She would like to meet you, Beulah.
Why?
I am not the one to explain my mother. She wants to talk to you alone. Will you?
I don’t see….
Her reasons are her own. As usual. Maybe after you can explain her to me. Lately I feel a greater need. But I should warn you she can be harsh. Her speech is a little slurred. And her memory … It is a great frustration. And an embarrassment, since she was once admired for her wit. It is a trait we prize.
Small thatched hut shunned out of the arc. Behind lies a cornfield, vines of beans creeping up the stalks. A rocking chair tipped on its side. No shrines, no cross. A sweet smell of mildew or rot. Cardboard nailed over the windows, flattened boxes of pesticide—Shelltox again. Bags of grain are stacked to the ceiling poles. A backstrap loom tacked to one wall is the sole adornment.
Mother, this is my friend—
We can introduce ourselves ourselves, Jacinto. Two bright eyes gleam from a hammock slung along the sacks of grain. Come girl, sit down. She beckons to a little crate.
Your mother lives in a granary.
Thank you, hijo, you can go now. Sit. Ándele. Swing me.
¿Señora?
Swing the hammock. Call me Marta. And you are Beulah.
Fine weave of wrinkles, heavy cheekbones, sunken temples. Jacinto’s toucan bill. Her hair is a turban, matte black, impossibly thick, braided with pink and blue ribbons. There is a slackening, a blur in the flesh from droop of lid to chin. Her right hand lies across the chest … a cutting of calla, a lily slowly withering. Petal fingers, she has Jacinto’s white palms.
You have beautiful hair.
My downfall. My nieces help me with it now. So that it does not fall. This is the house of my brother. No, it suits me, it is perfect. He built it specially. Exactly where I asked. He said when I moved in, A house without a shrine is fit only to store grain. This suits me also. The corn is my shrine, no? What is yours girl?
You’re a weaver.
Was. Obviamente.
You wanted to talk.
You can be direct. Good, it is best. Are you the one for my son? You are the first of his women he has brought here.
I’m not his—
Of course. No one is anyone’s now.
Your blouse, did you—
I hope you are not changing the subject. I am already making an effort for you. No I did not weave it. Huipil, not blouse. Every true Maya must weave hers. It is a rectangle embroidered with the four directions, the four colours of the corn. Her head slips through the centre, like a noose. No matter how far she travels she is always there, where she has placed herself. Between the heavens and the underworld, woven into the centre. Hung like a spider. These threads are strong….
They ask me why I lie here. Why I do not get up and hobble around. Do you want to ask me too?
No.
Good. Then you I will tell. I am where I have placed myself, am always. Three dead children, one beautiful husband with a stone for a heart. I am an old woman, almost sixty. There is only Jacinto holding me. Swing me. There … Again now, harder. Be careful with him, he is a smooth one. For his own good a little too clever, like his mother. But stronger. And his heart is good, though soft.
I should go, I don’t belong—
Ah, you have noticed already. It only came to me later, after twenty years or so. No, do not go yet. Soon. That box there. Bring it. Open—go on … Do you know what that is, under the creases?
A huipil.
Obviously. That is the last huipil I wove. When I had come back here for good. The finest weaver in the village still and ever. How do you like the embroidery?
There isn’t …
It is what they thought too. But this is my best work. Look more closely. The best embroidery they have never seen. I know it is dark. Look harder. Such detail, no? Of every colour, every shade. And every thread and stitch is white. When they finally saw, they said I was crazy. Then when I had my big stroke, they said … well, just think. But I was already sick when I came.
Señora, what do you want to tell me?
I want you to explain to my son.
About this?
No.
No entiendo, señora.
I want him to let go. So I can go.
He capers like a clown for a hundred children. This man, this famous Scribe. A spare tire, cheeks puffed out, fatman sway and swagger. Antic, comic is the serious face. He is the one they watch, eyes alight.
After, alone under the ceiba, he is the one the old ones bend their heads to hear. In such a sweet simple voice Jacinto sings—what lyric what lament? Two ancient sisters clutch at each other’s wrists, eyes never leaving him. Patricia says they are granddaughters of a Maya poet dead a hundred years. How does this make them feel…. There is no way to ask this.
Patricia packs the panel van—No she insists, this is what she is paid for, just sit by the fire. An earthenware vat of corn simmers, banked low for the night, the women to rise in darkness, make fresh tortillas for the sleepy family.
Across the embers breaths of air glide shadow mantas. He comes to the fire. It is quiet for awhile.
Your father was a Mexican?
Not my father. Her husband. I was born much later. When I press her she says it was the gardener. It may be true. With her, there is no knowing. Our culture centre was once a depot for hemp and chicle for chewing gum. Her husband’s family contested his will. The building was one of the things they could not take back. She gave it to me, and gave most of the rest away.
Is that why they think she’s crazy?
In town, yes. But here, they understood her pride. She was widely admired. A kind of hero once, though people had different reasons. Some admired her leaving, some her returning. Everyone had thought she ran off for the money.
She didn’t.
I believe she loved him. She kept only enough for her brother to build her house.
The granary.
Uncle has not touched the corn in there for months. He moved it in there after a fight. Then she would not let him take it back. It moulders now. The sicker she gets the worse he feels. He has begged her. He has begged me to beg her.
Have you?
With her, begging does no good. You have an expression in English—the good ones dying young? My mother has a harsher view.
That it makes no difference when.
Yes. You seem to understand each other.
He is beautiful in this light. Full lips, the oriental eyes.
How was she, Beulah? With you.
Not so harsh.
I am glad. Have you decided, about Bacalar? Or we could go to the village of the Chan Santa Cruz. I think that would interest you. It is a place the tourists cannot reach.
So different the nightroad. Bump bank stumble and swerve over the blond dirt. Shapes flit across the windshield. Green eyes blink in the dark-ahead. Washouts, potholes, seasick swells. The pale headlamps falter at each easing of the throttle. Creak of springs, torn tailpipe’s tracheal hiss. No talk radio, no talk. Low sawtooth scrub … branches claw at the roof.
We enter the little city, shoals of light in the tropic dark. Patricia drops us off at the nearest street, returns the car to the Centro Cultural. In the barrio no lights at all. No streets. I follow Jacinto, paleshadow … warren of wattle. Mutter of hens. Meek and mild I follow into the hut, out in the yard of Soledad. Light a candle. Will he fuck me now? He pulls from his shoulderbag a little packet in butcherpaper. My heart? Have you brought me my heart, Jacinto?
My mother gave me this. For you.
What is it?
She did not say.
Wait, don’t go.
It is for you to see, not me.
I’d like you to stay … un momento.
You know what this is?
A huipil.
But, it is not … complete. It is without embroidering. Does she want you to finish it?
Why did you take me there?
You came.
I
don’t belong.
You were expecting to?
Why I came … you asked. To San Andrés. My father’s name was Andrés. My real father.
I did not know mine.
I can just remember him.
It is something, at least.
I’ll come with you to Bacalar. If you still want me to.
REQUIEM
IT SHOULD HAVE COME rising up, like the foul earth splitting, groaning chaos and ruin. Instead your death came quietly. To me.
Before the day was out, before the eyes had dried, the Archbishop came in person, to confiscate her savings from the convent accounts. I pitied the Prioress, then. She fought him like a lion.
I have asked to wash her body in the fountain. I have asked their permission, and they have not yet denied me.
I have asked your sisters leave to come down among them, though I have done nothing to earn their friendship, I know. I will take you to where the survivors are gathered murmuring down below. Let me be your Camilla once more.
Ahh, Juanita, how easily you lift.
See, see how light. I am not so strong. Will they give me leave to carry you down? Though I know it is dangerous … though the chapel is stacked with these like cordwood, who once floated in the cellars. Who once breathed with us.
And if the answer is yes, I will take you to the fountain’s edge, under the trees and the black wedges wheeling in the smoke. And beneath the sun’s dull glare, I will ask them if this is the woman they remember. Remember her—remember you? In the orchards and the classrooms, in the chapel and the choir. Do they remember you that day, striding through a pouring waterspout—just to make us laugh? Do you remember her, as I do? I will ask.
Then I will make our sisters listen.
Will you all give me leave to speak, to ask something difficult of you?16
You all have pity, I will say to them, if you but look for it. This, no one can take away, it must be relinquished willingly.
You loved her too.
But the fathers and the doctors will tell us she was impudent. They must be right, it must be true. Seventeen centuries must make it so. She defied an imperium of light.
I may say her death was unjust. But then, there was her impudence … and their cause was such a noble one: to build a kingdom for a second sun. But I will confess before you that I wanted a saint too, if of a different kind, and I lied to make her one.
I killed her too.
And now that I have bathed her body and shown it to you, confessed to you my capital crime, I ask you finally: how then do you find her? How do you find?
These are only words, and lack the power to stir your hearts. But our souls—may they only speak when spoken to? For Grace, must we only stand and wait?
Carlos arrives after nightfall. He has found Amanda’s village, on the other side of the pass. But she had left the mountain thirty years ago. “The same year Juana came to the capital—she must have known. Even now she makes a fool of me!”
I know he does not mean this.
“She asked, Carlos, if you would deliver the eulogy.”
His lean, weary face is stricken. I am sorry to have taken his anger from him. We cling to each other like children.
After a while he goes on. “The mother is dead now. She returned to the village a few years ago. Amanda, no one is sure about. Some say people have seen her in the South. Oaxaca or San Cristóbal, or even farther…. It’s all I have. And this.”
From a cloth bag, he takes a bundle of leather, sodden and stained, and begins to unwrap its layers of canvas and oilcloth, as though peeling a fruit, or unwrapping a jewel. And it is like a jewel, that which he holds up to me, luminous and bright, the size of an avocado pit.
He has brought down ice.
“Yesterday,” he says, his face still streaked with road dust, “I could barely carry it.”
I turn it in my hand. He sits quietly watching.
For an hour after he is gone, I run this cold jewel over her forehead, along her temples, across her lips. I know it cannot help, I know I cannot help it. So slowly now it melts.
You would have made Him speak. In the silence of the night at the bottom of the sea, drowning in the suffocating sufficiency of His grace, you dreamed of calling to the sun … calling him to answer!
And you called this dream cowardice.
Do not leave me with this work, Juana. He will not answer.
Do not leave me. He will not answer for his work.
Don’t leave.
18th day of April, 1695
There is a vault where the flowered crowns are kept. It is entered only for a death. Inside, it is cool and dry. In the months of rain the walls are lined with sacks of rice to absorb whatever humidity they can. Two hundred bridal crowns from the day of vows. Once … Forty now. The scent of ancient wildflowers is indescribable. I did not want to come, I never want to leave.
The Prioress has walked me here. She lets me walk back alone now with the crown.
As for the fountain, it is too dangerous. But I may have as much water brought up as I need.
Carlos tells me I am exhausted. I do not feel it. I ask him about the bookbinder. Yes, he will ask him, he will try. But even the sacrilegious, he says, have little appetite for sacrilege these days.
He tells me to rest a while and take some food. Tomorrow will be the most difficult, the funeral in the morning, the interment that afternoon. But there is one thing left to do, one last duty to perform, and when it’s done—wither this heart of mine filled with rancour and mutiny. Blast these eyes that have watched you die. Void these lungs that breathed on after your last breath, burst this belly fired with bile and gall, that hungers on though I would make it stop, though I would stop it up.
Let bile and gall dissolve these stones now, bring down these walls that held you in. But oh, even then, that this black ink could raise the radiant dead….
I have cleared the room to do this work. And into the middle of this empty cell I have dragged the desk where once you wrote and I have laid you out upon it.
I will return your body to you. I defy them to deny me this. I will restore you to your beauty.
How much water do I need for this?
I cloak your shoulders, replace your veil, fold your fingers against your empty palms. Cradle out these cool entrails with my own hard hands, pack your cavities with balm. And lift up your vitals in my hands and spread them through the sky, like ribbons.
Carlos comes afterwards, to tell me what was said. They should have come by the thousands, tearing their hair and rending their cloaks … and in truth the ceremony was a splendid one. Though many did not come.
But Carlos was there. He rose and came to stand before them. His closing phrases I record:
There is no pen that can rise to the eminence that hers o’ertops. I should like to omit the esteem in which I regarded her, the veneration which she has won by her works, in order to make manifest to the world how much, in the encyclopaedic nature of her intelligence and universality of her letters, was contained in her genius, so that it may be seen that, in one single person, Mexico enjoyed what, in past centuries, the graces imparted to all the learned women who remain the great marvels of history. The name and fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz will only end with the world17
There is a bird, born in Heliopolis, from a nest of burning spices, who lives but once every few hundred years. She is forged from fire in silence. She is the sun of night. To the first fire, does the firebird return. To the sun’s first city, to Heliopolis.
And if you have a little time, together we will take her out across the plains and over the tortured hills, up through pines like bearded giants, where in the cold air her voice echoes still. Up and up across the snowy slopes to the cone’s smoking brim.
I will make her long lived. I will make her live three hundred years. I will deliver her. From you, to you.
Here. I place the crown of wildflowers on her brow. There, now we start.
This ceremony begin
s with the heart.
MONDAY
[March 20, 1995]
TEN A.M. He calls in sick. He has been up all night drinking port. Madeleine has already gone out. A whiteness flutters behind his eyes, a blizzard rages silently in his mind. He sits in the den staring at the phone he has brought in from the kitchen. The den once had its own phone. He removed it to remain undisturbed. He has not remained undisturbed.
He looks under ‘Limosneros’ in the phone book. There is only one. He realizes he remembers Beulah’s number; it is not in the book, but it is not her number he is after. He leaves a message at her parents’ home. His message now is something in a neutral tone. Have they spoken with Beulah lately? He’s just received a disturbing call. Several calls. As he speaks, he knows this too will be a disturbing message to listen to. He is not displeased.
The phone company has promised him a new, unlisted number. By Wednesday morning at the latest. With the police, it goes as he expected. Delisting his number was a good idea. That should do the trick. If it didn’t, if she came to the house or office—threatening calls, letters—anything, he should call again immediately. Constable Roberts. Call her police pager number, any time. He puts her card out on the kitchen counter for Madeleine. Their answering machine, unplugged now, is only a squat black box on a countertop.
He looks at the thermometer fixed to the outer frame of the kitchen window. It is almost thirty degrees below zero. A moment of certitude to savour.
It has stopped snowing outside. He begins grading term papers. He marks for almost seven straight hours, stopping only to brew more coffee.
When the phone rings his stomach plummets. Too much caffeine. He looks down at the desk. He is already on his feet. Still it takes him a moment to start towards the phone. It is Madeleine. She will go directly from work to be with Catherine. She’ll eat at Mother’s. He tells her about his calls, tells her about Constable Roberts. Her voice softens. Mom says Cate’s fine. Won’t be too late. The roads are icy. It’s supposed to hit minus forty. Unbelievable, she says, tomorrow is the first day of spring. He tells her she should take care. Coming home. She chides him in return. Eat something decent.
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