Catalina

by Markus Orths

  Juan was one of those students who managed as best they could outside the colleges, many of them living in boarding-houses. Under the regulations issued in 1534, the boarding-house landlord was required not only to satisfy the students’ proverbially large appetites but also to protect them from the ‘temptations’ and opportunities for ’moral transgression‘ that lurked everywhere. To obey the letter of the law, he would have had to give his charges a pound of meat each day, as well as soup, a dessert and an ’appropriate amount of bread‘; in addition it would have been his duty to lock the main door at half past seven every evening and check each morning and evening that all the students were present; to make sure that they were attending lectures as they were supposed to; to prohibit idle and unnecessary conversation among them, instead imposing set hours of study; and see to it that they did not under any circumstances spend their time playing at dice or cards. But the landlords and students together managed to sidestep the legal requirements by reaching a compromise that was agreeable to both parties: the landlord cut down on the daily rations, filling his own pockets with the money he saved, and in return he allowed the students complete freedom to do as they liked, letting it be no concern of his whether they were sitting dutifully in their rooms and studying, or staggering drunkenly from one brothel to another.

  So the students were able to lend substance to the myth that theirs was a life of untrammelled liberty, dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, though at the price, as Quevedo writes, of being gripped by ‘the claws of Hunger incarnate’ and being served ‘a soup so clear that Narcissus, had he tried to drink it, would have been in even greater danger than when he saw his reflection in the water of the pool’. The capigorristas, the poor students, based their hopes of financial solvency mainly on subsidies from home. Whenever a letter arrived from their parents, they would tear it open at once, their eyes greedy for money. But instead of the material support they had hoped for they would generally find only a litany of parental advice. That evening there would be a ceremonial burning of these letters and those received by friends, accompanied by the chanting of the Paulina, a savage parody of the Lord’s Prayer. To get his hands on any money, therefore, a student had either to work as a servant, enter into a liaison with some barely respectable barmaid, apply for a licence to beg, or simply steal. If students chose the latter course and were caught, then, under the terms of the 1492 Pragmatic of Santa Fe, they were subject not to local jurisdiction but to that of the Scholasticus of the university.

  As well as being exempt from military service and excused from paying taxes, students also had an enormous influence on the appointment of the university’s Rector and of the professors. Candidates for a professorial chair had to demonstrate their erudition in a competitive debate held in front of the students, who would then vote on them. But although the authorities did their best to prevent any attempts at bribery by the candidates, there was no limit to the students’ venality, and they would happily give their vote to anyone who promised them a mule, a parcel of land, jewellery, slaves, or anything else that could be converted into cash.

  Juan Bautista was a model student—that is to say a student who followed, with the utmost dedication, the models he saw before him. He went out on the town with his friends, squandered what little money his mother sent him, got drunk, gambled, won, lost, got entangled with women and would not have dreamt of doing any studying. He was living like any young man who has left home for the first time and is breathing in his new freedom like a drug—a young man pulled this way and that by different moods, and experiencing everything with great intensity. It was that phase of experimentation, of discovering who you really are, how you appear to others and what you can achieve; a phase when everything is permissible because you have no definitive picture of yourself but are still, as it were, painting that picture, trying out every conceivable style; it was a time of life when feelings are powerful, when thoughts are new and fresh and every experience is a wind of change, throwing into confusion all that has gone before; a time not yet dulled by the mustiness of repetition and the treadmill of resignation, but filled with hope, strength and a thirst for action.

  Juan was uncommonly good-looking. He was nearly six feet tall, with thick, dark hair and black eyes, and at eighteen he already sported a proper pointed beard and was extremely popular. He had assembled a whole horde of friends around him. It was almost as if, since the crowded student boarding-house in Alcala, unlike his mother’s more spacious house, could not accommodate his mania for collecting objects, he was left with no choice but to collect people. Juan was the focus, the fixed point that held his friends together. And so he was always one of the party when they set forth to—as they say—paint the town red.

  On one of Juan’s visits to Vitoria, after he had been a student for about two years, he found his mother in such a poor physical state that she was completely unable to work. Anna Bianca Arteaga sat motionless in the house, emaciated, gaunt and frail. For weeks the gout in her fingers had prevented her from making any ruffs. Now her money was almost completely gone, and she was considering selling the house so that she could continue to support her son. Horrified, Juan dissuaded her from doing any such thing. Then he watched the doctor treat his mother, prescribing sweat cures and bleeding her copiously three times, but all to no avail. After two weeks of fruitless treatment the doctor told them to wait and see what happened, left the patient a diet sheet to follow, and departed without indicating when he might return. Juan waited for three days while his mother followed the diet, but when there was no improvement he told her that from now on he would take charge of her treatment, that they could forget about the doctor’s instructions, that he, Juan Bautista, had already learned more in his first two years of study than that incompetent quack had in his whole life. But when Juan tried to apply to his mother’s case the medical knowledge he had acquired so far, he realized that it was actually very limited—indeed, that really he had no systematic medical knowledge at all, only a few names and anecdotes that he had picked up here and there and happened to remember.

  All the same, he gave Anna Bianca regular treatments: three times a day she had to bathe her hands in heated sheep’s milk into which he had stirred some herbs or other. While she did so, he talked encouragingly to her, assuring her that warm milk was the latest medical discovery. Only a few weeks earlier a lecturer had mentioned that the Divine Valles had used milk baths to cure the King himself of podagra. And in dealing with gouty complaints, the efficacy of milk treatments was sui generis. While treating his mother Juan used as many words as possible that were bound to be unfamiliar to her and would therefore impress her all the more. He quoted statements by eminent Spanish doctors, and enumerated all the newest medicinal herbs from the West Indies, which the famous Nicolas Monardes had brought together and named in his Historia Medicinal, and which, if they were ground very finely and stirred into milk—so Juan said, making it up as he went along—were a reliable cure for gout.

  His mother believed every word her son said. She did not know what ‘podagra’ or ‘sui generis’ meant, and she had never heard of the Divine Valles, but she nodded in response to everything Juan said, not without pride. After only a few treatments her symptoms gradually abated, until finally they disappeared altogether. This was due not so much to the placebo effect—to her faith in the medical authorities and remedies—as to her motherly wish that her son should be proved right and become an outstanding doctor. For this to happen, it was of supreme importance that Juan’s first attempt at healing should be a complete success, and so she and her body instinctively did their utmost to make it so.

  After his mother had regained her strength, Juan began to take his medical studies far more seriously. He tried to catch up as quickly as possible on what he had missed in the first two years. He took a part-time job in order to lighten his mother’s load. But the examination for the Licentiate was so expensive that he had to slave for six months to pay off his debts. Not only were the
re the honorariums for the professor, the bedells and the examiners, he also had to pay the masters of ceremonies and the workmen who had decorated the facade of the university with tapestries in honour of the occasion, as well as the drummers, trumpeters and bell-ringers. Everything was precisely laid down in the so-called Ceremonial, even the banquet which Juan had to give and which, with his mania for meticulous record-keeping, he describes down to the last detail. There was a salad consisting of fruit, vegetables, lemons, jams, sugared almonds, preserved cherries and pickled eggs, followed by partridges, pigeons a la neige, chopped poultry garnished with slices of bacon, sausage, pieces of rabbit and veal, and a fish platter with salmon, eel and dorados, while for dessert a white blancmange made of milk, almonds and sugar would not do, no, it had to be eggs a la royale, and to finish with there were cheese and Seville olives, aniseed bonbons and wrapped sweets, wafers, and of course the toothpicks which could be employed to bridge the belching silence of repleteness. But all this was as nothing compared to what his doctorate cost him.

  Juan had to organize a huge procession with refreshments, hire a richly caparisoned horse, buy a new suit of clothes made of velvet, and after the examination lay on a corrida in which five bulls were killed. He had to make a whole series of ‘gifts’ as prescribed by the university statutes: fifty florins each for the Scholasticus and for Juan’s sponsor, who placed the doctor’s cap on his head in the church, two gold pieces for each of the Doctors who took part in the ceremony, and a hundred silver reales apiece for the bedell and the university notary, as well as gloves, bags of sugar and three brace of chickens for each of the above, and sweets and delicacies for half the town at the bullfight.

  When at last his debts were paid off, Juan returned to his mother’s house in Vitoria, and began to practise as a doctor. All the things he had collected as a child he now threw away to make room for a new collection: whatever money was not needed for day-to-day living he invested in books and medical equipment. Among other things he bought the works of Amusco, Aguero, Monserrate, Calvo and Alcazar, and of course the chief writings of the royal physicians, Diaz’s Compendio de cirugia and Valles’s Methodus medendi; he purchased pirated handwritten copies of Pereira, Cristobal de Vega and Villalobos, and besides the essential surgical instruments he also owned a multitude of jars containing human extremities, entrails and other body parts preserved in alcohol, some of which came from the collection of the Valencian anatomist Pedro Ximeno. He would not allow his mother to work.

  Now and again Juan visited friends from university who had dispersed from Alcala to places all over Spain. In August 1601 he spent a few days in a village on the Atlantic coast. “On the way back,” Juan writes in his barely decipherable record for 14th August, the day on which he was to encounter Catalina, “the sun was hard and hot and [swarming?] so high up in the sky that it was starting to lick up my blood right through my skin, my donkey was creaking beneath me like the [sails of a weary windmill?], I was longing to have a rest and recover some strength, so as to […]. Flies, they had to be seen to be believed, were buzzing around so impudently […] that there was no catching them, and my donkey’s ears too would give a backward [twitch?] every now and then. Then I remembered the Ekain hill, which [towers?] above the Goltzibar and Beliosoerreka streams, I remembered that small, shady cave whose refreshing coolness is also sought out by all manner of sheep around the middle of the day. I made my way there […] Before sleep could [blindfold?] my eyes I heard something, and stood up and went to investigate the source of the sound. Some stones had come [stumbling] out of a gap in the rock to the right of the entrance and turned into flesh, into living skin: there was a hand, black with dirt, then a head, a body, by now the [creature?] was half out of the rock and, unable to stop itself, slid down the small stony slope, landing right at my feet; I drew my sword and shouted to drive the apparition away. The—as I now saw— young man, who was no less alarmed by what he saw, jumped up and stretched out his hands defensively. For a while we stood there, and spent silent seconds looking at one another, each assessing whether the other posed a threat or whether one might prepare, in a spirit of trust and human reciprocity, to strike up a conversation.”

  Chapter seven

  A second baptism

  “Who are you?” asked Juan. Catalina was still shaky on her legs, wet and messy, an unlicked calf. In the cave she had taken a decision, but she had not yet given a thought to what her life would be like now, how she would behave towards other people, what exactly she would do or say, what kind of manner she would adopt. She parted her dry lips to reply, without thinking at all of disguising her voice, without reflecting that now, as a man, she would have to give it a darker timbre: she completely forgot that her light, girlish voice, accustomed to praying, trained through singing and seldom raised above a sharp whisper, would betray her the moment she spoke to anyone. Awkwardly she managed to get her tongue moving, said ‘I…’ and then stopped short, taken aback by the sound of her voice, which had dropped of its own accord to a lower pitch. “I…‘ said Catalina, and gave a start, because her silent cross-country march, the time spent in the cave, the long hours without speaking, the thirst, the lack of sleep, all of those things had lent her voice such a dark tone that for a moment she herself thought someone else was speaking from inside her.

  “Who are you?” asked Juan.

  Now Catalina took her time. She needed to clear her head a little, to collect herself and put her thoughts in order so that she could see her way more clearly. She was glad that her own voice was helping her, reminding her who she was, or rather who she wanted to be.

  “I’m…‘ she said, and broke off.

  Had she any chance at all? Wasn’t it ludicrous even to try? What good were the altered clothes she was wearing? What good was any new name she might adopt? Wouldn’t it be easier to put an end to all this before it had even begun? Wouldn’t it be simpler to say, “Catalina‘, and tell him the whole story? But when she thought the name ’Catalina‘, she felt, for the first time, that she was thinking of someone else.

  “…Francisco,” Catalina said.

  She was giving it a try. She put all her strength and conviction into that name. Nonetheless, she fully expected that the tall, black-haired man facing her would, with a single word, bring the fragile, new, unconvincing self that she had created crashing down. “Francisco,” Catalina said—her voice hard, dry, deep—and she could already hear the stranger laughing and saying, Francisco?—no, a girl can’t be called that. “Francisco,” Catalina said, and waited for his annihilating response.

  “Francisco?” asked Juan. “Francisco who?”

  There was no disbelief in his voice, no doubt. The man repeated the name she had given herself, accepting it at face value. When Catalina heard the name spoken by another, it began to seem strangely real, solid and tangible. If he believes it, Catalina thought, then everyone else will too. And if they believe it, so can I.

  “Francisco Loyola,” she said.

  This came from somewhere deep inside her. She could not think what had suggested that particular name. She had been standing stooped and cowed before the stranger, but now she straightened up, a plant stretching towards the sun.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Juan.

  Catalina’s first impulse was to describe her flight from monastic life. Where were you, the man would ask. At San Sebastian el Antiguo, she would have to reply. But surely that’s a nunnery, he would say—no, that was no good, the truth would not serve here either. She would have to re-invent her history: having sewn herself a set of clothes, she must now stitch together a new life-story. She could not do it on the spur of the moment. But she must think of something to say right now, the man was waiting for an answer.

  “I was attacked,” her gruff new voice replied, already a little louder, a little more confident, and Catalina lowered herself into that deep tone, bathed in it, began to explore the new voice, to play with it.

  Attacked?“ asked Juan.


  Attacked,“ said Catalina.