Mirrors (37 page)

Like Teresa of Ávila, Juana Inés de la Cruz became a nun to remain free of the matrimonial cage.

Like Teresa, in the convent her talent caused offense. Did this head of a woman contain the brain of a man? Why did she have a man’s handwriting? Since she was such a good cook, why would she want to think? Deriding her questioners, she answered:

“What could we women know, but kitchen philosophy?”

Like Teresa, Juana wrote, although the priest Gaspar de Astete warned her that “Christian maidens need not know how to write, and it may cause them harm.”

Like Teresa, Juana not only wrote, but, scandal of scandals, she wrote undeniably well.

In different centuries, on different shores of the same sea, Juana the Mexican and Teresa the Spaniard defended, aloud and on paper, the despised half of the world.

Like Teresa, Juana was threatened by the Inquisition. And the Church, her Church, persecuted her for extolling human concerns as much or more than divine ones, for seldom obeying, and for questioning far too much.

With blood, not ink, Juana signed her confession. She vowed eternal silence. And mute she died.

GOODBYE

The best paintings by Ferrer Bassa, the Giotto of Catalunia, are on the walls of the convent of Pedralbes, place of bleached stones, in the heights of Barcelona.

There, detached from the world, lived the cloistered nuns.

It was a one-way street: the gate closed behind them and it closed for good. Their families paid large dowries so they would merit the glory of being forever married to Christ.

Within the convent, at the foot of one of the Ferrer Bassa frescoes in the chapel of Saint Michael, there are words that have survived, as if in hiding, the passing of the centuries.

No one knows who wrote them.

But we do know when. There is a date in Roman numerals, 1426.

The words are barely decipherable. In gothic letters, in Catalan, they pled and plead still:

Tell Juan
not to forget me.

TITUBA

She was captured in South America as a child, and was sold and sold again and then once more, passed from owner to owner until she ended up in the town of Salem in North America.

There, in that Puritan sanctuary, the slave Tituba served in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris.

The daughters of the reverend adored her. They were in heaven when Tituba told them stories of apparitions or read their fortunes in the whites of an egg. And in the winter of 1692, when the girls were possessed by Satan and writhed shrieking on the floor, only Tituba could calm them. She caressed them and whispered stories until they fell asleep in her lap.

That sealed her fate: she was the one who had brought hell into the virtuous kingdom of God’s chosen people.

The storytelling magician was put in the stocks in the public square, and she confessed.

They accused her of baking pies from the devil’s recipe book, and they whipped her until she said yes.

They accused her of dancing naked at the witches’ Sabbath, and they whipped her until she said yes.

They accused her of sleeping with Satan, and they whipped her until she said yes.

And when they told her that her accomplices were two old ladies who never went to church, the accused became the accuser and she pointed her finger at the possessed pair. And they stopped whipping her.

Then other accused also accused.

And the gallows were never empty.

WOMEN POSSESSED

Theologian and friar Martín de Castañega confirmed that the devil preferred women to men, because “they are pusillanimous and have less robust hearts and more humid brains.”

Satan seduced them by caressing them with his goat’s hoof and his wooden claw, or by disguising himself as a toad dressed as a prince.

Exorcisms of possessed women brought overflow crowds to the churches.

Protecting the breast of the exorcist were scapularies filled with consecrated salt, blessed rue, and the hair and nails of saints. Crucifix held high, he did battle with witchcraft. The bedeviled woman swore, howled, bit, shrieked insults in the tongues of hell, and with loud laughter tore off her clothes and proffered her naughty parts. The climax came when the exorcist rolled on the floor hugging the body where the devil had made himself at home, until the convulsions and wailing ceased.

Afterward, some searched the floor for the nails and bits of glass vomited by the possessed.

HENDRICKJE

In the year 1654, a young and flagrantly pregnant woman named Hendrickje Stoffels was judged and found guilty by the council of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam.

She confessed to “having fornicated with the painter Rembrandt,” and admitted to sharing his bed without being married, “like a whore,” or in a more literal translation, “committing whoredom.”

The council punished her by obliging her to repent and do penance and by permanently excluding her from the table of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Rembrandt was not found guilty, perhaps because the jury had in mind the episode of Eve and the apple. But the scandal caused the price of his work to tumble and he had to declare bankruptcy.

The master of chiaroscuro, who revealed light born of darkness, spent his final years in the shadows. He lost his house and his paintings. He was buried in a rented grave.

RESURRECTION OF VERMEER

His works were worthless when he died. In 1676 his widow paid the baker with two paintings.

Vermeer van Delft was sentenced to oblivion.

Two centuries passed before he returned to the world, rescued by the impressionists, hunters of light. Renoir said his portrait of a woman making lace was the most beautiful painting he had ever seen.

Vermeer, chronicler of triflings, painted only his home and a bit of the neighborhood. His wife and daughters were his models, and domestic chores were his subjects. Always the same, never the same: in the household routine, Vermeer, like Rembrandt, knew how to unveil the suns that the dark northern sky denied him.

In his paintings there are no hierarchies. Nothing and no one is more or less luminous. The light of the universe vibrates, secretly, as much in the glass of wine as in the hand that offers it, in the letter as much as in the eyes that read it, in a worn tapestry as much as in the unworn face of the girl watching.

RESURRECTION OF ARCIMBOLDO

Each person was a source of flavor, odor and color:

the ear, a tulip
the eyebrows, two crayfish
the eyes, two grapes
the eyelids, ducks’ bills
the nose, a pear
the cheek, an apple
the chin, a pomegranate
and the hair, a forest of branches.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, court painter, kept three emperors in stitches.

They celebrated him because they did not understand him. His paintings looked like amusement parks. And that was how the pagan artist managed to survive and live in luxury.

Arcimboldo indulged in the mortal sin of idolatry, exalting human communion with wild exuberant nature. His portraits, said to be inoffensive and playful, in actual fact were ferocious mockery.

When he died, art’s memory suppressed him like a nightmare.

Four centuries later, he was resuscitated by the surrealists, his belated children.

THOMAS MORE