City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  In her bones, her blood, she still remembered when, as a young child, she had sat up on the top of her father’s carriage with Pedro, the driver, on the way to Sevilla. It was forbidden for the noble little girl to sit there. She was supposed to ride inside as befitted a child of the aristocracy, but on the country roads, with no mother or father present to enforce the rule, Gelvira, her nurse, had given her a treat. The little girl saw the world as a bird might have seen it, flying above the ground. Then suddenly a rabbit darted from the ditch beside the road and ran under the wheels. Thud! Thud! The heavy carriage rolled over it. She stood and turned and saw it lying in the dust. Brown and white and bloody in the searing Spanish sunshine. It seemed to her it was her fault.

  “Stop,” she had cried. She wanted to go back, to fix the rabbit. She sobbed so long and hard that Gelvira had to lie to her mother that she had a cold. Her mother wept and worried that she would die. They kept her in bed for many days and made her drink nasty-tasting things the doctor prescribed. One sin of disobedience and so much turmoil.

  She had prayed to St. Francis to make the rabbit well. Sometimes she imagined it had gotten up and scampered away. The older she became, the more certain she was that no such miracle could have occurred. She still felt that childish guilt. Now she was about to feed what might be poison to the cat. He might expire in her hands.

  Death did not frighten her. She had seen people die. Old nuns, mostly, like Sor Elena, who lay now over on the cot near the window. Death would come as a relief for that old woman’s pain. When one of them was dying, Sor Monica was able to ease her sister’s suffering until she passed peacefully into the arms of Jesus. Human beings had immortal souls that lived on after death. But when animals died, they were completely obliterated. Forever.

  She crossed the cluttered infirmary to Sor Elena. The pale gray light of that Good Friday dawn shone on the old woman’s already ghostly face. Sor Monica broke silence and confessed her fears about the cat. “Even if the cat dies, I still will not know if Inez took poison on purpose or if someone else put it in her water. I am sorry I thought to do this test. I do not want to destroy one of God’s creatures.”

  “You should give the water to me to drink.” Sor Elena’s voice was weak but determined. “If it sends me more quickly to my Maker, I will be glad.”

  Sor Monica blessed herself and whispered, “Do not say such things, my sister,” but her heart knew what a relief it would be to speed Sor Elena on her journey and spare her the waves of torment she suffered more and more often. The Sister Herbalist felt herself a sinful woman to think such a thought.

  “In a way, the cat belongs to Juana, the maid,” Sor Elena said. “She brought it here as a kitten. Ask her permission. Perhaps that will put your conscience at ease.”

  “Juana would certainly say yes,” Vitallina, Sor Monica’s assistant, called from across the room. The big African woman, who had come to them from Brazil, had ears that could hear a straw break in the next street.

  “Go and fetch Juana to me, please, Vitallina, and bring the cat also. It is probably sleeping in the corner of the postulants’ refectory.”

  The stately Negress bowed gracefully and left the room. She was the most gifted person with medicines Sor Monica had ever met, but she was also the most superstitious. She had carried many pagan beliefs from Africa and learned many new ones from the Indians of the Amazon where she had lived. Now she was incorporating the beliefs of the Andeans into her weird cosmology. But she practiced no black arts.

  “Will you make me a yerba maté to calm my stomach?” Sor Elena asked.

  “Certainly.” Sor Monica took a gourd from the shelf and spooned in some Paraguayan tea. Then, using her apron to grasp the ladle, she poured in water from the cauldron boiling over the fire. After a moment to let the tea cool, Monica held the gourd so that Sor Elena could drink from the silver straw.

  “You are my angel of mercy,” the old nun whispered.

  Sor Monica’s mouth hardened against embarrassment. “I am only God’s instrument. I can do nothing until He lifts me up.”

  Sor Eustacia, who had so boldly directed the sisters who broke open Inez’s cell, appeared at the doorway. Her nose was red and her eyes a little glazed, as if she might be starting a fever. She touched her lips, a signal the sisters used to gain permission to speak. Her normally square shoulders sagged. Her cheeks were flushed.

  “Sister,” Sor Monica asked, “are you ill?”

  Before Sor Eustacia could answer, Sor Olga, the Mistress of Novices, came into the room and demanded to know what information the cat experiment had yielded.

  Monica resented Olga’s imperious tone. In a certain sense, the Mistress of Novices was her superior and would certainly be the next Abbess if anything happened to Mother Maria Santa Hilda. That in itself was a strong reason to protect Mother Maria. The Sister Herbalist prayed for compassion and holy patience. “We have not done our experiment yet,” she said humbly. “We will, in a few minutes.”

  She turned back and placed her cheek against Sor Eustacia’s forehead. “You have a fever, Sister. I will give you something. You must steam yourself and stay in bed all day.”

  “But, Sister,” Sor Eustacia protested, “it is Good Friday. I must be in chapel.”

  “Indeed!” Sor Olga interjected.

  “Nevertheless,” Sor Monica insisted, “you cannot allow yourself to become cold and damp.” She searched the jars on the shelf. Balsam of Tolu. Ipecac. Jalop. Guaiacum. Here it was—cinchona. It came from the bark of a tree. Vitallina had gotten it from the Indian herbalists in the market in the Plaza de la Fruta. Potosí’s European doctors thought the Indian medicines useless, savage, and so never bothered to investigate them. Sor Monica had found many that were beneficial. “Stir a spoon of this in water mixed with the juice of a quince and drink it every time the chapel bell rings. It will take away your fever. If you need more, Vitallina will bring it to you. She will come to see you every few hours.” She shook some white powder onto a bit of clean linen and rolled it up.

  Sor Eustacia took the packet, bowed, and left. She was one of those naturally silent people for whom the sacrifice of talk seemed no hardship.

  Sor Monica busied herself replacing the jar and rearranging her stock of herbs. Though normally no plants grew at this altitude, she and Mother Maria had managed, in the shelter of the cloister wall, to plant a single apple tree and an herb garden. They had recently begun to harvest their patch. The jars were full, and more bunches of their produce hung drying from the colorfully painted rafters.

  She returned to give Sor Elena more tea.

  “Kantuta flowers. You have some?” Sor Elena asked.

  “Yes, but not from our garden. They are plentiful in the market.” The Andeans believed they restored balance to the body.

  “There is a beautiful story,” Sor Elena declared. She was off in a minute, telling the Indian myth of the beautiful Incan princess who had fallen in love with a handsome commoner. The girl ran away from her father, the King, on a moonless night. Near her lover’s house, she slipped and fell into a ravine. The kantuta flowers supposedly took their scarlet color from drops of her blood. Sor Elena told the story at least once a day. She talked nearly constantly, as if now at the end of her life, she was compelled to speak all the words she had held inside for the nearly fifty years she had lived in silence.

  “I don’t understand why you and the Abbess prefer to believe there has been a murder in this convent,” said Sor Olga, the Novice Mistress. When her final day came, she would not have as many pent-up words as Sor Elena.

  Sor Monica tapped her fist on her breast in the signal of apology, pretending to be sorry for rejecting conversation, even though they were bound by the rule of their order to avoid talk. “I must prepare some medicine for Sor Elena,” she whispered.

  She busied herself cutting precious melon and grapes into tiny pieces, but she thought about what Sor Olga had said. Murder. It was the first time Sor Monica realized that the Abbess
had asked her to help investigate a murder. She had examined Inez’s body in minute detail. There was not the slightest sign of any illness. Poison was the most logical answer. If Inez had not killed herself, who in the convent would have and how and why? Inez was just a girl. A willful one, certainly, but what enemies wanted her dead? Were there people in this small community who harbored such evil in their hearts? There was a bit of strife, as there would be in any group of God’s imperfect creatures. The Abbess inspired some envy. She was powerful and highly aristocratic, too well loved by the many. A few of the sisters and several people of the town resented her. The Bishop and Fray DaTriesta had long been looking for an excuse to depose her. But Sor Monica could not believe they would murder Inez just to rid themselves of the Abbess. Perhaps the poison was meant for the Abbess and went to Inez by mistake.

  Sor Elena began to cough. The Sister Herbalist hurried to her side. The old woman’s fevered dark eyes pleaded with her. She begged for relief. But there was only one escape from her pain.

  After a few minutes, the terrifying coughing subsided. “Don’t worry,” Sor Elena choked out. “I will survive today. I am not worthy to die on the day Christ died.”

  Sor Monica stayed for a while and held her hand. It was small and brown. Sor Elena was of the holy type called Beata—women who had visions, ecstasies, some even had the stigmata, though Sor Elena never bore Christ’s wounds.

  In the past few weeks, she had told a fantastic story that she swore was true, and the brownness of her skin attested to it. She was born, she had said, at the mouth of the Ganges and was taken as a child by half-caste Portuguese pirates, who baptized her and sold her into slavery to the Viceroy of the Philippines. He, in turn, had sent her, dressed as a boy to protect her virginity, on the Manila galleon, an arduous seven-month trip across the Pacific as a gift to the Viceroy of Mexico. But riots in Acapulco had prevented the ship from landing. She eventually entered the convent in Lima and then came to Potosí with the much younger Mother Maria when she founded Los Milagros.

  Sor Elena was asleep. Sor Monica got up to prepare a mistela of wine, water, sugar, and precious cinnamon for when she awoke.

  “It snowed in the hills overnight,” Sor Olga said casually, startling Sor Monica, who had forgotten her presence. Olga was the one who taught the novices the rule of silence, and she was silent only in front of them and the Abbess.

  Vitallina returned carrying the cat. “Juana is away from the convent,” she said. “They say she went to help her brother, but I would wager she went to spend her money. It is what they are all doing, you know. Everyone says that the worth of the money will be cut in half. So they want to spend it now, while it still buys them something.”

  “What can you expect in a city like this, that lacks any restraint of civilized life?” Sor Olga said dryly.

  “Perhaps Juana did go to help her brother,” Sor Monica said. “He is trying to get excused from mita labor.” She snipped a piece of sugar from a cone and ground it in a mortar.

  Vitallina stroked the cat. “Juana has told me she fears her brother will die if he goes into the mines. He has had problems of the lung all his life.”

  Sor Monica prepared coca to include in Elena’s drink. It would open her pores and warm her body. “I have seen many sickened with lung disease by their work in the mine. One with that weakness would not last long. They say that in the Indian villages when they march the mita workers away, they play funeral music.”

  “The Indians die of other ailments just as easily,” Sor Olga said. “Smallpox and measles.”

  Sor Monica set aside the elixir and considered the cat. Its fur was brown and white, like the dead rabbit’s in the road. She went to the cupboard and drew out the jar where she had stored the water from Inez’s carafe. She prayed.

  “I will apologize to him for you,” Vitallina said. She buried her face in the cat’s neck and whispered to it in a strange language.

  Sor Olga glared as if she were witnessing a satanic ritual.

  When Vitallina finished, Sor Monica took the cat. It squirmed in her hands, clawed at her, hissed, and bit her fingers. Vitallina grabbed it back, and almost immediately it became calm again. Sor Monica sucked at the stinging wounds on her hands.

  Vitallina placed the cat on the counter and unclenched its jaw with her powerful fingers, forcing open its mouth. The animal did not protest. “Juana will not mind our using this cat,” Vitallina said. “She was very fond of Señorita Inez.” She flicked the cover off the jar and poured some of the water into the cat. It sputtered when she finished. She stroked its throat until it swallowed. Then it let her pick it up again and hold it.

  They waited in silence. Nothing happened. The cat began to purr.

  “Maybe God smote Inez for her sacrilege,” Sor Olga said.

  “What sacrilege was that?” Vitallina asked. Sor Olga did not answer. It was not the kind of question a Mistress of Novices would answer. Sor Monica wondered herself. She knew Inez was headstrong and seemed too worldly-wise for a novice, but she knew of no actual desecration of anything sacred.

  “It was just a manner of speaking,” Sor Olga said at last.

  “The devil could as well have taken her,” Vitallina said. “She was the kind of girl who could go either way. Strong for God or strong for the Evil One.”

  Sor Monica blessed herself in horror at the thought. “Mother Abbess believes she was truly repentant,” she said, “and so do I. That the cat lives shows us the water was not poison.” She said it as if it proved something, but she knew it did not.

  “Perhaps the poison will take a little longer to—” Sor Olga was interrupted by a moan from Sor Elena—a moan that turned to a scream of anguish.

  “Quick, Vitallina, get the tree sap from the blue bottle.” Sor Monica took the coca-and-wine infusion to the old nun. She held it to the writhing old woman’s lips. “Drink. Drink it all.”

  Sor Elena gulped the medicine. Vitallina thrust under her nose a gummy brown paste that Sor Elena inhaled. They had to treat the substance with great care. Even a whiff of the aroma inhaled while handling it made a person woozy. “Breathe,” Vitallina cooed. “Breathe.”

  In a minute, Sor Elena fell back on the bed. She moaned again, but not in pain this time.

  “The substance brings on vivid dreams,” Sor Monica explained to Sor Olga.

  “Do not let them take her to the stake!” Sor Elena suddenly shouted with a firmness and energy of which she was incapable when not under the influence of the drug. “Our Abbess. Our Abbess is in danger!” she continued to shout.

  “How does she know this?” Sor Olga demanded. “What have you told her to disturb her final days with such worries?”

  “Nothing,” Sor Monica replied, stupefied. “I never spoke of the Abbess’s danger to anyone except with Padre Junipero last night after—”

  Sor Elena cried out again. “They want to walk her through the streets naked to the waist—to humiliate her.”

  Sor Olga’s dark eyes widened with alarm. “This poor old woman has become a succubus to the devil.”

  “Or the gods,” Vitallina said.

  “She is just delirious from the drug,” Sor Monica said, and prayed it was the truth.

  Sor Elena’s body pitched with a strength it had not shown in years. “They will drag her the seven hundred leagues to Lima. They have a secret prison there. We will never see her again. Tell her to confess if they try to burn her. Tell her to let them strangle her before the flames reach her. God will forgive her for lying.”

  The shriek of the old nun’s voice, the terror of her visions, curdled their blood.

  “I will not listen to this.” Sor Olga sped from the room.

  As if Olga’s leaving calmed the hallucinations, Sor Elena suddenly opened her eyes. “The Tribunal protects its own,” she said in a calm voice. “They are corrupt. They find ways to prosecute the wealthy, so they can collect fines and confiscate property, which they use for themselves.”

  Sor Monica bl
essed herself and glanced at the door through which Sor Olga had just exited. “Please, Sister, do not say such things. It is dangerous.”

  “What will they do? Kill me?” Sor Elena laughed merrily, as if she had just discovered herself safely in heaven.

  “Still,” Sor Monica said. Sor Elena was safe from the Inquisition, but no one else was. Not even the Viceroy. Certainly not Mother Maria Santa Hilda.

  “The cat,” Vitallina said. She and Sor Monica turned to look for it. They did not find it anywhere in the infirmary, but while they were searching, on that day of Christ’s passion, Sor Elena quietly died.

  Eight

  “SEARCH FOR THE cat. You must find it. Perhaps it has gone off to some corner to die.” Maria Santa Hilda knew that Sor Monica would obey her. But she also doubted that the cat had died. From what Monica had observed, Inez’s death had been instantaneous. If poison had been in the water, would it not have killed as small a creature as a cat as quickly as it had a grown girl? Maria Santa Hilda had no idea if the inner workings of a cat bore any resemblance to the inner workings of a young woman.

  “Oh, and Sor Monica, please ask Beatriz Tovar to come to me.”

  There were things she needed to know that Beatriz might be able to find out. Beatriz, she had remembered, was friendlier with Inez’s sister, Gemita, than Inez herself had been. Gemita might know something that would explain her sister’s death, and she might reveal Inez’s secrets to Beatriz.

  And if Beatriz could be persuaded to go home, she might then act as a suitable messenger to carry information between the Abbess and Padre Junipero.

  A note lay on Maria Santa Hilda’s desk from the priest, warning her that the Grand Inquisitor was arriving soon from Lima and that DaTriesta was making inquiries about the town of people known to resent the Abbess of Los Milagros. There were those. She had often been courted by new arrivals who thought to form a bond with her. Whenever she suspected that their interest was in her noble blood rather than the nobility of her work, she snubbed them. She had been harsh with many silly men who wanted only to gratify their pride by bragging about their lofty connections. She had been wrong to be so rash. Eventually, she had learned to entertain their pretensions and to try to turn their vanity into true passion for good works. But some of the wounds she had inflicted in the distant past still festered. DaTriesta was building his case with those who bore them. The Abbess and her supporters must tread with great care and complete secrecy.