Take twelve cuckolds or, rather, players—
For they hardly differ as one may gauge—
Add half a dozen ladies of the stage,
And you’ll have the six half-wives of the
aforesaid players.
The captain, fairly embarrassed by the whole affair, was about to make his excuses and continue on his way, when the wife very sweetly thanked him for his intervention, although it was impossible to know whether she did so in order to provoke her pursuer or simply because she enjoyed that subtle and dangerous game in which women so often engage. Then she looked him up and down and invited him to visit her at the Corral de la Cruz, where they were giving the final performances of a play by Rojas Zorrilla. She was smiling broadly as she said this, showing off the perfect oval of her face and her equally perfect white teeth, which Luis de Góngora—don Francisco de Quevedo’s mortal enemy—would doubtless have compared to mother-of-pearl or tiny seed pearls. Alatriste, an old hand in these and other such situations, saw in that look some kind of promise.
And two months later, there he was in the dressing rooms of the Corral de la Cruz, having enjoyed the fruits of that promise several times—Cózar’s sword not having reappeared—and more than ready to continue doing so. Meanwhile, don Gonzalo Moscatel, whom he had met on subsequent occasions with no further consequences, continued to shoot him fierce, jealous looks. María de Castro was not a woman to keep just one iron in the fire, and she continued worming money out of Moscatel, flirting shamelessly with him, but never allowing things to go any further than that—every meeting at the Gate of Guadala jara cost the butcher a fortune in jewels and fine cloths—and she used Alatriste, whom the other man knew all too well by reputation, to keep him at bay. Thus, ever hopeful, and ever starved, the butcher obstinately persisted, refusing to give up his chance of bliss. He was encouraged in this, too, by La Castro’s husband, who, as well as being a great actor was also an out-and-out scoundrel, and, as he had with other such admirers, continued to use vague promises to squeeze Moscatel’s purse dry. Alatriste knew, of course, that—Moscatel apart—he was not the only man to enjoy the actress’s favors. Other men visited her, and it was said that even the Count of Guadalmedina and the Duke of Sessa had exchanged more than words with her; as don Francisco de Quevedo put it, she was a woman who charged a thousand ducats a stumble. The captain could not compete with either man in rank or money; he was simply a veteran soldier who earned a living as a paid swordsman. Yet, for some reason that escaped him—women’s souls had always seemed to him unfathomable—María de Castro granted him gratis what she denied outright to others or for which she charged her weight in gold:
An important point, pray listen to me:
With moneyed Moors she asks a lot,
With Christians she does it for free.
Diego Alatriste drew aside the curtain. He was not in love with that woman, nor with any other, but María de Castro was the most beautiful actress of her day, and he enjoyed the rare privilege of occasionally having her all to himself. No one was going to offer him a kiss like the one she was now placing on his lips, when, later, a span of steel, a bullet, disease, or time itself would set him sleeping forever in his grave.
2. THE HOUSE IN CALLE FRANCOS
The following morning, we, or, rather, Captain Alatriste, came under a hail of harquebus fire from Caridad la Lebrijana, upstairs in the Inn of the Turk, while we, downstairs, heard only their voices. Or, rather, her voice, because she was the one who spent the most powder. The matter under discussion was, naturally enough, my master’s fondness for the theater, and the name of María de Castro was uttered several times, attached on each occasion to a different epithet—“strumpet,” “trollop,” and “trull” being some of the milder ones—which was quite something coming, as it did, from La Lebrijana. After all, although she was, by then, almost forty years of age and still preserved the dark charms of her youth, she herself had worked unashamedly as a prostitute for several years before setting herself up with the money earned through her labors as the honest owner of that tavern situated between Calle de Toledo and Calle del Arcabuz. The captain had made her no promises or proposals of any kind, but on our return from Flanders and Seville, he had once again installed himself and me, as before, in the rooms above the inn; that winter, moreover, she had warmed his feet and other parts in her own bed. This was hardly surprising, for, as everyone knew, she was still madly in love with the captain, and had even waited for him chastely while he was in Flanders; for there is no more virtuous and faithful woman than one who leaves the profession in good time—be it via the nunnery or the cooking pot—before she ends up covered in buboes and left to die in Atocha Hospital. Unlike many married women who are honest because they have to be, but who dream of being otherwise, women who have walked the streets know what they are leaving behind, and how much they gain by that loss. La Lebrijana, as well as being exemplary, loving, still alluring, and voluptuous, was also, alas, a woman of spirit, and my master’s dalliance with the actress was more than she could bear.
I have no idea what my master said on that occasion, if, of course, he said anything. Knowing my master, I feel sure that he simply stood firm under fire, without breaking ranks or opening his mouth, very much in the manner of an old soldier waiting for the rain to clear up. By God, though, it took a long time; indeed, the battle at Ruyter Mill and at Terheyden put together were small beer compared to that quarrel, during which I heard turns of phrase one wouldn’t even use against the Turks. When La Lebrijana resorted to throwing things—the sound of shattering crockery reached us down below—the captain picked up sword, hat, and cape and went out to take the air. I was sitting at the table next to the door, where I sat every morning, making the most of the good light there to study don Antonio Gil’s Latin grammar, an invaluable book loaned to me by my teacher Pérez—an old friend of the captain’s and mine—in order to further my education, which had been much neglected in Flanders. At sixteen, I was determined to pursue the profession of soldier, but both Captain Alatriste and don Francisco de Quevedo were most insistent that having a little Latin and Greek, a neat hand, and a knowledge of good literature would take any reasonably intelligent man to places that the sword never would, especially in a Spain where judges, functionaries, scribes, and countless other rapacious crows were always bombarding the poor and the uneducated—which was almost everyone—with mountains of paperwork, the more easily to strip and plunder them. Anyway, as I was saying, there I was, copying out Miles, quem dux laudat, Hispanus est, while Damiana, the serving wench at the inn, was scrubbing the floor, and the usual customers at that time of day, the Licentiate Calzas, fresh from the Plaza de la Provincia, and the former sergeant of horse, Juan Vicuña, maimed in Nieuwpoort, were playing ombre with the apothecary Fadrique, the spoils being a few rashers of bacon and a large pitcher of Arganda wine. It had just struck a quarter past eleven on the clock of the Jesuit church opposite when a door slammed up above; we heard the captain’s footsteps on the stairs, and the old comrades exchanged glances and shook their heads disapprovingly before returning to their cards. Juan Vicuña declared the suit, the apothecary put down the ace of spades, and Calzas trumped it. At this point, I got to my feet, covered up my inkwell, and closed my book; then, picking up my cap, dagger, and cape, I gingerly tiptoed out so as not to dirty the newly scrubbed floor, and set off after my master through the door that gave onto the Calle del Arcabuz.
We walked past the fountain at Relatores to Plaza de Antón Martín, and, as if to prove La Lebrijana right—for I was following the captain with a heavy heart—we then walked up to the mentidero, a place where people gathered to meet and talk. This was one of the three most famous mentideros in Madrid; the other two were to be found on the steps of San Felipe and in the courtyard outside the palace. The one that concerns us, however, was in the quarter inhabited by writers and actors, in a cobbled square where the streets of León, Cantarranas, and Francos meet. Nearby was a reasonable boardinghouse
, a baker’s, a cake shop, as well as a few good inns and eating houses. Each morning, the little world of the theater congregated there—writers, poets, actors, and owners, as well as the usual idlers and others who came merely to catch a glimpse of a famous face: one of the handsome young men from the stage perhaps, or an actress out for a stroll with a basket over her arm and accompanied by her maid or indulging herself at the cake shop once she had heard mass at San Sebastián and given alms at Nuestra Señora de la Novena. The actors’ mentidero was justly famous, for in the great theater of the world that was Madrid, the capital of all the Spains, the place was like a gazette full of tittle-tattle. People stood around in groups discussing a play that had already been performed or was about to written; jokes did the rounds, either spoken or scribbled on scraps of paper; people’s honor and reputations were destroyed in less time that it takes to say credo; the more famous poets strolled up and down with their friends and admirers; and starving young men longed to be able to emulate those who occupied that glorious Parnassus and who defended it as fiercely as if it were a bulwark besieged by heretics. The truth is that never in the world was there such a concentration of talent and fame. I need mention only a few of the illustrious names who lived within two hundred paces: Lope de Vega in Calle de Francos and don Francisco de Quevedo in Calle del Niño, the same street in which don Luis de Góngora had also lived until his sworn enemy Quevedo bought the house from under him and put the swan of Córdoba out in the street. Tirso de Molina lived there, too, as did the brilliant Mexican Ruiz de Alarcón. “The little hunchback,” as Quevedo dubbed the last-named, was removed from the stage by his own cantankerousness and by other people’s loathing when his enemies wrecked his play The Antichrist by breaking a flask of some foul-smelling liquid right in the middle of the performance. Good don Miguel de Cervantes had lived and died near Lope’s house, in Calle del León, on the corner of Calle de Francos, just opposite the Castillo bakery; and between Huertas and Atocha stood the printer’s where Juan de la Cuesta had produced the first edition of Don Quixote. And then there was the church, Las Trinitarias, in which lay Cervantes’s remains, and where Lope de Vega used to say mass, and amongst whose community of nuns lived a daughter of Lope’s and a daughter of Cervantes’s. And since “Spaniard” and “ingratitude” are two concepts that always go hand in hand, I should also point out that nearby was the hospital where the great Valencian poet and captain Guillén de Castro, author of The Youth of El Cid, would die five years later, so poor that he was buried in a pauper’s grave. And speaking of poverty, I will just remind you that that most honest of men, unhappy don Miguel de Cervantes—whose modest wish to be sent to the Indies, citing the fact that he had lost an arm in the Battle of Lepanto and been a slave in Algeria, was refused—had died ten years before the events I am now relating, in the sixteenth year of the century, penniless and abandoned by almost everyone he knew. Alone and without ceremony, he was borne to his grave in Las Trinitarias along those same streets—with no public report of his exequies—and then promptly forgotten by his contemporaries. Only much later, when other countries were already eagerly devouring and reprinting translations of his novel Don Quixote, did we wretched Spaniards begin to lay claim to him, a fate which, with very few exceptions, we have always meted out to our finest sons.
We found don Francisco de Quevedo polishing off a pasty as he sat outside a cheap restaurant called El León, which was next to the tobacconist’s, where Calle Cantarranas and the mentidero meet. He called for another pitcher of Valdeiglesias, two mugs, and two more pasties, while we drew up a couple of stools and joined him at his table. He was, as usual, dressed entirely in black, apart from the red cross of Santiago embroidered on his tunic; his neatly folded cloak lay on the bench beside him, along with his sword. He had come from an early appointment at the palace, where he was trying to resolve the seemingly interminable wrangle over who owned the fiefdom of Torre de Juan Abad, and was taking the edge off his appetite before returning home to correct the new edition of his book, God’s Politics, Christ’s Government, on which he was engaged at the time in an effort to stave off criticism from the Inquisition. Our presence, he said, suited him perfectly, as a way of keeping away undesirables; for now that his star was on the rise at court—he had, as I mentioned earlier, formed part of the royal entourage on the recent journey to Aragon and Catalonia—he was constantly being pestered by people hoping for some kind of favor.
“What’s more,” he said, “I’ve been asked to write a play to be performed at El Escorial at the end of the month. His Catholic Majesty will be there on a hunting trip and requires some form of entertainment.”
“Plays are not exactly your specialty,” remarked Alatriste.
“Hell’s teeth, if even poor old Cervantes could have a go at playwrighting, I reckon I can, too. Besides, it was the count-duke himself who asked me. So from now on, you may consider plays to be my specialty.”
“And is he actually going to pay you, or will he, as usual, set it against future favors?”
Quevedo gave a wry laugh.
“As to the future, I have no idea,” he said with a stoical sigh. “Yesterday is gone, the morrow has not yet come . . . But for the present, it’s six hundred reales, or will be. At least that’s what Olivares has promised me. As the poet says:
Ah, see what I have stooped to,
Obliged by his high station,
I to my painful duty,
While he cries inflation.
“We’ll see,” he went on. “The count-duke wants a play full of intrigue, which, as you know, is the kind of play the king likes best. And so, I’ll lock up Aristotle and Horace, Seneca and even Terence, and then, as Lope says, I’ll write a few hundred lines in the vulgar tongue, just foolish enough to please him.”
“Have you thought of a plot yet?”
“Of course. Love affairs, secret meetings, misunderstandings, sword fights . . . the usual thing. I’ll call it The Sword and the Dagger.” Quevedo gave the captain a seemingly casual glance over his mug of wine. “And they want Cózar to put it on.”
At that moment, there was a scuffle on the corner of Calle Francos. People rushed over to see what was happening, and we, too, looked in that direction. Afterward, various people walked past us, commenting on the incident: a lackey of the Marquis de las Navas had apparently knifed a coachman because he had declined to give way to him. The murderer had taken refuge in the church of San Sebastián, and the coachman, on the point of death, had been carried into a nearby house.