Hunger's Brides (204 page)
to a sky swept clean of smoke.
Late morning.“I shouldn't say this,” the chaplain offers, “but there were only two new cases last night. With God's help, we may have this thing beaten.”
“A few more victories like this ⦔ Juana murmurs.
“And we're finished. Yes, Sor Juana, I know.”
11th of April
It should have come in like a hurricane, smashing everything in its path.
Instead it begins with a rash at her neck, a little cat's paw.
A mark I took no notice of. My mind would not open. All day long the thought of her marred throat I managed to escape, but not the foreboding.
One day soon now, someone will say that the marks on your body traced exactly the contours of the lake of Chalcoâ¦.
Thirteen hours we work without stopping, fed on green delusions and false hopes. Night finds us still in the main hall of the infirmary, sitting on stools, slumped against a grimy wall. A strange light in her eyes, face flushed, Juana begins telling another story. A picnic beside a spring high up on the WhiteLady. Cold
tamales con rajas
.
“I
remember a cream made from honey, the women used to sell. We'd spread it all over our bodies by the hot spring. Remember, Amanda?” Her eyes are very bright and full as I look deeply into them and blush.
“All the wasps â¦? How we stood naked, letting them landâthen jumped into the brook to keep from getting stung! What is it, Antonia, what's wrong?”
“You called me Amanda just now.”
The lantern guttering, rain falling into the hush beyond the windows, she starts to tell me about a sorcerer. A jaguar, whose friend is a bishop, or an Inquisitor. I wonder if it is a children's story. No, a story important to her grandfather, a story told to her the night he died. She wants me to take it down. He knows a bookbinder who conceals manuscripts by binding them into Bibles. Who does?
Carlos
. Write it?âwrite what, write which? She wants me to have Carlos bind it secretly under the cover of a Bible. It is a story that cannot be lost.
And so I write, but as usual only half understand what I am copying down. Other things I do not understand at all. Lies, false gods, twins of gods. Night, two prisons, three escapes. A jaguar vanishing, Night. The fulfilment of a prophecyâor else its reversal ⦠a wheel, or a spiral ⦠I cannot make it out, I copy it down.
Gaps will not be tolerated
, she says. Why does she say this to me. Do I not always
try?
So I write it, to have it bound under the covers of Bibles. Gaps will not be tolerated, gaps must be filled. Under the covers of Bibles, between their contents and their covers. Her brow is damp, her smile strange. What did she mean? Juana, I don't understand. I write it anyway. Her copyist, her parrot. I write to fill the silences, between each breath. I write to save my own life.
Ever since I was little ⦠the last honest man ⦠the last sorcerer was â¦
Who?
We had the most wonderful time
.
I said it once, 'Tonia. One night ⦠I think I said it, once. A wonderful time is goneâ¦.
She is asleep.
I write this and feel my heart swelling within me, a grotesque thing that will no longer sit in my chestâsits
on
it, crushing the breath out of me.
This dismal intermittent dirge
of the fearful shadowy band
insisted on attention less
than it coaxed a listener asleep â¦
⦠while Night, an index finger
sealing her two dark lipsâ
silent Harpocratesâenjoined
silence on all things living â¦
8
⦠All was now bound in sleep,
all by silence occupied.
Even the thief was slumbering,
even the lover had closed his eyes â¦
9
Darkness. Silence. It is the middle of the night. Green hopes withered on the vine, I hold her head to my breast as she sleeps her restless sleep, full of dreams.
10
In the morning word flies through the streets that Sor Juana has fallen ill.
Several times that day, the Archbishop sends men to report back to him on her condition. On the advances in God's War on the children of the earth.
AST
D
REAM
        12th of April, 1695
B
Y FIRST LIGHT
I
KNOW
: three days, five at most. We know the symptoms too well to waste a lie. She will not leave this cell again alive.
Carlos demands to see her. With so many people coming and going now, I know he can get in if he insists.
“Antonia please,” she gasps, looking up at me, wide-eyed,“don't let him see me like this.”
It should have come down like a comet, crying disaster, setting all the temples ablaze, like a sun summoned in the blackest night.
Instead it came quietly as on the feet of mice.
“Remember, NibbleTooth â¦? Walking up towards the mountain, up through the pines ⦔ She stops, shuddering with cold. The sheets and blankets are damp. She clutches at my arm as I turn to go for fresh bedding. “Antonia â¦?” She makes an effort to concentrate.
“Find Amanda for me.” Her teeth are chattering.“Ask Carlos if he will do this for me.”
“But she's in a delirium half the time!”
“She knows what she's asking, Carlos.”
“She is just sending me away. You just finished saying she doesn't want me to seeâ”
“She said you'd understand what this means to her.”
“What if when I get back ⦔
“With a good horse you can be there and back in two, two and a half days.” The coldness of the calculation shocks me. “There's still time.”
“He agreed to go, even knowing â¦?”
“Yes, he knew.”
“When he returns, will you ask him one more favour?”
“Oh Juanita ⦔
He would do anything for you
.
“It will keep his mind occupied.”
She tells me what it is. Yes, it will keep his mind occupied.
So tell me Juana about Nyctimene, this daughter of Lesbosâ
shamefaced Nyctimene who keeps watch by chinks in the sacred portalsâ¦
. What last role would you choose for me: to desecrate the holy lamps, or top them up that no one die in darkness?
But it's too late to ask you this.
13th of April
I will not record any more symptoms. There are lies and slanders even I will not record.
Flashes of her old self, her clearness and irony. Like when she asks to be cremated so as not to have to lie next to Concepción and listen to her gossip for all eternity.
Just now as she opens her eyes I have the unreal sensation, almost of luxury, that she's just woken up from sleeping late.
We never once had the chance to sleep in, you and I
.
I reach for anger, anger is the safest. How can she make
jokes?
“The
question is not when but how. We are all dying, 'Tonia. How would you have had me goâbreaking my neck slipping on the stairs? No, it is better to make a little comedy than die in one.”
The sisters too begin to keep a record. A kind of recipe book. All now compete for miracles. To build a case for her beatification.
Did you see how the touch of her fingers healed sister Elena's sores?
Yes and as she kissed one of the slaves on the forehead I saw the pestilence leave the woman's lips like a blue flame. Sor Juana had no fear for herself â¦
They are half expecting the plague to lift when you die. And I cannot rouse myself to anger. Any day now someone will claim to have seen your breasts running with milk.
I pore overâpour through this, her great book of dreaming. I try to meet her in dreams, to follow her through mine. To make her see me again, where the light is clean, where there is no smoke, no cloud, no sun.
The body in unbroken calm,
a corpse with soul,
is dead to living, living to the dead,
the human clock attesting
by faintest signs of life
its vital wound-up state,
wound not by hand but by arterial concert:
by throbbings which give tiny measured signs
of its well-regulated movement â¦
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