by Markus Orths
When Maria Perez gave birth to her first child, she lost only her right forefinger. For months, all efforts to make it heal had failed. Finally, it turned black. The doctor advised amputating the finger during the birth, for—so he informed them—birth pangs were the best anaesthetic. And so, when her time came, Maria’s mother, her grandmother, a midwife and a whole crowd of other women stood on either side of her bulging abdomen, over which a Virgin’s girdle had been laid; they gave Maria Perez moral support, helped her, sat her up, held her hand, waited and finally set to and pulled the baby out, while at the same moment the doctor, using some dubious surgical instruments, removed Maria’s right forefinger. And Maria’s diary suggests that he had been right in his pronouncement, for when her hands held her baby she noticed for the first time that those hands now had only nine digits, and it was only when she passed the baby to someone else that she felt the stabbing pain of that loss.
The child was healthy, not a little monster; they examined its hands, eyes and face, it cried and kicked, and its father could not stop crossing himself with relief. Added to which it was a boy, and they called him Miguel. They did not cut the umbilical cord off close to his belly, as was usual in the case of a girl, but left a few inches to spare, and after washing the baby they did not pour the bloody water onto the symbolic ashes in the hearth, as they would have done for a girl—so that she would stay at home—but tipped it out of the door, into the street, because a boy must leave home and go out into the world.
In the years that followed, Maria Perez was to bear six more children. What is more, she managed to conceive without performing any special acts of a religious or superstitious nature, which made her wonder if she had lost her finger for nothing. But she was unwilling to believe that anything happens without a reason; instead, her diary shows her pondering deeply on the nature of loss and concluding that for each child that was granted to her, something else was taken away.
While giving birth to Jacinta she lost the colour of her hair: as Maria Perez screamed and screamed, it turned white as snow. For some reason the pain must have been far greater than during Miguel’s birth. Even so, when daughter Jacinta herself was grown up, she refused to be daunted by her mother’s recollections and during her twenty-three child-bearing years gave birth to seventeen living children. Twelve of them married and produced an average of six children each, who in their turn gave Jacinta twenty great-grandchildren during her lifetime. A simple calculation—subtracting those who died before Jacinta, and adding the spouses—yields a figure of a hundred and twenty relatives who attended her when she lay dying. Of course they could not all fit into the room at once, and for two days and two nights they took turns to keep watch by her bedside. Because it was a particularly cold winter and that room was the only place where it was really warm, the family members standing shivering outside were constantly pushing their way in, with the result that a continual stream of people flowed past Jacinta’s deathbed, no one could sit down, and each stopped for only a matter of seconds to glance at her briefly before being pushed on from behind, so that after she had drawn her last breath no one knew precisely when she had died, or rather, who had been at her bedside at the moment of her death.
Maria’s second son was named Sebastian. What Maria lost this time was the child himself. Held for a few moments by the midwife, he seemed oddly recalcitrant and ungainly, like a glove puppet; he stretched and drew precisely one breath, which seemed to be all he wanted. Then he looked straight ahead of him with veiled, unseeing eyes, before his little head, like that of a clown in a puppet-show, flopped resignedly down onto his chest, and a trickle of blood ran down his chin, as though while still inside his mother’s womb he had popped a capsule of stage blood into his unborn mouth.
When she gave birth to Mari Juana, Maria lost three teeth. This second daughter grew to be a woman who far outdid her mother in piety. As a mere child—indeed, at an even earlier age than Catalina a few years later—she set her heart on entering a convent, and once there she rose ever higher, working her way up inexorably from the rank of an ordinary nun to that of prioress and later head of the whole order. This was not because she was driven by a pathological ambition, but because she took the figurative idea of ‘striving upwards’ too literally and thought that the higher she rose, the more she would really find herself ’up above‘, for ’above‘, to her, was synonymous with what was called heaven, and to be near heaven was her dearest wish. When she had ascended to the highest position in her order and realized that she could go no higher, she clambered, one day, to the top of the church tower and from its point climbed still further, into nothingness.
To the people watching from below it seemed for a moment as if Mari Juana were pulling herself up by a rope that dangled, invisible, from the clouds—while at the same time, some ten thousand miles away, a Zen master was telling his pupil that life was like climbing a pole, and that having reached the top one must simply go on climbing. But instead of trustfully pursuing her upward path, Mari Juana made the mistake of looking back towards Earth, which caused her arms to flail wildly as she regained her physical weight and lost her equilibrium, and those below could only look on helplessly as Mari Juana’s mortal body plummeted to the ground and burst there, a red paint-bomb, while—and this they could not see, but they believed they saw it—the immortal part of her left her body and continued on its upward flight.
When Francisco was born, Maria Perez lost her grandmother Isabel almost at the same time, and she had a fit of crying which so delayed the expulsion of the baby from her body that he was born congenitally slow-witted. The only livelihood open to him was the universally despised job of masturbation attendant at the casino. He had to hand the men, who often gambled right through the night, the tray-like receptacle into which they propelled their sperm: they would do this in a corner, without leaving the room and with a lack of inhibition worthy of the ancient Cynics. Francisco would then wipe off the whitish, sticky stuff that had often been sprayed right to the edge, and have the tray clean and ready for the next player. He did not mind this. The one thing he would have liked was to have someone to live with him, and, undemanding as he was, he would have been content with that, not presuming to think of such a thing as love. But in the whole course of his life no such person ever materialized, so that Francisco, who lived into extreme old age, died alone in the room that was all his meagre wage allowed, with no one to sit beside him and hold his hand as he breathed his last.
Of Mariana’s life nothing is known. She was the sixth child to be born. So much can be gleaned from the baptismal registers of San Sebastian. But in her mother’s diary we find only the enraged, teeth-baring scream of umpteen torn-out pages. We do not know what loss to Maria Perez accompanied this birth. The diary is not resumed until 17 April 1585, the day Catalina was born, the day when Maria Perez de Erauso, nee Galarraga y Arce, lost the ability ever to give birth again.
Chapter two
The day of sun and rain
It would be so wonderfully appropriate, so luminously metaphorical, if Maria’s last child—the legend-encrusted figure called Catalina de Erauso, later to be ridiculously and crudely dubbed the ‘Lieutenant Nun’—if Catalina had been born in the Whale and if, after due determination of the child’s sex, Ines had been instructed to pour the bloody water onto the ashes in the hearth but had stumbled as she carried the bowl through the hall, so that the water splashed onto the floor, ran along the cracks in the sloping hallway and flowed, unstoppably, symbolically, through the door and out into the world. That image, carved with craftsmanlike precision, might have formed the frontispiece to Catalina’s further life. But the truth is that Catalina was not born in the house at all, but outside, already in the world. What is more, she was born on a day that still puzzles weather experts everywhere, one that the Basque meteorologist and chronicler Santiago de Etxeberria called the ‘day of sun and rain’. The sudden downpour on that day will always remain a mystery, since it is a documented fact tha
t the sky was a clear blue with not a trace of cloud when Maria Perez, in the eighth month of her pregnancy, left the Whale accompanied by her son Miguel.
Miguel was then ten years old but, it is said, very advanced for his age. Although in addition to Ines the Erausos had hired another servant as a nursemaid, it was Miguel who, already at the age of six or seven, would be awakened in the night by the cries of a brother or sister who had had a nightmare, and would get out of bed, pick the - child up and pace to and fro with it until it had calmed down. He also went shopping and did a great many things which were really the nursemaid’s job, but she gladly took advantage of his precocious abilities to snatch the odd forty winks in the afternoon.
Miguel was a happy boy. This was because his father spent far more time with his son than other Basque fathers did. The reasons for this are debatable—perhaps love played some part in it, but the father seems to have been motivated chiefly by a sort of master plan which he pursued with single-minded determination. Miguel pere had his life mapped out in a most satisfactory way. In his youth he had travelled to the West Indies with his own father and, being essentially lazy, had set a time limit on his working career: up to the age of thirty he would build up his business interests in the New World, and then he would return home, marry, reap the fruits of his endeavours and start a family. Up to now everything had gone according to plan: he had leased a silver mine in Potosi and, leaving his own father there as overseer, had returned to San Sebastian when he was only twenty-eight. The amount of money flowing in from the New Colonies would enable him to live with his family for a number of years enjoying, if not enormous wealth, at any rate tolerable prosperity.
The final and most inspired part of the plan was the firm expectation that his first-born, when he was old enough, would in his turn travel to the New World, take charge of the family’s affairs there, and ensure that the flow of money continued unabated. Naturally, the son needed to be prepared for a task that was so vital to the continuing implementation of the plan. And since people are far more strongly motivated if they themselves want something than if they are acting on behalf of another person—even a father—Miguel senior made it his business to instil in his son an enthusiasm for that promised land. Night after night, while Maria Perez sat beside them listening and knitting something more tangible, he was knitting in his son’s mind an image of the West Indies as a kind of paradise. Avoiding all mention of any difficulty or unpleasantness that might await a colonist in the New World, he talked of ‘endless beaches with pearly sands and turquoise seas’, of breathtaking mountain landscapes and thick jungles‘, of ’uncharted regions’ that could turn any colonist into an explorer and discoverer, of the ‘deep respect’ which a traveller in the West Indies encountered everywhere, of ‘fabulous riches and treasures of all kinds’ which made possible a life of ’the utmost luxury‘, of innumerable pleasures and pastimes’ which the colonists could enjoy ’without restriction‘; and later—with a sideways glance at Maria Perez that was a plea for forbearance—he also talked of the ’beauty of the women there‘, who were ’available‘ to anyone. Miguel’s eyes shone bright as he talked—bright with the silver of Potosi—and the son took all his father’s stories for true coin, which of course for his father they literally were, or would be in his old age.
On 17 April 1585, several things chanced to coincide. Miguel senior was engaged on a week-long tour of San Sebastian’s gambling dens. Maria Perez was cross: her husband had not slept with her for three weeks. This was possibly because of her large belly, which was already unusually distended. All the same, she could not understand his avoidance of her, because during her previous pregnancies they had worked out an effective technique of suspended sitting which made the act possible almost up to the birth.
April 17th was an unusually warm day. Maria Perez pulled the curtains away from the window and looked out. There was not a cloud in the sky. She could still not hear the sea. There was still an unpleasant smell outside. For two months she had not set foot outside the house and had, as usual, devoted herself to staring intently at pictures of the infant Jesus. Now she went into her son Miguel’s room and told him to get dressed. The nursemaid was sitting with the other children, and Ines was out shopping. Maria felt like going on an excursion, something more than just a short ride: she wanted to escape from the stuffiness of the town and spend three or four hours breathing in the fresh April air by the sea.
The donkey trotted at a leisurely pace, with Miguel walking alongside. Maria had brought along a skin of water and two pieces of smoked cod wrapped in a maize tortilla. After half an hour the town was behind them, the smell was growing fainter and the air was starting to feel cooler. Near the shore there were a few fishermen’s huts. They went a little further along, to where it was deserted and completely peaceful. Maria dismounted from the donkey and sat down on a rock. Her son ran the remaining hundred yards to the sea and took off his shoes. The water was cold, so Miguel did not paddle in the foam for long. When he turned back towards his mother he saw that something was wrong. A wind had come up from the sea, making her screams inaudible, but she was screaming—Miguel could see that because her mouth was wide open. She was waving frantically.
Miguel started running at once, his bare feet racing first over sand, then over hard shingle. Maria was sitting on the ground, panting. Miguel knew what that meant. “I’ll take you home,” he said. Maria shook her head and let out a roar. “I’ll fetch someone,” said Miguel. But Maria was already lying on her back, her legs drawn up and wide apart, her petticoat pulled back. Miguel was looking straight at the place, covered with black hair, from which he himself had once emerged. Or was that already the baby’s head pushing its way out? Miguel grabbed hold of it and pulled, squeezing the new head; he did not know that a head like that was still very malleable while it was being born, and he pressed the nose down with one hand while with the other he bent the chin sideways so that Catalina could come out a little further. Two more contractions and Miguel was holding his sister in his arms, black-haired and covered with blood and mucus. Maria Perez fainted. Miguel bent over his mother’s chest. He could hear her heartbeat. And the baby? It was not breathing.
Miguel jumped up and tried to turn and run with the baby to one of the fishermen’s huts, but there was something holding him back. He knelt down, took the umbilical cord between his teeth, had to chew on it a bit, and then the baby was free. Miguel ran towards the huts, and Catalina stirred for the first time. It was a hiccup. Then she parted her lips and gave a cry. A fisherman’s wife came to meet Miguel, took the baby from him and dispatched her husband to assist the woman while she herself took care of the child. Running after the man, Miguel saw his mother being lifted from the ground, saw Maria Perez slowly come to and nod weakly when the fisherman asked her a question, saw him hurry past, carrying her in his arms, towards the hut. Last of all Miguel saw his shoes. On his way to get them he thought how strange it was, after all that had happened, to go back to doing a thing like fetching his shoes. And then the rain started. In San Sebastian everyone who was out of doors at that moment stopped whatever they were doing and looked up. Miguel stopped and looked up. The listless donkey looked up. The fisherman’s wife, holding the swaddled baby, looked up. The man carrying Maria looked up. And Maria Perez, lying against his chest, looked up and thought: where are the clouds?
In the evening when all was quiet and his mother was asleep, Miguel stood alone in front of the mirror in the salon, trying to think, but the mirror snatched away this thinking time, sucked away his smooth young skin, his short hair, his childish features, his small stature: what Miguel saw was no longer a child, a guileless ten-year-old with hairless skin—no, Miguel saw a young man of eighteen or so with the beginnings of a moustache, with a sword, cloak, feathered hat and red and yellow breeches, ready to set off for the New World, and in the top corner of the mirror he saw his father enter the room and come up behind him; he put a hand on his shoulder and spoke a few last words to him b
efore his departure. But Miguel was paying no attention, because he was thinking that before leaving he would have to say goodbye—to Catalina.
The first eight years of Catalina’s life are inextricably linked with the ever-present name of her brother. Miguel fed her, giving her extra rations and trying to fatten her up, for following her premature birth Catalina was a puny child. Miguel put her to bed, said prayers with her and every evening added, “Sun, sacred and blessed, return to your mother.” This had been a saying of his great-grandmother Isabel’s, dating back to the time when the Basques believed in sun and moon gods; in Baxajaun, the shaggy lord of the forest, and the cave-dwelling god Mari, who could assume different forms. Miguel put Catalina’s finger into her mouth for her to suck on until she fell asleep; he changed her nappies, washed her ears, nose, stomach, legs and the part he had no name for. When Catalina cried in the night it was Miguel who comforted her. Sometimes he took her into his own bed, where she seemed to sleep better. He helped her take her first steps and taught her to speak.