When the scullion girl went off to church, Doña Valentina took out her little silver fork. The gown in her lap was not her favorite. But it was
one of only three she owned. The new styles were simple and austere. They were meant to emphasize a small waist—which she still had as she’d never borne children. They were also meant to be ornamented with strings of
pearls and jewels—which she did not have. She used the two tines to catch at the thread and pulled, making a tear, right along the seam. Something easy to repair if she was wrong.
Valentina didn’t really know why she did it, but she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the bread, the cook’s blank face, the scullion shrinking away from the table. If it was a joke, they hadn’t seemed amused by it. The cook had looked resentful and distracted as she always did. But the kitchen girl, Luzia, she had looked frightened.
Valentina had heard rumors of illusions and miracles at court. Lucrecia de León had dreams of the future, the disgraced prophet Piedrola claimed he
spoke to angels, and the Mendozas were said to have a holy sage in their employ who could move objects with his mind. Of course, Valentina had never seen any of these things. She had never received an invitation to La Casilla, let alone the Alcázar, and she never would. Unless.
But her unless stank of desperation, and as she hunched over the seam of her skirt, tearing away threads like a bird picking at worms, she felt almost sick with disgust for herself. That shame was a shambling thing behind her, chasing her onward, driving her to do her worst.
As soon as Luzia returned from church, Valentina descended to the kitchen. She shouted at the cook and claimed there were weevils in the rice, which she spilled over the floor so that the scullion had to sweep it all up, crawling on her knees to find the stray grains. She demanded water for a bath when she’d had one only the day before, and when some of it sloshed
on the floor, she slapped Luzia hard enough across the face to send her stumbling.
Valentina felt breathless, frightened, as if she’d slipped her reins, as if she’d gone suddenly mad. There was nothing she might not do.
“Bring me my gown,” she snarled. “Be quick about it.” She half expected to find fangs had burst through her gums, claws at the ends of her fingertips. In the glass of the window, she studied the pale moon of her face with wonder and almost forgot to watch Luzia, pulling the black velvet from the trunk, finding the tear, hesitating. Valentina watched her glance up, making sure Valentina’s back was to her, and then she heard the faintest, softest humming noise.
Luzia shook out the skirt and brought it to her mistress. Valentina’s hands were trembling as she took it.
The tear was gone.
Luzia knew she’d made a horrible mistake as soon as she looked into
Doña Valentina’s eyes. They were wild this evening, the unsteady blue of troubled waters.
She stood with her mistress in the quiet of the bedchamber, both of them holding on to the black gown, as if intending to fold it up together, put it away, forget it.
“You will come to supper tonight,” Valentina said. She licked her colorless lips. “When we serve the fruit, you will perform.”
Luzia could think of nothing to say except “I cannot.”
“You will,” said Valentina, a smile beginning to form. “You must.” “I don’t know what you want me to do.”
Valentina seized her wrist. “Stop this,” she hissed. “You mended my skirts. You fixed the bread. You will do this or I will set you out on the street tonight. Think of what it would mean to be a woman alone, without occupation, without protection. Think before you deny me again.”
Luzia couldn’t think, couldn’t make sense of this moment. She could not do as Valentina asked. The magic was meaningless, a bit of fun, a trick of
the eye, and in the hands of a poor but pious Christian woman, nothing to fear. But if anyone looked too closely, what would they see? If someone bothered to examine Luzia’s lineage, to ask who her parents were, her
grandparents? Her father’s family was Portuguese. Maybe that would make
her past harder to trace. But what of her mother’s people? All of them dead and buried or burned, but as dangerous to her as if they stood praying in the street. Say you are a simple girl, a stupid girl, who learned a few magic
words, who was merely playing a game. And when Doña Valentina demanded to know where she had learned these things, then what would she say?
Valentina must have seen some capitulation in her face because she released Luzia’s wrist and patted her gently on the hand. “Put on a clean apron before you join us. And don’t hunch like that, as if you’re waiting for the next blow.”
Luzia went about the rest of her duties that evening in a kind of trance. She helped the cook make the cold salads, and roll out the pie crust, and thinly slice the ox tongue. She filled little bowls with lavender and warm water for the guests to wash their hands. Aunt Hualit liked to describe the
feasts at her rich friends’ houses where hundreds of dishes were served, and jesters and dancers performed between courses. But fish pie and ox tongue and salad were the best the Ordoños could manage. Luzia carried the pies up the stairs and set them on the heavy table at the side of the dining room. Valentina would serve.
Up the stairs, down the stairs. The courses passed, one by one, faster than they should, an indication that the conversation was stalling and that the night would not be deemed a success. Luzia arranged the tongue on a plate, ladled sauce into a pitcher, listened to the cook mutter Escárcega,
Escárcega, Escárcega, as if the playwright’s name was a curse.
She thought of what Valentina had said about her posture and stood up straight, but it was difficult to lose the servant’s shuffle she’d worked so hard to perfect. Best not to be seen. Best not to be noticed. All she wanted was to run to Hualit, but then she’d have to admit what a fool she’d been. What have I done? she asked herself, again and again. What might I do?
The answer of course had to be nothing. She would simply fail to do anything. She would stand at the head of the table looking foolish, maybe spill something on herself. She would endure a bit of humiliation and Doña Valentina would too. Maybe she’d kick Luzia into the street, but maybe she’d take pity, or maybe she wouldn’t be able to find another girl miserable enough to accept her sorry wages. Maybe the guests will go home before the fruit is served. Luzia looked at the pears, red and swollen with wine, sitting in their pretty dish. She listened, hoping to hear the scrape of chairs as the
diners above rose from the table, the front door opening and closing as they said their goodbyes. Instead, only Doña Valentina’s voice came, her whisper descending the stairs like a curling finger of smoke. “Luzia.”
The cook laughed when she saw Luzia tying a clean apron around her waist. “Putting on your best gown?”
“I hear Quiteria Escárcega has two lovers and lets them both take her at the same time,” Luzia said, and savored the brief spiteful pleasure of the cook’s mouth popping open. She picked up the pears in their silver dish.
I’ll go to Aunt Hualit, she thought as she climbed the stairs. I’ll walk to Toledo and start a new life. She’d become a beggar like her father had.
Except even that wasn’t safe work for a woman.
“Luzia will serve,” Doña Valentina instructed when Luzia entered with the pears.
Candles blazed along the sideboard, the dining table, the mantel. This
was expected in a nobleman’s house, but Luzia knew they’d be eating bread and sardines for weeks to account for the expense. Don Marius slumped at
the head of the table looking grim and bored.
Luzia made her slow way around the room, awkwardly supporting the dish of pears in the crook of her elbow, an unwieldy spoon in her other hand, conscious of the silence, the lack of chatter or laughter. She could feel Valentina’s eager eyes upon her, the other guests deliberately ignoring her— just two tonight, Don Gustavo and his bejeweled wife.
When at last she slid the final pear from the dish, she turned, feet tangling as she lurched toward the door.
“Luzia!” Valentina said sharply.
Luzia stood frozen, the silver dish in her arms.
“Is there something wrong with her?” the woman whispered, her ropes of pearls gleaming like light on water.
“Put the dish down and come here,” Valentina said, her voice high and bright. “Luzia has something to show us, a bit of entertainment for our
guests.”
At this, the woman leaned forward. “Does she sing? I love a villancico.
You can hear them singing down at the market in the morning.” Don Marius shifted in his seat.
Doña Valentina took a burnt roll from her pocket and set it on the table. It looked like someone had thrown a rock through the window and it had landed among the precious glass goblets and old-fashioned metal trenchers.
Don Marius’s laugh was unkind. “Have you gone mad?”
“Is it a trick?” asked Don Gustavo, stroking his beard. “I met a girl in Córdoba who could fit a whole orange inside her mouth.”
Doña Valentina pursed her lips at the obscenity, but that was all she could do. “Luzia,” she urged.
Some reckless part of Luzia wanted to reach for the roll, to correct it, make it a thing of appetite once more, but she kept her hands still at her
sides. Would Valentina wait until morning or cast her into the street tonight? If she did, would Hualit take her in? Do nothing, she told herself. Be nothing. If she willed it, maybe she would vanish slowly into the stone walls.
“Well?” said Don Gustavo.
“Well?” repeated Don Marius.
Doña Valentina reached out and pinched her arm, hard. But Luzia didn’t budge.
“Just send her back to the kitchen,” Don Marius said. “It’s late.” “It’s not so late,” Valentina protested.
Luzia didn’t look up from the table, from the burnt bread and the candles, but she heard the misery in Valentina’s voice. A party shouldn’t end so early. It was a failure of the host and hostess if it did, and if word got out,
there would be fewer invitations offered or accepted. Valentina would sit in her window, and she and Don Marius would dine alone. But that wasn’t Luzia’s problem to solve.
Don Gustavo heaved a sigh and pushed back from the table. “It’s time we said our—”
“Luzia has something to show us,” Valentina insisted.
“What is wrong with you?” growled Don Marius. “This is an embarrassment to me and this house.”
“I only wanted—”
“There is no greater burden than a fool for a wife. I offer you my apologies, Don Gustavo, my friends.”
“Please,” Valentina said, “I … If you had seen—” “And still she prattles on.”
Don Gustavo laughed. “What is it the poets say? God gave women beauty to tempt man and speech to drive him mad.”
Luzia didn’t mean to look. She didn’t want to see the shine of tears in Valentina’s eyes, the smirk on the woman in pearls, Don Marius and Don
Gustavo smug and red-faced with wine. She had no intention of reaching for one of the goblets, Venetian glass, wedding gifts that Doña Valentina brought out only for special occasions, clear and perfect as drops of rain.
She smashed the glass against the table.
The room went silent. The guests were staring at her. The woman in pearls had covered her mouth with her hands.
Luzia felt as if she were floating up through the ceiling, over the roof, into the night sky, as if her arms had lost their shape, curving outward and becoming wings. Valentina would have recognized the emotion that spread through Luzia’s blood, the wild and terrible potential, the same mad daring that had caused her to overturn the rice and slap Luzia’s face. There is nothing I might not do.
Luzia clapped her hands together, hard and fast, hiding the words of the song she whispered, a quick, humming tune. She spread her palms over the shards of the ruined goblet and they drifted together, like petals caught in an invisible breeze, a trembling rose of broken pieces, and then in the barest breath, a drinking glass once more.
The guests gasped. Valentina released a happy sigh. “Praise God,” Don Gustavo cried.
“Maravilloso!” said his wife. Don Marius’s mouth hung open.
Luzia saw her reflection in the goblet, changed but unchanged, made perfect and ruined all the same.
