Poison (27 page)

Did you say, Francisca de Luarca, that you had knowledge of spells, that you sought to enchant, that you made figures from wax, that you set a spell on your father’s silkworms, that you bewitched your sister and dried up her womb, that you … Oh, it appears that I agree to anything, I believe anything, under duress.

“And do you now abjure this statement, or do you agree that it is the truth as best you could reveal it?”

You would be no different. The scribe holds forth a quill for signature, and you would take the quill, kiss the quill, you would be only too happy to put your mark to such a document, your confession, which will send you to heaven. For you believe in whatever this angel says, so mysteriously black, his face obscured to you and his white hood bathed in the celestial light of the torch. You want this angel to save you.

REED, SLOTH, ANGER. GLUTTONY, ENVY
, pride. The course of any other of the deadly sins is easier to chart than that of lust. For lust is as a mirror to your soul. Until you know who you are, you cannot know whom you will desire.

When I was a girl of fifteen, I went to see the priest for the first time since the illness in my eyes, and I told him that I was afraid. That, though I had recovered my health, I was troubled in my soul.

“Confession?” he suggested. He shrugged his shoulders. It had been three years since Mama had died, but, standing near to Alvaro, I felt her presence, I thought that I did.

I remembered how his sleeve had brushed her forehead, her neck. I found myself wanting to touch his cassock. That was what we shared, after all: the witness of her passing.

I did not confess, and I went home. Then I thought better of it and returned. I made my confession to Father Alvaro once, twice, three times and more. Having started, I could not stop. I sought him out each week, becoming more and more scrupulous, and keeping in my head every tiny transgression. Savoring them. Each unkind thought I had conceived against Dolores, each word I had spoken sharply.

I kept myself as clean and as pure and holy as only the wicked can.

I worried over defilement but never over those appetites that possessed me. No, I did not want to. I set about satisfying them.

Without lying, I made my time with the priest last as long as possible. I felt how my blood burned, but I did not admit what my trouble was or how easily (how willfully) I confused the passion of the body with the afflictions of sainthood.
Incendium amoris
. They say the love of Christ can cause the flesh to burn
and never be consumed. Martyrs feel it long before they are staked and set afire. How foolish I was to imagine that my common scrupulousness, my delight in every sin confessed might draw me close to the flaming heart of God.

How foolish to think it was God’s heart that drew me.

At the door to the confessionary, my pulse would quicken. And after, when he would absolve me—
in pace
, “Go in peace, Francisca”—there was no peace. I was breathless at the sound of his voice.

One day I approached Alvaro in the road after Mass. He did not see me coming, for his head was bent, he was walking while looking at a small text. I caught up with him easily and I asked him without preamble, would he teach me to read? He was learned, he was a scholar, he was said to know many books. I told him I was quick to learn and that I wanted to help him. I suggested that I might apprentice myself to him and then he would have an assistant.

“Francisca de Luarca,” he said, and that is all he said. I looked at his mouth when he spoke, not at his eyes. I had made the mistake, in the wake of my mother’s death, so dreamlike and holy, of confusing this man with a phantom, a spirit, but when I looked at him now, I saw that when the priest smiled his teeth were strong and white like an animal’s.

I struggled with Alvaro’s transformation from angel to mortal. Having heard, when I was yet a child, his whispering approach to my mother’s deathbed—robes breathing as he walked, the sudden flash of the beautiful purple hose—the idea had grown in my mind that this priest did not walk as others did. Now that I knew him, now that I saw him when he was in a hurry and running with his cassock tangling between his ankles, I found myself surprised at these things. Just as I was shocked when I looked from his white teeth to his hands and saw how the wrists projecting from his priestly sleeves were covered with hair.

I never was sure which Alvaro I wanted, angel or mortal. Both, of course. But could they, did they, exist at one and the same moment?

“What is it you want to read?” he said at last, and I told him
how much I had loved the lives of the saints and how our mother had died before fulfilling her wish of teaching Dolores and me to read.

I lied to Alvaro. I said I intended to teach my sister all that he taught me; that for the two of us, it would be an aid to the progress of our souls to be able to study from devotional books, and that winters were long and tedious without such pious occupations. He looked at me, I saw myself reflected in his eyes, two tiny Franciscas caught in those rings of brown. He said nothing for a minute or more, appearing to consider my suggestion. Then he agreed. He said to come to his study on the next Thursday, after the bells that rang nones.

So it came about that each week I came to sit beside the priest at his long oak table, and I turned the pages for him, tended to his quills and blotted his writings, and, little by little, learned to write myself.

Alvaro was tall. When we stood near to each other, my head reached only as far as the fourth button of his cassock. He held himself straight, a matter of training, for he had been a member of the Bóveda, the Dark Vault. Ten months of the year the Bóveda devoted to study; and they were said to be as learned as the members of Loyola’s Society of Jesus. But, unlike the Jesuits, who were always concerned for comfort, during Lent the Bóveda scourged themselves, they went without food, they shed their own blood in their search for holiness. The rest of the year was little better, because the order had precepts governing every detail of life, down to the expressions the brothers wore on their faces. It was said that though the Bóveda had been disbanded for some years, a former brother could still be discerned by posture that was more rigid than a soldier’s.

Despite this history of self-discipline, Alvaro’s complexion revealed a sanguinary nature. His forehead, his cheeks and even his sharp nose were red, as if he had endured long exposure to the sun or wind, and this improvident-looking flush never diminished. His face, though clean-shaven, was shadowed by a heavy beard, and while he was thinking he would sometimes brush his quill against his cheek, so that it made a rasping sound. Later, when he would come up behind me and put his
lips to my neck, the scratching of his jaw against my nape would make the hair on my arms rise.

In the beginning, however, in the early weeks of my tutelage, Alvaro’s jaw was not in proximity to my neck but over our books, where it moved patiently up and down, making sounds to accompany letters, just as my mother’s had so long before. After the necessary tedium of copying and recopying baby words and infantile sentences, we moved on. It seemed to me to take forever, but Alvaro assured me that I was (if too old to be considered precocious) indeed a clever student and the quick one I had promised to be.

I swallowed long lists of vocabulary, I could not eat enough words. I loved the Latin ones best.
Félix
, my papa’s name, the name his papa gave to him, meant both lucky and happy, and so I learned that it was a doubly useless way of identifying my father. Good fortune had by no means graced him, and the father I knew was a man consumed either with longing for what he did not have or with sadness for what he had lost. He was never happy. A better name would have been
Fabian
, or “bean grower,” just two above Felix in the same week’s list of words. On the other hand,
Dolores
and
Concepción
were accurate enough. As for
Francisca
, the free one, well, I would learn of my own name’s aptness and irony—those liberties I took being the same that ended in my incarceration.

Words seduced me. I pondered the contrariness of ones like
femina
, being, as it was, comprised of
fe
for faith and
mina
for less. “Why, who could call woman the sex of less faith!” I asked Alvaro. “Of what is a woman’s life composed, if not of expectation?” What more would I learn when I read whole sentences, I wondered.

My mama told us that when her papa took his post as a lime spreader, when plague had turned the streets of Madrid into charnels, he could not sign his name to the workers’ roster, and this had shamed him. Part of her desire for words came from having eaten her father’s insulted dignity. With me, it was not pride. I was inquisitive. Too curious for a girl, my grandfather had said. When he told me the fires in the silk house were hot, I put my hand to the coals to know his meaning. I had badly
burned my throat eating an uncured olive. After a flood I nearly drowned in the stream. I licked the cat to taste what that was like. I always had to know. The existence of a world of words to which I had no entrance tormented me.

That the only educated person I knew was the priest—the same to whom I had helplessly granted other magic powers—made reading seem that much more an entrance to some better world, one apart from the sadness in life. And the ability to read made Alvaro seem all the more extraordinary. Reading and the priest, in my head they magnified each other.

What did I want? I wanted him. Him, of course. After the first week I knew that it was thoughts of him that had possessed my head, not holiness. Still, even now, when time and distance ought to make motives clear, I see that desire is not simple. How much of my wanting him was wanting to touch the person to whom my mother had entrusted her last journey, the hands through which she had passed on her way to eternity? I thought that he was like a portal to another world. I remember well the night my mother died. I cannot stop myself from conjuring the past, from listening again for the sound of his cassock whispering over the cobbles as he came to our door.

The books we read were not wicked, but they had magic in them, they did to me. We read of things I never dreamed existed. We began on Scriptures, both in Latin and in translation into the vernacular. But after those and after the usual devotional works—Thomas à Kempis and Augustine,
The Interior Castle
, by Saint Teresa—we read other books. Aesop and Aeschylus and Ovid. Boccaccio. Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s sonnets, Mandeville’s
Travels
, Sacrobosco’s
De Sphaera Mundi
and
Gargantua
, by François Rabelais. Places. People. And stories, so many stories.

Alvaro had in his possession books that had been banned by the Church. They were set aside, marked with a red stamp along the binding and piled on the highest shelf, from which they called to me, as I always wanted what was set out of reach. A few were scorched, their covers black and cracked. One afternoon he selected one of the blackened texts, and I ran my finger along its binding. “What happened to this book?” I said.

“It was taken from the Church’s burning of the library at Salamanca,” he said.

“But who would do so dangerous a thing as to seize it? Who would not be afraid?”

“I would not.”

“But how did you do it? Why were you not punished?”

“Who said I was not?”

I looked at him. He gazed out the window and his face was still in the way it was when he was thinking. His composure was the opposite of how my father concentrated himself. Papa’s thoughts seemed to scramble over his face like insects, they made his lips tremble, his eyes squint.

Suddenly Alvaro seemed much older to me than my father. His capacity for physical quietude made my father seem antic and boyish. “I was arrested and tried,” he said finally. “I made a case to the Holy Office for the examination of banned texts. I said that if I could study them, I could better refute any heresies they might betray.”

“Are you in trouble?” I asked.

“I am not in favor, Francisca.”

“Is that why you have been sent here, then? To such a small and insignificant town as ours?” As long as Alvaro had been in Quintanapalla there had been conjecture about this. Before his arrival, our town had shared a priest with Rubena and another place farther north. He had been an old priest, not educated, and he took a fit during one holy week. Then we had no Masses at all for a time. Finally Alvaro came, with his books.

He looked at me. “Yes,” he said. “That is why I am here.”

I nodded.

We began our lesson. We read from one of the Pseudepigrapha, called “false writings” because they were not accepted by the Church as the letters of Paul or Timothy had been. Some considered these books very wicked because they were a mix of faith and magic, but they were pretty tales. They colored the grim robes of Christ and made his bloody cross burst into flower.

In love with the words, in love with their master, on days when we did not meet, I would find myself helplessly drawn to
Alvaro’s lodgings in the road behind the church, and I would have to walk on so as not to attract any attention to myself. The priest in a small town is a public person. More than the baker in whose oven-warm shop people gather, more than the smith around whose fires the men go to gossip; more than the apothecary behind his counter or even the innkeeper at his long table, the people of a town own their priest. They come to him at any hour, his whereabouts are almost always known.