Hunger's Brides (119 page)
September, 1691. Gutiérrez paid a visit unannounced. I had seen little of him since late spring, when he had been unable to discover if the Inquisition was monitoring my mail. As for the authenticity of the Archbishop's madness, it was an open question at the Holy Office, with adherents on both sides even today. Gutiérrez no longer had an opinion. He did not know anything about the leaflet and knew little about Paracelsus. The truth was, Gutiérrez seemed to know less all the time.
As if reading my thoughts he excused himself for not having come sooner but there had been little to report, till now: on June 4th of this year, Doctor Alonso Alberto de Velasco, priest of the Tabernacle,
member of the Brotherhood of Mary, advisor to the Holy Office of the Inquisition, had made a formal denunciation of the sermon of one Xavier Palavicino, pronounced in the convent of San Jerónimo at the feast of Santa Paula. In response, Prosecutor Ulloa had written to the Tribunal, attesting that he had received the denunciation of the sermon and naming two Inquisitors to examine its propositions for pernicious error. The Inquisitors were said to be Mier and Armesto, thorough, capable men.
I did not want to seem ungrateful, but June 4th, this was almost
three months past
. Gutiérrez shrugged. He had only found out about it a week ago. Or two. The thing to note was that the prosecutor made his decision to launch an investigation less than a week after receiving the denunciation. By the standards of the Holy Office, this was particularly fast; this seemed very much like haste. Antonia looked at me strangely after he left. How could I take this so calmly?
But in October Gutiérrez brought better news. A printer's proof had been submitted in an application for a publishing licence from the Holy Office in Puebla. It was the same printer that had published the Letter Worthy of Athena and Sor Philothea's preface last year. Diego Fernández de Leon. A pause for effect. Bishop Santa Cruz's own printer. Yes, go on. The licensing application was for the printing of my carols on Saint Catherine of Alexandria.
It appeared Santa Cruz was to let them be sung after all. After Gutiérrez had gone, I turned to see Antonia's face younger by years.
Is it love, Antonia had asked that night. Surely if Santa Cruz is in love with you, she said, there is a chance. But how much better my chances seemed today if he didn't, if none of this was personal at all. And now this, after everything else.
Was
it love? How was one to know with such a manâwho was to say what certain men were like in the secrecy of their rooms? The things he had asked of her. This was lovemaking for himâwith a young woman so beautiful, so carnalâonly that she watch during his mortifications?
But perhaps this was precisely the point, that he had always resisted such sublime temptations. Asking nothing more than to have Antonia making reports to no worldly purposeânot even caring if they were true, perhaps even knowing they weren't. How I brushed my hair? Did I use a mirror? No, for him the game had been to picture it,
to watch her watching me, and suffering for it
. Watching me just as she had watched him.
Lord God, did I discipline myself? harshly, strictly?âdid he imagine he and I were alike?
Is this love?
How exquisite his pleasure, then, to imagine me after his betrayal, thinking about what he had done, seeing the sublimity of his gamesmanship as I first glimpsed the negative benefit of his sacrifice. For the point of the game had become that I should watch
him
now, moving beneath the veil of Philothea's letter. Yet how could he be sure I would?âthe consummate player would want me to give him proof of my contemplation of him, by finding the solution to a problem, a puzzle, a riddle.
⦠And, if that mind should ever crave for sweet and tender demonstrations of love, let it direct its apprehension to the hill of Calvary, where, observing the finezas of the Redeemer and the ungratefulness of the redeemed, your intellect should find a limitless scope to examine the excesses of infinite love and to derive, not without tears, fine formulas of atonement at the very summits of ingratitude â¦
What sweet and tender demonstrations he had concealed for me â¦
I do not doubt that it would go with you as it did with Apelles who found, while painting the portrait of Campaspe, that for every brushstroke he applied to the canvas, love sent an arrow into his heart; thus leaving, in the end, a portrait painted to perfection and a painter's heart mortally wounded with the love of his subject
. Apelles, a painter. Campaspe, the lover of Alexander. Obviousâhe, the all-conquering Santa Cruz, was Alexander, the beloved was Christ, and I was to learn to be Apelles, wounded by the beauty of Christ.
But with Santa Cruz
nothing
is obvious. I had been careless. A painter too is a watcherâSanta Cruz was telling me
he
was Apelles. Was I the beloved, then? But that would make Christ our conqueror, Alexander, and the two of them competing in their love for me. This made little senseâor I could conceivably be Santa Cruz's conqueror but surely not Christ's. What
was
it, what was I missing?
This, this, this
. The beloved, the Lover, was love itself: the love of Apelles, discreet, deep, a love that does not insist, a love that is only inferred. Sublime in its finesse, the discreet, Christlike, suffering love of Santa Cruz.
For me.
⦠This is desired for my lady by one who, since kissing her hand so many years ago, lives still enamoured of her soul, a love which neither time nor distance has any power to cool, for a spiritual love admits not of change, nor grows save in purity â¦
For how long had he wanted me to see him as Philothea, to love as he loved, as Christ loved? Philothea was powerless to resist such a love, and yet Santa Cruz had so valiantly resisted the enormous temptation to declare it. If I could only see that. But Philothea's love
had
changed. Precisely because I had not grasped, seen, contemplated his sublime restraintâand since that love was not purely spiritual, it could not forever resist the arrows of my heartless, blind ingratitude.
And yet how could he be sure that I had not seen his love from the beginningâthat I was not returning it just as discreetly, as two astronomers contemplating each other from afar? What did he
see
âwhat incontrovertible proof that his restraint was a matter of total indifference to me? Truly, could it have been that day with the Viscount? In that one instant of a monstrous, wounded vanity ⦠of the boyish man faced with the masculine beauty of a youth. He had never before seen me look at a man
as
a man. I could not have denied I felt desire then. And in truth it did not so much as occur to me to conceal itâfrom whom?
Yes Santa Cruz was powerful, and wounded in the power of his pride, but the secret heart of his vanity lay in the immense power he exercised over his own temptation, restraining it, withholding the immense liberality of his affections. But since I had proven incapable of seeing this, now let me see instead a more negative benefit. This was the message he had been returning to me in the preface to my own letter.
And yet even if I had now seen it, finally solved it, how to let him know after all this timeâhow was I to answer, to steer a path between false sentiment and utter surrender?
At San Jerónimo the stories that held the greatest sway over the mind of the convent were those of the
beatas
, not witches but false saints and holy women held in the Inquisition's secret prisons, soon to be secretly tried and burned at certain convents across the city. The rumours were repeated in the work rooms, the gardens and orchards, at the water basins and in the refectory. Rumours became near certainty, confirmed in letters from sisters and cousins and friends in other convents, in other cities. The number of letters multiplied. Eighteen convents in the capital alone, three thousand nunsâall writing and reading letters, all circulating the same stories in endless permutations. The letters flew like flights of startled doves.
There came an item of news from this time that I could not help
believing. It had come in a letter from our sister convent in Puebla. Bishop Santa Cruz had asked
la mÃstica
, Sor MarÃa de San José, to put to paper for him an account of her spiritual journey. It was a singular sign of favour for a countrywoman from Tepeaca he had once all but kicked headlong down the cathedral steps.
Eleven months had passed since the publication of my Letter Worthy of Athena, eight months since my reply to Sor Philothea, three since I had sent Santa Cruz the
villancicos
he had commissioned on Saint Catherine. Four weeks remained until they were to be sung on her feast day at the cathedral in Puebla. I had begun to let myself believe that he had no further wish to bring out the
mÃstica
in me, had found his Teresa. Perhaps, as Antonia had hoped, he was truly finished with me.
Friendship was impossible nowâtruly he was capable of anything. But if I had caused him pain, I could acknowledge it, if I could find a way. Who would not try to keep an old love from turning to fresh hatred? What would I not give to be forgiven certain things, to have back the friendships I have lost, to take back the hurt I have caused to the people who have loved me?
  Esteemed Philothea,
The love upon which you close your letter, on the kiss of the hand, I received as no less than the sweet wounding that you hoped and wished I might one day have the joy of enduring. I am enduring it now. I have meditated long hours on the heart's truth of your letter of loving correction, and have finally realized what should have been as clear as it was true and constant from the outset: that the kiss of Christ's hand has for some time been the very emblem of the illuminative path, active in learning, passive in loveâlove of a kind not quite unknown even in times since Alexander. And known perhaps even down to this day of ours.
You and I have often spoken of the learned Reverend Athanasius Kircher. Was it not his disciple who entered, through the intermediary of a mutual friend not unlike the discreet Philothea, into a correspondence with Galileo under the pseudonym of Apelles? âMasked Apelles,' âApelles behind the painting.' This masked Apelles, the Jesuit Scheiner, was the very figure of vigour in learning and discretion in love, for who could doubt that love motivated his earliest overtures to Galileo on sunspots? It was, after all, Galileo's early publications of his findings in the heavens
that had inspired Scheiner to purchase his first telescope. And yet for years Galileo did not know with whom he was dealing: for masked Apelles had begged that their shared friend, their Philothea, not disclose his identity. In truth, then, Apelles had corresponded with Galileo long before the first quill was put to paper.
Apelles and Alexander both looked with love upon Campaspe, even as masked Apelles and Galileo looked up with love upon their Beloved in the heavens. For truly did both men love God above any other. But where Galileo saw only the Beloved, Scheiner saw also their shared love. This is the kiss of Christ's hand, this is the love He would have us bear one other. For twenty years the masked Apelles persisted in his love, even through all the bitterness that had come between them and, restraining his passionate pride, published his own great work, in it conceding that indeed his figures now confirmed that the sun inclined on its axis, precisely as Galileo had argued, and that Venus indeed revolved around the Sun. These were the words, but had Galileo taken the time to ponder the gesture, in it he would have seen Apelles inclining towards Galileo. How could one with the eyes of Galileo be so blind, we wonder; how could the son of a great musician be deaf to the discord he himself had created?
And yet we could almost believe that he was not quite insensible, or regretted, or repented, for here is what Galileo wrote to their shared friend the magistrate Welser, their Philothea, who was no doubt wounded for them both that the correspondence had turned out so badly:
Nevertheless I shall not abandon the task in despair.
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Indeed, I hope that this ⦠will turn out to be of admirable service, in tuning for me some reed in this great discordant organ of our philosophyâan instrument on which I think I see many organists wearing themselves out trying vainly to get the whole thing into perfect harmony â¦
Might Galileo have been sending a message, this one of regret, to Apelles through Philothea? Even if that was not the message Galileo intended, we may still hope the passage contains one, and the message is this: Know thyself. This is the highest wisdom bequeathed to us by the ancients, a wisdom that should have been well known to Alexander, for Aristotle surely once communicated it to him. And it was also
known to Reverend Kircher, who had taken it directly from Hermes Trismegistus and without doubt communicated it to Scheiner, his disciple. Know thyself. Is this not the highest wisdom imparted by any teacher to his acolyte?
Galileo had failed to know himself, to see himself through the eyes of others, see the other in himself. In refuting the Jesuits, the followers of Aristotle, he had forgotten himself.
What happens to friendships, how do we forget the immensity of what we share, our love of love itself; how do we fall out of sympathy and into discord once we have corresponded? Why does our playing become so bitter to us?
Still more tragic is the hidden sympathy never detected. How much better to have proceeded as did Catherine of Alexandria, sensing how much she shared with the pagan scholars who debated her, finding the basis of their sympathies in shared ideas, our shared debt, and a shared capacity to correspond in a great love.
Galileo forgot himself, forgot his debt to Aristotle, and acted brutally, like a pagan conquering other pagans. There is no room for doubt that Galileo's difficulties with the Inquisition's magistrates grew from his lack of civility, nor that the growing enmity of the Jesuit scientists stemmed from the seed of a neglected regard. And still did the masked Apelles try one last time to communicate a secret correspondence,
sub rosa
, under the title of Scheiner's work of twenty years:
Rosa Ursina
. Dedicated to the Duke of Orsino, an Alexander of our time, the symbol common to the two Apelles is the rose of Alexandria: the very emblem of a passionate restraint, a silent, unspoken loveâlove of God, of the heavens, of love itself. The masked Apelles had demonstrated such patience and discretion,
such finezas
. How bitter, then, the disappointment of his love.
After long contemplation I have decided that the similarities between our times cannot be cause for surprise, once we have understood that these were loves of the spirit. For as the discreet Philothea has herself written, spiritual love does not admit of change.
  With this, and from the convent of San Jerónimo, I return the kiss of Christ's hand.
Your devoted servant,
