Forward, Spanish sea-dogs,
In whose veins runs the blood of Goths,
Fill your hands with gold,
With slaves, with treasure,
You’ve earned it, take full measure.
During that conversation in the garden, we spoke about a little of everything. Captain Contreras brought news of various wars, and Lopito described to Diego Alatriste the current situation in the Mediterranean, where my master had once sailed and done battle. Then, inevitably, talk turned to literature. Luis Alberto de Prado read some of his own verse, which, to his great pleasure, drew praise from Quevedo, and Góngora’s name was mentioned again.
“Apparently, the man’s dying,” Contreras told them.
“Good riddance,” said Quevedo tartly, “there’ll be plenty to replace him. Every day, eager for fame, as many overcultivated, turd-mongering poets spring up in Spain as mushrooms in the winter damp.”
Lope smiled from his Olympian heights, amused and tolerant. He could not bear Góngora either, although, paradoxically, he had also always hoped to draw him into his circle, because, deep down, he admired and feared him, so much so that he even wrote these lines:
Bright swan of Betis who so
Sweetly and gravely tuned thy bow.
Góngora—that prebendary-cum-swan—was, however, the kind of man who ate alone and never succumbed to blandishments. At first, he had dreamed of snatching the poetic scepter from Lope, even writing plays, but he failed in that as he did in so many things. For all these reasons, Lope always professed to loathe him, meanwhile mocking his own relative lack of knowledge of the classics—for unlike Góngora and Quevedo, Lope knew no Greek and could barely read Latin—as well as the success of his plays with ordinary people. Of his plays he wrote:
They are ducks who splash in the waters of Castile
Which flow so easily from that vulgar stream
And sweetly flood the lower slopes;
From plain-born Lope expect no high-flown tropes.
Lope, however, rarely stepped into the public arena. He did his best to get along well with everyone, and at that point in his life and his success, he was in no mood to become embroiled in disputes and rivalries. He contented himself instead with gentle, veiled attacks and left the really dirty work to his friends, Quevedo among them, for the latter had no qualms about pouring scorn on Góngora’s culturanista excesses or, indeed, on those of his followers. Góngora could no longer hit back at the fearsome Quevedo, who was a past master when it came to tongue-lashings.
“I read Don Quixote when I was in Sicily,” remarked Captain Contreras. “Not bad at all, I thought.”
“Indeed,” replied Quevedo. “It’s already famous and will, I’m sure, outlive many other works.”
Lope raised a disdainful eyebrow, poured himself more wine, and changed the subject. This is further evidence, as I say, that in that Spain of never-ending envy and back-stabbing, where a place on Parnassus was as sought-after as Inca gold, the pen caused more blood to be shed than the sword; besides, enemies in one’s own profession are always the worst kind. The animosity between Lope and Cervantes—the latter, as I said, had, by then, entered the heaven reserved for just men and was doubtless seated at the right hand of God—had gone on for years and was still alive even after poor don Miguel’s death. The initial friendship between those two giants of Spanish literature quickly turned to hatred when the illustrious one-armed Cervantes, whose plays, like Góngora’s, met with utter failure—“I could,” he wrote, “find no one who wanted them”—fired the first shot, by including in Part One of his novel a caustic comment on Lope’s work, in particular his famous parody of the flocks of sheep. Lope responded with these rough words: “I will say nothing of poets, for this is a good century for them. But there is none so bad as Cervantes and none so foolish as to praise Don Quixote.” At the time, the novel was considered to be a minor art requiring little intellect and fit only to entertain young ladies; the theater brought money, but poetry brought luster and glory. This is why Lope respected Quevedo, feared Góngora, and despised Cervantes:
All honor to Lope, and to you only pain,
For he is the sun and, if angered, will rain.
And as for that trivial Don Quixote of yours,
Its only use is for wiping your arse
Or for wrapping up spices and all things nice,
’Til it finds its just rest in the shit with the mice.
. . . as he wrote in a letter, which, to rub salt in the wound, he sent to his rival without paying the one-real postage. Cervantes would write later: “What bothered me most was having to pay that one real.” And so poor don Miguel was driven out of the theater, ground down by work, poverty, and prison, by a succession of humiliations and by many pointless hours spent waiting in anterooms, quite unaware that immortality was already riding toward him on the back of Rocinante. He, who never sought favors by shamelessly flattering the powerful, as Góngora, Quevedo, and Lope all did, finally accepted the illusion of his own failure, and, as honest as ever, wrote:
I who always strive and strain
To seem to have poetic grace
Though Heaven denies me again and again.
But then, that was the nature of the lost world I am describing to you, when the mere name of Spain made the earth tremble. It was all barbed quarrels, arrogance, ill will, cruelty, and poverty. As the empire on which the sun was setting was gradually crumbling, as we were being erased from the face of the earth by our misfortune and our own vile deeds, there, amongst the rubble and the ruins, lies the mark left by those remarkably talented men who, while they could not justify it, could at least explain that age of greatness and glory. They were the children of their time in the evil that they did—and they did a great deal—but they were also the children of the genius of their time in the brilliant works they wrote—and they wrote so much. No nation has given birth to so many men of genius at any one time, nor have the writers of any one nation recorded as faithfully as they did the tiniest details of their age. Fortunately, they live on in libraries, in the pages of their books, within reach of whoever cares to approach and listen, astonished, to the heroic, terrifying roar of our century and our lives. Only thus is it possible to understand what we were and what we are. And then may the devil take us all.
Lope remained at his house, the secretary Prado left, and the rest of us, including Lopito, finished the evening in Juan Lepre’s tavern, on the corner of Calle del Lobo and Calle de las Huertas, sharing a skin of Lucena wine. The talk grew animated. Captain don Alonso de Contreras, an extremely likable fellow, who enjoyed a good fight and good conversation, recounted tales of his life as a soldier and that of my master, including that business in Naples in the fifteenth year of this century, when, after my master had killed a man in a duel over a woman, it was Captain Contreras himself who helped him to elude justice and return to Spain.
“The lady didn’t escape unscathed, either,” he added, laughing. “Diego left her with a charming scar on her cheek as a souvenir. And by God, the hussy deserved it—and more.”
“Oh, I know many such women who do,” added Quevedo, ever the misogynist.
And on this theme, he regaled us with some lines that he had thought up there and then:
“Fly, thoughts, and tell those eyes
That make my heart so glad:
There’s money to be had.”
I looked at my master, incapable of imagining him slashing a woman’s face with a knife. He, however, remained impassive, elbows on the table, as he stared into his mug of wine. Don Franciso caught my look, cast a sideways glance at Alatriste, and said no more. What other things, I wondered, lay behind those silences. And I shuddered inside, as I always did when I got a glimpse of the captain’s dark inner life. It is never pleasant to grow in years and understanding and thus penetrate into the more hidden recesses of one’s hero’s mind and life, and, as I grew more perceptive with passing time, I saw things in Diego Alatriste that I would have prefe
rred not to see.
“But then, of course,” said Contreras, who had also seen the expression on my face and feared perhaps that he had gone too far, “we were young and spirited. I remember one occasion, in Corfu it was . . .”
And he launched into another story. Along the way, he mentioned the names of various mutual friends, such as Diego, Duke of Estrada, a comrade of my master’s during the disastrous attack on the Kerkennah Islands, where they both nearly lost their lives trying to save that of Álvaro de la Marca, Count of Guadalmedina. The count, of course, had since exchanged his soldierly accoutrements for the post of confidant to Philip IV and, according to Quevedo, now accompanied the king each night on his romantic sorties. Forgetting my earlier gloomy thoughts, I listened to them talk, fascinated by their accounts of galleys and ships being boarded, of slaves and booty. The way Captain Contreras told them, these events took on fabulous proportions: the famous incident when, with the Marquis of Santa Cruz, they set fire to the Berber fleet off La Goleta; the description of idyllic places at the very foot of Mount Vesuvius; the youthful orgies and acts of bravado, when Contreras and my master would spend in a matter of days the money they had earned from pursuing pirates around the Greek islands and the Turkish coast. Between swigs of the wine we were clumsily spilling all over the table, Captain Contreras felt moved to recite some lines written in his honor by Lope de Vega and into which he now introduced my master’s name by way of a tribute:
“Contreras’s valor was fully tested,
And laurels hard won, in the fight for Spain.
Alatriste and he were never bested
During that bloody Turkish campaign.
Even their slightest, most modest feat
(For a blade of steel cannot deceive)
Brought them praise and honor sweet.”
Alatriste still said nothing—his sword hanging from the back of his chair and his hat on the floor on top of his folded cloak—he merely nodded now and then, uttered the occasional monosyllabic comment, and managed a faint, courteous smile whenever Contreras, Quevedo, or Lopito de Vega mentioned his name. I listened and watched, drinking in the words, captivated by every anecdote and every memory, and feeling that I was one of them—and that I had every right to feel so, too. After all, I may have been only sixteen, but I was already a veteran of Flanders and some other rather murkier campaigns; I had both the scars to show for it and reasonable skills as a swordsman. This confirmed me in my intention to join the militia as soon as I could and to win my own laurels so that, one day, as I recounted my exploits at a tavern table, someone might recite a few lines of poetry in my honor, too. I did not know then that my wishes would be more than granted, and that the road I was preparing to take would also lead me to the farther side of glory and of fame. True, I had known war in Flanders, but had done so with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the innocent, for whom the militia is a magnificent spectacle; the true face of war casts a dark shadow over heart and memory. I look back now from this interminable old age in which I seem to be suspended as I write these memoirs and—beneath the murmur of the flags flapping in the wind and the drumroll that marks the quiet passing of the old infantry whose long-drawn-out death I wit- nessed in Breda, Nördlingen, Fuenterrabía, Catalonia, and Rocroi—I find only the faces of ghosts and the lucid, infinite solitude of someone who has known the best and the worst of what that word “Spain” contains. And now, having myself paid the price demanded by life, I know what lay behind the captain’s silences and his abstracted gaze.
The captain bade good night to everyone and set off alone up Calle del Lobo before crossing Carrera de San Jerónimo, wrapped in his cloak and with his hat pulled well down. Night had fallen, it was cold, and Calle de los Peligros was deserted; the only light came from a candle burning in a niche in the wall containing the image of a saint. Halfway along, he felt the need to stop for a moment. “Too much wine,” he said to himself. He chose the darkest corner, drew back his cloak and unbuttoned his breeches. He was standing there in the corner, legs apart, relieving himself, when a bell tolled in the nearby convent of Bernardine nuns. He had plenty of time, he thought. It was half an hour until his rendezvous in a house farther up on the right, beyond Calle de Alcalá, where an old duenna, a seasoned bawd and matchmaker experienced in her profession, would have everything ready—bed, supper, washbowl, water, and towels—for his meeting with María de Castro.
He was buttoning up his breeches when he heard a noise behind him. This was, after all, Calle de los Peligros—the Street of Dangers—and there he was in the dark with his breeches unbuttoned. He really didn’t want to end his days like this. He rapidly adjusted his clothing, all the time glancing over his shoulder, then he folded back his cloak so that his sword was unencumbered. Moving around at night in Madrid meant living in a state of permanent anxiety; anyone who could afford it hired an armed escort to light their way. If, on the other hand, your name was Diego Alatriste, you had the consolation of knowing that you could be just as dangerous, if not more, than whoever you might bump into. It was all a matter of temperament, and his had never been, shall we say, Franciscan.
For the moment, he could see nothing. It was pitch-black night, and the eaves of the houses left the façades and the doorways in deep shadow. Here and there, a domestic candle lit up a blind from within or a half-open shutter door. He stood motionless for a while, watching the corner of Calle de Alcalá like someone studying the slope of a fortification being swept by the fire of enemy harquebuses, then he walked warily on, taking care not to step in the horse dung or other filth that lay stinking in the gutter. He could hear only his own footsteps. Suddenly, where Calle de los Peligros narrowed and the convent wall ended, that sound seemed to find an echo. Still walking, he kept looking to either side, until he noticed a shape to his right that was keeping close to the walls of some tall houses. It might be some perfectly innocent passerby, or someone following him with evil intent; and so he continued on his way, never losing sight of that shape. He walked some twenty or thirty paces, remaining always in the middle of the street, and when the shape passed a lighted window, he saw a man wrapped in a cloak and wearing a broad-brimmed hat. The captain walked on, every sense alert now, and shortly afterward spotted a second shape on the other side of the street. Too many shapes and too little light, he thought. These were either hired killers or robbers. He unclasped his cloak and unsheathed his sword.
Divide and conquer, he was thinking—if, that is, luck was with him. Besides, the early bird catches the worm. And so, wrapping his cloak around his free arm, he made straight for the shape on the right and dealt a blow with his sword before his adversary even had time to make a move. The man slumped to one side with a groan, his cloak and what lay behind it pierced through; then, with his cloak still wrapped about him, his sword unused in its sheath, he withdrew into the shadows of a doorway, moaning and breathing hard. Trusting that the second man would not be carrying a pistol, Alatriste spun round to face him, for he could hear footsteps running toward him down the street. A black cloakless silhouette was approaching, wearing, like his companion, a broad-brimmed ruffian’s hat, and brandishing a sword. Alatriste whirled his cloak around in the air so that it wrapped about that sword, and while the other man was cursing and trying desperately to disentangle his weapon, the captain got in half a dozen short thrusts, dealt almost wildly, blindly. The last one hit home, causing his assailant to fall to the ground. The captain glanced behind him, in case he was in danger of attack from the rear, but the man in the cloak had had enough. Alatriste could see him disappearing down the street. He then picked up his own cloak, which stank from having been trampled in the gutter, put his sword back in its sheath, took out his dagger with his left hand, and, going over to his fallen opponent, held the point to his throat.
“Talk,” he said, “or, by Christ, I’ll kill you.”
The man was breathing hard. He was in a bad way, but still capable of assessing the situation. He smelled of wine recently drunk, and of blood
.
“Go to hell,” he muttered feebly.
Alatriste scrutinized his face as best he could. A thick beard. A single earring glinting in the darkness. The voice of a ruffian. He was clearly a professional killer and, to judge by his words, a cool customer.
“Tell me the name of the person paying you,” Alatriste said, pressing the dagger harder against the man’s throat.
“I’m not saying,” answered the man, “so slit my throat and be done with it.”
“That’s what I was thinking of doing.”
“Fine by me.”
Alatriste smiled beneath his mustache, aware that the other man could not see his face. The wily bastard had guts, and he clearly wasn’t going to get anything out of him. He quickly searched the man’s pockets, but found only a purse, which he kept, and a knife with a good blade, which he discarded.
“So you’re not going to sing, then?” he asked.
“No.”
The captain gave an understanding nod of the head and stood up. Amongst professionals like them, those were the rules of the criminal world. Trying to force the man to talk would be a waste of time, and if a patrol of catchpoles were to appear, he would be hard pushed to come up with an explanation, at that hour of the night and with a dead man lying at his feet. So he had better cut and run. He was just about to put away his dagger and leave, when he thought better of it, and instead, leaning forward again, he slashed the man across the mouth. It made a sound like meat being chopped on a butcher’s board, and this time the man really did fall silent, either because he lost consciousness or because the blade had sliced through his tongue. Just in case. Not that the man had really made much use of it, thought Alatriste, as he moved away. At any rate, if someone did manage to sew the man up and he survived, it would help Alatriste to identify him should they ever meet again in daylight. And even if they didn’t, at least the man—or what remained of him after the wound to his body and that signum crucis—would certainly never forget Calle de los Peligros.