Poison (39 page)

When Mateo passed through my legs, it was as if I were given back my innocence, I felt myself a virgin again, not only a virgin,
but the Francisca who sat at her mama’s feet as she tended babies by the fire: a child. I gave birth to myself. While suckling Mateo I had no monthly flow, and I felt a purity that separated me from Dolores and her little cloths stained with blood, her smell of a woman. It was wrong, I know it was, but at the time I felt I had transcended the flesh, the material that imprisoned her, that I had stepped into a cleaner world.

There were many locusts that season, small and brown, and they jumped up into my face as I walked toward the mulberry grove the next day. Their legs caught in my hair when I tried to brush them away. Mateo bounced on my hip, his fingers holding tight to my dress.

Truly, I thought, I was not my mother. I did not have this endless river of milk. And when I looked down at my body, my breasts shrunk flat against my ribs, I felt like an old woman, felt weak as I carried him, riding on my hip with his legs kicking and those little black eyes bright. I was walking through the trees, the even rows of them. They made what seemed like an aisle in a cathedral; the light came through the green leaves as if through colored glass. I sat down with him upon the ground, and held him close. The noise of the wind wailing past did not trouble me, and neither did the mournful cries of birds and far-off children.

The sun was shining brightly. It revealed a fine tracing of gold hairs all over his body, his back, his arms and legs. The hairs were almost too fine to see individually, but gave to his whole form a shimmer, a luster, as if he were a celestial creature: something revealed by a trick of the light, something that would disappear if I blinked. I uncurled his fist under the bright spring sky, turned it up to the sun, tasted it with my tongue, looked at it.

I knew then that I did not care for books so much as before. In the fine and complex lines there on Mateo’s palm, the history of the world was written. Each planet’s turning, the great celestial dance: an eternal logging of spring rains, birds’ flight, lovers’ kisses, leaves falling—it was all there, I saw it written on his hand. I held him tightly to me and buried my face in his flesh.

Here is heresy for you, you in your robes and your hoods,
featureless, cowardly. I will not tell you this next time, if you ask. I will not give this away. But, here, listen: Every mother is the mother of God. She knows it when she holds her child and sees that the world is not reflected but
contained
in his eyes. He puts his hands on her face, and she feels it,
this is
the love of God. Not some dim, imperfect copy, but love itself. And for that instant—And why is it not the truest and most real of all moments?—a woman knows that she has given birth to God, and God loves her for the life she gave, and God returns it to her.

That is the center. All else spins off it. Like Francisca dancing in the grove, her skirts twirling out from her belly big with child, she is the center of the universe.

I began that evening with goat’s milk in the same little cup that Dolores and then I, as babies, had used. Mateo liked it and drank with it spilling down his neck and wetting his clothes. He liked it enough that we had to mix it with water to make it last.

It was the year that people got sick from the water. Far above our heads the past winter’s snows melted and ran down through the high pastures carrying some evil spirit into the aqueduct, and the spirit got into the bowels and brains of children and some grown persons, too, and they all got the flux; before a month passed they went into fits and died.

I know all mothers say the same, but my child was an angel. He had gold ringlets and a red mouth, his cheeks were round, his eyes were black. I have never seen any living thing like him, he looked like the paintings in the cathedral.

We thought at first that it was one of the common diarrheas that children get from time to time. We gave him the bayberry drink, but it was bitter, and he swallowed little of it. After a week of the sickness, Mateo was suffering so that he called for me even when I was just an arm’s length away. He would call out over and over,
Mam Mam Mam Mam Mam
, repeating the syllable almost to himself. Like some prayer of grief, it strikes me now. As if he expected nothing, but could not help himself from crying.

The following week, he was not calling out with vigor as before, but moaning and talking at once. And the sobs came out jumbled with my name,
MamMamMam
, or just
MM MM MM,
his lips together and the sound broken by hiccoughing, his cheeks wet with tears.

When I could sleep, I dreamed over and over of my mother. I was able to do this purposely. Indeed, the only way I could find my way out of my troubled waking life was to meditate on my mama and her skirts. I pictured myself running home to our hearth, as a little child. I saw her so tall that my face reached only to her thighs. Mama stood by the fire, so real to me that I had to keep from calling out from my bed. I saw myself run to her and hide my face in her skirts, my cold hands reaching into the warm folds of cloth.

re they wrapping me in my shroud?
the queen wonders. Obdulia at her head, Jeanette at her feet: they lift the linen upon which the queen lies, and the chambermaids quickly strip the bed beneath her, pulling away layers of soiled bedclothes. They are gentle, they could not be more gentle, but even so, this brief ascension hurts María. She feels her bones are out of joint.

The slight sway of the makeshift sling nauseates her. The sense of nothing solid beneath her frightens her. Is this what it is like to be dead and disembodied? Awful, endless suspension? Even were it painless, this swaying and hanging—eternal limbo—could it be bearable?

Perhaps there is no purgatory. Perhaps it is as the gardener told her long before. The princess Marie was in the greenhouse admiring the violets. She was so young that her head came up only as far as the gardener’s shoulder. Monsieur Clément reached forward and plucked a snail shell from the lip of a pot. He peered inside it, then showed her the small orifice: a body with but one hole, both entry and exit. The shell was empty and dry, and when Clément crushed it between his thumb and forefinger, there was nothing left inside, only a brown crust. He grunted.

“You do not like the snails?” she asked.

“They eat the flowers,” he replied.

He brushed his hands together and held them before her eyes. “See? Nothing left.” He wiped his hands against his black breeches. “So it is for every living thing,” he said. “This is how it ends.”

The queen’s bed stinks, but it is not the familiar stench of illness that the maids are trying to banish. It is that other smell,
the dizzy, sickly sweetish one. “What is it like up there?” the cook asks Obdulia in the kitchen.

What
is
the smell like, other than itself? Obdulia shrugs, tries to think of it in terms the cook will appreciate. “A rotting pumpkin,” she says. A pumpkin overripe and pungent and left upon the coals until the skin is brown and blistered. Then, stick a knife into its side: would that first hot, wet, vegetable exhalation approach it? Obdulia shakes her head. “No,” she says. “That’s not it. It is something you have to smell for yourself.”

No matter how often they scrub the floor and sprinkle lime into the corners; no matter how many times they swab her arms and legs, back and belly with spirits of alcohol; no matter if they exchange her pillow for another, tear down the draperies, take away her hairbrush and coifs—and all of this was required after the goat’s blood sprayed everything the night before, after they removed its skin, gelid and sticky and vile, from the queen’s—no matter what they do, the smell of death remains.

This is the end, now, the evening that María will die, and the smell is so intense that it affects the queen’s visitors. Either they cannot sit still, or they fall asleep. The fidgeters pace and tap and twiddle. They adjust the draperies, move the chairs about. They pick up their needlework, break threads and miscount stitches. They stay no longer than a quarter of an hour before they find an errand that will not wait. As for the sleepers, they say they have come to read, either silently to themselves or out loud to María. But they mumble, the words jumble, and even as they try to sit up in their chairs, they slump over, cheek to page.

The maids lay the queen on her clean bed. Obdulia takes her right arm and holds it firmly just below the shoulder. Her Highness’s skin has grown slack. The bone slips in its loose envelope of flesh, and only by an effort of will does the maid not shudder as she pulls her mistress toward her. Obdulia tugs the queen’s shoulder as Jeanette pulls her hip, and in this way the two of them roll María gently onto one side and then back onto the other, so that the chambermaids can quickly gather up the soiled sheet that served as her sling. When at last they are all through, María is left neatly in the middle of a layer of clean linens.

Obdulia brings a fresh white nightdress and lays it facedown on the queen, its unbuttoned neck pointing toward her feet. They pull her limp arms from the sleeves of the soiled nightdress and then thread them through the sleeves of the clean one, and when Obdulia lifts María’s head, Jeanette draws the soiled garment over it and pulls the clean one down at so nearly the same instant that no one can look on the queen’s nakedness. It is a complicated process, and one at which they have grown more adept, having had in the past days twenty-three opportunities to practice it.

When they are done at last, when María has no strength left with which even to moan, the queen mother comes for a last visit. Marianna is one of the fidgeters, her page carries her needlework in a basket. “What did Dr. Severo say?” she asks Obdulia.

The maid curtsies nervously. “He came as we were just beginning to change Her Majesty’s linens,” she says. “He said he would return in the next hour to bleed Her Highness.” She curtsies again. Marianna nods.

“Well,” says Marianna, and says no more. She sits and gathers up her sewing—she is making undervests for the twins, expected next month—then lets it fall into her lap. She begins to speak to the queen, who lies silent and still. “I know it has not been easy for you here,” she says. “I imagine you must have been lonely these years. That is why, despite her frightful reputation and the vulgar rumors about your friend the comtesse, we were indulgent when she came to visit.” Marianna sighs.

Though María makes no answers, her mother-in-law pauses between remarks, as if the queen utters words that only she can hear.

“
La Jolie Araignée
.” Marianna’s accent is flawless, and acid. “I fear now we did you a grave disservice.” She makes a stitch in the tiny white vest, drawing a strand of thread too tight. The fabric puckers, and she drops the needle to loosen the stitch with her fingernails. She is not yet accustomed to the new glycerin preparation she is using on her thread. It makes the usually sticky linen so slippery that she does not have to tug at the needle.

María is too weak to turn her head, to look at Marianna as she speaks. Is this soliloquy for the benefit of the listening maid, she wonders, so that Obdulia may convey its content to the gossiping servants?

Outside, the rioting mob has scaled the wall. Eleven persons have been trampled to death, five crushed against the gate by those who used their heads as stepping-stones. Now their faces are caught between the bars of the great entrance, they peer blindly over the frozen lawns. People gather under the queen’s window, calling to her. The soldiery has armed all entrances, every window and door on the first two stories. The corridor of living saints has a triple guard. Carlos is quaking under Estrellita’s skirts.

María! María! María Marrana!

In the dark, before my eyes, a huge, luminous insect hovers. It holds still, as if to allow me to admire how it shines. Its wings beat so fast that they are visible only as a tremor in the air. A beautiful creature, a beetle with a shell the green-blue iridescence of a peacock’s neck.

A blister beetle. Dolores and I would see them clustered on the elder trees. Sometimes, one would find its way among the insects we collected for Papa’s experiments with colored silk.

Once, in the early morning, my sister and I went with our baskets through the fields, stepping high over the neighbor’s furrows, over stiles and past sheep chewing, past the stream and past the bleaching greens where long swaths of linen were laid out so the sun could whiten them. We climbed a hill to the place where the oak trees grew, and before we got there, we saw a party of veiled women bearing folded sheets into an elder grove. Their faces, their hands, their necks—all were obscured by a drapery of heavy white fabric.

“Look at the brides,” said Dolores.

“Nuns,” I answered.

The women spread their sheets under the elders and began to shake the trees’ boughs. Around them rained glittering, green fruit: thousands of beetles clumped together, too sluggish in the
early chill to fly off. The women bound them tightly in the sheet and carried them away, making a strange, silent procession.