Poison (17 page)

There must be some price paid for the transformation of matter—think of all the dead silkworms, after all.

TOUCH MYSELF TOO MUCH. YES, THAT IS
what I’m speaking of. I do not have the strength to stand, but I have strength for this.

Of course, I stink, and when I give myself pleasure I shiver and sweat and stink that much more. Self-pollution is the name they give it: this sin of solitude, sin of longing. By any mortal measure my transgressions thus far are sufficient to cast me into the eighth deepest, coldest circle invented by that ingenious Italian, so what do I care if my soul is fettered by one more small self-indulgence? I have no use for mortal measures, not even Dante Alighieri’s.

I do it to help me call back the past, that I may take some solace in the memory of what provided passport to this prison. And how it was worth any price.

A sharpening of longing and frustration—it’s as bad as the teasing, bobbing circle of light cast by the guard’s lamp as he passes. That moment when the door to my cell is outlined in silver. Not sun, but the memory of sun, just as when I touch myself I suffer the memory of physical love. Greet that memory, no matter how dim.

Passion. It does not exist in time, it erases the past and belittles the future. My love was willful and unreasoning; it was like a stone cast into the still pool of my life, waves reaching back to touch the far bank of my childhood even as they traveled forward to the opposite bank. It feels as if there were never a time when I did not know him. I see him at my birth and at my death.

Alvaro!
I call his name some nights when my tongue lock is off. I call him, and my neighbors try to silence me. They kick their bars to obscure the sound of my voice as I beckon him.
Venite ad me!
Come to me. Oh, lie close with me!
Dormi supra me et sub me
. Lie over me and under me.
Proximus me
. Next to
me. I speak in Latin, I use the words he taught me. Words of the Church, language of the saints.

“I’m praying,” I tell the White Hood if he comes. “Surely prayer is encouraged in this place.”

Venite ad me
. I don’t call on God. I care nothing if Christ comes. It’s Alvaro I want and I make my miserable flesh raw trying to remember how it felt to be with him. But the trembling twitch of response rarely does better than mock me and my desire.

Our bed burned, it burns, it always will burn. Sometimes we were fucking for four or more hours in a night. We could not stop, we could not wait until the door was shut behind us. We tore the clothes from each other.

His hands shook. It was as if every little hole that nature gave my body, he would try to get into me that way, so that the two of us might live together in one house of flesh. He crammed his tongue into my nostrils, his fingers up my asshole, his cock in far enough to touch my heart: he wanted to be that close to me.

I did not speak, but yes,
Open me
, I thought. I could not unlock myself by myself. I would begin to cry out to God.
Christ, Christ, Christ. Savior
, I would say. It would feel as if I had waited for him all my life, my every breath drawn in anticipation of this suffocation.

He was a fucking, sucking, licking dog. Yes, he was the man with the head of the dog, he was the terrible suitor with whom I had threatened my sister. He poked his red tongue into my throat and made me scream.

He wanted me so badly that I knew I was treasure, a galleon of gold from New Spain. He would sink me, he was a great wave breaking over me, making me gasp. He began by thinking he was the sea, the endless ocean, but he drowned in me. Swallowed me like a salt wave, gagging, but he wanted to die that way. We all want to die that way.

The pleasure of the flesh used to wash over me like a flood tide, a great black wave upon whose crest were borne fragments of my past—as if the carnal knowing were a storm, a great deluge after a dry, dry drought to end all droughts. The waters
rushed through my papa’s house, battered down the doors and swept everything away.

Under him, I lost my reason, I thought I saw what wasn’t there, my father’s clogs, his chair and pipe, cooking pots and kettles, the ladle kept hanging by the hearth, blankets from our beds and the remains of the previous night’s supper. I saw it all in a jumble and turning over and over in the foam and spit on top of the curl of a great wave, and I would laugh sometimes until tears streamed into my ears, Alvaro’s hand over my mouth, “
Tacete! Tacete!
”—Be quiet!—and the cold tears filling my ears.

“What! What!” he would ask, and he would shake my shoulders as if to dislodge some explanation. But this was nothing for which I had words—not then, anyway—just my surprise in how his body in mine had the power to break up the very chairs at my father’s table, carrying them off over our heads.

I returned home long after vespers, the sun dimmed, the bells of the cathedral now silent, but ringing still in my head. I would come into my father’s house, where he sat before the fire, Dolores tending a pot of something with no savor, chickpeas or bacon boiled until nothing but salt remained—the table my sister set was one whose guests dined on the taste of grief—and I would reach forward to touch the wall to see, was it there, any of it?

Dolores and Papa looked at each other as I made a slow tour of the room in which we lived, touching it all that I might believe in it again. I would pick up some trifle, a cup or a candle, turn it over and over in my hands. “Is this new?” I would say. “Did Papa bring this home from market?”

“
No
,” Dolores would answer. And then to Papa, “See, it is as I’ve told you.”

I paid no attention to her, I did not see how it was that my sister tried to turn my father against me. Made sure that he took note of every odd thing that I did.

“You’ll go to the wash works,” she said to me.

My grandfather once told us that when he was growing up in Quintanapalla they used to call the prisons of the Inquisition by that name: the wash works. For the method of the Church in the
cleaning of souls was not so different from the process of the wash works. The Holy Office wrung a body out, boiled and bleached it, trying to get a good confession. Of course, people could make such jokes then, more than fifty years ago. They even dared to speak them aloud, for when my grandfather was born, in 1611, Spain was not so troubled a place as it is today. The Inquisition’s hold on her countrymen was not so fearsome, and people were not so poor that for a few coins they would bear tales against a neighbor who did not say his prayers, or, worse, said the wrong ones.

If only a soul were so easily laundered as a hank of silk.

“Your mother killed her sons.”

“My mother’s sons were stillborn.”

“Your mother killed her sons and she ate them.”

“My mother had children born dead like every other woman in every other town and they were buried by my papa. You can find them if you dig, you can go and find them, they are in a row. They have gravestones, each of them, they are in a row next to my papa’s silk house, there are four stones. My mama never killed anything in her life, not even a rat.”

“Your mother killed her male children.”

When I put my hands over my ears, the White Hood smears the soles of my feet with grease, he builds a fire before them. As I am always so cold, for a minute the heat feels good.

“Did I say that?” I used to ask the Red Hood when he read me the transcripts before I signed them.
Release me and I’ll tell it. I don’t know. I do know. I didn’t do it. I did. If you say that I did, I did. I did whatever the witnesses say that I did. Tell me what to say, I shall say it, God knows that I will. Only tell me what I am to say and how
.… They go on like that for pages. And it seems that a person is capable of conversing entirely without intent or even consciousness.

The silkworm has been enslaved for many centuries. It cannot walk. Its legs do not support its body.

And the silkworm used for breeding, the female that lays those eggs my papa used to buy, her wings are unable to lift her.

In nature, a silkworm lives in the tree off which it feeds. It eats
the leaves, and in the autumn it spins a cocoon around itself; it binds its hidden self to a naked, stripped bough.

Sometimes, as the Purple Hood speaks, I have a vision of myself suspended by a strand of silk and swinging from a bough of a mulberry tree, one of many planted in a grove. The sun is bright, and hanging in the tree, I see the white light of the sky above, I feel its warmth. The trees are tall, they were planted many years before.
How black their tops are against the bright, white sun
, I think.
How implacable and mysterious. They are too high, too far away to know them
.

A playful breeze picks up. It catches my strand of silk and then drops it. Leaves me swinging: back and forth, back and forth. I swing outside of time, my whole body held in a smooth arc of motion.

My heart beats. It is the only sound in all creation.

Then, suddenly, I am blown off course, and the strand of silk carries me into the trunk of one of the trees. I hit it and swing backward into another. This happens over and over in time with the crashing beat of my heart.

The treetops disappear just as I awake to understand that these collisions
are
the noise of my heart, so loud that each beat threatens to annihilate me. And just as I think
No, I cannot stand any more
, the strand breaks and I fall. Fall but never hit.

Fall like water dropping from a precipice so high that it evaporates before it strikes the ground below.

All the while that I am consumed by this curious vision, I am speaking, evidently, I am answering questions. I used to believe that the transcripts were false, made up. But certain of the statements contain phrases that sound too much like my own to have been fabricated by another person.

The Purple Hood is increasing his persecutions. He is after something. A secret he wants from me before I die. But what? I would tell him anything, I have told him anything, whatever I can think of. That is the problem. I have contradicted myself. In my cell I think up perverse and damning crimes to attribute to my mother. In my cell I plan to give him what he wants. But then, when I am questioned, I forget the false accusations I have rehearsed. I cannot utter them.

It is growing more difficult to hold on to what is left of Francisca de Luarca, daughter of Félix de Luarca, failed silk grower, and Concepción de Luarca, wet nurse to the king.

When the White Hood brings me back, the dark throbs in time with my pulse.

“I am a worm,” I say to no one. “I am a silkworm,” I say to the dark.

ONSIEUR DE TROUVER, WHO OWNED PARIS’S
largest shop dealing in exotic animals, was enjoying a very lucrative year. Not a week went by that he didn’t sell dozens of lovebirds, and when a shipment was late, carriages of tearful ladies stretched for a mile up the street from the place of his business. Each morning, when he arrived for work, Monsieur de Trouver raised the shade in his shop, sliced an orange in quarters and dropped it into the cage where the marmosets sneezed. Then he put his hand in the big basket of birds, his thick forearm squeezing through the little trapdoor at the top. He made a face as he groped for dead birds on the foul wicker bottom. They were so light and frail that if he grabbed a live one by mistake it died of fright, as if he had tried to clutch an angel, a creature so sweet and elusive that his rough mortal touch had caused it to vanish.

Les anges
, he said to Marie Louise, when she made her first visit to his shop. He invited her to peep through a hole in the wicker at the bright beating color inside.
Vraiment
. I am telling you the truth.

Marie was fifteen. She had come to the market in Paris with her father. She was a princess and could have anything she liked, her father told her so. And while all fathers say such nonsense, this one, brother to the Sun King, spoke the truth. Yes, Marie was a princess and she should have any creature that might amuse her. Except the monkeys, which carried diseases.