Zorro

by Isabel Allende

  At the death of her husband, Amalia sank into a long period of mourning, from which she would never recover. She was not supposed to utter the dead man’s name, in order not to summon him from the other world, but secretly she wept for him every night.

  For centuries her people had roamed throughout the world, persecuted and despised. The ancestors of her tribe had left India several hundred years before and made their way through all of Asia and Europe before ending up in Spain, where they were treated as badly as in other places. The climate lent itself to their nomadic life, however, so they had settled in the south of that country. There were few nomadic families like Amalia’s left. Hers had met adversity again and again, and so Bernardo’s unexpected intervention had touched Amalia’s heart.

  Her people never had relations with the gadje unless for commercial reasons, otherwise the purity of their breed and their traditions would be endangered. Out of basic caution, the Romany stayed out of the mainstream; they never trusted strangers, and they reserved their loyalty for their clan. But it seemed to Amalia that this young man was not exactly a gadje; he was from another planet, a foreigner everywhere. Maybe he was a Gypsy from a lost tribe.

  Amalia, it turned out, was Pelayo’s sister, which Bernardo would discover that same day when Pelayo himself came to the wagon. He did not recognize Bernardo; the night they had caught him singing to Juliana in Italian, on Moncada’s behalf, he had seen nothing but Diego and felt the sword tip pressing against his throat. Amalia explained what had happened to Pelayo in the brittle sounds of Romany, her Sanskrit-derived language. She asked her brother’s pardon for having violated the taboo of not mixing with gadje. That grievous sin could condemn her to ma rime a state of impurity that warranted rejection by the entire community, but she was counting on the fact that rules had been relaxed since the beginning of the war. The clan had suffered greatly during that time, and families had been scattered. Pelayo reached the same conclusion, and instead of scolding his sister, as he would have before, he calmly thanked Bernardo. He was as surprised as Amalia at the Indian’s generosity, since they had never been treated well by a foreigner. They had realized that Bernardo was mute, but they did not make the common mistake of thinking he was also deaf and slow-witted. As a group, they scrambled to survive by taking on any job that fell into their hands; usually that meant selling and breaking horses, as well as treating them if they were sick or injured. They also made money with their small forges, working metals iron, gold, silver to fashion everything from horseshoes to swords and jewelry. The war frequently made them move on, but at the same time it worked in their favor, because in the furor of killing each other both French and Spanish ignored them. On Sundays and feast days the Gypsies would set up a ragged tent in some plaza and put on a small circus. Bernardo would soon meet the rest of the group, among whom a certain Rodolfo stood out, a giant covered with tattoos, who coiled a fat snake around his neck and lifted a horse with his bare hands. Over sixty years old, he was the eldest of the large family, and therefore the one with the most authority. Petrina, a tiny nine-year-old girl who folded herself like a handkerchief to fit inside a vessel for storing olives, was the main attraction of the pathetic Sunday circus. Pelayo did an acrobatic act on one or more galloping horses, and other members of the family delighted their public by throwing daggers at one another with their eyes blindfolded. Amalia sold raffle tickets, read horoscopes, and told fortunes with a classic glass ball, all with such unerring intuition that she frightened herself with her lucid successes. She knew that the ability to foretell the future can be a curse, since if it is not possible to change what is to happen, it is better not to know at all.

  As soon as Diego de la Vega learned that Bernardo had struck up a friendship with the Gypsies, he insisted on meeting them so that he could learn more about Pelayo’s dealings with Rafael Moncada. He never imagined that he was going to take a liking to them and feel so comfortable in their company. By that time in Spain most of the tribes of the Roma people, as they called themselves, were living a sedentary life. They set up their camps on the outskirts of towns and cities.

  Little by little they became part of the landscape, until the local population got used to seeing them and stopped bothering them, although they were never accepted. In Catalonia, on the other hand, there were no fixed camps; the Romany of that part of the world were nomadic.

  Pelayo and Amalia’s tribe was the first to come along that wanted to stay in one place; they had been there for three years. Diego realized from the first moment that it was not a good idea to ask questions about Moncada, or anything else, because the Gypsies had very good reason to be suspicious and to keep their secrets to themselves. Once the wound on his arm had completely healed, and Pelayo had forgiven him for the nick his sword had made on his neck, Diego was able to get his permission to join the improvised circus, along with Bernardo. They made one brief appearance, which was not as stunning as they had hoped because Diego’s arm was still weak, but it was good enough to allow them to join as acrobats. With the help of the rest of the company, they put together an ingenious tangle of posts, ropes, and trapezes modeled on the rigging of the Madre de Dios. They entered the ring wearing black capes that they removed with a grand flourish, revealing tights of the same color. In that garb they flew through the air quite recklessly, as they had on a pitching ship at twice the height. Diego also made a dead hen disappear and then pulled it from the neck of Amalia’s blouse, and with his whip he put out a candle placed on the head of the gigantic Rodolfo, without disturbing a hair. They never mentioned these activities outside the world of the Gypsies; Tomas de Romeu’s tolerance had its limits, and he surely would not have approved. There were many things that de Romeu did not know about his young guest.

  One Sunday Bernardo peeked from behind the artists’ curtain and saw that Juliana and Isabel, accompanied by their chaperone, were in the audience. On the way back from mass, where Nuria insisted on taking them even though the idea greatly displeased Tomas de Romeu, the girls had seen the circus and insisted on going in.

  The tent, patched together from yellowed pieces of sail discarded in the port, had a center straw-covered ring, some wood benches for the moneyed spectators, and space in the rear for the hoi polloi, who had to stand. In that ring the giant lifted his horse, Amalia squeezed Petrina into the olive vessel, and Diego and Bernardo did their trapeze act. In the same spot, at night, Pelayo organized cockfights. It was not a place where Tomas de Romeu would have wanted to see his daughters, but Nuria could not stand firm when Juliana and Isabel joined together to bend her will.

  “If Don Tomas finds out that we’re involved in this, he will send us back to California on the first available ship,” Diego whispered to Bernardo, aghast to see the girls in the tent.

  Then Bernardo remembered the mask they had used to frighten the sailors on the Madre de Dios. He cut holes for eyes in two of Amalia’s kerchiefs, and they tied those on to cover their faces, praying that the de Romeu sisters would not recognize them. Diego decided to cancel his magic act, since he had often performed it in the girls’ presence.

  Even so, they had the impression that the girls recognized them, until later that evening when he heard Juliana reporting the details of the spectacle to Agnes Duchamp. Whispering, behind Nuria’s back, she told her friend about the intrepid black-clad acrobats who risked their lives on the trapezes, and she added that she would give each one a kiss if only they would show their faces.

  Diego was not as lucky with Isabel. He was celebrating their escapade with Bernardo when the girl came into the room without announcing herself, as she often did despite her father’s strict prohibition not to get too friendly with Diego. She planted herself before them, arms akimbo, and announced that she knew who the trapeze artists were and that she was ready to expose them unless they took her the next Sunday to meet the Gypsies. She wanted to see whether the giant’s tattoos, which looked as if they were painted on, were real, and whether the lethargic snake might no
t be embalmed.

  In the following months, Diego, whose blood was boiling with the pent-up desires of his seventeen years, found relief in Amalia’s bosom.

  They met at tremendous risk. By making love with a gadje she was violating a basic taboo, for which she could pay dearly. She had been a virgin when she married, the custom among the women of her people, and she had been faithful to her husband till the day he died.

  Widowhood had left her in a kind of never-never land: still young, she would be treated like a grandmother until Pelayo, charged with finding her another husband once she dried the last tear of her mourning, fulfilled his obligation. Lives were lived in full view of the clan.

  Amalia did not have time or a place to be alone, but occasionally she was able to meet Diego in some quiet alleyway: there she would take him in her arms, always with the insufferable fear of being caught. Amalia did not entangle Diego with romantic demands; after the ugly murder of her husband, she had resigned herself to being alone forever. She was twice Diego’s age and had been married for more than twenty years, but she was not expert in matters of love. With Ramon she had shared a deep and faithful affection absent raptures of passion. They had been married in a simple rite in which they shared a piece of bread anointed with drops of their blood. That was all that was required. The mere fact that they had made the decision to live together sanctified the union, but they gave a bountiful wedding banquet anyway, with music and dance that lasted three whole days. Afterward, they took a place in a corner of the communal tent. From that moment on they were never apart; they traveled the roads and byways of Europe together, they went hungry in hard times, they fled aggression in many places, and they celebrated at the slightest excuse. As Amalia told Diego, she had had a good life. She knew that Ramon, whole again, was waiting for her somewhere, miraculously recuperated from his martyrdom. When she had seen his body, mutilated by the hoes and spades of his murderers, the flame that lighted her within had gone out, and she had never again given a thought to sensual pleasure or the consolation of an embrace.

  She had decided to invite Diego to her wagon out of simple friendship, and when she saw how on edge he was for want of a woman, it had occurred to her to help him; that was the extent of it. She ran the risk that the spirit of her husband would return, transformed into a mulo, to punish her for her posthumous infidelity, but she hoped that Ramon would understand her motives: she was not motivated by lust, only generosity. A bashful partner, she made love in the dark, without taking off her clothes. Sometimes she quietly wept. Then Diego would dry her tears with soft kisses, deeply moved. With her he learned to decipher some of the hidden mysteries of a woman’s feminine heart.

  Despite the severe sexual norms of her tradition, Amalia, moved by unselfish sympathy, might have done Bernardo the same favor if he had given her so much as a hint, but he never did; the memory of Lightin-the-Night was always foremost in his mind.

  Manuel Escalante watched Diego de la Vega for a long time before deciding to talk to him about the most important thing in his life. At first he had distrusted the youth’s arresting magnetism. To Escalante, a man of funereal seriousness, Diego’s lightheartedness was a character flaw, but he had been forced to revise that judgment the morning he witnessed the duel with Moncada. Escalante knew that the purpose of a duel is not to win, but to confront death with nobility and thereby gauge the quality of the soul. For the master, fencing and with even greater reason a duel was an infallible formula for revealing the true measure of a man. In the fever of combat, the essential personality emerges: there is little advantage in being expert with the blade if the swordsman is not imbued with sufficient courage and serenity to confront danger. Escalante realized that in the twenty-five years he had been teaching his art, he had never had a student like Diego. He had seen others with similar talent and dedication, but none had a heart as strong as the hand that held the sword. The admiration he felt for the young man turned into affection, and fencing became the excuse to see him every day. He was ready long before eight, but he was too disciplined and too proud to come into the room one minute before the stroke of the hour. The lesson was always conducted with the greatest formality, and almost in silence; however, during the conversations that followed he shared his ideas and personal aspirations with Diego. Once class was over they washed off with wet towels, changed their clothes, and went up to the second floor, where the maestro lived. There they took their usual seats in uncomfortable carved wood chairs in a dark modest room ringed with books on sagging shelves and polished weapons aligned on the walls. The same ancient servant, who never stopped mumbling to himself, as if endlessly praying, served them black coffee in small rococo porcelain cups. Soon they passed from subjects connected with fencing to others. The maestro’s family, Spanish and Catholic for four generations, nevertheless, could not claim purity of blood because their ancestors had been Jewish. Escalante’s great-grandparents had converted to Catholicism and changed their name to escape persecution. They had succeeded in eluding the merciless harassment of the Inquisition, but in the process they had lost the fortune accumulated over more than a hundred years of good business dealings and modest habits. By the time Manuel was born, there was only a vague memory of a past of comfort and refinement; nothing was left of their properties, artworks, or jewels.

  His father had made his living in a small shop in Asturias, two of his brothers were craftsmen, and the third had disappeared in north Africa.

  The fact that his closest relatives were devoted to commerce and the manual trades embarrassed the maestro. He believed that the only occupations worthy of a gentleman were those without tangible products.

  He was not alone. In Spain in those years only poor campesinos worked, each of them providing food for thirty idlers. But Diego learned of his maestro’s past only much later. When Escalante first told him about La Justicia, and showed him his medallion, he had said nothing about his Jewish heritage. That morning in the sola, as they were drinking their coffee, Manuel Escalante took a key from a fine chain around his neck, went to a small bronze coffer on his desk, solemnly opened it, and showed what it contained to his student: a gold and silver medallion.

  “I have seen one like this before, maestro,” Diego murmured, recognizing it.

  “Where?”

  “Don Santiago de Leon, the captain of the ship that brought me to Spain, wore one.”

  “I know Captain de Leon. Like me, he is a member of La Justicia.”

  Escalante’s secret society was one of many in Europe during that time.

  It had been founded two hundred years earlier in reaction to the power of the Inquisition, the fearsome arm of the church that since the sixteenth century had labored to defend the spiritual unity of Catholics by persecuting Jews, Lutherans, heretics, sodomites, blasphemers, sorcerers, seers, devil worshipers, warlocks and witches, astrologers, and alchemists, as well as anyone who read banned books.

  The wealth of the condemned passed into the hands of their accusers, so that many victims burned at the stake because they were wealthy, not for any other reason. For more than three hundred years of religious fervor, the people celebrated autos-da-fe, cruel orgies of public executions, but in the eighteenth century the strength of the Inquisition had begun to wane. The trials continued for a while, but behind closed doors, until the entire institution was abolished. The work of La Justicia had been to save the accused, smuggling them out of the country when possible and helping them begin a new life elsewhere.

  They provided clothing and food, obtained false documents, and when possible paid ransoms. During the period when Manuel Escalante recruited Diego, the orientation of La Justicia had changed; it combated not only religious fanaticism but other forms of oppression as well, such as that of the French in Spain and of slavery in foreign lands. La Justicia was a hierarchical organization with a military discipline, in which women had no place. Each step of the initiation had its colors and symbols, the ceremonies were held in secret places, and the only
way to be admitted was through another member who acted as sponsor. The participants swore to pledge their lives to the service of the noble causes embraced by La Justicia, never to accept payment for their services, to keep their secret at any price, and to obey the orders of their superiors. The oath was elegantly simple: “To seek justice, nourish the hungry, clothe the naked, protect widows and orphans, give shelter to the stranger, and never spill innocent blood.”

  Manuel Escalante had no difficulty convincing Diego de la Vega to stand as a candidate for membership in La Justicia. Mystery and adventure were irresistible temptations for Diego: his only uncertainty had to do with the clause about blind obedience, but after he was convinced that no one would order him to do anything against his principles, he overcame that stumbling block. He studied the coded texts the maestro gave him and subjected himself to training for a unique form of combat that demanded both mental agility and extraordinary physical skill. A precise series of movements with swords and daggers were performed on a design laid out on the floor; this was called the Circle of the Maestro and was the same design reproduced on the gold-and-silver medallions that identified the members of the organization. First Diego learned the sequence and technique of the combat; then he devoted himself for months to practicing with Bernardo, until he could perform the movements without thinking. As Manuel Escalante had indicated, he would be ready only when he could catch a fly on the wing with a single casual swoop. Otherwise he would never best a longtime member of La Justicia, as he would have to do to be accepted.

  Finally the day came when Diego was ready for the ceremony of initiation. The fencing master led him through places unknown even to the architects and builders who prided themselves on knowing the city like the palms of their hands. Barcelona had grown upon successive layers of ruins: the Phoenicians and Greeks had passed through without leaving much trace; then came the Romans, who had left their mark on the city but were replaced by the Goths and finally the conquering Saracens, who remained for several centuries. Each culture contributed to the city’s complexity; from the archaeological point of view the city was like a layered phyllo pastry. The Jews had dug out refuges and tunnels in which to hide from the agents of the Inquisition. When they abandoned them, those mysterious passageways became caves for bandits, until gradually La Justicia and other secret sects took over the buried entrails of the city.