Hunger's Brides (95 page)

I am not quite over my bitterness. I have written you about my lyrics for Saint Bernard, that Núñez had his way in the end and that they were not sung. This has brought more hurt than anything in the years since you left. And yet because in all these months you have not mentioned it, I cannot help suspecting you've not received that letter either. No matter, it's over now. I brought much of it upon myself. Such squabbles over theology are no place to speak one's heart. I do not much care for loose talk of God.

You asked last year about my grievance with Father Núñez. I gave you what it is built on, the circumstances, but what lies at its heart, what lies
on its altar is simple beauty itself. Though Núñez might fulminate against this or that formulation of mine, and insists on seeing attacks against him any time I encroach upon his holy exclusivities and prerogatives, in the end it is about this. His positions on the Holy Mysteries lack for neither learning nor subtlety. What they lack is beauty. He sees it, and it enrages him that this should enter into it at all. But from the simplest peasant to the most exalted sovereign of the world, we are swayed by beauty, we turn in its orbit. Womanish thoughts! Paganist poetry! he fumes, yet sees the evidence all around him. Even he. For it is said that at the Jesuit college Father Núñez has built with his own hands an altar to the Virgin that only he is permitted to tend. They say that the altar of Rector Núñez is very beautiful, that its beauty is of an Asiatic extravagance. When I remember this altar, my thoughts wander to a day in the distant past when things grew so bitter between us that I asked he be replaced as my director. It was your husband's uncle, don Payo, who tried to mend things between us. In refusing my request, he let slip a small detail I would never have guessed at, but without which I would find the altar incomprehensible. That as a novice, the boy Antonio Núñez wrote beautifully, of a beauty reminiscent of Saint Jerome's. As a result his noviciate with the Jesuits was made especially hard; his punishments were of a cruelty almost fantastic, until he had stripped the least marks of grace from his thoughts and writings. Is it for this, I wonder, that I could never quite bring myself to hate him? Oneness, Goodness, Truth. The transcendental attributes of God. But there is a fourth. It is in Her; it is in Her Son. Our souls sway to a fourth transcendental.
³⁸
Beauty. The poets overrunning theology! he cries, but I am only following Saint Jerome, the Ciceronian. And Núñez, better than anyone, knows this.

Obedience, forbearance, humility, resistance to suffering. This is what he answers with. In Núñez's Church of the Holy Infantry, to have a gift is indeed a great burden—the burden of annihilating it. No favours, no special gifts or sacrifices. To be an ordinary infantryman is more than burden enough.

I understand our sacraments as well as he, if differently, and while I find them of a majesty and depth that goes beyond our comprehension, they do not console me. I am not fed, I am not filled, by this bread.

He has made himself our authority on the Eucharist, but if others could only read the monographs Carlos will never publish on the ancient
Mexican sacraments. The Reverend Father has made himself our authority on communion, and takes the
finezas
of Christ to be his exclusive province. He treats the
fineza
like a demonstration, a proof, an axiom of love. Yet the
finesses
are an expression from which we
infer
love. They derive from our gift for inference. Love is not a truth that insists. We infer, Christ does not insist. And so Núñez's positions are never beautiful—they insist, they prove and reprove. And against the love of beauty and the beauty of love he knows he cannot win.

A love of Christ that is passionate, yet pure and disembodied—we both claim to believe in it. I believe that to develop the capacity for such a love here on earth, here in the flesh, would only make our love for Christ all the deeper and truer. Núñez cannot believe that any such love may exist among us, and reviles my need to feel it. I believe in this Love with every fibre of my being, yet from Him I do not feel it and so can find no way to return it.

What I feel is His absence. It is why I once sought for him in the beauty of the world. This at least I can feel. My mind infers it, but so does my heart. This is an absence at least bearable to me—and in the hours when it is not, I look to the mountains in the east, I look to the stars, and feel my love returning, flooding me…. I know you will understand but I add this in the event this letter is intercepted: If I could be less than utterly convinced of His existence, how much more bearable would my Lover's absence be.

Núñez hates this. Every tone and syllable. Because he more than anyone understands this failing in me, comes closest to sharing it. Passionate yet disembodied love. Before Christ, it fails him—it lacks passion; before Her, this love shames him—it does not feel disembodied enough.

Remembering that altar of his, I know that what he despises in my writing on sacred subjects is the well of sensual beauty I draw it from. Father Núñez has extinguished his gift. Only to find it reborn in me, rising to oppose him.

I am the books, I am the beauty, I am the gift.

And so my thoughts return often to that day with the Bishop when I went too far and yet, even sick with self-disgust, I continued to abuse the gift of speech from the heart in my lyrics for the humble Saint Bernard. I have heard Bishop Santa Cruz was in a rage when he learned they were cancelled, for it is precisely this heart speaking its secrets to God that for fifteen years Santa Cruz has pressed me to reveal to him. In banning
them, Father Núñez has dashed any hopes of an alliance with the Bishop. So one less worry, a boon it is hard to feel I deserve.

Santa Cruz calls this failure to feel the presence of Christ entirely normal. Spiritual aridity is the term, and it is a step on the
via mística
. What he mildly disapproves are the traces of worldliness still clinging to my sacred verses. Worldliness, the Bishop does not want either; what he wants is rapture.

My, but how melancholy this letter has become. If this was to be my attempt to set your mind at rest, it is hard to pronounce it a success. I pause for now and will start tomorrow afresh. My thoughts are with you, the thoughts and prayers of the entire convent are with Tomás. Sweet Lysis, I pray that a note from you of happy news is but a league or two off from here, and that I shall be able to start again on a note of joy and thanksgiving. And if that note has not yet been written by the time you receive this one, give not another moment's thought to writing until Tomás is well. Unless, dearest María Luisa, you should just need to talk….

There. I hear Antonia on the stairs. She has news. And more energy at times than either of us knows what to do with. It is like trying to curb wild horses. More soon.

Love,

I
see her pale face in the doorway. This news, I do not think I shall like.

But her news is not of the Archbishop at all, and for just an instant I mistake the two booklets she holds for the most recent issue of our city's
Chronicle of Notable Events
. She is trying to explain, so breathlessly as to have likely run the whole way….

“I was at the Hindus, the one with the turban—”

“Hindus—”

“‘Two copies for you and your mistress,' he says. ‘My compliments.' They all have them—
all the booksellers
, dozens of copies—next to
Inundación Castálida
. People are already buying them as if they were
yours
—”

“One
is
mine, I gather. Come, I'll take the one you haven't quite crushed yet….”

“Juana, who is Philothea?
E igua puta
—how did she get your letter?”

This is not possible. Printed by Sor Philothea, costs assumed by Philothea. Using the Bishop's regular printer. Licence signed by Santa Cruz, dedication by Philothea. The preface addressed to
me:

Sor Philothea is the Lord Bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz y Sahagún. If Antonia wants a harder question it's this: What is the
use of a disguise that lasts not five seconds? What is he doing—what has he
done?

I have seen the letter?
—seen it, of course you have! I sent it, you
asked
. Why not
‘received'
it?

But no, it was not Philothea who asked. Santa Cruz asked.

“The Bishop did this? But Juana, it was
private
. He said—you said….” she adds helplessly.

He said, I said. He said little, I on the other hand said rather a lot. No, but
this
, this is beyond belief.
Like a second Eagle of the Apocalypse … her quill cut finer … Deftness of proof, energetic clarity … Even Christ when he spoke of the highest mysteries, but under the veil of parable, did not provoke so much wonder…
. He cannot think this is helping anyone—to be compared to Christ.
Favourably?
He cannot think this helps
me
.