The Sisterhood (32 page)

Then they both saw me, and Josefa shooed me away and later told me that if I loved my mother to forget what I had heard. But fear had entered our lives.

Not long after that incident, my mother received a letter from my father, with the signature of his secretary, ordering that my brothers be sent to school, to the Franciscans near Zaragoza at once. My mother did not like it, but of course she obeyed. The boys’ chests were quickly packed and their valets prepared to accompany them. The boys were in high spirits as they kissed us good-bye, excited by this new adventure. Consuela and I waved our handkerchiefs from the tower until they were tiny specks on the plain below. My mother’s eyes were red, and she looked worried.

A new serving maid joined the servants. It was she who now lit our candles and brought meals to our chamber. She had slanted eyes that looked in different directions at once, which I thought gave her an evil countenance.

As winter gave way to spring, both my mother and Consuela suffered from sickness of the stomach. Josefa and my mother seemed to share an unhappy secret concerning my mother’s need to rest in the mornings and her desire for honey, while Consuela grew pale and thin and lethargic, with no interest in her lessons. Her eyes grew larger and larger as her face became drawn. She no longer wanted to sing or play checkers. “Nearly fourteen,” murmured my mother anxiously, “perhaps she is beginning her monthlies—it often makes girls tired.”

But Consuela grew too weak to leave her bed, and my mother would remain by her side all the day, coaxing her to sip a little broth when she was awake, and praying when Consuela slept. I hovered anxiously, wishing Consuela would wake in good health and join me in our lessons and games. Instead, Consuela’s beautiful hair began to fall out, and her eyes sank into her head. My mother was ill herself with worry.

“Come,” said Josefa loudly, pulling me from the sickroom one day as my mother and the slant-eyed maid were busy tending my sister. “You need fresh air and you shan’t get out of helping me with the mending this time!” I hated mending, but it was a fine spring day after the cold of winter and I was glad to leave the sickroom. We took our sewing—Josefa her large mending basket and I the pretty painted workbox my father had given me to hold my thimbles, embroidery silks, and scissors—to the east tower where Moorish defenders had once rained arrows on the Catholic army below. Josefa had placed thick cushions in the window embrasure that made a wide stone seat.

Josefa fussed about threading my needle for me and pinning things unnecessarily, then taking the pins out again, clearing her throat as if to speak, then saying nothing. Finally she nudged me and said, “Look, the swallows are back from Africa.” Above our heads the swallows were coming and going with bits of straw, and
amid the chirping of the older birds there was a cheerful peep-peep of babies just hatching. For the next few days the weather stayed fine and we watched the parent birds fly tirelessly back and forth with insects in their beaks for their babies. Josefa watched more than she sewed.

“See,” she said sharply one day. “A new male bird is flying around the nest above your head. Watch what happens now.” The new male bird went into the nest and emerged with one of the babies in his beak. He then flew off and we saw a tiny speck fall from his beak to the earth. One by one, to my horror, he took the babies, flew a little way off, and dropped them.

“To attract the mother to be his mate, he kills the babies of her first husband,” whispered Josefa, looking over her shoulder. Days later a messenger arrived on a lathered horse. There had been an accident at the Franciscan monastery where my brothers were at school. They had been seen sitting on the rim of a well in the cloister in their recreation hour. When a bell summoned them back to their lessons my brothers did not appear. Angry at their disobedience, a monk went to fetch them, but they were nowhere to be found. The entire monastery searched for them high and low, and finally a lay brother who went to draw water made a horrible discovery—all three at the bottom of the well, drowned. If they had cried out for help, no one had heard them. It must have happened very fast, one of them toppling in by accident, the others trying to help him and drowning, too.

My mother fainted.

A week later, as the summer heat rose from the plain below the castle, Consuela died, too.

My mother tore her hair and wept. Then she received a terrible letter from my father. He repudiated her utterly. My mother spent more and more time on her knees in front of her private altar. Josefa never left my side, and would allow me to eat nothing that
she had not prepared with her own hands. The slant-eyed serving maid fell down the stone stairs to the kitchens, breaking her leg and cracking her head so badly that she could no longer walk steadily or serve at table. From her corner in the kitchen she mumbled she had been pushed, but the other servants, like Josefa, did not like her and she was ignored.

Uneasy months passed and my mother’s waist had thickened. Another messenger came. My father had been lost at sea a week after leaving Seville. A freak wave, they believed, for all his experience it had taken him by surprise one night as he walked on deck. Masses would be said at court for his soul. The queen, who had always been kind, sent word that my mother should remove to the court for her lying in. Josefa said refusal was not possible, that we must take protection where it could be found. We began the slow hot journey across the plains to Madrid. When we arrived, the court was in mourning. The crown prince was dead. Rumors flew.

We were assigned rooms in the palace, but when autumn came they were drafty and cold despite fires and the braziers. My mother moved heavily from room to room, and then took to her bed. There were dark hollows under her eyes when she looked at me, and when she lifted her hand from the bedclothes to stroke my cheek her fingers were puffy. I was allowed to sit quietly beside her on the bed and play with the rings she could no longer wear that lay in a heap on the chest next to her bed. As the nights drew in, her bedroom was lit by two thick tapers, one on either side of her bed, which lit up an ebony crucifix on the wall above. Drafts made the candles flicker and the long shadow of the crucifix shifted as if Christ writhed in pain. My mother’s rings glittered in the light of the candles like dragons’ eyes—red and green. The rest of the room was deep in shadow. I imagined something was waiting there, holding its breath.

Each night when Josefa brought her supper my mother would ask, “Is there an answer yet?” Josefa would insist that first my mother must eat until, finally, she obeyed from tiredness and took a few spoons of soup, then a few sips from a goblet of Venetian glass holding sweet wine that smelled of almonds. Josefa would pat her mouth gently with a linen napkin. Then, night after night she gave the same response. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

“Send him word again, Josefa! They say he alone knows how to go about it, to send the children. He is my only hope now.”

Josefa told me to pray to help my mother get better. I took my beads and closed my eyes against tears, praying as hard as I could. My prayers had done Consuela no good. But Josefa at least came into the room with a happier expression one evening and bent over my mother to whisper something. I crept closer and caught the words, “He has set the matter in motion, sent for…” I could not hear the rest.

One gloomy night at the end of the month the rain fell heavily and the wind blew hard. Above my mother’s bed, the head with its crown of thorns seemed to turn this way and that as the tortured body writhed in agony. I was startled to hear a strange cry from my mother’s bed, like that made by the bird of many colors my father had brought home from his travels. The servants hated that bird, saying it shrieked with the voices of the damned, and it was left behind when we came to Madrid.

The cup of wine in Josefa’s hand fell to the floor and smashed. A servant was sent running for the midwife, and soon after for the doctors and an apothecary who entered, tearing off wet cloaks. My mother made the noise again and again and I put my hands over my ears. A priest hurried past, accompanied by a sleepy boy bearing the Eucharist. A page tugged Josefa’s arm to say someone was waiting.

She turned from the bed, pulled me from my knees, and dragged me toward the door. I pleaded to stay but Josefa shook me hard, and in a fierce whisper told me that I must be a brave girl; my mother’s prayer for my safety had been answered. A tall nun was there, silent and still as a statue with a cloak over one arm. She unfolded it. “I am Sor Arsinoe,” she whispered. “Make no sound and put this on.”

I pulled away, but Josefa snatched the cloak and wrapped it around me so tightly I could not move. “Go with Sor Arsinoe!” Josefa ordered as I struggled and kicked. “If you love your mother, go at once! Go!” I was led down the darkened corridor and a back staircase that led to the kitchens and pantries, then through a small door used when tradesmen brought supplies. A carriage with the curtains down waited in the rain. The nun pushed me inside and here I am. Josefa and my mother turned against me and sent me here. I will never forgive them.

From the Chronicle of Las Sors Santas de Jesus, Las Golondrinas Convent, Andalusia, Autumn 1551

Marisol has sulked for the past year—it is how she keeps sadness from overwhelming her. And a fifth girl, Sanchia, has joined the others. She is nine and came after the swallows left and smoke was rising from the valley, where fires burned to clear the fields. How horribly apt. When she was lifted unconscious from the closed carriage, at first we thought she was ill, possibly dying. But Sor Sophia who brought her said she was only in a deep sleep. Because of the terrible pain of the child’s burned legs and feet, she had been obliged to feed her dose after dose of a sleeping draft during the journey.

Now that she is healing and can walk again, Sanchia is restless. Her scarred legs and feet cause her pain and she cannot sit still long for her lessons. She skips, fidgets, and dances from the moment she rises until she is finally persuaded into bed for the last time. The Abbess coaxed the story from the child with the help of a plate of turrone, which she broke into little pieces and fed to her bit by bit.

The soldiers came when we were sleeping. They threw the furniture and our clothes about and ripped up the cushions. They
said that where there were Jews, there was gold and jewels. They laughed when they found the candlesticks that my mother lit on Fridays when the curtains had been drawn. They were hidden behind a painting of the Virgin, together with Papa’s prayer book in Hebrew, which he promised to teach me to read someday. Then they found the silver wine cups that belonged to Mama’s family, with the six-pointed star that is a secret. Mama put her arm around me and said the soldiers were laughing and happy because they were playing a game, just like the game Papa and I played when I pretended to be the organ grinder’s monkey. Papa would pretend to grind his organ and I would dance. Then he would look up and say “Where’s the little monkey?” and I would run and hide quick as anything until my grandmother and grandfather coaxed me out with sweets, the way pet monkeys are coaxed with nuts.

And then the soldiers took us away, to the place where there were a lot of people locked together in the dark. Mama said that was a game, too. Soldiers took Papa and my grandfather, and when they came back Mama cried and I said it was a bad game and I was afraid and wanted to go home. Then they took Mama, and when she came back she did not speak to me. A man came to see Mama and Papa. They talked through the bars and Mama went down on her knees.

Mama got her voice back a little after that and told me that next morning she and Papa had a surprise for me: they knew a magic spell that would turn me into a real monkey. I would be hiding with them, and when she and Papa said the magic words, I would become a monkey and must scamper and dance away like I always did.

The next day the soldiers came again. In place of our clothes we had brought from home, they gave us horrible gowns that scratched. They made us take off our shoes and hold candles, and then everyone left the prison together. Outside there were crowds of people, pointing and shouting “Carrion!” and “Murderers!” and spitting at us.

Mama told me they did not matter because I was going to be a monkey, but the magic would not work until we were in the right place. Then she and Papa would say the spell, and I must not be afraid but scamper to the nun standing in the shadows. Mama pointed to a tall figure and said the nun would give me sweets and then change me back into a girl before I knew it. But I must not look back or the spells would not work.

She said there would be a fire and it might burn my feet a little, but a monkey could jump over it. She pointed the way I must go, and repeated what I must do over and over until I said, “I know! I know! Just there!” Then they tied Mama and Papa together with ropes, with me squashed between them. They didn’t tie me, though.

My parents pushed toward the edge with me between them when the music started. People around us were crying and begging, but beyond them was noise and cheering. I heard my mother ask my father if he were certain, and he said in a shaking voice that all eyes would be on the fire; a child would not be seen if it were quick. He told me sternly not to lose sight of the nun’s white wimple—look, she was kneeling in the shadows. “Wait for the magic spell,” he said over and over, “then run straight to her.”