. She’s telling me about all the incarnations the Claustro’s taken since the Revolution. When they ransacked Old Mexico’s convents and closed them down. One by one.

  Her convent as stable. Military hospital. Mechanic’s shop. Discotheque.

  Once two artists took it over, made a huge studio. Gave themselves Aztec names. Dr. Atl and Nahui Ollin—Doctor Water and the Fifth Sun. Across the street from her convent there’s a fashion boutique now, called Vanidades. Next to that in a building as old as the Inquisition is an auto museum sponsored by Nissan. Auto-da-fé that restores your faith in Technology, with power steering power brakes, cataclysmic inverters. A friend here taught me if you can’t learn to laugh this place will kill you. Quick. I’m trying to learn this.

  I already know I will not find her, but here her absence is piled in every stone. So let it be her absence that keeps me company. How will I learn this? this art, extremely well…. And how can I explain, even to myself?—the pain of being here in her convent truly helps. Consoling contradiction in defeat that is this place. It’s real, there is such a lot of wood here in the buildings, more than I would have thought…. It’s not all cold stone … rafters sweet-oiled and warm. Late afternoons … flap of doves in the patio like the snap of wet sheets … certain slants of light … scarred gangster cats sunning themselves, rat hunters coddled by the cafeteria cooks.

  How I love to just sit, sun on my shoulders, stare through the heat … at the craticulas most especially, how I love this word for the mossy slits the nuns confessed through—to the crackpressed faces of tentfrocked priests. Their sad priapic parody of a smocked maternity.

  Today a group of young musicians is practising in the courtyard. Their laughter as one of them tries to teach the others a song on a kind of guitar. They smile at me as I pass. Foreigners come here all the time. From all over the world. Here they have a name for my disease.

  Sor Juanitis.

  The cooks are trying to make a pet of me. The way you train a bird to come to your hand. A trail of crumbs and sweets and cordials … tamarind, beet, prickly pear. Ladies so simple so bawdy and ribald. Where’s the harm? Oh I know but let myself forget for a while.

  Next week S has offered to take me to the Museum of Medicine—housed in the old palaces of the Inquisition—is this coincidence or paradox, do you think? One whole wing devoted to pre-Hispanic cures and healing diets. The Inquisition exhibit is in the other wing. In the palace of tortured anatomies.

  And there S and I will rediscover the lost Aztec recipe for obsidian wine … so many stairs, so steep, so many hearts, so much meat. It would have taken an army just to lift each victim to the top, but instead they walked up on their own. So what was the recipe for their holocaust?—sprinkle of hope / dash of progress / pinch of transcendent glory to take them up the aisle. Bring them to that final deathwed altar.

  Obsidian wine to toast the bride.

  I want to rest. I’m so tired of doing this alone. S wants me to stay, study here. She’d sponsor my project, I could work in a tradition—20th-century habits and mortarboards—and not sprawl and flap and flail reinventing toy prayer wheels on my own. S swears to me my ideas are new and startling and valuable, that I’ll find others here like her with their own brilliant new thoughts, that it would be good for me to talk to others.

  A world of friends, true friends and colleagues.

  Then next month we can go to Puebla, to the convent museum of Santa Monica where Bishop Santa Cruz bequeathed his heart to the nuns. S promises me it’s true. His heart is on a stick, all dried out, on a silver pedestal—S says it looks like a scouring pad. Rusted out.

  I feel like a fool S has me half-believing … that I have a second chance, a way out. And I tell her, half-tell, that maybe next semester. After the equinox I must see in Chichén Itzá, with forty thousand others who’ll watch the sun trace the shadowglyph of a serpent moving down the steps of a pyramid built for this one day each year … after that, when I’ve seen the glyph of equinox with the twin tumuli of my own eyes I could come back and study here.17 And live with her a while. I could … I could try.

  How I want to. I don’t know who else to tell this to but you. I want to rest, I want to laugh. Be touched and held. Like everyone else. I feel close to ending this work. I’ve done everything I could for her, given everything I had and failed. Unspeakably.

  Then why do I feel that quitting now is a betrayal—of who? Of her? Or someone who never cared about any of it? But if I am betraying you, Donald, tell me … it should feel better than this.

  Shouldn’t it?

  It’s late, very late now. S is asleep … with a little snore. Good-night, gentle reader good-night.

  †I, the Worst Woman in the World

  HARLEQUIN: MASCOT

  I will become your muse, Donald, and you, my dancing bear….

  SO HE IS TO BE MADE a mascot, for the visiting team. A shambling, comic player with his media critic waiting in the wings, parked just outside the gate, down below the trees.

  Part of the story would have leaked out in any event. But with one anonymous phone tip, Beulah made certain he would be her old comedy’s shining star—her frog-prince Dionysus, her cloud-brained Socrates.

  One reporter has not given up on the story. She looks familiar. The road is narrow at the gate. Whenever he drives out, he has to slow, less than a foot between them—Petra something. They’re all Petras and Natashas today. She is often on a mobile phone or smoking, the window rolled down.

  Was she a student of his, years ago? Shrewd grey eyes. Cropped, curly hair. Angular face … attractive, Germanic, her purpose set firm in jaws and chin. The voice, too, he knew. Confident, sardonic, yet
with the slightest stridency.

  Only one reporter left. But she broke the story; she will see it through. She took a risk and her instincts proved right. She broke it early, before the facts were all in.

  The facts are not all in.

  TRUE-CRIME STORIES 1

  THE HARD-BITTEN EX-PROFESSOR lies up in the loft on Chris Relkoff’s office couch—a touch of home. He is surveying his castle, his demesne, his paper kingdom laid waste. The harlequin king dons his mask of office, prepares to face the people he shall meet….

  Cool, windy day. Mid-afternoon clouds pile up in plum-blue contusions against the peaks. He sees her coming up the drive on foot, his critic, his shadow, his interpreter to the masses. Petra Something. She carries a slim briefcase in one hand, a heavy black tape recorder slung over the other shoulder. Standard issue Smith & Westinghouse. Real jobs, they give you a gun and a badge.

  Coming up on foot is a concession. Or he supposes that’s how he is to take it. A pilgrimage, on foot—abandoning the high ground of public righteousness for the soggy fens of private right. Welcome to Lourdes, welcome to Compostela.

  When she is still thirty yards or so away he sets a fresh scotch down on the desktop. Another little crescent imprinting the oiled mahogany, his script of scimitars. It was a turk’s writing desk, after all. Once.

  He waits for her beside the door, leaving it just slightly ajar. Though he can’t see her any longer, he can hear her crunching up the gravel walk. One second more. He is surprised by how angry. He studies the wood grain in the door. All his cares are supposed to be behind him. Bygone. She shouldn’t be coming anymore. Begone. She should be made to go away.

  She should be made to go away.

  She’s set her briefcase down to smooth her hair. As she reaches up to knock he pulls open the door. She looks startled, for an instant almost frightened. Strange. She is the one who’s rehearsed her opening scene, he is the one meant to be off-balance, left helpless to improvise.