Poison (29 page)

When he told me of the little girls, he said of Tita that she was small. “Small like you, Francisca,” and he held his hand out and placed it on my head. I felt that he was seeing her there instead of me. He did not care so much about his mama or papa, all his love for family was spent on those two lost little girls.

I had no breasts to speak of, and one Thursday, with his razor, Alvaro took away the hair covering my secret parts. He looked at me. “You are … you look like a little girl,” he said. “Just like a little girl.” And I could see he liked me this way. His eyes were steady as he looked. “Turn around,” he said, and I did. I enjoyed his rapt attention. His pleasure in making me a child and his knowing me carnally as I looked so like a child caused me some uneasiness, but not enough that I resisted him. No, not at all.

I have never known another person with so unwavering a gaze. His eyes blinked less often than was natural. They were so dark, it was hard to discern where the colored part left off and the middle began. I let my head slip beneath the surface of the still, black pool of each pupil. Submerged, there was no logic, no means to question. It was as if I had attempted to speak with my head under water: words bore no discernible shape. Ill formed, they surfaced, popped and evaporated too quickly to interpret.

That first afternoon I had heard my own drowned objection as I reached forward to undo his cassock. When Alvaro allowed me, after so many buttons that my fingers were ringing—perhaps with guilt rather than exertion—when he let me push the robe from his shoulders, I smelled him, smelled the scent that had tantalized me all the while, a scent almost eclipsed by books and ink and the dust of the confessionary. That essence of him, which had come through the grille and the curtain, a salt sharpness, as if all the seasoning withheld from my poor life were there in his flesh, springing forth.

“
Da, Domine, virtutis manibus meis. Impone capite meo galeam salutis
.” Give virtue, oh God, to my hands. Place on my head the helmet of salvation. With these words he had put on his cassock. With a different language I removed them.

My lessons recommenced at the usual hour, on Thursdays, after the bell that rang nones. Time collapsed and stretched at once. Some afternoons each moment hung in the light like a red jewel, like a single seed of a pomegranate: I would be aware of each one breaking under my teeth. Ten minutes became a sea of time and longing. Another day the bells of vespers seemed to follow those of nones without a moment between them, and I would wonder how it was that so many hours had elapsed without my even drawing a breath.

I closed my eyes under him. I closed my eyes and I saw deer running or hands kneading dough. I saw ten spoons in a box, a bottle of walnut oil. I would see a cloud of flies buzzing over a bowl. I never knew what I would see. Paper burning. One page with nothing written on it, clean white, and the flame catching a corner. Then suddenly the whole thing on fire, crumpling.

Some afternoons, as the last light of the sun shivered and disappeared suddenly like a candlewick drowning in melted wax, church bells calling softly through the trees, calling the faithful to drop their earthly chores and turn to God; on such afternoons there came that moment where flesh smothered consciousness and sought its own destruction. Eyes closed, everything black. Feeling him on me, his weight, I’d see Alvaro’s broad thumb, just as it looked on Ash Wednesday, approaching my forehead as if to crush reason and sensibility and will.
Remember, Francisca, that ye art dust and unto dust ye shall return
.

“Fuck me!” I would say to him. “I want to be under you.

“Please!” I said.

He pulled back and looked at my eyes to be sure I wanted what I asked for. I nodded, and he did fuck me, hard enough that it hurt, and I liked that, too, his hurting me. I wanted him to reduce me to no more than a shadow, the place where I had lain under him.

He pushed me away, sometimes, refused me. Once he laid his head on the table and I wondered, were his tears soaking into the binding of the books from the great library at Salamanca? But when he looked up his eyes were dry. He knew he could not help himself, or me. I took off my clothes and kicked them under the table. It was cold, on winter afternoons, but I did not
feel it. For a long time Alvaro just looked at me, saying nothing, and I was not ashamed. I returned his look.

“Give me the razor,” I said. “I will take off the hairs. I like to.” And after that, it was always I who did the barbering.

I reached out to him and he caught my wrist. How quick I grew at undoing all those priestly buttons, thirty of them—my fingers flew nimbly over each clerical closure. I undid him and held him in my hand. Pressed my tongue in the little hollow where his throat met his collarbone, licked up the salt taste of him.

He kneeled and walked on his knees to me. And I crawled away, taunting him until he lunged and caught me. One hand on each buttock, he pulled me back to him, my hands catching at the chair legs.

“These are the loaves,” he said, biting my ass, and he put his hand between my legs. “And the fishes.”
Panis et pisces
. Smelling my secret places.

“Loaves and fishes. And so now you know the miracle of abundance, Francisca. Here is the feast that is never consumed.”

Profaning, yes. But what if there isn’t any God or gods listening? None at all? Or what if there is, and he likes his creation to take pleasure in its flesh?

What if it is unbearable sadness to find oneself an angel, so much love and no arms with which to embrace?

N MADRID, IN THE DAYS WHEN SILK WEAVING
was the most lucrative and competitive of all the industries in Spain, it was not unknown for a business to disappear outright. A cracking, creaking, rumbling shudder would shake the cobbles loose in the street; horses would shy, but before their drivers could whip them on through the dust, a shop would have collapsed and sunk under the street, its foundation undermined by hidden passages. So secretive and sly were the silk mercers that their district was riddled with underground tunnels, tunnels that allowed workers to come and go without a rival’s knowledge.

The richest of these mercers was Catalano, who sent spies to ateliers in Lyon, thieves to workshops in Paris and Marseille: small, mean and desperate men who stole sketchbooks from the best French weavers and brought the season’s latest patterns home to their unscrupulous employer. Before a certain weave had even rolled out of the great looms in Paris, Catalano had it draped over his arm and under the nose of some grandee who paid him in gold for his ingenuity and trouble.

This mercer had little competition in Madrid. The only man to stay in business, the only one at all, was Alessandro, a weaver who would not stoop to dishonesties, but whose own fabrics, based on designs he had made himself, were so beguiling that he still made a living, enough to keep him and his one child.

For Alessandro had a beautiful daughter whose name was Ana and who was almost ready to be married. Alessandro had been worrying over her dowry and how he might contrive a good match for her when Ana fell ill with a fever that sapped her strength and spirit. Formerly cheerful, the delight of her father and all who knew her, she lay upon her bed, and when she was not sleeping she wept.

Who would marry Ana now? She grew ever more wasted and sad, and the weaver gave all he had saved to worthless physics and apothecaries, until he had no dowry for her. Not even a peasant would have her, Alessandro worried, for the girl was ghostly, although her beauty had not vanished.

Finally, as there was no cure for her illness, Ana died.

Alessandro was stricken. He cloistered himself in his workshop, caring nothing for himself anymore. He had no earthly desire beyond a fitting burial for his daughter, and he determined to use his loom to make her a dress for all eternity, a dress so magnificent that when Ana rose to greet her Lord she would outshine every princess of all the ages. Lacking any assistance—no drawboy or a single soul to help him—Alessandro was forced to reset his loom alone, and it took him three days and three nights, during which he did not sleep or eat but worked without ceasing.

When the loom was ready, he threaded it with the last silks that he owned. He used colored threads as bright as jewels, and threads of silver and gold thread he had saved for many years because there had never before been any call for such richness.

What Alessandro loomed was not merely a pattern or a design, but a bewitchery of silk, a magic cloth the beauty of which was born of his despair. It was a pattern of bees sipping nectar, of flowers turning their heads to the sun, of birds and deer and every graceful creature. Of all bounty and goodness, of stars and planets, sun and moon. It was everything that Alessandro’s heart had known when he held his daughter in his arms, and all that he could not bear to part with. When he saw what he had made, when the last span rolled out from under the reed, Alessandro knew that the wearer of this fabric would steal every heart, just as surely as Ana had stolen his. He knew that it was a cloth that could make him the richest silk weaver in all of Spain, in all the world. But Alessandro would sell none of it, and would weave no more than that required for his daughter’s dress.

At the funeral Mass, Ana’s beauty caused rioting. Though she lay still on her bier, she was as radiant as a full moon. Sparks flew from her unbound hair, her lips smiled as she wore the dress her father wove. Princes who had flocked from distant
cities fell in love with the dead girl. They wept upon her breast and kissed her cold mouth. Mourners crowded so close about the coffin that there was trouble in getting the lid nailed shut, for so enchanting was she that everyone had to touch her, no one could be dissuaded from putting a finger on her breast or tracing just once, just for a moment, the outline of her cheek. But finally, after the last of them were beaten back from her body, Ana was put in the earth, and then her father died, too.

After Alessandro was dead, his goods and all that was in his poor workshop were sold to meet the debts he left, for he left nothing else, no mourners and no kin.

And the rich mercer Catalano came to the auction. He bought Alessandro’s loom, just as it was, still set to make the fabric that had created Ana’s dress, and he had the loom carried to his shop. He ordered that it be set up with his best silks and his gold and silver thread; and before he commanded his workers to start the loom, he bought himself a hamper filled with the finest wines and sweetmeats, for Catalano wanted to be ready to celebrate the fame and even greater wealth he anticipated. But, as it happened, he never had cause to make merry.

The rich mercer’s factory was incapacitated by Alessandro’s loom. Drawboys could not hold their threads. They dropped them, and they tangled and caught in the works. It happened this way over and over again, for when the workers looked at the cloth coming from the loom, they went crazy with love, they lost their reason.

At first, Catalano was not deterred. He outfitted his draw-boys with blinkers, and when they tore them off, he fired them and hired blind men. Still, even blind workers were drawn to the cloth. They fingered it as it emerged from under the reed; they, too, dropped the threads and stilled the loom. He gloved them, then, but they tore their gloves off and left their posts to touch the fabric, and the loom clacked on untended until the heddles snapped and the warp beam broke.

Catalano had the loom repaired, and he traveled to Cádiz, where he bought twelve African slaves off a boat. He had their hands burned until there was no sense left in their fingers, and
he blinded them, too, but to little purpose. They sucked the cloth and died of love.

So the rich mercer went on, spending all he had accumulated over the years, determined to make Alessandro’s loom work.

He called in priests and had the machinery exorcised, consecrated. He squandered days of prayer. He fasted until he was a wraith, until he was an utterly broken man, but he never made more than a few inches of Alessandro’s cloth, a scrap much fondled, sucked and picked on, which he took with him to his grave.

“There, that is a story that my grandfather told,” I tell the queen. “He would tell it at night, that story or one of his other tales, when it was summer and the days were long. My mama would let my sister Dolores and me walk up to the silk house to sit with our grandfather after supper, and that is when he would tell us tales.”

Is it true?
María whispers.

“I told you, it is a story my papa’s papa told me.”

Yes, but is it true?

“Do you believe it?”

Yes
.

“Then it is true.”

She nods.

It must be a very good poison that unsticks the spirit from the flesh, allows it to come and go as it pleases, leaving the flesh to founder alone.

The queen thinks she is dreaming. What happened was this: the retching finally shook her loose. María choked. She coughed, writhed, and then she was free. She left her feverish, aching body in her bed, left it in the company of basins, bandages and useless remedies. She came seeking company, seeking solace. She came and found me.