Poison (23 page)

By this time I was twelve, the year that children made their first confessions, the year that girls became women and boys, men. At this age we were considered old enough to understand the meaning of sin, but still young enough to be innocent of the sins of the body.

In a dream Mama talked to me of this day, telling me to remember that I was to be a good and worthy vessel to receive the body of Christ. “Do not run or shout on that day, Francisca,” she told me, and in my bed, lying as far from Dolores’s body as I could, I felt Mama touch me. I felt my mother’s hands on my face, on my neck and chest and over my heart.

“Obey your papa and big sister,” she said, “and make a good confession. After you eat the body of Christ, hold yourself still. For you will have Jesus in you then, and you do not want to lose Him.”

I pictured myself as some drinking cup, a vessel to be filled with holiness and then held carefully, so carefully, for the rest of my life, lest I spill it out. And yet I knew myself—I was the child who knocked over her cup at every meal. The way I saw it, either I would dribble and slop the love of God away or I would knock it down and lose it all at once. It would be impossible to remain filled with holiness.

Nevertheless, when all the children of twelve years went to confess to Father Alvaro, I stood in line with them. Waiting to talk to the priest, I remembered how his purple hose had flashed from under his cassock as he had leaned forward over Mama in her nightdress, for I had not been so close to Father Alvaro since that night long past.

After Milagros, the wheelwright’s daughter, went into the
confessionary, there was no other between me and the little house built inside the church. The confessionary looked like a tiny chapel in the big church, it had a pitched roof and a little cross on top like some celestial weather vane, and two doors, two wood benches, two stones upon which to kneel, all divided by a wall with a window hung with a red cloth.

“It is dark inside, you can see nothing but the red square of cloth, and all you hear after you close the door is the priest’s voice,” Dolores said.

I felt dizzy waiting my turn. I wasn’t without transgressions, but I kept thinking,
What shall I say? What shall I say?
I did not even consider betraying the one sin that troubled me. I suffered immodest dreams. What could I do about that? Either Mama came to me in the dark and asked me to be good, or the Devil came.

Just the night previous I had dreamed that I heard the sound of a bird calling out fiercely—it shrieked as if a cat had got it—and when I rose from my bed, I saw a man and a woman and they were naked, and when he touched her she cried out like a bird. I could not keep my eyes away from them, they were so tiny that I had to bend down to look at them where they stood together at my feet. Suddenly there was a carpet on the floor such as only rich people have, a beautiful carpet woven of silk of all colors, and underneath a squirming lump.
Bite it!
commanded a voice in the dream.
You must bite it
. But I did not. I watched the wriggling lump under the carpet, until at last I turned back the edge, drawing it up by the fringe, and underneath the little man and his consort were taking their pleasure one with the other. When I looked more closely at the tiny female I saw she was myself.

That was not all. There was something worse than the dreams. Dolores would leave me at the well when she went to have our corn milled. She said I was so slow that she would not walk with me the whole way, she would just as soon let the old women at the well watch out for me and relieve her of me for an hour or so. But as the women talked, I slipped away. Though I was old enough that I no longer had the freedom allowed to children, and though I had the beginning of a woman’s body
and was to be watched, I had a talent for making myself invisible. I was not like some of the other girls who ran hoping to be chased, and when I stole away, no one stopped me. I made my afternoons my own.

The tumbledown house by the smith’s had a room at the back, a place easily overlooked by those who did not know of it. But the Devil always knew where to find me.

One day I squeezed myself behind an empty cask and put my eye to a place where the boards were warped and parted, like a skirt, to reveal the chamber beyond. There was a woman inside, uncovered, her bodice undone. A nurse, I, like an idiot, thought at first, but there were no babies there. Men came in and took off their belts and buckles straightaway in front of the hearth. From where I was hiding I saw things falling, hats and shirts and occasionally a slice of naked flesh, white and soft.

I returned again and again to spy. I did not care that it was wrong, I slipped away from my chores. It was concupiscence that drew me. Concupiscence that made me feel the way I did when I woke in the morning from my dreams, that made me feel as I had when a younger girl, hearing about saints and having lustful raptures.

I would not tell the priest about this sin of mine. He would tell me to stop, and I did not intend to. So, there in the little dark cage in the church, on the occasion of my first confession, I began to lie.

I made up sins of disobedience and covetousness, I fabricated whatever seemed likely for a girl my age—jealousies, gossiping, small thefts I had not committed. I fell under my own spell in there, telling stories, only the hard floor under my knees reminding me of the world. It was easy to lie in the dark, there was no one’s searching eyes to avoid. When I was done, I stopped speaking and waited for the words of absolution, but there were none, not immediately. I heard what I thought was a sigh, and I felt my face burning in shame. Suddenly it seemed to me that this Father Alvaro could see through the wall and into me, straight through to my heart, which he knew was stained and not yet ready to come into any knowledge of Christ.

As for that heart, it began to beat so loudly that I could not
have heard any mortal voice. I got to my feet, stumbling, and I quit the confessionary and ran. I remember the faces of the other children as I passed them—they hung before me in my mind’s eye, pale and trembling as if I saw them under water.

That night in my father’s house I became ill. A sickness began in my head and spread down into my hands and belly. My eyes closed shut with fever, and I found myself dizzy and tormented by strange dreams of having stolen my sister’s old doll. Dolores no longer played with the doll that Papa had bought when we first got money from the king, but she was too mean to let me have her. She had given the doll a beautiful name, Margarita Isabella, and while I lay in bed I saw myself get up and go into the little box that Dolores kept under our bed and I took out Margarita. I touched her head made of glazed porcelain, her pretty red lips and her eyes that were blue like a foreigner’s; I stroked her dress with its pinafore and bows and touched the little shoes of black leather that Dolores used to slip on and off Margarita’s feet, as if nothing were more wonderful to her than those tiny black slippers. Even then, I knew that Dolores loved the doll because in her clean dress with its tiny, perfect buttons, Margarita was like a little piece of a past that was happy, of a time when our mother’s abundance was so great that it took her to a king and bought for us such presents as we never had again. I knew it and begrudged my sister that little evidence of better times, of the possibility of happiness.

In the fever, I saw myself strip off Margarita’s clothes and then take the naked doll, leaving only the dress and the shoes in the box. I went to the back of our house where the dry earth was packed from everyone’s walking in and out, and I sat and dug a grave in which to hide the doll. I dug it with my own spoon for eating, a wooden spoon that my father had made. Then, as I laid her in the hole, suddenly Margarita was not a doll any longer but that baby whose mouth and nose I had smothered many years before. In the dream I believed I had killed the child, and I wanted to hide her body before Mama could find it.

I was lying in bed with a fever, at least I know my body was there, but my eyes would not open, there were sores on my
hands and feet and in my mouth as well. The skin all over me felt dry and tight. It seemed to me that it took days to cover the dead baby, to bury her in the hard gray dirt. Though I was very tired, I walked back and forth until the dirt was packed so tight that no one would ever be able to tell I had dug a hole there.

After the dream, I heard the voices of my father and the curandera talking together, and she said, “Well, if Francisca lives, she will surely be blind.” I felt her fingers on my face, I felt her bathe the crust from my eyelids. The wash she used had the astringent aroma of rue, reminding me of Mama and making me cry all the more. She pulled one eye open and she was right, I saw nothing.

The curandera told my father that she had a powerful tea made of devil’s cherries, the same that come from the belladonna plant, and if I grew worse he was to give it to me. But he boiled it up as soon as she left our hearth—he did not wait to see my condition—and the bitter draft burned the sores in my mouth and made me cry until the tears took the skin from my cheeks.

In the sickness I tossed, I walked in my sleep. I fought my papa and suffered more strange deliriums. I thought a midwife was after me with her tongs. Not long after Mama died, Dolores had taken me to Pascuela’s house to be present at her childbed. This was the same Pascuela who had been a friend of our mother’s—the same who was afraid of Mama’s books—so it was not odd for us to be there, we came in Mama’s stead, since Mama would have been there. That was what was right, Dolores said. At Pascuela’s, the blood came out of her, but not issuing from her mouth, from lips like my mother’s that spoke and kissed and told of magic palaces. Pascuela’s blood came from between her legs, more blood than there ought to be at a birth, much more. Her screams were loud and terrible. She cursed her poor husband and said she would know him no more, she called him a pig and a toad and a foul lying lizard who had crept between her sheets. Her sisters sobbed with fear. This was to be Pascuela’s firstborn and she was a narrow portion of a woman married to a big man. So fate overtook her, the baby
was too big. She and the child died before the midwife had a chance to take off her cloak and unpack her child-bringing tools.

My fever would not abate. I saw the midwife at the altar with Father Alvaro elevating the host, and I had thoughts of how the body of Christ Jesus had been born of flesh and thus soiled by the impurity that comes from a woman in her childbed. I worried about such things. Even though I never knew I was thinking of them, they must have lain in my mind to bother me like that when I was ill. Or perhaps I had had some premonition, then, of how passion might one day take its due.

The fever made me thirsty, so thirsty, as if all the dust I had dug from that hole was in my throat. Believing that I had hidden my terrible crime, I prayed for Mama to come back to me, the way that she used to come to our bed at night, when Papa was busy with some chore or another, adding up imaginary wealth or planning arguments against my grandfather and his obdurateness. On such nights I was almost never asleep, although I pretended to be, breathing slow and deep and even. I was waiting for Mama to come. She said things to us when she thought we slept, brushing the hair from our foreheads, finding an ear in which to whisper—she said things she would never say aloud during the day. “Francisca, child, your mama loves you, oh, you cannot know how much!” She would whisper these words of affection in a tone she did not use while we were awake, and she kissed the tips of my fingers, each one, before putting my hand under the blanket. Thinking of it now, my fingers ache with the memory of those kisses.

Her words came low and urgent and she apologized for her short-temperedness, her punishments. Nothing grave, nothing that ever led me to doubt my mother’s love. But she must have felt some sorrow, for she put her head in her hands, and sometimes she wept. Whenever my mother cried I remembered the girl my papa spoke of, dancing at her wedding in the shining black shoes. My papa said he leaned against a wall and watched as she danced alone. With an angel, a devil: someone or something no one else could see.

“I was not patient with you today, Francisca,” she would say
at our bedside, her mouth pressed to the blanket, “but it wasn’t how I meant to be, it never is. I raise my voice and an instant later I think how sorry I am. How, if only I had a little time, I might be kinder.” They were two different women, the day and night mothers, the day one sometimes distracted and short-tempered, and the night visitor whose throat I could see in the moonlight, her head tipped back, her cheeks wet, and her smooth neck glowing while she cried.

Perhaps, while I was ill, my night mother did come, as I prayed for her to. Perhaps she pulled my hot head into her lap and kissed my eyes and cured me, because when the fever finally passed and I sat up and opened them, the curandera had been wrong, I could see.

My papa was not a pious man, but he brought us up not to go looking for evil, he told us that there was trouble enough in the world that would come after us, whether we wanted it or not. After I recovered, he told me that if I had any bad thoughts I must pray, and I did. I tried hard to be good. I got into the habit of penances that I inflicted on myself without the help of any confessor. I did not wear a shift for all that winter or the one after it. But it was a while before I went back to the priest.

HOUGH DEAD FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY
, Juana la Loca has her box in the Teatro Real. Not everyone can see her, of course, but when the queen and Olympe take their seats in the neighboring balcony, María starts, she stumbles back and drops her opera glasses.