Saving the World (5 page)

The boys were now just down the hall, calling out for me.

I sighed and gathered the beads, putting them back in the pocket of my dress. Tonight, after the boys were asleep, I would string them back together by candlelight and then use them to pray for forgiveness and peace.

W
HEN I CAME TO
the door, the group of a dozen or so boys caught sight of me and braked to a stop. They knew the rules. “A visitor in the front parlor!” they announced as if this news somehow excused their shouting and running at full speed indoors. I would have corrected them, but the look on their faces stopped me. It was a look I knew well, excitement qualified by apprehension, the younger showing more excitement, unsuspecting as they still were of what the world was likely to bring them. A visitor could mean good news: someone in search of a foundling to raise, a childless couple or the more questionable lone man looking for a boy to do his work. Maybe by nightfall one of them would have a new family. This thought was running through their heads, to be sure.

“A man in a uniform,” Cándido offered, his eyes widening, impressed.
A man was a further novelty in this world of children and the women who cared for them. As for the uniform, that was not unusual in our garrison city with its busy port, though a uniformed man's presence in a foundling house was somewhat puzzling.

“Did he state his business?” I asked, looking from one to the other. Despite their excitement, they seemed pale, weary, too. It had been a long day for them as well, I reminded myself.

“He didn't say.” Cándido had become the spokesman. “He asked us if we wanted to serve our king!”

My heart sunk. Could the army now be drafting boys? For the first time in years we were not at war with England or France. But since May the two powers had been at war with each other, our neutrality doubted by both. “And so we are arming ourselves in preparation for going to war to prove our neutrality!” Doña Teresa had remonstrated, shaking her head, as if the king were sitting before her, ready to be improved. “Are you sure the visitor did not make mention of his business?” I asked again, trying to control the worry in my voice. The boys picked up my moods the way a pail of milk picked up odors. “Did he give a name?”

The boys had sensed my worry. Apprehension now had the upper hand on every face.

“His name is … is … F-F-Federico.” Andrés, the older of the Naya boys, had a bad stutter. As he spoke, I cast a warning eye about, lest any make matters worse by taunting him.

“His name is not F-F-Federico!” Francisco mocked, having just joined us. No doubt he had stayed behind with our visitor, hoping for some advantage that could only be given to one. He was a big boy and a bully. One of the ones I had to struggle to love. “His name is also Francisco,” he boasted. He would remember that.

“
Don
Francisco,” I corrected. A courtesy owed to any man, no less one sent by the king. “Please tell Nati to attend to our visitor. Do so quietly,” I added, expecting a noisy stampede to the kitchen.

Francisco shook his head. “The gentleman said he had orders to speak to the rectoress, Doña Isabel Sendales de Gómez,” he rattled off my full name.

“Sendales
y
Gómez,” I corrected. Was the fresh boy taunting me?
De
would only come to me by marriage. I had been teaching the boys about names. But why should they remember? They who often came to us with no names.

My old discomfort rose up, a peppery nervous feeling I knew well. Rarely did I attend to outside visitors. Occasionally, a dignitary or a bishop had to be greeted or an official required a report by the rectoress. Almost always, these visitors were accompanied by Doña Teresa, who would have forewarned them about the rectoress's strange habit. “Is Doña Teresa with our visitor?”

“No!” the boys chorused. “He came from the king,” they repeated. “He said he wanted a p-p-private audience with our rectoress,” Andrés explained, blinking as if the stutter were afflicting his eyes as well. I eyed Francisco.
Don't you dare
.

There was no help for it but to go to the front room and attend to our visitor. “Boys,” I ordered, “I want each and every one of you to ready yourselves for prayers.” Groans. “Afterwards we will have our supper.” I herded them down the corridor, stopping at my chamber door. “Go on. I'll be there soon.”

“Are you going to cover yourself?” Francisco asked, calling attention to my vanity. I had caught him making faces behind my back, something rare in my boys. To most, I was the first face that had hung over their cribs and loved them into boyhood. But Francisco had come to us late; a drunk uncle had used and abused the boy, beating him within an inch of his life, which was why the boy had ended up at the hospital next door, miraculously recovering and becoming our charge. He had already been toughened by the hard ways of the world. “You are to help the younger ones get ready,” I reminded him, ignoring his question altogether.

I watched for a few seconds as the boys strode away, then slipped into my room. Quickly, for I had kept my visitor waiting long enough, I removed my apron and shook out the folds of my skirt. I felt the heaviness on one side—the beads! I scooped them out and lay them on my bed to take care of later. As I did so, I heard a noise, too purposeful to be our cat, Misha, or the supper Misha would be after at this hour. I lifted the side of the cover let and peered under the bed.

There he was, my little Benito, our most recent admission. His name had been carefully printed on a piece of parchment that had been pinned to his tiny jacket. Three years old, I judged him to be when I opened our front door and found him tied to the post where visitors bound their mules and horses. That morning, he had clung to that post, screaming as if he were being tortured when we tried to loosen his fingers. Finally, I managed to carry him indoors, and from then on he clung to me. Slowly, I was weaning him away, for I could get nothing done with a child underfoot or in my arms. He had improved, no longer crying when I left him with the others at their activities, but at first chance, he'd steal away to my room and hide under my bed. I did not have the heart to punish him. Clearly, the boy was suffering enough with some nightmare terror in his head.

“Benito!” I tried to sound cross. I went down on my knees. How long had he been there? “Come at once!” I ordered. But the child stared, wide-eyed, and squirmed out of my reach.

I could not address this matter at present. My delay was now veering into rudeness. I let the coverlet fall again on my other visitor and hurriedly lifted my mantilla over my head. I did not have a glass to check my appearance. Indeed, I avoided all bright surfaces that might offer my reflection back. Perhaps it was all vanity, as our Francisco suggested, and not courtesy to the fainthearted as I told myself, but I always hid my face before going out into the world of men.

T
HE PARLOR HAD ONCE
served as Doña Teresa's receiving hall and it still gave off an air of its former elegance. She had left behind some of her fine furnishings: the thick carpet with a richly colored pattern, which her husband had purchased from a sea merchant; a long table on which visitors could lay down whatever they carried; some somber-looking chairs, which were uncomfortable to sit in, purposely so, Doña Teresa explained, chuckling. Her husband disliked the endless run of visitors and petitioners at his doors. So as to discourage them from lounging at their ease, Don Manuel had ordered his master carpenter to make him a half-dozen straight-back chairs with hard, ridged seats. They were impossible to sit in for more than minutes at a time. Doña Teresa always laughed heartily
when she told the story. Sometimes she did seem to delight in her deceased husband's recollected naughtiness.

As if he had discovered Don Manuel's ruse, I found our visitor standing, his back to me. He was perusing the large tapestry Doña Teresa had left behind on the wall, a depiction of the Virgin on her knees, head bowed, as the angel Gabriel delivered the mystifying news. The moment was known as one of the joyful mysteries, but as the rectoress of a foundling house I could not imagine that joy would be the response of a young virgin upon hearing such unwelcome news. “Let it be according to your word,” she was reported as saying. One of those scriptures that, the more I lived, the harder I found to believe. There were many such doubts these days, best kept to myself, I was discovering.

I had entered the room, undetected, a skill I had perfected over the years, wishing to be spared the gawking of the curious. I took this opportunity to study our visitor. He was not much taller than myself, short for a man, though his uniform gave him the air of being somewhat larger than he actually was.
He came from the king!
We could expect Cándido's refrain for days on end. Our poor boys had so little to recall of consequence that wasn't grim. It would be a while before the memory of this happier incident dimmed.

“Oh.” Turning, the man looked startled to find a veiled lady in the room. Between us on the long table lay a rolled-up parchment and a book whose title I could not make out. Perched beside them was his tricorn hat. He glanced at it as if considering donning it in order to remove it in ceremonious greeting. Instead, he gave me a slight inclination of his head. “Doña Isabel Sendales de Gómez?”

Y
Gómez, I thought, but did not correct him. So our Francisco had merely been echoing our visitor's mistake. “How can I help you, Don … ?” I dared not risk the wrong name. My boys could be highly inaccurate in their reports.

“Francisco Xavier Balmis, honorary doctor to the royal chambers, surgeon consultant for the armies”—this explained the uniform—“director of the royal philanthropic expedition of the vaccine …” He stopped as if
he were tired with his own importance. Or perhaps he had heard me sigh. I had to be careful. Being covered allowed my face to reflect feelings openly without fear of discovery. But sighs were audible.

“I come today in my capacity as director of that expedition, Doña Isabel. It is an extraordinary mission, decreed by our good king Carlos IV.” He bowed his head slightly at the mention of His Royal Highness.
Our? Good? King?
I could hear Doña Teresa plucking each word like an untuned lute string. She would beg to differ with this description, I thought, recalling Doña Teresa's rants. Perhaps our visitor's association with “our good king” was why she had not accompanied him.

“This expedition will bring salvation to millions who would otherwise perish from the smallpox …”

Smallpox
—the word itself was an infection! I felt my skin prickle. My old scars pulsed as if they were opening again, mouths repeating the word:
Viruela, viruela.
My head swirled. I caught myself just in time, both hands on the table. Briefly, it crossed my mind that I had not worn my gloves. The marks on the backs of my hands would be visible.

“It is a warm evening,” the stranger noted. Perhaps he had observed my dizziness, was suggesting I lift my veil. But I had seen his eyes taking in my figure, for the smallpox had not made a total ruin of me. He was imagining, no doubt, a lovelier face. I was not yet ready to disillusion him.

“I am sorry for your loss.” He had made the common mistake of thinking my black mantilla and attire were mourning clothes. Indeed, there had been a loss, many losses, but they had occurred so long ago, I could not lay claim to fresh condolences. “The heart is not on the head's timetable,” Doña Teresa sometimes counseled me. She had been mourning as long as I had, indeed longer, for her son had been stricken by the same wave of the smallpox that my family and I had been, and by then Don Manuel had already been dead a year. “It is difficult to lose those dear to us,” our visitor added quietly as if he had endured such losses himself.

Again, I did not correct him. I wanted him to think of me as a widow, a woman who had once been wanted. He was an older man, some years my senior, very elegant in his royal uniform, his dark hair lightly touched with
gray—or was that powder on his hair? What business had such a one with our foundling house? Perhaps Don Francisco's business was with me as a survivor of an epidemic. How could I serve him?

“You might have heard of the new vaccine?”

With a hospital next door, there were always rumors. Some years back, I remembered hearing talk of a doctor, a crazed Englishman (“They are all crazed,” Doña Teresa liked to say about the English) who had been purposely infecting boys with what he claimed was a harmless pox that would protect them from the actual smallpox. The claim had sounded as ridiculous as the tales of pilgrims who touched the bones of the apostle at Santiago de Compostela and were instantly healed of their limps, their harelips, their excesses of humors.

“This vaccine is nothing more than a benign form of the pox that afflicts cows,” our visitor went on. “Cows, Doña Isabel!” he repeated as if delighted that the physical salvation of man should also issue from a stable. “You have heard it said, no doubt, that English milkmaids have lovely complexions?” He touched his cheek with the back of his hand. I shivered as if he had touched my own face.

“A certain Dr. Jenner in England asked himself, Why? Why should milkmaids be spared the smallpox while princes and peasants everywhere were being cut down?” Our visitor stopped as if to let me ponder this riddle as well.

“God works in mysterious ways,” Father Ignacio, my confessor, would have replied, as he did to my own misgivings and doubts. It was an answer that I was finding increasingly unsatisfying. Perhaps this Dr. Jenner had felt the same.

“What Dr. Jenner discovered was that in milking cows affected with the cowpox, milkmaids would catch the infection. Small blisters erupted on their hands, which disappeared after a few days. Nothing more. However, when the next wave of smallpox hit their villages, they were spared, as if they had already had the smallpox itself.” Our visitor beat his fingers on the table as he spoke this curious observation. His eyes glowed with feverish intensity. I had never heard a scientific matter described so passionately, so simply. The doctors next door rarely deigned to explain themselves. And
when they did, their explanation might as well have been in English for all I understood of it.