Captain Alatriste

As for Diego Alatriste, the table that Caridad la Lebrijana reserved for him near the door was commodious and sunny, and sometimes the wine brought with it a meat pie or some cracklings. The captain had carried over from his youth—something he said very little or nothing about—a certain taste for reading. It was not unusual to see him sitting at his table, alone, his sword and hat hung on a peg in the wall, reading the printed version of Lope's latest play—he was the captain's favorite author—recently performed in El Principe or La Cruz. Or it might be one of the gazettes or broadsides featuring the anonymous satiric verses that circulated at court in that time that was at once magnificent, decadent, mournful, and inspired—a time that cast a shadow as black as a curate's cloak over the favorite, the monarchy, and the morning star. In many verses, in fact, Alatriste recognized the corrosive wit and proverbial bad temper of his friend the unredeemed grumbler and popular poet Don Francisco de Quevedo:

Here lies Senor Perez, the swine

Whose life was Satan's appetizer

While his devil's broth was stewing.

No pussy ever meowed to him.

How he rued Herod's misconstruing

The use of power; so much wiser

Not to have slaughtered innocent lambs:

Forsooth! Such succulent cherubim

Should be spared and saved for screwing.

And other pretty bits of the sort. I imagine that my poor widowed mother, back there in her tiny Basque town, would have been alarmed had she had a hint of what strange company my serving as the captain's page had led me into. But as for the young Inigo Balboa, at thirteen he found that world to be a fascinating spectacle, and a singular school of life.

I mentioned a couple of chapters ago that Don Francisco, along with Licenciado Calzas, Juan Vicuna, Domine Perez, the pharmacist Fadrique, and others of the captain's friends, often came to the tavern, and engaged in long discussions about politics, theater, poetry, and routinely, a punctilious appraisal of the many wars in which our poor Spain had been or was then involved. She may still have been powerful and feared by other nations, but she was touched with death in her soul. The battlefields of those wars were skillfully re-created on the tavern table by Juan Vicuna, using bits of bread, cutlery, and jugs of wine. Originally from Extremadura, and badly wounded at Nieuwpoort, he had once been a sergeant in the horse guard, and deemed himself a master strategist.

War had soon become a real and pressing concern, for it was during the affair of the masked men and the

Englishmen, as I recall, that hostilities were renewed in the Low Countries, after the expiration of the twelve- year truce that our deceased and peaceful King Philip the Third, the father of our young monarch, had signed with the Low Dutch. That long interim of peace, or its effects, was precisely the reason so many veteran soldiers were wandering without employ through the Spains and the rest of the world, swelling the ranks of idle braggarts, bullies, and blusterers disposed to hire out for any petty villainy. And among them we may count Diego Alatriste. However, the captain was one of the silent variety, and in contrast to so many others, no one ever saw him boasting of his campaigns or his wounds. And then when the drumrolls of his old company sounded again, Alatriste, like my father and many other brave men, rushed to reenlist beneath the old general of their old tercio, Don Ambrosio de Spinola, and to play their part at the beginning of what today we know as the Thirty Years' War. He would have served on and on had he not received the serious wound at Fleurus.

At any rate, although the war against Holland and in the rest of Europe was the topic of conversation those days, I rarely heard the captain refer to his life as a soldier. That made me admire him even more, accustomed as I was to crossing paths with a hundred swaggering braggarts who, talking out of both sides of their mouth and fantasizing about Flanders, spent the day trumpeting their supposed feats at full pitch, clanking their swords through the Puerta del Sol or along Calle Montera, and strutting like peacocks on the steps of San Felipe. Their sashes were stuffed with tin tubes filled with documents praising their campaigns and their bravery, all of them ringing falser than a lead doubloon.

It had rained a little, early that morning, and there were muddy tracks on the tavern floor, and that smell of dampness and sawdust that public places get on rainy days. The clouds were breaking, and a ray of sun, timid at first but soon after very sure of itself, framed the table where Diego Alatriste, Licenciado Calzas, Domine Perez, and Juan Vicuna were chatting after a meal. I was sitting on a tabo-ret near the door, practicing my penmanship with a quill, an inkwell, and a ream of paper the licenciado had brought me at the captain's suggestion. 'So he will be able to instruct himself and read law and bleed the last maravedis out of clients, like all you lawyers, scribes, and other bloodsucking varlets.'

Calzas had burst out laughing. He was a pleasant fellow with a kind of cynical good humor, and his friendship with Alatriste was old and trusting. . 'My faith! What a great truth that is,' he had replied, still amused, and winking at me. 'The pen, Inigo, is a better source of income than the sword.'

'Longa manus calami,' the good father put it.

A principle about which all those gathered around the table were in agreement, either in cordial accord or to hide that they did not know Latin. The next day the licenciado brought me a gift of writing materials, which no doubt he had skillfully extracted from the courts, where, thanks to the corrupt practices of his office, he earned an easy livelihood. Alatriste said nothing, and he did not offer me counsel on what use to make of the pen, paper, and ink. But I read the approval in his calm eyes when he saw me sitting beside the door practicing my letters. I did that by copying a few of Lope's verses I had sometimes heard the captain recite on nights when the Fleurus wound tormented him more than usual.

The bastard has not come, as planned,

Whose design it was on this fair day.

To die by my genteel and noble hand

And, in so doing, gain cachet.

The fact that the captain would occasionally laugh quietly as he recited those lines, perhaps to gloss over the pain of his old wound, was not enough to cloud the fact that I longed for pretty verses. Like others I applied myself to copying that morning, having heard them also during the captain's long, sleepless nights.

Hand to hand I must duel with him