Beneath the Orange Tree - Chapter 1 on Orange Street

The orange tree leaned over Catalina del Valle’s shutters like an old neighbor, offering its light and scent in equal measure. Its branches scraped the wooden frame every morning and scattered a dust of blossom that fell into the mortar and onto the counter where she ground herbs. The tree had been planted by her father before the sea swallowed enough years to make his face a matter of story rather than memory; he had placed it there because the lane had too many stones and not enough green, because the fruit gave color to the pale houses and a warmth to the mouths of those who ate it. Catalina measured time by the tree: a fuller canopy meant a better harvest in the coming year, a quick frost in bloom meant a winter of scarce coin. That morning the sky above the harbor was a soft, hushed blue, the kind that suggested storms far from sight but left the quay itself calm. Fisherboats creaked at their moorings, and gulls argued over a discarded coil of rope, while beyond the masts the larger hulls waited like heavy beasts for their masters to return.

Inside the apothecary the air was a patchwork of aromas. Rosemary, dried lavender, and the resinous tang of pine filled the room in measured waves. Jars lined from floor to ceiling: some were earthenware with white glaze and narrow necks, others plain glass where the sun turned the preserved peels into little suns. Recipes were kept on folded slips of parchment, tied with twine and tucked beneath glass weights to keep them from curling. Catalina had learned each thing by feel — the stiffness of a ribbon of bay leaf that told her it would quickly crumble, the right pressure of the pestle against the brass mortar that would coax out a bitter medicine without bruising the herb into uselessness. Her hands moved with a quiet authority; people who came to the shop expected remedies as much as they expected discretion. There were clients who needed a salve for a child's fever and clients who needed a quiet hour in which to speak of matters that could not be named aloud.

Doña Teresa stood by the doorway, thin as a slice of lemon and wrapped in a shawl of sober grey. She watched the street with the economy of someone who had learned to make observation a craft. When Catalina smelled a change in the wind she did not name it; she set down a spoon and listened instead for footfalls that might sound like the government’s men. The old woman’s hands did not shake when she counted coins, but there was a guardedness around her mouth, a narrowness to her smile, that a stranger might mistake for thrift. They had learned to speak in the language of small things: errands, favors, a certain way of pressing a coin into the palm that meant more than its value. It was not that they wished to hide from their neighbors — rather, they had learned that privacy was sometimes the only way to keep a life intact. Conversation in the lane rarely rose above the level of the marketplace; more delicate exchanges were made as gestures, as the passing of a wrapped fig, a tilt of the head. Catalina and her mother had become fluent in that economy of movement.

On a day like this, talk of the sea always arrived at the shop. Sailors brought news of distant ports and goods tucked beneath tarpaulins: cloth that smelled faintly of a foreign spice, a chest of glass beads whose colors held the sunlight, a barrel of goods that the captain promised would pay for a winter’s security. Men at the quay argued about the royal edicts that sought to regulate trade, and talk of customs officers and their lists threaded through the market like a shadow. Catalina recognized the tone of those conversations: seedling worry, then rumor, then the hard certainty that arrived in the shape of a horse and a parchment. She had no taste for politics, and yet the politics of the harbor had a way of touching the shop; sooner or later every regulation or decree arrived in some form on her counter, a request for a potion whose price the client would try to lower because a fine had claimed more than the household could spare. That morning a messenger passed with the usual clatter of a busy port, but his cloak was too plain and his tread too brisk to belong to a man whose business was only coin. Doña Teresa watched him and let the silence between them say what could not be spoken.

Even as the sun climbed, the lane had its rhythms of exchange and small favors. A woman with a basket of sardines came to trade with news — the captain of the galleon downriver had been delayed — and a boy with a scraped knee arrived asking for a balm. Catalina tended both with the same practiced care, closing the shop for a moment to sponge the child's wound and to give the fishwife a sachet for sickness that came with long journeys. Her acts were humble, the sort that go unnoticed by those who measure life only by grand episodes, but for a neighborhood they accumulated like stitches. Each mended knee, each soothed fever, was a knot joining household to household. It was how communities were kept: by small mercies, by remembered favors, by a pattern of quiet assistance that became, over years, a mutual contract. Catalina liked to think of herself as part of that unstated agreement, a woman whose medicines and discretion could hold the pieces together.

As the afternoon wore toward evening, talk in the market turned colder. Men who in the morning had laughed over port wine carried now a setness to their faces that was hard to miss. A fisherman muttered that he had heard how a clerk in the trading house had been questioned about lists; a potter spoke of soldiers who had come two streets over with orders to search rooms for forbidden property. The trading house — a name that made people lower their voices when they said it — had been busier than usual, and rumors grew like mold in the dark. Catalina felt the weight of rumor the way her father had once felt a storm coming to the harbor: first in the tightening of his shoulders, then in his way of moving through the house with a kind of urgent care. She told herself that they had no cause to worry, that the apothecary was a plain business and that their days had no relation to the concerns of powerful men. Yet the gestures she and Doña Teresa practiced were not merely habit; they were instruments of survival.