Cervantes Street (13 page)

Who was this philosopher? I wondered.

“Young Miguel, thank your lucky stars you’ve met me. For your own sake, be so good as to favor me with your complete attention. The least I can do to show my gratitude to your noble-hearted father is to teach you everything you need to know to survive in this viper pit. I’ve been here four years, and I’ve seen many men who arrived with me die in this land of pagans and idolaters. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that the early sparrow gets the worm. Tomorrow, as soon as the doors of the bagnio open with the first call to prayer from the mosque—you’ll recognize the call because it sounds like a man who’s been trying to relieve himself for a month and still can’t do it—we’ll go down to the port to meet the fishermen who return with the rising sun. All the fish they don’t want, they toss to the dogs or throw back to the sea. If they don’t have any fish to throw away, there are always plenty of sea urchins.” Sancho made a face. “I would not have eaten such repulsive creatures back in Spain, where I never lacked for a crust of bread, a slice of cheese, or an onion. But when there’s no horses, we saddle dogs.” He paused, then added, “It’s going to be hard for you to survive here with a lame arm.” Sancho held his head between his hands and then smiled. “Do you still write poetry? I hope so. Algiers is the best place in the world for a poet. These cruel Moors only respect two kinds of people: madmen and poets. According to their crazy religion, poets and locos are God’s blessed people and must be respected because they are in constant contact with Him.”

I wondered what other pieces of wisdom the fat man had in store for me.

Sancho got up. “The warden’s men are collecting the fee to sleep in the rooms. If you don’t have enough money for a place in a room, you have to sleep out here with heaven as your blanket. Unfortunately, I have barely enough to pay for my own place tonight. Many are the nights when I’ve had to stay out here.”

All I possessed were the iron chains around my ankles—which didn’t belong to me—and the clothing hanging on my emaciated body.

“You wait here while I go inside to find you an extra blanket. The nights get chilly this time of year.”

Notwithstanding Sancho’s ample frame, he sprang to his feet with the agility of a dancer and hurried away, zigzagging among the crowd.

The Algerian sky shimmered with the light of the moon. I closed my sleepy eyes. I was beginning to drift off when I heard, accompanied by a flute, an eerie wail, a lamentation that was not meant for humankind, but for the heavens: it was a late-night call to prayer coming from the mosque. The plaintive voice, like an invisible kite, ascended from the tip of the minaret toward the grape-black African sky powdered by stars. An absolute exhaustion overtook me, a weariness at what I was beginning to accept as the curse of my sad fate. I saw my soul leave my body and fly over a glassy, doleful sea, a sea without any shoreline. The first day of my life as a captive in Algiers had come to an end.

Chapter 4

My Mortal Enemy

1576

Luis

All things change and we change with them. It was hard to believe that the tender affection I felt for Miguel during our school days in Madrid had turned to animosity. Our Redeemer’s message is to forgive those who injure us, but my heart blackened and seethed with hatred and I couldn’t stop its petrifaction. I did not recognize myself anymore. If I examined my features in a mirror, I looked exactly the same, but my soul was no longer that of the gentleman and Christian I professed to be. There was no light in my eyes. My best friend’s betrayal revealed to me that hatred, like love, is an uncontrollable emotion, one that lived and grew in me like a heaving, insatiable incubus I could not exorcise. Hatred, I discovered, could outlast love.

I was relieved when Miguel wrote me from Rome. I had won. What the eyes cannot see, the heart cannot feel. There was truth to that. He was far enough away not to represent an immediate threat to my happiness with Mercedes. The epistles he sent me during the time he worked for the cardinal went unanswered. They were full of anecdotes about the colorful—and important—people he met in Rome, his excited comments about the Italian poets he read in Dante’s language, his swooning descriptions of the great works of art in the churches, basilicas, and private homes. Yet after a while there was a lull in his letter writing. Perhaps he came to realize I was not going to answer him.

Two years went by. Then, one evening at my grandparents’ home after dinner, Mercedes and I went for a stroll in the flowering orchard. We meandered in silence until Mercedes sat down on a stone bench in an arbor. I sat next to her. It was April, the air was redolent of fragrant blossoms. The birds that hid in the thickets during the hot hours of the day had begun to emerge in search of insects and had commenced their evening twitters. Mercedes seemed enraptured by the sweetness of the moment. I said, “I’ve been thinking, my love, why wait three more years for the start of our happiness?”

Mercedes looked away, her gaze lost in a shadowy corner of the orchard. Though physically she remained by my side, her mind was somewhere else. After graduation I hoped my family would intercede to find me work in His Majesty’s court. My dream was to settle with Mercedes in Madrid, to raise a family, and to devote my free hours to poetry. I had been taught that modesty is a quality every true gentleman must have. So I had no grand dreams; big dreams were for adventurers and soldiers of fortune. My aspirations were those of most men of my station.

“Why the sudden change in plans?” She looked puzzled. “Why not wait until you graduate, as we discussed? Marriage could distract you from your studies, Luis.”

I was not one of those men who thought that a woman was by nature a defective creature. Despite my obfuscated state I could see that her objection was perfectly legitimate. Mercedes was discreet, the embodiment of immaculate virtue, of purity itself. Her reputation was above all suspicion and blemish. I was sure there was no other woman in Spain as chaste as she was. However, this was the first time she had said no to me, and the beast of jealousy roared inside me. What reason could she have for delaying my wedding proposal, other than secretly loving Miguel and hoping he would return?

“I’ve consulted with my parents and our grandparents, and they have raised no objection. Besides,” I added, knowing she loved living in Toledo with our grandparents, “if you like, you can live here until I finish school. I will come visit at every possible opportunity.”

“I cannot give you an answer today, Luis.” Mercedes sighed, then took my hands in hers and held them against her cheek. The warmth of her hands made me want to kiss her on the lips and ravish her. When her long hair and her eyelashes brushed my skin, I had to still the trembling I felt overcoming me. She spoke, remaining in the same position, and her breath stroked the skin of my hands. “This is a complete surprise. I need more time to think about it before I agree to the change in our plans.”

At that moment I regretted not having punctured Miguel’s heart with my sword the day I found him in Mercedes’s chamber. I pulled my hands away from hers, got up, and walked back to the house alone.

* * *

The joyous news came to Alcalá that our forces had defeated the Turks at Lepanto. As was the case after major battles fought in foreign lands, it took months before the names of the survivors were printed on the broadsheets that were glued on the walls of the government buildings. The day I heard from a visitor to my house that the broadsheets were posted, I rushed out to read with rapt attention the names of the survivors. Rodrigo Cervantes’s name appeared as a survivor, but there was no mention of Miguel. The Turks had taken no prisoners. Could it be that he was dead?

A few days later in Toledo, my grandmother, who went to early Mass every day, asked during supper, “Luis, is Rodrigo Cervantes a relative of your friend Miguel?” It was the first time since Miguel had fled Madrid that his name had been mentioned in my presence. “I read his name on a broadsheet outside the church this morning.”

“I read the list of survivors that was published in Alcalá,” I acknowledged. “Miguel’s name was not on it.” I kept my head low, staring at the roast leg of lamb in front of me. The meat on my plate suddenly nauseated me. I dared not look in the direction of Mercedes. I took the silence around the table to mean that I was expected to say more. “Abuela, I’ve been very sad, as you can imagine. He was my dearest friend in the years before I went to Alcalá. I’d never had a friend like that before.” I should have ended it there. Instead, I heard myself saying, “I wanted to spare all of you. But I might as well tell you that one of my classmates ran into Miguel’s father in Madrid. Don Rodrigo informed him that Miguel’s body has not been found. The last time he was seen during the battle, he was fatally wounded. Don Rodrigo fears that Miguel’s corpse sank to the bottom of the Bay of Corinth.” It was the biggest lie I had ever told, a lie so grievous I wondered whether it was a mortal sin to wish the death of someone I knew—anyone’s death, for that matter. It was too late now. I could not go back in time to erase my words.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” my grandfather responded. “I know he was like a brother to you. May God keep him in His Glory.” He crossed himself.

My grandmother also crossed herself. “I will have a Mass said for his soul,” she said.

I looked in Mercedes’s direction: her eyes were closed, and a gleaming tear slid down her cheek.

* * *

A few months after the scene in the garden, I heard from Miguel. The wretch was still alive. This time his letters were filled with a woeful tale of the wounds he received fighting the Turks, making it sound as if his heroics alone were responsible for crushing the Ottoman navy. When he was not boasting, Miguel complained about his slow recovery in the Italian hospitals, and the loss of the use of his left hand. I felt a burst of joy when I heard he was crippled. In the same breath, I hated myself for rejoicing in the misery of another human being, especially someone I had once loved without reservation. I knew it was a sin and unchristian to feel that way, even about my enemy, but my hatred was stronger than my faith.

In his letter, Miguel pleaded with me to intercede in the king’s courts with high officials I knew through my family, to expedite the back payment of his wages and to grant him the pension due to invalid soldiers. I burned his letters.

Praemonitus pramunitus,
my father used to say. Why leave it to chance? As unlikely as it seemed, what if Miguel somehow managed to return to Spain? I was aware that the wheel of Fortune took unpredictable turns. Was my fear justified or irrational? I would never let Miguel take Mercedes away from me. Still, I had to take decisive action.

* * *

Mercedes married me in a private ceremony in Toledo attended only by our family. That day, which should have been one of the happiest of my life, was marred by the circumstances under which Mercedes had changed her mind. Had she been hoping that Miguel would return to Spain?

My jealousy notwithstanding, I couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful or considerate or gentle wife. Our harmonious domesticity seemed to indicate that we would be as happy in our marriage as my parents were in theirs. As for Miguel, Mercedes was now my wife. Even if he managed to return to Castile, he could never take her away from me.

Mercedes remained with our grandparents until I finished my studies at Alcalá. Not long after our wedding, she became gravid with child. The news filled me with the greatest joy I’ve ever known. If it pleased God, I hoped there would be many more children to come. Though her health had always been good, from the very beginning her pregnancy was fraught with complications. Diego was born in the seventh month, and Mercedes bled so much during the birth that the doctors feared for her life for the first forty-eight hours afterward.

The joy of fatherhood was diminished by Diego’s sickly constitution. He would often refuse the teats of the wet nurses we brought to the house, and Mercedes’s breasts produced but a few opaque drops of milk. My son’s growth was almost imperceptible. A year after his birth, Diego was so skinny and frail I feared crushing one of his ribs when I lifted him in my arms. He was as pale as a white lily, as if no blood ran in his veins. Without an apparent reason, he would cry for hours, sometimes for days, not with the anger of infants, but as if he mourned an inconsolable loss. No matter where I was in the house, or how far I tried to get away from his wailing, I could still hear him. Even when I was leagues away in my residence in Alcalá, after I said my prayers at night and snuffed the candle, I could hear him crying in the darkness, as clearly as if his cradle were next to my bed.

Diego’s frailty was our greatest worry, and Mercedes became his shadow. Her precautions bordered on the unhealthy: she insisted on first tasting everything he ate; she made sure that he never stepped on the floor barefoot; that he was not exposed to the sun during the hottest hours of the day; that he was not ever caught in the rain; that he avoided the evening’s dew; that he was never in the proximity of anyone with a cold, or a cough, or recovering from a fever or any kind of illness; that he was swaddled in heavy fur wraps at night; that after his baths, he sat by a fire, sipping a hot cup of chocolate, until his entire body was dry.

Diego seemed to accept all the excessive concern with forbearance. Mercedes’s devotion to our son was so complete that she began neglecting her appearance. Yet despite her lack of vanity, motherhood had endowed her with a ripeness and softness that made her lovelier than ever. My desire for her grew. She would never again be as beautiful as she was after the birth of Diego. But I became invisible to her, an acquaintance living in the same house. She forgot her wifely duties to me, and slept on a cot by Diego’s bedside.

* * *

Was God punishing me for my unfounded jealousy about Mercedes? For my hatred of Miguel? Hatred was, I knew, a slap to God’s face. Obviously I was not a good Christian. In my youth, as a student in Madrid, poetry had been my religion. Yes, I was a dutiful Catholic: I fasted when I was supposed to fast; I went to Mass on Sundays; I confessed and received Holy Communion every week; I observed the religious holidays. I did everything that was expected of me, but I did not
live
for God: I wanted the earthly rewards. I worked harder to attain those than to earn my place in heaven, which I believed was virtually guaranteed me by the apposite life I led. I began to go to Mass at dawn daily; when that proved insufficient to quell the disquiet in my soul, I started to pray for a few hours every day, like Grandfather Lara did. I prayed for the health of my son; that he would grow stronger and become a man; above all, that the sins of the father would not be visited on the son.