Poison (5 page)

It wasn’t like any plague we had endured before, nothing like the yellow disease that makes the skin swell tight and shiny before yellow bile oozes from their mouths as they expire. And not the scarlet disease, either, in which, after the fourth molt the worms emerge in a red skin and die. This illness had no dramatic manifestations. It was a simple loss of appetite. The worms would not eat; they would not eat the new leaves. They would rather die than eat them. Their jaws stopped moving, and we knew when they did so that they were finished.

In the morning, before Papa was awake to see it, Dolores and I would run up the hill and into the silk house. We’d gather up the dead worms and throw them on the ground outside. The birds alone profited from my father’s scheme, the crows grew fat that spring. The few worms that did eat the leaves grew slowly, and the cocoons they spun were inferior and small. Too small to sell. On the night we killed them, placing the trays over
the steaming rocks and turning the cocoons with a large spatula until the worms had surely smothered and died, my father was genuinely drunk, drunk on spirits from a bottle and not those born of enthusiasm. He was still drunk the next day when we took our harvest, not enough to fill even a quarter of the baskets from the previous years, to the silk market. There we learned that by the stipulations of the guild the cocoons were of insufficient size to sell.

My father took his case to the guild master. He lowered his asking price. He tried to bribe the guild constable, an old friend of his father’s. But it had not been a drought year, and high-quality silk was plentiful. On our way to market we saw other carts whose baskets were filled with big white cocoons, the sun touching them and making them shine even as we whipped our mule so that we could beat our competition to market. I stood with Dolores and the mule outside the guild office as my father begged, and sacrificed his pride, all to no good. Above us the trees were filled with hawks who awaited the dispersal of the crowds at dusk. Then they would descend to gorge themselves on the piles of scraps left by the butchers. The birds turned their heads at us and blinked slowly, and pitilessly, or so it seemed to me, and I felt myself cloaked in shame.

The guild remained obdurate. It would not yield to any amount of wheedling.

Papa closed the office door quietly behind him, and before we got back into our cart, he threw all the work of our worms away. Each little spun white house with its dead occupant he threw onto the great stinking heap of offal outside the butchers’ stalls in the plaza, and there, as well, did he leave his dreams to rot.

From this time forward, with my grandfather dead and Papa ruined, the fortunes of the Luarca family would be left to the ingenuity of its women. Hardly a bad thing, on the face of it, as Luarca women lacked for neither talent nor tenacity. In fact, my mother was soon discovered to possess a rare gift, and it was this gift that provided her passport to the palace. It was this gift that would save us for a time, before it also brought destruction.

cissoque corde, ut dixi, anima mea fuit ab hac carne soluta
. He spoke softly. He touched my eyelids with his tongue.

How can it be that I was in his arms so briefly? A hundred afternoons, no more. Once each week a few hours stolen, and finally at night, by cover of darkness, each embrace made hot and holy by the risk we took in bedding each other.

“Scissoque corde
—” I repeated.

He put his hand over my lips. “No,” he said. “Translate.” His fingers smelled of incense. The man who taught me to read, who licked words from my eyes and tore grammar from my throat, was a priest.

As he spoke I heard—I thought I heard—the creak of a carriage axle outside. But who would be afield at such an hour? I turned to the window’s blank eye. I could not make out any sound of wheels. It was said that officers of the Inquisition wrapped the rims of their carriage wheels in rags, wrapped them to ensure silence in their approach. So stealthy were they, it was said they wrapped a horse’s hooves, too, and slit an animal’s vocal cords to prevent a whinny or a nicker, any noise of warning. Inquisition begins in silence.

“Listen!” I said to him.

A reflection of the one candle burned in each of his dark eyes. “I hear nothing,” he said. But perhaps the blood pounded in his ears, drowning out the sound of danger.

“Blow out the light,” I whispered. “They came to Rubena last week.”

They had come to the neighboring town, and they had taken away the tanner. They left his empty shoes by the door of his house, to prevent his wife and his sons from the sin of hope, of believing some other fate had befallen him, that he had gone
off with a mistress or been chased by a bandit. Without that unmistakable sign, the people of Rubena might have thought the tanner’s disappearance the work of love, or thievery, or witchcraft. The hide over which he had been working was still on the table, his broad knife dull and sticky with the flesh he had been scraping.

What had this tanner done to attract the notice of the Holy Office? He was said to have been in the practice of changing his linen on Saturdays. At a fiesta he was observed refusing a dish made with pork. He was, someone reported to the Holy Office, a secret Jew.

“Please,” I said.

He snuffed the candle with his hand. “
Scissoque corde
. Francisca.”

The dark was filled with sighs. Whose? Were we sighing? Was I?

I began to try to sort out the verb form. I spoke slowly but did not falter in my translation. My aptitude for language would later count against me, as literacy is held to be a common sign of witchcraft.

“My heart, as I said, split open, and my soul was liberated from this flesh,” I translated.

“Yes,” he said. “
Bonissimus
. Very good.” His lips breathed words onto my palms. Palms that burn still from his kisses, and that itch with longing.

“Who said this?” he asked me.

“Saint Catherine of Siena.”

“When did Saint Catherine die?”

“She did not die. She never died.”

“When was she born?”

“In the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and forty-seven.”

“And when were you born, Francisca de Luarca?” His breath came in short gusts and broke up the words.
Fran cis ca
. We were lying together on the floor beside the table where just that afternoon we had read from the
Legenda
and the
Acta Sanctorum
, accounts of Saint Catherine’s life, written more than three centuries ago by Raymond of Capua, her confessor.

“I was never born,” I said.

“When were you born, Francisca?”

“I have not yet been born.”

Burning. But not the sting of a coal, not the sizzle of nettles or the shriek of scalding water spilled upon you. No earthly burning, this, but how light might feel were it to enter you, were flesh to become literate in senses other than touch.

And of course flesh does, it does—flesh learns everything. Blood flows toward consciousness, bones apprentice themselves, a body’s very skin sets itself a course of study. The only truths worth knowing, the only ones we remember, are those we learn by the flesh.

Where did the burning begin? Wherever his tongue first touched. Yes,
there
, then. Why would he not begin there, and right away? I did not hesitate to open my legs to his tongue. We had no time to squander on modest kisses. Besides, it mattered not where he began, it was as if he touched me everywhere at once. The soles of my feet blistered, and flames licked between my fingers in his hair.

Trying to remain still under the tutelage of his tongue. Its tick-tick-ticking followed by a calculated, expert, teasing pause. He was the clock that made a mockery of time.

My inner eye saw only sky. Despite the late hour and the darkened room, on my back I looked up to a bright day, a day flooded with light. He touched me, and I saw one filament spun by a worm, one almost invisible thread cast between two branches and hung glistening in the air. Bowed by a breeze but impossibly strong. Why did it not break? As soon as I asked the question,
snap
, the strand was gone. I was gone. I was what gave way and snapped.

He pulled away from me. “When were you born?”

I gasped. “Now,” I said. “I am … being born … now.”

He touched me, my belly, my shoulders, my face. I touched him, too. Were we truly there? Was he? Was I? “
Bonissimus
. Yes,” he said. “You are being born now.”

I felt the night sigh all around us, with us, through us. His lips seemed fuller when I could not see them, when I tried to know them by touch. I counted his teeth in the dark, I dug my fingers
into the soft, wet well of flesh under his tongue. I pulled him to me, into me.

“Oh, please, I beg you. Please.” Arching toward them like a bow, trying to divorce my spine from the rack to which they make me fast. “Please. Further. Go further. Kill me. Split my heart, please. I am begging you.”

They do this in the light. In the bright light. Standing near to me, making fast the ligatures, their robes are so long that they drag on the floor. Their hoods obscure their features, and all I can see of my tormentors is an occasional glint of light reflecting on the wet surface of their otherwise hidden eyes.

The robes they wear and the hoods that preserve their anonymity are made of the most wonderful and lustrous silk. Silk so beautiful, so like the silk of which I dreamed when I was a child, that I find myself wanting to touch it. I wonder how it might feel under my fingers.

Their robes are black, but a black that light reveals as containing all colors, a black that shimmers and glints red, green, purple: every hue. Their hoods are white, most of them, and a few are red. Those in red hoods are in charge, they direct those in white. One of them, one only, the one who asks the questions, is the head of this prison. He wears a purple hood.

They do nothing in the dark, of course. They need light to see, they need light to write down what I say, to record my confession. But I can close my eyes. I need not be here, with them.

Scindite cor meum
. Split my heart.

I am remarkable for sheer mortal stubbornness. My flesh will not succumb, and its insistent clinging to life enrages them. Is interpreted as a sort of insolence. But it worries them, too: how can so seemingly frail a creature survive all this without the help of some higher, or lower, power?

We begin with the rack, as usual we begin with the rack. After one White Hood secures my ankles and wrists in their shackles, after he turns a crank until I am stretched as taut as a harp string, another stops up my nostrils with wax. Wax he has kneaded with his fingers until it is warm and pliant, until the feel
of it is as intimate and terrible as that of his fingers themselves. When my nose is sealed, he forces water into my entrails through my mouth, pouring it from a little height, enough that it courses through the funnel jammed between my teeth. It’s either swallow or drown, suffocate.

As they do not want to kill me before they hear what I have to say, they stop after a jug or two, which I generally vomit, and then the Purple Hood begins his questions, after the caution that silence will likely result in further encouragements to make me speak.

I’ve confessed to everything. I have confessed to too many things, so we keep starting over.

Or, as they say, we “continue.”

My unfortunate tendency to laugh under duress also results in continuations. No one can be tortured twice, not for the same accusation—that is the law—but tortures may be continued, as mine has been, for months.

My priest is dead, and my mother, too. Yet they gather evidence against each of them. After all, it is never too late for sentencing, never too late to decide the fortunes of an immortal soul. I am the one in whom truth is hiding: the Purple Hood must suspect this. He asks me questions. About the priest: Had he ever betrayed any disbelief in the sacraments? What was he looking for in those texts? Whom else had he tutored? About my mother: How many times had she been with child? What happened to the bodies of the babies who were stillborn? What sex were those dead children?

Though I was arrested three years ago, it was only last summer that they began to question me. A clerical delay, possibly, for this prison is full enough that most of us die before our records of arrest are reviewed, before even a plan of interview is decided upon. But in my own case, I think it more likely that the Purple Hood’s questions reflect a palace preoccupation.

The court is in a paroxysm over witches. Witches are found everywhere. When the
Bellavente
sank last season off the coast of Málaga, twenty women were burned in that port town, burned without trial. Rumor has it that their hearts were gouged out and cooked separately in a big pot, the same in which their
accusers said they had stirred up the storm that sank the unfortunate ship. And those twenty women died a hundred leagues away from the palace, a full three weeks’ journey from Madrid, where last August King Carlos made his official statement. Stood quavering on the royal balcony in the Plaza Major and read his words from an unrolled parchment. “The failure of Queen María Luisa to get with child,” he said, “is due to sorcery.” His voice was weak, his words had to be repeated by an official crier. The crowds, faces tipped up toward their king, were strangely silent. After the proclamation they dispersed without the usual rioting and commotion, without the ordinary noise of assembly that is carried down through the cobbles until the prison’s locks and hinges whine.