by Markus Orths
Catalina seemed to feel more at home with Spanish than with Basque, despite being told by her parents that Basque was the language of Paradise, since ‘Eve’ came from the Basque word ezbai, which means ‘no-yes’. Ah yes, her parents: since one of the ships bringing back silver from America had been plundered by Portuguese corsairs and they could no longer afford the nursemaid, they were glad that Miguel saved them most of the work of bringing up Catalina, but on the other hand this led to a strange lack of closeness between them and her, and they had enormous problems with her, mainly because she was so strong-willed. If Catalina wanted something, she wanted it absolutely. And in order to get it she would sometimes have alarming tantrums and fits of profound, defiant obstinacy, screaming and stamping her feet until she got what she wanted, but at other times she would sink into an unchildlike, almost non-human state of apathy and unresponsiveness, and show such total submission and resignation that her parents were afraid that breaking the child’s will might do her some permanent harm, and so to be on the safe side they would give in to her after all.
Catalina’s own earliest memory was of movement. Of being carried, or rather of being dragged along. One day, when she was eighteen months old, she managed to crawl downstairs without anyone noticing, and reach the hall. She was attracted to the line of light around the door, which was slightly ajar, and felt her way along the wall towards it. Once outside she set off and took a few steps, but then, dazzled and confused, she lost her balance, fell over and ended up face down with her nose in the dirt. She did not cry out. No one noticed her. She put her hands in the stuff she was lying on. It was the family’s excrement, which Ines had tipped out in the night, adding only a scattering of dirt on top. Catalina explored the heap of dung, poking her fingers into it, then rolled over on to her back and looked upwards. A blue cloth was spread up there, full of a hot brightness. She looked at it, her eyes open and unprotected, until they started to hurt. Just as she was narrowing her eyes, something moved between her and the sun—something that slavered, that licked her chin, slobbered over her lips, lapped at her face, that panted, nuzzled at her, snuffled and drooled. Making a bleating sound, Catalina groped around for anything that might protect her, found some thick, shaggy hair and pushed herself underneath it. Here it was warm and soft, and that tongue could not get at her. She held on tight and would not let go. Not even when the dog started to move. Clinging to the hair of its belly, she let herself be slowly dragged along. As her heels made furrows in the dirt and her head tipped backwards, she saw everything upside down: a light-blue sea, roofs like ships’ hulls with upside-down houses as their cargo, people’s feet and coach wheels on a sky made of mud. When she could not hold on any longer she simply let go. The dog went indifferently on its way. Catalina was left lying in the middle of the road. Someone picked her up and spoke to her, though holding her at arm’s length to avoid getting soiled. Catalina saw a beard and a cap. Then she heard a different voice, a voice coming closer, a familiar voice and she knew whose it was. Miguel ran up to the man as fast as he could, took Catalina from him and carried his sister back to the Whale.
From then on he never let Catalina out of his sight. For the next few years he took her with him whenever he went to mass or down to the harbour. He read with her, wrote with her, played with her and told her about the West Indies. But he never gave her the slightest hint that he meant to go there himself in a few years; he simply repeated the things his father had told him, even reproducing his father’s facial expressions, his father’s gestures, and his father’s embellishments. And just as Miguel had listened to his father, so Catalina listened to her brother, listened to the rehashed stories, even if at first she could not understand it all, and as time went on Miguel painted the West Indies in even brighter colours than his father had done, and that brightness became a brightness in his eyes which did not come from the silver of Potosi, as in his father’s case, but from the sadness of the impending parting.
When Catalina was seven years old, a curious chain of events took place. It was the day of the Corpus Christi procession. The centrepiece of the procession was the monstrance, encircled by golden rays, in which the consecrated Host was carried through the streets under an enormous baldachin, surrounded by priests, monks and other dignitaries. All around were musicians playing strident music; groups of raucous young men wearing swords and performing dances; whalers and cod fishermen wearing the gold ring-and-chain earring which meant that they had spent a season hunting and fishing in the Davis Strait between Greenland and Baffin Island and off the Labrador and Newfoundland coasts; woodcutters shouldering their axes, shepherds with woollen smocks draped over their other clothes, peasants in traditional costume, with tall caps and crossbows, and miners from the iron ore mines; here and there among the throng, groups of merry-makers in brightly-coloured finery sang or shouted, already drunk even at this early hour of the day. When the roadside spectators saw the Blessed Sacrament they instantly fell silent for a moment, kneeling to cross themselves and murmur a few hasty prayers—but as soon as the monstrance had passed out of sight they promptly became as exuberant as before. Whistles from the crowd greeted the giant papier mache figures, symbols of evil, that were carried through the town. These were the gigantes and cabezudos, giants and big-headed dwarfs, grotesquely brought to life by the slow, ponderous, lunging steps of the perspiring dancers concealed beneath them.
Last of all, but visible from afar, came the dragon, the famous tarasca, and as it brought up the rear the spectators fell in behind it. It was—in the words of Antoine de Brunei, who was travelling in Spain at the time—‘a serpent on wheels, of vast dimensions, with a scaly body, a belly of horrendous size and a long tail, with terrible eyes and a gaping mouth with three tongues and rows of pointed teeth protruding from it’, and the men inside the dragon worked the monster so skilfully, by means of long poles, that a good few of the onlookers had their caps knocked off. In short, there was such a crowd, so much pushing and shoving and such a din that you could not hear yourself speak, or tell who was in the procession and who was just looking on.
When the dragon was being carried past, Miguel bent down to Catalina, meaning to lift her onto his shoulders to give her a better view, but Catalina had vanished. Noticing that the undulating green scaly flank of the dragon did not quite reach the ground, she had run forward a few steps and slipped underneath the monster, joining the men beneath it in a dim twilight of trapped heat and suffocating air. She could hear puffing and panting and she could smell sweat, but before her eyes could adjust to the semi-darkness she felt herself being grabbed and forcibly ejected, pushed back out into the crowd, where she was at once caught up in a vortex, a swirling tide of flesh, legs and bellies, a maelstrom of revellers, until at last it spat her out and there were only a few more bodies to fight her way through. Exhausted and dripping wet, as if she had been washed ashore from a shipwreck, she came to a halt. She raised herself on tiptoe and called out for Miguel, but that was utterly pointless with all the hullabaloo going on around her.
She turned away from the crowd and saw an empty street ahead of her. With every step she took it grew quieter. All at once a man-sized billy-goat emerged from a side street. It was clad from head to foot in goatskin, walked on two legs like a man, and had arms that ended in claws, and horns on its head. It came up to her, bent down, thrust its horned head into her face, put its claws on her shoulders and emitted a repulsive noise. All this happened so quickly that Catalina gave a violent start and ran away in terror. Only after several minutes, when she was out of breath and had to put her hands to her aching sides, did she stop and look back. The goat had not followed her.
Catalina did not know this part of town. It was eerily quiet out here. Not a soul in sight. She had left everybody behind. It was as if the streets and houses had been emptied out and left hollow. Nothing. Except for those boys over there, six boys, and now she saw plainly that they were coming nearer. They were perhaps ten or twelve years old. Catalina w
as about to ask them the way back to the Whale when she realized that something was wrong. The boys gathered around her and began to push her about. One of them put out his leg to trip her up and she fell over, and the others pelted her with mud. When she got up they pulled her around in a circle by her hair, spat at her and knocked her down again. One after another they sat on her stomach, pressed her arms down into the dirt and boxed her ears. Up to this point she had not thought of putting up any resistance. But now, when one of the boys took his eyes off her for a moment to call something to the others, Catalina fought back, hitting the boy in the face as hard as she could. He gave a yelp of pain and Catalina thought she might manage to escape. But instead, like angry wasps, they all came at her at once and rained down blows on her, real punches, until, after one last blow struck her on the temple, Catalina passed out.
When she opened her eyes she was no longer lying in the street. She was looking up at a round, flat face very close to hers. The face belonged, as Catalina was to discover years later, to a woman named Beatriz de Aliri. Her nose was small, her eyes light-coloured, her mouth a long, straight slit. Now the woman sat back on her haunches and spoke. It was a peculiar, unpleasant rasping sound, barely above a whisper and yet full of fury. Beatriz was huge, in her mid-twenties, with angular shoulders and hair twisted into a shape like a tower, making her appear even taller than she already was. She spoke in a low but venomous tone, talking to Catalina in short bursts as if she were spewing out fire, with pauses in between. “Covered in filth,” she said, “the sofa, all this muck, think yourself lucky…‘ She paced to and fro in front of Catalina. She had a long skirt on and looked as if she were walking on stilts. Then suddenly she turned away and talked to herself. ”Whatever possessed me…filthy brat…nothing but trouble’, she hissed, slapping herself on the forehead with the palm of her hand. She spoke disjointedly, spitting out odd phrases, while in the background a man, whom Catalina now noticed for the first time, scurried back and forth along the wall like a lizard that had lost its way. “What are you scuttling about like that for?” asked the woman. “Get some cloths to clean up with!” The man disappeared. Beatriz flapped her arms about like a bird with broken wings trying to fly, and now even her words sounded like a jay’s chattering: “Think yourself lucky, think yourself lucky!”
Catalina looked around. The room she was lying in was small, with windows that let in hardly any light; she could hear the sounds of revelry in the distance. The man brought the cloths and held them out to the woman. Quietly, as though she had no need to raise her voice, Beatriz hissed: ‘What am I meant to do with them?“ She flicked her eyes in Catalina’s direction, and the man went over to her and handed her the cloths; his smile was crooked, almost apologetic, his look kind and soothing, as if to say don’t worry, it’ll soon be over. Catalina dried herself, though she did not know what there was to dry, since the dirt and blood had already formed a crust on her body. Bits of it flaked off and fell to the floor. Alarmed, Catalina knelt and scraped them up, but the more she picked up, the more bits fell off her. But Beatriz said nothing. Instead, she came closer, started circling around Catalina, viewing her from every angle. Suddenly with a different look in her eyes. All at once she had forgotten about the dirt and was talking about something quite different. Using an expression Catalina had never heard before, something to do with ’salt‘. Obviously asking her something, but she didn’t know what to reply. Then other words followed, frightening words that Catalina didn’t know. Had something been pushed into her? Catalina shook her head. A thick rod, a sceptre, a chunk of meat, go on, show her your willy!” she said to her husband. But he had already vanished. “Down there!” the woman said to Catalina. “In there! Let’s have a look!” And she knelt down in front of Catalina, lifted her skirt before Catalina could stop her, and reached between her legs, making her flinch. Then she withdrew her hand from under the skirt. “Nothing!” she shouted, straightening up to her full height again. Catalina did not know if this was good or bad. “Now let’s have you out of here!” yelled Beatriz, and seizing hold of Catalina, dragged her out into the street.
“Where do you live?”
“In the Whale,” Catalina said.
“The Whale?” asked the woman. “Where’s that?”
Catalina told her the name of the street, and was grabbed and pulled along. The woman marched through San Sebastian with giant strides, grumbling when she had to make a detour to avoid the huge carts that were being rolled past for that evening’s theatrical performances. Held by the hand and barely able to keep up, Catalina ran along beside her, and it was only now that the pain set in. Her head was pounding and something that did not feel like sweat was running down her back.
Maria Perez was standing in front of the Whale. Beatriz de Aliri’s voice suddenly took on a wheedling note. Her face seemed to spread as if it were melting; smiles, honeyed tones, she was talking about Catalina, fetched the girl in off the street, some food, and taking care of her, and as for the dirt in the house, well, obviously, the cost of cleaning up, no, that wasn’t enough, after all, there was the loss of working time too, two hours at her house, she hadn’t been able to do anything all that time, so if at all it would have to be, yes, that was certainly enough, no, really, glad to be of assistance, a child like that, you couldn’t just, Christian duty, the way she was lying there, poor little mite. Beatriz took two coins, with a nod to Maria Perez, and left Catalina standing there watching her strut away on her long legs, lifting the hem of her skirt, until she turned the corner and disappeared.
Miguel, arriving home soon afterwards, took the sponge from Ines’s hand to attend to his sister, who told him what had happened. But Catalina did not mention Beatriz’s strange words, which she thought about when she was alone in bed. She did not tell him how Beatriz had touched her under her skirt—what that signified she had no idea—nor did she repeat the word which the boys had shouted at her a few times in between hitting her and which, as she lay awake that night, unable to sleep, preyed on her mind more and more: ugly. Next morning she secretly went up to the mirror and ran her fingers over her face. She seemed never to have noticed before that her nose and chin were a little out of true and that her eyes were washed-out, expressionless and brown.
*
A year later her brother was standing in front of that same mirror, with his father behind him, talking to him; and when the father had said all there was to say, the son helped him dispel the awkward silence by asking for information that he already knew by heart so that his father was able to go over it all yet again.
“How long will the journey take?” asked Miguel.
“More than fifty days,” said his father.
“How many people will there be on board?”
“A hundred and twenty.”
“How many ships make up the fleet?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Who’s the captain of my ship?”
“Francisco de Inigo y Arturo.”
“When shall we leave Seville?”
“In May.”
“Where shall we land?”
“At Veracruz.”
“How shall I travel on to Potosi?”
His father told him.
And my grandfather will be there?“
“He’ll be waiting for you.”
“How will I recognize him?”
“You can’t miss him.”
“Does he look like you?”
“He has our family name.”
“How much profit does the mine make in a year?”
“A reasonable amount.”
“Where’s Catalina?”
“We’ve been looking for her for hours.”
She was not in the Whale. Nor in the street outside.
“She’ll be at the harbour,” said Miguel.
And his father nodded.
The San Marco cast off and set a course for Seville. Maria Perez pressed a handkerchief to her face. Miguel’s father swallowed. Mari Juana crossed herself.
Francisco, only half comprehending, slowly raised his arms. Jacinta shouted words of encouragement after her brother. Mariana stood dumbly beside her father and groped for his hand. Ines ran through the streets of San Sebastian, asking all and sundry if they had seen a little girl. Miguel, on board ship, craned his neck, scanning the shore. But there was nothing for him to see. Unbeknownst to anyone, Catalina was sitting in the church. She was waiting for the time to pass. She knew the ship would sail at about ten. She knew her brother would never go on board without having said goodbye to her. When the church clock struck twelve times and she could be sure that the San Marco was out of sight, she left her hiding-place and ran home.
“Oh, there you are!” cried her mother.
“Where’s Miguel?” asked Catalina.
“He’s gone,” Maria Perez said. “You know that.”
Chapter three
Blood on the wall