Hunger's Brides (201 page)

After dusk the streets are almost empty. Few want to risk the miasmal
airs that rise at night to spread the plague. Many in the surrounding countryside see visions in the pre-dawn skies. Each morning there circulate fresh tales of a flaming sword hanging over the city, dragons, giant black hearses …

Fly early, return late
, the rich say as their coaches whisk them to lengthy retreats in Cocoyóc, the thermal baths Moctezuma once reserved for his personal use. Carlos describes the melancholy lethargy these flights provoke among onlookers too poor to leave. It echoes on long after each carriage disappears.

“And all the superstitions of Europe,” he says in disgust, “are being dusted off now and retailed here. From normally reliable sources I'm hearing fantastic accounts—I hope they're fantasy!—of naked virgins being made to plough furrows around villages in the dead of night….

“Now this talk again of an Indian uprising. Today any fool can see the Indians are too busy dying to threaten anyone.”

We are sitting in the locutory. It is the one Juana used to use. There was once a rosewood grille here, but the room is divided now by an iron grate with barely room to slip a book between the bars. Carlos gets up and goes to the window, tall, barred, not much wider than his narrow shoulders. He stands looking into the little strip of garden. I am sure he is thinking of her. With almost anyone else he can be very short-tempered, and is not a little feared. Yet he endured no end of teasing from her in this room. Some of it wounded him, I think, more than he let on. But he told me once he would exchange the Chair of Mathematics for the privilege of her teasing.

“They've started in on the Jews again. I wonder if Juana was right … if our fear of them didn't start up again during the first great plagues in Italy. Soon they'll have Jews drinking the blood of Christian babies once again.” I know he is speaking to her through me.

Juana listens carefully as I repeat his words.

“They're saying Jews are spreading the sickness to our drinking water.”

She says nothing, eyes like coals. I've said this to make her angry. The old game I used to play to get her to speak. What kind of monster does this make me, that I played it then, that I should resort to it now?

25th of February

This morning there are two new red crosses of quarantine in the street below. But these are not the only signs.

Almost everywhere are hastily daubed 4s, and symbols I ask Juana to explain. One is the Greek
tau
wreathed in serpents. Another is an Egyptian trigram representing the
Animus Mundi
, though I am still not sure what this is exactly. Carlos says one of these was found painted in red on the cathedral floor. Juana couldn't say, any more than could he, who might have done it—unless someone from within the Church itself. What did interest her was to learn it took two days for the trigram to be removed from the cathedral.

This and other half-hearted responses to the tide of superstition give us the feeling the authorities are losing conviction, as though they fear God might be revoking the Church's magisterium on earth. It's true, everyone knows it: the Archbishop has lost his nerve, which more than anything feeds the malaise in the streets. This week he has had the fountain in his courtyard stopped, the basin drained. His mind was never stable. Carlos's devotion to him has always hurt and mystified her. I know that he brings news of the Archbishop's unravelling now as a gesture.

I find her sitting the window, gazing absently out. She listens to the latest without turning her eyes from the street. “How His Grace must fear this liquid inquisition, 'Tonia, like a woman's own flesh.”

Does the
sound of many waters
trouble him so? Is it
la Flojera
, as Juana believes, that terrifies him? The old fanatic faces now the end of a life spent buying clemency with the charity of others. He has tried to purchase Grace. Now he finds nothing to preserve his body from its corruption. The Archbishop's palace is a fortress—walls thicker than the span of an arm, ceilings three times the height of a man. How it must trouble him now, Juana says, that his palace rests on the ruins of Tezcatlipoca's temple—ancient god of sudden reversals of fortune. The first bishop of Mexico, according to her grandfather, had a Mexica inscription carved above the main palace doors. An inscription since removed:
I leave you to the one whom I have seated on this throne; through him I renew all things
.

She is still thinking of him as, with a little smile, she tells me that to each Mexica god there corresponds a disease. To cure a disease, the healer acts it out, becomes it, in the guise of its god. A theatre of disease.

Old man, act out thine affliction
.

Plague crones and plague maidens bring in the sickness. They enter through unlocked windows and unbarred doors. They exit the cracked lips of the dying as a tiny blue flame. They renew themselves each night
from the earth herself, in the miasmal breath rising up out of the corruption of her bowels.

The man who spills his seed on the earth exposes himself to mortal danger.

27th of February

From the beginning, the rumours have held a special quality of unstoppable horror. Unnamed villages left without a living soul. Villages gone mad, thresholds and pathways strewn with bloated and blackened bodies. A vulture paradise. Fresh bodies, still warm, still moaning, reduced, by
la Flojera
, to the consistency of stew. They say it has followed the slaves out from Africa.

The War of God, they're calling it.

It should have come on crying panic and calamity. It should have spread like a forest fire roaring disaster. Instead it came quietly, as on the feet of mice.

S
ACRED
H
EART
        

28th of February

T
HE
P
RIORESS
takes to her bed with a fever.

The number begins to mount. Within two days the bodies are accumulating faster than they can be buried. Someone has the idea of dragging them into the cellars where it is cooler, but those of us bringing the bodies are more and more horrified by the swelling ranks of corpses in the semi-darkness. It was a terrible mistake to bring them there, compounded now several times a day. Soon no one is willing to go down. With a shudder, averting our faces now, we tip each litter's dead freight and send it thudding down the steps.

Then comes a night of terrible rain, and hailstones as large as fists. In the morning the cellars stand at least ankle-deep in a reeking broth.

4th of March

At mid-day, a minor earthquake, but strong enough to send a crack running up the column across from her cell door, and cause a minute or two of vertigo.

Over the past few years, such tremors seem more like a monthly occurrence. The conjunction of hail and comet and flood and quake should seem to us almost commonplace. Instead we're like children cringing before the next brutal cuff, a blow amplified by our fear.

It is said that in a town in Italy the plague was once averted by rounding up all the beggars, lepers, Jews and sodomites, then locking them in a big barn and setting it alight.

5th of March

Soon we'll all be saved
.

In the Plaza del Volador the construction is nearly complete. The Archbishop's amphitheatre will hold twenty-five thousand. One of its chapels is dedicated to San Sebastián and another to San Roque, our intercessors against the plague. Open-air masses have been ordered said at the portals of the city, the five causeways across the half-drained marsh they say was once a lake.

Another order is circulated, that the head of each household must say prayers three times a day at the threshold of his house.

Barefoot processions wend their way through the city, as many as fourteen a day. Flagellants go dressed in sackcloth, nooses about their necks, lofting imprecations to the sky. Sometimes the Archbishop can be seen trudging ever more wearily in the vanguard, violating a health edict against public assembly that he himself helped promote.

In the first week after the outbreak, he was said to be everywhere—saying masses, launching pilgrims, blessing statues of San Roque, erecting rough crosses carved with the buboes of plague. Few claim to have seen him lately.

At the Archbishop's command a belt of wax is being laid that will encircle the city and be lit as a barrier against the pestilence.

I ask her how any plague could possibly stand against all this.

Faith should be made of sterner stuff, her answer.

Still Juana does not leave her cell.

From passing sisters and especially the novices, reproachful looks rise up to me on the second storey where I stand just inside Juana's doorway. They do not know about the Prioress's orders forbidding her to come out.

8th of March

Nine more bodies to the cellars. Tumbled down the steps through the swelling stench.

Within these walls, the body count rises; without, rumours spread unchecked. Almost every village to the east and south of the capital is said to be burning up with plague.

Like the Archbishop's belt of wax, she says grimly. A firebreak.

10th of March

Violent sensations batter my heart. Before the rage takes over I must write—or I am afraid it will never loosen its hold. I begin with the light that comes into their hopeless faces in the courtyard below as Juana emerges from the seclusion of her cell.

What did I
want?—
in one breath I am begging her not to come out, reminding her of the Prioress's order—yet my heart bursts with pride as she steps past me. In not a single face does there now appear even a glimmer of the usual resentment or scandal at her disobedience.