The Scroll of Seduction (20 page)

The next day and night were worse than the first. My sadness overflowed and every part of me plunged into its depth. With no strength left, I crumbled like an empty shell against the wall. I would have died perhaps–and in good time–had it not begun to rain, forcing me to accept the shelter the soldier offered me in his box. His name was Sebastián and he was from Andalusia. On the morning of the third day, I heard the far-off sound of trampling hooves, and I knew that before long, my mother would be standing before me.

 

THAT WAS MY LAST ENCOUNTER WITH ISABELLA, MY MOTHER, AND
she would later grieve, accusing me of having said unthinkable things to
her, when in truth I said what any bereft daughter would dare say to her mother. I did not insult her, but I did bemoan her lack of love for me to her face, I denounced her willingness to sacrifice me for reasons of State, her inability to love anything or anyone but her realms. I told her she was dry and arid like a moor and that she had used every one of her children as coinage to trade for power and territory. I cursed life for making her my mother. My only real mother, I said, had been my wet nurse, María de Santiesteban. I wished her a lonely, painful death so that she might atone for all of the pain and suffering she had so cruelly prescribed for me.

It gave me great pleasure to watch her bewilderment as I railed on and on, rushing to get out all the words that had been corroding my insides. Little remained of the girl she had left in Laredo, the girl who she'd rocked in her arms as the storm blew. She herself had destroyed me.

But in our duel, my mother reserved for herself the last stroke: she would consent to my journey, she said, if I agreed to leave my little son Fernando behind, in Spain, to be raised by my father and her as a Spanish prince. That was her requisite to allow my departure. If I accepted and left my son, I could set sail for Flanders as soon as spring arrived.

D
ecember drew near and with it, midterm exams. Fortunately, my student life continued to unfold without major variations. I had begun to think of myself as two different people: the one who lived in and the one who lived out. The girl inside the boarding school and the other out in the city streets. The good girl and the woman. When I returned from my first weekend with the Denias, Mother Luisa Magdalena called me to the infirmary. She began by asking if I was still constipated, but it didn't take her long to work her way around to asking about the house where my friends lived. I told her about the alarm system and the automatic locks. I thought the best way to calm her fears would be to chatter and be bubbly, like an enthusiastic girl recounting all the details of a field trip to her mother. Mother Luisa Magdalena's maternal instincts had found in me an ideal target. By contrast, given what had been going on with me, I had no desire to have a mother as a confidante. I didn't want her to realize this, though. She still clung to the short-lived intimacy we'd shared at the beginning of the school year. I had the impression that she thought our relationship had not deepened further out of some personal fault of her own, so she was constantly seeking a way to reestablish the lost connection between us. The infirmary was a small, white-tiled room with metal cabinets–also white–against the walls, and a desk and chair. It looked out on the shady side of the interior garden. Through the window, one could see the pine tree at
the center of the courtyard. It was a cold room, and inevitably my teeth chattered after I had been there for a while. The nun went out to get me a cup of hot chocolate.

“So, that is really great,” she said, setting it down on the table beside a plate with a slice of bread and a square of chocolate. “I think you're very lucky to have met a family in Spain that is so well versed in history. I imagine it must be fascinating for you to learn more about Queen Isabella and her children.”

“Oh, it's mesmerizing,” I quipped. I tried to hide my irony by taking a big gulp of the thick, hot chocolate. “You have no idea how much they know about Juana. Especially Manuel, the nephew.” I smiled with feigned naïveté. “I think he's obsessed, actually, with trying to reconstruct her life. The aunt, well, she's more concerned with the family estate and whatnot. They're both a little weird, there's no doubt about that. Very solitary characters,” I added, compelled by a smidgen of honesty.

“That's very Spanish,” she said. She always sat up very straight. The convent chairs–uncomfortable and high-backed–had left her permanently looking like a soldier awaiting inspection.

“Really? I thought Spaniards were supposed to be sociable and boisterous. Not that I mind; I'm introverted myself, so it's fine with me.”

“Well, all that business about Spaniards being gregarious is a generalization, a stereotype. We like to talk, sure, but there's a part of our character–especially the Castilian character–that's very mystic, very austere. It's something you have to take into account. Even though you're from the tropics, you seem more Castilian in your personality. At your age, you should be out making friends, spending more time with your classmates,” she said sweetly, maternally. “I hardly ever see you talking to them. Piluca and Marina are very fond of you, you know. And I used to see you together all the time.”

“I don't like hearing them talk about their families and their summer plans. It depresses me,” I said, taking refuge in my own black legend.

“But you have family, Lucía. Oh, and by the way, you should write to your grandparents to see what they want to do about Christmas. Do you
think you'll go back to Málaga? Or to London? When is your cousin's wedding again?”

My routine was going to change over Christmas. I would have to think of an excuse not to leave Madrid. I had already written to my grandparents, excusing myself from the wedding on account of a heavy load of schoolwork in my last semester of high school.

“I'm not going to the wedding. It's too long a trip. And to be honest, I don't want to go. I might just stay in Madrid,” I said, tentatively.

“Oh, child, the walls will close in on you if you do that. It's very lonely around here at Christmastime.”

“Well, I bet I could spend the holidays with Manuel and his aunt. They'd probably love to have me. They don't have many friends, you know. Like me.” I smiled, still testing her.

“The aunt is very sweet, if eccentric, I think, but are you sure her nephew isn't a little taken with you?”

“Mother Luisa!” I cried. “Manuel is much, much older than me.”

“That's never stopped men before. Quite the opposite, in fact. Men
do
fall for younger women, you know; it happens all the time.”

“Well, not this time. Manuel just sees me as another student. I think the fact that I'm so enthralled by the way he recounts history probably boosts his ego, but that's it. You're imagining things.”

“Well, you might be surprised, you never know.”

I wondered if she suspected the truth, if God maybe had some secret contact with people like her who dedicated their lives to his service. As worried as I was about being discovered, and as ashamed as I was of my duplicity, I was also amazed that a nun who had no real life experience could pick up on what Manuel and I thought was so well concealed.

“Are you trying to say I shouldn't spend the holidays with them?”

“Just that you need to think about whether you would enjoy spending Christmas with people you hardly know.”

“I know them better than I do the nuns in Málaga.”

“Yes, I suppose you're right. And I'm not saying you won't be able to do as you like.”

I kept quiet, staring at the rays of sunlight that fell on the pine tree, giving it a fairy-tale look. Then I made as if to go.

“Wait, Lucía. Look, I must admit it's a little embarassing for me to broach this subject with you, but I've been thinking that there are some facts of life you should know at your age and that, for lack of your mother, I should tell you.” She had leaned over to pat my hand, and she was blushing. I looked back at her intrigued.

“I'm talking about your sexual education,” she said. “I know that here at school we don't deal with that and basically leave it up to the parents, but in your case…”

I was agape, not knowing how to respond. I almost wanted to laugh at the irony of it all, thinking that at this rate I could probably teach a class on the subject to all the students at the convent, if indeed they hadn't already learned those lessons themselves.

“Women's bodies start to mature after their first period, and I'm sure that your anatomy classes have given you an idea of how your sexual organs function, but those textbooks and illustrations are very schematic, and as far as I'm concerned, young women these days should at least have some basic information about the dangers of exposing themselves to certain experiences before the time comes.”

“What kinds of dangers, Mother Luisa?”

“Well, unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, that sort of thing. The flesh is weak and instincts are a force of nature that we can't always anticipate. Like a hurricane, or an earthquake. Boys don't pay as high a price as girls do. Believe me, I've known more than one who has ruined her life through ignorance. It's not school policy to instruct girls on these sorts of things. I am doing this because of my own personal conclusions on this matter. So it's just between you and me, all right?”

The shaft of light had disappeared. The pine tree was fading in the golden, dusky light. I could hear doors closing, footsteps on the corridors; the school was preparing for supper. I was trapped like a deer in headlights. The nun's eyes were on me, and I didn't dare move. I'd have to let her finish her speech. I could think of no delicate way to get out of it, to get up and go. Maybe I would learn some anatomy. My mother's sex-education book was at least fifteen or twenty years old. The illustrations had the same style as the black-and-white engravings of old art
books. I had trusted Manuel to know what he was doing. He had drawn a diagram of my menstrual cycle, marking my “safe” days and my fertile days, because he thought that condoms were unnatural and awkward. When I told him I'd never seen a condom, he showed me one. At first I couldn't figure out how that flat rubber ring topped with gelatin and sealed in its little aluminum packet was supposed to work. I couldn't see the gelatin but I felt it when I pulled out the ring, which resembled a foil-wrapped chocolate coin. He told me it went over the penis and had to be rolled down with thumb and forefinger. I got the giggles when I saw the rubber on him but I also felt sorry. It looked like it must hurt, although he said it didn't. I tried to keep tugging it downward so that it would fit snugly, covering his member from top to bottom, but he stopped me. You had to leave a little room at the tip, he said, for the semen. Once it was on, the hood looked eerie and a little ridiculous. How could they not have invented anything better than that, at least aesthetically? I agreed that we'd be better off going with the rhythm method, which, he said, had been used since time immemorial. He asked me if my periods were regular, and when I said yes, he took note of my dates on a sheet of graph paper, numbering squares from one to twenty-eight. He blocked off certain days when we'd abstain and others when, if we made love, he would make sure to withdraw and not to ejaculate inside me.

And that's how we had done it. And I had felt safe.

I lowered my eyes, staring at my school uniform skirt. I had to have it washed. Lately I forgot about things like that. It wasn't so stained, but I could see a few dark patches between the pleats.

“Am I making you feel uncomfortable by talking about this?” Mother Luisa Magdalena asked me.

I said she wasn't. Why should I feel uncomfortable? If she, who had never even touched a man's body, thought she could teach me “the mysteries of life,” as our science teacher called it, then why shouldn't she? I was touched. Mother Luisa was a very unusual woman. That's what I liked about her.

We stayed in the infirmary until dinnertime. Mother Luisa Magdalena took out some anatomy books and drew diagrams, explaining what
each part of the female genitalia was called and what it was for. She told me that in some parts of Africa, girls under ten years old had their genitals mutilated. Their clitorises were cut off so they would never be tempted by the pleasures of the flesh. It was barbaric, she said. She explained that the clitoris was like a minute penis, hypersensitive. She wasn't blushing anymore. She took on the tone of a professor, but you could tell that the whole system fascinated her. Amazing, isn't it? she said at one point. I kept wondering how it was that she'd ended up a nun. Hearing her speak so passionately, so poetically, about sexuality made me want to cry, but I hid my eyes so she couldn't see them welling up. I didn't want her to feel bad.

It was a very useful conversation in the end; it cleared up a lot of things that until then I'd only intuited about bodily functions and sexual relations. Yet I was anxious when I left. Mother Luisa Magdalena did not put as much faith as Manuel did in the rhythm method. According to her, it was very unreliable, since the hormonal balance that controlled women's–and especially young women's–menstrual cycles could be thrown out of whack by lots of things, things as trivial as getting upset, and then all those calculations went down the drain. I consoled myself by thinking that my chances of getting pregnant were probably very slim, given how infrequently Manuel and I saw each other.

The idea of my body as an oven that could produce other humans made me think of the silica used by glassblowers to make jugs and decanters. I too could blow up, I thought apprehensively, recalling the image of pregnant women's bellies, like taut balloons. I fell asleep with my hands crossed over my stomach.

That week I felt less alone at school. Having a place to go on the weekends, adults besides the nuns who would look after me without being paid to do it, made me feel like a normal girl. Piluca and Marina wanted to know what the Denias' house was like. I described it with great exaggeration, which seemed to earn their respect and admiration.

In civics class I gleefully took part in playing a trick on the teacher, who was a young, awkward, very self-conscious man. “Okay, everybody in the front row, stare at his shoes the whole time and see how nervous he gets,” said Florencia, a girl from Cádiz with very straight, blond hair
and wide, doll-like eyes. We walked in giggling. The teacher was sitting on a dais in front of the chalkboard. We took our seats at our desks and, the moment he began to speak, started staring at his shoes. They had been polished. Brown brogues with ornamental foxing and perforations around the tongue and laces. After a few minutes, the poor man didn't know what to do with his feet. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, put one foot behind him and then the other, and reached down furtively to pull up his socks. We were nearly hysterical but managed not to laugh. Mother Blanca, who sat in the last row knitting, theoretically keeping an eye on us, hissed to get us to be quiet. “Girls!” she cautioned. As soon as class ended, he rushed out the door and we burst out laughing. “We didn't do anything, Mother Blanca. We were just looking at his shoes.” The nun shook her head slowly from side to side, smiling, infected by our hilarity. “You little devils. The poor man. Don't do it again.”