No one loves art more than she does.
Leonor leads me into her study. I follow willingly. I love this room, try always to see it as for the first time: four unsteady herons stopped mid-stride—precarious stepladders running along shelves that line each wall to vertiginous altitudes; books, maps, illuminated manuscripts … the shelves fairly founder beneath their burdens. This is the room I have always dreamt of having. Near the tall windows a whole cabinet of curious animal skulls vacantly ogling. Thrown together in a walnut case, a precious cornelian vase, potash, verdigris, bits of rock and statuary. On brass carriages huge magnifying glasses stand ready for inspections. Leonor dismisses the attendant and herself fetches down folders that bulge with prints and engravings. Two folders for Velázquez alone, virtually everything he has done. Even sketches Leonor has made of some of his sketches from Italy. For the third time this month she brings them out, spreads dozens over the lacquered table, and I do not tire of them. Prints of half the works in the royal collections, even now the greatest in all Europe. In the span of forty-five years Philip IV amassed four thousand paintings. Philip. The great patron of Velázquez.
She says this sardonically, as though to take up my part in an argument, one we had last year, over my elegy for the King.
“Patron? Let me tell you—the King killed Velázquez. Went years without paying him for his work. Four years once—while they gave Rubens palaces.”
I stand looking over her shoulder at the prints. She does not look up. I know better than to argue when she is like this. She is like this often now.
“A servant who painted was all he was. He was not treated as I treat you. At bullfights Philip made him sit with the servants—the greatest painter in the world! I couldn’t bear it.”
It infuriates her that Philip had paid one of the dwarves—who was it? El Primo, perhaps—a daily ration of nine reales.
“Velázquez, mi amor, was poorer than most of the misfits he painted.”
The drapes are open. She sends me to the windows to pull back the cambric lining. Rain falls in the zócalo. A soft grey light falls across the vast walnut table, strewn with papers now like leaves on a pond: prints of the great painter’s hunting tableaus, homely scenes in bodegas and kitchens, portraits of the King and of Quevedo. Her fingers stray over a fanciful rendering of Aesop, sketches of gods in the streets of Madrid—Vulcan holding court in a blacksmith’s shop. A pale Bacchus, the toast of sunburnt campesinos …
She shows me again the work of his last years. The masterpieces.
Las Meninas.
“Look at little Margarita here. It is no surprise that the Princess comes out so well. He was very fond of her. But las meninas† themselves … I knew each of them intimately, and I swear to you he has seen into their souls.
“Not so very long after it was finished a painter arrived from Italy. He had come expressly to see it and left the same day, went straight back to Italy. ‘I have just now seen the theology of painting,’ he said, and would look at nothing else.31 The theology of painting, Juana.”
But the King did love him, I say, hoping to deflect her.
“Yes, he loved him. The man ruined everything he touched. He loved Mariana, too. She cheered him, she bore him children. He thanked God for the consolations she brought. And still his infidelities would not stop. Losing Felipe Próspero broke her heart. How beautiful that child was. Here—here was how Velázquez saw him as a toddler. Was this not a beautiful child? And then for her to lose him, only to give birth to that monster….
“By then Mariana and Philip had been spending most of their evenings with the sabandijas. This was the class of diversion they sought. There was an amusing one with flippers they particularly liked. If he’d sent that one home to America with us I would have pitched it overboard myself.”
How many times will she tell this? Leonor claims her physician calls it melancholy, but she does this to herself.
Leonor … come to the window.
“Philip should have felt at home with them—with his incontinence, his haemorrhoids, his nephritis. But her, even the most hardened felt sorry for her. And yet when that baby was born … scrofulous, hunched, rickety … the joke was, the real father must have been one of the dwarves. Once the jokes started, there was no stopping it.
“And now we have a monstrosity as King.”
Leonor, come see the square … the rain has stopped.
I have loved her for her love of literature and laughter, for her loyalty to Velázquez, but I cannot help wondering now if the courtiers did not hate Philip, and then Mariana, for preferring las sabandijas to them.
She comes to the windows.
Is it not lovely? I ask. Below us a cat laps at a gleaming puddle. All across the vast plaza wraiths and revenants simmer up from the paving. Vendors uncover their stalls again. There is hardly a square to match it anywhere in Spain. Has she not told me so herself? She looks into my eyes, with her palm cups my cheek. “Mi alma, once we get back to Madrid,” she assures me, “once you have seen Las Meninas for yourself, you will feel as I do.”
About what, I ask myself—a dead king?
She tells me she needs me, just as the Queen needed her, as the King needed his great painter, needs me more than ever, with everything she loves so far away. She has only me, and this new confessor who is helping her. I should go to him, too.
I do not like the look of him.
“No, he is humble and pious and brilliant.”
Perhaps….
“Helping you?”
Leonor speaks of a difficulty between her and the Viceroy.
“A good and capable man,” I say.
Too old and fat now to be a husband to her….
I try to change the subject. It is dangerous to be put between them. He too is my patron, a friend.
“Why don’t we walk through the square—just for a minute?” Now she is annoyed.
Could we sit in the patio, at least, under the trees? Or next to the library …? No.
It costs her too much effort now to dress and go down before nightfall. She does not want me running off, either. Tell the pages what authors I want and they will bring them up. In the evenings she is more herself but the later the hour, the more reckless she becomes. It is the days that she dreads. Once the night starts she will not let it end. The masquerades, the Academy, the dances and the plays. My plays.
Maybe she thinks I haven’t seen her watching him. Does she imagine her husband will never notice? It’s dangerous for all las meninas but especially for me; the Viceroy sees me as her favourite, but if he could stay awake beyond eight o’clock he would see it is Imelda and Teresa who attend her once I have turned in—when else am I to read, to write these verses and sketches that so divert her? How often has she slipped in at dawn, thinking not to wake me, and found me working? She feigns surprise, each time, that I would lose sleep over her. But in her eyes the tenderness is real, and so I cannot bring myself to ask, to go back to sleeping in the dovecotes with the others.
Whole days we spend in her apartments.
A small private chapel stands between her bedchamber and the Viceroy’s. It is the only point of connection between her apartments and his. Adjoining her dining room, the main salon divides into alcoves by the deployment of tall biombos† constructed in the Japanese style but elaborately painted with scenes from Mexico’s history and streets. Late mornings before the sun is too strong, we sit on the latticed balcony, the zócalo before us, a wide plaza filled with life. We watch the secretaries and functionaries in black with their high starched collars. Priests leaving the cathedral, next to us. Grandees and their bejewelled trains of slaves coming back from El Parian across the square. Lay women in nun’s habits selling blessed talismans and love potions to halfwits….
Last week strange news reached the palace of a birth in the African quarter, an infant, stillborn, with the head of a lion. In the past she would have packed us all off to investigate. No, she is sick of the others. Why not just
the two of us then? Come, she never visits the city anymore. She used to enjoy that, I remind her. Not the heat, the sun, the sicknesses in the streets. In her mind she sees the pox scars on their faces … the withered limbs. Hunts, then. We could go into the country, I say, but I do not want that either.
Is this all? The question we ask ourselves. At first we do not notice it, then we try not to. The homesickness, the furies of tedium, the tedious furies. She was not always this way. Every day the same. The same conversations, over and over. And what she fears most is the melancholy, the melancholy is the worst. This could break anyone, she says, this could break a queen. Truly, I do not doubt it.
Once there were at least four maids and ladies in constant attendance. Now I am everything to her. Carver, cupbearer, dresser…. Her household is running half wild with nothing asked of them until nightfall. I am the only one she can be with, she says, I am the only one who can lift her spirits.
Is this all?
Yet is this not precisely how I am to serve? Do I think of abandoning her as soon as things become difficult? Velázquez stayed until the end. He watched and he saw, he consoled and he recorded, and it was not easy.
But how will this end?
This morning after a masquerade, we wake late, to an unholy clamour in the plaza. We are in time to watch a man hanged in the zócalo for breaking into a convent and attempting to assault a nun. The Indian ladies selling fruit in the shade of the gallows do not so much as flinch when the trapdoor opens. I do not like the look in her eyes. This too is entertainment.
Just the sort of thing Philip would try, she says, when she sees me watching her. And then, before I can be angry I feel a rush of pity. She is afraid. She sees it herself, what happened to Mariana happening to her.
Barefoot, naked under a muslin chemise she languishes on the balcony and now in the salon until mid-afternoon. I have been dressing her each day for weeks, but in her bedchamber. Her near-nakedness in these semi-public rooms shocks and unsettles me; into her beauty a distracted quality has crept, the thinnest edge of madness. She is chilled, yet her forehead is hot and dry. She pulls back the carpet, draws up her chemise and lies full length on the cold stone floor. Extends her arms fully toward the unlit hearth, as if to lengthen the cold, as if a doll teaching itself to swim. After a moment she turns over onto her back, blinks, as if she has forgotten where she left me, calls me to her. She has come to a decision. There is something she needs very desperately to talk about. Something for us to … It is dangerous. I must only do this if I wish it. Yes? I sit close over her. The aroma of almonds rises from her, all the creams I have palmed into her skin. Do my own hands still smell of almonds? Yes. My hair spills jet across the ivory of her belly. Such a sweet confusion … She smiles into my eyes. Almost the same, no? Yes …
The new ambassador.
What …?
Until now there has been no one.
Leonor, I don’t … know how.
A hint of this would mean ruin. The Ambassador … do I—
Of course I know which one. Does she think I am blind?
Father Núñez says—what, you’ve told him? Oh yes, everything. Everything. Says what—no, I don’t care what he says. Tell me …
I want you to take a message to him. Learn it word for word. I need them to be my words. To Silvio … Tonight, after the play.
Not every day is the same.
Ambassadors—the one foreign power Madrid ever permitted to post an ambassador here was from the Shogunate, before the Great Persecution. Informally the Philippines, Perú and Naples support enviados, but the more legitimately they conduct their offices once here, the more suspiciously they are viewed by the Crown. And yet the presence of ambassadors at a court that lacks for nothing else agreeably glorifies the majesty of the Vice-King’s person, not to mention New Spain’s pretensions to be a kingdom on a footing with Aragón—to the point where every man of honour is a don and every hidalgo is all but a count, and every foreigner here an ambassador of something or other. But here the marvel is that the one we might with greatest precision call Ambassador is not a foreigner at all, but rather a former Spanish envoy to a foreign power; while the foreigners, not ambassadors except in euphemism, will either be an associate trailing that Spanish envoy here from his last posting, or be of any sort at all, provided he has with some foreign potentate a passing acquaintance—the less meaningful, in fact, the better. Military adventurers, fencing masters, gamblers, idle travellers, collectors of rare objects, arrangers of rare events. Any sort at all. These we call not the Special Envoy of His Serene Highness the Grand Duke of Tuscany but, limply, the Ambassador of Florence. Of things vaguely Florentine. Ambassador of florins.
Yet am I so different? Court poet—what have I let my life become? Was this not the title I once so prized?
How could I not have rebelled at the sight of the other writers and artists here? The worst reduced to the station of jesters, grown parasitic and fat at the King’s table—the best, to the role of scold, and still just as much a part of the show. I thought I was above it all, inviolable behind the shield of my learning, invisible behind my masks, invincible on the battlements of my accomplishments. At eighteen the poet of choice for all occasions of state, whenever there is a visiting functionary to praise, a lavish gift to be commemorated. And now, by the time Europe’s new ambassadors reach the palace gates, all have heard of me.
New Spain’s Vice-Queen needs diversion—it is an urgent matter of state—so I am become her mistress of illusions, her magus, her hunting hawk. She yearns for daring, I write things Lope wouldn’t risk. She is my Sovereign: I will be her warrior poet, her armoured suitor, her Giantess, her friend.
I write her sonnets. I carry her messages. Have I come so far not to create a Las Meninas but only be one?
Juanita, write us a comedy for Easter, another comedy for the empire. Somewhere in the Spanish dominions, they say, there is a comedy being finished every day. In a good week Lope could finish two himself, in a great month, ten. By the close of this century there will be ten thousand, with the ones I have written for her. Leonor sighs over reminiscences of Madrid, the parties in Vienna, the genius of Lotti’s theatrical sets at the country palace—so I design marvels and have them built for her. Once, I build a camera obscura with my own hands, after designs by Leonardo. For two whole days it fascinates her.
I have sat in the audience among these friends of mine and watched my own plays performed. I have basked in the ebb and flow of their cultivated flattery, and believed it, no, devoured it. Seeing my work well received, did I so badly need to think them connoisseurs of art? The empty heads, the empty hearts … Here we’re all actors, with me the most abject of all, trapped in the plots of my own plays, lost in mazes of my own design.
All in the name of entertainment.
One by one, each of my lying masks has fallen away. Coquette, raconteuse, innocent. And what then remains of me, as finally the legend overwhelms even the charm and only the last mask is left. Freak of nature, monster of learning—la Monstrua. For women an object of both envy and disgust, for men, certain men, a trophy.
Carlos, I am not so different from them as you thought. Dear Carlos. The last of the honest suitors. Even were I not now dishonoured, the only ones to pursue me still would be the giant-killers, the dragon-slayers—out to take a unicorn for their mantle. The letters that arrive now almost daily from the coast only make me feel more keenly my solitude. Poor Carlos, condemned to chase after me, just as I am condemned to love one who does not see me, even as I flee one who truly loves me. Poor dear Carlos—a scholar’s mind, a mystic’s soul … with the heart of a mathematician and the face of a clerk.
Carlos, what has happened to love?
I thought him desperate, but wasn’t I the desperate one? To have remained so long deaf to the flatulent hiss of their clever fakery, to the gnashing and clashing of beaks, the endless disputing over mangled concepts, to the clatter of the finest ideas of the age spilling over the par
quet like pearls from their glossy, swinish lips. How long was I to overlook their raucous, wrenching vulgarity?—gorging themselves like vultures on their gossip and murderous jealousies, on their coarse lusts and treacherous intrigues.
The decadence of Mexico imitating Madrid mimicking Paris aping the final degeneracy of the Medicis …
I carry their messages.
She watched me stuffing myself at a banquet of honeyed compliments and acid retorts—bitter chocolate sipped hot in the sweet night air. Cigarettes heaped on argent trays, gold braziers to light them. Intoxicating coach rides beneath wheeling stars, daring baths on the lake … until the worm was firmly embedded in my soul. How I hate these games of theirs now, yet I wriggle caught up in them like a minnow in a net. This puerile rage for cards. Cards, cards at all hours, while the lifeblood of a continent ebbs away through its open veins.32 I learned too quickly and not well enough, won too easily and stayed too long.
Here everything’s a game, yes, but not the one I thought I was playing. She spoke so sweetly of my vulnerability, smiled reassurance down at me from the commanding heights of her unattainability. Why did she never explain to me the real rules, the true motives of the game? To keep one married gentleman out of the bed of another’s wife. To lead idle nobles, unprotesting, by their privates in the service of their king—with us, the unattached maids-in-waiting, to do the leading. Games to keep a rich girl single just long enough to arrange a marriage, a marriage to someone not yet senior enough to have seen his future wife cavorting like a whore.
What has happened to love?
All around us the cloying scent of too-sweet fruit hangs in the air, as we whirl, beautiful as moths, blinded in this bright storm. Then one is plucked from the vine—for one, the dance stops, the game for her ends in marriage. Among the rest there must be casualties—disease, pregnancy, abortive loves—while for the poorest among us the games never end, except in mad spinsterhood or prostitution. At best, a few years cloistered as a concubine. Then it all begins again, but by then the player’s lost her best assets, the adolescent plumpness, the limpidity of her unlined eyes, the undistracted quality of her attention.
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