Poison (20 page)

We had not enough money to pay for mourners or for a sin-eater to sit by her body with his plate of cold mutton, chewing away at whatever transgressions might keep my mother in purgatory. We did not have enough for friars to carry her from our house to the church, but neighbors helped, and despite Papa’s expulsion from the guild of silk growers, my mother did not go into the charnel trench. No, Concepción de Luarca was allowed burial in the church of Quintanapalla, where my grandfather rested beneath our pew, as did his brother and all our family (except Ernesto, whose body disappeared, and the little dead children of my mother and my aunts, whose flesh had to be content to wait outside until such time as Christ would come to wake them).

The slab covering the Luarca grave had a hole in it where the gravedigger could put his crowbar to pry up the block of slate, and around the hole was a design of eleven silkworms making a circle and, below that, the letters for the name Luarca. It was eleven worms because it was from eleven hundred eggs that my ancestor Sandoval had begun the Luarca family silk business. We set Mama in her tomb, and the slab slid into place with a
gritty, regretful sound—a sigh, if stone could sigh—and I wondered if she had at last the peace she had said she wanted.

When my mother left for Madrid, three years before her death, she took comfort with her, but so long as she was alive, I believed comfort existed in the world and I believed in its return. When she died, comfort died too. I was tormented by memories of her sitting by our bed, of her singing in the evenings as we fell asleep. She knew many songs; I cannot remember more than a verse of any of them, but they were songs of love and romance, of young men who went out in the world to seek a wife and the trials they endured for the women they wanted.

When Mama died, Dolores was a girl of about fourteen. Not yet fully grown, neither was she a child, and to her fell all those duties that belonged to women. Dolores made a mockery of the idea of a home. She knew how to tend a pot, but the meals that came from hers were without taste. Whatever she cooked might have been good except for the lack of an onion or a clove of garlic, things that were not unobtainable. No, something easy, something hanging by the hearth. Something she withheld.

The character of my life without my mother became such that I survived, certainly, but there was always the rebuke of whatever was missing. Buttons off dresses, hose not mended, fingernails ragged, cups chipped. Everything was clean, my frocks and even my underthings, hidden from the world, had no stains; but there would be one unmended seam and my hair left unplaited. To me, these were shameful announcements to all that our mother was gone; and when I went out in the world I felt that people looked upon me as one insufficiently loved.

Dolores must have grieved after her fashion, but I was the only one to cry either at Mama’s death or after it. My sister held her back straight and set her chin. Papa became distant and vague, except for brief fits of rage, which were almost always directed at me. For I wept, and my crying drove him wild with anger.

He would begin by begging. “Stop, Francisca,
stop
,” he would say. “Please stop, child. It doesn’t do any good, this crying.” And he would tell me how it troubled my mama up in
heaven, never letting her spirit go easily to its reward. Or how the weeping would wear out my eyes until I was blind, how he would apprentice me and send me to live with the weavers in Epila, and on and on. But nothing he said could check my tears, even when he resorted to threats, saying, “Stop! Or I’ll turn you out of this house, I will, for I cannot stand another minute of it, Francisca!”

Finally, he beat me. He would cuff the side of my head so that I would fall to the floor. I would cover myself, and he would kick me, even, while Dolores remained silent and stolid. She stepped around us, continuing her chores. When he stopped, I would crawl to him and climb like a tiny child into his lap, for when the fit had passed I was not frightened. My father was a gentle man in all other ways and times, and something in me understood that his striking me was just his way of railing against fate. His rage was the only thing that could purge us both, me of my grief and him of his anger. I have fond memories of our sitting quietly together with him rocking me.

Mama left behind a small chest of belongings. Cures, they were, herbs and other things as well, things that were condemned by the Church but in which people kept their faith, and it was not any slight to God to use them because whatever power was in them was put there by God, so what was the harm? Was there any difference between an amber bead to ward off the evil eye and a relic of a saint or a scapular with a holy image? They were all the same, my mother said, but she kept her amulets secret nonetheless. It was not possible to be too careful when any harmless thing might be considered evidence of witchcraft.

After Mama died I kept her chest secret from all eyes, I found a place where it was safe and spent a part of every day going through the contents, although I knew them as well as the back of my hand. A necklace of shells from the sea to prevent children from foaming at the mouth; those gray donkey beads taken from just under the forelock of some animals and used to make a foul-smelling poultice. Glass beads, and that
yellow compound taken against jaundice. Powerful words written on small papers sealed in wax or velvet pouches. Dried herbs in little leather bags tied with horsehair. The powder from the white hellebore roots we collected in autumn and dried on the hearth, and which we used on the floor beneath our bed to keep fleas and lice away. Dried hop flowers, too, which we gathered wearing gloves and a kerchief tied around our mouths and noses, otherwise it would cause us to sweat and have palpitations. Senna, and monk’s rhubarb. Savin for the kidneys, and deadnettles for the monthly time, and the five-fingered grass that stops diarrhea. Silverweed seeds for spasms of the womb. Orpine for pus. Dried arum berries, which I had eaten once as a small child and which had taken me to the point that I could hardly breathe and nearly expired, for the berries are poisonous when fresh and uncured. A headache powder I used to watch her make from equal parts goose grass, sapodilla and the thorn weed, which never grows in the same place twice but which—required as it was for every woman’s larder of cures—had to be tracked down each summer when it flowered and released its nauseating odor.

I opened all the little bags and inhaled, as if breathing their contents would heal me of the sorrow of which I believed I should die. For it seemed impossible that my mama, whom I loved without measure, was gone and had left me with all that love for her still in my heart, yet with no place to go. I tried every cure she left behind, but there was nothing that could help me. I was so wretched that I stopped growing taller. How could I continue, how could I change, unwitnessed by my mother?

Dolores was three years older than I. Wherever we went she was in a great hurry and she held my hand tight. I took three steps for each one of hers, but still I tripped on the cobbles or on a stick. Or I just tripped on air, it seemed.

“Clumsy!” she would say, and she would pull my arm with impatience until it began to hurt me all the time, my left arm.

“Quiet!” she would say, at least a hundred times a day. “Quiet! Or I’ll tell Papa to feed you to the wolf.”

Now that it had fallen to Dolores to be my mother and to
discipline me, she would try to contend with me as I did with her. She invented a wolf who lived in the old silk house, and she threatened to let it out so it should catch and kill me. Well, though my sister’s bad-temperedness and constant rebukes may have been as ready to eat me up as a slavering beast, I knew she did not quite believe in her wolf, so I decided to help her.

“Have you seen him, then?” I asked. “He came last night while you were sleeping. I didn’t wake you for fear you would scream and then he would kill you for certain.

“It is not me he wants,” I told Dolores. “He stood here, by your side of the bed, and look where he scratched a D on the door.” I pointed to a clumsy letter I had made in the wood with a sharp stone. Mama taught me that much, anyway. When Dolores looked at the door, I could see by her mouth drawn into a small circle that I had frightened her, and she gave up on the wolf and on turning my own tricks against me.

When I could, I would go to my friend Natalia’s home. Natalia’s father was a wine merchant; they lived over his shop, which had in it casks and barrels and jugs of all sizes. I was greatly taken with Natalia and enchanted by her nimbleness. She was a pretty child, and I knew that were she to walk with Dolores, she would never stumble, she would skip daintily by her side. Natalia would not cry and thereby grieve her papa; and were I only like her, my life would be different. And so I studied Natalia, I tried to move as she did, I practiced taking graceful steps, balancing on the stones behind our house. When we played together I would beg to try on her shoes, which were not like my wooden clogs (the end of our mother and her work was also the end of leather shoes for us) but were kidskin slippers her papa bought her. They had designs pressed into the tops of them, designs that looked to me like writing, magic words that I imagined formed some spell that kept her from tripping.

I wanted to coax my toes into those pretty slippers, but my feet were too big. “You will grow into them,” Mama had said of my feet. But then she died and I decided not to grow any more. Natalia’s little feet disappeared into my clogs as she laughed. We spent many afternoons in the wineshop, underfoot, but her father did not mind our being there, nor did her mother. If it was
cold outside or if it rained, we could always go there; it was better than at my house, where Dolores spied on our games.

One day I went to Natalia’s papa’s shop and he told me I had to go home. Dolores took me back a day later; they had Natalia lying in a box on a table where I could not see her. My sister picked me up and held me over the box. Natalia was wearing a white dress, and there was lace on the collar. Beautiful lace like the kind that comes from Brussels. Wedding lace, the lace she had shown me among the other things from her mama’s dowry. “Oh, Natalia!” I breathed, “you are wearing your communion dress!”

She was dead. I must have known this, for I was not such a young child and I had seen my dead mama just a year before; yet it seemed to me that Natalia was asleep. Her hands were tied together with a long strip of white cloth, and I asked why. Was she a sleepwalker?

Dolores told me that Natalia had turned into an angel, and that the following day all the people would take her to the shrine at Queranna.

“Will we watch her fly up out of the box?” I wanted to know. All I remember about going to Queranna was the mud where so many had trampled the earth outside the shrine. That and the backs of people taller than I. But I did begin to regard my life a little differently. Now I have a friend in the sky, I thought, and I wanted to die, too, so I could fly up and be with Natalia and Mama. But I was frightened, too, and the fear of death, of Mama’s and Natalia’s being dead, settled into the color white. Anything white—not just winding-sheets, but a lily, even, or a white chasuble on a priest, the dresses we were to wear for our first communion. The color white thrilled me, it made me tremble.

As if, even then, I guessed the place I would end in, this place of White Hoods.

The first time I came to Madrid was with my father. In the year after Mama died, Papa made a trip to this city to collect payments owed to my mother from the palace, and I accompanied him. The throngs of people, the noise and heat and dust of that summer following Mama’s death, the vendors wiping their
wares ceaselessly, keeping them free of the dirt that blew along the roads in the wake of carriages. Constables and soldiers and hawkers and beggars, women with young children. The unceasing calls of people selling soaps and candles and knives and sweets, wines and orangeades and sandals and scarves. I had never been in such crowds before, and I clutched my papa’s arm. Despite having begged to accompany him, I felt I was being dragged somewhere against my will and was sure I would die in the heat and dust. There was a protest over some tax or another, and we were held up by a great throng in the street and forced to wait outside a city tanner’s business, much bigger than the shop that had been in our town, so big that a full dozen men scraped meat from hides with broad knives. They made long swipes with the blades and then drew them against their legs before the next pass. The smell of lye was strong and sickening.

An unearthly music interrupted my watching them, and I turned to see the approach of a party of lepers ringing their bells. Their faces were white and fleshless, and I found them curiously beautiful. To my eyes their rags seemed like lace, and I asked my papa, holding on to his hand, “Are they angels? Are they coming to tell us something about Mama?”

“No!” he said, and roughly he pulled me to the side of the road. “Why are you so given to strange fancies!” he hissed, but I paid him no mind. I watched how easily the lepers got through the crowds that had delayed us almost an hour. The people parting to let them pass only further convinced me that they were holy visitors, spirits who might tell me of my mother, and I tried to escape Papa’s hand so that I might follow them. When he would not let me go I felt tired and ill and suddenly defeated in everything, and I made as if to lie down on the ground.

“How you hinder me, Francisca! I wish to heaven I had left you with Dolores!” Papa said, and, at the advice of one of the men at the tanner’s, he ended up entrusting me to the care of the Monasterio de la Encarnación, the same whose charitable offices had first hired my mother as a wet nurse. The friars gave me a cup of water and left me on a stool in their library, among all their books and two monks studying there. I looked to see that my hands were quite clean and then I asked their leave to
touch the books, to take them down and examine the marks on the pages inside.

I wanted so much to be able to read, I felt that this ability which my mother had wanted to give me would, like the ringing bells of the white angels I had just seen, clear a path before me. If I could read, I might also tread as an angel, unhindered.