But upstairs, she is different. After the interrogation, after a year, should I have expected any less? She seems not at all surprised to see me, as if she’d been waiting for me to arrive. Her wide black eyes are grave, and in them the barest flicker of what I choose to see as pleasure to find me standing at the door of her cell. What is it that has changed? I remember that awful inward gaze, the blaze of tremendous energies focussed on the wavering tip of a flame, as though to still it.
You have stilled it. Should I be happy for you?
On the outside, people keep saying she has taken a vow of silence. Others, that after forty days of interrogation she can no longer speak. But the silence came first.
And now as we are discussing the plague she speaks freely to me. What does it mean, doesn’t it matter anymore—what has happened? I can no longer restrain myself.“When did you start … speaking again?” I ask, feeling cheated. She tells me she never stopped.
“You know what I mean.” Now no answer—is it only me she does this to?
“Because Núñez is dead, Juana?—or because I’ve come …?”
I don’t really believe this, but give her the opportunity to be cruel to me. The one who abandoned her here.
“No.” She says this gently.
She waits for me to press her for more but I know this is all the explanation I will get. It’s a relief when she turns away from me those black eyes that see everything. For this one moment I do not have to pretend to be still angry with her. She looks out the window over the rooftops…. Her chin is so small—the wimple, I know, is what does this, and makes her neck look so long.
“The Church has known for two weeks. It’s been an open secret here, but no one is sure if it’s one disease or three. One strain produces buboes. Another they call the Dragon, which can kill in a week or as little as an hour. Those two we knew. But the third may be new here. La Flojera, some are calling it. La Flojera likes her prey half-digested before she sits down to eat….”
She turns finally to look at me. “Don’t think I don’t know why you’ve come.”
“Juana—we can start again, now that Núñez is dead.”
“You didn’t expect the news to bring me pleasure.”
“You didn’t expect me to conceal mine!” Our eyes lock, then in her eyes the shadow of a smile.
“No.”
“Carlos says the Archbishop has weakened.”
“How is Carlos?”
“He wants to see you. He believes you could start again. With the Archbishop’s confessor gone….”
“We hear His Grace has ordered the building of an amphitheatre.”
“The carpenters have already started.”
“In the Plaza del Volador, I imagine.”
“Carlos says the Archbishop wants you to write carols for the inauguration.”
Finally I have the satisfaction of seeing a glimmer of surprise in her eyes.
The Mother Prioress enters as we’re sitting by the window and without even glancing at me begins.
“Sor Juana, I’ve come to remind you of our understanding. Present circumstances notwithstanding, you are to continue to keep your contact with the others to a strict minimum.”
Only now do I notice how the Prioress has been withered by the years. Her watery blue eyes stare out from a net of wrinkles. Liver spots dot the patrician face. Her hands are unsteady, but the voice is firm.
“Over these next days it will be difficult to keep order. Your presence here, now more than ever is an incitement to …” She searches a moment for the word, then continues.“If you have recommendations to make, if there are measures to be taken against the contagion, which is in all likelihood already among us, then you will communicate them to me only. We have no need of any heroism from you. It has been hard enough over these past months to reverse the influence you have had here. Your martyrdom would be a calamity for the order and spiritual well-being of this convent. This affliction, as with all things, must pass. And for the survivors, things will go back to being as they were. I hope I have made myself clear.”
Without waiting for an answer, the old wraith turns on her heel and totters dizzily out.
Juana stares after her a long moment. “We’ll see how long their good order lasts.”
Before very long the news comes from down in the kitchens that Concepción is dead. Dear old friend.
She had just finished making lunch. Feeling a little tired, she had gone to lie down. Vanessa was trying not to disturb her. She reached over her for a jar of flour. It slipped and came crashing to the floor next to that dear, grey head. She did not wake. She will not, again.
It is among us.
I tell Juana I’m staying. She does not argue. There’s work to do, I say. She does not argue.
I tell Carlos, who has come to wait for me down in the locutory.
“We’ve been over all this!”
A flush spreads up from his collar to his cheeks. I know he has allowed himself the hope that she herself might come down. “We lost her a long time ago, Antonia. There’s nothing more to do here.”
I try to tell him there is, but he does not hear. He tells me they don’t need me for this, that suffering is their vocation—what can one more person add but more suffering? More gently he adds, “Anyway nothing can be done. You have not worked in a hospice, no one even pretends to have a cure for this. And even if there were you’d still be doing it for her, and she for God knows what—do you think I’ve nothing better to do than pass my days waiting in the locutories of this maldito claustro—for her, now you …?”
His face is flushed.“I thought it was Juana who was always leading me into these little tantrums….” He cocks his head as if scanning the room. He is getting so grey. It makes his brown eyes look even bigger through the thick lenses of his glasses. “Maybe it’s something in the air in here.”
21st of February
I divide my time between her and attending to the sick. She is ever more frustrated to be confined to her cell. Her questions about what is being done have come to sound like criticism.
I ask Carlos to bring more news so I have something else to tell her about. After a year I thought I’d be grateful for any words from her at all.
In the street tonight beneath her windows and hers alone, the neighbours hold a silent vigil. I recognize a few faces, eerily lit by the upcast shadows—a candle held at the height of each chest. Hollowed eyes, a nose’s triangle of shadow across each forehead. The look of silent, haunted carollers.
“Is it the same at the other convents?” she asks, standing at the window.
“They expect the convents to do their suffering for them,” I answer. “You taught me that.”
23rd of February
Carlos brings word that the Bishop of Puebla has refused to take over as viceroy for the Count de Galve, who has been recalled to Madrid. After demonstrating to everyone his political genius during the grain crisis, after having betrayed his friend Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and leaving her exposed to her enemies and inquisitors, Santa Cruz claims to have withdrawn from worldly affairs. He must feel he has done enough.
Juana says it’s his insane vanity. By retiring now he’s punishing all of New Spain for his humiliation at not having been named Archbishop—instead of Aguiar—by universal acclaim.
Carlos comes every day. One of New Spain’s most famous men. I know it’s as much for me as for her. He endured a lot to let me stay with him. The scandal among his family and colleagues and neighbours—that a woman should leave a convent for a bachelor’s house. Even if she was just an oblate and not a nun. At least they didn’t know about my past.
He comes in the afternoon and waits in the locutory, waits till end of day then goes away again, to put in another long night working at the hospice. These past few days I’ve not been able to go down to him for even a moment. Yesterday from her window I watched him walking home, bent into the dusk as though into a stiff wind.
More and more I seek comfort in t
he learning that seems to allow Carlos and Juana to remain calm while the hysteria simmers down below, in the streets and the convent patios. I tell Carlos about the vigil, he tells me how it is in the city. With no trace of irony New Spain’s finest historian says he’s glad to be able to perform this small service at least.
After dusk the streets are almost empty. Few want to risk the miasmal airs that rise at night to spread the plague. Many in the surrounding countryside see visions in the pre-dawn skies. Each morning there circulate fresh tales of a flaming sword hanging over the city, dragons, giant black hearses …
Fly early, return late, the rich say as their coaches whisk them to lengthy retreats in Cocoyóc, the thermal baths Moctezuma once reserved for his personal use. Carlos describes the melancholy lethargy these flights provoke among onlookers too poor to leave. It echoes on long after each carriage disappears.
“And all the superstitions of Europe,” he says in disgust, “are being dusted off now and retailed here. From normally reliable sources I’m hearing fantastic accounts—I hope they’re fantasy!—of naked virgins being made to plough furrows around villages in the dead of night….
“Now this talk again of an Indian uprising. Today any fool can see the Indians are too busy dying to threaten anyone.”
We are sitting in the locutory. It is the one Juana used to use. There was once a rosewood grille here, but the room is divided now by an iron grate with barely room to slip a book between the bars. Carlos gets up and goes to the window, tall, barred, not much wider than his narrow shoulders. He stands looking into the little strip of garden. I am sure he is thinking of her. With almost anyone else he can be very short-tempered, and is not a little feared. Yet he endured no end of teasing from her in this room. Some of it wounded him, I think, more than he let on. But he told me once he would exchange the Chair of Mathematics for the privilege of her teasing.
“They’ve started in on the Jews again. I wonder if Juana was right … if our fear of them didn’t start up again during the first great plagues in Italy. Soon they’ll have Jews drinking the blood of Christian babies once again.” I know he is speaking to her through me.
Juana listens carefully as I repeat his words.
“They’re saying Jews are spreading the sickness to our drinking water.”
She says nothing, eyes like coals. I’ve said this to make her angry. The old game I used to play to get her to speak. What kind of monster does this make me, that I played it then, that I should resort to it now?
25th of February
This morning there are two new red crosses of quarantine in the street below. But these are not the only signs.
Almost everywhere are hastily daubed 4s, and symbols I ask Juana to explain. One is the Greek tau wreathed in serpents. Another is an Egyptian trigram representing the Animus Mundi, though I am still not sure what this is exactly. Carlos says one of these was found painted in red on the cathedral floor. Juana couldn’t say, any more than could he, who might have done it—unless someone from within the Church itself. What did interest her was to learn it took two days for the trigram to be removed from the cathedral.
This and other half-hearted responses to the tide of superstition give us the feeling the authorities are losing conviction, as though they fear God might be revoking the Church’s magisterium on earth. It’s true, everyone knows it: the Archbishop has lost his nerve, which more than anything feeds the malaise in the streets. This week he has had the fountain in his courtyard stopped, the basin drained. His mind was never stable. Carlos’s devotion to him has always hurt and mystified her. I know that he brings news of the Archbishop’s unravelling now as a gesture.
I find her sitting the window, gazing absently out. She listens to the latest without turning her eyes from the street. “How His Grace must fear this liquid inquisition, ’Tonia, like a woman’s own flesh.”
Does the sound of many waters trouble him so? Is it la Flojera, as Juana believes, that terrifies him? The old fanatic faces now the end of a life spent buying clemency with the charity of others. He has tried to purchase Grace. Now he finds nothing to preserve his body from its corruption. The Archbishop’s palace is a fortress—walls thicker than the span of an arm, ceilings three times the height of a man. How it must trouble him now, Juana says, that his palace rests on the ruins of Tezcatlipoca’s temple—ancient god of sudden reversals of fortune. The first bishop of Mexico, according to her grandfather, had a Mexica inscription carved above the main palace doors. An inscription since removed: I leave you to the one whom I have seated on this throne; through him I renew all things.
She is still thinking of him as, with a little smile, she tells me that to each Mexica god there corresponds a disease. To cure a disease, the healer acts it out, becomes it, in the guise of its god. A theatre of disease.
Old man, act out thine affliction.
Plague crones and plague maidens bring in the sickness. They enter through unlocked windows and unbarred doors. They exit the cracked lips of the dying as a tiny blue flame. They renew themselves each night from the earth herself, in the miasmal breath rising up out of the corruption of her bowels.
The man who spills his seed on the earth exposes himself to mortal danger.
27th of February
From the beginning, the rumours have held a special quality of unstoppable horror. Unnamed villages left without a living soul. Villages gone mad, thresholds and pathways strewn with bloated and blackened bodies. A vulture paradise. Fresh bodies, still warm, still moaning, reduced, by la Flojera, to the consistency of stew. They say it has followed the slaves out from Africa.
The War of God, they’re calling it.
It should have come on crying panic and calamity. It should have spread like a forest fire roaring disaster. Instead it came quietly, as on the feet of mice.
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
Alan Trueblood, trans.
Bolder at other times
my mind denounced as height of cowardice
yielding the laurels without one attempt
to meet the challenge of the lists.
Then it would seize upon the brave example
set by that famous youth, high-minded
charioteer of the chariot of flame;
then courage would be fired
by his grand and bold, if hapless, impulse,
in which the spirit finds
not, like timidity, a chastening lesson
but a pathway summoning it to dare;
one treading this no punishment can deter
the spirit bent upon a fresh attempt
(I mean a thrust of new ambition).
Neither the nether pantheon—
cerulean tomb of his unhappy ashes-
nor the vengeful lightning bolt,
for all their warnings, ever will convince
the soaring spirit once resolved,
in lofty disregard of living,
to pluck from ruin an everlasting fame.
Rather, that youth is the very type, the model:
a most pernicious instance
(causing wings to sprout for further flights)
of that ambitious mettle,
which, finding in terror itself a spur
to prick up courage,
pieces together the name of glory
from letters spelling endless havoc …
SACRED HEART
28th of February
THE PRIORESS takes to her bed with a fever.
The number begins to mount. Within two days the bodies are accumulating faster than they can be buried. Someone has the idea of dragging them into the cellars where it is cooler, but those of us bringing the bodies are more and more horrified by the swelling ranks of corpses in the semi-darkness. It was a terrible mistake to bring them there, compounded now several times a day. Soon no one is willing to go down. With a shudder, averting our faces now, we tip each litter’s dead freight and send it thudding down the steps.
Then comes a night of t
errible rain, and hailstones as large as fists. In the morning the cellars stand at least ankle-deep in a reeking broth.
4th of March
At mid-day, a minor earthquake, but strong enough to send a crack running up the column across from her cell door, and cause a minute or two of vertigo.
Over the past few years, such tremors seem more like a monthly occurrence. The conjunction of hail and comet and flood and quake should seem to us almost commonplace. Instead we’re like children cringing before the next brutal cuff, a blow amplified by our fear.
It is said that in a town in Italy the plague was once averted by rounding up all the beggars, lepers, Jews and sodomites, then locking them in a big barn and setting it alight.
5th of March
Soon we’ll all be saved.
In the Plaza del Volador the construction is nearly complete. The Archbishop’s amphitheatre will hold twenty-five thousand. One of its chapels is dedicated to San Sebastián and another to San Roque, our intercessors against the plague. Open-air masses have been ordered said at the portals of the city, the five causeways across the half-drained marsh they say was once a lake.
Another order is circulated, that the head of each household must say prayers three times a day at the threshold of his house.
Barefoot processions wend their way through the city, as many as fourteen a day. Flagellants go dressed in sackcloth, nooses about their necks, lofting imprecations to the sky. Sometimes the Archbishop can be seen trudging ever more wearily in the vanguard, violating a health edict against public assembly that he himself helped promote.
In the first week after the outbreak, he was said to be everywhere—saying masses, launching pilgrims, blessing statues of San Roque, erecting rough crosses carved with the buboes of plague. Few claim to have seen him lately.
At the Archbishop’s command a belt of wax is being laid that will encircle the city and be lit as a barrier against the pestilence.
I ask her how any plague could possibly stand against all this.
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