Hunger's Brides (13 page)

Not even the poetry of Xochitl's reticence prepared us for this place beyond the trout pool that she had bequeathed to us. By the time we had started down I knew, and for once kept it to myself, that it was not to our maturity she had trusted. Such beauty kept its own secrets. We never told anyone.

We planned to go the very next day. But so many things, it seemed, had to happen before we could make our way back up to Ixayac, to discover the hot spring, the falcon nest, the plunge pool below the little waterfall. It seemed like years.

T
HE
H
UNT
        

F
ROM HER NOTES
it appears Beulah's researches began in earnest after the first in a series of CBC radio broadcasts on the life of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz.

The first aired in the spring of 1990, toward the end of Beulah's freshman year. Sor Juana had belonged to Beulah's private world for almost as long as she could remember. When she was about twelve, her father, a surgeon, brought home from Mexico a collection of the nun's poetry. He himself had had to read her in grade school in Spain. Possibly he hoped to encourage his daughter to keep up her Spanish.
¹⁸
On the cover of that first poetry collection was a rich portrait in oils: a beautiful, elegant nun, seated at a writing desk before a wall of impressive tomes. The collection became for Beulah a talisman and a refuge. That her parents played up a casual physical resemblance between this shining exemplar and their brilliant, volatile daughter was perhaps innocent enough. A goad wrapped in a compliment. The sort of thing parents do.

Colleagues had on more than one occasion mentioned Beulah Limosneros to me. But in that freshman year she would have been simply too gamine. As I later calculated, she'd turned seventeen barely a week before classes began. Naturally I was curious. But when in 1992 I became her honours adviser it was only because Relkoff, the one real poet on staff, had run afoul of the new department head and gone on sabbatical to Ireland. Which left us to divide up his responsibilities. Beulah fell to me.

When I saw her name on my class list that fall, I assumed she'd enrolled in my seminar on early American literature to curry favour with her new adviser. A notion of which I was quickly disabused.

She was at least two years younger than anyone in the room. She spoke only rarely, but from the beginning her interventions were so incisive that she seemed to preside over our discussions as a silent moderator. Only part of the effect was owing to her unsettling physical presence. She had turned nineteen by then, and was very much in season.

She signed term papers with her student number. She was of course alone in doing this. Metaphoric, quicksilver—a dash of sulphur—her
papers were like adventures in alchemy. I had no trouble matching them to her. For an undergraduate's, her style was perfectly unscholarly (which is to say, presumptuously confident). Yet, for the novelty of her ideas and her obvious mastery of the material, my colleagues had been handicapping her as our most promising aspirant in a long while.

One would set her a perfectly standard task for an undergraduate, say, a ten-page discussion of Anne Bradstreet and meanings of the number four in her “Four Elements,” “Four Seasons,” “Four Ages of Man,” “Four Monarchies.” Or, John Smith's Pocahontas—Saviour or Saved, Traitor or Translator? Both are decent enough topics. Instead, Beulah's first paper was on the use of poetic figures in a work of subatomic physics.

After twenty pages of this, she pauses for a small excursus into Hawking's anthropic principle—much maligned by his colleagues precisely for being mythological and therefore unscientific. She stages a spirited defence of his physics from a poetic perspective. Then a spirited critique of his poetry from a quantum physics perspective. By page forty, you notice that all along she's been edging toward some thunderous megrim of her own—something scathing and strangely funny, her
misanthropic principle
.

In concluding (on about page fifty), she asks, “Why all these quantum leaps of metaphor? To make the work of physicists more accessible to the uninitiated? Or is it to reassure
themselves
, as though, without
the primitive poetic charge, our seekers have not delved deeply enough into the charismatic mysteries?” She then compounds the unforgivable by asking a fourth consecutive question in her conclusion.

You can—and I did—quarrel with Beulah's conclusions, but the overall impression is of her playing your thin tune with her left hand, her own
étude
with the right, while balancing the globe on the tip of her nose as she rocks back and forth on a unicycle. Meanwhile, the true final line remains unstated:
But of course, my Misanthropic Principal, you must feel entirely free to give my little effort the grade you think it merits
.

It had started on the first day of class. I was favoured with my first private audience, outside office hours, of course, but she did knock. White tennis shoes, black jeans, long auburn hair gathered at her nape in a silver clasp, the arresting eyes I had not seen at close range. She wore a long-sleeved, white cotton turtleneck, and over it, in the manner of a smock, an extra-large men's T-shirt, short-sleeved, black.

She asked if I really intended to call John Smith to Anne Bradstreet early American literature. Because I must realize it was not early, not really American and not much of it literature. Do go on. Third century—even the ninth—that was early. Or 1492, as the beginning of the end.

“Your Americas, Professor, look like some Puritan's idea of New England.”

It was churlish of me, but I pointed out that had she done even the most cursory research, she'd have seen what the course was to cover.

“Oh yes, your outline was fascinating.”

“Thanks.”

“It's like a course in prejudice.”

The tone was playful, the eyes were not.

“It's Beulah something, isn't it?”

“Which makes you Professor
Somebody
, doesn't it.”

I thought it a good moment to start over. The job really doesn't have to be difficult.

“I meant no offence.”

“Limosneros. Don't make it rhyme with rhinoceros. Please.”

“I think I can manage.”

“BYOOlah LeemosNEHRos—how's that?”

“Prejudices against what?”

“Let's see, Professor …” She used the long fingers of a small hand to count the ways. “There's the La
tee
no. The
Cath
olic. The
fee
-male … Oh right, and the Baroque.”

I glanced out the window, deciding if was I being called a hick, bigot, Puritan or some fresh mix of the three.

I didn't get time to phrase the question. She'd swayed out, leaving the door ajar. Ah, but they did keep us young. Beulah Limosneros, Day One. The immediate effect: me deciding to change the course name for the following year. Nothing wrong with it per se, aside from being unexpectedly revealing. Her charges weren't fair, of course, not balanced, certainly, but neither were they wild shots in the dark, not completely.

But then, I was still assuming she'd been working with just the course outline, when by the first day of class she'd already skimmed everything I'd ever published. Her paper on quantum physics arrived on my desk a month later, and it was the perfect lure.

I'd come to a professional interest in literature late in life, while in France finishing up a doctorate in philosophy. From eight years at the summits of Scepticism and Empiricism—chez Ockham, Bacon, Descartes, Hume
&
cie
—I had descended with a pressing wish to meet women. Ergo literature. The paper that changed the course of my academic career was only a lark. “James Fenimore Cooper and the Negative Way.”

The short version: If you want to better understand the true, study the liar.

The long version: In radical mysticism, the negative way holds God to be unknowable, and goes from what can only be said inadequately to the great mystery of what cannot be said at all. A first dim step on that dark road is the attempt to say what God is
not
. Do this completely enough, and you are left with a cut-out of God, a template, a negative; list off all the false names and be left with the One True Name, and so on.

Though God is not of direct professional interest to sceptics, except of course as the anti-Christ, the method was promising.

James Fenimore Cooper, on the other hand, whose novels had been plunked down on my nightstand when I was a boy, was of enormous professional interest. He'd pretty much invented the myth of the American frontier and was singled out by Mark Twain as its biggest liar. Twain had done most of the heavy lifting. I did little more than list and categorize Cooper's techniques in the high art of falsification. My study ended with something wry about James Fenimore Cooper's great service to Truth, by exempting everything he touched from the need for serious inquiry. Looking for the authentic in his work was indeed to chase down the last of the Mohicans. I believe my unfortunate last line read,
If, however, someone were to come along equipped to lie about everything at once, the stars themselves might wink out
.

One winces to read this sort of thing now. It makes for a rather large target.
†
Yet the high road for my Cooper and the negative way was already paved and deliciously smooth. In those heady days of the late seventies, the knowability of Truth was becoming as problematical as God's had once been. And a quite elevated number of people found themselves preferring Truth's unknowability to its non-existence. Moreover, the smart-alecky tone was consonant with
postmodernism's sophomoric triumphalism, and therefore publishable. So the notion had legs, and I had my bailiwick: literature as
via negativa
.

A little string of publications followed.
²⁰
It didn't hurt that my advanced studies had been in Paris under a French superstar (whom it would seem kindest to identify here as X.Z.). To the French, this meant I was at least capable of receiving culture, an imprimatur that turned out to be lofty enough for pretty much everyone else. For a while I pursued (against the grain, as it were) two careers, one in French, the other in English—sardonic sceptic in Europe, lyrical empiricist in America. I only moved back to Canada when I realized that I could accomplish the same results with a single paper for the two audiences. In fact, I could effect no other result, no matter what I wrote in either language.