by Markus Orths
Anything was possible. Now that he had accepted her new name, now that she herself had begun, for the first time, to believe in the person she wanted to be, anything was possible. And anything might have happened before their meeting.
“How? When?” asked Juan.
But ‘anything’ was rather a lot to cope with just now. Too much. And besides, one question would only lead to another. Catalina wanted to gain time, recover her strength, have something to eat and drink, think carefully and produce a well-crafted story that would arouse pity without straining credulity, so that this man would believe it and be willing to help her. “It’s a long story,” said Catalina, determined not to become embroiled in details. And to discourage him from asking further questions she pretended to be exhausted, putting a hand to her forehead as if she were giddy and about to collapse, and just at that moment she really was overcome by giddiness, a black veil of faintness really did descend over her eyes, and she swayed and sat down, putting her hands out behind her. Juan went to fetch a skin of water. Catalina drank from it, and it did her good. It strengthened her. It mended the cracks in her lips and flushed the dust from her throat. Then Juan gave her bread and sheep’s cheese.
After that Catalina would have liked nothing better than to lie down on the ground somewhere and be covered over with darkness and peace, but she could not afford to show weakness, and so she pushed her exhaustion aside.
“Where are you heading for?” she asked.
“Vitoria,” Juan replied.
“So am I,” said Catalina without thinking. She was about to add that she had an uncle living there, but she bit her lip just in time, for she was no longer Catalina de Erauso, and if she was not Catalina de Erauso then her family also did not exist, and if her family did not exist there was no uncle in Vitoria. The thought filled her, all at once, with exhilaration. It gave her an undreamed-of, all-consuming sense of freedom, a feeling of independence so overpowering that it left no room for doubt, fear or uncertainty. She was no longer herself. She was a different person, a person who could do things Catalina could never have done, say things Catalina could never have said. From this moment there was no going back. Everything was before her.
“Will you take me with you?” she asked, and for an instant she was horrified by her own question, for coming from a girl it was an outrageous question, an immoral, whorish question. But that momentary shock was succeeded by a sense of power. She was no longer a girl, she was a man, a stranger even to herself, someone who would surprise her in everything he did because all possible deeds still lay before him.
“Yes,” Juan said at once. “It’s always better for two people to travel together. This region isn’t safe.” The true reason for his quick assent was different. “That young man,” Juan later wrote, “sitting before me at the entrance to the Ekain cave, there was something that seemed to [connect] him with me, I felt that something—what it was, I could not say—drew me to him.”
“Where are your shoes?” asked Juan, pointing to Catalina’s feet in their dark blue stockings.
“They stole them,” Catalina said, glad that she had left her flat nun’s sandals behind in the cave. Juan took a spare pair of shoes from his bag and handed them to Catalina. While he was packing up his things, Catalina slipped the big shoes on and took a few steps to see whether she would be able to walk in them. She caught sight of the body-sized opening she had made in order to get into the cave. She bent down, picked up the stones that she had pulled out and closed the hole up again. It is hard to say why she did this. Out of respect for what had happened in the cave? In veneration of the god Mari, whom she thought she had encountered? Out of fear that what she had left behind in there might take on a life of its own and emerge from the darkness to come after her? Perhaps there were elements of all three; what is certain is that Catalina left the entrance exactly as she had found it and exactly as it was when Andoni Albizuri and Rafael Rezabal ‘discovered’ the cave almost four centuries later. Rafael felt the same draught that Catalina had felt. He called to his companion, ‘Andoni, emen zulo bat zeok ‘which means, “Andoni, there’s a hole here’. They then removed the lumps of rock that Catalina had removed once before and looked at each other, and Rafael asked: ‘Ze egingo diau? (’What shall we do?”). ‘Aurrea!’ said Andoni without hesitation, a word that has become the battle-cry of the region’s archaeologists: ‘Come on!“
On the way to Vitoria, Catalina’s overtiredness, like that of a child that has stayed up too long, turned into over-excitement. She was thrilled by the nakedness of the world around her. She saw everything as if she were seeing it for the first time, looking at it with new eyes that she herself had set in her face. Nothing clouded her enthusiasm. She drew deep breaths of air into her flat chest, which suddenly struck her as masculine. Juan sat on the donkey, and Catalina walked alongside him. She had said, “I’d rather ride on St. Francis’s mules‘—in other words, walk—because she was afraid of giving herself away. She could not remember exactly how a man set about mounting a donkey. It was too long since she had seen it done. She only knew that it was quite different from the way a woman did it. She let Juan ride first and memorized his sequence of movements so that she would know what to do when her turn came. Altogether, she never took her eyes off Juan. As unobtrusively as possible, out of the corner of her eye and under cover of the cap which Juan had made for her from a piece of cloth, she observed every movement, however small, and stored it all in her memory: how Juan spat, making a sort of purring noise as he brought a lump of mucus from his throat up onto his tongue before pursing his lips and spitting it out onto the ground; how every now and then Juan scratched his stomach with four scrabbling fingers; how he patted the donkey’s neck just below the ear and soothed it with a few words; his gestures when he talked, the sudden jerk of his arm, the way he plucked at his nose, his whole repertoire of finger movements.
During those hours they spent on the road, Catalina was like an empty vessel eager to be filled. As well as observing, she asked endless questions. And Juan answered them. About his home town, his studies, his mother’s house and his work as a doctor.
“You wouldn’t believe how many sick people there are,” Juan said.
“Tell me more about what you do,” said Catalina.
“Well, it depends.”
“What on?”
“On the illness.”
“What was the last illness you treated?”
“Marsh fever,” said Juan.
Catalina was practising. She was pleased that she was managing to ask all these short questions in the same deep voice. This was her real reason for questioning Juan so closely. She wanted to see how her voice would develop, now that she had had some food and rest. Although she noticed that it kept trying to creep upwards, back to its natural pitch, she successfully forced it back down, and with each new question it became easier to hold it at the lower pitch.
“Marsh fever?”
“That’s right.”
“What is that?”
“No one really knows where it comes from,” said Juan, rubbing his chin. “But the patient often loses a lot of hair, is deathly pale and has swellings like those you get with gout. The man I was treating was already old. The point came when he couldn’t walk any more. The gouty swellings on his feet burst open. Some nasty stuff came out. You can’t imagine how it stank. And it was so noxious that the wounds just wouldn’t close up again. Then he developed dropsy and abscesses.”
“What does that mean?”
Juan explained.
“And what happened then?”
“He couldn’t move any more. He even lost all movement in his hands. Incidentally, our king has the same illness. His valet has made him a chair on wheels, with a horsehair mattress. Unfortunately the man I was treating had nothing like that. He spent all day lying in the rotting bed of his body‘
“And what did you do?”
“I put him on diets and ordered milk baths.”
“D
id it do any good?”
“He got diarrhoea and grew more and more thirsty. He wanted to drink all the time. I wouldn’t let him.”
“Did you manage to cure him?”
“No, he died. In the end he summoned his family to him. His body was festering, riddled with open sores and covered in lice. The smell he gave off was so bad that you could only go near him with a cloth tied round your face. He showed his children his body and said a few words about the transience of life. Then he closed his eyes, for the last time.” Juan was astonished. Normally an account like this would set people yawning, and their attention would wander. But with every sentence that Juan uttered, this young man called Francisco Loyola showed more interest and asked more searching questions. This, Juan thought, was someone who wanted to know all about the subject, a man who was not satisfied with just a general explanation.
Under Francisco’s insistent questioning, Juan described his work at length, explained aspects of human anatomy and indicated the difference between the male and the female skeleton. He found himself giving a detailed and exact account of how he had removed a stone from a patient’s bladder, and not only what method he had used—the Spanish or the Italian—but why he favoured the Spanish method when even the King’s own physician, Francisco Diaz, used the Italian method. And all the time, Juan was talking to his companion with the greatest of ease, as if he had known him for years. But because in fact he knew nothing about this youth—where he came from, where he was really going, what he was doing at present or had done in the past—Juan decided after some time to swing the conversation round to him, and so he asked Francisco about the attack that had been made on him.
Catalina still needed a little more time to invent her story. So first she rubbed her nose and scratched her stomach and also, in order to do something that would appear natural in a man, scratched her chest, which she found oddly exciting; after this she collected saliva together in her mouth—not quite managing the purring noise, but making a weak, halting sound—and spat it out onto the ground beside her. This cleared her head, and she started to speak.
“I was on my way to Vitoria,“ said Catalina, ”when suddenly there were six men standing in front of me. They stole my donkey. My sword. My dagger. My money. My shoes. Then they dragged me into the cave, right into the depths of it. They left me in there alone, without a light. It took me a long time to get out.“
“Is the cave big?”
“It’s vast.”
“I only know the small front chamber.”
“There’s no comparison between that and the part behind the stones.”
“And you live in Vitoria?” asked Juan.
“No.”
“But you said that was where you were going.”
“I’m looking for work.”
“What kind of work?”
Any kind.“
“What about your family? Where do you come from? Where were you born?”
Catalina said nothing for a moment. Then she stammered something about ‘growing up alone’ and ‘orphan’; “I haven’t got one,“ she said, ”no family‘, “all alone’, she repeated several times, and for a moment she really felt the talons of loneliness clutching at her, but she recovered herself, brushed all that aside, suppressed the feeling and said, ”That’s not quite true. No,“ she said, ”there is still somebody, my brother, the only person I have left. Miguel‘, she said. “I want to work so that one day…’—here she faltered and looked at Juan—‘I want to earn money, to go to the New World. Miguel went away and never came back, but I know where he is, he’s in Potosi. I want to go after my brother,“ she said, ”do you understand?“
Catalina suddenly realized that what she had just said was not an invention, and that Juan was the very first person to whom she had confided her hopes. She looked up at him. Juan returned her gaze, and their eyes met for longer than is customary between strangers.
Luck was on their side, and they soon found a man who hired out donkeys. Juan agreed a price with him and told Catalina that with the hired donkey they would be able to reach Vitoria that same day. Then she had to mount. She did everything just as she had seen Juan do it, going close up to the donkey’s flank, pushing herself off from the ground as hard as she could and using the momentum to swing her right leg over the donkey’s back while pulling herself up with her hands.
It was far into the night when they reached Vitoria. The inns were closed, and Juan invited Catalina to his home for the night. The house that received them was dark and silent, as Juan’s mother was already asleep upstairs. Juan led Catalina into a small room crammed with books, cleared some space and brought her blankets, pillows, a basin to wash in and a light. Then he went out, but as he left he turned back towards her and gave the door a gentle push so that it slowly swung to, gradually blocking her view of his face. She heard him say ‘good night’ before the door closed. They went on standing for a while on either side of the door, unable to see each other.
Catalina lay down with a sense that events were running away with her. She saw all the books in the room, the sheets of paper, handwritten notes, manuscripts. On a shelf above her, which she could only see by tilting her head right back, she discovered transparent containers with strange red, beige, black and brown objects in them. She did not know what they were, but did not get up to find out because she was so full of new impressions that there was no room for any more. She could hear her own rapid breathing, which refused to subside into the gentler rhythm of sleep, and so as she lay there she tried to create some order inside her head. She took one last look back at the girl she had left behind in the cave. She thought—who had that been? A convent child. That girl had done her duty, she had studied Latin and learned how to think, how to calculate, write and do various other useful things. She had fulfilled the purpose for which she had sent herself to the convent, and she was now surplus to requirements. Now, in order to get to the New World, the West Indies, some day—perhaps in two or three years’ time—there were things to be learned which a girl could not learn, was not allowed to learn, things which must be learned by someone else—for instance by a man named Francisco. How had she hit upon that name, she wondered. Suddenly a scene from her childhood rose up before her, vivid and crystal-clear, as if by moving aside the debris of her old self in the cave she had made room for this memory. She had been seven years old. Some of the neighbours’ children had been teasing her and her second brother Francisco. But their taunts had not been aimed at her and her ugliness, but at her brother, who was rather backward in every way. The children imitated his slow, clumsy, dopey manner; they played the ‘Francisco game’ with exaggerated contortions of their limbs, nasal moaning sounds, a hobbling gait and dragging arms. Catalina did nothing to stop them. Although she saw the tears in her brother’s eyes, she was nasty enough to take a malicious pleasure in his suffering, because this time he was the target, not she. For a moment she even felt tempted to join in on the side of the mimics, simply so that she should not be bottom of the heap, glad to have someone she could look down on. She brushed away the memory with a feeling of distaste for the girl she had once been.
Catalina was awakened—it was still dark—by a loud knocking; habit made her leap up, thinking that it was time for Lauds, and she reached for her things, but there was nothing there. She was still wearing her male clothing. Now it all came back to her. Juan had taken her home with him; when she was alone she had washed her face in a basin; for a long time she had been unable to sleep and had leafed through a book, but at some point she had, after all, stumbled into sleep as if it were a hole in the ground. But she had not slept for long. And now she was standing in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do. She felt dizzy from getting up too quickly. The knocking grew louder. It was not someone knocking at the door of her room: it was further away, probably at the front door.
Catalina put on Juan’s shoes, went out into the passage, following the sound, and reached the front door at the same instant as
Juan, who was approaching from the other direction. He held the lamp up high and looked at Catalina. For a moment she thought: it’s all up now. My face, I shouldn’t have washed it. But Juan nodded to her as if they were old friends, saying: Already awake?“ Catalina answered, ”I can’t sleep,“ and Juan opened the door. Standing outside were some men in search of a doctor. Anticipating this, Juan had already dressed and even had a bag in his hand. ”If you can’t sleep‘—Juan lifted a cape down from a hook on the wall and held it out to Catalina—’why don’t you come along?“
Catalina took the cape from Juan’s hands and slung it round her shoulders. It felt good. Like a shield to protect her from the piercing eyes of the world. Together they followed the men. A few streets away they were directed to a tavern. Inside were swaying figures, drunk from the night’s alcohol, and from their midst rose the voice of a man screaming with pain. During a game of cards, Juan was told, someone had drawn a pistol and shot another player. The victim was bleeding like a pig and there seemed no way to stop it. Juan called for some hot oil, but when this request was only met with helpless stares, he sent Catalina off to find some. She headed for the kitchen at once and returned with the oil as fast as she could. In the meantime Juan had examined the wound and established that no vital organs had been affected, but this did not stop the victim from bellowing as if he were at death’s door.