Catalina

by Markus Orths

  There was total silence. The onlookers could not take it in all at once. What they were seeing was an impossibility! Maria de Chavarria was nursing a smile. Juan Bautista de Arteaga was leaning for support on the arm of the bishop’s throne. The judge, the hangman and the priests all stepped back a pace. In the crowd, no one moved.

  “Hang Francisco Loyola!” said the condemned man. “But not me. I am Catalina de Erauso.” But his voice sounded full of regret at what he had just done. In a slightly lower voice he added, “Don’t be misled by what you see.”

  At last the crowd erupted into a hubbub of yelling, shouting and roaring. They pointed at the spectacle before them, demanded answers, explanations, demanded to be told what was going on. “Cheating swine!” someone shouted. All the more reason to kill him!“ And others: ‘Him? You mean her! Jezebel! Cheating whore!” Uncertainty prompted some nervous laughter. There were cries of ’Satan!“, and people began frenziedly crossing themselves. The priests, too, held aloft their holy water sprinklers as if to fend off higher powers; their mouths moved continuously, mumbling, chewing their Latin prayers that no one could hear.

  The Cid was standing close to the edge of the scaffold, his eyes staring. Never had the word ‘dumbfounded’ had a fitter application. Close by him someone cried out: “That’s right! It was Francisco Loyola who was condemned to death! This can’t be him! He mustn’t be hanged!” At this the Cid drew his pistol. The people around him backed away. Some of them screamed. The Cid raised an unsteady left arm. He levelled the gun and took aim. There was a moment’s silence, and then the shot rang out. Francisco fell to the ground, naked and wounded. A number of men pounced on the Cid, took the gun from him and held him fast. Juan pushed aside the people who were in the way and leapt up onto the scaffold. He knelt down beside Francisco, whose eyes were open. He was lying, naked, in a pool of his own blood. Juan raised the upper part of Francisco’s body and examined his chest and shoulder. The bullet had passed right through him, and the wound was not dangerous.

  All this time Francisco was trying to read Juan’s expression, anxious to know how badly hurt he was. Juan gave a nod. “It’s nothing,” he murmured into Francisco’s ear. “There’s no danger. But all the same,” he added softly, raising his eyes briefly to the noose, “it would be no bad thing if you fainted at this point.”

  Francisco raised himself in Juan’s arms and, bringing his mouth close to Juan’s ear, whispered, A gunshot wound, Juan? Then do me a favour and don’t use hot oil.“

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Dictation

  The death sentence was quashed. The man who had attempted to kill the prisoner was one of the witnesses who had testified against him at the trial. This fact was more than enough to discredit him. He was tortured until he made a full confession. The townsfolk of Huamanga got their execution after all and were content.

  But now everyone wanted to know what was to become of Francisco Loyola, who had saved his life by stripping off his clothes. The bishop had his eye on him. After three days he sent several nuns to Loyola to examine that mysterious body of his. The nuns approached the figure lying in the bed and turned back the cover. They felt his breasts, and Francisco could not help laughing because it tickled. He made a suggestive remark, causing one of the nuns to start saying her rosary at the top of her voice. Then they pulled his legs apart and fingered his sexual parts; one of them reached her hand into the orifice, looking for something, and then nodded, withdrew her hand and whispered two words which were soon making the rounds: virgo intacta. This inspection aside, Francisco was sealed off from all visitors in order to prevent him from telling his story. The bishop wanted to be the first to know the truth about this person. After a week had passed he entered Loyola’s room.

  “It is time for you to speak,” the bishop said, sitting down on a chair.

  “Where is your…your secretary?” asked Francisco. “Arteaga?”

  “He will not be present.”

  “Why not?”

  “I must first judge whether what you have to tell is suitable for other ears than mine and those of the Lord, if you understand what I mean.”

  “What do you wish to know?”

  “Tell me everything!”

  For the past few days Francisco’s one wish had been to tell his story, from the beginning—to Juan Bautista de Arteaga. But now it was the bishop sitting here, and he too was waiting for words from him. Francisco could only toss him a few bones, no more, no less: the barest skeleton of his life.

  “Very well,” said Francisco, and this is how it appears in his memoirs. “The truth is that I am a woman. That I was born in such and such a place. That I am the daughter of this man and that woman. That at a certain age I entered a convent. That I was brought up there. That shortly before taking my vows I left the convent for this and that reason. Went to such and such a place, undressed and dressed myself again, cut off my hair, travelled to one place and another, took ship, landed and went rushing around the country, killing, injuring, wounding, leaving a trail of havoc and roaming around until I finished up here, now, at the feet of Your Eminence.”

  “Is that all?” asked the bishop.

  “That’s all I can say.”

  The bishop looked at the person before him, whose body was concealed under a blanket.

  “But why?” asked the bishop.

  Francisco remained silent, turning his head away slightly.

  And…and how?“ Confusion overcame the bishop as the profile of this person was presented to him, he could see it now, clearly, the cheek really was that of a woman, but what was that on the upper lip? And those arms, muscular as a cowman’s, and that look, hard as a rock from Arica. And yet, that body, yesterday? It was all beyond his comprehension. ”Have you nothing more to say?“

  “No.”

  “There will have to be an enquiry into this.”

  “Into what?”

  “Everything. Your life. Your conduct. Your deception.”

  “I’d like to get up,” said Francisco. “Tomorrow. I’m free. My sentence has been rescinded. I ask to be given some clothes. That’s my last word.”

  “Clothes?” asked the bishop. “I don’t know what clothes I should give you, Loyola. I really don’t know. What you have done is outrageous. Such a thing is unprecedented. The case must therefore be referred to His Holiness. Only His Holiness can decide what is to happen. You will be taken to Rome. Two of my servants will accompany you there. And Arteaga. You already know him, of course. He insists on taking personal charge of this important matter. May His Holiness show leniency in deciding your fate.” With that the bishop rose and walked to the door. He turned round once more, quickly blessed the room, with a brief glance at Loyola, and said, “The Santa Barbara will sail in three weeks’ time, for Seville. You will be on board. From Seville you will take a ship to Genoa. From there you will travel straight to Rome, making no detours on the way. That is my last word.”

  Juan had one leg crossed over the other. His hands lay flat on his thighs. He was waiting. Francisco was pacing up and down. The boards creaked under his boots. He was wearing his habitual clothing. They were in the small cabin which had been allocated to the bishop’s secretary for the voyage. The Santa Barbara was setting sail. Footsteps and shouted orders could be heard from outside. The waves breaking against the ship made a continual sucking and snorting sound. A wind had come up and was taking the vessel out to sea. Their ‘big talk’ could now begin.

  “They told me that on the day when Miguel pulled me out of my mother’s womb it rained even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Can you believe that?” Before Juan could answer, Francisco went on: ‘Once, in a cave, I threw a stone up as high as I could, and it was caught by a god called Mari. Can you believe that?“ Juan realized that these questions did not require an answer but were complete in themselves. And now Francisco formed the words that were needed. As if he were obeying an impulse that had been frozen for a long time and was now, at last, thawing.
He did not stand still but strode rapidly to and fro in the cabin. He made no attempt to gloss over anything, nor, however, did he inject any remorse into his words. They were simply a true reflection of what had happened. No more, no less.

  The ‘big talk’ lasted for four days; Francisco told his story until evening brought exhaustion, until darkness fell, until he ran out of words. The time that was not filled with speech he spent alone on deck, sitting in an odd corner and letting the shavings from his narration waft away on the wind. On the fourth day he was within sight of the end.

  “Then seven nuns came, they pawed me all over and one of them stuck her wormy little fingers into my private parts and poked about as if she were trying to free a drawer that was sticking. Can you believe that?”

  This time Juan nodded. He listened to the remaining bits of the story, the last few crumbs—the interview with the bishop, and the order to leave for Rome—and with that Francisco’s narrative had caught up with the two travellers, as if it had actually joined them in the cabin. Everything had been said.

  “We must note it all down!” said Juan.

  “What?”

  “Your life!”

  “What for?”

  “So that it doesn’t get lost.” And Juan took a sheaf of paper and writing materials out of the drawer of the cabin table and set everything out in readiness. “Now for the writing,” he said. “I’m going to write it down.” Juan stared at the paper. He was about to start. But then he looked up.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Francisco.

  “I don’t know,” said Juan. “I think I can only understand you if I write as if I were you. That’s the only way for me to see the things that you’ve seen.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You start again from the beginning, and I write as you go along.”

  Francisco told his life-story all over again. What he had already said lay before him like a road; he could simply follow it without having to think about what direction to take, and so the sentences came bubbling out so fast and so fluently that Juan Bautista de Arteaga struggled to keep up. Juan wrote down what he could, but many words and sentences were lost. He was like a bucket standing out in the pouring rain: most of the water always falls outside it. The sound of his breathing was mingled with Francisco’s words, the scratching of the pen with his footsteps. Drops of sweat splattered simultaneously onto the paper and the floor. In the act of writing Juan bundled together what was said and what he managed to hear, and from this combination a text took shape. By the time they had spent something like two days and nights on end in the cabin, neither eating nor sleeping but only speaking and writing, and were approaching the last stage of the narration for the second time, they were impatient to get to the end. They had not changed their clothes for days, they were trapped in their own sweat, out of breath and suffering as much pain, one in his wrist and the other in his jaw, as if the hand were sprained and the tongue dislocated.

  Before they could return to normality, surfacing like divers after a long underwater swim; before Juan could gather up the pages of writing from the table to put them in order, and then read them through again at his leisure, days later, on his own, attempting to decipher and correct passages that were unclear; before Juan realized that the text was but a stunted version of Francisco’s life and that he had only recorded the bare facts; before he had to admit to himself that in the dictation process an immense amount had been lost—feelings, thoughts, anything that might have afforded an insight into the inner self of this human being; before Juan finally asked his companion, “What shall we do with this text?” and Francisco replied, “You keep it. You wrote it!”; before Juan died many years later, leaving the carefully preserved manuscript to the Sevillian branch of the Urquiza family; before the autobiography of the Lieutenant Nun took its tortuous path to its first publication in 1829 under the title Historia de la monja alferez, dona Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma—before any of this could happen, the last sentence had to be spoken, for the last sentence always has to be spoken sometime. And when the last sentence had fallen from Francisco’s lips and Juan had caught it, Juan laid his pen down on the paper. Francisco was leaning against the wall. Juan stood up, and Francisco moved towards him. They stopped just a small distance apart. They gazed at one another as though seeing each other for the first time. They did not take their eyes off each other. At last they each stepped forward and closed the remaining space between them. But their embrace lasted only for a moment. Then they drew apart.

  Chapter twenty-eight

  A decision in Rome

  Even faster than the Santa Barbara, rumours flew across the sea, rumours spun around a truly incredible individual: rumours about all the things done and experienced (as well as about many things not done or experienced) by this remarkable personage. Like a gathering storm, Francisco’s reputation gradually brewed up and then broke in the form of a single name—a name that had attached itself to him even before he landed on Spanish soil again after almost twenty years in the New World: the lieutenant nun, the nun lieutenant, la monja alferez. Francisco could do nothing about any of this. Nor did he wish to. People pounced on his story and continually told and retold it. They exaggerated it, distorted it, elaborated it, with no regard for what was true and what was not, but even so the core remained the same. Furthermore, in the story as it was handed down, people of every century have found inspiration for writings of their own, recasting the material in new forms. This process will never cease, because far more is involved than the fate of a single human being.

  In her book The Lieutenant Nun, Sherry Velasco discusses a large number of texts revolving around Catalina’s life: not only the official and authentic documents, such as a letter written by the Bishop of Huamanga, another by Pedro de la Valle (a member of the circle surrounding Pope Urban VIII), the relaciones of 1625 and 1653, or an account by Fray Diego de Rosales, but also a multitude of fictional works. These include a play by Juan Perez de Montalban written while the lieutenant nun was still alive; Thomas de Quincey’s Romantic version of the story, entitled The Nautico-Military Nun of Spain; Carlos Coello’s Zarzuela, La Monja Alferez, published together with a critical prologue by Jose Gomez de Arteche; Juan A. Mateo’s play La Monja Alferez; an anonymous manuscript from I9th-century Mexico; the two-volume historical novel by Eduardo Blasco, Del claustro al campamento o la Monja Alferez; a host of warrior nun‘ comic strips; Emilio Gomez Muriel’s 1944 film with the improbably pretty Maria Felix as Catalina; works by Ochoa, Morales-Alvarez, Rodriguez, Keller, and Miras; Aguirre’s film made in 1986, and others far too numerous to mention. But many of these fictional versions unjustifiably romanticize the return voyage to Seville and give us a sentimentalized relationship between two people, a purely postulated act of love, a Catalina who slips back into her ’innate‘ role and reverts to an incongruous femininity.

  The reality was quite different: that one fleeting embrace on the Santa Barbara did not lead to anything more. For even if Juan saw the act of writing as a kind of union on a higher plane, which might indeed have led to their finding each other in a more tangible way, Francisco had arrived at a different point. His dictation was also a diktat. He was the one setting the terms. It was his own life he was relating. What he said concerned him alone. Or so he thought, at any rate, and he not only dictated his life-story to Juan but determined everything else too: the pace and the rhythm. He did not realize that Juan could only get down on paper a tiny fraction of what he said. But he was not concerned about that. Francisco was dictating his life to himself, cementing it with every word he spoke. Francisco Loyola was ramming Francisco Loyola, like a peg, more and more firmly into the ground. He could not be anything now but the man he had become. And after he had said it all, he had said all there was to say.

  After a two-week stay in Seville, another ship carried the two travellers to Genoa, where the Papal coach was waiting to convey them to Rome. People there already knew who was coming, and gossip was rife
. Passers-by turned their heads and tried to peer into the coach, but the curtains were drawn. The Pope received Francisco in audience and listened to his story—and a strange thing happened. One assumes that the Pope will see what Francisco did as a blasphemy against God, an outrage against the fundamental values of the Church. Each individual must occupy his allotted place in the world, the Pope will surely say. The ordinances of Nature must be obeyed. From now on, Loyola, you must cease to live as a man, you must renounce this clothing, which disfigures you and robs you of the identity that was bestowed on you once and for all. Look into your heart, and go back to leading the life that you were elected and chosen and destined and intended to lead—the life of a woman. But Urban VIII said none of these things. He listened to what Francisco Loyola told him, kept putting questions to him, and enquiring into details, was astonished at all the things this person had experienced. No doubt he had difficulty seeing a woman beneath the mannish garb, but could see the man who had taken up the cross and the sword and helped to ‘pacify the heathen’. One of the many ‘valiant men who had opened up a New World to Christianity’.