Catalina

by Markus Orths

  While Francisco soon dismissed the incident from his mind, the Cid, that very day, swore the exact opposite—that he would never forget what had happened—and from that moment on Francisco Loyola, though he did not know it, had an extremely dangerous enemy at his back.

  Chapter twenty-two

  In the dark

  In 1616, Francisco Loyola was thirty-one and, thanks to his way of life, already had a furrowed brow and pendulous jowls. He was in some town or other—they were all the same to him—when he ran into an old acquaintance from his army days, Carlos de Silva, a lieutenant like himself. Silva was cursing the state of calm that had descended upon the country, bemoaning the leaden tedium of such periods of peace. Battles were few and far between, there were not so many Indians fighting now, and it was a matter of luck whether you happened to be in the right place when a chance of fighting did present itself. “A gutless breed,” was Silva’s verdict on the Indians, who in his view had given in far too easily. The soldiers, robbed of their raison d’etre, were condemned to idleness.

  That night, Silva told Francisco, he had what he called an ‘assignation with a sword’. His adversary’s name was Acosta. The grounds for the duel were trivial, a mere pretext. The truth was that the men missed the thrill of battle. They wanted to smell danger again, wanted that sense of being alive which they only had when their lives were in jeopardy. They wanted to be fighting for their lives again, not having to wonder if they actually had lives worth fighting for. Silva asked Francisco to be his second, to support him, for the second was expected to come to the aid of the principal if the need arose. Francisco agreed at once.

  There were eight hours to go before the appointed time. The duel was to take place in secret, in a small wood, at eleven o’clock at night. The two men had something to eat, then lay down and slept for two hours. When they woke, they had a drink and did some arm and leg bending exercises to warm up before practising duelling moves.

  “Always remember that you mustn’t just watch your opponent’s sword!” said Francisco. “Your eyes have to be everywhere—on his sword, his feet, his free arm and especially on his face. Concentration is everything. You’ve nothing to lose.”

  “How can you say that? I have my life to lose!”

  “If you’re keen to stay alive, that makes you a good fighter. But if you don’t care you’ll be unbeatable.”

  “What about you? Aren’t you keen to stay alive?”

  “I’ve often imagined how it would be if I were the one being run through. I’ve seen a lot of faces as men fell to the ground. What’s so terrible about it? In the end, when all the screaming is over, there’s just silence, without even the mechanics of breathing to disturb it any more. It’s simply quiet. Do you see what I mean? What could be better than that? And when I’m fighting I see only that silence before me, and not the darkness that comes with it.”

  “Tonight it will be dark,” said Silva, moving over to the window. A cloudy night. The moon won’t stand a chance.“

  “What news is there? Tell me all that’s been happening,” said Francisco, to distract him, and Silva talked about the townspeople and the newly arrived white prostitutes, especially a woman from Cordoba whom he was going to visit tomorrow—it did him good, he said, to talk of tomorrow, it gave him courage. Talking about the future made him feel stronger, and tomorrow, incidentally, the Bishop of Huamanga, who had been in town for two days, would be holding a high mass, and he would go along to it and give thanks for the successful outcome of the duel. Francisco looked up. The Bishop of Huamanga. And Juan Bautista de Arteaga. Francisco thought of times long past, and of the person he himself had once been. All of that lay buried under the detritus of years: Miguel, Ana, the weeks spent in Concepcion, their parting, the words that Juan…Francisco ran his hands over his doublet. Juan’s letter. He had sewn it in there. But this wasn’t his old doublet—because of heavy wear and tear he had had to replace his clothing several times over. He had never thought of Juan’s letter, which would now be mouldering away on some battlefield or in the soil of Paicabi.

  “The bishop,” said Francisco. “Has he still got the same physician? Juan Bautista de Arteaga?” ‘I don’t know.“

  “Then we’ll make enquiries tomorrow.” ‘Tomorrow!“ said Silva. ”I like the sound of that.“ Francisco and Silva went on talking, we are told, ”about this and that, until ten o’clock, when we heard the bells striking the hour, and we took our swords and cloaks and set off. The darkness was so impenetrable that you could not see your hand in front of your face, and when I noticed that, I suggested we should tie handkerchiefs around our arms so that whatever happened in the next couple of hours we would still be able to recognize each other.“

  They went into the wood. The last few steps to the appointed spot were difficult, they could hardly see where they were placing their feet, and now and then a small animal darted across their path. They arrived early and had to wait. Francisco had an odd sensation. It felt as if he had been here before, in this very place. But it was only the darkness that he was remembering, the darkness and the feeling he had had when he destroyed the image of the Nameless One in Potosi. He drove the memories from his mind. At last their opponents appeared; they too had come without a light. Now that their eyes had overcome their vain craving for light, Francisco and Silva were at least able to see the ghostly figures approaching. Not their faces, only shadows emerging from shadows. Dark shapes that were only a fraction lighter than the surrounding darkness.

  Acosta and Silva each took a step forward, while Francisco and the other second drew back so as to give the duellists enough space. Without a word the fighting began. The seconds heard the clatter of blades, the combatants’ panting breath and the scraping of their shoes on the woodland floor. When Silva took a definite hit, though not a dangerous one, Francisco moved forward to his side. Without hesitation the other second followed his example. For a moment the two principals paused. Silva took advantage of this lull to lunge at Acosta and deliver a fatal thrust right into his adversary’s chest. A yell of triumph spurted from Silva’s lips, polluted with blood, for his cry of triumph was also a cry of pain and of death: his lunge had brought him victory, but also defeat. It had only succeeded because he had not side-stepped Acosta’s weapon. The two swords entered the men’s chests simultaneously, and plunged in deeper and deeper. Each seized the other’s shoulders and pulled him nearer, until their faces were close together. They saw themselves in the gleam of each other’s eyes, mistily, for the last time, and then they tipped over sideways, dead. For a split second all was still.

  Francisco and Acosta’s second took up the fight. Francisco dealt the first blow. After they had spent some minutes cautiously testing each other out, it was clear to Francisco that the other was not his equal. He could tell that he must have been a good swordsman once, but he was hampered now by the sluggishness of one no longer young. His reactions were slow, and so he was repeatedly forced into a desperate defence. His mental slowness became more apparent the longer the fight went on, and his lack of fitness was betrayed by his laboured breathing. And there was a fear in him that Francisco could positively smell—for Francisco’s opponent had recognized that he was outmatched.

  Francisco now deliberately began to make Acosta’s second look foolish. He had already had several chances to land a fatal thrust, but instead he inflicted only light scratches, as if he were making notches in the other’s skin to record the points he scored. He was like an orca on the Patagonian shore playing with a seal it has caught, killing it only after having some fun with it first. But Francisco was to pay dear for this self-indulgence, for his adversary now saw an unexpected chance: he would stake everything on one throw, summon up all his remaining strength for a final, decisive thrust at a moment when the other did not expect it. So he risked everything and suddenly, in apparent surrender and weakness, offered his broad chest as a target for Francisco’s sword. Once more Francisco spurned the offer, but he could not resist inflicting
another scratch and then twirling round on the spot, confident of victory, enamoured of his own prowess and delighting more in this sport the longer it lasted; but as he completed his pirouette he saw his adversary’s eyes, alert again, panther’s eyes in which the will to survive was not yet extinct, and the panther suddenly sprang at him, in two long bounds, with all the unforeseen strength of a body that has already been written off. The blade pointed straight at Francisco’s unprotected chest and would have reached and penetrated it, had not the thrust been diverted at the last moment, for the man tripped over Silva’s hand where he was lying prostrate on the ground, the blade found only Francisco’s arm instead of his chest, and it was the white handkerchief that turned blood-red.

  Angrily Francisco Loyola plunged his sword into his adversary’s body and then pushed him away. “As you see,” he said mockingly, “I had already bandaged the wound even before receiving it.”

  The man was lying on his back, about to breathe his last. Francisco bent down. Now he looked into the dying man’s face. He could not believe what he saw. Taking his handkerchief and grabbing up a stick from the ground, he cobbled together a makeshift torch, lit it and rammed it into the ground next to the dying man. He looked at him again. He did not know what to feel.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Miguel de Erauso,” said the dying man.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” said Francisco.

  He opened Miguel’s shirt and took a look at the wound. Then he started to remove his own clothes. One by one he laid the garments down beside the man who had once been his brother, matter-of-factly, as if he were performing a duty. He took off his doublet, his shirt, his undershirt. Finally he unwound the bandage that he fastened round his breasts every day to flatten them. He knew that his brother was past saving, but acting under a strangely mechanical compulsion, as if he could not do otherwise, he wrapped the bandage round his brother’s wound.

  Miguel de Erauso looked at the female torso before him and said not a word. By the light of the torch he saw the deep scar on his adversary’s chin and said not a word. He looked into the eyes of the other, who was kneeling over him, and said not a word. He put together all these things that he saw, and remembered all that had happened many years before. At the moment when insight began to dawn in him, when he suddenly saw with the clear vision of one who is close to death, and opened his mouth for a final word, a name that he wanted to titter, as a surmise, as a question craving an answer—at that moment his heart ceased to beat. There would still have been enough breath in him, the name could still have issued from his lips like a last look, but Francisco Loyola, instead of closing the dying man’s eyes, placed a hand over his mouth.

  Chapter twenty-three

  Wanting a different death

  This was by no means all that happened that night. When Francisco drew back his hand it was wet with the blood from his brother’s mouth. He wiped it off on his breeches. The torch, which had almost burnt itself out, cast a meagre light over the scene. Francisco turned and walked a few steps without knowing where he was going, or why. He simply kept walking until he saw the lights of the town. By this time the clouds had cleared from in front of the moon, and Francisco could see that a man holding a torch was approaching from the direction of the town. The man deliberately barred his way. Not only that, but he laughed and suddenly grabbed him by the shoulders. Francisco made to draw his sword, but it was not hanging at his side, and now it came to him that he was still half naked. The man pushed him with such force that Francisco fell over backwards, and his assailant threw himself on top of him. At once Francisco felt the prickly beard in his face and an evil-smelling tongue trying to push its way between his lips. The man’s bulk was so massive that Francisco could not shake him off. He rubbed Francisco’s breasts with his hands, squeezed them together and gave a loud belch. Then he tore open his own breeches, Francisco heard grunting sounds, and the man’s hard member, stiff as a pole, pressed against his abdomen.

  Francisco struggled but had no chance at all against that hairy colossus. Finding himself powerless to get the fellow off him, he stopped struggling and lay still beneath him, took a quick breath, then ran his tongue over his lips, closed his eyes and whispered some lascivious, obscene words. Snorting, the man put his mouth inside the open lips of his victim. Francisco licked up the foul little lake presented to him before slowly extricating himself from the kiss, then he steered his lips past the man’s cheeks, opened his mouth as wide as he could, and buried his teeth in the man’s neck, trying with all his might to make his teeth meet. Immediately his mouth filled with hot blood. The man screamed and started using his hands to hit out at Francisco and try to throttle him, but Francisco hung on to his neck and would not let go. His jaw was an iron clamp; he did not move, breathed through his nose, felt the blood trickling down his chin, felt the man’s movements grow weaker and stop. Still Francisco did not release his grip, but dug his teeth even harder into the man’s neck. Then it was all over.

  He rolled out from underneath him. Spat out everything that was in his mouth, blood and scraps of skin and flesh, turned on his back and looked up at the sky, exhausted, still tasting blood on his tongue. He stood up, still moving in an oddly mechanical way, as if he were being controlled by some other agency, went back the way he had come, into the wood, to the site of the duel, picked up his clothes and got dressed, covering up the breasts that had betrayed him. He buckled on his sword, returned to Silva’s house and gained entry to it, went to the washbasin, washed his face, rinsed his mouth out, gargled and spat until there was no more water left, took his things, loaded them onto the mule, mounted his horse, and left the town in which all this had taken place. He did not give Juan Bautista de Arteaga another thought.

  Now he rode. First along the coast, until he came upon one last freshwater stream, where he paused for food and drink before taking the path leading to the mountains. Francisco wanted to reach the high ground: some impulse drew him towards a place where he could gain an overview. He made few stops on the way, sometimes eating, drinking and even falling into a doze while riding along. He hardly noticed when two men approached him. They rode up to him and asked him the way. They themselves were completely lost. Francisco shrugged and said that he had no idea where he was either. The men decided to travel with him. That way, they said, they all had a better chance of survival. They had underestimated the terrain: no matter where they came to, behind every hill, behind every mountain peak lay the vastness of the Andes.

  Francisco did not care. He felt a deep indifference, an almost cynical resignation. Let destiny take its course: what was going to happen would happen anyway. There was nothing he could do. He did not know the way. He was lost in the labyrinth. From above their heads came the hoarse cries of the vultures, patiently biding their time. Not only did the landscape become desolate and bare of vegetation, but the air also grew noticeably colder. Altitude sickness often made the three of them stop and throw up whatever they had put into their stomachs. And there was not much to be had now—a few herbs growing beside the path, roots. If they were lucky, a dead animal that had only just expired and had not yet started to rot— though eating it made them feel twice as nauseous as before. Eventually one of the exhausted horses collapsed, trembling. Francisco’s companions finished it off with a bullet and threw themselves upon the meat, though they found only a few scraps; the horse had become almost entirely skin and bone. The other two horses and Francisco’s pack-mule did not last much longer.

  Lack of water was not the main problem, for every so often it would rain, or they would come upon a stream with drinkable water. Far harder to contend with was the cold. There was scarcely any wood to make a fire, and the icy chill of the nights slashed at their bodies. Francisco lay by himself, but the other two huddled as close together as they could, rubbing each other’s hands and dirty faces to warm them, and using the horses’ hides as blankets. These kept out the worst of the cold, but because the shreds of f
lesh had been imperfectly scraped off there was a penetrating stench of decay about them.

  While his companions constantly bewailed their lot, Francisco barely said a word. He was totally wrapped up in himself and had only a superficial awareness of pain and privation. He was waiting for something, though he did not know what. One day, towards dawn, he heard shouts of joy coming from his companions, who were walking ahead of him. He looked up and saw what they saw: two figures leaning against a rock, people who might be able to help them, who would know where they were. Francisco’s companions ran towards the strangers but stopped a few paces away from them. Francisco caught up with them. What he saw made him too stop and stare: the figures were no more than caricatures of human beings, dead, frozen, their mouths hanging crookedly open as if they were laughing. Only just dead: no beak-marks yet. The three lost wanderers now had to pass close by the starved corpses.