Hunger's Brides (92 page)

White rook mates black king. The Bishop has lost his first game to me, gracefully. His face is curiously open, with a nakedness that in a simpleton we take for Good.

“The queen sacrifice was particularly nice.”

“You taught it to me once.” I no longer feel particularly triumphant. Against a more experienced opponent he would have seen it for what it was.

“I thought your mind elsewhere…. But as Vieyra and Father Núñez before me have discovered, humility is a most democratic virtue whose benefits apply equally to all. The mortification you bestow upon me in my defeat is a favour.”

With my loctutory crowded after the sermon a fortnight earlier, this was as far as I had gone. These were the arguments Santa Cruz had come to hear for himself. But now he has said, with the most disarming simplicity, this curious thing:
‘my defeat is a favour.'What
I say in reply is spontaneous precisely where my other foolishness has been rehearsed, for here is an idea that touches a genuine chord in me. If I could just say one true thing today, one thing
I feel…
.

“But in Christ, don Manuel … in Christ we feel this mortifying Love drawn and tempered to a fine and lacerating edge. Of such a gift we have already a thousand times proven ourselves unworthy. So to chasten us for our unworthiness of His
finezas
is also a fine thing, for He chastens whom he loves. But God's greatest
fineza
is a still more negative favour—to release us from his hand, to spare us his
finezas
, to grant us no favour at all.”

The Bishop—startled from his languor—asks for an explanation.

Of errors in judgement and character I was already a hundred times guilty, but my single sin that day was speaking aloud thoughts that should have remained silent. For if the Word made flesh is God's greatest gift, then returning that gift to God—in the soul's gift of silence—is our most sacred offering, the highest of which we are capable. Our holiest prayers are those addressed in His secret Name, as the Hebrews taught so long ago. Our most sacred offering is a silence beyond naming …

And yet I do not keep silent.

“As I have said, don Manuel, God is not completed by our requital of His love. But by making us incomplete, he gives us the chance to choose completion. By leaving us free, he makes it the highest expression of our free will to
choose love
. How beautiful this is. But when He asks that we respond to the boundless favour of His love by loving as He loves us, the most faithfully we are able to reciprocate is by loving Him especially for the favours He does
not
bestow upon us. His greatest gifts we shall surely crucify. Withholding them, God spares us the opportunity to commit the most diabolical evils. So you see God's greatest benefaction, his subtlest finesse, contains in its belly another: the gift of not having to revoke our freedom.

“And what is its highest expression? The freedom to choose love, as we have seen. But
which
love—to love, yes, but
how?
Loving, not without need, not without desire—these are both beyond most—but loving
without hope
. This we may call loving heroically. This, even the worst of us at the best of times can do…. To love without the slightest hope of being worthy of our love's Object, or of His love's return. And to exercise our free will as if with hope, as if we were in fact capable of good, of love, of being loved, in the terrifying absence of His Grace….”

I sit here in Atlantis replaying that dreamlike hour in a mind filled with a silent roaring. Is this deafness—a roaring we can no longer distinguish from sound? Swelling to drown out all other sounds and then receding, the mind no longer able to hold to the featureless din. Caught up in the moment, I go further in ten minutes with my friend the Lord Bishop Santa Cruz than in twenty years of confession.

Z
EALOT
        

A
NY FOOL KNOWS
there are things a man does not tell his lovers. Still other things an adulterer conceals from his wife. Conversely, the disclosure of certain confidences may prove a tactical asset. Any fool knows this too. The trouble, at times, is knowing which is which.

Towards the end of our brief intimacy I submitted to the tedium of a puerile game Beulah imposed on me. It was literally a game of truth or dare. I now see that on this particular day, and others, I gave up more than I got in return. I tell the story now as I told it to Beulah then, with the same innocence….

I have an aversion to religion.

My grandmother lived in Manitoba, a zealous member of the local Pentecostal congregation, a church of charismatic preaching, of speaking in tongues. Still, zealot is too strong a word.

She was a nurse. She saved my life when I was six. My parents had brought me twenty hours by train across the Prairies. In three more hours I went from charging through her sprinkler to kneeling at death's door. She nursed me day and night, the pneumonia soon so tangled in my lungs that the sole life sign was the slightest fogging on a spoon placed against my lips.

She had watery blue eyes, and favoured paisleys. She baked rhubarb pies like an angel. She smelled like lavender, liked to laugh. She detested drink, abhorred Sunday sports and commerce, and knew Catholics to be idolators. Her bunions, forcing an end to a forty-year nursing career, utterly deformed the soft slippers she was by then reduced to wearing, even to Church, where she played the organ. Really played, a genuine holy roller. I can see the tiny grey and russet curls that wriggled free of the severe bun she wore. A heathenish coiling at her nape and temples as she banged out those same gospel hymns for me on the piano at home. Any day of the week, not just Sunday. She loved the music.

Zealot is too strong a word.

I owed her a life. I wanted to make it for her a life truly saved:
Grandma, I felt the baby Jesus enter my heart last night
, I whispered, and believed. She cried, and as she wiped her eyes, my own searched for something neutral to settle on: the kidney-shaped hollows on either
side of the bridge of her nose, which over the years her glasses had scalloped out.

My conversion was as fleeting as it was shallow. When we came back the following summer I had to tell her I couldn't believe anymore. I waited until the last day, but I was taught to tell the truth.

So taught, I'm obliged to state that there was no miracle cure. No breakthrough in nursing science saw me through either, but rather a hodgepodge of folk remedies that may or may not have abetted a child's natural resiliency. This was the Prairies in the early sixties. For pneumonia, burning hot mustard plasters applied every hour around the clock, the nostrum of preference in southern Manitoba. My father claimed she'd drawn the phlegm from my chest through a tube down my throat, drawn it from my nostrils with her lips. I didn't know whether to believe him.

Maybe she hadn't really saved my life after all. Maybe, for a while, she had only watched over it.

O
n the island of Mexico, from the old barrio of Nacatitlan, a street goes north through the new streets intersecting it, running west and east straight down to the lake. Here, where the shacks and shanties and huts are low, one may see the white volcanoes to the east, the southmost gouting steam above the other, white and still. A whiteness washed faint copper in the smoke of scores of small fires set in the western hills.

North of the barrio of Nacatitlan, the street is called Calle de las Rejas where it approaches the porter's gate of the convent of San Jerónimo, and from there past the slaughterhouses and butcher shops to the monastery of San Agustín, the richest in all Mexico. Here, in the days after the first Sunday of Advent and leading up to the festival of Our Lady of Guadalupe and in the fortnight beyond this to the Nativity, the beggars gather in great numbers at the monastery gates. The street passes them by and proceeds along the west face of the convent of San Bernardo to arrive at the
zócalo
, a vast plaza bounded on the south by the edifices of the city administration and on the east by the long façade of the Viceregal Palace. On the north stands the massive yoke of the Metropolitan Cathedral, its second tower at last nearing completion. It is the hour approaching sunset in this season of festivals and the end of rains. As though upon a living coat of arms, the central plaza of the Imperial City of Mexico lies embossed and embroidered and crisscrossed and braided with tens of thousands of people, afoot, on mule-back and horseback, and in litters and carriages.

Over at the Cathedral and unconstrained by the solemnity within, celebrants have hemmed its walls about with exuberant bouquets the violet of Advent—irises, jacarandas, violets, hyacinths. Along the blank west wall the bouquets lie tumbled at its base like the sprays of violet breakers, while standing lost and awash among the flowers, here at the customary place, wait a few score unemployed carpenters and masons still hoping to be collected for the late, last work of the busiest season.

Three blocks farther north, the street reaches a smaller plaza at whose southeast corner agents stream in and out of the Customs House, its west windows reflecting a sky orange with the approaching sunset.
Hemmed too in violet bouquets stands the small rose-coloured temple of Santo Domingo, on the north edge of the plaza itself. Across Calle Puente de la Aduana to the east stands the edifice of an austere authority: two tall storeys, a stone coat of arms, a cloth banner above the tall front gates at the southwest corner. There the sky blazes red-orange in the glass; farther along, the light slanting over the plaza leaves some windows in shadow on the upper floor. In one of these, six north of the gates, a lamp burns.

A second is lit as the first arrivals enter. Their carriages come in not through the front but by the rear gates, backed in black canvas to discourage petitioners and relatives and to frustrate the few inevitable daredevils. From the courtyard, where carriages wait in deep evening shadow an attendant leads each new arrival down a long black corridor lighted by rough torches. There are many doors; all are shut. Among the cracked and battered doors one is new: torchlight gleams dully in its heavy bosses and rivets.

Second-last to arrive is one who walks this corridor for the first time. He is young. He carries in one hand an Italian tricorne hat. His hair is blond; he wears it fashionably long, in ringlets. The tall robed attendant walks swiftly ahead. The young man tries not to fall behind, while trying not to try to keep up either. Tall himself, long-limbed, he is nevertheless hampered by the high-heeled shoes, canary yellow to match his long velvet
justaucorps
and yellow satin suit. He curses himself for a fool, first for accepting a last minute invitation to leave the comforts of the palace, no matter from whom, then for getting into a carriage without knowing its destination. He knows it now. The shudder he has so far managed to suppress gathers at the base of his spine and skull. He reminds himself that he comes to give what amounts to a literary assessment, which he intends to render concisely and then just as quickly leave.

Led now through a small patio behind the front gates he sends a last wistful glance out and climbs a tall staircase, its railing wrought of flat iron, unturned, unadorned. At the second door on the left, the attendant leading him knocks and returns swiftly the way he came. The most important guest is yet to arrive.

The door opens. Inside are five men. Straight ahead, behind a desktop as deep as it is broad, its clutter of dossiers pushed to one side, sits a burly man of about fifty in a white tunic and scapular. His beard is full and heavy, thick, starting high on his cheekbones, almost at his eyes. The
heaviness of the beard and brows make the alert eyes, deep in their well of wrinkles, seem small. The heavy black curtains to his left are closed. Before them a secretary sits attentively at an
escribanía
. Another Dominican sits on a plain chair midway between a divan and the door. Over his scapular he wears a black mantle, the hood drawn back. He glances up briefly from a dossier on his lap as the man in yellow makes his entrance. A red-bearded friar sits at the edge of the divan. His habit is black, the hood especially large, of a soft material. The Augustinian's smile seems friendly.

To the right of the desk the drapes are parted a little, letting in the day's last light. Through the smoke in the air over the city, high thin clouds trail plumes of crimson. Just beyond this armspan of sky is an unoccupied chair, thickly upholstered, walnut arms inlaid with ivory and nacre. Beside this a low table, and upon it a small platter of sweetmeats. Across the room a Spanish gentleman paces to pass off his unease for impatience. He gives a familiar nod as the young man enters, crossing over to him. Without rising from behind the desk, the Master Examiner beckons to the empty chair next to the Spanish gentleman's. For several moments no one speaks. Sounds are heard in the hallway. All come to their feet, the young man reluctantly, as a man comes in, removing his travelling cloak on his way to the chair by the window. The servant hurries from the door to take the cloak and broad-brimmed hat.