第2章

When María de las Nieves Moran crossed from convent school to cloister to become a novice nun, it was to prevent Paquita Aparicio, her beloved childhood companion, from marrying the man both girls called "El Anticristo." Of course that is not the version known to history. María de las Nieves became one of "the English Nun's" last two novice nuns, and took as her religious name Sor San Jorge—Slayer of Dragons, Defender of Virgins. She did understand that she was living in a time that called for acts of selfless valor, and that by her own self-sacrifice she was eternally sealing Paquita's sacred vow not to engage in conjugal relations until she—María de las Nieves/Sor San Jorge—had first.

The upholding or breaking of that vow between two thirteen-year-old convent schoolgirls would not only influence the history of that small Central American Republic but also alter the personal lives of some of our American hemisphere's most illustrious men of politics, literature, and industry. What if we read history the way we do love poems, or even the life stories of sainted Sacred Virgins? What if love, earthly or divine, is to history as air is to a rubber balloon? I'm holding a balloon inflated more than a century ago, the nearly weightless globe still supple and warm with the human breath inside. What if I unknot it and let the ghostly air escape, or better yet, take it into my own lungs … ? (Maybe this balloon, at least for now, should be regarded as metaphorical.) This project, which you did not live to see completed, Mathilde, had its origin in an old newspaper photograph that, more than thirty years ago, first brought me to your door in Wagnum, Massachusetts. That photograph in the Wagnum Chronicle was a reprint of one that had appeared earlier in Le Figaro in Paris, and it depicted a Wagnum man bearing a remarkable resemblance to one of Latin America's greatest poet-heroes not just of the nineteenth century but of all time, and forever and ever. As a result of that visit, I've spent the ensuing years unearthing and writing this story of María de las Nieves Moran and the people who were closest to her.

One afternoon when they were both still students in the Convent of Nuestra Se?ora de Belén, Francisca Aparicio—Paquita, familiarly—summoned María de las Nieves to a secret rendezvous in one of the school pavilion's superfluous stone patios. She wanted to share with María de las Nieves the latest note she'd received from her terrifying suitor, smuggled into the convent by his secret ally and friend, the eminent Canon Priest ángel Arroyo: "… It won't be long now, Paquita, before we close the convents. Then you won't have anywhere to hide from me. See how love conquers all, mi dulce monjita?" Paquita laughed, though the unfolded note trembled in her hands. The patio smelled of rainy season mold and the urine of little girls who never made it, in the deep hours of the night, from the dormitories to the privies in the rear garden. "His sweet little nun!" she exclaimed. "But this man is so impudent and pernicious, little sister! Look what he calls me! Look at the diabolical messages he sends!" She spoke as if she'd just discovered a new, haughtily adult way of speaking, as if she should have been covering half her face behind a deftly wielded fan as she spoke.

Alarmed, María de las Nieves snatched the note from Paquita and hotly announced, "This I am bringing to the Headmistress General ahorititita!" (Double dimunitives, "little-little right now," usually signifying, in that local vernacular, more of something, in that case a more immediate immediately.) Paquita's hands reflexively lashed out to grab the letter back, and tore it in half. As if in mirror images, each lunged at the other's half of the letter. Standing stiffly inside their petticoats and identical ankle-length brown serge jumpers and high-collared white blouses, the interned students' uniform, they ended up entwined like Spanish gypsy dancers, slowly circling, each with one arm cocked behind her head to hold half a letter as far back as possible from her rival's reach and the other groping forward, fully extended, fingers wriggling—one girl, Paquita, with skin as white as a sliced almond and black eyes glossy with tears, already ample breast rising and falling, her abundant hair a swooshing avalanche of ebony ringlets down to her waist, her elegant, ladylike nose up in the air like her own avenging angel; and the other, María de las Nieves, damp-cinnamon-colored and skinny as a puppet made of hinged sticks, with no chest at all, and the thin, straight, rust-streaked hair of Indio-Yankee miscegenation, her small flat nose flared out with fury, and strikingly opaque eyes under slashing scimitar brows, swampy mud-hued eyes which, like those of an intelligent drunkard's, seemed always to be intensely staring outward, inward, and nowhere at the same time. Four hands now entwined into one writhing fist, they hovered face to face, until María de las Nieves let go, pushed Paquita away, and flung her balled scrap of the letter to the floor. Paquita staggered backward, righted herself, flopped down on top of it, and, looking up, was run through by María de las Nieves's look of cold pity and disdain.

"I don't need the letter, little-little leadhead. I'll just tell the Madre Headmistress about it." María de las Nieves spun to go, and almost crashed forward onto the floor as Paquita's arms closed around her knees. And so Paquita found herself kneeling before this daughter of an Aparicio family employee (an Indian, albeit a landowning one) begging, pleading: "But it's just a lot of wind! He always says things like that! Close down the convents? He couldn't even if he wanted to. Hermanita mía, you know as well as I that as long as the President's wife is our Madre Prioress's patrona …" and so on.

María de las Nieves's expression softened, turned thoughtful, until finally she said, "Bueno. But you have to promise me just one thing."

"Claro, claro, anything."

"You will remain a virgin until I no longer am one myself."

"Sí, sí, claro, I promise." And she grabbed and kissed María de las Nieves's hand.

That had felt like a return to the tortuous method of some of their childhood games, when Paquita had learned to fear María de las Nieves's occasional bouts of perversity, until she'd discovered that she could always reduce "Las Nievecitas" ("The Little-Snows") to a fit of remorseful giggles with a well-timed smile of bemused and tolerant love. But this time all Paquita's smile seemed to accomplish was to further incite her fanaticism: María de las Nieves grabbed Paquita's wrist, jerked her to her feet, and pulled her, almost running, back into the school and to the oratory dedicated to La Virgen del Socorro, she of breast and erect nipple bared to succor her Divine Infant with her Divine Milk. She pushed Paquita down onto her knees and kneeled closely alongside her to seal the vow in prayer. Paquita obeyed, but stole a sidelong glance at her childhood friend, certain that she would be met by a playful look of conspiratorial mirth. Instead María de las Nieves answered with a theatrical stare of righteous anger and sorrow, and Paquita bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. But in the next instant she was filled with fear: María de las Nieves roughly grabbed her by the wrist again, lifting the back of Paquita's hand to her own tear-soaked cheek to hold it there as if it were a handkerchief before thrusting it back against Paquita's lips with the command "Lick my tears!" No, said Paquita, she would not lick her tears. María de las Nieves whispered, "Francisca Aparicio, harlot of the pigsties, lick my tears or I will scream!" And Paquita audibly gasped.

Only when Paquita finally licked the other's salty tears from the back of her own trembling hand did María de las Nieves release her grip on her wrist, telling her: "It's a Holy Vow to La Santísima Virgen María and can never be betrayed without damning us both. So now he can never make you his wife. I swear that I won't free you from this until he's dead, which I hope will be soon—" And having expressed such a perhaps sinful desire, María de las Nieves quickly crossed herself, whispered an act of contrition, lifted her slender arms around Paquita's rigid shoulders, covered her cheeks with soft kisses, and murmured, "Ay my poor hermanita, now we even share each other's sins."

That was how the historic vow—heretofore unknown to history—was made. If the vow was broken, history and the lives of illustrious men would unfold one way; upheld, history and men would turn out, at the least, a little-little differently.

TWO YEARS BEFORE, Juan Aparicio had dispatched his daughter to the convent school in the faraway capital of the Republic to put her beyond the reach of her despicable suitor, a man nearly thirty years her senior, the new revolutionary Liberal government's governor and military commander of the department of Los Altos. María de las Nieves was also enrolled in the school by the Aparicios so that their daughter would not be too homesick, and to be the family's trustworthy informer. Also to advance both girls' educations and refine their feminine domestic skills and Christian virtues—it was well known that there was no better school for girls in all Central America than that of the Convent of Nuestra Se?ora de Belén. Juan Aparicio often told his daughter and María de las Nieves that no woman was beautiful unless the light of intelligence and learning showed in her eyes.

Los Altos was the country's most Liberal department, at least if the mostly opposite loyalties of the Indian majority were discounted, and the Aparicios, who lived in Quezaltenango, the provincial capital, were among its leading Liberal criolla families. They were dutiful Roman Catholics who even sent their sons to study with the Jesuits, there being no better educational option in Quezaltenango, but they worshipped the ideals of Progress even more. Nobody had been happier than they when the Liberal rebels, invincible with their new breech-loading rifles and Mexican sanctuaries over the border, triumphantly entered their forward-looking little city; Juan Aparicio was among the first to sign his name to the decree expelling those same Jesuits, those "Perpetual Assassins of Thought," and closing their school. But at least one trait set the Aparicios apart: despite their untainted Iberian heritage, they seemed immune to the native-born elite's faux-aristocratic disdain for hard work. When coffee was still the crop of the future, Juan Aparicio had established the family's first coffee plantation in the tropical wilds of the Costa Cuca piedmont with "his own bare hands," alongside a drafted army of Mam Indian laborers. Now coffee was the crop of the present, and Juan Aparicio's two-story Italianate mansion was one of the grandest in Quezaltenango, if not all Central America. When the Conservatives were finally driven from power in the capital of the Republic, the Aparicios were immediately comfortable with the Liberals' first President, the affably hedonistic General "Chafandín" García Granados, who declared that although the dark ages of more than three decades of nearly theocratic Conservative dictatorship had turned him into a revolutionary, he was adamantly not a Utopist. Naturally, the new Liberal governor and military commander of Los Altos, the Revolution's indispensable radical rabble-rouser, had become a frequent visitor to the Aparicios' mansion. During several of those visits the eleven-year-old Paquita had obediently entertained the legendary mestizo warrior, who was nearly forty, at the piano, her playing rudimentary but energetic. The Aparicios had been prepared to let themselves feel honored by a friendship with the man who, despite his scandalous and even criminal youth, had already made his mark on the history of the Americas on the side of enlightenment and progress. But the man of the people had thrown dirt on the family's generosity by setting his rapt heart and marital ambitions on their daughter, still in most pure and innocent girlhood. Paquita's father had resisted with tempered but resolute disdain. It was well known that El Anticristo had threatened Juan Aparicio's life for his refusal, and begun to make trouble for the family in countless irritating but ominous ways in the city in which the Aparicios had lived for four generations. Soon after dispatching Paquita and María de las Nieves to the convent school, Juan Aparicio went to live in New York City, in order, the two girls were later told, to establish a firm that would import his own coffee to the United States, and export Yankee products to Central America.

In the nearly three years since, Paquita had laid eyes on her reprehensible suitor only once, during her second year in the school, when the revolutionary government had convened public examinations of Nuestra Se?ora de Belén's interned students in order to judge whether the girls' minds and spirits were being deformed by the nuns' medieval regimens, and to decide whether the school should be allowed to stay open or immediately closed. So there he was that day, El Anticristo, who'd come all the way from Los Altos, seated along with President General García Granados and his wife, Do?a Cristina, a former student of the school and now the convent's most eminent patron. Madre Melchora the Prioress and Sor Gertrudis, also known to history as "La Monjita Inglesa"—the foreign nun was still the school's Headmistress General, though the following year she would be elected Novice Mistress—faces veiled, were the only two nuns present in the school salon that day. Paquita spotted him at the end of the long row of government delegates rising almost in unison from their chairs as she entered. He was still dressing as he had whenever he came to their house in Quezaltenango: in a short jacket—Paquita's mother said he wore it only because a military officer's frock coat made his legs look comically short—and straw jipijapa hat, though for once he wasn't carrying his notorious bullwhip. The hat, brim pulled low over his eyes, may have hid the donkey bristle of his haircut, but his pair of horizontal mustaches, square graying beard, and side whiskers could not obscure the sun-baked swarthiness of his mestizo skin or the strict thinness of his lips, though all contributed to his overall air of trying to hide himself behind an elaborate disguise, of which his martial stiffness and fearsome reputation were aspects. Paquita recited a sonnet by Quevedo—"Mírale el cielo eternizár lo humano"—and calmly solved all the arithmetic problems posed to her, was quizzed in geography and Spanish but not Latin grammar, spoke a few simple phrases in English, and performed a fairly brief, modestly enunciated oration on Christian virtues as they should be embodied in the home by a loving Christian mother and wife. One of her examination books was passed among the dignitaries so that they could examine her penmanship, as were samples of her needlework. There were no questions on theology or Church history. She was aware of his eyes fixed on her the whole time, his head tilted back as he stared through the shadow under the brim. Halfway through the exam she reflected, surprised, that she hadn't even blushed, as she always had in his proximity back in Los Altos, before she'd even understood what was happening. In detached wonder, she told herself, There is the man who by going to my father and declaring his intention to marry me made himself ridiculous and caused unending calamity for my family—and for María de las Nieves too, because if not for him, neither of us would be here, we would still be living at home, we would still just be day students at the Belemitas' school. At last nearing the end of her speech on the God-fearing wife and mother, she saw him extract a small diary and pencil from inside his jacket and drop his eyes as he jotted something down, releasing her from his stare, and only then did her face blaze with confusion and shame. When she was finished he was the first to erupt into applause, and all the others, rising to their feet, followed, which could have given the impression that both her performance and his approval had saved the school, which was not in the least true, because everyone knew that the school was in no realistic danger of being closed as long as the President and Primera Dama's own daughters were enrolled as day students. Later María de las Nieves told Paquita that when it was her own turn to be examined, El Anticristo dozed through the whole thing, head jerking up and down, finally snoring so explosively that she forgot the words to her own oration on a Christian woman's domestic duties and stopped and looked pleadingly at Sor Gertudis and Madre Melchora, while the President's wife whispered to her husband, who looked sleepy himself, and who finally lifted his long, languid, frock coat–clad frame from his chair, walked over to El Anticristo, and, taking his hat by the crown, picked it off his head and set it back down, waking him. El Anticristo had not liked that at all, darting a look like a snarling dog's at his master's retreating back; he collected himself and smiled at María de las Nieves, his even row of little teeth flashing between his whiskers like a piece of yellowed bone.

During the students' Wednesday afternoon walks to one or the other of the hilltop churches at either end of the city, El Calvario or El Cerro del Carmen, Paquita was always expecting her appalling suitor to appear at any street corner, standing among the clusters of schoolboys, clerks, and soldiers who regularly lined their route, whistling and even calling out some of the girls' names while the servants and lay matrons shepherding them scolded, Eyes down and forward, ni?as; she imagined him looming over the crowd on horseback to stare at her from under his hat. But he never turned up anywhere, not once. Yet hardly a day passed when she didn't receive at least a tersely affectionate or merely informative sentence printed in his own distinct hand, or even a message discreetly confided to her by a stranger, as just a few weeks ago, when the new barber who came to the school, pruning the knotted ends of her hair, had whispered a sentimental message of affection and salutation from "El Héroe of the Battle of Malacate." His most trusted emissary was still the rooster-faced Padre ángel Arroyo, whose breath always smelled of stale liquor and the heavy sweetness of the anise seeds he chewed to hide it. As a priest, he was allowed to visit her without chaperone in the interned students' visiting parlor. Padre ángel claimed to be a longtime intimate of Paquita's family, a ruse to which there was not a crumb of truth. During only Paquita's third week as a student there the priest had passed her a note through the visiting parlor's wrought iron bars, which she read later in the dense shade of the amate tree in a corner of the garden. The then-thirty-eight-year-old military hero of the Liberal Revolution, leader of its most radically anti-clerical faction, had written to his eleven-year-old paramour to inform her of the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Republic. So she'd known even before Madre Melchora, though the Company of Jesus had provided the convent with its preaching clergy and confessors, including the stuttering little Irish priest who came solely to confess Sor Gertrudis—La Monjita Inglesa—in English.

That night of the historic vow, Paquita penned by far the longest letter she'd ever written to her exasperating suitor—El Anticristo, as she often teasingly addressed him, even in a serious missive like this one, knowing that he liked it, knowing that she did not like him for liking it, reawakening that itch to feel furious with him, to scold and rebuke, so strangely, deeply pleasing—pouring out her confusion over the whole incident with María de las Nieves. Perhaps it will be better if for a little-little while you stop sharing your little-little secrets with me, she wrote. A few days later Padre ángel delivered his reply, rolled up into a thin tube, tied with a pale blue ribbon, and pushed through the visiting parlor's bars. In that letter El Anticristo assumed the comforting tone of a doting father, telling her not to worry, white dove of my heart, though it was precisely because of vows like that, so redolent of the Dark Ages and against nature, that he was going to send all those crazy humbug-stuffed harridans to the same place, far from our shores, that they'd sent the Jesuits, who'd been followed into exile soon after by all the other useless monks and friars of the male religious Orders, and also the Archbishop: Soon their vows and professions will mean nothing here anymore. Tell your misbegotten so-called sister, in my name, that if in the little time you have left there she causes you any more difficulty, I will make her pay. I think she knows what my bullwhip is made of.

Paquita was unable to resist sharing this letter with María de las Nieves as well. They met in a corner of the orchard, which was also off-limits to the students, though all knew the way in through a door in the storage rooms behind the school kitchen. Paquita watched tensely as María de las Nieves, holding the letter, read it over more than once. Smiling calmly, handing the letter back, María de las Nieves said, "Bien. You've become a heretic?"

"Claro qué no. Qué no, qué no, but I felt a duty to warn you."

"When he says in his own name, which name is he referring to?" María de las Nieves then asked, because she knew that before the war El Anticristo's name had been José Rufino and now he had changed it to Justo Rufino. Rufino the Just!

Paquita folded the note and tucked it inside her sleeve. When she looked up again, María de las Nieves was already walking away through the orange trees. Not even two weeks later María de las Nieves stupefied everybody by leaving school to become one of Sor Gertrudis's two remaining novice nuns. The gray-eyed, pale, and freckled Novice Mistress was by then already renowned throughout that city and even beyond as La Monjita Inglesa, though her heritage was not English but Irish and she originally hailed from Yonkers, New York. In her judgment, María de las Nieves, during her nearly three years as a boarding student, had revealed sufficient evidence of a vocation for a life of chastity, poverty, obedience, and prayer, and so the convent's twenty-three nuns voted unanimously to accept her, with dispensations for her young age and lack of dowry. That Sor Gertrudis had only two novices to train was a reflection of the decline all the female religious communities were experiencing during those years of insecurity and danger. The Liberal government might forbid any further taking of vows and professions any day. The death of the individual personality, so zealously and prayerfully sought by those interred in convents, being a kind of suicide, went the radical Liberals' reasoning, wasn't it immoral not to put a stop to it? For woman was formed to be man's companion, not to bury the treasure of her beauty and grace in the sad solitude of a convent.

Slightly more than half a century later, in 1927, in Madrid, Spain, Padre Santiago Bruno would publish his La Monjitia Inglesa, his hagiographic life of Sor Gertrudis de la Sangre Divina. The Spanish Jesuit's book provides the only known historical account of events inside that convent during the cataclysmic last year of the convents, including a description of María de las Nieves's veiling ceremony in the convent chapel:

Then how can religion be coming to an end in our Republic if He still summons this virgin to dedicate herself to a life of penitence for all our sins and to be His bride? Give thanks for Sor San Jorge's taking of her vows, for her humble obedience placates God's ire, and through her prayers and devotion our sweet little country's anarchy shall be tamed … So went Bishop Julian Ibes's sermon, delivered while María de las Nieves lay prostrate on the stone floor before the altar, legs straight and arms out from her sides (she was a shadow of the Crucifix, waiting to be filled in by His suffering). Ponder for a moment the immense difference between the place this Sacred Virgin today leaves behind, and the one to which she comes to live, where austerity shall be her constant companion, fasts her only banquets, mortifications and disciplines her only luxuries and gifts. What shall be her rewards? The tranquillity of a good conscience, and the eternal gratitude of pious patriots … This sermon of the soon-after-exiled Bishop Ibes, in the form of a clandestinely printed pamphlet, was swiftly circulated among those loyal to religion and the Conservative party. According to Padre Bruno, for many months afterward, in rich and poor Christian households, obedient little girls knelt before private oratories, altars, and domestic saints to say a prayer for the famous sermon's little novice nun, who had taken the name Sor San Jorge.

So maybe María de las Nieves's initial conception of her calling and vocation really wasn't so contradictory, in spirit if not in scale, to Padre Bruno's historical version after all. On that day of her veiling ceremony, as she lay, face burning with embarrassment, against the cold stone floor while Bishop Ibes pronounced his sermon, hadn't she wanted to leap to her feet and stare defiantly toward where Paquita and the other boarding students were sitting behind their own screened tribune and shout, Let's see if you dare to marry El Anticristo now?!

Bishop Ibes had then come down from the pulpit and, taking María de las Nieves by the arm, led her toward the rear of the chapel and the door to the lower-choir. Carrying her newly consecrated white veil in both hands, she walked with her eyes straight ahead, posture erect, shoulders back, a dreamy smile fixed upon her face—I am promised in marriage to Our Lord! (Oh, maybe that was the last time any of this had felt right!) Behind the lower-choir's opaque grille her new Sisters were intoning the Regnum Mundi in the very hushed manner of those trying to disguise the imperfection of their voices. She stooped through the lower-choir's door with an abrupt little stumble and the veil unfurled from her hands; inside the nuns closed around her, jostling to be the next to embrace her, covering her face with their foul-smelling kisses, a few with upper lips, even cheeks and chins, nearly as bristly as a man's. (It was horrifying, she would recall so many years later, describing that moment as she never could have then. I was a feed trough in a barn full of starved animals.) Prodded down onto her knees, she watched her hair, sliced from her head with a large shears, falling in thin splashes to the floor. Sor Gertrudis ordered her to keep her eyes closed while two of the most elderly nuns vigorously stripped the layers of her student uniform from her body for the last time, and then her new religious garments were being roughly pulled over her head, that first touch of scratchy wool against startled skin prompting a feverlike shiver that ran down her torso and made her nipples ache. She felt so transformed by the somber weight of her habit and the thick linen headdress tightly hooding her head, blocking her ears, swaddling her neck and chin, that she put her hands out for balance, even as the white veil was ceremonially lowered over her eyes and Sor Gertrudis intoned, "You no longer need to see, Sor San Jorge, because you will see everything in heaven." At that moment she'd wanted nothing more than a mirror. But mirrors were prohibited in the cloister; she was never to look at herself in a mirror again for as long as she lived. From that day forward she was to have no other mirror than her Sisters in Religion and the starry examples of holy and sainted nuns through history. The first book her Novice Mistress, Sor Gertrudis, assigned to her as spiritual reading was filled with accounts of the horrifying fates of young novices who, against the will of God, decided to return to the world. Those stories often came vividly to mind, causing her to squeeze her eyes shut and clench her fists while twitchy shudders ran all through her.

Because María de las Nieves was a probationary novice nun, wasn't she still free to renounce her vows? Poor and innocent belief! She owed absolute obedience to the Novice Mistress and to her Confessor, now the sole guardians of her conscience and will.

WHEN BOTH WERE still students in the convent school, María de las Nieves and Paquita were taught to manage the hypothetical expenses of a Christian household, paying with the nearly edible hardtack coins baked by the nuns for that purpose. The two girls had then elaborated those lessons into their own game of "shop"—they especially liked that English word, shop—always played around one or the other's bed in the dormitory. "Let's make a shopping in the shop." The bed was the shop and the merchandise was the assortment of personal belongings arrayed over it, though mostly these were extremely ordinary, in keeping with the school's strict regulations on personal possessions. Because in the dormitory all but the most necessary conversation was prohibited, it was a quiet and subtle game, requiring caution and tact. If caught, they would be forced to kneel on hard corn kernels in the school patio with their arms out straight and a rock in each hand for hours—or worse! But any Madre Monitor nun or student observing María de las Nieves and Paquita only saw the two inseparable girls standing as if in transfixed meditation or stupefied boredom or idly pacing around a bed upon which lay, for example, a pencil box, a tortoiseshell comb, and a catechism book. The "shopkeeper's" role was to decide what more desirable item each of these ordinary ones would be changed into, and that was really the heart of the game: a catechism book might be changed into a crystal bottle of Parisian perfume with India-rubber tube and bulb attached, and so on. The strolling shopper, circling the bed, having stopped to eye "the window," would almost always decide to enter—declining to enter ended the game immediately, though that had hardly ever happened. Whenever it had, it had always been María de las Nieves who'd declined, which is not as surprising as it might seem, for in this way she could compensate a bit for Paquita's much greater knowledge of luxury items; but it was also because she was prone to such seemingly bewildering rebuffs, as if really she disliked being treated with gentleness and affection and could endure it for only so long before she had to put a stop to it, sometimes grossly. Once inside the shop, if the shopper could not remember what an ordinary item had been turned into, she wasn't allowed to ask, not even for a hint. With a gesture, a raised eyebrow, she could ask the price, and with held-up fingers or even a whisper, a price would be given; they never haggled like people did in the markets; each girl paid from her own savings of real coins.

Paquita had shown María de las Nieves how to hold the perfume bottle in one hand and the pink little bulb in the other, squeezing it to make a misty cloud of perfume fly from the bottle's atomizer onto her neck like a kiss. She'd paid six centavos for that, and thereby acquired Paquita's worn, lambskin-bound volume of Padre Ripalda's Catechism.

When María de las Nieves became a novice nun, that slender volume was the only personal item from her secular life that she was allowed to bring with her into the cloister. It was kept inside the plain pine box at the end of her narrow bed of planks and straw-filled mattress, along with her breviary, book of meditations, the Contempus Mundi, her cilicio, and rosary beads.

Now she had been a novice nun for five months. It was the first Thursday after Pentecost, only weeks into what would be one of the rainiest winters in memory. In the cell she shared with the Novice Mistress and Sor Gloria de los ángeles, her sole sister novice, María de las Nieves had just awoken—before five, but well after four, as according to the Rule of the Order. Silently, in the predawn park, she recited the prayer points assigned by the Novice Mistress the night before and stepped to the end of the bed to begin dressing herself with profound Modesty, while giving thanks to the Lord, who guarded you through the night. Her religious garments lay folded atop the box. Crouched beneath her habit of night-dampened wool, she wriggled-hopped out of her sleeping chemise, reached for the sackcloth tunic folded atop the box, and wrestled it on. Only then could she straighten up and push her head out through the habit's collar, her arms down the sleeves. She pulled on her hood, pinned on her white veil, and knotted her black cord belt. She glanced across the darkened cell and saw Sor Gloria still struggling inside her habit like a headless, limbless beast, and that profane image provoked a silent puff of laughter that hung inside her like one small cloud in an otherwise leaden sky; a little cloud, she ruefully reflected, full of sin instead of rain. She lifted the lid off the box and reached inside for her manual of Meditation Points, but picked up Paquita's old catechism book instead and brought it to her nose.

Was it still a perfume bottle from Paris, or had it turned back into Padre Ripalda's Catechism?

Only You know the truth, my Lord, she dutifully prayed. Oh, please let it be a catechism book.

María de las Nieves's harsh and submissive new life in the cloister, during those first months, had passed like a deep dream in which she watched herself growing ever weaker and more infirm, slowly fading away like a mild patch of afternoon light on the forest floor. But just look at what a droopy and dejected little thing I've become in here, she admitted to herself one day, with an inward shiver of lonely truthfulness and self-pity. I, who in childhood was so brazen and sharp-tongued that even adults were wary of me! But did that mean her personality was dying? Shouldn't she rejoice that her future Bridegroom had decided so quickly to favor her? Still, whatever it was she was losing had yet to be replaced by even an inkling of the promised radiance of His divine love.

Every day she prayed: Please, my Lord, please let me feel something of what I am supposed to feel.

In the five months since María de las Nieves had become Sor San Jorge she hadn't seen Paquita Aparicio once, not even a glimpse, nor had she received any message from her, nor had she even heard her name spoken. She hadn't received any visitors from home either: not from her own mother or Paquita's mother or Paquita's older brother, Juan, who'd all occasionally come from Quezaltenango when she was a student; nor had she received any letters. As a novice nun she was forbidden all locutory parlor visits and all correspondence, even from her mother, for a year.

Every day she prayed also for some bit of news of Paquita. But it was obvious that she had no gift for prayer, or even any ability.

THE STORY OF how María de las Nieves had first come to live with Paquita and her family when both girls were six was a peculiar but fascinating one, and Juan Aparicio never tired of telling it. Over the years many people, in many parts of the world, would hear it from his own lips, and those listeners often remembered it, so that it spread the way a good traveler's tale does, routinely provoking head nodding and heartfelt commonplaces about fate and the way things can go in the American tropics, and sometimes even stirring imaginations in more private ways. How there had been a legend, or rumors, brought down by Indians to Quezaltenango, that far away in the mountains two women and a little girl were living on their own deep in the forest. The little girl had golden hair, one of the women had leathery black skin, and they spoke among themselves, the Indians claimed, in an unintelligible demon language. After a few years of hearing those stories, Juan Aparicio had finally hired a Mam Indian to lead him to the mysterious females. For more than a full day, and all through the night, they'd hiked across a terrain of forested ridges, mountain slopes, and valleys. When they finally arrived at the rustic little forest compound, they found a little girl standing alone in the dirt yard. A spotted fawn, tamely standing by her, bright brown fur nearly the same color as her skin, scampered away at the sound of the men's approach, and the girl turned and stared at Juan Aparicio so directly yet calmly that it was he who was startled. The scent of a still-smoldering cooking fire hung in the air, though there was no sign of the legend's other two women. The little girl wore a begrimed smock of coarse cloth, her hair was braided into numerous limp sprouts tied with rag ribbons, and she was puffing on a crude cigar of wild jungle tobacco. From one hand she dangled a strangely buoyant, elongated, yet gelatinous object, a sort of ghostly idol fashioned, it appeared, from some smudgily translucent material that it irked Juan Aparicio to be unable to identify. But the girl's stare was every bit as disconcerting. Her eyes had the dark radiance and mossy hue of deep forest light, steadily and fearlessly watching as Juan Aparicio slowly approached, speaking to her in a tone he might have used to soothe a panicked animal. She called out a burst of gibberish and held the idol out as if to warn him away with it—because of its size and the way she now balanced it upon both palms, oddly tremulous and almost floating, the thing, he realized, was nearly weightless. It appeared to have a little face painted on in red blood or perhaps cochineal paste, and long ears. Juan Aparicio had then needed a long moment to recompose himself. Meanwhile the little girl's expression, wide-eyed and grinning, had become one of excited hope and emotion.

"Muddah and Lucy gon git wadah, Dada," she screeched, as emphatically as before. "Yuh brin me panqueques made av sno like yu promis me, Da? Jaja! Look da rabid Pakal Chon make me!"

The demon language was English. The little girl's hair was not golden but a rust hue that would darken as she grew older. The idol turned out to be a plaything, a sort of anthropomorphic doll, made by one of her Indian neighbors from the inflated intestines of a peccary, ingeniously twisted and tied together into the crude form of a rabbit. Juan Aparicio was the first white man María de las Nieves had seen since the death of her father, Timothy Moran, almost three years before. Though she knew that her father was dead and where he was buried, in her confusion and excitement—probably abetted somewhat by the slightly psychotropic effects of wild tobacco upon such an immature brain—she also thought that her father had somehow returned from his long journey to New York City, where he was originally from. In New York City, her Da had liked to tell her, the little girls ate pancakes made of snow. When he'd named her Mary of the Snows, hadn't he been thinking of those special pancakes and the fortunate girls who ate them? In her fantasy she had always known that when her Da returned, he would bring her pancakes made of snow. So María de las Nieves herself would recall many years later in My Forest Memories, her brief unpublished memoir, handwritten in the simple style of a children's story and composed for at least one very young reader. (There it was one morning, inside a plain manila folder, laid upon the desk at which I'd been invited to work.)

So that was how Juan Aparicio found María de las Nieves, and the black servant from British Honduras, Lucy Turner, and a young Indian woman, Sarita Coyoy, mother of the girl and "widow" of the Yankee immigrant Timothy Moran, who'd brought them to that remote place, intending to start a coffee farm. Timothy Moran had barely even begun to clear the land when he'd perished, stranding his female dependents there. He'd died, Sarita Coyoy soon after told Juan Aparicio, from a mule kick to the stomach. At least he'd had the time to build his family their wooden huts first, roofed with durable oilcloth. All three females almost constantly smoked those hand-rolled cigars, their teeth stained dark with the juice. They grew their own corn, squash, and chilies, but were undeniably dependent on the frugal, bartering generosity of their Indian neighbors. They dressed in the rustically woven fabrics and clothing of the Indians of the mountain forests, but also in tattered remnants of the garments of civilization. Timothy Moran had left behind, among other personal artifacts, a burlap sack filled with bottles of Irish whiskey; the sack of bottles, buried in the dirt, was dug up by Lucy Turner on the day of the rescue. He'd also had a leather-bound two-hundred-page notebook in which, mystifyingly—though it is not the only mystery in this story that I was never able to solve—he'd scrawled only the names of four kinds of orchids in misspelled Latin, leaving the remaining pages utterly blank. In his trunk there was also a small collection of by then nearly rotted magazines, mainly Harper's Weekly and Punch, from which Lucy Turner had taught the little girl to read in English.

Sarita Coyoy said she was from the Yucatán, and that she'd met Timothy Moran when he was managing a henequen plantation there. They were all Christians, Sarita insisted, though they possessed no Bible or even prayer book. Her daughter had been baptized a Catholic, Sarita Coyoy said, just after her birth and just before they'd fled the Yucatán because of the murderous Indian uprising against foreigners and whites there, crossing the border into this country and settling first in Amatitlán. Many years would pass before Juan Aparicio would finally begin to distinguish what was true and what was false in the accounts that Sarita Coyoy and Lucy Turner gave of their pasts. Born on August 5th, feast day of Mary of the Snows, the remarkable little girl could speak and read in English and Spanish and also spoke an Indian language, Mam.

Juan Aparicio brought the trio back with him to Quezaltenango, where he was raising his own family, including a daughter, Paquita, the same age as the rescued girl. Lucy Turner was soon the Aparicio household's head inside servant, although Sarita Coyoy's position as an inside servant with few chores was even more privileged: she was given two rooms of her own next to the stables, where she lived with her daughter, who was otherwise treated by the Aparicios as nearly a family member.

Paquita and María de las Nieves together attended the day school of the Bethlehemite nuns in Quezaltenango and, during the weeks and months they spent at the Aparicio coffee farm, roamed and played as freely as if both had grown up together in the wilderness. Paquita freely shared her clothing—even her childhood dresses came from Paris—with María de las Nieves, and all her other belongings. María de las Nieves's isolated upbringing had made her a precocious reader, despite the limited reading material at hand there. Books were new to her, but she was immediately as comfortable with them as if in the mountain forests books in at least two languages had grown on trees. She never needed to be asked twice to read out loud, and often she didn't even need to be asked. Juan Aparicio began searching out suitable books for María de las Nieves in the hopes that she would impart to his daughter some of her bookish enthusiasm and habits, along with her familiarity with English, the language of Progress and the Future. María de las Nieves and Paquita did indeed spend many hours reading together. Subsequently Juan Aparicio sometimes even found his daughter secluded in some corner of the house with a book of her own, and then he knew that he was being rewarded for having taken the stranded females into his home. On rainy afternoons, whether in the city or on the farm, María de las Nieves and Paquita liked to climb into one or the other's bed and lie closely together under one of those coarse and hairy Momostenango Indian blankets woven from mountain sheep's wool, fastidiously but relentlessly pinching and plucking at the blanket, holding woolly tufts to their eyes, scrutinizing and discarding until finally one girl or the other found a single bristle of wool long enough to insert inside her nostril while twirling it between thumb and forefinger, tickling the membrane until her eyes began to water and all the nerves in her face began deliciously to contract and dissolve into one blissfully prolonged itch that finally became unbearable and she explosively sneezed. That pleasurable vice, their shared secret, once reawakened, often became insatiable. María de las Nieves and Paquita passed many rainy-season afternoons together under scratchy Indian blankets, sneezing until their heads ached and their limbs felt achingly hollow. How many blankets did they leave looking entirely moth-eaten, picked clean of fuzzy wool, until all that was left was the denuded weave underneath?

IT'S A CATECHISM book, María de las Nieves silently, decisively told herself. It's what He made it and intended it to be, not a perfume bottle. She laid the book back into the box and took out her volume of Meditation Points—Spiritual Exercises of San Ignacio, Adapted to the State and Profession of the Virgin Brides of Christ—and carried it over to the weak glow spilling from the niche holding the small Sanctuary Lamp. Both the Novice Mistress and Sor Gloria de los ángeles also stepped into that dim light, books open in their hands, though none spoke any word. Once dressed, read your Meditation Points, and meditate on them for a while. Pray until Prime. Birdsong and rooster clamor poured in through the still-darkened rectangular window high in the wall, along with the wet smells of night just beginning to lift off the earth. She tugged lightly at her hood, adjusting it under her chin and, rolling the tip of her tongue in and out through the gap in her upper teeth, found her place in the manual. The Meditation Points the Novice Mistress had assigned were on The Rule of Chastity, and its two poles: Love only your Husband. Do not love with particular friendship any living creature … Point One: Consecrate to God your body and senses, renouncing all bodily delight … Point Two: The supreme eminence of Virginal Purity. Virgins are Angels on Earth, just as Angels are Virgins in Heaven … Third Point: Ponder this Point. Virginity, perfectly guarded, is a prolonged martyrdom. Firstly, because of the temptations with which the Devil battles it. Secondly, because of the war waged inside ourselves, by our own body, soul, imagination, et cetera. Who will defend you from such enemies? The arms of the enemy are the same features and charms which God gave you for His delight. If you surrender, you are making war on God with the same beauty, health, graces, and charms which He gave you. And if He taketh them away, with a grotesque and contagious sickness, as He has done to so many, what will happen to you then? Ponder it well … A certain poor Indian anciana with her nose rawly devoured by mountain leprosy is what María de las Nieves now recalled, and futilely pondered … When the Novice Mistress shut her book, that was the signal for the two novices to follow her out of the cell and through the cloister to the upper-choir for Prime, Terce, and Mass.

PAQUITA, THAT NIGHT, as she did almost every night, had crept from the school dormitory to crawl into bed with the servant Modesta Sabal. Ever since she was a little child, Paquita had been crawling into bed to sleep with Indian servants. How could any girl, as a few of the other students actually did, prefer sneaking into the cloister at night to sleep in a hard, narrow bed alongside a bony or flabby old nun reeking of candle wax, incense, rancid breath, and dirty hair, or even one of the younger Sisters?

The approaching dawn had yet to penetrate the darkness when Paquita was woken in the shuttered, pitch-dark room by the door opening and air swooping in, striking her steamy skin like chilly ocean spray as she lay with her chin nestled between the sleeping Indian woman's hard shoulder and soft, tangy neck. Modesta's nostrils were clogged by a perpetual rainy-season cold, and the saliva flowing from her wide-open mouth had so soaked Paquita's cheek that when she lifted her head to stare blindly toward the door, that side of her face tingled in the air.

"Ni?as, today bring back three," said the voice speaking into the darkness. "Three Inditos, eh?" After a moment the voice repeated, "Three Inditos," and added, "Do you hear me, you lazy donkeys?"

Paquita went rigid with confusion and terror. The small, brittle-sounding voice belonged to Madre Melchora. She knew she was about to be discovered in the servant's bed, and horribly punished. But it seemed incredible for the Prioress to have left the cloister at such an hour, through the only door leading into the school ground, just to walk all the way to the servants' room to deliver that message.

Ordinarily Paquita and the interned students saw Madre Melchora only during religious retreats or during her visits to the school on the first Friday afternoon of every month, when she liked to make the girls run around the garden until they were out of breath, hitting at their legs and rears with a stick as they went past. Afterward she would sit under the garden's peach tree, improvising villancicos and other religious rhymes out loud, and challenging the girls grouped around her to improvise their own. During those Friday visits, Madre Melchora's small, lusterless brown eyes, which had the pretty shape of garlic cloves, would often brighten, and a faint blush would seep into her age- and austerity-scourged cheeks, and a thin smile of penetrating sweetness would animate her coarsened, though delicately shaped lips, and Paquita would remember that Madre Melchora really was the same exquisitely featured, adolescent aristocrat depicted in the portrait hanging in the school's visiting parlor, wearing a crown of fresh flowers on the day of her profession more than half a century before, when the Republic itself was still in its infancy. Back then, the professing of a new young nun, especially when she was from the wealthiest and best of families, with so much more to give up for God than an ordinary girl, had been an occasion for citywide rejoicing, with fireworks and elegant balls.

Paquita stared into the dark, not even daring to blink, listening to the pounding of her heart and to the sucking stewpot of Modesta's breathing as if it were also her own. But maybe this is a dream, she told herself. I'm dreaming with my eyes open. Even if it is a dream … Dreams lie, she'd learned in theology class, but some tell the truth. San Agustín's mother, Santa Mónica, had the gift of being able to tell when a dream should be ignored and when it was a message from God. If this was the Prioress appearing to her in a mystical dream, then Paquita knew why. Yes, it wasn't hard to imagine what might be worrying her. Of course I'll help and protect you, Madre Melchora, she silently promised, tightly clutching two fistfuls of her chemise. I'll do everything I can … She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, feeling how they ached almost as if punched from the pressure of building tears: I'm going to marry El Anticristo. I said yes a week ago. Not even my mother knows.

"Sí, Madre Reverenda. Three," said Josefa Socorro, the other servant, speaking from the nearby bed. So it really was the Prioress at the door.

"The most repugnant you can find, hija mía," said Madre Melchora.

"Of course, mi Madrecita."

The Prioress said softly, "Blessed be the Sacred Heart of our Most Holy Mother in Heaven."

And the servant responded, "Blessed be the Sacred Heart of our Se?or."

Paquita heard the rustle of the Prioress's habit as she turned in the doorway, the door quietly closing, and the soft click of the latch, gently lifted and released. She exhaled, but her relief was fleeting. The secret of her engagement to El Anticristo, which by day was often like a dangerous fairy tale silently and thrillingly telling itself in her very blood, felt now like the mouth of a bottomless cave inside her.

Only a week ago Paquita had hesitantly murmured yes in the confessional to her future husband's latest emissary, Padre Josefat Trevi, who guaranteed her a lavish wedding in the Los Altos Cathedral, despite Rufino the Just's strained relationship with the Church. The young, pink, utterly hairless, native-born diocesan priest came to the school twice a week only to confess the boarding students. "Because by then, Francisca," Padre Josefat had whispered, "your future husband will undoubtedly have ascended to the Presidency." It might be a matter of days, weeks, a few months at most. Everyone knew that the radicals of the Patriotic Junta had grown impatient with the slow pace of reforms, with the first Liberal President's appetite for compromise, his cozy friendships among the old Conservative elite. Back in February, El Anticristo had briefly assumed the role of Interim President while Chafandín García Granados was away at the head of the troops repressing a new Conservative-Jesuit rebellion in the eastern part of the country: only then—by the Interim President's irrevocable decree—had the remaining male monastic Orders and the Archbishop been expelled.

"He'll need you, Francisca, and we'll need you too, so that he doesn't go too far, so that you can intercede on our behalf when he does," Padre Josefat had continued. "You will be the Queen of Central America, Francisca!" The lowly diocesan priest looked like a pink India-rubber ball with round pinkish eyes painted on. Padre Josefat even lacked eyebrows. Were these priests who were allied with El Anticristo apostates? Or apostles of a more just Kingdom of God here on earth? Who was there for her to ask or confide in? Not a soul!

So her three years in Nuestra Se?ora de Belén seemed to have accomplished the school's stated mission after all: filled her with terror and love of God, and prepared her to be a modest, devoted, and virtuous Christian mother and wife—to El Anticristo. Yet she'd sworn to the Holy Virgin not to enter carnal relations until María de las Nieves, now promised in holy matrimony and chaste eternity to the Divine Redeemer, had done so first. The future was sometimes like a mirror in which her imagination exulted, delighted, or even wept, but now it was curtained in black. She silently prayed: You made me this beautiful for a reason. Madre Melchora was once as beautiful as I, and You made her beautiful for Yourself. So I was made for someone else. Perhaps I will never comprehend why.

Paquita would never forget Madre Melchora's portentous, predawn visit. Indeed, seventy years later, in the last letter she would ever write to María de las Nieves, her nearly lifelong friend and sometime nemesis, she would confide: Something inside my heart froze forever that night, mi hermanita. Guilt and terror like a splinter of glacial ice lodged in her heart, which her own long life of loves and sorrows would never thaw.

"But who could the third Indian be for?" Josefa muttered in the dark. "Surely it's not just an ordinary penance."

Modesta Sabal loudly snorted mucus in her sleep. She had slept through the extraordinary visit.

"Wake her, patoja!" Josefa lit the lamp by her bed, casting a light that filled the low-ceilinged little room like a dirty-gold, quivering liquid.

Paquita sat up and shoved the pretty young servant. Modesta woke gasping and sputtering, and Paquita leaned over and gave her a good-morning kiss on the cheek. Modesta's shining dark eyes always seemed to smile on the world no matter how she was awoken! Josefa and Paquita told Modesta what had just happened, and then both servants speculated out loud on what it could mean, and who the third Indio might be for.

"What do you mean, for?" asked Paquita. "What does she do with them?"

"Our Madre's purpose is most sacred, Se?orita Francisca," said Josefa. "But it is not for you to know."

The Prioress's unprecedented visit seemed even more ominous to the two convent servants than it had to Paquita. Every Thursday, near dawn—always after shooing Paquita back to her dormitory before the students were woken for morning Mass—Josefa and Modesta went into the city streets to look for destitute Indian men. Before, for as long as each had been a servant there, they had always had to return to the convent with just one Indian, but in February Sor Gertrudis had been elected Mistress of Novices, and had soon after convinced the Prioress to let her join in her weekly rite: from then on two Indians had been required. Now the Prioress had come all the way to their room in the dark to tell them to bring back three. Though they were just servants—las mandaderas, the only ones allowed to come and go from the cloister on errands—they knew that such abrupt changes in routine were only supposed to happen outside, and that inside the cloister, it was the serene timelessness and order of heaven that was to be emulated. So it seemed like one more sign that religion really was in danger of coming to an end in their world. But it was also one more sign of the growing influence of the foreign Novice Mistress over the Prioress. Madre Melchora del Espíritu Santo had been reelected Prioress every three years for nearly three decades without ever before having shown such favoritism, her love for her professed Sisters and Daughters in religion—as Padre Bruno acknowledged in his vida of Sor Gertrudis—as evenly dispersed, nourishing, impersonal, and unfathomable as the Divine Light and Dewdrops of Dawn.

"Grosera!" scolded Modesta, slapping Paquita on the shoulder, for she had just induced a magnificent sneeze, quaking the bed. The servants thoroughly disapproved of this business of making yourself sneeze with blanket hairs. Paquita wiped her watery eyes and nose with her sleeve, sat up, and blurted:

"The third Indio is for María de las Nieves." As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she knew they must be true. "Sor San Jorge, I should say." She'd wanted this last to sound lightly derisive, but her trembling voice betrayed her. Nothing filled Paquita with more unease than the thought that María de las Nieves was truly holy and favored by God.

"Santa Cecilia y Santa Rosa de Lima!" exclaimed Josefa. "I think not!" And she added a feminine growl of disdain that gladdened Paquita's heart. Josefa had the classic features of a jowly Mayan Queen, eyes like enormous dark seeds, sagging earlobes, fat lower lip lugubriously curled, regal anteater nose. She rarely smiled but when she did, as now, the effect was incredible, for Josefa was missing exactly every other tooth in both her top and bottom rows, and her every single intact tooth was situated beneath or atop a gap. It seemed impossible that such an arrangement of teeth could be accidental, but it was.

"You think not?" asked Paquita. "Why do you think not, mi querida Josefa?"

"Because that muchachita is a little devil. Everyone knows that."

"Apparently Sor Gertrudis does not know that."

"Pues síííí, ni?a. But Sor Gertrudis is very wise. She is destined to be Prioress."

"But Josefa, you just said—" She should try to hide how cross this conversation was now making her. "Josefa, then why do you think Sor Gertrudis has such a high opinion of Sor San Jorge? Last Friday, when she came to school with Madre Melchora, she told us that since entering the novitiate María de las Nieves has become like a little girl returned to a state of innocence. For such are her simplicity, humility, and obedience. That's what Sor Gertrudis said. What do you think of that?"

As all three contemplated those words, the long silence was broken by the startled clatter of another convent's bells—the Clarissas, now ringing their own dawn Angelus a few long blocks away.

"Then it must be so," Modesta said softly

Modesta began to work with her fingers at the sleep-knotted ends of Paquita's hair, which fell in loose, lustrous tangles to her tiny waist. Paquita pulled a handful of her tresses down over her eyes, pressing them beneath her spread hand while her tears soaked into them, seeping and falling in tart droplets onto her extended tongue, flavored—salty, sweet, bitter, and sour!—by the rose-petal, orange-blossom, and almond-oil mixture she worked into her hair every night before bed, and by the vinegar she rubbed into her face. She lifted her hand away just long enough to say:

"Because La Monjita Inglesa likes talking to her in English, that's how they became friends. That hardly makes María de las Nieves ready for sainthood, eh?"

When Paquita joined her schoolmates for morning Mass in the chapel, conducted by the convent chaplain Padre Lactancio Rascón, the black lace mantilla she wore over her head was her most recent gift from El Anticristo. Woven in Paris by the inheritors of the secret methods of the Chantilly lace makers beheaded during the French Revolution for having served the aristocracy, the shawl consisted of an intricate pattern of railroad tracks and locomotives pulling trains in and out of tunnels. So far the nuns hadn't noticed it, and Paquita, though she knew that Pope Pío IX had issued bulls condemning Progress, Modernity, and Liberalism, had dared not ask whether or not the mantilla counted as a blasphemy.

"THE ROME OF Central America" and "Pope Pío IX's Favorite City," these had been the Conservatives' civic-minded nicknames for their pious capital. Everybody knew that in the intimacy of his personal oratory in Rome, the Pope prayed every day before a crucifix carved in the former colonial capital, Santiago de los Caballeros, from the native wood of an orange tree by the native-born master sculptor Juan Gamusa. Irreverent foreign travelers inevitably remarked that the Conservative Citadel resembled a colossal convent; they marveled that a visit to a New World city, set down amid so much verdant abundance, could leave the soul feeling so penetrated by gloom. Yet it was one of the youngest capital cities in the Americas. Not even a hundred years had passed since the former capital, among the oldest, had been devastated by earthquake for the third time in less than a century and its surviving population, by royal decree, ordered to move to the nearly uninhabited Valley of the Cows to found and build a new city—along with the uprooting of several entire Indian villages to provide labor, to carry the rocks and rubble the forty-five kilometers from the old to serve as the foundation of the new. But the work of building a new city from scratch, interrupted by Independence and the constant convulsions of civil wars throughout the Isthmus, had proceeded with dreary slowness anyway, despite the seemingly inexhaustible supply of Indian labor. Another half century passed before the most essential buildings, public and ecclesiastical, were more or less completed, including the Cathedral, which had to wait twenty more years before it was finally provided with bell towers, a chaste neoclassical facade, and a mechanical clock face that still had no hands. But how radiant and blessed the city could look, when approached from the mountains and across the plains on a clear day, the domes and belfries of its thirty-eight churches, monasteries, and convents shining pink and gold in the sun!

Unlike Nuestra Se?ora de Belén's nuns—even the nuns who taught in the school were otherwise strictly cloistered—Josefa and Modesta went out regularly into the streets and markets of the city the Liberals had now begun to call "the Paris of Central America" and "La Peque?a Paris"; out into what the ecclesiastics referred to merely as "el siglo"—literally, the century, but also the world. And the century did seem to have been turned inside out, and upside down. Every day Josefa and Modesta saw or heard about some new outrage. Clowns costumed as priests entertained in the new state schools, sprinkling Florida Water instead of Holy Water from their hyssops, and dispensing pale marzipan cookies shaped like the Host in order to infuse children with disrespect for the mysteries of the Eucharist. Confessionals had been removed from emptied monasteries to the gardens of fashionable Liberals, where they served as flowering-vine-draped booths for coquetries and dalliances. The new military academy was situated in the emptied Recollect monastery; the new telegraph office in the former church of the Franciscan friars; the Bureau of Liquor and Tobacco in the Dominicans' vast old cloister. A new law was passed prohibiting clergy from naming their illegitimate children heirs to any church property or wealth whatsoever.

Josefa and Modesta wanted to believe that what they often heard was true: that because most Liberals had wives, mothers, grandmothers, and sisters who'd been nurtured and educated in girlhood by nuns, they would never dare to close the convents. Nuestra Se?ora's nuns, of course, had always had their own sources for keeping up with events in "the century": students, parents, visitors to the locutory parlor, patrons, including the president's wife, Do?a Cristina. They were resisting the daily sacrileges and threats, they always reassured their supporters, by the most effective means they knew: through prayer. La Monjita Inglesa's Spanish was flawed, and spoken almost entirely without articles. "Prayers stronger than men," Sor Gertrudis, voice ringing out, had reminded the schoolgirls during her previous Friday visit alongside the Prioress. That very conviction was the source of her fame.

When El Anticristo's marauding predecessor Serapio Cruz and his Liberal-rebel horde had seemed poised to conquer the city four years before, just weeks after their murderous sacking and burning to the ground of the departmental capital of Huehuetenango, Sor Gertrudis had placed a tiny tin rifle in the crib of the Divine Infant in the little oratory outside the sacristy, and prayed to Him to defend the city better than men could. For three days and two nights, the freckled foreign nun had fasted and prayed before the crèche, until word arrived that Serapio Cruz's head, fried in oil, wrapped in moss and oak leaves, and carried in a sack slung over a captive Liberal student's back, was being marched across the plains toward the city gates by victorious Conservative troops. The somber city had responded to that news with its greatest outpouring of public rejoicing since that set off years before by Pope Pío IX's declaration of the Immaculate Conception as church dogma.

The Archbishop was the first to call Sor Gertrudis "La Monjita Inglesa," at High Mass in the Cathedral the following Sunday, proclaiming her feat as equal in holiness to that of the nun whose prayer vigil had been credited by Cardinal Richelieu with the French victory over the British at the Bay of Biscay. Soon La Monjita Inglesa was known throughout the country and, credited with a miracle, was even prayed to—daily people pushed rosaries, medals, scapulars, mantillas, and other articles through the convent's revolving turngate with notes and names attached asking "the English Nun" to bless and return them.

But the defeat of Serapio Cruz was Sor Gertrudis's last battlefield victory. It was the Liberals' country now. Upon their triumph two years later, the exhumed head of he who in life was Serapio Cruz was granted the Church's most solemn posthumous honor: burial in the Cathedral crypt, alongside the Conservative dictator who had ruled the country for thirty years and whose Indian followers had begun calling him "the Son of God" when the former swineherd was still in adolescence and leading them into war with a personal mandate from the Queen of Heaven to drive out all foreigners and heretics.

BRING BACK THE most repugnant Inditos you can find, Madre Melchora had mandated. But Josefa and Modesta understood this to mean they only had to be as wretched in appearance as those brought before the Prioress and the Novice Mistress the week before, the week before that, and so on, and also sober, if only relatively so. Sober enough to promise suitably respectful, even fearful, comportment in the presence of the Prioress, the Novice Mistress, and whomever the third Indian was for—that is, no eruptions of violent, obscene, satanically heathen, or otherwise outrageous behavior. All of that had been known to occur anyway, because when bringing Indios, or indeed any men, including priests, into close proximity with nuns, you could never be too vigilant, no matter how docile or polite they initially, externally seemed.

The two mandaderas left through the convent door adjacent to the turngate, the nun who was Portress closing it behind; Josefa with a basket of hard-boiled eggs and bread rolls balanced atop her head, Modesta with a clay jar of warm, sweetened atole, ladle and stringed drinking gourds dangling. The dawn was so fog-thickened that it might as well have been night, for all they could see ahead and around them. Josefa and Modesta turned the corner to walk along the convent's long, windowless southern wall instead. A tallow street lamp still burned up ahead like a single ripe orange floating in the pearly-gray mists. The city's streets had originally been laid, in accordance with Spanish colonial policy, at slightly downward-sloping grades running east and west from the central Calle Real, so that rain and sewage would drain from the most elite neighborhoods down through progressively poorer ones. But many of the old clay drainage pipes and midstreet gutters were so clotted and collapsed by rot that during the rainy season some of the most important intersections, worn concave by traffic, turned into impassable pestilential swamps.

One of the portable bridges spanned the avenue they were walking toward, and Josefa and Modesta could hear the rumble of cart wheels, the clatter of hooves, the softly resounding thumps of so many sandaled and bare feet crossing the sodden wooden planks; also the domesticated and wild animal sounds of what could have been a fog-shrouded Noah's Ark passing up ahead, mixed with the cries of human babies. Passing down the avenue and over the bridge was a human stream of Indians on their way to the market behind the Cathedral, Indians from the villages outside the city gates, and from far beyond, bringing the city its food and labor.

Otherwise, the only signs that the city had begun to stir were the smell of pine-fat-kindling and cooking-fire smoke in the damp, night-flower-sweetened air; stripes of lantern light in cracked shutters. As the sun rose, the fog would lift too, and the city, as it had for two rainy weeks now, would feel lost under low gray skies that erased the usual horizon of mountains and volcanoes, creating the illusion that they were alone at the bleak top of the world, instead of in a lush valley plateau.

In front of the recently opened El Moro y el Oro tavern men lay prostrate; as they hurried past, Josefa and Modesta could see—chis!—faces completely blackened with ants. One drunkard had rolled across the muddy swath of street into the sewage ditch running down its middle. The stench of shit is as the sweetest aroma from heaven to one immersed in loving devotion to God. Sí pues, Madrecita, but not to those who would have to rouse El Hombre Caca to his feet in order to bring him to you. Taverns, cantinas, billiards halls and gaming rooms, and other by-the-glass liquor establishments opened weekly now, to say nothing of brothels, which before had been confined to a few easily avoidable alleyways and the proximity of barracks.

Josefa and Modesta turned left onto the unevenly paved avenue and, walking along the convent's eastern wall, merged with the market-bound traffic. Most Indians carried their wares on their backs, kept in place by straps across their foreheads. Women also balanced bundles, baskets, and jars atop their heads, and their daughters followed obediently behind, looking less like children than like diminutive women, dressed the same as their mothers, in long woven skirts and embroidered huipiles, and wearing necklaces and earrings made from red beads and punctured, now defunct coins bearing the image of the late Conservative dictator. The servants set basket and jar down on the sidewalk of the Plazuela Habana and stood scrutinizing the passing multitude for appropriate candidates.

Paquita had guessed right: the morning's third Indian was to be for María de las Nieves. Sor Gertrudis knew that her newest novice's first months in the novitiate had left her demoralized and full of doubts. She'd counseled María de las Nieves that her feelings of inadequacy were not only to be expected, they were even laudatory, so long as they presaged a true death of the personality and self. Rather than to a complete lack of vocation, the Novice Mistress ascribed her young charge's spiritual troubles to her immaturity and ordinary native indolence, stubborness, and pride. A girl had to grow up before she could learn to die. After much prayer, meditation, and discussion with both the Prioress and the nuns' Confessor, Padre Lactancio, she'd decided to guide María de las Nieves onto a path of rigorous penitential self-mortification—so years before, as a young Carmelite novice in Havana, Cuba, Sor Gertrudis herself had been guided—one that would elicit authentic reactions and emotions one way or another, impossible to fake, if also difficult to manage. That morning's session in the lower-choir with Madre Melchora's Thursday Indians was to initiate María de las Nieves's harsh new regimen.

It didn't take long for the servants to collect their three Indian volunteers: corpulent Antonio Kaal, a goiter the size of a partridge under his chin, who'd come to the city in search of a son who'd joined the army two years back and hadn't been heard from since, and Domingo Toc, wearing his hangover like a reeking suit made of broken eggshells. The third Indian was Juan Diego Paclom, and his name was destined to leave at least a trace of his existence in recorded history. Only five years later he would die in the mountains of Momostenango, a rebel chief fighting against the Liberals in the doomed Indian uprising known as the War of the Caves. By then Juan Diego Paclom would be a full-fledged chuchkajawib, or "mother-father" shaman-priest, one of those with the especially dangerous ability, albeit useful in wartime, to summon the ancestors from within sacred mountains during séances in pitch-black caves in order to send death to their enemies. But that morning, when Modesta and Josefa plucked him off the street, he was still a young aspirant, fulfilling the pilgrimage to which a dream had called him, so that he could begin his apprenticeship: searching for the woman who would be his Spirit Wife and to whom he was to bring the gift of a lamb. A Spirit Wife was more important than a real wife because without one he could not commence his training, neither in the hard world at hand nor in the spirit one. Indeed, all the providential and calamitous signs that Juan Diego Paclom was destined to be a chuchkajawib were present. Lightning spoke in his blood (flashing, forking-twitching). Mundo, the mother-father Earth, kept trying to clutch him to her-his breast, and thus he was always stumbling and falling; earlier on his long journey to the capital, he'd broken his foot.

When the servant Modesta saw the young Indian limping along, hair falling to his shoulders around his slender, solemn face, and leading a scrawny lamb at the end of a knot-repaired length of rope, one of his feet filthy bare and the other wrapped in mud-caked rags, she immediately called him over: "Want some eggs and bread? A drink of atole?" Mixing Cakchiquel, her own first language, with Spanish, she explained, as she did to the other candidates, that Madre Melchora, a very holy woman, had invited him to her home. La Madre had a supply of paid Indulgences issued by the Santísimo Padre Pope Pío IX, and she would give him enough to shorten his stay in Purgatory by thirty days. Did he understand? Did he know what Purgatory was? Josefa exclaimed: "Thirty fewer days of waiting and torture!"

Until they were admitted by the Portress, Sor Inés de la Cruz, into the convent's dimly lit reception vestibule, Juan Diego Paclom had never even seen a nun before. The Portress's faceless black executioner's hood terrified him, but her cheerful voice singsonged from inside: "Cálmate, Don Se?or. Our visitors always come out alive." Quill pen held in three poised fingers, the Portress recorded the three visitors' names in her book with delicate flourishes, demonstrating an artistry that was the result of countless hours of practicing penmanship in the dark. (The names can be confirmed in the Archiepiscopal archives, in one of the bound volumes in which Nuestra Se?ora de Belén's Portresses inscribed the names of every visitor, including every one of Madre Melchora del Espíritu Santo's Thursday Indians from 1847 to 1874.) The Portess told Juan Paclom that he had to leave his lamb at the door because animals were not permitted inside; she sternly warned the three Indians that as long as they were in the cloister, they had to keep their eyes fixed on the ground, or God would be angry and would cancel their Indulgences.

The three volunteers were led by the two servants through the gloom-light of the cloister, down corridors like tunnels, to the lower-choir. Inside, on the floor, were three earthenware bowls as if for animals to drink from. Furtively raising his eyes, Juan Diego Paclom saw an ornately carved and gilded altar built around a lavishly dressed Our Lady, its niches filled with objects made of precious metals and gems, and many smallish bearded santos who he knew must be the true owners of this house of holy women: within such images the most powerful spirits often resided. The pretty, dimpled servant caught his eye, made herself look cross, touched her eye with a finger, and jabbed it down at the floor. When he heard movement in the lacquered wooden shell of the room's spiral staircase he raised his eyes again and saw the first monjita coming into view around its curve, slowly and unsteadily, as if descending on stairs of floating logs. Her black veil was pulled back around her white hood: she had a parched, ancient face and feverish, small brown eyes. She was followed by another descending nun, and he glimpsed her large foot in stocking and sandal kicked out from under her hem as she stepped off the bottom step—Indio! Bajo ojos! blasted her strangely accented voice, and he dropped his eyes again and raised them just in time to see the hem of a third monjita's habit alight onto the floor, so oversized it hid its wearer's feet completely. And then the Indian with the goiter was summoned forward by the pretty servant to stand beside one of the bowls, and the broken-toothed servant helped lower the ancient Madre onto all fours on the floor. None of what happened next bore any resemblance to the dream Juan Diego Paclom had faithfully followed to this room—the Indian fearfully blurting, "No!" the pretty servant scolding, "Ishto! Por Dios! Shhhh!" and then the ancient Madre kissing and washing that Indian's feet, and the strange words she pronounced—but he knew that often it was a dream's elusive essence one had to decipher and heed, rather than its deceptive details. The big-foot monja who'd shouted at him, her massive face so pallid and speckled it looked painted on, eyebrows like daubed licks of flame, followed, and she performed the distressing ritual with the second Indian in the same manner as the first, only more energetically. Even before he was called, Juan Diego Paclom swung his low gaze toward the crooked folds of the brown habit stepping toward the third bowl. And she also lowered herself onto all fours, and now it was a white veil, not a black one, blocking his view of his own feet: his bare shredded foot caked with layers of dirt, toenails cracked open, and the other rag-wrapped, stinking with infection, steadily throbbing with pain. How skinny she was, inside her hanging folds of brown wool! Her oversized sleeves puddled on the floor, hiding her wrists, but her hands emerged, propped on their heels, the young, bitten, brown fingers tensed as if ready to scratch. The white-draped head slowly sank toward his feet, but then stopped. He felt her veil brush against his bare foot like a trickle of chilly water. Was that her breath on his skin? He felt sick with shame and suspense. Were those her lips, that soft little pat? He heard a faraway groan in her throat. "I am lower than the lowest," went the girlish smatter of a voice, "slave of the slaves." They were the same words the other two monjitas had spoken, though by the end she was nearly inaudible. The second nun again spoke commandingly: "Sor San Jorge …" but everything else was in an incomprehensibly barked gibberish language.

For a long moment the ni?a nun held herself perfectly still over his feet. Then her body shifted decisively backward, though she did not lift up her head enough for him to be able to see her face; with shaking hands, she began to unwrap the mud- and blood-stiffened rags around his injured foot, at first tentatively, then with firm tugs. He lifted his foot off the floor to help her. Cool air enveloped the swollen foot's pain-inflamed skin and chilly lightning ran up his spine and shuddered warmly down into his groin as slowly his penis began to grow. The second nun spoke again—"Besar heridas como besar heridas de Jayzoocristo, Hermana!" (Kiss wounds as if kiss wounds of …) And then the ni?a nun did the unforgettable thing. She raised her face just enough so that he saw the thin arcs of her brows beneath the white band, and a pair of tear-glazed, molasses eyes met his own with a direct and desperate girlish honesty that swept through him like an unfathomable caress, binding her to him in befuddled complicity. ("I can still feel this thing that she left inside me, this mute little stone that knows everything," Juan Diego Paclom would assert, five years later, to his fellow doomed rebels in the War of the Caves. "I knew she was the one I had come looking for, my Spirit Wife …") The ni?a monjita held his gaze a paralyzing moment longer. Then she lowered her head, her lips, to his broken stinking foot, and did what that other nun had just commanded her to do.

HANDS CLASPED BENEATH her chin and tongue out like a thirsty cat's, María de las Nieves was following several paces behind the Novice Mistress as they returned to their cell. She felt just as she had as a little child whenever her mother had tried to make her vomit up the sickness in her stomach by tickling the back of her throat with the rancid tip of a rooster feather dipped in castor oil. Ahead in the dim light of the corridor, a crimson-glowing lamp in a niche marked the draped entrance to the Chapel of Death. Whenever she passed this way she always succumbed to a brief, inwardly spiraling wonder, as if the corridor were dissolving beneath her feet from stone paving into one made of time running on and on: In seventy, sixty, fifty years, or much sooner, I too will be carried into the Chapel of Death … And where would Paquita Aparicio be? Would she ever know what María de las Nieves had been made to do that morning at that obscene Indio's wretched feet?

Eyes fixed on the trailing hem of the Novice Mistress's habit, she dropped her hands and feverishly scratched through layers of coarse wool and sackcloth at an outbreak of ferocious itching in her rash-smeared skin while silently reciting an act of contrition over the pleasure found in scratching. She was startled by the nearby bleating of a lamb—because animals have exposed genitals, openly fornicate, and often overtly invite touching (petting, stroking), their Constitution forbade domesticated animals inside their cloister, though there were small entrances cut into the full-sized doors of the food storage rooms so that cats could come and go hunting rodents; it wasn't even uncommon for a nun to wake deep in the night to the purring weight of a cat or even kittens nesting atop her head; the truth was that cats were everywhere … The Novice Mistress seemed not to have even noticed the bleating; her bearing and pace were unaltered. They had entered the corridor running alongside the square garden of the professed nuns' cloister, its four sides lined by semicircular arches. Though doing so was prohibited by the rule governing the manner in which a nun should return to her cell from the choir, María de las Nieves turned her head to the side far enough to see past the edge of her veil. Just beyond the flower bed of glossy red anthuriums planted in the shape of the Sacred Heart stood a small grove of banana trees, the dark emerald shadows within beckoning like the secret entrance to a subterranean world—

"Sor San Jorge!"

Caramba! She pulled in her tongue and snapped her eyes forward and found Sor Gertrudis looming in her path like an enormous draped statue. A few more steps, they would have collided. She raced through a horrified act of contrition for having profaned their holy house with that silent caramba of any lost girl of the world or any muleteer—no better to use a seemingly innocent exclamation like camarón! because God would know you really meant caramba and not prawn—and, gaping up at her teacher's broad, freckled face, said,

"Yes, Mudder. Oh, I am sorry, Mudder."

But the Novice Mistress's placid gaze, as usual, hid her feelings as completely as headdress and veil hid her fiery red hair. Itching all over, wan with defeat, María de las Nieves waited; and felt a weak pang of clinging love, an almost irresistible—and, of course, forbidden—urge to embrace her Nana Madre Gertrudis, to bury her face in her woolly habit and dissolve in a flustered, exhausted little girl's tears.

"You were, Sor San Jorge, so deep in contemplation of this morning's exercise that you forgot yourself?" The Novice Mistress's voice was flat and distant.

María de las Nieves thought for so long, so fruitlessly, about how to answer this that Sor Gertrudis finally broke the silence anew: "Your thoughts, Sister."

"Gee, Mudder, I dunno whadda say." She lowered her hands, busily whirled them in front of her chest, and said, "It was … Gee!" She shrugged helplessly.

"That's all, Sister. Gee?" The Novice Mistress's gee fell like a heavy drop of cold soup. María de las Nieves's father's native New York Bowery, primary source of her emphatically heaved gee and also Mudder (though Lucy Turner, the servant from British Honduras, had always pronounced it "mother") was a world apart from the genteel Protestant Yonkers of Sor Gertrudis's upbringing.

"Yeh, Mudder." Something else she might say dawned on her and she almost floated up onto the tips of her toes as she hurried to get the words out: "I'm not wordy of such a gift, Mudder Gertrudis! Oh, so unwordy!" Oh, perfect!

"Well, that is at least a thought, Sister," the Novice Mistress finally replied. "Unlike simply gee. Which is not actually a word, but an ignorant yelp. Most likely derived from a blasphemy. It's better when you do your thinking out loud in Spanish, mi vida."

The other nuns always used such everyday endearments, but the Novice Mistress never did. María de las Nieves, stunned to the core, had to stop herself from grinning.

"By visible things do we come to the knowledge of the invisible, Sor San Jorge," the Novice Mistress continued, assuming her pedagogical tone, her eyes as blank as those of stone angels. "Our Husband can only reach us via our senses, and via that which we know how to perceive and comprehend. And so we need our senses and our minds to die, so that they exist only for Him."

They resumed their march. María de las Nieves (Sor San Jorge) and the other novice, Sor Gloria de los ángeles (Immaculada Concepción Loreta Lucena) shared the Novice Mistress's cell—only the Prioress's was larger—in a far corner of the professed nuns' cloister. The smaller, separate, prettier novices' cloister, reached via a short passage off the patio behind the refectory kitchen, stood empty now but was maintained as if the nuns perpetually expected it to fill with white-veiled young virgins tomorrow. Every morning the vacant cloister's kerosene lamps and candles were lit and every evening before the Great Silence extinguished by one or the other of the two novices; daily, the two girls swept, mopped, and polished there, and picked flowers from the garden for its little chapel and another bunch to be blessed by the Prioress and delivered to the President's wife, Do?a Cristina, at her home; every morning but Sundays and solemn feast days they followed the Novice Mistress inside for their three-hour novice class, and returned in the afternoon for their spiritual reading.

To Sor Gertrudis, her only two novices, both being formed in religion by herself, were the first true daughters of the austere "Reform" of the convent's Constitution that she had been patiently planning and working toward for years. Even more so than a Vicaress, who led the nuns in prayer in the choir, a Novice Mistress, especially if she was able to shape an entire generation or two of new nuns, was usually regarded as next in succession to become Prioress. But now that Sor Gertrudis could finally foresee the day when she would be able to implement her Reform, the convent, all the convents, were faced with the threat of closure. It was as if her own and the Liberal radicals' opposite ambitions had been inching in tandem for years toward a day of reckoning that loomed so closely now they were living in its inscrutable but all-darkening shadow.

Converted in Yonkers, New York, to the One True Religion at the age of nine, Sor Gertrudis (back when her name was Anne Louise Rowley) was sixteen when she realized that what she most desired in her convert's zeal was a contemplative choir-nun's absolute forsaking of the world. The Vicar of the New York Archdiocese, a Cuban priest and seminary professor exiled from Cuba for his antislavery views, had offered to help the articulate and tenacious young convert with ecclesiastical-red hair. His cousin was Prioress of the Carmelite Convent in Havana, and that Order had a tradition of welcoming converts: their great founder, Santa Teresa de ávila, was herself from a Hebrew converso family. The Havana Barefoot Carmelites were renowned for the rigor and holiness with which they pursued the ascetic Teresan ideal in the middle of that most sinful, sensual, and pagan of cities, still under the rule of the Most Catholic King of Spain. Despite the torrid and humid Caribbean climate, they wore coarse, heavy wool habits. By the age of twenty-five Sor Gertrudis de la Sangre Divina—she'd taken that name for the German saint and mystic celebrated for her devotion to the pulsating, flaming, bleeding heart of Jesus—had been carried by fevers to the brink of death three times. The passion with which she scourged herself in order to love God better so shattered her formerly robust constitution that her Confessor and Prioress forbade her anymore mortifications, even non-bloodletting ones. By then a persistent inner whisper was already beseeching the Yankee nun to seek transfer to a sister convent where she could give her Lord more pleasure. Why did that voice keep repeating, like mosquitoes covering her soul with inflamed little bites, the obscure names of the tiny republics of Central America?

Permission for Sor Gertrudis's reassignment was granted. Disembarking at Livingston on the Atlantic coast, she made her way, face and hands hidden from view beneath layers of capes, blankets, veil, and gloves, in the company of a small group of travelers, by riverboat and mule train, through jungles, quicksand trails, and burning plains, before finally ascending to the chilly high plateau of the Conservative Citadel. The Carmelite convent there had a reputation as the strictest in the world; Sor Gertrudis never found any reason to doubt that this was true. She spent the next eight years there plunged into an impenetrable spiritual lassitude—the most severe spiritual crisis she would endure in all of her long life in religion—that was rooted in her guilty and terrifying conviction that that convent couldn't be made any more perfect or austere without turning every last one of its nuns to stone. One day the Carmelite Prioress mentioned that the Prioress of Nuestra Se?ora de Belén was expanding her community's mission to the educating of girls wealthy and poor, her teaching nuns assuming their new duties without any slackening of their vows or cloistered reclusion. Upon hearing the name of that convent for the first time, Sor Gertrudis understood her destiny. For fate often reveals itself among monastics as it does among secular lovers: a name speaks to us, and we feel compelled to hide that name away in our heart, where we find that a nest of love has already been prepared and is waiting, and we forget that just a moment ago everything had seemed so dull and hopeless.

Sor Gertrudis had little trouble arranging her transfer to a new Order and convent. Once more, and in the firm belief that it was for the last time, bundled and wrapped, the future Monjita Inglesa broke cloister to set foot in el siglo for the walk to Nuestra Se?ora de Belén. Though the walk was brief, during it, according to Padre Bruno, Sor Gertrudis was lastingly pierced by a sense of the world's desolation.

The former Carmelite found much to busy herself with in her new convent, and was soon vigorously restored to the certainties of her faith. Madre Melchora appointed her Mistress General of Boarding Students, her first task being to teach the girls to prefer sleeping in the new dormitories of the just-expanded school rather than in the nuns' cells. One incandescent night, while praying, Sor Gertrudis conceived a Reform of the convent's Constitution, which she wrote down in Latin. During the Archbishop's inspection visit, she offered him her new book of laws and customs. The prelate concurred that it was indeed divinely inspired, but, without a doubt, too strict and austere for her Sisters. He counseled prayer and patience and told her that she would recognize her moment when it came. Sor Gertrudis had been waiting for eleven years.

FOR THE PAST week, María de las Nieves had been reading the vida of Sor María de Agreda during her afternoon periods of directed study in the novice cloister library. Nothing she had ever read before had so impressed or stimulated her, or awoken such concentrated yearning. In deep prayer trances, Sor María de Agreda had traveled from her convent in Spain to the other side of the world, to remotest New Mexico, where she went among the heathen tribes, converting souls, teaching catechism, inspiring the Indians to go in search of Spanish priests to come and baptize them, walking hundreds of miles, for days and weeks, often across the territory of the Apache, unredeemed and murderous spawn of Satan. Sor María was often wounded on these missionary journeys, and more than once she received holy martyrdom from our Lord. Yet because she was in both places at once, in New Mexico without leaving her convent in Spain, she never broke her vow of perpetual cloister.

When Sor María de Agreda's mystical travels began, María de las Nieves told herself, she was just an adolescent novice, like I am now. That was almost three centuries ago. But I doubt I'll be elected Abbess, or Prioress, by the age of twenty-four, like she was. More than two months had passed since María de las Nieves had for the first time taken part in Madre Melchora's Thursday Indian ritual—she'd obediently done so every other Thursday since, alternating with her sister novice, Sor Gloria de los ángeles.

Of course Sor María de Agreda had told her Confessor about her missionary exploits, and soon, all over Spain, people had heard of them. Padre Benavides, the director of the Franciscan Missions, was dispatched by his Spanish superiors to find and investigate the tribes the miraculous nun was said to have visited. The Indians told him about the beautiful girl in blue robes who came down out of the sky and went among them preaching. Padre Benavides said that he'd even found rosaries that the Spanish nun had distributed among the Indians. When the Franciscan friar returned from America he went directly to Agreda to interview the young nun. She has a beautiful face, Padre Benavides wrote in one of his reports to his superiors, very white, although rosy, with large black eyes. Her habit is just the same as our habit. It is made of coarse gray sackcloth, worn next to the skin, without any other tunic, skirt, or underskirt. Sor María de Agreda was able to describe in detail for her visitor many of the places they had both been to in New Mexico. My dear Fathers, wrote Padre Benavides, I do not know how to express to your paternities the impulses and great force of my spirit when this blessed Madre told me that she had been present with me at the baptism of the Pizos and recognized me as the friar she had seen there.

Padre Benavides's reports on his encounters with Sor María de Agreda and her visits to the Indians in New Mexico, printed in many languages, were widely read, eventually drawing the attention of Pope and King. A century later in the Bethlehemite monastery in Santiago de los Caballeros, Fray Antonio Labarde wrote and published his Vida de Sor María de Agreda, containing lengthy excerpts and descriptions of those reports, as well as of the nun's own writings; this was the volume in which María de las Nieves was now immersed. Of the several provocative parallels between her own life and that of the mystically bilocating Spanish nun, the one concerning her habit seemed far from the most remarkable, but María de las Nieves also wore prickly sackcloth against her skin, a sackcloth tunic beneath the rough wool of her habit. That this was a constant mortification was evidenced by the rashes and sores, some infected, that now covered her torso. The past months' regimen had not only worsened some of these infections but had drained her body of strength while slowly poisoning her blood; she was exhausted and anemic from the agonizing lack of sleep, the aching hunger of regular fasts. She shivered constantly with chills, even on the rare days when the afternoon sun came out, when she could sit in the garden or orchard for a while, steaming inside the bearskin of her habit.

The old, desiccated vellum-bound volume and its moisture-stained, partially eroded pages lay open on the library table between María de las Nieves's propped elbows while she hunched over it, hidden inside her veil, one hand cradled against her nose, the other propped visorlike over her eyes. She had pulled a perfect, nearly straight, inch-long fiber of wool loose from her habit and, pinching it between rolling thumb and finger, had worked its delicate point deep inside her nostril, and was expertly tempting a sneeze, though without distracting herself from her reading.

Three barred windows high in the wall overlooking the cloister garden let in the gray afternoon light. Now Sor Gertrudis sat at one end of the table, her freckled brow furrowed in concentration, an index finger tracing the lines of Latin text in a theological treatise. Sor Gloria de los ángeles, assigned Padre Nierenberg's The Temporal and the Eternal, sat nearly opposite, gaping down at her open book, her lids, as if finally relinquishing their long struggle to stay afloat, slowly and peacefully sinking over the reddish jelly of her sleepless eyes beneath the golden shimmer of her brows, while her hands absently caressed the purring cat on her lap.

From childhood, wrote Padre Benavides, Sor María de Agreda felt great grief for those who are damned, and particularly for the heathen, who, because of the lack of light and preachers, do not know God, our Lord—. María de las Nieves sneezed, deliciously, into her hand, and so loudly that the cat in Sor Gloria de los ángeles's lap woke and sprang to the floor.

"Jesucristo," said Sor Gertrudis, flatly, without looking up from her book.

"Jesucristo," repeated Sor Gloria a moment later, whose drowsy voice was softer than a dove.

María de las Nieves remained hunched and rigid, soaked palm clasped over her nose and lips, blinking back tears, waiting to see if the lingering sensation would resolve itself suddenly into another sneeze, as often happened. She dropped her hand and hoarsely intoned, "Blessed be His Name, forever and ever." The cat, slate gray, yellow-eyed, having streaked partway across the floor before stopping in its tracks, was glaring over its shoulder, back arched. Such explosive sneezes almost always seemed to set off an aching echo in the very marrow of her bones, and María de las Nieves let her arms hang loosely at her sides until it passed. She wiped her hand on her sleeve, turned a page of Fray Labarde's book, and began furtively groping and plucking at her habit, along the underside of her thigh, hunting another perfect piece of wool, pausing to scratch her rashes through the fabric. But another sneeze rocked her as she turned her face into her shoulder just in time and she heard the cat hiss and the rapid thumping of its sprint toward the door, which was closed.

"God is sending you a catarrh, Sor San Jorge," added Sor Gertrudis, after the usual obligatory exchange.

"Yes, Mudder, indeed maybe He is."

The Novice Mistress said, "You know that our Lord does not like us to be delicate, Sister, but please make sure that you don't sneeze onto the book. It is one of the few books in this library that was rescued from the rubble of our first convent in the old capital. Our predecessors must have loved it very much."

SIX WEEKS EARLIER, in June, El Anticristo had finally ascended to the Presidency of the Liberal Republic, triumphing over the incumbent in a constitutional free election from which Conservative candidates were excluded. The transfer of power was peaceful. Soon after, the former President's wife, Nuestra Se?ora de Belén's most devoted alumna and patron, met with Sor Gertrudis and the Prioress in the latter's office, decorated with large, dark oil portraits of her predecessors and other religious figures and scenes. Do?a Cristina had come to deliver the startling message from the new ruler that he hadn't forgotten the excellent performance of the students at the public examinations that he'd attended in the convent school so many months before. Would Madre Melchora and the famous Monjita Inglesa be willing to advise his government in the establishing of the new state schools for girls?

"Then the convents are saved?" asked Madre Melchora, withholding her answer. Do?a Cristina said that she suspected that the new President's anti-clericalism had already been sated. Now he would have a new hunger to feed: ultimate power. He would want to be loved as much as he was already feared. Of course he must know that even most of the men who'd voted for him were at least secretly against expelling nuns … When the former First Lady finished her analysis, Sor Gertrudis gruffly complimented her on her political astuteness and frankness. Do?a Cristina, savoring a long sip from her gourd-cup of hot chocolate, had a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she regarded the Monjita Inglesa's humorless visage. Then she set the gourd back in its silver, monkey-shaped holder, and remarked, "Everything my husband has achieved in politics he owes to what I learned as a schoolgirl in this convent, especially from my Nana Melchora. He did not always govern as I would have wished, but he would never have persecuted our female religious Orders. But if our new President truly despises nuns as much as some claim, not even Cardinal Richelieu and Santa Catalina de Siena together would be able to dissuade him from whatever he has planned."

During the afternoon hour in the community parlor, when speech was allowed to flow freely as long as it related to spiritual and strictly communal matters, such events as the rise and fall of political chieftains in el siglo were rarely mentioned. The two novices were kept even more isolated from the world. But during one of their novice classes Sor Gertrudis, without meeting either of her two students' eyes, told them that during their conversation the former Primera Dama had confided that she thought the new President would leave the convents alone because from now on he would want to turn his attention toward enriching himself, and to finding a wife. At the word wife María de las Nieves forgot to breathe. Her heart lurched and plummeted through her airless self. Had the Novice Mistress said wife because she knew something about Paquita? She waited tensely for her teacher to say more. The misery flooding her now was guilty and unconfessed confusion, and a longing to hold her lost Paquita in her arms. Her own imperfect sacrifice was supposed to keep Paquita's vow of virginity unbroken; if that wasn't true, then there was no reason to marry God. That was the pact she'd made.

And now all this time had passed and she still hadn't received any message or even sign of life from Paquita. This was how you began to die, from this hurt of being forgotten and unloved and knowing it was because of what you'd done.

So, as if nothing else could ever again matter as much, she sat reading about Sor María de Agreda, a consoling voice, like a balm on all her blistering unhappiness and shame, and then something more. María de las Nieves now lived for these afternoon library sessions. In her meditations, interior prayers, and as she lay awake at night, she lost herself in methodically narrated adventures and inner dialogues inspired by the mystical travels of the Spanish nun. These imagined flights were becoming so vivid that in her high excitement she sometimes wondered if they might not be the anteroom to the actual experience, as the antechoir was to the upper-choir; the antechoir, where hot chocolate–making equipment was kept so that nuns could refuel themselves before and after exhausting sessions in the upper-choir, where those who had the true gift of prayer flew as close to the radiance of their Husband's love as possible without having to leave their bodies behind forever. Whenever she could now, María de las Nieves tried to lose herself in meticulously guided day and night dreams of mystical bilocation. She went home to Los Altos to see her mother and Lucy and to eat limón and guanabana ice. She traveled to New York City to visit Paquita's father, and to see where her own father and Sor Gertrudis had been born. She even made the entire Convento de Nuestra Se?ora de Belén, with its school and walled-in orchard, lift off the earth like an enormous aeronaut's balloon and navigated it through the stars. Were they going to heaven? Perhaps someday, if they were martyred. But they were looking for Purgatory, to bring cool water to all the thirsty souls waiting there, enduring its flames. Was it right that these hours in the library should pass so pleasurably, reading, dreaming, tickling her nose? María de las Nieves knew that if her contentment was noticed, the Novice Mistress might decide to banish her from the library.

That was why she now faked a loud yawn. Silently and a bit contritely, praying for mercy, she weakly bobbed her head up and down and let her mouth droop open in imitation of Sor Gloria de los ángeles's sleepy stupor. As if following a secret logic, the cat now leapt up into her lap. If she allowed herself to sneeze, the cat, jolted by the earthquake, would dig its claws deep into her thighs before springing away. Yet, depending upon Sor Gertrudis's mood, it could also be looked upon as a too free assertion of her own will were she to noticeably nudge the cat off her lap.

Sor María de Agreda was befriended by King Felipe IV of Spain. The Spanish monarch was so enchanted by the young Abbess's stories, by her mystical and trained intelligence and learning, and by her beauty, that he frequently came to the convent to sit hour after hour at the locutory grille, conversing with her. Sor María de Agreda's habit often emitted the scent of fresh dawn roses. According to Fray Labarde, the scent of the actual roses in the royal gardens were enough to fill that sin-wracked Christian warrior of a King with such emotion that he would need to sit down as if exhausted by life, staring at the ground, nodding to himself and making gestures of supplication with his long, pale hands. They exchanged more than six hundred letters over the subsequent years, slowly growing old together, for time moves as slowly inside palaces as it does inside convents. The King always wrote on the right-hand side of a sheet of paper and Sor María always replied on the left—two separate handwritten columns lying as if shoulder to shoulder on every sheet that traveled between them.

Everyone deceives the King, Sor María de Agreda wrote in one of her typically frank letters. Lord, this monarchy is coming to an end, and everyone who does not try to set this right will soon be in hell. She was the King's most trusted adviser. The King knew he alone was to blame for all of Spain's calamities. He was a libertine, a lecher, a perpetual adulterer. In every bad thing that happened, from military defeats at the hands of English infidels to common crimes in the streets of Madrid, he saw displayed God's wrath against himself. The King wrote to Sor María: It is a great comfort to me in the middle of all these worries to know that there is someone who is trying to lessen them by so safe and certain a method as prayer; only, I fear, Sor María, that I am the one who wastes all the pains you take, because in the measure that your efforts increase, my sinfulness increases, so that I am unworthy of the good you seek for me. The nun answered, My Lord, no man can truly be a King who is not ruler of himself, controlling and having complete mastery over his desires and passions. It is by crushing them and refusing to be ruled by them that a King's heart is put in the hand of the Lord. The hand of God is strong and presses hard, which is why God said, Whom I love, I correct.

Though Sor María de Agreda was declared Venerable by Pope Clemente X, her beatification process was stopped, for too many bishops thought her heretical and crazy, Sor Gertudis had explained in novice class one morning, launching into a tirade against Spain. For in Spain, she said, they were now embarrassed by nuns like Sor María de Agreda. "Why? Because, dear girls, I want you to know that the spiritual daring and genius of a nun like that only provokes the insecurity, self-consciousness, and spiritual smallness of that now terribly reduced race of people. Those Spaniards have been hiding behind their silly, haughty mimicking of reason for generations now, ohhh they are such mannered little sardines, ashamed of their lost glories, their imperial crimes—for bringing the Word of God" (and she roughly cleared her throat) "to pagans and cannibals—a past which now seems tooooo intimately bound up, let us say, with the visions, levitations, divine flights—nowadays called hysteria, lunacy, heterodoxy, subversion of ecclesiastical authority!—of our most glorious Sisters. Well, at least here in the cloisters of the Americas, we resist such contra-mystical, effete rationalist revisionism. Ohhhh those little Spaniard monsignors, they do test our obedience and humility, don't they? They want us to be small. I'd rather take on our own Liberal sans-culottes any day. They just want to guillotine us."

When the Novice Mistress had finished her disconcerting outburst she fell silent, her eyes hard as snail shells imbedded in the solid putty of her blanching face. María de las Nieves, as always whenever the Novice Mistress spoke in English, quietly and somewhat perfunctorily translated the lesson for her sister novice. Sor Gloria de los ángeles sat silently, an aching look of concentration on her face and her lips silently moving, as if by mental exertion she was reconstruing the foreign nun's unusually histrionic, galloping cadences and trying to fit them to María de las Nieves's abridged and neutral version, stretching and pulling at the latter like taffy; then she turned to the Novice Mistress and tremulously asked:

"Do they really want to guillotine us, Nana? Do they really want to cut off our heads like they did to the Carmelitas and Ursulinas in France?"

"That is impertinent question," the foreign nun answered in her awkward Spanish, still staring straight ahead as if at nothing at all. "You pray every day that we deserve happiness of martyrdoms give to our French Sisters!"

María de las Nieves, of course, under the Novice Mistress's tutelage, had already learned much about the renowned nuns and mystics, their hard-earned visions and ecstasies. (Santa Teresa de ávila as a levitating young nun, grabbing onto the iron bars of the chorus as she rose up to the ceiling, crying out to her sister nuns to hold her down.) But it was Sor María de Agreda who really illuminated those most difficult days of her novitiate, and helped to guide her. María de las Nieves knew now that such flights and visions were won only through the most heroic discipline, suffering, and selflessness, and by the twinned powers of reason and faith. In her daily novice classes and spiritual reading, in her slow learning yet surprising aptitude for abstract study, training her intellect on the mysteries and divine attributes of the Holy Trinity and the complex demands of interior prayer, she was beginning to understand what was actually required to become one of the great nuns. She knew that learning had to be counterbalanced by brutal obedience, and also by daily contemplation of the will as the only means to the spiritual perfection that opens the door to the seraphic world of visions where nuns can finally become living metaphors of sacred fire and wedded bliss. Perhaps the Novice Mistress really was finally succeeding in shaping María de las Nieves into a true Jesuitona. She was no adviser to a King, but secretly thought herself suited to such a role. Oh yes she did. Well, at least she was doing all she could to set things right! For if Paquita Aparicio and El Anticristo … ahhh (here it comes) … pues, not her fault … ahh—

A jarring sneeze. María de las Nieves had to bite her lip to keep from crying out, such was the searing pain caused by the clawfuls of flesh the cat had torn away with.

"God blesses you, Sor San Jorge. We have to be grateful for everything our Lord sends us. A bad cold can be a trial, but it can also be the first sign of something more severe."

"Oh yes, Mudder!"

As a young novice, Sor María de Agreda had also been made miserable by her own sense of sinful inadequacy and self-doubt. One day, in novice class, while discussing Sor María's youthful trials, Sor Gertrudis had gravely said: She made of her soft young flesh a slaughterhouse. Through ascetic penitence and self-mortification the Spanish novice had finally found the means of escaping her worldly self. Her prayer trances had begun almost immediately, conveying her to the farthest corners of New Mexico and even beyond without removing her from her convent. And her own blood, seeping into her habit, had imbrued the sackcloth with the smell of roses at dawn. But María de las Nieves's rashes and wounds gave off a smell more like the emanations from a pile of sun-rotted, blackened mangoes. So far, at least, she'd been spared the Agreda novice's phantasmal and demonic carnal torments. Though Sor Gloria de los ángeles, apparently, had not. Just the other night Sor Gloria had woken them in their cell, screaming that she felt invisible hands on her body, the scrape of invisible beard, and hot breath on her face. María de las Nieves, shivering from sadness and fright along with her usual fever chills in her hard and narrow bed, lay awake listening to the Novice Mistress trying to calm the sobbing novice. Poor Sor Gloria! How she wished she or Sor Gertrudis were at least allowed to lay a comforting hand on Sor Gloria's writhing back or shoulder. After only a few more minutes, the Novice Mistress had scolded, "Now that is enough, Sor Gloria, you cease this right now, foolish girl, Sor Gloria you will now stop," and without another word she'd turned and gone back to her bed, while poor Sor Gloria's sobbing had grown even deeper and more choked.

Now the fly-drone-laced silence of the library was dashed by the first splatter of afternoon rain, which, within seconds, became a pounding downpour, so suffusing the room with the smell of wet earth and vegetation that María de las Nieves imagined winged cherubs flinging handfuls of torn-up garden and mud in through the windows. Meanwhile she went on bringing herself to the verge of a sneeze, and then letting it subside, dexterously twirling her pinched length of wool as she read.

My heart never delighted in earthly things, for they did not fill the emptiness in my spirit, wrote Sor María de Agreda, looking back on her own early days as a novice. For this reason the world died for me in my youngest years, before I really came to know it. —María de las Nieves wondered, And how well did I ever get to know it? An image of her Confessor Padre Lactancio's face on the other side of the confessional grille suddenly bloomed, his tensely staring eyes, the damp, taut skin over pursed lips like a thin scrap of undercooked meat on a grease-sheened plate. The next thing she thought of was that shop with a sign over its door reading, Umbrellas Repaired. Don José Pryzpyz, trained in London. She'd been in her last months as a student when she'd spotted it on one of their weekly outdoor excursions, when the boarding students of Nuestra Se?ora de Belén were led through the muddy city streets in a long double row of shawl-draped schoolgirls holding hands, past the clamoring men and boys who lined their route. At the bottom of the hand-painted sign, smaller script announced that Don José Pryzpyz also repaired caucho-weather-proofed and India-rubber cloaks and capes. The shop was as small as any tailor's, with only a single, barred vertical rectangle of a window in its strikingly narrow facade, the shutters pulled open. That afternoon there was a group of men and boys clustered in front of that window, and though all their heads had turned as one to direct the usual ardent stares and mating calls at the schoolgirls going past, what first caught María de las Nieves' alert eye was the way those men and boys had been postured around the window just a moment before, obviously absorbed by whatever there was inside that window to look at. By the downward tilt of the taller men's heads, and the way some of the tallest even had to remove their hats so that these wouldn't topple over their faces as they looked down, she could tell that it was not something well inside the shop that they were looking at, but something right there, at the bottom of that window, though she was unable even to glimpse whatever it was through that wall of frock coats and trouser legs. Then the little shop was past.

María de las Nieves had barely turned her head while squeezing Paquita Aparicio's hand to ask, "Did you see?" The students were supposed to maintain silence until they reached the grassy slopes of the Cerro del Carmen.

"Quién?" asked Paquita without moving her lips, for if they were caught speaking in line, they could be punished.

"Not who. That. That new shop we just passed! Bueno. Zaz! It's past."

The next week they went to the muddy meadows behind El Calvario for their recreation, and so didn't take the avenue leading past the mysterious shop. The week after that, in order to evade the increasingly ribald male uproar along their route (another clear consequence of Liberal atheism), their lay matrons and senior student monitors led them back to the Cerro del Carmen along a different avenue, and the following week they took that route again, and the next they returned to El Calvario. A week later María de las Nieves left school to become a novice.

So, in truth, her heart had delighted in earthly things. She still wondered about that shop where a man with an unusual name, trained in London, repaired umbrellas and caucho-weatherproofed capes, and displayed in his window something sufficiently remarkable to have drawn such a crowd. Of course it was sinful to occupy your mind with such things as umbrellas and mysterious windows when you were in choir, chanting the five psalms of Lauds. When you recite psalms and hymns, you must hold in your heart what you say with your mouth—

"Jesucristo."

"Jesucristo."

María de las Nieves looked up from her book, hand still pressed over her nose and mouth, and knew—the intuition filled her like ink poured into water—that this time Sor Gertrudis's quietly alarmed gray eyes had settled on her even before she'd sneezed. Face flushing, she looked down at her Vida de Sor María de Agreda. She tried to read the same few lines again and again but now they made no sense, as if this new atmosphere of danger required an entirely new method of reading. Her chest silently rose and fell as if she were out of breath from running. Only when she finally risked a glance at the Novice Mistress and saw her returned to her own book did she feel calmer. Soon the printed words began to absorb her attention almost as before, though she resisted the urge to pull another piece of wool from her habit.

The light of God, wrote Sor María de Agreda, coming out to meet me as I entered life through the door of rational thought, showed me the beauty and importance of truth. God raises up those who humble themselves. He keeps His secrets hidden from the proud, but He reveals them to the little people. —When the Most Holy Virgin decided to reveal the true story of her life as Mother of God and Co-Redeemer, wrote Fray Labarde, she chose Sor María de Agreda to be her scribe. The Queen of Heaven, via the Holy Spirit, told Sor María everything that the Bible leaves out: how she was also immaculately conceived in the womb of her mother Santa Ana; how it was her own idea that her Son by God should take human form and be sent to earth to redeem mortal humanity, even though she foresaw her own maternal sorrow; her ascent into heaven alongside her resurrected Son, and her return to earth to lead the Apostles—Sor María de Agreda wrote it all down, enough to fill eight weighty volumes. When she was finished, she destroyed every page, and then rewrote it from memory and left only one copy in the possession of her loyal friend the King, who considered it the most important book written since the New Testament; it was titled The Mystical City of God, the miracle of Her omnipotence and infinite grace. Divine holy life of the Virgin Mother of God, our lady and queen María Santísima, redeemer of Eve's sin and mediatrix of grace. Sor María successfully defended her great "autobiography of the Virgin" before separate tribunals convened by the Holy Inquisition and the skeptical Doctors of the Sorbonne; both subsequently condemned it, but only after her death. Among nuns the world over The Mystical City became one of the most beloved of books. Fray Labarde's vida contained only tantalizing descriptions, a few excerpts and paraphrases. Soon María de las Nieves would be finished with the learned friar's life of the Agreda nun. She wondered if there was any way of convincing Sor Gertrudis to assign her The Mystical City as her next spiritual reading. She would certainly have to conceal the intensity of her yearning, for the Novice Mistress also taught that reading, incorrectly practiced, was among the forbidden pleasures of the body.

Two afternoons later, Friday, in the library—on Monday she would be assigned a new book to read—while anxiously poring over parts of Fray Labarde's book that she'd already read at least once before, she came upon a sentence that stupefied her: He gave me as much snow as my wool would bear. It was disconcerting that she'd somehow missed this sentence before. She understood its obvious meaning—God had given Sor María de Agreda as much suffering as she could endure—yet she found herself rereading it as if she didn't, as if these words concealed a personal yet mysterious significance it dared her to decipher. She felt frightened to have come across such words, which seemed to menacingly hint at her old secular name—a name she'd previously loved, because of the magical resonance of snow and its association with her Da's faraway northern city—in mocking juxtaposition to wool, a word that now projected a menacing shadow into every corner of her existence. This seemed an unjust end after all the loving attention she'd lavished on this book, and she felt irked and even slighted. María de las Nieves now sneezed, and squeezed her eyes shut, as if flinching against an inevitable blow. But the Novice Mistress subjected her to nothing more than the usual subdued call and response. She felt a thorough self-disgust with her own spirit and soul and mind and name and body, this sneeze-addicted, unwashed, itching, burning, sweating mass with its recent distraction of newly swollen little breasts and a perpetual dark fizzing inside, down there between her legs, and even deeper inside. He gave me as much snow as my wool would bear. It was as if her own depraved physical being, this skin and blood flashing hot and cold, hair, teeth, bones, moisture, filth, had all been crushed, boiled, and reduced down into an inky substance just to print those few words that kept their secret hidden … Ay Madre, ay Jesucristo, I'll do anything, pound me into powder, just make me a saint!

The light in the room had yellowed and thickened into a suffocating and translucent gelatin. Sor Gertrudis sat at her end of the worm- and termiteeaten table, immobile behind the peaceful rhythm of her index finger tracing lines of Latin text. María de las Nieves's heart felt frozen with terror. She sat paralyzed in her chair until the sensation subsided, leaving her feeling tremulous and drained.

That evening it was Sor Gloria de los ángeles's turn to leave the library early to ring the bell for Compline, and when María de las Nieves heard its muffled tolling, that was the signal to close her book, rise from her chair, and return the book to the shelves. Still feeling weak from that fit of fright, she said her prayer to God, giving thanks for the divine gift of reading and asking for help in learning to love knowledge without vanity. She knew that it might be a very long time before she would hold Fray Labarde's Vida de Sor María de Agreda in her hands again and so she clasped it tightly. Goodbye beautiful, beloved book, good-bye, I love you. She set it back on its shelf, her eyes filling with tears.

Sor Gertrudis, having taken a few deliberate steps toward her, said, "Sor San Jorge. One moment please. Just right there, hold still for one moment. Thank you, Sister."

Her stare was fixed on María de las Nieves's habit, roaming over it. Bending forward, hands on knees, the Novice Mistress lowered herself for an even closer inspection, searching as if she'd lost something very tiny in the habit's picked-at, threadbare fabric, smeared and encrusted all over with dried mucus, especially the sleeves. María de las Nieves stood with her arms limp at her sides. Not having seen herself in a mirror for so many months, she didn't know that her sneeze obsession had begun to disfigure her face. Her nostrils were perpetually flared, the membranes inflamed and visibly swollen inside the rims, and her lips were always slightly parted and pulled back into a frozen, cheerless near grin. She looked as if she was perpetually on the verge of a sneeze.

The Novice Mistress straightened up and asked, "Moths have been feasting on your habit, Sor San Jorge?"

"Perhaps dat is so, Mudder Gertrudis," she answered in a barely audible tone. "But I have not been seeing too many mods."

"You have been making yourself sneeze with wool pulled from your habit."

"Dat is so, Mudder."

"Is it because you consider it a mortification, Sister?"

"Yes, Mudder."

"It is not because it gives you pleasure."

"I … Oh, no, Mudder."

"And do you expect to be given a new habit, when this one has been reduced to shreds?"

WITHIN WEEKS OF El Anticristo's assumption of the Presidency, a new decree was passed forbidding priests from wearing clerical garb into the streets unless leading religious or funeral processions. The old Concordant signed with the Holy See by the Conservative regime, which had obligated the state to uphold Catholicism as the One True Religion, was severed; freedom of religion was declared as yet another inducement to immigrants. The first Protestant marriage in the country was celebrated at the American Legation, uniting a Yankee railroad engineer and a recently converted cigar roller from Barrio El Sagrario. There was already one Hebrew with an umbrella-repair shop in the city and now, on the old Calle Real, another opened a floral shop, selling flowers that everyone had previously gathered freely from the meadows beyond the city gates; so why was this business such a success? Then El Anticristo dealt the Church a devastating blow, decreeing the nationalization of all Church-owned property without exception. The expropriated wealth would be administered by the government for the purpose of "developing agriculture."

In the past, Sor Gertrudis would have been able to bring her questions about whether or not María de las Nieves's sneezing might be a mortification or a sin, and if a sin, what degree of sin, to a Jesuit Confessor or some other learned friar, and would have soon received a decisive answer, complete with theological citations. But Padre Lactancio Rascón, Nuestra Se?ora de Belén's chaplain since the expulsion of the Jesuits, like virtually every other native-born, diocesan priest, had not been educated in Salamanca, Paris, Rome, or the Angelópolis of Puebla; his erudition provided for little more than quotations from the Bible and methodical renditions of the Latin Mass. Sor Gertrudis had inherited a Jesuit's distrust of such priests. Hadn't Napoleon, scattering his agents throughout Spanish America in a plot to arouse the colonies against the mother country, instructed them to gain the aid of the American-born lower clergy, perceiving their natural sympathies?

Padre Lactancio had no answer to her questions about María de las Nieves's sneezing, but assured Sor Gertrudis that he would deliver them to the Ecclesiastical Council and the Curia for their consideration. He advised patience, however. The bishops were lately much preoccupied.

"I put in your hands," the foreign nun obediently responded. "I know do this I put in hands of God too." (Yo poner en vuestros manos. Yo saber hacer esto yo poner en manos de Dios también.)

"It might be a long wait, Madre." The priest was unable to repress a malicious smile. "They might have to send all the way to Rome for an answer."

"Our Lord wait long time on Cross too," she sternly replied. "Impatience a great sin." Padre Lactancio's face darkened, and he dropped his gaze. It broke his heart to be so frequently reminded, day after day, of his own inferior intelligence and even piety, and of the disappointment he knew he must represent to these learned nuns who had no choice but to rely on and obey his spiritual guidance. Thank God they no longer wished to be confessed once a day, as apparently some had back when their Confessor was a Jesuit.

During novice class one afternoon María de las Nieves finally dared to ask if Sor María de Agreda's "autobiography" of La Virgen María could be her next spiritual reading. The Novice Mistress replied that it had been one of her own favorite books when she was young and promised to meditate on her request. But even before the end of that same class, Sor Gertrudis switched to English to announce, "It is certainly not up to me to decide whether the Most Holy Virgin did actually dictate The Mystical City to Sor María or not. But it being true of this book that its author does openly identify herself with the heroism and even person of our Most Holy Blessed Virgin, I wonder if it makes suitable reading for a mere novice who does seem to identify just as strongly and openly with its mortal author. Hmn? What do you think about that, Sor San Jorge?"

Of course it moved María de las Nieves to be spoken to so thoughtfully just when she was feeling so despised and low. So those words touched her almost like maternal caresses she'd never expected to feel again, though she also understood their meaning: that she was not going to be allowed to read the book. Submitting to the Novice Mistress's authority in this as in all other matters, she answered, "I don't know, Mudder."

"Well, I think it is not suitable reading for you just now. If God wills it, perhaps there will come a time." And then, dropping her voice into an unusual whisper, the Novice Mistress confided: "You know, Sor San Jorge, we women of the Church have always been told that we are too essentially weak and flawed to be counted on to find or recognize the truth on our own. Maybe that is indeed true, mi preciosa, for how is it that I was not able to decide on my own about your sneezes? I did not have to leave this matter solely to Padre Lactancio. I could have told him what I thought about it, and I am sure he would have agreed. But I hesitated. I proceeded as I was taught to proceed, by Jesuits and Carmelites. Well, too late! It is now too late."

María de las Nieves was astonished to see an apologetic little smile quivering at a corner of Sor Gertrudis's lips and a darting shyness in her eyes as she turned her mottled face away. Mi preciosa! It was only the second time the Novice Mistress had addressed María de las Nieves with such personal affection. Only the second time in nearly a year. But now, instead of secretly filling her with bliss, it made her sad, and then despondent, and she sat staring blankly at her own hands clasped in her lap.

IT WAS DURING that time that a basket of fresh, seemingly exquisite beef was delivered anonymously to the convent of the Recollect Sisters. Their Madre Superior had the good sense to feed a piece of the meat to one of their dogs; suffering horribly, the dog promptly died—no doubt poisoned by Freemasons. (But there were also those who, recalling how the Jesuits had justified murdering monarchs to keep their kingdoms free of Protestantism, observed that the most likely consequence of a convent of fatally poisoned nuns would be widespread violent uprising against the Liberals.)

The menacing developments in the world outside, along with the saturating dampness of the rainy season, had accelerated Madre Melchora's decline into a disconcerting frailty. Her walk had become perplexingly unsteady, she was many times thinner than before, and her trembling hands, in their parched wrapping of bruised skin and veins, resembled withered, pulled-up roots. No matter how much water she drank, she remained thirsty; she hardly ate, but her breath was always foul. Sometimes the venerable Prioress seemed to find the simplest choices or problems bewildering or even terrifying. At such moments, she always cried out for her hijita Sor Gertrudis.

Ominous signs were everywhere: After their nine days of heartrending laments in the home of the deceased, the black-clad women who worked as professional mourners still went door to door throughout the city, asking for eggs to bring to the convents. In exchange for each florin of three dozen eggs, the nuns would pray a novena for the recently departed immortal soul. Funeral bells tolled no more frequently than usual, but eggs were arriving at Nuestra Se?ora de Belén's front gates in greater quantities than ever before. María de las Nieves was frightened by those overflowing baskets, almost too heavy to lift, a few eggs inevitably spilling and breaking as the baskets were lurchingly carried inside. What was known out there that now made people want to donate so many eggs to nuns? The two novices spent many hours sitting on the floor of the kitchen, out of the way of the Sisters and servants working at the wood-burning stoves, weighing eggs in buckets of salted water. Eggs that sank directly to the bottom were the freshest and were set aside for Padre Lactancio and his sacristan or sent to the Archiepiscopal Palace, where the exiled Archbishop's relatives were still residing; those that floated to the top had been laid at least five days before and were given out in the free morning school for poor girls; eggs that hovered in between were kept for the convent and boarding school.

María de las Nieves was sitting on the kitchen floor weighing eggs with Sor Gloria when she overheard the nuns and servants talking about three fourteen-year-old students who'd been caught in a storage room in the school stripped naked to the waist and expelled. They'd been meeting there weekly to bare, measure, and compare the size and shape of their blossoming breasts by candlelight. Paquita, with an ample chest well before other girls her age, had not been among them. Her own—. But a nun was not ever even supposed to think about her own just emerging little turtle-head breasts and sprouting hair, which the Novice Mistress said was a sign of women's fallen state like mala madre, the horrifying leaking filth inside her. Still, in the kitchen Sor Gloria de los ángeles gravely whispered to her, "Sorita San Jorge, you are finally getting some chichitas too." And then Sor Gloria slumped backward onto the floor with her hand over her own mouth, writhing with silent laughter, which she fought to stifle, until she ended up lying on her back, staring emptily at the ceiling and panting for air.

… POINT SEVEN: CONTINUOUS meditation on the inviolate guarding of the senses, those of eyes, ears, tongue, and nose, through these windows the Death of Chastity enters … Standing before the Sanctuary Lamp with her book of spiritual exercises open in her hands, María de las Nieves remembered the remote consistory of Church wise men now supposedly weighing her fate. She sighed bleakly, and told herself, They are going to fry me in oil like chicharrón. Should she escape? Did she dare? But where would she go? Before, if a nun or novice ran away, the government would send soldiers and police to capture and return her, but could any Prioress ask such a thing now?

Her attention was caught by a black shadow sinking vertically through the dark light in the window. A few moments later she saw it again and realized it was a pigeon, floating straight down in front of the window, wings out and unmoving, like a dark, descending Cross. When it flew up again, she glimpsed and heard its flapping wings. Moments later it descended in front of the window a third time, holding the same posture. She could smell its tart droppings on the sill and saw a wispy column of steam rising between the bars. She had broken out in a cold sweat. Small pebbles of pulsating light danced inside her head and before her eyes.

THE CONVENT SCHOOL'S main entrance faced the corner of a street that, because of the steeper grade of its incline, often turned into a torrential river during the rainy season. The October rains were so heavy and continuous that one night the street overflowed as never before, so flooding the school that the interned students woke in beds standing in a foot of steadily rising muddy water and debris. Bringing their mattresses and hastily packed trunks, the students and servants came to stay in the vacant novice cloister. María de las Nieves couldn't bear knowing that Paquita was so close by. But for as long as the emergency lasted, no member of the community who was not a Teaching Sister or Monitor nun was allowed into the novice cloister. Night and day nuns in shifts marched an image of the Miraculous Virgin through the corridors, chanting litanies against the steady crash of rain and howling winds, imploring her to spare their cloister from the flooding.

Oh, Sor María de Agreda, prayed María de las Nieves, prayer carried you to the other side of the world, but my prayers can't even get me into the novice cloister to see Paquita. If only they could speak face to face, embrace, and forgive each other. She felt sure that their mutual vow of virginity, which her nun's martyrdom would make lifelong for both, must be weighing terribly on her old companion. Then she would release her from it, but only as long as Paquita didn't marry El Anticristo. She resolved to sneak into the novice cloister to find Paquita. The Sister Monitors should not be impossible to trick or evade. According to their Constitution, the nighttime Monitors had to be their community's most elderly nuns. They were older, much older, than the century, doddering and even senile.

María de las Nieves spent the day outside in the wintry downpour, with the nuns assigned the task of seeing what could be salvaged from the quicksand of the devastated gardens and orchards. Down on all fours, drenched and chilled to the bone, she groped in mud up to her thighs and elbows for submerged clusters of carrots and heads of cauliflower. That night, exhausted and overwrought, babbling about so many drowned kittens, she sobbed herself to sleep; later the Novice Mistress and Sor Gloria were unable to wake her for Matins. When Sor Gloria carried her in her arms to the infirmary the next morning, María de las Nieves was unconscious and burning with fever.

She woke sometime later to the weight and feel of a large, warm hand on her bared belly, and the smell of tobacco, and a deep, self-assured male voice talking about the long-ago first convent of Indian nuns in Oaxaca, New Spain. Opening her eyes, María de las Nieves found a man in a black frock coat, with salt-and-pepper beard and mustache and still-youthful ruddy cheeks, sitting by her bed. Standing alongside were Sor Gertrudis, stonily scowling down at the man's hand on her belly beneath her rolled-up chemise, and the Infirmarian Sor Micaela. "They wanted to prove they could endure all that the white gachupina and criolla nuns could," the man continued; he punctuated his remarks with softly resonant drum taps of his fingers against her hollow belly. "But their Indian-princess skin was too delicate for sackcloth and they fell as gravely ill from skin and blood infections as this poor novice of yours has, Madrecita. Like her, they also never complained. Medical knowledge was still in the dark ages, and they were not even bled until it was too late. An entire convent, every last soul, sacrificed to God in this way. But the Lord must have illuminated their Archbishop, because he had their Reglemens altered so that their successors would wear less abrasive fabrics. I suggest the same for this little novice of yours, Madre. She is clearly allergic to wool."

"Yes, Dr. Yela, I ask Madre Melchora," the Novice Mistress answered in a leaden tone. "But our Rule is strict obedience to divine command of God."

"She is also emaciated and anemic. When she has recovered her strength, she needs to eat more, and should be excused from fasting for at least one year. In the meantime I will send over some bottles of Vino Pepsona de Chapotauet. This is beef, Madre, first-class beef, which has been scientifically treated in a solution made from the gastric juices of animals and mixed with a little wine, so that it can be easily drunk. Very fortifying. It comes from France, of course, but Don Simón Goldemberg has it in his pharmacy on the Street of the Capuchins."

María de las Nieves was in the second week of her convalescence, wearing a new long-sleeved, ankle-length linen tunic beneath her wool habit and back to making herself sneeze almost as frequently as before, when a much awaited shipment of Breton lace, silk brocade, and several bolts of satin and velvet arrived at the convent spoiled with mildew, mold, and a low-tide stench. It was the third week of November, a season of clear skies and brisk, ebullient breezes. By that time of year the nuns were usually producing a steady flow of Christmas decorations and ornaments along with semestral prize ribbons for the school and their normal work of sewing vestments for the sacristy. Before, they had always ordered their finest fabrics from Europe, but this year they had heeded the prudent advice of Don Valentín Lechuga, the convent's secular majordomo, to be more frugal: in San Francisco, California, "Breton lace," sewn by Chinese women, could be had for half of what it cost in France. Shipping costs were much lower too, down the Pacific coast by steamer, rather than from Le Havre to Aspinwall, across Panama by rail, and up the coast by steamship again; or by sail from Europe around Cape Horn. That afternoon in the community parlor the distraught nuns wept in desolation over the spoiled fabrics. They would have to celebrate the Birth of the Savior in a sparsely and dingily decorated convent, the figures in their Nativity crèche dressed in last year's robes. Madre Melchora, trying to rise from her chair in order to speak, became entangled in her string of rosaries, which snapped, sending beads rolling across the floor, chased and batted by a black cat that pounced out of nowhere, and it all seemed yet more ominous proof of God's irritation with his servile Brides, for no one could remember any nun, never mind one so revered as their Prioress, ever having had such an accident.

The next day Don Valentín delivered a letter, imprinted with the official seal of the Legation of the United States America and penned in a vice-consul's hand, which the Prioress was to cosign so that it could be mailed to San Francisco in the expectation of the convent eventually receiving reimbursement. "… European goods never arrive damaged with water," Sor Gertrudis read aloud from the letter. "To compete in this market, United States merchants and shippers must improve in the art of packing. Textiles and cotton goods generally should always be subject to steam pressure and wrapped in coarse blankets or India rubber–treated coverlets, for which there is no duty—" A shriek cut her short. One of the nuns, turning to examine the slovenly Yankee burlap packing, had discovered that the ruined "Breton lace" was now white as purest snow, every green blemish and patch of mold vanished. The silk brocade was also pristinely restored, though the bolts of fabric were still ruined. The nuns jubilantly gathered around the table upon which the lace and brocade were laid, taking turns touching the restored articles. Some jumped up and down in their excitement, others dropped to their knees in prayer, for there was hardly a nun in that room, no matter how young or old, who had not been waiting all her religious life for just such a manifestation of their Se?or's divine love.

"Oh my Sisters!" crowed Sor Gertrudis. "If the seculars only knew of the joy hidden in convents, they would storm the walls to live here too!"

María de las Nieves, holding a piece of the restored lace over her nose to investigate what a miracle smelled like, inhaled the familiar mustiness that over time, their cloister gave to all fabrics, including those she was wearing. The Novice Mistress snatched the lace away with such a reproachful look that María de las Nieves was about to cry out that she hadn't been trying to make herself sneeze. The look's message stopped her cold: Sor Gertrudis no longer loved her at all.

ON THE FEAST day of the Immaculate Conception, Madre Melchora was moved from the infirmary, moaning from the malignant tumors devouring her insides, to her cell to await the death that Dr. Yela said was imminent. Sor Trinidad the Night Monitoress was on her inspection rounds two nights later when she came upon Madre Melchora sprinkling the doors to the nuns' cells with Holy Water. The next day Sor Trinidad would tell her anxious Sisters about the corona of light that had illuminated their Holy Madre throughout the encounter, and how she seemed to have recovered her long-lost sprightliness, though she was still as thin and wasted by illness as before. According to Sor Trinidad, the Reverenda Madre told her: "I've been waiting to talk to you, hijita. You know that very soon I will be with my Husband. We both want Sor Gertrudis de la Sangre Divina to succeed me as Prioress."

Although the morning found Madre Melchora back in her bed, too weak even to lift her hand, Sor Trinidad's story seemed all the more credible because up until then she'd been the leader of the nuns' faction conspiring to ensure that the anti-Reform Vicaress, Sor Filomena del Ni?o Jesús, would succeed Madre Melchora as the next Prioress.

Madre Melchora's prolonged death agonies were surely a sign that she had lived a blessed and holy life: her Se?or was lovingly rewarding her with suffering before summoning her to His side. The Death Candle was lit, and no other light was allowed to penetrate her cell.

"Sí Madre mía, querida, voy, voy," Madre Melchora whispered, her eyes barely flickering open. "Muchas gracias, ni?itas, por sus preciosas flores …" They were her first intelligible words in days. A mandadera was immediately dispatched to fetch Padre Lactancio, for this might be her last chance to receive the final Sacraments while still coherent. When the priest had left the cell only hours before, he'd been disconsolate, blaming himself for already having waited too long.

"To who you speak, Madre?" asked Sor Gertrudis, her lips close to the Prioress's hooded ear. "Who the little girls bring you flowers?" María de las Nieves leaned in closer between the nuns sitting in vigil on the floor around the bed.

"La Virgen Santísima has come to see me, hijita," answered the Prioress, though her lips did not seem to be moving. "And here are all the little girls I prepared for first communion who died from the cholera later that terrible year. Oh look, how beautiful! I'm coming, ni?as!"

That year in Nuestra Se?ora de Belén the feasts and octaves of Advent and Christmas overlapped with mourning rites. An impending death and its aftermath provided Padre Lactancio with the opportunity of repeated visits inside the cloister, during which he always managed to corner and pester María de las Nieves with remarks about her sneezing and the Vatican tribunal weighing her fate, and the gratitude she already owed him for having interceded against the Novice Mistress in the matter of whether she could wear a linen tunic, all the while touching her shoulder and arm like a cat pawing a candle flame. Five days after speaking her last words, the lime-dusted corpse of she who in life had been Madre Sor Melchora del Espíritu Santo, crowned with the same now withered and preserved flowers she'd worn on the day of her profession sixty-six years before, was borne from the Chapel of Death to the lower-choir.

Sor Gertrudis was elected Prioress one day after the feast of the Circumcision of the Infant Jesus, and ceremoniously presented with the convent seal and keys by Canon Molina, the acting Ecclesiastical Governor. Her reign was formally initiated that same day with a reading out of the new Constitution and Book of Customs. No detail of convent life proved too insignificant for Madre Gertrudis's Reform. All personal hot chocolate–making equipment and braziers were to be immediately removed from the nuns' cells. Because the Lord said that she who loves her father and mother more than she loves Me is not deserving of My love, even family members would no longer be permitted to visit the locutory parlor; indeed, the locutory was now closed to all but clergy on prescheduled missions of spiritual guidance. Even Do?a Cristina was no longer allowed into the cloister. Never again would any male who was not a priest defile the lower-choir, nor would any pagan Indio; from now on the nuns would even do the masonry themselves when burying one of their community in the crypt. No nun or novice would ever again be exempted from wearing a sackcloth tunic, for the Lord bestows skin allergies on His Brides as an opportunity to share His suffering—

Within days one of the younger nuns, Sor Cayetana del Ni?o Salvadór del Mundo, dismissed herself during recreation to visit the privy and went directly to the front doors, opened them, and stepped out into the street. The doors were always closed during the midday hours, and it had never occurred to anyone that they should be locked so that they couldn't be opened from the inside. It was the first time in memory that a nun had escaped a convent in that city by the obvious means of leaving by the front door. The new Prioress summoned locksmiths.

On the ninth of February, the Liberal government issued a decree ordering all the female religious communities to be consolidated into a single convent in eighteen days. It was more shocking than an outright order of expulsion because it was so unexpected, and in some ways even more dreadful, for how were nine convents of nuns, all following different Rules and Customs, to coexist inside a single convent? That same day the further professing of nuns was also outlawed—finally, according to the Liberal press, putting an end to the coercion of young women into unproductive slavery, suicide in life, and perversion of the laws of nature, medieval practices having no place in a democratic republic of free citizens.

Every afternoon now Madre Sor Gertrudis tried to prepare the terrified community for the moment when soldiers would come to expel them. The history of the Church's female religious Orders was a luminous galaxy of Blessed Virgins who, rather than commit suicide or submit to the depredations of convent-sacking infidels and barbarians—Vikings, Goths, Franks, Saracens, Magyars, Moors, Tartars, the armies of Voltaire and Benito Juárez—had resisted to the last: entire communities of nuns cutting off their noses or lips or secreting rotted chicken meat inside their orifices or finding some other way to make themselves repugnant to their attackers, provoking the glorious martyrdoms that dispatched them, intactum, to their Se?or's Bridal Chamber.

"Although God can do all things," Madre Gertrudis quoted from the sacred writings of San Jerónimo, "He cannot raise a virgin after she has fallen."

María de las Nieves blurted, "Madre, do you know if—" and stopped herself. "Yes, Sister?" asked the new Prioress. "Nothing, Madre," she answered, lowering her gaze, brusquely apologizing. But Sor Gertrudis's narrow-eyed stare bored into her. That evening in the refectory María de las Nieves was given beans dressed in lamp oil for dinner; she ate them without even a grimace, thanking her Lord for having let her off so lightly and asking for forgiveness, though she was unable to stop herself from again silently posing her question: Why would You be able to raise the dead and restore sight to the blind and trade hearts with nuns and not be able to repair a virgin? Oh Se?or, did You ever try?

The acting Ecclesiastical Governor, Canon Molina, instructed all the Prioresses to inventory their convents' valuables, and arrange for their storage in the homes of trustworthy seculars. But each Prioress was allowed to send a formal letter of protest on her community's behalf to the Liberal government, with a copy to the Curia. From Nuestra Se?ora de Belén came a female monastic's Apostles' Creed declaring the nuns' willingness to die as martyrs. Padre Bruno included that letter in his La Monjita Inglesa, and listed the twenty-two nuns who signed it: the novice Sor Gloria de los ángeles's signature is among them, but Sor San Jorge's is not. On the next page the Spanish priest reported that Madre Sor Gertrudis had received instructions to release her sole remaining novice in as secret a manner as possible. Limp with terror and grief, in secular dress and hooded cloak, Sor Gloria was escorted at midnight by the Portress, Sor Inés, and the Cellaress, Sor Guadalupe, to the door leading from the cloister into the school—at the school's front gate a coach was waiting to bear her home to her heartbreakingly indifferent family.

But where was the novice Sor San Jorge?

"—AND ALL THOSE pícaras novicias and young nuns, hearing themselves called se?oritas and other gallantries by the soldiers escorting them out of their convents, forgot their grief and smiled like the coquettish doncellas that a true and just God, who delights in nature, wishes them to be … Are you listening to me, Mamita of my heart? What a marvel!" Paquita Aparicio was reading out loud to her mother from the newspaper El Tren de la Tarde (though it would be decades before Los Altos had its own train). "Mi queridísima, Madre, can there be any doubt that one of those flirty novices was our Las Nievecitas?"

During her first three years as a boarding student, Paquita had always had to stay behind in the convent school during holidays, along with María de las Nieves. Now that El Anticristo was President of the Republic and living in the capital, Paquita had been allowed to come home, and then hadn't even returned for the new school term. She'd told her mother, and written to her father in New York, that she and Justo Rufino intended to wed in July, as soon as she turned fifteen.

"I suppose Las Nievecitas will want to come back and live with us again."

"I think it would be best for her to stay with the monjitas, mijita mia, wherever they go next," said Do?a Francisca Mérida de Aparicio to her daughter in her flat, muffled voice, which always sounded as if it came from the bottom of a well.

But Paquita insisted on sending a coach for the mandaderas Modesta and Josefa so that they could be her servants when she was married, and if María de las Nieves wanted to come home with them, all the better—

El Tren de la Tarde sneered that it was obvious that Church authorities had ordered the Prioresses to dispose of their notorious instruments of torture, though what had obviously been a dungeon was found in one convent, and in another, iron bolts in the walls, the remnants of broken chains, and shackles. But the only reference to Nuestra Se?ora de Belén was a mocking description of a mural in its refectory portraying San Agustín weeping over the death of his mother, Santa Mónica—a total falsehood, asserted El Tren de la Tarde's correspondent, a former Jesuit seminarian, because in his Confessions San Agustín admitted that he had not wept.

In the next day's newspaper Paquita read that the government had now decreed the Santa Catalina convent open to the public during the workday hours. When the acting Ecclesiastical Governor announced that any secular person trespassing into Santa Catalina would be excommunicated, Rufino the Just reacted to the threat as if to an act of war, declaring the immediate extinction of all female monastic Orders. The nuns were given just three hours to vacate Santa Catalina and go home to their families. Any nun who refused could be arrested and shot. Those events were days past by the time Paquita read about them, but the realization that it was too late now to send a coach paled in comparison to the most recent development reported, however derisively, in that same edition: the Ecclesiastical Council, declaring our lost brother José Rufino to be an apostate and anathema to all Christian humanity, a Pharisee of modern times, accursed and placed outside the mercy of God, had ordered his immediate excommunication. And let the fate of the excommunicated follow all those who willingly lend him their support—

Salve, María! gasped Paquita. Tears fell onto the backs of her hands, which her future husband had yet even to touch with his own fingers. Am I excommunicated too? What about our Cathedral wedding? And how will we baptize our children? She returned to the newspaper and read through a blur that the priests had also prohibited him from taking the name of one of the saints of the Roman martyrology, Justo … —accursed and placed outside the mercy of God! Well, go and find crueler words than those, if you can!

FOUR DAYS BEFORE the Sisters of Nuestra Se?ora de Belén were to abandon their convent, María de las Nieves, as she did every Friday afternoon, had gone to confession in the lower-choir. The small mahogany door of the confessional window was decorated with an exquisite painting, in oils and gold leaf, of the Lamb of God nestled inside a corona of flames; when she pulled it open she found Padre Lactancio already waiting on the other side. The priest's eyes were tremulous pools of lonely pessimism. She sneezed so suddenly she didn't even have a chance to lift her hands.

"Jesucristo," said the priest in a quietly stunned tone, nearly gaping at her.

"Blessed be His name, forever and ever."

"Impious and disgraceful ni?a," he said, in his suffocated voice of torturous, unconfessed love. "Why, of all possible moments, do you choose to sneeze now?"

"It wasn't on purpose, Padre," she answered. "It must be because today is a cold, gray day, and I also feel cold and gray inside. Soon we'll be leaving our cloister."

"That is not among the causes of sneezing mentioned by Aristotle." Padre Lactancio pronounced the philosopher's name with an acid trace of personal resentment. The judgment, he told María de las Nieves, had finally arrived.

"All the way from Rome?" she asked, as brightly as she could.

He didn't know. The judgment was unsigned, but it had been slipped under the door of his sacristy in an envelope sealed with the emblem of the Curia. "What I think, Sor San Jorge," he said, "is that some very learned theologian or canon, knowing that this is a critical and historic moment for our Church in this country, one certain to be studied by scholars for all time, did not wish to have his name attached to a disquisition on sneezing. But I confess, I had hoped for a more compassionate interpretation. I trust the writer felt guided by God."

María de las Nieves felt the stirring of pitch-dark panic, but managed to ask calmly: "Does our Madre Priora know?"

"Pobrecita, she is running in circles, trying to see to a thousand matters at once. We are to discuss later today what is to be done."

Padre Lactancio had brought the letter, which he unfolded and began to read out loud from in his earnest, stumbling manner. Padre Famianus Strada, the author of a seventeenth-century treatise on the sneeze, was cited as the fundamental source for much that was to follow, beginning with the myth of Prometheus, who, while making a clay statue that he wished to endow with life, stole a beam of sunlight from Apollo and absent-mindedly put it up his nose, causing himself and then the statue to sneeze violently. As soon as María de las Nieves heard the words "Aristotle wrote, It is very pleasant to sneeze, and the pleasure is felt in all parts of the body," she had no doubt about her fate. The judgment's author next cited a seemingly binding precedent. A little more than a century before, in the former viceregal capital, when the sneeze-provoking inhaling of snuff was endemic in the convents, the Archbishop had declared the use of snuff by nuns to constitute a mortal sin of the flesh. The possession of snuffboxes and the practice of accepting pinches of snuff from visitors to the locutory was prohibited inside all the cloisters from that day forward.

"… The novice Sor San Jorge's habitual sneezing is of the gravest category of mortal and monastic sin because it is a debauched bodily self-pleasuring and, in the satisfying of lechery by a less obviously proscribed means, a ridiculing of her most solemn vow of virginal purity."

María de las Nieves, eyes cast down, felt indignation growing inside her. Her brow flashed hot. When she finally spoke, she managed to sound calm: "Why now, Padre Lactancio, if the convent is to close in four days, and all novices are to be freed from their vows? You're not really going to show it to Madre Gertrudis, are you, Padre Lactancio? It isn't even signed. Somebody is playing a trick on us. Don't you think so?"

But the priest was again reading from the judgment in a low, rapid voice: "The angelic doctor San Tomás de Aquino wrote that the reason can be consumed by the vehemence of such pleasure until there is no room for intelligent activity. Because the novice Sor San Jorge has only been vehement in the pursuit of her vice, she should be confined and observed. We pray that it is the loss of reason, more than wickedness, which explains her. There it ends, Sor San Jorge." With a momentous nod, he concluded, "So perhaps it is the loss of reason, and not wickedness, which explains you. You know I cannot defy the orders of my Superiors."

When the new Prioress read the verdict, she ordered María de las Nieves confined to a punishment cell in the novices' cloister. But Padre Lactancio assumed that the imprisoned novice had simply been freed, that she, like Sor Gloria, had been discreetly slipped out of the convent before the move to Santa Catalina. He was sorry that there'd been no chance to say good-bye. María de las Nieves, he knew also, must now consider him an odious fool, and he blessed her for that. But priests share with God the great vocation of bringing happiness to others: at least twice a day, Padre Lactancio went to Santa Catalina to visit Madre Gertrudis and her nuns. But it was not until the second day that he finally dared to ask her about Sor San Jorge's whereabouts.

"She left behind in punishment cell, Padre," was the foreign nun's cold-hearted reply. "The authorities find and send home. But Padre, no call her Sor San Jorge. Sor San Jorge is no more her name."

ONE MORNING MARíA de las Nieves woke to bells ringing Prime, which, being imprisoned, she would not attend; the next to the reedy squawking of a soldier's cornet. She'd been stripped of her habit, veil, and headdress. It was impossible to pull a sneeze-worthy piece of thread from her sackcloth tunic. She could hear the clamor of soldiers in the professed nuns' cloister and knew it was just a matter of time before they finally found her, for the convent was not a labyrinth; they would only have to explore a little more. That morning the little door at the bottom of the locked door to her cell did not slide open for her daily ration of hard bread and water. But the previous dawn someone had delivered three oranges as well, and then tried to push something else through the opening, but it was too large. Then she'd heard the shriek of the bolt being slid open, the door opening and closing, footsteps receding. When she woke again, the morning light pouring through the high barred window, she saw the big box left just inside the door. But it was not a box. It was a fat single-volume edition of Sor María de Agreda's The Mystical City, the "autobiography" of the Most Holy Virgin. All that day and the next she read without stopping. No more food or drink was pushed into her cell, but she felt indefatigable. She slid the open tome across the floor, chasing the fading light until she was down to just one small diluted patch penetrating through the crossed iron bars. It truly was a book of marvels: the divine unborn Infant in the Holy Virgin's suddenly transparent womb, waving to the future Apostles being carried in the mortal but also transparent wombs of their mothers; and the Holy Virgin's adventures in heaven.

But the Bible and liturgy and the vidas of saints and nuns that she'd been reading and listening to for a year were also full of marvels, if not so realistically told. Sor María's book went thoroughly into matters lightly passed over in the Bible and everywhere else, so much so that it was as if the screen of divine instruction had been ripped away, and she was now reading about biblical events as they had actually occurred. This idea disturbed her so much that as soon as it became too dark and she had to set the book aside, she sat on the floor sucking and chewing orange peels, scratching at her rashes, and thinking about what she'd read late into the night. Such was her absorption that she didn't feel afraid. She could smell wood smoke and meat roasting in the air, and something foul, as if fabrics, or even hair, were being burned. She heard glass smashing. Some of the soldiers became drunk the way Indians do, querulously shouting and arguing with their own sorrow, fear, and shame. Then she almost forgot to breathe, because it was as if those same violent, unhappy voices were sending her an archangelic revelation about one of the chapters she'd read earlier that day, the one in which the Holy Virgin is early in her pregnancy and her husband, José, notices. For being most perfect in the proportions of her body, the slightest change was the more apparent. Sor María de Agreda related, page after page, what the Bible leaves out: José's prolonged anguish over his much younger wife's infidelity. As his suspicions grew, the carpenter became more melancholy, and sometimes spoke to his adored wife in a severe and unkind manner, something he'd never done before. But the Holy Virgin maintained her usual sweetness, and went on making his meals and attending to all his wants. After passing two more months in unendurable uncertainty, José came to a decision. He prepared a bundle of clothing and took a small amount of the money he'd earned from his carpentry, leaving the rest. He told God he was going away, not because his wife had committed a sin but because, seeing her condition, he was ignorant of the cause, and could bear it no longer.

So she lied to her husband to keep him from abandoning her to face the scandal alone, thought María de las Nieves. He pretended to believe her, because it gave him an excuse to stay, though he was devastated, because he knew now that she'd also lied when she'd told him that she loved him. Maybe she even secretly despised him, and loved someone else. María de las Nieves sat in the pitch-darkness of her punishment cell as if at the bottom of a bottle of ink, and prayed: Queen of Heaven, send me a sign, because I know that Satan prepares you for himself by giving you satanic thoughts. It was just before dawn when the bolt in the door was slid open, and she told herself to accept the horrors that were about to befall her as just punishment. But it was only Padre Lactancio. The priest led her out of the novices' cloister, while she carried the enormous book against her chest in both arms. In the kitchen a soldier was crouched in front of the stove working a bellows and did not even glance up as they passed. Padre Lactancio took hold of her elbow and ordered her to close her eyes when they entered the garden—but she disobeyed, and saw soldiers and even women asleep in the open corridors, some using the satin robes of saints' statues as blankets. She saw the rag-shrouded, leathery, long-haired skeleton of a nun, pulled from the crypt and propped up against the base of the fountain, an empty aguardiente bottle between her splayed thigh bones.