Poison (10 page)

“Have you had your … your things removed? All of them, I mean?” he asked. At least that is what she thought he wanted to know. Perhaps he wished to blame his failure on some obstructing, nonexistent undergarment.

Sometimes, even if María understood Carlos, she pretended she did not. Either that, or she pretended too great a modesty to allow her to answer even delicately posed questions. Any words she did not know she tried to commit to memory, and the following morning she would ask Esperte their meaning. For a girl interrupted en route to becoming a nun, the translator was surprisingly forthcoming.

Fortunately, as the nightly debacle was initiated only after the candles had been extinguished, María did not have to see Carlos’s face, nor disguise her own torment. He sucked at her breasts, and the touch of his lips provoked such revulsion in the queen that she felt her scalp draw tight with rage. She found herself wishing that he would take his nourishment directly from his ridiculous wet nurses. Then perhaps he would let her nipples alone and engage in a more profitable activity.

But he did not, and before even a season of married life had passed, the queen despaired of the king’s ever making her pregnant. Carlos never managed to get himself inside her, not the part of himself that would matter. He stuck his fingers in her, stuck them in without removing his rings and moved them around searchingly as if he were examining her prior to any more daring entry. But he did not once put his organ inside her. He sucked her nipples and he wriggled against her and sprayed semen over her thighs like a huge and gangling baby. He even mewed like an infant in her arms. The noises he made were useful in that they obscured the sounds of her weeping.

When she asked him to do it, when she whispered in halting, mispronounced Spanish, “Put it in”—“I think actually you said ‘Put it on,’ ” Esperte told her the next day—when María gave her husband directions and tried to lead him, he went soft in her hand. He quit her bed and bedchamber.

AS IT A MEASURE OF OUR WICKEDNESS THAT
we preferred to do it on our knees?

The Church forbids us the posture of dogs, of cattle.

The Church reserves our knees for supplication. The Church requires that a man and woman face each other, that they lie down together.

Did it make us that much more bestial that we could not see each other’s eyes or mouth, nor any feature that might separate us from the animals? Our hairless skins.

On my knees I saw nothing. Eyes open, I looked forward into darkness; I used my hands to support me. My hands held the wall, the floor. Or I might close my eyes; I might duck my head and go down, breastbone to floorboard.

If he pulled too far out of me, I protested.
Don’t
, I said. I wanted him in, further and further in and never out. Were I to betray any pain, were I to whimper, biting my lip, he would stop, and I would turn on him.

No!
I would say.

But I cannot while I hear you crying
.

I am not crying
.

Sometimes he did not touch me at all—not with his hands. Other times he might put both of them around my neck. I would imagine him strangling me, then; it would have been easy enough to do.

When I thought of this, I found myself surprised that the idea did not trouble me.

HE FIRST TWO BABIES WERE BROUGHT TO OUR
house in the week of the feast of the Annunciation, though no angel came to foretell of their arrival. Rather, a dirty man with a leather vest came to our house with a paper none of us could read and asked that my mother sign where he pointed. At his feet rested a large basket with a stout handle and two greasy little heads poking out, one on each side, from a tangle of swaddling that had once been white but now was covered with dust from the road.

Standing next to Mama and holding tight to one of her legs beneath her skirts, I looked at the babies. They were in bad need of a bath, they smelled, and their eyes were crusted shut. The man produced a bent goose quill from his pocket and dipped it into a small glass bottle of ink. According to this messenger, the contract, which bore at its head the insignia of the Monasterio de la Encarnación, said that in return for Concepción de Luarca’s suckling these children, she would receive nearly two hundred maravedis per week per child, a sum sufficient to allow us to buy what we then, with no worms, no income, could not provide for ourselves. Like the rest of creation, we grew beans and raised pigs and could trade for our flour, our eggs and salt, but we needed candles, soap, we needed clothing and shoes, and we had almost no money for such things.

Mama did not set out to be a wet nurse, of course. She had had two children of her own, as well as her share of stillbirths and of children who had died in infancy. All boys, in answer to the Purple Hood’s question.
Ahh
, he replies. “
Nnnn Hnn
.” When he is thinking, he often puts his hands under his hood to rub his face.

A year after my birth, my mother had taken in a neighbor’s child whose wife had died in childbed. It was easy enough to
suckle two, Mama had said. My mother was small but she had a lot of milk, so much that she complained that the bodice of her dress was always wet, and her breasts, hot and as hard as bricks, ached.

After that first baby, Mama often helped to feed a child whose own mother was sick or hadn’t enough milk. It was a thing she could do easily, nurse a child, and so she never stopped, her milk never dried up.

“What if someone falls ill?” she would say, more to herself than to anyone else. “What if some child’s mother dies?” So when there was not some unfortunate babe in her arms, she kept herself flowing by squeezing her tits into a cup. I would catch her with her back turned, milking herself in the corner and then throwing the cup of cloudy, pale yellow liquid out the door. It made a little rivulet that ran quickly down the packed dirt path, as if hurrying away from our house and into the world. The milk was sweet, evidently, for ants came to drink of it.

In the four years since the death of my grandfather—four years since we were silk growers and relatively prosperous among the people of Castile—our silk house had stood empty. Papa sat in the same corner where his father had sat, but instead of looking upon the industry of the worms or, like my grandfather, closing his eyes that he might hear in their jaws the sound of rainfall, always so rare where we lived, Papa occupied his hands and eyes with the manufacture of whatever trinkets he could sell at market. Hair combs with each tooth painstakingly carved, and toys for children: wooden tops painted bright colors and balanced so well that on a flat stone they would spin for whole minutes, dolls with dyed hair of wool from the one sheep we kept for that purpose. And a little jointed man strung up between two sticks. When you squeezed the sticks he executed a series of little flips that had his legs folding over his face, a face that Papa had painted so carefully, each eyebrow arched with fear—that emotion perhaps occasioned by the toy figure’s tenuous position in life, forever strung between two tight ropes.

Or maybe the doll’s face expressed the fear that other faces would not. Not the usual fears that were always with us: of plague, of drought, of poverty, accident, of bad luck and evil
eyes. No, the greatest fear in those years of my childhood, a fear not spoken, a fear I sensed before I could name, was of Inquisition. For a small town, Quintanapalla received an unequal measure of attention from the Holy Office, undoubtedly an accident of geography, as Quintanapalla lay along the road between Madrid and Burgos, two bastions of the Church, and suffered the constant traffic of Church officials, who were always looking out for another sinner to feed to the insatiable prisons, another mouthful of fines to pour into the holy coffers.

One spring, two houses—the house of the mason and that of his retired father-in-law—were emptied in the night, their inhabitants collected from their beds. One day they were there, and the next they had disappeared, empty shoes lined up outside their doors. It had long been feared that the mason, flagrant in his refusal to observe holy days of obligation, would attract unwelcome attention, but no one had imagined that his wife, her aged parents and young children would also be taken.

I walked with my sister past little Antonia’s empty house and I saw her blue shoes there, also empty, and whatever sympathy I had for her was tainted by my desire for those ownerless blue slippers with a bright tapping silver cover on each toe. I stopped to stare, clearly acquisitive, and my sister tried to pull me on down the street.

“Look there!” I said to frighten her. “There is Antonia standing in her shoes and she is covered in blood and her hair is on fire!”

Dolores dropped my hand and ran home, and I crept forward and took the little slippers, something no one else in Quintanapalla would have been so brazen as to do. But the street was deserted, and I wanted those shoes. I kept them hidden in the silk house, and I wore them when no one else was around. The lie I had told to frighten Dolores affected me, though. I could not wear the shoes without imagining my own hair catching fire, and eventually I threw them into the pond.

It was said in those days that children taken into the care of the Holy Office were not sent to asylums but were forced to join the ranks of a children’s crusade. Each year an army of Holy Innocents, as the forcibly rehabilitated little sinners were called,
was dispatched south to the Moors in hopes that God would be sufficiently touched by our country’s proselytizing zeal to once again smile on Spain, now generations past her Golden Age of military triumphs and colonial wealth. Well, whether God cared or not for the Innocents’ Saharan fate, the Church’s disposal of them was pragmatic: the children perished and removed the need to feed and clothe them.

The years after the failure of our worms were drought years in Castile. Our small garden dried up, we had only a few onions to show for our trouble, and we grew sick of thin soups flavored with nothing more than a sliver of salted pork.

Plague as well as famine emptied half the houses of Quintanapalla. Persons whose faith was strong said it was God’s right to watch or not watch over the people, and only He knew why such blights came upon the faithful. And those whose faith was weak, if they were smart they kept their mouths shut, lest the black carriage of the Inquisition come silently one night to take them away to a place where they would be encouraged to voice their opinions to a scribe.

We heard rumors that in Madrid whole quarters of the city were abandoned to the plague. The rich people left first, piling whatever they could into their carriages and whipping their horses north to where the air was better. Whatever beggars still lived moved into the empty houses of rich men, ate cured meats from their plates and drank wine from their cellars, only to die weeks later in their beds.

The dreaded white avenues of death. My mama’s papa had briefly held the job of spreading lime in the gutters of cordoned-off streets. A soap maker by trade, his business evaporated when plague came, people foolishly caring more for godliness than cleanliness. “Wash yourselves!” he would yell at people in the plaza. “Save yourselves!” But the people hurried past, his wares went unsold, and he was forced to hire himself to the city of Madrid, which paid him well for his work. There was a choice of occupations offered by the desperate city: to spread lime from a cart, to ride a donkey and check the cordons blocking off diseased areas, or to go on foot catching the contaminating rats with a prong and dropping them dead or as good as
dead into a wheeled barrel of vinegar. My grandfather determined that the farther he was above the dirty streets the safer he would be, so he signed on as a lime thrower and he stood up on the driver’s seat of the lime cart. Every night he washed himself with his own soap, as much as four times from head to foot, but still, he died after a few months, black spots like coins—the Devil’s currency—all over his limbs. He took handfuls of lime from the sack and rubbed it on his skin until he burned as if he were in hell already, but it did no good.