Poison (33 page)

“Who told you, then? Who is as wicked as I intend to be?”

But he did not answer that question.

I had been Alvaro’s pupil for some time. The Six Weeks of the Virgin had come and then passed, the mulberry was in spring leaf, and I wanted to be with him each day. Still, we met only once each week. On one of those Thursday afternoons, I did not go to Alvaro’s study, but I went on the back of the wine seller’s cart to Rubena, and I saw Visita, who did cures in that town.

The wine seller was a taciturn man, who had agreed to take me to Rubena in exchange for some eggs and he said nothing as
I handed him the basket. He said nothing as he drove, and said nothing as he dropped me in the small plaza of the town of Rubena. I asked directions to Visita’s from an old woman in the marketplace, saying some lie, that I was coming to fetch a tonic for a cousin with the greensickness. She told me how to go and I walked the three miles to the witch’s house.

Visita was a midwife and a healer, especially to women. When I called at her open door, she came to the threshold and looked at me. “Who are you?” she said, and I told her.

“The younger daughter of Concepción de Luarca? The same who nursed the king?”

“Yes.”

She looked me up and down. “You are not with child,” she said. “And you have yet to be wed.”

I told her that what she said was true.

“Then you are here because you are not chaste and you do not want to get with child.” She folded her arms.

“Yes,” I said, finally.

“How will you pay me?” she asked.

“I have no money, but I am used to work. I will do as you bid me.”

She let me stand at her door for some minutes, and then, seeing that she had not frightened me off with her sharp manner, she stood back and opened her arm, inviting me in. Her home was a storehouse filled with more remedies than a person could count. Visita told me she made a practice of visiting shrines and collecting holy things, picking up the grain and flowers and whatever else pilgrims had left, offerings that had soaked up some of the saints’ power. She had holy water and the forelock from a cow that had been marked with a sun on one flank and a moon on the other. Charcoal from olive bark, fangs of a dog, licorice and wild rhubarb, fenugreek, ligosticum, marrow from the bones of a paschal lamb. Indigo, birthwort, goldenseal. Sacks of cherry pits dyed many colors, fragrant beads made of sandalwood and cedar, feathers and ribbons, materials with which to make amulets. The sacred takes many forms, supposedly, and it looked to me as if Visita had found them all. On her hearth she had four cats sleeping.

“I have no senna,” she said. “I will help you, and you will collect this herb for me.” She handed me an empty basket, a big one that would take me some time to fill.

I nodded. I stood among her cats by the fire as she went and pulled a chest out from under her bed. From it she took a little bag of stones of different colors, and she shook the bag and four fell into her hand.

“Which one do you like?” she asked, and I hesitated, for I had no understanding of what they were.

“Some young girls like to have trinkets for their hair or fingers, my daughter wears a ring on her toe, but you will have a special shining stone inside you, just like Saint Eulalia.” Eulalia’s liver had been like an oyster—when they cut her up, it was filled with pearls.

Visita held the stones out. “Pick your favorite of these, and I will help you to wear it,” she said.

I was not sure, suddenly, that I wanted the magic Visita offered, but some power in the woman compelled me beyond my fear. Her two hands were different. The right hand, like any other working person’s, was callused and thick. Even after she washed it, black lines of dirt remained etched into the dry cracks in the tips of each finger. Her left hand, though, the one she called her healing hand, was as if it belonged to another woman. It was as white and soft and smooth and beautiful, as delicate as the hand of the Virgin. And it was unnaturally warm. When she shook the little stones from their bag into its palm, they seemed to acquire an extra luster and to wink there at me.

“Come,” she said. “You are taking too long.”

I reached into her palm and chose the stone that was the smallest and pale purple. She put the rest of them in the bag, locked it back into the chest and with a great heave slid the heavy box under her bed. The purple stone she put into a kettle over the fire and made her fire blaze high under it. She put in some herbs, too. I am not sure of all of them but I could smell trincilla, and I recognized hyssop and the white hellebore flowers. The steam rose higher, and it began to boil.

Visita led me into a small room with no windows, where I could hear the noise of geese through the wall. Mama used to
tell us that witches turned themselves into geese and that they sucked the life out of children. They could stick their bills into a basket with a sleeping child and that would be it, she said. But she also told us that women must be good to their babies and care for them and that if their babies died from lack of care, it was wrong to excuse this as the work of witches who came in through the cracks.

“Lie down,” said Visita, and I did. She took my underclothes from me and opened my legs and I was lying with my knees up as I did for Alvaro. Somewhere in Rubena a pig was screaming. The screams stopped abruptly. The next week that pig would be sausages.

Visita was an agile old woman, gentle and her hands were clean, but it hurt me when she put the little stone up so high. She had a wand that she used, something made of bone that held the stone and pushed it farther than where her fingers could go, past that circle of flesh that closes a woman’s womb. When she did this, there was a terrible clenching in my belly, and it did not go away, even after an hour or more. I felt cold all over. “You will have to lie here for a while,” she said, and she kept her hand on my forehead so I could not rise.

Visita’s voice was soothing as she talked to me. She never put curses on people, she said. She could, but she would not. “Why should I go to hell to pay for other people’s wickedness?” she asked.

I was sick with pain for hours, I had to lie on my side and keep my knees drawn up to stand it, but she talked and she talked, and it helped to pass those hours. She told me so many things, some to do with me and of the practical sort, that I must always be clean about my person and not let any other man besides my lover know me. “Someday you will have children, too, Francisca,” said Visita, “but not yet, for you are just a girl and you have no mother to help you.”

By dusk I still did not feel as if I could stand being in a cart drawn by a mule. I could not even sit up on a pallet, so I remained at Visita’s for the night and went back to Quintanapalla the next day.

“I went to the priest to find out what had become of you,”
Dolores said when I returned home. “He told me that you had not come to help him yesterday.”

“No,” I said.

“Where were you?” my sister asked me. “You frightened Papa with your absence.”

“I was taken sick,” I told her. “I had some trouble with my stomach and I—”

Dolores turned her back to me, and I stopped speaking.

Well, let her think I have a secret, sinful life, I decided, and I was glad she had gone to Alvaro to ask after me and had learned that I had not come to see him. As long as no one connected my straying to Alvaro, I felt safe.

With the weather fine, some days I wandered far from my father’s house. I had the senna to gather for Visita, and I took her twice what she had asked, and after that I found more and more excuses to be afield at all hours. I was seen everywhere, I made a point of this, so that the people of Quintanapalla would come to understand me as a wandering sort, and I was so taken up with my own passions that I did not see beyond them to how others might also find them interesting.

As for Visita’s cure, it turned out that I was not so unfortunate as some girls, for I learned later that a bad fever could follow from the stones, and it even killed some. But then, neither was I as fortunate as others, for after several months the little stone came out one night, with some blood and water, and it hurt me very much. I had quit the bed I shared with Dolores and gone outside to relieve myself, so at least I was away from my sister and her prying eyes. I looked at the little stone in my hand—it was a summer night, the moon gave me enough light to see—and I decided to say nothing of its coming out to Alvaro. I did not want to go through the pain of another visit to Visita, so I hid the purple stone away in the chest of my mother’s cures.

My monthly time was very strong and bloody after the stone came out, and it got worse for some months and then dried up. I thought I was ill, for I felt so weak and tired and I thought how bad it was that the stone had come out and I had hidden it from Alvaro and now was sick. But it was nothing unnatural: I was with child.

I say this easily today, but then it was something that I held inside as a secret even from myself. I mean that I
knew
it, but as it seemed to me something that would change my life irrevocably, I refused to consider it before I had to. I suppose I had a desire to remain myself a child. They say no female is a woman until she is a mother.

I continued to go each week to Alvaro. My pleasure had shriveled, yet I teased him to touch me, to remove my skirts, and in time it became obvious that I was carrying. Alvaro said nothing at first, but he stopped knowing me carnally, and if we lay together, he would only put his hand in my hand, or he would hold me as I slept with my back turned toward him. Finally, one afternoon when I came in, he was standing at his window and when I opened the door after knocking, he turned around and said, “Francisca, come here to me.”

He put his hand on my side and he looked at me. “This is my child, is it not?” he said finally. And I looked back into his eyes.

“Yes,” I answered.

He nodded.

We stood awkwardly together, and then we made as if to pray, both on our knees, but we rose again quickly. Having forsaken the Church and all her warnings, what purpose was there in returning to her now?

We spoke of leaving the town together. The next new moon, we said, when darkness would aid our escape. But when that night came, I did not do it. I stood for an hour at the door to my papa’s house, listening to the sound of his breathing. I could not rid myself of the feeling of his rough palm stroking my head. I thought of Alvaro’s telling me how he wept in the confessionary, and I knew that my father held himself at fault for my mother’s death and that missing her, together with the blame he took to his heart, made his life sorrowful.

My father took solace in my company that he did not find with Dolores, and this was because I forgave him, as she did not. I did not say to Papa that I knew he had wanted the mulberry to make a better life for Mama and for us, but I did not have to. He knew that I loved him:
him
, the father whose dreams had ruined us. I knew that he could not be any man other than the one he
was, no more than Dolores could have been another woman. Or than I could have been a reasonable girl who put up with the attentions of a steady farmer or cobbler or smith. Allowed my betrothal to a dull decent man and had his babies and scrubbed his pots. Papa had to have his silk, and I had to have my priest, and we forsook all else. Still, even as my father’s daughter, I did not want to run away in a manner that would cause him the shame of my disappearing with a priest. That would have killed Papa, I thought.

But he would soon know of my state—I could not hide it much longer—and then what? So Alvaro and I planned to leave Quintanapalla separately. We would meet in Soria, we said, on the Feast of the First Martyrs. But then we did not do that, either.

After a while, when I felt better, we resumed our carnal life, we took it up again. Not just I, but the two of us together had begun to dream even while waking. We ignored our approaching fate. We did nothing to avoid it.

ILKWORMS FIND THEIR WAY EVERYWHERE. IN
the dark of my cell I catch myself brushing at my arm or my neck, trying to shake off a phantom worm. They crawl among my skirts. The sound of their jaws gives way to the silence of their spinning.

I would take one in my hand when I was small. I would stroke its cool, bluish skin, and it would stop mid-chew, jaws open, leaf held in its front feet. The worms’ great eyes are useless to them, they swing their heads as do the blind, their front quarters falling into the ceaseless, serpentine motion they use for spinning.

Having had their food brought to them for more generations than anyone can count, silkworms lie helpless and greedy in their trays. They go nowhere unless their hooked feet catch in the clothing or hair of those who feed them. We found worms in our beds and in our shoes, in our bowls and our pockets.

I used to carry them back to the silk house; I did when I felt tenderly disposed to them, transporting their smooth, cool-fleshed bodies on my flat, open palm, which, if not sufficiently warm, made a worm lie as still as if it had died.

In another mood, I might squash it. Lay it on the ground outside and stand with it under the toe of my shoe, considering for a moment. Then tread on it slowly, so that the chewed green leaves of our trees would burst from its split side. If it was old enough, from just below its stilled jaws, its full silk glands would squeeze out. I would squat down and poke a bit of straw into one of the glands, shining like a tiny silver egg. A silvery mucus would ooze out: unspun liquid silk.