The Samurai of Seville

by John Healey

  Ah, thought her aunt, and just when I was about to congratulate her for her maturity.

  ‘And you get along well.’

  ‘We get along splendidly.’

  ‘And you are not consumed with jealousy?’

  ‘Yes I am. But what am I supposed to do? My own father has other women. Your husband had other women. They say even our pious King has other women. Why should it be otherwise for Julian?’

  Soledad considered her niece anew, for now the girl was again demonstrating a sagacity beyond her years.

  ‘That a couple might end up that way is one thing, dear,’ she said, closing the fan. ‘But that a marriage begin in such a manner, when the two of you are so young, is something else.’

  ‘He’s told me he will stop seeing her. To give him up a priori feels very harsh, absurd.’

  Soledad raised a hand to her mouth, a tic she resorted to when faced with doubt. Her fingertips smelled of the shrimp, of the damp sands of Cádiz. She rinsed them in a small silver bowl by her plate filled with water and slices of lemon.

  ‘Has he kissed you?’ her aunt asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has he tried?’

  ‘Of course he has, along with many other things. But I have forbidden it, until…’

  ‘Poor girl.’

  ‘To tell you the truth I am more concerned about what will happen on our wedding night than I am about what he does with his ugly aunt.’

  ‘Worried, or intrigued?’

  ‘I have no experience, and it seems he has more than enough.’

  The delicate girl paused. Out through the open doors giving on to the patio, she watched two birds bathing in the shallow upper tier of the fountain, flapping their wings. ‘But then I think, even if that part of our life proves unsatisfactory, how important is it in the end? Is not the fact we are suited for each other in so many ways more important than what goes on in the night?’

  ‘You are too young for this sort of wisdom, dear. You’ve no cause to think that “what goes on in the night” shall be a disappointment.’

  ‘I shall just have to see. Mother was not encouraging, though she and father are still together and civil with each other, when that aspect of their lives has been an absolute disaster.’

  ‘And yet you are here, thank god, because of them.’

  On her way home, Guada did the crying she prevented herself from giving into in front of her aunt. Once she collected herself, she instructed the coachman to steer the carriage down by the water’s edge. Stepping gingerly, protected from the sun with a dainty umbrella brought from Paris years past by her aunt’s deceased husband, she walked to where the earth began to soften and stared at the Guadalquivir. The river was alive with light and motion. The noise from its flow was a comfort to her. Its name came from the Arabic al-wādi al-kabīr, , ‘The Great River.’ The Phoenicians before them had named it the Baits, and later Betis or Baetis, giving its name to the Roman province Hispania Baetica. An older Celtiberian name was Oba, meaning river of gold.

  Its golden patina held forth that afternoon. Hidden beneath the moving surface swam trout, barbel, black bass, sturgeon, pike, and carp. She closed her eyes and smelled it and gave thanks to her father, with all his faults, for the folly of having her baptized in its waters.

  – VII –

  In which the travelers reach the New World

  A rookery of ungainly, full-whiskered elephant seals basked along the curved briny beach betwixt dried strands of kelp and seaweed on San Simeon Bay. The morning mist had burned off by noon, and a gentle December sun warmed their tawny hides. The Samurais watched, indifferent some of them, others appalled, as a high-spirited cadre of Spanish sailors went about shooting the animals at close range with their muskets. By the time enough of the herd had sensed the danger and returned to the safety of the sea, loudly lumbering into the meager waves, at least thirty of their brethren lay behind bleeding to death.

  The barbarians claimed the meat to be excellent and the blubber useful, the skins ideal for winter garments. But the vast number of dying beasts made it plain to most that the killing had taken place for its own sake.

  Shiro and Diego, not participants in this spectacle, walked inland a good hour away from the shore, inspired by a simple need to get away from the rest and feel the assurance of solid ground beneath their feet. They made their way through green fields of long grass and tarweed, through small groves of twisted live oak, cypress, and cedars bent by winds. A family of deer grazed upon a distant hill dotted with junipers and Monterey pines. As they looked further east, higher hills rose in succession. The smell of the land raised their spirits.

  Shiro asked Diego if Father Sotelo was well known in Sevilla.

  ‘The general impression we have of him is that he is trying to make a name for himself, an ambition that, in Sevilla, was thwarted. Thus, like myself, he has looked to gain some success by going abroad. The order to which he belongs, the Franciscans, is a rival of the Jesuits. Not wealthy or influential enough to rise to the rank of Bishop or Cardinal in Spain or in Rome, priests like him look to distinguish themselves preaching in new territories where, if enough converts enter the Church, they might someday be named Archbishop of distant flocks.’

  ‘But do they actually believe in what they preach? The man on the cross who is also god, one of three including a dove that is also just one god, the idea of heaven and hell?’

  Diego grinned, for he had never considered his religion from a foreigner’s view. ‘What,’ he asked the Samurai, ‘do you believe in?’

  ‘In very little. In the power of nothing. The brevity of life, the simplicity of earth and stone.’

  ‘Well,’ Diego rejoined, incapable of commenting on this blasphemous stance, ‘many of the priests do believe in our religion, and many just pretend to, or, better put, they use it toward their own ends. It is hard to know in Sotelo’s case. Many priests are second or third sons who, unable to inherit a sufficient amount of their family’s wealth, take their vows as a practical and socially condoned alternative. Which explains why there is so much hypocrisy: priests who fornicate, priests with mistresses and children, Cardinals, even the Pope.’

  ‘Men are men,’ Shiro said, ‘the world over.’

  ‘Now there’s a sharp shard of truth,’ Diego agreed.

  ‘I cannot imagine Father Sotelo with a woman, though perhaps he has one waiting for him in Spain. In Japan, what he most seemed to enjoy was looking at the men in the baths.’

  Diego laughed. They paused, took stock of how far they had strayed from the bay, turned, and began to retrace their steps. The ship, seen from that distance, presented an elegant composition anchored in the pristine water, surrounded by such an array of untrammeled nature. Rather than head back to the clearing where the beach was, littered now with the giant dead seals being assaulted by fleas and flies, they set a course for a modest peninsula or Cerro that formed the bay’s northern promontory of protection, an advancement of land rich in shade from towering eucalyptus trees.

  ‘How about you?’ Diego asked. ‘Have you left someone special behind?’

  Shiro recalled his day and night with Yokiko, the peach scent that hovered about her skin, her shy smile, the sounds she made with him in the darkness.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘except for my mother. There was someone. But she is not waiting for my return.’

  ‘So you are a free man. Perhaps you’ll find a Spanish or an Italian girl.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the young Samurai, to be polite. ‘Though I prefer my own kind.’

  ‘Have it your way,’ said the Spaniard, never unaware for long of the stark differences between them.

  ‘And you?’ Shiro asked. ‘Who is counting the weeks until your return?’

  ‘Aye, there is someone,’ Diego said. ‘A young woman I am engaged to marry. But I worry that after so much time her heart may have chilled. And when she sees this,’ he added, raising his stump aloft, ‘only God knows how far she shall run.’

&nb
sp; Nevertheless, Shiro envied the Christian.

  By the time they reached the woods of the promontory, they could see the longboats returning to the ship, the sails being readied, and heard the bell summoning everyone aboard. Rather than walk back toward the beach, they made their way down to the rocks, stripped and tied their garments tight, and waded into the cold water, pushing aside swaths, green, rubbery kelp entangled with soggy strips of eucalyptus bark. They swam to the ship directly, Diego making admirable progress with the use of a single arm. Within the hour, the Date Maru had left the bay and resumed its heading south toward New Spain.

  – VIII –

  In which nature bestows a gift

  Julian and Guada lay side by side in the shade. The Moorish tiles under them, littered with fallen blossoms, covered the surface of an expansive terrace. An open pair of tall glass doors behind them connected the terrace to a master bedroom. They had arrived at the estate an hour earlier and were still formally attired. After four days and nights of the social fury surrounding their wedding, they were relieved to be alone.

  When they closed their eyes, their ears focused on the rustling leaves, the waterspouts feeding the garden fountains below, the cries of darting swallows. Opening their eyes revealed a twilight sky and the swallows racing through it, hithering and thithering, turning and swooping, rising and falling, the sharp little wings catching remnants of a setting sun only birds could see.

  The raspberry-hued thirty-five-room finca at La Moratalla belonged to her aunt, Soledad Medina. Though Andalusian at heart, the main house had been repainted and decorated a century earlier by a duchess from Gascoigne who had married into the family. It sat in rural grandeur hidden by towering palms and plantains, flanked by well-tended gardens, graveled paths, and groves of orange trees rarely harvested. The outside world was kept at bay by ivy-covered walls barely visible in the distance and an imposing wrought iron gate emblazoned with the Medinaceli coat of arms. Apart from the live-in servants responsible for meals and maintenance, and the day laborers who arrived by mule each morning from Palma del Río, the newlyweds had the estate to themselves.

  When the option to stay there was first proposed, Julian had wavered. His first inclination was to organize a house party, a continuance of the wedding feast, inviting a coterie of friends to Carmona or Madrid. His concept of a good time had much to do with drinking surrounded by male friends and little to do with intimacy. But a conversation with Guada a week before the ceremony had changed his mind. Shortly before they were to enter the eating hall at Doña Soledad’s palace in Sevilla where the table was set for twenty-two, Guada had taken him aside.

  ‘I have not failed to notice the clouds darkening your spirit,’ she said. ‘I think I know their source.’

  ‘I do not know of what you speak,’ he said.

  But the irises of her eyes, green like sea pebbles, and her dark brown pupils bore into him. ‘I’m reminded of how the Guadalquivir begins as a trickle in the forests of Cazorla, and then how it transforms moving west, league by league, widening and deepening into the waterway gracing my city.’

  ‘What, my dear, are you getting at?’

  He tried to hide his impatience. Her throat reddened the way it did when she became upset.

  ‘I only mean I would be most pained should your anxieties deepen as the altar approaches.’

  He began to interrupt her, ‘Guada…’

  ‘Let me say just one thing, Julian. I marry you freely, you as you are. We have known each other since childhood, and I have come to care for your heart, your heart with all its complications and extraneous attachments. Nothing else matters. Trust me, and you shall see of what I speak.’

  As the ensuing meal progressed, he felt a weight lift from him, and his admiration for her grew.

  And now they were married as evening enveloped the Moratalla estate. The tiles cooled. The orange blossoms began to secrete their aroma into the evening air. The swallows dispersed, the fruit bats arrived.

  ‘Come to bed,’ she said.

  They lit no tapers or candles. The house, rarely occupied, and even the silken threads of the bedspread disbursed a liturgical odor of beeswax and breviaries, tabernacular dampness and old wooden pew.

  – IX –

  In which a warning is offered

  A clean Pacific breeze flattened the azure surface of Acapulco Bay. The Date Maru, rechristened by the barbarians as the San Juan Bautista, lay at anchor. Its timbers creaked. Its hull gathered barnacles. The ship and its cabins were empty save for some cats and a musket-bearing sailor standing guard.

  In town, the Spanish colonial authorities had greeted the Japanese with fanfare. But within a week, they relieved the Samurai of their weapons, except for those of Hasekura Tsunenaga and his closest bodyguards. An absurd altercation over gifts and protocol had left two Spaniards wounded. The Japanese found their hosts malodorous and unpredictable. But the local populace continued to marvel at the Japanese mode of dress, the bolts of silk offered in trade, their use of chopsticks instead of forks or fingers.

  After two months of rudimentary religious instruction and classes for the Samurai to try and learn Spanish, the next phase of their journey got under way. Hasekura Tsunenaga ordered a delegation of traders from Edo to stay in Acapulco, but the rest and all of the Samurai set out for Mexico City by way of Chilpancingo and Cuernavaca. It was April in the capital when they arrived, and they were greeted with crowds and fiestas. Hasekura Tsunenaga ordered the first baptisms to take place. Archbishop Don Juan Pérez de la Serna supervised the rites personally, and a large congregation looked on as the Samurai including Shiro were admitted into the Holy Roman Apostolic faith. The Samurai obeyed out of fealty and politeness. Only a handful had begun to take the priests seriously. The joke going round in private among the warriors was that being baptized was the only way to ensure getting a bath.

  Hasekura Tsunenaga took up residence at the finca of the Spanish governor. Many of the Samurai were housed at local military barracks. But some, including Shiro, guided by his friend Diego, found rooms at a brothel, where baths were arranged and where women provided services in exchange for silk. The women came to call Shiro ‘Tlazopilli,’ Aztec for ‘the handsome noble,’ for how he was formed and carried himself. While the other Samurai staying there indulged in the new surroundings and grew lazy swallowing inordinate amounts of spicy food and spirits, Shiro followed the austere regimen practiced by those confined to the barracks.

  Talking to the women and spending more time with Diego, he learned the story of how Mexico had been before the barbarians came, and how the generation of the women’s grandparents had been subjugated. The brutality in the tales did not shock him, for the stories his mother and Katakura Kojuro and Date Masamune had told him of famous battles past had been equally gory. What affected him more was what one of the women said to him late one evening after all the rest had fallen asleep.

  ‘Now they have come for your people,’ she said. ‘They start with smiles and promises, with their priests and crosses and holy water, speaking of trade and the brotherhood of nations. But none of it is true. At heart they are conquerors and thieves. You should turn back and save yourself. You should not go any further with them.’

  ‘Diego will protect me while I am there.’

  ‘Diego is just one man, and they are many thousands. And even Diego, if he has to, will choose his own kind over yours.’

  They were joined in the capital by a Spanish Admiral, Don Antonio Oquendo, who, with a unit of soldiers wearing metal helmets and armed with muskets slung from their shoulders, led the embassy expedition from Mexico City down through Puebla and on to the port of Veracruz on the Gulf. A small fleet awaited them. Shortly after their arrival, their katana swords and tanto short knives confiscated in Acapulco were returned to the Samurai. Among them, its scabbard wrapped in canvas, was the sword given to Shiro by Date Masamune. He wondered whether it represented a peace offering, or something else. He examined it for damage, and while t
he others went on a three-day debauchery bidding farewell to Mexico, he remained near the harbor, fasting and sharpening his blade.

  On the tenth of June, they were back on the water. He stood once more at the midship of a Spanish ship called the San José. The waters of the Gulf were crystalline. Immense turtles paddled close to the sandy sea floor. Under the command of Antonio Oquendo with Hasekura Tsunenaga at his side, the ship put Veracruz behind them and set a course for Cuba.

  – X –

  In which the Admiral of the High Seas recalls a painful day

  Alonso Pérez de Guzmán y de Zúñiga-Sotomayor, the 7th Duke of Medina-Sidonia, observed the newlyweds from a balcony at his ancestral palace set in the hills outside the village of Medina-Sidonia. He tried, with the aid of a cane, to find a position in which the shooting pains in his hip might diminish. A light September drizzle fell. The couple in the garden below, recently arrived from La Moratalla, sat by the fountain holding hands. It irked him to see them oblivious to the weather. The beauty of his niece brought back memories of the first months he had spent with his own wife, Ana de Silva y Mendoza, the daughter of the Princess of Éboli. They were betrothed when the girl was only four and he fifteen. Eight years later, after a dispensation from the Pope due to Ana’s age, they married. Now their children were grown and married, and the skinny girl who had been his twelve-year-old bride was long dead and buried in his family crypt not a five-minute walk from where he stood. He imagined her, shriveled and blackened, her rotting fingers covered in white gloves and rosary beads.

  Inside, on his desk, there was a letter addressed to the Admiral of the High Seas, penned no doubt by an official in Sevilla looking to flatter, but who was unaware of how much the title irked him. Fellow nobles who knew him well had, at his request, ceased using the accolade years ago.

  For reasons the Duke could never fathom, Philip the Second had handed him the helm of the Spanish Armada when the Marques of Santa Cruz died. He had refused, ineffectively, for he had no experience at sea. The ignominious defeat in 1588 at the hands of the English off the coast of France and Ireland was blamed on him. The sacking of Cádiz in 1596 had been blamed on him. Then they blamed his stubbornness in 1606 for the loss of a squadron of ships off the coast of Gibraltar. He always contended that the King, now deceased, had been a fool to choose him. The Duke was a Grandee of the land, a Duke at home on horseback riding through the countryside of his estates or along his family’s beaches in Sanlúcar. He was a man of saddles and reins, dogs and hunting muskets. Sails and swirling seawater, ocean gales and slimy fish were alien to him. Oquendos and Bazanes were born and raised for that. He had not been bred to vomit over the side of a galleon or to issue orders to insolent sailors from Lugo. He could never live down the public humiliation the title had brought upon him.