By the time he left the seminary, my mother was dead and his parents had already willed the bulk of their estates and possessions to my mother’s first child, Rodriguito, who had been left in their care. Carlos and his father, Don Rodrigo, had never gotten along, and Don Rodrigo viewed his son’s decision to leave the seminary with suspicion and irritation. His mother, Doña Inmaculada, was more sympathetic, but there was little she could do to change her husband’s mind. In truth, neither of them was especially concerned with Carlos’ religious dilemmas. They were more perturbed by his tastes for questionable romantic entanglements. Upon his liberation, Doña Inmaculada encouraged him to find a proper Sevillana and marry as soon as possible.
He was gently but firmly banished to Carmona, where he was assigned the task of managing the family’s estate there. “Your mother,” my grandfather said to him, “makes an appearance there twice a year, entranced within a mist of memories from her childhood, and she does little that is useful, other than check the linen and hand out alms to beggars. I am quite certain we are being robbed in a most disrespectful and wanton manner, each and every year, by our farmers, laborers, and household help, all of whom have little incentive to do otherwise. Look into it, son. Keep your eye on them. Exert a presence. Insist upon accounts rendered, and double-check them. Order any necessary repairs or improvements, and make sure they are done, and done at the amounts agreed upon. Let them know we are a family that is not to be trifled with. And if you must beat someone or dismiss anyone, do not hesitate. The local constables still fear and respect our coat of arms. And by all means, concentrate your energies on the females of the species.”
Uncle Carlos did his best. But the initial enthusiasm he experienced at being free of the seminary, and free from his father’s hectoring, soon gave way to boredom. The local gentry in Carmona were hopelessly conventional. Carlos’ dandyish sense of fashion was either ridiculed or ignored. There were no local damsels that appealed to him in the least, and from time to time he imported a young friend from Sevilla, so as to not rouse the rage and scorn of his neighbors. He played games of Ruff and Honors with the local doctor, the priest, and the chief constable, after he taught them the rules. The son of his least honest farmer was a beautiful lad he would have killed to conquer, but if word got out, Don Rodrigo would summon him back to Sevilla and never leave him in peace again.
It was at this juncture that a letter, written in my grandmother Inmaculada’s elegant script, told him of his aunt Soledad Medina’s declining health, along with gossip to the effect that she had taken on a new ward, a widowed foreign girl she was said to dote upon almost as much as she had upon my mother. Intrigued and in want of a change of air, he spent a week increasing demands and threats upon his workers. He gave detailed instructions to the household help as to where and how to clean, where and how to prune, where and how to primp and polish. He then gathered together his latest Parisian coats and breeches and commandeered a two-horse carriage.
Doña Inmaculada and her bevy of envious señoras from Sevilla society had been disseminating the opinion that Doña Soledad was close to madness. But Carlos had his doubts. Though a long time had passed since he had last seen her, his memories were favorable. Even a much diminished, and possibly senile, Soledad Medina would be far preferable to the company the rest of his family kept. He remembered her as being truly stylish, as opposed to Sevilla-stylish. She was multilingual, a former beauty who actually read. She had had the exquisite taste, once upon a time, to have chosen the Duke of Medina-Sidonia as her lover. Her late husband, almost as wealthy as she, had been an infamous philanderer. Reliable rumors proclaimed her last lover, many years past, was a priest she had poisoned upon discovering he was also ravishing her cook’s young daughter. She had been kind to Carlos when he was a boy, and he remembered La Moratalla as a kind of Arcadia. Her two sons, his cousins now deceased, he recalled as bullies, something she had been aware of, and that she had endeavored to curtail.
Setting off at dawn, he drove the carriage north to the Guadalquivir River and followed it east through the villages of El Acebuchal, El Calonge, and Peñaflor. After leaving Palma del Río, he followed the river Bembézar as it wound its way northwest, until the sight of a pair of guards, posted at the start of a long and private tree-lined road, confirmed he had arrived. He reached the imposing gates of the estate proper just before twilight. He told me that his first impressions, seeing the gardens and the fountains, the sculptures and the main house in such magnificent condition, made him question why he had stayed away so long. It also drove home, in an instant, the distance between his immediate family’s wealth, which was considerable, and that of his aunt.
A footman greeted him and installed him in a charming room decorated with various sets of antlers mounted on plaques and still-life paintings of dead game. A note from Doña Soledad requested his presence in the main drawing room for a pre-supper aperitif at nine o’clock. Though eager to wear a pair of pink satin breeches embroidered with gold stars, for finally, here was a place, though hidden deep in an unpopulated corner of rural Andalucia, where such a garment might be appreciated, he chose instead a pair more sober in hue, with a navy vest and coat.
***
At nine o’clock sharp, Doña Soledad emerged dressed in black. He noted how the dress was of the best couture. Her health had actually improved over the months Caitríona had been living with her. She no longer required the moveable chair, and relied instead on a black cane with a silver handle shaped like a wild boar. Caitríona O’Shea came into the room just behind her. He thought her beautiful, and admired her thick braided auburn hair, her brown taffeta dress and lace collar. Caitríona’s Spanish had improved enough to allow conversation in the family’s native tongue. Her first impression of my uncle was vivid, that he was slim and not very tall, but graced with a beautiful face, high cheekbones, brown eyes, and blond hair. The ladies drank ice-cold Manzanilla sherry, Carlos a fortified wine.
“Carlitos,” Doña Soledad asked him, “how long has it been?”
“Nine years,” he said. “When I was sixteen.”
“Qué barbaridad,” she replied. “Now I must congratulate you for deciding against the priesthood.”
“I’m not cut out for it,” he said with a smile.
“I could have told you that,” she said. “You might have saved yourself the trouble if you had thought to consult me first.”
“My father rather insisted upon it.”
“Perhaps he hoped to have a confessor in the family,” she said in jest.
“I cannot imagine an experience more onerous than having to listen to my father’s sins,” he replied, pleased with his wit.
She did not entirely trust his motives for the sudden visit, after so many years, but she told me she saw so much of my mother in his physiognomy, that it pleased her to look at him.
“What brings you here just now, after all this time?” she asked him.
“Where to begin?” he replied. “Ennui with my current condition, I suppose, and a sudden nostalgia for this beautiful estate, and its mistress. I would have come to you sooner, after my liberation from the cloth, but I was unable to leave Carmona until now—and when I see the wonderful state things are in here, I am tempted to kidnap your foreman, whose skills would make my newly found raison d’être much easier.”
“So you’ve taken the reins of your mother’s estate,” she said, unconvinced by his elaborate flattery.
“At my father’s insistence.”
“Do you always do as your father bids?” Caitríona asked suddenly. “First the priesthood, now the farm?”
My uncle told me that when she said it, her impertinence surprised, annoyed, and charmed him.
“I live, quite literally, at his discretion,” he said, looking at her directly for the first time. “My income comes from his pocket. It falls upon me like manna upon the desert. I imagine something similar must happen to you, here, as well.”
“Touché,” she said with a blush.
“There is nothing more vulgar than conversation about money,” Doña Soledad said. “Tell us something amusing.”
“Amusing,” he said, searching desperately. “Well, perhaps it is not terribly amusing, but as I was savoring the aroma of the orange blossoms out my window here earlier this evening, I could not help but remember how dreadful the priests smelled when I lived with them in the monastery.”
“My word,” Doña Soledad replied, raising a fan to cover her nose. She feigned to be affronted so as to hide a small sore recently erupted there that she repeatedly covered with powder. But Caitríona laughed, and this pleased him.
Prompted at supper, she described some of her happier memories from her girlhood in Ireland, and Carlos appeared captivated by it. He in turn recalled how, as children, he and my mother played at hide-and-seek there at the Moratalla estate. He did not mention the misery Doña Soledad’s sons caused him, but later my great-aunt told me that she remembered it while he spoke at the table that night. She remembered how sensitive he’d been as a child, and saw flickers of that same sensitivity still there, hidden by then under layers of cynicism and faux worldliness. She felt sorry for him. Everyone knew what the central drama of his life was, an issue that, in her old age, seemed trifling. She recalled the hours of handwringing and complaint she’d been forced to hear from Doña Inmaculada, and the fulminations against the Lord flung forth by Don Rodrigo for having been cursed with such a son.
It was with this proclivity of her nephew’s in mind that she placed no obstacles in his path when he asked permission to accompany Caitríona the following day to visit my mother’s grave. Doña Soledad was no longer able to get there, and she had Caitríona go for her each day instead. Caitríona brought bouquets of flowers, and detailed instructions for keeping the site free of weeds and fallen leaves. It was a daily excursion she enjoyed and had grown accustomed to, kneeling before the remains of my father’s former love.
One night she described to me how it felt for her when the head gardener had taken her to the grave for the first time one pristine autumn afternoon. Though she had been told about the Roman columns, she was shocked to see them, and realized they had not been imported. She told me she had seen enough in her short life by then to know that what rested beneath the earth she knelt upon, that what remained of my beautiful, worshipped mother, right there so close to her knees, was something too horrible to describe—bone, sinew, darkened robes. That such macabre elements had once been a beautiful creature, filled with life and emotion, sobered her. The macerated flesh beneath the grass had known the pleasure of Father’s embrace. It had captured his heart in a way she feared she hadn’t. It had carried and, just before expiring, given birth to me, the child Caitríona had cared for so lovingly in Venice, in Greece, and in Egypt. The thought that she and her son were all that survived, because of the love story that had started with the corpse buried beneath her there, was doubly strange.
On the way up to the grave with Carlos, conversation was scant at first. It was not until they crossed the small wooden bridge separating the formal gardens from the wilder parts of the property that he inquired about her son.
“How do you know I have one?” she asked.
“I don’t,” he conceded. “It’s just a rumor that reached me, in a letter from my mother. Is it true?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And is he in good health?”
“In what regard?”
“I thought I would have seen him by now.”
“Is that part of the rumor as well?” she asked. “That he is afflicted with some deformity?”
“Not at all,” he said with a grin. “No one in Sevilla possesses that degree of imagination.”
“I’m relieved to say he is in splendid health,” she said, “and perhaps, before you leave, I shall present him to you.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
“Did you ever meet your sister’s child?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid I never did.”
“Why is that?”
“I was chained to the seminary,” he replied, uneasy.
“All that time?” she insisted. “The girl was almost two when her father left with her. Would you not have been allowed a dispensation?”
“I suppose I might have,” he said. “But we grew apart, you see—my sister and I. All of it entirely my fault,” he hastened to add. “I’m not proud of it.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said, blushing and looking away. “You must think me monstrous.”
“Not at all.”
But he probably did.
She observed his behavior at the grave. Doña Soledad, she knew, would demand a full accounting. For her own part, she decided that if my uncle shed tears, they would probably be false, and he would forfeit her interest and respect. But he didn’t. He knelt down, and with his head bowed, seemed to pray. But then he became distracted by how she was arranging fresh blossoms about the headstone.
“It’s good of you to have brought flowers,” he said.
“I do it every day,” she said, “for your aunt.”
He simply nodded.
On the way back down to the formal gardens and the house, she felt a need to say more. “I know I should try to ignore it,” she said, “but I am uncomfortable with the fact that people like your mother gossip about me. People who have never laid eyes on me.”
“Give it no more thought,” he said. “It’s what people in the provinces do, everywhere really, but most especially in Sevilla.”
“Even so,” she said, “I would feel better if I told someone other than your aunt, you for example, my full story. I expect it will come out eventually anyway, but in some distorted fashion.”
“I would be honored,” he said, “and I will be very discreet.”
“As if you were my confessor,” she said.
He laughed. “Precisely.”
And so she told him everything, with greater detail than she had ever used in her discussions with Doña Soledad, if only because he was so much closer to her in age. And when they arrived at the house, she took him to the nursery to see little Patrick. Fascinated by the child’s foreign aspect, Carlos did his best to be agreeable to the little boy.
Years later my uncle confessed that when he retired to his rooms after the meal that day, he lay down and considered the possibility that his mother and her friends were correct, that his aunt might be going mad. How else to explain her attachment to the young Irish woman and her bastard child? Clearly it was yet another expression of the old woman’s devotion to the memory of his dead sister. Convinced that my father and I had departed this Earth, the Irish damsel and her son were the only creatures that maintained a living link to his aunt’s lost loved ones. And what a curious link it was, he thought. But then he had to admit that Caitríona seemed a pleasant young woman. She was spirited and refreshingly frank. She was a pleasure to look at, and her little boy was handsome. And so, by the time evening arrived, he thought it might behoove him to strive for some degree of the open-mindedness, some degree of the generosity, or “madness,” that defined Doña Soledad. For it seemed to him that his aunt still felt sympathy toward him, and she was old and very wealthy, and—something that rarely left his mind for long—his parents were still determined to leave almost all of what should have been his to Rodriguito, my mother’s little boy.
It was at that moment, he said, as the light changed, and cool air entered through the windows, when he first gave serious thought and consideration to my mother, his sister, his former playmate, to whom all the family’s love and attention had transferred once his inadequacies as the firstborn became obvious. What a short and strange life she’d had. Raped by her husband. Then impregnated again by a fellow who might as well have descended from the moon, only to die giving birth to the violent foreigner’s baby girl.
And he remembered how, before supper that evening, he changed into his pink breeches, if only to see how the ladies would resp
ond. Adjacent to the full-length looking glass, where he spent a good deal of time admiring himself, he noticed something quite beautiful hanging on a peg in the corner. He went over and saw it was a leather quiver, filled with royal arrows, a very handsome quiver that had been dyed a deep, rich red. Upon returning to Carmona he took it with him.
– XX –
They were three conversations Caitríona would never forget. The first took place in the courtyard at the Casa de Pilatos, the same place where, two years earlier, she had waited with Paolo Sarpi on her first day in Sevilla. It was winter and misty. The air smelled of rose petals and burning leaves.
“You will of course be within your right to take a lover,” my uncle said. “I only implore that you exercise precaution. If your honor were to be besmirched mine would be as well.”
“You are most kind,” Caitríona replied.
“I am serious.”
“Yes. I know.”
“And … well …”
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” he said, flustered. “I don’t know what I was going to say.”
“I assure you,” she said, “that nothing you declare at this juncture can shock me in the least.”
“It is only that, perhaps, if you were so inclined, so disposed, if you were sufficiently taken with my person, at some moment in time,” he said, “we might attempt to conceive a child together.”
“I thought that was it.”
“And?”
“We might. At some point. Were we both so inclined,” she said. “Do not be overly concerned for me. I know what this is. It suits me. I appreciate it, if only for the welfare of my son. And I shall do all I can, within reason, to give you the propriety and the freedom you desire.”
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