Hunger's Brides (81 page)

If I have never seen her there, it is because I do not go…. For you see, dear friend, the flowers in the orchards, the smell of the earth, the hard rain that lays bright bracelets of coin on each blade of grass, all these

things bring too near the absence of another time. And of a kind of poetry now lost to me.

As the years go rushing, rushing by, in things absent I feel a presence as of stone—your absence as of a stone in my breast; your distance the darkness behind it, and all that holds it in are these letters from you: the presence of your absence. Absence—yours, others'—is become a presence ever before me, an ever constant pressure, the mass of a stone I am afraid to roll back. Always for me lately, this absence, this dance. This too is a kind of siege.

I have been afraid to speak to you of all this,
amada dueña de mi alma
, for fear I will not know how to stop, or when I must.

There was the day you first came to this convent….

Sweet Lysis, I too regret, bitterly, every hour together we could not have. With this letter I enclose a few verses that, hesitant yet, reach for your hand….

I send you all my love and anxiously await word.

  
día 6 de enero del año 1689
de este convento de San Jerónimo
,
   de la Ciudad de México
,
    Nueva España

[2nd day of April 1689]

Her Excellency, Lady María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga
Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna
,
Madrid

Mi querida Lysis
,

O
ur daughter has safely arrived
. Castalia has reached the New World. I have our collection under my hand now as I write, as I have written for thirty years, so many countless hours, with serried rows of books in friendly ranks, standing watch close at my back. Something else I have never said to you, I say it now. That a man I loved more than the sun, my kinsman, loved your kinsman with all his great heart. How beautiful it would have been, and how strange, to have known so very long ago that today—under the aegis and seal of the House of Paredes—I would reach up to shelve my own first book only to discover that it fits between his two best loved authors. Between these two books I still have of his, between Homer and Manrique I stand: Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor.

I exist.

This book. Our first. I open it. I cradle her, this child of ours, run my ticklish nose down her bumpy spine, snuffle out her newborn's scents. I hold up a world in my palm. A life entire.

I laugh a little through the springs in my eyes at the saucy title you have found.
Castalian Flood
. Run, ye mockers and sinners and poetasters, run for the arks!

Such a feeling of dangerous peace creeps over me, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. Between Manrique and Homer, between peace and fight. One book—isn't one enough? Why do we have to struggle so much not to be crushed? Surely now all the fighting could stop. And yet I know it does not.

For a long time after my girlhood ended it was hard to love the
Iliad
as before. Even now I prefer the
Odyssey
, and there are parts of his
Iliad
I dislike still. For a while after leaving Panoayan I disliked it all, every chapter. As a young woman at the palace, what I saw in those chapters
was the endless waste and horror of all that is most beautiful in men. The finest flowers of an age cut and trailed through gore and dust. This epic of deflowering men. And then just when it all becomes too much, a Homer transformed writes a kind of miracle for us, an interlude, as though by a different pen, as though the Homer of the
Odyssey
drops by for a turn. The working of Achilles' shield at Vulcan's forge.

On that shield, as Thetis of the silvery feet stands tiptoe at his shoulder, anxious yet marvelling, the smith Hephaistos works the heavens and beneath them two cities. In one, a civil peace: festivals and marriages, through the streets wind bridal processions by torchlight; women crowd doorways to watch the maidens pass. A marketplace wrought in silver, sober heralds and arbitrators sit in open court … sage elders in session on benches of stone slow-worn to gloss.

The other, a city under siege. Outside its walls not one but two contending armies ring the ramparts in glittering bronze. Beyond, Hephaistos works soft fields triple-ploughed … teams of oxen till in the sun, to each teamster a man brings sweet wine in gold flagons. Under a silver tree a feast is spread. Women scatter white barley for the workers to eat. Beside a fire a brass ox lies jointed and trimmed. Copper reeds sway in a silver stream, sheepflocks gleam. A player with his lyre refreshes the harvesters, as with light dance steps—for their fardels were light—they keep time…. And enclosing all, the deep gyres of the Ocean River running at the shield's outermost edge.

Why has Homer given us this shield, this paradox of an object of war, yet a refuge from it? Is his an act of defiance, or does he merely tease out the moment, an idyll before the bloody climax? Whatever his purpose, it is an interlude of all that is beautiful and fine, all that is worth living, striving for, all that made that war terrible and cursed. All this was lost, the Poet suggests, over Helen. We should despise her, even when the Trojans themselves cannot. This daughter of Zeus and Leda, Delusion and Nemesis, hatched from an egg to a beauty unbearable to men. But which Helen? For there were two….

The poet Stesichoros was struck blind and his sight restored only once he had admitted that Helen was never in Troy, that she had instead been spirited to Egypt by Hermes and replaced with an illusion fashioned by Hera from a swath of cloud. It is an illusion so real as to trigger a war, a myth so real to us now it may as well have happened. A myth wrapped in an illusion cradled in the hull of a dream.

Among those who have been to Ithaca and know its coast are some who believe that Odysseus never made it home. That the coast described at his landing was not Ithaca at all, but Leucas, Isle of Whiteness, Isle of Dreams. And that his return, therefore—or the
Odyssey
entire—was a journey in a dream, real as a city on a shield.

The last of Helen's husbands was Achilles. According to one who claims to have visited the White Isle himself, Achilles and Helen were married after their deaths and lived together there. And so we wonder if the shield was to protect Achilles from Hector or Helen. And which Helen was this and which was war and which one love? Two cities on a shield, two Helens, each looking out to sea. One over the plains before Troy, one over the shores of Egypt. Helen of Sparta, Helen of Troy. One the illusion of a possession, one the dream of a release, both of an impossible beauty.

Since my childhood I've known, as one knows an old dream, how the fires and floods and storms conspire with the illusions of the years to keep us from Ithaca.

Sweet Lysis, let our daughter be the siege raised, let this book be our shield, let these pages be our dream of release from all cares of consequence, all delusions of possession, all the torments of absence. Let us make of this book—this shield, this dream we have shared—the place where we come from so far to meet, I from the west and you from the east. To our island of dreams, our dream of an impossible beauty, and in it, together, we walk the white shore.

Juana…
.

  
día 2 de abril del año 1689
de este convento de San Jerónimo
,
de la Ciudad Imperial de México

[29th day of June, 1689]

María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga
Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna
,
Madrid, España

Lysis …

S
o the incomparable Christina of Sweden is gone. As your letter arrived, the first rumours had only just begun. It is true, then; she was interred at Saint Peter's Basilica. The Pope forgave her every excess after all. In abdication, poverty, obloquy, even in death, she commanded a queen's respects.

For another moment after finishing your letter I could not quite believe—in the sense that one could hardly ever believe she really was alive, so very alive was her legend. Here at the convent, as it had been at the palace, the talk was often of Christina, just as she was fascinated by convent life. (For Christina, it was the married woman who was truly a slave; nuns were only prisoners, and even the queen was not free….) They are probably talking of her now in half a dozen cells around this patio. All the rumours that she would come, was coming, was in Seville, then in Cadiz itself, waiting for a proper embarkation. For an entire fleet, more likely. From my earliest days here—and perhaps it never quite stopped—I had the notion she would come to stay a while with us at San Jerónimo, with her menagerie of parrots and apes, with her equipage of fourteen thousand books, and we might sit together and while away the days. I would tell her of our academy, of Antonia and Tomasina, María and Belilla, and she would tell me of hers, of Bernini and Corelli and Scarlatti. And we would talk of Descartes and astronomy, of languages and the fighting spirit of queens, of horsemanship and marksmanship, of a life of the mind and men's breeches.

When they asked her about this—her loves and her pistols and her breeches—do you know how she answered them?
The soul has no sex
.

You write me gently of her death, but it is I who should be consoling you. You had much higher hopes than I that we might one day win her
patronage for a nun in the wilds of America. It was a cruel twist that the emissary of your friend the Grand Duchess of Aveyro was due to leave for Rome the following day. How much less cruel for me to have read of it across this time and distance, than for you—when not a week earlier, you had placed our collection in the messenger's hands. And with it a manuscript copy of
Las letras a Safo
. How could our Castalia fail, you wrote that day in such high spirits, how could
Sappho's
lyrics fail to enchant Christina of Sweden? By the time I read those words, she was two months dead, and only now the news is confirmed. How cruelly time and distance work at the edges of irony: one edge they blunt, its opposite whet.

Her influence was enormous, you write trailing off…. Between the lines I read what you do not quite say: If Sappho's lyrics had
been
in
Castalian Flood
, Christina might already have read it and taken up our cause.

The collection has gone through two print runs in two months. You write that we should be thinking about another collection—surely there is something to be done about Núñez. What is it,
really
, that fuels this grievance of ours, you ask, that it blazes up from embers banked long ago? Can he not somehow be persuaded to tolerate
Las letras a Safo
in our next collection, when that bright day comes? By which I take you to be asking if there is anything you can say to overcome my fears. In answering the first, perhaps each of us will find our answers to the second.

While you were here, your protection sufficed, but the House of Paredes is back in Spain now. My relations with the Viceroy are cordial but not warm. The Count is decent enough, but it does not help to know he is part of the faction that has brought such grief to your husband's brother. As for the Countess de Galve, if it did not so inflame the Archbishop to hear of her visits here, she would not come at all any longer.

Do you know what she has just done? She put on
Amor es más laberinto
, knowing full well from what happened to us that he would not come to any play, least of all this one. All this may bring her a childish satisfaction, but I do not see what good it can do her or me, and though I cling to my love of comedy more grimly each year, it is not exactly why I stayed up from Matins to Lauds for two months writing it.
²¹

The Archbishop persists in his refusal to serve as her spiritual director, even as he did with you. Unlike you, she takes it personally, though he would gladly do as little for any woman. Since His Grace will not minister to her, the Viceroy stays with Núñez as well. Father Núñez is
happy to oblige. You kept him as your director because in your life you had found so few with the nerve to challenge you—better the adversary one sees, you said, as befits a Manrique. But it was you who convinced me to find another director precisely because I did have much to fear. Now you wonder if I have not become ‘more timid in my rebellion than I was in my submission.'

The question is a fair one. As I say, in the answer to your first, perhaps we'll find our answers to the second and now this third.

Twenty-one years ago the Reverend Father Antonio Núñez led me to see the service of Christ as Loyola himself first had, as a mission of chivalry. The verses of Juan de la Cruz speak of the soul's longing to be ravished by Him, a prospect Núñez can just countenance. But that in the verses of Juana
Inés
de la Cruz a nun should speak to Christ as to a courtly lover … no, this Núñez cannot bear. (Even if there'd been a hundred Teresas, such raptures would still for Núñez be intolerable in a nun.) How he must have suffered until he had me in his power. For so soon as I was safely locked away, gone the chivalry, gone the cavalry. The virtues of the footsoldier are entirely other. Obedience, forbearance, humility, suffering.