Aztec Blood

offered me the Moorish dream smoke early in our relationship, but it gave me a headache. Perhaps my Aztec blood was requited only by the dream-making of flower weavers.

'Tell me about Cervantes and Mateo,' I pleaded.

'Mateo was a young autor, the manager of a travel troupe, and—'

I interrupted. 'The troupe of actors you ran away and joined?'

'Exactly. As you already guessed, he was my first lover. Not the first man to enjoy my body, but the first I wanted to make love to me.'

I smiled at the thought of the two hellions in a theater and in bed. Dios mio, it would have been a volcano colliding with a tidal wave.

'So why does he hate Cervantes?'

'Cervantes was a writer of plays, but he had not gained the fame that was to come after the publication of Don Quixote. Mateo was the manager of a troupe of actors and desired to have his own plays performed. He showed some of his plays to Cervantes.'

'The tale of a knight-errant,' I asked, 'an old hidalgo who jostled with windmills?'

'I never knew exactly what Mateo's comedia plots were about. He said Cervantes spoke well of them, and for a while they were friends.'

'Close enough that Mateo might have poured out his heart to Cervantes? Told him of all the adventures and misadventures he had known in the pursuit of wine, women, and glory?'

'Yes, Mateo's told me that too, that the old man 'borrowed' our friend's adventures; and I have no reason to doubt him. Mateo's life would fill many books. But it is also true that while Mateo's plays about knights and dragons and beautiful princesses were popular with audiences, they were everything that Cervantes loathed. In Don Quixote he parodied Mateo and his writing mercilessly.'

'So Cervantes 'borrowed' his life and ideas and presented them with mockery.'

'Mateo hasn't forgiven him.'

'For certain,' I said, 'Mateo goes muy loco whenever the name of Miguel Cervantes is mentioned.'

'If he knew that you and I went to see La Numantia...'

'Si, he would remove an ear from each of us. And, Ana, you said to me once that Mateo was not a picaro, but a gentleman. Of course, he told me his whole life story during our wanders and battles with pirates, but I wonder if he told you the same tale—'

'He told me nothing. I learned it from one who knew Mateo when he was a marques.'

A marques! A nobleman above a count and below a duke. A great personage. Even those who bore an empty title because their estates had been lost or confiscated could sell themselves in marriage to a very rich widow or merchant's daughter.

'You know the tale from Mateo's own lips,' she said. 'He was an orphan at five, his father dying in battle and his mother taken by the plague. His father, the marques, was a general for the king, one with a fine reputation. After the death of his parents, Mateo was raised in the house of his cousin, a count. At a very early age, he was pledged in marriage to the count's daughter, who was a year or two older than him. When Mateo was seventeen, a servant awoke him and informed him that a man had been seen sneaking into the house. Grabbing his sword, he made a search for the intruder. The intruder turned out to be his closest friend. He found the man in the arms of his betrothed.

'Por Dios, can you imagine the scene, Cristo? The hot-blooded, idealistic young nobleman, raised in the tradition of hombria, that a man must be honorable and his honor is inexorably linked to the honorable behavior of the women in his life. He finds his wife-to-be making love with his good friend? Can you guess what happened next?'

I knew Mateo too well to have to guess. 'He killed the man, of course.'

'Cristo, had he simply killed the man, he would be a marques today instead of a picaro. He killed not just the friend but his betrothed. She got in the way of the fighting men and was slain. Ay, men and women throughout the land praised his act of honor, but it was the old count's only child. To save his own family's honor, he saw to it that Mateo became a hunted man.'

I was quiet for a long time after listening to Ana. Closing my eyes, I imagined what it must have been like for Mateo—and the two lovers. The shock of discovery. Fear as the wronged man bloodies his sword. The hapless woman on the floor.

The thoughts depressed me, and I was relieved when Ana asked me to move my massaging farther up her body.

ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE

Seville was enlightening for me. I even learned how to see through a servant without seeing the person. But my heart tugged more and more toward New Spain. I had given up the notion that Elena would ever be mine. Like Calisto and Melibea, we could not resist fate and custom. She would be married to Luis, bear his babies, but would never achieve her dream of being fully realized as a poet and writer of plays. Grasped in Luis's tight fist, she would slowly wither into a dried-up old woman whose dreams had turned to dust.

Hopefully, I would be able to make her a widow.

Some days I would go down to the docks and watch the ships come and go. Their destinations were to different places in the Spanish Empire, scattered about the four corners of the world, but in my own mind each was sailing for Veracruz.

The matter hung so heavily on me that Ana complained I was no fun, telling me not to come around until I learned how to laugh again. I suspected that the Italian count, who was courting her, had more to do with her comments than my love-struck moodiness.

My desire to return home came to a head when a familiar name became the talk of Seville: Catalina de Erauso, the woman-man who'd escaped from a convent and become a soldier for the king.

Listening to the tales of her in cantinas and the theaters, I separated in my own mind some of the fact from fiction. While the stories told of her incredible adventures as an army lieutenant and her many duels and escapades, they left out the fact that she had led a bandit gang that robbed the king's silver, and that she wore men's clothes to seduce women.

She passed through Seville to appear before the king in Madrid. He awarded her a pension and paraded her before the court as a heroine of the Spanish Empire. She was returning here to set sail for Italy, where she would be received by the pope. I sent a note to her at her inn, asking if she had spent all the silver she'd stolen in Zacatecas.

She would not know who sent the note until she faced me. Even if she recognized me, I was not worried she would report me to the king's officers as an escaped mine slave. While she would stick a knife in my back if she had the opportunity, she would not want me questioned about my activities in New Spain for fear of exposure of her own criminal acts.

My message was returned with word that she would meet me at her inn. I was to accommodate her by having a carriage at our disposal, at my expense, of course. Had this woman-man forgotten that she had once tried to murder me?

Catalina came out of the inn dressed in a nun's habit, but I was having none of it. For one thing I'd never known a nun with crisscrossing knife scars creasing her face, one with a nose reddened from decades of drink, broken and rebroken so many times it looked like a badly busted knuckle. The nuns I'd known typically had their front teeth. A nun's eyes, fixed on Eternity, were serenely beatific. This nun had the stare of a sheep-killing dog.

If you're a Bride of Christ, I muttered to myself, I'm the pope.

She did not recognize me when I presented myself to her in front of the inn. It was too many years, too many lives ago for her to identify me as the mestizo boy who'd robbed a temple for her. And she had gotten only a brief glance at me when I saw her through the window. In my mind there was no risk in confronting her about Luis and much to gain.

'I need some information about Luis de la Cerda. My brother spied on you when you met with him last in New Spain. You spotted my brother watching you through a window at an inn in the silver country.'

I saw the bulge of a long dagger under her habit. She looked at me with a blank face, but her eyes perceptibly narrowed. No doubt her mind buzzed with thoughts of cutting my throat.