Ana leaned out of my arms and pulled aside Felicity's towel. Before she slipped into the water, I saw and understood what Ana meant when she called Felicity a good actor.
Eh, if Catalina the Bandito could fool kings and popes, why couldn't Felicity—or whatever
ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
Ana's enthusiasm for plays, parties, and lovemaking was inexhaustible, and she kept me busy with all three. My sole regret was that I saw so little of Mateo. At first his name was on everyone's tongue. Stories of a caballero who had returned from the New World with his pockets full of gold made him an instant legend. The stories they told about him! I heard that Mateo had found the lost Island of California, where an Amazon queen sits upon a throne of gold with her feet on the skulls of men who had the misfortune to shipwreck on her shores. But the most notorious tale was that he had found the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola while exploring the deserts north of the Rio Bravo.
Ana expressed curiosity about the fabled cities, and I told her the story.
After the conquistadors had looted the Aztecs and the Incas, they looked further for more golden conquests. In 1528, a party of Spaniards landed on the peninsula that earlier Juan Ponce de Leon had named Florida, which meant 'flowery,' when he searched for the Fountain of Youth. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was one of them. This man with a strange name—Cabeza de Vaca, 'Head of Cow'—and an africano slave named Esteban, were among sixty men shipwrecked on the coast of Florida. Nunez, Esteban, and two others traveled eight years across the continent, over a thousand leagues, to an area far north of the settled areas of New Spain. There, in a desert land beyond the Rio Bravo, near where the present settlement called Santa Fe is located, they claimed to have seen in the distance seven golden cities. Expeditions to find the cities, including one led by Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, failed to find anything but poor indio pueblos.
Eh, but Mateo found the seven cities, had he not?
I would have expected Mateo to become deeply involved in the Seville theater scene, but although I did encounter him occasionally in the world of plays, he had become engrossed in another one of his other favorite enterprises.
'Mateo is involved with a duchess,' Ana said, 'a cousin to the king.'
'Is she married?'
'Of course. Her husband is the duke, who is in the Low Countries inspecting the army. The duchess is very lonely and demanding of Mateo's time, and energy. Mateo believes that for the first time in his life he is truly in love.'
'Is there anyone in Spain who is married and does not have a lover?'
Ana thought for a moment. 'Only the poor.'
On several occasions, Ana had made cryptic references to Mateo's dark past. During a discussion about a Miguel Cervantes play, Ana cast a little light on Mateo. Ultimately, I was able to draw secrets from her that stunned me and changed my whole perspective about Mateo.
I knew, of course, a small part of his past, that he was bitter toward Cervantes. However, his hatred for Cervantes related to something deeper. Ana explained Mateo's anger while we rode in her carriage to the play.
'When Mateo knew Cervantes, he of course was very young and Cervantes quite old. You are familiar with the background of the author of
Ana, who seemed to know everything about the literature of Spain since Roman times, enlightened me. Cervantes had been born into reasonably humble circumstances. The fourth of seven children, his father was a barber-surgeon who set bones, performed bloodlettings, and attended lesser medical needs. The young Cervantes did not attend university but acquired an education through priests.
After hearing of Cervantes's military service, I was surprised that Mateo would not have more respect for the man. Both had served in Italy and had fought the Turks. Cervantes had been a soldier in a Spanish infantry regiment stationed in Naples, a possession of the Spanish crown, and served in the fleet under Don Juan of Austria, when it routed the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto near Corinth. Though stricken with fever, Cervantes refused to stay below. On deck, he received two gunshot wounds in the chest and a third rendered his left hand useless for the rest of his life. He later fought at Tunis and La Goleta. Sent back to Spain, recommended for a captaincy, Barbary corsairs captured the ship carrying Cervantes and his brother, Rodrigo. They were sold into slavery in Algiers, the Muslim center for Christian slave trafficking. Unfortunately for Cervantes, Letters of Recommendation magnified his importance in the eyes of his captors. But while the letters raised his ransom price, they also protected him from punishment by death, mutilation, or torture when his four daring bids to escape were frustrated.
Five years of captivity under the Bey of Algiers, four heroic escape attempts, his resounding success in battle, all brought him nothing. He arrived home to find that Prince Don Juan de Austria was both dead and out of favor with the king. The prince's recommendations for promotion were worth nothing.
Cervantes found humdrum employment. An affair with a married woman produced a daughter out of wedlock, whom he raised himself. He married a farmer's daughter nearly two decades younger than him. The girl had a small piece of property in La Mancha. While visiting La Mancha, he conceived his first published work of fiction,
'One of the plays he wrote was La Numantia,' Ana said, and took me to see a performance. 'Numantia was a Spanish town that withstood a terrible seize by the Romans. For ten long, bloody years, three thousand Spaniards defended the town with desperate courage against a Roman force of over one hundred thousand. Cervantes chose to set his play in the final days of the siege, at a time when the dead and starving lay in heaps in the city. Infants sucked blood from their mothers' breasts rather than milk. Two Numantian youths fight their way into the Roman camp to steal bread. One is killed, but the other, fatally wounded, comes back with blood-stained bread before dying.
'Think of the image,' she said, 'blood-stained bread and babies drinking the blood of their mothers.'
For this play Ana dressed as a woman of quality, wearing a mask of course, and we sat in a box. The mosqueteros were even quiet during the play. 'It is a story of great patriotism, of the courage of the Spanish people,' she said. 'One does not throw refuse at our people. When I first saw this play, I was just a girl. A drunk yelled an insult at the way one of the boys who had given their lives for bread had acted his death scene. The men in the pit almost tore him to pieces.'
Watching the play, I barely breathed during that scene for fear of antagonizing those around me.
No single hero dominated the four-act tragedy. The people, the city, and Spain herself were the heroes. Characters included Spanish ladies, Roman soldiers, even the Rio Douro.
I was impressed by Cervantes's mastery in blending dark pagan superstitions with the Spanish people's heroism in resisting the Roman invaders. In one scene the earth opened and a demon appeared and scurried away with a sacrificial lamb. Marquinio the Sorcerer, a black lance in one hand, a book of magic in another, summoned a dead youth from the Place of the Dead. The lad speaks to the people of their duty and their fate. They must destroy their city, denying Rome both victory and spoils. Neither gold nor gems nor women must fall to the invaders.
Ana pointed out an interesting little man in the audience. 'Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, one of your fellow colonists. He came here from New Spain to study law and theology and ended up writing plays. One of his plays,
Ruiz was a bowlegged hunchback with a flame-red beard. He had the blazing stare of a religious fanatic, the body of a dwarf, and the curled upper lip of a starving wolf.
I said as much to Ana.
'His hunger is for fame and glory, but his body precludes both the battlefield and the dueling field. So he puts all of his energy into his quill and garrancha.'
'His what?'
'He believes he's a great lady's man.'
'Santa Maria.' I crossed myself. 'Poor devil.'
'Poor women! They say he is hung like a bull.'
After the play, Ana and I relaxed in her Roman bath. I rubbed her feet while she smoked hashish. She had
