Poison (28 page)

Having been without any priest for the better part of a year, the people of Quintanapalla were inclined to be grateful, and though they thought Alvaro too bookish and too often cloistered with his pages and his quill, like most uneducated people—like me—they were awed by studious occupations. Once it was made plain to them that Alvaro was searching for heresies hiding among all those words in his study, they became respectful of his need for quiet, and people were tolerant even of my setting about to help him. It seemed to them that I was offering my labors in service to routing the Devil out of one of his bastions, and as much as persons were able to perceive my longing to be with Alvaro, they understood my desire as a kind of piety. For a while they did. As long as I was careful, they did. And though his window beckoned me, I would not stand beneath it unless no one was about.

But one week I arrived at the little study early, breathless, and I found that he was waiting, too. He was eager. He must have been, for my knuckles had rapped only once when the door opened. In the sudden draft, as if the very room had sharply drawn a breath, his cassock swayed around his ankles. I panted on the threshold, eyes watering slightly from my run down the hill. I drew a deep breath, smelling all that for which I had longed: the ink’s metallic fragrance coming from the open well, the lamp’s scent of oil, the odor of charred wick lingering still from when it was extinguished the previous night; the smell of the books he had rescued, slightly damp and acrid like wine cork; the paper upon which we would write together, dipping our quills into the ink.

And in the midst of all these, Alvaro, whose blood, so visible in his cheeks, seemed to exude some yearning or hunger. Or was
that my own? I withdrew my hand, still poised in the air between us, ready to rap again on the door, which he had opened. I pulled back and covered my mouth with the hand, and we stood thus for a moment, not speaking.

“Come in, Francisca,” he said at last. “You let all the warmth out.” I stood there as if paralyzed, until finally he grasped my wrist and drew me in.

“Is there something troubling you?” he asked, when I could not concentrate on the words before us, and I covered my face with my hands. But then, feeling childish, I looked up quickly. I did not answer his question, and he dismissed me early.

I did not return the next Thursday afternoon, nor the two following. Our next meeting was the obligatory Lenten confession. Alvaro was in his dark cubicle, I was one more in a long line of sinners. I began with the usual words, I said I had transgressed and asked forgiveness. But then, “It is Francisca,” I said.

My words, whispered, seemed huge in the dark of the confessionary, that first darkness from which all others issued: the dark of his study, lights extinguished. The dark of longing, and of night. The heaving, awful dark of my cell.

Alvaro made no answer, not knowing what I meant by identifying myself. Or, perhaps, because he did know. At last he said, “Go on.”

“I have impure thoughts,” I said. “
Ad te puto
.” I think of you.

I had no thoughts at all for the old women in line behind me, waiting to confess their niggardly sins. No thoughts of Dolores or of my papa or of my immortal soul. My only thoughts were impure, and they were so great as to obscure my notice of anything else. I whispered—I must have, for I was not totally mad, not yet—but what I was saying was so large to me, it seemed as though I must have shouted.

“We must not see each other anymore,” he answered, suddenly, urgently, and not in our Latin but in Spanish. “You may not return to my study. The lessons are over. I absolve you.
Cede
.” Go.

“How can you absolve me?” I said.

He made no answer. I waited as long as I could, I waited until
I could feel the old women grow restless, and then I quit the church. The grandmothers looked at me as I passed them lined up against the wall, muttering their Ave’s.

I came to his study. He sent me away. I came back.

“Please,” he said.

“Please,” I said. We were standing in his doorway together. He was trying to close his door, but I reached past it. I touched him, I let my hand rest for a moment on his chest. And I saw it—whatever had let him hold himself apart from me—I saw that resolve give way.

He let me in. He told me that he had mortified his flesh. He knew, he said, that a woman could be the Devil’s tool, and he considered the Devil surpassingly clever to have sent so small a woman, one who was a virgin and one who asked for a tutor. He scourged himself rigorously, but every place that he opened his flesh, it was as if he made it burn that much more with lust.

His nose was long and sharp and it would dig painfully into me when we embraced, like a blade against my breast, and when he entered me the first time, my soul flew up above the town of Quintanapalla. Up, up, until I saw the innkeeper’s wife with her sticks for her fire slowly walking the steep path to her house, and I thought, Oh! how old she is, by the end of this winter she may be dead. And I saw my father in the silk house, now the workshop where he made little wooden things to sell, and my heart swelled with love for him, for those fingers that looked so coarse yet fashioned such toys as the little acrobat on his wire. I saw all the toys and spoons and hair ornaments that he had carved for me and my sister. I saw Dolores, too, scrubbing and scolding, and our neighbor as he led his cow back through the gorse. And I loved everyone. I felt I was touching all the world.

“You have learned to write on me as well as on the page,” Alvaro said once, examining his skin before he clothed himself again. I used my fingernails on his back as if they were quills. I liked to leave my mark on his body. Sometimes, when I was under him, I would bite Alvaro, and then he would pull away in surprise, the red signature of my teeth on his smooth skin.

We read. Each time we began the same way, sitting at the table with words spread before us, until my hand reached for his
leg. I was brazen, feeling him hard under his robes. Nothing held me back, I felt him and I burned. The idea of hell was such a poor little fire in comparison.

“Is it for this that a priest wears skirts?” I asked, my hand feeling between his legs. “To hide his sex?”

In the beginning of our bedding together, there was only one question each week. Not whether or not we would fuck—that was understood—but
when
. When would we succumb? We would wait, heads over books, until the question grew, until the always unspoken (but no less audible, no less readable) words—
Fuck me; lie with me; oh, touch me
—had grown so large, it was as though they were spelled out in the air before us, obliterating the lesson on the table.

When we gave in, I would feel light begin to pour through my body. As though I were a vessel, a pitcher, a cup. As though at last this were the Holy Spirit my mother had promised on the day of first communions. Light that I saw only as a silver fire behind the closed lids of my eyes. I could not help thinking of all that I remembered of saints and their raptures. I felt an ache in my throat, like that of suppressed grief, or the onset of illness. I was driven by a sudden shift in the old relation between spirit, mind and body. My senses were enslaved to the flesh. I was sick with desire.

In the beginning it was I, always, who touched first, whose hand reached over the quills and ink and pages to touch his sleeve, to undo one and then another button. It was my question that had to be answered, my
Tui tangere possum?
“Can I touch you?” But then he became bold, too. He would be standing by the door when I entered, he would have been pacing for an hour or more. The lesson would be set out on the table, quills lined up precisely and books open to where we had left off the previous week. We shoved aside its pages, pushed away the opened inkwell. The lesson that day would be written on me. My head came down hard on the table. The ink went over, a spreading black lake of lust.

What did I know of his life? It seems to me now that in the time we had, I told him everything and he told me nothing. He had come from Jaca, in Navarre. He was the second eldest of his
mother’s four children. When his papa left them, the two girls ended in an asylum—his mother could not feed and keep them all. Alvaro and his older brother remained with her only until they were old enough to go out in the world and learn a trade.

His papa, to hear him tell it, had suffered greatly because, like Carlos’s father, the tormented King Philip, he was always struggling between his worry over his soul and a hellish itch to put his hands on every woman he saw. In Alvaro’s family it was thought that the sons of Bartolomé Gajardo were each of them half of their father. That Tomás was lust and improvidence, and Alvaro was worry for the soul.

Yes, Alvaro was to be forbearance, he was to be zeal for higher things, and not prey to mortal temptation. He told me that he had never thought before to worry over lust. But, as it happened, the sons of Bartolomé Gajardo were not like the front and hind quarters of an ass, one all head, the other all immoderate balls.

It was true that Tomás had been a rogue, he could not keep any job. Apprenticed to cabinetmakers, to tanners, to chandlers and bookkeepers, he did not last at any occupation. As the two brothers had set out in the world together, their mama crying bitterly, Alvaro stuck by Tomás and followed him from town to town, job to job, always going farther north until they finally reached Paris.

Tomás disappeared into the masses of the city. Alvaro lost him, but he did not go back to Spain, not yet. He remained and got a position in an atelier that made buttons. He learned to make buttons of horn and bone, turning them on a special lathe, and wood buttons meant to be covered with fabric. He made silver buttons, too, which had to be hammered after they came from the mold, buttons made of shell, which broke as often as not before he had finished polishing them, buttons to be stitched upon gowns and waistcoats, stitched with silk.

As I lay with him I liked to think that the work of our worms, years before, had somehow made its way over the Pyrenees, wafting north like a thread of smoke through the air, until it reached the great city of Paris and a tailor there, where, guided by a needle, it pierced the shank of a button my priest had made.

Alvaro made busks, too. Those balusters of ivory or of bone that keep a woman’s back straight. “Ladies of the court wear them,” he said. “Their maids fasten them into the backs of their corsets.” A busk is what lies closest to a woman’s skin.

“It touches her,” he told me.

Because it did, a busk had become a fashionable means of sending a
billet doux
. Gentlemen ordered them for their mistresses. They paid to have sweet messages and poems inscribed upon them. At his bench, Alvaro etched passionate words into the long, flat tongues of ivory. He began to think of a woman’s skin, and of her body.

Alvaro said that he had led a peculiar, solitary life in Paris. He had few friends. He took all his meals in his rooming house; he ate silently and read the gazettes slowly as he drank his soup and chewed his bread. He could read by then; he taught himself French by carefully copying messages from paper to ivory, and by less exotic means. He read gazettes others left behind at table, publications bought by persons traveling through the city and then discarded. Advertisements for lectures at the medical colleges, for theological debates at the seminaries, for the performance of a new drama by Racine. Notices of positions offered to those trained in dentistry and wig making. Warnings of fever outbreaks and lists of its symptoms. Accounts of ladies and their dresses, of who wore what to the prince de Conti’s Mardi Gras ball. Reports of how high the heels would be the following season and where to get the best jeweled opera glasses, and an article on how the price of hat trimmings would increase the next fall because of a plague among African ostriches, which were molting so uncontrollably that even those birds which survived were running naked through the sands. He liked to read of the fashionable people who might be wearing his buttons and busks. But two things happened. The buttons and busks began to bore him, and the flesh for which they were intended beckoned.

The Bóveda welcomed those whose minds were agile and keen. In Paris, Alvaro felt a vocation—a call either toward God or away from the button atelier—and he entered the order. He studied in Paris for some years, he believed he would remain
there always, but in the year 1673 the Bóveda was cast out of France. If the pope would not discipline them, then Louis would, and the same year that so many witches were purged, the same that Princess Marie threw her bouquets on the gallows, the Sun King disbanded the Bóveda for its study of questionable texts. Alvaro came home to Spain and to further discipline at the hands of the Franciscans, his mind having trifled with wanton books, perhaps, but his body still pure. He had remained celibate in that city famous for its courtesans and dancing girls, for every titillation of the flesh.

“What were you like as a boy?” I asked him such questions all the time. I wanted to possess that knowledge, wanted to bind myself to him even in those years that preceded our meeting. He reminded me of myself, a little—the youthful desire for knowledge, and now I wonder if all mortal lovers are not like Narcissus, ever eager to catch a glimpse of themselves.

Alvaro told me a little, very little. “I had a penchant for sweets,” he said, as if that were the sort of answer I was seeking.

“But what did you
do
?” I pressed.

“Well, sometimes we boiled milk and honey until it formed a soft candy that stuck to the sides of the kettle.”

“Ugh!” I pushed him away from me. “What does that tell a person!”

He would look at me when I burst out at him. His face would express puzzlement, as if truly he had tried to give the kind of answer I sought.

“That was when my sisters were still with us,” he continued. “I dreamed of sweets. I never got enough.”

“Perhaps you had worms.”

There was a sadness in Alvaro. It drew me to him, and yet it vexed me, too, and made me say sharp things. Some of this sadness was the way he was made, but some had to do with his sisters. He had tried to find them but could not, and the Church was angered by his stubborn attachment to his earthly family. Because of it they almost did not grant him the reader’s license he requested, and he was routinely called back by his new Franciscan bishop for questioning. He left once for months on a useless journey, discovering no trace of Tita and Amalia. He knew
the asylum to which they had been sent was somewhere west of the place he was born, but he did not find it.