Hunger's Brides (59 page)

Ambassadors
—the one foreign power Madrid ever permitted to post an ambassador here was from the Shogunate, before the Great Persecution. Informally the Philippines, Perú and Naples support
enviados
, but the more legitimately they conduct their offices once here, the more suspiciously they are viewed by the Crown. And yet the presence of ambassadors at a court that lacks for nothing else agreeably glorifies the majesty of the Vice-King's person, not to mention New Spain's pretensions to be
a kingdom on a footing with Aragón—to the point where every man of honour is a
don
and every
hidalgo
is all but a count, and every foreigner here an ambassador of something or other. But here the marvel is that the one we might with greatest precision call Ambassador is not a foreigner at all, but rather a former Spanish envoy to a foreign power; while the foreigners, not ambassadors except in euphemism, will either be an associate trailing that Spanish envoy here from his last posting, or be of any sort at all, provided he has with some foreign potentate a passing acquaintance—the less meaningful, in fact, the better. Military adventurers, fencing masters, gamblers, idle travellers, collectors of rare objects, arrangers of rare events. Any sort at all. These we call not the Special Envoy of His Serene Highness the Grand Duke of Tuscany but, limply, the Ambassador of Florence. Of things vaguely Florentine. Ambassador of florins.

Yet am I so different? Court poet—what have I let my life become? Was this not the title I once so prized?

How could I not have rebelled at the sight of the other writers and artists here? The worst reduced to the station of jesters, grown parasitic and fat at the King's table—the best, to the role of scold, and still just as much a part of the show. I thought I was above it all, inviolable behind the shield of my learning, invisible behind my masks, invincible on the battlements of my accomplishments. At eighteen the poet of choice for all occasions of state, whenever there is a visiting functionary to praise, a lavish gift to be commemorated. And now, by the time Europe's new ambassadors reach the palace gates, all have heard of me.

New Spain's Vice-Queen needs diversion—it is an urgent matter of state—so I am become her mistress of illusions, her magus, her hunting hawk. She yearns for daring, I write things Lope wouldn't risk. She is my Sovereign: I will be her warrior poet, her armoured suitor, her Giantess, her friend.

I write her sonnets. I carry her messages. Have I come so far not to create a
Las Meninas
but only be one?

Juanita, write us a comedy for Easter, another comedy for the empire. Somewhere in the Spanish dominions, they say, there is a comedy being finished every day. In a good week Lope could finish two himself, in a great month, ten. By the close of this century there will be ten thousand, with the ones I have written for her. Leonor sighs over reminiscences of Madrid, the parties in Vienna, the genius of Lotti's theatrical sets at the country palace—so I design marvels and have them built for her. Once,
I build a camera obscura with my own hands, after designs by Leonardo. For two whole days it fascinates her.

I have sat in the audience among these friends of mine and watched my own plays performed. I have basked in the ebb and flow of their cultivated flattery, and believed it, no,
devoured
it. Seeing my work well
received
, did I so badly need to think them connoisseurs of art? The empty heads, the empty hearts … Here we're all actors, with me the most abject of all, trapped in the plots of my own plays, lost in
mazes
of my own design.

All in the name of
entertainment
.

One by one, each of my lying masks has fallen away. Coquette, raconteuse, innocent. And what then remains of
me
, as finally the legend overwhelms even the charm and only the last mask is left. Freak of nature, monster of learning—
la Monstrua
. For women an object of both envy and disgust, for men, certain men, a trophy.

Carlos, I am not so different from them as you thought. Dear Carlos. The last of the honest suitors. Even were I not now dishonoured, the only ones to pursue me still would be the giant-killers, the dragon-slayers—out to take a unicorn for their mantle. The letters that arrive now almost daily from the coast only make me feel more keenly my solitude. Poor Carlos, condemned to chase after me, just as I am condemned to love one who does not see me, even as I flee one who truly loves me. Poor dear Carlos—a scholar's mind, a mystic's soul … with the heart of a mathematician and the face of a clerk.

Carlos, what has happened to love?

I thought him desperate, but wasn't I the desperate one? To have remained so long deaf to the flatulent hiss of their clever fakery, to the gnashing and clashing of beaks, the endless disputing over mangled concepts, to the clatter of the finest ideas of the age spilling over the parquet like pearls from their glossy, swinish lips. How long was I to overlook their raucous, wrenching vulgarity?—gorging themselves like vultures on their gossip and murderous jealousies, on their coarse lusts and treacherous intrigues.

The decadence of Mexico imitating Madrid mimicking Paris aping the final degeneracy of the Medicis …

I carry their messages.

She watched me stuffing myself at a banquet of honeyed compliments and acid retorts—bitter chocolate sipped hot in the sweet night
air. Cigarettes heaped on argent trays, gold braziers to light them. Intoxicating coach rides beneath wheeling stars, daring baths on the lake … until the worm was firmly embedded in my soul. How I hate these games of theirs now, yet I wriggle caught up in them like a minnow in a net. This puerile rage for cards. Cards, cards at all hours, while the lifeblood of a continent ebbs away through its open veins.
³²
I learned too quickly and not
well
enough, won too easily and stayed too long.

Here everything's a game, yes, but not the one I thought I was playing. She spoke so sweetly of my vulnerability, smiled reassurance down at me from the commanding heights of her unattainability. Why did she never explain to me the real rules, the true motives of the game? To keep one married gentleman out of the bed of another's wife. To lead idle nobles, unprotesting, by their privates in the service of their king—with us, the unattached maids-in-waiting, to do the leading. Games to keep a rich girl single just long enough to arrange a marriage, a marriage to someone not yet senior enough to have seen his future wife cavorting like a whore.

What has happened to love?

All around us the cloying scent of too-sweet fruit hangs in the air, as we whirl, beautiful as moths, blinded in this bright storm. Then one is plucked from the vine—for one, the dance stops, the game for her ends in marriage. Among the rest there must be casualties—disease, pregnancy, abortive loves—while for the poorest among us the games never end, except in mad spinsterhood or prostitution. At best, a few years cloistered as a concubine. Then it all begins again, but by then the player's lost her best assets, the adolescent plumpness, the limpidity of her unlined eyes, the undistracted quality of her attention.

Tonight I think of Teresa. What's to happen to her now?

Learned fool I tried to see these
galanteos
—these vile palace games—as some ancient tragic rite, as the dance of male and female satellites around a dying planetary king.
³³
Like the seasons, the rules for each dance change: one night the ladies draw by lot their partners for the ball; another night the men compete not for a lady's favour but for the prize of her scorn.

This evening's little diversion called for the gallants to start off the ball in the arms of their second choice. Leaving us all to guess at their first.

But first, Juanita, give us a comedy.

She said I would have her protection. I laughed. I had not meant to wound her…. At nineteen, I was not a frightened child. I was not like them but I was not a prude. Was I not born on a farm in a pagan countryside? Have I not seen animals in the fields?—and I have seen things here. In three years at this palace I have seen too much. In a few hours, Silvio will look me full in the face and, with those glittering viper's eyes studying my least reaction, say it was all for a bet, that he and ‘a friend' had gone double-or-nothing on whether he could have me in the space of one single night.

Tonight I would trade anything for the peace and silence of my girlhood in Panoayan, for the stillness of a village and a farm asleep on the dark shoulder of a volcano. I would give anything to see this bright whirlwind
snuffed
. I feel that mountain inside me now as smoke and solitude and stone.

Tonight I would give up even these things to see it erupt just once in a white cone
of fire
.

Ahh …

But instead of getting to play out my small part in a great cosmic agony I watch the next act of my life reduced to low farce—for this audience finds comedy in everything. In death, in the pathetic antics of cripples and lepers, in corruption and betrayal and loss. Anything to mask this fresh wound in their chests.

After the play she came to tell me he was waiting for me in the bowers by the Hall of Comedies. He never deigned to come to the Academy, so she led me to him like a sacrificial lamb. She even picked the place. Knowing of his interest in me, did she come to hate me because the rumours of her relations with Silvio were true, or because they never could be? Decorated soldier, veteran of a dozen duels with married men, Silvio was different, special,
más varonil, más válido. Tell me…
.

I am my own executioner.

Leonor Carreto—the most beautiful creature I have ever met. How could I guess that one so beautiful could be so base? The Marquise de Mancera, for all her beauty and attainments, is bored with everything but power. And knowing this at last I feel, looking back, the malice of power in her every moment with me. With a lover's cruelty she insisted I play, learn my part word for word. Make her words my own, as I had offered mine to her. But this, why this? Surely nothing so banal as my purity. Surely something more than a break in the tedium, the voyeurs
thrill at seeing an uncommon spirit pawed over, the gambler's at seeing a ruinous wager lost. Learned fool, calculate the probabilities. Was it to convince herself—no,
convince him
—that I would come to be no different than she one day, after a lifetime of petty stratagems and intrigues? Or was it instead to prove one thing? To me above all.

The cut that wounds the mortal, the genius does not feel.

I went like Eve towards the serpent, Ariadne after Theseus, betraying her sex, her blood, her soul … only so he could then betray her. I found him at the bottom of the garden, a darker shadow among shadows—tall and powerful through the chest. I had watched him, many times. Disdaining the fashions of the French, he wore his own hair short, shoulder length, drawn at the nape with a simple clip. The beard trimmed close, streaked grey at the cheeks. Over a grey silk doublet he wore a velvet jerkin, black, lightly corsetted, so the adoring eye might contrast the breadth of the chest with the slimness of the hip, roam from the white stockings and hose full along the lithe muscular legs—to the jaunty parting of the jerkin at the jut of the codpiece. The beautiful blue hells of his eyes, impudent … the arrogant male, even with her. Did he imagine I might simply succumb without a word?

He stepped towards me into the moonlight, and even as I should have been thinking how deftly staged the moment was, my celebrated self-possession had already begun abandoning me. I heard myself asking how he'd found the play.

“Interesting.”

“Surely the representative of Milan,” I said, trying to get my footing, “has a more
interesting
response? Do you not find it something more than
interesting
that the play's hero challenges God and defies His order, but then invites punishment for his transgressions?”

“Only as a point of chivalry. But, yes, the old
and
the new. And for once, a noble man's sinfulness is not blamed on some outside force.”

“I wouldn't have thought you such a staunch champion of responsibility.”

“I believe it weak to blame new evils on old devils. Don't you agree?”

At last I felt myself beginning to relax. “With other causes so proximate, yes.”

“Our hero took his fight directly to God, I respect that—and welcomed the return blow as an act of
nobleza
. He has committed a misconduct in his host's house, after all. But I see this subject has begun to bore.”

“No, no it's just—this isn't the face you show in there.”

“‘This painted semblance you so admire / sets up false syllogisms of colour …'” he quoted, bowing slightly.

“You know it?”

“I know all your work, Juana.”

“I never see you at my plays …”

“Good of you to notice.”

When had I become such a blunderer?

“You mustn't take it personally, child, I'm just not one for sharing. Anything. But let's not waste your time on the trivial. As the whole world now knows, you're no mere poetess but a formidable philosopher. Perhaps you would help me? With a little syllogism.”

“If I can.”

“Excellent. Let's see … if it is true that to delight in evil creates a horror of solitude …” He glanced down at me. “Are you with me.”

“Oh yes.”

“And if to flee solitude is to pursue the complete and perfect joining that is
love …
then this would mean that to flee solitude is both to love and to delight in evil.”
³⁴

For an instant I hesitated. And then, instead of remarking that his syllogism consisted of verb phrases rather than common nouns, instead of subjecting him to a lecture on syllogistic figures, moods and distributions, instead of reducing the ramparts of his premises to wet straw and his propositions to so much hot air, I stood like a witless quail before the gamekeeper and found myself admiring the meagre kernels he was tossing to the ground. Already I should have guessed the whole thing was rehearsed, every word, under Leonor's direction. But I had let myself find something fatally compelling in an idea, as she knew I would. So instead of running—or standing to
fight
, I stuck my empty head through his little loop of string….