Hunger's Brides (108 page)

Standing as it does on the compound's north side, our chapel is notable for its cool, and can be quite icy on winter mornings. Notable also for its tranquillity—when not a ball court—a place where I have spent many quiet hours. This January morning our chapel offered neither calm nor quiet. Never, I would wager, had the Holy Office been so well represented here. Consultors and familiars, assessors and censors, prosecutors and examiners, one by one they filtered in, in all the sulphurous pomp of their offices. Even the Holy Tribunal's accountant put in an appearance, who rarely partakes of anything more carnal than the inventories of iron tools and personal effects. Even our Reverend Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda himself was there. Slowly, from where we sat behind the chancel lattice, the whispers among the sisters of St. Jerome rose in fits and gasps—at the entrance of each new official—to a pitch of strangled panic; until finally the Prioress was forced to rise, and striding before us at the grillwork—quenching light as she advanced, shedding it in spokes—furiously gestured for silence as our guest began to speak.
And as he commenced, the quills of half a dozen secretaries seated at little writing desks in the aisles scratched like dogs at a kitchen door.

To the nave of our chapel now I saw drawn every rift and resentment, Dominicans to port, Jesuits to starboard—patterned like filings scattered on a parchment—no, arraigned along the axis of a needle pointing to a nun hidden in the upper choir. Who diverts herself with conceits such as these.

It would be saying too much to claim that Father Palavicino's discourse was in my defence, as indeed he did, say too much. He began by predicating a more conservative position than mine on Christ's
fineza major
, His greatest expression of love for Man. But even though taking a position somewhat distanced from my own, Palavicino did not contest the propriety of a woman, a nun,
taking
a position, and this would have been all the defence I could have asked. For then he did a brave thing, given his auditors, whose attendance he may not have predicted but by now was well aware of. Xavier Palavicino looked the Chief Inquisitors squarely in the eye, and opened with a quote from Jonah: ‘
Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.' And now this bride of Christ, our Minerva of America, has been summoned as a great fish to bear us up her prophecies, and to cause many a holy doctor to shake the dust from his books and sharpen his wits
.

With Father Núñez, half-blind, somewhere below us in the chapel, Palavicino defended me against the blind depredations of the Soldier, this Soldier of Castile. Palavicino praised my intelligence, the deep learning implicit in my position, my grace in stating it. He was only echoing, in this, the published judgement of a bishop-nun but if I was not mistaken, much dust would indeed be shaken, many quills sharpened. What kind of black mirth would the fishers of souls make on this one day? Why did he not come to me first? Still am I treated like a child in theological matters,
un menor de edad
—speak when consulted, theologian's muse. They do not need a woman to tell them how to act—to think, perhaps—but action requires courage. Yes, gentlemen, but thinking requires
thought
.

Still, who was I to criticize anyone for this?

Minerva, pagan goddess … Letter Worthy of Athena, her prophecies … a great fish—
this last he said knowing I was writing carols for the cathedral on Saint Peter, fisherman. The allusion no doubt struck him as clever.

Oh yes, and glaring down at the Inquisition's saintly officers, Father Palavicino likened my persecution to the persecutions of Christ.

My defender qualified me as an innocent lamb, spoke of a
wound in my side
from the Soldier's cruel lance. What on earth or in heaven's name had made him think to say this?—another helpful friend comparing me with
Christ
. Was he completely mad?

With defenders such as these …

Worse, it was not even me they defended—woman, prophetess, leviathan—nor any living creature at all. It was a principle they made of me. Some new category. They were like men born to the desert: rain they had seen, small springs, salt lakes, storm-born freshets foaming into sand—yet coming over the last dune at the world's end, what they saw was mere water no longer but the
gates of Atlantis
.

Irony or iron consequence? For I had been the one to play this category game for them, lead the merry chase through monster, muse, paragon, virgin—the female in me being thus incompleted uncoupled unachieved, the dam of our perfidy not yet burst in me—they presumed to praise me as all but a man in
validez y valor
.

In my locutory afterwards the mood was somewhat glum. Each of my visitors had been at the sermon, but as the parlours were not opened Sundays until three, all made the trip back by their own separate paths, presumably to see how I was bearing up. Ribera was sitting in an ox-hide chair at the grille nearest the clavichord. Dean de la Sierra had not taken a seat at all, but stood rummaging in the bookshelf against the east wall. Carlos sat next to Ribera but not quite at the grille, as if he too were less than keen for a good frank talk. First to arrive, our convent chaplain sat quietly on a bench by the window closest to the door while I tried to cheer things up. I was becoming not a little resentful, not only of my lack of success but that it should fall to me, in the circumstances, to do such a lot of cheering.

Palavicino arrived last, and had a choice of the bench beside the chaplain or the armchair next to Gutiérrez, who had not been here for weeks yet appeared now. Slumping down beside the chaplain, Palavicino told of being accosted outside the chapel by a raving madman who had denounced the sermon in my defence as heretical. As Palavicino pronounced the word it took every mite of self-possesion not to glance at the Inquisitor Gutiérrez, who was staring at the chandelier.

Just then, a small new personage dropped by on his way to the palace to present his credentials. Baron Anthonio Crisafi gave the general
impression of being the Sicilian envoy of the Spanish viceregal administration of southern Italy. I had not known we needed one of these. There was something funny and flighty about his eyes, which seemed never quite to meet mine. Although in better days I would have found his presence in every way comical he quickly proved much better informed than could be expected of a recent arrival, and moreover was taking pains to make clear that his information extended to me. He had arrived knowing that on my locutory wall was a copy of Velázquez's
The Geographer
—more improbably still, he knew that the painter's model was a lunatic at the court of Philip IV.

Glancing about him, the Baron took the empty armchair and as he sat, pulled it closer to the grille. He was all but telling me he came from Spain with a message from María Luisa. And yet I did not trust him. I had been having some trouble lately telling my friends from my adversaries.

Trying to marshal my wits I launched into a little peroration on the painter's true model for
The Geographer:
Democritus, the laughing philosopher—a man so ruled by candour, the people of his own village thought him insane. I had the distinct impression the Sicilian knew this, too, perfectly well.
Who has sent him? If it is María Luisa why has she sent him knowing this?
Lest the frantic workings of my mind show in my face, I rose and made my way to the back of the room to pace back and forth, I hoped theatrically—the nun beneath the globe beneath the lunatic on the wall—as I cobbled together a few ideas from bits of Justinian,
†
and from Mondragón's treatise on the virtues of insanity and the holy truths of the mad.

“Indeed,
mis señores
, we the sane, who never cease to thirst for conquest—to rule, found cities and cultivate our own holdings—can only look with envy on the estate of the one we call mad.
El loco
pays neither tax nor tribute, suffers neither vassalage nor servitude. Small wonder kings seek his candid councils, and the slyest of the sane feign holy madness….”

This won a few wistful nods from the
cuerdos
†
among my interlocutors.

“In the ears of the king, gentlemen, such sooths are bittersweet, but in the eyes of Democritus are so filled with gall he puts them out to maintain his philosophy of cheer….”

The Sicilian may have known all about the gravity of my situation and all about the painting—nevertheless he looked slightly dazed by the shift in tone. Foreigners
—
even the Spaniards themselves—were never
quite prepared for the intensity of this game the way we play it, we the children of Spain and Mexico. The blood in the lace, the sword in the cape, the red in the tooth as we smile. I was thinking to draw the ‘Ambassador' out, but in truth there was something I could no longer quite trust in such jests. It was a loss of dexterity I found unsettling.

“What say you, Baron—does not the lunatic's smile as he contemplates the world make elegant comment on the philosophy of cheer?”

“La Casa del Nuncio,”
the Baron blurted,“—in
Toledo
, Sor Juana, is not to be missed.”

What was this? What was he trying to tell me? “Has the Ambassador visited many of Spain's
casas de locos
during his travels?” I asked. “They are a great favourite, I understand, of foreign visitors.”

“Yes, Sor Juana, that is true.”

“And do foreign noblemen come expressly to such houses, as in Lope's day, to shop for a suitable fool to return home with?”

“They do.”

“And you've seen them at palaces other than Madrid's?”

“In fact, yes.”

I left off pacing, making my way somewhat absent-mindedly to my seat by the grille. Of course the House of the Messenger was a madhouse famous throughout Europe, fools and gold being Spain's last remaining exports. But it was the way he stressed its location … I racked my brain for the rather-too-much I knew of Toledo—eighteen Church councils, capital of the Visigoths, of Saint Hermenegild and the Arian heresy—the royal seat of Alfonso, Emperor of the Two Faiths … of El Cid, El Greco, La Mancha and Quixote, the ancestral castle of the falconer López de Ayala …

Seeing me at a complete loss the Baron bent to extract a small packet from his satchel.“I had planned to present this once we knew each other better. But I think this is the moment after all.” He took the book from a soft wrap of oiled leather.“I have heard that you read Italian.”

“From whom, Baron, may I ask?”

“Perhaps the most original and most daring poetry written in this century. On
our
peninsula, at least.”

The Scelta
. Campanella's
Scelta
was written in an Inquisition prison cell after a plot to expel the Spanish from Calabria.

Thanking him, I rose quickly and placed the book on the shelf farthest from the grille. Would there be a message tucked in its pages? From
María Luisa, perhaps? But no, this was the worst sort of book to conceal a message in. The message had to be the book itself—but what?

There was so much to consider, I was relieved to see him rising to go. When he had taken leave of us, the chaplain took the opportunity to see him to the street.

“Someone has sent him from Madrid,” offered Ribera.

“Or even Sicily,” added Carlos dryly.

“Or else Rome,” said Gutiérrez. He had not asked about the book. The tone was casual.

In the silence after ‘Rome' was let fall, Palavicino sat stewing. De la Sierra had been standing by the bookcase nearest the exit for half an hour, and I had begun to wonder if he would be back. As Dean of the Cathedral and the Archbishop's Vicar-General, his presence here before today had already been barely tenable. Father Xavier Palavicino was the next to find an excuse to leave, a plea for forgiveness in his eyes, a man with much on his mind. Well, no matter, it was good of him to come.

Who were these men in my locutory? Which were foes, which friends? And which had the capacity to do me greater harm—maleficence, accident or foolish acts in my defence? It was dawning on me that a fate might be decided by questions such as these, and by such men, as much as by my own actions. I could not quite decide whether to feel fury first or make straight for terror.

I had had enough of company. It was time to clear the room.

Reverting to my disquisition on lunacy and cheer, I reminded them it was always like this. Each time a new Viceroy arrived. You make too much of it, dear friends. Remember? The threats, the manoeuvres, the betrayals … it goes on for years. You've just forgotten. Things looked so much darker ten years ago, and yet for these ten years, have I not seen my freedoms multiply? I am not free to travel, but yet the world freely comes to me. Half the gentry of Europe files through this locutory; half the books we here are not free to buy, they bring over as gifts. The thoughts I am still not free to write openly, I have only to ply in parables and allegories; while whatever I am too cautious to publish gets published for me. Even the learned Inquisitors bring their proofs and arguments now for my candid opinions, too freely given.