Hunger's Brides (82 page)

For all that, things had not acquired the bitterness you have yourself witnessed between Núñez and me until near the end of what was already a dark time. In 1674, the Marquise Leonor Carreto died suddenly in Tepeaca, on her way home to Spain. The incoming Viceroy lasted four days before he too expired. I had narrowly escaped death myself—having lain at its door for nearly a month through an attack of typhoid. It was during my illness that the Holy Office sentenced a Franciscan—Carlos's dear friend—to burn at the stake for his activities among the Maya in Yucatan. Father Núñez had not yet reached his position of eminence at the Holy Office and has always claimed he was not intimately involved. Until the end. For he was one of two Jesuits assigned to bring the condemned to contrition. The harshness in my relations with Father Núñez dates from that day.

Much of the rest you know, but for a detail or two. Almost immediately after Bishop Santa Cruz's election was overturned (almost certainly with the connivance of the Jesuits), Santa Cruz took an interest in a text by an Irish Jesuit whom I had known in my locutory. Father Godinez had been highly critical of the Jesuits here as spiritual directors, the gist of his criticism being that they too often clipped the wings of
their penitents for fear that our mystical flights might soar too perilously high, commending us to penitence rather than love, to obedience rather than communion.
²²
The Society of Jesus refused to publish it.

Highly irregular, then, for Bishop Santa Cruz to have his Dominican secretary edit and publish a Jesuit text that the Jesuit Order had disapproved. It seemed obvious that Godinez was speaking of Núñez in particular. Many at the time thought I had been the one to bring the text to the Bishop's attention. But while Núñez is himself a veritable apostle of self-mortification, I know that he believes such extremes and rigours are not for women, for we fall easily prey to the ultimate wickedness of ecstasy. It is his view (and having endured six months among Teresa's Discalced Carmelites, I have never been much inclined to protest) that excesses of physical mortification are in women the shortest path to the demonic loves of Loudun.
²³
That it is so very different with men, I leave for others to decide.

But to compensate for the relative moderation of our physical trials, Núñez would substitute a cruelty of the heart. I give you your former spiritual director, and a sampling from his latest circular to us….

You will perhaps recall the sentiments.

And so it frequently amuses me to note how many of the churchmen under his direction have become just such
extáticos
. His Paternity don Pedro de Arellano, now my nominal director, was a Núñez disciple. During his time with Father Núñez, don Pedro acquired a most holy fear of sin, most notably his own—as he found himself stabbing the
patron of an inn after a twenty-four-hour gambling binge. Domingo Pérez de Barcia, another Núñez acolyte and more ecstatic still, had to be replaced recently as the head of the Archbishops new women's prison: the cat, I gather, had been set among the very pigeons of ecstasy. And we have the Archbishop himself, who now takes to his bed in murderous rages a few days each month. Even though Núñez is the only one who can so far control him, he controls a depreciating asset, for everyone here watches with malign anticipation for the day when the most unpopular Archbishop in living memory reaches that apoplexy of wrath from which there can be no recovery.

But now, in the span of a few months, Father Núñez has dedicated to Bishop Santa Cruz first a rehash of a text he wrote years ago on the reforms of the Council of Trent,
²⁵
and then recently some new text—I am still trying to get the details, but I hear it is another tome on penitence. So Núñez has begun courting my most powerful ally within the Church. It seems he was only waiting for you to leave.

Finally
I have admitted it, you will say. What more evidence do I need that this is no truce? But at least he does not defame me, and his courtship does not succeed. I will not let it. (One cannot walk two blocks in Mexico without tripping over a theologian. Bishop Santa Cruz has only one of me—indeed is the only one in the Church who can now claim to
have
me in his collection. He has known me for fifteen years, and yet however often I tell him the
via mística
is simply not in my temperament, Santa Cruz has never given up hope that he will one day find the mystic in me. The risks of (my) ecstasy he is prepared to run, for the nun's transports are the oil that lights the altars of the Church, the blood of renewal, the blood of Christ himself. So you see, Núñez detests the very thing the Bishop has never given up hope of finding in me. But finding it, what then? I suspect that Santa Cruz, the great resolver of Biblical contradictions, has this idea that he will one day shape my holy ravings, or play John to my Teresa. Or perhaps it is the reverse….)

It occurs to me tonight that since the first rumours of Christina's death, I've been half dreading Núñez would come to bring me the news himself. The Nun-Empress, he used to call her, with that sarcasm, that Philistine tone and that memory he wields like a scalpel, with which I know he has made you suffer, too. ‘Beware of her, Juana. Christina of Sweden did more to silence Descartes than we ever could.'
²⁶

Silence Descartes? If Núñez ever does come to gloat I will offer him
this—from among those letters of hers she had published, here is her note to a Descartes who had recently expounded his ideas on the infinite amplitude of the Universe.

Who can doubt that Christina, who had negotiated the Peace of Westphalia and knew the hearts of men and the tides of politics no doubt better than he, imposed upon Descartes a quiet moment or two of reflection then?

There it is. Now you know the circumstances that fuel the fires of our old grievance. Núñez has taken up too much of our time this night. It is late, soon it will be day. Antonia is asleep.

I want to tell you a secret. As you know I am widely envied the location of my cell, for its sunny mornings, its views of the mountains. You are among the few from the outside world to have seen those views. But there is quite another reason I would not trade this cell. Behind a tapestry, there is a small door opening into a stairway. A century ago many of our cells had such doors, as one may see from the architect's designs (to be Superintendent of Works has its compensations). But not long after the convent was finished, the stairways were ordered walled over, for the nuns had begun to congregate on the roofs at the slightest pretext, at street festivals, religious processions—there is no end of things to watch in the streets once one begins to take an interest.

A convent has many secrets, and this is among our best kept. I am not the only one to have restored my cell to the original design. There are three of us, as far as I can tell. We know who we are. We do not go up by day for fear of being seen, even though the archbishop who ordered the stairwells sealed has been dead half a century.

But very late at night, when I cannot sleep, or a scream in the street or in a cell has woken me, such things in a telescope I have seen…. Some nights it is only the stars that bring relief. The stars were always distant,
the stars do not change. Looking up at the night sky—unchanged since in the childhood of our race we first traced their constellations—have you ever felt your spirit mounting to those heights up through your eyes?

The Twins, the Fire-Bow, the Great and the Little Bear, Cassiopeia … And is it not with a child's eyes that we trace again in letters of wonder this starry alphabet, and through those eyes feel our own childhood reaching back down to us?

When it is very clear and the magic lantern of the night glows brightly, when the horizons stand traced in stars like figures cut from black and laid on lantern glass, I swear to you, even when it is cold, I smell fresh-picked corn baking in the sun as I once did in Nepantla. That, for me, is what these moments on the roof have come to mean.

Eight years I have waited for the Archbishop's permission to buy this cell and I wait anxiously still. For in these rooms, so long as they are not mine, even this secret doorway can be taken from me.

And now, as I say good-night, I promise you before this ink is dry to slip up to the roof and think upon the infinite expanses of the universe, the limits on the hearts of men, the closeness I feel to you despite the distances that separate us … and to look into the east to you, for you.

Love …

día 29 de junio, Anno Domini 1689
   del convento de San Jerónimo
,
 de la Ciudad Imperial de México
,
     Nueva España

Post Scriptum. Mid-morning: remembering last night's stars, I have yet one more favour to ask. I should tell you right out, it is less for me than for Carlos. All his studies and observations, his proofs and calculations—
it breaks my heart a little these past few years to see him so freely sharing all this with visiting scholars (while rounding on the local ones like a wounded stag). He has understood that he can never publish most of his work, and so tries to advance the work of those who perhaps one day can. For six months now he has been attempting to obtain a copy of
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
, a new work of natural philosophy. Technically speaking it is not banned, but since this Newton is a Lutheran and apparently goes further than Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes combined—indeed pulls together and builds upon their studies—most booksellers here sensibly assume his text will soon be on the next Index and want nothing to do with it. Apparently the holy officers at the port in Veracruz are of the same view and have confiscated at least one copy that we know of. If, however, as happened earlier this year, a nobleman from Madrid happened to be travelling to the Indies with a parcel under seal of the House of Paredes, it would not likely be opened. I hasten to repeat that he would be committing no infraction. Technically.

T
he locutory stands in readiness. By a bookshelf I sit radiating an admirable, a mighty calm. Gutiérrez has just left. I need not remind myself that in the past he has brought reliable information from the Holy Office: rumours of cases, advance word of rulings, gossip of the Inquisition's inner tensions and debates—monthly casualty reports from the war between the Jesuits and the Dominicans. Today, as one of two consultants on the case, Gutiérrez brought news of a licensing application—routinely approved, yet whose implications for me cannot be routine.