by Markus Orths
Catalina put a kerchief over Adeida’s bosom and shoulders, saying, “You’ll catch cold, young lady‘
Controlling herself with difficulty, Adeida left the shop. Inside she was raging. No man had ever rejected her. She could not understand it. She looked in the mirror. Had she changed? Was something wrong with her? Had she suddenly started to smell? She walked around the town so as to attract male glances and reassure herself that all the men still desired her. But that was no real help. She had to face it: they all did, just not this man Loyola. Her vanity was wounded to the core. She must go to him again, even at the risk of a still worse defeat, she must prove to herself that she could do it, she knew she would never rest easy until she had had her way with this shop assistant and seen his eyes afire with lust, like those of other men. And so Adeida entered Urquiza’s shop once more, feigning self-confidence but no longer mistress of the situation as she had been before. She missed her conversations with him, she said without preamble, she missed him, please would he come.
Catalina knew she had won. What an opponent! she thought scornfully. One who collapses as soon as you use her own tactics against her. She looked Adeida up and down as if she were a horse she was thinking of buying—examined her face, her hair, her body. She’s still not completely crushed, thought Catalina, I haven’t done with her yet. “Very well,” she said, making it sound as if she were doing Adeida a favour, “I’ll be there this evening.” Somewhat relieved, Adeida turned, lifted the hem of her long skirt and departed with as much dignity as she could muster.
That evening events moved swiftly. The maid left Catalina at the door to the salon and disappeared, the door was flung open, Catalina was pulled inside, painted lips were pressed against her mouth and a tongue thrust itself between her teeth. In a single movement Adeida threw off all her clothes, every stitch she had on. Stood there naked, and Catalina did not know what to feast her eyes on first. Now all the things she had imagined were actually going to happen. Now this body would be hers to possess. She wished she could toss her own clothes aside too, but that was impossible. There was a clear rule that she had to follow. A coldness settled upon her. Now she proceeded cautiously, as though she were descending a steep slope step by step, in constant danger of slipping. Slowly her hands took possession of the other body, appropriated the skin bit by bit, her fingertips like little heads mounted on long necks, taking their time to see and smell and eat whatever there was to see, smell and eat.
Inwardly Catalina was placing every possible restraint on her desire. She would not lose her head, not let herself get carried away. When her hands had conquered the other woman’s skin and her mouth had followed where her hands had gone before, when Catalina saw that this body was wholly at her mercy, when she noticed that Adeida was not doing anything, anything at all—her desire suddenly changed its nature and became something very different: a sense of enormous power. An unbounded feeling of dominance. Catalina knew that now she could do what she liked with Adeida, that the woman was—literally—in her hands. And to make a first sacrificial offering to this new feeling, Catalina curled back her tongue, retracted her lips like a camel, placed her teeth in the vanguard of her attack and bit Adeida, not playfully but hard. Adeida screamed. Her areola instantly turned red with blood. Catalina raised her head, curious to see what would happen.
“Now!” cried Adeida, and Catalina felt herself being pulled down, for Adeida saw what Catalina had done as a piece of violent foreplay and plunged willingly into submission, touched her breast and put her bloodied finger to her lips, and writhed like a fish under the weight that pressed her down. But Catalina jumped up and stepped aside. “What’s wrong?” asked Adeida. Catalina raised her eyebrows. “I have to go now,” she said. With intense satisfaction she looked down at Adeida one last time, having done exactly what she had wanted to do. And she did not find it hard to leave Adeida lying there—on the contrary, she drank in the expression of horror in Adeida’s eyes, and every nerve in her body thrilled at her power over the other woman. She sensed that she had destroyed a person, or if not a person, at any rate that person’s image of herself. Catalina left the house and never saw Adeida de Cardenas again.
Instead, three days later, she met a man named Reyes. This was anything but a chance meeting, for the man was Adeida’s brother-in-law and had been sent by her to exact vengeance. Reyes did not for a moment conceal his intention. He openly threatened Catalina, jostled her, provoked and insulted her and, when she still remained calm, spat in her face. Catalina wiped off the spittle, took a step backwards and for the first time in her life drew her sword in anger. It did not occur to her for a moment that she could be in serious danger.
The fight lasted only two minutes. Then the point of the sword penetrated the epidermis, dermis and subcutaneous tissue, the tiny hair shafts, the stratum corneum, pigment cells, capillaries, basement membrane, sebaceous glands and sweat glands, hair muscles and hair roots, and all this happened so effortlessly and with so very little resistance that you would have thought that human skin was specially designed to be penetrated, had there not been an immediate outcry from a whole host of sensory nerve-cells—those nerve fibres which simply stop short in the tissue as if they had been snipped off, and which have always had the job of registering pain. And that Reyes felt pain goes without saying, for in fact his pain only ended when his whole body met its end.
But the sword point was still stuck fast. The limbs still twitched violently as if someone were shaking out the body like a blanket.
Catalina still had the hilt in her hand. She stood bent over Reyes. Saw the blood leaking from his chest. Was reminded for a moment of the blood from Adeida’s breast, which she had tasted. Something seemed to be flowing up through the blade and the hilt into Catalina’s hand; she was somehow coupled to that man’s death as if she had touched an electric current and lacked the strength to pull herself free. Everything went quiet. Catalina jerked the blade out of the body. For a second or two she thought that the dead man’s heart was coming with it, skewered like a fish for grilling over a fire.
From that moment her way of moving changed. Everything she did now was done with more deliberation. She took a single, watchful step backwards, her senses like fine hairs pointed in all directions.
*
The prison in Trujillo was a single, miserable barred cell. Twelve men were already sitting or lying there, silent, whispering or asleep. There were no blankets, only a floor of trodden earth. Without a word Catalina lay down on the floor, ignoring the men. Moving in her newly acquired, deliberate manner, she crossed her hands behind her head and closed her eyes. She did not know whether what she had done would be regarded as an accident, an illicit duel or murder, all she knew was that she wanted to be out of here, and the sooner the better. She could think of nothing else. She went over all the possibilities and soon had an idea. Her convent days were long past; even so, she would have to steel herself to do what she had in mind. But this was a day when anything was possible; the day when she had killed her first man. She ran over the whole thing in her mind. The idea was as simple as it was foolproof. Catalina stood up and dusted herself down. The men coughed. One of them complained. Catalina took a step towards him, said nothing and simply gave him a look. The man lowered his eyes. Catalina walked over to the bars and called for the guard. He came over, surly and bored.
“I want to speak to a priest,“ said Catalina.
“What for?” the guard wanted to know.
“I want to make my confession.”
The man looked at her suspiciously but went off, and half an hour later Father Diego de Ronda turned up, in a threadbare brown habit and with a small black prayer book in his hand. Two guards fetched Catalina from the cell, and she had to kneel down before the priest, who, with an expression of mild distaste, blessed the air around the prisoner and then sat down on a chair and said: ‘I’m listening.“ Catalina made no mention of the actual reason why she was in prison, the affair involving Reyes. Instead
she confessed her meeting with Adeida de Cardenas. She described her violent conquest of the woman in such a way that the priest’s eyes began to soften. Diego de Ronda spoke a few words of admonition. After he had granted her absolution, Catalina asked whether she could now receive the body of the Lord. Tomorrow, said the priest, tomorrow a mass would be held for the prisoners.
Catalina stood up. “With cool calculation she kissed his fingers and then asked whether a man suffering from malaria, Juan Bautista de Arteaga, had been taken to the Franciscan monastery as she had requested. The priest nodded and said that the patient was already there and that his condition was satisfactory. Catalina was taken back to the cell, where she lay down again as if nothing had happened. She did not move again all night, but lay there, not sleeping but staring up at the ceiling, thinking, or pretending to think. Her new discovery—of violence as power and power as violence—had already found its niche in her.
Mass the next morning was held in the small prison chapel. The prisoners had had their shackles removed, and there were guards positioned at the sides and at the exits. Catalina let the mass wash over her as she had so often done as a child, when her mind was on something quite different from what the priest was saying. When it was time for communion, each prisoner knelt down, received the consecrated Host on his outstretched tongue and then made his tongue shoot back into his mouth like a frog’s, so that the thin, flat body of the Lord dissolved in the unsavoury morass of saliva and could be swallowed.
Father Diego was anxious not to drop the consecrated Host on the floor. Intense concentration was bringing beads of perspiration to his forehead. Finally it was Catalina’s turn. She put out her tongue; out of the corner of her eye she could see the server standing by with a jug of water at the ready. In a minute Father Diego would dip his fingers, wet with the men’s slobber, into the clean water and wash them thoroughly. Then he would dab them dry—those same priestly fingers sanctified by the aura of the Host—on the folded white towel. The priest placed the wafer in her mouth. Silently murmuring, “Forgive me,” Catalina spat the Host out into her hand. The priest’s heart missed a beat. Catalina stood up, held the Host high above her head so that everyone could see it, turned a full circle and, ignoring the muttering that was starting up, shouted, “I claim the protection of the Church.” Then, with the Host clasped in the palm of her hand, she stood perfectly still. The guards were about to rush at the prisoner, but the Franciscan, his voice cracking, placed himself in front of Catalina with his arms outspread and fended off all who came near, shouting, “No one is to approach him! The man is under the protection of the Church! This is the body of the Lord!”
It seemed as if only his own words fully brought home to Diego de Ronda what had happened, for now he knelt down before Catalina and crossed himself. Catalina knew what she was doing: with her skills honed by years in the convent, she was a schemer of the first (holy) water. Calmly she observed what happened next. After a few moments’ thought, the priest rose resolutely to his feet and with vehement bursts of prayer brought the mass to a proper close. Having pronounced the blessing he made a sign to the server, who sidled over to him, his head bowed. They whispered together, and the server nodded and went off. Ronda ordered the guards to remove the other prisoners. They obeyed, if anything rather relieved to get away. Now the priest murmured several prayers, and begged Catalina not to move. She said nothing and waited. A number of monks arrived. Some had brought candles, others censers, one bore the weight of a large cross, another had a black hood at the ready, four of them were carrying a baldachin, and they all followed the instructions issued by their Father Superior, who had accompanied them.
The baldachin-carriers took up position around Catalina, the candle-bearers formed a protective outer circle, the hood was placed on the prisoner’s head, the procession, with the cross in front, set off for the Franciscan monastery, and no one could see how, under the hood, Catalina was smiling. The procession was escorted by guards armed with guns, some at the head and others bringing up the rear, and sure enough, in twenty minutes the Franciscans had arrived, unmolested, at the portal of their monastery church. The presence of monks swinging censers had ensured that passers-by fell on their knees before the passage of the Host, which must on no account touch the ground or be defiled in any other way—this was, after all, the consecrated Host, the body of the Lord, which took absolute priority over all worldly concerns. The monks led Catalina to the sacristy. There they extinguished the candles and the burning incense and sang a hymn. After this one of the monks knelt down in front of Catalina, who readily held out her hand to him. The monk scraped the dried wafer from her palm, and while the Host was being locked inside the tabernacle the other monks sat down by Catalina and set about endlessly washing and re-washing the hand that had dared to besmirch the body of the Lord, plunging it into the harshest of soap solutions and brushing away at it so hard in all directions that after a while Catalina began to feel that her skin was dissolving in the noxious liquid. She snatched her hand from the clutches of the scrubbing monks, declaring, “That’s enough!”
Then she said, “I will avail myself of the asylum of the Church for the next few months—until things have calmed down outside and Juan Bautista de Arteaga is well again. Which cell can I find him in? And another thing: I’m thirsty.”
Chapter seventeen
In the mountain of Potosi
Skeletons. Masses of skeletons. Wherever you looked: by the side of the path, among the sparse mountain vegetation, lying between boulders or actually on the path itself. The closer Juan and Catalina came to the Cerro Rico, the ‘rich hill’ of Potosi, the more bones they saw, as if the skeletons were multiplying in the night in grotesque orgies of lovemaking. Most were human skeletons. Either already gnawed clean, or still darkened by beetles and crows. Sometimes there were fresh corpses, and then the shadows of larger creatures rose up and scattered at their approach. At first Catalina thought that it was all some weird hallucination produced by fatigue and the unaccustomed thinness of the mountain air. But Juan saw exactly the same thing, so what she had taken for an illusion must be real after all: these were the remains of so-called mitayos, Quechua Indians who for decades had been forced to work in the mines. The skeletons were those of men who had not even completed the long trek from their villages to Potosi, which could take as much as three months, or who, after toiling for a year in the ‘man-eating mountain’, had had no strength left to combat their mortal exhaustion; men who had set out, often with their wives and children, and who were so unlikely to return that to be on the safe side a requiem mass was said for them before they left.
Catalina heard a rushing, roaring noise, and again it was not an illusion, not just the blood in her own ears: the noise came from outside of her; from the conical mountain which had been visible for some time as a silhouette on the horizon, and which now loomed ever closer. With the streams of water being pumped out of the mountain and gushing down into a single channel, the pounding and turning of the whims and treadmills used to grind the ore, and the mules and men at their unceasing toil, the whole mountain reverberated with a mighty rumbling and humming. And, riddled as it was with shafts, passages and galleries, holes that constantly drew men in and spewed men out, the silver mountain seemed, to the approaching travellers, like a vast beehive.
Juan and Catalina had had to spend a full two months in the monastery at Trujillo before Juan was sufficiently recovered for them to set off, secretly, and on foot, for Lima. There they had stayed for some weeks, had worked and bought two mules which carried them via Arica to Iquique, and from there they had started to climb, extremely slowly and cautiously, treating the ascent with due respect, for they had been told what to expect at high altitudes—thin air and biting cold. Soon the slow pace became habitual, so that they not only moved more slowly but also spoke more slowly, thought and ate more slowly, indeed, it almost seemed to Catalina as if she dreamed more slowly at night, and her dreams were filled with the creatures
they encountered on the way; a condor, llamas, wild cats or small animals that would dive head-first into their burrows.
Now, having reached Potosi, Catalina was complaining of nausea, fatigue, headaches and nosebleeds. Despite this she was eager to begin the search for her brother right away, but Juan ordered rest to counteract her altitude sickness, and Catalina curbed her impatience by thinking of the joy to come. Meanwhile Juan was secretly making enquiries, hoping to surprise his young friend. He had decided to try and find Francisco’s brother himself. He had naively supposed, only a few days earlier, that he would be able to go from one mine to the next and simply ask. But faced with the 600 mines that gouged their way through the mountain, and 570 different leaseholders, Juan had abandoned that idea and adopted an easier method: he went to the royal treasury to consult the registers that recorded the number of mines, their exact position and the names of the leaseholders. Juan spent a whole morning leafing through the documents. But he found nothing. Francisco’s brother was not listed anywhere as a leaseholder. So it was as the bearer of bad tidings that he returned to Catalina.
“He’s not here?” asked Catalina.
“No. There’s no mine anywhere registered in the name of Loyola.”
“In the name of Loyola,” Catalina repeated tonelessly.
“Yes,” said Juan.
Catalina pulled herself together. Loyola. Of course. The search had not even begun; that was the wrong name. But she did not let her relief show. Juan would expect her to be disappointed by what he had just told her. And by now it was no effort for her to convey the impression of sadness. She assumed a sombre expression, wrinkling her brow and turning her lips down a little at the corners, and then lowered her eyes, while inwardly keeping a tight grip on her true feelings.