Conquistadora (12 page)

That very day he kept walking past the parish house and beyond the boundaries of Boca de Gato. The capital was thirteen leagues
away on the other side of a mountain range. He scrabbled his way toward the city by working odd jobs in exchange for a place to sleep and a meal. It was 1829, toward the end of a relatively stable period after the depredations of the Napoleonic era and before the First Carlist War. He was modest and hardworking, and the peasants who took him in were mostly kind. All he remembered years later, however, was not the people, but the names of the rough mountain terrain he traversed—Cerro Matallera, El Pedregal, Miraflores de la Sierra.

It took him six months to reach the capital. From the top of a hill, he saw a confusion of roofs and steeples long before he entered the gates. The closer he came to the city, the more people walked with him on the Camino Real, many of them like himself, young boys and men with no other place to go but the road before them.

In the capital, Severo slept in dreary alleys in the shadow of the cathedral. He stole food when he couldn’t find work, fought other boys who, like him, had abandoned their homes or were abandoned by their families. Stronger, smarter, and braver than many of the forgotten children of the streets, he soon became their leader and organized a gang of thieves and pickpockets that terrorized the capital for almost two years.

He was caught, beaten, and thrown into a prison with men who’d committed far worse crimes. Murderers, traitors, and political prisoners were hanged, but drunks, thieves, adulterers, and debtors were locked up. Many of these desperate men longed to start their lives over. They filled Severo’s head with stories about the New World, territory settled over three centuries earlier by Spain. Those mysterious lands, including Peru, Mexico, and Argentina, were no longer colonies, but it was still possible to become a great
señor
in Spanish America. Severo spent four months in prison dreaming of boarding a swift ship with fluttering white sails that would take him to Spanish America. There he’d make his fortune in gold and silver, which his elders assured him would be revealed if he kicked the ground hard enough.

Severo was eleven years old, child enough to imagine his return to Boca de Gato dressed in splendid silk breeches and brocaded
chalecos
like the ones worn by the dandies who walked the streets of Madrid—the men he so adeptly pickpocketed and whose pretty ladies
he admired. He’d build a house for his mother and retire his father from the cobbler’s bench, and he’d become a
caballero
, riding splendid Andalusian steeds on a silver-studded saddle.

One day Severo heard the voice inside telling him to confess, so he lined up during the weekly visit of the prison curate.

Padre Gregorio was impressed with Severo’s knowledge of Latin and the liturgy. “You’re an intelligent boy,” he scolded. He fluttered his scented fingers toward the grim, foul-smelling cell Severo shared with nine other men. “How did you allow this to happen to you,
hijo mío
?”

“I was hungry, Padre.”

“Thousands of people are hungry in this city, son, and they don’t become criminals.”

“But many do, Padre,” Severo said. The priest gazed at him, looking for contempt in Severo’s tone or movements. He saw nothing but regret. Severo’s face softened. “I’m not a bad boy.”

“No, son, I don’t believe you are.” Padre Gregorio placed his hand on Severo’s bristly head, murmured a prayer over him, and then asked, in Latin, “Do you repent fully and completely?”

“Yes, I do, Padre,” Severo responded in the same language, fully aware that the padre’s question could be answered in only one way.

“Do you promise to uphold the Ten Commandments, especially the ones you broke in your troubles?”

“Yes, Padre, I promise.” His voice thickened, and Padre Gregorio appreciated Severo’s restraint, how he pressed the fingers of his left hand around his right wrist as if to keep from slapping his own face. He looked up at the priest with such a pitiable, contrite expression that the old man was moved.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said in Spanish, squeezing Severo’s shoulder.

Padre Gregorio vouched for the boy after he’d served only half his sentence. He found Severo a job as a runner and floor sweeper for Marítima Argoso Marín. Padre Gregorio also convinced his brother and sister-in-law to allow Severo to sleep in a shack in their backyard. Severo repaid
señor
and
señora
Delgado’s kindness with his labor. He was good with his hands and soon fixed hinges on doors, replaced and raised the sagging clothesline in the courtyard, nailed down squeaky boards on the stairs, and straightened wayward balusters. The Delgados were delighted with his industry.

Their cook, Noela, was a tall, bony woman whose husband managed the Delgado farm near Allariz, in Galicia. Noela went home for Christmas, for Holy Week, and for a month in August with her employers, but the rest of the year she lived in a room behind the kitchen. One night, she noticed that Severo brought home discarded newspapers every day and sat with them at the kitchen table after dinner.

“What do you read?” She was hard to understand because she spoke Galician and assumed everyone understood it.

“The newspapers tell about the world,” Severo said.

“You’re lucky you can read. I never learned my letters.”

“I can read aloud, if you like.”

After she put the dishes away, Severo read to Noela as she sewed. If he looked up from the papers, however, her bright eyes were on him, not her work, as if she believed that he’d created the contents of the newspapers for her amusement. Once a month, she dictated letters to her husband and parents, which Severo wrote and posted. None of her relatives could read either, but the correspondence was brought to the parish priest, or to a learned villager who charged two pennies to read them, five pennies to write a response.

“Do you write to your parents?”

Severo lied, but that night he wrote to his mother, letting her know that he was safe and had a job, with no mention of his reasons for leaving, the journey to Madrid, the years on the streets, the time in prison.

He worked six days a week at Marítima Argoso Marín’s offices. When making a delivery, he was sometimes given a penny or two as a tip, which he saved because he still had the idea that someday he’d sail to the New World to become a rich man. He was known to the thugs and urchins on the streets, who sneered and taunted him for pretending he was better than they were.

Paquito, an older boy who’d become the leader of a gang after Severo was imprisoned, wanted to prove that he was in charge after Severo was seen around town again. He followed Severo as he made his deliveries, jeering and teasing him, goaded by the other boys.

“No me jodas,”
Severo said. He was carrying a dossier from Marítima Argoso Marín to a waiting customer at a bank.

“Don’t fuck with me,” Paquito repeated in a falsetto, swishing an invisible skirt to indicate Severo was a sissy.

Severo quickened his pace, but the boys followed and surrounded him, pushing and shoving. He was three doors from the bank and intended to make his delivery, but he didn’t want the boys to think he was running away from them. He faced Paquito.

“I don’t want to fight, but if you provoke me, you’ll be sorry.”

“Ay,
la señorita
don’t want to be provoke, ay, ay, my smelling salts,” Paquito said, pretending to go into a swoon.

Severo took the chance and ran into the bank, caught his breath, delivered his documents, received his tip. He took a moment to talk to himself. I know how to defend myself, he thought, but if I don’t put an end to this
jodienda
, I’ll have to fight every boy in Madrid. He meant to avoid prison again, and he needed a different kind of respect so that the boys would leave him alone. He was strong, but the streets and prison had taught him that mental toughness was more effective than fists. When he emerged, Paquito and his boys were waiting, as Severo expected.

“Chicken!” they called.
“¡Cobarde!”

Severo stepped right up to Paquito. The other boys surrounded him, but he knew they were waiting for Paquito’s first move. “What did you say?” Severo asked, nonchalant. It was the way he said it, his cool tone and relaxed stance, Severo noticed, that changed something in Paquito. He’s scared, Severo thought. “I heard you say something,” he said, turning his head toward where they’d surrounded him before. “Over there. What did you say?”

Paquito puffed his chest and his face turned red, his bravado returning. “You’re a fucking coward,” he said, and to prove it he lunged at Severo as the other boys circled them. Paquito wrestled Severo to the ground, kicking and punching, spitting, calling him a
pendejo
and a sissy and a
mariquita
. Severo warded off the blows as best he could while Paquito flailed wildly. A crowd gathered, and Severo knew that the police would be coming to break things up. He stood and pulled Paquito upright by his breeches, then punched him under his ribs, left, right, left. As Paquito bent over to protect his belly, Severo elbowed the top of his head. The boy crumpled to the ground, his limbs jerking. From the corner of his eye, Severo saw a policeman running in their direction. The other boys scattered as Severo melted into the crowd, rubbing his elbow, working to control his hard breathing. He turned the corner and slowed to a normal
pace, as if he’d just come from a good meal. Paquito lay unconscious on the ground as passersby stepped around him. He was just another of the discarded of the city, and no one cared what would happen to him now that all the excitement was over. Severo never saw him again, and the other boys stayed out of his way.

Every so often Severo stole something too temptingly available, like the day he took a copy of
La vida es sueño
from a used-book stall on the street while the vendor argued politics with another customer. And it gave him a thrill from time to time to pick a coin or two from a distracted or drunken
señorito
. But mostly, he delivered dossiers, swept the floors at Marítima Argoso Marín, read as much as he could, helped around the Delgados’ house, and tried to stay out of trouble.

His days folded into each other and his boyish squeak changed into a man’s voice. Noela teased him about the stubble growing on his chin and upper lip, and how his sleeves were too short for his arms and his breeches too tight. A few days later Padre Gregorio delivered a new change of clothes for Severo, collected from parishioners.

The shirt, pants, vest, and jacket were too big, but Noela took in the seams as he read to her. He buffed the shoes until the leather gleamed, and packed rags into the front to be removed as his feet grew. He wore the entire ensemble to church the next Sunday and noticed the admiring glances from girls and women.

“You already look like a man,” Noela said, and Severo realized that she was seeing him differently. Lately, he’d noticed that she sat closer to him than she used to, and while measuring him, and later making sure the clothes fit, she seemed to use her hands more than necessary for the tasks. But he wasn’t sure, and he didn’t want to get in trouble. One night, when the Delgados were out for the evening, Noela served his supper but instead of staying in the kitchen while Severo read to her, she said she was going to bed early. He was disappointed, because he had a battered copy of
El conde Lucanor
, purchased at the same stall where weeks earlier he’d stolen
La vida es sueño
. She left, her hips swaying in a way that made him wonder. She was probably as old as his mother, although Mamá would never shake her hips like that, nor had Noela done it before. He was confused and decided it was probably time for him not to spend so much time with Noela in the kitchen because he liked living in the Delgados’
house, and his job at Marítima Argoso Marín, and saving his money so that he could sail to América where he’d kick the ground to loosen gold nuggets. He finished his dinner, washed and put the dishes away, and took his usual bench at the kitchen table.

It was hard to concentrate on the first story in the book—“What happened to a Moor who was king of Córdoba”—when Noela shuffled in wearing a nightgown and an elaborately embroidered shawl that looked out of place among the blackened pots and pans, the smoking fireplace, the rough table and bench, the stone floor.

“When a woman tells you she wants to go to bed early, and moves away from you shaking her hips like this”—she showed him, with a coquettish smile that was as incongruous as her shawl—“she means she wants you to follow her.”

Severo was thirteen years old. He had urges and imagined what it would be like to be with a woman, but he had no idea what women meant or didn’t mean. “Did you want me to come to bed with you?” he asked Noela, making sure that what he was hearing was what she was saying.

“You’re kind to me and a very good boy, but now you’re an
hombrecito
. It’s the only gift I can give you.”

She was bony and long-legged, and smelled of ashes and garlic. But she didn’t laugh when his excitement was greater than his skill. She was as eager as he was but also patient. While he subsequently had many women over the course of his life, Severo never learned as much from any one of them as he did from Noela, whose greatest gift was to teach him that women don’t have to be pretty to be desirable.

Severo’s supervisors at Marítima Argoso Marín were impressed with his disciplined habits and his ability to read and write. In his thirteenth year he won a promotion from floor sweeper and message boy to assistant clerk. After two years, he was moved to apprentice
escríbano
, scrivener. From time to time Padre Gregorio came around to the Delgados’ to see how Severo was doing. The priest died happy that he had extended his protection and friendship to the sort of young man who not only needed it, but who would surely succeed in life only because of timely pastoral intervention.

However, a cobbler’s son, even a moderately educated one; a convict, even for petty crimes committed in his youth; a poor man, albeit one with a job could only go so far in Spain’s capital. One morning, just as he received his wages, Severo heard an internal voice telling him that, once again, it was time to go. He cleaned his pen nibs, stoppered the inkwells, stacked his papers neatly in their appropriate archives, and walked out of the office where he was tied to a desk from early morning to late evening transferring figures from one ledger to another. He collected his only other change of clothes, the purse where he hid his money under a stone in the floor in his shed, and the five books he owned, two purchased, three stolen. Noela was at the market, the Delgados were in their rooms, the street was congested with servants, vendors, children walking to school. Three
señoritas
selecting ribbons from a dry goods counter turned to watch him go by, and the coachman of the Delgados’ neighbor waved hello but asked himself why Severo was on the street at this time of day when he would ordinarily be at work. He noted the bundle he was carrying, and the coachman later told Noela that she should make sure that nothing was missing in the house. “I didn’t trust that boy,” he said, even though in the five years he’d seen him coming in and out of the Delgado house he hadn’t voiced his concerns about their boarder.