Hunger's Brides (91 page)

By ‘our' discussions I take him to mean the Dominicans, whose stronghold is Puebla and whose warlord is the Lord Bishop Santa Cruz. They still find something not quite clear about Father Núñez's motives. It is a game with them to analyze the adversary's positions endlessly. I brace myself. Núñez, the rector of our Jesuit college, invites to his chambers not just Jesuits but Dominicans, a Franciscan and three officers of the Inquisition. And yet he does this to attack a fellow Jesuit. Why? Yes, Vieyra is influential, but he uses that influence not for the Company but to persuade King John to suppress the Inquisition throughout Portugal. Stunning enough in itself, Vieyra next has His Holiness himself declare him to be henceforth beyond the jurisdiction of the Holy Office.

The Jesuit Vieyra has become the greatest living threat to the Inquisition just as the Jesuits are infiltrating it; the Holy Office, through its rigour and universal reach, stands as the main obstacle to Jesuit designs on global power. In America but also in the Orient, the soldiers of Christ have only to adapt certain points of Catholic doctrine slightly to make it palatable to local rulers, certain other
minor
points in the Philippines to counter the incursions of the Moor.

The Jesuits, unchecked, will destroy the Church
.

Santa Cruz makes no effort now to conceal his passion. I rarely see him so unguarded. The heavily bejewelled fingers delicately prowl the platter. Walnut, date, fig.
Suspiros
and
aleluyas
. A bite from each. The platter's losses mount up on the Bishop's side plate of Puebla porcelain. I try very hard to share his passion. Manila, Macao. Mexico, Lisbon. Rome, Madrid. Even Versailles. I am about to be asked to play my small part in
a mighty conflagration reaching into the heart of every continent. His Holiness setting forth from the Papal Palaces to join the other great champions in the field—the King of Portugal, Emperor of Cathay, Shogun, Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition, Cardinal Inquisitor in Rome, General of the Company of Jesus … And somewhere in all this lies the fate of the Jews, and the mystical advent of Vieyra's mysterious Fifth Empire. Only the Lutherans are not invited. But then they were the ones who ruined things in Japan.

Were I a writer of romances, were I a general or a prince, were I half so brave as the nun-ensign, I would surely fly to the fight. I would not fail to seek my place in the universal theological struggle. But I am pledged never again to set foot beyond these walls, a nun who may not freely walk across this room.

With Father Núñez, my chief interest in speaking on theology was that he did not want me to, whereas Santa Cruz has always tried to draw me into these questions more deeply. It would be an insult to our friendship to show a lack of interest now, especially with him in this humour, so pleased that I have let myself become—
fool
—involved. And in his unwonted candour I have a measure of his frustration. For even as Vieyra beards the Inquisition and holds His Holiness in the palm of his hand and Bishop Bossuet guides Louis XIV over the narrow path between insubordination to the Pope and excommunication, Santa Cruz, a bishop at thirty-five, is still a bishop and has been for seventeen years.

Antonia is playing more brightly now, a sonata that sounds like Scarlatti, but even if it isn't, I am almost sure the Bishop once mentioned a dislike for Scarlatti. Tomasina and Ana watch attentively, so sober and discreet.

Suddenly Santa Cruz has my full attention.

“… one of just several signals that Father Núñez is distancing himself from Archbishop Aguiar.” What has he just said? “Quietly the Inquisition commits all its resources to overturning Vieyra's exemption to its jurisdiction, and he is losing ground. The Jesuits do not like working in the open, yet Vieyra does precisely this. Just as the Archbishop does now in his defence. As a show of support for Vieyra, the Archbishop asks Núñez to deliver this sermon.”

“So although Núñez will not refuse a direct order,” I murmur, “his refutation of the sermon afterwards serves notice that if the Company of Jesus must choose between Vieyra and the Inquisition, Vieyra loses.”

To which the Bishop responds, fully including me now, that we have it on unimpeachable authority that Archbishop Aguiar and the Portuguese Vieyra have never so much as
met
.

“And yes,” the Bishop continues, “if Núñez is forced to choose between influencing real events in Mexico and accommodating an archbishop's fantasies of eminence, His Grace the Lord Archbishop also loses….”

It is vital that I make sense of this day if I am to find the source of the misunderstanding with Santa Cruz. And yet each time I think this hour through, so much remains unclear. Clarity is a thing to prize, clarity of mind I prize most highly. And yet at about the time of Carlos's departure things become considerably less clear. I am clear about my annoyance, I am clear about the sensation of unreality. And now I am clear about one other thing: this annoyance I know. I know it exactly. It is that which precedes waking at three in the morning at one's work table as one is being shaken by the shoulder and called to choir. The dream need not be particularly good, but is preferable to opening one's eyes.

As Santa Cruz asks me to reprise my arguments in this crisis over a sermon, the sensation is of being asked to explain a complicated joke, which, moreover, was never amusing.

Forty years ago, with great flights of oratory already behind him, and decades more ahead, Antonio Vieyra wrote a flawed sermon that, worse, boasted even as it was exposing its own flaws. He is blind now, ill. Eighty-two. He has left Portugal to return to the country he has loved for half a century. Brazil. Sworn enemy of an Inquisition that has real reason to fear him—five defiant years in its prisons and under attack again for the past decade, and also now by the landowners who hate him; outspoken defender of the Jews and New Christians; tireless protector of the enslaved Africans and the Indians; master of twenty languages and American dialects.

Antonio Vieyra is a flawed man, and a great one. The New World has not had such a holy instrument of Christ's true conscience since Bartolomé de Las Casas. And the writing is the least of his greatness. It is one thing for me to be impulsively foolish, quite another to be rehearsed in it. How have I come to this place? How do I find myself on the wrong side, with the buzzards circling a great, embattled, eighty-year-old man? I too am flawed, I too am not humble. And I have not fought all my life for others as he has, accepted prison and torture. For others. Yes, I have made other choices.

And now I remember something I should have remembered then, from a time that is gone…. My grandfather speaking of Sahagún and Las Casas, with that fierce pride of his that was itself like firelight. These two, he said, and Vieyra, were the proudest sons of the Iberian Peninsula. For all the horrors perpetrated by us since Ferdinand and Isabela, not another race in Europe would have produced three such men. He spoke to me of this at the firepit, the last night we spoke of anything.

Bishop Santa Cruz assumes an expression of absorption. And as I prepare to begin, I would be anywhere but here, saying anything but this, thinking any thoughts but these. Weakly I ask why he even needs my arguments.

“Whatever Núñez is up to, Juana, if he plays the jack again, as Jesuits do, quietly behind the scenes, we answer with a queen.”

Amused, he asks Antonia to bring the chess set over. I could easily reach it myself but I suppose he wants her to stop playing so we may concentrate. She looks like she might have been crying. It's so selfish of me to have forgotten she is ill. As we are shifting the candy tray to make room for the little chess table I touch Antonia lightly on the shoulder and tell her she should go. Santa Cruz has the idea she should take notes for me to help with the dictation later. Instead of asking why write any of this down, though the answer is obvious, I am saying she is not well and agreeing to write it out for him myself. And there I have promised it, with not so much as a demur. There is no turning back. But instead of letting her go he asks her to stay anyway. Antonia has a temper and coldly now insists that no, she really would like to stay, as though he's instead given her permission to leave. The scar in her cheek stands out pale against her colouring.

“Excellent, Antonia. If you are quite up to it.” Indulgently, the Bishop includes her in the conversation. “A few details, so that you may be useful later. In the service of your mistress, what counts are the details.
Fineza
, Antonia, in its theological sense refers to the subtleties of love at work throughout Creation. Such is the love of Christ, masked, reserved, discreet, and above all, Antonia,
watchful …
”

Conceding the advantage, Santa Cruz accepts Black. White takes his pawn, Black takes mine. And then I am beginning in this language I am not far from despising, the language of canonical lawyers playing at theology, “First, don Manuel, the Jesuit Vieyra boasts that he will contest the findings of not just Augustine, but Aquinas and Chrysostom
too, then improve upon their positions, finding a
fineza
no one can match. Augustine holds that Christ's greatest sacrifice for Man was to give His life for us. Vieyra responds that since Christ loved Man more than life itself, the greater sacrifice was to absent himself from Man. But to this, we must answer that Christ is not absent at all but is present in the wafer and the wine.”

Bishop Santa Cruz nods in satisfaction. He has been over this point carefully with me, has corrected me quite gently, as a friend. But I am not at all satisfied. It is not just the language—for the sake of this argument I go against everything I most intimately feel. “Present not only in the Eucharist but also in His Word.”

I take another pawn, Santa Cruz takes mine. “Next, the Reverend Vieyra treats the Host as a remedy—a substitute for His presence rather than
being
that living presence. A confusion as fundamental as between metaphor and analogy….”

“¡Vale!”
approves Santa Cruz,“Augustine vindicated.”

In his enthusiasm he reaches out to sample a sweetmeat, falters, then gives in, but this time with deliberation. “I know you are loyal Augustinians here at San Jerónimo, but will you only intercede,” he wonders, “for one saint and not the other two?”

Black takes my pawn with a knight. I take Black's knight with mine. “In claiming to refute Saint Thomas,” I say, “Vieyra illogically argues from genus to species; in attacking Chrysostom, he confuses cause with the expression of its effect….”

I carry on in this fashion until I feel I have refuted myself, and Antonio Vieyra only incidentally. Santa Cruz takes my knight. “But surely,” the Bishop suggests, “complete victory lacks one final step. Proposing a
fineza
greater than Vieyras.”

I answer that what makes this whole matter vain is that among so many sublime demonstrations of love we insist on deciding which one is best. We are like children picking blackberries. With our jars filled to overflowing with a harvest of such sweetness, we set to squabbling over who has picked the most. For Chrysostom it lies in the washing of the feet, even the feet of Judas. For Aquinas in the wafer and the wine, for Augustine in the Passion. We should give thanks to all who have discovered such richness in the Mysteries, then find what sweetness we can in our own little jar of blackberries.

“What Vieyra has found,” I add, “is undoubtedly rich and lovely. So if
I seem now to repeat Vieyra's mistake it is only to say he should not speak of besting the
finezas
of three maximal Doctors of the Church when a simple nun might find one, if not better then at least not worse than his….”

White queen, with a glance of triumph, takes his rook. Black pawn, with a glance of amusement, takes my queen.

“Look at it this way, Juana,” he says, queen in hand. “Vieyra's faring no better here today.”

“And here,” I continue, more cautiously, “I direct my attack not at Vieyras logic but instead at his imagination. But since in all matters theological, errors of the imagination are infinitely more dangerous than errors of logic, you must promise, don Manuel, to correct instantly the slightest unorthodoxy in my position—anything that, by sheer inadvertence or feebleness of mind, might exercise the Inquisition. Errors in art, after all, are rightly answered by mockery and contempt”—he must have known my reluctance was not feigned—“but errors in theology must be answered before the Holy Office, and for all eternity.”

“Of course, of course.” His frown is one of impatience.

Clinging to the slim purchase of that promise—
his promise
—I press on. Black queen takes my castle.

“Christ's greatest finesse, Vieyra claims, was that He loved humanity without wishing that we return His love. Unless it be for the good that loving Him does
us
. Here Vieyra's greatest fault lies not in confusing wishing with needing—though this he does peerlessly—but in reducing love's rich dominions to a single impoverished colony….”

I wonder if it is really possible that Santa Cruz has not seen his own queen in danger. In taking mine he has left his unprotected. The sense of unreality only deepens. I have never beaten him. I feel my annoyance and self-disgust dissolve to a slow-rising elation. White knight takes black queen.

For just a few hours it's as though I am waking not from but to a dream, to find myself a citizen of Plato's submerged Atlantis … speaking the language of Atlantis, flooded by Atlantean cares and intrigues in a parlour at the bottom of the sea. Antonia's pallor, the Bishop's languor—the slight displacement between his gestures and his words—all seemingly the natural consequence of our submersion … occasional echoes of speech rising to the surface of my recollection in tremulous bubbles.

“Surely if Our Father's house has so many rooms,” I am proposing now, “it is because there are so many ways to love and as many dispositions. What shall we call loving for the good that being in love will do you? Let's call this
amor egoista
. Loving for the good your love will do your beloved? Call it
amor magnánima
. For the benefits accruing to you from the return—the requital of your love? Call that love mercantile. Loving for loving's sake, with no
desire
that it be returned? Vieyra's
amor fino
—selfless love. And truly, this
is
beautiful, but in this he only follows Saint Bernard. Loving without desire is perhaps a feat the greatest among us may manage. Whereas loving for loving's sake, but without any
need
that it be returned—this we may truly call a divine or sovereign love, for such a love lies beyond us…. God alone is not completed by His love's return. His love is already complete. Divine Love is for Him alone.”