For Fuentes, Quixote, «como desfacedor de entuertos» (Cervantes 88), is Western literature's most faithful emblem of the ideals of love and justice. Sor Juana's emblem of those ideals is the Virgin Mary, who epitomizes Don Quixote's merits: Mary is «la Valiente de aventuras, / Deshacedora de tuertos, / Destrozadora de injurias» (II, 10-11). Fuentes has forcefully enunciated these sociopolitical positions consistently throughout his career of forty-three years. Sor Juana understandably dissents more circumspectly. See, for example, how she petitions for a captive slave's freedom (I, 258-59), begs the viceroy's year-old infant to grow up to be a merciful prince (1, 74-77), and asks the same pacifist forbearance of the father, Viceroy Tomás de la Cerda (IV, 375-85). Given the context, she is shockingly anti-patriarchal and anti-Catholic in her sacred dramas and their loas: El Divino Narciso (III, 3-97), El mártir del sacramento, San Hermenegildo (III, 97-183), and El cetro de José (III, 184-258). (N. del A.)

Her March 1691 essay-letter to the bishop of Puebla is held to be autobiographical: Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz (IV, 440-75). The recently unveiled discovery by Elías Trabulse (El Enigma), the prose and verse Carta de Serafina de Cristo published precisely one month prior to the Respuesta, is now held to be a satirical prelude to the Respuesta. Elsewhere in her work, scholars can see the thinly disguised figure of the nun in, for example, the heroin e Leonor of Los empeños de una casa (IV, 3-184) and the Amazonian Beatriz of La segunda Celestina (co-authorship attributed to Sor Juana). Much of her lyric poetry, especially the romances, are epistolary and reveal a great deal about the nun's inner and outer lives. See Paz (338-39) on the «neo-medieval» nature of Sor Juanas culture and society, and Elías Trabulse (Ciencia y religión) on the clash between medieval and modern thought in Sor Juana's time. (N. del A.)

The last verse is itself an intertextual play on a sonnet written by her Spanish baroque predecessor, Luis de Góngora. In him the bitterness is not directed against his own vanity (as it is in Sor Juanas), but meanly, against the vanity of Woman, whom he warns had best seize the day and enjoy her youthful beauty while she can, for soon it and she together will turn into «tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada» (del Río I, 623). (N. del A.)

In his dramatic depictions of battles between Spaniards and Indians, Bernal Díaz describes the «voces e silbos de los indios» (78), for example, or says that «daban los indios grandes silbos e gritos» (82). (N. del A.)

Coincidentally, El Escorial once housed monks of the Order of San Jerónimo (Sor Juana lived in the convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City). (N. del A.)

The painting most notably cited is the triptych, The Garden of Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), depicting medieval notions of the Creation, the loss of Paradise and Hell. Overall, the novel is so much a sea of migrant transtexts (a term for intertexts favoured by Kristine Ibsen) that, a year after Terra Nostra's appearance, Fuentes published a kind of reader's guide. Of Cervantes, o la crítica de la lectura, Fuentes says that, «de manera cierta, el presente ensayo es una rama de la novela que me ha ocupado durante los pasados seis años, Terra Nostra» (36). (N. del A.)

For that «typical» view of Sor Juana, see, in addition to Paz and Bénassy-Berling (Humanismo y religión), Arenal and Powell, Egan («Juana Inés»), Franco, Glantz, and Sabat-Rivers («Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz»). (N. del A.)

To help us with the strange mathematics of this equation, Fuentes includes a chapter called «Dos hablan de tres» (535-37). (N. del A.)

And the ever-hermetic Fuentes has injected our imaginations with the subliminal notion of an androgynous couple: Juan-Juana (Inés). Both are «de la cruz»/«of the cross» because he hears the mark of a cross on his back and she, as a nun, is married to the Cross. (N. del A.)

«Y el Rey, que vigilancias afectaba, / Aun con abiertos ojos no velaba. / El de sus mismos perros acosado, / Monarca en otro tiempo esclarecido, / Tímido ya venado, / Con vigilante oído, Del sosegado ambiente / Al menor perceptible movimiento / Que los átomos muda, / La oreja alterna aguda / Y el leve rumor siente / Que aun lo altera dormido [...]» (I, 338; Terra Nostra 744). (N. del A.)