complete his gesture.
“Your father . . .”
Again, he left these words hanging inconclusively in the air. Perhaps, I thought, he wanted to tell me that his friend Lope Balboa would have been proud to see me that night, sword and dagger in hand, alone against seven men, and only sixteen years old. Or to hear his son saying that he was in love with a woman.
“You did very well in the Alameda just now.”
I blushed with pride. In Captain Alatriste’s mouth these words were worth a Genoese banker’s ransom. It was the equivalent of a king commanding a subject to don his hat in his presence.
“I knew it was a trap,” I said. The last thing I wanted was for him to think that I had fallen into the trap like some novice.
The captain nodded reassuringly. “I know you did. And I know that it wasn’t intended for you.”
“Angelica de Alquezar,” I said as steadily as I could, “is entirely my affair.”
Now he remained silent for a long time. I was staring obstinately out of the window and the captain was watching me.
“Of course,” he said again at last.
The scenes of that day kept crowding into my mind. I touched my mouth, where she had placed her lips. “If you survive,” she had said, “you can claim the rest.” Then I turned pale at the thought of those seven shadows emerging out of the darkness beneath the trees. My shoulder still hurt from the knife thrust stopped by the captain’s buff coat and my tow-stuffed doublet.
“One day,” I muttered, almost thinking out loud, “I’ll kill Gualterio Malatesta.”
I heard the captain chuckle. There was no mockery in that laughter, no scorn for my young man’s arrogance. It was a gentle laugh, warm and affectionate.
“Possibly,” he said, “but first, I must have a go at killing him myself.”
The next day, we planted our imaginary flag and started recruiting. We did so as discreetly as possible, with no ensigns, no drumroll, and no sergeants. And Seville was the ideal place to provide the kind of men we required. If you bear in mind that man’s first father was a thief, his first mother a liar, and their first son a murderer—for there’s nothing new under the sun—this was all confirmed in that rich and turbulent city, where the Ten Commandments weren’t so much broken as hacked to pieces with a knife. Seville, with its taverns, bawdy houses, and gaming dens, with the Patio de Los Naranjos and even the royal prison—which quite rightly bore the title of the Spanish Empire’s capital of crime—abounded in purveyors of stranglings and dealers in sword thrusts; and this was only natural in a city populated by gentlemen of fortune, hidalgos of thievery, caballeros who appeared to live on air and with not a thought for the morrow, and monks of the Holy Order of Intrigue, where judges and constables could be silenced with a gag of silver. It was, in short, a university for the biggest rogues God ever created, full of churches offering sanctuary, and a place where men would kill on credit for a
The problem was that in a city like Seville and, indeed, in the whole of Spain, where all was bravado and effrontery, many of these self-proclaimed killers were nothing but talk, young ruffians full of valiant oaths, who, in their cups, claimed to have dispatched between twenty and thirty men, boasting of murders they hadn’t committed and of wars in which they hadn’t served, of how they were as happy to kill with their bare hands as with a knife or a sword, strutting and swaggering, in buff coats and hats as large as parasols, and sporting black looks, goatees, and mustaches that resembled the guard on a dagger; however, come the moment of truth, twenty of them together wouldn’t have been capable of seeing off one drunk constable, and if tortured on the rack, they would have confessed everything at the first turn of the screw. If you were not to be dazzled by such an apparent abundance of fine swordsmen, you had to know who you were dealing with, as Captain Alatriste certainly did. Thus, trusting to the captain’s keen eye, we began our levy in the taverns of La Heria and Triana, in search of old acquaintances who were men of few words but had a ready hand with the sword, who were not stage villains but genuine ruffians, men who would kill without giving their victims time to confess, so that no one afterward could go telling tales to the law. The kind of man who, when questioned under pain of death, and when the torturer turned the screw, would offer as guarantors only his own throat and spine, and remain entirely dumb, except to say naught or “My name’s Nobody” or to call on the Church itself for aid, but otherwise offer no information, not even if someone promised to dub him a Knight of Calatrava.
Calling on the Church wasn’t, in fact, such a bad idea, for Seville boasted the most famous rogues’ refuge in the world—the Cathedral’s Patio de los Naranjos, whose renown and usefulness is captured in these lines:
This was one of the courtyards in the Cathedral, or Iglesia Mayor, which had been built on the site of a former Moorish mosque, just as the Giralda tower had been modeled on a minaret. It was a pleasant, spacious area with a fountain in the middle and was shaded by the orange trees from which it took its name; the main door of this famous courtyard opened onto the Cathedral square and the surrounding steps, which, during the day, like the steps of San Felipe in Madrid, were the favored place for idlers and rogues to meet and talk. Because of the courtyard’s role as sanctuary, it became the chosen place of asylum for desperados and scoundrels and criminals on the run from justice, and there they lived freely and well, visited both day and night by their whores and companions; and those men whom the law was most eager to apprehend only ventured forth into the city in large gangs, so that even the constables themselves dared not confront them. The place has been described by the sharpest quills of Spanish letters, from the great don Miguel de Cervantes to don Francisco de Quevedo, so I need not provide much detail. No picaresque novel, no soldier’s tale or rogue’s story is complete without a mention of Seville and the Patio de los Naranjos. Simply try to imagine the atmosphere of that legendary place, close by the Casa Lonja and the shops selling silk, a place where fugitives from justice and the whole criminal world were as thick as thieves and as snug as bugs in a rug.
I accompanied the captain on his recruiting campaign, and we visited the Patio during the day, when the light was still good and it was easy to recognize faces. On the steps up to the main entrance beat the pulse of that multifarious and sometimes cruel city of Seville. At that hour, the steps were seething with idlers, sellers of cheap trinkets, strollers, rogues, streetwalkers with their faces half veiled, girl pickpockets disguised as innocent maids accompanied by ancient chaperones and little pages, with light-fingered thieves, beggars, and blades for hire. In the midst of them all, a blind man was selling ballad sheets and singing about the death of Escamilla:
Half a dozen ruffians were gathered beneath the arch of the main doorway and nodded approvingly as they listened to the turbulent story of that legendary swordsman and hired assassin, the very cream of the local villainry. We passed them as we went into the courtyard, and I couldn’t help noticing that the whole group turned to watch Captain Alatriste. Inside, thirty or so fellows, identical in appearance to those at the entrance, were lounging in the
