Poison (15 page)

But even were I to tell you where we find ourselves, I and all my company of witches, were I to explain to the best of my knowledge where it is we live: two hundred and eighteen paces north of the Plaza Mayor, a hundred and forty-three west and then score after score of steps descending down, you would never find us.

The prisons of the Inquisition are secret, they have no address, they extend without boundary under the city of Madrid. Below bullrings and parks, under the opera house and the great mercado. The citizens of Madrid are always treading and working, supping and fucking, talking, singing, bathing, sewing and sleeping over a vast labyrinthine metropolis of the damned, a world equal to the imaginings of a Dante. Those housed and those employed by the prison do not enter and leave by any one gated passageway. No, there are countless accesses throughout the city, each invariably a modest door bearing no sign and
squeezed between two busy merchants. Everyone has seen such doors, passed one en route to the barber, the glazier. Wondered briefly, what is that unnamed portal just beyond the apothecary’s? That locked gate by the tanner’s? There are so many, they need not be used twice in one week. Unlocked but briefly and under cover of darkness, when streets are empty, when no one is there to see a few cloaked figures, heads bent, eyes averted.

Our band of sixteen, plus guards, left on the morning of the twenty-first day of the month of June in 1686, while it was yet dark. And as the sun was just beginning to rise, we joined the procession heading toward the Plaza Mayor.

My eyes watered all day from the brightness of daylight. I had not been outside for a month, a time that seems laughably short to me now. But then, at one point, when it occurred to me, I pulled up my sleeve to examine the skin of my arm in the sun. I had not seen myself in long enough that I had to touch it to make sure it was mine.

We tottered under the heavy robes and pasteboard hats bearing inscriptions of our crimes. We swayed after an army of soldiers bearing bundles of wood to the stakes, already set in the plaza, set and ready to receive their damned. We excited fury in the spectators, and they spat on us, some demonstrating a quite astonishing marksmanship. For the occasion of the grand auto, Madrid had been closed to carriages and to all horses save those beasts that had the honor of bearing the Inquisitor General and his holy army. Some onlookers had had to walk miles to reach the Plaza Mayor, but, after all, attendance at this spectacle granted a greater indulgence than even a hundred novenas or a thousand self-imposed lashes. As for those who were trampled to death en route, I guess they went straight to heaven, having been sacrificed with newly whitewashed records.

For so great a display as this grandest of public burnings, the court must have gone into considerable debt. Swooning under my hot, heavy robes, I wondered dully what person could have advanced such sums as must have been required to buy what looked to be a silk carpet ten leagues long, a path for the august Inquisitor General to walk between his balcony and that bearing
King Carlos and Queen María Luisa. More interesting, what sins must have paved the way for such generosity?

Had I been a man, and as rich as my papa dreamed of becoming, then I, too, could have taken my pleasures and paid for them thus. As Papa’s father might have remarked, God helps those who help themselves.

Perhaps the saved congratulated themselves on their virtue as they stared at us poor damned—stared as though before their eyes we had been dredged from the burning lake—but I tell you that the shrieks they gave were little different from the profane yowling that fills the prisons of the Inquisition. “Burn them!” they cried. “And no strangling first! Burn them alive!”

My little company was not there to be included among those incinerated at the end of that day. No, our appearance was merely one of the many appetizers for the holy consummation that would take place only after bigamists were burned, blasphemers made to lick coals, the foreheads of falsifiers branded with their crime and the thighs of harlots scalded with boiling holy water.

As part of one act in this interminable drama of foreplay, I marched—stumbled—in my robes depicting hellfires, beneath the canopied box of royals in their velvet upholstered chairs. One of sixteen, together making a living tapestry of caution: Do not dare to do as these wretches before you! All told in pictures on our robes, stitched prettily in silk twist. Mine was a little long, it dragged. On my bodice a diminutive couple fornicated in such a position as only a chaste and virginal needleworking nun might have conjectured. Around our necks were lanyards bearing knots, one for each hundred lashes we would receive prior to imprisonment. Each of us paused in our procession as those sinners immediately before us heard their sentences read.

A band of seducers dressed in robes of red with three-horned hats heard that their genitals would be publicly scalded with melted wax, and then on the following day they would be ridden around Madrid from dawn to dusk on the backs of mules, so that everyone could get a good look at what was left of those parts that had led them astray. At least that is what I think was to happen to them—the sobs of the relapsed Jews behind us
made it difficult to hear the sentences. The Jews carried un-lighted candles, evidence of their stumbling in spiritual dark, I would venture. Whoever had planned this spectacle had fully indulged a passion for symbol. The sexual offenders were led off to the cauldrons of melted wax, and my party of witches advanced to the sentencing arena.

I was insolent enough to glance quickly at the king and queen as they looked down at us. I knew it was hoped that God, even as used as He was to heaven’s boulevards all paved in gold, might be sufficiently impressed by such an extravagance of piety to bless the royal couple with an heir, and I looked at the childless mother of our country.

Yes, again it was by chance that I saw our queen, some seven years after her nuptials, and still on rations of opium following her riding accident. Severo was having trouble weaning her from the milk she chose to suckle. This time it was not any hurried, secret ceremony I witnessed; the queen was displayed like a jeweled chalice on an altar at the end of a long beautiful corridor of silk and more silk. To my eyes, unused to color and light, such finery seemed to burn and burn and never be consumed, like that celebrated biblical bush. María Luisa looked a good deal fatter and more unhappy than she did as a bride. And Carlos, he looked thin and unhappy.

Our names were read aloud, and together we witches were sentenced to life imprisonment. Those nine whose tongues were to be cut out were separated from the rest of us and led away. I saw the queen watch them. What did she think of it, this peculiarly Spanish display of religiosity? As far as I could see, Her Highness remained composed. She turned a little in her seat as the deceased criminals passed by, each represented by a box of bones and a placard bearing his name and likeness.

My priest was there among them, in one of the boxes. A monk carried his bones, provided the legs he no longer had, so that he could ascend to the stage and be hung on a post to hear his crimes recited by the Inquisitor General. We were together that day. What flesh we could still claim was reunited. The likeness over his remains did him no justice, but I knew it was he
when the great robed judge read his name and his history of transgressions: heretic, seducer, irreligious priest.

The French might view executions as a form of entertainment, party tricks only a little more importunate than conjuring birds from cloaks or pouring water from an empty cup: a kind of hocus-pocus, here-and-then-gone. The French might gather around scaffolds with song and flowers, but no one in the Plaza Mayor threw bouquets at these condemned. When the bishops of Toledo and Granada and Madrid stood up and in unison excommunicated those they had judged unrepentant, a cry went up from the crowd. The sound of self-righteous fury was so loud that those condemned to be burned jerked in their shackles, and as God knows, the lot of them looked dead already.

Those nobles rich enough to have bought a place in the ceremony each led a criminal to the circle of stakes set with tinder. Twenty-two were burned that night—as the sun went down, heavenly fire eclipsed by hellfires. Each at a stake about twice the height of a tall man, with a little plank seat nailed almost at the top of it. Each criminal was handed by a nobleman to a pair of priests who escorted the damned up a ladder and chained him to a stake. The priests exhorted each sinner one last time to confess, repent. The four who did were given clemency and strangled before their fires were lit.

As for the rest, all relapsed Jews, on this, their last hour on earth, they were past caring about anything; their last sobs were behind them. Had Christ himself descended from heaven to light their fires with his flaming heart, they would not have betrayed any surprise. After a trumpet blast to ensure attention, the fires below the little seats on the stakes were lit. Set with a good amount of dry straw below the wood, they caught quickly. The windows around the plaza, rented for at least a ducado an hour for the privilege of viewing the burning at close hand and unmolested, disgorged arms waving handkerchiefs and flags and standards, any scrap of fabric.

My band of witches stumbled off, encouraged to step lively by a lash that whisked at our ankles. We were marched three times around the plaza, our pretty robes having been removed so that
they would not sustain any damage from the crowds who hurled stones and garbage at us; and then we were whipped and led to our cells in bloody underclothes. One long day of unshaded sun had been sufficient to burn our faces so that we had many subsequent days’ worth of entertainment picking at the blisters on our cheeks.

Stripped of my holiday attire and returned to the netherworld of prison, the dark exploded before my eyes for hours, showing me all the colors again and again, colors of which I had but dreamed for a month. The vision of the silk threads of my robe, which on that everlasting day I had had ample time to examine, stitched up the dark making it red, yellow, green. It mattered not whether I opened or closed my eyes, a fantastic fabric wove and rewove itself before me, silk binding everything up together. For the first time I asked myself, was it shameful that it had been my family’s trade to raise the worms that spun such robes as Inquisitors forced their victims to wear?

As a child I never considered such matters, for then the machine of the Inquisition was far less real to me than any of the machines of silk production—the mills and the cumbersome looms, the great stone presses that force the red, blue, brown from madder root, woad leaf and walnut. I was so filled with dreams of a fantastic future, and all of us were so thoroughly under the spell of my father’s hopes for wealth that we did not even care whether or not, being working people, we were denied by decree the very fabric we helped to create. If you were a person who earned his bread by the work of his hands and were caught wearing silk, the fine was never less than triple the cost of that garment: in other words, never less than what you could not afford.

Even so, we all did wear a little bit of it. All silk workers do for luck, for pride, for defiance. Privately we would not comply with the silk laws, and those rough clothes that the world could see had inside them secret pockets lined with silk. Empty of coins, perhaps, but filled with a rich weave of purple, green and
gold. Or we wore little belts of silk, like the red sash that used to lie next to my mama’s skin, hidden by her skirts, or the black one my grandfather had had on him. There had always been one blue silk ribbon threaded through Dolores’s and my undervests, knotted tightly over our hearts.

HEN MY MOTHER CAME HOME FROM MADRID
, I thought: So this is the woman who has suckled a king! For she was so small, and her hair was suddenly gray; she was not at all as I remembered her. I suppose I had grown a little, and she had shrunk. But even so, what I had feared had come to pass. Another child—a king, no less!—had gobbled up my mama.

I was eating an onion when she came in the door. Dolores and I would take one from where they hung twisted into a rope, pull it down when Papa was out, and then lay it on top of the coals from the night’s fire and cover it with more coals. They were big, sweet yellow onions, and the juice seeped out and turned to sugar as they cooked slowly. We squatted on the stone hearth and waited, and after what seemed long enough Dolores would poke a sharp stick between the embers and into the heart of the onion. She would draw it out of the ashes and cut it with the long knife I wasn’t allowed to use, and we would each have one half; though, being older, Dolores’s was the first choice of the better or bigger portion.

I could never wait to eat my share, and I would burn my mouth on the hot open skin of the onion. I had a crack in the middle of my bottom lip that would not heal from burning it so often, and I was just touching my tongue to that place where my lip stung when I looked up at the noise of the door, a scrape of wood against the packed dirt floor.