Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  Really Beulah? you haven’t heard of this company? they’re supposed to be famous in Canada very avant-garde—ah, por eso—musician friends of mine met them at a huge arts centre in the Rocky Mountains. Bumphh, is the name. Is this correct? No, S. Banff. My friends helped arrange this tour. I have to help, you see? But such a strange name for a theatre company, what does Strontium Nanny mean? And how could you not want to meet them they’re from your country and touring a play on Sor Juana? Why B? YBY?

  Banff. Am I just supposed to call this coincidence, S, and if that’s all it is, why meet them why bother?

  And S answers Coincidence?—no, 1995 may be the year Old Mexico discovers Canada! Ah yes S and remember sleepy sentimental 1492? when the Genovese befriends the Arawak and 1519 when the Spaniard gets cozy with the Aztec…. Oh S, sweet-hearted S don’t be hurt / think badly of me. How can I make you understand. I’ve lost interest in the Land Forgetting Forgot. The White Eden of Pretend.

  [31 Dec. 1994]

  S finds me in the library. Just opening the latest book by Margo Glantz. A book I’ve wanted for months. Straight from a full dress rehearsal S has tears in her eyes. I have to come tonight. If I won’t come for Paz then at least for her. She asks this one favour of me. On New Year’s Eve.

  Beulah this place has seen everything, every Sor Juana imaginable. Last April it was Sor Juana in Mismaloya—nuns as maximum security convicts in striped pyjamas…. I understand you, B, it was hard too for me at first. But the one I saw today is the Sor Juana we have never looked for—and never seen.

  She looks nothing like her. Short short hair, white-blond. Tall as a tall man. A dancer—classical training—that much is obvious. Y una presencia arrolladora … toughness and grace, and so vulnerable at times.

  They’re all wonderful! so excited to be finally here at the Claustro. I’ve never seen actors absorb changes so fast. They’ve written new lines especially for the performance here. And they move so beautifully—relaxation, precision, economy—the director calls it a kind of mantra for them. Strontium Nanny, you still haven’t told me.

  They’re getting nervous about letting us down, B. The acoustics are bad—y esas malditas puertas de la chingada. Letting us down?—how many times have I complained about those doors—every time they redecorate another office, that’s how often. Cracked and split you can see right through them to the plaza outside no wonder the sound—the rector’s asked me to say a few words of thanks at the reception after. Thanks? I should be begging forgiveness for those doors.

  This too, Beulah, everything that happens tonight is part of your story. You have to be there. Whether or not Paz comes.

  She cares. She cares. How can I say no to her?

  But how can I come like this S—in jeans with rips?

  Ay Beulah, no te preocupes, we’ll be the most beautiful women there. For you I have a green dress … and tonight a red one for me. You should see the actor who plays don Carlos de Sigüenza. So handsome you’ll die.

  Treasure this hour of furious hemming, taking in and letting out the gorgeous long-sleeved gown of satin green—Gavin remember me in green?

  In at the waist down at hem, cuff and badinage that covers up the bandages—Beulah how can you be so thin and have such breasts? Cause B’s a miracle of modern medicine gryphinbride of doctor Frankenstein, stitched and surgically enhanced endowed by Dow but how can I tell this to sweet S? no just shrug and sweetly blush.

  Here Beulah try this black shawl—que preciosa. Eres de una belleza … and S lifts her chin, remembering, from the jewel box lifts an emerald brooch … here, querida, I always wear it with this dress, it was my mother’s. It goes with your eyes.

  Oh S of the giant heart, how can you? you hardly know me. You only know my name.

  Sweet sensuous S in that dress—red-velvet low slung, stretched taut over a canvas of cinnamon kid. Blue-black hair, high-boned face, fierce as a falcon mask. S your body is so beautiful in that dress. Have you ever been more lovely than this?

  Maybe on my wedding night. But that was such a long time … she kisses me.

  Arm in arm with S propping B on the one-block walk to the Claustro, in heels a size too big / toiletpaper-toed teetering. With every stutterstep—exhilaration cooling cooling that ebbs out fresh miasmas of disaster. Night of Paz.

  Will he come?

  Pause at the gate—Beulah you’re so pale. Maybe it was too soon—are you strong enough?

  For you, S, only for you.

  Wait let’s not go in just yet. We’ll go around to the plaza and sit and rest. Just for a minute. There’s still time.

  Thank you, S.

  We sit in the plaza under a bust of Juana. Patina of brazen indestructibility. Draw strength from this. Though I no longer look for her, no longer hope to see…. How practical how brave the little brass soldier.

  Children play soccer in the lower court. Past us a clutch of boys—trailing a bigger one pistoning a clattercan of spraypaint. Against the convent walls young brown men shirtless smash a handball—bruising palmslap of Indianrubber, fist thuds of onomatopoeic goma pock pock the dusk.

  And we sit not speaking as the lanterns are lit. Bats flitting, glancing off soft columns of insects tranced in light. Indigo seeps up from the east. We founder in a lake of ink. Feels like dread as we go in.

  Inside the doors at the greeting line’s end stands the most stunning woman in All Creation. Auburn movie star in a navy power suit—old money, Swiss-schooled in the most ancient authority—double axe of cash and sex.

  Beulah this is la Directora, my boss. Narrowing of the huge brown eyes … I’m sorry S but with Paz coming we’re completely full. Your friend …

  S to the rescue whisks me past. Forgive me B, but it was worth it wasn’t it to see her face?

  Backstage I already have a place for you near the old chancel—Backstage?—no.

  Really, no? I want you to meet them. No no don’t worry then, maybe later. There’s another … Come, ven, this way, up in the upper choir above the nave. Up by the tech booth / electrical confessional. That’s right up this little staircase I’m right behind you.

  Sway up the spiral dollhouse steps to the landing. Into the light cast up the well quicksteps a guard. Lo siento, señorita, this is not for the public up here—

  Guido, have you forgotten our friend? Blinks from S to me. Ayy, buenas noches, Maestra. No la habia visto. You mean she is the one last week …? But Maestra she looks so much better. In his face a kind of wondering. Shy smile, fingertips to his heart in a gesture of pledge. She looks … like the painting, no? Not the new one, the one up there, above the stage.

  Si Guido, un poco.

  Sweet Guido slenderer than a reed ducks into the shadows to retrieve two folding chairs / flashes back before his cartoon uniform has time to follow or sag. Unfolds them at the railing, bids us sit with a low maître d’ flourish, schoolboy flush.

  Next to the technician’s booth two men roost alike as brothers, spectacled barn owls watching us. Baleful the younger, smiling the elder nods at S who whispers to me the playwright and the director. Which owl is who who? spiral thread of hilarity unravelling—

  The younger is a Mexican living in Canada.

  They’re not brothers?

  No, but I see what you mean. I’ll introduce you after.

  No need no need.

  The elder owl smiles and offers S a pull from a silver hip flask. She puts her hand over his, shakes her head.

  Has she been with him?

  Do you have enough light, B, do you always write everything?

  All of it, get it all down. Brightlit stage near-empty—four chairs, four music stands. Columns rising from the stage, baroque scrollwork of gilt. Scrollframed portraits, gilded scenes of ecclesiasticial grapplings.

  but the centrepiece … presiding queenly serene above it all, a portrait of her.

  Prehispanic soundscape, clay flutes shellhorns and drums. Slow antiphon of cough and countercough in the audience. Scents of mildew, S’s faint
perfume. Jasmin, dust.

  Why don’t they start?

  We’re still hoping Paz will come. They say he no longer has any idea of time.

  While all Mexico bends to his magnum agendum.

  Shifts of restlessness. Shriek of folding chair on stone. A murmuring. One minute, two, three. Playwright and director huddle now, fiercefaced whispering.

  It’s him! him! bent dwarfgod shuffles in on the arm of his queen / trailing his Nobel retinue—secretaries editors retainers poetasters poet-bodybuilders. Octavio Paz—imagine!, no hard feelings all is forgiven, even the playwright owl is smiling now, let the circus begin. House lights down.

  I try I try I try not to look at him who never once wrote to me.

  Ah a bilingual play how clever is cleverness left to itself. Spanish and English narrators, amusing Punch and Judy duelling to tell the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as stand-up comedy for the end of the 20th century—quick fujifilm this somebody, this making of comic history—but wait why not S and me?

  PUNCH: The year is 1692. Eclipses—

  JUDY: Cometas—

  PUNCH: Occult sciences and unexplained sightings—

  J: Del cielo, extrañas criaturas chupadoras—*

  PUNCH: Quacks and miracle cures—

  J: Horribles epidemias; una obsesión por lo grotesco y lo deforme—†

  P: Storms and assassinations—

  JUDY: Hambre e insurrección—‡

  P [GRIM]: Oh it’s the nineties alright.

  Cue titters from the orchestra pit.

  P: Today, just this year, the Archbishop of Mexico is attacking Nobel laureate Octavio Paz from the pulpit.

  J: Si el Arzobispo de México quiere atacar a Octavio Paz, debería quedarse en la

  fila y esperar su turno, como el resto de nosotros.§

  Peal and clap of hysterical laugh—this is more like it, all turn to see how Paz reacts. Does the playwright see how it’s his own play he’s sapped? The show’s let loose in the audience. All now looking at the great man but who wasn’t anyhow? Quick get it back, playwright, right your leaky scow now.

  Enter the tall dancer. How am I supposed to feel? My first big test—chin up soldier, tighten that gut it’s not her, just an actor, that’s all. An actor, this is only reality, nothing more, just the last filmreal electric eel, reel it in reel it. In.

  P: In the 17th-century, an archbishop attacks Mexico’s greatest living poet for defying Father Núñez—

  J: In the 20th, an archbishop attacks Mexico’s greatest living poet as the principal obstacle to the campaign for Núñez’s canonization.

  They want Núñez canonized?—S is this true?

  Shhh B shhh.

  J: In 17th-century America, even Cortés’s dispatches to the king were on the index of banned writings.

  P: We like to think publishing is a risky, dirty business today—

  Faint laughter severed on a siren wail. From outside a slow risen flood of yelping dog, rumble of trucks gearing down … A child’s first trumpet class down the block … Beautiful stage voices whisked off—

  on acoustical

  sleighrides

  of snowy reception.

  Brilliant actors reduced to near pantomime … feel a stab of pity for the so-much-better they deserved. Focus sliding like sand out of a glass, like a playwright slumping in his chair, into his socks. Even he is watching Paz—if he walks out now—Octavio Paz can set us free!

  S, it’s true about those doors.

  ¡Caray! B tonight is the worst—qué pesadilla—what? now a helicopter? Dios mio I’m going to be sick—how will I face them after this?

  Chopchopchopchopchopchop—so playwright, make this clever in Mexican.

  The director up and pacing now in and out of shadows his chiaroscuro of fiasco. The playwright contorting in his chair and I want to shout down to them Enough!—Actors you have done her honour and your art, you have come so far tried so hard but the times have beaten us all.

  Enough.

  Will I watch her be silenced again—right here in front of me?—I want out—how can I leave S who would never leave me? Just then S touches my arm handsome don Carlos says something to Juana who is pacing too, striding power, then stops—and Octavio Paz leans to hear—

  … to see time as a spiral is to see history as prophecy … as a delicate ecology at the brink of collapse—a double helix of mythic strands recycled and recombined until time itself winds down to die …

  S grips my wrist and leans to me we have a play on our hands again— look. Feel it feel the stillness in the audience even through the din, see it in Juana’s face in her body of a dancer.

  The helicopter comes back—is there a riot outside, a student mob gone all Tlateloco?—and as another scene begins the tall blonde enters without her cowl, dressed in suede skirt and blouse of violet silk. Now Father Núñez in sweater and jeans. Are they quitting? The whole cast entering, the playwright agog turns to the director who sees—he sees it and his face is filled with something, they have improvised. They are speaking this strange text in streetclothes as though to save all our lives while the helicopter hovers hovers hovers like a hawk and Núñez smiles at the dogbarks and hornblasts and children celebrating a tremendous soccer goal—Paz saw it first but the whole audience knows and I have never felt anything like this—Sor Juana unafraid, a speech that goes—has she made it up? this wasn’t the end at all was it, Juana?—while the Spanish narrator echoes her, ever so slowly, to savour it to give me time to get it all down to honour them with this as she honours us—I will write this down for you I will make this mine:

  Dawn, fog. Sky the colour of time. This place is filled with ghosts! I live with one—no, five hundred. I look out into the time-swept streets and see still others—past or future? Streets filled with mists, miasmas, phantoms. Spectres of vanished instruments and books, and cruel levers of iron and timber soon, now, to come.

  The ghosts of young men playing a ball game against the massive convent walls. And on those grey walls others sketching bright, crude symbols with strange cylindrical brushes. A few words I recognize: Crisis. PAN. México para los Mexicanos …

  San Jerónimo: the crumbling ghost of a ball court, an altar, an ancient book.

  Tremulous blue light in the rooms across the street.

  Thank you, sweet actors. For you, I will write this.

  Applause a roar of water through the choir drowning out the siren wails and I turn to S, is it always like this are they always so warm generous?—No B, once in a very long while. S’s black eyes very full. Your countrymen have honoured us. Her. Will you meet them, B will you thank them in their tongue, speak a few words for me? Come to the reception. Please. This too is part of your story. We’ll make la Directora sweat a bit. You two the most beautiful women there and you and I the smartest. Please? We’ll sit with the actors.

  OK, S, OK but just for a minute….

  Actors mill in the corridor outside the patio. Everyone?—meet Beulah, Sor Juana scholar and a countrywoman of yours and dear dear friend of mine. Warm smiles, tired hellos and no one asks where are you from East or West? Suedeskirt Sor Juana friendlysmiles. Her actor eyes searching for a reaction and I want so to tell them tell her how they made us made me feel but don’t know how. Not yet not now.

  In through the towering doors into el patio de los gatos, in past the cold cuts and champagne buckets. Tables ranged all round the arcades—how many faculty work here S?—oh, many, B many. And all rise at the head table as we enter this banquet of Seth my eyes searching out the jewelled casket / procrustean bed not yet revealed to us.

  All the scholarly arcadians and their spouses ringing the patio rise to follow the salute head-tabled, but none takes a step, no one speaks, all frozen in attitudes of lost certainty. Instant that lasts sempiternally—Pompeii tableau set in aeons of igneous/lunch. Then the tall tall blonde Sor Juana starts forward strides across the patio—emptiest of all the world’s stages—steps to the headtable frieze says hello my name
is Denise … puts out a hand and we are all released into high relief set free returned to our professorial faculties / who gather round enfold us as we straggle up to be greeted touched shyly in welcome welcome bienvenidos!

  Soon toast after toast of You have given us back Sor Juana given her back her voice given us a Sor Juana who can weave like a dancer through time and space, who speaks to us in your idioma but our idiom, yet remains herself entirely. Thank you, friends from Canadá. We will not forget this soon. We say this with all sincerity.

  And they do. As sincerely as each toast we answer—S and B and all the actors with glasses swapped from passing platters—S whispering this is becoming hysterical. Sweet S of the quick black eyes and deepthroat laugh.

  Hello my name is Fabiola and this is Tomás. He also is from Canadá. We drove all day from Guadalajara. Are you an actor also we did not see you up there, did we?

  Valiant S into the breach of etiquette, no she is a visiting scholar from Canadá, a SorJuanista like us. Fabiola’s long ahh, I have been one too, since my first published poem to Sor Juana when I was thirteen. Your compatriotas were superb. Two different stories two languages in one single play, I did not know this could be done. And the doubling of actors—one playing both Father Núñez and that disgusting Silvio—que maravilla!

  But where is Paz? asks Fabiola the awkward question everasked—and S laughs he’s over in el gran patio, do you know his coming to the play was a mistake? His wife thought it was part of their party for Paz’s magazine Vuelta—do you want to go over?—come let’s all go. Vuelta’s 20th anniversary! I can get us in. Estoy segura. I know a friend of Paz’s. I have given him favours.

  And we are in, through the ivory gates—inserted in someone else’s dream vision—convent patio as Bedouin encampment—tent caravan of white awnings arcades hung in tapestries, goats slowturned on spits. Chamber orchestra playing, anemones swaying under a night so clear even a few stars fall—igniting in fountains, trembling the moon …