Poison (12 page)

The money she earned came routinely, delivered four times a year by a man dressed in palace livery. Quite a lot of money, it seemed to us: fifteen gold pieces in a little black kid bag whose
cords were kept tied by a squashed red berry of wax stamped with the king’s seal. Papa bought Dolores a doll with a china head and he gave to me a little necklace of red stones. He took to smoking the same tobacco that his father had smoked, and it hung sweet and blue over our heads after supper.

HEN THE GROOM CAME TO THE QUEEN’S
room, the winter sun had risen just high enough that the draperies were outlined in silver. By the orders of the court physician, Severo, the queen had been given nothing to eat since the fall from her horse, only barley water, and she was dreaming of all the foods that she most liked and had not eaten in the years since her arrival in Spain. She closed her eyes against the sun and let them wander under their lids. Her fingers twitched slightly, as if she were trying to hold on to something being drawn from her grasp. The groom waited, and when the queen stirred, her maid Obdulia nudged him, and he held up a long switch of brown hair.

María said nothing, but
How pretty!
she thought, and she remembered the long fall of hair that she had worn as a girl, when dressed for a dance. Her hair had grown so quickly and so thick that she had had it cut one hot summer, so that it had hung only as far as her waist rather than to her knees. Her nana had saved the cut hair so that she might pile it that much higher for the following winter’s balls. Or she could let a long plait hang forward over one shoulder, its last curl dipping coquettishly into her décolleté. She could have it crimped, ironed or waved. She could tie it with ribbons or catch it up in a chignon. Oh, there were a thousand ways to wear such a switch of good hair, her nana said, and it was sent in a box to the seamstress, who gathered it at one end and stitched it so tightly together that it would never come apart. It was put safely away in her dressing chamber, where it lay coiled in a velvet-lined cedar chest. Each week, whether she had worn it or not, her maid brushed it out and laid it away again in its powdered chamois cloth. When María came to Spain, she had brought it with her.

The queen held her hand out to the groom and beckoned him toward her. How odd that Ignacio should bring her hair to her. She couldn’t have left it at the stable. She rarely wore it, and never to ride. She did not have a life of such festivity any longer that she needed extra hair to pile up, and that reflection made her feel like weeping. That was the trouble with opium, it made her as sad as it did happy. But why did Ignacio look as if he were crying as well, his eyes swollen and red-lidded? And little Esperte, standing in the doorway, her brown eyes were spilling over down her pale cheeks.

María beckoned to Ignacio again, and the groom stepped toward her bed. The hair he held was gathered at one end, but instead of binding to keep the strands together, María saw that there was blood there, dark and clotted, and the long chestnut switch smelled of the stable.

The queen looked into her groom’s eyes, and knew what it was he held out. She might as well have seen Rocinante, his neck slit just minutes after his last bucket of oats held for him by Ignacio. Slit so deep that a mouthful of red-stained grain came out with his good, faithful blood, spilling down in a curtain, darkening his coat and making a red lake of his loose box. His beautiful white-blazed forehead sinking like a falling star, the white stockings suddenly crimson. His lovely, great, wet eyes looking in confusion at the groom, who, sobbing, had cast the blade into the straw and fallen to his knees in his charge’s blood.

Ignacio had not let anyone else carry out the king’s terrible order; he had trusted no one but himself to be sufficiently merciful, to kill the animal manfully, to cut deep and fast. So, like an overzealous lover, the groom had thrown himself at the horse’s neck and stabbed him in a clumsy last embrace. Rocinante’s legs buckled in a moment, and as the animal sank to his knees, the groom reached out for him. They lay down in the straw together, Ignacio’s arms around the huge, warm neck, his breeches stiffening with the beast’s still-flowing blood.

Lying in her bed, her fingers caught in Rocinante’s tail, it was as if María heard her horse’s hooves in the acceleration of her heartbeat, steady and drumming faster. Saw herself on his back,
the two of them growing smaller, more distant, the whisk of his tail as they disappeared around a hedge together.

“No!” she screamed.
“No no no.”

For María Luisa, who married the king whose life my mother had saved, the days in the royal residence had passed, one after another, with the same heartless monotony as the meals. A year went by, two years, three and four.

It was because the queen was bored, I imagine, that she made the mistake of forgetting the minister of etiquette’s most oft-repeated advice, to
watch
herself. Her strategies at the games of court were worse even than at those of cards, if she could be said to have anything as sophisticated as a strategy. María could no more remember whose favor it was important to curry, whose protection was essential, than she could whether aces were high or low. If her detractors—and there was no shortage of them, according to my prison neighbors—could agree on anything, it was that it was hard to believe that the queen had been raised at Versailles; for this was a place that to the Spanish imagination was built as much of intrigue, both romantic and political, as of bricks and mortar, a palace gilded more by flattery and pretense than by precious metals.

Inauspiciously, María made a fast friend of the court jester, a dwarf of the grand old line of dwarfs from Peñarroya, that lead-mining city where each family could boast an idiot or two, a limbless prelate or a raving baker, twelve-toed tanners, blind chandlers and salivating spurriers with spittle-flecked lips hanging loose and wet. Why, the people of Peñarroya were so thoroughly poisoned that a normal birth was a remarkable occurrence, and sent everyone scurrying to the church to give thanks, not only relatives and friends but every citizen who heard tell of the miracle.

Unnaturally diminutive, Eduardo Zarragoza was the sole child of his mother to have been born with his heart on the inside. All his other brothers and sisters, both before and after him, were buried in a single grave, which was reopened at the terrible conclusion to each of his mother’s confinements, reopened to receive into its depths another tiny corpse with its
heart hanging like a strawberry on the outside of its ribs. Like some terrifying, catechizing painting come to life, the little bleeding hearts beat but once or twice in the cold air of earthly incarnation.

Eduardo was happy to come to the court in Madrid when he was fifteen and there join the palace freak show. It was nothing like the one María had known at Versailles, where the Sun King’s eclecticism gathered all manner of unusuals. King Louis had only one bias—a fondness for multi-breasted virgins, their little tits lined up and trembling under his august attention like those of nursing cats: two, three, even four pairs ranged down a gauze-draped abdomen. But these were merely the crown jewels, so to speak, of the French collection, an army of entertainers that required its own 117-room dormitory on the opposite bank of Versailles’s ornamental lake, a low building just hidden by the birch grove. Unlike the French, the Spanish are not generalists; their passions are narrow, fixed, unswerving. They favored dwarfs to the point that the royal family collected no other miscreations, and Eduardo had made the seventh of seven.

He suffered migraines, all the dwarfs did, and the queen mother doled out headache powders and laudanum each week. The supply of pain medications to the dwarfs was contractual. It allowed for crooked spines and bandy legs to cut capers, turn cartwheels, and it encouraged mirth over melancholy, courage over cowardice. For the laudanum, dwarfs sought out palace employment. More than an addicting drug, it was a change in unhappy perspective, a miniature revolution: seven lives made bearable.

Each week they went to Marianna—Eduardo and Pedro and Domínguez; Escobar and Diego Valdéz and Diego Zarragoza (a cousin of Eduardo) and Juanito (another from Peñarroya). Not to Dr. Severo, the palace physician, but to the queen mother, for Marianna wanted the dwarfs to feel that measure of loyalty to her and to her alone. She wanted them to think of her as the one who relieved their suffering. After all, she needed to be somebody’s saint, and more, she insisted on some measure of control over every member of the court, and laudanum was her lead rein over the dwarfs. So each Sabbath after they had remembered her
pleasingly at vespers, Marianna received the dwarfs in the west wing’s audience chamber, where she sat in her black gown, her soft chin folding over its collar, the beads of her rosary spilling from her lap, and she called them one by one, alphabetically, and they came forward. They kneeled before her and she gave them each the little paper of headache powders (which, useless, they discarded immediately) and the vials of laudanum (which, priceless, they guarded more carefully than they would have coins, were there any coins to be had).

Of the dwarfs, only Eduardo was not addicted to the opiate. No, by the fifth year of her reign, it was María who depended upon his ration, who waited for it each week, her sleeping draft. Her sleeping eating talking laughing breathing draft. The queen and her dwarf—for by then that was what Eduardo was called:
her
dwarf—had places where they met, a different one each week. They passed in a hallway, by the grotto, the map room, the reliquary. He dropped his vial into her hand, her muff, the top of her riding boot.

Laudanum was what allowed the queen, month after month, to bear the strain of her now famous, if only assumed, infertility. To permit, without screaming, the humiliation of having her private parts made public. Of Dr. Severo taking samples of her monthly flow, of his plucking out pubic hairs for alchemical study, of his washing her thighs, her bottom, her every crack and intimate fold of flesh with stinging solutions of astringent herbs meant to increase the sanguinary circulation.

Why, the application of a few drops of laudanum made it possible to lie still under Carlos’s repeated attempts to get her with child, attempts now witnessed by physician, by confessor and even by the occasional expert called in for consultation.

“He is doing it correctly,” Severo always concluded, for who could criticize a king’s lovemaking and remain confident of keeping his head?

“Yes, but are you praying as you do it?” asked the king’s confessor.

Experts nodded, mumbled, squinted, then retired to the guest apartments to write unintelligible reports.

Bobbing on a narcotic tide of tolerance, María worried that Severo would notice her wide-pupiled eyes, but the physician was so completely focused on her failure to procreate—a failure that threatened his position almost as much as hers—and so intent on his examination of her nether parts; and, perhaps, so embarrassed by the requirements of his profession, that he never looked above María’s neck to those eyes, eyes as wet and as wide with grief as with laudanum.

In the only privacy Queen María had—that is, when she relieved herself—she would unstop the little vial and peer into its blue glass throat as she sat on her commode. She carefully administered the opiate drop by drop onto her tongue.

Each vial of laudanum contained exactly and invariably seventy drops: ten for each day of the week. If a certain day required more—the day of an audience, a festival or some other long torment—then María made sacrifices to accommodate that occasion, the day preceding or the day following one of necessarily restricted solace.

“That old beetle!” Eduardo called Carlos’s mother. Always wearing black mourning—Carlos’s father had been dead for fifteen years, but she found it suited her mood—Marianna’s shiny-tight bodice of iridescent silk shimmered green in some lights, blue in others; and when her feet in their heeled slippers made their clicky-clicky sound; and when, as she had a nervous tendency to do, she scuttled down corridors and disappeared into doorways; well, it all conspired to make Marianna seem to the fanciful queen and her friend like a great beetle hunting smaller prey throughout the palace. Behind the queen mother’s back, Eduardo would wiggle his short fingers over his head, affecting antennae to make María laugh. Foolishly, she sometimes did. Even more foolishly, as the years wore on, and as the queen never bore any children who might have satisfied her playful nature, Eduardo and María began to play other tricks as well.

The queen mother was superstitious. She kept a little shrine in her room where she kneeled before the Virgin and told her her troubles. One afternoon, when Marianna was closeted in another wing with the ministers of finance—a monthly meeting
whose purpose was to undo those disasters that Carlos weekly wrought—María crept into her mother-in-law’s room with Eduardo. Together they looked at the little Virgin of Sorrows.

“Do you suppose the effigy answers her?” said María.

Eduardo smiled. “We could see that it did,” he said.