It was a time of high culture in the City of Mexico. Scholars and clerics, philosophers and mathematicians, poets and historians abounded and on all their lips was the name of a child. A girl child. Bastard daughter of a woman who scorned marriage and educated her girl children. And this child at the age of ten had acquired not only huge knowledge but also the analytical skill to draw fresh conclusions from her studies.
She was an honored person, even in the streets and markets. But she was alone. For the scholars and mathematicians there was no honor in conversation with this person. What could be done with her?
The vicereine took the child to her heart, and in that safety she flourished. A favorite at the court, she was supplied with everything she needed. She learned the fine arts of diplomacy and conversation and life was good until the vicereine died.
At seventeen some choice had to be made. There were only two. Marriage or the convent. Marriage was not to be considered. The barbarity of it appalled her. To voluntarily walk into such cruel servitude! To walk with a shy smile all dressed in sweet pure white to such a bloody sacrifice! Her mother inherited the lease on a hacienda and ran it successfully. She had no such option.
And so it was the nunnery. No more laughing out loud. No more flirtation. No more compliments for her beautiful face, charming figure.
It was a refuge. She had her own quarters, her own slave girl. Her duties were few. She entertained the scholars and thinkers of the city and she began to write.
And she wrote poems and plays and essays on all secular things and the Jesuits turned on her and harassed her endlessly. She wrote and spoke on the rights of women. The right to live freely. To seek an education. In the convent school she led the girl students as they wrote and performed in their own plays and a great body of anger grew against her.
Her only weapon a pen.
They took her books away from her and she turned her mind to the flies at the window and she documented their short lives, the movement of their wings. She saw that they did not spring fully formed from rotten meat, as so many thought, but that they hatched as maggots from eggs and that the maggots had a place in the world as did all things. She observed the cloud formations at her window and speculated long on their composition and formation. Her notes were copious.
It was not the Jesuits who broke her spirit. It was not the hunger riots at her door. It was the sad knowledge that all she wrote, all she longed to make clear was blown away in the wind. That no person, even those she loved and honored, could absorb and understand her thought.
``Look further!'' she would say, but their minds had grown in the patterns of the day and did not break free. It was she who retreated. She who apologized for her secular thought in the shelter of the Church. Her ungodliness.
And she repaid the Church by going among the plague victims and seeking to ease their passing.
She died among them.