The Scroll of Seduction

by Gioconda Belli

  I OPENED MY EYES. I SUPPOSE THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE THE STATE I was in while Manuel spoke is to call it an interlude. The outside world faded into another reality, projected from inside me onto my retina. I don’t know if it was the dress, his soft, gentle voice calling me Juana, or my lively, adolescent imagination, but I was completely swept away by his narration. A voice within me spoke out, completing Manuel’s story, making comments and observations; I felt seduced and captivated by the same sort of fascination that makes us follow the complicated thread of convoluted dreams. I felt like my mind, wide as the sea, had been storing those images for years, just waiting to let them emerge, ready to project them the moment they were summoned. I felt what it was like to be born (sort of like being naked in front of a man for the first time), and to have a life determined by decisions that others made on my behalf. (I think the weight of that dress contributed to the latter, confining me in a silken suit of armor.)

  “Manuel, what time is it?”

  “Four o’clock.”

  “I have to go back to the convent in an hour.”

  “You will, but for now, close your eyes again.”

  IN ORDER TO COMPREHEND MY MOTHER’S COLDNESS, I NEEDED TO understand what her succession to the throne had entailed. It hadn’t been easy. People at court had been talking about it my whole life, but it wasn’t until I reached adolescence that I managed to put two and two together and reconstruct the past that had turned my mother into the formidable woman whose presence I longed for, but who also inspired in me the silent devotion others felt in temples in the presence of God.

  My mother had truly loved her half-brother Enrique, the son of her father King Juan from his first marriage. When King Juan died, the crown was passed to Enrique, and he became King Enrique IV. Six feet tall and blond, this was a brother who liked to laugh at courtly ceremonies and received nobility on cushions on the floor, dressed as a Moor. He convinced my grandmother that it would be better for my mother and her brother Alfonso to go and live at court in Valladolid, far from the isolation of Arévalo.

  Grandmother didn’t want them to go, but she couldn’t refuse. It was after her children left that she went mad. My mother was ten and Alfonso was nine. They spoke more Portuguese than Spanish. That was about when Princess Juana, the daughter of Enrique and Juana of Portugal, was born. My mother and uncle were there for her baptism and heard the king proclaim her future heiress of Castile. How could my mother have guessed that one day her succession to the throne would lead her to be at war with that child? King Enrique’s licentious lifestyle, his fondness for boys, his disastrous affairs with courtly ladies, all contributed to the rumors that led to his nickname “the Impotent.” Since impotent men cannot father children and since the handsome Beltrán de la Cueva was not only Enrique’s favorite–the king had named him governor of his royal household and grandee of Castile–but was also on quite intimate terms with the queen, the noblemen began to insinuate that he had fathered the princess, calling her “la Beltraneja.” But despite all that, rather than do away with Don Beltrán, the king bestowed on him more and more titles. He named him Count of Ledesma, arranged for him to marry a niece of Cardinal Mendoza, and to top it all off, named him alderman of the Order of Santiago, the largest landholder in the whole kingdom of Castile, with the exception of the king himself. This favoritism was too much for the nobles, especially the archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso de Carrillo. Carrillo, who commanded a great army, had been protector and tutor to both my mother and her brother since their arrival at court. Enrique’s excesses and the question of his daughter’s legitimacy led Carrillo and other noblemen to advocate that the crown be passed to my uncle Alfonso.

  The heir apparent, however, died one night after eating trout–possibly poisoned, because after all, who dies of that?–so my mother became next in line for the throne. After several uprisings, military sieges, and increased pressure, the king accepted my mother as his successor and signed a treaty at Toros de Guisando to ratify the accord. But King Enrique went back on his word on more than one occasion. My mother lived through those years on edge. Several attempts were made to marry her to the king of Portugal, and to another noble suitor much older than herself, but finally Carrillo proposed that she marry my father, Ferdinand, in order to gain the support of the kingdom of Aragon in the War of Succession. My parents were married in Medina del Campo, in a secret ceremony. My father disguised himself as a mule driver in order to attend. Only after the formal solemn nuptials and the six days of celebrations that followed did they send a messenger to notify King Enrique of the event. His rage was such that he again proclaimed La Beltraneja his heir. Between my parents, it is told, love flourished since they first met. Both were young, handsome, and I suppose that the secretive nature of their wedding, the knowledge they were thereby uniting Castile and Aragon, the risks they took, fueled the attraction they felt for each other. They knew that they were the focal point of many expectations and much tension. Nothing like conspiracy to make the blood rush and ignite strong passions.

  In order to prove that their marriage had been consummated and that gone were the days of Castilian impotence, my father came out of the conjugal bedroom on their wedding night to display the sheet stained with my mother’s virginal blood.

  My tutor, Andrés de la Miranda, and Beatriz Galindo recounted many stories that helped me form a picture of my mother as she must have been at that juncture of her life, when she gambled it all to possess (on not very transparent premises, according to my judgment) her right to the throne of Castile. But the most revealing thing about her temperament is the manner in which the day after Enrique died–having left no will–she had herself crowned de facto queen in Segovia, on December 13, 1474, by virtue of the Toros de Guisando Treaty, my father’s absence notwithstanding. He had already accepted his role as king consort in a capitulation signed before Carrillo and approved by King Juan of Navarre, my paternal grandfather; but for Isabel to throw it in his face so bluntly clearly wounded his pride. So she devised a way to tend to his wound. When he reached Segovia on January 2, Cardinal Mendoza and Archbishop Carrillo were waiting in the outskirts of town to receive him, beneath a royal canopy made of the finest brocade. His mourning attire was exchanged for a cape embroidered with gold and ermine. On his way into the city he rode through suburbs decorated with standards, and all the people came out to give him a joyous ovation while music filled the streets. The finest minstrels were singing on the corners, conjurers threw pins and scarves into the air, and there were men breathing fire and balancing objects on their heads. It was a triumphal reception that lasted well into the evening, when he crossed the gates of San Martín, amid noblemen who knelt as he passed and held flaming torches aloft. My mother waited for the procession to reach the square before she appeared at the top of the Alcázar stairs, a vision of gold and fire, bedecked with her crown and a ruby necklace. Young and beautiful at twenty-three, she slowly descended the stairs amid her subjects’ cries to meet her husband and accompany him to the cathedral, where he swore his allegiance to the city and promised to defend and enforce the laws of Castile.

  A few days later, my parents chose their royal emblem and insignia: Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando. Isabella and Ferdinand, equal rulers, ruling equally.

  THE APARTMENT WENT QUIET.

  “Not bad for a fifteenth-century queen,” I said to Manuel, turning around to look at him. I watched the afternoon light fade, reflected in the closed window of the building across the street. “I really do have to go back now, Manuel. It’s almost five thirty.”

  I undid the low bun that my braid was pinned up into. My head hurt. More than pain, it was a sort of electrical buzzing that seemed to radiate from my skull. Visions of medieval palaces–the intensity of history being revealed to me like an old memory–gave the present a faded, unreal veneer, but I had to return to it, to go back to school, if I didn’t want Mother Luisa Magdalena to become openly suspicious and interrogate me about my Sunday exp
editions.

  Without a word, Manuel took my head in his hands, placing his thumbs over my temples.

  “Just relax for a few seconds.”

  I breathed deeply, my eyes closed, once, twice, three times. Then my hands began to unbutton the bodice.

  “Let me, I’ll do it.”

  We went back to Manuel’s room. He helped me get the gown off and then left so I could get dressed alone. It was all very quick and professional, with none of the hesitation that had been there a few hours ago. He assisted me as if he were the eunuch from one of the harems in A Thousand and One Nights, or the valet of a queen much older than myself.

  My contemporary clothes did not immediately strip away the sensation I had of inhabiting another time. It was hard to adjust, go back to rushing, to the bustle of the street. I insisted Manuel let me go back to school on my own. I wanted to have a little time to myself, without feeling his presence, his attention. I didn’t tell him that, but he must have intuited it. The street seemed to be taking a siesta along with its residents. The only people out were a few groups of boys, sneakily smoking on corners here and there. I had never smoked in my life. Up until that time, I’d never felt the urge to do adult things without telling anyone. But I was starting to see that neither the convent nor my academic education were going to teach me what I really needed to know about life. Adults had a knack for making one doubt one’s own judgment. According to them, it was bound to be immature, juvenile. But what else did I have besides my own judgment? How was I supposed to learn to live? How?

  Manuel fascinated me. His milieu, his obsession with Juana and Philippe, were more seductive than the cautious inner voices I heard, whispering the nuns’ warnings. He could well be eccentric, strange, but I was flattered he had made me his accomplice. I could learn much more about history and human nature from him than from anyone my age. I wanted to know more about the intimate truth of men and women. What pulled them together and pushed them apart? What made them forego reason in favor of passion regardless of the suffering it could involve? I wondered why it was that the mystics the nuns presented as role models to us–people like Saint Teresa and Fray Luis de León–had to punish themselves, wear hair shirts, and choose to renounce the world for a life of solitude in order to find God and sanctity. I questioned whether my father’s adultery couldn’t just be a result of his human nature rather than an aberration. I could not be sure whether the negation of the flesh and all that masochism and self-denial was a trait of the Spanish character, if it was somehow related to the arid landscape, the desolate reddish plains of Castile.

  As far as mysticism was concerned, I preferred Father Vidal’s vision. He was a beautiful, broad-shouldered priest who had taken us on a spiritual retreat the year before. “God is vast, an all-encompassing presence, who is nevertheless aware of each and every one of us. God knows every one of us by name.” The idea of God calling me by my name, thinking of me as Lucía, had made me weep. It was during that retreat when I first knew the notion of a loving, gentle God. God is love, the priest told us. That seemed much more acceptable to me than the idea of a white-bearded lord tallying up everyone’s sins in a book he’d dust off on Judgment Day. That seemed like such a petty, narrow conception for a being whose intelligence was supposed to be limitless, who was all-powerful and all-knowing. Thanks to Father Vidal, God had become much more tolerant and compassionate to me.

  When I left the metro station, I hastened my pace to arrive at the bakery in time to return to school with my habitual selection of pastries. I made it to dinner promptly, and Mother Luisa Magdalena came up to me at the dining hall to inquire about my day.

  “I looked at Flemish paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth century,” I said. “Bosch and Van Eyck. And then I stopped for a snack on calle Goya.”

  She glanced down at my pastries on the table and smiled.

  CHAPTER 4

  On Monday night, I felt compelled to write to Isis during study period to tell her that I had come across her letters and my mother’s papers. I started to cry as I wrote. Unlike Mother Luisa Magdalena, who, listening to my words, could only visualize opaque images, Isis and I both shared the precision of our memories. If I evoked my mother, she would know exactly what I was remembering. She would be able to picture the curve of the perfect lips my mother was so proud of. She lavished on them lip liners and lipstick in colors ranging from brown to red to purple. To enhance them she barely wore any other makeup. She purposely let her skin look pale and applied just a bit of mascara on those black eyes of hers I had inherited. The result was dramatic, because my mother’s skin was soft and glistened like a pearl, so her bold mouth stood out suggestively, insinuating something ripe, edible.

  To know that for Isis my mother’s memory was filled with color and perfume and her unique gestures (like when she was nervous and wound her hair around her index finger, curling it again and again) released me from the necessity of explanations and freed my emotions. I didn’t want to get sentimental, but I found myself drowning in my feelings. If writing to Manuel had made me feel mature and perceptive, writing to Isis I experienced myself as a desolate, infantile girl deeply in need of compassion. I wrote to her from a scarred childhood, an orphan’s profound sense of abandonment I hadn’t even realized I was so torn up with until it took shape on the page. My chest became stiff as canvas, and when I finished my letter, I left the study hall so I could go and cry like a child in my bedroom. It was as if it were the first time I had wholly internalized the definitive nature of my parents’ absence, the fact that they would never, ever come pick me up from school; they would never, ever be sitting waiting for me in the parlor, sipping coffee and nibbling on cookies, like the other girls’ parents. At no point would they come to take me home. I had no home. I was like a helium balloon that had no hand holding on to its colored string; a balloon that had drifted away, the wind charting its course. Being at a boarding school with other girls who were also not living with their parents had allowed me to play tricks on myself, to pretend that after all my years there, on any given day, if I did everything right and was a good student, I too would receive a visit from my parents, and would walk out the tiled foyer with them. But that was not to be. No one would come for me. I pictured graduation day. The celebration after the ceremony in the auditorium and the mass in the chapel. And I knew exactly what I would feel behind the smile I would display to share the joy of my peers, behind the expression I would wear as I wished them luck and said good-bye to them, and the emptiness I would feel when I trudged back to my bedroom to pack my things, Mother Luisa Magdalena by my side, chatting away to try to console me.

  This realization shattered the illusions I’d been hiding behind. At one point my sadness scared me and I told myself that I had to stop crying. I hugged and rocked myself and started to console myself the same way my father used to: speaking softly, sweetly, saying it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s all over now.

  I sank into a deep sleep, and when I woke I felt like I was drowning. When I opened my eyes, I floated to the surface and gulped in air. It took me a minute to recognize my tiny room, the trees silhouetted in the window. Slowly the alarms ringing in my body quieted down as I saw the silent furniture, the walls (I never realized how immobile the world is until I confronted tragedy; that was when I began to see the soullessness of everyday objects). I hadn’t stirred up the memories of those first days after my parents died, hadn’t recalled the conversations I overheard describing the hangar where my grandparents identified the bodies. They didn’t realize I was listening when they told my aunts and uncles the sickening details of black bags, tray tables, and the mystery of my father’s right arm, which mysteriously remained intact, the only recognizable part of his body. The airline psychologist had explained this was relatively common: a random extremity would often manage to escape, uncharred. The fuselage would rip and the fire would miss it. At least they were lucky enough to be able to positively identify their loved one. Most people would just have t
o wait for the dental records. In my dream, I had taken my father’s arm from the stretcher and thrown it over my shoulder, begging him to hug me one last time. In my nightmare, I saw the charred remains of his cadaver struggle to stand up, not just to hug me but to lean on me, silently begging me in a voice that just my heart could hear to get him out of there. But my stealthy attempt to reach the door unnoticed had failed because my father’s movements were accompanied by loud, metallic noises, as if he were pulling a string of tin cans tied to him. When I had turned around to reproach him, I had seen that the noise was coming from my mother’s blackened skeleton, which he was dragging behind him, pulling it by the hand. In the hangar, the other mourners had turned to stare at me disapprovingly. Suddenly I had heard my grandfather’s voice. He and my grandmother had caught up with me and had pushed me toward the table where the corpses I was trying to take with me had been just moments before. Gesturing angrily, they had insisted that I put them back. I had not wanted to obey, but an overpowering will had forced me to please them. My father’s forearm, his strong hand, had clung to me in a desperate grip. While my grandfather struggled, I had begun to scream, only to have my grandmother cover my mouth with her hand. Unable to breathe, I had woken up. It had been very cold the night before and I was covered with every one of my winter blankets.