“Sister Christian…what’s your price for flight?”

Night Ranger, 1984

for Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz 1648-1695

The day is blue and yellow, behind the red hacienda. We have come in search of Sister Juana, from her convent in Mexico City. Tepetlixpa, where she was raised, sprawls under the fire and ice of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. Whippoorwills and woodpeckers watch from the woods as we weave the garden path to the white door. A cowbird flits alongside our trail, turning his beady eyes on us and inquiring our intention with its strange song.

We greet the ghosts in her grandfather’s library, where the criolla girl, christened Ines, feasted on row after row of forbidden fruit. Oh, baby, this is where she grew up, Miguel says in that breathless Spanish accent of his. Like everything is an emergency, or a love affair. We follow in her footsteps, seeking knowledge, poetry, passion. Hungry for everything.

By three, she read and wrote in her native Spanish, and in Latin, too. Before her breasts bloomed, she was learning music, teaching Latin, and mastering Greek logic. She razed her jet tresses and begged her family to let her Yentyl her way into university as a man. When they shook their heads, she ran off to the convent, called to the nunnery so that she would “have no fixed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study.”

Sister Juana wrote, “What is the devil in my being a woman?” among endless treatises on doctrine, history, and musical composition. There were the redondillas, and the plays, works staged and read and debated by scholars and viceregals far and wide throughout New Spain. Her love poetry was the most popular of all, of course. It is why Miguel and his nightclub tribes wear her on black t-shirts, styled like Guadalupe but with rainbows for garlands. Oh, girl, she was for sure lesbian, he told me before we left the city. Her lengthy arguments on philosophical and theological matters were not so popular, but she routinely took on the Church itself, with rigorous and impassionate scholarship that few dared dispute.

If she deftly wrestled the brightest minds in her locutario, and pointed the bird to men and religion and politics, and hoarded books into an impressive collection of her own, she was loved even more by her sister nuns and by the indigena, because she spoke on their behalf. She spoke their language. She wrote often in Nahuatl, about the Virgin Mary but also, other goddesses, Cihuacoatl and Huitzilopochtli.

We meander through the hacienda petting zoo, tickling goats and dromedaries. Miguel snuggles up to a bulbous capybara, who looks on suspiciously and roots through his knapsack for food. A man with a few dozen parakeets on his arm points us toward the aviary on the island.

I am sorry, amigo, Miguel says to the giant rat, and the whole scenario feels like something out of Nacho Libre. I laugh out loud. No peanuts in here, Big Guy. Just this play by Sor Juana. Miguel pulls out a worn copy and flips through it. I perch on the side of a wheelbarrow, disturbing a trio of small birds who flutter off into the frangipani.

The sun is soft today, pure mercy. Miguel reads in Spanish, Juana’s voice coming through the hush and clamour of the centuries. In 1689, a Mexican nun was contrasting the parallels between Aztec sacrifice and the Catholic Eucharist. El Narcisso Divino, The Divine Narcissus.

She is buried in roses and rosaries, at San Jeronimo where she spent more than half her life, the Convent of Our Lady of Expectation. Just a year after dismantling her treasured library, she died after she contracted cholera, caring for her sisters during a pandemic. First she sold all 4000 books of poetry, philosophy, science, and history, and her collection of musical and medical instruments, too. She gave the proceeds to the poor.

It is often said that the Inquisition came for her, a romantic possibility complicated by the church and crown’s deep respect for her intellect, scientific inquiry, and charity work. Still, her equalitarian philosophies ruffled those feathers. Whatever it was that transpired, Juana renounced secular study a year before her last breath. She signed her renunciation in blood: I, the worst of all women.

Lorette C. Luzajic writes, edits, publishes, and teaches small fictions, from Toronto, Canada. Her work has (or will) appeared in Axon, Indelible, Ghost Parachute, Trampset, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres, Unbroken, JMWW, Cleaver, New Flash Fiction Review, Litro, The Dillydoun Review, and more. She has been nominated for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and four times each for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Lorette is also an international visual artist working with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far.