Poison (4 page)

Anyone who listened to my father talk understood that he now fancied himself a sort of silk emperor; he controlled all the guilds and the workers and every detail of the great industry—the wash works and dye works and the fashionable colors and patterns, the weavers and their apprentices who labored to set the great looms, every detail down to the last greedy, chewing worm. He shook his head, made a sort of disapproving noise
with his tongue, and as the evening wore on and the fire dimmed, he took to looking fixedly into one corner of our home, to a spot at which he muttered and cursed and occasionally gestured as if in argument. One night I saw his father there.

“Grandfather!” I said, and I started toward the figure, but he shook his finger at me.

“No closer, child,” he warned, but he smiled through the smoke wreathing around his head. In a moment he had vanished.

When the old trees’ roots would not let go of the earth, Papa said that anyway they had polluted the ground to which they clung, and he set to work terracing and tilling a new grove, on land that we owned but had left unused and untenanted. “The bean field,” Grandfather had called it, for each year we intended to cultivate a crop there. But each year the worms and their feeding took all the time and strength we had. In years past, the plot had been leased. In such times as we now found ourselves no one had any money to pay for such things. Everybody was so assured of being caught by the Church in some misdeed—for a crime as small as failing to observe one holy day of obligation—that families clung to whatever coins they possessed, saving them so that they had money for the inevitable fines. If they could pay them immediately, then they would not incur more of them, and they would never end up in one of the prisons of the Inquisition, or so they hoped. For it was said that once the Church took a bite of a man or a woman, once it tasted even one maravedi, its appetite was such that only the whole body, the whole fortune, would satisfy it. So, people saved their coins, no one leased our land, and Papa set to work to reclaim it from the briars and weeds.

Even in the winter with the ground frozen so that he was forced to chip and chip with his hoe and even then made almost no progress in a day, my father worked without cease until there was a new grove laid out beside the old. He planted the prepared soil with the seedlings that he had bought, paying fifty maravedis for each of them, and soon the trees were tall and healthy. So healthy! They grew on nothing, they needed less
water and, as if enchanted, they blossomed, they budded, they thrived. In three years, they were taller than I.

My father could not contain his delight. He nearly danced among the new trees, and I believe they gave him even greater pleasure than they might have were they not planted next to his father’s ruined stumps. Well, for a time, anyway.

My great-great-great—oh, too many generations to count—grandfather was among the first to cultivate silk in Spain. He had sailed the trade routes for as many years as his legs and back remained strong, his balance good, and then he retired from the sea just at the time when silkworms and mulberry trees and the art of making the lustrous fabric had come to Spain from the Orient. This ancestor, Sandoval de Luarca, returned to his home in Castile with crates of mulberry seedlings, and after the trees took root and grew to sufficient size (they are a fast-maturing plant) one spring, now generations past, Sandoval awaited the docking at La Coruña of a ship bearing silkworm eggs from China. The eggs were transported by sea in a small chest kept cool by its proximity to a great block of hewn river ice packed in sawdust. Once in Spain, they traveled by Sandoval’s mule cart, also in the company of ice, not cold enough to freeze the eggs, but just cool enough to prevent them from hatching before their arrival at the lodgings my great-great-and-so-on-grandfather had built for his worms, at which point, having dripped steadily away on the roads to Castile, the carefully packed block of ice had been reduced to a pile of wet sawdust.

Good silkworm eggs are very expensive. No one buys Chinese eggs any longer, but the worms that spun the first silk in Spain came from eggs transported on the fast-sailing ships that brought other perishables from the Orient, everything kept cool by ice: aphrodisiac ointments made from the hooves of one-horned river horses, ginseng-root cures for dropsy, hot sweet peppers from the province of Hunan, tiny Chinese oranges favored by King Philip I and his court. Sandoval hadn’t any money for the eggs; he obtained them by collecting on a debt of incalculable value.

At sea, years before, he had saved a man’s life by drawing a
great splinter from his neck and sucking the wound clean with his own lips. “He spat the pus into the ocean!” my grandfather had told me, and from this grateful trader, ever eager to recompense for the miracle of his life returned, Sandoval accepted the silkworm eggs as a gift. Thus, it was by a twist of fate—a stranger’s misfortune and near death—that we became a family of silk growers. Since we were not Moors as most silk growers were, we were not tortured or exiled. But, still, perhaps it is inauspicious for a family’s good fortunes to proceed from any accident, even one that did not prove fatal. Certainly my father later attached significance to the story of Sandoval and the splinter, saying that my ancestor had spat out the pus but swallowed seeds of an ill fortune that would inexorably return; but by then Papa’s reasoning was not what anyone could follow.

While he waited for the new grove to mature, Papa entered into a partnership with a silk grower named Jorge Encimada. Together they raised an experimental generation of Señor Encimada’s worms, feeding them leaves treated with an extract taken from the shells of the kermes insect that lives on oak and feeds on the sweet flesh of the tree just under the bark. Papa had Dolores and me gather the bugs, and he paid us one maravedi for every ten that we caught. We had to strip off their shells, too, ignoring their scratching kicking legs, and set their little suits to soak in vinegar. Sometimes I would drop one down Dolores’s collar when she was not looking, or into her hair where its legs would tangle, and then she would scream so that Mama came running, half amused, half angry.

“Don Pascual!” she would say, but not loudly. No, she would only mouth the name of the Inquisitor General. “Come with your cart, Don Pascual, and take this naughty girl away!” And then I would put my head in her skirts and hide.

After my mother died, I wondered whether she was taken to a place with any view, and whether she saw when it came to pass that one day I was collected by an officer of the Inquisition and thrown into a cart like those we joked about. I hope she did not. Yet some say that the reward of heaven is precisely this: the chance to observe from above the torment of the damned. That
the righteous enjoy the punishment of sinners, even those who were their children, and in life their beloved.

Could my mother have guessed, when I was a child, what a sinner I would turn out to be? At home with my family I was obedient enough, especially with the incentive of a reward. No matter the quarreling or the unappealing nature of the jobs our father gave us, Dolores and I both pursued money zealously; we were sorry when Papa told us we had gathered enough kermes bugs. He took the last basket from me and bent down until our eyes were level.

“Your papa is a very clever man,” he said, and I nodded, but I saw the ghost of my grandfather standing at his side and shaking his head. I heard him, too.
No te rejis
, he said in disgust. Don’t blow your horn.

Papa and Señor Encimada’s experiment—their intention was to raise red silk—was not a success.

The cocoons that the worms threw off were of a color that must have been a pale pink mockery of their dreams. Still, they did sell them at market, not for much, but a Dutchman, thinking them a local curiosity, bought the lot of them. If only Papa had taken this modest failure as some sort of caution, then our lives might have turned out quite differently, but it seemed an evil spirit had attached itself to him.

My father was a true son of Castile, of our homeland in the bleakest and most fearsome of all the regions of Spain. In his rock-gray eyes I saw the windswept, wind-whipped plains which drop suddenly from the Pyrenees, which fall tumbling down from the Cantabrian Mountains, which plummet, crack and crumble and then work their peculiar bewitchment. A magic of altitude, of precipice, a magic of gulch, gully and chasm. A magic of something high brought suddenly low. A dizziness, a loss of balance. Blood’s memory of soaring, and a tendency to dream of that which is far, far above your head. Remember Quixote, fever-addled, finding giants in windmills and princesses in peasant girls? My father could not read that romance, but in Quintanapalla, not far from the birthplace of the Knight of Sad Countenance, he fell under the sway of visions
as potent as Quixote’s. My father was a true Castilian, a man who would risk everything for the sake of his dreams, even what he loved best. And I am my father’s daughter. I am a daughter of Castile.

In the spring of the year of our Lord 1667, my papa, Félix de Luarca, bought eggs from the old man in Soria who bred the silk moths. There were others who raised eggs closer to our home in Quintanapalla, but it is best to buy eggs from a tested, trusted source. Healthy silk eggs are a luminous blue-gray color, like slate. Dead eggs are yellow. It is not unknown for unscrupulous vendors to wash dead eggs in wine so that they take on the slate color; then they sell them. If there was one way in which Papa would not cross my grandfather, even in death, it would be to go to a new egg vendor.

So he made the trip to the old family vendor in Soria; he was gone for three nights. He returned on the fourth, carrying the tiny wood caskets of eggs packed in straw. On the way home, he told us, he had stopped at the shrine in Queranna and there he had poured out an offering of oil—the finest he could buy, from the first press of the pick of last year’s olives—over the feet of the miraculous Virgin there. He was sure, he said, that all would go well for us, that the fortunes of the Luarca family were about to change. He seemed, to Mama, Dolores and me exchanging secret glances, drunk with optimism. He sang as he opened the tiny boxes—more eggs than we had ever purchased before—and he sang as he transferred them to the goatskin pouch used for hatching. He pulled the strings tight, and Mama undid her bodice, as I had watched her do each spring. It was the heat of her flesh, the murmur of her blood, that would incubate the eggs, awakening them from their chilled slumber; and when he handed her the soft little package, Mama tucked it in the warm hollow between her breasts. Before three Sabbaths had passed, the eggs would burst and discharge a hungry army of worms.

The hatching of silkworm eggs is timed carefully, for it must coincide with the opening of the buds on the mulberry trees. Silkworms and mulberry leaves mature together, of necessity. The tiny worms with their weak jaws feed upon tender new
leaves, and as they grow older and larger they eat older and tougher foliage. Papa hoped that with the new trees he would eventually be able to produce two generations of worms each year, something that was done in the warmer climates of the Orient but had never been accomplished in our part of the world. It required cutting the trees all the way back at midsummer, just as one generation had stopped feeding and commenced to spin. The Chinese, so Papa had learned at one of his meetings, left just a leaf or two at the end of each branch to draw the sap and keep the tree alive, thus forcing the tree into new leaf for a second time in one year. I saw Mama wince as he explained the process to her, his eyes hot and bloodshot as they always were when he set to scheming; he seemed focused on something no one else could see. “But not yet,” he said, “not this season or even the next. The trees are still too young.”

Mama walked carefully through her chores those two weeks. Each morning she gently turned the bag that hung between her breasts, checking its contents and safeguarding, next to her heart, our family’s livelihood. My papa used to boast that every egg he placed between Mama’s two tits hatched. That not one failed, and that there was no silk farmer so fortunate as the one wed to Concepción de Luarca. Then, if he thought we were not looking, he would open Mama’s bodice and quickly kiss each breast and the little bag hanging between them. Seeing that, I wanted to kiss her as well. My mother was a taste of something of which I never had my fill.

The worms hatched at Eastertide, exactly as the buds on the trees were unfurling. We brought the worms their leaves, which looked quite like the leaves from my grandfather’s trees, but as they matured they grew even better, bigger and shinier. We carried in baskets and bushels and crates of leaves, Dolores and Mama and I. Papa fed the worms three times during each night, while the rest of us slept, for silkworms eat through five Sabbaths without stopping, pausing only once each week to burst and shed a skin. We brought baskets of the shining waxy green leaves into the silk house. We spread them on the trays. For a time everything looked promising.

Growing worms eat steadily. We watched as they grasped the
new leaves in their front feet and chewed. We held our breath at the first molt, that dangerous period when the worms sink into a torpor for a day or so, their flesh growing pale and cool as they cling to the trays. Then the black spots appeared on their heads, and the old skin cracked from that point and split, just as it should. Each worm wriggled out in a new ill-fitting suit that would soon fill out and burst in its turn; the worm ate its old skin first and then went on to eat the leaves. All appeared to be well.

I alone believed that they were doomed. Our worms, my worms. My partners in the rich work of making one thing from another. Waking and sleeping, I dreamed of their death. When I told Mama of these visions, she did not scold me, she embraced me; she pressed my face to her bodice to stop my prophecy. We clung together, holding each other tightly, long enough that when I pulled away I saw how my breath, so close and wet, had left a dark stain on Mama’s dress.

In the silk house, on the hill above our little house, the worms stopped eating. Not all of them at once, but gradually, over the course of the week between the second and third molt, the better part of our silkworms stopped eating. They died, and with them most of our investment.