Poison (16 page)

My mother had been gone for nearly three years, and her hair, hair that had swept the floor as she combed it sitting on the bench before the fire, the very color of her hair, even, had been sucked from her head, which was now gray and drooping on the tired stalk of her neck. When I was very young, my mama would dress her hair as she sat on the hearth, warming her back with it
gathered before her in one long swaying rope, her fingers flashing white through the dark locks as she braided. After she was done, she would pull the loose hairs from her comb, and they would drop onto the floor, and, as it was my responsibility to sweep, I would pick up the long black strands later and look at them. I saved them all coiled together in the box where I kept my few things, and on the night Mama came home I went to that box and took out the hairs. While she was sleeping I compared the old hair to the new, and it wasn’t the same at all; and I wondered, was this really my mother?

The mediums say that it is prudent to keep a lock of hair and a few nail parings from the dead, especially those of your father or mother, because in them lives the spirit of your family; that is why the hair and nails continue to grow even after the rest of the body’s life has fled. So when your papa and mama die, they tell you, keep these little snippets and shavings, hide them in a safe place by your hearth. Called by these slivers, the spirits of your ancestors will return and keep you safe.

In our house was a box made of rosewood with little carvings on all its sides, designs of stars and suns and moons. I hated to open it and see the contents, hair and fingernails all tangled together, too many generations to count, and whose was whose? It was impossible to tell, and the smell of unfamiliar bodies was concentrated inside and distasteful to me.

Papa told us that when he married Mama she had danced a hole in her shoes. They were new and black and polished with beeswax to shine like a mirror, and Papa could see his face on her toes shining back up at him as he said his vows. He kept his head bent not because he was not proud to take such a wife, he told us, but because he was humble; he did not take my mother’s hand for granted. After the wedding Mass, said by a friar who used to come to town on horseback, in the days before Quintanapalla had its own priest, the villagers drank wine and danced all the night, and no one danced longer or harder than our mama. She danced the first dance, the “dance of the grandmothers,” as it is called, when the gray old mothers of the town cast off their years and hold one another’s hands. And Mama did not stop after that, but went on dancing. Everyone played
something, even were it only an instrument as crude as a stick on a bottle or a spoon against a tin plate—they all beat time as she danced.

At last, when all the wedding guests were tired out and drunk and sleeping (the old horseback-riding priest drunk and snoring, too), Papa wanted to take Mama to bed, but she would not stop, she had to keep dancing. When I think of her now, it is as if I see in my inside eye the last of her girlhood: her dancing and dancing and not stopping until the sun came up. For that was the last night of a girl’s life, her wedding night; the next day would come housekeeping and the next year childbearing. Mouths to fill and pots to scrape and shine, grain to carry to the mill, and no one ever asked a girl to dance again, no young man brought her a sweet or a flower. The day after her wedding Mama’s feet were covered in blisters, she couldn’t get up from the marriage bed, and she never wore those shining black shoes again. Dolores has them still, I guess, Dolores who has never danced a step in her life.

I looked up from the onion, my tongue just exploring the burned place on my lip, tasting it, and then Mama was inside the door and I dropped my half of the onion. It rolled under the table, and when I bent to pick it up it was covered with dirt.

“Francisca?” said my mother, Dolores already in her arms. I could see that she was hurt by my reluctance to come to her. When I did at last embrace her, I felt how small she was under her clothes, and how her bodice, which once had split its seams trying to hold her abundance, that bodice seemed almost empty now.

After she greeted us, she went to her bed and lay down upon it, right away, because she was tired and ill, and I could see then that her chest was indeed as flat as a young girl’s, as flat as my own. She came home spitting blood, and she did not live long after that, whether it was weeks or months or a year, I cannot say, all I know is that to my childish greed, it was short, too short. Nothing. An afternoon.

All the time that she lay in bed, she told us stories of the great stone house where the king lived, the king who was only a boy,
as young as I, younger than Dolores. The king’s house in Madrid was so big, Mama said, that a hundred of our house could fit inside, and I sat with Dolores beside Mama’s bed and tried to imagine a house of that size.

Of course it was in the king’s house that one of my dreams had come to pass: now my mother could read. There had been hours each day at her disposal, and Carlos, whose physical health was so poor that his studies were endlessly forestalled, made but little use of the tutors assembled. So they and my mother passed the evenings in her lessons, and she came home with a box filled with books, making ours the only household in Quintanapalla to have such a thing as a library, and causing suspicion to fall upon us.

For spoken words are uttered and then gone: orphaned, disowned; but recorded words are evidence. Who could know if our books reflected heretical thoughts? If one could not tell what was written on a book’s binding even, how could that person know if it was a forbidden text? How could a body trust that an Inquisitor would not come and kill everyone in the house for inviting the Devil to live under its roof? No matter that my mother told those few who did come to call that she
could
read and that her volumes were safely pious, the women of Quintanapalla looked nervously at her books. They would not touch them, they drew back if she so much as flipped through the pages. Mama’s friend Pascuela, carrying her first child, and on this account very nervous of evil eyes and other dangers, covered her ears when Mama tried to read a story to her. There was no one else besides her two young daughters with whom my mother could share her last enthusiasm.

Despite the fears of the women of Quintanapalla, the books my mother brought home to us were not dangerous works. They came from the king’s great house, after all, and were the
Lives of the Saints
(most of whom we had not heard of, for they were foreign saints like Patrick, who chased all the snakes off a green island) and
Confessions
of Augustine, along with guides to prayer and contemplation written by some holy persons from Castile, including Teresa of Avila, of course, and
The Imitation
of Christ
, by a man called Kempis—that one was in Latin—and some medical and chirurgical texts on midwifery and the care of infants.

Mama wanted to teach Dolores and me to read, but she was not strong enough to sit up, and the lessons, which she began the very evening of her return, made her breathless. She pointed to the letters and made their sounds, and she tried to show how it was when they were strung together. But when the letters kept company, one with another, their natures changed in ways she could not explain, and the languid movement of her thin finger trying to chase them down on the page made us yawn with frustration and then weep with fatigue until, finally, we fell asleep in the bed with her.

After a few tries, Mama decided to forgo explanations and simply read to us herself, so that at least she could pass on the learning contained in the stories. When she grew tired of reading, she would close her eyes and simply talk, so slowly sometimes that she made me impatient and I would nudge her or even jump on the bed and rumple the bedclothes, reach out and tug at one of her hands. What was it like? What was it like? I wanted to know.

Carlos was only eight years old when King Philip died, and then Carlos was king, but still, Mama told us, King Carlos put his hands down his breeches and scratched his asshole like any other child with worms. He put his fingers in his mouth and into our mother’s, too, until she began to be troubled by the same itching. “Don’t think the rich courtiers are so different,” Mama told us. “Everyone in the palace has worms.”

Mama said that Carlos jumped and jerked his limbs about, any tiny noise and he would startle, she had never had anything like him; he made Mercedes seem like an angel. He had been baptized, she knew, but, just for good measure, she had taken him again to the church and poured water from the font over his head. But it did no good, he trembled in her arms, and if a cup dropped, a casement slammed, he would scream as if he were being burned alive. For a child of nine, he was greatly stunted, his legs would scarcely support him and sometimes she had to carry him like an infant.

Mama’s milk improved Prince Carlos’s strength, and while she was in the palace he learned to walk and to laugh; but she could not cure him, not completely, and she said to us that perhaps it was true, the talk that all the Hapsburg family was bewitched. She would try to shove her nipple into his wide-open mouth, just to shut him up, but sometimes it would not work, he would choke upon it and cry harder. The windows of the nursery were lined with layer upon layer of wool felt to protect Carlos from any unwanted noise or draft. What little light did come into the prince’s apartments seemed to disappear, sucked into the thin, high wail of the boy, as if his crying were some kind of rent in the fabric of the day, a hole into which all sweetness, all substance, all flavor disappeared.

The prince preferred my mama, demanded her; her smell was the only thing that might make him stop crying, and so no one ever would take him from her embrace, and my mama was enslaved. Each day she looked forward to one thing only, Carlos’s falling asleep and giving her the chance to make progress in her studies. Then she could bring home to us her books and her knowledge.

Before she died, Mama read us every book she had; she died the day she finished the last page of the final volume. After, I tormented myself, wondering if only I had been able to borrow books indefinitely, would she not have lived as long as there were new words to read? But in the moment I was happy, I did not look ahead. I had a particular fondness for stories of martyrdom, and in the afternoons, after Mama would fall asleep, Dolores and I remained on the floor by our mother’s bed, and I told her how we might contrive to get martyred ourselves. We would travel, I said to my sister, to places far away and filled with infidels on horseback. I saw them with wild snarls of hair hanging down their naked bodies, and they sat their horses without a saddle or bridle, just holding the beast by the mane. Rogues who would assuredly try to compromise our virginity and, when we protested, run us through with their great lances until we were transported to heaven in raptures of ecstasy.

Well, I was young, my blood was hot, and the stories had not the effect on me that my mother had hoped. I tossed in the bed I
shared with my sister, suffering nightmares of Saint Lucy with her eyes in a dish, followed by Agatha’s breasts in a bowl and Eulalia stumbling with her head on a plate—a legion of women all dismembered with their parts displayed on the kind of fantastic gold dishes I imagined must outfit a palace.

I rolled about on the floor by my mother’s deathbed talking nonsense, and sometimes I would see her looking up to the ceiling, and she might smile as she heard what I said to my sister. I comfort myself that perhaps it was a diversion for her as well. At least she could rest her voice when it grew weak from reading. Perhaps she was happy to see that, ill as she was, these stories were yet something she could give us.

All pious stories, of course, dwell particularly on the idea of
eternal reward
, and I puzzled over this idea. “
For ever and all eternity
,” I whispered to myself as I wiped the table, repeating the stories’ common refrain as I did my chores. And I would wonder how it was that Saint Lucy had
traded time for eternity
, never dreaming that I would come to such a place as this prison, which has taught me the sense of such phrases. The stories my mother told assured me that
eternal bliss
was very desirable, but I found it not nearly so exciting as the martyrdom that preceded it.

The big black book containing saints from all the lands had illustrative engravings of their torments, and I teased Dolores until with me she enacted these tableaux, once earning for my trouble a beating when I rent our dresses by forcing sticks through the cloth (so as to better indicate the arrows that pierced Sebastian). Papa was in no mood for martyrdom, he felt Mama’s and his own pain too keenly.

Perplexed by this constant talk of death and transcendence, Papa asked us not to say such things as made his flesh creep. It was bad enough that Mama was so ill, without my daily imaginings of how we, too, might depart; but I could not stop myself. I persisted, I led my sister astray until that day our father punished us severely, and so frightened Dolores that she never mentioned such things from that day forward. I am not sure what she continued to think privately, for she never again would whisper a word of our game, not even in Papa’s absence.

But, for my part, I continued to dream of raptures and martyrs, perhaps even more feverishly once it became my own private realm.

Saint Teresa was my favorite. Having lived only the century before and been born not so far from me, in Avila, she seemed close enough to be real. She died a virgin and was not martyred, but she suffered other torments, and I prayed for any sort of vile disease that might mortify my flesh to the benefit of my soul. My spirit then would burn so prettily, like a little lamp of virtue. The
Life of Saint Teresa
, written by Herself, was filled with intoxicating accounts of how prayers had transformed her flesh and caused her to float up toward heaven even as she clung to chair legs and doorframes. The next day her bones would be all wrenched out of joint and she felt as if dogs had been chewing on her heart, but this did not seem too high a price for flying.