Teresa of the New World Page 6

  Teresa snorted again when he tried to pat her head. Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving him with the other sleepy girls of the household in the light of another pink and yellow dawn.

  The housekeeper was also puzzled. She had grown to depend on this tattooed child from the north who never wasted time gossiping or singing or giggling with her friends. There was always so much work to do, and with the rumors of sickness in Mexico City, some servants had started to run away. Now more than ever, the housekeeper needed willing hands in the kitchen to cut up meat and make tortillas and stir the soups. She needed calm faces and strong backs. She hardly recognized this new Teresa, who frowned at the slightest order and looked at her with contempt.

  “What has happened to you?” the housekeeper exclaimed finally.

  An assistant cook joined the conversation. “Fray Tomás says she has a hard heart. It happened overnight, he says.”

  “It is good to have a hard heart,” another woman spoke. “Everyone knows that a bad temper is good protection against disease.”

  The housekeeper grumbled about turkeys that had to be plucked and dirty floors that had to be swept and the dozens of tortillas that had to be made before breakfast. Teresa noticed that the housekeeper’s cheeks were flushed red, the pockmarks a bit more noticeable, the black eyes a bit too bright.

  “Are you sure you are not sick?” the cook asked with a touch of malice.

  “Sarampión toca la puerta,” the assistant cook carelessly sang.

  The housekeeper drew in her breath for everyone to hear and slapped the assistant cook across the face. “There is plenty of strength in these arms,” she warned before she hurried from the kitchen.

  The next day, she did not come down from her room.

  That afternoon, the Governor left the house with a large group of men and a string of horses packed with supplies. His secretary informed the cook that the Governor would return in a few weeks, after his business was completed in the countryside. For now, the secretary was in charge, and the household work should continue as usual. Except there would be no more formal dinners. The secretary, himself, preferred to eat alone.

  Two more servants became ill, and a few more ran away. Every morning, one of the assistants to the assistant cook came down to the kitchen to report that the housekeeper’s fever was higher, her body like a stove. The housekeeper had also developed a rash that moved down her pockmarked skin from her hairline to her feet. Certainly she had the measles, the dreaded sarampión. The assistant to the assistant cook looked scared, although she did as she was told and went up again to put cold cloths on the housekeeper’s forehead and to bring her water.

  Finally she said that the housekeeper was dead, or almost so.

  Teresa did not cry. She did not feel sad at the news. Soon the assistant to the assistant cook became sick, and then the assistant cook and then a third woman from the kitchen. Teresa helped take care of them because she knew she was safe from the disease. Because her hard heart protected her.

  Fray Tomás was also busy tending the feverish children at his school. Whenever Teresa saw him, he looked terrible, his neck wrinkled and thin as a turkey’s, his face hollowed and voice hoarse. As always, he seemed to be running even when he was not. As always, he asked about Teresa’s health and happiness and gave her his blessing. He told her that the village of shopkeepers and blacksmiths and artisans was emptying quickly. Typically, they had eaten less well than the Governor’s household and seemed more affected by the epidemic. Most of the slave hunters had departed with the Governor, and their Indian families had fled the area or were sick and dying unattended. Most of the children in the monk’s care were orphans.

  The Governor’s secretary did not get sick, for he was a Spaniard, and they had special charms against all forms of disease, sarampión and viruela, escarlatina and tabardillo. The Spanish men left behind with the secretary also did not sicken but seemed dismayed and surprised at the deaths of their wives and sons and daughters. More and more they spent their time burying or burning the dead from the village. Soon that included the dead from the household: the assistant to the assistant cook who had tended the housekeeper, two assistant cooks, and two stable boys. Teresa had only to drag a body out to the courtyard, and it would disappear.

  By this time, almost everyone else in the Governor’s house had run away or was already fevered. Teresa did not know who was feeding or taking care of the Governor’s secretary, or if he had already gone. She never saw him. She never saw anyone but the remaining Indian servants, who were all sick, and a few slave hunters and Fray Tomás. She understood now that she could do whatever she wanted to do. She could wander through all the rooms of the Governor’s house alone. She could enter her father’s bedroom and open again the wardrobe with its smell of sweet wood. She could go into the library and take down her father’s book, although she could not read it. She could throw the book into the kitchen fire and watch it burn.

  In fact she had no energy for these things since she spent most of the day bringing water to her demanding patients, preparing gruel for them, and washing and changing their bedding—the fine cotton cloths she used freely from the chests upstairs. One woman thanked her before she died. Another cursed her.

  Fray Tomás stopped by the kitchen to get food. “You are doing good work,” he praised. “You are a good girl, Teresa.” He looked as though he were about to fall down.

  Teresa shrugged. She wasn’t trying to be good. She hadn’t cared when the housekeeper died or any of the others. She simply took their bodies out to the courtyard.

  “God bless you,” the friar said as he picked up the basket of meat and tortillas and fruit. His blue eyes glittered too brightly. “They are all going to Heaven, you know. I have seen it myself. I have seen their souls slip up to the sky.”

  Teresa looked thoughtfully at the friar before she nodded. She had seen that, too. Pointing at the basket, she made the gesture for eating and then for sleeping. Pointing her finger at the friar, she shook it in a scolding way. He should eat more! He should sleep more! Fray Tomás shrugged apologetically. Probably she was right, but who had the time when so many people needed him? He trudged away.

  That evening, her own fever surprised her. Teresa knew she wouldn’t die, because of her hard heart, but the fever came anyway, and she went to her last two patients, changing their bed cloths one more time, leaving them water and a pot of soup. She touched the mottled skin on their faces. Both seemed cooler. She shook her head. She could only hope for the best.

  Then she dragged herself from the kitchen to a pile of clean dry straw in the nearest barn. The horses were gone, taken by the Governor, although the stable still smelled pleasantly of old manure. The air was dark and cool, and before she collapsed, she also surrounded herself with pots of water and a covered pot of soup. There would be no one to put cold cloths on her forehead or moisten her lips or change the straw. She would be alone with her sarampión, just the two of them.

  Teresa’s head ached until she wanted to twist it from her neck as she would have twisted off the head of a chicken. Tossing and turning, burning and groaning, she saw wonderful things even as the sores appeared, first on her face, then moving like a feathery tip of fire to her chest and groin. Fire and feathers. She saw brushstrokes in the air from the wings of angels. She saw Juan Diego, the man who carried roses to the Bishop, his apron glowing with a picture of the Lady. She saw Fray Tomás, too, and this was not so wonderful, for the friar was bleeding from his mouth and nose and ears, from every opening in his body. She saw his soul, a yellow sheen, slip up into the sky.

  She saw the wise woman. This was the most vivid dream of all. It was the old wise woman who lived with the coyote pup and the owl on the loudly talking, magic-filled hill, the wise woman who had kept the helmet from the conquistador and used it as a scarecrow in her field of maize. The woman’s long braided hair was bone-white, her brown face creased into a web of wrinkles. Her eyes were dark. Her mouth had sunken. A
round her neck, over wrinkled breasts, she wore a seashell necklace, pearl-white with gleams of coral pink.

  The wise woman looked directly at Teresa. She did not look at Teresa’s father. She was not interested in Teresa’s father. “What you have lost will be restored to you,” she said. With a painful leap of her hard heart, Teresa knew the wise woman was speaking to her and no one else.

  Tossing and turning in the straw bed, Teresa reached out to the air, the brushstrokes of angels. She was thirsty. But she did not have the strength to find and lift a pot of water. Her skin itched, and she remembered all the women and men she had nursed and how they had scratched their bleeding sores and made them more inflamed. Like them, she couldn’t resist. She itched and scratched.

  What had she lost?

  She had lost everything. She had lost her mother, cheerful and smiling. She had lost her grandfather, her uncles and aunts, her baby sister. She had lost her foster mother, who had tattooed Teresa’s cheeks to make her a member of that tribe. She had lost the Moor, who had carried her when she was tired. She had lost her father, the deceiver. The betrayer. She had lost her soft human heart. She had lost the housekeeper with her powerful arms and stern pockmarked face. She had lost Fray Tomás.

  What did the wise woman mean? Teresa reached out to the air.

  What would be restored to her?

  She knew when her fever broke, feeling it crack and fall away, freeing her arms and legs and loosening its hold on her chest. She crawled to where she had placed the closest clay pot, lifting the lid with a trembling hand and spilling the liquid over her face and shoulders and floor of the barn. Some of the coolness splashed deliciously on her lips and down her throat. Teresa gasped and breathed in the odor of straw, horses, and her own urine. The air smelled so good. She felt so good, despite her aching muscles, despite the rash that still dotted her neck and shoulders down to her stomach. She was weak. She was sticky with sweat and dirt. But she felt so good.

  And she had something to do. She could still hear the wise woman’s voice. She hadn’t understood then, when she was a child. She hadn’t realized that the wise woman had been talking to her and not her father. What you have lost will be restored to you. Now Teresa had to return to that village, back to that hill and crumbling adobe house. Now she had someplace to go.

  6

  A large raven flew into the barn and perched on an empty stall. Kro-ak, kro-ak. The bird rattled, weirdly liquid, and Teresa woke from her second sleep of the day. The raven turned its dark eye on her and croaked again before flapping with a dramatic flutter of wings outside into the summer sunshine. Teresa agreed. It was time. She was stronger now, having rested a full day and drunk her pot of soup and all her pots of water. She should stand now and go outside and find something more to eat.

  She still wore her stained cotton shirt and leather skirt. She found her yucca sandals and staggered out the barn door, feeling the weakness of her legs as she followed the bird past the garden and into the courtyard. There she stopped, paused, and returned to the rooms by the kitchen where she had kept her last two patients. They were gone. Perhaps they had died and the Christians taken their bodies. Perhaps they had recovered and left on their own. She no longer had any responsibility here.

  Unsteady, she walked into the village, where the dirt path was rutted and she had to be careful not to fall. She was thirsty again, and the light rash on her chest burned and itched. Just as Fray Tomás had said, the village was empty. Teresa looked about with interest, in part because she had been to the village so seldom, rarely leaving her kitchen and garden. The small adobe houses stood silently, surrounded by small yards of maize and beans, the ears ripening, the pods dangling unpicked from the vines. No one was in the blacksmith shop or the woodshop where the Indians had learned to make Spanish chairs, tables, and beds. The door to the whitewashed chapel was open, the twisted heart carved into wood. Here there was only more silence, and Teresa didn’t stop to look inside.

  But she paused before the building that had been the friar’s school, wondering if there were any children who needed care and forcing herself to go in. Only Fray Tomás lay sprawled on the floor, one hand clutching his torn brown robe. From the black blood, Teresa knew the monk had been visited by tabardillo, a friend to sarampión. She was not surprised. She had seen this in her visions.

  She hurried out of the foul-smelling room onto the dirt street, where the sky was turning darker blue and the shadows in the yards deepening. Ahead, a second raven perched on a post in front of an adobe house, its roof made of cane and woven leaves. The bird cawed, agitated. A Spanish man appeared in the doorway. He and Teresa stared at each other.

  “Go on,” the man said. “Get out of here.”

  The raven flew down the path, and Teresa followed. So a few people were still alive. They waited in their homes for the pestilence to pass. As she walked on, slowly, two more houses showed signs of life. In each case, a man came out and stared at her, afraid she had come because she was sick and needed help.

  Teresa walked through the village, and then she left the village and the Governor’s house and the Governor’s kitchen behind her. She would never go back, never see them again. She was walking north along a well-worn path. She was searching for a stream where she could drink and wash herself and her clothes.

  Soon she began to notice the animals. A large king snake, brown as chocolate, slithered in front of her flicking its tail. This was the snake that ate other snakes, even rattlesnakes and the poisonous banded coral. A family of deer accompanied her for half a league, picking their way through the thorny brush where she could hear the brittle snapping of twigs. Sometimes they scrambled ahead so that she saw their rumps in a flash of white. Lizards darted across the trail, scurried here and there, here and there, here and there, and then watched her from a stone or root. Some had streaks of brilliant blue around their throat and bright orange on their belly. Birds flitted through the air like falling leaves, branch to branch, tree to tree, more birds than Teresa had ever seen before. She knew some of them from her hours in the Governor’s garden: jays and gnatcatchers, wrens and robins, doves and finches. A flock of parrots flew like a green cloud in the darkening sky. Quail rustled in the grass.

  As Teresa walked further into the summer night, she saw cuckoos and heard the whoooo of owls. Finally she found the stream she knew would be there, what the farmers used to irrigate their fields, and she drank and cleaned herself, scrubbing away the stains of sickness. Tired, she made a bed off the path, near the water. A wolf called another wolf in a valley beyond. From the ground, Teresa could feel the warmth of small mammals, mice and packrats, sleeping in burrows. Her stomach growled. The new abundance of animals seemed to answer back, growling and rustling. She went to sleep, and the animals ran through her dreams, winding like ribbons over her breasts and arms and legs, winding through her hair. She felt the stirring of her old life, when this had been normal, when the world had been alive in her body.

  The next morning, she reached another village. Some of the houses smelled of rotting flesh, and she did not enter these. But one house had only the fragrance of pink roses planted as a hedge around the yard, and in this kitchen, she found food, her mouth watering at the sight of dried meal not yet eaten by mice, dried jerky in a sealed clay jar, and dried chilies hanging from a nail. She opened all the cupboards and filled a leather saddlebag also left behind.

  Oh—she smiled when she found that bag, for it had a pocket that contained treasure. Teresa recognized the tinderbox immediately, small and wooden and carved with a simple floral design. Inside were a piece of flint, a curved piece of steel, and tiny pieces of prepared oilcloth. Now she could make a fire whenever she wanted.

  This village and the one close by were completely abandoned. Not everyone had died. There weren’t enough bodies. But the survivors had gone, leaving their dead just as Teresa had left hers in the Governor’s courtyard. When the bodies in a house were old and dry enough, she went inside to look for more foo
d. Most of the corpses lay on pallets and had their faces covered. Only a few had been left to die alone, without anyone or anything by their side.

  Strangely confident, the animals wandered through the villages, too, as easily as they wandered through the forest. Teresa saw skunks and raccoons, coatis and opossum, rabbits and hares. Lying on the roof of one house, a mountain lion stretched out comfortably, eying her as she walked by. In the orchards of apples and pears and plums, in the fields of maize and beans and squash, pigs and cattle also roamed at their ease.

  Occasionally she saw signs of people. In the dirt, there would be footprints, the litter from a recently eaten meal or the remains of a campfire. Once she heard voices in the distance, but she did not go toward them.

  Outside the third village, the last adobe house smelled clean, the neatly swept dirt in the yard littered with fallen grass from the sagging roof. A tall yucca grew by the door, the spiky leaves at its base trailing threads that could be twisted into rope, the thick stalk rising up in an abundance of white flowers. Here, too, someone had planted pink and red roses, which bloomed in a fragrant mass of scent. Teresa stood and breathed in the perfume. She felt reassured. Beyond a corner of the house, blue sky showed with the brilliance of late afternoon, her second full day of traveling. Teresa adjusted the saddlebag slung across her shoulder. She wanted to scavenge quickly and be gone.

  Inside the house, the first room contained nothing but broken pots smashed into pieces and scattered on the ground. In the second room, a back door let in a shaft of light in which the dust motes seemed to hold still like a solid thing in the air. Here Teresa caught that familiar odor, not of death but sickness, cámaras de sangre or bloody stools. Someone groaned along the wall, and a bundle of rags shifted before flinging itself into that solid shaft of dust and light. Teresa shrank back as a hand fell out of the bundle, then an arm, and the woman on the floor groaned again. Against her breast, she clutched a dead child.