I did not examine these details too closely, though, for I was far from lucid, so addled that I did not recognize myself in the Íñigo who took the beatings or who waked with a shudder in the darkness of a dank cell, listening to a rat scamper back and forth across the floor. My one true anxiety was that I would rot in that cell until I was fourteen, at which time I would make close acquaintance of the rope and wood contrivance still standing in the interrogation room, as if signaling that sooner or later I would be its prey.
In the meantime, I chased the rat. I was tired of going to sleep dreading its bites, and I devoted many hours to studying the situation. I ended up knowing its habits better than my own: its chariness—it was an old veteran rat—its audacity, the way it moved inside the walls. I learned to follow its scamperings, even in the dark. One night, pretending to be asleep, I let it follow its usual routine until I knew it was in the corner where I had set out bread crumbs every day, enticing it to that spot. I grabbed the water jug and slammed it down, with such good fortune that it turned up its paws and died, without squeaking an “Ay!” or whatever the devil rats say when they get what is coming to them.
That night, finally, I could sleep peacefully. But the next morning I began to miss my cellmate. Its absence left me time to reflect on other things, such as Angélica’s treachery and the stake where I could, and almost certainly would, end my brief life.
As for their burning me to a crisp, I can say, without braggadocio, that I spent no time at all worrying about that. I was so exhausted by the prison and the torture that any change would seem like a liberation. I often busied myself in calculating how long it would take to burn to death. Then again, if one recants in the proper form, they will use the garrote before lighting the pyre, and the end will come more gently. Whatever they did, I consoled myself, no suffering is eternal; and ultimately there is peace. Furthermore, in those days dying was a common occurrence, easily accomplished. I had not committed sins enough to weigh down my soul to the point of preventing my rejoining, in whatever place, that good soldier Lope Balboa. At my age, and having a certain heroic concept of life—do not forget that I was in these straits because I had not informed on the captain or his friends—the situation was made bearable by considering it a test in which, again begging your pardon, I found I was quite pleased with my performance. I do not know if in truth I truly was a lad with natural courage; but the Lord God above knows that if the first step toward courage consists of comporting oneself as if one were indeed courageous, I—let the record show—had taken not a few of those steps.
Nevertheless, I was hopelessly melancholy, filled with a deep anguish—something akin to wanting to cry but which had nothing to do with the tears of pain or physical weakness that were sometimes spilled. It was instead a cold, sorrowful sadness related to the memory of my mother and my little sisters, the captain’s look when he silently approved of something I had done, the soft green hillsides around Oñate, my childhood games with boys who had lived nearby. I regretted that I had to bid farewell to all that forever, and I mourned all the beautiful things that had awaited me in life, and that now I would never have. And especially, more than anything, I was sad not to look for one last time into the eyes of Angélica de Alquézar.
I swear to Your Mercies that I could not hate her. Just the opposite, knowing that she had played a part in my misfortune left a bittersweet taste that heightened the sorcery of her memory. She was wicked—and she became more so with time, I swear in Christ’s name—but she was breathtakingly beautiful. And it was precisely the combination of evil and beauty, so tightly entwined, that fascinated me, an agonizing pleasure as I suffered every torment because of her. By my faith, one would think I was enchanted. Later, as the years went by, I heard stories of men whose souls had been stolen by a wily Devil, and in each of them I recognized my own rapture. Angélica de Alquézar held my soul in thrall, and she kept it as long as she lived.
And I, who would have killed for her a thousand times, and died for her another thousand without blinking an eye, will never forget her incomparable smile, her cold blue eyes, her snowy white skin, so soft and smooth, the touch still on my own skin, now covered with ancient scars, some of which, pardiez, she herself gave me. Like the one on my back, a long scar from a dagger, as indelible as that night, long after the time I am writing about here, when we were no longer children, and I held her in my arms, both loving and hating her, not caring whether I would be dead or alive at dawn. When she, so close to me, whispering through lips red from kissing my wound, spoke the words I shall never forget, in this life or in the next: “I am happy I have not killed you yet.”
Frightened, prudent, or perhaps astute, if not all of those things, Luis de Alquézar was a patient crow, and he had the cards to play the game by his rules. So he was careful not to give the advantage to anyone. Diego Alatriste’s name was not broadcast anywhere, and he spent the day, like all the previous ones, out of sight in the room in Juan Vicuña’s gaming house. But during that period, the captain’s nights were more active than his days, and in the dark of the next one, he made another visit to an old acquaintance.
The chief constable, Martín Saldaña, found him at the doorway of his house on Calle León when he returned from his last rounds. Or, to be more exact, what he encountered was the light glancing off Alatriste’s pistol, which was aimed straight at him. But Saldaña was an even-tempered man who had, in the course of his life, seen more than his share of pistols, harquebuses, and every other kind of weapon pointed at him. This one made him neither hotter nor colder than usual. He propped his fists on his hips and stared at Diego Alatriste who, in cape and hat, was holding his pistol in his right hand and, to be safe, resting the left on the handle of the dagger stowed in his belt above his left kidney.
“’Pon ’is body, Diego, you like to tempt fate.”
Alatriste did not respond. He stepped a little out of the shadow to search Saldaña’s face by the faint light from the street—just a large candle burning at the corner of Calle de las Huertas. Then the captain turned up the barrel of the pistol, as if intending to show the weapon to his friend.
“Do I need this?”
Saldaña observed him an instant. “No,” he said finally. “Not this minute.”
That broke the tension. The captain stuffed the pistol back into his belt and dropped his hand from the dagger.
“We are going to take a little walk,” he said.
“What I cannot understand,” said Alatriste, “is why they are not openly looking for me.”
They were walking across Antón Martín plaza toward Calle Atocha, deserted at that hour. There was still a waning moon in the sky, which had just emerged from behind the chapel of the Amor de Dios Hospital, and its beams rippled on the water falling from the curbstone of a fountain and running in rivulets down the street. There was asmell of rotted vegetables in the air, and the pungent odor of mule and horse manure.
“I don’t know, and I do not want to know,” said Saldaña. “But it is true that no one has given your name to the authorities.”
He stepped to one side to avoid some mud, but put his foot where he least wanted and choked back a curse behind his graying beard. His short cape accentuated his stocky build and broad shoulders.
“Whatever the case,” he continued, “be very careful. The fact that my catchpoles are not on your trail does not mean that no one is interested in the state of your health. According to my information, the familiares of the Inquisition have orders to bring you in with maximum discretion.”
“Have they told you why?”
Saldaña threw a sideways glance toward the captain. “I haven’t been told, and I do not want to know. One fact: they have identified the woman who was found dead the other day in the sedan chair. She is one María Montuenga. She served as a duenna to a novice in the convent of La Adoración Benita. Do you know the name?”
“Never heard it.”
“So I imagined.” The chief constable laughed quietly to
himself. “Better that way, because whatever else is going on, this is a rather murky business. They say that the old woman was a procuress, and now the Inquisition is involved…. That would not ring a bell either, I imagine.”
“None.”
“Right. They are also talking about some bodies that no one has seen, and about a certain convent turned upside down in the midst of a hurly-burly that no one seems to remember.” Again that sideways glance at Alatriste. “There are those who connect all this with Sunday’s auto-da-fé.”
“And you?”
“I make no connections. I receive orders and I carry them out. And when no one tells me anything, a circumstance I greatly celebrate in this case, all I do is watch, listen, and keep my mouth shut. Which is not a bad position to take in my office. As for you, Diego, I would like to see you far away from all this. Why are you still in town?”
“I can’t leave. Íñigo…”
Saldaña interrupted him with a strong oath.
“I don’t want to hear it. I have already told you that I do not want to know anything concerning your Íñigo, or anything else. As for Sunday, I do have something to say about that. Stay away. I have orders to place all my constables, armed to the teeth, at the disposition of the Holy Office. Whatever happens, neither you nor the Blessed Mother of God will be able to move a finger.”
The swift black shadow of a cat crossed their path. They were near the tower of the Hospital de la Concepción, and a woman’s voice cried out, “Watch out below!” Wisely, they jumped aside, and heard the chamber pot being emptied onto the street from above.
“One last thing,” said Saldaña. “There is a certain swordsman you must keep an eye out for. Apparently, parallel to the official plot, there is a semi-official one.”
“What plot are you referring to?” And in the darkness, Alatriste smirked and twisted his mustache. “I thought I just heard you say that you know nothing at all.”
“The Devil take you, Captain.”
“They want me to wake with the Devil, that is true.”
“Well, blast it, do not let that happen.” Saldaña adjusted his cape more comfortably around his shoulders, and his pistols and all the iron he wore at his waist clinked lugubriously. “That person I was speaking of is going around making inquiries about you. He has recruited half a dozen of those big talkers to fillet your innards before you have time to say ‘good day.’ The bastard’s name is…”
“Malatesta. Gualterio Malatesta.”
Martín Saldaña’s quiet laugh was heard again. “The very one,” he confirmed. “Italian, I believe.”
“From Sicily. Once we worked together. Or rather, we did half a job together. We have crossed paths another time or two since then.”
“Well, by Christ, you did not leave a pleasant memory behind. I believe he very much wants to see you.”
“What more do you know of him?”
“Very little. He has the support of powerful sponsors, and he is good at his trade. Apparently he went around Genoa and Naples, killing right and left on behalf of others. They say he enjoys it. He lived a time in Seville, and he has been here in Madrid about a year. If you want, I can make further inquiries.”
Alatriste did not answer. They had come to the far end of El Prado de Atocha, and before them lay the empty darkness of the gardens, the meadow, and the start of the road to Vallecas. They stood quietly, listening to the chirping of crickets. It was Saldaña who spoke first.
“Use caution on Sunday,” he said in a low voice, as if the place were filled with indiscreet listeners. “I would not like to have to put you in shackles. Or kill you.”
Still the captain said nothing. Wrapped in his cape, he had not moved. Beneath the brim of his hat, his face was darker than the night.
Saldaña breathed a hoarse sigh, took a few steps as if to leave, sighed again, and stopped with an ill-humored “I swear by all that’s holy.”
“Listen, Diego,” Saldaña continued. Like Alatriste, he was staring into the dark meadow. “Neither you nor I have many illusions about the world it has been our lot to live in. I am weary. I have a beautiful wife and employ that I like and that allows me to save a little. That makes it necessary, when I am carrying my lieutenant’s staff, for me not to know my own father. I may in fact be a whoreson, but I am my own whoreson. I would like for you—”
“You talk too much, Martín.”
The captain had spoken softly, in an abstracted tone. Saldaña removed his hat and ran one of his broad hands across a skull barely covered with hair.
“You’re right. I talk too much. Maybe because I am getting old.” He sighed for the third time, eyes still focused on the darkness, listening to the crickets. “We are both getting old, Captain. You and I.”
In the distance, they heard bells marking the hour. Alatriste did not move. “We haven’t many years left,” the captain said.
“Not many at all, pardiez.” The chief constable put on his hat, hesitated an instant, and then walked back to the captain, stopping at his side. “There are not many who share our memories and silences. And of them, few are the men they used to be.”
He whistled an old military tune. A little song about the old tercios, raids, plunder, and victories. They had sung it together, with my father and other comrades, eighteen years before in the sacking of Ostend and on the long march from the Rhine toward Friesland with don Ambrosio Spínola, when they took Oldenzaal and Lingen.
“But it may be true,” Saldaña said in conclusion, “that this century no longer deserves men like us. I am referring to the men we once were.”
Once again he looked toward Alatriste. The captain slowly nodded.
The thin moon cast a vague, formless shadow at their feet.
“It may be,” the captain murmured, “that we do not deserve them either.”
IX.AUTO - DA - FÉ
The Spain of the fourth Philip, like that of his predecessors, was enchanted with the ritual burning of heretics and Jews. An auto-da-fé attracted thousands of spectators, from aristocracy to the lowest townsman. And when one was celebrated in Madrid, it was witnessed from the loges of honor by Their Majesties the king and queen. Even Queen Isabel, who, because she was young, and French, was at first repelled by such activities, eventually became an enthusiast, like everyone else. The only thing Spanish the daughter of Henri the Béarnaise never accepted was to live in El Escorial, which she always found too cold, too grand, and too sinister for her taste. She was, however, subjected to that vexation posthumously: having never wanted to set foot inside it, she was buried there after her death. Though it is not such a bad place to be, God knows, laid to rest alongside the imposing tombs of Emperor Charles the Fifth and his son the great Philip, ancestors of our fourth Austrian monarchy. Thanks to whom—great leaders that they were, whether for bad or ill, and to the despair of Turks, French, Dutch, English, and the whore who birthed them all—Spain, for a century and a half, had Europe and the world by their tender testicles.
But let us return to the bonfire. Preparations for the fiesta, in which, to my misfortune, I had a reserved place, began a day or two before the event. There was great activity by carpenters and other workmen in the Plaza Mayor, where they were constructing a high platform fifty feet long facing an amphitheater of stair-stepped benches, draperies, tapestries, and damasks. Not even for the wedding of Their Majesties had such industry and facilities been on display. All the streets into the plaza were blocked so that coaches and horses would not clog free movement, and for the royal family, a canopy had been rigged on Los Mercaderes, as that location offered the most shade. Since the auto was a long ceremony, taking the whole day, there were stands, protected from the sun by a canvas, where one could get a cool drink and something to eat. It was decided that for the convenience of the august persons of the king and queen, they would enter their loge from the palace of the Conde de Barajas, using an elevated passageway over Cava San Miguel that communicated with the count’s houses on the plaza.
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nbsp; Expectations resulting from this level of preparation were so high that vying for tickets to a seat at a balconied window often deteriorated into a battle royal. Many people of influence paid good ducats to the Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty’s household to obtain the best locations, including ambassadors, grandees, the king’s courtiers, council presidents, and even His Holiness the Papal Nuncio, who never missed a bullfight, a tournament of tilting, or an outdoor roasting, not even for a fumata blanca in Rome.
On a day like this, meant to be memorable, the Holy Office wanted to kill several partridges with a single shot. Resolved to undermine the Conde de Olivares’s policy of rapprochement with the Jewish Portuguese bankers, the most radical inquisitors of the Supreme Council had planned a spectacular auto-da-fé that would strike fear into the heart of any who were not secure in the purity of their blood. The message was clear. However much of Olivares’s money and favor they might have, Portuguese of Hebrew blood would never be safe in Spain. The Inquisition, relentlessly appealing to the religious conscience of our lord and king—as irresolute and easily influenced as a young man as he was when old, pleasant by nature but lacking character—preferred a ruined nation to one whose faith was threatened. And that preference, which in the long run had its effect—predictably, a most disastrous effect—upon Olivares’s economic plans, was the principal reason why the trial was being hastened: to serve as an efficacious example to the public. What ordinarily would take months, even years, of assiduous instruction was completed in a few weeks’ time.
Because of the haste, details of complex protocol were greatly simplified. Sentences were usually read to the penitents the night prior to the dreaded day, following a solemn procession of officials carrying the green cross destined for the plaza and the white one that would be raised above the stake. This time they were left to be made public on the day of the auto-da-fé, when everyone was already present for the festivities. Prisoners destined for the auto had arrived from the dungeons of Toledo the day before. They—we—were about twenty, and were housed in cells the Holy Office maintained on Calle de los Premostenses, darkly referred to as Calle de la Inquisición, very near the Santo Domingo plaza.
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