Poison (30 page)

In the palace, Dr. Severo draws back a cape of silk from María’s breast. He feels her arm, looking for her pulse, for some confession of how her heart fails her. He squeezes so insistently that he calls her back. She stirs slightly. “Ouch,” she says. The doctor understands almost nothing of the queen’s condition,
only that it is deteriorating steadily. Her periods of lucidity are shorter and more infrequent. Despite all manner of teas and waters, she grows steadily more dehydrated. Her hands pick at the cape over her as if she wants to take apart the lovely pattern: unloom, unweave all the world.

The poison makes her do it. Makes her fingers twitch and trouble the cloth. The chemical, whatever it is—Severo still does not know—has a complex of effects, and not all of them are unpleasant. She feels cold, it is true, and the cold is a dead cold that creeps toward her heart from fingers and toes, inexorably claiming more and more of her extremities. Her feet paddle helplessly, tangling in the bedclothes, and then they are still.

What an odd dream
, she thinks.
That loom. That unearthly fabric
. Why can she not waste quietly away like the weaver’s daughter? Why must she suffer so, she wonders miserably. She wants to go back to sleep.

Each time before she vomits she feels her scalp grow wet and slimy with sweat, and the spells of retching are disorienting. It is not possible to vomit so much so often. She watches with stupefied interest what comes up into the basins held by patient hands.
What is that?
she thinks.
Where can it all come from?
It is as if she disgorges meals she has not eaten, a life she never led.

But, afterward, she feels better for a moment. She stretches luxuriously, and with a feeling of sensual pleasure she has never before experienced. The sheets come alive under her hands. What is more, her moments of rapture grow more frequent. There were none yesterday, the day she fell ill, the day she was poisoned. Then her thoughts circled senselessly in a sort of abased pleading.
Help me, God, O God. O God, have mercy. Mea culpa, Mea maxima culpa. Please
. Church Latin yielded to helpless begging, and then to sentimental pleading,
Mother, Maman, please come, take me home, please please please
. But, today her suffering is not so unremitting. There are these curious flights of ecstasy, and these wonderful dreams, as if she were once again a child listening to a story, feeling a cool hand on her head.

“Ma–ría! Lu–isa!”

From her bedchamber the queen can hear the rabble. At the
sound of her chanted name, she opens her eyes to the white winter sky, she sees black smoke coiling heavenward from her east window. What does it mean? she wonders. Is the stable on fire? But what can that matter now? All she wants is her mother. All she wants is to be home.

The queen’s swollen tongue feels dry and sticky, and when she tries to ask Obdulia the origin of the smoke, the little maid cannot understand the choking noise she makes. María’s body burns in her bed, but all she feels is cold.

“Is there such a fever with poison?” whispers Obdulia to Jeanette. She lays a fresh cloth on her mistress’s brow, replacing the one that has grown warm. María’s left hand lies on top of her little dog’s head, stroking the soft fur. He trembles. “No–o, no, n–o–o–o,” moans the queen as the sickness returns, and she writhes a little. She feels so wretched, it is as if her organs squirm like eels in a net. Her liver feels black and damp and cold, her heart shivers, her bowels cramp. Only her stomach is hot. Her stomach burns all the way to her throat. Obdulia holds a cup to her lips and she takes enough water to wet her tongue. “O God, O God,” she says, and she turns her head back and forth on her hot pillow.

Just a corridor away, a floor above, Carlos is with Estrellita, pushing aside the little table with its cold cups of thistle tea, untouched plates of omelette and bread, a bowl of custard.

He kneels by her bed. He puts his face in her bedclothes, he feels the heat of her coming through the counterpane. The king prays in Estrellita’s company.
Touch me, God
, he asks silently.
Touch me through her. Find me. Please. You are here, I know
. The king’s eyes are closed.

They have had Estrellita in the palace for forty-seven days now, in the room just next door to the weeping penitents, twins whose tears fill buckets and in whose lachrymose offerings Carlos bathes each evening. All palace teas and coffees are boiled up in the water they weep, all eggs hard-cooked in the tears they shed. They are greedy for sadness, they have not as much sorrow as they desire, and so they always have reason to go on lamenting.

This is the corridor of the living saints, the wing of the palace
reserved for penitential misfits: bleeders and weepers, spectral self-starvers who live on no more than their ration of the daily Eucharist: a thimbleful of wine, a morsel of dry bread. This is the secret corridor whose entrance is hidden under a tapestry, whose servants and whose kitchen are separate from the rest of the palace’s, whose inhabitants are so precious that their company is shared with only an honored few.

Behind each door is another miracle. There are the two conjoined boys, who, born to a life most intimate, have between them four legs, two arms, no testicles, twenty-three fingers and one many-chambered heart, which beats a slow song. Their identical heads are turned ever toward each other; they have found their vocation in a never-ending dialogue on theological concerns. When Dr. Severo is confident that their health will allow it, those thornier Inquisitorial questions are presented to them. Their neighbor is fat old Sister Tomita, the one who levitates, her elephantine girth swelling with rapture against her stays, a giant corset, which, empty of her flesh, the laundress who has never seen Sister Tomita believes is some strange military contraption, a sling for hurling boulders, perhaps, or some sort of tent. But why should I wash this? she wonders. Should it not be the responsibility of the soldiery? When the fits come upon her, Sister Tomita’s stays must be undone, lest they pop, grommets whizzing. She swells further and further until, at last, she floats.

Unlike most afflicted with charisms, Sister Tomita is not shy, and as she rises, before she even passes the sconces illuminating her chamber, she calls for witnesses to come.

“Intestinal gases!” Doctor Severo has diagnosed.

“Ridiculous! Theatrical chicanery!” snorts the queen mother. Nonetheless, she never misses an ascension.

“Excommunicate her!” wrote the pope to the bishop of Madrid, and his letter was delivered by express coach.

As for little Estrellita, she too has her detractors. “It is a hysterical manifestation,” says Marianna. “We must send her home.”

“But she is not of a hysterical temperament, she has never been hysterical,” argues Carlos.

“Not unless you count spontaneous hemorrhaging as getting carried away,” says his mother. Still, she keeps a small square of silk soaked with Estrellita’s blood beneath her own pillow. No harm in it, if the child lacks supernatural power or divine connections, and, on the off chance that she is not a holy pretender—well, so much the better.

Carlos cares nothing for skeptics’ taunts. He believes, he guards all his living treasures jealously, he values none of them above Estrellita. Each afternoon, before vespers, he is at his little saint’s feet. Wrapped in a cloak, her small boots are elevated on a cushion of white silk, a cushion replaced each morning when the night’s blood has soaked it through, the sodden one taken downstairs to the royal reliquary.

Today, she was asleep when he came to her. She is still asleep, and dreaming, and as she dreams, her dreams pass through the king. And it feels good to him to be filled, if only for a moment, with the dreams of a saint. All the sweet, aching longing, all the patient certitude of God’s love rises from the child like steam off a hot cup and fills Carlos José, the crippled king of Spain.

When he can resist no longer, he reaches for her cheek and brushes it with his ringed fingers. Her eyes open, eyes black and mysterious like the night that brims with spirits.

“My wife is very ill,” Carlos says to Estrellita. “I am afraid she may die.” Estrellita rests her hand on his head. She strokes it in much the same way that María Luisa strokes the little dog on her bed downstairs.

“I am afraid,” he says again with his head bowed.

“You must pray for her,” Estrellita says.

“May I look, then?” asks Carlos, gesturing at her feet, and she shrugs. He is her king.

Only Carlos may open Estrellita’s boots. To their locking buckles there is but one key, and Carlos wears it on a black velvet ribbon around his neck. The lock ensures that Estrellita may not remove her boots. The lock promises that her wounds are a real and true testimony to the presence of God, and not some trick played on the king. For all of Spain knows that Carlos—like his father and his father’s father and all the kings before him—is desperate for any manifestation of the holy. In
such troubled times of drought and plague, a family might well drive stakes into the hands and feet of an unmarried daughter, hoping to trade her weight in gold before she found a lover and demanded a dowry.

But Estrellita is the genuine article, Carlos knows this to be true. From inside her boots spills a red redder than rubies, a treasure of bright gems falling to the floor. He wipes up her blood with his royal sleeve. He presses it to his mouth. Estrellita’s family resisted her being collected and carried off to Madrid. Unlike the Luarcas, they accepted no bag of gold in exchange for unusual talents, and they pleaded that their daughter might be returned to them by the new year. Estrellita’s mama and papa made no more claims for her than she made for herself. She had had no visions in which the Virgin or Christ or any saint appeared to her. She had never been a clever student of her catechism. She was given to pranks and bursts of temper.

As the king busies himself with her dressings, Estrellita stretches on her couch. She looks like an ordinary child waking. Despite her stubborn, ceaseless bleeding, her lips are full and rosy, her cheeks are flushed with apparent health. Wrapped in her cloak, gloved and booted, she eats nothing, sips tea made of thistles. The bandages Carlos removes from her wounds smell sweet like the blossoms of the orange trees that fill the terraces of her family’s home by the sea, and Carlos keeps these holy linens, stained with sanctity, in a chest at the foot of his bed. The reliquary with its pile of forty-six cushions (forty-seven, less one that was sent to the pope), smells like the most exalted hothouse. When they are in its confines, the nuns who tend it laugh with helpless joy. They cannot remember the troubles of the world, they cannot recall what keeps them on their knees ten hours of each day.

As for Carlos, it is not only that he desires to be saved, and to save his country. The king of Spain has fallen in love with Estrellita.

He does not want to know her carnally. He would not think of such a thing. It is just that she smells so good. He wants to inhale her. He presses her dressings to his lips, and his teeth ache with longing. He breathes deeply: a lungful of orange blossoms,
of blue ocean, bright sun, of … Perhaps it is because Estrellita seems so oblivious to him—the king!—that Carlos’s love for her grows ever stronger.

She breathes evenly, slowly, and her eyelids flutter as His Highness speaks to her. Perhaps it is not true, any of it. Perhaps there is no God, no heaven—still, faith does transform believers. And perfect faith, a faith such as Estrellita’s, makes the blood smell sweet. When she dies she will not rot because, like all the other holies who have expired in the secret corridor of saints, she cannot conceive of putrefaction.

Sometimes Estrellita vomits the tea that she drinks, and it comes up gold like wine. The lame king drinks it, and then he dances. He forgets all his fears. He forgets that he wants to be saved—it is tiresome to worry all the time—he forgets that for him each night blooms with pain, fantastic red flowers bursting from the draperies with every beat of his pulse. His latest ailment, gout, the one that killed his father, is a hot, flaming mortification of the flesh that gives him no rest.

Carlos looks at Estrellita’s eyes, her smooth brow. “The doctor says that María is vomiting blood, that she has been poisoned.” The little saint does not move. “I am afraid,” he says for the third time.

Estrellita sits up on her elbows. She looks at him. “I want to go home,” she says. “I do not like it here.”

Carlos stares at her. He shakes his head. “I cannot let you go,” he says.

The girl lies back on her couch.

Downstairs, Severo is bent over the queen, his ear to her mouth. “I want to go home,” María manages to say, her dry tongue laboring to form intelligible words. He knows she is dying, but
I cannot let you go
, thinks Severo, shaking his head. Not without some attempts at healing that appear heroic.

By María Luisa’s bed, also, are a clutter of trays, but unlike the little saint’s, these bear basins and bandages and salves, lancets of various sizes. Severo is discovering that María does not part with her blood as readily as Estrellita.

The queen is afraid of bleeding, so much afraid that Severo’s first three attempts to bleed her have been failures. It isn’t that
she has not delivered herself into her doctor’s care—she is trying to be obedient to his wishes—but her fear is so intense that her flesh refuses to comply. She can feel her veins deny the knife. When Dr. Severo cuts, her heart pumps backward, her panicked blood flows away from the lancet’s touch. Now her arms are paining her, burning in the places he has cut them.

“Please, I beg of you,” she says. Her voice is terrible to hear, a ragged, phlegmy whisper. “The foot, the foot. Use the foot. Oh, please.”

Dr. Severo nods, and he and his assistant each take one leg and gently pull María down in her bed until her knees are bent over its edge and her white feet hang below the level of her faltering heart. The assistant brings the basin and sets it on the tile floor below the queen’s toes.

Dr. Severo’s touch is cool and dry. He kneels before María’s feet, and he takes the left one in his hands. He runs his thumb along the top of the arch where one promising vessel protrudes stark and blue against her pale skin. The assistant lays a square of linen on the floor beside the basin. On it he places a fleam and a lancet kit containing four delicate, bright blades forged in the Austrian city of Klosterneuburg. Partial as he is to spring-loaded devices, Severo prefers to use the fleam, which is equipped with a trigger similar to those on firearms. When he discharges the sharp, one-toothed blade, it makes a satisfying little
chock
and cuts deeply and with surprising strength. On the other hand, the fleam’s one metal tooth is nearly the size of a horse’s, the marks it leaves unsightly. If the queen should recover, as unlikely as that may be, he might find her displeased by the scars. He had better use a blade from the lancet kit. Doctors have been hanged for less.