City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  While she waited for Beatriz, the Abbess took up her pen to respond to the padre.

  LATER THAT GLOOMY morning, in the pale light filtering in from the clerestory windows above, Beatriz followed the turnings of the corridor to the convent chapel where Inez’s body lay. “Comfort Gemita. That is the most important thing you must do. But if you can, try to also find out if she knows any secrets that would explain why Inez died.” This was the task Mother Maria asked of her. Beatriz knew how to pry secrets out of Gemita. What she did not know was how to comfort her. She had no idea what it was like to have had a living sister who then died. Her mother had told her so many times about the dead baby, her older brother, as if she were supposed to mourn him. But he had died long before she was born. She could feel nothing for him. She tried to feel sympathy for her mother. Sometimes she did, but most of the time she just felt lost, as if her mother cared more for the lost baby than she did for her living daughter. But it was not as if her mother did not love her. Sometimes her mother loved her too much. Needed her too much.

  Inez’s poor little sister had practically no mother at all. And no father. All the girls knew that the Alcalde doted on Inez and ignored his sad younger daughter.

  Beatriz carried a cross of guilt with her to the chapel. Inez had asked for help, and Beatriz had ignored her. But how could she have known that Inez was serious? Inez always lied. And teased. When she had asked Beatriz to come and stay with her that night, she might even have been setting a trap to get Beatriz into trouble.

  Now Inez was dead.

  Beatriz’s steps slowed as she neared the chapel door. Her neck tingled in anticipation. She was afraid. Never had she seen a dead body. Suppose Inez were to sit up in her coffin and accuse Beatriz of abandoning her in her hour of need? Beatriz blessed herself and told herself that no such thing was possible. Then she blessed herself again and forced herself to walk on. She would not let fear overcome her. She was a Potosina. She would be brave, like the Cid she had read about in her father’s book. A book girls were not supposed to read, but that her mother allowed her. For her mother wanted her to be modern.

  She pushed open the chapel door just enough to peer in and see Gemita kneeling with her arms crossed on the bench in front of her, her head down. She wore a beautiful dress. A silk petticoat trimmed with silver lace and broad double ribbons the color of the green leaves of the trees at Lake Tarapaya in the spring. Her waistcoat and girdle were embroidered with pearls and cunning little knots of gold. A white lace mantilla covered her dark hair. Her body was so still, she might have been asleep. Or dead.

  Beatriz gulped and pushed the door farther. The hinge squeaked. Gemita lifted her head and turned and gave Beatriz a wan smile. Her eyes and nose were red. Her sweet round face wore a puzzled, questioning expression, as if she had a fateful decision to make and didn’t know how to choose.

  Beatriz genuflected and knelt between Gemita and the bier. The cedar coffin was surrounded by huge silver candelabra, but it was plain—as befitted a nun, rather than a wealthy Spanish girl. There was not one silver ornament on it. Inez was dressed in her novice’s habit. A rosary was wound in her pale hands.

  That was as far as Beatriz’s eyes would go. She blessed herself and closed them and bowed her head long enough to say an Ave. Then she forced her eyes open and looked right into Inez’s face.

  There was nothing frightening about it. It was peaceful. And beautiful. That wide mouth that had laughed so uproariously was closed and calm. The skin of her cheeks was whiter, but as flawless in death as it had been in life. She looked as holy as she had said—in these past few weeks—she wanted to be. “Are you all right?” Beatriz whispered to Gemita without taking her eyes off Inez.

  “I am an unworthy person.” Gemita’s voice was a little hoarse.

  Beatriz took her chubby hand. “You aren’t.”

  “I am,” Gemita insisted. “I am here keeping watch with my dead sister and all I can think about is myself. Do you want to know what I was thinking when you came in?”

  Beatriz did, but she did not say so.

  “I was thinking how my father always sent Inez to church in his calash, but he sent me here in a lowly sedan chair. He has never cared for me. I was thinking that now that Inez is dead, maybe he will learn to love me the way he did her. Maybe I will get to ride to church in the calash. Is that not an awful thing to think?”

  “No,” Beatriz lied. “I think you are just too upset.”

  “I am not upset enough. I should feel bad for Inez, but do you know what I have been wondering? I have been thinking that if my father died, too, I would have half his money and be very rich. Then I could go to Spain and live like a princess.”

  Beatriz squeezed Gemita’s hand tighter and thought, If I had all that money, I would take Domingo Barco out of that sad little house where he lives with its rough furniture and its dirt floor. I would bring him to live with me in a mansion. Then she bit her lip and asked God to forgive her, because she did not want her father or her mother to die.

  “My father loved her because he thought she was good,” Gemita whispered. “But she was bad. I am good, but he has never loved me because I have no arts to make him. Is it a sin for me to want my father to love me as much as he loved her?”

  “No.” The sin was in Beatriz’s own heart, because she could think only what freedom it would give a girl if her parents did not love her so much.

  “My mother has been crying since she heard the news last night. She could not come because she is so ill. Not even her medicine helps her. She once cursed Inez in public. Did you know?”

  “I heard.” All of Potosí had heard the story.

  “My mother keeps screaming that she is responsible for Inez’s death. I think it is because of that curse she made.”

  “She just feels bad. It is her grief. Inez is with God now. We must remember that and not be sad.” The last words came automatically, and Beatriz wondered if she believed them.

  A nervous shadow crossed Gemita’s face. “Do you think she died in a state of grace?”

  Beatriz quickly crossed herself. “She told me that she would spend the rest of her life in penance, in mortifying her flesh.”

  “But she was very bad,” Gemita whispered, and turned conspiratorially. “She read forbidden books. And she knew about things she shouldn’t know. Hidden papers that she said would protect me if I was in danger. I think they must contain the words to forbidden Indian spells. Do you think she is in hell?”

  Beatriz looked again at the peaceful face of the girl in the coffin. “She repented. God can forgive anything to the soul who repents.” Padre Junipero told them this often. But suppose what Gemita suspected was true—that Inez had truck with Indian sorcerers? She would spend a long time in purgatory.

  “She went out at night.” Gemita’s voice took on an insistence, as if she wanted to believe that Inez was in hell.

  “She did?” A drop of jealousy tinted Beatriz’s shock.

  Gemita nodded vigorously and then straightened her mantilla. “She had a lover.”

  “No!” Beatriz’s shout echoed in the silence. The candle nearest her sputtered. She stared at Gemita in utter disbelief.

  “She told me herself. He is an actor. Before she came here to the convent, she said she wanted to run away with him.”

  Beatriz’s jaw sagged. She could not speak, only stare into the serene face of what remained of Inez.

  “I don’t know how she did it,” Gemita moaned. “I wish I did. I would do it, too.”

  “Do what? Leave the house to meet a man?” Gemita was only thirteen, still a baby to have such a thought.

  Tears streamed from her eyes. “To make my father love me as much as he loved her.”

  Beatriz put her arm around Gemita, who sobbed and sobbed into her shoulder.

  LATER THAT MORNING, despite the Commissioner’s dire warnings, the funeral of Inez de la Morada took place in the convent church of Santa Isabella de los Santos Milagros. The Abbess would
have been hard-pressed to stop it without a major scandal.

  After Beatriz told her about Inez’s lover, the Abbess had considered postponing the interment. This new information made her wonder if her conclusion had been right. Perhaps Inez had gotten pregnant. Lesser girls had taken their own lives to hide such a sin.

  The Abbess had consulted Sor Monica. “No,” the Sister Herbalist had said. “I examined her body thoroughly. She was not . . .” Her voice faded. “She was no longer as she—”

  The Abbess suppressed her impatience and provided the words the shy Monica could not utter. “She was no longer a virgin.”

  Monica nodded and grimaced. “But she was not pregnant. The womb was not at all swollen.”

  “Perhaps he threw her over, and she had a broken heart.”

  “It would have shown in her humors. She was not out of balance. I had never once in these three weeks seen a sad expression on her face.”

  So the Abbess did what her heart had dictated from the first. She let the burial go on, especially in the face of what had transpired out in the town.

  The Alcalde Francisco Rojas de la Morada had accepted Padre Junipero’s advice—urged on him also in Mother Maria Santa Hilda’s letter of heartfelt condolence—to accept his daughter’s death as God’s will. Given the season and the promise of daily prayers for the repose of her soul, he relented and agreed to bury his beloved Inez quietly in the vaults beneath the floor of the choir loft of the convent, along with the saintly Sor Elena.

  The Alcalde told only his closest associates the tragic news and instructed them that he wished to forgo the pomp ordinarily accorded the deceased of such an important family. His devoted followers—Don Felipe Ramirez and Don Antonio Cerón and the members of his guard—took him at his word. But many others—Don Juan Pasquier, Don Luis de Vila, the Treasurer of the Cabildo, and Don Melchior de Escobedo, the contador—saw the Alcalde’s request as an indication of the depth of his grief and an opportunity to demonstrate their sympathy and loyalty to the most powerful leader among them. Working through the night, they organized a procession to escort him to his daughter’s funeral.

  When the Alcalde and his nearly prostrate wife—supported by her African maid, Bernardina—left their palacio that morning, they found a grand funeral procession ready to follow their carriage to the church: First came the Indian guard, known as the King’s Yancanas, wrapped in black wool blankets and wearing black armbands. Several non-Basque mine owners wearing mourning caps were accompanied by their Indian workers, who wore their typical black hats but with the brims turned down. Then artisans of the city, wearing black woolen shirts and high-crowned hats; they carried bows and arrows at their backs and trailed the flags of their guilds along the paving stones. The caciques—Indian leaders—of Potosí and many of the surrounding towns, dressed in Spanish-style mourning, dragged their black woolen mantles along the ground, holding on to the corners with their left hands. A company of harquebusiers, dressed in black taffeta with their weapons reversed, their drum heads loosened, and their flags trailing, was followed by a company of musketeers, who wore black bands on the arms of their dark silk uniforms. All of the King’s non-Basque officers and the non-Basque members of the Cabildo marched slowly in single file to the sad drum beat. Even the Father Provincial of the Franciscans was in the train. White wax candles burned in the windows and on the balconies of Morada’s supporters.

  Confused passersby, having heard no public announcement of a nobleman’s death, wondered at the elegance of the procession.

  The Alcalde’s carriage at the head—draped with crepe and accompanied by his guard on horseback—alerted the populace that this was not just another group of Holy Week penitents. Rumors spread. That the Alcalde’s beautiful and dissolute wife had succumbed to one of the many drugs she was known to take. That in anger at his daughter’s committing herself to the convent, the Alcalde was staging a mock funeral for the girl, though no one could think what priest would officiate at such a ceremony. Seeing the elaborate outpouring of sympathy, some even believed that the Alcalde himself was dead. Whether this last opinion was caused by the widespread anxiety over the currency, no one could say.

  Many citizens ran ahead of the procession to the plazuela outside the church of the Convent of Santa Isabella de los Milagros, where a bonfire warmed the damp, overcast day. Those who managed to catch a glimpse saw the Alcalde alight and himself give a hand to his suffering wife. They and his guard and four or five others, including Doña Margarita de la Torre, a widow who was rumored to be the Alcalde’s mistress, entered the church. The doors were then closed, leaving the hundreds who had marched in the cortege locked out and Don Juan Pasquier, who had spearheaded the arrangements, stupefied.

  Once inside the church, the Alcalde and his men repaired to a small room left at his disposal as the church and convent’s main benefactor. After they stored their cloaks and swords, the men returned to the main church and marched silently with the ladies up the center aisle. The Alcalde’s younger daughter, who had spent the night in vigil at the convent, prayed near her sister’s casket. In every corner, more than a thousand candles burned. Their light dazzled off gold-leafed altars and beams and the golden decoration on the richly colored paintings of the Virgin and the saints.

  Up in the choir behind a rood screen, only two small candles stood watch at the coffin of Sor Elena. The church and the convent were built side by side and shared a common wall, but the only communication between them was through an arched opening to the second-floor choir room, where the nuns went to attend Mass and other services in the church. Otherwise, the sisters used the chapel within the convent for their private community devotions.

  Wearing their black veils over their faces, the Sisters of Santa Isabella chanted a piercingly sad requiem for the deceased.

  “Populus ejus et oves pascuae ejus.”

  Sor Olga’s lips chanted the words. She knelt erect and proud. She was one of God’s people and a lamb of His pasture, but she was dignified before God. Not some poor blasphemous servant who resented her master. She was clear on the object of her indignation. Maria Santa Hilda chanted distractedly at her side, nearest the remains of their blessed sister. Sor Olga seethed that Sor Elena’s holy memory was being polluted by joining her requiem with that of the damned soul whose body was down in the main church. Elena, who had spent nearly fifty years of her life in the order, was one of the first to come to Potosí. Olga remembered her face, luminous in prayer, inspiring them all in the daunting task of imploring grace and mercy from their Creator for this venal, violent city. Sor Elena deserved a Mass of her own. Deserved to have the whole city turn out to honor her holy life. Instead, all she had was this shambles—second place to the unworthy daughter of a worthy father. A daughter aided in defying her father by the proud Abbess who was every bit as willful as her young protégée.

  The bell at the vestry door rang out. Father Junipero, two of his brother Jesuits, and two Indian altar boys entered the sanctuary of the main church. The sweet aroma of incense wafted up to the nuns in the choir, who intoned the Introit of the Mass for the Dead. Sor Olga prayed that God’s judgment of the Abbess, sure to come at some point, would arrive with due speed.

  TURMOIL ROILED BENEATH the calm exterior of the Abbess. Compelled to bury Inez here by an irresistible conviction of the girl’s innocence, at least of the crime of suicide, she had committed an act the Bishop and Fray DaTriesta were sure to call defiance. The power of Inez’s personality, even in death, had seduced her into endangering herself and the reputation of her convent.

  A force that she could not withstand had taken possession of her. Something that had nothing to do with her orderly life of carefully planned steps taken to achieve ends of obvious merit. Something outside herself, or so deep within that it seemed outside. Like the sexual passion of sinners. Or the ecstasy of the saints.

  She chanted the mellifluous phrases of the requiem and, by slow, quiet concentration of her will, absorbed their peace and be
auty until they calmed her spirit and surrounded—but did not soften—the steel resolve within her.

  After the coffins were placed in the vaults beneath the choir floor, she stayed behind while the other sisters went off to their cells to contemplate their loss in private. When she was sure she was alone, she took a lit candle from in front of the painting of Santa Barbara and stood in the center arch that overlooked the church. This was the prearranged signal—made necessary by the certain presence in her convent of a spy for the Inquisition. Her talk with DaTriesta had confirmed this. But still this clandestine act made her feel soiled, as if she were arranging a sexual assignation.

  Three loud raps on the sanctuary door in the church below answered her. She blew out the candle, slipped behind the tapestry on the wall to her right, turned a hidden lever, and opened a secret door that only she knew existed. She had had the builders put it here because she had imagined they might one day need to take some innocent who claimed sanctuary in the church to safety in the convent. Now she was using the door to go in the opposite direction.

  She closed it behind her and silently descended a musty, narrow stone staircase leading to another concealed door that from the church looked like nothing more than a painting of San Juan Batista. She opened it and stood immobile, waiting for him to approach, heart beating as she imagined a girl’s heart would beat at the approach of a lover.