Hunger's Brides (145 page)

Lying as it did on the far side of the chapel and refectory, the workshops and orchards, the
gran patio
was another world though I had once imagined I knew it well enough. Like the others, I came for the torchlight processions; and after quakes I had often come to supervise the masons. While the colonnades around the first and second storeys had been preserved, to anyone acquainted with the original plans, the place was a bewilderment. Each according to her means and whimsy, various residents had made modifications, all being expansions of one sort or other—a third storey kiosk on pillars in a vaguely Turkish style, or ground-floor additions shambling a third of the way into the plaza. Flat roofs with crenellations, peaked roofs of thatch or of canvas, all more than likely propped on untreated uprights. Walls were of adobe brick or simply mud over wattle, some painted, a few limed, most left bared to the elements. Then another extension is built to abut on a wall that may or may not survive the next tremor … leaving more or less at hazard, blind alleys, light shafts and hidden recesses, and balconies giving onto blank walls. In appearance it was as I imagined a bazaar of Persia, or a market town at the edge of a desert. Our Santa Paula's first convents in the Holy Land might have looked thus.

Late afternoon was becoming a favourite time, for though the blood-sport of the processions was to begin again in a few hours, there was no sign of this yet. The nights were as written in sand. By the first light of each fresh morning,
el gran patio
was itself again. In the looseness of
this order lay a resiliency one had to live here to notice. The fuss and fluster of chickens darting under foot, the call of songbirds from their cages … throughout the day, servants gossiping at the fountain, hanging laundry, fine articles of silk, others of cotton, and among them, ranged indifferently, hairshirts torn and darkened. Schoolgirls strolled in pairs, novices and lay favourites sat on the stone benches in the passageways.

Our new neighbours had grown used to us. At the outset there was bound to be resentment. Though small, it was still a corner cell with two storeys, and views to the north and west. More, my presence threatened to mean more scrutiny from the other patio and beyond. But when Antonia and I arrived, barefoot and tonsured, all our belongings in our two hands, perhaps the resentment grew a little less.

I wondered if it was not another dangerous fantasy but I let myself imagine Antonia and I might grow to like our new home … though so far she was having the more difficult time, to find her place. The nun's return to the noviciate for her Jubilee is provided for in the statutes; a good deal rarer is the secretary to a novice forbidden to write.

After Núñez had come and quickly gone again, there came a change. The Church began to authorize the visits of friends to the locutory once again. For the longer walk, one of several minutes, I was grateful though it was an occasion for more gossip, as I now had to walk past the entire convent.

San Jerónimo had not had a bishop's visit in over two years. His Excellency Angel Maldonado kept his promise, and I let myself believe he did indeed make the long journey from Oaxaca for me. Save for the bright blue eyes and the purple cassock, he might have been taken for a native of this country, his cheekbones high, his nose prominent, fine-bladed at the bridge. He seemed surprised that I was aware of the
beata
trials—but he knew María de San José well and though he disliked Santa Cruz, he did not believe there was any immediate threat to her. He did not mention any rumours concerning our convent as the site of the next trial, and it was a relief not to have to discuss it. What he had made the six-day journey to tell me was that the Holy Office was mere days away from publishing charges against Father Xavier Palavicino, whom I must know well, given that he had risked so much to defend my letter on God's negative
finezas
. Very gently he asked if even Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz did not have a few small sins she could freely confess for her Jubilee?

Bishop Maldonado was a decent man. It would have served nothing to point out that Oaxaca was very far away from the affairs of Mexico, that Father Núñez had been withholding his intercession for months, that I hardly knew Palavicino at all—and to tell the Bishop he was bringing me news of charges I had known of for almost two years, this would have been callous while leaving me to appear all the more intransigent. There was little he could do to help me here, but I preferred to think I might still have a good friend in Oaxaca, who before he left did his best to impress upon me the precariousness of my situation—certainly I must accept Father Núñez's offer of protection, at least from the Archbishop. The progression of events was in the bishop's view methodical, and his main concern was with what or who should logically follow now that the Palavicino affair was coming to a head. We parted on my promise to give our discussion my most urgent consideration.

I could not bear to ask it—to be brought by such as these to ask: Was it possible that my grandfather had been a secret Jew? Could a truth and fear so vast have hovered, sensed yet unseen, over all our years together—could we have shared so much, yet not that truth, that pride, that fear? However much I searched my memory, I scarcely recalled his mentioning the Jews at all, even while he had talked so often of the other great peoples, those of Cathay and Egypt, the Persians and the Moors, the Spanish and the Mexica.

But if ever there was a fact, a truth, a pride he found painful above all others, it was that the Spain he so loved had once had a special gift, an example to all Europe. The gift was tolerance, and the Moors had given it. Under the Almohads, in their capital on the Guadalquivir, the city of Córdoba alone fathered, in the span of eight years, two universal geniuses: a Moor who would go on to write the great commentaries on the Greeks, and a Jew writing treatises on medicine and philosophy in Arabic. In Córdoba, the Jews had embraced Arabic, writing only their poetry in Hebrew,
the secret language of the heart
. The phrase had been my grandfather's. And among the early Christian kings, some had been inspired to lead by the Almohad example. But the inspiration did not last; the gift withered on the vine, and the expulsion of the Jews began, under Isabela. A great queen, Abuelo said, and a great error. Here was the true Spanish heritage that the Conquest had betrayed, the great hybrid that Christian Spain had failed to coax into flower. And yet, for all this, Maimonides was the sole Jewish writer I ever heard mentioned by name, his
Guide for the Perplexed
the only text, and this only in passing: a work of paradoxes on the unknowability of God, denounced as
heretical by the Jews themselves—or rather, Abuelo added with that sad smile, by the still perplexed.

And that was all. But was it, truly?

Why did he come to America? the prosecutors would not fail ask, after their false witness had given her testimony. They would say it was to hide himself in the wilds of a demonic country, as a place conducive to the practise of his secret rites.
No
. He had served his king, he was tired of war, a commoner who loved books and Spain equally, and who dreamed now of exploring. But what first brought him to Xochitl's village? What was the source of his lifelong fascination with the escapes of the sorcerer Ocelotl, or with the verses of the poet-emperor of Texcoco who had built a temple there to the Unknown God? I had only to remember some of the books in Abuelo's collection to glimpse the paths he had travelled. I had only to think on this to see that it was a collection of just such works that I myself had greatly added to. I asked myself now if it was not just possible that he had come in search of that secret flower that the Conquest had failed to produce but had not quite succeeded in destroying, and to which the greatness of Spain could once have been grafted, or by which revived. What name could one give to such a search, of which Abuelo might have been only half aware, and yet which I had, just perhaps, half-heard woven through all our talks and into the silences of his life? Of our life together, which they would now try to make a lie.

And I had only to consider these researches seriously for a moment to realize that Abuelo would surely have
written
. If only notes—knowing that these had to remain strictly hidden, perhaps to be destroyed at his death. And if he had truly heard Death's step in the courtyard that night, he might have been burning his life's work at the firepit as I slept. My fear took on a new guise: that his writings were not destroyed but concealed—at the hacienda, its hiding place a secret my mother had taken to the grave—or in some hidden recess behind the bookshelf at Uncle Juan's, near me all those years. And that the Prosecutor would next bring forward these papers to ask if I had seen them—claim to find it incredible that I had not, had not in fact
based my own heresies upon them
—before demanding that I repudiate them, that I watch them burned before my eyes.

How better to explain this rage like the pique of a child whenever I heard them—and I had only to close my eyes in this darkness to hear the
holy doctors judging the beliefs of the country of my birth as superstition and heresy. Or whenever I felt them turning to derision the loves and passions of my childhood—the riddles and puzzles, the hidden forms and secret knowledge.

There were answers I would never have, fears and doubts I could no longer let myself entertain, but what was true beyond any doubt was that the hidden connections I had sought in stories and in the world all around me were real: the flesh and blood people in my life, the stories I was not to be told. No need even to close my eyes to see him, a man in his prime, a fine horseman riding into Xochitl's village, and now see her as she must have been then, before the accident. His daughter's age, with Amanda's grace, for that grace had first been hers. A young woman wise beyond her years, except perhaps foolish in love, even as one of his own daughters had been once. And how those two must have talked, for Xochitl had stories quite the match for his, of jaguars and walking fish, trout that were not there and the masks of god. Eventually a thing had broken that had made their friendship impossible—and yet after all the injustices of the Conquest, he must surely have seen this as but a feather in the scale. Perhaps it was precisely this, the scale of the incommensurate, that left him unable to resolve things in his mind. Like a problem with zero in algebra. Impossible, yet impossible to abandon altogether. Over the past few months it had occurred to me that she'd chosen to come to live with us as an act of contrition—to serve the daughter of her friend by nursing the daughter of her lover. But though Xochitl had lost her place in her village, she would not have agreed to come to Nepantla if she had not loved and trusted my grandfather. There was something between them she did not wish to twist—they never spoke again, and lived together until he died. Friends for life.

The untold stories, the unspoken correspondences between the legends, were real, as real as mountains, and strong. And it had become troubling to think on the ways in which their hidden influences and sympathies had not ceased. Is it possible to walk a path all our lives and not know—even refuse it, to think we have turned our back on it—even as we think we are following another, making each choice at every crossroads for reasons we do not see, and which might as well be the opposite of what we think they are? When every choice seems a turning away. And might one not end thereby in hating choice itself …?