Cervantes Street

by Jaime Manrique

  Most nights, on my knees, alone in my chamber, I recited the Holy Rosary until dawn. Then I lashed myself ten times and wore a hair shirt to go to sleep for a few hours. My back was always swollen and painful, and sweated blood as if I bore the stigmata. Only my faithful servant Juan, who helped me bathe, who helped me dress, who washed out the blood from my garments, and ironed them, and who applied ointments to my tortured flesh, knew of it.

  My love of Christ would be shown through my good deeds. Under the guidance of Father Timoteo, I began to give alms to the poor—to feed the hungry who knocked on our door, to clothe the naked and shoeless who lived in Madrid’s filthy alleys and who died from exposure in the cold months. I opened my coffers to the city orphanages. I gave generously to the Dominican missionaries who traveled to the Indies to convert the heathens. Through these actions I was blessed with grains of peace.

  * * *

  Time passed. I was named a magistrate of the king’s Royal Council, a position of high rank. Diego was still small for his age and prone to childhood illnesses, but his gentle nature provided me with the warmth and affection that otherwise remained absent from my life. Mercedes and I attended family functions together, but we were really strangers dwelling under the same house made of ice. My former love for her had withered. I hadn’t quite forgiven her, but I felt no hatred for her, either. I thanked God for the precious joys in my life, for His blessings and His Grace. I couldn’t say I was happy, but I found a measure of solace in beginning to accept my grievous fate.

  One day, an envelope made of expensive paper arrived on my desk. There was no forwarding address. It was not the usual kind of official mail I received at work. I tarried before opening it. Then, curiosity tempted me. I broke the seal and pulled out a sheet of scented rose paper that read:

  Your Excellency,

  My name is Andrea Cervantes, the younger sister of Miguel. I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t remember me. It has been many years since the last time I saw you at my parents’ home. It is my most fervent wish that this letter finds you and your loved ones enjoying good health and God’s blessings.

  After much hesitation, knowing how busy you must be and the important affairs you must attend to, God gave me enough courage to ask, on my knees, for an audience with Your Excellency. You must have heard, Don Luis, about the dire circumstances under which my brothers are held in Algiers . . .

  Although my memories of Andrea filled me with revulsion, later that day—after much debating with myself—I made up my mind to pay her a visit. Miguel’s sister’s home was located in the respectable vicinity of the Convent of the Descalzas Reales, on a street too narrow for coaches. I alighted and told my carriers not to wait for me. The bells of the churches had just tolled four times, and my plan was to make my visit brief, so that I could walk home while there was still daylight.

  Unhealthy curiosity was always one of my gravest defects. I knew it was better to let sleeping dogs lie; that poison-filled, angry scorpions crawled out from under stones when you began digging in the remains of the past. And yet, I wanted to hear from the lips of Andrea Cervantes about the miserable life Miguel was living as a slave in Algiers. I was standing before her door, the iron knocker in my hand, when suddenly it opened and Andrea Cervantes herself greeted me with, “Don Luis, please excuse my appearance, I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon.” She was breathless and rushed her words. “I happened to be looking out the window,” she pointed to the second floor of her home, “when I saw you arrive. Thank you so much for coming to visit me so promptly, Your Grace. God has listened to my prayers. Please come in.” She stepped aside.

  She was wearing a black housedress that left her throat and arms exposed. With nervous hands she brushed back her midnight-black hair. Andrea had aged since the last time I saw her, but she had grown in allure. The sparkling onyx of her eyes reminded me of Miguel—she had the smiling Andalusian eyes of the Cervantes brood.

  Andrea led me up the stairs to a sitting room in the Moorish style. She pointed to a low divan and offered me a glass of sherry. “No, thank you. I’m afraid I cannot stay very long,” I said. “My wife is expecting me.”

  Andrea nodded to indicate she understood. She sat across from me on a large scarlet cushion. She wore black satin slippers, embroidered in red. Her feet were very small, the size of my hand. From the patio floated the laughter of a girl and the voice of an older woman.

  Andrea explained, “It’s my daughter, playing with the maid in the garden. The last time Don Luis saw her she was still an infant.”

  A warm flush spread all over my face. I squirmed on my divan.

  “I will get straight to the point, Don Luis,” she said, noticing my discomfort. “My poor mother’s suffering breaks my heart. We don’t have the means to pay for the ransom of my brothers. The Trinitarian friars who negotiate the liberation of captives in that port of Moors and idol worshippers have informed us that they do not have sufficient funds to rescue both of my brothers, even though Rodrigo’s ransom is much lower than Miguel’s. You may have heard Miguel lost the use of his left hand fighting the Turks. To leave him in Algiers indefinitely amounts to a death sentence. You were Miguel’s best friend.” Tears moistened her eyes.

  I didn’t know what to say. Andrea continued, “As you know, the king has established a fund to loan money to needy widows of good families. Don Luis may not be aware that my mother comes from landed gentry. She can put a vineyard her parents left her as a guarantee that she will repay the debt and the interests. She would like to borrow enough money to acquire a license to export Spanish goods to Algiers. If everything goes well, she should be able to save enough money to pay the debt within two years.”

  Doña Leonor’s widowhood was news to me. “I’m very sorry to hear about your father’s passing, Señora Andrea. I didn’t know.”

  She crossed herself. “Thank heavens, my father is still alive, Don Luis. But we know people who can, for a fee, produce the necessary documents to make it look as if my father were deceased. I pray the good Lord will forgive us for this deception because our motives are pure: to free our brothers from that land of infidels, where their Christian souls are in grave danger.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I said. “How can I help you in this matter?”

  “You see, Don Luis, my father would go to Andalusia to stay with our relatives up in the mountains, and hide for as long as it’s necessary. We would tell people he had died while he was away visiting relatives. Later, when he reappears, we’ll say we were misinformed.”

  Clearly, she had been hatching this deception for a while. The luscious temptress was asking me to be complicit in breaking the law. “I’m afraid you forget I am an officer of the king,” I said. “I could never knowingly do something that would jeopardize my honesty or my family’s honor, even for the noble cause of helping a friend.”

  “I understand, Don Luis. But you are our last hope.” She covered her face with her hands and started sobbing.

  Being in Andrea’s proximity felt as dangerous as playing with an asp. Once more, my unhealthy curiosity won the best of me. I remained glued to the divan.

  She stopped sobbing with a series of short hiccups, then dabbed her cheeks with a handkerchief she pulled from a pocket in her dress. “Don Luis, my husband, Don Diego Obando, had to leave for New Spain on urgent business to claim the title to a property a relative of his left him in his will. He’s been gone longer than we had anticipated. If he were here, my family would have no need of my desperate rescue plan.”

  (The next day, I learned that the man she called her husband was a married man who had abandoned her and left for the New World. As reparations to her honor, Don Diego gave her the handsome house with all its furnishings.)

  “If you can help us, I don’t know how I can ever repay you for your goodness of heart. But you will certainly have my eternal gratitude and you will constantly be in my prayers. You can always count on me as your most loyal servant.” She was talk
ing now in the breathy voice I remembered from our first meeting, when Miguel and I were students at Estudio de la Villa in Madrid and she had told me the bizarre story of her child and the child’s father. Every word she uttered was draped in gossamer. A breeze that wafted in from the garden cooled the sitting room, yet perspiration dewed the swale between her breasts.

  My hands were sweating; I felt light-headed, disoriented. I hadn’t been with a woman in a long time; I could no longer go to Mercedes to satisfy my manly desires, but I was not the kind of man who would engage with prostitutes. Was Andrea insinuating something indecent? Was it the devil making me see something that was not there? Or was this further proof—as if I needed any more—that the Cervanteses were immoral people?

  I could have denounced Andrea to the authorities for trying to bribe an officer of the court. If I helped her, I became her accomplice. Then an insidious thought crossed my mind. I could help Andrea to obtain the loan and then denounce the living Don Rodrigo to the authorities. I didn’t care about his punishment, and knew that hers and her mother’s would be severe. After all, Miguel had destroyed my marriage. He had soiled what I held most pure and sacred. I would repay him in kind, making sure he spent the rest of his days as a slave along the Barbary Coast. Aeternum vale, Miguel, I thought. I’ll never see you again. You’ll never get another chance to come near my family and harm me.

  * * *

  After I left Andrea’s house, I felt impure. I needed to go to the cathedral to pray, to confess my grave sin. But as I kneeled in our family pew, my face sunk in the palms of my hands, I realized I could not confess to Father Timoteo what I was about to do to Miguel and his family. He would dissuade me from it. He would never again see me as a good Christian. The clarity with which my hatred made me see myself was excruciating.

  The murmurs of the devout praying in the cathedral reverberated in my head like a swarm of furious bees. Were they praying for me? The din rose, and I wanted to get out of the cathedral and then run, run until I disappeared into the oncoming night. The prayers became more ominous-sounding—like a flock of garrulous blackbirds clustered together in a pine tree to protect themselves from the winter cold. Were the birds chattering in Latin? I looked around me, and the flickering lights of the votive candles made me think of the searing flames of hell. No priest could help me now. No human being, even if he was God’s most devoted servant, could deliver me from my poisoned heart. I would beg to our Celestial Father directly for His forgiveness and then, as penance, devote my life unequivocally to Him. I would become a monk, leave my family, and spend the rest of my life fasting and praying. Better yet, I would become a hermit, and live in a remote cave where only wild beasts could find me. But I knew my flesh was too weak to withstand such rigors. I didn’t know what it was to be hungry or cold, or to sleep on the bare ground, or to spend my nights in darkness. Was God speaking to me? Was this heresy? Who was I to deserve such a miracle? I, who was so far from being Christlike. As long as I keep this revelation to myself, I’ll be saved. God wants me to stay in Madrid and do His work in this city of sinners and apostates. He’s calling me to be a soldier in His army of Divine Light.

  At that moment I was at peace. God’s Grace had touched me, and I knew happiness.

  Chapter 5

  The Casbah

  1575-1580

  No one entered or left Algiers without being reminded of death. Before it is too late to deter once and for all time future historians from picking up their quills and dipping them in the mendacious ink used by those abject scribblers of words to dress up their rachitic tales, I will relate myself what happened—at a time when I was still young and bold and despised cowardice—in that city with a scarcity of mercy and a surfeit of cruelty, in that purgatory of life, that hell on earth, that port of pirates and sodomites called Algiers, and I swear upon the salvation of my eternal soul that the events I’m about to describe are the truth, without any embellishments.

  The first ones to leave the Bagnio Beylic in the morning were the captives who worked in the giardini of the rich; they returned at the end of the day, to be counted and to rest for the night. The most unfortunate ones had to walk for hours before they could reach the orchards where they tended the fruit trees, the vegetable and flower gardens, and the irrigation channels. These pitiable men lived in constant terror of the nomad and pagan tribes of the south, who conducted raids in the orchards, capturing and enslaving the workers whether they were Christians, Moors, or Turks.

  Ransomable captives like Sancho and me were exempted from hard labor. But we were expected to feed ourselves. Without Sancho I would have starved; nourishment reached my belly thanks to his ingenuity. When he smelled food, Sancho had wheels in his feet, the eyes of a falcon, the nose of a wolf, and the ferocity of a Barbary lion. As soon as the guards opened the doors of the bagnio, we rushed down the deserted casbah. At that hour, the streets teemed with nocturnal criminals who didn’t bother with slave beggars. Sancho and I raced to be the first ones at the shoreline to meet the returning fishermen and scavenge the discards they tossed on the beach. Even when the rough winds prevented the fishermen from going out to sea the night before, there was always a plentiful supply of sea urchins for the taking along the rocky shore. I would slurp their mushy bits of sweet orangey caviar until I appeased my vocal stomach.

  At the foot of the casbah, a small gate opened to the strip of beach where fishermen moored their boats and unloaded their daily catch. On both sides of the gate were impaled the men who had incurred Hassan Pasha’s wrath by attempting to cross the Mediterranean in barques and balancelles made of big pumpkins strung together with twine. These desperate escapees would stand in the middle of the floating pumpkins holding in their stretched-out arms a robe, a rag, any large piece of clothing—hoping the wind would make a sail out of it. The lucky ones drowned. The survivors were tortured and left for the African vultures, which plucked out the men’s eyes while they were still alive. After a while, the stench of rotten flesh was just another unpleasant city smell, indistinguishable from the stink of the latrines in the casbah, which expelled revolting fumes. The stench lifted only when strong winds blew in from the Sahara.

  As the fishermen approached the shoreline, I would stand for a brief moment gazing at the dark sea; the pain of my incarceration was accentuated by the reminder that such a beautiful body of water—the Mediterranean of the Greek mythic heroes—lay between my freedom and me; between my family in Spain and the lair of criminals where I was trapped, which I was determined to escape from no matter what.

  When the boats beached, Sancho and I ran in their direction like hungry hounds to snatch the discarded fish from the air before the belligerent seagulls flew away with them. The fishermen greeted us with taunts of, “Run, Christian dogs, run if you want to eat!” The fear of hunger overruled my shame. Their unwanted catch, seasoned with their insults, was preferable to a strict diet of sea urchins. These meager scraps were sometimes our only meal of the day.

  Chewing fast, and spitting out the prickly bones, Sancho would say, “Quick, Miguel, eat the worms before they fill their bellies.”

  After we sated ourselves, we searched for mollusks and crustaceans, edible to Christians. Later we would sell them in the souk. Sancho excelled at killing the highly prized crabs with the throw of a stone. He bundled our catch in rags he reserved for that purpose, and we set out for the market.

  The souk was the heart of the casbah. I was fascinated by the fabulous bazaar where people admired, purchased, and sold goods from all over the world: pipes of Spanish and Italian wines, butter, wheat, semolina, curried rice, flour, lard, chickpeas, olive oil, fresh and dry salted fish, eggs in many sizes and colors (ivory ostrich eggs the size of a man’s head; speckled quail eggs the size of a fingernail), vegetables, fresh figs and figs preserved in syrup, smoky African honey, almonds, oranges, grapes, and sugared dates. Earthenware, perfumes, incense of many kinds, wool, precious stones, elephant tusks, lion and leopard skins were also displayed,
as well as stunningly colored fabrics that shimmered in the hot sunlight.

  When luck smiled on us, we sold our bits of fish and made the twenty aspers charged to sleep in the bagnio on the floor of a room crammed with men, the only protection from the chilly and unhealthy night winds that arrived in the autumn.

  On my first tours of the labyrinths of the casbah, Sancho served as my Virgil. “Look, Miguel,” he said, pointing toward the roofs of the houses, “I swear these people must be half cats. See how they hang their laundry on the roofs? That’s because the poor houses have no patios. See how the women travel from roof to roof? That’s how they visit each other because their husbands don’t want the Turks and Moors to lay eyes on them.”

  I learned how to glimpse the inside of the dwellings with their ancient tiled floors of intricate design and beautiful colors. The interiors of the houses were immaculate, in stark contrast to the mounds of filth on the streets. Algerian women went about barefoot, swathed in billowing fabrics, their gleaming black hair uncovered, as they sailed through the shaded interiors and vanished behind drapes. The gold bracelets around their arms and ankles, and the necklaces of long strands of lustrous pearls, glistened fleetingly inside the homes as the women darted about. Now and then a woman would stand still for a second to stare bracingly at Christian men, her alluring eyes gleaming golden like those of wild cats.