Poison (18 page)

Les oiseaux d’amour
. The tiny lovebirds were imported by the thousand for the pleasure of French ladies. Bought in Venezuela, traded for beads or mirrors or worthless stones dug out of the banks of the Rhine—that cold and twisting river worlds away from the steaming Orinoco—the little creatures were packed in baskets by savages and loaded onto Portuguese ships
in Cumaná. Suffocating in the hold for the better part of a summer, most of the birds perished by the time they reached the markets in Paris. But if only three of every hundred birds survived the journey, they made a nice profit for their dealers.

It was the rage that year in Paris for fashionable ladies to have a lovebird and to teach it to sing. The tiny, brilliantly colored birds had a naturally plaintive call and, so far from home, so homesick, the sounds they made grew piercingly sweet. The duchesses and marquises, the comtesses and princesses who bought the little birds devoted hours to their tutelage. The ladies changed their cages, one after another, to make sure their pets were housed in a musically conducive environment. Cages of birch wood, of wicker. Cages of gold or of bamboo with silver leaf. They bathed the little creatures in spirits of alcohol and massaged them with scented oils. And if the birds survived these treatments, they fed them fruit ices and put spirits in their water dishes: a drop of vodka made by royal appointment to whichever Romanov was currently the Czar—the bottle said Alexis, but hadn’t Feodor ascended? Well, no matter, whoever caused the potatoes to ferment, the vodka was quite effective in loosening the lovebirds’ tongues. And why not (for resistant cases) a tiny drop—oh, just a breath!—of alcoholic suspension of opium? Laudanum: that did the trick. Some of the birds sang most beautifully. Others fell silent, perhaps dreaming bird dreams of their faraway homes. A few fell dead from their perches and were replaced.

“Five louis for a creature weighing less than an ounce!” Marie’s father rapped his walking stick against the big basket, and the resulting flurry of constricted flight was such that a few bright feathers leaked out from gaps in the wicker. Monsieur de Trouver did not cower. This might be the king’s brother, but the laws of fashion and of commerce were entirely on his side.

“Five louis,” he repeated.

“Very well.” Marie’s father shrugged. “
Vite, Marie, plus vite
.” Just be quick about it. He was impatient, he wanted to go to the perfumer’s.

Four years later, on a Wednesday afternoon, at a quarter to three—Queen María was returning from the stable—her father
died in the rare-animal dealer’s shop. He was picking out a matched set of tortoises for his brother Louis’s birthday. If he had them gilded that afternoon, they would live for another week, they would last through the festivities. His heart stopped as he counted out the money.

But that was four years later. On this afternoon, the duc d’Orléans was impatiently swinging his silver-headed walking stick with one hand, adjusting his wig with the other. His daughter was on her knees beside the basket of birds. Monsieur de Trouver busied himself watering the animals with a polished copper can whose long spout he poked into the cages, replenishing empty dishes. The marmosets sneezed without stopping. Marie picked a lovebird with a little crest of rosy feathers sticking up from its head. She tried to touch one tiny pink quill, and the bird bit her. Back home, in the château, she had her maid hang its cage by the window. The lovebird sat on its perch without moving. A month later it was dead.

What must it have been like in the trees by the great rivers of the jungle? Air warm and soft and flowers of so many colors. Then caught in a net, packed in a basket, held in a ship’s hold, and at last, dead in France, where the sun did not shine so often. Dead and then replaced, one bird after another.

The first Friday of every month, the marquise de Montpellier hosted a competition for the most piercingly lovely birdsong. She held it in her salon, and it was the most coveted invitation, but no more than thirty ladies with their birds and their maids could be accommodated by the marquise’s salon of chartreuse and pink brocade. They came by carriage, and the owners of the little creatures, feathers drooping, berated the driver at every sudden jounce or turn, at every motion that might upset the bird swinging in its cage from a hook in the ceiling of the coach. At the marquise’s salon, they played endless rounds of cards, reversée or trocero, to determine the order in which the birds would sing, all the while sharing those infamous imported pink cigarros (one part tobacco, one part cloves and one part coca leaves) upon which all revelry depended, and which they smoked with the aid of long ivory and gold holders (to keep the fumes at such a distance from their painted faces that they would not cause
their eyes to water and wash off their artfully applied cosmetics, their gummed-on black beauty marks).

It was because of those cigarros that the entertainments reached so immodest a pitch, just as the cigarros were to blame for the previous spring’s excess, when one and then another of the ladies took to wearing naughty golden lockets. They would press open the little catches so that out tumbled the contents: not miniatures but locks of hair, and hair not from a lover’s head, but from somewhere else. These curls were tight and wiry. A game evolved: based on the minute examination of but one hair, its exact shade of brown and the tightness of the curl, who could guess the identity of a certain paramour? One springy red sample gave away the duke of Fife, but others were more challenging.

That was much too vulgar and risky, decided the marquise. The birds could hardly get them into the kind of trouble that came from the lockets, all the tedious duels and their tiresome result—balls that were ruined for lack of men who could dance.

The ladies soon discovered that though the lovebirds sang nicely in cages, their performance improved if they were let out into the room. For, though they called piteously for their release, the birds were terrorized by the ornate furnishings at the marquise’s, and they flew around and around the salon, inevitably lighting on the chandelier, where they sang most beautifully until they were either recaptured or they expired. Some burned to death over a candle flame (the stench of singed feathers was dreadful!), but most dashed themselves against the illusory escape offered by one of the hundreds of mirrors.

Adding to the frenetic quality of the first Friday of each month was Mademoiselle de Toquetoque (the same whose teeth had gone prematurely black from too many of the pink cigarros) and her unfortunate tendency to overexcitement. At nearly every competition she climbed up on the chairs in such a fashion that some bit of her attire—farthingale, hoop, lace pantaloon—caught upon an armrest or spindle and caused her to topple to the ground in a tangle of ribbons and teacups, little iced cakes stuck all over her voluminous skirts. While the craze for birdsong lasted, Mademoiselle de Toquetoque sprained one ankle
and both wrists, broke her collarbone and exhausted seventeen lovebirds, all of whom she had buried between her favorite rose trees, claiming ever after that the blooms thereon grew prettier and more colorful with each added corpse.

It was cruel sport, the marquise de Montpellier thought, but enchanting nonetheless. Or perhaps enchanting because cruel. She would have considered hosting the competition two Fridays a month instead of only one, if it hadn’t been a rather untidy entertainment, what with the scramble to catch the birds and the unavoidable evacuation of their panicked bowels. Even though they were so small, they could make quite a mess. And the frantic pitch of the afternoons—after the cigarros, drugged ladies chasing drugged birds, climbing chair backs in their fetching but quite unstable gold slippers, the birds each a quick blur of red or green that came to a sudden stop at the mirror over the great fireplace and dropped softly to the floor. The feel, so light, of the finally stilled body, when one stooped to pick it up.

The sun in the queen’s apartments in Madrid shone gray and wan and reminded María of the faint beam that fell on the first bird that died, its feet curled and pulled up into the soft feathers. Marie had taken her chance then, she had touched the crest of pink, stroked the little corpse. The marquise’s had been no place for tears, though, and she left with her maid before anyone noticed. At home, she was out of her coach almost before the horses had stopped, the dead bird hidden in her muff. She ran down the galleries, she put her head in her nana’s lap,
Pas juste, pas juste
. It isn’t fair. She was behaving like a child of five, not a young lady of fifteen. Nana put her hand under Marie’s chin and lifted her face.
Whatever made you think that life was fair, child?

The bird was replaced the next afternoon with another even pinker than the first, which, after the example of Mademoiselle de Toquetoque, came to rest in the garden, but without palpable effect on the flowers. Of course, the king’s roses could hardly be improved upon, they were already fertilized with fish from the Caspian Sea, with the blood of lambs and the bones of pheasants and all the other sacrifices made in the royal kitchens.

Had her father known what passport the purchase of lovebirds
would arrange, he might have considered them even less desirable gifts than monkeys, hydrophobia notwithstanding, but the marquise’s entertainments, along with the pink cigarros filched from the marquis’s hidden stock (what a boon that her absentminded husband couldn’t remember where it was he had stashed them!) were a secret carefully guarded by ladies and their maids. If the men were to learn of such revels, they would have put a stop to them, as killjoy fathers and husbands always did.

Yes, girls hide things from their fathers. They grow up, then, and keep secrets from their husbands.

The queen began to consult witches because of infertility. Not the unfortunate souls who ended up my neighbors, not laundresses or nursemaids, but admitted sorcerers and makers of potions. Beautiful women, some of them, they earned enough money off the superstitious court to dress in such silks as nobility could hardly afford. They did nothing for María except to take her gold coins, seven ducados for a little copper hand wrapped in coltsfoot and bound up with hairs from Carlos’s pillow. She was to wear it only when they lay together, wear it next to her heart. She told the king it was to protect them from sorcery, and of course he approved of that. Around his own neck he wore a paper folded seven times and secured in a locket made of leather from the ear of a hare, a fragile pink leather. On the seven-folded paper were the words
In nomine patris et fili et spiritus sancti
, followed by a long roster of saints’ names and angels, and lastly the names of their highnesses written in what was said to be ink made of nuns’ blood, then
Christus ab omni vexati me diabolicae perversitatis te Carlos et Maria defendat. Amen
. Very bad Latin, but then most witches are not so well tutored in their Latin as I am.

After the two state weddings—the proxy at Versailles and the hurried affair in Burgos—Carlos and María had a third wedding. A colleague of Carlos’s confessor arranged it in great secrecy, lest anyone find out, especially his mother. The king and queen went cloaked from the palace at midnight, after Marianna had retired. They were guided by a hooded person,
whether man or woman they never learned. They carried salt in their pockets and coins in their shoes. In the church of San Cristóbal, in a dark chapel near the north entrance, they were greeted by a cleric who also was cloaked and hooded. When directed, the queen removed her wedding rings and Carlos made his water pass through those gold and jeweled circles three times. The cleric prayed in a language they could not understand, he doused them with waters sacred and profane, and then the couple was returned to the royal residence.

Such nocturnal rites are, of course, forbidden. Their performance is reason enough to hang a common person like me. But in his fear of impotence, Carlos has been attended over the years by many upon whom the Church would frown. In the wake of initial disappointments, Carlos and María were fumigated with a special magic fish upon retiring, something caught from the great river Amazon in the New World and brought home to Spain packed in tamarind bark. And for one month, each evening upon retiring, Carlos’s royal member was anointed with hypericum juice, with wine and honey. In all, the king was better seasoned than a state dinner, the cook could have taken lessons from the witch. After that, Carlos’s manliness increased, and, excited by the fumigations, he decreed that he and María were to be exorcised weekly: stripped and rubbed and beaten with holy switches, splashed with water from a font. Untoward spirits were exhorted by holy men who screamed into their navels and ears and assholes, trying to rout them out. A hot stick was shoved into María’s nostril to smoke out the devil, and morning and evening, Carlos enjoyed enemas of holy water.

Not only the illiterate daughters of silk growers and soap makers are impressed by the written word. Evidently, spirits are not immune to such power as that conjured by symbols traced on parchment. The king’s and queen’s names were written everywhere, on hundreds of bits of paper sealed into tiny envelopes and worn next to the skin of pious nuns. A whole convent wore their names, nuns prayed each hour for their fecundity. Two hundred friars walked to San Sebastián under a banner asking that God send their highnesses such evidence of his love as could only be indicated by the queen’s pregnancy.

Though blame was generally placed on María, there were many who suspected that King Carlos was unable to get his queen with child. María’s own uncle, King Louis, was the worst for curiosity about Carlos’s manhood. The Sun King’s spies stole so many pairs of the Spanish king’s drawers to inspect them for emissions that the king had to be re-outfitted monthly by the royal tailor.

Poor Carlos. In spite of excitement over scourging and fumigations, in spite of eating quantities of Severo’s potency pills, in spite of praying while fucking, nothing worked; and Carlos began to suffer fits of melancholy so deep that for days he would not eat or speak but lay inert in his bed. The moat of relics heaped around him grew so wide that even his valet could not step near, and his gloom spread over the kingdom until almost all of the flowers in the palace park ceased to bloom. On those days on which he rose and allowed himself to be dressed, his mood was as fragile as one of the remaining sickly blooms: one discouragement would knock the frail pink endeavor from its stalk. Either that, or the cumulative disappointments of the day—the dismal reports from the financiers, the news of outbreaks of plague, the sinking of ships and the inevitable discovery of another family of Jews hiding under the Academia de Historia—it all wilted his spirits so that by evening he was hiding again under his hair shirts and martyr’s knuckles.