Hunger's Brides (205 page)
I wake startled, overcome with fear. In the darkness my fingertips find the faintest throbbing at your throat.
I sleep.
14th of April
Today a letter. A nobleman from Perú has written that he would like to come here, to make a life near her. A wealthy gentleman. He offers everything he has, without conditions, only that she might have the freedom to write whatever she wishes, whenever it pleases her.
More dreams, day and night, hers and mine. The cell is awash in dreams. It is all we have left to talk about. She tells me hers, still asks to hear mine.
I will not let anyone in. They bring fresh blankets, soup, oranges ⦠and leave them at the door.
In a confused muttering she speaks to me of guiltâall the things and people sacrificed to feed her mind. Her hungers, her shame ⦠something about a river, a face, or a hot spring called the Face. I cannot make it out.
What storm-tossed end would you have chosen for yourself, Juana, what tempest of the mind and soul?
⦠against her will was forced
to run ashore on the beach
of the vast sea of knowing,
with rudder broken, yardarms snapped,
kissing each grain of sand
with every splinter â¦
12
I check on her. Her eyes are open. For a moment I â¦
“I had a dream, Antonia ⦔ She pauses, closes her eyes, and after a breath opens them again.“There was a mountain spouting glyphs of smoke,
ancient signs. An old dream of mine,” she says forcing her cracked lips into a smile. “Good that it should visit me once more. Your ⦠turn ⦠now.”
I'm not sure she even hears me. I have to speak loudly now. Her ears are leaking fluid. I shouldn't write this, but I can't help it. There is nothing else.
⦠no rapid surging flight could ever reach
of eagle soaring to the very heavens,
drinking in sunbeams and aspiring
to build her nest amidst the sun's own lights,
however hard she presses upward
with great flappings of her feathered sails
or combings of the air
with open talons, as she strives,
fashioning ladders out of atoms,
to pierce the inviolate precincts of the peak â¦
13
It is not darkness she strives against but light, an all-conquering light.
“I was flying again,” she murmurs weakly.“Before me the mountain ⦠the sun at night. All human history stretched below, since before the Floodâ¦. How we cling, each to our life.” Her laugh is a gasp.“So real it seems, our little bit of clay. How stubborn we are.”
She wakes, sleeps. One minute, two. She wakes, pauses an instant to swallow painfully.
“Just now, 'Tonia ⦠I dreamed the whole of human history. From the first dawn down to our last day, last hour. How long have I been asleepâAntonia, are you there?
“How long would a dream of all eternity last?”
I watch her slip back into her dream of the sun at night, blood streaming from her eyes.
At this almost limitless elevation,
jubilant but perplexed,
perplexed yet full of pride,
and astonished although proud,
the sovereign queen of the sublunary world
let the probing gaze, by lenses unencumbered,
of her beautiful intellectual eyes â¦
â¦.The eyes were far less quick
to reel, contrite, from their bold purpose.
Instead, they overreached and tried
in vain to prove themselves
against an object which in excellence exceeds
all visual linesâ
against the sun, I mean, the shining body
whose rays impose a punishment of fire â¦
14
How could it have taken me so long to see that she was going blind?
The plague has broken. Or having eaten its fill, has gone away to sleep. It is only hunger wakes the dreamer.
15
16th of April, 1695
The day dawns bright, mocking us with its orderly distribution of the gifts of light. There will be but one death today.
I can no longer keep her to myself. Fresh bedding, the braziers charged with spicesâ¦. By late afternoon I've done what I can to scrub the walls clean of their rust-red streaks, like a child's fingers run mad with paint. In this stained nursery I am about to go insane. She has just asked if the day is clear, if I can see the volcanoes. She has forgotten that the new cell faces west, not east. I tell her yes. She asks about the flowers blossoming in the trees.
The survivors gather about the bed. Someone asks if anyone smells it, yes they all smell tangerinesâ¦. Is it only my own lies that can be beautiful?
The Prioress comes in, unsteady, hesitant. I can see it in her face. This final irony cuts even her, deeply: that the Archbishop has asked to see you, has asked that you leave the convent for your protection. Or his.
The faintest hint of a smile caresses your dark lips.“Last night ⦠just now. I had the most beautiful dream.” Your voice is a faint whisper. I bend low and struggle to fill in the words. You feel my breath on your cheek, the drop of a tear. “Ahh, Antonia, it's you. How good ⦔
Your eyes try to find me. “All my life I have been falling back to earth.
I would not look down, would not see. But hovering over me ⦔ She tries to swallow, shakes her head slightly as I try to press a
cántaro
of water to her lips. “⦠broken on the earth I looked up to the face of Ammon.
This bright dreamâ¦
.”
“What did she say?” the Prioress asks. I do not answer.“I heard her say something,” she demands, reddening.
“You must have heard her say Amen, Mother.”
To be a liar can sometimes be a mercy.
At the end, in your beautiful blind eyes I saw a faint light turning in ⦠as if to sleep. The light I'd first seen last night. As though in a dream, I watched the Phoenix leave her nest of burning spices and take flightâ¦.
How long does the dream of all eternity last.
It should have come howling riot, crying havoc, on the thousand voices of the flood. Instead the end came quietly, as on the feet of mice.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz died an hour before the dawn, April seventeenth, in the year sixteen ninety-five.
IZARDS
        