Poison (19 page)

When María Luisa recovered from her broken rib, she was summoned to the king’s audience chamber and then she was told by Carlos, Marianna standing nodding behind him, that she could not ride again.

“Never?” she said. “Surely you do not mean never?”

“It is too great a risk,” Carlos said. “Severo concurs that another fall could compromise whatever hopes we have of your conceiving a child.” His little speech sounded rehearsed, an impression supported by Marianna’s nodding. His mother had coached him, María guessed.

“I see,” she said.

Her one pleasure taken from her, María returned to her bedchamber and brooded. For a month she sulked. She looked out the window past the grille and watched the swallows over the
pool as they flirted with their reflections, coming within a hairbreadth of their shadows on the water. The reflected bird, the illusion, lived and shimmered, breathed and flew just as the living one did, disappearing into the deep black water. Diving down, then surfacing. Reality, illusion. The bird in the air looked no more real than the one in the water. She watched and watched them until she was in a trance some days, there was nothing else to do. Slowly, an idea began to form. A plan.

When the court traveled, as it did each June, to the Escorial, that prison called a summer residence, Marianna took her daughter-in-law on a more complete house tour than any she had given her before. They went through libraries and solariums. They toured the pastry kitchen and then they descended into the crypt below the palace church, not the gold-and-black mausoleum that was famous all over Europe—no, that place was only for the remains of kings and of those queens who produced heirs, Marianna said. She showed María a neighboring chamber of all-white marble: floor and ceiling, walls and sarcophagi. Lamplight shone prettily on the white surfaces of eternal sleep. “Queens without issue,” said Marianna, and she looked sharply at her daughter-in-law.

That night, María Luisa asked Eduardo and Esperte to help her. She told them of her idea, a drama she would like to enact. They listened, they considered. Finally they agreed.

That summer, the dwarf and the translator managed, between them, to spirit away the little cloths upon which María spilled her monthly blood. Eduardo’s long tenure as a jester was helpful; years of prestidigitation made his tiny hands quick. And Esperte, well, that particular subterfuge was less dangerous for a woman.

The queen of Spain’s two friends secreted her bloodstained cloths on their own persons. In her apartments they took them from her and they put them in their underclothes. It was not without risk, and on one occasion the bloodied bandages were discovered on Eduardo by the palace gamekeeper. The accident involved some dogs: as Eduardo hurried away from the estate’s grounds to the thicket where he burned María’s cloths, one of the king’s hounds caught the scent of ripened blood. Joined by
two more, the animal easily overtook the dwarf on his short legs. Together they caught him and tore off his hose and breeches, exposing drawers filled with red-stained cloths. Afterward, Eduardo suffered an unpleasant course of cathartic treatments to relieve the hemorrhoids he said tormented him.

“Is this not chivalry?” he asked, laughing between spasms of intestinal cramps brought on by enough strong senna tea to make a regular-sized person quite ill. María sat by his bed.

“I would tell you it was the best example I have seen in this country, but that would not be much of a compliment,” she replied, shifting queasily in her chair. All summer Esperte brought the queen emetic herbs and fed them to her in secret after breakfast so that María could pretend the sickness that comes with carrying a child.

When they returned from the Escorial to Madrid, it had been three months—June, July and August—since the observed and documented cessation of the queen’s monthly flow. Carlos, Marianna and all the court were ecstatically happy. Bells rang nonstop. One thankful novena commenced before another was concluded. María set about trying to crochet a little silk cap for the pretended baby.

“How flat you remain,” Carlos said, his hand on her stomach. “You are not being laced, are you?” he said, his small eyes made smaller as he squinted in worry.

“No,” she said, and in the privacy of her apartments she opened her bodice. “See, no stays.” She patted his arm. “A woman does not show a child so soon,” she said to him.

Severo examined María. It mattered not, he told Marianna, that the queen’s breasts had not yet swelled as an expectant woman’s should. In time they would. Anyhow, he said, what sort of queen would give suck to her own children?

“None, none,” agreed the queen mother, shuddering fastidiously at the notion.

The pig’s blood was intended for the manufacture of blood pudding. It was delivered to the royal residence on the evening of the third Friday of every month. Delivered in a large crock made fast with a doubly knotted cord, it sat in the kitchen overnight,
for the cook did not begin to make blood pudding until Saturday.

The dwarf’s fingers, though practiced in parlor tricks and juggling, were so short that to untie the cords was difficult for him. He panted with fear as he crouched in the dark kitchen. When at last he got the lid off, he dipped a ladle into the blood and took out as much as he dared, filling María’s chamber pot to the depth of his first finger’s second knuckle. He put the dripping finger in his mouth and sucked it clean, then replaced what blood he had taken with water and stirred it into the crock. He retied the knots of the cord.

Step by silent step from kitchen to María’s apartments. Careful not to spill even a drop. One hundred and three stairs.

The blood was cool, even cold. “Ugh. My God, my God,” the queen said as Eduardo stood watch and Esperte poured it over her thighs, between her thighs. When she stood from her bed, it ran down her legs, and María carefully made footprints to her chamber pot and back to her bed. The smell of blood filled the room. Esperte, a little squeamish about such things, felt ill as she watched that first time. When María was back in her bed, lying in her blood-soaked nightdress, Esperte stood back and looked at her mistress with her hands over her mouth.

“All right. Go. Go!” said the queen. She gave Esperte and Eduardo a quarter of an hour to return to their beds before she began to scream.

KNEW THAT MAMA WOULD LEAVE US, WOULD
die. I knew it even before the parish notary arrived to draft her will, for though she could make her own letters and sentences, it was the business of the Church to oversee a testament. Mama made her confession of sins and of faith, and the death tithe was paid from the coins she had brought home from Madrid. Then, one night, Papa went to fetch the priest from his lodgings, the new priest who was tall and had good leather shoes, the same who had occasionally read her letters to us. Alvaro.

Yes, my Alvaro, though I did not know him yet. I was still a child.

Mama was hemorrhaging after a fit of coughing. There was blood, a lot of it. It spilled all over her and us. Dolores and I had been quarreling—we were unmindful of our mother’s deterioration in that way children have of not seeing obvious dangers. Oh, I suppose we were frightened to see her so thin and to hear the coughing, but we didn’t think about it. Instead, we went along as usual and that evening we fought. When Dolores reached over Mama’s legs to slap me, I caught her hand. Mama sat up as she had not for days and she tried to separate us. She began to cough and the blood came up, spilling down her chin and neck.

We stopped, stunned, and watched as it soaked into her nightdress. She was sitting up in her bed; and her nightdress, a new one of bleached linen, was white, very white. Her face had that beauty peculiar to the dying, as if already she partook of the spirit. I guess I always believed my mama was holier than Mary, above even the Queen of Heaven, who stands with her feet on the moon and stars. When I saw the blood and watched it soak
into her gown, I was frightened, but I was also awed, as if some mystery were unfolding.

She lay back, and the blood spilled out of the corner of her mouth, and her face grew more and more lovely, her eyes bigger and more beautiful. To a child inured to the ugly stink of plague, of people’s swollen armpits and lolling tongues, of pus and black swellings in their groins, swellings so close to their secret parts that it seemed as if they must have been some punishment for concupiscence, there was something mysterious and beautiful in my mother’s dying, something that must have come from the everlasting talk of the Church, of blood redeeming souls. My mama looked to me as if she died in a fountain of holiness.

After Papa left to fetch the priest, I stood waiting by the window near Mama’s bed. She roused herself suddenly and took my hand. “I dreamed nine dreams,” she said, and she told me that there was a cat sitting on her chest and he was so heavy she could not breathe. “Chase him away, Francisca,” she said, and then she said no more but only tried to live a little longer.

From the window, I could see nothing. It was a moonless night, and quiet, as quiet as if all creation held its tongue. We spoke not a word, and Mama breathed so slowly and shallowly, but she was not resting. No, her attention was keen, and her hand held tight to mine, and I knew there were many about her bed waiting—her mama and her papa, her sisters and Ernesto, and all the little sons who died. Together they cried for her to hurry to them.

Then, all at once, her breathing grew fierce and loud like an animal’s. So loud that it seemed to catch hold of me, to take me in its teeth and shake my bones. I covered my ears with my hands, but the noise itself tore them away and forced me to listen. I tried to find the place on Mama’s arm where Dolores had showed me her pulse beating, I wanted to feel the language of that heart which loved me best. It had been steady on the morning of that day, but now it was so erratic that the beats scattered under my fingertips like spilled grain. As I sat beside my dying mother, holding tight to her arm, something happened to me.

Did I swoon? I felt an unaccustomed lifting. I know I used to fill my head with nonsense about saints and all manner of feverish ravings, but that night—I cannot say for how long or by what power—I truly felt myself plucked from the material world and from the ordinary minute-by-minute march of time.

I found myself in a secret chamber of God’s unknowable heart. I had a certainty that life held a beauty and an order which I could but dimly perceive, and which at that time I compared to the teasing appearance of unreadable words on the page, an unknown key to human understanding and happiness. Perhaps it was no more than the shock of being once again parted from my mother, my life, this time forcibly and finally. Perhaps it was the ecstasy accompanying that annihilation. Whatever it was that came over me, the fit passed quickly, the thoughts remained but their potency evaporated, they became ideas as dead and as cold as my mother was soon to be.

When I came back to myself, the house was still. Even the fire burned without a pop or crack, and I could hear Father Alvaro’s cassock as he walked toward our house. His cleric’s robe, a little long, hissed over the cobbles as he and Papa approached.

Dolores let the men in, and the priest wasted no time with us but kneeled immediately by my mama’s bed. He began to pray, and when he wiped her mouth before he anointed her, I thought to myself,
He cannot help himself, he cannot resist touching her
. The Latin of the viaticum was mysterious and beautiful. It flowed from Alvaro’s lips and all around us, and we, too, kneeled as Mama was anointed. Long after her whispered profession of faith, he went on praying, invoking the Virgin,
Mater pulchrae dilectionis, liberos tuos adjuva
. Mother of fair love, help your children.

I heard an owl call softly and mournfully, as if the great bird of night also listened and grieved. It was late, I was young, I swayed on my knees. I sat back on my heels, and, finally, it seems to me, I slept, although I did not lie down.

When I awoke, the priest had left, my mother was dead. There was wax on her eyelids, and I knew that she belonged to us no more now, but to the priest and to the Church.

Dolores was busy throwing out all the water in the house,
which you must do when someone dies. For this is what people believe, that the water takes into itself the spirit of death and must not be used for drinking or any other purpose, not to wash off a plate or to put out a flame. And you must be careful where you throw that water, for if it soaks into the earth where the roots of a tree are hidden, well, those roots and perhaps the whole tree will die.

Even that day, even directly after Father Alvaro’s visit, I found I remembered little of his being there. I recalled the odd detail. I remembered that his hose, when he bent over my mama in her bed to anoint her lips, were dark purple, the color of an eggplant.
Requiescat in pace
. Peace.

“Mother of God!” Mama would exclaim when she was angry with my sister or me. “Only when I am stretched out with dirt covering my eyes, only then will I have
peace
,” she would say. The vehemence with which she said the word, spat it out.
Peace
. Now the priest had come and had given her what she had so wanted, proclaimed it in the language of the Church.