Hunger's Brides (14 page)

Of course, the circle of researchers was tight and the topic obscure, but the conference sessions were often well attended. In Europe, the German sophisticate could indulge his own early childhood frontier fantasies. I came to call it the Karl May effect.
†
As for the French attendees, with me they could slum permissibly in
a petite cabane de bois
. This was an adult fantasy fully accessible only to the French, but the newcomer experienced it as a sort of lost weekend involving equal parts Rousseau, red Indian and maple syrup.

In America, on the other hand, the notions of literature as anti-truth, and Truth as poetic figure, brought a
je ne sais quoi
of European perversion to conferences that might otherwise have seemed exercises in parish civics.

The minute I started reading Beulah's paper on the poetry of physics, I saw that she had indeed done her research. I was mildly flattered that she was showing off for me. Rereading it three years later, I'm tempted to say I still had no idea what she was up to.
†
She was not hunting for higher grades, she was baiting a hook. And her timing was good.

At the same time, she had far bigger fish to concern herself with. In the first of many winding searches through the stacks of the university library tower, Beulah unearthed a little gem by Ermilio Abreu Gomez titled
La ruta de Sor Juana
, a work putting her on the nun's trail. Photos—of the poet's birthplace, the villages of her early period, the surrounding countryside—maps, portraits of her confessor and
prelates, reproductions of diverse documents. All invaluable raw material. Beulah writes:

If Beulah was searching out the thread of a connection to Sor Juana, she had only to begin with the Mexican poet's own self-analysis, written in 1691 in a letter of self-defence addressed to a bishop:

Down through the years, much has been made of Sor Juana's voracious hunger for learning. And even a glance over the list of materials Beulah was to consult—and voluminously annotate—indicates that her own quest must have grown to consume as many as fourteen hours a day. Here, then, was that first incandescent thread, a connection Beulah was curiously slow to grasp and ultimately unable to defuse: an inclination to study that eventually went off like gunpowder.

Her first major obstacle, oddly enough, was on the library tower's tenth floor, in the Hispanic Studies area. The on-line catalogue had indicated several titles that should have been shelved alongside
La ruta de Sor Juana
. Finding almost none of them, she checked the catalogue again, but the books hadn't been signed out. So where were they?

Reading her journal entry for this day, I imagine her now, striding down the aisles, eyeing each student immured in a stack of books as the possible culprit, and in the process no doubt eliciting a few curious stares herself. She suspects that someone has made off with the whole section in order to hoard it in some out-of-the-way corner. Finally, exasperated, she goes to ask just what the hell is going on. A long-suffering librarian, maybe flinching just perceptibly, informs her the university has begun selling off some of its special-interest collections in the face of funding cutbacks. A powerful private university (“rich fascists”) in the eastern United States is purchasing many of the rarest titles in the fields of Latin American history and culture. The library is slowly getting around to deleting them from the computer. Now the books can only be obtained through interlibrary loans, a process both expensive and slow.

Waiting impatiently for each new book to arrive, fuming at each fresh delay, Beulah hits upon a strategy—of going to a section, for example Mexican Colonial History, to look doggedly through every book index for some mention of Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor / Sister.

Late one evening just before closing, her eye falls upon the following series of index entries:

She pauses, tired but alert now, thoughts turning in narrowing circles around an as-yet indistinct point—then the sudden leap.
The Inquisition
. Excitedly she flips the book shut to discover she holds in her hands Medina's meticulously detailed
Historia de la Inquisición en México
. Beulah has just rounded the first sharp bend in the path. She has entered her labyrinth.

T
he cart lurched up the track and away from Panoayan. A last shred of pride kept me from turning back and begging to be allowed to stay. I rode beside the muleteer, my back straight, my front crumbling.

One driver, three mules, a burro and a girl. I hardly recall a single feature of the roadside. Knowing I spoke Nahuatl, the driver asked me a polite question or two, to which I replied in monosyllables, hard as these had been for me to manage lately.

The one ray of light to reach through the clouds and down to me on that cart seat was that it was not the same muleskinner, drunk on
pulque
, who had driven us from Nepantla five years back, madly bawling away and singing. And vomiting. He had his way of making the Rabbit sacred. Mine was to work myself into an unholy fury: I was homesick.
I'd been away less than an hour
.

Away an hour and already so much to be thankful for. It was a different driver. No one saw me cry. And I didn't vomit. But then, riddles were a cure for seasickness, weren't they, and I now had a riddle to cross
oceans
with. For what a sight my ungrateful tears would have made—hadn't I demanded this very thing? Had I not vowed to Isabel that I would disguise myself as a boy and go to the Royal University? I would find my own teacher. Take classes! And among the towering racks of the New World's greatest library, stroll forever. This was what adventurers did—pursued their destiny, defied the risks, strove towards high exploits like giants storming heaven.
²²
But with Amanda.

Not like this.

How I wanted to let Panoayan go now. Place of thorns, this El Dorado of loss—of pasts and precious jades, of tongues and riddles and
friends
. Josefa and María were right: these mountains were oppressive—suffocating. They might be the Heart of the Earth, a place of women's secrets, but that heart was cold now, and still. Or so I wanted mine to be in me. I was on my way to the city of Mexico, seat of empires. This was to be my life. I must make myself hard as iron and full of briars.

At the eastern shore the late sun loured on the lake with a light dulled to pewter. In the shallows, mats of flotsam heaved in a dance of
woodblocks, reeds and corn husks. Up and down the shore, mounds of refuse stood slumped in squat pyramids—rags, cobs, potsherds and rinds, glass glints, strips of hide—as if built on the trash of an earlier tribe. That was the custom of this place, to build on what remains, and never, ever be free of it.

Back from the flat shore sprawled a midden of wattle huts and mud, endless mud and lurking dogs. In one hovel a woman in a greyish
huipil
nursed a dirty-cheeked infant while squatting and poking at a brazier. As if in its smoke she sought some small help in driving the flies away from the infant's mouth and eyes. This was a blouse such as Xochitl and Amanda wore. I had never seen one dirty. Outside,
macehuales
†
lurched about drunk … dogs fought. For this, I was not yet hard enough.

Was this really the lake I—and how many others—had dreamt of and conjured? It was not enough to leave home. Now I had to give up even my illusions of what we had seen from up at Ixayac. And everything Grandfather had taught me to see….

This was not that blue-green eye into which
los conquistadores
had stared, and I had too—as down through the
oculus
of a vast underground cathedral. Over there, crouched beneath that rust sunset, was most certainly not the city of the white sunflower, its nectaries tall pyramids of cut gems. I had seen it
myself
, from Ixayac—seen this shore I now stood on. But then again, my eyes were not so very clear after all, and no longer was I his ray of pure white light.

I saw this shore become still more hideous as the light failed and a thick darkness gathered. For a few minutes more I could still have looked back to the volcanoes—the white chisel-tip edged in fire, her lover standing over her.

I would not. That beauty was behind me now.

But I would
never
—not dragged by four hundred mules—enter Mexico over this
calzada
. The old causeways the Mexica had built were as straight as dies—not these corruptions, as full of crooks and sags as an old stick. I would find a boat. The driver glared but said nothing. I guessed that he'd been planning to stop at a
pulquería
, and that a weakness for drink must surely be the chief hazard of mule-driving. Well, he might as soon talk sense to his mules as stop me getting down.

It was cold that night alone on the shore. But I was eleven now, and after all the brave talk, here was a thing the intrepid would never fear to
do. I dragged my trunk down the beach. Any villager sober enough to see could have followed my trail to where I hid in a thicket. All that night I clutched tight to my chest a purse containing the fifty pesos Grandfather had left to me. It was a lot of money, and it was still his.

It was for our books.

Never had I imagined so many mosquitoes might exist in the world. Nor that all at once they would converge on me. At first light I was of a more subdued cast of mind. I climbed into the cargo canoe and went where the man gestured, up into the bow. He wrestled aboard the cedar trunk that carried my earthly attachments. There
were
books, quite a lot. By the time we had taken on two more passengers, weavers from Puebla and their huge bundles, the canoe seemed more awallow than afloat.

The boatman pushed off. Seeing the European girl in her one presentable dress and perched at the prow on her cedar trunk, they must have thought her the daughter of some Iberian grandee. One weaver whispered, glaring pointedly at my well-ballasted trunk,
“Aicnopilpan nemitiliztli
. …”

Among the poor is no life for kings
.

To which I could not help but retort, “I'm not so rich, friends, but I hear my uncle over
there
is.”

They were not much older than I, a couple already, or brother and sister. And once they had recovered from their embarrassment we laughed a little about their surprise and my rich uncle. They did not ask me how I had learned their tongue, and I liked this restraint and saw its dignity, and I liked them as they talked about their hopes for sales and how many days they might have to stay, and whether they would go back at all. Something passed between them then, and I surprised myself in resisting the impulse to ask about it.