Hunger's Brides (20 page)

The new Viceroy did look splendid riding into the ring and up to the platform on a jet black stallion caparisoned in pale green silks. The triumphal entry had been the Viceroy's idea, as an advent far more dramatic than in a university lecture theatre. For the first time, the finalists were all on the podium and the Viceroy himself read their poems aloud—then decided on the spot. Still … the ceremony I had in mind involved me in at least a
vuelta
†
or two on that black stallion. I could ride him. I sat a horse passably well—I am my father's daughter after all.

Ten thousand people turned out, and three bishops. It was a lot, more than I could ever have imagined. Did one city really need three?

And never had I seen such an array of brilliant university gowns as on the platform that day, with its unsteady pulpit and the carved judges' chairs, each under its own canopy. I watched them all watching me up there along with them on the dais, and thought, Today the Royal University
has come to me
.

I took first place—and I did make a friend. Second prize went to a boy three or four years older than I. It created a sensation that ‘children' should take the first two places, and the University's professor of poetry
only the third. But the professor seemed so genuinely pleased for us that I liked him instantly. The boy, Carlos,
†
was vaguely descended from Góngora, the greatest poet of our language. Grandfather would have said the ‘two greatest poets'—the greatest being the early Góngora, with the late as distant a second as all others came a distant third to him.

We were at a reception at the parade marshal's house when I saw the other prize-winners again. It must have taken a cargo ship to supply textiles enough for all the dresses: velvets and satins and silks in crimson and violet and lemon. Jewels and pearls by the hod and barrow, and silver more plentiful than tin. Capes and plumed hats, jewelled swords—and spurs—silver spurs half the length of a man's forearm. The risk of a goring on a dance floor surely exceeded the rigours of the ring.

The courtyard was a delirious polyhedral arrangement of waist-high hedges, benches under fruit trees, stone paths in diagonals through flower beds. We were led in stately pomp towards the platform on the north side. Above us for three full storeys was a living green drapery of creepers abloom in fiery pinks and peach. I had no idea such a place might exist in this stone desert of a city. Like ours, this was another of the great houses with three tiers of colonnades running around a patio—but open to the sky, not barred like a prison window.
Here
was a courtyard and a fountain. Not a warehouse, not a half-fountain crushed like a tin prison cup.

I was standing on the dais with the officials and other finalists—of course, all men—and I wondered at the water pressure. This fountain squirted and gushed and sported and rolled as if the sprite of a fountain bathing in itself. We were, it was true, on the Alameda, just at the end of the aqueduct, but was there maybe a little wind-assisted pump somewhere? Such reflections on hydraulics soon leading me to notice that the soft jostle on the dais was just as intimate as in the plaza, and less impertinent only to the extent that similarly placed collisions were passed off here as accidents.

Moorish rugs were spread over that half of the dais protected by a canvas pavilion, open across the front and patterned upon the tents of distant Arabia. From the pavilion's corners, indeed from most of the courtyard columns, rich pennants, paper streamers and bunting drooped prettily. Throughout the patio, people posed studiedly under a fine, warm
llovizna
.
†
The evening sky had reached the palest blue edge of
grey. In that soft light the ladies gloried in their lambent fabrics; the men stood in quiet counterpoise in soft browns and blacks—charcoals and glosses and mattes. Among us at elbow height wobbled trays of chocolate and nutmeats borne by proud, puffing nymphs with beribboned hair. We were all at least half-aware of the beauty of the scene, and ennobled in a small way by our role in it. The rainfall blessed the women round the dais with sparkling curls and a hint of glaze on our lips, our cheeks, our wrists.

The glazing of our eyes was next effected by the speech makers.

When at last the quartet started up, I turned to Carlos, who had maintained a geometrically fixed distance from me all this time, and asked if the composer was Zarlino. I was quick to admit that I'd read a good deal of orchestral music but had heard next to nothing actually performed. Indeed it was, he said. Perhaps he might be permitted to escort me to a concert or two this month? He was home for all of December from the Jesuit seminary in Puebla.

This was all very quick. I would have to learn to be more careful about such easy openings. Coming up from just behind me was the other prize-winner (and to think I'd assumed the competition had ended), asking if I agreed with Zarlino, against Galilei, that music should have its own voice and not imitate the spoken word.

“My agreement, sir, might depend on the words spoken. In this past hour I find myself quite vehemently swayed towards Zarlino.”

The conversation, as it must, turned to the competition. Carlos briefly feigned shock that a girl should be chosen, let alone a
doncella
of such tender years. (He was so much older.) But the professor remained so gracious that Carlos soon confided he was relieved not to have embarrassed the family and the name of Góngora, entirely. His true love was mathematics, and he would have the Chair of Mathematics one day.

To repay their grace I reminded them of what the Knight of the Woeful Figure had said about poetry prizes. “Always strive to carry off the second prize, for the first is forever awarded as a favour … the second going to the one who should have placed first—”

“Making third place, second,” said the professor, smiling.

“And the first place, third,” I continued.

“Which, as we know,” Carlos said, “is in actuality second….”

But such an unholy fuss was made when it became known that I had been born in the very year Miguel Sánchez published the first great work
on our Virgin of Guadalupe. And had I not just won a great tourney taking her glory as its theme? Surely, said one fellow, this was a sign she had blessed the outcome herself.

It was Carlos who made the discovery. Just how old
was
I? he'd asked, that is, if he might presume…. So I was born in 1648! (Truly mathematics was his gift.) But what of it, don Carlos?

“Does the lady think it mere
coincidencia?” he
asked.

Here was an interesting word, I said (because it was new to me—and just as new was the sensation of being caught at a disadvantage). Had he meant the
coincidentia oppositorum?
But no, obviously he did not mean Guadalupe and I were opposites. Indeed he seemed to mean the reverse—but then what was the reverse of a union of opposites? A disunion of opposites, or a union of dissimilarities—or a complete non-relation of perfect irrelevancies? Well, I couldn't stand there gaping forever, so I played for time.

“And where on earth, don Carlos, did you hear—“

“It has been newly employed,” he said brusquely, “by a distinguished English scientist, Tomás Browne.”

Fortunately he now went on to laboriously define it, which gained me the time I needed.

“But don Carlos, what can this new term possibly mean? To bring two events into conjunction precisely to say there is none? To say that what appears to mean something means nothing at all? Does your Englishman not offer to refute Superstition only at the cost of making Hazard his cult?”

Just such a conversation as I had dreamt of having one day in the capital …

I went on now rather eagerly—according to my information, English was a mere dialect, a gumbo of German and French, possessing a simplified lexicon improvised to communicate the rudimentary sentiments of global trade and the terse niceties of piracy.

“Which would make it, would it not, gentlemen, akin to the pidgin the Spanish use in the Philippines?”

England, its manners, its mercantile impulse, its rough tongue, creeps into many heated discussions here, for many of my fellow citizens are nervous about privateering, and about being cut off from Spain. Since the rout of our Armada, we spoke of the English, I imagined, much as the Romans had of the pirate fleets of the Vandals.

At this point we had attracted a small audience. It was the best part of the day, a real piratical free-for-all. People jumping in, flailing about, and whenever some fool or parlour wit would take my side, I'd change tacks, for the sheer fun of it. So thick was the spread of confusion that only Carlos seemed to notice, and smiled, I thought, a little wickedly.

“And after all,” I said, on just such a tack, “there is our own debt to Latin. Few would think our Castilian the poorer for it.”

“No great poetry,” thundered some bluff wit in return, “has ever come from any
Protestant
country!”

“Was there not once word,” I asked, “of a great flourishing on their stages at the same time as Spain's own best day?” I had heard of at least one great play—on the wizard Faustus, no less—and was distracted by a thought: how curious it was that such a character should take the name of ‘one favoured by the augurs.'”

“But
señorita
, what notice should we take of their dramatists,” Carlos said slyly, recalling me from my reverie, “when the English have closed their own theatres down?”

“Señor
, do the Iberians not consider our Mexican culture to be a pidgin of like kind, precisely when they themselves have not produced a great poet for, what, a generation now? We should not be similarly complacent.” He seemed prepared to agree so I tacked instead into rougher waters, arguing that any country capable of producing a great queen might just be ready to make one decent poet.

“Perhaps you'd care to amplify—”

“Well, yes, don Carlos, happily. Imagine, if you will, a
great pidgin
poet.”

There was a gratifying moment of silence. Carlos nodded, appearing to consider this seriously. Then a thick-whiskered fellow said,
“Señorita
, you have the mind of a man.”

“Ah, the mind of a man.” I eyed them each in turn, taking my time. “A man, perhaps,
caballeros
. But
which
man …”

We were interrupted then, and I felt sorry Carlos was going back so soon to the seminary in Puebla. But we still had a month and there would be other receptions.

I did get to take home a glittering prize. A jewelled snuffbox I couldn't wait to use.

As for the winning poem, I'm sorry it was not so good. Better than Carlos's but not much. Here in the city, craftiness and the contrivances of fashion counted for more than substance—
Art takes form, form takes
substance, substance takes craft
. Or so it was said. How they worshipped at the shrines of their subtle framing devices. And at lines ending in unexpected rhymes, such as
urraca / saque / triquitraque / matraca
. … I would do many like this to earn my keep.

I was already a little sick of hearing about Guadalupe, but I owed her something better. One day I would write a poem for Carlos, for he had been truly passionate about her. If his poem had displayed slightly less skill, so also had it used less trickery than mine.

After just a few such experiences in the arena, I would come to feel that poetry written for the tastes of its time could almost never be great. We must write through our time, or even to it, but never
for
it. Poets must concern themselves with neither fashion nor even what people want, but with vision—raw and immediate—of what lies beyond our eyes. Beneath this, our great Dream of Common Sense.

But a poetry competition was not the place for such concerns, and this not quite the day for leaving the last childish things behind.

People were kind. “The Poetess, the Poetess!” they had cried as I left the ring, and again on my way to the carriage from the parade marshal's house. At the receptions that month, the gentlemen proved very attentive. Having Isabel's features and increasingly her form no longer seemed so terrible.

And I was out of my cave
.

The boulder had been rolled back—the jar unsealed and Hope
†
broken free. I was determined Aunt María would never seal me in again.

There were receptions and luncheons and balls for the Poetess to go to, and she would no longer be denied. In another fortnight the prizewinners were to have an audience with their majesties, the Viceroy and his German wife. A German. Here was a people that
elected
its emperors.

Her hair, they said, was of spun gold.

So much the better—but I was to meet my first
Goth
.