Hunger's Brides (2 page)

And of course there was the manuscript itself: a mangy stack of papers of assorted sizes and colours, dog-eared, stained and spattered. Scripts ranging from scrawl to type to childlike printing that ignored the lines. Napkins, gas bills and manila envelopes. Clean white sheets started fresh in a full and fluid hand become by page's end a pinched and graphic twitching from which I could decipher only the occasional letter. The typed pages, a total of 457, were not necessarily the easiest: Beulah's hand would sometimes slip from ASDF to SDFG or even from JKL; to YUIO. I could read certain passages only by decoding painstakingly, letter by letter.

Overall, I've felt compelled to temper the wildness of her tone and the extremism of her conclusions, to bridge the gaps in her research and to abridge her lyrical flights. To draw just the occasional line between truth and fantasy. And then, to find an ending. The task has not been without its challenges, and not without its diversions. Yet my attempts to recreate myself with these materials would never have seen the light of day were it not for what I have found here. It is a sort of true-crime story, a document for an insatiable time.

But now I wonder if all this feels too impersonal. Perhaps knowing where it ends, with Beulah on her way to a sanatorium. Yes, a more intimate start.

Here, meanwhile, my own drama begins, with me making sense of retirement at forty-two. I'm sure I feel as many retirees do. We are like poets in exile on unfashionable islands. We are the tiny emperor appealing to history. We are the last living alchemist.

Getting up from the desk, I raise the blinds and stand a moment staring into the west. A sea of stone heaves up before these windows, a slab of Cambrian time. From the pilings beneath my feet, a wide trough slopes away deep and slow, then out to the Rockies' massive cresting. Most days I see a rib cage there, upthrust, transected by a glacial blade. It carves clean to the bone, laying bare a jagged spine of peaks that arches south along the broken curvature of the earth. This, it seems, is to be my consolation: to rediscover a landscape once
lost to me. Days I spend walking the foothills above Cochrane, twenty-six miles from Calgary. My nights I spend quietly, in a vast, vaulted affair of varnished logs and endless windows euphemistically called a cabin by the former colleague who has lent it to me. My retreat stands like a cathedral on the last high tableland before the foothills. Below, a patchwork of leafless poplar, and thick spruce spilling in soft folds to the valley floor. The Bow snakes flat and white among the bluffs. Beneath the thinning ice the river quickens. The end of winter comes late up here.

I look out the north window at a pumpjack nodding away like a relentless rocking horse, while in the distance the wheels of justice grind slow and inhumanly fine. From where I now stand I see them—yoked, as Sor Juana might say, to the blind circlings of an ass.

So. A beginning.

Donald J. Gregory, Ph.D.
Cochrane, Alberta
May 9, 1995

               

 

Rose of San Jerónimo

Rose, heaven's flower versed in grace

Unstable Margins

Stay, elusive shadow …

Abecedario

Anagrams

Trout

The Hunt

I
love
Theseus, and thus

Four-Year Fast

Arts of Armoury

Bullfighter

Echo, finding Narcissus on a mountaintop

Auto Tour

Heretic's Song

Hall of Mirrors

To this the ages passing testify

Echo

Yet still the passion in her heart which drew

R
OSE OF
S
AN
J
ERÓNIMO
        

17th day of April, in the year of Our Lord 1695

A N
UN OF THE
H
IERONYMITE ORDER
slips out of the room to inform the Prioress, who will notify the Archbishop of Mexico. Who will in turn send word to the Viceroy of New Spain, and he finally to his monarch in Madrid. While I just stand by—raging, as Juana Inés de la Cruz lies stricken with plague. And I, Antonia Mora—betrayer, forger,
whore
—know exactly who to blame. Let the official record show that in these last, darkest days, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz emerged from the safety of her seclusion and toiled unstintingly, impervious to the swelling pandemonium—with me, her oh-so-loyal secretary and companion at her side—ministering to the sick of this convent, even down to its servants and slaves.

The end began two months ago. Late February, 1695. It is become now a year to remember.

The first whispers sifted in like smoke: a strange pestilence, burning like a brushfire through the Indian population of nearby Xochimilco. Soon neighbours all across Mexico City were reminding each other of a terrible plague said to have reached the coast on a slave ship in from Africa last year. Killing hundreds, then vanishing. Leaving villages without a living soul. Fathers and husbands gone mad: home from a week's hunting to find their thresholds strewn with bloated bodies lying in the sun where dogs had turned away from them. Buzzards too sated to fly … rumours too horrible to be anything but true.

Here in the capital it has always started among the poor. This time is no different. Out of every ten Indians, it strikes nine and kills eight, depopulating an overcrowded slum in as little as a week. Among the Europeans, our city's densely packed religious communities offer up the ripest pickings. By the time the sickness takes hold in the convent of Jesús María, a few short blocks away, our own cloister is ablaze with tales—not so wild, it turns out—of nuns vomiting fire, of bodies swollen black, hunched, horridly misshapen.

All but a few here have succumbed to the rising hysteria, and I have felt it in me, in the pit of my stomach, a fluttering like young love. I have seen it wavering like firelight in my neighbours' eyes … and it is a temptation difficult to resist. I resist another day or two by writing this.

I write as she taught me, I write because she no longer can.

Three separate strains of disease, shipmates now ashore and travelling the same road.

Sometimes they attack simultaneously, but more often each culls its own prey—wolves dividing up a flock. The first favours the body's hollows and joints, spawning grotesque swellings at the neck, under the arms, between the legs. Death is slow but survival, if in a greatly diminished state, is at least a possibility.

The second—
el Dragón
, or so we in whispers now call it—covets the lungs, drawing from its tortured interlocutors carmine flames of arterial blood that scorch the air for several feet about the deathbed.
Llamas de carmina
everyone says, never red, never vermilion or scarlet. Carmine. What is it we sense in this tint just short of purple—the dye of the cloak that protects, or the mantle that none may resist?

How I wish I could ask her …
this, and
trescientas cosas mas.
²

The third killer, the deadliest, we call
la Flojera
. The Lazy One. A name that chills me to my very soul.
La Flojera
fancies her meat predigested, liquefied. Savaging its victim's moist linings, her softest tissues … within hours a friend, a woman, is reduced to a moaning sac of overripe fruit leaking thin blood from her body's every opening.

Three nights ago, dark rites of propitiation for the deadly sins that surely brought on this plague flared into orgies of frenzied mortification. Chanting, flickering tapers, the swaying glow of censers … hairshirts black with blood and moonlight. Thirty nuns crawled that night on flayed knees over the convent patio, and with excoriated tongues licked its paving stones clean in the shape of a glistening cross.

We are the Brides of Christ, heads teeming with dreams of a lover resurrected as the plague claims us in our bloodied beds one by one.

It has been a consummation of appalling violence.

In this place of women, men now are everywhere, scuttling stooped and harried through the rooms and passageways, shovelling lime into now-vacant cells. Litter bearers and gravediggers, priests bending reluctantly to hear gasped confessions, handkerchiefs pressed to pale faces against the meaty stench. Any servants not yet stricken stay away. So few able-bodied women now remain that surgeons and priests do double duty supervising the labourers as they burn the dead women's garments.

Any man caught fondling a corpse or looting it of jewellery will be, by
order of the Viceroy, drawn and quartered in the public square; and by order of the Archbishop, excommunicated from God. But we have discovered that neither decree is necessary. From best to worst, all of us have at last been delivered from sin.