Purity of Blood

“I can just imagine what your enemy will write,” said the captain, beating a dead horse, holding his fingers as if he were writing on air.

“You say, don Francisco, I am a filthy Jewish pig,while you dance to the tune of a lively Hebrew jig…

“What do you think?”

Don Franciso’s face grew even more dour. Were it not Diego Alatriste speaking, his tormentor would have tasted steel some time ago.

“Bad, and with very little flair,” was all he said, dispiritedly. “Those lines could, in fact, have been written by that Cordovan sodomite, or that other friend of yours, the Conde de Guadalmedina, whose behavior as a caballero I do not contest, but who as a poet is the mortification of Parnassus. As for Gongora, that puerile asshole, that proparoxytonic, euphistic versifier, that dabbler in vortices, tricliniums, promptuaria, and vacillating Icaruses, that shadow on the sun and eructation of the wind…he is the last thing that worries me now. I do fear, however, that I have brought you into a bad business.” He gripped the jug of wine more tightly and took another swig, glancing in my direction. “And the lad.”

The lad—that is, I—was still in the corner. The cat had strolled past me three times, and I had made every effort to get in a good kick, with little success. I saw that Alatriste, too, was looking at me, and he was no longer smiling. Finally he shrugged his shoulders.

“The lad got himself into it,” he declared calmly. “As for me, do not concern yourself.” He pointed to the pouch of gold escudos in the center of the table. “They have paid, and that eases all cares.”

“Perhaps.”

The poet did not seem convinced, and Alatriste’s lips again twisted with irony.

“What the devil, don Francisco. It is a little late for regrets, now that you’ve already got me dressed for the ball.”

Dejected, the poet took a swallow, and then another. His eyes had begun to water.

“But to turn a convent upside down,” he said, underscoring the obvious, “is not a trifling matter.”

“Nor is taking La Goleta, pardiez!” The captain strode to the table, where he picked up his pistol and removed the primer and charge. “They tell that my mother’s great-uncle, a man well known in the day of Charles the Fifth, broke into a convent one day in Seville.”

Don Francisco looked up, interested. “Was he one who inspired Tirso’s play?”

“So they say.”

“I was not aware that you were related.”

“Well, now you know it. Spain is a pocket handkerchief: here everyone knows everyone, and all roads cross.”

Quevedo’s eyeglasses were dangling from their cord. Thoughtful, he held them a moment but did not place them on his nose. Instead, they dropped from his fingers to again hang above the embroidered cross on his chest, and he reached instead for the wine. He drank a long, last draught, gazing lugubriously at the captain over the lip of the jug.

“Well, by the good Christ, I venture that your uncle, that trickster Don Juan, had a bad third act.”

III. MADRID STEEL

The next morning found me at mass with Diego Alatriste and Senor de Quevedo, a rather momentous event. Don Francisco, both because of his Santander heritage and his cross of Santiago, felt it a point of honor to fulfill the rituals of the Church, but the captain was not moved a hair by a Dominus or a vobiscum. It is, however, only fair to point out that for all his oaths, moderate in themselves, for all the blasphemy and By Gods, only standard in his former profession, never in all the years I spent at his side did I hear Alatriste speak a word against religion. Not even when, in the Tavern of the Turk, his friends’ controversial comments left Domine Perez in the middle and no maxim with a breath of life. Alatriste did not practice Catholicism but he respected tonsures, robes, and wimples in the same way that he respected the authority and the person of ourlord and king. Perhaps it was his discipline as a soldier, or it may have been the stoic indifference that seemed to govern his moods and his character. A further detail: though he so seldom attended mass himself, the captain always obliged me to pay my dues to God every Sunday and feast day, whether in the company of Caridad la Lebrijana—like all former whores, La Lebrijana was extremely pious—or Domine Perez. And two days a week, at Alatriste’s insistence, the good priest taught me grammar, a little Latin, and enough catechism and Sacred History that, as the captain said, no one would take me for a Turk or an accursed heretic.

He was a man of many contradictions. Not much later, in Flanders, I had occasion to see him kneeling with bowed head as the tercios were preparing for combat and the chaplains were going up and down the rows blessing all the men. He did not do it to affect piety but, rather, to show respect for comrades who were going off to die believing in the efficacy of the whole rigmarole. Alatriste’s God was neither placated by laud nor offended by oaths; He was a powerful and dispassionate being who did not manipulate the puppets on the stage of life, but merely observed them. And it was also He who, with reasons incomprehensible to the actors in the human comedy—why not just call it a farce—operated the stage machinery, causing lethal trapdoors to open or revolving panels to shift suddenly, sometimes imprisoning you in shackles and other times—a literal deus ex machina—extracting you from the most dire situations. It might all be due to that long-ago prime motion and efficient cause that Domine Perez mentioned one fine afternoon when he had been a bit too free with the sweet wine and was attempting to explain Saint Thomas’s five proofs to us. But as for the captain, his interpretation of the matter was possibly closer to what the Romans—if I am not deceived by the Latin I learned from that same domine—called fatum.

I remember a taciturn Alatriste, when enemy artillery was creating significant lacunae in our ranks, and all around, fellow soldiers were making the sign of the cross, commending themselves to Christ and the most blessed Virgin. Suddenly you heard them reciting prayers they had learned as children, and the captain murmuring “Amen” along with them, so they would not feel alone when they fell to the ground and died. His cold, gray-green eyes nevertheless were fixed on the undulating rows of the enemy cavalry, on the musket fire issuing from the terreplein of a dike, on the smoking bombs that snaked across the ground before exploding in a burst that left the Devil well supplied. It was evident that “Amen” did not bind him in any way, as one could read in the absorbed gaze of an old soldier attentive only to the monotonous drumroll from the center of the tercio, a beat as slow and calm as the tranquil pace of the Spanish infantry and the serene beating of his heart. Because Captain Alatriste served God as he served his king. He had no reason to love God, even to admire Him, but being who he was, he afforded the deity his respect.

One day when we had taken a bellyful of steel and shot on the banks of the Merck River, near Breda, I saw