Hunger's Brides (98 page)

I shouldn't keep him but suddenly do not want to see him leave.

“Gutiérrez … which sermon was the Archbishop to give?”

“Heraclitus Defended,”he
says, a smile swimming into the watery blue of his eyes. “The printers at Santo Domingo have a thousand copies they are not so sure they will be paid for. I can get you as many as you like. The price, I'm sure will be reasonable.”

Philothea's letter is neither a mistake nor a misunderstanding, neither lesson nor pique. These are not just provocations and threats, this is a betrayal—not even in the heat of anger but deliberate, premeditated for years, or months, or at least weeks. If the Archbishop's connection to Vieyra is a deep and abiding friendship, then without question Núñez would have known. And even he, even acting under Jesuit orders, would not have exposed himself and his career to Archbishop Aguiar's rage without seeking assurances. The rebuttal of a Jesuit by a Jesuit, a gesture made moreover in a Jesuit college rectory, marked the boundaries of their support for Vieyra and for the Archbishop himself. Of what Santa Cruz had led me to see, that much had been true. But the gesture sent
two
signals. The audience for the first one being the Holy Office itself and the Dominicans within it—but the second embedded within the first had a separate audience. The message was personal, from Antonio Núñez to Santa Cruz. Far more than offering his services as he had in the past, Núñez was indicating his readiness to switch allegiances from the present Archbishop to his clear successor—perhaps even to work, as Aguiar's confessor, to hasten the man's collapse. Responding to the signal or to the risk taken in sending it, Santa Cruz had come to Mexico to hear Núñez's proposition.

Arduous and pleasing holocaust for slaughter on the altars of Religion
. This may as well be from Núñez's latest circular. Philothea speaks like Núñez far too often for it to be hazard. There can be no more escaping it. She is speaking
for
him, from him, of him. The Apostle Paul on women's learning … Augustine on gifts and responsibility, the whipping of Saint Jerome—beauty, obedience, the
galleon …

It has happened. The thing I have worked so many years to prevent. Núñez has won Santa Cruz over. As Philothea has in so many ways been telling me. And if it happens to be true that Vieyra and the Archbishop have never met, Núñez will have known of this too. Santa Cruz's unimpeachable authority in my locutory that day was Núñez himself.

Núñez and Santa Cruz have found a common enemy.

I will be clear, I must. Núñez and Santa Cruz. I should be flattered they have laid down arms, lain down together, the ox and the dog. The beast has two heads now. I will stop being such a fool. I will stop asking and asking why.

Why?

Why ask me for theology—why are sacred verses no longer enough? Why praise sacred verses,
if
they are not enough?
… not so harsh a censor as to condemn verses … a skill Saint Teresa and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus have
sanctified…
. As examples of skill in verse, why use these? Why Teresa—whose skill as a poet was secondary—and not John of the Cross whose mastery was sublime? And if it is because she is a woman why mention Nazianzus at all? A vulgar poetaster, a dog in the manger who gave the order to burn …

It cannot be. All of this cannot be about the
Letras a Safo—
just because I did not leap at the chance to have Santa Cruz read my lyrics? For this, I was ungrateful?—and all this is just a bout of pique? But his face showed none of this. I see him getting up to leave that day…. He asks if I do not have something for him to read during the long carriage ride back to Puebla. “Something other than our Father Núñez's
Shriven Communicant.”
I offer to send Antonia for the Vieyra sermons in Portuguese. He smiles, asking if he might not read instead some of these lyrics for Sappho he has been hearing about. Antonia pales, as I remember Carlos had earlier with the Viscount. I say the verses are not quite ready yet to be read. He accepts readily enough, saying something about the perfectionism of poets, and that he looks forward to reading the transcription of my negative
finezas
very soon.

He didn't even try. Who could be that petty? No. Not even Santa Cruz could be so vain. He had what he came for, the promise of my written arguments. Or was it that he resented having to hear of her lyrics from someone else? Someone more vulgar, someone who does censor verse, who does speak of them to everyone. Someone like Núñez…. Are
Las letras a Safo
Núñez's price? His prize. No. No. It can't be this.

The night is cold. Tired of pacing from window to window to desk to bed, I move into the sitting room. Antonia comes out of the library, where one has more room for pacing, and lights a fire in the hearth. She goes out and leaves me to my thoughts.

Gutiérrez is right. The haziness is not amusing, and ‘dreamlike' is not comical. It is dangerous, for many reasons.

This is certainly a betrayal, but there is something else here, something more. I can't help thinking the preface that introduces it is only secondarily about my letter, or how Santa Cruz feels about it, or me, or even about telling the Inquisition why he publishes a tract so dubious.
No, here too is a gesture. To show the world what he has done, and tell me what he may yet do.

In one stroke Sor Philothea publishes the nun who bests both the Archbishop's idol and Núñez, his captain. Pronouncing herself a follower of this nun, Philothea shows His Grace how his horror of Woman is become an object of general merriment even as Philothea slays the dragon herself. In binding all this up in the skullduggery after the sermon, Philothea flushes Núñez from cover, who has been working at cross-purposes behind the scenes. In this she drives a wedge between Núñez and the Archbishop, or rather burns Núñez's bridges and his ships, for in now speaking for Núñez she signals to all a switch in his allegiances without having to name the beneficiary. Any criticisms Philothea makes of the traits that the nun displays in her letters—want of humility, excess of worldliness, ingratitude, insubordination—apply equally to Núñez's conduct towards the Archbishop. Indeed should that final apoplectic crisis come now, let it be on the heads of Núñez and the nun.

The next move is of course mine. Which the Holy Office, now called publicly to attention, will be watching. Philothea does not even fear to raise the head of Cerberus.

One move. The breathtaking beauty of it. All question of causes and effects aside—and speaking only of the beauty of the game, for beauty's sake—how often can even a consummate player, even one such as Santa Cruz, expect to be offered such a move?

When?

But can I not let this go? Surely it doesn't matter now, to know when my friend of seventeen years decided to do this. Or whether he came from Puebla to Mexico with at least some of this in mind. Perhaps he had sensed his opening in Núñez's latest overtures, a chance to humble me and capture Núñez in one move. Or maybe it was only in my locutory that he began to contemplate the possibilities. Coming to collect my letter and Núñez's manuscript as one does minor pieces; then Núñez's proposition, a slightly more important piece. Discovering next that a fiction planted by Santa Cruz himself had taken root in my mind: that I was unaware that the Archbishop's friendship with Vieyra was neither pretence nor another delusion. Sensing, in this, the most tempting hint of an ironic symmetry: my scorn of Núñez's manuscript dedication to a knowing bishop, my ignorance of Vieyra's to the Archbishop, a man he'd never met.

And now Santa Cruz has Núñez, too. It seems to be what Núñez wanted. Well then, they have each other. But Santa Cruz's fury over Saint Bernard would not have been feigned—he was afraid Núñez and I, in our resumption of hostilities, would spoil things before it was time and rearrange the pieces on the board. What ecstasies of anticipation Santa Cruz must have suffered!

Now I have at least an answer. All the answer I will likely ever have. And it is a mercy to see something clearly, if even just this one instant, during our chess lesson that day, something suggested to him by the game itself…. This is the moment. The most spectacular gambit of all.

Bishop Santa Cruz has sacrificed his queen.

The gambit he himself taught me, an extension of our lessons, brought now into the world for all to see. We are not to take this as a betrayal but as a sacrifice. It is one thing to do it on a board. How many can execute it in the flesh?

I see the hour. The late afternoon light angles through the window bars, strikes a painting on the north wall, filters through the boughs and leaves of the rosewood grille. Tomasina and Ana moving back and forth, refilling bowls of chocolate, replacing half-empty trays of sweets and fruit. The light falling across the board, the chess pieces clustered in one corner. Black has just retired, its king mated. I have never beaten him. Santa Cruz is being gracious, but clearly had I been a more experienced player he would not have mistaken my queen sacrifice for inattention.

“I thought your mind was elsewhere,” he said simply. “But … humility is a most democratic virtue, whose benefits apply equally to all. The mortification in my defeat I take as a favour.”

It is the sort of thing I expect him to say with irony. But his dark eyes are liquid and full. Neither anger nor hurt, not mortification. Almost … gratitude. But for what? Of course—I have released him from the scrupling of his conscience, whatever that might be. But no, it is not that. His boyishness has never been more manifest than in that instant. He is leaning back … crumbs of sugary crust lie in the purple folds of his cassock, sugar crystals in his small moustache. I had never thought of him as anything but relaxed, but all the tensions in his face I see now are gone.

In his eyes, all the affection and goodness of a child after the most severe punishment, and yet deserved. A guilt not purged but absolved.