Poison (38 page)

Carlos squints as though he does not understand. He will go upstairs where it is peaceful, he will go up to Estrellita.

Outside, the mob has begun to dismantle the wall around the palace grounds. The guards have locked themselves in the gatehouse. They have stuffed their ears with scraps of wool felt torn
out of their uniforms. They are frightened of these people, the citizens of Madrid, who, just last week, were peaceable. They do not want to hear any more of the shouting.

“
María Marrana!
” the crowds scream now, having replaced the queen’s second name with a slur, unnaming her, taking away what her mother had given her, the name Maman chose over those picked by the queen’s father, “No, not Thérèse! Not Colette! It is Louise, Louise! Yes, Marie Louise.”

“
María Marrana!
” come the cries. María the Slut. They penetrate locked casements. They rattle the panes.

The palace shudders. What a sorrowful place it is. Each lamp and doorstop and chair is groaning. Plates ooze tears of misery, candles sputter in dismay and each hinge moans. The very halls tremble and heave with weeping. By tomorrow, even the smallest corner will be saturated with unhappiness, as if sorrow were a kind of liquid that could leak over every garment and drapery, staining them, leaving rings upon the carpet, marks of tidal wretchedness upon the walls. The rooms will have a mildewed smell of melancholy, the floorboards will be warped with weeping.

But that is tomorrow. Now is the hour for grand gestures, and Severo is making himself ready to flay the white goat in the queen’s apartments. It is as good as an admission that he has failed, that all of his expensive training and equipment cannot save a life. With my mother they used the pigeons, dipping her cold feet into their opened breasts, the little hearts beating yet under toes as good as dead. One last chance to live: to stand in the breasts of creatures so recently flying.

They summon the little saint who, with such concentration that her head shakes on the rigid stalk of her neck, can slow the palace clocks, all of them, and all the clocks in the city of Madrid, and once, even those as far away as Toledo. Carlos accompanies Estrellita as she is carried down the stairs by two nuns who make a seat for her with their strong hands and arms. She will buy for the queen an hour, a few minutes, however much she can.

The goat is a pretty creature. Not knowing her doom, nevertheless she suspects it, and her hooves slip and scramble on the
floor as the two pages drag her into María’s chamber. A hand on either side of her red bridle ensures her captivity until Dr. Severo’s assistant comes and takes her from them.

From a wheeled chest filled with knives, Dr. Severo selects one with a short, bright blade. His assistant holds the goat tight, he locks her head between his knees, and Severo makes a quick, expert cut from her chin down her breast and then a long slice along her belly. His knife is so sharp that it requires no force to move it. It almost eludes the doctor’s fingers, so quickly does it rush ahead to part the animal’s flesh. It must be this sharp, because if the cure is to work, the goat has to be skinned so fast that she remains alive. Stands, living, without her hide, which is to be laid over the queen.

If Severo has any true skills, they are taxidermic: he has the hide off the goat in two minutes, less time than one turn of the sandglass, and he leaves her standing absolutely still, amazed by her fatal nakedness. Her long beast’s eyelashes quiver under absent lids, and her naked knees knock as her pretty white coat, spattered with red, is carried steaming to the queen.

Without her hide, the goat’s life expands and fills María’s chamber. It presses up to the ceiling and sets the chandelier swaying. The lights shiver. For a moment, it overpowers the growing smell of death’s arrival, the smell that the doctor carries away in his clothes, that the maids try to shake from their aprons when they walk for a moment outside in the cold, flapping their skirts. It does not smell bad, that’s the surprising aspect. Illness and excrement smell noxious, but death smells sweet, mysterious and forbidden. No matter that the secret will in time be divulged to all, the smell makes fingers itch with curiosity. Outside María’s maids flap and shake even their underclothes.

The little creature’s hide is surprisingly heavy. It takes two, Dr. Severo and his assistant, to bear it, slick and hot and dripping, to María’s bed, and to drape it over her. She herself has been stripped for the occasion and lies completely unclothed beneath a sheet of linen, which at the last is whisked away by Obdulia before the hide is dropped down, whisked away when only an inch remains between the two skins: the queen’s and the
goat’s. The blood drips on the floor in oily, shining, perfect circles, which dry quickly, first congealing so that the light disappears from their surface, then turning black and sullen like plague spots.

As she sees it approach, María grimaces slightly, but then she relaxes under its warmth. It is distasteful, but she is helpless to resist its comfort. There is nothing that feels like this wearing of two living skins. A second skin, an extra skin, feels as good as one imagines it might. She will have an hour or two of warm comfort before it cools and dries, sticking to her.

My health must be deemed a little frail, for I was spared the fire today. Of course, they cannot burn us every time, and while the blisters are healing, the
garrucha
is useful. One White Hood made my arms fast behind my back while another set the pulley. Then a rope was bound around my wrists held behind my back and I was hoisted and dropped, hoisted and dropped.

I have become like those holy acrobats who pass from town to town around the Feast of Saint John, leaping through bonfires, their features hidden behind grotesque masks that make their heads as big as pumpkins, their tricky joints bending impossibly backward. Dolores and I would scream when we saw them in their black hose, their painted Devil’s grimaces howling at the lick of holy fire. Do I look like that now, I wonder, my mouth set in an endless scream?

While I sit here in the dark, head on knees, arms clasped around ankles, joints swollen stiff, I helplessly recall the little vessel I was to be at my first holy communion: a cup to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Spiritus Sancti
.

Try as I may, I no longer know whether I am empty or full.

This morning the Purple Hood told me that I am descended from a family that counts a very famous heretic among its members. My mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother was Jeanne. She wasn’t a virgin at all, he told me.

Jeanne d’Arc.

They say that when Jeanne d’Arc was burned at the stake her heart would not be consumed by the flames. Though they burned it for a month without cease, tending the fire high—the
wood was oak and it burned hot—her heart would not be consumed, so they cast it into the Seine. From there it tumbled along the riverbed. It floated past stones and fish and eelgrass. It passed under the bridges of Rouen, under oars and through nets. That most courageous heart, that stubborn, undefeated heart, traveled on to the ocean through tides of algae and rubbish, and its only reverence came from blind snails, from an old frog diving for his den in the mud.

Did my mother inherit such a heart? Did I?

Will nothing destroy our hearts?

ATEO. MATEO. NAMED FOR THE AUTHOR OF
the first book of the New Covenant, the new order, the rebuilding of the world. The same book that begins with so many begats that the queen used to yawn and swoon with boredom before bed, but nonetheless, Mateo: a name of surpassing hope.

From the beginning, I loved him so that I covered him with kisses each minute that he was awake, I held him the whole day, and would only put him down in fear that, as Dolores said, I would love him to death. Later, when he could creep along the floor and then walk, when he was a big boy whom I could gather up and hold tightly to myself, when he woke to the world and began to see where he was, then I loved him all the more. “Alvaro is in you,” I would whisper when I lay on the bed with him. I wanted to make his life good, I wanted to keep him safe. This was all I thought of.

Francisca, I told myself, you tempt fate. Do not be such a fool! For I knew it was a danger to so love any mortal creature, and what I felt for my child I cannot call wrong, but it was too much. I was crazy with it, I wanted to eat him. I danced with him, kissed his lips when his mouth was still wet with my milk. I worried that what the grandmothers said was true.
Rein in your heart, Francisca. Keep it back
, the old women at the well told me.
Don’t love him so much until he is older
. Half of the children—oh, at least that many—end up in the ground before their first or second saint’s day. Only fools give their hearts to babies. But there was no teaching me.

As Mateo suckled I would take his fingers into my mouth and taste with my tongue’s tip the sweetness of him, bite between my teeth the little papery nails so that he could not scratch himself. My hair was caught fast in his hand; his fingers held so tight that
it hurt, he took a writhing pleasure as he suckled. I can yet feel his hand on my side as he drank from me, fingers squeezing, digging in, but they felt so good. With Mateo in my arms, eating me up, I had a glimpse of holiness. I understood finally what my mother’s life had been and what it had meant.

The sweetness of his exhalation: I smelled myself, the best of myself, the sweet whole pure of myself, on his breath as he lay sleeping. I would bend over him in his basket, smelling the air around his face for any sour or stale scent, but it was sweet, uncorrupted. How could I stop myself from loving him so?

I would roll with him in the bedclothes when Dolores was out and when no one else was there to see. We would turn over and over, and I would tickle and kiss him, and he would laugh and I would laugh, and then suddenly my laughter would turn to tears and I would be holding him too tightly in my arms, and he would struggle to escape and begin to cry. I wanted time to cease passing. Oh, God, just long enough that I could drink him up before the inexorable, unkind march of days tore my child away from me. There had never been time for anything I had wanted. Never time to lie in my mama’s lap. No time for Alvaro’s mouth to linger on mine. And no time for me to hold my son to myself. Of course, he was not his mother’s. No child is.

I was slow to wean Mateo. He was hungry, and I did not have enough for him. I was not like my mama, full to bursting, and what I did have began to dry up. I grew thin and then thinner, as if it had taken what small portion of flesh I had to feed him for as long as I did. We would sit at the hearth of an evening, Mateo at my breast for two hours, longer, trying to get what he needed. He was so hungry, he could not stop; if I took my tit away he cried.

“Give him food!” Dolores would say. “It is time you weaned him.”

But I could not stand the idea that my child would be anything other than all mine. Whenever I looked upon him I thought to myself,
He is purely me. Mine
.

One day I came home from a chore to find Dolores sitting before Mateo, a spoon in her hand. She startled at my footfalls. I stood at the open door, looking at the little bowl of porridge in
her hand, and at him reaching for the spoon. She was doing no harm, but I slapped her, and the bowl fell on the floor.

She stood up. “You’re starving the child,” she said. “An hour after you left, he was crying and pulling at my skirts.” She held her hand to her face, her fingers met the red marks mine had left. “You’ve seen him as we eat,” she said. “His eyes follow our spoons to our mouths. How can you let him be hungry? You are no mother. You are a beast. He snatches at crusts, he—”

I covered my ears. I knew what it was: She wanted him. She wanted to take my son from me. Even though she had been fearful before his birth, afraid he would be a monster, Dolores now separated my child from the evil I had done. My sister loved Mateo as I did, as a gift of God, but one she felt she deserved more than I did.

I could have killed her in that moment, pushed her into the fire and then smashed the lamp and burned the house down, too. But I did nothing, I surprised myself by falling onto my knees weeping. Perhaps she had been feeding him all the while, whenever I left him with her. Perhaps he was not mine at all. Mateo was screaming, and I tried to force my tit into his mouth, but he turned his head away. He shoved his hands at my chest, pushing me, for I stank of despair and he would have none of it.

Dolores held him as I sat in the furthest corner of the house, my knees drawn up.
Francisca
, I said my name to myself over and over, as if to call myself back, but my teeth were chattering, and Mateo went on crying.

“Take him,
Santa María
, take him, Francisca,” Dolores begged me. “He’s crying for you,” she said. She tried to pull his fingers off her dress.

“No!” I could not stand hearing it, the crying.
Leave me, leave me
, I thought. Only one thing I had for him and he refused it. Me.

My love for him was not exalted, it brought out nothing but the basest in me. In him I felt I had a prize, and someone—Dolores!—would take it. I felt I could have stood sharing my son with any woman besides my sister.