Poison (26 page)

“I would ask Your Highnesses’ leave to bleed Her Highness, beginning early tomorrow morning. Perhaps if I could purge her of this bad blood, help her body to rid itself of what troubles her, then she will recover.”

Carlos looks at his mother. She nods at him. “You have our leave,” says the king.

HE TORTURER, HE IS A LOVER, TOO. SOMEONE
who cannot be satisfied by words from your lips or by the assurance of your captivity.

Someone who wants the secret inside you, who wants to open your flesh and read it like an oracle, expecting truth.

The torturer—he has no name, he wears a white hood—asks that you believe him to be the ally of your soul. The enemy is your flesh, your corporeal life. Together you and your torturer conspire to force this stubborn mortal flesh to reveal those secrets that it has kept from your soul. Together, you persuade the flesh not to be so withholding.

It is not hard to believe this. No, there is nothing easier to believe, it seems obvious and true. And I sometimes have a vision of myself as an egg—an egg with a stubborn shell. Inside me, we know, my torturer and I, is a golden orb of truth: my heart, my pith, my yolk. And if only we can conspire together to break me, then the truth will flow forth.

I want nothing more than to give way. I have not been silent, I have spoken pages. My confession fills chest after chest, and they gather dust, waiting for my final sentencing. I have testified endlessly against myself, against Alvaro and against my mother. Like an old woman who knows that death awaits her impatiently, I have tried to divest myself of all I have: of every thought and memory.

After I have been made fast to my seat, after each wrist and ankle has been shackled to a rung so that I will not wriggle away, and when the White Hood is occupied with the quiet chores of setting tinder and painting the soles of my feet with grease, I can hear the rabble, the shouting from the streets above. I can hear the queen’s name, an endless singing taunt,
Ma–ría, Ma–ría, Ma–ría Lu–isa, sounds of rioting and confusion.

The Purple Hood comes in. He asks me endless questions about my mother. I will never be able to tell him enough, for this one fateful consanguinity will sentence me to endless interrogation: the king of Spain and Francisca de Luarca drank from the same tit.

The sorry bewitchment of the king and queen of Spain, the reason for their not getting with child, the reason that the queen will be destroyed—all this has been traced back to my mother’s milk. No matter that Mama might well have saved Carlos’s wretched life along with those of countless other children. No, her ability to cure damns her—and me as well—more than any other fact of her short life.

“What did she do with the sucklings that died?” says the Purple Hood. The White Hood stands by the tinder, but he does not light it, not yet.

“None died,” I say.

“None?”

“No, not one.”

“And of her own children?”

“I told you. They were buried by my papa.”

Every time the Purple Hood asks about my mother, he returns to this notion of dead children. It is said, I know, that witches use the fat of infants to smear on their legs and arms so that they may fly.

“Did the people of your town find your mother unusual?” the Purple Hood asks.

“She was unusual.”

“How?”

“She was better than they were. She took in foundlings and saved their lives.”

The White Hood rocks on his heels with boredom. He wants to light the tinder.

“They were impressed by this?” says the Purple Hood.

“Everyone was. Why else would she have ended up in the palace in Madrid?”

“And the priest, Alvaro Gajardo, did he know she was a witch?”

“My mother was not a witch.”

“He heard her last confession, did he not?”

“Yes.”

“And you heard it as well?”

“No.”

“You attended her death with your sister Dolores.”

“I was a child. I do not remember what was said.”

“What do you remember?”

I say nothing.

“What do you remember?”

When I still do not answer, the Purple Hood makes a slight motion with his right hand and the White Hood steps forward. He nods, and the White Hood lights the tinder.

The flame creeps along a dry stick, and I watch its progress.

“What do you remember?” the Purple Hood asks again.

I remember everything, and nothing. I remember my heart was rent. In the same way that Saint Teresa wrote of her raptures, after it was over, my heart felt as if it had been chewed by dogs.

“She said to me that she dreamed nine dreams,” I say. “That was the last thing my mother told me.”

“Dreams of what?” says the Purple Hood.

I shake my head.

Have I squandered something in giving him this secret? Something that had been mine and mine only? A memory that had meaning only for me? This is nothing he could want or value. I see my mother on her deathbed, conjured by the flame in the room with the robed Inquisitor, the scribe and his quill, the torturer and the bored physician. My mother seems suddenly small before this audience.

This is how they conspire to break you
, the fire whispers, and I am silent, listening.

Yes, I am talking to you
, it insists.
I am eating you up, I lick you like a lover, I consume you. They think I shall convince you of their wisdom and power, but I am betraying them to you
.

Do not give them everything
, the fire says to me. Does its
voice issue from the sticks as they snap? Is it gas in the wood, popping and hissing? A coal’s collapse? The grease as it drips from my feet to the stones below? The fire’s voice is persuasive. It is soft, learned and irresistible.

Your love for your mama and papa, your quarrels with Dolores. Alvaro and what time you had with him. They will make all of these seem small and pathetic to you. Everything
, it insists, and falls silent.

All of us in the room are silent. The torturer puts his hand under his hood to scratch his face. I have a brief spell in which I begin to cough, and unable to draw a full breath because of the smoke, I think I shall suffocate. When the fit passes, I find that I understand the fire’s message.

Exaggeration of punishment diminishes temptation. Their reasoning, what the Holy Office hopes to make clear, is that
nothing
can be worth such anguish. Thus all human desire—everything that tempted you—is reduced to folly.

At the advice of the fire, eaten by the fire, I determine that I will never speak of anything I love or hate. But I will betray my promise.

It is very difficult to keep your secrets under such conditions. Do you know why? It is not as simple an answer as
pain
. It is because you want to love your torturer, too. Yes, that is easier than hating him, it requires much less strength to make him your final passion, to die of love for him.

But this is how he will destroy you
, whispers the fire.

What does it matter?
I argue back. Any momentary enlightenment is likely to be obliterated by the next trial.

The Purple Hood’s questions go on endlessly. Which herbs did she use to cure an ague? Did she keep a cat or a bird? What were the things she said to us as children?

“Did she know her Paternoster?”

“Of course.”

“Her Ave?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“How often did she say the Credo?”

“As often as anyone else.”

Whatever I say, the scribe writes it all down. Sometimes, on a
fortunate day, at some point during the encouragements, I find myself in a bright field of the past, one of the terraced plots where the mulberries grew, and it is just as it was one afternoon so many years before. A lifetime before. One winter afternoon I went outside and found what I thought was heaven.

Snow, so quiet. White.

Such snowfalls we had the winter I became a woman. Enough snow to silence all creation, to shut up each gossiping tongue and cloister every spying eye. The town of Quintanapalla slept all winter long.

I walked up the hill to the silk house, past bare winter trees, past ice twisted into fantastic shapes in the place where we daily spilled our well water, slopping it out of our buckets because the cold made us that clumsy. I walked and each footfall was smothered, the cold leaked into my shoes, the only sound was the creak of ice under my feet. Against the dangers of such weather we used to tie the pruned branches of the mulberry trees, tie them so that the wind could not snap off a frozen limb. Rabbits perished in their dens that winter. They curled tight into one another and they slept their lives away. The beasts of the field tried to burrow into the haystacks to keep warm, but they died, too. A merchant traveling from Madrid stopped in our town’s inn, and, sitting with my father as he warmed himself before the fire, he told Papa that in the royal residence a fire blazed high on the kitchen’s great stone hearth, but still the room remained so cold that spirits froze in a glass left on the mantel above.

Alvaro made pastoral calls on the day following the Sabbath. He was out, everyone knew, so no one came looking for him. Even if some soul required a priest—the birth of a sickly baby, its death, or the last rales and rattles of its grandmother—no one came slogging his way through the cold to his lodgings. As for me, I was always afield even in the worst weather, no one ever looked for me. Dolores had long since given up any pretense of sisterly guidance. She took no credit for whatever virtues I exhibited (she saw none, either) and accepted no blame for my flaws (of these she could list many). And she no longer expected that I would be home at any particular hour. So on those silent,
white winter Mondays Alvaro and I met in the silk house. We knew we were safe there because if my papa was out, he was at market, and Dolores would be tending the hearth or visiting some pious gossipmonger, letting her feet, wet in their hose, steam before the fire as they discussed with relish the eventual damnation of the majority of townsfolk.

Walking through the silent snow, feeling the heat of my flesh burning under my very clothes, I was on fire, enough to melt the very winter and banish each drift. Flakes balanced on the boughs I passed turned to bright drops and fell winking into the snow. On fire. Feverish. No, better to say I was
fever
itself. I came to him like a disease, and he caught me up in his arms.

Each time, the first embrace so tight as if we meant to crack each other’s bones and suck the marrow. I would pull him toward me, and everything would grow confused in the heat of my desire for him. Like looking at a vista beyond a bonfire, all that I saw was distorted, trembling and merging. One body ran into another. Sometimes when I closed my eyes I was Teresa wedded to Christ as recorded in the journals she kept. He came and put his lips on her, and she burned, too.

Venite ad me
. He spoke to me in Latin, the language of the Church and all her saints, and when he called me to him with those words our union existed not only out of time but beyond ordinary and profane human conversation as well. We became sacred together.

Venite ad me
. Come to me, Francisca. His eyes as hot as his tongue but lacking its focus.

We were trapped together in the silk house one day, then another and another. A blizzard left our absences undiscovered. She is in some barn, she has found shelter with a shepherd and his flock, I imagined Dolores saying. The snow trapped all of our town, and perhaps all of Castile, in shuttered houses.

We drank snow from the drift outside the door. My handfuls slaked his thirst. And what did we eat those three days but each other? What fire did we make beyond the burning of our bodies?

Suspended outside time, speaking in Latin together, tracing my letters on his body. Long and leisured love poems spelled out
in the language of the saints,
Amores mortuus sum,
I am dead of love.

We lay together in his cloak lined with fur, my face tipped up into his neck, feeling the pulse in his throat under my parched lips. I felt the whole silk house rise into the storm, the wind picked it up with us inside, and I shook in his arms even as timbers rattled and trembled.

When we returned to earth, when the storm was over, I went outside into the snow and walked down the hill and toward my father’s house in the little valley. I saw each tree standing snow-laden in fantastic garb of ice, and as if I had happened into a group of lovely, lace-dressed dancers, the trees shimmered and waltzed through my tears. In the afternoon’s light, so bright and clean, I became blind with the white all about me, I saw nothing but white light. As if I had waked from our bed in the silk house and walked into the bright fire of heaven. So cold that my skin burned, I felt that I was consumed by God. I heard angels sing, my head rang with celestial voices.

How lovely to have died in my sleep and to have been taken up to heaven. The sparkling streets of heaven, the white fields. I believed in heaven as a child.

When the scribe reads me my confession, he stands with the light coming from behind him, over his shoulder, so as to see the pages he holds, he stands and he reads to me what it is I have said. And kneeling there (for someone pulls me to my knees, someone forces me into a posture of supplication), kneeling no higher than the scribe’s boot tops, the light looks so holy and his features are invisible: just the dark outline of a hooded man. It looks the way I always thought Judgment would look. This angel has the light, and I float in the darkness at his feet.