The novel Black Nightshade (448 pages) is divided into four parts. The first part deals with Christina of Sweden, who became queen in 1633 at the age of six, on the death of her father Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years’ War. She is famous for her conversion to Catholicism and removal to Rome, as well as for her patronage of the arts. The year is 1650, when Christina is still in Sweden, and we are introduced to the queen watching the river flow under one of the bridges of the old town in Stockholm, the island Stadsholmen. She wishes to devote herself to writing and indeed she is known to have been prodigious in her studies and knowledge of languages. In the novel, she has fallen in love with the memory of René Descartes, the French philosopher who visited the queen in 1649, following a correspondence between the two about hate and love. It was so cold in her castle that Descartes died there, having contracted pneumonia, in February 1650, shortly before the narrative opens.

         We are introduced to the correspondence between Christina and Descartes, which took place through the mediation of the French ambassador in Sweden, Pierre Chanut, with whom Descartes stayed on his arrival. Christina went so far as to offer Descartes transport to Sweden on a ship of the Swedish navy (official vehicles being used for seduction reminds the author of the case of a Swedish admiral who fell in love and learned to practise love with a mulatta in the West Indies). The sailors in the ship transporting Descartes to Sweden discover the wooden doll of a girl supposed to represent Francine, Descartes’ daughter by a domestic servant, Hélène Jans, who had died nine years earlier at the age of five.

         The first part of the narrative is interspersed with letters written by Christina and Descartes, tracing their nascent and mutual admiration for each other until Descartes’ death, and with excerpts from a book for women written by Hélène Jans, which describes the properties and uses of numerous herbs such as yarrow, lady’s mantle, motherwort and others. At the end of the first part, Christina abdicates in favour of her German cousin Charles Gustavus and leaves Sweden in possession of Hélène Jans’ book of herbs for women.

         In the second part, we are introduced to Hélène Jans in her home in Amsterdam, where she is reading a book on female anatomy (the narrative includes two excerpts from this book, which regards menstruation as divine punishment) and where she receives a visit from a friend, Camile, who requests a love-potion. Hélène attends the young daughter of Zacharias, who is about to give birth. She is known to prescribe herbs that will prevent conception or bring about a miscarriage, so the daughter is surprised that with her knowledge Hélène was unable to save her own child, Francine, who died of scarlet fever. She asks Hélène to tell her story. Hélène recounts how her father was a pharmacist and believed in an education for all his children, boys and girls, how she became interested in the medicinal properties of the herbs in his pharmacy, how she went to work as a washerwoman in the house of a famous bookseller in Amsterdam. In 1629 Descartes came to stay with the bookseller, and Hélène fell in love with his sensitive mannerisms. Every Thursday evening, Descartes would instruct the members of the household, servants included. He also talked about his life, how his mother had died giving birth to another child, but he’d been told it was giving birth to him, and how he had joined the army as an act of rebellion against his father. Amsterdam at that time was a vibrant city, owing to all the merchandise arriving from the Dutch colonies. Descartes talked about the mind and the stars while Hélène defended traditional knowledge, plants and the body’s sensations. They met one Sunday in the botanical garden and made love. Descartes received a letter, which proposed the idea of a universal language. Descartes rejected this idea, but Hélène was taken with the idea as a way of bequeathing her medical knowledge and wrote a treatise, Lingua nova e universalis, arguing that a common language was possible based on the rational ordering of philosophical thought. Descartes, in a letter, then embraced the idea.

         After a relationship lasting five years, Hélène arranged to meet Descartes in Amsterdam’s botanical garden with a love-potion. Nine months later, in July 1635, their daughter, Francine, was born. At the risk of being branded a witch, Hélène devoted herself to acquiring greater medical knowledge, but in the spring of 1640 she learned that Descartes planned to separate her from their child, whom he wished to educate as a lady. Hélène took the decision to run away with the child and seek refuge in Amsterdam’s Jewish district, but before she could do so, Francine fell ill and died. This is the end of Hélène’s story and she urges the daughter of Zacharias to be quiet because she is about to give birth.

         The second part of the narrative is interspersed with short poems and notes written by a university student, Einés Andrade, as well as letters and extracts from Hélène and Descartes’ works.

         In the third part, Hélène has just delivered Zacharias’ daughter’s baby when Christina of Sweden visits her in her home in Amsterdam, having recently abdicated and now free of royal duties. Hélène is initially reluctant to invite Christina into her house, but the two women soon warm to each other. On entering the house, Christina is immediately struck by the fragrance of fresh herbs, which contrasts with the smell of dampness in the royal castle of Stockholm, Tre Kronor. Hélène and Christina set about making lunch together. Hélène accuses Christina of having stolen Descartes from her and Christina confesses that she was in love with Descartes, but didn’t have time to let him know. Christina has come to return a treatise and personal diary that were in Descartes’ possession and belong to Hélène. Hélène is deeply moved and Christina lies, telling her the last thing Descartes said before he died was her name. They then proceed to tell each other their lives, to eat and drink, to laugh and cry. Hélène asks why Descartes wanted her to recover these documents. Christina suggests it is so that Hélène can finish her work on a universal language to promote understanding and remove the need for wars. When they say farewell, Amsterdam experiences a strange atmospheric phenomenon, a pervasive smell of raspberries, flowers blooming all over the place, neighbours talking, female animals on heat, male animals howling, a great celebration in the main square. The night became known as the night of the comet, though no one knew what comet it was. Christina and Hélène begin a correspondence. Christina again urges Hélène to undertake the creation of a universal language similar to musical annotation or Arabic numerals, fast to learn and common to all languages. Hélène insists that she is too busy for such an undertaking and is not impressed by the attempts of men like Francis Bacon and Gottfried Leibniz to match the nature of things and the way they are expressed in language. In a later letter, Hélène informs Christina that she has finished a book of herbs for women and taken on an apprentice, Agnes, to whom she hopes to transmit her knowledge.

         The third part of the narrative is interspersed with Christina’s poems and songs and with further notes by Einés Andrade on the search for a universal language.

         In the fourth part, Einés Andrade was born on the same night Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. Einés’ grandmother, Carme, goes upstairs to the attic to find some herbs she can use to relieve the mother’s discomfort after giving birth. These herbs are in a chest the women of the house inherited from a distant ancestor, Agnes, Hélène Jans’ apprentice. No one understands how Einés’ mother, Livia, can even have been pregnant since she is still at school, until she recounts how a handsome salesman had visited the house when the others were out and mounted her with her clothes on. The act of conception is explained away either as Livia hiding the father’s true identity or as a magical event. Livia and her sisters decide on two names for the child: Einés in honour of their ancestor Agnes, whose chest is in the attic, and Andrade, which sounds like a surname, to disguise the fact Einés doesn’t have a surname from her biological father. The priest who baptizes the child is so scandalized by some of the things the sisters tell him that he retires to Peru, where he embraces liberation theology and wears jeans instead of a cassock. Einés grows up in a house of women, is successful at school and gets good marks. One day, however, she is banished to the attic for asking if her great-great-grandmother had been a monkey, having read a book on evolution, and there she discovers Agnes’ chest full of herbal remedies, works by Christina and Hélène and poems that she herself will write when she is older.

         Having devoted five years to a doctoral thesis on Descartes and rationalism, Einés, now a university student, suggests to her supervisor, Miguel Valdés, that it would be much more interesting to analyse the human side of Descartes and in particular the influence on his life of Hélène Jans. Miguel replies that philosophy involves the study of ideas, not people’s lives. Einés explains about the papers in the attic and her belief that Hélène’s letters influenced Descartes’ interest in a universal language. She also has evidence that Descartes may have been murdered with arsenic since his symptoms, which Christina wanted kept secret, do not correspond to those of pneumonia. Einés argues that Christina and Hélène are examples of a different way of doing things, knowledge placed at the disposal of human happiness. Unable to convince Miguel, Einés realizes that she has to abandon her academic career and devote herself to writing the story of these women, which is also her own. She decides to continue Hélène’s work and become a herbalist.

         The fourth part of the narrative is interspersed with a biographical account of the life of Einés’ great-grandmother, who emigrated to Cuba and defended the rights of women working in the canning factories of Vigo, with poems by Einés and essays on patchwork, love and pastry by the female members of her family. There is also Christina’s last letter to Hélène, who has died, lamenting the fact she couldn’t prevent Hélène being tortured as a witch.

         This is an intricate narrative, constructed like patchwork, a mixture of fiction, essay, poetry, diary, based on real events and historical characters. The role of women in history is upheld and the Cartesian separation of mind and body, which relegated women to a secondary place, is firmly rejected with descriptions that are by turns amusing and inventive. Black Nightshade is regarded as one of the strongest Galician novels this century, for which it received the Xerais Prize for best novel among other awards in 2005.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne