NÚÑEZ
‘… other countries have received and obeyed their majesties willingly and without resistance–’
JUANA
[mocking eyes bright]
Insert a gag between my teeth with the pure force of your arguments, Father! Claim this pagan territory for your Church.
Gabriel hovers over Núñez, peering wonderingly into his face. The young priest has seen this kind of rapture many times before, in many faces, but never Núñez….
JUANA
Become the ram’s head you promised me, Father.
Batter down my defences.
NÚÑEZ
‘Understand and obey!
If you do this you will do well. Their Majesties and I will receive you with all love and charity.’
JUANA
Is this the best you can do–offer promises, bribes? No! Command understanding, Priest!
NÚÑEZ
‘But, if you do not do this and put impediments in the way, I swear to you that with God’s help, I will come among you powerfully and make war upon you everywhere and in every way that I can, and I will subject you to the yoke of obedience to the Church and their Majesties.’
The triumph in her eyes has faded. Her voice betrays exhaustion, disappointment.
JUANA
No … Convince me. Make me see.
Truly, can you not do this for me?
NÚÑEZ
‘I will take your persons, your women and children, and will make slaves of them and sell them or dispose of them as their Highnesses shall command.’
JUANA
We are made slaves already.
NÚÑEZ
‘I will take your possessions and will damage you as much as I can, as vassals who do not obey or wish to acknowledge their sovereign, but resist and oppose him.’
JUANA
We are already damaged and bereft. Bring us to give freely of our assent.
NÚÑEZ
‘And furthermore, I protest that the damage and death which you suffer thereby shall be your own doing–And not the fault of their Majesties, nor mine, nor of the knights who accompany me.
Of all I say and require of you, the scribe who writes this shall be my witness….’
CUT TO: Cortés continuing his proclamation over a bewildered farmer tilling a stony field high up in the pass, the plains to the east filled with smoke, the hacienda of Panoayán below.
FADE OUT
BERSERKERS
REMEMBER THIS. Or, if there is still a way, forget.
The iambic creak of jays nesting near Beulah’s window. Pale blue walls, grey-green carpet, her bedroom’s dark green curtains tightly drawn against the afternoon. The bray and screetch of swing sets in the park across the street. As we rutted on the sea floor of Beulah’s darkened apartment I was sometimes afraid, just once or twice, that if she’d asked it in that instant, I would have murdered her. Brutally.
I think I know how this sounds, under the circumstances.
Such an admission conjures some sad escalation from whips to chains to whetted razors. But there were no hooks or attachments, no booted uniforms and scout knots, no ropes or scaling techniques. The topographies were the same as they’ve been since Eden, since Atlantis.
Everything I should ever have needed in a marriage Madeleine offered me. Throughout those early years, as long as I was passably discreet, Madeleine rarely gave me any need to lie. I was never asked to make excuses about the occasional skipped dinner or weekend conference. She wouldn’t be jealous of mere sex.
For Beulah there was nothing ‘mere’ about sex. Comparisons are invidious; analogies, the last resort of the desperate. But if in lovemaking Madeleine played the daring spelunker, Beulah was the savage who’d painted the cave.
Madeleine lacked inhibitions, Beulah burned hers like gasoline.
There was a wildness. She would strip herself so bare, always down, deeper into this primitive sea, and take me with her. I had never been there, pared of my hesitations, my crabbed, scuttling fears. I’d known nothing like it, no intensity like this until the night of Catherine’s birth, when I swore to Madeleine on my daughter’s eyes: No more infidelities.
Tidal, oceanic, but not Birth’s violent crash of surf flinging itself up the beach. Rather, the Return. Placid, fatal undertow … a first, slow penetration. Short pulse, long ebb. In and down. Back, withdraw … again. Subsiding otter-glide, slippery slide over amphibian skin.
Serene, obscene, epicene.
Down through epilimnion and thermocline, down over angled hydroplanes. Bank and dive through the dark. Dive, back, dive. Again. Here and there the flare and flicker of phosphorescence … dragon fire, distant suns exploding … ships’ lanterns through salt fog. In and down. A throb of pressure—ringing anvils, kettle drums locked in bone. A soft string of mute concussions … gleam and fire of batteries from a shore. Down, retract, return. Ever deeper, brine thickening … a knitting in the protein warp. A faint clutch unclutched … a notch, minutely riven. Deliquescent starbursts in the flesh.
We were dying, knowing at last what it was to be alive. Two minds, one consciousness, fastened to dying animals. Our death was all around us yet outside. And for that hour we were not alone. Sex and death—God, I’ve made enough of a joke of things without dragging poor Sigmund in. Yeats was bad enough.
But death was not the point. We had just held up our lives—high up, cupped wildly beating in our hands.
Something I saw two weeks ago in Mexico shook me. It was a mistake to have followed her there. An indigenous sculptural motif as old as the feathered serpent she so often mentions. At least two thousand years. Of a youth, emerging face-first from the unhinged maw of a dragon.
Sometimes with the world about to burst to white, when we had draped ourselves in the dragon’s fresh-flayed hide, our faces a berserk mask, I could look into those green and amber eyes and somewhere in them see the face of a girl, staring out at me.
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
chorus
Seraphim, come!
Come all and find
a Rose that is cut
and yet it lives on;
that withers not
but revives
to a fierce new bloom,
one stemming from
her own deepest being;
and so it proved a blessing
to have bent her to the knife.
Harvesters, come!
Come all and find
a Rose that is cut
and yet it lives on.
verses
Against a frail Rose
a thousand north winds contrive:
how hedged in by envy she is
in the brief hour Beauty is given to live!
Because she is lovely, they envy,
and because she is learned, they ape:
how ancient now is this story
in a world that pays merit with hate.
A thousand panting breaths
give vent to a thousand whirling blades on edge—
that for each fresh distinction score and mark
a great and lonely heart.
So many deaths
against a single life conspire;
yet none meets with success,
for having sprung from cowardice and rancour;
so do not read too much into the ignorant,
blind, malignant fate
she suffers on the wheel of blades,
for with this God constructs the chariot of her triumph.
Although the circling engine
is a cutting courtesan,
it is one whose machinations
serve to restore Catherine’s fortunes.
And to the Rose herself
it is not new, not in the least,
that upon her august splendours
pungent barbs should mount an honour guard
to mark her final glories.
JUBILEE, DAY 37: HERESY, THE TECHNOLOGY
INT. MODERN DAY–CLIP OF
LESBIAN PORN, BY WOMEN, FOR WOMEN Dom. / sub. Close focus on restraints, engines of penetration–anal, vaginal, fisting …
INT. MEXICO CITY–MODERN DAY, MUSEUM OF MEDICINE, DAY Exhibition in progress, banners strung up at the entrance. “Instrumentos Europeos de Tortura y Pena Capital.” Long lines waiting to get in. Inside, dim floor lighting, soundtrack music from The Mission. A tour guide leads a small group past various exhibits. Speaking in Spanish, she pauses to model the use of certain items. Translation is unnecessary. Two women, maybe the same two from the previous scene, trail the rest of the group, handle the objects, pale, sweating, hands shaking, yet laughing.
CUT TO: The courtyard below, a group of students in jeans and T-shirts performing a silent play on the theme. From the radio in the ticket booth horn-blasts of mariachi, the volume turned up against the music from above. After a long moment, a man rushes to the second storey balcony. Very tall, heavy-set, bearded, his face contorted in anguish. Calls down furiously in Spanish at the ticket seller who shrugs, turns his music down.
INSIDE THE INQUISITION’S SECRET PRISONS–DAY Scene of savage brutality. Dominican scribes seated to one side of the action, recording all. Two women, indeterminate age. One strapped to the rack, the other on the wheel. Wheel angled such that the low point of each revolution passes directly over a flame. Light filters through one tiny window high up, near the ceiling. Light falls across high side of the wheel. The wheel spins lazily, the woman passing through sun then shadow then flame, imparts a stroboscopic effect.
The wheel is spun by public executioner–black hood thrown back so he can sweat and breathe more freely. He is busy splitting his time between wheel and rack, making adjustments. One inquisitor stands by each, interrogating each subject, pausing frequently to give the torturer instructions, or to give the scribes time to record every cry, gesture, word, prayer, every crack of bone and cartilege….
Partly concealed behind a latticework set high in the wall sits a hunched figure.
INSIDE A CONFESSIONAL–LATER SAME DAY
The public executioner kneels, his face troubled. The hands, clasped in supplication, are meaty. Nails broken and dirty, under them what looks like red clay….
Taking his confession is Núñez, eyes glowing like embers in the semi-darkness.
INSIDE THE CONVENT LOCUTORY–LATE AFTERNOON Panel of sunlight warms the window bars and frame. Lines of black and red ants runs endlessly up and down the blinding white plaster, to and from a crack in the wall.
NÚÑEZ
Heresy, the enemy from within…. For the rooting out of heresies, Europe has developed effective, if crude, tools.
JUANA
Such contempt they must have for you, Father, to expect you to sell your eternal soul for the price of my submission.
NÚÑEZ
My superiors have instructed me to share with you my own very genuine repugnance for these methods.
JUANA
Everything is to be permitted in the name of obedience?–even reducing God’s highest creation to a dumb slavery.
This is not God’s work.
NÚÑEZ
You want me to believe you a coward, Juana, but you will bear up well under torture.
Of course, everyone breaks.
JUANA
Do you think I didn’t know that even you have run afoul of the Holy Office?
NÚÑEZ
So you think you understand me … but I do not think you do, since the pamphlet I was reckless enough to write has been so thoroughly suppressed.
It happened just after I first knew you. The same year I found you sobbing in the cathedral.
A pamphlet of sixteen pages. I composed it in the guise of the Blessed Virgin’s secretary, writing in her behalf.
The secret trial lasted three months. Do you want to know what I wrote, Juana?
JUANA
Yes.
NÚÑEZ
It was a plea, that the women and girls of New Spain refrain from wearing provocative colours during Holy Week. The pamphlet concluded with a formula of respect. “Yours, whose feet I kiss.” The Virgin here would kiss their feet as Christ once washed those of his followers. But the inquisitor saw in my formula a lascivious intent.
You will be smiling now. But perhaps when the smile has died on your lips you will think of the danger you are in. If this could happen to me. You will imagine how much and how many of your confessions I have had to conceal. Try also to imagine how much these dissimulations have imperiled me. And how hard I have worked to keep the Holy Office from concluding your works are a hundred times more scandalous than my little pamphlet once was.
And perhaps, at last, you will understand that I cannot protect you any longer….
[rises, gropes his way toward the window]
My great impiety was only to put a few words in the mouth of the Virgin. But you …
JUANA
Mute, she is so much less dangerous.
NÚÑEZ
[he begins to nod–then, whirling to face her, cries out fiercely]
Santiago!
JUANA
[startled]
¿Me darás el Santiago? First Cortés’s proclamation, now his battle cry?
NÚÑEZ
They will tear your body down, Juana, block by block, like an Aztec temple–
JUANA
You are the one, Father, whom they have marked for the first sacrifice.
NÚÑEZ
The body you have worked so long to veil within these walls–
JUANA
It will be your heart….
NÚÑEZ
And on the same site, and with the same stones–
JUANA
At your life’s end you would settle for this?
NÚÑEZ
They will rebuild of you–an altar to Christ.
JUANA
As they have remade you, Father? As they have allowed themselves to be remade by their own hatreds and fears? For the serpent, the woman, the Jew?
[pauses]
Do you think I do not know how they made you suffer as a novice for your creativity? Do you not know your legend, Father? The pains they took to purge you? The marks are all over you.
I know how much you once thirsted to complete the number, to stand among the elect.
NÚÑEZ
They will show your body to you, Juana.
JUANA
These men you now stand among, Father Núñez, are these the elect?
NÚÑEZ
Then they will return your body to you. They will bring you back to earth.
JUANA
I know your soul, Father. That is why I have loved you. Fear, respect, hatred–these you have earned. But my love, I gave freely to what remained of that tormented youth–who once laughed and ran, wrote verses and plays. Who once knew shame.
And is that boy not Gabriel today?
This is why you have chosen him now.
NÚÑEZ
I have taken the confessions of these men. They are not like us, Juana. They have been coarsened by their work. They are not holy.
JUANA
I have seen your fear, Antonio Núñez.
NÚÑEZ
There is a kind of complicity, things they are reluctant to do to another man, but with a woman–
JUANA
You have seen terrible things.
NÚÑEZ
With a woman, these men’s coarse spirits soar to something close to artistry.
JUANA
Now, with the end so near, you fear for your own–and where it might soar to.
Do you really think you could be allowed to sit at God’s table?–a henchman with blood under his nails! With this your last act?
NÚÑEZ
You will be stripped naked.
JUANA
They have made you party to monstrosities, Father, the vilest inhumanities.
NÚÑEZ
Juanita, I have seen their dead eyes. You will feel their coarse hands on your shame.
Unspeakable crimes.
NÚÑEZ
Juana, I cannot protect you, do you understand me?
JUANA
Your fear is why they sent you.
NÚÑEZ
Garras de gato–the skull cat … a cap fitted with iron claws.
JUANA
What has been your harvest, Father Núñez? Lice and ticks and fleas! As you have so often said yourself.
NÚÑEZ
Each fresh turn of the screw–drives the claws farther through the skull and into the brain.
JUANA
A harvest of gall.
NÚÑEZ
[the faintest note of pleading]
In this case a very special brain.
La Pera–the ‘pear’ comes in two sizes. One for the woman’s place of shame–
JUANA
The shame is not ours alone. Is it, Father?
NÚÑEZ
A smaller one for the place of filth–
JUANA
You have always been a man of books–
NÚÑEZ
Wrought-iron, pear-shaped, when inserted–
JUANA
A man of reason–
NÚÑEZ
Its sharp tines open out–
JUANA
A man of learning–
NÚÑEZ
Slowly tearing the vitals apart from within.
JUANA
Their methods are for you the most terrible defeat–
NÚÑEZ
Las mordazas. … gags, branks, scold’s bridles–
JUANA
Absolute defeat. Unto eternity …
NÚÑEZ
An iron mask so tightly fitted as to permit the entry of air only–
JUANA
Your eyes can’t conceal from me your desperation, Father–
NÚÑEZ
… through one tiny opening–
JUANA
So desperate to believe these crimes against our humanity can be justified.
NÚÑEZ
Easily blocked with the most playful application of a fingertip.
JUANA
But you lack their faith.
Like me, Father, you are consumed by doubt.
What if, however improbably, the soul exists–eternal yet not indestructible.
And in spite of all, yours still lives?
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