Poison

N A YEAR OF AMPLE RAIN, ONE HECTARE
, carefully tended, would sustain enough mulberry trees to feed about one hundred and forty-four thousand silkworms. The trees’ first buds appeared just after Palm Sunday. They unfurled by Whitsun and were in full summer leaf by the time we celebrated the feast of Our Lady. In autumn we pruned the bare branches and with the wood we collected we made more bonfires for Saint John the Baptizer than any other family in Quintanapalla.

Our lives followed those of our trees and our worms. Each year we carried almost seven thousand pounds of leaves to the silk house. Leaves bundled in baskets and bags and yoked to tired shoulders or pushed in the old barrow. Leaves wrapped in a linen and balanced on an upright head, or dragged in a sack along the dry ground so that they got dusty and had to be washed.

I was a child of five years, smaller than other girls my age, small enough that I could walk under my grandfather’s table without ducking my head, but I was not so small that I could not carry my share of the mulberry leaves; and, like my father and mother, my grandfather and my sister, I carried leaves from our trees to our worms, bearing them on my head in a basket that was broad and flat like my mother’s, except that it was half the size.

The silkworms ate without cease. Day into night into day, we forced them to feed; they paused only to split their skins. After the fourth and final molt, each worm as long and as thick as my grandfather’s thumb, they were ready to spin. One hundred and forty-four thousand worms of good quality, vigorous and industrious, could spin almost ninety pounds of silk cocoons, that total including the weight of the worms inside, which we killed
by steaming the trays of sleeping cocoons over stones heated by fire and doused with water, smothering the worms in rising clouds of hot vapor. We had to kill them. If we did not, they would turn into silk moths; they would escape by chewing through the silk they had spun.

Each year, just before All Souls’ Day, we took our ninety pounds, more or less, of raw silk cocoons from our one hectare to market. There we sold them; and from the market they were carried with the harvests of other silk farmers on a great tumbrel pulled by oxen to the cisterns in Soria, where they were soaked and soaked and soaked again, and then unraveled. The unraveling required the labor of comb girls, who clawed the silk apart with the nails of their middle fingers notched in one, two, three places—notched to the detriment of their lovers’ backs, or the flesh of anyone else they might care to touch, themselves included.

After the labor of the worms was thus undone, the silk was ready to be twisted into thread at the throwing mills, also in the city of Soria. In the mill yards the crated unraveled silk was unloaded by the men who worked there, the shining work of our worms thus passing from the hands of maidens to those of swains: from one to the other, like a secret, like a greeting, like a whispered promise of more and better gifts to come. Or so I liked to dream as I fed the worms, for, though I had never seen a twisting mill myself, I knew that its clacking, groaning machines were tended by young men who labored long days for little money, not even a hundred maravedis, a scant handful of coins—barely enough to buy them their suppers and an occasional trinket for a sweetheart, my papa said.

Twisted into hanks of fine, strong thread, the silk was crated again and carried from the mill to the wash works nearby, where it was tied in bags and boiled in soapy water, then rinsed and dried and bleached in fumes of burning sulfur.

From the wash works, the silk was crated one last time and then carried to the dye artists in Epila, whose hands were permanently stained black from endless immersion in pigments; their ears and noses, too, if they were like me and in the habit of absentmindedly scratching an itch. The dye artists made our silk
purple, perhaps, or red or green, dropping each white hank into a cauldron of color. I could picture the nearly naked vat boys as they slowly stirred the strands with a pole, sweat running down their thin chests and into their loincloths. For in the dye works with its boiling cauldrons they could wear nothing more, and naked they carried the dripping hanks out to the factory yard’s great racks and hung them there to dry.

Woven, then, by the weavers in that same city: each lustrous colored thread held tight by a loom’s jumping heddle until it was battened fast to another, made to lie forever between its neighbors—one slender stroke of color after another, placed so as to create a pattern, a shining, dreamlike scene of ever-leaping deer and wheeling birds, of imagined animals following one another, caught in the fabric for all eternity. Or an endless, meditative weave of repeating geometric symmetries: squares inside squares, stripes and circles and crescents, trapezoids and triangles and pyramids of silk.

A year of ample rain. In truth, I cannot remember a year of ample rain, other than the one in which it all arrived between one Sabbath and the next and coursed down the mountain and through our house. But by the end of a tolerably wet season, our worms produced silk sufficient for about forty pairs of hose—a modest accomplishment given the work it took, the efforts of our whole family, though one that grew in my imagination, and in my dreams. Grew until it was enough silk to clothe the grandest assembly the land had ever seen.

Enough silk for a state wedding, or funeral. Hundreds of dresses, thousands of doublets. Collars and cloaks and cuffs and ruffs of silk.

Enough silk for tapestries to drape every inch of cold stone wall in the king’s palace in Madrid. Enough to carpet each stone stair and to lay a shining path for the king to tread to his queen’s bedchamber.

Enough for his forces, too, his armies and his navies. Enough to rig an entire armada—sails, shrouds, and yards of silk: red and green, white, blue, gold, all shimmering on the surface of the ocean, like light broken by the water into every conceivable color.

Enough for a thousand silk dancing slippers.

Picture it like this. Picture it as I have countless times: unfurled, one endless, slender, shining strand. Once I took a cocoon and soaked it and unraveled it myself, and though I broke the silk repeatedly, still the one cocoon, undone, unspun, took me around and around and around our house more times than I could count. Mama went in and out of the door; her skirts tore through the strand I’d stretched across the threshold. When I went to catch it from the breeze it eluded my fingers. But away from the perils of clumsy hands and busy skirts, in the care of comb girls and mill boys, our silk would not break.

Even without the magnification of my desire, our worms—our ninety pounds of cocoons—would yield about fourteen thousand leagues of spun silk. I asked Papa to do the arithmetic for me, and as he figured, squinting, I squinted, too, and saw a filament so fine that in the wrong light it might be invisible, and yet so magically strong that it could withstand the wind of any maritime storm.

Enough to take me back and forth to the New World seven times.

If I were to follow the route of Cortés, embarking from La Coruña, as he did one hundred and seventy-one years ago, in 1518—that is to say, if I were to sail more or less straight into the sunset, west, that same compass point which the poets employ to evoke death, Helios’ burning chariot sinking into the waves with a hiss of steam—the length of raw silk required for the manufacture of, say, a dozen dancing slippers would take me far past the Azores and past the dreadful glass-flat calm of the Sargasso Sea, past Hispaniola and Cuba and over the Nares Deep (into which ships sank as far down, they say, as Mount Ararat was high) and on past the tip of that distant land of flowers, La Florida, where Ponce de Léon died seeking a cure for death.

Another few slippers’ worth and I would be across the warm gulf and into the Bay of Campeche, docking in the port of that city named for the true cross of Christ, Vera Cruz, the city that is the entry to the new, unspoiled world: the land of another chance, the land of hope. And what better name for hope than
that of the cross? For isn’t hope what flowed from Christ’s side? From his heart and hands and feet? Isn’t it hope that makes one don slippers and dance? Either that or despair. Yes, despair does quite as well for dancing.

As if those silk-slippered feet, like some mischievous crusade transported into the air, would trip and skip and pirouette across oceans and past islands. Gliding and dancing over waves and past storms and on to the gold and silver of New Spain.

Seven times across the oceans.

Seven. A magic number. And an odd one, which would not bring me home but leave me on the green shore of a land of savages who wore no clothes at all, silk or otherwise.

I was a dreamer. Of course I was. Spending so much time in the company of silkworms, watching the worms, I learned to be a worm. From leaves the worms spun silk, and I apprenticed myself to them. I found a way to transform the life I was given into another life, one that was fantastic, unexpected.

It was a family failing, imagination. Each night after dinner we sat before the fire, Papa in his chair, Mama and Dolores and I on our bench, and the mathematics of greed and desire, of our rich future, kept us awake until we stumbled at our chores the next morning. It was a family failing, but I was the worst afflicted. Even after I finally lay down to sleep in the bed I shared with my sister, I dreamed of silk. Of all the silk in the kingdom of Spain. To me it seemed as if this bounty were truly ours, as if it were we who wore such dresses and cloaks as those perhaps spun from the work of our worms. And if my poor linen shift did not keep out the cold, my dreams of silk were very warm, almost as warm as the cloth itself would be, and all people know that there is nothing both so warm and so light as silk. Or dreams.

I dreamed that when Papa and Mama became sufficiently rich they would hire enough workers to relieve them of their chores, and then Mama could sit in a chair with a footrest and wear a beautiful dress of purple silk damask. We could wear silk then, when we were rich. Mama could be a lady of leisure, a señora who lived with her family and her servants in a big house and
had nothing to do all day but sit by the fire and change her clothes and think of what it would be that she would have to eat that night; and whatever it was would taste very good when the rest of the people were mostly hungry. But Mama would not be idle, no, she would use her time wisely and learn to read, holding a book in hands now soft and always clean. She owned several books already, little devotional texts that Papa had brought home from market, all of whose letters and words were nothing more to us then than pattern on paper, inscrutable and frustrating. I opened the books and I stared at the pages too hard, trying to make sense of the words inside, and the little marks wriggled and twisted before my straining eyes like the worms on their feeding trays. But not forever would they so defeat me, for when we were rich and Mama had learned to read, she would teach the words to me. Spanish, and Latin, too.