Poison (44 page)

Once in the custody of the Inquisition, there was the possibility of release if fines were paid, but Papa had no money. There was little money in Quintanapalla, and the fine for a witch was expensive, ten ducados, an amount impossible to imagine paying, even were we all to labor from dawn to dusk for a year. We paid one ducado, the last that was left from my grandfather’s savings, the last of the silkworms’ earnings, and I was remanded
to my father’s care until eight Sabbaths should have passed. Then the other nine were due.

Papa set about in earnest to earn the money, stealing more and more minutes from each night’s sleep so he could make more traps, trap more squirrels, skin more squirrels and sell more skins each month to the trader who came to town: fifty little hides for one ducado. But before he worked himself into his grave, Cristina García came forward, the daughter of one of the local merchants, and she settled the issue. She finished what my sister had begun long before.

If ever there was a God in heaven, He knew that Cristina was a girl whose blood ran too hot and fevered her thinking. She was one of the few who colored her lips and her cheeks, she always found some bit of money for a ribbon or a charm to wear about her neck. She went about with her head uncovered. Secretly I liked to watch her, for she was bright and lively, and as soon as she was out of the grandmothers’ sight she was tugging at her clothes, rearranging her bodice to show more of her skin. That year she had bought little bells from the peddler who sold such trinkets, the same who sold the mirrors, and she tied these little bells to her shoes so that you could hear her run from the boys that she teased.

Blood must have its due. Cristina fell in love with a boy named Alonso, a boy who had no time for her. His brothers were dead and he worked hard to care for his father and mother, who were old. He did not even hear the merry noise of Cristina’s boots, which she polished with grease until they shone, the little silver bells ringing against them. She decided that he was bewitched.

Francisca
, she thought to herself,
Francisca has bounced her witch glass on his head. She has shined it in his eyes and beamed it over his heart
. She went to the wheelwright. Francisca has an enchanted glass, she told him, and she holds it out to steal the soul of whomever it touches. With it she peeled the soul right off Alonso Manteña, she sucked the marrow from his bones.

Fate conspired with Cristina García. Not a week after the time of her accusation Alonso grew gravely sick, and then I was as good as sentenced. It did not matter that he had fallen ill with
the same sickness that plagued his father’s servant. No one stopped to say, Look, this boy has been sleeping in the same place with his father’s cow and pigs and the plowboy who has been coughing and spitting blood all winter.

I was at our own hearth when Dolores came in. “Alonso is very ill,” she said. “They do not expect that he will live.” Nothing in her face, in her manner or her voice, betrayed how my sister felt delivering such news.

I put down the trap I had been helping my father to make. With the imminent death of Alonso, there was no reason to work so hard. We could give up, at last. I went to Papa and I untangled the length of gut from his fingers, stopped them from tying and setting yet another little trap.

“How relieved the squirrels will be,” I said. And I kissed my father’s forehead.

As it happened, Alonso tarried, he took his time dying, and Papa’s life was over first. My father announced his death a week before its arrival. Not long after we heard of Alonso’s sickness, Papa had a fall outside our door. He grew dizzy, stumbled, and when we took him into the house, we found that of his two hands, only one had strength. Of two legs, only one could walk. His spirit left one side of his body first, and when he drank water, it escaped from the slack half of his mouth.

He told us he would die. He knew it, he said, for he had been dreaming each night of his own father and mother, of Ernesto, who had fallen with his ass and his plague coins into the ravine. “There
is
a coach made all of pearl,” he told Dolores and me excitedly. “Just as Concepción said there was.”

He saw Mama in his dreams, of course. It became so that he spent each night in her arms. With his one leg, he danced with her under the sheet, and he was happy. At last he was no longer alone. Mama was visiting him, and soon he would be crossing over to her, he would see once more his reflection in the shiny tips of her black shoes. He told us that now Mama was always dressed in her finest clothes. “As she was for her wedding day,” he said.

Dolores sat by Papa’s bed with her hand on his head. She leaned forward and looked closely at his face as he rested. When
he slept, she placed her thumb on his eyelid and pushed it up. The dreaming eye moved crazily over the room, it passed over her face without recognition. Over walls and ceiling, past the fire, past the window and around again, lighting on nothing. She let the lid fall closed and settled back in her chair. “
Papa!
” she would yell, and she would shake his shoulder. She could not stand it, to be so dutiful and to have him escape into the next world and leave only his ungrateful body behind.

My sister never wanted to do any kindness that wasn’t noted and tallied. She misered up lists of good deeds, never missed a holy day, never skipped a bead on her rosary. She trusted that all the arithmetic would come out right and she would earn her place in heaven.

I was with my father the night he died. Dolores had set a lighted candle by his bed. We were waiting for the last breath, the vapor on the looking glass, when suddenly he reached his arms out.

“Francisca!” Papa cried. His eyes opened and he saw me.

“Daughter!” he said, and by my dress he pulled me close to him. The slack side of his mouth was white with spittle and his voice was hoarse in its insistence. “Do not neglect the worms!” he said, and then he stopped talking, stopped breathing.

We let him lie dead in his bed for the rest of that night. We left a lamp burning, wasted oil until dawn, waiting until the next day to wash his body. When the sun rose, Dolores brought a basin of water, she brought two clean linens. “Here,” she said to me. “You do it.”

What happened, finally, with my sister was this: she never did have a child. She married on Ascension Day, as I said she would when we were young. But she did not marry Luis Robredo, and she did not move to a warm southern place. She stayed near to Quintanapalla, she went no farther than the neighboring town of Rubena. Her husband is a flax farmer. I know this much. I was not there when she married, but I know it nonetheless.

In the spring, at Eastertide, when we used to hatch out our worms, Dolores helps her husband in the planting of flax seeds. They sow them very thickly, so thickly that the plants, each trying
to reach past its neighbors to the sun, grow straight and tall. In the summer, they pull the plants up by the roots. They remove the seeds and put them aside for the following spring, and they set the stalks to soak in the pond. It is Dolores who beats the soaked and dried stalks, who separates out the chaff from the stems, and who hackles the flax—using a comb fashioned from twelve iron teeth set in a jaw of wood.

She gets together all the long, sticky fibers, and Dolores and her neighbors spin and gossip together until the women have wound up all the work of the fields onto bobbins. It takes many weeks. Worms are quick at their work, but spinning flax is a slow occupation, and in Rubena they have no time for Saint John’s bonfires, no time for harvest feasts. No matters other than spinning flax can claim their attention, for in the late fall the weaver arrives.

A taciturn man, he sets up his loom in Dolores’s barn. The cow and the goat must survive out of doors until he is through with her thread. The weaver says nothing to Dolores, he is well suited to his solitary occupation. When she sets his evening meal before him, he does not look up. It is as though he still sees cloth under his nose, and he passes his spoon from hand to hand as he does the loom’s shuttle. In a week he is finished weaving, taking the best cloth and leaving behind what Dolores will bleach and piece together into bed and table linens for her husband to sell at market.

They are not poor. My sister is one of the few in Rubena who have an oven in the house, and it is to her hearth that others come to bake and to gossip. Apart from her childlessness, she considers herself happy. Dolores has spent these first years of her marriage in consultation with healers, who try to defeat whatever evil eye has dried up her womb, a curse blamed on me, the pollution of my sins. She sits herself on baskets upturned over boiling pots of wild rue and fenugreek. She swallows bitter medicines.

She gives herself airs, trying to get with child. She tells her husband that her constitution is more delicate than most, that washing his clothes in the winter and chilling herself with cold water might steal heat from her body and keep her from conceiving.
She says she cannot wade into the pond to collect the bundles of flax soaking there, and that too much beating and hackling might further shrivel her womb. He loves her enough that he has bought her a servant; he takes her to every shrine to the Virgin within a hundred leagues. He is a thin man with a mustache, which he pulls when he is worried. He has pulled almost all of it out because of Dolores.

My sister’s dreams are of proving herself a woman, that is what she wants. Even if the cures render only one miscarried child, then Dolores will be satisfied. For a miscarriage is a grief she can share with her gossiping friends; they will mourn and keen with her, they will help her forget. But barrenness is a burden that a woman bears alone.

When she is not spinning Dolores spends evenings making soap, as our mother and grandmother used to do. Making soap. Mending. Scouring. The Devil loves idle hands, so my sister keeps herself busy. Her fingers are raw and red. In the evenings, as she stirs the soap kettle, she must think of Mama, for the dead are always with us, we cannot escape them.

Just last night Alvaro came to me, and I wept in my sleep, wept and laughed at once. I cried out and stood from the floor where I lay. In my sleep I shook the bars of my cell.

Yes, it is true, Alvaro. You came to me. You fucked me all night in my dreams. Your tongue was so hot and you held me so tightly, your embrace broke my spine, your lips burned my forehead. Your tongue fucked my ears and my eyes, your mouth on my neck was so wet and so wide that I felt the whole of myself slip into your throat. You bit me all over, my nipples were bleeding.

I heard you cry out as you parted my legs. Were you surprised that my desire was so evident, that I made myself no more than a cup for you to spill? But you drank me up, I was gone and then restored to you, and so you tore me open, you fucked my heart.

You came to me and I was glad, for I am not so proud that I would rebuff you merely on the grounds that you are impossible. I am impossible, too. Impossible that you are dead, impossible that I still live.

HAT WAS LEFT OF THE QUEEN EVAPORATED
like a sweet fragrance from the palms of those hands she longed for. One moment her mother felt her—a weight on her neck, a pain in her chest—and the next, nothing.

In Madrid the poison worked its final magic. Death has returned the queen, as it does all of us, to her true, first self. Once again her waist is the narrow span of Marie Louise de Bourbon, the prettiest princess on the Continent. Once again, the one hundred buttons of her wedding gown fasten easily, each tiny, silk-covered sphere slipping through the embrace of a waiting buttonhole. The people at last can see Her Highness in her nuptial finery, in the French gown she wore when married in secret. Spain could not afford such a gown—not then, not now—no more than she could have procured the mountains of flowers upon which the dead queen lies.

In all of our country there are not such flowers as the Sun King has sent. A convoy of flowers was dispatched with military speed, the same expeditiousness that propels French armies into battle before enemies even know they are besieged. King Louis sent them as soon as he heard María was ill. After all, flowers would be good for either outcome, convalescence or death. But this many flowers in winter! Even from a monarch whose every gesture is grand, they are a ridiculous extravagance. Did the king at last regret his harshness in marrying his niece to Carlos? His relentless insistence on politics before romance, when anyone else but himself was involved?

Perhaps when her uncle learned of her sudden illness, he recalled the letters María had sent over the years, recalled her begging him to do something, anything to save her. Because Louis had received those letters. Spies, enemies, mothers-in-law might
dare to empty a queen’s envelopes, but no one tampers with the Sun King’s correspondence.

Perhaps on the morning after the envoys brought news of María’s illness, the Sun King rose from his mistress’s embrace and remarked to himself that she was the four hundred and sixty-seventh woman to whom he had made love, and that under his wig dyed so black, his own hair had thinned and turned a color that only four hundred and sixty-seven vain, demanding mistresses might have made it. Perhaps his surgeries of late, those notorious attempts to stitch up a royal asshole which also had suffered grand gestures—and which have made it fashionable this year in Paris to claim piles, fissures and fistulas among one’s trials—perhaps all of these reminded the most splendid monarch that as life is short, so is suffering long.