Hunger's Brides (77 page)

  Would hate the existence of these classes more than any particular thing we might teach in them.

  But he hates
us
—our songs—our
voices
.

  Plays and music have had a place in the cloister for centuries. It will take more than one archbishop, however lunatic, to change that.

  You, he hates most of all.

  Why I've never met the man. Which is fortunate—for we might have to warrant his grievance if he actually knew me.

  It's not a thing to smile about—why aren't you
afraid
of him?

  Whatever would make you think that?

  You shouldn't
provoke
him.

  Come Antonia, you've been telling me all week how hard they're working. San Jerónimo's best young minds. This is the Hieronymite convent of the learned widow Santa Paula, after all. Think of this as our Holy Land—and Paula herself, not the Vicaress, back of the lattice smiling down at us.

  
[faint knock]

  There—listen to them giggling—their
voices
. Female scholars. A miracle!

  But the Prioress—

  Will know soon enough. We're keeping them waiting, 'Tonia. Our little academy of beauty … Are they early?

  
You know why.

  Then we give them extra algebra first, since they're so keen.

  Not for algebra.

  At least we may hope therewith to lull the Vicaress into that deep algebraic rumination best expressed in counting sheep. After that, a bit of astronomy. Half the girls like
that
, at least. Then the Ovid for anyone still upright. There now,
mi amor
. It really is all right to smile. You've marked the sections? And not just the pirates and the Amazons, I trust….

  
[Enter twelve young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty, in the robes of postulants.]

SCENE II: An hour later. Throughout, the refectory door has been open. The afternoon light through the orchard leaves plays indistinct shadows over the floor beside the rostrum
.

The nun, still attractive for her age, walks to the door, stands a moment looking out. Along the refectory wall runs a long narrow walkway over-arched by orchard boughs; through the trees, glimpses of extensive garden plots
, tinajas
†
, shady colonnades. She turns back to the somnolent classroom and, glancing up at the lattice above the rostrum, gently pulls the door closed behind her. She speaks …

… All right, enough astronomy for today—none of you is listening anyway. And why would that be, I wonder? Are you all with Tomasina here?—who seems to think the telescope was invented so the novices of San Jerónimo might miss nothing of what goes on in the rooms across the street. And again all I get is laughter for an answer! Enough, then?—or shall we turn to Ovid?

  Yes!

  
Please
, Juana.

  María, Belilla … Anyone else interested?

  Sor Juana, you know we are.

  You're teasing us.

  
Why bother with these old stories?

  
¡Cállate!
Tomasina. Juana, don't listen.

  Be a bit kinder, Belilla. She's started us off with an excellent question, even if asked a few weeks late. So. Why read Ovid's old stories …? Quickly now, not much time left.

  They tell the exploits of heroes?

  And heroines too,
verdad
Isabel? Anyone else?

  They show a pagan world—the world of sin before Christ.

  Yes, Ana, and something of the world's sins since, don't you think?

  But why teach women at all?

  Sor Juana, don't encourage her.

  Ask Tomasina why she even comes then—
why
Tomasina? Tell us.

  Didn't Saint Paul say
mulieres in ecclesia taceant?

  Why Tomasina, how nice to see our lessons in Latin bearing fruit! That women should be silent in Church is not necessarily bad. Men also might profit from a little more silence before their God, don't you agree? Even a saint may say too much—

  Sor Juana!

  Don't you think Saint Paul would smile to see his
dictum
used by a girl who hates homework? Ah, dear girl, a smile from you is heavenly reward indeed. Isabel, what if I told you Ana had a cold last week? Old news, you'd say—

  Sor Juana, I wouldn't!

  No dear, you wouldn't be so rude, but you'd be thinking it—or some of you. What makes some old news last a thousand years?—mere stories outlasting an empire, as Ovid's have outlived the empire that exiled him. Maybe you'll consider this during our work today. Antonia tells me you've given
Heroides 15
your close attention…. You've read his
Metamorphoses:
what's the most obvious difference here?

  They're in the form of letters?

  Good, on this we're quite agreed, but to whom?

  
To their … lovers?

  Yes Isabel, some might say that. And number 15 is purportedly written by? Come now, quickly—

  
Sappho
.

  Ah, a little hush stills the room. At last we've everyone's attention. Sappho … apparently the learned woman isn't such a novelty after all, Tomasina. But what do we really know about Sappho? Antonia?

  That she was a teacher of women.

  So they say. Good, what else—Belilla?

  That she was a—

  She was called the
Tenth Muse
.

  Belilla thanks you, Antonia. And how many Muses were there supposed to be?

  
[in unison]

  Nine!!!

  How lovely!—our own chorus.

  But Sor Juana, they
call you
that.

  Really Isabel?
[mock coquette]
Then it seems they'll call anyone that these days. But Ovid puts her in a whole regiment of heroines—alongside … anyone?

  Ariadne?—

  Phaedra—

  Helen!–

  Stop, please—

  Hypermnestra!—

  Medea!—

  Stop,
señoritas
, no need for all of them!—thank you. Now, what is Ovid up to? Heroines, he calls them—his gallery of adulteresses, parricides, Amazons. And how does a flesh and blood woman end up in such
a collection? The Greeks called Sappho the Poetess in the same way they honoured Homer as the Poet. Yet Ovid has her heaving great sighs over a boatman named?

  Phaon—

  A
boy
.

  Why yes, Belilla.

  Young enough to be her son.

  Ah the ups and downs of motherhood—ask Procne, ask Iocaste. Ask the sisters Ariadne and Phaedra—indeed, half Ovid's heroines have taken a rather disastrous fall. How curious, and how precarious for Sappho. Ovid puts her on a cliff ledge, spurned, her wondrous poetic voice stopped, mimicked now by a plangent echo. Antonia, will you read for us? You know the place.

Once again—Philomel?

  Procne's sister.

  And what happened to Procne? Hurry now.

  Her husband cut out her tongue and locked her away and said she was dead so he could marry Philomel.

  Such a mouthful!—thank you, Antonia. And his son, Itys?

  
The sisters killed him. To take revenge.

  And then?

  Secretly they chopped him into pieces and fed Tereus his own son's flesh.

  Tantalizing tale. I commend you all. You've learned Ovid's old stories well. Even Tomasina is despite herself nearly a classical sage. So … Ovid, whatever is he up to? In the passage you just heard, what associations is he creating for his Sappho? Is she Philomela or Procne, or both? Ovid's Sappho is driven to the brink by the love of Phaon, a common boatman—her forest lord and master is little more than a boy, as Belilla has pointed out. Ovid has the greatest lyric poet of antiquity call this young sailor her ‘genius,' her voice—and who can doubt this is how Ovid sees himself? So now who has cut out
Sappho's
tongue, so to speak.

  Phaon?

  Ovid?

  Sor Juana, why is he so cruel to her?

  Yes and yes, and I've asked myself this, too, María. And yet there are touches of sympathy that puzzle me. Earlier he has her shrieking in grief, at times invoking her love for her pirate brother, but also the love of a mother for a murdered son. Let's come back to your question in a minute—may we, dear? 'Tonia, just a few more lines.

Is there not something very strange happening here? Who is the abandoned nightingale singing for Itys?

  Philomel.

  But Philomel killed Itys.

  As you say, Isabel. And how touching it is, how tender—to hear the
lament of the murderer ‘abandoned' by her victim's demise. And if Philomel sings for Itys and Sappho sings Philomel's song, for whom does
she
sing?

  Phaon?

  
Ándele
, Belilla.

  And so does Ovid's Sappho grieve for a lover or a son—or are we to suspect he is both? And has he abandoned Sappho or instead been devoured by her? So many precipitous conclusions Ovid leads us to. But wait, how thoughtless of us—we've left Sappho at the edge of a cliff! Where again?

  Cape Leucas.

  And why was it called the white rock of Leucas?

  Because it was white?

  
[laughter]

  But why not, Isabel? We won't let these Spites make fun of you—in my dreams those cliffs
are
white. But there's more, too. Who was Leucothea?

  The White Goddess.

  Excellent. And what happened to her? Anyone …?

  She threw herself into the sea.

  Goodness, why?

  She was …

  You can say it, María. It's ancient history now.

  
Violated
. By her sons.

  And there is yet another unfortunate who threw herself from the white cliffs of Leucas—yes, 'Tonia?

  Queen Artemise.

  Who was …?

  Commander of the Persian armies.

  
A military fiasco, I imagine.
¹⁶

  No.

  Not love again.

  She'd fallen in love with her own son.

  Not so unlike the Sphynx's priestess—

  Like Iocaste!

  Iocaste
exactly
, María. And the mother of Oedipus. Now, Menander tells us that at the top of that white rock stood also a temple dedicated to Apollo Leukatas, and that each year—or in time of plague—a criminal was hurled down to ward off evil, an outcast hurled into the sea to purge the unclean. Some might call it a whitewash. A detail survives: to the scapegoat's shoulders, wings were strapped.

  Like Icarus.

  Quite possibly, María, on a hot and sunny day…. Curiously enough, Apollo's cliffside shrine was also once thought to offer relief from the pangs of love. Aphrodite herself came to visit it, driven to grief over the young Adonis—and what happened to him?

  He was gored.

  Yes, to death, by Apollo, in the guise of …?

  A boar!

  Why
María
—it seems you too are becoming a scholar. And yet I remember someone coming to my cell just last week, lamenting with a great shedding of tears how hopeless she was. Now she's positively beaming. Not so hopeless after all, it seems. And now to the rest of us it should be clear the Hellenes' use of irony didn't begin with Ovid or even Homer. What final irony did the Greeks reserve for the goddess of love? Antonia?

  She threw herself into the sea.

  Yet another leap from the cliffs of Leucas into the foaming surf. Aphrodite—of sea spume born, into spume returned.

  But what does it all
mean?

  
What indeed, Belilla. Is this the meting of poetic justice, do you think, or the judging of poets? Wait, though, not all the evidence has been weighed. As always, there's another version: It's said that on the way to the island of Leucas, Aphrodite, though grief-stricken, nevertheless managed to fall for a new lover—dextrous girl. Now, guess what
his
name was. No one …? Antonia.

  
Phaon
.

  The same Phaon?

  Depends whom you ask, Belilla. 'Tonia, give us the story, please.

  They met on a boat.

  Do tell, a shipboard romance.

  Phaon was the boatman, but very old. Out of pity Aphrodite changed him into a beautiful boy.

  Out of pity, you say. What then?

  She fell in love.

  
Ay pobrecita
, to tumble head over heels for one's own creation.

  So Ovid is saying Aphrodite's really
Sappho?

  Well, Belilla, it's a theory at least.

  What else could it mean?

  That Sappho's Aphrodite?

  
Please
, Juana.