Hunger's Brides (51 page)

Enough for now. It has been a long, full day.

Your faithful servant, Carlos.

16th day of July, 1667

Puebla de los Angeles, New Spain

Dear Juana Inés,

I have reached Puebla. My noble companions will be staying on a few days as guests of the Bishop. A Dominican, he has been known to me by reputation for some time now. The Jesuits here are convinced that without their intervention he is sure to become Archbishop one day. In the meantime, where you and I would do very well on two hundred pesos a year, he will have to make do with his Episcopal stipend of sixty thousand, raised from the blood of our soil.

I have been anxious to find myself free of the Viceroy's cousins. I tell you I could not have suffered their company a minute more. Nor, I would venture, could they mine.

The Indian dancing I wrote you about only whets their appetite for more. One day near nightfall we reach a river overflowing its banks.
Gracias a Dios
everyone sees the futility of risking their possessions, not to speak of lives, on that river, at that hour, for a capricious detour to see more dancing. Grudgingly our little raiding party turns back to a
casa de comunidad
about a mile from the river, near the village of San Martín. I had not known such houses existed, but my foreign companions delight in apprising me that almost every Indian village maintains at its own expense a guesthouse to lodge those on Crown business. Very loosely defined, this applies to almost anyone and perfectly to us. By the time the food is served everyone at table is in a foul humour (then, O calamity, too little salt). One of the gentlemen begins roundly abusing the
mesonero
, until, with the greatest reluctance, I have to intervene. Though the royals say nothing, our honeymoon has ended and we all know it.

Most infuriating of all is how, as league by league we draw closer to Spain, their farewell tour through America turns everything to an ever-sharpening derision. Yet at the same time they somehow manage to treat
whatever we pass—farms, villages, orchards, ruined temples—as their own personal inheritance. How these peacocks boast of possessing a thing they claim to despise. It is the sleek who have inherited the earth.

By noon today we covered the remaining three leagues to Puebla. Making the trip to Veracruz alone, so desolate a prospect as I left you in Mexico, now seems truly splendid. Certainly travelling ahead of them will be infinitely better than trailing behind. At each stop I would have found both stores and servants exhausted.

On the other hand, the bandits who along this road run many of the taverns, such as that rat-trap in Chalco, will no longer metamorphose into paragóns of generous civility when I arrive without my nobles. Why is it that at the same inn, the rich are actually charged less and lodged better?

I hasten to add that we did not stay at the inn owned by your aunt's husband but I did walk up the street to see her. A delightful woman, and lovely. Hearing me speak perhaps at too-great length of our friendship, she gave me directions to your mother's hacienda, suggesting I go and make her acquaintance. It is too far to detour now, but I hope one day to make that journey. I imagine she will be beautiful.

Sitting here writing to you, I find my heart lighter than at any time since I decided to leave Mexico City. I think you are still friend enough to be glad of that.

Good-night Juanita….

17th day of July, 1667

Mi querida
,

Remember when we met, and later that month at the palace? Two children in a room full of European aristocrats. There we were, you and I, being awarded first and second place in the
certamen
†
—teen prodigies, poor, and American-born to boot—with the Royal University's Professor of Poetics a red-faced third.

My first year at the college in Puebla, your first year at court. Who could have blamed us for turning to each other—then and during each college vacation?

But I hadn't fallen in love with you yet.

I've never spoken of this. The day it happened we were not even in the same city. I was in Puebla, poring over a letter about you from a professor who was there, who saw it all with his own eyes. The Viceroy himself
said seeing you that day, besting all those professors in debate, was like watching a galleon fending off a handful of canoes.

Forty professors from the Royal University of the Imperial City of Mexico, the incomparable capital of New Spain—against one teenaged girl!

Whose idea had it been? The Viceroy's?—his wife's? They must have found it all so amusing. Was it done expressly to humiliate America's greatest university? Obviously the stated purpose was a sham: how could anyone hope to tell by examining you whether your learning was innate or acquired, diabolical or divinely inspired? Were you given the opportunity to decline the invitation? I doubt you would have anyway. How did you feel—elated, terrified? Did they tell you there would just be a professor or two? Surely not forty! Were you hoping to please the Vicereine, or to show
them?

I think I know.

I have many times imagined the scene since then. Ah, to have been there!—noon in the palace's Hall of Realms … settling into their seats, the Viceregal couple—sleepy gestures, watchful eyes…. To their left, the ladies of the court taking their seats once again, murmuring wickedly behind wavering fans. To the right, the gentlemen still frenziedly wagering.

One girl, beautiful and pale, standing alone at the centre of the hall.

The sages begin to file in, puffed up in the colours of their respective faculties—mathematics, astronomy, music, law, theology, philosophy, poetics … I can just see them strutting in, the historians, the humanists, the scripturists, the rhetoricians, the astrologers—peacocks all. And a few parlour wits invited to leaven the proceedings.

Silence falls. A clever preamble by the Viceroy. The university rector receives the instruction to proceed. The first easy questions, dripping condescension. Cautious replies, indulgent applause. The queries longer now, more in earnest. You begin to relax, riposting with precision and wit yet the applause seems fainter now. Through narrowing eyes, the ladies are beginning vaguely to see in this performance a betrayal, the men, cause for disquiet.
Sotto voce
various gamblers curse each hapless professor for a fool as he is toppled by your lance. Yet somehow they envy him his chance at humiliation.

The ranking pundits look increasingly desperate now as their turn approaches. Questions bifurcating and ramifying into such complexities
that even their posers seem to lose the thread. Others, you bring to stumble into the very snares they've laid. Spider-like, you reel them in one by one, many ceasing to struggle almost immediately, meekly sitting without even attempting a rebuttal. Those who do … manage to sound at once shrill and petty, their objections reduced to cavils.

Now in an attempt to confuse you they put their questions in tandem—history, then theology, then mathematics, then part two of the history question. But like a chess master playing on several boards at once you see their game at a glance, while
they
become distracted by the interruptions.

Finally one greybeard, whose local eminence has been for some minutes crumbling to a highly public rubble, starts to shout you down. The bettors who laid the longest odds rise indignant in your defence. The rector turns to the Viceroy to protest!

Shouting now on all sides.

The Viceroy inclines his head slightly: the Vice-Queen is whispering something in his ear. Suddenly he rises. The room falls quiet again. Smiling he thanks the Royal University for its participation and, suddenly solemn, bows to the red-cheeked girl.

How they must hate you, these wise men. Nothing left to do but paddle their canoes away across a sea of indignity. A rout of unimaginable proportions.

Is that how it was Juana?

And was that the exact moment of my fall?

No.

The precise instant was in the beginning … as the learned doctors swaggered in, when you stood alone, head bowed in concentration, unsure of the outcome. I fell in love with you then. In a scene described to me in a letter, from a casual friend.

Juana I've borrowed enough money to get us both passage to Europe. We'll never be free to exercise our talent here. Now that I've really left maybe you'll take me seriously and stop treating me like some impetuous boy.

Come away with me.

I will wait for you in Veracruz until you send me word.

Until you send me word … Carlos.

21st day of July, 1667

la hacienda de San Nicolás

Querida Juana Inés
,

I could not quite bring myself to write these past few nights. Emotions too unstable to be wrestled into an envelope and commended to the void, only to be ferried across it by some stranger. By the time this packet of mercury wings its way to you I am sure everything will have slipped and shifted yet again.

It was dawn when I set out from Puebla, exhilarated….

The roads are deserted—the sun rising grandly before me above the fog. But before I have ridden many leagues to the east, a kind of melancholy infiltrates my mood. The road has been climbing for the last couple of hours away from the boggy ground Puebla is anchored to. I dismount and look back over my trail.

The plain below is choked and blue with the smoke of a thousand fires. And looking out over this landscape for perhaps the last time I see a battle scene for one of your Florentines, Da Vinci … “War on Eden.” A campaign giving no quarter and leaving in its wake an America of drained watercourses and scorched slopes from Quito to Mexico. New Spain indeed. This country will resemble arid Spain soon enough.

My cast of mind sombres to the point where even as I find myself at the first mountain pass, leaving the battlefield at least temporarily behind me, and surrounded by waterfalls and freshets, by the sound of water surging below, all I can permit myself to see pouring forth is the lifeblood of a great leviathan groaning under our assault. Here I spend my first night, cloaked in mist and dreaming of a sea battle sounding all around me….

My aching joints wake me before dawn. My horse, tethered all night in the same mist, is not at all eager to be saddled with me, the mule still less so to be burdened with my affairs.

From here the trail twists its way over an ever-steeper series of grades. Two leagues up for every one down. Killing work for the animals. Negotiating even the lower trails exacts the utmost concentration, as bogs threaten to engulf the unwary at every turn. I have been remembering our talks and believe your grandfather to have been right: I now see for myself that without Moctezuma's help, his gifts of food and of course his unwillingness to attack the Spaniards as they walked their
horses along these steep game trails and treacherous marshes, the conquest of America would have died right here.

Then there are these high-country rivers, most of them impossible to ford. What a miracle of water is our New World. I hear the roaring an hour before I reach it. Unthinkable to cross without that bridge. More spume than water, the river tumbles battered from the heights of a glowering volcano as high, I suspect, as our Popocatepetl. On the far side of the narrow bridge, which I must coax the animals across, stands the hacienda de San Nicolás and my first meal in nearly two days.
El terrateniente
receives me courteously, though he is too wary to lodge me at the main house. Only after I have paid an outrageous sum for a chicken, which his Indian cook prepares for me most deliciously, does he say I could have had, for a tenth the cost, one of the delicious fowl that abound in the surrounding woods.
Guajalotes
,
†
of course, but also large woodcocks and something the Indians here call a pheasant … he just assumed a city man would prefer chicken.