Hunger's Brides
Page 120
A young monk distributes to each seated man a little bark-bound book. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, recently translated by Jesuit scholars in China. Waiting until the last book has been handed out, the old man, FATHER ANTONIO NÚÑEZ DE MIRANDA, the Prefect of the Brotherhood of Mary, begins to read. The lower lip flecks with spittle.
NÚÑEZ
All warfare is based on deception. Therefore, when capable of attacking, feign incapacity; when active in moving troops, feign inactivity. When near the enemy, make it seem that you are far away; when far away, make it seem that you are near. Hold out baits to lure the enemy. Strike the enemy when he is in disorder. Prepare against the enemy when he is secure at all points. Avoid the enemy for the time being when he is stronger. If your opponent is of choleric temper, try to irritate him. If he is arrogant, try to encourage his egotism…. These are the keys to victory for a strategist….
EXT. QUIET, DESERTED STREETS–NIGHT INSIDE THE COLLEGE–CANDLELIGHT
Antonio Núñez kneels before the altar he has built to the Blessed Virgin. It is an altar of an oriental magnificence. His old back is laid bare, a welter of cuts, some nearly healed, others fresh and suppurating. Taking up an ivory back-scratcher, ornately carved, Núñez rakes it slowly–with firm, even pressure–across his back, turning it into one long, running sore.
The conclusion of a prayer muttered through gritted teeth….
NÚÑEZ
… And pardon also, for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, to whom I am about to do … such violence.
INSIDE THE CONVENT LOCUTORY - MORNING
In contrast to the street, the room is dimly lit. Light filters through a barred window looking onto a small courtyard. Pale walls, stained with mildew. Rough, dark rafters; five-metre ceiling. Elaborately carved wooden grille cuts room in two.
A shuffling at the door: the young monk, whispering instructions, orients Núñez towards the grille, aims him through the doorway. Núñez enters alone–back straight, step firm. A nun sits calmly on the other side of the grate. There is colour in her face and hands from working in the gardens, a slightly haunted expression in her large lustrous eyes. SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ greets her old adversary with a grim smile, beckons him to the empty seat across from her. Only a slight fumbling as he reaches for the chair betrays his failing sight.
JUANA
Father.
NÚÑEZ [venomous]
Sister.
JUANA
It’s good you’ve come.
NÚÑEZ
I have assured them you are only playing for time.
JUANA
I have an offer.
NÚÑEZ
You have called me here to haggle.
JUANA
An offer.
NÚÑEZ
You have something left we want?
JUANA
They’ve sent you, have they not …?
A full and sincere confession, freely given. And the outward appearance of submission.
NÚÑEZ
Submission–you offer us what we already have!
JUANA
What you have is a spectacle, and a martyrdom in waiting.
NÚÑEZ
An apostasy you mean.
You offer me a bribe–
JUANA
A compromise.
NÚÑEZ
A bribe–to endorse a lying apostasy!
JUANA
I understand. You’re not accustomed to compromise.
NÚÑEZ
Since when are you, woman?
JUANA
Since the day I first walked through that gate. And each single day since.
[pause]
In return, I ask only that you assure them I am no threat.
NÚÑEZ
God does not compromise! I do not compromise.
[Núñez stands.]
JUANA
I offer my willingness … to undergo a genuine change.
NÚÑEZ
[shaking his head] Ridiculous–what would you confess to?
JUANA
Everything.
NÚÑEZ
What will you confess to?–lasciviousness and fornication?
JUANA
Anything. I have brought down upon myself envyings and backbitings–
NÚÑEZ
Parables! You speak in riddles to be misunderstood!
JUANA
‘I have provoked wraths and s-strifes and debates’–
NÚÑEZ Y
You take yourself now for the Redeemer!
JUANA
‘T-tumults and confusion’–
NÚÑEZ
Do you ask me now to take all this on faith?
JUANA
[raises her gaze sharply to meet his]
‘Faith’–that, I would never ask, not of you. And blind faith is the one thing I will not submit to. Let us begin together with this. With what you know to be true.
Show me why I have failed. Show me why it was wrong to approach Him through this hunger He himself instilled in me. Make me see why I must only stand and wait for Grace. I will help you break me down. I will help you to remake me in his image.
NÚÑEZ
You would challenge God to speak. Through me.
JUANA
Through you.
NÚÑEZ
You cannot begin to grasp your own arrogance can you.
JUANA
Through you.
NÚÑEZ
No.
JUANA
[straightening her shoulders, voice flat]
If you refuse a compromise, then a wager: the ante to be my soul. This renewal of my vows–this conversion will be geniune or I die apostate.
I leave the judging of its authenticity entirely to you. In the end, you have only to withhold your support, inform your superiors and be rid of me, your conscience clear. Ningún compromiso.
NÚÑEZ
I do not believe …
JUANA
[irritably]
I do not ask you to believe. Only that you report to your superiors what you have heard here.
HOW TO FOUND YOUR OWN INQUISITION
B. KRANKEIT AND O. PENA,
A MANUAL FOR THE MODERN INQUISITOR24
… In our view, then, the characteristic definitive of Inquisition is not persecution of the heretic, a term at once too narrow conceptually and too vague sociologically, but rather persecution of the convert (or false convert).
The defining structural configuration should instead be as follows. First, a society whose axes of spiritual and secular power are unstable, as during the holocaust years of the Spanish Inquisition under the newly ascendant Catholic kings. Second, the introduction of the convert, defined here as the social actor having travelled the greatest distance, both ideologically and socially, in the shortest time. Take the case of the New Christians (conversos) of Jewish extraction, who as a result of their conversion gain access to offices and social positions denied to members of alien faiths.
The society initially accommodates the rapidly mobile element, but not without tension from the social strata along the convert’s ascent, and as these stresses threaten a social structure already defined as unstable, the Inquisition dynamic is set in motion. (Significantly, in Spain, Inquisitors are drawn from the ranks of aristocratic families jostled by the convert’s arrival, while the lay familiars of the Inquisition, of solid working class stock, see themselves promoted in some sense to the stratum that the upwardly-mobile convert vacates.)
The structure now attempts to re-establish equilibrium, first by a conservative retreat into hyper-orthodoxy. The Inquisition, newly armed with codes to which no one had until recently conformed, proceeds to re-examine the convert’s assimilation and de-legitimizes it … in the Spanish context, this transforms New Christian into false Christian. This final operation seems almost deliberately ironic: for attempting to conform, the convert is prosecuted as a heretic (an ideological traitor, in modern terms, and not, we must stress, as an alien
, or a spy).
This model of a structural dynamic enables us to distinguish, on this basis at least, National Socialism from the Inquisition. The Nazis, albeit informed by the spirit and methodical rigour of the Inquisition, considered the Jews not traitors or heretics but aliens to be first deported, then eliminated. Other links have been traced—in our view more successfully—to the Stalinist persecution of Bolshevik false converts, culminating in the purge trials of the 1920s and 30s.22
A recent study provides an interesting test case for our thesis. Anderson attempts (after Graves, but with rather less documentary support) to recast the myths of Ancient Greece as the by-product of a campaign by patriarchal Hellenic invaders to extirpate the indigenous worship of the Great Mother, and then to prosecute the heroes of their Helladic cousins—who had previously invaded Greece and converted to the worship of the Triple-Goddess—for heresy.23 Thus we would find Sisyphus, Oedipus, Bellerophon, Orpheus, Phaëthon, Icarus, probably Achilles and even perhaps Odysseus languishing in the secret prisons of a Hellenic Inquisition, suffering its humiliations, defamations, and tortures.
The same author goes on to observe that awaiting further inquiry is the possibility of applying this reasoning to the study of appetite disorders. It is argued that women, the most mobile social actors in modern society (indeed among the few who can claim to have made dramatic progress in their agenda) have internalized the Inquisitorial dynamic and so act as auto-Inquisitors prosecuting their own ‘false conversion’ to the canon of rationalist materialism, partriarchal social structures, Apollonian aesthetics …
JUBILEE, DAY 2: RAM’S HEAD
THE STREET–MORNING
The young monk, GABRIEL, guides Núñez through the bustling streets, down Calle de las Rejas. As they pass, conversations stop, smiles fade, a young woman crosses herself. A few blocks on, a carriage pauses in the street. One of the men from the boardroom descends and offers them a lift. Gabriel stops, but Núñez presses on as though he has not heard. As Núñez and Gabriel near the convent of San Jerónimo, an old woman kneels to receive a benediction.
Núñez and Gabriel pass without pausing, enter the convent.
INSIDE THE CONVENT LOCUTORY–DAY
NÚÑEZ
Sit closer.
JUANA
I can hear you perfectly well from here.
NÚÑEZ
And you know perfectly well I can barely see. Or is it something you smell?
Juana looks out through the bars to the little garden. An old nun busies herself outside with gardening, stealing little glances into the room.
JUANA
I smell spearmint and sage.
NÚÑEZ
They tell me you always claim to smell smoke when I enter the room.
JUANA
And rosemary.
NÚÑEZ
Rosemary helps the memory.25
JUANA
To remember, but not to forget.
NÚÑEZ
Odd that someone as bold as you should so fear the scent of smoke.
JUANA
Only …
NÚÑEZ
Finish.
JUANA
When I smell it on you.
NÚÑEZ
Ahh yes, I remember now, this unnatural fascination of yours for the quemadero.
VOICE-OVER: They say the priest you burned that day was jolly and rolypoly.
NÚÑEZ
My superiors have decided to take your bet. They would not be persuaded by my doubts. I warned them: She speaks in riddles like a prophet, stutters like Moses risen sputtering from the silent Nile. She is more subtle than Bruno, I said. They answered that Bruno would have confessed to anything at the end, had we let him.
V.O.: They say his flesh stuttered and spat like a roasting ham.
JUANA
Moses stuttered before Pharoah, not God.
NÚÑEZ
Exactly what they told me! Part the waters, they said–by force if need be, she invites it.
Blind now to her beauty, you, Father Núñez, will see her more clearly than any of us could.
We have her silence already, I protested. But the silence of the Nile is a pagan silence. We must baptize her silence, make it Christian, they said. It is we who decide what her silence shall say.
I told them, she will confess to a fabricated whole so as to evade conviction for the real particulars.
We have experience in such matters, they answered. No individual can stand against this.
JUANA
Guileful, I will catch myself with guile.
NÚÑEZ
Prideful, you will catch yourself with pride. You are your own worst enemy. A house divided. They are counting on this.
You say nothing now.
Sit closer.
She drags her chair forward.
NÚÑEZ
Closer!
Knees now touch the grate. Núñez leans forward until his lips brush the latticework. Voice falls to a whisper.
NÚÑEZ
You are the dramatist, Sor Juana. If I return to play my part, are you up to playing yours? I warn you, God will not be tested. If you leap, no host of angels will break your fall.
[sits back in his chair]
Begin.
Hands clasped in her lap, forcing herself to look past his face, she begins.
JUANA
I have been willful and filled with pride.
NÚÑEZ
You will do better than this!
JUANA I
have gloried in my obstinacy.
NÚÑEZ
You feel contempt for your superiors.
JUANA
I only thought the value of my learning equal to theirs.
NÚÑEZ
You think you can outlive us.
JUANA
The Holy Mother Church is eternal. I am a corrupt bag of flesh.
NÚÑEZ
Yes. Gabriel out there tells me you are fat and sleek as a cow. You think you have suffered.
JUANA
I have fasted.
NÚÑEZ
You think you can outwit us.
JUANA
No.
NÚÑEZ
No, no, no?’ This is your full and sincere confession? For this we are to offer you your Jubilee?
[pause]
Say it.
JUANA
Say what?
NÚÑEZ
Say it.
JUANA
Jubilee.
NÚÑEZ
Tell me what it means to you.
JUANA
My Jubilee will be a renewal, a restoration. A new beginning….
NÚÑEZ
Do you think I did not hear you savouring the word? Did you think I would not know that Jubilee once meant a time when the fields lay fallow and all lands reverted to their former owners?
You speak in codes. This Jubilee you plan is a rebellion! Like that of your martyr, Hermenegild.
Do you doubt that I know you?
JUANA
No.
NÚÑEZ
Then know beyond doubt that I will transform this Jubilee you have begged for into a ram’s head–to batter down your defences as at a trumpet blast, trample your doubts, reduce this wall you have built around yourself to rubble….
[pause]
Do you doubt this?
JUANA
T is why I have asked for you.
NÚÑEZ
I have waited twenty-five years for you to come to your senses. I am out of patience.
And do not succumb to the fatal delusion that because I have come again, because I have been sent, that my hands are tied. Know that I have been freed to stop coming any time I decide. To simply stop. No explanations asked.
Tomorrow I will be leaving the city for Zacatecas. Days or weeks, I cannot be sure. But while I am gone, by all means, playwright, write your lines well. Because if I elect to return, you will give me what I want.
V.O.: Behold the Warrior Priest dep
arting on a long tour of the battlefield. See the narrow hands that curb the mighty, the heart of rock that feeds despair … the basilisk’s slow stone thighs propel it across the lone and level sands; like unto the King of Men, its majesty scarcely to be borne, away it slouches towards Bethlehem …
FADE OUT
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
… O Providence most high! Who here contests
that the Law of Grace, through Heaven’s influence
found its fulfilment and champion
in Egypt’s Catherine?
Just as in its pure translation of Moses
Egypt kept His commandments inviolate,
the Gospels found in Catherine of Egypt
their minister and advocate.
All the more so, if the Cross—
despised in Rome and Judea—
among its hieroglyphs, Egypt worshipped
long before, on the breast of Serapis.
Thus did Catherine inherit
in the very blood of Egypt (though vitiated by its cults)
an ardent zeal for Law and Cross,
and in her veins did God distil perfection from viciousness.
Her martyrdom was for the Cross, and upon it—
since the opposite diameters of the Wheel enthrone,
at the heart of four right angles,
the Cross as its sovereign figure.
And on that circle Catherine was crucified,
though she did not die within it:
the circle being the divine hieroglyph of the Infinite—
instead of finding death, she was given Life.
Rejoice, blessed Egypt, at this blossoming,
of so many regal branches the renewal,
for in this one Rose of Alexandria,
God has granted thee an eternal Spring.26
JUBILEE, DAY 16: FORMULAS
EXT. THE PLAZA DE SANTO DOMINGO—AFTERNOON