Once I watched a spider lure a fly into its web. It was early morning in the courtyard and the dew was still on the roses. Sparkling in a corner of the stone wall was a web that appeared as if it had been strung with diamonds. It caught my eye and I was drawn to it, powerlessly drawn to it. And then I saw that I was not the first. Woven into the web was the body of a cricket. All neatly bound up in silk, like a little loaf, waiting to be the spider’s next meal. And at that very moment another fly was being drawn into the shimmering latticework. It would have been so easy for me to destroy the web. I might have, too, except Doña Grazia on her two canes had silently come up behind me and whispered, “Beauty! Beauty, a deadly but most lovely beauty. You know I used to take my inspiration from such things as spider’s webs and dragonfly wings.”
Finally Papa speaks and breaks the silence at the dinner table. “I think it might be time for Doña Grazia to retire.” He gets up. “Pablo!” Pablo, Emilia’s son, who helps in the kitchen, comes with Doña Grazia’s canes. I watch as she walks with Papa on one side and Pablo on the other. She looks just like a spider now, slowly scuttling out of the room. It is as if she has eight legs: the two God gave her, two canes, and the legs of Papa and Pablo.
Tonight I dream of hinges and spiders. Spiders spinning webs in ancient walls…spiders waiting…waiting, waiting.
This is all I remember from the day of my Communion. I remember first the sweet smell of my Communion cakes baking. The scent of vanilla swirling up from the kitchen before I was even awake. And then I remember opening my eyes and knowing it was barely morning. It was that time just after dawn when the light slides through the window, thin and gray, and there is always a softness to that light that is soothing to eyes just opened. My dress hung on the clothes tree, stiff and very white. The veil draped on the looking glass was stirred by an invisible wind. I got up and I put the veil on. While still in my night rail I kneeled, clasping my hands with the rosary twined among my fingers, and said my Hail Mary. Sister said I must do this first thing on the morning of my First Communion. I must do this before I spoke a word to anyone. Before I even made water in my chamber pot.
But while I prayed, that sweet smell of the cakes wound its way from the kitchen. It made my mouth water, and I wished that I would not have to wait until the party to eat them. I pictured the cakes in their little suits of sugar frosting and the rose-colored crosses. Emilia, who could not write a word, could inscribe anything in frosting. And then it was time to dress and go to the cathedral. I carried a small bouquet of flowers and a basket with some of my Communion cakes and a small jug of olives. These I would give to the poor as we entered the courtyard of the cathedral through the Puerta de Mollete, the Muffin Gate. For this is where the poor waited to receive food, and on one’s First Communion day it was customary to give food to them.
But you see, we never got that far. We never got to the Muffin Gate. I never had my Communion. Just as we stepped round the corner into the Plaza Zocodover, there was a terrible scream. From whose throat it came I am not sure. It could have been Mama’s or maybe Grandmother’s or maybe even Papa’s. And then I followed their gaze. In the middle of the square hanging feet up was a body. The head covered in blood, long strands like snakes spilling from his stomach. The square was deathly still and there was only one sound being spoken, the name Juan de la Cibdad. I knew the sounds, but they did not make sense in my ears. Juan de la Cibdad had come to my little brother’s baptism; Juan de la Cibdad had eaten at our table four days ago. What was Juan de la Cibdad doing hanging upside down with red snakes crawling from his belly? Then Papa whispered hoarsely, “Turn around, Beatriz. We are going home. Tomás, take Juana’s arm.” And Papa took Abuela’s arm. And Abuelo, my big grandfather, suddenly seemed to shrink. He put out his hand to touch Papa’s elbow as a child might who does not want to lose his mother in a crowded marketplace.
Now that is all that I remember of the day. Papa told us not to leave the house, nor should we open the door for anyone. The rest of the day is like mist to me, until night fell.
Had I heard the hinges? I think not. What would a bolt sound like? But near midnight I was told to dress warmly, and it was not Mama’s maid, Matina, who came to help me. It was Mama herself. I put on my heaviest camise and kirtle, and then Mama said, “Another.” So I did. And then she fetched my warmest merino dress. And then she said, “Another!”
“Another dress, Mama?” She nodded and said, “Another.”
I am wearing three dresses and five shawls. The buttons do not close. I have a satchel with my Bible and that is all. We are leaving Toledo. We shall leave through the wall itself and not through the gates! This astonished me. How do we do that? I ask. There is in our cellar a door that leads into a secret passage that passes directly through the Puerta Vieja de Bisagra that puts us right on the Paseo de Madrid. We are going to Granada. If they have killed the leader of the New Christian community, Juan de la Cibdad, then they can kill us. This is what my father says. And this is very strange—they do not try to whisper behind my back. They do not try to protect me. They do not treat me as a child any longer. I hear everything. I have seen everything. I have seen a dead man, his blood dripping, his guts spilling, hanging upside down in the square of the Zocodover. And now I know I am not a child. Grandfather is speaking to me. “You must go, Beatriz, to your great-grandmother; you must go to Doña Grazia. You must beg her to come with us; you must insist. She refuses to move. No one can budge her.”
“But why should I be able to?”
“You must try.”
So now I go into her bedroom. She sits straight upright in bed. Her night rail is trimmed in finest lace that has turned creamy with age. From the outside she looks like a confection, frothy and sweet; but her eyes are hard and black, her mouth stitched into a little puckered line. I feel myself being drawn into her web of lace. My feet move on their own, for my mind is numb. I am one of those insects about to be snagged in a silken death. I crawl right up on the bed. “Abuelita!” I whisper. She does not move. Her eyes are sunken. I put out one finger and touch the lace that gurgles up around her neck. She tips over. Abuelita is dead. My little spider grandma collapses against the pillows.
The fire in the grate has gone out, and a sudden draft sucks ashes up the flue. I go to the shuttered windows and open them. A cold wind blows in. The lace on my great-grandmother’s gown stirs. She is like the ashes. She will blow away. She will not hang upside down and bloody in the square. I shall never have my First Communion. I do not care. But I do wonder how Brianda looks in her veil.
Chapter 11
“WHAT’S THAT IN your hand?” Constanza had just come into the kitchen from the cook yard. She peered hard at Jerry as if trying to see something through the dimness of a darkening day. But it was morning and the sun was up and Jerry stood barefoot in the kitchen clutching a piece of paper in her hand.
“You tell me.” And she held out the letter toward her aunt. Did it sound rude? She didn’t care. The words sounded wonderful to Jerry. Slow, but not strangled, not chunks of rock. Constanza took the old piece of paper and looked down at it. She squinted harder, then moved to the desk where she kept orders and picked up a magnifying glass. “Oh,” she said suddenly. Jerry noticed a tiny pulse in her temple. Her aunt was muttering something. “‘No me gusta mi mantilla de…’ Oh, Lord love a duck, they’re always complaining about their veils. Heh!” She snorted and handed the letter back to Jerry. But Jerry was quick. She put her hands behind her back and did not reach for the letter.
“But what is it, Aunt Constanza?” She said the words slowly. The letter began to tremble in her aunt’s hands.
“Well, it’s just some letter, that’s all. Old, old letter. You know, when my sister died—that was years ago—they sent over to me what they couldn’t sell. Just old family stuff. Half of it I don’t know what it is, what to do with it…you know,” she added in a tone of dismissal, thrusting the letter out toward Jerry, who now took it.
And that’s i
t, Jerry thought. Just old, old stuff. She looked hard at her aunt, but Constanza did not look back. She was shuffling some papers on her desk. “My, my. I got ten dozen more Communion cakes to bake myself here by tomorrow. Have to get crackin’. I’ll let you do the driving tomorrow afternoon when we deliver them—three different churches, one up the valley. Nice windy road. I’ll teach you how to downshift on the curves.”
“You got to keep your eyes on the road, Jerry. I don’t think you’re concentrating hard enough.”
Her aunt was right. She wasn’t concentrating hard enough. She was thinking about her aunt, not the road. How her aunt seemed not to know about that letter, not to care. But the problem was that Jerry was beginning to care. Who was Brianda? And who was Beatriz who had written to Brianda? And why, when she had first looked at the letter, couldn’t she really translate much of it, and then why did she in some mysterious way now understand the letter? This was not a bad dream, not a good dream, not a dream at all. But what was it and why did her aunt not know anything?
“Watch out!” Constanza roared. A truck was coming their way and Jerry was taking the curve too fast. Somehow they managed to emerge collision free, but they were both breathing hard. “Pull over, child. I’ll drive for now. Your mind is someplace else.” And that, thought Jerry, was in fact the understatement of the year.
A breeze stirred in the small church and the little girls’ veils blew softly around their faces. Jerry could tell that they were debating whether to transfer their bouquets from one hand to another to secure their veils. There were only five first communicants, three little girls and two little boys. The all looked to Jerry to be about second graders. She remembered her First Communion dress. She hated it. And the veil was even worse. Leave it to her mother to come up with something really weird. Her veil was a turban with a scarf attached. She looked more like an Arabian princess than a first communicant in the Roman Catholic Church.
There was to be a party in the refectory afterward, and Constanza had baked the white cakes for it. As she stood now in church, Jerry realized that this fragrance blended perfectly with the baking cakes in the house in the wall, the home of Beatriz in Toledo. After the service Jerry helped her aunt in the refectory serve the cakes and lemonade. The cakes had not just crosses but doves of peace and lilies inscribed in frosting on them. Sinta was there with her family. A cousin of hers had celebrated her First Communion. “You should have come to the movies. It was really good.” Jerry smiled and shrugged. “Tomorrow we have a study hall right before sewing. They might let us into the sewing room. So bring your skirt and we could get a head start. Okay?”
Jerry nodded and smiled broadly. Sometimes, she realized, she got sick of smiling. If only a word would come out. Well, they had sort of with Aunt Constanza there in the kitchen when she had demanded—yes, demanded not simply asked—about the letter. “You tell me.” She remembered the words. She remembered wondering if they sounded rude. When she had been in the cellar, she never even thought about words and when or if she could speak them. She had a voice when she was in the cellar, and it had been heard. She knew this. When she had opened the trunk, when time flowed back and unimaginable distances suddenly flexed into a brief arc and allowed her to walk into another century and another house, she had a voice. She had spoken. She was not mute. Now if only she could speak so fluently, so freely, upstairs in the light of day.
Perhaps tonight when she was in bed she would try to whisper the questions softly into the night. She had, after all, managed to speak a few sentences to her aunt. Her voice was there. It was somewhere. She just knew it.
Chapter 12
JERRY LAY IN BED. She had been trying forever to recall the sound of Beatriz’s voice, but for some reason it wasn’t working. And every time she tried to think of a question to ask, even if she had remembered the girl’s voice, for some reason she thought of her mother, her mother and the stupid veil she had concocted for Jerry’s First Communion. In her desperation she had even tried to imagine a conversation between herself and Beatriz about Communion veils. It would go something like this: If you think simple is bad, try silly, try looking like a cross between a desert Arab in a burnoose and a Hindu swami in a turban for your First Communion. Take your pick.
But Beatriz and Doña Maria and Doña Grazia and the rest seemed to recede into some misty region. Instead there was her mother, Millie, so fragile, her toothpick arms, her darting glances, with her rapid-fire, breathless speech, always rushing up to you as if she had something desperately important to confide.
Jerry got out of bed now and went to the bureau drawer where she kept a few things in a small cedar box with writing on the lid that said “New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.” She opened the box and took out the linen card the nuns had given her at the Catholic Charities home and read again about the friars in Assisi and Padua who were praying, perhaps at this very minute, for her mother.
Outside she heard the rumble of thunder, then a crack of lightning peeled back the dark, and every object was limned in a hot white radiance. On the porch she saw the figure of Constanza. She saw the small bald spot, somehow shocking, like the eye of a hurricane as strands of Constanza’s white hair loosed by the wind whipped about her head. A few smudged stars wheeled in the sky and clouds chased after a lopsided moon. Everything was swirling in this night, but Jerry clamped her eyes shut trying to banish the image of those violets eddying around her mother’s ankles.
Jerry was still holding the card of the Franciscan friars in her hand. Assisi! The word jumped out at her. That was the medal Beatriz’s father had made for her cousin Brianda as a gift for her Communion. She had seen that medal in the trunk. She was sure. So tarnished it was almost black. She had simply scraped it aside when she had replaced the Bible the first time she had ever opened the trunk.
Jerry waited until she was sure that Constanza had gone to bed. She then took a flashlight. The steady rain outside muffled her footsteps. The temperature had dropped and the air was cold. On the back of a chair was a shawl that she picked up and wrapped herself in. She opened the cellar door and began her descent. The stairs were familiar. She knew that the edge of the third step was cracked. She no longer needed the flashlight. Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness now and she knew the way. It was curious, but not only did the familiar shapes seem to dissolve into the perpetual dusk of the cellar, she also began to feel the slide of time itself.
Outside the stars swirled, and inside once more centuries began to bend. Time curved back as Jerry reached to lift the lid of the trunk. She pushed the Bible aside. A small, dark disk glowered. She picked it up, licked it, then took the corner of her shawl and rubbed it. The figure of a man emerged. On one shoulder a squirrel was perched, on the other a bird, and the man’s head was tilted toward the sky where two more flew. Jerry rubbed a bit harder. The man’s mouth was open. It was St. Francis. He was preaching to the birds and all the animals that Brianda had loved. Brianda, who hadn’t even wanted the cook to kill a mouse in her pantry. Brianda of Seville…
In the House of the Doctor
ON CALLE DE JERONIMO
SEVILLE, SPAIN
APRIL 1480
Luis
I think it is an awful thing being twelve years old, especially to be twelve years old and the youngest and the only boy. I am left out of everything. I tell my friend Paco this and he says, “So you want to wear dresses and corsets and kirtles like your sisters and weave ribbons in your beautiful hair?” He waves his fingers through his own hair as a girl does. He does not understand. It is not that I want to wear dresses; I just don’t like being left out. They all think I am too young, too young to understand anything. But I know a lot more than they think. I know, for instance, that Rosita is secretly seeing Juan Sebastian, a young gentleman of the court. But Juan Sebastian is an Old Christian and we are New Christians, Conversos, and we must marry other Conversos. So Rosita and Juan would be in big trouble if anyone found out. Of course my other sister, Elena, knows. Because
girls, especially sisters, cannot keep secrets. Also she knows because Rosita needs Elena’s help to make meetings with Juan. I figured this out because I became suspicious when they kept going to the convent to help embroider the robe of the Macarena Virgin, which will be carried through the streets during the Holy Week procession to the cathedral. But Rosita does not work as long on the robe as she says nor as often. I cannot believe that my mother and father don’t suspect anything. But they don’t. This is why children can get away with a lot—because their parents are so unsuspecting.
But I am cleverer than my sisters. I don’t say stupid things like I am going to church to light a candle for Abuela Yolanda, who died last year. No. When Papa sends me on an errand to, say, the herbalist on the Calle de Hierba, I add on a few errands of my own. Papa is a doctor and he sends me often because he likes only the freshest herbs and compounds. Lately Papa has been sending me on lots of errands—errands that keep me away from our house for maybe two hours or more. Just yesterday I had to first go to the herbalist for some theriac. Then I had to go to the olive dealer several streets away for some unripened olives. Papa uses the oil of such olives to dissolve myrtle berries. This is a cure for worms. And every child in Seville, I think, has worms these days. You see them scratching their behinds. My sisters and I have never ever had worms because Papa treats us with what is called a vermifuge three times a year, made from the myrtle oil and some powders. We have to drink it and it makes us spend hours in the privy. I think having worms might be better.
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