Two Natures

The Holy Office and I disagreed about nearly everything across eighteen months, but on one point of craft we were of a single mind: a case is built like a garment, and the fiscal had cut his to a pattern. Every piece of my life had been recut to serve it. What remained, that first summer, was the fitting — and the fitting, in that house, is done upon the body.

But first understand the daily shape of the thing, for the tellers give the trial as a scene and it was not a scene; it was a climate, and I lived in it five hundred days. The Office works by audiences: you are fetched from the cell at their pleasure, never at yours, stood in the countinghouse room, and invited — always invited; the courtesy never once slipped, and I came to understand the courtesy as the coldest instrument in the building — to search your memory and discharge your conscience. Three times, by their form, comes the admonition: tell what you know, for the Office does not arrest without cause. They do not tell you the cause. They do not tell you the witnesses. You are to guess your way into confession, and every guess is taken down by the notary and becomes evidence, and a frightened prisoner guessing at his accusers will convict himself of things the fiscal never dreamed of — I heard it happen through walls, reader; the machine runs on the fuel of its inmates' imaginations. I did not guess. I have told you my apprenticeship: I had been examined by rooms since before I could reach their tables, and the first law of the examined is the one my mother's silence taught over a kitchen wall — volunteer nothing; let the asker spend first. So between audiences I kept my own counsel and the sheep's sleep of the watchful, and in audiences I answered what was asked, exactly, fully where fullness was safe, and the notary's pen and I became, across those months, the two steadiest workers in the building.

They examined me again in August. Tribunal men this time: physicians and a surgeon of their own appointing, sworn to the Office, with the finding of the midwives already in the folio before them — and I ask any honest tradesman whether he has ever conducted a second measurement without the first one's chalk marks guiding his eye. Their conclusion the record keeps: that the prisoner was a woman, was now and had always been; and that whatever member learned men had once certified must have been artificial — a made thing, a fraud of wax or skin or the Devil's tailoring. Always, mark. The word did more work than all their instruments together. It was not enough to describe the body on the table that August; they reached back through it and re-described every year I had lived — unmade the birth-night in the rented room, unmade the war, unmade Cuenca and the quorum and the great Díaz himself — always a woman, and therefore always a lie, the whole life re-dyed in one vat. I lay under their hands, the best-annotated anatomy in Castile, and understood that this examination was not looking at me at all. It was looking at February 1586, at sufficient and perfect, at the crown's embarrassment; and an embarrassment, unlike a body, permits only one finding.

Which brings me, reader, to the fifteenth of August, 1587, and to the hardest page in this account to write levelly. On that day they brought Francisco Díaz — physician to His Majesty, the great man of the stone, the master who had examined me with method and named what he found as he found it — before the tribunal, to answer for his certificate. And the great man retracted. What he had seen and sworn eighteen months before, member and testicles, sufficient and perfect, formed like any man's — all of it he now unsaid, and the terms of the unsaying the record keeps: that his eyes had been deceived by an illusion of the Devil, wrought by the evil arts of the accused.

I learned of it as the prisoner learns everything, sideways — a shift in the questions; the fiscal's new confidence, worn like a new coat; then the substance of the retraction put to me in an audience for my response — and I will give you the honest layers of what moved in me, in their order, as I have sorted them at this table since. The first layer was plain animal desolation: the one paper of my life that had said the whole of what I was — even the crease, even the both of me — burned in an afternoon, and burned by the very hand that wrote it. The second layer was the professional insult, which bit deeper than you might credit: to save his finding they made him a fool, and to save his standing he made me a sorcerer; between fool and sorcerer, a man of science chose to arm the indictment. The third layer came later, at this table, and it is the one I will leave standing, because it is the one a survivor can afford. Consider what the tribunal offered him: either the King's physician erred at the height of his art — and there goes the certificate, the reputation, perhaps the royal favor — or his art had been ambushed by Hell itself, which flatters everyone: his eyes remain excellent, merely outmatched by the Prince of Lies. They built him a bridge of gold out of my case, and he walked across it. I do not say he lied; fear is also an anatomist, and it dissects older men than he was. I say only this, surgeon to surgeon, across whatever distance now stands between us: he examined me twice, and the first time — with no tribunal in the room, no warrant guiding his chalk, nothing at stake but the truth of a body under method — that time, he wrote sufficient and perfect. A man's first finding, taken before the fear arrives, is usually his real one. I have kept his, even if he could not.

So there I stood as autumn came on: the midwives against me, the tribunal's doctors against me, my own great examiner converted into the crown witness for the Devil, and the fiscal's garment fitting closer at every audience. Every voice of authority in the kingdom had now pronounced upon my body except one, and that one they were obliged, by their own forms, to hear. The Holy Office, whatever else I say of it — and I have said it — writes down the answers. Its notaries took my words as carefully as they took everyone's against me. Very well, señores. You have measured me with midwives, neighbors, doctors, and a frightened courtier. Now the body will speak for itself.

How does a man prepare the defense of his life in a cell, without a book, without counsel worth the name, without so much as knowing which witnesses have said what? I will tell you, because the preparation was itself a chapter of my life and the tellers give it nothing. He discovers what he has actually kept. My library was under seal in some clerk's inventory, but I found, pacing that cell through the autumn — four steps, turn, four steps, the prisoner's league — that the candle-lit years had not been rented learning after all; it had soaked in past where confiscation reaches. Chauliac I could walk through operation by operation. And the other shelf, the shelf I had bought against no examination but the one that now arrived — Pliny and the commentaries, the learned frames, the cases of the ancients — rose up page by page when I called, until the cell was, on good nights, the best-stocked study in Toledo with the lamps out. I composed on my feet, in the dark, in the space of four steps: ordered the life as you have had it in this book — for this book, reader, is the child of that pacing; I built its spine that autumn without ink — sorted what was provable from what was merely true, matched authority to assertion like linings to cloth, and rehearsed, against the three-times-repeated admonition, the one deposition of my life I would volunteer. When they fetched me at last to answer the accusation at length, I had been ready for weeks. I had been ready, in the deepest ledger, since a night in a rented room in my seventeenth year.

I told them the truth. I understand how that sentence reads from a man convicted; I write it anyway, because it is the spine of this whole account and because — this is the strange pride I have carried out of that room — the truth I told them is the truest self-portrait I ever made, better than any likeness in these pages. The record keeps my words, and I will lay the heart of them here whole: I am and was a hermaphrodite. I have and had two natures, one of a man and the other of a woman.

And then I gave them what I have given you, in its lived order, compressed into testimony with my life leaning on it. That I was born as they had read in the registers, and lived a girl, and was married a girl, to a mason of Jaén, and that all of it was lawful and none of it was lied. That in the labor of my son — hard labor, the body at its uttermost — nature finished in one night work she had left folded: a passage broke above the water's channel, and a member came partway forth; and that what emerged, lived — hidden, imperfect, but mine and natural, no more chosen than my marks or my mother. That years after, with the art in my hands, I did for myself what I would have done for any patient: severed with a surgeon's knife the skin that bound the member, and freed it to its function — and let them mark, I told them, that the art came after the nature; the knife freed what the birth had made; no blade on earth manufactures what is not there. And that this member, which examiners of every rank had seen and sworn to, had in the year before my arrest been lost to me — an injury, and the treatments that followed — so that the midwives at Ocaña had found what was truly findable that June: a body whose man's nature had withered and whose woman's nature remained. Both findings true, señores. Both certificates honest. The contradiction is not in the papers; it is in the assumption beneath the papers, that a body must keep to one column of your register all its days. Nature, señores, does not clerk for you.

That last sentence I may not have said aloud. The pacing composed it; whether the audience received it, the folios know and I no longer do; a man's great speeches migrate, over years, between what he said and what he was. But the authorities I called, I called, and the record keeps them, so let me summon them again at this table with the ceremony they earned, for they were the strangest muster of witnesses ever to file into that countinghouse: four dead men, unrackable, unsequesterable, every one of them on the tribunal's own shelves.

Aristotle first, the master of those who know: who treats of creatures partaking of both natures as of a thing in nature — to be studied, categorized, explained by causes, like twins, like left-handedness, like every other of nature's less-traveled roads; requiring, note it well, señores, philosophy, and not once in all his books an exorcist. Pliny next, the great cataloguer, in whose Natural History stand the androgyni among the peoples of the world, born of both natures — and who records, in the dry voice of a man filing what the world sends him, that such persons were in older times accounted prodigies, and in his own day were simply... counted. Filed with the world's furniture. I gave them the drawer of wonders, señores, and asked only to be filed in it. Cicero and the Romans I gave them for the law — for Rome, which governed more of the earth than Spain yet has, met such births with a jurist's shrug and an assignment: let the person be reckoned to the nature that prevails. Reckoned, señores — a civil verb, a clerk's verb; where Rome reached for a ledger, your fiscal reaches for a pact. And Augustine last — your own doctor, the Church's own, and I confess the pleasure was not small of fetching my heaviest witness from their own altar — Augustine, who writes of the androgyne plainly: rare, but real; born so; creatures of God's making like any other, whom he numbers within the human family, in the City of God itself, without recourse to any devil whatsoever. There is my pact, I told them. It is with Aristotle, Augustine, Cicero, and Pliny — tacit, I grant you, but I hold to its terms, and the other party has never once retracted.

You see the architecture I set against the fiscal's, and I was prouder of its joinery than of anything I ever cut in cloth or closed in flesh. If I am of two natures by nature, then behold how his whole garment comes apart at the seam. The first marriage: lawful — a woman wed a man. The second: lawful — a man, certified so by the crown's own physician in the season when the man's nature prevailed, wed a woman; and if their lordships preferred Rome's rule to my testimony, the outcome was the same, for the nature that prevailed had prevailed before witnesses of every rank. No sodomy, then, for there was no coupling of like with like. No imposture, for I wore no nature I did not own. No mockery of the sacrament, for I entered it by its every gate, licensed, examined, banned, and blessed. And no Devil — attend, fiscal, for this was the beam I aimed at his keystone — no Devil at all, because nothing in the case wants explaining beyond what nature, on the authority of philosophers and saints, herself provides. His entire indictment needed Hell the way an arch needs its center: remove it, and every charge falls into a heap of ordinary events — a hard birth, a rare body, a surgeon's knife, an injury, two honest certificates sworn eighteen months apart over a changing body. I offered them a case with the Devil unemployed. I knew, even as I built it, that unemployment was the one verdict the Holy Office least likes to return.

They listened. I will enter that much for the tribunal of Toledo, and it is not nothing, whatever it proved to be worth: they listened, the pens working, the questions after — and the questions after were the real examination, and they were not stupid questions. Why, if all was nature, the years of silence; why the habit of a man taken in secret and not the case brought to the church; whether I had read my authorities before or after I had need of them — a lawyer's dart, that one, and I answered it straight: after, señores, mostly after; a man learns the name of his country when he meets other travelers from it; the country was mine from birth all the same. What they made of me behind the table I could not read then and will not invent now. The Office's faces are the best-trained in Spain. But the audiences changed after that day — shorter, procedural, the machine's attention turning elsewhere, to witnesses I never saw, to consultations I would learn of only by their fruit — and there settled over my case the long administrative quiet that prisoners fear more than the strappado, because quiet is the sound of other men deciding.

Let me give the quiet its own entry, for no teller has ever spent a line on it and it was the longest country I ever lived in. A prisoner of the secret cells holds three estates: his routine, his body, and his head, and he will keep all three or lose all three together. The routine I built like a poor man's monastery: the pacing-league at set hours, four steps and turn; the barber-work I was permitted on myself, order maintained against the argument of lice and stone; the meals — the Office feeds its inventory adequately, mark, your prosecution is paid for out of your own sequestered goods, so I dined those eighteen months, with perfect irony, on the sale of my own wool. The body I drilled as I drill patients: stretched, worked in the space given, slept by discipline, sheep-fashion, in slices. And the head, reader — the head I gave employment, because an unemployed head in a stone room hires the Devil the fiscal kept alleging. I recited anatomy, bone by bone, vessel by vessel, aloud, in order, the whole man twice weekly — my Chauliac, my wards, my war, all of it walked through and kept oiled. I retook the Protomedicato's examination from memory and passed. I turned heels in my mind, wool I could feel to the ounce. I told over the towns of Andalusia south to north with their fairs and their gates. And nightly, last thing, against the dark's own interrogatory — was any of it worth this; would the road not have been kinder; what is she suffering tonight — I held the audit I have held at this table since, entry by entry, Alhama to Yepes, and closed the books balanced every night but nine. I counted the nine. A man should know the exact size of his despair; it is the one measurement no examiner will ever take for him.

It held seventeen months, that quiet, all told, from accusation to sentence — through the winter, and the spring, and the summer, and deep into the second winter, my forty-third, if the arithmetic of Alhama holds, spent walking a league a day in four-step stages while the folios thickened somewhere overhead, my words and the words against me interleaved in that terrible patient sewing of theirs. Whether María waited beyond one wall or ten I never learned. What they did with it all — with the philosophers, the certificates, the two natures, the unemployed Devil — they announced to me and to all Toledo on a Sunday in December, in the Plaza de Zocodover, dressed for the occasion. The plaza wants a fresh candle and a steadier hand than midnight's. I will meet you there, reader, at the next entry. Wear something warm; I was made to.