Ten days passed before Luzia was allowed to go to mass.
Doña Valentina had invented a thousand chores that needed doing to keep her from leaving the house.
“You can go to church next Sunday,” she complained. “Surely that is enough.”
Luzia studied the freshly cleaned game birds laid out for that night’s supper. There was something accusatory in their nakedness, their pale, pimpled bodies. Her fingers were still cramped from the effort of removing their feathers.
“It is my soul we discuss,” Luzia said, dropping her voice as if the devil himself might hear. “Surely that is enough.”
Luzia knew Valentina would happily consign her to eternal damnation for the sake of a seat at the right table, but it would be a very bad thing if Luzia was not seen attending church, taking communion, making her confession.
In the dim light of the kitchen, Luzia watched Valentina calculate the narrow difference between a little miracle and the crime of witchcraft.
“Águeda—” Valentina began.
“I go to mass at San Sebastián,” said the cook. “But—”
She was stopped short by Águeda’s cleaver, cutting through the necks of each bird on the table in a series of decisive thuds that made her point clear: I am a cook and not a chaperone.
“Very well,” Valentina said. “But no dawdling. I expect you back within the hour. I don’t know how you can spend so much time confessing when you have nothing to confess.”
I have many murderous thoughts, Luzia considered saying, but managed to restrain herself. She would never make it to Hualit’s and back in the
space of an hour, but she would go to church anyway. If she was kneeling in prayer, she would at least be off her feet.
Luzia was still puzzling over Valentina’s determination to keep her housebound when she rounded the corner that led to San Ginés and a man dressed in velvet and fur appeared.
“Señorita?”
“Keep your coins, señor. I’m a woman of virtue,” she shot back with as much force as she could, grateful for the people coming and going. When a rich man approached a servant, he could want only one thing.
“Señorita Cotado, I am employed at Casa Olmeda and my mistress bade me inquire if you might consider a change in position. She can offer you a far better wage and situation.”
Luzia’s steps slowed. “You’re offering me a job?” “My mistress is.”
“It is a respectable house?” “Most respectable.”
“I will consider it,” Luzia said, the words strange in her mouth when all she wanted to do was shout yes.
On the next street, she saw a wagon being loaded up with goods and furniture. Other pieces had been tossed into the street. Luzia wondered if someone had died and then saw the men emptying the house belonged to the Inquisition’s alguacil. As they broke through the lid of a locked trunk with an axe, people hurried past, heads down, eager to be away from the tribunal’s business.
“Books and papers,” one of them said, and they lifted the trunk into the wagon, potential evidence for the trial.
Be thankful, she told herself as she sat and stood and knelt in the narrow pew at San Ginés. Think of Casa Olmeda. A new position with a wealthier family, better wages. Her hand curled around the pearl in her pocket. Maybe God had opened this path for her.
She thought of the books the alguacil’s men had placed in the wagon.
What would become of them? And what would become of the person who had collected them, who had laid them carefully in that chest, who might never return home? Torture, exile, a sentence of service on a galley or in a prison, banishment to a convent, death. All frightening. All possible. But
there were plenty of bleak fates to be met in Madrid that had nothing to do with the Inquisition.
Blanca Cotado had taken a fall and died in a pauper’s hospital before
Luzia and her father could find or claim her. She didn’t want to think of her mother now, to wonder who had washed her body, or if her spirit had rebelled at the prayers spoken over her corpse. Leveyat hamet, her father had whispered as he’d stumbled behind his beloved, as she was carried with the other paupers from the hospital to the church, wrapped in her linen mortaja, like a fly made ready by a spider.
Leveyat hamet. A mitzvah. A mitzvah. He had torn at his shirt, his voice growing louder, until in terror, Luzia had dragged him away. Be silent, she had begged him, berated him, unable to stop her tears. Be silent or they’ll
take you too. She’d been too young to really understand what was happening. She only knew that the priests had her mother’s body and that if her father kept speaking someone would hear; the words would travel, a spreading stain, until they reached the ears of the inquisitors.
Luzia shook away the memory. The grief wasn’t nearly as bad as the
shame she felt remembering her father cowering against the wall, his eyes shining, his lips still muttering forbidden phrases. I will not end that way. Not like her mother, shoved beneath the stones of this church; not like her father, tossed into an unmarked grave. She reached for the thread of hope she’d had within reach only moments ago.
“Casa Olmeda,” she whispered to herself as she made her way back toward the church door.
A hand slipped around her wrist, the grip hard enough to bruise. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself, milagrera.”
“Hualit?”
Her aunt hissed a warning and yanked her into one of the chapels that
was usually locked behind an iron gate. A massive crucifix towered over the altar, the Virgin to the left, John the Baptist to the right, both of them surrounded by a gathering of saints and martyrs. Hualit was in her Catalina de Castro de Oro clothes, cocooned in a long black velvet cloak. A white ruff brushed her pointed chin, her face emerging like a luminous pearl
above it, and her thick curly hair had somehow been bound up in a tidy pile. “You’re the talk of all the hidalgos and caballeros in Madrid,” Hualit
whispered furiously. “What madness has entered your body that you would play such a game?”
Luzia yanked her arm free of her aunt’s grip. “I’m trying to make a little money, secure a better position for myself. That’s all. The mistress of Casa
Olmeda is offering me employment in her household.”
Hualit snorted a laugh. “That humorless hag? You can do better for yourself than Vitoria Olmeda.”
“Not sleeping on a dirt floor every night would be better, no?”
“If there is even a hint of heresy in your miracles, the inquisitors will snap you up and ship you off to Toledo for trial.”
“How else am I to make my way in the world? You have remarked more than once that I am no beauty. I have no talents but this little bit of …”
Hualit seized on her hesitation. “What name will you give this, Luzia? Do you think to pretend the angels speak to you with your murky blood?
Rome is already pushing for an end to the study of astrology and
divination.” She glanced at the altar as if the saints themselves might be listening. “The Church owns miracles. Not scullion girls and street prophets. You are no beata doing good works.”
Luzia felt a kind of frantic anger that sat in the hollow of her throat, an ache that if she wasn’t careful would turn to hot tears and make her look like a child. She took a long breath, trying to swallow the bitter mix of
panic and rage and something nameless that had the shape of a bird, lost in the rafters of a building, searching for sky.
“I can’t remain as I am,” she managed. “My back is already twisting from the weight of water and washing and baskets full of apples. I’m growing old before I’ve had the chance to be young.”
“There are worse things for us women.”
Us women. As if they were the same. It was not just a difference in
stature or comforts. She and Hualit were not a pampered hound with a silky coat set next to a stray dog scrounging for scraps in the rubbish. They weren’t even the same class of creature. Luzia lived like a rat, and her only choice was to stay hidden or risk death. How many times had she complained to Hualit about the misery of her situation? But nothing had changed; there had been no pearls or offers from noble ladies until she’d dared to creep from the kitchen and let herself be seen.
“You say there are worse things, tía. But I say a quick death is better than a slow one.”
Hualit rolled her eyes. “You are not in danger of dying from hard work. You think you know hardship, but men have a gift for finding new ways to make women suffer. If they don’t charge you with witchcraft, you’ll be
branded a Judaizer. You are walking onto the pyre and whistling while you do it.”
“A conversa is not the same as a Jew.”
Now Hualit’s jaw set. “It is to them. Never forget that. You think because we were dunked in water and whispered over by a priest, they consider us real Christians? We are poison to them. Something they’ve been forced to
swallow that eats away at the very substance of who they are. You’ve shown off your little tricks. This must be the end of it.”
“Is it me you fear for or yourself?”
“There is room in my large heart for us both.” “No one knows I’m your niece.”
“How many questions will it take before you tell the inquisitors who I am, where I live? Before they learn you have the taint of the Jew in your blood? Do you not see where this is headed? Where is your own fear,
Luzia?”
It was still there, alive and squirming, waking her in the night like a squalling newborn. Of course she was afraid. But she wasn’t sorry. Not when she might carve some real luck from this moment. Her mother and father had vanished from the earth as if they’d been consumed, as if they’d never been here at all, uncelebrated, unsung, mourned by no one but Luzia and Hualit. Better to live in fear than in grinding discontent. Better to dare this new path than continue her slow, grim march down the road that had been chosen for her. At least the scenery would be different.
She reached into her pocket and held out Valentina’s pearl. “Can you sell it for me?”
Hualit took the earring and held it up to the light. “You really do work for paupers, don’t you? This is shit.”
“So you can’t sell it?”
“It’s shit but it’s still a pearl. You didn’t steal it, did you? I won’t sell stolen jewels. Even my friends have some standards.”
“It was a gift.”
“I think you mean a bribe.”
“I suppose it depends who you’re asking,” Luzia countered. “What do you intend to do with the money?”
“I don’t know yet.” “Of course you don’t.”
“I’ll buy a hat covered in ostrich feathers.”
“You might as well throw your money in the river.” “Then the fish and I will be happy.”
“For a time.”
“Can any of us expect more?”
“How philosophical you’ve become in your new fame.” Hualit dropped the earring into her pocket. “I’ll sell it and I’ll get you a good price for it, but no more milagritos.”
Luzia said nothing. She wasn’t going to lie with the Virgin and all those saints staring down at her.
Hualit sighed. “Embrace me, Luzia. Quickly now, before anyone sees.
And don’t look so grim. That will age you before any amount of toil.”
Luzia let herself be swept into her aunt’s arms. Her hair smelled of almonds, and when she drew back, she expected to see Hualit smiling. But the look on her aunt’s face was one Luzia couldn’t quite make sense of. Her eyes were slightly narrowed, as if she were fretting over the household budget or dissatisfied with the cut of a gown.
“No more milagritos,” Hualit repeated.
Only a few, Luzia bargained silently. Enough for another pearl, a chance to secure employment with Vitoria Olmeda. She was allowed to want more for herself. And even if she wasn’t, she would find a way to get it.
Later Luzia would understand that when it came to anything worth having, there was no end to more. She would reflect on the path she’d seen before her and how wrong she’d been about where it would lead.
But on this day she only smiled at her aunt and said, “They will tire of my tricks eventually and then I will return to my sad servant life.”
“If you’re lucky,” Hualit said. She gave Luzia a little shove through the gate. “And our family has never been lucky.”
