Aztec Blood a-3

by Gary Jennings

  "We are to stand in the pit?" I asked. "With the mosqueteros."

  Ay, the gleam in their eyes told me that I was in the hands of Mateo-style maniacs. Except I was soon to discover that his dementia had nothing on these two women-in-men's clothing.

  The play was regarded as second only to the tale of Don Quixote as a great masterpiece of Spanish literature. But it was also controversial.

  "The Holy Office vacillates about La Celestina, and it is on and off the Inquisition's banned list," Ana said. "And when they do ban it, their edicts are ignored, troubling them to no end. The familiars would not dare take the autor or his cast into custody. The people would not permit it. Don Quixote incited us to laughter by mocking the hidalgos and the insane chivalry that dominated their writing, but La Celestina touched our souls. The people of Spain are made of blood and fire. They are greedy and generous, foolish and brilliant. They have God in their hearts and the devil in their thoughts. The devious slut, Celestina, and the two lovers represent the best and the worst of us."

  Referred to generally as La Celestina, the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea was not a new play. It was first presented eons ago, in 1499, seven years after the discovery of the New World and over twenty years before the fall of the Aztec Empire. The tragedy of the two lovers was set forth in an astounding twenty-one acts.

  Celestina was a bawd who served as a go-between for two young lovers, Calisto and Melibea. Calisto was from the minor nobility; Melibea was of higher status and wealth, making them unsuitable marriage partners. But they came together as lovers and defied convention, not just by speaking words of love, but by physically consummating their passions.

  The true star of the comedia was Celestina, who was both evil and cunning. Her coarse humor and ironic commentary fascinated audiences everywhere. But her cunning and greed ultimately betrayed her. Paid for her role as go-between, she refused to share her gold with her conspirators. After killing her, they were themselves murdered by an angry mob.

  But nothing would free the lovers of their own fate. Their uncontrolled passions were the instrument of their doom. Calisto was killed in a fall from a ladder to Melibea's window. Melibea—her lover dead, her honor ruined by her virginity's loss—throws herself from a tower window.

  "Their attempt to defy destiny was doomed," Ana explained in the carriage ride to the theater. "Fate and custom foreordained their end—foreordains all our ends, demonstrating the futility of opposing the gods."

  "Who was the author?" I asked.

  "A converso Jew, a lawyer. He first published anonymously because of fear of the Inquisition."

  As I watched it, I could well understand the author's fear. The language of the play was often coarse. Celestina made bawdy comments about a young man's "scorpion tail" pene, whose sting produces nine months of swelling. A character accuses Celestina and a girl who lives with her of having "calluses" on their stomach from all of the men who visit. There are suggestions of female bestiality, though not in regard to the lovely and innocent Melibea.

  Those pompous inquisitors from New Spain would throw fits were they to watch twenty-one acts of La Celestina, in which lust, vice, superstition, and evil were main characters. As a sort of heavenly justice, I imagined myself tying them up, pinning their eyes open, and forcing them to watch the play repeatedly.

  The tomatoes? You wonder what they did with the tomatoes? When we entered the pit it was filled with men who chattered endlessly. All of them appeared not only to have seen the play performed before, but some appeared to have come to this particular presentation on more than one occasion. These street merchants and common laborers discussed the actors, the way they delivered their lines, their mistakes and triumphs, as if they themselves were the play's autor. The play was conducted in the middle of the afternoon in order to utilize sunlight. Why were these louts going to a play in the middle of the day instead of working?

  But I, too, soon got used to expecting good performances.

  "It's what we paid our money for," Ana said. "When I first acted, my pay was the coins tossed on the stage during my performance. I went hungry until I learned how to play a character. ¡Bolo!" she screamed at the actress playing Areusa and threw a tomato when she did not deliver a line to her liking.

  Ana and Felicity were not the only ones who knew the exact lines from the play. Some of the favorite lines, usually those which were deshonesto, were spoken by the mosqueteros at the same time the actor uttered them.

  I was quickly enthralled. Soon I was throwing tomatoes myself....

  After the performance we rode back to Ana's large home. On the way I noticed Felicity looking at me more and more with a small smile and seductively bold eyes.

  When we arrived back at her house, Ana instructed us, "Come, we will use my pool to refresh ourselves."

  Her "pool" was an ancient Roman bath. The city had many Roman ruins, and Ana's was not the only house built upon a bath or other edifice.

  I had taken many baths in the warm pool with Ana. I was startled when she suggested that the three of us enjoy a bath together.

  "Felicity's lover has been in Madrid for a month," Ana said.

  He was none other than the younger brother of the count who was Ana's own benefactor and lover, the brother who Ana said preferred men.

  "But he has to keep up an appearance of propriety," she said. "Hence Felicity, who is a fine actor."

  I did not understand what Ana meant by Felicity being a fine actor.

  Ana was already in the water when I slipped into the pool, putting my towel aside as the warm water engulfed me. Felicity sat on the edge with her towel wrapped around her as Ana and I came together.

  Ana leaned out of my arms and pulled aside Felicity's towel. Before she slipped into the water, I saw and understood what Ana meant when she called Felicity a good actor.

  Eh, if Catalina the Bandito could fool kings and popes, why couldn't Felicity—or whatever his name was—dupe the dons of Seville?

  ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN

  Ana's enthusiasm for plays, parties, and lovemaking was inexhaustible, and she kept me busy with all three. My sole regret was that I saw so little of Mateo. At first his name was on everyone's tongue. Stories of a caballero who had returned from the New World with his pockets full of gold made him an instant legend. The stories they told about him! I heard that Mateo had found the lost Island of California, where an Amazon queen sits upon a throne of gold with her feet on the skulls of men who had the misfortune to shipwreck on her shores. But the most notorious tale was that he had found the Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola while exploring the deserts north of the Rio Bravo.

  Ana expressed curiosity about the fabled cities, and I told her the story.

  After the conquistadors had looted the Aztecs and the Incas, they looked further for more golden conquests. In 1528, a party of Spaniards landed on the peninsula that earlier Juan Ponce de León had named Florida, which meant "flowery," when he searched for the Fountain of Youth. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was one of them. This man with a strange name—Cabeza de Vaca, "Head of Cow"—and an africano slave named Estéban, were among sixty men shipwrecked on the coast of Florida. Núñez, Estéban, and two others traveled eight years across the continent, over a thousand leagues, to an area far north of the settled areas of New Spain. There, in a desert land beyond the Rio Bravo, near where the present settlement called Santa Fe is located, they claimed to have seen in the distance seven golden cities. Expeditions to find the cities, including one led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, failed to find anything but poor indio pueblos.

  Eh, but Mateo found the seven cities, had he not?

  I would have expected Mateo to become deeply involved in the Seville theater scene, but although I did encounter him occasionally in the world of plays, he had become engrossed in another one of his other favorite enterprises.

  "Mateo is involved with a duchess," Ana said, "a cousin to the king."

  "Is she married?"

  "Of course. Her husba
nd is the duke, who is in the Low Countries inspecting the army. The duchess is very lonely and demanding of Mateo's time, and energy. Mateo believes that for the first time in his life he is truly in love."

  "Is there anyone in Spain who is married and does not have a lover?"

  Ana thought for a moment. "Only the poor."

  On several occasions, Ana had made cryptic references to Mateo's dark past. During a discussion about a Miguel Cervantes play, Ana cast a little light on Mateo. Ultimately, I was able to draw secrets from her that stunned me and changed my whole perspective about Mateo.

  I knew, of course, a small part of his past, that he was bitter toward Cervantes. However, his hatred for Cervantes related to something deeper. Ana explained Mateo's anger while we rode in her carriage to the play.

  "When Mateo knew Cervantes, he of course was very young and Cervantes quite old. You are familiar with the background of the author of Don Quixote?"

  Ana, who seemed to know everything about the literature of Spain since Roman times, enlightened me. Cervantes had been born into reasonably humble circumstances. The fourth of seven children, his father was a barber-surgeon who set bones, performed bloodlettings, and attended lesser medical needs. The young Cervantes did not attend university but acquired an education through priests.

  After hearing of Cervantes's military service, I was surprised that Mateo would not have more respect for the man. Both had served in Italy and had fought the Turks. Cervantes had been a soldier in a Spanish infantry regiment stationed in Naples, a possession of the Spanish crown, and served in the fleet under Don Juan of Austria, when it routed the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto near Corinth. Though stricken with fever, Cervantes refused to stay below. On deck, he received two gunshot wounds in the chest and a third rendered his left hand useless for the rest of his life. He later fought at Tunis and La Goleta. Sent back to Spain, recommended for a captaincy, Barbary corsairs captured the ship carrying Cervantes and his brother, Rodrigo. They were sold into slavery in Algiers, the Muslim center for Christian slave trafficking. Unfortunately for Cervantes, Letters of Recommendation magnified his importance in the eyes of his captors. But while the letters raised his ransom price, they also protected him from punishment by death, mutilation, or torture when his four daring bids to escape were frustrated.

  Five years of captivity under the Bey of Algiers, four heroic escape attempts, his resounding success in battle, all brought him nothing. He arrived home to find that Prince Don Juan de Austria was both dead and out of favor with the king. The prince's recommendations for promotion were worth nothing.

  Cervantes found humdrum employment. An affair with a married woman produced a daughter out of wedlock, whom he raised himself. He married a farmer's daughter nearly two decades younger than him. The girl had a small piece of property in La Mancha. While visiting La Mancha, he conceived his first published work of fiction, La Galatea, in the fashionable genre of pastoral romance. It would be another twenty years, at the age of fifty-eight years, before his masterpiece, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, was published. In those twenty years he wrote poetry, plays, and worked as a tax collector—and was once imprisoned for discrepancies in his tax-collection account ledgers.

  "One of the plays he wrote was La Numantia," Ana said, and took me to see a performance. "Numantia was a Spanish town that withstood a terrible seize by the Romans. For ten long, bloody years, three thousand Spaniards defended the town with desperate courage against a Roman force of over one hundred thousand. Cervantes chose to set his play in the final days of the siege, at a time when the dead and starving lay in heaps in the city. Infants sucked blood from their mothers' breasts rather than milk. Two Numantian youths fight their way into the Roman camp to steal bread. One is killed, but the other, fatally wounded, comes back with blood-stained bread before dying.

  "Think of the image," she said, "blood-stained bread and babies drinking the blood of their mothers."

  For this play Ana dressed as a woman of quality, wearing a mask of course, and we sat in a box. The mosqueteros were even quiet during the play. "It is a story of great patriotism, of the courage of the Spanish people," she said. "One does not throw refuse at our people. When I first saw this play, I was just a girl. A drunk yelled an insult at the way one of the boys who had given their lives for bread had acted his death scene. The men in the pit almost tore him to pieces."

  Watching the play, I barely breathed during that scene for fear of antagonizing those around me.

  No single hero dominated the four-act tragedy. The people, the city, and Spain herself were the heroes. Characters included Spanish ladies, Roman soldiers, even the Rio Douro.

  I was impressed by Cervantes's mastery in blending dark pagan superstitions with the Spanish people's heroism in resisting the Roman invaders. In one scene the earth opened and a demon appeared and scurried away with a sacrificial lamb. Marquinio the Sorcerer, a black lance in one hand, a book of magic in another, summoned a dead youth from the Place of the Dead. The lad speaks to the people of their duty and their fate. They must destroy their city, denying Rome both victory and spoils. Neither gold nor gems nor women must fall to the invaders.

  Ana pointed out an interesting little man in the audience. "Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, one of your fellow colonists. He came here from New Spain to study law and theology and ended up writing plays. One of his plays, The Truth Suspected, will open next week."

  Ruiz was a bowlegged hunchback with a flame-red beard. He had the blazing stare of a religious fanatic, the body of a dwarf, and the curled upper lip of a starving wolf.

  I said as much to Ana.

  "His hunger is for fame and glory, but his body precludes both the battlefield and the dueling field. So he puts all of his energy into his quill and garrancha."

  "His what?"

  "He believes he's a great lady's man."

  "Santa Maria." I crossed myself. "Poor devil."

  "Poor women! They say he is hung like a bull."

  After the play, Ana and I relaxed in her Roman bath. I rubbed her feet while she smoked hashish. She had offered me the Moorish dream smoke early in our relationship, but it gave me a headache. Perhaps my Aztec blood was requited only by the dream-making of flower weavers.

  "Tell me about Cervantes and Mateo," I pleaded.

  "Mateo was a young autor, the manager of a travel troupe, and—"

  I interrupted. "The troupe of actors you ran away and joined?"

  "Exactly. As you already guessed, he was my first lover. Not the first man to enjoy my body, but the first I wanted to make love to me."

  I smiled at the thought of the two hellions in a theater and in bed. Dios mio, it would have been a volcano colliding with a tidal wave.

  "So why does he hate Cervantes?"

  "Cervantes was a writer of plays, but he had not gained the fame that was to come after the publication of Don Quixote. Mateo was the manager of a troupe of actors and desired to have his own plays performed. He showed some of his plays to Cervantes."

  "The tale of a knight-errant," I asked, "an old hidalgo who jostled with windmills?"

  "I never knew exactly what Mateo's comedia plots were about. He said Cervantes spoke well of them, and for a while they were friends."

  "Close enough that Mateo might have poured out his heart to Cervantes? Told him of all the adventures and misadventures he had known in the pursuit of wine, women, and glory?"

  "Yes, Mateo's told me that too, that the old man 'borrowed' our friend's adventures; and I have no reason to doubt him. Mateo's life would fill many books. But it is also true that while Mateo's plays about knights and dragons and beautiful princesses were popular with audiences, they were everything that Cervantes loathed. In Don Quixote he parodied Mateo and his writing mercilessly."

  "So Cervantes 'borrowed' his life and ideas and presented them with mockery."

  "Mateo hasn't forgiven him."

  "For certain," I said, "Mateo goes muy loco whenever the name of Mi
guel Cervantes is mentioned."

  "If he knew that you and I went to see La Numantia..."

  "Sí, he would remove an ear from each of us. And, Ana, you said to me once that Mateo was not a picaro, but a gentleman. Of course, he told me his whole life story during our wanders and battles with pirates, but I wonder if he told you the same tale—"

  "He told me nothing. I learned it from one who knew Mateo when he was a marqués."

  A marqués! A nobleman above a count and below a duke. A great personage. Even those who bore an empty title because their estates had been lost or confiscated could sell themselves in marriage to a very rich widow or merchant's daughter.

  "You know the tale from Mateo's own lips," she said. "He was an orphan at five, his father dying in battle and his mother taken by the plague. His father, the marqués, was a general for the king, one with a fine reputation. After the death of his parents, Mateo was raised in the house of his cousin, a count. At a very early age, he was pledged in marriage to the count's daughter, who was a year or two older than him. When Mateo was seventeen, a servant awoke him and informed him that a man had been seen sneaking into the house. Grabbing his sword, he made a search for the intruder. The intruder turned out to be his closest friend. He found the man in the arms of his betrothed.

  "Por Dios, can you imagine the scene, Cristo? The hot-blooded, idealistic young nobleman, raised in the tradition of hombria, that a man must be honorable and his honor is inexorably linked to the honorable behavior of the women in his life. He finds his wife-to-be making love with his good friend? Can you guess what happened next?"

  I knew Mateo too well to have to guess. "He killed the man, of course."

  "Cristo, had he simply killed the man, he would be a marqués today instead of a picaro. He killed not just the friend but his betrothed. She got in the way of the fighting men and was slain. Ay, men and women throughout the land praised his act of honor, but it was the old count's only child. To save his own family's honor, he saw to it that Mateo became a hunted man."