Poison (34 page)

The spring before my grandfather died, Mama fell ill with a fever the same night that Papa came home with new eggs. My father worried that her hot skin would kill the worms before
they hatched, but instead the fever hurried the eggs to hatch sooner than we expected, and they burst all over my mama and papa in their bed one night. They awoke to find their linens alive with tiny worms, no bigger than ants.

Mama stood carefully on the pallet. She shook with chills as Papa picked the worms from her long hair and her white nightdress. I remember watching from the bed I shared with Dolores as Mama stood silently, her face pale. I could not see the worms from that distance, and so I did not know what my father was doing to her. On his knees and peering so closely at the folds of her nightdress, the end of her long braid in his hand, he seemed, to my childish eyes, to be performing some curious obeisance to my mother.

After he was done, Papa gathered up the sheet with all the worms inside, and he ran up the hill in the dark to the silk house. Until the mulberry was in leaf we had to feed them osage, and that year we feared that the cocoons would not be the best grade, that they would spin waste silk, which broke when the comb girls unwound the cocoons. But, as it happened, the worms performed well, and the cocoons fetched a good price at market.

Long after the failure of the trees, my papa would talk about the better years that had preceded it. “Do you remember, girls,” he might say, “when the worms hatched early and how your mother stood in her nightdress as I collected them?” And he would stare into the fire.

Increasingly, my father became a man interested in salvage, in anything that had been saved. The more dramatic or miraculous the rescue, the better. The year following my mother’s death, he entered into the curiosities trade. Not for any profit such enterprise might bring—though we were poor enough that we had no money for sugar or for candles. Papa traded in curiosities for the comfort they brought him.

The things for which he walked miles each month to Epila were these. A pair of breeches, whole and undamaged, found in the belly of a giant sea tortoise. A hat fashioned of thick wool felt with a handsome buckle that bore the marks of lightning. Its wearer had not been harmed by the storm, “Because of the
buckle!” said Papa. “The buckle saved him!” A set of false teeth carved from ivory that survived a fire. Their wearer did not, but the teeth were unscorched, and bequeathed to Papa by his old friend Señor Encimada of the colored-silk experiments—who set his house on fire one night building a device to conserve lamp oil—they provided Papa’s entry into the curiosities trade. Papa exchanged the teeth for the hat, which he kept for a month and then traded for a dog that retrieved objects cast into deep water. But the animal had an appetite that matched its exertions, and my father traded it for a wooden bosom, a fragment from a figurehead, the carved lady who had graced the bowsprit of a sunken ship: that much of her had washed ashore. I liked her—I would, being my mama’s child—but he traded her away, too. He went through quizzing glasses that never broke though they were run over by carriages, a featherless bird that ate nothing and drank nothing and yet lived, and other odd things. Finally, Papa had the breeches from the tortoise’s belly, and those he liked too well to consider parting with them.

I would catch him examining the fabric, turning the breeches inside out to look closely at the seams, the gussets and codpiece. They were silk, of course, they were a gentleman’s pair dyed yellow like goldenrod, and Papa would touch the buttons and the knee laces. “See here how they are unhurt,” he would muse aloud to himself and to any incidental audience. The breeches were cut for a man of smaller stature than my father, or he might have tried to wear them. As it was, I saw him put them on his person once or twice. He drew them up as far as he could, and he turned his leg this way and that to admire how it emerged from the miraculously surviving fabric. As his father would have observed, the happiness of some is always at the expense of others.

Any person, any thing that had escaped ruin: my father took pleasure in these. On the last night of his life he asked for that pair of breeches, and when I brought them to him, he touched them with his eyes closed, and he smiled.

AST OF THE ROYAL RESIDENCE, TICKET SELLERS
at the bullring close one and then another booth. No one has arrived for this afternoon’s contest between the celebrated Avianco, a beast that has this season gored five toreros and trampled three times that number of picadors and banderilleros, and Juan de Juni, his latest challenger. In his stall, Avianco bellows, but no one comes. Señor de Juni and his entire entourage have joined the masses of citizenry walking west toward the palace. I can hear them overhead. Their footfalls shake mortar from between the stones.

Outside the palace the rioting has not abated. The original theater crowd has swelled and gains new fervor with each report and rumor. “Give María to us!” people scream. “Why does the slattern hide! Of what is she afraid? Of justice?”

The throng at the gates has grown large enough to interrupt traffic. The Calle Mayor is impassable, and carriages and carts are halted as far north as the Gran Vía. With nowhere to go, horses skitter in their traces and kick at one another. Shrill whinnies pierce the air.

Though it is not yet dusk, and the hour when on most days the last frenzied business would have the plaza bustling, the marketplace is empty. Merchants did not open their shops at all today, vendors never arrived. Even the rats are nowhere in evidence, and the hawks have forsaken the butchers’ stands for the palace roof.

Below them, the little maid Obdulia enters María’s bedchamber with a basin. She sets it on the edge of the vanity table, pushing aside hairbrush and earrings, a breviary with its spine unbroken, tortoiseshell combs, combs of silver set with tourmaline and garnet, combs of gold set with emerald and alexandrite. Ivory combs. A pair of teak combs inlaid with jet flowers. So
many hair ornaments all heaped together, one and then another falling to the floor. There is no room for the requirements of illness among all the clutter of cloisonné boxes, families of tiny dogs made of silver, baubles and trinkets, bottles of scent, and a wooden toy, an acrobat no taller than her hand, a little man walking a tightrope stretched between two sticks. When the sticks are squeezed, he does a jaunty flip and returns to his pose on the ropes.

The toy belonged to Carlos many years before. It was something that his wet nurse gave him—yes, something that my papa carved. Obdulia makes room for the basin, and the little man falls to the floor. She picks him up. She squeezes the sticks to make him execute one and then another flip before setting him down and turning to Jeanette.

María’s maids are trained in matters of ribbons and buckles and curtsies. They know little of medicine or apothecary arts. Why should they, when their flesh is young and healthy? Their sudden immersion in illness—in bandages, basins and purges, in fomentations and diaphoretics, in sweet oils, barley waters and astringents—leaves them shaken, by turns hysterical and subdued. But they do their best. As instructed by Severo, once each hour they try to settle their mistress as comfortably as they can over a large shallow basin, so that she may urinate in it.

This time when they come, María is dreaming that she has been locked, by her mother-in-law, in the works of a great clock. She is standing on one tooth of a cog, which turns slowly, carrying her toward the door to a huge birdcage. She holds a golden key, a key she must fit to the lock on the cage door. The timing is exquisite, she knows she must be ready to get the key in the lock quickly and climb inside the cage. Otherwise, she will fall from her place on the tooth of the cog, she will be ground between gears.

When Obdulia wakes her, María sobs once with fear as she senses herself falling through clockworks. She looks at her maid without recognition. The process of getting the queen over the basin is awkward, and Her Highness slips from Obdulia’s grasp so that one buttock fills the china cavity, the other remains on the sheet. Still, it is the best the two maids can manage. Their
mistress moans so terribly at every touch that they dare not try to adjust her or center her body over the basin.

It has been more than a day since the queen has passed any urine. María tries, but she cannot, and the effort brings a terrible burning between her legs, as if God had set her secret parts on fire in some unwonted punishment for lust. “
Please
,” she begs the maid, “just leave me be.” But in this, her requests are overridden by her physician’s. María closes her eyes. Why do they wake her? Why don’t they leave her in peace? Even bad dreams are better than waking. She can be awake only so long before the vomiting starts again, as if consciousness itself brings on nausea. Perhaps when they go, she can fall back to sleep. Perhaps her old trick of the orange trees will work.

Each night when the queen went to sleep, when at last she closed her eyes, she would think about the orange trees. One thousand orange trees in silver tubs.

Picture them. They are beautiful.

The tubs are solid silver, polished bright. They bear a design of the sun, of Helios in his chariot, horses plunging around the sides. But unless directed, you would not even notice the tubs, the artist’s work would be wasted, because the trees themselves claim all of your attention. In the winter, when streams are frozen, when beneath the surface of rivers there is only the distant and ghostly passage of water, when all the world is frozen into silence, the halls of Versailles are clamorous, are resounding ringing pealing with the sight and scent of orange trees in bloom. Impossible, but the trees bloom because their king desires that they bloom.

The light comes in the countless windows, and the warmth of the weak winter sun is magnified by its passage through the panes. When it touches the white blossoms, it encourages them to release their fragrance into the long galleries down which the princess Marie runs, dodging fat old comtesses in their sedan chairs, their weight cracking the kneecaps of their footmen like so many walnuts.

One thousand orange trees in silver tubs. Each tree as tall as the princess, or taller. The leaves shining, the blossoms white as
snow, and the smell so sweet that when Marie Louise put her face to the orange flowers, it was impossible not to weep.

The queen brought three orange trees with her when she came to Spain. Their roots were bound up in wet moss and wrapped in sacks. But when the bridal party was transferred from the ferry to litters there was no one to carry them: they were too tall and too heavy. And so the trees were left to die in the Pyrenees. María thinks of them, gray and leafless. By now, even their dead, dry boughs would be gone, the wind would have blown them over.

Some nights, when Carlos came to Her Highness’s apartments, while the queen mother was in the gaming room playing solitaire, the king and queen would read aloud together that tedious first chapter of the book of Saint Matthew. After a year or two of marriage, María could recite it, she did not need to see it before her:
Solomon begat Roboam and Roboam begat Abia and Abia begat Asa and Asa
 … Forty-two generations from Abraham to Christ. Generations uninterrupted by flood or exile or any other disaster. The holy litany was meant to incite Carlos’s manhood, to provoke him to get with begetting himself and continue the endless chain of holiness. To the queen’s mind, there were few things less arousing than recitations of Scripture, but it was Carlos’s confessor’s advice that they recite this little bedtime prayer, or wish. In the dark, after the liturgy, the ineffectual fumbling began. When it was over, the king left the queen in her rumpled bed, and Obdulia came in to dress María for sleep.

As the maid began to brush her hair, María closed her eyes, her head nodding with fatigue and with the gentle tugging of the brush.
One thousand orange trees in silver tubs
, she said to herself. And they appeared before her, and she began to count them. She pictured herself walking down one of the galleries in the château; she willed herself to feel her fingertips brush each branch as she passed. Sometimes María would fall asleep before Obdulia finished brushing her hair, already dreaming as her maid dropped her nightdress over her head.

The queen’s happy dreams are always set in Paris, always of
some endless fete, a party in full progress that began days before and will go on for days longer. She dreams of a courtyard full of footmen and carriages, a parterre swarming with pages. Everywhere she looks, someone is bearing trays piled so high with food that they spill over in doorways, and grapes roll along the floor so that guests tread on them. The princesses all stay in bed past noon, drinking dishes of chocolate and eating thickly buttered bread served with violets on top. The small, bright heads of the flowers yield under their sharp white teeth.

The dances begin after midnight, and the princess spins and swirls in rooms whose walls are of mirrors. Surrounded by mirrors, the silk and the lace, the velvet brocade, and the plumes and the jewels, all the layers of finery go on forever, each dancer multiplied a hundred times, each princess become a hundred princesses. Endless sweeping skirts and silk dancing slippers. Not only are French ballrooms built of mirrors, they are built with such marvelous cleverness that the sound of one violin is refracted and refracted until the notes of the single instrument sound like a whole orchestra. But there is not merely one violin, no: there are one hundred. And twelve harps, harpsichords, dulce melos and piccolos.