I am Venus

by Barbara Mujica

  It wasn’t until two weeks later that Juana saw her again. She was struggling to help the cook, Bárbara, carry provisions into the kitchen. She limped in pain, but it was clear she wanted to make herself useful. Bárbara was not an overly patient woman. She had a household to provide food for, and she preferred to dispatch her tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible. Marketing at dawn, peeling, shelling, cutting, mixing, stewing, and baking in the mid to late morning to prepare for the midday meal. Then more peeling and shelling for the light repast at dusk and another in late evening. Still, she waited without comment as Lidia lugged bundles of vegetables, jugs of oil, animal carcasses, and condiment pouches across the patio with the help of Andrés, the houseboy. Lidia worked in silence, always with her baby nestled in a sling snug against her back.

  “He kept his rage close, like a dog on a tether,” she whispered by way of beginning when she was finally ready to tell her story. It was a beautiful day in early spring, and Juana was relaxing in a rocking chair by her brazier, embroidering. Arabela sat on a cushion by the flame, tatting lace, and Julia crouched next to her, sewing a gown for Ana.

  “Go on, Lidia.”

  “You won’t send me away, will you, señora?”

  “No, I won’t send you away.” She sighed. She had been thinking about a childhood story of a snake caught under a rock. A farmer saw the creature squirming and writhing, so he took pity and freed it. No sooner had the farmer moved the rock and freed the snake than it reared up his head and hissed. Then it bit the farmer on the ankle.

  “How can you pay a good deed with evil?” gasped the farmer right before he died.

  “It’s your fault,” laughed the snake, “for being stupid enough to trust a viper!”

  Would Lidia do the same to her? wondered Juana. Would she turn out to be a faithful family servant, like the cat she had rescued, or would she turn out to be a serpent under a rock?

  “I won’t send you away,” Juana repeated … but with misgivings. Lidia had already regained her color. How long before she turned back into the spirited minx she had once been?

  “His rage was like a dog,” Lidia began again. “It was always with him, an inseparable companion. He nurtured it. It slept by our mat and waited in a corner when he ate. He cherished his rage.”

  Sancho hadn’t been averse to marriage. He knew it was the fate of men, whether noble or common, just like bowel movements and death. What he had resented was the heavy-handed way in which Emilio, the master carpenter, had decided the matter without even consulting him.

  “I have a wife for you,” he had said. “A maid in the house of Velázquez, the painter. She’s too good for you, really, but old Pacheco seems in a hurry to get rid of her. He offered two hundred maravedís, fifty for you and one fifty for me. Now sandpaper those boards, and don’t stop until you’re done.”

  Sancho was glad to get the money, so he said nothing. Carpenters hadn’t been paid for months, and apprentices weren’t paid at all. Sancho depended on Basilio for sustenance, and so if Emilio had nothing, Sancho had even less. Any amount of cash, no matter how small, was welcome.

  Lidia loved life at Court. She was put to work in the laundry, where she scrubbed, rubbed, wrung, and hung out to dry the table linen and bedsheets of lords and ladies. The scent of lilac water intoxicated her. Folding dainty embroidered hand towels thrilled her. Just knowing that the fabric in her fingers had touched the flesh of dukes and countesses made her feel significant. She lived in their realm and breathed the same air.

  Before long she learned her way around the Alcázar and discovered ways to sneak out from among the piles of cloth. She tiptoed like a thief through the corridors pretending to do her job and spying on her betters. Finally, she discovered what she was looking for: Velázquez’s studio.

  Juana could imagine her stealing in, smiling coyly, curtseying, and handing Velázquez a sweet-smelling hand towel, pretending to be flustered at his amazement—“Oh, Don Diego, I must be in the wrong place … I thought …” Juana could imagine her giggling and turning to run out, dropping a cloth and bending to retrieve it, wiggling her little bottom in provocation. Naturally, she didn’t tell Juana everything. She did reveal that after she found him, she saw the painter again. How often and under what circumstances, Juana could guess, but Lidia didn’t elaborate. She treaded carefully. She lowered her eyes appropriately and offered feeble explanations: “I was so happy to see someone from home!” She knew she couldn’t leave Velázquez out of her story entirely because everyone had seen her likeness in The Expulsion of the Moriscos. But she didn’t dwell on it. She didn’t gloat.

  The one thing she didn’t like about Court life was her husband, Sancho. She had dreamed of a handsome, dark-haired lover, someone debonair and worldly. (She had dreamed of Velázquez, although of course she didn’t say so.) Sancho was everything she’d never dreamed of, not even in nightmares. Short and stocky, with a chunky neck and uneven teeth, he was bearishly ugly. To Lidia, he looked liked a weather-beaten keg placed over thick, stumpy logs. He reeked of garlic and farted like a cannon firing rotten eggs. When he ate, he reminded her of a hyena from the king’s menagerie—the way he tore his food apart with grubby claws and stuffed it into his mouth. And he liked his wine, too. Maybe she’d have gotten used to his nauseating face and manners if he’d at least been gentle, or if he didn’t gamble away the few blancas he managed to get his hands on. But Sancho was brutish and irresponsible and as thin-skinned as an onion. He took offense at a sideward glance, and he was suspicious of his own shadow.

  “Before running out to the laundry early in the morning, I’d primp and preen. I’d lick my finger and rub it over my eyebrows to make them smooth, and I’d pinch my cheeks to give them color. Then I’d put on my cap and apron and scurry out of the room without saying good-bye. I couldn’t wait to get away from him and to get to the wash and the day’s gossip. I wanted to find out which foreign prince was coming to visit, what the ladies were wearing, who was going out in whose carriage. That was my world, not Sancho. I didn’t care about him—he was there, but he wasn’t part of my life.”

  Carpenter is not a lowly occupation. A carpenter is a respected artisan who belongs to a guild and (unless he works for a bankrupt king) earns a decent salary. But it must have seemed to Sancho that Lidia wasn’t showing him any respect at all. He may have heard rumors about how she lingered by Velázquez’s studio. Perhaps someone had even mentioned that she had posed for the artist. One day, when she came back chattering about Lady This One and Lord That One, he lifted his hand behind his head as though he were going to toss a log, then smacked her so hard across the face that she flew clear across the room and banged her head against the wall. He was a strong man, don’t forget. A man used to carrying beams and furniture.

  That cuffing opened her eyes. She learned to play the part of the obedient wife, even as she flitted and flirted around the palace. She set food before Sancho at dinnertime, and she lifted her skirts for him whenever he wanted it, which was always. Night after night he would ride her like a mule and then collapse into a drunken daze by her side. By the end of the first half-year she knew two things: that she was pregnant and that she loathed him.

  The order to leave Madrid came as abruptly as the order to marry. Emilio turned to Sancho one day as they were repairing the moldings in one of the palace alcoves.

  “Congratulations, my boy,” he said with a snicker. “You’ve been promoted. You’re ready to take the test to enter the guild. You can do it in Aranjuez.”

  “Aranjuez?”

  “That’s where they’re sending you. To the sitio real in Aranjuez. Tell your wife. You leave in three days.”

  Aranjuez is a lovely place, famous in all Europe for its luxuriant forests and exuberant gardens. It’s not far from Madrid, and the hunting is plentiful, so the king spends a lot of time in this beautiful “rustic” palace, whose galleries overlook undulating meadows, shady lanes, intricate gazebos, and graceful fountains. There are exotic plants�
�elms from England, cotton from America, and a clump of mandrake. He planted them all on an island in the River Tajo, the famous Jardín de la Isla, where he also built a menagerie to compete with the one at El Buen Retiro and filled it with exotic animals: tropical birds, monkeys, camels, gazelles, jaguars, hyenas, and buffalo that produced milk from which the quesadero made delicious cheeses. It’s a marvelous place, a land of dreams and fantasies. But Lidia didn’t want to go there. And once she got there, she detested it.

  Sancho didn’t like it either, which put him in an even fouler mood than usual. The king constantly ordered renovations and repairs, so there was a lot of work to do, and even an occasional payment for doing it. But Sancho hated being far from his favorite taverns and his tertulia—the men he drank, gossiped, and played cards with. He hated the refined environment of the place—the mozárabe ceilings with their three-dimensional trompe l’oeil mosaics that made the rooms look twice as enormous as they already were, the gold leaf moldings, the artificial ponds and artificially stocked woods. Everything about the place was false. But most of all, he hated that his wife was pretty and might attract attention.

  “He didn’t know that I was pregnant yet,” said Lidia. “And I wouldn’t have told him if we had stayed in Madrid. I would have gotten rid of it. There was an herbalist in the laundry, and sometimes she helped girls. But we left for Aranjuez before I could go to her. So I finally did tell him. I told him so that he’d leave me alone. ‘Get off me, you pig! I’m pregnant!’ I screamed it in his ear one night when I could no longer bear the weight of his body or the stink of rotten garlic.

  “‘Good,’ he screamed, ‘because that’s just the way I want you. Pregnant all the time! I don’t care if the brats live or die, just as long as you’ve got a big belly!’ And he made good on his word. I got pregnant six times in five years and carried four babies to term, including a pair of twins—all boys, except this one.” She held up little María Jesús. “Well, after he told me that, he ran out to find some poor goatherd to roll dice with! Gambling! Rich men, poor men, they all do it! When I was at Court, I heard of rich men who lost fortunes at the gaming tables. And for a wretch like me, a poor woman, to have a husband who gambles …” She was trembling with rage.

  “Relax for a while,” whispered Juana. “You can tell us the rest tomorrow.”

  But Lidia wanted to go on.

  “One day,” she began again, “we heard that the king was coming to spend a fortnight at Aranjuez. He was going to bring a large group of friends with him, including Velázquez.” She became cautious again, weighing each word. “I thought it would be so nice to see a familiar face,” she said, “someone who remembered me from … happier times.”

  By then Lidia was heavy with her fourth child, little María Jesús. She wasn’t allowed to work at the palace—the king wouldn’t want a pregnant maid in his line of vision. So Lidia was confined to her room, forbidden to go out.

  “But I snuck out anyway,” she told Juana. “I spied on them. I wanted to see the ladies in their riding dresses. I wanted Don Diego to smile at me, just once … because … you see … he was my former … my former employer.”

  Lidia’s eyes went dreamy. “Every afternoon, after the hunt and the midday meal, the ladies and gentlemen would take their siesta under trees with leafy branches that stretched out to form a parasol. They would remove their shoes and doze peacefully in the breeze. They liked to play at being rustics. The ladies wore dresses that were simple, like those of country girls, yet made of fine silk. And they wore jewels like no country girl has ever seen—pearl necklaces, emerald hair ornaments, diamond earrings, ruby rings … They were so lovely, these ladies. I wished I could serve one of them, instead of living in a pigsty with a pig. They’d line up on the meadow for tug-of-war, or else some of them would hide and the others would try to find them. Sometimes they’d pick flowers and weave garlands. Even Don Gaspar came for a few days. Imagine the count-duke in his bare feet braiding flower stems! You’d have thought he didn’t have a care in the world! I knew Don Gaspar was busy in the war room most of the time, but here he seemed as relaxed as can be.

  “I stayed hidden. I made sure they didn’t see me. I saw Velázquez speaking with many elegant ladies and powerful men, but only from a distance.

  “Then, one day, I saw some of the guests’ servants carrying trunks to an awaiting coach. ‘Is your master getting ready to leave?’ I asked a squire. ‘Day after tomorrow, they’re all going home.’ And then, when he saw my belly, ‘Stuffed like a partridge, are you? Get back in your hole, where you belong.’

  “That’s when I knew I had to take a chance. They were going to leave soon, and I had to talk to Don Diego. I just had to. I wanted to tell him how unhappy I was, how badly things had gone for me. I didn’t want anything from him”—here, she looked warily at Juana—“only that he ask if they would take me back in the palace laundry. Or maybe that he help me find some other place to run away to after the baby was born.

  “Pretty soon the king’s party came along. They were all lined up in hunting formation, hat plumes and horses’ manes quivering in the morning air. Velázquez looked as graceful as ever in his crimson riding jacket and lace collar. Spain had just won an important victory over the French at Fuenterrabía, and they were celebrating with one last kill. The king was an excellent hunter, renowned for his skill with the crossbow. Don Diego was deep in conversation with a man I heard everyone call Don Luis. A moment later, Don Luis rode ahead to speak with some other gentleman.”

  Don Luis de Haro, Marquis of Carpio, was the man who would soon replace the count-duke of Olivares as the king’s confidant, and the man whom I suspect of commissioning my portrait—that is, the painting of Venus. Either him or his son.

  “I had brought my basket with me,” Lidia went on, “so I could pretend I was picking berries if anyone saw me. I stationed myself behind a thick oak tree and watched them. They were coming toward me, trotting toward the woods. Velázquez was toward the rear of the party. I waited for the king and his closest friends to pass before I budged. Just as Velázquez approached, I stepped out into sight and held my breath.

  “He looked right at me. My heart skipped a beat … I mean because his face was so familiar and welcome to me … his smile was like a soft breeze on my cheek.” Lidia began to stammer. She paused, but quickly pulled herself together. “He looked right into my eyes … but …” she looked down. Her voice became low, throaty, and forced. “But he didn’t see me. It was as though I were invisible. It’s not as though he found me … ugly or … disgusting … with my huge belly … It’s not that he turned away or snarled at me the way the squire had. It’s as though … I just weren’t there.” She began to weep softly. “Nobody sees me,” she whispered. “It’s as though I were dead.”

  “Lidia,” said Juana. “Go rest now. It’s enough for one day.”

  “No, señora, let me get it all out. Let me get it over with.” Arabela handed her a cup of water and she drank it. She sat quietly a while, as though lost in memory. She was breathing deeply, as though she might faint.

  “After that, I lost all hope of ever getting away from Sancho,” she said finally. Tears trickled in spurts over her still-bruised cheeks. “There was clump of mandrake in the Jardín de la Isla, and I began to sneak in there every once in a while to gather plants. I don’t know if you’ve ever used mandrake. The leaves have a nasty odor, but they’re good for curing skin irritations, so I was glad to find the plants on the property. With children, there’s always a rash or a scrape that needs attention.

  “But mandrake is good for something else as well. If you squeeze the juice from the bark of the roots, you get a foul-smelling liquid, but the stink goes away after a while. Essence of mandrake bark is a strong sleeping drug. It makes you fall into a slumber so deep that you don’t wake up for hours, even if the house falls in. People say it drives the Devil out of the soul of a possessed person, but if you use it all the time as a sleeping potion, the Devil learns to r
esist it, and then he comes back with a vengeance. I started dribbling a few drops into Sancho’s drink at supper. By the time I stretched out on the sleeping mat, he was too dead to the world to roll on top of me and demand I open my legs. Sometimes the Devil would come to him in his dreams. Sancho began to complain of nightmares, but I didn’t care how much the Devil taunted him. Every night I dripped the mandrake juice into his cup from a vial I kept in the sleeve of my blouse.”

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed Juana. “Did you poison him?”

  “No, I didn’t poison him. If I’d been at Court I could have gotten hold of some arsenic and made fast work of it, but no, mandrake just makes you sleep … nothing worse.

  “One night he came back from the carpentry shop a little early. I had just given birth to María Jesús a couple of months before. I was still eating with the children, seated on a mat on the floor. Usually the little ones were fast asleep by the time he was home for supper. I’d serve him his meal, and he’d sit alone, stuffing food into his mouth, burping and grunting and farting like a pig. But that night I wasn’t ready when he got home.

  “‘Where’s my food,’ he growled.

  “‘Just as soon as we’re done here,’ I said. I only had bread and cheese for the little ones, but I had made a fine lentil stew for him, with a bit of bacon and onions. ‘I have something nice for you,’ I added.

  “‘Now!’ he screamed. ‘When I get home, I want my supper. I want it now!’

  “I got up and took the baby off my breast and laid her in the cradle,” said Lidia. “She started to scream. ‘Hush,’ I told her. ‘Hush, Jesusita, Papá wants his dinner.’

  “Sancho stood there staring at me, trying to steady himself. His eyes were bloodshot and runny. He belched loudly, and the stench of rancid wine filled the room. Suddenly he lunged at my oldest boy and yanked the bread out of his mouth, then threw it on the ground. Sanchito is only four years old, señora. He was terrified. The twins started to wail, too. It all happened so quickly then … I crouched down to pick up the bread—we don’t have bread to waste—and suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my … female parts … and my rump. He kicked me so hard, two, maybe three times, that I felt as though my guts would spill out onto the floor. I tipped over in pain, clutching my knees, even though that wasn’t what hurt.