Poison (41 page)

Anima Christi, sanctifica me. Corpus Christi, salva me. Sanguis Christi, inebria me
. Soul of Christ, body of Christ, blood of Christ. Sanctify me, heal me, drench me.

Sometimes it was only the press of other bodies around mine that kept me standing with my baby in my arms. I was so tired that even his small weight was like a stone. When I slept I had a nightmare, the same dream each time, of a red ocean, like a vast bleeding of color. There was a staircase in the ocean of red, stairs like those that lead down from the pulpit in the cathedral, and some of them were under the red sea. The sky was white. Not blue, but white like a shroud. Every time I dreamed this
dream, more of the stairs were submerged. Even if I were not brave enough to go down the stairs, as I knew I was meant to do, the water would rise inexorably. In my arms, instead of Mateo, I would be holding a child my mother had suckled long ago, the one I had started to smother. I would drop her into the red waves, and then wake up in a fearful state, clutching my son.

His hair lost its shine, his eyes went blank. They stopped reflecting the sun, the light went into them and disappeared. They died first, his eyes, and then I saw that Mateo was nothing but a bag of wrinkled skin, with a little skeleton inside. I was so filled with remorse that it was like an obstruction in my throat, and when I opened my mouth to speak I was surprised by sobs instead of words.

The roads to the holy places were filled with men and women hawking whatever they took into their heads might sell. Trinkets or remembrances of the particular place—beads, prayer books and relics for those credulous enough to suppose that the dog legs and rabbit leather displayed had once borne the spirit of a saint. Desperation bred ugliness in the pilgrims. People were fearful that the holiness would dry up before even half of the long line of hopeful had a chance to see or touch—as if the miracle was
not
miraculous but limited and would run out, like bread from the baker on the day before a feast. Fights broke out, and bandits took advantage of the confusion to steal what little they could.

A much renowned
santiguardo
, or what is sometimes called a faith healer, the seventh son of a daughterless union, lived in the foothills below Avila. He was very old, and as he no longer left his pallet to greet the pilgrims, they came to touch him. People had to be restrained from crushing him, so many hands plucking at his ragged clothes, trying to pull one thread to save their lives. I saw him, and I thought of the little cakes of soap Mama made. When we used one long enough, the figure on it would be almost gone, no more than a raised spot on the soap; and just so, the touching of so many hands seemed to have worn the features off the old man’s face. But I had made my way to his pallet after many hours, and I raked at his sheets as well, I pressed Mateo’s
hot hands to his lips, withdrawing them with white flecks of spittle on the palms.

I learned to visit places at odd hours, to travel by night while most people slept. I walked under a clouded, starless sky, and I listened to the night, to sheep coughing in a distant pasture, to the wind and, once, to a dog licking himself somewhere nearby. The loud slopping noise of his tongue filled the dark, and the sound of the animal grew until I could see his teeth and his wet gullet before me, and it seemed like
time
itself, always ready to swallow us all. No matter how tired I was, I could not bear to remain still and do nothing for Mateo. Not even for an hour could I rest before I was up again, relieved to hear the noise of twigs breaking under my shoes.

The shrine at Tordeso was no more than a cross set up over a hole in the earth. Pilgrims had scraped away all the dirt they could carry, the ground upon which it was said our Holy Mother had wept. Years before, the Virgin had appeared no higher than my knee and sitting upon a snow-white ass no bigger than a cat. The peasant girl who witnessed the apparition saw Her for fifteen consecutive nights; on the last night, the Virgin caused a lily to sprout from the earth. The peasant girl was taken away by White Hoods. She stood before the tribunal in the auto-da-fé of 1616, and onlookers stoned her to death. Since that day people have come to the town to take earth from that spot where the lily grew.

I arrived at Tordeso before daybreak. An old man was filling the hole with spadefuls of earth he took from his wheeled barrow.

“Who are you?” I asked. “What are you doing?” I began to laugh, I could not stop. “Is
this
the holy ground, then? Dirt from your spade!” I had traveled so far that several times in the night I had had to lie down on the ground with Mateo until I could walk with him once more.

The old man looked up from his occupation. “Señora,” he said, and the voice that scolded me was my grandfather’s. “How do you think, with so many coming each day, that there would be any ground left? The forest would be uprooted.”

“So it is a lie?” I said. “Holy dirt! I have walked all night to get to this place!”

“Not a lie.” He threw his spade back into the empty barrow and it made a hollow ringing sound, like a bell.

The sun was coming from the east, fingers of light through the trees. One fell upon his face, and I saw the lines etched deep around his mouth: my grandfather’s mouth, twisting down on one side as it used to do when he argued with my father. Gusts of wind hissed through the leaves like serpents.

“All that matters is faith,” my grandfather said. He reached forward and touched my shawl just where my heart was, the place where my sick child slept. He withdrew his hand and rubbed his fingers together, as if the material of my clothing, or my soul, were still between them, as if to test what I was made of.

He gestured toward the empty cup he saw in my hand. I looked at it before holding it out to him. He bent and dug the cup into the soil he had thrown into the hole, and offered it to me like a drink. “Your child is dying,” he said. “There will be no more Luarcas.” I looked down at Mateo, his face white, asleep in the shawl. That morning I had licked the crust from his eyes. I had sucked the snot from his nostrils so he could breathe. In the early light, Mateo’s face looked ancient, bones emerging as if in the past weeks he had hurried forward through the years to arrive early at his death: a tiny old man.

“Have you made all the usual promises?” my grandfather asked me. “What you will do, and how fervently you will believe, if only he lives?”

I paused, I looked at him. He wore a gray apron with a pocket, the same one he had worn in the silk house. The pocket held the tiny pair of calipers he had used to measure the cocoons, to see, when the worms were finished, if they had spun the largest grade of cocoon. “Francisca?” he said.

I nodded. “Yes, I have promised,” I whispered.

He knocked the cup from my hand.

“You are right,” he said. “You have traveled all night to be tricked.” I opened my mouth, said nothing. The dirt fell onto our shoes.

There was no holy place left, no road unwalked, and I returned home. It was the week after Eastertide, the risen Lord’s promises bursting into flower on every branch. Dolores and Papa did not seem surprised to see me, nor did they question me about my absence. It was as if my travels were in truth the strange dream they had seemed.

At night I lay with Mateo on top of me, his head tucked under my chin. I could smell the mulberry blossoms, the sweet scent of them sliding down the hillside, through door and windows, through the cracks and under the eaves, down the chimney.

I tried to take his sickness into my body, as healers say they can do. I concentrated and I called to him, not aloud, just my flesh desiring it. My flesh addressing the fever itself,
Come in. Come in. Pass from him to me
. Sometimes I felt it working. Mateo would relax, his breathing would ease, and I would feel a sick shiver in my bowels. But I could not do it completely, I did not have the concentration. His head moved back and forth fitfully on my chest until my bodice came undone. His fretting left smears of mucus, which dried and drew my skin tight like a scab.

At the end the fever grew high and confused him. One night, in the light of the candle as I was trying to wrap him more comfortably, he looked at me and his eyes showed that he did not know me. They opened wide in fear. Every noise, an ember falling to the hearth, made his legs twitch with terror, and I would weep, it seemed to me so unfair. What nightmares could he have already?

Mateo could not talk—not more than a few words—and yet his babblings had the quality of a language that I could not understand, one only he knew. The wasted hours of my tutelage! All that I had learned and none of it of any use to me. My child’s was the only speech I must understand, and I could not.

I considered, for a moment, that I should smother him, that it would be the most merciful thing. I kept trying to pray, saying to myself over and over,
Francisca, Francisca, just breathe, you must breathe, you must hold him
. In the dark I would have a vision of my heart, red and gushing and terrible inside me.

I had seen the hearts of beasts, pigs or sheep slaughtered. As a
child I used to watch my papa skin and gut the squirrels he trapped. He made a tidy pile of the skins, another of meat and one of entrails. His hand cut the smooth muscle that separates the lungs from the belly, and he reached a finger up into the cage of the ribs, feeling for the little heart. Often the tiny heart would still be beating, the foolish little engine of life ignorant of its plight.

My bodice undone, I felt the hot, dry skin of his cheek against me, and I no longer called to the sickness but to my child himself, saying to him,
Come back. Come back into me, Mateo. Come back in and I will make you over again. I will give you another, better house of flesh
. His breathing was so faint it was almost silent, motionless. I got up, I lit a candle and gently separated Mateo’s flesh from mine. I held him just far enough from me that I might look at him, and as I did, it happened, life left him.

What I had dreaded passed without moment, it was nothing, almost. The departure of Mateo looked like nothing, sounded like nothing, smelled and tasted like nothing. There was only one difference: he was suddenly heavier in my arms. I blew out the candle, and I got back into bed with him, and I slept. Slept holding tight to him for I do not know how long.

Dolores said that Papa took Mateo out of my arms, and that I was with them when we buried Alvaro’s son in the mulberry grove, not far from my mother’s dead children, my little dead brothers all in a row by the silk house. There was no one else there, no priest. A little way beyond our small party I saw two laborers dragging a plow through the grass. They were making their way to the hops field, and I watched their slow progress and saw how the big blade opened up the earth and separated the grass like a part drawn by a comb through a woman’s hair. Like the two smooth wings of my mama’s hair swooping away from the white parting. I felt that if only my mother were with me, I could bear losing my son.

Perhaps I was a child myself, for I still so loved my mother that the world around me was a series of reflections of that person I loved best—as if my grief over Alvaro and over Mateo were echoes of my first unhappiness, that of losing her. As if she
stood between mirrors, as if all of reality offered endless likenesses of Concepción de Luarca. The earth opened under the blade, and I watched until the workers disappeared from view. My father’s spade hit stones as he dug, they made a rasping ringing sound against its blade.

Birds filled the mulberry grove. Owls and every other bird. The useless grove of trees, left to grow as it would, never stripped of its leaves, never pruned, was beautiful. Animals ate the fruit off the trees, and their leaves made a yellow fire on the hills in autumn. The grove was now a place where lovers met, where laborers from the nearby flax fields brought their noonday meal, a place where I myself wandered, and one where now I dream I wander.

Mateo was buried on the highest ground of the mulberry grove, under the branches of the tree that was planted first. I would go and sit there and know that my child was in the ground under me, and out of the earth came an ache that got into my bones on even the hottest day. The body of my son would dissolve, it would go back into the earth and into the first tree of all those trees I loved. That tree would have my bone, my flesh in it. I lay under its leaves, my cheek to the earth.

It had been weeks since last I had suckled Mateo, and my breasts had shrunken to nothing. But after we buried him the milk came back like a curse, burning me. I felt it under my skin, hot, like retribution, it pained me from my neck all the way to my groin. I beat my body saying
Why! Why!
Why should it come back now, and too late?

For a week my milk flowed like tears. My bodice, and even my skirts as far as my knees, stiffened and smelled of dried milk. But I would not change my clothes, I would not suffer them to be washed. I chose to wear my misery.

On the second day after my mother died and before I had begun to cry, I listed for my papa every wrong she had ever done me. I reminded him of how bad-tempered she had always been at the worms’ fourth molt. How she had cut off my hair when I complained of her combing it. I said that she had required too many chores from us each day and that she had put the babies before me and my sister. I said that she had gone off happily to
live in a palace and get sick there. A whole litany I had, and one that I rehearsed to myself, silently counting up the slights and wrongs as I sat by her empty bed.

My papa looked at me, and he said, “But, Francisca, child, these amount to no more than an instant measured against years of affection.” I looked into my papa’s kind eyes then, and I saw how it was with me, that I had soothed myself with the memory of little hurts, saying to myself, Well, she is gone, so much the better. Grief lay in remembering how happy I had been in her arms, how loved I had felt then. Grief is the memory of happiness.

All I saw for months after Mateo died was decay. It rained often the rest of that spring, and even where the roads were paved with cobbles, worms writhed in the puddles and I would walk over them and taste death as I watched them pink and blind and squirming. I hated my flesh and begrudged its health. I wished that it would sympathize with my soul, which was so sick and weary.