Poison (11 page)

Plague ravaged all of Castile, and the death of so many workers meant that fields and fields of wheat rotted. Flour costs rose so high that for the first time in Dolores’s and my remembrance we found ourselves hungry at night—not so much that we starved, but when we lay down in the dark we felt empty and when we slept we dreamed of eating.

My papa came home one evening from the market and set his basket of toys on the hearth. “Concepción,” he said, and he went to my mama; and when she turned around he put his large hands on her cheeks and held her lovely face between them. “Concepción, I have been with Enrique, and he has told me how their family gets by with Ilena now taking in children from the orphanage in Madrid. She suckles foundlings, and the family gets good money for their care.”

Sweat made a dark shadow around the brim of Papa’s hat, and he smelled of wood smoke and the Portuguese wine he drank with Enrique. My mama’s black eyebrows came together as she waited to hear what else he would say. She took his hands from her face and she held them as she looked at him.

One after another, things had gone wrong for my papa. To discourage evil spirits, we slipped charms under his pillow at night as he slept, we filled his shoes with clover. But nothing helped. His fortunes had turned sour, perhaps, Mama said to us, because he had not respected his father. Not long before, our last pig had escaped into the woods, and while trying to chase it home, Papa had been treed by wolves eager to make dinner of both him and the pig.

After watching the wolves eat up our winter provisions, Papa hung in the tree all night; he stayed there long after the pig’s last
screams, too frightened to move even though the wolves grew bored with waiting for him to climb down and wandered off. Papa remained hanging in the tree until his nerves were permanently affected, shriveled, as he described the feeling, by exhaustion and fright. The only relief he got, he said, was from the bottle. His hands shook badly, then, so badly that it took a good deal longer for him to make his toys, and he could not paint such engaging little faces on the dolls and soldiers as before, and so he sold fewer of what had become more difficult to make.

“Concepción,” he said to Mama, “you could do that. You could take in a foundling or two,” and she looked at him. What he was asking was different from taking in a child as an act of charity. To hire herself out, that would be a shameful thing, possibly. Something that might lower the family and jeopardize her daughters’ chances to marry well. Mama looked at Papa, she said nothing but she let go of his hands and she sat on the bench by the hearth. I knew that she was figuring in her head the few coins she got for eggs and how they disappeared before she ever had enough to buy Dolores or me a pair of shoes. She didn’t answer Papa’s question that night, or for two days more. At supper, on the third night, she set a poor soup on the table and Dolores and I made faces as we dipped our spoons in. We made noises of disappointment, we sighed. She looked at us. “All right, then, Félix,” she said and she nodded at Papa and he looked down at his plate.

She took in two and then three at a time, she had such abundance, it was like children’s stories of cups that never were emptied, bowls of porridge that overflowed. These are the tales that hungry people favor, of course, but it is not just the twist of my memory, the same that makes childhood hay lofts seem as vast as ballrooms, no, Mama did have a genuine gift as a wet nurse.

We did not find this ability surprising, for we all knew of Mama’s generative powers. She made us, and gave us suck; and she had given the silkworms their life, too, keeping the eggs safe in the holy warmth bounded by those two warm globes of what, it seems to me now, was love. The silkworm eggs had ridden about where I wished to be, nuzzled as Mama walked, the quiver of her flesh calling the worms to
Awake! Awake!
just as
now her body said to the orphans,
Sleep. Eat. Grow
. Mama had that kind of flesh—and soul; she gave what was needed.

I was a girl of nine. I had not yet taken my first communion, my portion of the body of Christ, but I was old enough for chores, which I did quickly so as to be done with them. And I was young enough that I yet preferred my mother’s company to that of anyone else. I liked to stay at her side, to watch as she sat with one of the babies by the fire. Sometimes her milk came down so hard that the suckling coughed and pulled away from her nipple, which was dark and lovely and so big that it looked to me like a fruit separate from the rest of her. A fine spray of milk would arc into the light from the fire, and I would see how it fell on the baby’s head or right past the baby and onto the hearthstones, where it evaporated in an instant from the heat, as if it were a magic substance and not one to remain before mortal witness. If I was fast enough I could trace my finger through the steaming drops.

It was lazy and warm and safe by the fire, the orange light made us as rosy and pretty as ladies in paintings, and the babies’ dark greedy eyes stole sparks from the flames. The milk, too, came into the corners of their little sucking mouths and shone in the light. The babies’ eyes rolled up into their heads in delight as they suckled, and sometimes I wouldn’t be able to stand it, just playing quietly with a doll at my mama’s feet. In mimicry I held the doll to my own flat chest, but then I flung it away and jumped up from the warm stones, trying to force my jealous head between my mother’s breast and the babies’ busy mouths. Afraid, I guess, that they would eat her up and leave nothing for me.

Does love bring out the good in some people? It always seems to have made me my worst. I began to hate the babies for taking away my mother’s attention. I began to wish them ill.

One day Mama left me with a sleeping child. She went to market with Dolores and asked me to stay behind and watch the baby. I played for some minutes on the hearth. I lined up broom straws. I took a bit of cheese from the larder and with it tried to catch a mouse. I looked in my sister’s little wood box and
touched all the things she would not let me touch. And then I drew near to the cradle by Mama’s bed.

The baby was sleeping on her back. Air whistled softly through her nose. Her lips—still shaped in a greedy O—moved as if she suckled even in her sleep. I did not approach the cradle intending the child harm, but I found myself pulling the cover up over her sucking lips and whistling nose. I watched for a minute as the baby’s breath made the cloth quiver. Then I put my hand over her face, and I did not take it away, not even when I heard a voice in my head—Mama’s!—say to me, “What are you doing!”

But then the baby moved, and the feeling of her struggling beneath the cloth was an awful squirming that I had felt once before, when Dolores and I had trapped a mole under one of my mother’s aprons. Suddenly I saw that mole, dead, and it frightened me so that I jumped back, away from the cradle. When my mother and sister returned, the child was screaming, and I was curled miserably in the opposite corner of the room.

“What’s happened!” Mama said. At her side, Dolores looked smugly innocent.

I did not admit what I had done, for my sin was so dreadful I was afraid confession might result in the very thing that had led me astray; I was afraid Mama would stop loving me. So, I kept my torment to myself, and soon an outraged infant joined the ranks of those who peopled my dreams. Her cheeks were red and fat and filled with fear and condemnation; and my shame was such that whenever I saw her I covered my eyes. I tried to hide, for now my dreams had turned on me.

Meanwhile, the one surviving son of King Philip of Spain, Carlos, was taken with another of his everlasting illnesses. A sickly child from birth, his health was deemed even more precarious than that of the older Prince Baltazar, who had died the previous year. Though Prince Carlos was the same age as I, he was not yet weaned. An infirmity in his legs, aggravated by troubles with a delicate digestion, meant that this boy of nine years was still carried in arms and still attended by a veritable army of wet nurses, their court-appointed position representing the
highest honor for a woman of my mother’s new vocation. As King Philip was too ill to sire another child, it was essential that his one remaining heir survive.

Mama smelled so good. She was clean, she washed herself. She never had the sour smell of some wet nurses. The children she suckled, who arrived sickly and small, bloomed and grew at an enormous rate. They came scrofulous, they came with fevers and boils and eyes sealed shut under crusted scabs. They arrived still and cold in their rags, only their mouths moving, sucking and sucking at their wizened thumbs. A month or two with Mama and the babies were saved, their rashes and fevers and discharges all banished. They smiled and laughed, their bellies were round, sickness did not take even one of them. The following spring, the orphanage requested that my mother be installed in Madrid; they wanted to take her away from us and have her all to themselves.

But, instead, with her growing fame as a curer of children, Mama took in the child of the duque de Pastrana, a wrinkled weasel of a baby whose little blue fingers grasped at my mama’s neck and left red marks there. As soon as she arrived, her screams filled our house and kept us awake for six nights straight. But the money was good enough that we all had new dresses and ate meat from the butcher’s—no squirrel or rabbit for us—and on the seventh day the infanta settled into Mama’s side and stayed quiet there. Mama went about her chores, she carried Mercedes in a shawl tied around her shoulder and left her dress unbuttoned, her tit exposed. The baby suckled all day and all night, and how I hated that, but within a fortnight she was not so ugly a child. The following month when the duque’s servant came to check on her progress, only a distinctive mark on Mercedes’s forehead (one that all the duque’s family bore) proclaimed that the child was the same as the dying brat he had left with us. The report was made: Concepción de Luarca was blessed with a holy milk, and it was not long before this was known by all the Spanish court, including Queen Marianna, one of whose ladies-in-waiting was the duque’s sister.

Now, the crown prince Carlos Segundo had, by that spring of his ninth year, used up two hundred wet nurses, all of whom
had conformed to the royal standard written in a book containing the wisdoms of the court obstetrician and bound in blue leather. I saw this book myself (and read it years later), because Mama was issued a copy of it and two other medical texts and later brought them home with her. A royal wet nurse must be not less than twenty years old nor more than forty. She should have borne two or three children of her own. She must be healthy, of good habits and of a good size. Of course, she must be chaste, modest and sober without being subject to fits of melancholy. There must be no Jewish or Moorish blood in all her ancestry.

To administer the last of these tests—Mama had passed all the rest—an old crone was employed by the court physicians. Her name was Constanza, and she had a wig made of alpaca to cover her bald head. When the powers came upon her, she told my mama, all her hair had dropped out with fright. To make her prophecies, this seer consulted an ancient book of curlicued Arabic writing. Although she could not read the strange and foreign letters, they helped her to see the truth of things, or so she said. Of course, such writings were condemned by the Church, and an ordinary person would be burned for their possession, but Constanza was kept free of the prisons and never examined by any Inquisitor, and this was because she had the power to smell the blood of infidels, especially Jews.

Now that she is so old she is almost dead she is retained by the Inquisitor General. She goes bald because she is too weak to hold up her head under its wig, and she is fed the food of Saint John the Baptizer, honey and specially raised locusts. Her advice is sought only in the most stubborn of cases. They took me to her just last month, and she passed her great, quivering nose over my neck and into my armpits and behind my knees. No introductions were made, but I knew it was she, for I remembered my mother’s telling me that when she arrived in Madrid she was presented naked before an old woman who picked up each of her tits, holding the nipple between gloved thumb and forefinger, and she looked underneath and smelled the fold of skin there. And she smelled her undergarments and her more private places as well. In this way, Constanza determined if
there was even a little drop of Jewish blood in a person’s heritage. But she found none, not in either Mama or me.

After all inquiries were made, after Mama was summoned to the court for a week and then returned to us for a fortnight, we received notice that her services were commandeered to suckle the child, His Royal Highness, Prince Carlos. My mama was collected by the royal carriage and taken to the palace in Madrid, where some three dozen substitute nurses were kept handy in case of emergency—for almost anything could indicate the advisability of a change. By the time Carlos was weaned at age twelve (weaned from the tit but not from its product) the palace had employed three hundred and ten wet nurses. How many of those actually gave suck to the king, I could not say, but any upset, no matter how distant from the prince’s delicate digestion—from a pimple on his ass to a chill in his knee—was apt to be blamed on his current nurse, so it was not a job without worry. Mama had never given a thought to what she ate or how she slept, but, under the direction of the court physician, Mama’s meals were restricted to unseasoned gruel, to lamb and to eggs and to that part of the neck meat of a bull that is said to make flesh strong and regal. They lifted up her skirts to see if she had her monthly flow, there was fuss and interruption without cease; and her milk, with so many annoyances, could not have been as good as it was at home.

I missed my mother when she was gone, but then it was peaceful, a relief, really, to be rid of the babies, and thus of my guilt and jealousy. And, too, Mama had become increasingly thin and distracted when she was nursing the future duquesa. Her temper had grown short, she laughed less often, and when she did the sound she made was easily confused with crying or coughing. Before she left, she smoothed our hair behind our ears. “Be good, Dolores and little Francisca,” she said. “Cause no trouble to your papa.”