“How we loved the trees, Amanda and I. Once we spent a whole morning planting pines … in a churchyard—yes, in Chimalhuacan. I remember. How tall are they now, I wonder….”
Juana turns to me to explain, but I know who Amanda is. She has told me before, though only once. Has she forgotten this?
Here in the courtyard tonight the light is so soft. We could almost forget what is going on inside. We sit on a stone bench at the edge of the orchard. Her face is pale, her round black eyes are lustrous with that intensity that still sometimes startles even those of us who think we are used to it. Her wimple is pulled back. Her black hair has grown back thick and straight, and above where it tucks under her robes, flares out like a satin cowl, framing her face.
At dawn from the colonnade above the courtyard I stare into the eastern sky. White smoke from Popocatepetl, though the mountain itself I cannot see. Is the entire world and heaven too now ablaze? Has your hero’s bright chariot run wild, Juana, drying up the lakes and seas, scorching even heaven?
What was it in her stories yesterday that troubles me? Stone lovers cursed, demonic serpent children haunting mountain meadows, a lost tribe disappearing after the Conquest into an underworld, over whose entrance sits the smoking mountain …
The mountain is in each one.
I remember something in a poem. Evading another day of horror before me, I grasp at this glimmering … this sweet release of verse.
A poem of hers—the only one, she claimed, that ever really mattered to her. First Dream. I go to its hiding place in the archives, deserted these past weeks. I return to the cell with it, light a candle, find the passage.
… Of a mountain next to which that very Atlas,
which like a giant dominates all others,
becomes a mere obedient dwarf…
… of the loftiest volcano that from earth,
a rearing giant, goads high heaven to war …6
I read page after page of these lines, the rhymes, the visions always too difficult for me to do anything but marvel at—and that in this prophetic Dream of hers she has seen so clearly, even down to the counterpoisons we have used against the plague. And suddenly I know why I am frightened by her stories. One after another with hardly a pause between. Not just that they should tumble out after almost two years of silence. It’s how they come. They ramble. She has never been unclear in her life.
It is time to return to work.
I wake her.
8th of April
Some of the sisters have gone mad. Three run wildly about. I can barely bring myself to write. One stands outside the infirmary screaming in answer to each scream she hears inside. No one bothers to quiet her, what is one more scream?
The last shred of convent discipline unravels now, the vow of enclosure. Men everywhere coming and going. Here now in a convent, here in our dying, most know more easy freedom with men than ever while they lived. At last I have this to share with them.
And even as we still live, the last differences between us fall away. Old and young, poor and rich, learned and ignorant, sensuous and ascetic, talkative and silent. All engaged now in an unceasing inner dialogue of questions and silences. Look at these faces.
What have you done to their beauty?
If I could be granted the power to accomplish one thing, in this final hour, one single wish—O pardon me my wistfulness—I would restore to them their beauty. I would have them see themselves, some now for the first time ever in her life, as simply … beautiful.
Who dares call this a lie? This beauty of girls.
Does he—is our Eternal Author well satisfied with His creation now? With the grace of His loving union….
… utmost perfection of creation,
utmost delight of its Eternal Author,
with whom well pleased, well satisfied,
His immense magnificence took His rest;
creature of portentous fashioning
who may stretch proud arms to heaven
yet suffers the sealing of his mouth with dust;
whose mysterious image might be found
in the sacred vision seen in Patmos
by the evangelic eagle, that strange vision
which trod the stars and soil with equal step;
or else in that looming statue
with sumptuous lofty brow
made of the most prized metal,
who took his stance on flimsy feet
made of the material least regarded,
and subject to collapse at the slightest shudder.
In short, I speak of man, the greatest wonder
the human mind can ponder,
complete compendium
resembling angel, plant, and beast alike …7
9th of April
A wind has been clawing all night at the shutters. In the morning I wake
to a sky swept clean of smoke.
Late morning.“I shouldn’t say this,” the chaplain offers, “but there were only two new cases last night. With God’s help, we may have this thing beaten.”
“A few more victories like this …” Juana murmurs.
“And we’re finished. Yes, Sor Juana, I know.”
11th of April
It should have come in like a hurricane, smashing everything in its path.
Instead it begins with a rash at her neck, a little cat’s paw.
A mark I took no notice of. My mind would not open. All day long the thought of her marred throat I managed to escape, but not the foreboding.
One day soon now, someone will say that the marks on your body traced exactly the contours of the lake of Chalco….
Thirteen hours we work without stopping, fed on green delusions and false hopes. Night finds us still in the main hall of the infirmary, sitting on stools, slumped against a grimy wall. A strange light in her eyes, face flushed, Juana begins telling another story. A picnic beside a spring high up on the WhiteLady. Cold tamales con rajas.
“I remember a cream made from honey, the women used to sell. We’d spread it all over our bodies by the hot spring. Remember, Amanda?” Her eyes are very bright and full as I look deeply into them and blush.
“All the wasps …? How we stood naked, letting them land—then jumped into the brook to keep from getting stung! What is it, Antonia, what’s wrong?”
“You called me Amanda just now.”
The lantern guttering, rain falling into the hush beyond the windows, she starts to tell me about a sorcerer. A jaguar, whose friend is a bishop, or an Inquisitor. I wonder if it is a children’s story. No, a story important to her grandfather, a story told to her the night he died. She wants me to take it down. He knows a bookbinder who conceals manuscripts by binding them into Bibles. Who does? Carlos. Write it?—write what, write which? She wants me to have Carlos bind it secretly under the cover of a Bible. It is a story that cannot be lost.
And so I write, but as usual only half understand what I am copying down. Other things I do not understand at all. Lies, false gods, twins of gods. Night, two prisons, three escapes. A jaguar vanishing, Night. The fulfilment of a prophecy—or else its reversal … a wheel, or a spiral … I cannot make it out, I copy it down. Gaps will not be tolerated, she says. Why does she say this to me. Do I not always try?
So I write it, to have it bound under the covers of Bibles. Gaps will not be tolerated, gaps must be filled. Under the covers of Bibles, between their contents and their covers. Her brow is damp, her smile strange. What did she mean? Juana, I don’t understand. I write it anyway. Her copyist, her parrot. I write to fill the silences, between each breath. I write to save my own life.
Ever since I was little … the last honest man … the last sorcerer was …
Who?
We had the most wonderful time.
I said it once, ’Tonia. One night … I think I said it, once. A wonderful time is gone….
She is asleep.
I write this and feel my heart swelling within me, a grotesque thing that will no longer
sit in my chest—sits on it, crushing the breath out of me.
This dismal intermittent dirge
of the fearful shadowy band
insisted on attention less
than it coaxed a listener asleep …
… while Night, an index finger
sealing her two dark lips—
silent Harpocrates—enjoined
silence on all things living …8
… All was now bound in sleep,
all by silence occupied.
Even the thief was slumbering,
even the lover had closed his eyes …9
Darkness. Silence. It is the middle of the night. Green hopes withered on the vine, I hold her head to my breast as she sleeps her restless sleep, full of dreams.10
In the morning word flies through the streets that Sor Juana has fallen ill.
Several times that day, the Archbishop sends men to report back to him on her condition. On the advances in God’s War on the children of the earth.
LAST DREAM
12th of April, 1695
BY FIRST LIGHT I KNOW: three days, five at most. We know the symptoms too well to waste a lie. She will not leave this cell again alive.
Carlos demands to see her. With so many people coming and going now, I know he can get in if he insists.
“Antonia please,” she gasps, looking up at me, wide-eyed,“don’t let him see me like this.”
It should have come down like a comet, crying disaster, setting all the temples ablaze, like a sun summoned in the blackest night.
Instead it came quietly as on the feet of mice.
“Remember, NibbleTooth …? Walking up towards the mountain, up through the pines …” She stops, shuddering with cold. The sheets and blankets are damp. She clutches at my arm as I turn to go for fresh bedding. “Antonia …?” She makes an effort to concentrate.
“Find Amanda for me.” Her teeth are chattering.“Ask Carlos if he will do this for me.”
“But she’s in a delirium half the time!”
“She knows what she’s asking, Carlos.”
“She is just sending me away. You just finished saying she doesn’t want me to see—”
“She said you’d understand what this means to her.”
“What if when I get back …”
“With a good horse you can be there and back in two, two and a half days.” The coldness of the calculation shocks me. “There’s still time.”
“He agreed to go, even knowing …?”
“Yes, he knew.”
“When he returns, will you ask him one more favour?”
“Oh Juanita …” He would do anything for you.
“It will keep his mind occupied.”
She tells me what it is. Yes, it will keep his mind occupied.
So tell me Juana about Nyctimene, this daughter of Lesbos—shamefaced Nyctimene who keeps watch by chinks in the sacred portals…. What last role would you choose for me: to desecrate the holy lamps, or top them up that no one die in darkness?
But it’s too late to ask you this.
13th of April
I will not record any more symptoms. There are lies and slanders even I will not record.
Flashes of her old self, her clearness and irony. Like when she asks to be cremated so as not to have to lie next to Concepción and listen to her gossip for all eternity.
Just now as she opens her eyes I have the unreal sensation, almost of luxury, that she’s just woken up from sleeping late. We never once had the chance to sleep in, you and I.
I reach for anger, anger is the safest. How can she make jokes?
“The question is not when but how. We are all dying, ’Tonia. How would you have had me go—breaking my neck slipping on the stairs? No, it is better to make a little comedy than die in one.”
The sisters too begin to keep a record. A kind of recipe book. All now compete for miracles. To build a case for her beatification.
Did you see how the touch of her fingers healed sister Elena’s sores?
Yes and as she kissed one of the slaves on the forehead I saw the pestilence leave the woman’s lips like a blue flame. Sor Juana had no fear for herself …
They are half expecting the plague to lift when you die. And I cannot rouse myself to anger. Any day now someone will claim to have seen your breasts running with milk.
I pore over—pour through this, her great book of dreaming. I try to meet her in dreams, to follow her through mine. To make her see me again, where the light is clean, where there is no smoke, no cloud, no sun.
The body in unbroken calm,
a corpse with soul,
is dead to living, living to the dead,
the human clock attesting
by faintest signs of life
its vital wound-up state,
wound not by hand but by arterial concert:
by throbbings which give tiny measured signs
of its well-regulated movement …11
I wake startled, overcome with fear. In the darkness my fingertips find the faintest throbbing at your throat.
I sleep.
14th of April
Today a letter. A nobleman from Perú has written that he would like to come here, to make a life near her. A wealthy gentleman. He offers everything he has, without conditions, only that she might have the freedom to write whatever she wishes, whenever it pleases her.
More dreams, day and night, hers and mine. The cell is awash in dreams. It is all we have left to talk about. She tells me hers, still asks to hear mine.
I will not let anyone in. They bring fresh blankets, soup, oranges … and leave them at the door.
In a confused muttering she speaks to me of guilt—all the things and people sacrificed to feed her mind. Her hungers, her shame … something about a river, a face, or a hot spring called the Face. I cannot make it out.
What storm-tossed end would you have chosen for yourself, Juana, what tempest of the mind and soul?
… against her will was forced
to run ashore on the beach
of the vast sea of knowing,
with rudder broken, yardarms snapped,
kissing each grain of sand
with every splinter …12
I check on her. Her eyes are open. For a moment I …
“I had a dream, Antonia …” She pauses, closes her eyes, and after a breath opens them again.“There was a mountain spouting glyphs of smoke, ancient signs. An old dream of mine,” she says forcing her cracked lips into a smile. “Good that it should visit me once more. Your … turn … now.”
I’m not sure she even hears me. I have to speak loudly now. Her ears are leaking fluid. I shouldn’t write this, but I can’t help it. There is nothing else.
… no rapid surging flight could ever reach
of eagle soaring to the very heavens,
drinking in sunbeams and aspiring
to build her nest amidst the sun’s own lights,
however hard she presses upward
with great flappings of her feathered sails
or combings of the air
with open talons, as she strives,
fashioning ladders out of atoms,
to pierce the inviolate precincts of the peak …13
It is not darkness she strives against but light, an all-conquering light.
“I was flying again,” she murmurs weakly.“Before me the mountain … the sun at night. All human history stretched below, since before the Flood…. How we cling, each to our life.” Her laugh is a gasp.“So real it seems, our little bit of clay. How stubborn we are.”
She wakes, sleeps. One minute, two. She wakes, pauses an instant to swallow painfully.
“Just now, ’Tonia … I dreamed the whole of human history. From the first dawn down to our last day, last hour. How long have I been asleep—Antonia, are you there?
“How long would a dream of all eternity last?”
I watch her slip back into her dream of the sun at night, blood stream
ing from her eyes.
At this almost limitless elevation,
jubilant but perplexed,
perplexed yet full of pride,
and astonished although proud,
the sovereign queen of the sublunary world
let the probing gaze, by lenses unencumbered,
of her beautiful intellectual eyes …
….The eyes were far less quick
to reel, contrite, from their bold purpose.
Instead, they overreached and tried
in vain to prove themselves
against an object which in excellence exceeds
all visual lines—
against the sun, I mean, the shining body
whose rays impose a punishment of fire …14
How could it have taken me so long to see that she was going blind?
The plague has broken. Or having eaten its fill, has gone away to sleep. It is only hunger wakes the dreamer.15
16th of April, 1695
The day dawns bright, mocking us with its orderly distribution of the gifts of light. There will be but one death today.
I can no longer keep her to myself. Fresh bedding, the braziers charged with spices…. By late afternoon I’ve done what I can to scrub the walls clean of their rust-red streaks, like a child’s fingers run mad with paint. In this stained nursery I am about to go insane. She has just asked if the day is clear, if I can see the volcanoes. She has forgotten that the new cell faces west, not east. I tell her yes. She asks about the flowers blossoming in the trees.
The survivors gather about the bed. Someone asks if anyone smells it, yes they all smell tangerines…. Is it only my own lies that can be beautiful?
The Prioress comes in, unsteady, hesitant. I can see it in her face. This final irony cuts even her, deeply: that the Archbishop has asked to see you, has asked that you leave the convent for your protection. Or his.
The faintest hint of a smile caresses your dark lips.“Last night … just now. I had the most beautiful dream.” Your voice is a faint whisper. I bend low and struggle to fill in the words. You feel my breath on your cheek, the drop of a tear. “Ahh, Antonia, it’s you. How good …”
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