I am Venus

by Barbara Mujica

  “‘It’s my food that matters, not your brats’.’

  “I pulled myself up. The children were crying louder now. One of the twins started to scream. Sharp, piercing screams, like the bursts of a whistle, the kind of screams that give you a stabbing headache.”

  Sancho lifted his hand to slap the boy, but Lidia pushed the child out of the way. “Run!” she yelled. “Run!” All three disappeared out the door.

  Sancho grabbed her by the arm and twisted, trying to dislocate her shoulder. Lidia stepped on his foot and wriggled away from him. He grabbed her again and raised his hand high behind his head, so high it seemed to detach itself from his body. She saw it coming down toward her cheek, down, down, as if in slow motion, but this time she couldn’t get away.

  “Then he hit me on the chest so hard, I thought my nipples would burst. I stumbled, and he hit me across the face. I could taste blood in my mouth. One of my teeth was wobbling around under my tongue. I could feel my lip swelling up as though a bee had stung it. The baby was screaming and screaming. He turned to the cradle and looked at her with such hatred, I was afraid he would kill her.

  “‘Stop!’ I begged. ‘Please stop! Let me get you your dinner.’ I hobbled to the kettle, scooped lentils into a bowl, and placed it on the mat with a half-loaf of bread. He sat down on a stool and brought the bowl to his lap.

  “‘Wine!’ he thundered. I didn’t have money for wine, and the water from the well had a funny smell, but I had collected some rainwater in a jug from a morning shower.

  “‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘This is all I have.’ I collapsed on a bench by the door. It was dark out and the children were who knows where? I rubbed my arm. It ached horribly.”

  Juana had put her embroidery to the side. She was weeping softly, dabbing her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “Don’t go on, Lidia,” she whispered. “Don’t go on.”

  “I’m almost done, señora.” Lidia breathed deeply, as though preparing for a terrible ordeal.

  “I was sitting on the bench, terrified to move. I wanted to go out and call the children, but I was afraid. They’re probably safer out there among the wolves, I thought. So I didn’t budge.

  “‘Why are you sitting!’ he snarled. ‘How dare you sit there while I’m eating! Get up and serve me wine.’

  “‘I don’t have any …’

  “‘What? I can’t hear you.’

  “‘I don’t have any,’ I said louder. I tried to stay very still, very calm. I tried not to shift positions. I stopped rubbing my arm. I was afraid that any gesture, even a swallow, might irritate him. The baby was still whining and I was frightened for her.

  “He jumped up and moved toward me. Instinctively, I shrank back against the wall and lifted my hands to cover my face. ‘You whore! You bitch!’ he screamed. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you did when those palace big shits were here, those cacas grandes. You ran out to see them, didn’t you? You ran out to see that painter! A painter’s no better than a carpenter, but you think he is, don’t you, you tramp! You slut! But he isn’t. He’s a worker, just like me.’ I’m sorry, señora, but that’s what he said.

  “I was trembling. I kept looking toward the cradle. I wanted to grab the baby and run. I didn’t see him raise his foot, but the next thing I knew, my shin exploded! It felt as though it were splintering. A pain like lightning jolted through my leg, from the arch of my foot to my knee to my hip. He had kicked me so hard that I staggered to the basin and threw up. I remember the smell of vomit, the awful liquid, gray-green and mucous-tinged, spewing into the bowl. My head pounded. My eyes throbbed. Everything went blurry and I thought I might lose my balance. I steadied myself against the wall and tried to breathe. I couldn’t pass out. I couldn’t lose consciousness because if I did, who knows what he might have done to the baby.

  “All of a sudden, he burst out laughing: a high-pitched giggle like the hyenas in the king’s menagerie when they fight over food.

  “After a long pause—I don’t know how long—but long, I got my breath back. ‘I have some juice from the berries in the garden,’ I stammered. ‘Would you like some of that?’

  “At first he didn’t answer, but then he grunted, and I pulled myself up and limped out the door. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

  “‘To get the juice. It’s in a jug by the front step.’ He was watching me, but it was dark. I bent down with my back toward him and quick as a bolt slipped some mandrake juice into the mug—a big dose, huge. Tonight, I thought … tonight will be the last time … the very last time.

  “He staggered onto the sleeping mat and fell into a deep sleep. I slipped out the door and called softly to the children. They had been hiding behind the bushes, not ten paces from the hut. ‘Go to sleep,’ I whispered.

  “‘Let’s run away, Mamá,’ whimpered Sanchito.

  “‘No,’ I said. ‘He’d only find us and kill us. Go to sleep.’

  “‘But …’

  “‘Do as I tell you. He’s going away. He won’t ever bother us again.’

  “When I was sure they were asleep, I went out to the shed and grabbed a pitchfork. I stood there with it in my hand and looked down at Sancho, snoring and grunting in his sleep. I hoped the Devil was torturing him. I hoped he was dreaming of being stabbed to death. But after I’d thought about it a while, I put the pitchfork down. Driving the prongs through his heart would leave a terrible mess. There would be blood, and the Santa Hermandad would surely hunt me down and hang me into the town square, just like they did my mother.”

  Arabela looked up from her handwork and squinted. Lidia lowered her voice, as if confiding a secret. “My mother killed a man who battered her,” she murmured. “I don’t know whether or not he was my father. I was very little when it happened, but I do remember the Holy Brothers, with their black hoods and powerful horses. They grabbed her and dragged her off … I remember them tying a rag over her head and slipping a noose over her neck …”

  Juana stared at her, wide-eyed. “She did what she had to,” said Juana. The other women turned to her and gasped, but then nodded. “Good for her.”

  Lidia took a deep breath and went on. “Well, that wasn’t going to happen to me. I looked around for some rags, but all I had were the clothes on my back, so I took them off and wadded them into a bundle. Then I placed them over Sancho’s face and sat on them. I straddled him. I was careful that no air should get in. I hugged his filthy head with my knees. He squirmed for a while. I tightened my grip. Finally, he was still.

  “I stood over him a long time, searching for signs of life. I held an onion skin in front of his nose to see if it fluttered. Then I slipped my fingers under his shirt. His skin was clammy and repulsive. His heart wasn’t beating, but just in case, I pushed the bundle of clothes into his mouth and nose one more time and sat there a while longer. Then I got dressed and waited for dawn.

  “The night was eerily quiet. The air was fresh, and the moon hung high and opaque in the sky. I felt strangely giddy. At first light I limped to the carpenters’ shop. The carpenters begin work early, but no one was there yet, so I hobbled to the hut where one of them lived. The door was open, and his wife was already at work kneading dough. She eyed me suspiciously. ‘Why are you here at this hour?’ she asked. ‘The men aren’t out of the house yet.’

  “‘Something’s wrong!’ I told her. ‘I can’t wake up Sancho. He went to bed at the usual time, but this morning he hasn’t stirred.’

  “‘She studied my face. I could see her taking it all in—the swollen lip, the angry bruises on my jaw and cheek. ‘Why are you limping?’ she asked.

  “She caught me off guard. ‘I … I fell … trying to … trying to …’

  “‘I know what happened,’ she said matter-of-factly. I froze. ‘Sancho’s heart, it gave out,’ she went on. ‘It just gave out. It happens.’ She was staring right into my eyes. ‘He died of a heart problem.’

  “‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe …’

  “‘Definitely.’ She placed
dough on a board and began to shape it into a loaf. ‘Where are your children?’

  “‘Still sleeping.’

  “‘Bring me your children. I can’t take care of them myself, but there are farm families around here that would be happy to have an extra boy. Sanchito will soon be old enough to work and earn his keep, and the twins are healthy; they’ll grow. You take the baby, the girl. You can leave her in a convent if you can’t keep her.’

  “‘What about the burial?’ I asked.

  “‘I’ll take care of it. Do you have people?’

  “‘In Madrid.’

  “‘Some of the farmers are taking produce into the city today. See if one of them will take you in his wagon. You can hardly walk with that limp.’

  “I stammered my thanks and turned to leave. ‘One more thing,’ she called after me. I turned around to face her. ‘You did the right thing,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the children. Just get out of here.’”

  Juana was sobbing hard now. Heavy, disconsolate sobs. She could hardly catch her breath. Finally, she buried her face in her hands and shook her head. Her whole body pitched and heaved as though it would break. “Holy Virgin Mother,” she stammered, “protect this woman.”

  “Señora,” said Lidia with bowed head. “Please let me stay here forever. I promise I’ll never give you reason to regret it.”

  Juana wiped her eyes and thought about it a moment. The cat or the snake? Would Lidia turn out to be the cat or the snake? Juana took a deep breath. In front of three witnesses Lidia had just confessed a crime that could send her to the gallows. In so doing, she had given Juana complete power over her. She had furnished Juana with a guarantee of loyalty. Arabela and Julia stared at their laps, each one lost in soundless prayer. Only the crackling of the brazier was audible. Finally, almost imperceptibly, she nodded yes.

  Years later, she would remember that she had had a choice, and that she had made the right one.

  It wasn’t too long after Lidia came back to live at the house on Convalescientes that Velázquez began to turn his attention once again to Venus. Is this what he and Haro were talking about at the sitio real in Aranjuez? I can’t be sure, but I do know that at about that time Velázquez started looking around for another model. Lidia was out of the question. Not only was she no longer the lissome girl she had been, but her new elusiveness made her impossible to approach. She and her baby pretty much stuck to the kitchen, where she now worked as Bárbara’s assistant.

  Constanza was also out of the question because Constanza was dead—another gloomy story. At Court people had been gossiping for years about the ongoing friendship between the queen’s pretty lady-in-waiting and the king’s new wardrobe assistant. They had been seen together at the bullfights in Medina, which Velázquez had attended in the party of the count-duke; at the sitio real El Pardo, where Velázquez had gone to paint hunting scenes; and at El Escorial. There were rumors that he was going to paint a female nude, Italian-style, and that she was going to pose for him.

  Constanza’s husband may have been an obtuse old man, but the buzz was too loud and too persistent to escape his notice. His wife’s conduct had become a public embarrassment, and he knew he had to do something—but what? He could corner Constanza and the insolent little painter and run them through with a sword, but that would create a public scandal. He could lure them out to his country estate and burn down the house, the way the honor heroes did in Calderón’s dramas, but to be absolutely honest, he didn’t have the stomach for murder. After some deliberation, he decided that he would get her pregnant again. By the third month, Velázquez wouldn’t want her. And by the time she got her figure back, the painter would have found another model. Problem solved.

  Don Basilio set his plan in motion. He had been rather lax about his bedroom appearances for a while (after all, there were so many flowers to choose from in the king’s garden), but circumstances had changed. Although Constanza found her husband repulsive, she knew what her wifely duties were, and within eight weeks, she knew she was expecting. Not long after that, she began to show. One morning, well before her due date, she noticed a blood stain on her shift. She called for the midwife, who examined her and declared that it was nothing—a routine discharge. But by evening, Constanza was bleeding profusely, and it was clear that something was wrong. The queen summoned her own physician, an old converso named Marcos de Montemayor, whose medical skill outweighed his impure blood in Her Majesty’s mind.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

  The queen sent one of her favorite ladies-in-waiting, Doña Milagros de Rodríguez, to sit by Constanza’s side all night, and to call for the doctor if the patient took a turn for the worse. Around midnight, Constanza began to drift into delirium. Doña Milagros called for the queen’s doctor and for a male midwife to deliver the fetus, which she was certain was doomed.

  The baby survived a couple of hours. It was a tiny, feeble mass of tissue that hardly resembled a human child. The poor thing struggled heroically to breathe, but finally had to give up. By the time it expired, Constanza was already gone—another woman dead in childbirth, one of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, lost every year.

  The next morning, Don Basilio made quite a spectacle of his grief at Court. Velázquez had been busy at work in his studio since dawn and had missed the commotion. When Mazo entered the workspace a little before noon and told his father-in-law the news, Velázquez didn’t say a word. Instead, he stood in front of his canvas for a long time, staring straight ahead. Then he picked up his brush and began to paint.

  15

  THE BIRTH OF VENUS

  1660; 1644; 1660

  “HE HAD A CHILD, YOU KNOW.”

  “Yes,” I respond evenly. “I know.”

  “A son. The son he’d always wanted. In Italy.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Cintia wraps her shawl more tightly around her shoulders. The air has grown chilly, but it’s still more comfortable in the garden than in the house, where moisture settles into the crevices of the stone walls and gives the atmosphere a dank feel.

  “Oh, no particular reason. I didn’t think you knew—that’s all. She was a model.”

  “Who was?”

  “The mother. At least, that’s what I heard.”

  “What kind of a model?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe a nude model. Juan told me he painted a lot of nudes during his second trip to Italy. There’s one in the collection of …”

  “Juan?”

  “Juan de Pareja.”

  “Oh.”

  “The Morisco.”

  “He was a good painter in his own right. I’ve seen his work.”

  “You know how those Italian women are, always looking for an excuse to drop their petticoats. She must have been posing, and then, well … one thing led to another. It’s only natural. A woman lying around with her pussy exposed. What do you expect? Men are animals and women are stupid enough to want to please them. Whether a woman is covered from head to toe like a nun or an Arab or sprawled out naked on a bed, it’s all the same thing. She’s doing it because of some man. Why, Velázquez was just …”

  “I’d really rather not discuss this.”

  “Why not? He’s dead now. Of course, she probably isn’t. She must have been much younger. Artists don’t paint old women nude.”

  My head feels like a vessel with a wasp trapped inside. I can hardly stand the buzzing.

  “I’m going in now. I don’t feel like having this conversation. Anyway, you don’t know anything about any of this. You’re inventing …”

  “All right, I won’t mention it again.” Cintia chews her gums, the way old women do. Spidery veins stretch across her cheeks to the sides of her nose. Her skin is tawny and as tough as hide, in spite of the bacon grease she rubs on her face to make it smooth. All she manages to do with her beauty regimen is make herself stinky. She runs her sandaled foot through the dead leaves, then kicks them a
side to expose the sleeping earth below. “His name was Antonio.”

  “Whose?”

  “The boy. Antonio de Velázquez. He gave him his own surname. Surprising, under the circumstances, isn’t it?”

  I stand up to leave.

  “Oh, sit down. Don’t be so tight-assed.” She yanks on my sleeve and pulls me back to the bench. She gropes in the pocket of her habit and brings out a pipe, and then two small gray stones.

  “What’s that?”

  “Flint.”

  “You can’t smoke here, Cintia. Mother Augustina will see you.”

  But she’s already puffing away on her pipe, spitting and coughing like a soldier. “I could have made a fortune in Rome, you know.” She blows tiny circles of smoke into the cool autumn air. “Whoring is a much more respectable profession there than here. I could have had my pick of girls. And so many powerful men with money. Dukes, cardinals … If I’d gone to Rome, I could have been a rich woman.”

  “You didn’t do so badly for yourself, Cintia. You made plenty.”

  “Yes,” she says, gulping smoke, “I suppose I did.” She pauses reflectively. “Well, not really. Don Felipe and Olivares were cheapskates. The count-duke deserved what happened to him.”

  “Maybe, but not because he was stingy with whores, Cintia.”

  “Why then? Because he refused to take orders from the queen?”

  “Queen Isabel hated him. She wanted peace with France—she was French, after all—but Olivares brought nothing but war.”