The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

braggart, but concentrating on the job at hand. He was perhaps from a good family. The captain ignored a feint and made a circling movement to the right so that the sun was in his adversary’s eyes. He silently cursed himself. By now, the first act of The Garden of Juan Fernandez would be in full swing.

He decided to finish the business, although not so hastily that it might work against him. Besides, there was no point in complicating his life further by killing a man in broad daylight, and on a Sunday. His opponent made a lunge, which Alatriste parried, making as if to deliver a straightforward blow, but instead shifting to the right, lowering his sword to protect his own chest and, in passing, dealing the other man an ugly cut to the head with his dagger. A bystander might have described this as both unorthodox and somewhat underhand, but there were no by standers. Besides, Maria de Castro would already be on stage, and it was still a fair walk to the Corral de la Cruz. This was no time for niceties. More important, the strategy had worked. The young man turned pale and fell to his knees, bright red blood gushing from his temple. He had dropped his dagger and was resting all his weight on his sword, which buckled slightly beneath him. Alatriste sheathed his own sword, then went over and disarmed the wounded man by gently kicking the blade from under him. Then he held him up so that he wouldn’t fall, took a clean handkerchief from the sleeve of his doublet and bandaged the gash in the man’s head as best he could.

“Will you be all right on your own?” he asked.

The young man looked at him, confused, but did not reply. Alatriste snorted impatiently.

“I have things to do,” he said.

The man nodded weakly. He made as if to get up, and Alatriste helped him to his feet, letting him lean on his shoulder. The blood was still flowing beneath the improvised bandage, but the man was young and strong. The bleeding would soon stop.

“I’ll send help,” added Alatriste.

He couldn’t wait to be gone. He looked at the tower of the Alcazar Real that rose up above the walls, then back toward the long Segovia bridge. No constables—that was one good thing—and no bluebottles either. No one. The whole of Madrid was watching Tirso’s play, and there he was, wasting time. One way to solve the problem, he thought impatiently, would be to slip a real to some errand boy or footboy, of the sort usually to be be found loitering near the city gate, waiting for travelers. They could then take the stranger back to his inn—or indeed to hell or wherever else he might choose to go. He helped the wounded man sit down on a large boulder that had once formed part of the city wall. Then he restored to him hat, cape, sword, and dagger.

“Can I do anything more for you?”

The other man’s breathing was somewhat labored, and his face was still drained of color. He looked at Alatriste for a long while, as if he found it hard to make out his features.

“Tell me your name,” he murmured at last in a hoarse voice.

Alatriste was brushing dust from his boots with his hat.

“My name is my affair,” he replied coldly, putting his hat back on. “And I don’t give a damn about yours.”

Don Francisco de Quevedo and I saw him enter just as the guitars were signaling the end of the interlude. Hat in hand, short cape folded over one arm, sword pressed to his side, and head lowered so as not to bother anyone as—with many a “Forgive me, sir,” “Excuse me,” “May I come past?”—he pushed his way through the people crowding the yard. He arrived at the front of the lower gallery, greeted the constable of the theater, paid sixteen maravedis to the man selling tickets for the tiered seats on the right, then came up the steps and joined us where we were sitting on a bench in the front row, next to the balustrade and near the stage. I was surprised they had let him in, given how packed the theater was, with people still standing out in the street, protesting because there was no more room; later, however, I learned that he had managed to slip in, not through the main door, but through the carriage gate, which was normally used by the ladies to reach the section reserved for them. The porter there—wearing a buffcoat to protect him from the knife-thrusts of those trying to sidle in without paying—was apprenticed to the apothecary in Puerta Cerrada owned by Tuerto Fadrique, an old friend of the captain’s. Nevertheless, once the captain had greased the porter’s palm, paid for the entrance fee and for his seat, and made the usual charitable donation to Madrid’s hospitals, the cost came to two reales: no small drain on the captain’s purse, when you think that, for the same price, you could usually get a seat in the upper gallery. Then again, this was a new play by Tirso. At the time—along with the venerable Lope de Vega and that other young poet treading hard on his heels, Pedro Calderon—this Mercedarian friar, whose real name was Gabriel Tellez, was both filling the purses of theater-owners and actors and delighting his adoring public, although he never reached the heights of glory and popularity enjoyed by the great Lope. The Madrid garden near Prado Alto from which the play took its name was a splendid, peaceful place, much frequented by the court and known as a fashionable spot, perfect for a romantic rendezvous, and, as I had seen during the first act, it was being used to good effect. The moment Petronila appeared, dressed as a man, in boots and spurs, alongside Tomasa disguised as a young lackey, and before the beautiful Maria de Castro had even opened her mouth, the audience had begun applauding wildly, even the mosqueteros —the musketeers, or groundlings—who were, as usual, crammed into an area at the back of the yard. Their name derived from their habit of always standing together, wearing cape, sword, and dagger, like soldiers ready to be inspected or to go into action—well, that and their tendency to make rowdy comments and to boo. This time, however—urged on by their leader, the shoemaker Tabarca, the musketeers had greeted Tomasa’s words, “Maid and court are two ideas in mutual contradiction,” with warm applause and the grave approving nods of real connoisseurs. It was always important to gain the musketeers’ approval. This was a time when bullfights and plays were attended by both the common people and the nobility, a time when there was a real passion for the theater, and much depended on the success or failure of a first night, so much so that even famous playwrights, hoping to win the musketeers’ favor, would often address a prologue full of praise to that noisy, hard-to-please audience:

Those who have it in their power

To make a play seem good or dire . . .

For in that picturesque Spain of ours—so extreme in its good qualities, and in its bad—no doctor was ever punished for killing a patient through bloodletting and incompetence, no lawyer was ever banned from practicing because he was conniving, corrupt, or useless, no royal functionary was ever stripped of his privileges, having been caught with his hand in the money box; but there was no such forgiveness for a poet whose lines did not scan or who failed to hit the mark. Indeed, it seemed sometimes that the audience got more pleasure from seeing a bad play than a good one; they enjoyed and applauded the latter, of course, but a bad play gave them license to whistle, talk, shout, and hurl insults—“A pox on’t,” “I’faith,” “Od’s blood,” “Why, not even Turks and Lutherans would put on such a shambles,” et cetera. The most hopeless of block-heads made themselves out to be experts, and duennas and clumsy serving wenches assumed the role of learned and discerning critics and rattled their keys to show their disapproval. They thus found an outlet for that most Spanish of pleasures, namely, venting all the spleen they felt for their rulers by kicking up a row in the safety of the crowd. For, as everyone knows, Cain was an hidalgo, a pure-blooded Christian, and a Spaniard.

Anyway, as I was saying, Captain Alatriste finally joined us, where we had been saving him a seat until another member of the audience demanded to take it. Wanting to avoid a quarrel—not out of cowardice but out of respect for the place and the circumstances—don Francisco de Quevedo had let the importunate fellow do as he wished, warning him, however, that the seat was already taken and that as soon as its rightful occupant arrived, he would have to relinquish it. The disdainful “Hmm, we’ll see about that” with which the man responded as he made himself comfortable was immediately transformed into a look of wary respect when the captain appeared. Don Francisco shrugged and indicated to the captain his now occupied place on the bench, and my master fixed the intruder with his cold green eyes. The man was a wealthy artisan (as I found out later, he held the lease on the ice wells in Calle de Fuencarral), and the sword hanging from his leather belt looked about as much in keeping with him as a harquebus would on a Christ. He took in at one glance the captain’s ice-cold eyes, his veteran’s bushy mustache, the guard on his sword all dented and scuffed, and the long, narrow dagger, the hilt of which was just visible at his hip. Without saying a word, as silent as a clam, he gulped hard and, on the pretext of leaning over to buy a glass of mead from a passing vendor, shuffled farther up the bench, robbing his neighbor on the other side of some of his space, but freeing up my master’s place entirely.