Poison (32 page)

María’s eyelids tremble but they do not open, and the queen mother reaches forward and gives her shoulder a little shake. “I’ll read to you, then, shall I?” she says, and she takes out a volume of patriotic histories. The stories are boring, and her voice lacks inflection. Soon the maids fall asleep, the secretary botches one and then another contract, and, having used up all her parchments, she too falls into an inky stupor.

María twitches, dreaming. When the counterpane slips and exposes her little dog’s nose and one gray paw, Marianna looks at it with distaste.

“I must leave you now,” she says, though she has not had time to finish even one tale, not gotten even as far as the union of Castile with Aragon. María stirs, opens her eyes. And the
secretary wakes and quickly gathers up ink and parchments. The queen mother pauses in the doorway.

“Oh,” she says. “Your friend, the comtesse. She has left.”

“Left?” María says softly.

“Yes, by night, and without so much as a word. A search of the guest apartments has not yielded anything—nothing that might implicate the comtesse, but Carlos has sent forces after her, nonetheless.”

“Implicate her?” María whispers. “In what?”

“Why, in your poisoning, of course.”

María closes her eyes.

The queen mother hesitates at the door for a moment, but when her daughter-in-law says nothing more, she leaves. The maids awaken, the little dog’s paws twitch. Under closed lids, María falls asleep once more.

In her dreams, Juana la Loca comes and snips and snips with tiny golden scissors.

“I do not like Marianna, either,” the mad queen Juana says, and she lays her scissors on María’s dressing table, bequeathing them to her.

OME WEEKS IT SEEMED TO ME THAT NOTHING
happened, nothing except waiting to see him. The rest of my life was reduced to a tasteless gruel of existence, like the penitential fare they feed us here. There was nothing but anticipation, and by Wednesday, when but one day separated me from him, I was already heartsick, because I knew that it would be so fast, our time so short, then gone and another whole week of nothingness to endure.

Did the week begin or did it end with the day I was with him? Thursday was consumed as if by a bright fire. Then Friday’s burnt, dry husk. Seven days until our next meeting were too many to endure, and I began tortured vigils below his window, the sound of his quill scratching my heart.

I lost what ability I had to be careful.

When Sunday offered the solace of going to see him say Mass, even my prayers were profane. I asked God to give me the priest all for my own.

Mama told Dolores to keep the blood of my first period, she would be gone when I became a woman, but she said Dolores should save the cloths so that I might use them later for a spell her mama’s mama taught her. A love potion: mistletoe, holy thistle, the little cloths, one hair from the head of your beloved and water passed thrice through a shift worn next to your heart for seven days. Boil them and heat them all together over a fire made with birch wood. Pour the potion they make over your love’s meat. Not white meat of a fowl, not meat of a rabbit with a racing fickle heart, but red flesh: mutton or venison.

My own spell was a little different. I poured myself out over his words. We took each other on the table where we read together, we did not move the pages, and I spilled my monthly flow over the manuscripts. My blood stained the story of God’s
blood. Alvaro pulled back, his fingers wet with my flow. He looked at my life on his hand, he put his fingers in his mouth and tasted me.

Did my spell enslave him? Was it from that point forward that he, too, lost his reasonableness and discretion?

“What do they say to you there in the dark?” I would ask him what sins people confessed. Dolores. My father. And others as well. Everyone.

At first Alvaro refused to tell me such confidences, but now he answered me, he put his hot mouth between my breasts as he spoke. “Whose sins would you have me betray?” he said.

I thought for a moment. There was an old gossip in our town, Doña Petra, whom I did not like because she had caused trouble for my mother. She had said that Mama’s dancing so long at her wedding was wanton. When Mama came home ill, she told me that our mother was prideful and that she had finally been humbled.

“What are Doña Petra’s sins?” I asked Alvaro.

“You will not believe me if I tell you,” he said.

“Tell me anyway.”

“She says she is troubled by self-pollution.”

“Oh, what a liar you are!” I said. I pushed him off me.

“I swear it to you,” he said, and with his breath hot on my neck I believed him. Eyes closed, I saw Doña Petra upside down in her house, her skirts around her head and her fat old legs in the air, her hand between them.

“What about her husband?” I asked. “What are his sins?”

Alvaro sighed. “He thinks the baker is a cheat, he thinks the chandler is a cheat, and the miller, the smith and the wheelwright. Because he thinks everyone is out to cheat him, he steals from them first.”

“He steals!”

“Nothing much, nothing that anyone misses, so he isn’t caught,” Alvaro said. “Or if he is, if the chandler knows of his slipping, say, a length of lampwick into his pocket, then the chandler adds another maravedi to the price of the lamp oil he came to buy.”

“So, he is right in thinking everyone cheats him.”

“Yes.”

“And does the chandler come to you, then, and tell his side? Does he confess to charging too much for lamp oil?”

Alvaro nodded. “It is tedious, isn’t it?”

“What about Dolores?’ I said. “Her sins must be dull.”

Alvaro looked at me. “Why does your sister hate you so?” he asked.

“Is that what she confesses!”

“Yes,” he said.

I looked at him. “Our mother loved me more,” I said.

He said nothing, and I went on. “I made sure that she did. When I was a tiny child and just learning to speak, Mama saw me walk in circles around and around my sister, who was sitting by the hearth, and I was snatching at the air by her head, her neck, her heart. ‘What are you doing, Francisca?’ said Mama, laughing. ‘Taking Dolores’s love away,’ I answered.

“Mama stopped laughing. She pulled me from my sister’s side and she shook me and told me not to be so wicked. But I did not change. I only grew more clever at getting what I wanted. And, despite my being wicked and unworthy, Mama did love me more.” I rolled onto Alvaro, ground my hipbones into his groin, felt him harden. “She could not stop herself any better than you can,” I said.

With my tongue in his mouth, how could Alvaro make any answer? But I ought to have listened to what he said about my sister. It should have made me more careful.

Alvaro told me that my father cried in the confessionary. He cried and said that he was afraid of dying. Afraid that my mama was not only not in heaven but nowhere.

“I try not to think on it,” he said to Alvaro, “but it is like a great black wall before me, from the earth at my feet to the stars above, a black wall and nothing behind it. No heaven. No Concepción.” And he wept.

“Don’t tell me any more about my father,” I said after I heard that. I did not like to hear about his crying while Alvaro listened.

I was hungrier and hungrier for tales about other people, though. I could not rest until I knew what everyone’s sins were.
Most were sad to me—even Doña Petra’s was sad after I stopped laughing and thought about it. They all had to do with longing and lonesomeness. My sins, as well.

Now, remembering our conversations, I wonder if Alvaro did not give me everyone else’s soul instead of his own. if it was because he would not give himself to me that I wanted to know everyone else’s stories. He always kept some part of himself hidden. He fed my desire for communion with other people’s secrets. This did not make me love him any less. No, it inflamed me. I wanted him more and more. All the others whetted my appetite for him.

He used to call out while we fucked. A man of such composure with his books, when he was inside me he uttered syllables that made no earthly sense. He spoke a new language, and his speech was not human. Either that, or it was utterly human. He cried out with a grief-stricken sound, an awful, low moaning, a keening, lamenting howl.

“What are you thinking when you make such sounds?” I asked him once when we were spent and lying beside each other. A moment before, he had had me on my knees from behind, his hands on my shoulders. He drove into me until my lips bled for biting them—I didn’t dare scream—and when we were done with each other, we crawled under the table to sleep. We curled together, sometimes we slept upon the very pages we had studied and then scattered to the floor in our haste. I would wake first and then look at him, he would seem as if dead, he looked that peaceful, his breaths so shallow, and his face so still. His eyes traveled under their lids, but his countenance was as smooth and untroubled as the village idiot’s.

If I did not sleep, I would drift and dream. Words floated into my head, bits of what we had read together. I thought about the knowing of the body. Like the first story in the Scriptures, the man and woman who are father and mother to us all, they cannot keep themselves from this carnal knowing, it is irresistible to them. The Scripture calls it having one’s
eyes opened
.

Knowledge, unbearable knowledge, of everything all at once: the knowing that makes you naked. And not knowing with the head, but with the heart.

“What are you thinking when you make such noises?” I asked him, again.

It was dark, and he took so long to answer that I thought he had not heard me. Finally he said, “I think the thoughts that I have been instructed never to think. I feel what the fathers of the Church have told me I am not to feel. I think of
possession
. I think,
She is mine
. I think,
Francisca, you are mine
.” He rolled toward me, held me, drew in a breath so close that I felt the air rush cold past my cheek.

“I know that it is wrong,” he said. “At least, I know that I have been taught that it is wrong to feel as I do. This is the danger of carnality, my confessor would tell me, but in the moment I cannot regret it. And I wonder who the devil is that he could make wrongdoing feel so much like … like a gift from God.

“I am afraid,” he said then. “Afraid because I do not want a God who could refuse me this. Who could refuse me
you
. When I am with you is the only time I believe that I will live forever, the only time that I do not care if I expire this day, this night.”

I touched him. I put my hand on his belly, always so hard, muscles tensed as if braced for a blow. “I want to hold you until we are dead, both of us,” I said, my mouth on his throat.

As a child I always conceived of the world as if it were one of my mama’s plates, the earth laid out flat. It never made much sense to me that it was round like an onion, some of us clinging like ants to the sides or the bottom. No, I thought of it the way the ignorant persecutors of Columbus did, and I saw myself as someone running along the rim of the plate. Heaped on the plate like some good meal was the safety of the world and all its comfort. Outside, over its edge, was endless chaos and plummeting down. Each of these—safety and surfeit and their opposite: falling—each held its attraction for me, and it was an equal attraction. Only on the edge, only with Alvaro, was I balanced between the two.

I was not innocent of how it was that a woman got with child, but having always been told that children were the reward of virtue, I had no worries about myself and that matter. After all, I was doing something that was certainly wrong. Had my mama
lived longer I might have known better, but as it was, I was surprised when Alvaro said one day that we had to have a grave conversation. What we were doing was dangerous for many reasons, and one was that I could find myself with a problem like that which ruined the Barrancas, all of whom had died of shame, more or less. It was said that Bonita Barranca, as beautiful as her mama, had lain with her brother, and her papa turned her out. After she was gone, he died in his bed, and we heard that her brothers, who went away, died, too. It was plague, I guess. The old women of Quintanapalla said wolves had eaten Bonita.

“I don’t care about that,” I told Alvaro. “Let them eat me, too. I’d rather be dead than stop.”

He was silent. After a moment, he said, “There is something we might try.” I could tell he was of uneasy mind about it. Still, since anything seemed to me less dreadful than abstinence, I ended up consulting a witch.

There was a trick that certain healers knew, something that had spread north through Spain, a device of the Moors who used it on their camels so that the beasts should not calve and delay a desert journey. And then they turned it on their women. Well, as the work of Moors, it was held doubly wrong by the Church, but Alvaro and I, we had stepped outside the boundary of holy laws. Harlots used this trick, and it worked for some.

“How does a man of the Church know of such things?” I asked Alvaro.

“I am surprised you did not guess, Francisca,” he said. “What teachers do I have besides books, and the confessionary?”