Hunger's Brides (218 page)

What do you say to someone who doesn't want to go on? But who knows, who can make
sense
of this. And just when did we start to presume some divine right to understand things?

The miracle is that we understand anything at all. In the end.

In her pages I have seen the Sistine Chapel made with Popsicle sticks, I have wandered with her ten years in the Amazon, to the ruins of the absolute book. I have tried to make sense of some small part of it. And now, maybe, I have.

You see, I always thought she'd called that night to ask for help. In all this time, in this season of thinking about nothing else, it never once occurred to me. It might have been the other way around.

What do you say to someone who doesn't want to go on? The man who would, the one who chooses to go forward is the man who lets himself be broken. So he can begin as new. That man begins in some small way as her creation, and sets out to make a life of his own. To make another start.

This ceremony, too, begins with the heart.

T
IMELINE
        

N
OTES
        

1.
Ovid,
Metamorphoses
, translated and with a preface by A. E. Watts, with etchings by Pablo Picasso (North Point Press, 1980), p. 62.

2.
The refrain of a poem by Sor Juana.

3.
‘
Siglo de Oro's
latter, better half …' Evincing a certain editorial glee, I'd begun compiling lists of solecisms, errors of fact and anachronisms. But this one gave me pause. First, as a statement of personality it accorded well with widely documented instances of Sor Juana's bold self-awareness. In its devious way, the phrase was also accurate. Spain's
Siglo de Oro
was indeed its golden century, and Sor Juana was arguably the only great poet of its second half. Without her holding down the fort, as it were, it becomes merely a golden half-century. She is also, in the distaff sense, a ‘better half,' being the only great female poet of both that century and that side of the Atlantic divide.

But then what of the anachronisms with which the whole manuscript is rife? Five categories have so far emerged.

i) Unintentional. These are legion.

ii) Deliberate. These are few. (For example, moving the date of a trip or trial from 1678 to 1693.)

iii) Misleading. These seem like anachronisms, but may not be; the intent is evidently to challenge the historical knowledge of someone who reads to debunk. A seventeenth-century reference to cancer, or to a shuttlecock, feels anachronistic even if it isn't.

iv) Aggressive.
Aggressively anachronistic
is a term one might apply to the work as a whole (diction, topics, themes).

Should characters sound
modern
, or instead carry what amounts to a heavy accent that they themselves would not have heard? Which is to say, they will sound bracingly modern to themselves, and we, antiquated, to readers of the future. (Passing over, for a moment, the extent to which ‘modern' is a construct of modernism.)

Is this, then, an objective portrayal of the seventeenth century, or one filtered by our time? The trap here is plain enough: unfiltered, objective portraits are never available to us, and acting as if they were—in history or in fiction—is pretentious.

v) Chronic. (There was a temptation to call this category
meta-temporal
or simply
nonsensical.)
These anachronisms suggest a mission of historical fiction that is not just to lie by getting one's facts scrupulously straight, nor only to interrogate the concept of Fact as cultural artefact, nor even just to pose an alternative to history's account and
thereby a challenge to it, but rather to mount an inquiry into time itself—its ultimate structure and our relationship with it.