Hunger's Brides (90 page)

I see the beautiful young face of the King's emissary, recall deciding to bring points of colour to those smooth, pale cheeks…. I ask if a man of his beauty believes he may blunder along with no particular purpose at all. If the rest of the distaff world stands before the blunderbuss and counts itself disarmed. Is it the Sun King himself, I wonder, who eagerly awaits this blundering's translation, ear cocked to the report? I suggest that my young friend press on, as earnestness may yet win the day. But why not raise his aim—and set his sights not on mere flirtation, but on a conquest less abstracted—

Always at this point Tomasina returns from her watch at the archive windows and rushes into the room.

“The Bishop's carriage, it's
here
—parked beside the canal,” she adds, as if this in some way added to the drama. Then there comes that moment after an arrival is announced when conversation falters. Carlos gets up grudgingly from the Bishop's chair and pulls another to the grille from the far side of the room. Antonia hastens over with the chess table. As she places it within easy reach behind me she bends to my ear and asks to be excused. She does not look particularly well. I look over at Tomasina and Ana, both standing attentively now at the arras, ready to fetch the slightest thing from the staging area behind them. Finally both my
escuchas
are actually listening—just when the very authority in whose name they are to eavesdrop will already be present.

“'Tonia, look at those two standing there, between ecstasy and panic. Will you try to stay a moment—”

“Ah, chess,” says the Viscount,“I'll wager you play like Greco himself.”

“Stay, Toñita—just till he's settled in?”

“Did the great Greco not die near here?”

“Not at my hands,
Vicomte. Gracias, 'Tonia
. As a child,
Monsieur
, I'd always intended to learn. And then I ran out of time. But the Bishop sometimes consents to a lesson when he has business here.”

“One of the better players in New Spain, I understand.”

“What a curious thing for you to know.”

“I've been hoping to meet him.”

“Have you? Of course you have …”

As Bishop Santa Cruz enters, the change in the Viscount is quite complete. It is clear that he has some business to transact. I find myself half-admiring the young man's duplicity even as I am resenting being used as a stalking horse. Bishop Santa Cruz is also, for an instant, quite transformed. At first I think it is recognition, or surprise, but it is not quite either. He is our most handsome churchman. Indeed many of the sisters here, and I can only imagine how many in Puebla, confess at our weekly chapter of faults that when Satan visits at night, he is as likely to take the guise of Bishop Santa Cruz as to masquerade as Our Husband. Santa Cruz's features are boyish, which in a man of fifty can be appealing. Fine brows carrying the suggestion of a frown in perpetual warning to triflers, the chin slightly too delicate for the width of his jaw. The teeth are good and big, indeed better fitted to a slightly wider mouth…. I had always thought his most striking feature his eyes, large, a deep liquid brown, accentuated by pale hair almost blond. More than pleasing enough, but the Enemy appears to me rather differently. A little taller, a little younger, more … statuesque.

The Viscount on the other hand—though he is now beyond any doubt a viper—is angelically beautiful, with his gold locks and lilac eyes and hands of marble. The features and the hands, though, are not a cherub's but the warrior Michael's. Square chin, wide mouth, pale, full lips, a nose prominent yet fine at the bridge. For an instant they face each other: A younger man, beautifully masculine, an older man, boyishly handsome. And in that instant, the Bishop's face is almost unrecognizable. It is the clearest moment in what remains of the afternoon. What appears, what seems almost to rise up—as the Viscount's beauty strikes it like the slap of a glove—is the figure of an enormous vanity. And though Bishop Santa Cruz and I are old friends, I shudder to think of
that poor girl in Puebla looking into his face as she begged to be permitted to enter Santa Monica.

For a moment I fear some real violence must pass between them, but it is only the usual cut and thrust. An insult here about the Bishop's lineage, another there about the Viscount's immoral king and country, vague hints of war and excommunication …

“Obviously a spy,” says the Bishop, as the Viscount's footsteps die out.

Santa Cruz fixes his dark eyes on Carlos.

“Don Carlos, you spend so little time in Puebla anymore. You must still have many friends there.”

“A few. Who tell me your work on Genesis is nearly complete.”

“That's so, yes.”

“Two thousand pages, Lord Bishop. Monumental.”

“A book like any other, don Carlos. To be read a page at a time. But you,
señor
, almost daily I hear of you winning some new distinction for the Chair of Mathematics and—is it Astronomy or Astrology? I never remember.”

“Astrology.”

“We are told you are predicting an eclipse of the sun for next August.”

“The margin of error is still considerable.”

“Yes, isn't it,” he says, holding Carlos's eyes an extra heartbeat. The Bishop's gaze shifts to Antonia. “I bring good report of your sisters at the convent school. The youngest takes after you, I think. Very clever with her languages. What was her name …?
Antonia?”

“Francisca.”

“Will you play something for us, Antonia? I haven't heard you at the clavichord for—how long has it been?”

I ask Santa Cruz if she could play something brief, she is not altogether well. To which, after listening a moment, he answers that brief will be best if she finishes the way she has begun. Antonia plays well, and yet her playing just now is not quite soothing. She is unhappy, no doubt, that I have kept her.

“I notice you have something of a Puebla reunion on your hands, Juana.”

“So I have.”

“The time may not be far off for those carols we have been scheming about.”

“For Saint Catherine?—you're in earnest?”

He has not quite promised but the commission is clearly mine now to lose.

“It would be good to hear Puebla talk of Puebla again. There was a time when our little Puebla de los Angeles stood up very nicely against the brilliance of the capital. We have our splendid volcano, though Mexico does have two…. While Mexico has its cathedral, we have ours, lovelier and almost as large. We have the Jesuit Seminary, Mexico has the great Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo. But while we have a children's choir, Mexico has Sálazar. And since don Carlos left us, Mexico now has the two of you.”

It is the second allusion to Carlos's unhappy departure from the seminary more than twenty years ago.

Santa Cruz shakes his head ruefully. “And now during Holy Week to have the great college's rector Antonio Núñez, giving a sermon by none other than the immortal Vieyra. Your four-time winner of the Seal of the Holy Crusade delivers a homily from the Prince of the Catholic Orators!”

After the false modesty regarding Puebla, the mock heroic tone of the tout nicely inserts the skewer: a delirious prestige attaches locally to the Seal, our highest prize for eloquent sermonizing, but even in Núñez's case, it is quite eclipsed by the informal title of Prince of Orators, which was devised for Vieyra alone and by which he is known throughout the Catholic dominions.

“Don Carlos, I suppose you were here for Sor Juana's analysis after the sermon?”

“Regrettably, his Lordship the Viceroy wanted some prominences surveyed on the coast, for gun emplacements.”

“So there were at least two of us to miss the great moment of Sor Juana's rebuttal.”

“The moment was not particularly great, don Manuel.”

“As ever, she is too modest.” Santa Cruz's eyes have not left Carlos.

“I hadn't noticed.”

“Your holy crusader and our Catholic prince both out-manned, outgunned by a simple nun—they should have seen the emplacements ranged against them and put out to sea. A pity, don Carlos, that you were not there. You at least could have given me a competent summary. So I've come to sort it out for myself. Our Mistress of the
poetic fineza
corrects—”

“Questions, don Manuel, merely questions.”

“Of course.
Questions
New Spain's most original thinker on the Eucharist.”

Carlos glances at me, a look of warning that finds me torn between cheer and dread. He knows what the Bishop's patronage means to me, now especially. He knows how long I have wanted this commission. But Santa Cruz has been provoking him since—well, since he stopped provoking the Viscount. Is it something Carlos has done, something he has said—everyone here hears everything, or thinks they do—is it to do with his services to the Archbishop?

Carlos is not one to hold his fire for long. I fill my return glance with the fervid hope that Carlos follow the Viscount out.

“I should be going,” Carlos says, getting arthritically to his feet,
“Su Ilustrísima
the Lord Bishop has important matters to discuss. And I have some records to check at the Archbishop's palace. From the time of Bishop
Zumárraga.”
His eyes glitter as he looks my way. It has come out with a strange emphasis but now he is bending to add, conspiratorially, his smile including Santa Cruz,“You can tell Antonia it's not the music.”

As the slight, stooped form disappears through the doorway I sketch ambitious plans for his next visit, to shower him with proofs of my gratitude. The remark about Zumárraga, Mexico's first bishop, is not so very odd, I tell myself. Carlos is always nosing about in some archive or other for the chronicles he is asked to write. And the jest about Antonia's playing defused the whole situation wonderfully.

All in all he has handled the Bishop with unwonted forbearance and grace. Yet what I distinctly recall feeling as he leaves is annoyance. Annoyed that so many of the people upon whom I most depend seem to dislike each other. Annoyed, as always, at Carlos for half a dozen things. Annoyed, too, at my own weariness, the sense of wasted time, that I will be up until dawn now finishing the convent accounts. And at Antonia for the mournful music she has chosen, when she knows so many pleasant lays; at her ingratitude towards the Bishop who has brought her here, and just perhaps towards me. Annoyed at the Bishop—for his shabby treatment of Carlos. And at myself again, for giving voice to my great pique with such a little peep.

“You were cruel to him.”

“I thought his temper might get the better of him.”

“And what would his temper tell us that it hasn't already?”

“It may only be prudence, given his friendship with the Franciscan
they burned. But it bothers me that he always manages to be away when something happens. Like this sermon. And his silence on the Eucharist. Fifteen years ago he talked of nothing else, and has abandoned the field to Núñez ever since.”

“But you've said it yourself. Prudence.”

“It is not
why
he goes that I wonder about, but
how
he always knows far enough in advance to arrange things so tidily. It is not
why
he has been silent for fifteen years, but
how
Núñez from that time became so knowledgeable on the old cults. Are we all to retreat from theological questions the moment Antonio Núñez shows an interest—are you to hand over all the beautiful verses you have written on the
finezas?”

The compliment is sincere. If I persist, this will become unpleasant.

With Carlos gone I am determined to be done with this quickly. It is as he has said—the Bishop does have matters to discuss.

“You do know, don Manuel, that Father Núñez has dedicated this new work to you.”

“A sobering look at Communion.”

“Are you here for the manuscript?”

“I have it.” His hand starts towards the tray. He checks the impulse, then takes up a candied fig with a kind of languor. “But I don't have to come from Puebla for that. I am more interested in his motives than in his book, more still in his motives for the sermon.”

“A straw man. Vieyra has written—what is it, thirteen orations on the Eucharist, many of them sublime. Núñez attacks perhaps the weakest. Why not strength on strength? There would have been a contest to watch.”

“This Portuguese, Vieyra, is an old favourite of yours, is he not?”

“He and Camões have removed any doubt their language can soar as high as our own.”

Santa Cruz asks my opinion on the local edition of Vieyra's work on Heraclitus. “I admire it. Though I haven't read their translation—but some sense of the grace of his style could not fail to come through. No one in our tongue is writing a prose to match his.”

The Bishop smiles before biting delicately into a walnut square. “Certainly not the plodder your Royal University found for the translation. But I am told the editions in Madrid—the '76 and '78—were awful translations also.”

“I haven't read them.”

“But you've seen them.”

Not having seen either, I answer instead that any speaker of Castilian should really read Vieyra in the Portuguese, the quality being so high, the languages so close. I promise to send Santa Cruz home with my copy. He promises to bring me the Castilian editions next time.

He pauses to dust sugar from the purple cassock. “Perhaps we should be translating him in Puebla.” His eyes shine with mischief. “You would be interested?”

“For Vieyra, I would need time. Without it I would only make a fool of myself.”

“Time might be something I can arrange. Now to Núñez. You had begun to say why that sermon suited his purposes. Our discussions in Puebla have run along those same lines, though going somewhat further….”