Marvelous, p.2
Marvelous, page 2
Catherine looks down at her hands. They are still soft, though the skin now is lightly spotted, stretching thin as onionskins across the backs. She remembers when Petrus would not take her hands for fear of frightening her; remembers when she was frightened. It seems so long ago—another man, another woman. Another life entirely.
The funeral Mass goes on and on, the warmth of the day bringing out the odors in people’s clothing. Or perhaps Catherine’s mind is drifting, perhaps she is gone from this place, gone away to someplace where time moves differently, where hours stretch slow and aching in the space of ten breaths here in the church. Under the concealing fall of her veil, she holds a little pouch of fawn leather, unadorned, the throat of it pulled tight by a darker leather thong. The lock of Petrus’s hair is inside, and she cups the bag between both palms, a prayer.
Also in the bag is a folded bit of paper, creased, the ink faded. She has nothing left of her mother but the thimble from her sewing kit; even the hair powder she had once used, one of the few things that escaped being sold after the sinking of Papa’s ship, is long gone. Catherine had brought that powder, which smelled so like her mother that it made her weep, with her to Château de Fontainebleau, to her wedding; she wore it in her hair until none of it was left. And though she made more powder, doing her best to reproduce her mother’s recipe, it never smelled quite the same.
But she does have this one bit of her father—this letter, this paper, his words, his slanted hand, his love in ink. When she cups the bag, she can hear the paper rustle, just a little. She inhales, breathing in again the bodily odors of all the people around her, and oh, how she longs suddenly to be small again, to have known no sorrow, to have her father smiling into her face, palms full of rose petals that would one day be turned into scents for women’s wrists and throats, into powder, like Maman’s, for their hair. Smell, ma petite belle. Breathe them in. Would your mother like them?
She rises at the end of the interminable Mass, all the words and rhythms that have comforted her all her life, and which she clung to so desperately for their familiarity in the midst of so much overwhelming strangeness when she arrived at court as a bride, sounding hollow now as poorly cast bells. Henri reaches her first from his seat a little down the bench, and offers her his arm; his wife remained behind at their home, laying out the food.
Catherine finds herself faltering a little as they walk, round stones in the dirt street catching under her feet. She tightens her grip on her son’s arm, and feels really old for the first time in her life. Madeleine detaches herself from her husband and takes Catherine’s other arm in a firm grip; together, her two children steer her toward the funeral feast.
The other mourners straggle out behind them, mumbling to keep their voices at an appropriate, funereal level. There are more of them than Catherine expected. Most, she suspects, will have come because Petrus enjoyed the patronage of the Duke of Parma, under whose protection the whole village rests. Only a few have come because they knew and loved Petrus himself; but then, he made himself difficult to know.
She finds herself looking back, as if her other children might have joined them—Ercole floating alongside from wherever it is the dead do go, Antoinette, grown now and richly dressed, following at a sedater pace than she would have set in childhood. Come from wherever she is now.
Chapter 2
Garachico, Island of Tenerife
1547
Pedro
It was other children who taught him to bark when he was little more than a babe, to raise his piping voice, doglike, to the fat moon. They surrounded him and urged him on with their laughter until he felt like a dog in truth, and sometimes they ran down the town’s streets, always a little behind him, all yipping and growling in play. He thought them his pack.
It wasn’t until he was a little older, his limbs lengthening and hardening and all the softness gone from his feet, that he understood that the laughter was jeering, and that the pack encircled him not as their leader, but as their prey. They poked him with sticks; sometimes they threw stones. When he was still small and round he thought this was how boys always played. Now he knows differently, knows enough to recognize the difference in the way they play together and the way they play with him.
La Bestia, they call him. The boys, and everyone else: fishermen and merchants, priests and slaves, beggars and the wealthy families who live in the best houses in the town. Women cross themselves when they see him; children are sometimes frightened, sometimes taunting, and sometimes want to pet him, for the hair that covers him like a pelt is very soft. It is thickest on his head and face, and covers his shoulders, chest, and back like a cape drawn in against a breeze.
Isabel tells him not to mind the taunts. And she never calls him La Bestia. She calls him Pedro, because that is his name, given to him by his mother and father.
He does not know who his mother and father are. Or even if they still are, rather than were. Sometimes at night when the town is dark and quiet as a womb and all he can hear is the wind over the hills and occasional muffled laughter of drunken men stumbling home from the taverns, their voices echoing through the narrow winding streets, Pedro wonders whether one of them might be his father. Whether his mother waits up at night for her husband to return. Whether the two of them miss him, Pedro.
Isabel’s mouth, usually soft and generous, turns thin and puckered when Pedro asks about his parents. She will tell him only that his mother was Guanche, like Isabel herself, and that his father was a Spaniard, like Isabel’s own husband.
“One of them who came over years after our leaders surrendered to their soldiers,” she says, bending low over her work, a necklace of clay beads that she has painted bright with the dyes of plants. “No doubt he meant to make his fortune from our rich land.”
“And did he?” Pedro asks, but Isabel just shakes her head, makes an irritable sound at the back of her throat, and will not answer; and from this he understands that they are probably still here, still in Garachico. He might pass them every day and not know it.
But they—they must always, always know him. There is a small, hard satisfaction in that, in knowing that his hairy face is unmistakable; that if they are still here, they can never forget him.
“Are they hairy, like me?” he asks on another day. He has come in from the rain, and his hair is all sodden, pressed flat to his skull and dripping puddles on the floor.
He knows that she must know his parents. He is old enough now, nearly nine summers behind him, to realize that since he was not abandoned immediately after his birth, news of him, a hairy infant, must have traveled swiftly through the town. When Manuel brought him to her, Isabel must have known who abandoned him, and why, for the shame of bringing something so monstrous into the world must have been hard to bear. The only question is why they did not give him up sooner.
Isabel, who had snatched up a rag and begun rubbing it briskly over his head, pauses now. She knows, without asking, whom he means.
“No,” she says, after a very long silence, during which Pedro stares down at the spreading damp. His feet, in their secondhand shoes, shift against the floor. Isabel catches his chin in her hand, tugs his face up and stoops to meet his eyes. Her smile is small and sad.
“There is no one like you,” she says. “You are very special.”
It was Isabel Gonzales who gave Pedro ahoren from her own pot when he was small and hungry and alone, the fine fern-root and barley flour dissolved in goat’s milk so it was thin enough to drink; and her grandson Manuel who showed him, when he was bigger, how to gather limpets and winkles and mussels when the tide was low. Pedro has become so good at gathering that he is able to supply Isabel and Manuel with an abundance of shellfish, freeing them from the task and letting him feel he has truly earned himself a place by their hearth. He glows with his ability to help them, to provide.
Manuel brought Pedro home when he was just a babe—“Squalling and scrawny, left for the church to take in or dispose of,” he said. The clipped way he spoke about it later told Pedro that he thought it more likely Pedro would be disposed of than given shelter, had the priest been the one to discover him. Dropped from the cliffs into the sea, the waves swallowing him whole, the fact of him gone in an instant.
Instead, it was Manuel who found him, hardly more than a child himself, then, hearing Pedro’s cries when he was passing the church in the night, on his way back from a night of mischief making with his friends, warm with cheap wine. The wind that whipped along the street, the creaking of the trees overhead, the rumble he could hear coming in from the sea—all of these must have aroused in him a strange, bruising tenderness, for he stopped at the church, picked up the child that lay on its step, hands fisted and face screwed in fury, and cradled him against his chest, carrying him home to the house he shared with his grandmother, Pedro’s hungry cries startling her from her slumber.
“Only a few weeks old, you were,” she says, whenever Pedro begs for the story of his coming to her. “Without all that hair, you’d have been the tiniest sack of bones.” She tells him how his mouth opened and closed around her finger as if it were a teat; how his tongue muscle thrust her finger away, disgusted, when it yielded no milk. How she laughed and cried together, the clench of sudden love butting up against the fear that he might not survive, this small draggled creature thrust so unexpectedly into her arms.
They have lived together all the years since then, among the dusty streets and bright-painted houses. The tolling of the church bell calling them, all unwilling, to prayer. Their house is small and cramped, for all that the only sticks of furniture are the chairs and table built by Isabel’s husband so many years before, the plain bedstead he used to share with her. There are pegs by the door for hats and for Pedro’s woven palm bag, and shoved against the wall are his and Manuel’s pallets, stuffed with straw and only slightly softened by flock, bits of wool and fabric cut up fine. Pedro likes to sleep with the small, humped shapes of his wooden menagerie dozing beside his pallet.
Manuel made the toys for him from spare bits of wood, during idle hours that could have been spent instead lazing with friends or wooing women. Instead, he chose to spend the time whittling for Pedro—the flash of knife, the curls of wood falling to the floor between Manuel’s sun-browned feet, leaving in their wake a horse with its tail carved in motion; a dog, tongue lolling; a pig, fat and round and fitting perfectly into the hollow of Pedro’s palm. A goat with wee sharp horns and swollen teats, her two kids gamboling behind her. Pedro loves to run his fingers over the little grooves in the animals’ bodies from the knife scrapes, the spindly delicacy of their legs and horns.
Manuel’s careless hand on Pedro’s head, not to pet him or test the texture of the hair there but to ruffle it in affection. Isabel’s playful scolding over the mess of wood scraps; her gentle glance when Pedro kneels in the dust, playing with the animals with the sun hot on his head and shoulders and the seabirds wheeling above. At night, he falls asleep warm and fed, toys beside him, the smiles of the only two people who matter filling his head and his nighttime breath mingling with theirs in the house’s single room.
Every day, Isabel combs the hair on his head and face with her own wooden comb, the one her long-ago husband carved in a pattern of flowers that look just like the bright yellow ranúnculo that sprout wild all over the island in autumn. The hair on his cheeks droops especially long; though there is no looking glass in Isabel’s home, Pedro can feel its length with his fingers, and if he looks down he can see it, soft and brown.
Isabel’s own hair is white and wispy as the clouds that are pushed across the blue, blue sky by the ocean winds. Her skin is roughly lined like the bark of a dragon tree, and she has little humps of skin, darker than the rest, in clusters on her cheeks and throat. The largest of these has a hair growing from it, long and black as a spider’s fine leg. Pedro’s chest feels warm looking at that hair, growing, proud and unapologetic, where it oughtn’t.
Isabel scolds him whenever he turns up with scrapes from his encounters with other boys. She prods at his swollen cheekbone, making him wince. “Cruel children,” she mutters, and then a few words that Pedro does not understand but whose meaning is unmistakable when paired with her scowl, white brows pressed together over the long straight bone of her nose. These are words she shouldn’t say; they come from a language that is now forbidden, the secret language of Isabel’s girlhood, which she stubbornly refuses to forget. Her own name wasn’t hers until after the island was finally overcome—her father, a goatherd, slaughtered like one of his own goats, and her brothers put on a great ship and taken away. Her new name—Isabel—may be a Christian name, and she may have been baptized by a priest’s holy water, but she still worships silently the god of her parents and grandparents.
Yet to Manuel, her grandson by blood, and to Pedro, whom she calls el nieto de mi corazón—the grandson of her heart—she will not speak the name of her god or any of his intermediaries. She fears the boys will be clumsy and say the names aloud where someone else might hear.
The bell of the new whitewashed church calls them to Mass every Sunday. Manuel, whose skill as a builder means he never lacks for work in their growing port town, points out the fine details to Pedro and Isabel—from the fitted beams in the ceiling to the graceful stone arches—as they wait for the service to begin.
Pedro sits cushioned between Isabel and Manuel and listens to the priest while ignoring the sideways stares from the other benches. He recites the Latin prayers in a whisper, tries to feel their holiness on his tongue though he cannot understand them with his ears. The priest’s Spanish sermons at least are comprehensible, and Pedro sits straight and still as he speaks. His mind strains to fill with all the mysteries the priests have deciphered from their heavy holy book.
But no matter how closely he listens, the priest’s stories never answer the one question that drifts in an endless whirlpool through his head. Perhaps, he thinks, he can ask the priest himself one day, when he is older and feeling brave.
Instead, Pedro begs Isabel for stories of her god, and even of the evil spirits who, Isabel says, caused all manner of illness and accident; but she refuses.
“Evil did not cause you, cariño mio,” she says, understanding at once his unspoken worry.
Pedro often goes down to the sea to harvest shellfish for their supper; but he also helps by scouring the beach for shells that Isabel can use in her work. Almost everything from Isabel’s girlhood has long since been forbidden by the Spanish who conquered the island, but the rulers have not entirely quelled admiration for traditional artistry. Isabel sits most days in the shade, stringing clay beads and shells into adornments that she can sell; it is Pedro’s job to make sure her pile of shells is always heaped high.
Today, Pedro hurries through the twisting streets. He keeps his head low, eyes on his feet as they scurry forward. If he stops even for a moment he is as likely to receive a coin as a kick; the merchants shoo him away when he lingers too long outside their shops and stalls, afraid that his strangeness will deter custom. Although thanks to Isabel he is no beggar, the wealthy always seem to assume he is one, anyway; they offer him coin if he lets them touch the fur of his cheek. Once, one gentleman cut a long lock of his hair to bring home to his wife.
A pity, the gentleman said, rubbing the hairs between his fingers, that a little beast like you can’t be skinned like a goat. What a handsome coat you have.
Pedro gives these coins to Isabel, and she takes them, though with a furious look when he explains how he came to have them. He much prefers the look she gives him when he brings her his gleanings from the sea.
The sea is once again his destination, and he does not look up at all until he reaches it, even when he passes the monastery where monks’ voices thrum through the windows. At the beach he removes his shoes and places them on the sand, high enough that the tide cannot snatch them away. The sand is soft and black; Pedro amuses himself for a short while by marching up and down the shore, neck twisted so he can see the line of his own small shallow footprints before the waves lap them away. When he has tired of this, he finally crouches down to work.
Always, the sea is generous. It daily offers an abundance of shells that have been abandoned by their occupants: large, spiny shells with insides as pink and smooth as palms; the rough dark shells of mussels; the curled shells of sea snails, as small and delicate as a fingernail. He picks through them all, putting the best ones into the sack Isabel made for him for just this purpose, woven tightly from the fibers of palm leaves.
Two fishermen are at work far down the beach; one of them waves to Pedro, and Pedro lifts his hand in response, smiling with all his teeth. They are too far away to see him properly; he must look like any ordinary boy to them.
He is still smiling when he throws the bag over his shoulder and makes for his favorite spot, a nook within one of the twisted rocks overlooking the sea. These rocks were formed, Manuel told him, long ago by fire from the tallest mountain in the area. Hills loom high around the town, but as far as Pedro knows, only this one ever belches fire.
He used to fit perfectly inside this nook, nestled close enough to the water that when the tide was in, he could feel the spray on his face as the waves rushed forth. The sea is a deeper blue than the sky and filled with just as many mysteries; not just the fish and eels, crabs and urchins, but deeper mysteries of the sort that sailors like to describe, particularly to small boys with large eyes and eager questions.
These sailors, accustomed to all manner of extraordinary sights in the strange lands to which they journey, often seem less shocked than other people by Pedro’s appearance. They speak of monsters that lurk in the deepest parts of the sea, many-armed and many-toothed, all the more fearsome because they come from a place where humans cannot go.
