[ 6th day of January, 1689 ]
la excma. doña María
Luisa Manrique
Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna,
Madrid, España
Dearest María Luisa,
Sweet friend, beautiful Thetis
of the Seas, you seek to fashion me a peerless armour at the glowing forge
of your cares. How I love that you would protect me still. First, to let
you know we are alone. Antonia has gone out on an errand. Please know that
we will always have these moments, these letters written in my hand. But
the simple fact of being alone does not leave me free to speak. And things
we said here in this cell, just we two, I am not free to write, when the
mails may be opened at any time by the Holy Office or the Crown. I know
you know this — I
want you to hear me say it. Still other things may be written to be read
obliquely, as one reads fables written by a friend who has read and loved
the same stories, as have you and I. And then there are lines that may
only be spoken in the theatre you and I make here, that no longer resonate
in the world outside, as with an instrument whose sounding board is split.
If together we could not create such a place where the instrument could
be heard again, what use would writing be, what use theatre?
Last, let there also be things I may say in these letters that I could never
say with you here with me, sitting so near. We must always make a place for
these, as I will before I stop tonight.
But if I am to keep my promise to write often, I will need help. To burden
you with tedious plaints in the too brief hours we had alone together in this
cell would have been too graceless even for me. Even now I hesitate, but hope
you will give me leave....
You write to warn me that these
seven years of quiet I celebrate as a truce are in truth a siege. So I
tell you now that Father Núñez has
indeed caught wind of our plans and has begun to rail against our Castalia
before she even reaches here. It is as if he believed the lyrics on Sappho
were in it — but how can that be, if the source of his information is
the Holy Office there? Surely he knows they would have mentioned any verses
on Sappho had they been there. And if he has some other source so early — who?
And yet, sweet Lysis, even with
these fresh worries, what I most suffer from has little to do with Núñez or Archbishop Aguiar. Not a siege
but a blockade — and I am that grain ship, that silver galleon straining
at its hawsers to run the line, anxious, chafing to put to sea before I
sink beneath the worthy new duties they heap on me almost daily. These
will keep me from any work I might call mine more surely than any Church
injunction can.
The daily Masses, the Friday chapter of faults, the public acts of contrition
that bring the envious among my sisters so much satisfaction ... yes, these
weary me a little more. But there is yet much more than these. The prayers
of the Divine Office I barely mention — these you yourself have grumbled
about often enough in my behalf. The very thought of being woken mid-night
for the prayers of Matins (with those of Compline still on our lips), you
find hideous; but I sleep little anyway. Often as not I am reading or writing
when the chimes call us, and these at least I do not mind. Have we not
always found them among the loveliest of the capital?
I have been elected convent accountant for the third straight term. Few convents in the city have ever earned six percent per annum. Of course we must first have money to invest, so by far the task most prodigal of my time lies in hosting the convent’s many patrons. To do this effectively, though, means rehearsing our niñas and novices in skits and our choir in musical entertainments. Then there is the writing of these — if something better suited really cannot be found. And because I have not been clever enough to conceal my familiarity with Nahuatl, I am become a sort of Solomon of disputes among the hundred and fifty servants here, though far from all speak Nahuatl.
Worse, because one set of apartments
or another is always being renovated to accommodate still more servants,
I very often find myself Superintendent of Works: as most of the workers
are also native Mexicans, whose overseers are seemingly selected for their
inability to let them work in peace.
Other charges I take in turn
with three or four other sisters. Besides the classes I wrote you of, four
of us see to courses in reading, music, dance and arithmetic for thirty
young girls. Then there come occasional turns in the infirmary, the cellars,
the archives, the library — this
last, as you can imagine, I do not resent so much.
Having now quite exhausted myself (and surely you) I pass over a few other,
minor tasks, to close with the sermons and arguments I am consulted on
by various monks, priests, bishops and inquisitors, never forgetting the
carols, lyrics and plays I am asked to write for the churches and cathedrals — these
I do on my own time, though the commissions go chiefly to the convent coffers.
Perhaps you will understand after all this complaint why I can almost not
bear the thought of doing without Antonia now that I have found her. I
was thoughtless not to explain all this to you first in a letter in my
own hand. (Even as sensing your hurt has made me see, if belatedly, how
the similarity of her hand to mine only made things worse, and troubles
you still. )
You have always been anxious
about my friends. Gently you remind me that Hypermnestra’s
husband, the sharp-eyed Lynceus, by showing kindness at first, killed more
Danaïdes in the end than did all his forty-nine brothers combined.
But I depend on so many people for so many things; I would be consumed
with anxiety if I felt I could trust only the friends I did not need. This
would be no way to inspire alliances anyway, but this you know better than
I. A spirit of mistrust entrains its own surprises.
The Inquisitor Gutiérrez
I admit to needing as much as liking, though I liked him instantly ...
he of the bland looks and feigned bemusement that clothe the figures of
a sharp mind in an almost childlike frankness. Scarce a fortnight over
from Spain, he first ambled into my locutory to register his disappointment
that so many otherwise serious individuals in this city were making fools
of themselves with ridiculously exaggerated praise of a certain nun in
a certain convent. He stayed three hours.
On his next visit we worked through
some of the briefs he was preparing; I took a no doubt wicked pleasure
in suggesting corrections he might make to a certain priest’s newest manual of devotion for nuns. Later, when one
detailed argument in particular was singled out for commendation, Gutiérrez
openly acknowledged my help — at the Holy Office, before a roomful of
his colleagues! Everyone was talking about it. Can one even imagine it, the
impertinence of the thing? The Jesuits and the Dominicans disliked him about
equally for it, with the result that — we laugh about this — he’s
now seen as something of an honest broker. One wry Augustinian to keep the
Dominicans and the Jesuits from each other’s throats.
My prickly friend Carlos, for
his part, made a terrible start with you — con
ese asunto del arco. Certainly you of all people owe him nothing, not even
the gift of your comprehension, having stayed your husband’s hand and
kept my slightly seditious friend out of irons. You scarcely knew me then,
yet heard my petition — which said so much for your openness of mind
and heart. But if Carlos had made a better beginning I know you’d have
seen under all that awful pride and irritability a beautiful mind and such
a generous spirit. Yes I do take his employment with the Archbishop as a betrayal,
but of our principles, not of me. In the matter of serving the His Grace, Carlos
has little choice. The University’s stipend is a mean provocation — among
his relations he has a dozen mouths to feed — and you’ve seen for
yourself how profitlessly he conducts himself at the palace. Almost any extra
income he gets is at the Archbishop’s sufferance: his chaplaincy at the
hospital, his commission to write the history of the convent of the Immaculate
Conception (and you cannot begin to know how galling his newfound ‘expertise’ in
convent life can be), and now this post of Almoner.
It is only fitting that your
questions turn to Antonia’s origins, for
the defence of our good name is our best guarantee, however imperfect, of honourable
conduct. What’s more, it is entirely in keeping with your own nobility
of spirit that you have been able to forget the towering elevations separating
your origins from mine. You will be angry even to hear me mention this
again; but that I have never forgotten it is entirely in keeping with the
natural laws of perception. From the depths of the lowest valleys, one
cannot forget the majestic altitudes of the summit; whereas at the summit
one is struck by the grandeur of what one sees, not where one stands.
I was born a natural daughter
of the Church. My father was an adventurer barely of the hidalgo class
whose name I do not even have the right to take. Antonia’s
origins are not much different from mine, and if she has been so very much
less fortunate, it serves to show me, as nothing ever has, how things might
have gone with me. She too was born in the countryside. East of Puebla, not
far from San Lorenzo de los Negros. Her father was a military physician who
retired to the country to sire a score of daughters on the mulattas and negresses
in his employment there. His less common passion, though, was educating them,
and thereby proving to his satisfaction a theory of his that women, even of
mixed race, may become gente de razón, if thoughtfully trained.
I cannot decide if this lets me like him a little more, or a very great
deal less. And yet I profit by his results.
Dearest Lysis, I know you will
not let yourself be repelled when I tell you she was once forced to sell
her body as a courtesan. In the better houses the men would ask for the
educated one, the tall one — for
White Chocolate, as though to order a hot beverage from a palace steward.
But it is clear that in the beginning she was not in such fine houses.
There is the frailest line of
scar — by glass, or sharpest steel — that
runs from the corner of her left eye all down her pale cheek to the corner
of her smile. Yet it has neither disfigured her face, nor maimed her spirit.
She has been willing to tell me much more, but I do not want to know — while
unspeakable, it is not quite beyond my capacity to imagine it. I have seen
them in the streets. For years I heard their screams at night. We hear
them even here.
Knowing that the situation of those dearest to her is precarious, I have
begged Bishop Santa Cruz, who has done this much, to do whatever else he
can. She has become a friend to me. You cannot know my loneliness when
you left, my thoughts during this cold year. Until I met you I was content
to stay in here, within the walls of this cell, with these friends who
are my books my only company. But since you left how I hunger to see the
streets again, to walk in them just one hour....
I have forfeited that liberty,
but at least I have Antonia — a warm salt
breeze, salt in speech, strong as the sea. She is tireless in my service, sleeps
almost as little as I, though rather better, and though she is not yet twenty-two
to my forty, fusses over me like an anxious mother hollow-eyed with worry and
nights of care. (And as you are always chiding me for not making copies of
the verses I give away as gifts, here is someone now for that work, too.) Know
that in her you have the strongest ally, for she is always trying to warn me
against one prideful folly or other. She has been my Penthesileia — no,
like the Angolan warrior princesses of her grandmother’s ancestors,
such strength, to see her in the orchards and the gardens they say ...
the quiet rage in her that must find its release somewhere.
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.
del día 6 de Enero 1689
y de este Convento de San Jerónimo,
de la Ciudad de México,
Nueva España
.