No more daydreams of a rich, courageous rancher galloping across the valleys of California with his sword at his side; instead he began reporting scraps of supposed letters from his father that announced, among other calamities, the family’s imminent financial ruin. At that moment he had no idea how close to the truth those lies would be within a few years. Then, as a finishing touch, he started imitating the precious mannerisms and tight trousers of Juliana and Isabel’s dance instructor. He responded to Agnes’s novel-inspired gazes with little affectations and sudden headaches, until he planted the suspicion in Agnes’s mind that she was pursuing an effeminate artiste. That game of deceit suited his histrionic personality perfectly. “Why are you acting like such an idiot?” Isabel, who from the first had treated him with a frankness bordering on rudeness, asked more than once. Juliana, distracted as she always was in the world of Agnes’s novels, never noticed how Diego changed when Agnes was present. Compared with Isabel, who could see right through Diego’s theatrics, Juliana revealed a distressing innocence.
Tomas de Romeu fell into the habit of inviting Diego for an after-dinner drink with Agnes’s father, once he realized that the older man was interested in his young guest. Le Chevalier would inquire about the activities of the students in the School of Humanities, the political tendencies of young Catalans, and the rumors Diego heard in the street and from the servants, but Diego, aware of the man’s reputation, was cautious in his replies. If he told the truth, he might put more than one person in jeopardy, especially his companions and professors, blood enemies of the French, although most agreed with the reforms they had imposed. As a precaution, in Le Chevalier’s company Diego feigned the same affected, dimwitted mannerisms he adopted around Agnes, with such success that the father ended up dismissing him as a spineless dandy. The Frenchman was hard put to understand his daughter’s interest in de la Vega. In his eyes the young man’s hypothetical fortune could not compensate for his staggering frivolity. Le Chevalier was an iron man otherwise he would not have been able to maintain his stranglehold on Catalonia and he was quickly bored with Diego’s trivialities. He stopped asking him questions and sometimes made comments he would have kept to himself had he thought better of him.
“On my way back from Gerona yesterday I saw pieces of bodies the guerrillas had hung from trees and speared on pikes. The buzzards were having a feast. I still have the stench on me,” Le Chevalier commented.
“How do you know that was the work of guerrillas, not French soldiers?”
Tomas de Romeu asked.
“I have good information, my friend. In Catalonia the guerrillas are ferocious. Thousands of contraband weapons pass through this city; there are arsenals even in the church confessionals. The guerrillas cut the supply routes, and the population goes hungry when vegetables and bread don’t get through.”
“Let them eat cake, then.” Diego smiled, echoing Queen Marie Antoinette’s famous remark as he tossed an almond bonbon into his mouth.
“This is not a time to make jokes, sir,” Le Chevalier replied, annoyed.
“Starting tomorrow it will be forbidden to light torches at night because they are used to send signals, or wear a cape because muskets and knives can be hidden beneath them. What would you say, caballeros, if I told you that there are plans to infect the prostitutes who service the French troops with smallpox!”
“Please, Chevalier Duchamp!” Diego exclaimed with a scandalized air.
“Women and priests hide weapons in their clothing and use children to carry messages and light explosives. We will have to search the hospital because they hide weapons beneath the bed covers of women who are supposedly in labor.”
Only one hour later, Diego de la Vega had managed to warn the director of the hospital that the French would be arriving from one moment to the next. Thanks to the information provided by Le Chevalier, he was able to save more than one of his companions from the School of Humanities and a number of endangered neighbors. On the other hand, he sent an anonymous note to Le Chevalier when he learned that bread destined for a barracks had been poisoned. His intervention foiled the attempt, saving thirty enemy soldiers. Diego was not sure of his reasons, but he detested treachery of any kind, and he simply liked the game and the risk. He felt the same revulsion for the guerrillas’ methods that he did for those of the occupation troops.
“There’s no point in looking for justice, Bernardo, because there is none, anywhere. The only positive thing to do is to try to prevent more violence. I am sick of so much horror, so many atrocities. There is nothing noble or glorious about war.”
The guerrillas relentlessly harassed the French and stirred up the people. Farmers, bakers, masons, craftsmen, merchants ordinary people during the day, they fought by night. The civilian population protected them, furnished them with food, information, mail, hospitals, and clandestine cemeteries. The tenacious popular resistance wore down the occupation troops, but it also kept the country in ruins. To the Spanish cry, “Blood and guts!” the French responded with identical cruelty.
For Diego, the fencing lessons were his most important activity, and he never arrived late for a class, knowing that the master would dismiss him and never take him back. At fifteen minutes before eight he was at the academy; five minutes later a servant opened the door, and at eight on the dot he was standing before his fencing master, foil in hand. At the end of the lesson the maestro often asked him to stay a few minutes and discuss the nobility of the art of fencing, pride in strapping on the sword, the military glories of Spain, and the obligation of every caballero with a sense of honor: to defend his good name, even though duels were banned by law. Those themes led to others more profound, and during those discussions that sober little man, who had the starched and prissy demeanor of a fop and was sensitive to the point of absurdity when it came to his own honor and dignity, revealed the other side of his character. Manuel Escalante was the son of a merchant from Asturias, but he had escaped the undistinguished fate of his brothers because of his genius with a sword. Fencing elevated him in rank, allowed him to invent a new persona and to travel throughout Europe rubbing elbows with gentlemen and nobles. His obsessions were not historical duels or titles of nobility, as it seemed at first view, but justice. He sensed that Diego shared his concerns, although being so young, he did not as yet know how to articulate them. The master felt that finally his life had a high purpose: to guide this young man to follow in his footsteps, to convert him into a paladin of just causes.
Escalante had taught fencing to hundreds of young caballeros, but none had proved worthy of that distinction. They lacked the burning flame that he immediately recognized in Diego because he himself had it. He did not want to be carried away by his initial enthusiasm; he decided he would get to know this youth better and put him to the test before he shared his secrets with him. He sounded him out during their brief conversations over coffee. Diego, inclined always to be frank and open, told him, among other things, about his childhood in California, the escapade of the bear with the hat, the pirates’ attack and Bernardo’s muteness, and the day the soldiers burned the Indians’ village. His voice trembled as he remembered how they had hanged the tribe’s ancient chieftain, beat the men, and taken them off to work for the whites.
On one of his courtesy visits to Eulalia de Callis’s palace, Diego ran into Rafael Moncada. He called on Her Excellency from time to time, more the result of his parents’ requests than his own initiative. Her mansion was on Calle Eulalia, and at first Diego believed that the street had been named for his family’s old friend. It was a year before he found out that the mythic Eulalia was the favorite saint of Catalonia, a virgin martyr whose torturers, according to legend, cut off her breasts and made her roll in a tunnel of slivers of glass before they crucified her. The mansion of the former governor of California’s wife, one of the city’s architectural jewels, was decorated inside with an excess that shocked the sober Catalans, for whom ostentation was an inarguable sign of bad taste. Eulalia had
lived in Mexico for a long time and had been infected with that country’s taste for the baroque. In her personal retinue were several hundred people whose livelihood came primarily from chocolate. Before he died of apoplexy in Mexico, Dona Eulalia’s husband had set up an operation in the Antilles to supply the chocolate shops of Spain, and the family fortune ballooned. Eulalia’s titles were neither very old nor very impressive, but her money more than compensated for what she lacked in bloodlines. While the nobility were losing their income, privileges, lands, and sinecures, Eulalia was growing increasingly wealthy thanks to the aromatic river of chocolate flowing from America directly into her coffers. In other times the most aristocratic nobles, those who could prove that their blue blood dated from before
1400, had sneered at Eulalia, who belonged to the self-made peerage, but these were not times to quibble. What counted now, more than ancestors, was money, and she had plenty of that. Other landowners complained that their campesinos refused to pay taxes and rents, but she did not have that problem she entrusted a carefully selected group of thugs with collections. Another factor in her favor was that most of her income came from outside the country. Eulalia had become one of the most recognizable citizens of the city. She made a grand entrance wherever she went, including church, with several carriage loads of servants and dogs, her retainers outfitted in sky-blue livery and plumed hats that she herself, finding her inspiration at the opera, had designed. Over the years she had gained weight and lost originality, and she was now a gluttonous matriarch robed in eternal black mourning and surrounded by priests, pious old women, and Chihuahua dogs, horrid little beasts that looked like skinned rats and relieved themselves on the draperies. She was completely divorced from the fine passions that had tormented her during her resplendent youth, when she colored her hair red and luxuriated in milk baths. Now her interests had dwindled to defending her lineage, selling chocolate, ensuring a place in paradise after she died, and working every way she could to obtain the return of Fernando VII to the throne of Spain. She loathed the liberal reforms.
Because of his father’s orders, and in gratitude for how well Her Excellency had treated his mother Regina, Diego de la Vega tried to visit Eulalia on a regular basis, even though that obligation seemed like a major sacrifice. He had nothing to say to the widow, except for three or four formulas of courtesy, and he never knew in what order to use the forks and spoons at his place at table. He knew that Eulalia de Califs strongly disliked Tomas de Romeu, for two reasons: first, because he admired all things French, and second, because he was the father of Juliana, with whom, to her chagrin, Rafael Moncada, her favorite nephew and principal heir, was in love. Eulalia had seen Juliana at mass and had to admit that she was far from ugly, but she had much more ambitious plans for her nephew. She was discreetly negotiating an alliance with one of the daughters of the duke of Medinacelli. The desire to prevent Rafael from marrying Juliana was the one thing she and Diego had in common.
On Diego’s fourth visit to Dona Eulalia’s palace, several months after the incident of the serenade beneath Juliana’s window, he had occasion to get to know Rafael Moncada better. He had come across him several times at social and sporting events, but except for nodding to him in greeting had had no further relations. Moncada thought that Diego was a humdrum young fellow. Except that he lived beneath the same roof as Juliana de Romeu, nothing else made him stand out from the design of the carpet. That night Diego was surprised to find that Dona Eulalia’s palace was extravagantly lighted, and dozens of carriages were lined up in the courtyards. Until then, she had invited him only to gatherings of artists and to one intimate dinner, during which she questioned him about Regina. Diego thought she was ashamed of him, not so much because he came from the colonies as because he was a mestizo. Eulalia had treated his mother very well in California, even though Regina was more Indian than white, but after living a while in Spain, she had been infected with the scorn the Spanish felt for the people of the New World. The widely held opinion was that because of the climate and contact with Indians, criollos the Spanish born there had a natural predisposition toward barbarism and perversion. Before introducing Diego to her select friends, Eulalia wanted to have a very good sense of who he was, so she ran a few trials to be sure that he looked white, dressed well, and had passable manners.
That night Diego was shown to a splendid salon where the cream of Catalan nobility was gathered, presided over by the matriarch dressed, as always, in black velvet as a sign of her unrelieved mourning for Pedro Fages, but dripping with diamonds, and seated in a huge chair with a bishop’s canopy. Other widows buried themselves in life beneath a dark veil that covered them from the combs in their hair to their elbows, but not Dona Eulalia. Her jewels were displayed on the opulent bosom of a well-fed hen, her decolletage revealing the beginnings of enormous breasts as smooth and round as summertime melons. Diego could not tear his eyes away, dizzied by the glitter of the diamonds and the abundance of flesh. Her Excellency offered a plump hand, which he kissed as required; she asked about his parents and without waiting for the answer waved him away.
In the adjoining salons, most of the gentlemen discussed politics and business, while young couples, overseen by the mothers of the young ladies, danced to the strains of an orchestra. There were gaming tables in one of the rooms, gambling being the most popular entertainment in European courts, where there was no other way to combat tedium, aside from intrigue, hunting, and brief affairs.
Fortunes were bet, and professional players traveled from one grand home to another to fleece the idle nobles, who, if they could find no players of their own class to lose money to, enriched unsavory characters in gambling dens and dives. And there were hundreds of those in Barcelona. At one of the tables Diego saw Rafael Moncada playing blackjack with a group of caballeros, one of whom was Count Orloff. Diego recognized him immediately by his magnificent bearing and those blue eyes that had inflamed the imagination of so many women during his visit to Los Angeles, but he did not expect the Russian nobleman to recognize him. He had seen him only once, when he was a boy. “De la Vega!” Orloff called out, getting to his feet and embracing him enthusiastically. Surprised, Rafael Moncada looked up from his cards and for the first time truly registered the fact that Diego existed. He looked him over from head to foot as the handsome count recounted to one and all how this young man had captured several bears when he was barely a pup. This time Alejandro de la Vega was not present to correct the count’s epic version of events. The men applauded amiably and turned back to their cards. Diego stationed himself near the table to observe the particulars of the game, not daring, though the men were only mediocre players, to ask whether he could join in because he did not have the funds to match their bets.
His father sent him money regularly, but he was not generous: he believed that privation shaped character. After only five minutes, Diego realized that Rafael Moncada was cheating, as he knew perfectly well how to do that himself. In another five he decided that although he could not show Moncada up without causing a scandal that Dona Eulalia would never forgive, he could at least put a spoke in his wheels. The temptation to humiliate his rival was irresistible. He planted himself beside Moncada and watched him so insistently that the man became uncomfortable.
“Why don’t you go dance with the pretty young things in the other room?” asked Moncada, making no attempt to veil his insolence.
“Because, caballero, I am intensely interested in your very peculiar style of playing. I have no doubt that I can learn a great deal from you,” Diego replied, smiling with equal insolence.
Count Orloff immediately caught the intent of those words, and nailing Moncada with his gaze, he let him know, in a tone as icy as the steppes of his country, that his luck with cards was truly miraculous. Rafael Moncada did not answer, but from that moment he was unable to pull any tricks, since the other players were watching him with conspicuous attention. For an hour Diego did not move from Moncada’s side but stood looking over hi
s shoulder until the game was over. Count Orloff saluted, clicking his heels together, and retired with a small fortune in his purse, prepared to spend the rest of the night dancing, well aware that not a single woman at the party had failed to take notice of his elegant bearing, his sapphire eyes, and his spectacular imperial uniform.
It was one of those leaden Barcelona nights, cold and damp. Bernardo was waiting for Diego in the courtyard, sharing his wineskin and hard cheese with Juanillo, one of the many lackeys attending the carriages.
The two had been keeping warm by dancing on the brick paving. Juanillo, an irrepressible talker, had finally found a person who would listen without interrupting him. He identified himself as the servant of Rafael Moncada something Bernardo already knew, the reason in fact that he had approached him and launched into an endless story filled with gossip, the details of which Bernardo classified and stored in his memory. He had proved before that any information, even the most trivial, could at some point become useful. He was still talking when Rafael Moncada, in a foul humor, came out and called for his carriage.
“I have forbidden you to speak with the other servants!” he spit at Juanillo.
“He’s just an Indian from the Americas, Excellency, the servant of Don Diego de la Vega.”