The Scroll of Seduction (33 page)

Juan de Padilla, a native of Toledo and the son of Don Pedro, one of my most faithful defenders, was the leader of the rebellion. The Santa Junta de las Comunidades, or Holy Assembly of Communities, as the rebels called themselves, said they were rising up “in service to the queen, Doña Juana.”

I often sought Denia out to ask him about my children, and the state of my realms. He would become flustered and look uncomfortable. On one occasion I held him six hours, refusing to let him go until he gave me a report, but the man was a liar. To explain why my son was to be crowned emperor he tried to make me believe that my father-in-law Maximilian had abdicated in Charles's favor, as if I could not guess that he had died.

Just two days after this conversation, I found out Denia had ordered that the corridor I used to walk to San Antonlín be sealed off. I ran to berate him and order him to have it reopened. We were quarreling when Bishop Rojas, president of the Council of the Kingdom of Castile, arrived, asking me to sign a decree condemning the Comuneros who had risen in arms.

Denia could not keep me from meeting with the bishop. And it was he, pale and sweaty, fearful of the chaos that had spread like wildfire, who told me that my father had died four years ago. From his lips too I learned that indeed Maximilian had died, and judging by what he said, I gathered that the rebels were up in arms, protesting at the way my son had left Spain's rule in the care of foreigners. The uprising was gaining strength, he said. Unhappy peasants discontent with their lot had joined the rebels.

“Believe me, Bishop,” I said, “everything you have said is news to my ears and hard to discern from a dream. No one has told me the truth for sixteen years; I am mistreated by all, and the marquis here is not the first to deceive me.”

The bishop looked at the marquis. For the first time in all those years, he was frightened; I saw it on his face and felt overcome with
joy, especially when I listened to his contrite attempts to justify himself, claiming he had been forced to lie to me to “cure me of my passions.”

 

I REFUSED TO SIGN THE DECREE THE BISHOP HAD BROUGHT UNTIL I
could verify what I'd been told. On August 29, I received the Comunero leaders, Juan de Padilla, Juan Bravo, and Francisco Maldonado. I heard out their grievances and their grounds, and I entrusted them to do what they felt most benefited the interests of the kingdom. It was all so sudden and so overwhelming that I panicked at my own ignorance. My life was so full of falsehood that I doubted my ability to distinguish truth from lies.

In mid-September, an authority from the Santa Junta and the Cortes expelled the Denias and the ladies who kept me locked up. I went out onto the balcony to greet the crowds packed into the plaza in front of the palace. The leaders of the rebellion, and the people themselves, urged me to defy Charles and govern the kingdom on my own, expelling the Flemish and impeding the flow of riches and tithes from Spain.

It was marvelous to feel so much affection coming from people who had never even seen me. But if freedom made me feel light on my feet with joy, doubts weighed me down and paralyzed me. So many years of confinement had turned me into a fearful woman. And what did I know about government anyway? I had spent my whole life defying and despising authority. Who was to say that these men would not imprison me too were I to do what I thought right and not what they wanted me to? I never had any great desire to be queen. I said so more than once. And if it meant warring against my children, I had none at all. I couldn't forget that those who were offering to serve me hated Charles and needed my support to oust him. I needed time, time to think, to discern the truth. Suddenly, an enormous responsibility had been thrown on my lap, one that I had not chosen. I decided to take my time and meanwhile refused to commit and didn't seal or sign anything.

Yet again, nobody understood me. I had scarcely salvaged my desire to dress in a way befitting my rank, the authority to appoint my own household, the freedom to venture outside the walls of the palace, when the Comuneros lost their patience and tried to force me to sign their
decrees. They even threatened to starve Catalina and me if I continued stubbornly to wait. Perhaps in the end my fears damned me and I lost the only opportunity I had to change my fate, but I told them again and again that I needed time to heal, time for my mind to clear the fog caused by so many lies and so many tears.

The nobles struck back with renewed vigor and put down the rebellion. A traitor paved the way: Pedro Girón, who took over from loyal Juan de Padilla as commander of the Comunero army. Girón let them through so they could retake Tordesillas. The rebellion lasted only seventy-five days. Between December 5 and 6, Tordesillas surrendered to the royalists.

I awaited the grandees on the palace courtyard, holding Catalina's hand.

One signature of mine would have sufficed to put an end to Charles's power in Spain, but instead of showing me his gratitude, my son didn't even have the courtesy of granting me the quiet freedom I deserved. On the contrary, Charles reinstated the Denias and left them to ride roughshod over me. Vicious and arrogant, fully endorsed by Charles, the Denias came back to run my household. And I did not free myself from them until the day I died.

 

“UNTIL THE DAY SHE DIED?” I ASKED.

“April 12, 1555. It was Good Friday. Juana was seventy-six years old. She'd been imprisoned in Tordesillas since 1509, when she was twenty-nine. The first Marquis of Denia died. His son, Luis, came after him. But Juana was told that the old man had fallen ill. They never told her the truth. The Denias kept her forever entangled in a web of falsehoods, they forced her to live in an upended world; a world of darkened rooms without windows, populated by hostile faces that mocked her and tormented her mercilessly. She died covered in sores, with gangrene, a rebel to the end, refusing the treatments they offered her, refusing mass and religious ceremonies almost right up until her last day. When she died, the Denias and her children plundered what remained of her treasures. Remember the golden cross you wore on Christmas Eve? Juana always had it with her. It was a gift from her son Ferdinand–probably the
only unselfish gift she ever received in Tordesillas–and she loved it dearly. And what did Charles do, knowing how his mother detested the Denias? He gave it to them when she died. Juana must have turned over in her grave.”

“What about the trunk?” I asked. “How big was it? Are there any descriptions?”

“When Doña Juana arrived in Tordesillas in 1509, they took a very careful inventory of all her belongings. Eight days before she died, the Denias took another one. During the forty-six years Juana spent there, her treasures dwindled considerably. Her father led the way, robbing her of huge quantities of gold and silver. My ancestors got in on the act too, of course, helping themselves generously. Then her son Charles finished off, absconding with all that was left under the pretext that it was for Catalina's trousseau, since she was to wed the king of Portugal. Just picture it, Lucía: Charles ordered the trunks to be taken from his mother's room while she slept. And then, so she wouldn't realize what he'd done, he had them filled with bricks. But Juana figured out what had happened. She made them open one of the trunks and saw the bricks. And rather than accuse her servants, she realized who had really robbed her and said that she hoped her children would enjoy themselves. Juana's classy response shamed Charles. Embarrassed, he ordered that nothing else be touched, and he kept his word for a year. But after that, he started raiding Juana's things from Tordesillas again. Every time he visited his mother–which was not very often–he left with everything he could get his hands on that seemed valuable, or anything his wife Isabel wanted. But the trunk in question disappeared eight days before she died. It was made in Flanders, small and rectangular with a gold lock and rose-colored engravings. There are statements from Juana's washerwoman Catalina Redonda, her two sisters, Marina, Doña Francisca de Alba, and other servants, all insisting that she always kept it carefully hidden in a place that only she had access to. They said that whenever the queen got it out, she'd make her ladies and servants turn their backs so they couldn't see what it held.”

“She must have been afraid they'd steal the few jewels she had left,” I said. “What makes you think it held documents she'd written?”

Manuel smiled and smoothed his hair, staring at me with eyes that betrayed how enthused he was about his own theories.

“There's a reference in one of García del Campo's documents–he was the quartermaster of her chamber–that mentions a document holder containing ‘all of Her Majesty's writing.' Think about it. ‘All of Her Majesty's writings.' The way he calls them ‘writings' shows he didn't know how to qualify what Juana had written, and ‘all' means there were a lot of them, so I think Juana wrote quite a bit. We knew she could, after all. She'd studied with Beatriz Galindo. Her written Latin was as good as her Spanish. And what would Juana write, Lucía? She wasn't religious. One of the grounds for calling her mad was her lack of devotion. Since her early days in Flanders, she hardly went to services, to mass. She had intelligent friends. Erasmus of Rotterdam, for one. I've always thought that his
The Praise of Folly,
though it's dedicated to Sir Thomas More, was a sort of homage to Juana, a vindication of her. It was one of the books she had on her nightstand when she died. It's not unreasonable to think that she might have taken solace in writing.”

“You're right,” I said, admiring the queen. “Take me to the room upstairs,” I begged. “Please? I was always good at working out puzzles. If you'd just let me help you. Two minds are better than one.”

“You think you're the heroine in a novel, that you're going to find the hidden treasure, don't you? Keep in mind that writers who write thrillers build their imaginary plots very carefully. I've seen it done. They assemble them as if it were a mathematical equation: first
x
happens, resulting in
y,
and so on. It's all tied together so that cause and effect follow one another in an orderly fashion, but real life doesn't work that way.”

“But I was the one who noticed the difference between your grandfather's study and the way the room is now. You didn't pick up on that.”

“You had me obsessing over that clue like a fool. And you were right. There's no obvious logic or reason to explain why they made the room smaller. There's a dividing wall. I found a way through it, and it leads to a narrow space, but there's no trunk in it. Just a bunch of old junk, broken objects that no one's bothered to throw away. But you win. I've already lost the game. Maybe you can see what I missed.”

He produced a key from his pocket and held it up. It was a copy of Águeda's. She saw herself as the only guardian of the Denia treasures, but he had as much right as she did. We'd wait for her to go to bed. His aunt had always taken sleeping pills, he said. That's why she hadn't heard his nighttime expeditions. She would never have allowed them, he added.

“After having lived alone with all those things for so long, she feels like they're an extension of herself. And she's never liked to be touched.”

We crept up after midnight. Manuel took a flashlight and some candles from one of the kitchen drawers. The third floor was warmer than the rest of the house. On the first two floors, the heating barely made a difference in the January cold that sneaked in through the cracks in the windows. It was very dark. The humming of the dehumidifiers was hardly audible, but I found it comforting. I didn't like the idea of going into the room at that time of night. But we went in. Manuel flicked the switch and locked the door from the inside. The ceiling lamp cast a dim light. We crossed the room and went over to the far wall. It all looked the same to me, but Manuel walked over to one of the glass-front cases. Inside was a beautiful image of the Virgin's Immaculate Conception and other gold and silver liturgical objects inlaid with precious stones. I helped him pull the case back from the wall. I couldn't see anything different behind there; just the same wood panels that bordered the room, each one topped with a rounded molding.

“This is it,” he said. “This is where you go through.”

Manuel took a chisel from the floor and slipped it beneath the molding, then started to pry at it gently.

“It's not exactly a door. It took me ages to figure out that the molding in this panel isn't just decoration, like the others. It can be pried open, and the panel comes all the way off. Not as sophisticated as a secret door, but you can imagine that when it gave and I saw that it could be removed, I couldn't contain myself. I was convinced I had found the secret hiding place.” He was still levering away with the chisel, and soon the molding, which seemed to have a pressure fit gave way with a crack, and the wood panel came all the way off.

Manuel lifted it off and put it on one side. I felt a gust of stale air, and dust hit my nose and eyes. I coughed.

Hoisting up a leg, he slipped through the opening and then helped me through. Rather than a room, it was more like a false-bottom suitcase, a narrow space, no wider than the two little vaulted windows covered over with black paper, the windows from the picture. Broken chairs, latticework, doors, and curtain rods were all pushed up against the back wall, which was covered in a layer of grime. A pile of cardboard boxes sat in front of the windows, with a series of iron fittings leaning up against them, and a small, round table where Manuel sat the candles. The collection of useless, broken objects lined the room in a disorderly fashion, amid dust and cobwebs. A frayed tapestry hung on the wall. The darkness, cramped space, and stale air made me feel breathless and claustrophobic. Wanting to run out of there as fast as possible, I covered my nose. Dust billowed up in clouds the second we touched anything. I stepped very carefully. Curiosity forced my body to move against its will, to overcome my discomfort. I walked the short length of the room and went over to Manuel, who was poking around by some leather suitcases that must have belonged to his grandparents.