Poison (2 page)

When we were rich, Papa would sleep. I knew sleep was a pleasure he had not gotten nearly enough of so far in his life; and so for my father I imagined a remarkable and astounding bed: a bed like a boat with high sides, a bed like a horse with tall legs, a bed like a fortress that no one could storm. Under his covers (made of silk, of course) he would sleep for as long as he pleased, which would probably be months or even years, and then, when he was truly rested, he could decide what to do with his money. When I told him about the dream bed I had built for him, Papa would shut his tired eyes and tip his face up toward the ceiling, toward heaven, and laugh at the luxury of endless and uninterrupted sleep in a man-sized cocoon of silk. Of course, even as a child I knew that this was unlikely. My father could not rest, not when there was money to be made; he would never consider himself prosperous enough to sit still.

I told my big sister, Dolores, that with the huge dowry she would have when our fortunes were made, she could marry Luis Robredo. She was not even sufficiently old that she had received her first communion, but already her thoughts had turned to weddings and matchmaking and I picked out this husband for her, a man of some twenty years and the son of a local estate owner. Her usually pinched face grew almost pretty when I
spoke of her dowry and dress. “You’ll be wed on Ascension Day,” I said, and she nodded eagerly, no doubt picturing herself rising into heaven just like Christ himself. My dreams made her that buoyant. She would be rich enough that the sacrament of marriage would be performed by the archbishop of Burgos, I told her, and not by a backward Pyrenees priest who wore crude leather sandals through the winter snows. No, the archbishop’s feet, which touched only the floors of cathedrals and palaces, would be shod in our silk, and Dolores and Luis would live in a house such as only grandees have, and it would be not in Quintanapalla but in some place where it never snowed, far to the south, in Andalusia perhaps, or in Valencia where orange blossoms drop from the cliffs into the Mediterranean Sea.

“What about you, Francisca?” she would ask, her hands clasped together earnestly. “Where will you live when you are a lady?”

“I will stay at home with Mama,” I said. For even then I knew that I had what I wanted. Though I dreamed endlessly of what might be—though I conspired with our worms and their creation and made up all manner of fantastic fates for the silk we raised—I never wanted to move from my place at my mama’s hearth, where I had her skirts near enough to touch and where I breathed her very smell from the air around me.

“But there must be something you want, Francisca. Something your papa can buy for you,” my father would say, pulling my braid to get my attention. I said that I wanted a lamp like the one that hung over the church’s altar, a lamp of silver with red glass around a flame that never burned low. I would give it to Mama to read by, I told him. I pictured how its light would touch the pages of her book, touch her hands and face as well, making everything as red as flowers.

Nights, awake in my bed as my sister slept beside me, I went over and over my father’s calculations. “Fourteen thousand leagues,” I whispered again and again to myself like a spell, until, tired and dizzy, I was left clinging to the end of a strand of silk, poised between the fishes in the sea and the wild men on the coast of New Spain.

•   •   •

Once, when a messenger of souls passed through our town, one of those old men who charge a maravedi for a minute of their time—they pocket your money and close their eyes and tell you that they see your departed—one of the messengers took my chin in his hand.

“This one,” he said to my mother, “this one will stray.” He looked in his sack. “Take this,” he said. He pressed a charm into her hand. “And see that you drive some nails into her bed.” For it was believed by some that iron would keep witches away.

He shook his head. “Tell me, child, do you know your Paternoster yet?” he asked, and with his hand still on my chin he turned my head this way and that, looking carefully.

“I do,” I answered, insulted. “And the Ave and Credo and the Commandments as well.”

“You say them, then, and do as your mama tells you.” With that he moved on to our neighbor waiting her turn after us, the hand that had held my chin collecting another coin.

He was right, of course, I did go far afield. But that was after my mama was gone, after my father’s greed had conspired with fate to take our worms, then our mother, and then all the rest. Not that I had no part in the ruin of my family. For dreamers are reckless people, after all; and when I found I had fallen from the safety of my place by my mother’s side, I set about looking for solace elsewhere, without any thought of sin, or of danger.

The journey I made, however, was not the kind of which a child might dream, not one of vast geographies, not one requiring ships or dancing slippers. I went only as far as Madrid, a mere two days’ travel from Burgos, whose cathedral I could see from the house where I was born. We had three windows in our house, two of greased parchment, which, in the warm months when the shutters were unnailed, admitted light but no view, and one window of glass. Bubbled and so wavy that to look through it was like gazing through heat rising from a flame, the glass pane showed us a distant southern vista where the river Arlanzon cut through Burgos and around the great cathedral there, its distant spire like a thick finger pointing up to God.
Either that or a monument to passions more base than those that might project a body heavenward.

Two days’ ride south from that spire would bring a traveler to Madrid. Madrid, whose palace rises square and white at the end of the grand Calle de Arenal, and whose prisons, underground and vast, extend beneath that same palace’s foundations. Above Madrid’s streets, the palace took my mother’s life. Below them, the prison of the Inquisition is taking mine.

My father believed he had everything figured out. He reworked the arithmetic each night, not to be sure it was correct, for he had an exceptional talent with sums and could do almost any mathematical contortion in his head, but for the pleasure such calculations gave him. “Francisca,” he would say, “give me some numbers.” I would make up some puzzle like this: “If we planted thirty-eight more mulberry trees, and each produced seventeen bushels of leaves in a year, and silk cocoons were selling for twenty-nine maravedis per pound, then how much more rich would the addition of thirty-eight trees make us?”

Papa looked into the fire as he figured, his eyes narrowed, his cheek twitched. “Eleven ducados!” he would answer with barely a pause. “New shoes for all my girls! And perfume! Colored candles! Shawls! I’ll take you all to market, and you shall have what you like!”

When checked, his calculations were always correct; any written mathematics were simply for the delight he took in making numbers on the flat hearthstones, of using a charcoal and then wiping his makeshift slate clean again with his forearm. He could not read but he did know his numbers, and he looked almost frantic as he figured, his mouth moving along with his hand and sweat running from the hair at his temples.

Once a week perhaps, Papa would walk up the hill and past the mulberry grove to the silk house, where his father lived with the worms. My grandfather was a cantankerous old man who ate his meat and bread with us but said nonetheless that he preferred the noise of his worms chewing to the clamor of our family at table. He swallowed his food as fast as did the worms and
then he took up his staff and made his way out the door and up the hill, back to his spot in the silk house, which was kept evenly warm by a small fireplace in each of its four corners. By one of the hearths Grandfather had his own chair with a high back and a footstool. There he smoked his pipe and snapped the occasional order at Dolores and me when we fed the worms. He used a sweet, heavy tobacco, the smoke of which sat upon his head like a fantastic hat, and after a bowl or two he would doze. It was peaceful in the silk house, and were you to close your eyes to their ugly jaws, the sound of so many worms chewing gave the impression of rain falling steadily onto the roof.

Each week Papa would undertake to persuade my grandfather to move ahead with the times, to try new ways to make us rich, to plant new trees or feed the worms differently. To add madder and indigo and cochineal to their diet, so that they might produce colored silk, which would require no dyeing and would fetch, my father was sure, a high price at market. To feed the worms on leaves soaked in wine, which was said to result in cocoons that were larger and more loosely spun, and in that way the silk filaments could be more readily unraveled and reeled. To forsake killing the worms by the old steam method and instead bake the cocoons in a clay oven. To fertilize the mulberry with oil cake, as they did in China, and to prune them more severely each autumn. To paint the trees’ bark with warm tar and to spray their first buds with the milk of a newly kidded goat. He had no end of ideas, my father.

Every year at market time, Papa attended a scientific gathering in Epila. He belonged to a society dedicated to the advancement of agricultural arts—a “convocation of cuckoos!” proclaimed Grandfather—cuckoos who “filled his head with all manner of rubbish.” But my father wanted to try every innovation and improvement of nature of which he heard tell. He argued ceaselessly on the behalf of progress, but my grandfather said it all came down to avarice, he accused Papa of not being interested in knowledge, he accused him of being motivated solely by a love of money. Grandfather said the people who held such meetings as my father attended were greedy, too. “But at least they are smarter than you, Félix!” he went on. “For they
have figured out a way to make a living from fools. Fools like you who pay money to trade in worthless talk!”

“Señor,” Papa would say, for he addressed his father thus, “why be averse to a small speculation? We could invest, say, a mere five ducados and make a return of ten times that in as many years. We could—”

“Nah!” would spit out my grandfather, and he would remove his hand from his better ear, which he cupped in compensation for its deafness, catching the words from the air and directing them down its bristly, winding canal. That is, he would cup his ear when he wanted to hear what was said, but not even for the sake of conjecture would he entertain such thoughts as newfangled fertilizers or improved trees or wine soaks or whatever it was my father suggested. He listened only so long before he turned his face to the wall, his head like a bishop’s under its miter of smoke. Then my father would curse and set off back down the hill, casting dark looks at the old trees, which, though they had clothed and fed him for all the years of his life, he had begun to disdain as inferior.

Silk growing is not as easily accomplished in Spain as in the Orient—or even, it is said, in New Spain’s province of Tehuantepec—but for generations now the silk produced at home has been favored by our countrymen, for it bears no stain or scent of infidels, no contamination of some Buddha or Vishnu or Allah or whatever gods there are to whom savages bow their heads. People who bought imported silk cloth complained that it smelled of the Orient—a smell, they said, almost as bad as that of Jews. So there was always a market for Spanish silks, which made it nearly sane to cultivate mulberry trees in a climate as harsh as that of Castile, where we lived and where the snows from the Pyrenees blow sideways in the winds and the mountains are more rock than soil. Everyone knows that no matter where it is accomplished, silk growing is an art for the stubborn, the patient, the foolish.

A new strain of mulberry was the innovation that eventually took hold of my father’s imaginings; it occupied more and more and more of his thoughts. Available each spring at the market in Epila were crossbred trees from a farm even farther north than
Quintanapalla, where they had been tested by that part of Castile’s terrible climate; and each year that he did not buy them my father was sure would be the last of their availability, that he had missed forever his opportunity to make us rich. He argued with his father tirelessly in the new trees’ behalf, and for years my grandfather resisted his son’s attempts to persuade him to replace half—or a quarter, or just one row—of our trees with the new strain. Papa promised this new strain was in every way identical with the old: the leaves were the same shape, and like ours they were bright green and shiny on one side, lightly furred on the other. The sap, only the sap, was different. While ours was white like milk, the new strain’s was a slightly different color, a sort of gold like honey, and it was thicker, sticky. The trees, called
Mirabile
, were resistant to drought and untroubled by pests such as red beetles and the bindle worms that sometimes ate a year’s profits along with the bark of the trees; and to produce more leaves with less care and water would indeed have been a miracle in Castile, which has a drought every decade at least, the rains coming only after we choked on the dry dirt that the winds had blown out of the empty fields.

“Nah!” my grandfather yelled on one occasion. “You are lazy, Félix. Nothing comes from nothing. No shortcuts in the making of silk. No easy way. No geese with gold eggs.” He went on, speaking in such illustrative abbreviations, many of which I later learned were taken from the tales of a wise man named Aesop, and how my grandfather knew of them I cannot guess. A great noise of thunder interrupted their argument, and Grandfather jumped up and grabbed a pair of tongs. He took a coal from the nearest hearth and, moving with unsuspected agility, ran through the silk house, waving the live coal between the stacked feeding trays filled with worms.

“A storm like this is the Devil’s work!” he said to my father, shaking the smoking coal under his nose. Papa merely folded his arms and snorted. But, Devil’s work or not, thunder will stop the worms from feeding; and it was said that a burning coal waved in the air would calm them.

“You should use vinegar to settle them,” my father said. “Sprinkle the floor with vinegar.”

“Bah!” said Grandfather,
bah
being his one variant of
nah
.