by Markus Orths
“Pull yourself together,” Juan hissed at him, but to no effect, and when Juan dabbed the hot oil onto the wound the patient’s screams redoubled, although not for long, as he soon fainted from the pain. At last there was a bit of peace and quiet, and Juan could make a more thorough examination. By now he had staunched the bleeding, and he delved into his bag for some salves. As he bandaged the man, he gave Catalina instructions, and took whatever she passed him as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Finally Juan produced some fresh bandages and a jar containing a decoction of myrrh. He set these down in front of the men, extracted two coins from the victim’s pocket and left the inn with Catalina.
“Your first wages,” he said, putting one of the coins into her hand. When she turned a questioning face to him he added, “I’ve been looking for an assistant for some time, and now I think I’ve found one.” Before Catalina could answer he had already placed a hand on her back and pushed her out into the street.
Chapter eight
On good and bad play-acting
Catalina spent the next year working alongside Juan. There was more than enough to keep them busy: nasal polyps, asthma attacks, haemorrhoids, jaundice, gout, diphtheria, fever, erysipelas, visual impairments, syphilitic glandular swellings, and tumours of the spleen. Besides all this, goitre operations and punctures of the pleura had to be performed, using cannulas and drains. In cases of urethral stricture Juan, who favoured the ‘bougie treatment’, inserted tiny wax candles with rigid wicks into the urethra, by means of which he could administer caustic drops. There were any number of other surgical interventions, from quite minor ones to the amputation of every conceivable body part.
Whatever it was, Catalina soaked it all up. She was not troubled by the patients’ screams, nor by the blood or the smells. She seldom felt any revulsion. On the contrary, it was always the most drastic butchery that kept her eyes most firmly riveted on the twitching limbs.
To her it was all new, and anything new was good. She avidly devoured the experiences of each day—the visits to patients, the operations, everything Juan told her, every word she heard, every word she read in Juan’s books. She spent hours on end studying the illustrations of the human body or absorbed in the lucid, lightly-tripping style of Bernardino Montana de Monserrate’s Libro de la anatomia del hombre. She battled her way through De recta curandorum vulnerum ratione, the magnum opus of Francisco Arceo, Juan’s former teacher at Alcala de Henares—not that she understood much of it. Her favourite book was the Cirugia universal by Juan Fragoso of Toledo. The volume was still pristine and unread. Juan had only bought it that spring in Alcala. The very chapter headings sent a frisson through her: ‘How it can be shown that someone has died of vexation or grief, “How to prove virginity’, ”Whether a birth should be regarded as legitimate if the mother was pregnant for eleven months’ or ‘On the question of the ability to beget children in the absence of a penis’.
Once, not long after she had come to Vitoria, Juan was consulted by a man who was doubled up with pain and said he was peeing stones, he was desperate, he couldn’t stand it any more, he needed help. Juan led him into a small, separate room, laid out some sharp and terrifying-looking instruments and ordered the man to take his clothes off. Catalina was startled when she saw the man’s member before her, so unconcealed and open, so matter-of-fact, cold and naked, so very different from the illustrations she was familiar with from Juan’s books. But, showing no sign of inhibition, she studied it closely, memorizing every detail: the two reddish-purple bags of skin, shrivelled, wrinkled like walnuts; the black hair curling right up to the navel, and, lying to one side, the shaft of the penis, lined with veins, with a bald, split, miniature head peeping out like the head of some Tom Thumb. Yes, there was no getting away from it: she might don men’s clothing, she might disguise her voice, she had actually heard of a hair restorer produced in Italy which could make even a woman grow a beard; but here she was looking at something that no money in the world could buy her.
It suddenly struck her that sooner or later she would give herself away, and be seized and clapped in jail for what she was doing. She could not possibly hide her body forever from the gaze of others. Could they not already see what she really was? Here, in this room, with a naked man on the table, Catalina too suddenly felt naked and uncovered, exposed and unmasked. She broke out in a sweat, and had the feeling that someone was standing behind her, eyeing her speculatively. Could it be Juan’s mother? Catalina looked round, but there was no one there. She closed her eyes and told herself to keep calm. Meanwhile Juan was performing the operation, using the Spanish method. He inserted one finger into the man’s anus, which enabled him to reach behind the bladder. Moving his other hand over the naked skin of the abdomen, he slowly pushed the bladder stone from the navel to the pubic area and guided it into the neck of the bladder. Then, picking up the knife, he started making an incision next to the anus and quickly extended it towards the neck of the bladder, parallel to the bundles of muscles, so as to avoid the perineum and the raphe. Catalina had to pass him the luncino, a kind of catheter. Juan inserted it, while the man almost bit his tongue off. With a lance-shaped instrument, the rallon, Juan made room for the ‘cranesbill’, a pair of forceps with long, narrow jaws that could be opened and closed by means of a spring. Juan pushed the cranesbill in and activated the spring so that the jaws opened inside. Carefully he took hold of the bladder stone and was starting to pull it out when he realized that it was far too big. He crushed it using a different pair of forceps, and removed the fragments with a small, spoon-shaped instrument. The man survived. Not so Catalina’s fear of detection, which faded more and more with each day that passed.
On the contrary, she became increasingly adept at playing the part she wanted to play. Her voice grew firmer and was soon immovably fixed deep down in her abdomen. Even if she had been woken up in the middle of the night, the strangled, high-pitched convent voice would not have been resurrected. Catalina’s posture also changed: she stuck out her flat chest (which she hoped would remain flat), often placed her hands defiantly on her hips, and threw back her head. Years spent shuffling along the cloister had left their mark on her gait, but gradually she threw off her nun-like restraint, and in town she watched carefully to see how the young men walked. An advance payment from Juan had helped provide her with clothing: she sported both hat and sword, and possessed a selection of ruffs, as well as stockings, doublets, two capes, and close-fitting breeches; fortunately for her, a small foot was part of the ideal of masculine beauty at that time. She sewed a padded pouch into the front of her breeches, had her hair cut according to the current male fashion, and rubbed her fingers in the dirt of the street every day to make them rougher. She adjusted her behaviour too, quickly acquiring minor skills like swearing, spitting, belching, scratching herself fore and aft, doffing her hat, bowing, and whistling for a coach.
And so her gift for observation matured into a different kind of perception altogether. Seeing was no longer just seeing, but had a specific purpose. Catalina studied men and registered their every action, storing and adapting it within herself before regurgitating it as her own behaviour. The longer she wore male costume, the more deeply she immersed herself in the masculine world, the more at ease she felt. She much preferred fencing to knitting, playing cards to gazing at pictures of saints, riding a horse to passively sitting around. She loved the comfortable breeches and the straightforwardness of men, their taciturnity—their ability, on occasion, simply to keep their mouths shut—but also their direct manner of doing things, their openness, the heedless egotism they showed in their dealings with other people and in the way they ignored rules, hit out, got into fights, and stuck to their own point of view, stubborn as mules. She could do all these things now. On the other hand she accepted that there were some things a man could not do. She knew from the start that she must settle for the one dish or the other: choosing titbits from both was not an option.
For Catalina t
he main thing, that year, was that she was earning money. She needed it for the voyage. She was quite clear about what was involved, because Miguel had told her all about the journey to the West Indies, and so Catalina knew exactly what was possible and what was not. Or at any rate she thought she did. And even for the man she now was, Francisco Loyola, there was one insurmountable obstacle: the—as Catalina imagined—labyrinthine, dark, sinister corridors of Seville’s Casa de Contratacion, a gloomy building where thousands of sombre-faced officials carried out their odious business. These officials investigated every traveller to the Far West thoroughly, subjecting him to minute scrutiny and uncovering whatever secrets there were to be uncovered. Never in a million years, thought Catalina, would she be able to conceal her true identity from them. They had long lists and registers; they would easily establish that there was no such person as Francisco Loyola. And even if by some fluke the investigators did fail to notice anything amiss, her access to a ship would still be blocked by the armies of doctors and medical attendants in the Casa who carried out probing examinations of every would-be traveller and would not hesitate to shout, “Take your clothes off!” No, for Catalina there was only one way to get onto a ship: secretly and unofficially. And that meant paying money. A large sum. A very large sum. Catalina knew that before starting the ocean crossing the ships of the New Spain fleet made a last stop, for repairs and provisioning, at the Cape Verde Islands. That was where people who had something to hide from the Casa de Contratacion would wait, and according to Miguel there were always enough ships’ captains keen to earn some extra money who would take them on board. Miguel had told her the price of an illicit passage: 50 ducados. A ducado was worth 11 reales or 47 cuartillos or 94 cuartos or 188 ochavos or 375 maravedis. So 50 ducados would be 550 reales or 2,350 cuartillos or 4,700 cuartos or 9,400 ochavos or 18,750 maravedis. To save up such a sum would take her forever.
For the first twelve months, life in Vitoria proceeded more or less smoothly. Catalina improved in everything she did. Especially fencing. This was because the fencing master, a friend of Juan’s, spent a long time explaining the theory of fencing to her before she was allowed even to touch a sword, and this method paid dividends, for it meant that when Catalina had her first practice with a sword she already knew exactly how to use it to best effect, and did not fall into the error of rushing blindly into action; on future occasions too she always fought with cool detachment, ruled by her head, not carried away by the heat of the fight. Moreover, by the end of a year she was able to arm-wrestle the theatre doorman Ramon Baroja for a full minute by the clock without conceding. This was a notable achievement, considering that twelve months earlier it would have taken little more than a puff of breath from Baroja to make her unmuscular little arm give way.
At this time Catalina admired Juan without reservation. He was ten years older than she was, and in every aspect of life he was the one with the superior experience and knowledge. Whatever Juan did was right and good, simply because he did it. He displayed the same mastery of his profession as of his life, he had many friends, people stopped to greet him in the street, he was respected; sometimes he stayed out all night with women whom, for whatever reason, he never brought home. But if you are together with someone for long enough, if you share everything with him, house and board, work and conversation, moods and silences, if you live in such close proximity that you see what he is like at times when he thinks he is unobserved, then inevitably there comes a point when the spell is broken. Catalina saw that Juan would sometimes sit alone doing nothing, and not only doing nothing but being oblivious to the world at large. At these times she saw pure, unrelieved sadness lodged in his eye like a splinter. She noticed that Juan often talked about the past, about his time in Alcala. In his work as a doctor, too, Catalina observed some contradictions as time went on. But it was a whole year before she summoned up the courage to raise the subject with him. First she gathered her ammunition: she read and researched, compared and explored, weighed the evidence and rehearsed in her mind what she wanted to say until at last she felt adequately prepared.
“Tell me,” said Catalina, “who is right, Geronimo Polo or Bernardo Caxanes?”
Juan was sitting in the sun with a cold drink, fanning himself.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“One says you should bleed a patient as close as possible to the site of an infection, and the other says as far away as possible.”
“Caxanes is right. As close as possible.”
“How do you know?”
“Experience.”
“And why do those who follow Geronimo Polo say the opposite? Have they no experience?”
Juan shrugged his shoulders.
“If you’re right,” Catalina said, “then the others are wrong and are constantly doing people harm.”
“They are.”
And you aren’t?“
Catalina had to brace herself to ask this short question. Juan, on the other hand, had no idea which way the conversation was heading, and answered without giving it much thought.
“No. I’m not,” he said.
“But there are always two opinions on everything,” said Catalina. “One book says one thing and another says the opposite. Some authorities say you should apply as much ointment as possible to a wound, and others as little as possible. Some say dressings must be changed every day and others say never.”
“What are you getting at?” asked Juan.
“Do you remember the gunshot wound you treated on my first night in Vitoria, a year ago?”
“Yes. What about it?”
“You put oil on it.”
“That’s what you do. Gunshot wounds are poisonous.”
“Do you know Dionisio Daza Chacon?”
“Of course. He was the King’s personal physician and a surgeon at the battle of Lepanto.”
A good doctor, then?“
“One of the best.”
And what if I tell you that he says gunshot wounds are not poisonous at all. And that anyone who puts oil on them is a…‘— Catalina paused—’…a bungler.“
Now Juan turned to face her.
“Where does it say that?”
“In one of your books.”
Juan said nothing.
“I think,” said Catalina, “that you doctors just guess.”
“What did you say?”
“You guess. You try things out. You don’t actually know the right thing to do, you just work on assumptions. Because if there are two views on everything, how can you tell who is right?”
“Obviously the one who manages to cure more of his patients.”
“And which one is that? In both camps some patients die and some get better. If they get better, the doctor shouts, there you are, I’m right!—and if they die he says, well, it’s all in God’s hands. Basically you’re all just groping about in the dark.” Catalina paused to think, and while she was thinking Juan finished his drink, because he was beginning to find this conversation uncomfortable and wanted to go back indoors. Then Catalina said very slowly, weighing each word, “But the main thing is that people must never find out. They must never lose their belief in you. They must always think that you’re good doctors. That’s why you have to defend your opinion so vigorously. As if it were the only correct one. As if it were immutable, carved in stone. In other words you’re constantly having to pretend you know exactly what’s what, while most of the time you’ve no idea at all. And that means—‘
“What does it mean?”
“It means that you’re play-acting, the whole time. And you have to act well. Well enough for people to swallow it.”
“I think you’ve been out too long in the sun,” said Juan. “We’re doctors, not actors.” He stood up, wiping the conversation out of existence as if it were a line in the sand. “If you want to see actors,” he said, “go to the theatre.”
In a square in the town, or more often simply in the space between two rows of houses, they woul
d set up wooden structures so as to form a long rectangle. At one end would be the stage, and at the other the cazuela, or ‘hen-coop’, a small balcony reserved for the women. Rooms in the adjoining houses which gave a view of the stage would be rented out as boxes at high prices. Below these there would be wooden balconies for the section of the audience that was not quite so genteel, but still too genteel to sit on the benches at ground level. Only the stage, the cazuela and the balconies at the sides were protected by a wooden roof. The remaining area, the pit—comprising a few benches and the space where spectators had to watch the show standing up—was covered by a canvas awning slung between the houses to keep off the sun.
Catalina was standing down there, among the common people. She had got in easily, and without paying, because of her friendship with the doorman Ramon Baroja. In the past year she had been quite a frequent visitor to the theatre and she now had no inhibitions about blowing kisses to the women in the cazuela, like all the other young men. She would also cup her hands suggestively in front of her chest, whistle, or stick out her tongue and lick her upper lip. She would raise her hand behind her head and make covert signs with her fingers. She had learned to imitate the lovelorn look in the young men’s eyes, and tried to do even better. The result was always the same: the women pelted them with nuts, shells and other objects, ostensibly in annoyance, but really to spur them on to further impudent words and gestures.