A Woman of Seville (15 page)

But I wish he’d survived the sword-thrusts of angels and was returning frozen yet replenished. Or even unreplenished. I’d take him back in any condition or shape. As I watch the slow trickle of unfamiliar ladder-men, I’ve almost given up hope when I see someone who makes my heart skip. It is someone I am close to, but oddly, I can’t remember who he is. Then I realise it’s Enrique Rastro, but he isn’t forty years old anymore. He is very young, about twenty-five. I begin to wander along the wet track, just behind him, trying to get a better look but not wanting to seem rude. He notices me after a while and stops.

‘Enrique?’

‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ His voice is Enrique’s, though not as world-weary as I remember.

‘You look so young.’

Enrique shrugs and keeps walking slowly. He is surely in some pain.

I run after him and clutch hold of his arm, ‘Enrique! It’s me Paula.’

He turns halfway round and says sorry, politely, but shakes his arm a little to release my hold. My hand has stuck to his sleeve through the contact of ice. Not until the ice breaks does my hand drop away. It is a little awkward hanging on to him when he doesn’t want me to.

It is plainly obvious that this Enrique look-alike doesn’t know who I am. What a rebuff. Nor is he affected by the spell of my beauty, like the older Enrique was. It can’t be Enrique. Unless it is 1600 again and everything has been cast back, as happens in dreams or at the theatre.

We’re standing looking at each other and I say, ‘What was it like up there?’

‘Apart from the blue angels, pretty boring.’

‘Did you meet someone called Aurelio by any chance?’

He forces a tolerant smile. ‘Look. I don’t think I know you, but thank you for your interest.’

He has no memory of me and he isn’t pretending. It must be Enrique though, turned back in time. This might explain why he doesn’t know me. Because we haven’t met yet. It still has to happen in the future.

A couple more ladder-men are trudging down the path, returning from their exploits in the sky, and I turn back to see if Aurelio is among them. I get caught up in the crush of a family reunion. By the time I remember Enrique again he is tiny in the distance. I have some of his icy wetness still on my hand and I put my fingers in my mouth and suck on them. Sugar crystals, for sure.

There’s a chance, one in a million, that Aurelio may still return. I’m prepared to face reality though, so I ready myself for departure. Before I leave the campsite I decide to throw our two ladders on the bonfire. I don’t want to have to lug them home and I’d have to sneak them into Seville if I did. Ladders are out of favour, along with their owners, and you need a costly licence to carry one around. I throw both on the fire and hear the nails pop like firecrackers, but I keep the bells, tying them together with the handkerchiefs and hanging them round my neck. I join the depleted caravan returning to Seville and, as I walk, I jangle like a cow, which keeps the predators from my side during the day and away from my tent at night.

When I’m back in Triana I find a note to me in Aurelio’s bundle of belongings. It says, ‘Don’t forget that ladder-men don’t always come back looking the same.’ And on the other side of the parchment, ‘Why don’t I like to touch earth? They buried me in soil to make me confess.’

But he never told me about his tongue. And I never confessed to knowing. He wouldn’t want me to think he’d been degraded and mutilated like that.

The young Enrique continued to plague my thoughts. Had Father Rastro gone up the great ladder instead of going to Castile? Had the encounter with angels and ice made him look so young? No, it couldn’t have been he who I met. Enrique’s not a ladder-man; he couldn’t join the guild and he wouldn’t be driven to climb up there.

There are great ladders in other places apparently. (Bartolomé, a member of our caravan who made it back down safely, told me.) Sometimes people go down the wrong ladders on their return journey. There was a frozen Chinaman who came down the track in Andalucía. He didn’t know where he was and we tried to help him out. Some of our men may have got lost in the sky above and gone down a ladder to Russia or China. There’s a chance Aurelio went down the wrong ladder. Some men turn up a year or more later having found their way home, like lost cats.

Back in Seville a letter arrives from Rome. I open it in expectation, but am quickly disappointed. It’s only from Bishop Rizi. I attempt to read it to myself. My benefactor says he’s given up on me. He has returned to Rome, his birthplace. I’ve resisted his advances one time too many.
So be it. The house stays mine, but with no income flowing in, I shall have to give up Violeta and do more artist modelling.

The next day I visit Harmen who hadn’t even realised I’d gone away. Is Father Rastro
really
in Castile as I’ve been told? Harmen says he knows from Doña Fillide, whom he is to wed next week, that Father Rastro is currently residing in his birthplace of Toledo. Rastro’s mother died last month, Harmen explains, and he had to leave in a great hurry to attend her funeral. (So I only got told a piece of the story in the convento!)

I’m left to my own devices. Abandoned (once again) by the important men in my life. Harmen, whom I’ve been able to call my friend, soon to be married. Enrique, my spiritual advisor—whom I admit to loving—mourning his mother up north. Rizi, my benefactor, gone for good. Aurelio, my teacher in the art of loving, still missing, believed to have expired in a cloud.

I don’t feel like getting any replacements. I sit on my balcony and watch for Aurelio as I used to do in the evenings before the ladder-man plague began.

‘Have you seen the ladder-man?’ I ask the only neighbours I’ve got to know, the ones whom I used to chat with while they were bird-watching.

‘Long gone now. But climb over for a coffee, dear.’

Sometimes I do. And keep up my search. Scan the roofs for his hairpin shape. Nothing much stirs on the balconies these days. The cats and birds are noisier. Wilder for feed than before. Like me, they miss our ephemeral friend.

‘He was just a phantom, wasn’t he?’ I lament.

‘And what if he was?’ console my neighbours. ‘He was a quiet one, but diligent; we liked him as much as you did.’

‘You did? That’s nice,’ I say, leaning forwards and hugging my knees hard against my chest, taking physical comfort in their pressure. Why aren’t I sad? Why haven’t I cried? I still don’t know. But something’s going to happen, I feel sure. Orange copper flowing through my veins; hayloft chatter of leaves in my head. Love is a flame that continues to burn, within if not without.

As recounted by Diego Velázquez nearing the end of the year of our Lord, 1616

Brazenly and even carrying some of their belongings with them, the Morisco boys walked out of the front gate in broad daylight, telling the guard of the Holy Brotherhood they were on a mission for Father Lopez. The friars were busy organising a Saint’s Day procession, so the Moriscos’ absence wasn’t noticed until evening. But the boys were only two miles from Seville when Camilo changed his mind about the adventure. He slouched back home with his friends’ accusations of ‘coward’ and ‘turncoat’ sticking
in his back. Mercedarian scouts were sent out, and the others were caught napping before dawn of the next day.

The second time, the boys escaped by hiding in a milk dray while the driver of the cart was chatting to one of the seminary cooks. It was still dark when the dray left the convento grounds. As it slowed to turn a corner, the boys jumped out and ran down a side alley. They were caught two days later, trying to sell a Mercedarian icon to a priest standing in the patio of a church in San Gil.

The third time, the boys concocted a more cunning plan. It was All Saints’ Day and they begged to be allowed to join the procession. They marched alongside cardboard giants, tar-faced demons and flagellating mystics. They sang their hearts out, not knowing whether they would get a chance to bolt or not. Luck came to their aid. A fight broke out between two cutlass-wielding spectators, the boys signalled to each other and broke from formation, running away in five different directions. Father Lopez was spinning around like a weather vane trying to keep track of the five. Camilo was able to tell the Moriscos this amusing fact much later, because he didn’t run away with the others. Luis, Telmo, Arauz, Benito and Remi met up again on the docks as planned, having evaded detection so far. Little fools, they applied for work on the galleys, intending to earn their passage to Tunis. While they were
being weighed and measured, they were intercepted by a burly customs official.

‘Kid, I recognised you straight away,’ the official scolded Luis, and the boys were roped together and led back to captivity.

‘I’m going to die of shame,’ Luis told his friends.

‘Don’t worry. Selling images of yourself is only an offence in Muhammadan lands,’ comforted Telmo.

The sketches I made of Luis two years ago had been put to good use by the ecclesiastical sheriffs. Luis’s face had been copied again and again and distributed to checkpoints around the town. The authorities were all familiar with the sweet round face of the biggest Morisco. News of the boys’ capture spread from the convento to the Court of Elms. While Sevillians generally have no liking for Moriscos, the fact that the escapees were so young elicited sympathy for their cause.

Back on Mercedarian land, acting leader Lopez was getting flustered. Victor María, still residing in the convento, was instructed to paint a group portrait of the Moriscos. This portrait would be copied and circulated around town. Victor María told Harmen Weddesteeg that he was going to do the portrait a professional injustice.

‘They look nothing like the real boys!’ Father Lopez exclaimed on seeing the near-finished portrait, and
Victor María, stalling for time, apologised for his lousy rendering.

‘I’m a novice painter, but I’ll keep on trying.’

Father Lopez wanted an accomplished painter to be brought in to do the job, and there was even some talk of it being me (can you believe it?) though no-one actually approached me on the matter. The boys were warned they’d have to make their next move fast.

They scaled a convento wall on a moonless night, separated into two groups and left Seville on foot. Luis and Benito were beaten up by bandits a few miles from town. They were left bleeding on the road. Two Christians on horseback rode by and carried them to a nearby Loreto convent, where the boys met up with two Morisco girls, one of them who turned out to be Benito’s twin sister. A happy reunion ensued, but the Loreto nuns had no qualms about returning the missing boys to the priests. They sent a messenger to Father Lopez with news of the boys’ interception.

Remi and the Cordoban brothers were at large for a longer time, but Arauz had injured his ankle springing down from the high convento wall. As a consequence the three of them were forced to find a place of rest not far from town. The boys accepted work in the apple orchards, hoping to make a little money and live on
apples, but they were not far enough from Seville to evade detection. After ten days, they too ended up back in the convento, disappointed, but not dejected. Camilo, who had stayed behind each time after the first, let out war-whoops of delight when he saw his friends enter the cloister courtyard. Later on, reunited in the dormitory, Camilo hugged each of them for a long time.

‘You didn’t make it!’

Luis ruffled his hair and told him they intended to try once more.

‘Do you like my new glasses?’ Camilo asked.

Luis and Benito both tried the pair of glasses on. They claimed they couldn’t see a thing and the lenses hurt their eyes.

After the fourth failed attempt, the younger boys decided that they had sound reasons to stay in the convento, in particular four meals a day and soft beds to sleep in at night, but the olders boys, Luis and Telmo, were still intent on leaving.

I wasn’t privy to any of their escape attempts. I learned about the boys’ misadventures from reading the broadsheets, listening to gossip and then, much later, the full story with all the details from Luis de Pareja himself.

It was on one of my afternoon strolls about the town that I recognised his picture nailed to the walls of the
Arenal. The picture on display was a copy of my drawing of Luis laughing, the one I did nearly two years ago. Why the authorities chose this drawing to rein the boys in I don’t know, but I assumed it was because they thought it was the closest likeness.

I remember making Luis laugh that afternoon in Pacheco’s studio when he was disinclined to do so, and now Luis is being referred to in the broadsheets as ‘the laughing Morisco’, as though this is true to his nature, to laugh at life, to laugh in the face of adversity, to laugh as he boards the galleys to row his way to freedom, as though he’s enjoying every moment of his wing-clipped existence.

A day or two after hearing about the Morisco boys’ injuries, I ran into Paula Sánchez in San Vicente Square.

‘Paula!’

‘Diego Velázquez, how fortunate!’

We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of months.

Paula started to explain why she hadn’t been able to help Luis, as I’d asked her to do, on that sweltering afternoon when I was possessed by a desire to pass by her home.

‘Enrique Rastro has been in Toledo for some time,’ Paula said. ‘When Father Lopez took charge, he immediately put an end to my visits.’

She didn’t need to explain; I knew Father Rastro had been up north and I didn’t blame her for anything. The
Inquisition guards, she continued in her defence, came to her house last time the boys escaped. They searched inside. They were rough brutes, she said, in disgust. They ripped up her carpets. They pierced her mattress with their swords. When her black slave protested, they knocked her against a wall and laughed when she cried.

Paula’s heard that the Morisco boys have been apprehended a fourth time. Did I know anything about their current situation?

I didn’t mention the boys’ alleged injuries. I didn’t want to alarm her. I volunteered to visit the boys and find out how they were faring. Paula brightened on hearing this. And could I give them some money from her, clandestinely? Yes, I was surprised to hear myself say, I will do that, if I can.

She made me promise, she handed the money over, a generous amount, so I guess I’ll have to.

‘And if Enrique Rastro has come back,’ Paula stammered.

‘Shall I tell him something, if he’s back?’

‘No, no. Please don’t mention me. Just let me know later, if he has returned.’

I put two and two together.

‘Is it good for you, if he’s back?’ I inquired.

Paula shook her head. ‘Not for me it isn’t. At least, not if he’s been back for a while.’

I nodded understandingly. I’ve guessed correctly, but more importantly, Paula has let me share in her secret. I’ve got this thing about people not trusting me, so it means a lot that this exceptional woman does.

I arrive at the convento with the money from Paula and a gift that Juana Pacheco has made at my request—a parcel of sugared egg whites, a confection popular among children. It seems from what I can infer at the gate that Father Rastro is still away in the north.

Father Lopez is accommodating, but he will only grant me access to Luis.

‘Why do you want to see the others?’

At the last moment he changes his mind and allows Benito to come along too.

‘They’re not to be treated as celebrities,’ Father Lopez quibbles as the boys enter the room. ‘Don’t put more ideas into their heads than they already have.’

Straight away Luis unbuttons his cassock to show me his injuries. Obviously he thinks this is what I’ve come to see. Others have done so apparently.

‘These are knife wounds!’ I’m squatting down and fingering the abrasions on his legs and back. Only when he has had his full of my sympathy does he let me turn my attention to Benito who is more of a fright. He has scabs on
his face, and his hair has been shaved to tend a nasty wound. His shaved head makes him look a bit like an old man.

‘So you copped it too?’ I say, stating the obvious, trying hard not to smile.

Benito nods and proudly rubs his hand over his shorn head. Then the two boys, as though on cue, perform little actions and acrobatics in front of me, to explain what happened. Benito echoes everything Luis says, so the story goes like this:

‘One of them has Benito on the ground and is knocking his head against the flagstones,’ Luis begins.

‘Yes, he’s knocking my head against the flagstones.’ ‘And I get the bastard in the kidneys,’ says Luis.

‘Harun Luis kicks him in the kidneys.’

‘The bastard squeals and rolls over like he’s going to die.’

‘Yes, like he’s going to die,’ says Benito, acting out the torment of the villain with much enthusiasm.

‘And I whack him in the eyes with my bag.’

‘You sock me,
him
I mean, with your bag, just like that.’

‘The other lashes me with his knife,’ Luis says, as Benito rises from his prostration and pulls a chimerical dagger out of his clothing.

‘And blood spurts everywhere,’ Benito finishes off by
lunging at Luis’s back and legs and thrusting, thrusting, thrusting countless times and surely killing his victim if this were real life.

‘Red, red gouge,’ Benito inveighs slowly and solemnly, turning to me and bringing the performance to a close.

Red, red gouge indeed. The boys have portrayed themselves as courageous, but I wonder what really happened during the assault.

At this point I remember Paula’s gift, and ask if we may go out into the courtyard to eat Juana’s treat. I hold her parcel of sweets up for inspection and Father Lopez takes a peek at the messy meringues and permits us to leave. In the garden Luis makes for an enormous fig tree and when we’re hidden under its low-lying boughs I hand over the confections. Not realising they’re to share with the other Moriscos, Benito and Luis pop them in their mouths in quick succession.

‘Paula Sánchez has asked me to convey her warmest sympathies to Telmo and Arauz,’ I quietly inform the boys.

I pick up a papery brown fig leaf and slip the knuckle bag that’s hiding Paula’s coins beneath it. I shift the big leaf slowly across the grass. ‘And she also gives you,
all of you Moriscos that is
, a gift.’

Luis accepts the fig leaf knowingly and nonchalantly, enfolding crumbly leaf and bag securely in his clothing
without saying a word of thanks. This is probably because he’s still chewing egg whites and also because he couldn’t know how much money is in the bag with the knucklebones.

‘Paula says not to come to her home if you escape again. They searched for you there last time.’

As he’s almost finished munching, Luis manages a reply. ‘The Castle guards are watching from the gallery and roof. The fence is guarded with dogs and they bark if we come close; then the guards yell at us.’

‘Don’t let the guards apprehend you for they will show you no mercy,’ I tell him.

I can’t think of anything encouraging to add, so I fall back on what I’m not supposed to say. ‘Did you know you boys are the talk of the town?’

‘Will anyone be painting us again?’ Luis replies sarcastically, with intended meaning.

He’s referring to Victor María’s doltish efforts with the paintbrush. My response is to laugh and Luis starts laughing too. Laughter as freedom—the freedom to laugh. The Moriscos getting their own back.

Victor María left the convento soon after his botched effort with the group portrait. Now he’s vassalled to Harmen Weddesteeg who’s apparently negotiating a new legal status for the self-exiled monk. There have been all sorts of difficulties because Victor María has no civil
status; he’s someone officially owned by the Church. Marius Rosano, who seems to keep regular counsel with Weddesteeg these days, told me all about it. Marius has been staying with the newlyweds in their country villa. While in Carmona, Marius saw Harmen set up his easel and alter the painting known as
The Penitent Woman
. The place once occupied by the human cavity has been filled by a woman in a grey and pink dress holding open an olive-green fan. Doña Fillide herself! Well, she has the perfect dimensions for it.

After leaving Luis and Benito in the convento, I wander the chilly streets of San Vicente and San Pedro without the usual decisiveness in my gait. I’m a broken compass of sorts. Not sure where to go or what to search for. I’ll seek out Paula Sánchez tomorrow or the next day. Find her in the marketplace, accompanied by her black slave. Tell her the boys are doing well. That they’re joking about their misfortunes.

I pull my hat down over my ears protectively and order some roasted chestnuts from a street vendor. This gives me a chance to stand quietly beside the brazier and attend to a runny nose. These well-intentioned visits to the convento could be my undoing. It’s quite possible the Mercedarians will find out I gave Luis all that money. Pacheco might come to hear of it, and he wouldn’t be impressed.