The Scroll of Seduction

by Gioconda Belli

  THE BUILDING’S AGE EXPLAINED THE BIZARRE PARTITIONS THAT its current inhabitants had installed to make better use of the high ceilings. Manuel’s apartment, for instance, must have once been a huge salon with very high ceilings, but now it was a split-level. The door, entryway, bedroom, and bathroom were on the lower level, which was so dark it needed artificial light even in the daytime. From there, going up another short staircase and a trapdoor one came out onto a bright, well-ventilated room that functioned as living-dining and study room with a tiny well-stocked kitchen. The French windows opened out onto a balcony where pots of hanging geraniums sat atop a row of phone books stacked one on top of the other. It was a very pleasant surprise after the gloomy downstairs area. The room smelled of tobacco. There were many books stored in antique bookshelves, a comfortable-looking sofa against the wall, a work table with a typewriter, and on the walls, beautiful old maps and manuscripts. Models of delicate sailboats were set up in different places, and there were also odd-looking mobiles made of scrap metal. Pushed to one side of the dining table there was always an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

  I had never been to Manuel’s bedroom until that day. It was clean and tidy. He had a beautiful, mirrored armoire with volutes and rosettes carved into the wooden doors. His bed had a silk bedspread with orange and black diamonds, the night table, the lamps were tasteful and exquisite, most likely objects inhereted from his ancestors. He went to the armoire and took out a dress, which he laid delicately on the bed. As if it were a task requiring all of his concentration, he carefully pulled it from its protective case and frowned, examining it, before smoothing out the slightly wrinkled skirt. Where on earth did he get it? I wondered, gaping. It was sumptuous: alternating red and gold silk panels, a narrow waistline trimmed in delicate velvet ribbon, and a wider version of the same trim on the rectangular neckline. A row of tiny black buttons ran down the front of the bodice.

  Manuel lifted the hanger up and turned toward me. Like a couturier with his mannequin, he held it up to me, squinting for the full effect.

  “This was worn with hoops called verdugos, to accentuate the hips,” he said, apparently satisfied with his visual inspection, “but we won’t bother with those, partly because I couldn’t make them and partly because you wouldn’t be able to sit down in them.”

  “Are they like a corset?”

  “Not exactly. Verdugos were bell-shaped extensions, worn around the waist and tied through the legs, so that when the dress fell it created the illusion of very wide hips. I’ll help you get changed, if that’s all right.”

  He means I should take my clothes off, I thought, staring at him, not saying a word. In my late childhood I had gone through a phase filled with elaborate, strange fantasies where, either imagining myself to be an Egyptian slave or an Aztec princess, always these rough, violent men would force me to get undressed. I would kick frenetically, fighting and struggling against them, but in the end, when my captors took me out to a plaza and exhibited my naked body before a frenzied crowd, I would get inexplicably aroused. Whether I was dragged by huge, fierce guards or tied to a post like Christ on the cross, as soon as I pictured myself naked I would feel tremendously powerful, despite being the victim. I would imagine those scenes as I showered, before I went to school. Sometimes I envisioned lecherous hands grabbing at me while I squirmed and protested, at others I would glare at them, proud and haughty. Unable to imagine the sexual act, my fantasies would climax when the hero rescued me, pulling me to his chest and covering me up with his cape. I got the same sort of thrill playing hide-and-seek with my cousins in the empty rooms of my grandparents’ house. They would catch the oldest two or three of us girls and push us under the beds and touch us down there. For years I was convinced that down there hid the precise spot that connected all the fibers of my being, the magnet that kept me grounded, the place that was pulled down by the force of gravity like an invisible beam of light shining from inside me down onto the ground. I understood why my mother was so worried that something might obstruct it. Maybe it was the fear of us being catapulted into space, having lost our bearings, that made my cousins act so fast and snatch their hands away so quickly, as if the soft smoothness between our legs might burn them.

  “Let’s try it on,” Manuel said, his back to me now as he unbuttoned the dress from its hanger, which was hooked over the armoire. “It’s going to fit perfectly. Let me help you.”

  Manuel carried on with the determination of a robot programmed to perform a task. Possessed and obsessed, he seemed already to have been transported to another reality. Maybe that was why I was finally able to submit to the game without too much bother. I felt like I was with a scientist attempting to enter a parallel time; like a character out of some fantastic, far-fetched tale.

  “You can leave your underwear on, but take off everything else. I’ll slip the dress over your head. There’s no zipper, logically.”

  Facing me, standing at the foot of the bed, he stared at me without malice. I was looking at him too, my back turned to the mirror where just a minute ago I’d seen my face, my cheeks blushing slightly. I was planning to tell him to look away while I got undressed, but instead I started to unbutton my top. I unzipped the suit pants I was wearing. The silk lining slipped down my legs, rustling softly. I pulled down my stockings and slipped them off. I could feel my heart pounding in my belly. I proceeded to stand up and take off my white blouse. When I took off my bra, he was still staring at me with that guileless expression.

  “Ready.” I smiled, cupping my hands over my breasts. “Hurry up so I don’t catch a cold. It’s freezing in here.”

  It took a second for him to react. He took down the dress as if he’d had to complete a thought before he could do anything else.

  He walked over to me.

  “Raise your arms,” he said.

  I stuck my head through the neck hole. Manuel was standing very close to me. His cold hands brushed against me. For a few seconds all you could hear was the sound of the material slipping over my body. I felt myself starting to get wet between the legs. It was such a luxurious feeling, to abandon myself to this game, and each touch of the dress against my skin was like a pebble falling into a pond, sparking off countless shudders. I thought it was funny, the way my childhood fantasies were coming to life. I hadn’t felt vulnerable when I was nude. It seemed more like my skin was a magnetic field, charged with fluid energy. Even though it was a new feeling, my instincts recognized it.

  Manuel leaned over me and said that now he’d have to button up the corset. I thought he would be clumsy, but I made no effort to help him. “Let’s see,” he said, “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.” His long, slender fingers turned out to be very nimble, ably slipping each button into the piping buttonholes. The dress had wide sleeves, and the narrow bodice fit me perfectly. He stood back to look me over, head to toe.

  “I won’t go overboard and try to make you wear the steeple headdress. But we’ll have to put your hair up. Do you happen to have a barrette in your purse?”

  I said I did and he ran to get it. I heard him bound up the steps two by two. I looked at myself in the mirror.

  I had become a character from another time. A Spanish princess from the days of the reconquest of Granada, the discovery of America. As girls we always played make-believe and pretended to be princesses. This is a game, I told myself. It’s just that this one is about one princess in particular. I pulled my hair into two sections and held it back behind me to see the effect. Better. Long hair hanging down over my shoulders lowered my status. I looked more like a lover than Philippe the Handsome’s wife. He came back with my purse, and I pulled out a brush and barrette.

  “Let me do it,” he said quickly. “Tell me if I hurt you.” And he started to brush my hair, straightening it, and then slowly, gently pulling it back. Touching my ears and neck every once in a while, he slowly braided my hair and then secured it with the tortoiseshell clip.

  Instantaneously, I lo
oked completely different. Dignified. Elegant. Finally Manuel looked at me, and we smiled into the mirror. His eyes came back to the present. He took my hand and twirled me around and then went to the far side of the room to look at me from afar and get the whole effect.

  “Extraordinary,” he said. “Welcome to the Renaissance.”

  CHAPTER 3

  In the Madrid early afternoon, with the mezzanine windows half-opened to a partly cloudy day, dressed like a princess, I sit on the sofa that Manuel places in the middle of the room. He sits behind me. And tells me to close my eyes. He speaks in a low voice, slowly, deliberately. He susurrates. I let the voice take me with it. I sink into it and emerge someplace else. I am Juana.

  AND IT IS TOLEDO. NOVEMBER 6, 1479, THE DAY OF MY BIRTH. Beatriz Galindo, an olive-skinned woman with Castilian features, black hair pulled back into a low bun, and small, sparkly eyes, is there when her friend, Queen Isabella, my mother, delivers me. Finally, my head pokes out, and amid relieved cries and a solemn silence, the midwives wrench me from my original vortex and present me to the uncertain world I am about to join. I can feel slender hands, calluses on palms. No longer protected, enshrouded, my exposed skin registers the weave of the fabric swaddling me. I feel myself transported, from precipice to precipice, from one set of arms to another. The world is deafening and the brightness unforgiving. I want to go back to the warm, wet depths of the womb. I am hungry and distressed and I want to cry. A breast appears before me. Soon I will recognize it as belonging to my nurse, María de Santiesteban. My mother will not feed me; she has to feed the kingdom, and I am but her third child.

  “I want my daughter to learn Latin, Beatriz,” I hear my mother say. “I want her to enjoy the pleasures of the intellect. Given that she will never be queen, she ought to be a princess with a brain.”

  “Yes, Isabel. Now you rest. She’ll be beautiful,” says Beatriz. “Look how delicate her features are. She’s a Trastámara.”

  “I shall call her Juana. Juan was named after John the Baptist. She will be commended to John the Evangelist.”

  In a little while, Ferdinand, my father, will come in to greet my mother and to meet me. He’ll glance at me indifferently. I am not the son he had hoped for, and he casts his cold eyes over my tiny body, swathed in wool, startling me from my sleep and making me wail and holler. My mother comforts me. She rocks me for the first time, in front of my father. I recognize her warmth and her heartbeat; I recognize the body I used to inhabit, the castle where I was once my own cloistered room. Her proximity makes me feel whole again, makes me feel intact. My nose nestles her breast, searching for that familiar scent, that part of me that has been taken away. Lying in her arms, I no longer feel my father glower or notice the cold.

  Manuel’s voice, so close to my ear, whisks me through time, and my first few years blur into a series of shadowy images.

  WE’RE A FAMILY OF NOMADS. MY ROYAL PARENTS ARE WAGING A WAR, and their itinerant court moves from castle to castle. First they battled the supporters of Juana la Beltraneja in the War of Succession. After their victory in 1485 they continued to consolidate their power and moved to end the domination of the Moors by conquering their last stronghold: Granada. They set up court wherever it is militarily convenient. My sister, María, was born, and now my wet nurse breast-feeds her, and a woman named Teresa de Manrique becomes my governess. I have hardly any time to play, because my mother has demanded that her children be raised as worthy princes and princesses of Castile and Aragon, which implies a number of duties. I learn to play the clavichord, to dance, to knit. If I behave well, Teresa takes me to the kitchen and prepares rose sugar sweets for me. If I am rowdy or laugh too loud, I get a smack because experience shows that physical punishment cures recklesness in girls and that pain is a healthy way of disciplining our bodies. I have started classes with my tutor, the Dominican Andrés de la Miranda. He left his monastery in Burgos in order to become our private instructor. In Latin class, my younger sister María puts her head down on the table and sleeps. I can’t sleep because Father Andrés is very strict and admonishes me, describing the torments of hell. He burned the tip of my ring finger with a charred stick to help my imagination visualize the sensation of the burning flames that will consume me if I don’t learn to be a good Christian. I kicked and screamed, but my mother, who came when she heard me calling to her, smiled at the monk and approved of his barbaric methods. Don Andrés talks about the large numbers of infidels who roam free in our kingdom and worship other gods. Beatriz Galindo contradicts him and extols the benefits of living alongside Jews and Moors. Secretly, she shares poems and stories of courtly love with me. I devour them on the nights my parents are busy with court festivities. I dream of becoming an adult and no longer having to live through wars, persecutions, and fear.

  I, Lucía, remember the nun at the Catholic school in my country who, when I was a small child, also invited me to hold my finger over a lit match, to demonstrate the torments of hell. And then there is Mother Aurora, a fair-skinned nun with a glass eye, who often supervises us in the dormitory, and who told me that taking a shower for more than half an hour is tempting the devil.

  Those are vestiges of the mentality that led to the Inquisition, Manuel says. Your parents were the ones who chose Torquemada as the Great Inquisitor, he adds. In securing an austere and intolerant court they seeked to debilitate the alliance between the traditional nobility and the corrupt, licentious priests, as well as raise their own status in the eyes of Rome. Their strategy worked. Those were the years when they abolished the classic, white mourning attire, and substituted it for all-black apparel. They cultivated a severe, penitent mind-set, which suspected color, the pleasure of the eyes, or the the delights of food. They shaped the “Castilian” spirit and made Castilian Spanish–with its harsh, guttural, masculine sounds, which only Latin American Spanish has managed to soften–into the official language of the land.

  Poor Juana, growing up surrounded by punctilious governesses averse to fun and affection. Poor Juana, having a tutor like Miranda, who got his kicks by making note of the different types of heresy, from the common to the exotic, in dossiers that he always carried with him and that she read behind his back.

  I WOULD READ THE CONFESSIONS OF CURANDERAS, THE WOMEN FOLK healers who read the future in the bowels of rabbits. That sinister world seemed no darker to me than the corridors of our palaces, traversed night and day by whispering clerics who stared at me, even as a child, with obsequious compassion and thinly veiled concupiscence. Few were the joys I found among the men entrusted with my education and care. Perhaps my father’s rejection was contagious and the three princesses born after Juan reminded them of the vagaries of a womb that seemed only to give birth to one female after another. María, Catalina, and I would always be reminders to my father that his virility had produced only one male heir to the throne: our weak, scrawny brother Juan, who I surpassed both on horseback and in archery skills; I never shot an arrow from my crossbow that wouldn’t hit its target. If what happened to me when we were crossing the Tajo on our way to Toledo–when my mule lost its footing and fell into the strong river current–had happened to Juan, there would be no more crown prince. But I didn’t lose my composure, nor was I paralyzed by fear when the icy water cut my breath and soaked my velvet dress, making it heavy as armor. I grabbed the mule by the ears and tugged her out of the deep water. Then I clung to her and dug my heels into her side to make her swim to shore. Though I was trembling, I was calm and triumphant, especially when I saw the faces of all those ladies and gentlemen and all those servants, staring at me, pale and dumbfounded, incredulous, relieved and full of admiration at my bravery. I was only ten years old, but I was my mother’s daughter. So often I had seen her from my bedroom window at dawn, leading the cavalry on her way to battle the enemy.

  To reward my courage I was taken to see my parents as soon as we reached the palace. My father embraced me and tugged on my braid affectionately. I think it was then that I recognized t
he part of him that lived in me, and he saw his own reflection in my eyes. He was proud of me. My mother held me tight. I didn’t mind the rancid smell that clung to her, ever since she vowed not to bathe until Granada was taken back from the Moors.

  Juan and Isabel were brought up to rule as king and queen. The same was not true for the rest of us. Only the two oldest accompanied my parents and saw them often. I applied myself to my studies of Latin and romance languages, and mastered the clavichord, in hopes that news of my progress would make my parents notice me, send for me to read aloud to them, or play for them one night. I was probably twelve when Beatriz Galindo, La Latina, gave me a book for my birthday that mesmerized me. It was called Delectable Vision of Philosophy and Liberal Arts, by Alfonso de la Torre. Until I read it, I had never thought about how extraordinary it was that our species had managed to deduce the existence of the soul, of internal and external realities, nor had I noticed the unrelenting insatiability of our thirst for knowledge. I had never wondered where the artistic impulse came from, never questioned the need for beauty, never considered that, as a woman, I could play a more active role in my household. Though I would never be queen, given the line of succession, I could propose to leave my mark, take more conscious control of my destiny, flatter my intellect over my vanity. Because I was vain. Why not admit it? Ever since my mother let me exchange my black dresses for crimson ones, even though the material cost twice as much, I had begun to take great delight in ordering new clothes. The mirror did not lie when it reflected my beauty as superior to that of my sisters. I was the spitting image of my Aragonese grandmother. The resemblance was so striking that my mother teased me, calling me “mother-in-law.” But people also said I looked like Isabel of Portugal, my mother’s mother, who lived in Arévalo in a fortified castle on the Adaja River. I was flattered to hear that I had inherited her dark-skinned beauty, so different from my mother and older sister’s fair complexions. Nevertheless I didn’t like being compared to her, because I often heard the ladies at court whisper that she was mad. They said she had a guilty conscience because she had forced her husband Juan I to execute his faithful but malevolent servant Don Álvaro de Luna, and it had driven her insane. Apparently, my grandfather never got over having obeyed her and died thirteen months later, in a deep state of depression, claiming that he hated being king and would have been happier as the son of a farmworker. They say that my poor grandmother, mortified, saw Don Álvaro’s ghost everywhere, and insisted that the river that passed under her window whispered the dead man’s name. My mother, however, had more lyrical memories of her childhood in Arévalo. Her eyes would water when she spoke of her childhood independence, the freedom she had to roam the Castilian countryside at will, until she felt that its tenderness had made its way into her very soul. When she was upset, she said, all she had to do was close her eyes and imagine the plains and the hills of Castile, the paths beside the rivers, to regain her inner peace. I think that from that experience my mother assumed that her own children would not miss her, not suffer when she was gone, and that we would learn to value ourselves and not be dependent on the family for affection. And though it might have worked well for her, I felt empty when she was gone, as if my heart had also left. As I grew, that longing for affection turned into physical pain. I would dream of affection and cuddling.