Faith should be made of sterner stuff, her answer.
Still Juana does not leave her cell.
From passing sisters and especially the novices, reproachful looks rise up to me on the second storey where I stand just inside Juana’s doorway. They do not know about the Prioress’s orders forbidding her to come out.
8th of March
Nine more bodies to the cellars. Tumbled down the steps through the swelling stench.
Within these walls, the body count rises; without, rumours spread unchecked. Almost every village to the east and south of the capital is said to be burning up with plague.
Like the Archbishop’s belt of wax, she says grimly. A firebreak.
10th of March
Violent sensations batter my heart. Before the rage takes over I must write—or I am afraid it will never loosen its hold. I begin with the light that comes into their hopeless faces in the courtyard below as Juana emerges from the seclusion of her cell.
What did I want?—in one breath I am begging her not to come out, reminding her of the Prioress’s order—yet my heart bursts with pride as she steps past me. In not a single face does there now appear even a glimmer of the usual resentment or scandal at her disobedience.
We stand at the top of the cellar steps. The scene strikes the eye like a vision called Despair. She is afraid, I know, if she does not do this now she will not be able to. I follow her down. I follow only her.
In the cellars, on the slippery stairs, in fluid halfway to our knees, I fight not to add my vomit to the putrid soup we walk through. How I would have fought to withhold my tears if only she had been able to stop hers. I watch them stain the pale fold of cotton she has wound about her face, another around mine. Thin shield against the reek clawing at our heads, searing our eyes.
How can he let this happen to his brides? Fury dims my eyes—is it so dark, can he not see? Can he not feel? This sacred heart of his, why does it not break? This? this is his sacred mystery—misery?
That’s not what I see. I see bloated bodies swelling in the murk—a jumbled pyramid of meat. At its periphery rat corpses float like bloated little barges. I see this hallowed earth soaked in vomit and blood and pus. Out in the patio as we drag the bodies up, one of us stands guard to drive the carrion birds off—are these your dark attendants then, that we defend our sisters from? She accepts your silence. I do not.
Where has the light gone that once was in their eyes?
No one should ever have to touch what we touched, what our sisters have become. To feel unwilling fingers tearing through skin riven like sodden paper, sinking through the puttied, putrid flesh beneath, finding purchase only at the bone.
What have you done to us?
It’s no use. There are no words to express the horror of those hours. There are no tongues for this.
Weeping, sliding, stumbling, we begin dragging the corpses from the cellars up into the light. She needed my strength, her lumbering Amazon. She needed my strength.
When I see how many have rushed to our aid—familiar faces, names for those hours erased—all my resentments for all the years of slights and spites and jealousies just fall away.
After, we stand together in the light … slimy, fly-blown, sick with horror. And tonight I swear by all I can still find holy that for a moment I felt, we felt clean.
But he did not wash me. His hands never touched me.
The negroes in the sanitary detail sent by the city had been refusing—even on pain of imprisonment and excommunication, even under the lash—to enter those cellars. And no whip or cane or iron in the world could ever have forced me down there either. But now, out in the open, the bodies can be washed and blessed, taken away for burial.
A mass grave has been dug at the bottom of the orchard in ground greatly esteemed for its flesh-eating properties.
When night fell we rested in the darkness, unable to bear the world by torchlight. And while we rested, more died.
11th of March
I feel Juana jostling me awake at first light. Mind numb from a sleep like death, I still know, even before I open my eyes, yesterday was no nightmare, at least not one I will ever wake from. In every aching joint and muscle burns the memory of yesterday’s heartsickening cargo. My back is a column of fire. As Juana’s frail form precedes me through the dim passageway, I wonder how she can even walk.
Without a light, we make our way across the convent grounds towards the infirmary. At our approach a low droning fills the space between our footfalls, the space between my indrawn breaths. Just inside the door we pause as our eyes adjust to the room’s near darkness. Two torches flicker weakly at the far end of the room. The drone resolves itself into the buzz of bottleflies and the low moaning of two rows of figures twisting in the gloom.
So many varieties of horror still to discover. Suddenly, that today might be worse than yesterday is no longer unthinkable. My pace slows as we make our way up the aisle between the rows. Juana has stopped a few paces short of a robed figure bent low over a bed, while above it, a novice I recognize holds a lantern over a woman’s bare torso.
A blade flickers in swift descent to the woman’s neck—darkness spurts from a swelling the size of an egg. As the robed figure straightens my blood runs cold—is it all a nightmare after all? A giant, beaked bird with glittering eyes turns and comes toward us. I hear a woman’s strangled scream—the patient whose neck has been slashed?
Juana grips me by the shoulders.
The robed figure hastily removes the mask to reveal a young man’s earnest face. “It takes some getting used to, I know,” he begins, then falters as he recognizes who is with me.“Sor Juana? What you did yesterday … I cannot begin to express my admiration.” The mask dangles from one hand like a hunting trophy.“I’ve been trying for the past two days to get that vile mess cleaned up, but couldn’t get a soul …”
“There were several of us,” Juana says.“Antonia, I imagine you’ve met our new chaplain, Father Medina?” By the way she says this I know she approves of him. The little gesture of an introduction amid the mounting misery makes me want to cry. I don’t trust myself to speak.
“Our chaplain, as you see, is wearing the very latest in Italian fashion.”
With a trace of embarrassment, he starts to explain. “Antonia, yes?—the robes here are of a waxed linen,” he says, holding up the hem. “Quartz eyepieces…. The beak is stuffed with spices, to counteract the plague’s miasmas.”
“What they may counter,”Juana puts in, “are the smells. Our next task should be to set out braziers to incense these rooms.”
As the ill come in ever faster, Juana brings me to a grim appreciation of the chaplain’s system for clustering the sick according to their symptoms. Those with only fever are held apart in case their illness is not plague at all. Those with buboes, who are the most numerous and the slowest to die, are brought to the main hall. If the swellings can be brought to suppurate within a week, some of these patients may yet live, though their hearts will be seriously weakened, the doctor explains.
“As will all ours be,”Juana says gently.
Those in the clutches of the Dragon or la Flojera are confined together in the room nearest the chapel. Neither group lives long enough to catch the other’s disease. And no one survives. The doctor almost never enters here to face his never-ending defeat, undisguised.4
… so that they might concoct a healthful brew—
final goal of Apollonian science—
a marvellous counterpoison,
for thus at times from evil good arises …5
12th of March
Today amid all the torment and darkness I am happy to be at your side, to do this simple, hopeless work. Our years together have come down to this. We will end here.
So little we can do to stem this sea of suffering. The kind chaplain’s treatments are not just inadequate but seem almost to substitute one sort of suffering for another: man’s for God’s. Purges. Cauterizations. Emetics to induce still
more vomiting, blood-letting to further swell the tide of blood, caustic vesicants to further blister the patient’s blotched and burning skin, treacles of herbs to bring the buboes beneath to suppurate. Pain as an antidote for pain.
Still, the chaplain’s energy and scientific presence bring comfort to the women who lie dying all around us.
Juana and I discover the finest treatment of all: cool water trickled across blackened lips and furrowed brows.
15th of March
Of the priests still courageous enough to stay among us, one spends most of his time among the victims of el Dragón and la Flojera, administering last rites.
I admire this bald little man for his gentle cheer. That he still finds the strength at times to smile. Sometimes I hold a lantern for him and listen to last confessions gasped over blackened tongues, feel shadowy pulse-beats at the neck or wrist flutter and still. I have seen him weep.
I never learned his name.
17th of March
Under Juana’s supervision a few of us feed the braziers with spices, recharge the lamps, fetch water, tend the fires beneath great vats simmering in the courtyard.
The dead we lift by the corners of the sheet she died upon. We have neither the strength nor sufficient hands any longer to dress the dead nuns in their bridal costumes and shroud. But on each nun’s head we still place the crown of wildflowers she wore at her profession. From the grave in the orchard, the sheets come back to be placed in one vat for boiling. From another, boiling water is drawn and the empty bed and floor beneath it are swabbed with lime.
To this work there appears no end.
Juana can be seen now all over the convent, among the nuns and servants equally. Lancing buboes with a skill she learned in dissections, applying hot and cool compresses, bathing the bodies of the dead.
Comforting the dying is the hardest thing of all, smoothing their tortured brows. As death approaches, she’s the one they ask for. Most often it falls to her to signal to a priest and assist him in the ceremony I’ve come to detest.
My daughters, on your knees, pray to Our Lord God so that He may extend His mercy and His Grace to this sick woman, while I, His servant, give to her the unction of the holy sacrament.
Taking the oil from Juana’s hands, the priest approaches the dying sister and anoints her, tracing the sign of the cross, first over the eyes—close them, I bid thee—then over the ears—unstop them—over the nostrils—draw breath—across the mouth—seal it—across the hands—open them—along the shoulders—lay them bare.
And so Christ’s brides arrive before him, attentive, mute, blinded, barechested. Open-handed.
20th of March, Spring
In one room they die spread-eagled in agony, in the other they go quietly and quickly, blood rushing from their faces and secret openings. For many it begins with the mockery of a knotting pain low in the belly and the groin. What a black brood they are about to deliver.
Excruciating headaches, flashes of intense heat and chills. For some, the sudden gush of nosebleeds, a thin bloody fluid leaking from the eyes and ears. For most, the sinister rashes we call poseys, the wracking convulsions, the dry, black tongues. And the blood—vomiting blood, coughing blood, voiding bloody clay.
And the worse this madness gets, the harder it is to remember their names. They have names. We have names our fathers gave us. We have the names our mothers used.
We have names.
Tomasina, María, Asunción, Araceli, Candelaria, Concepción …
More terrible even than the agony is the confusion in their faces.
The horror, the prostration too, but worst is this anxious confusion. Their eyes glow with the purest humanity we see in the face of a suffering beast.
Who will explain this mystery? Will he? Will I? Will she?
28th of March
The second priest comes to the infirmary only when sent for. Father Landa. Yet at least he comes, unlike so many others. I try to remind myself of this to lessen my dislike of him, to not see the shadow of gloating in his fat, clean-shaven face. With such a beard he must have to shave twice a day. But how can that be—when is there time, and where …?
It is late evening. I see him on a stool next to a cot, rounded shoulders hunched over the Bible in his lap, rocking strangely. I draw near, though I am reluctant to. Over the prone figure before him, he is reciting something. It sounds like Revelations:
And the Harlot of Nineveh was drunk on the blood of saints and martyrs. So He poured His hatred into the vessels of his judgement: that the horns of the beast should score her vitals, should eat her flesh and burn her with fire …
Can this really be Revelations? He isn’t even reading.
He sent seven angels to pour out the vials of his wrath upon the earth, which broke out in grievous sores, and on the sea, the rivers and fountains, which ran blood, and into the darkness where they gnawed their tongues for pain—
He’s making this up. It isn’t like this—
And He tracked the dragon through the wilderness, where she hid from him in the swamps. He drove his sickle into the foetid earth and twisted, delivering her of the child she harboured there—
“Are you trying to frighten her to death?” I cry grasping at his shoulder, glaring into his mad eyes. “Get away from her!—Juana!”
She hurries over. The small, neat form beneath him is cool and lifeless. She’s been dead an hour. Thank God, I murmur.
Vanessa …
This face we know. This name I have no trouble remembering. Vanessa.
I will remember your bright eyes, your graces, your body: small and slender and strong. Your mastery in the kitchens, Juanita’s birthday party … I will remember.
I feel Juana’s arms encircle me.
The next day, the little bald priest comes to tell us our fat Father Landa has been called away to duties at some monastery or other.
Our little priest, the one for whom I have no name, turns back to his work. I see a glint of satisfaction in his kind eyes.
2nd of April
Although the Dragon is more terrible, la Flojera more horrifying, it is the buboes I come to loathe. The very word … knotting first into clusters like tiny garlic heads, then swelling flower bulbs, then, ripe and soft and seedy. Huge, rotting figs.
Many of the corpses awaiting burial are so blackened that all distinctions of race are now erased. And so we go forth, hand in hand, equal before our God, waiting on his grace.
I find Juana in the infirmary, holding an old woman’s hand. Her name … her name is … Ana.
The end approaching, Ana turns her face to Juana, a question in her eyes, in her face a century. “Is there something I can bring for you, Mother?” Juana asks anxiously. “Is there something you need?”
“No daughter. Only to die.”
A minute or two later, the Prioress comes, roused from her own sickbed by the news of Ana’s dying. Ana is the convent’s most ancient nun, an old woman already when the Prioress first took her vows.
For a moment, Juana and the Prioress sit side by side. A moment of grace.
3rd of April
Juana tells me she too is losing the power to discriminate. At times the droning of a fly seems as loud as a scream, as terrible as a death rattle.
Sometimes, she says, I can think of no words as beautiful as agua … gracias.
5th of April
Carlos no longer comes every day, but when he can. His own hospice is filled to overflowing. With what time he has, he is experimenting with an idea Juana once had many years ago for making ice. To bring comfort to those with fevers. He has mounted a series of fans on a drum over shallow pans of water. If the rate of evaporation could be increased sufficiently … but he lacks the strength to turn the drum with enough speed. Perhaps something could be done with gears, he asks, beside a swift stream? Juana sends me back with the idea of driving the drum with steam. She tries to explain the mechanism to me, but I cannot follow.
6th of April
T
he chaplain has been urging the Prioress to permit that the corpses themselves be burned. Most of the bodies reach a sickening state of decomposition within hours, and there is little ground left in which to bury them. Juana agrees. But the Prioress cannot bring herself to issue the order.
“Burial in this convent’s consecrated ground …” Mother Andrea de la Encarnación draws herself up and squarely faces him. Despite the strain in her face, her voice is calm.“This is not just a nun’s most fervent dream, young man, it is her sacred right.”
7th of April
A pause amid the carnage. Seeing the surgeon’s young face filled with exhaustion and dismay, Juana teases him into a debate on disease transmission, a conversation he soon engages in with great absorption. Plague atoms, the reigning view, versus her champion Kircher’s theory: living infective corpuscles he claims to have seen through a microscope in his laboratory in Rome.
“The waxing of our chaplain’s linen, Antonia,” she says turning to me, “is thought to keep the plague atom from attaching itself. A very sticky sort of atom, it seems. In my view, Doctor, the only thing those robes will keep out is fleas….”
In a moment they will forget I’m even here.
We are sitting outside the infirmary toward the end of day. She and the surgeon had been discussing the possibility of laying the most feverish patients in a shallow water pan. But before he leaves they agree there are too many ill, too few hands.
A year ago I would have clung to my anger that she should speak so freely with the surgeon and have so little to say to me. But for the past quarter hour she has been talking swiftly, intently, only to me. And yet these stories of her childhood, which I would have been overjoyed to hear a year ago, I am suddenly afraid of.
“… I remember it so clearly, the day we arrived. There was such a light … Branches hung low over the road and the sun was setting red in the hollow beneath them. The campesinos were unloading the mule carts.
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