Hunger's Brides (24 page)

Tomas Trebino has also reached the terminus.

He falls silent, watching everything set alight around him. Effigies, chests of bones, strangled companions. Ana de Carvajal. Perhaps he has read Dante, and the scene is not without the slim comfort of some small precedent. His confessors mistake his silence for mortal terror. They remove his gag that he might repent. Instead the blasphemer launches into an attack on the poet of Revelations. Trebino exhorts John the Witness to join him in the fire, that the great saint might repent and confess his own crimes.

The executioner holds Tomas Trebino's head steady as they light his beard on fire.

Trebino struggles to look down through the flame. With his foot he drags a block of wood to the stake as if to say,
begin
.

On that day Nature in all her elements is forced to submit. Fire consumes him. Air receives the smoke. His charred bones are wrestled from the jaws of street curs and buried in shallow earth. His suet is scattered over the waters of a reeking canal.

His quintessence is consigned to oblivion.

In the suffocating closeness of the coach, our mingled perfumes ill mask the fetor of our bodies: María, Magda and I ride slowly home through the alleys of the New Jerusalem, covered in silence and ash.

Since I am not yet in a position of open defiance, soon enough I will oblige and give them an accounting of sorts. Gaps will not be tolerated. It is why the repeated questions, it is why the careful notes. It is a kind of fussiness, after all.

But the Inquisition is no conclave of rattled nuns. And it is not the want of charity, chastity and grace that the holy officers so fear and
loathe but the slattern of Incontinence. Against her they are bulwark and bung, caisson and closter, dike and dam. This is the craft of clots and clods, of pears and branks and the surgeon's beaked mask.

These officers and learned doctors, these are the humble stop-gaps. Craft is enough, all is craft. The meekness that inherits the earth.

And who is their Jacobi Topf? Is he born, have we met somewhere, will we yet?

But gaps are everywhere … and lie in silent shapes just where there seems no gap at all. Their shrine and studio is memory. And how they shift and gape at this latest charge: that Uncle Juan's parents were secret Jews.

So differently now those days echo in my memory. For then, what Aunt María feared more even than my recklessness was her own daughter. Magda, the one who served the breakfast. And how unfathomably wise it was to dam the fountain, not comical at all. And the whimsy of finding Uncle Juan brave was not at all whimsical: for however sincere his efforts to be a good New Christian, he could never quite turn his back on the parents who would not abandon an older faith.

And is it true, as the holy officers now suggest, that my own father was one too? For it is among the Basques and Portuguese that the Inquisition finds so very many of its secret Judaizers. And indeed was there not a faint echo, in the
auto-da-fé
of 1656, of that great spectacle of 1649? The arrests began the following year and took place throughout the early 1650s. When Father rode away from us for the last time, I was five years old. It was the spring of 1654.

Did he stay away from us, so often, so long—and then abandon us—to keep us from harm? The Inquisition brought my childhood to an end during a carriage ride. It remains for me to know if they had already taken my father.

So many questions they have. I too have questions now. If it's an accounting they want, I too seek a settling of our accounts.

Magda asked about him. Did I think he was ever coming back? To be cruel, I thought, but perhaps to be doubly cruel. If she knew. And if she knew, it was because Aunt María did also. Grandfather had introduced my father to Isabel. But who introduced María to Uncle Juan? Were Juan and my father friends? My eldest sister and Magda were about the same age….

How painful it can be to see where one has not looked, into places one has not dreamed of. How very differently I might have looked upon my
aunt María, if I had grasped the worst of her fears. And what if I had known from the beginning that Uncle Juan had been my grandfathers friend? I liked him already—he might have become a second father to me. How I needed one then. And I would have feared, not pitied, Magda, had I known what she was. It is from her stock that the Inquisition's familiars are drawn.

Gaps will not be tolerated by the holy officers—gaps are all around us. I too was once frightened of them. But no longer. Yes, I will give them a reckoning of sorts. But for this, let there be another art, with eyes to see the gaps through lenses of clemency. With ears to hear their music, and hands to turn the instrument that plays it. Let there be others, too, for this work.

We will play on drums and spinets, on barrels and pins, on time's very axle. We march under the Ensign of the Trout with trident tongue. When they hear our chiming jingling tune of links and the gaps between, the holy armourers may find, as others have, that mail is lighter, suppler, stronger than plate. That each of us carries part of the score, and that we are all linked in surprising ways and strong. Strong despite ourselves, surprising in spite.

And even as night is the lace around each star, yet there is nothing frail in that dark. Of this night lace now may we fashion a shimmering net and cast it. And let us see if not a few fishers of souls are caught.

H
ALL OF
M
IRRORS

D
ETECTIVES
C
URTIS AND
G
REEN
have had to leave, after going to the trouble to sleuth out the location and then putting up with all the dust and switchbacks to get up here. It is a bright, spring day in the mountains. They left so soon. But they've got their work to do, their statements to take, their musical rides. I wasn't that sorry to see them go. I was afraid they might have heard I was going away for a while.

That night, she'd placed on her desk a box of journals, papers and a few souvenirs of our time together, carefully laid them out for me to find. Of this I'm certain now.

It is all such an infuriating, terrible
waste
. … Such a wrenchingly inadequate word, for a career, a life. I can call it a calamity, I can call it whatever I want, but the word changes nothing. This could have been prevented. This is not what advisers are for. This was my carelessness. And now I want to believe there is some way still to snatch something from the wreckage.

She sits by a window on the tenth floor of the library tower. Its book racks radiate out from the elevators that run up the tower core. The study carrels ring the floor, all along the windows. The views can be superb, but at least one person cares nothing for them: reflected in a window glass is a young woman poring over a volume in which her own ideal is depicted as being deeply fascinated with mirrors. But why should that matter to her so much?

What does Beulah see as she looks into the mirror, where the mind's images collide with those of the eye?

I sort through these journals and wonder where she lost her way. And try to find some evidence that it happened before we met.

… As a child she perches on a chair before the vanity in her mother's darkened bedroom and peers intently into a mirror, which consists of a fixed centrepiece and two side panels on hinges. By realigning the mirror's panels, she can create an infinite retrogression, an endless light relay of planar reflections curving gently away to a bottle-green dusk. To touch either panel even slightly is to launch a dragon's tail arcing through a two-dimensional sky, or to fold it up again just as suddenly, like a trick with cards. Amazed, she crouches there, indifferent to
the distant cries of other little girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalks or hobby horses on the lawns.

How many times has she longed to climb into the looking glass and disappear, threading her way through its endless runs, its brittle windings and darkening alleys? To become a two-dimensional Alice exploring a wonderland where each thing flows to and from its opposite: left hand into right, self into other—order from chaos, a candescence from flesh.

Her journals also show that she felt grateful for the horrors mirrors conceal.

Her research is unorthodox; its methods begin now to lead her into a deep maze. And much of what she is on the verge of discovering about mazes she has already seen in a bedroom mirror: mystery, concealment, deception, horror. Maybe it's in the library tower that she first experiences the sensations that become both companion and guide: a sudden tightening in the chest, a glimmering of shapes falling into line on a distant horizon of the inner eye, the seashell roar of the sea….

At the next bend, her maze takes on the aspect of a funhouse: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, too, has an abiding fascination with mirrors, and Beulah—disoriented, a little at sea—is amazed by the happenstance of her discovery. She needn't have been.

Juana Ramírez was raised among the remnants of a people for whom the mirror held great significance. Mexican cosmology, as Beulah's research so vividly records, manages to be at once complex and breathtakingly poetic. The night sky, the stars, the very concept of the divine all partook of the demonic, the ravening and the terrible. No god better exemplified this than Tezcatlipoca, one of the most haunting visions of divinity ever conjured by the collective imagination.
²⁸

In the darkness of a night stalked by apparitions and spectres, people felt the Smoking Mirror particularly near. It was the jaguar, and it waited at each crossroads. The god dwelt in his House of Mirrors—a hall of concave, eerily reflective surfaces that enshrined a statue of black obsidian. This statue, the Lord of the Mirror, was worshipped in awe and cursed in despair as the master of inversions and sudden reversals of fortune. Though possessed of a matchless power, typically he chose to act through deception, misdirection and sleight of hand. The statue's pectoral mirror was a scope through which Tezcatlipoca
could see others—into their very hearts—while himself remaining invisible. An obsidian mirror replaced one of his feet, torn off in some primordial combat with a demonic earth mother.

He was known also as Broken Face, He-who-causes-things-to-be-seen-in-a-mirror. The Smoking Mirror summoned visions and brought them rolling through smoke across vast stretches of space and time. To peer into it was an hallucinatory source of enchantment, terror, paralysis….

His date marker in the Aztec calendar cycle was 1 Death.

Sor Juana certainly knew something of these legends. She may even have been marked by them. But her curiosity could just as easily have been purely intellectual, as of any seventeenth-century thinker reflecting the enthusiasms of her era. In seventeenth-century science, mirrors held renewed interest as refractors and reflectors of light. Newton fitted mirrors to his telescopes to improve upon Galileo's. For the philosophy of knowledge, a mirror's distortions were a troublesome source of altered perceptions—calling into question, in the age of Descartes, even man's faith in the data of his senses.