9
NEW DIRECTIONS
1628–1629
HER SCREAMS CURDLED YOUR BLOOD. THEN CAME THE POUNDing—the explosive racket of someone banging at the door.
“Let me in!”
More pounding. Thunderous pounding that made your head throb.
She charged into the room with the fury of a tornado, her dress in tatters, her disheveled hair falling across her eyes.
The councilmen gasped in amazement. What horror had befallen her? Her jaw was bruised, and angry cuts crisscrossed her arm. An abrasion the size and color of a wine-soaked host defiled her shoulder.
The girl tossed her head and wiped her hair out of her eyes. Her whole body trembled as she approached the mayor, her father. She turned abruptly and stared into the distance, her eyes glistening like emeralds. Through the shredded chemise her skin shone white and smooth as marble.
“I have as much right as anyone to stand here in this circle of men! Even if a woman can’t have a vote, she can have a voice!”
Esteban, the mayor, took her arm. “Daughter! Laurencia!”
“Don’t call me your daughter!”
“But why …?”
“I’ll tell you why! Because you allowed that bastard to abuse me! Where were you when I needed someone to defend me? Fernán Gómez dragged me off before your very eyes, and what did you do? Nothing! None of you! What kind of shepherds are you, that you let the wolf invade your fields and carry off your lambs! And you call yourselves men! You’re nothing but sheep!”
Eyes blazing, Laurencia flung her arms wildly. Her exquisite torso twisted and writhed, drawing attention to her smooth neck; her minuscule waist; her firm breasts, youthful and high.
Don Felipe held his breath. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“No wonder they call this place Fuenteovejuna, the sheep well! You sheep! You cowards! You’re no manlier than rabbits. You’re barbarians, not Spaniards! Chickens! Why don’t you dress up in skirts, with thimbles in your pockets? Why do you carry weapons if you’re afraid to use them? Arm the women! We’d do a better job than you of protecting this village!”
Her voice rang through the theater like the bell of a cathedral, melodious and rich.
“Who is she? I have to have her,” the king whispered to Olivares.
“María Inés Calderón. She’s only sixteen.”
“Get her for me.”
Laurencia threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin. The arch of her back sent tingles into His Majesty’s groin.
“Give me stones, and the first ones I’ll hurl them at are you cowards! Spinning girls! Sissies and faggots! Tomorrow we’ll dress you in farthingales and bonnets. We’ll paint your lips and powder your cheeks. The age of the Amazons will return! The women of Fuenteovejuna will give this town back its honor!”
The audience roared its approval. María Inés Calderón had once again thrilled the city of Madrid with her brilliant interpretation of the role of Laurencia in Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna. Only a consummate actress could play Laurencia, the peasant heroine who rebuffs the advances of the evil comendador, and then fights him off with tooth and claw when he tries to rape her.
Spectators leapt to their feet, applauding wildly, even those aristocrats who had more in common than they’d like to admit with the comendador. Lope had set the action in the times of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, more than a hundred years earlier, so that none of the noblemen in the audience could feel alluded to.
The afternoon when María Inés—La Calderona, as she was known—played Laurencia to a packed house, I was seated in the cazuela, the women’s section, wholly engrossed in the show. By the end of the day, all Madrid was gossiping about what had happened at the Corral de la Cruz, not during the performance, but afterward. In every bodega and mentidero you could hear snorts and chortles and snickers as people invented and embellished details. Don Felipe had entered the theater incognito through a secret passage, along with his inseparable companion, the count-duke of Olivares. That in itself was unremarkable. The king and queen often attended performances, and they usually came in through a clandestine entrance to avoid being importuned by the mob. Nor was it unusual that by the final bows the king had fallen desperately in love with the leading lady. But what was extraordinary was that it took him less than an hour to get her flat on her back in his bed with her knees splayed and her future assured. I should say her immediate future, rather than her entire future because the king was notorious for tiring easily of his paramours.
By the next morning, the gossip mill was grinding full speed. According to—well, everyone—the breathtaking young actress had a very tight hymen—so tight, in fact, that it frustrated the king’s efforts to enter her. In a frenzy, His Majesty called for the royal surgeon, who performed an emergency operation on the willing but impenetrable Calderona. Before she had even had the chance to heal, the king jumped on her and had his fun, which left the girl barely able to walk for an entire month—in spite of which she performed superbly every afternoon at the Corral de la Cruz for the run of the play.
For the city’s scandal sheets, which at the time were gaining enormous popularity, La Calderona was a godsend. Madrileños reveled in the stories of her bedroom tricks, which, of course, they had no way of knowing. She was, they said, an extraordinary acrobat who could make love while doing a headstand, a sideward leg extension, or the splits upside down. Felipe and his Calderona were the subject of conversation for years, and the affair even figures in the chronicles.
Though I have no way of proving the stories of the girl’s sexual prowess, I can say with certainty—because I saw it with my own eyes—that within days of their encounter, La Calderona pushed her way into Court company, parading around as if she were a duchess, instead of the king’s slut. She sashayed through the halls of the Alcázar in brocades and ermine, which only nobles were allowed to wear. She attended dinners and hunts. She showed up at bullfights and cañas. All of this was tolerated, until one day she went too far.
The occasion was a visit from an emissary of the House of Gonzaga, in Mantua. The Crown was bankrupt. Olivares had just announced the suspension of all payments to the palace staff, with the exception of Velázquez, who continued to receive his salary. Moneys owed to debtors would not be paid. Donations to the poor would be put on hold. In spite of this, the king ordered massive festivities to impress the Mantuan dignitary, with processions and dancing and cañas in the Plaza Mayor.
The spectacle was well underway when María Inés Calderón, flaunting a velvet fur-trimmed cape fastened with a diamond brooch the king had reputedly given her, sailed brazenly down one of the streets that edged the Plaza Mayor and then disappeared with her entourage into a building. Moments later she reappeared, chin high, eyes defiant, on one of the balconies overlooking the square.
The balconies were reserved for aristocrats—usually those who owned the houses on the Plaza Mayor, or the titled friends they invited to view royal celebrations from this privileged post. But there, in full view, was La Calderona. She smiled and waved to the crowd as though she were taking bows on a stage. No one knew who had invited her, but she was there nonetheless, flirting with her admirers from midair. She moved with the boldness and grace of a Laurencia, the character she played in Lope’s comedia.
Suddenly, a hidden hand flung open the door behind her. A commotion erupted on the balcony. Royal guards appeared and shoved the actress to the side. La Calderona scanned the street, as though looking for an escape route. She couldn’t exit through the balcony door, which was blocked by soldiers. She couldn’t jump from the balcony, which was two floors above the street. Another girl might have trembled in terror, but La Calderona glared at the men defiantly. Sneering, she turned toward her admirers on the street, who cheered her on.
But then the gleeful hoorays stopped abruptly. The soldiers parted and another figure appeared on the balcony: a beautiful woman with regal bearing. She wore a sumptuous dress of brocade, heavily bejeweled, w
ith a tight-fitting bodice and wide, flowing sleeves of a silk lighter in color than the bodice. The collar, white and trimmed in silver ribbon, was of the kind they call a Medici collar: raised in back and held in place by a wire form. It was the queen.
Isabel de Borbón was known to be an easy-going woman, jovial and tolerant of her husband’s indiscretions. In fact, she reputedly had had an indiscretion or two herself early in their marriage. But in spite of her complacency, Isabel de Borbón had no intention of ignoring María Inés Calderón. The actress’s presence at Court was an embarrassment, her brazenness an insult. Her relationship with the king was making Doña Isabel the butt of endless jokes in the tertulias and mentideros of Madrid. And now the cheeky girl had intruded into a space reserved for nobility. She, Isabel de Borbón, was not going to stand for it. She pushed through the soldiers and stood before La Calderona. If a moment before the actress was defiant, now she was flummoxed. She hesitated a moment, then bowed her head and curtsied deeply.
Isabel raised her left hand and pointed to the balcony door. She said only one word: “Fuera!”
María Inés disappeared. By the end of the day bad couplets were circulating about the incident all over Madrid. For example, this one:
The reina took the puta by surprise
And zapped her with a bolt from her eyes.
Or this one (and please excuse the vulgarity):
The king’s slut may be a good fuck,
But now she’s really out of luck.
From that day on everyone referred to the balcony as—and now, once again, I have to beg you to forgive me—the Balcony of Marisuperfuck, in honor of La Calderona’s prowess.
Everyone thought the actress would hightail it out of town after that, but she did no such thing. Instead, she continued her career on the stage. She didn’t have to work, of course. The king continued to give her everything, and he even secured her a permanent seat for Court celebrations on another balcony on the Plaza Mayor. But María Inés relished acting and the adulation of the crowd, and she wasn’t about to give that up.
Some time in 1629 La Calderona gave Don Felipe a son, Juan de Austria. The king had high hopes for the boy and fulminated against any anyone who disparaged him for being illegitimate. After all, the illustrious Carlos V, the king’s own great-grandfather, had also produced a bastard son, the first Juan de Austria, who had become one of Europe’s greatest military leaders.
I remember the year of Don Juan’s birth because not long afterward, on October 29, the queen gave birth to Prince Baltasar Carlos, Felipe’s first legitimate son. All Spain rejoiced.
As for La Calderona, she realized that now that an heir to the throne existed, her moment of glory had passed. She begged the king to allow her to retire to a convent. Maybe he resisted. After all, she was still young and beautiful, and she had provided him with many hours of pleasure. Nevertheless, he let her go. The last I heard, she was abbess of some obscure nunnery in Alcarria. The king didn’t release her child, of course. The royal couple had already lost several infants to disease, and he wasn’t about to put all his eggs in the basket of legitimacy. He entrusted little Don Juan to a wet nurse and had him raised near the palace. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the incident on the balcony.
Doña Juana rarely visited the mentideros, but that afternoon, she had been in the Plaza Mayor and had seen for herself the confrontation between the queen and the actress. Now she wanted to know what people were saying. She put on her black cape and a mantilla of the kind the authorities had banned over and over again to prevent women from doing exactly what Juana was doing now: sneaking out of the house incognito. As she and Julia worked their way through the narrow streets, they pulled their veils across their faces and kept their gaze to the ground. She made her way to the steps of San Felipe and wandered around the crowd, ears cocked. “The cuckold queen,” people were calling Isabel de Borbón. “The wronged wife, betrayed and discarded.”
“Must be desperate, to shove her husband’s lover off the balcony like that,” opined an old woman.
“Must be a lousy lay, if you ask me,” snickered another. “If he got what he needed at home, he wouldn’t be out prowling at night with that pimp, the count-duke.”
“All men prowl,” growled the first. In front of the door of the cathedral a blind beggar sang:
Poor Queen Isabel
He’s made her life
A living hell.
He won’t come near her anymore.
He’d rather fuck his actress whore.
The crowd yelped in glee and the poets among them launched their own round of verses. Before they got to the most vulgar of the couplets, Juana had made up her mind. It was time to put her plan into action. It was an audacious plan, but Juana was determined. After all, her own honor was at stake—hers and that of her daughter. If she did nothing, she risked becoming the butt of all kinds of jokes, just like Doña Isabel. Madrileños can be very cruel.
To obtain an audience with the queen of Spain is no simple thing, but Juana wasn’t starting from nowhere. There was her husband’s status, of course, and the many royal affairs she had attended with him. She had kept the company of countesses and chitchatted with ladies-in-waiting. She had even been presented to the queen once or twice, although she didn’t expect Doña Isabel to remember her. Still, there was no chance that Juana would appeal to Fonseca or any of her other friends at Court for help, for what she was planning to do had to be done in secret. And the queen was well insulated, so she could not be easily approached.
Like all queens before her, Queen Isabel had her own staff, independent of the king’s. Among Doña Isabel’s many attendants were the meninas, referred to by the Portuguese word for “little girls” because they wore flat shoes, like children. These women were personal companions, whose job it was to accompany and entertain the queen. And then there were the dueñas, usually older women who served as second mothers to the queen, who, after all, lived far away from her own mother at the French Court. In addition, there were scores of personal servants—chambermaids, dressers, and hairdressers. There was an attendant in charge of the queen’s jewels, another in charge of her clocks and watches, and still another in charge of her linen. There was a maid to bathe and perfume her and another to empty her chamber pot, and also countless minor servants, both male and female: cooks, assistant cooks, sweepers, scrubwomen, laundresses and ironers, not to mention carpenters, gardeners, blacksmiths, grooms, and stable boys.
How, Juana wondered, could she make her way through this human labyrinth to get to Doña Isabel? She could imagine the face of the third assistant majordomo when she, the wife of an artisan, asked for an audience with the queen. Petty bureaucrats like him loved to say no to women like her. In the end, she offered a gold coin to a chambermaid, who was reputedly sleeping with Majordomo Number Three, to get her an appointment with him. When she finally saw him, she gave him a thick gold chain to put her on the queen’s calendar. It was expensive, but it worked.
When Juan de Fonseca scrunched up his mouth and looked out at the world through half-closed eyes—which is what he did when he was thinking—he looked more like a ferret than ever. On this day in May, 1629, a few weeks after the scandalous encounter on the balcony, he appeared so ferret-like that a dachshund might have hunted him down for his master to pelt. Velázquez wanted to go to Italy, and Fonseca knew that the boy’s instincts were right—every great artist had to spend time in Italy. Tastes were changing, and a new, more elaborate style was developing—one that sought to capture moments of intense dramatism, of surprise or shock, one that was intensely psychological. The only way for his protégé to become a true luminary, thought Fonseca, was to learn the new approach through direct contact with Italian painters.
But the king balked. He wanted Velázquez to remain just where he was, so that he could paint Court portraits. Don Felipe depended on him to produce images of himself and his courtiers that would awe and inspire the people. Now that Ruben
s had left Spain, he didn’t trust anyone else.
“But Your Highness,” argued Fonseca, “how much better he will render your image when he has absorbed the new techniques. The boy is a genius. He will be the greatest painter in Europe. Spain will be the envy of the world, not only for its splendid armies, but for its art.”
“It’s worth considering,” he conceded, without making any further commitment.
Eventually, the king did decide to grant Velázquez a leave of absence and a stipend, but the old priest knew that the flimsiest contretemps could cause Don Felipe to change his mind. Fonseca had to be careful—he needed to manage the situation perfectly.
Fonseca rubbed his ferret eyes and looked wearily out the window. It was nearly nine in the evening, but the summer sun still hung low on the horizon, although shadows crept over the palace wall. Somewhere an anvil was pounding and a duck on the pond of the palace compound was squawking at its mate. Noise, thought Fonseca. There’s too much noise.
To smooth Velázquez’s path, Fonseca had begun procuring letters of introduction to Italy’s rich and powerful, but even this operation was turning out to be tricky. One obstacle was Flavio Atti, emissary of the duchess of Parma to the Court of Felipe IV. “The fool,” said Fonseca out loud as he watched a gaggle of ladies in farthingales make their way across the park. In the dusk he could only see their silhouettes, and in their wide skirts they reminded him of gray mushrooms gliding over the path. Word had reached him that Atti was dead set against Velázquez going to Italy because he was convinced that the painter was a spy, and that his trip to Italy was nothing more than a cover. Alvise Mocenigo, the Venetian ambassador, had been more cooperative. He was a jovial type, more concerned with good wine than with helping Velázquez, but he did agree to write a few letters presenting the Spaniard to people in high places.
I am Venus Page 11