The Scroll of Seduction

by Gioconda Belli

  IN THE ART HISTORY CLASS TAUGHT BY MARISA–THIN, WIRY, ATHLETIC arms, librarian’s face–we studied the Roman obsession with rites. She read us part of Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March: Caesar sends a letter to a wise friend expressing his irritation at the fact that due to evil omens and fortune-telling, the Senate session has been canceled. Marisa talked at length about the importance of rites at a time when the world was seen as inscrutable and science had not yet managed to explain natural phenomena or the psyche. It occurred to me, while I was doodling absently, that perhaps I was carrying out my own rites of passage and bidding my innocence farewell. I instinctively felt that my life was about to enter a new cycle, that the girl who still bore hopes of bringing the dead back to life and that believed tragedies could miraculously have happy endings was being left behind forever.

  That night, I took the Pradwin book that Mother Luisa Magdalena had loaned me out of my armoire. On the back cover, I read that the author was Ukrainian, a historian, and that his biography of Queen Juana was the product of an interest in her that had arisen after one of his visits to Spain. I glanced at the engravings and reproductions of paintings from the period. I looked hard and long at Juana’s face. Our resemblance was remarkable. It wasn’t that we had the same features; it was something less obvious, a familiar air we had about us. Juana had delicate features. I was struck by the perfect curve of the thin eyebrows that arched across her high forehead. Were they natural, or did people already pluck them back then? Her eyes looked like they had no eyelashes. (The painter had simply traced a black line above her lids.) They were her most remarkable feature, dark and almond-shaped. Her nose was thin and straight, very aristocratic, and she had a small, well-defined mouth, with a sensual, full lower lip. It crossed my mind that one really had to be beautiful to look good wearing those headdresses, which hid the hair underneath a monastical velvet coif. Philippe the Handsome looked very delicate. Although the reproductions were black-and-white, one could guess his very fair complexion and the light brown, almost blond, hair. He had Manuel’s coloring, though Manuel’s hair was white. Would I have fallen in love with Philippe? In my fantasies, my heroes always had strong arms and broad chests rather than beautiful faces. I liked to imagine the strength of a man’s body under my fingertips, the musculature of the legs, the coarseness of the beard, the firmness of the whole. But I also liked to imagine the eyes and the sound of the voice.

  From what seemed a long way off, I heard the call for lights-out. For the past few weeks I had surprised myself at the ease I had developed in escaping reality. Lost in my thoughts I could entirely forget time and space. I got up and placed the book among my school texts. I was not going to read it, I told myself. Were I to do it I would know too much and would not be as attentive with Manuel. I preferred to listen to his version of the story, at the apartment. There I would be wearing the same silk-and-velvet dress that Juana wore in the engraving I had just seen.

  Maybe it was because I was experiencing new feelings, but that week I spent more time than usual with my classmates: Piluca, who was delicate and perfect and diligent; Marina, who was sweet and childlike; Cristina, the practical one; and, of course, Margarita with her jokes. I was curious to find out how they dealt with the problems of growing up and forging their way through the terra incognita of real life, which was confronting us all. I paid attention at recess and on breaks to their stories of domestic conflict. Piluca and Marina were day pupils, so they went back home every night, argued with their siblings, played and studied with neighbors. Marina was obsessed with a boy who lived in the apartment above her and who every afternoon, when he figured she was sitting by her window doing her homework, lowered a can tied to a string with messages to her. “He sends me stupid poems, they’re ridiculous!” She’d laugh, blushing. “Or he copies passages from the ‘Song of Songs,’ the fool.” She said she couldn’t stand him, but it was obvious that they had developed a sort of curious intimacy–his bedroom being directly on top of hers–if only by knowing they were in such close proximity. She listened to his music. She knew when he got into bed, when he turned out the light. He’d even say good night to her by tapping gently on the floor. Piluca, on the other hand, lived in the shadow of her older sister, who was a singer and was starting to become known. Boys were constantly calling her house, and Piluca spent every second of her free time spying on her sister. I joined their talk, telling them about the games I used to play with my cousins, while I couldn’t help picturing the expressions they would have on their faces were they to know that just the week before I had taken my clothes off in front of a man. It wouldn’t be very long before I returned to Manuel’s apartment. It wouldn’t be very long before those conversations would ring even more naive and innocent to me. I already felt as if I had crossed the threshhold that took me past adolescence.

  Lucía: you were given a most appropiate name, the Latin for light. Do you shine in the darkness, or is it that your memory shines within me during the day, when I close my eyes?

  So long, Manuel.

  It was Friday, and those were the words of his newly arrived letter. I went from anguish to a sort of sweet confusion. No one had ever addressed anything so poetic to me before. I slipped the letter into my skirt pocket and looked for excuses to be alone so I could keep rereading it. I spent all day in a near-beatific state of euphoria. I went to chapel in the afternoon. Kneeling in the dark, amid candles and the smell of incense, I saw Manuel’s eyes burning in the flames of all the votives lined up before the altar.

  CHAPTER 5

  Before I left on Sunday, I dedicated some time to quiet Mother Luisa Magdalena’s worries about me. In a motherly way she tended to be quite vigilant and aware of my moods. If she saw that I was pensive and silent, her instinct went on guard, and Christ’s Amazon that she was, she set off against my melancholy, suggesting this or that distraction. I was surprised to see that rather than accept my customary visit to the Prado, she kept insisting I go with Margarita and a few other girls to the Puerta del Sol shopping district. I assured her that I wasn’t sad or depressed, I just didn’t feel like shopping. For the first time, I regretted having made her my confidante and protector, and letting her have an influence over me. Never before had she taken any part in deciding what I would or wouldn’t do on Sundays.

  I left the school with Margarita and the others, but said good-bye to them when we were out on the street. Intrigued, Margarita asked me if I was going to see my boyfriend. I denied it emphatically. That wasn’t it, I said. I simply didn’t feel like going shopping.

  When I got to the Prado, I still hadn’t shaken off the uneasiness I felt at being the center of attention just when I wanted to avoid questions and prying.

  It had only been a year since I had been allowed to roam around the city by myself on weekends. Most of the time I would walk to the Prado, browse around department stores like Corte Inglés or Galerías Preciados, wander up and down the Gran Vía, or else go to the movies with Margarita. My routine had changed ever since Manuel appeared in my life. I had met with him every Sunday since the start of the school year in September. If I needed to go shopping or run errands, I went on Saturdays.

  Manuel was waiting for me, cigarette in hand as usual. He was wearing a black wool coat, which made him look paler. His blue eyes were watery planets, floating in the pallor of his face. I let him whisk me through the museum halls. He wanted to show me a painting by Francisco Pradilla, Doña Juana la Loca. We stopped briefly before Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. I had spent hours staring at that triptych, I told him. There was always something new to discover, and it never ceased to excite my imagination. “All of Dalí can be found in that painting,” he said. That was precisely what made it so fascinating to me, I said. One could imagine so many other painters dumbfounded before it. One could find later in those painters’ works their attempts to go further, to unravel the past and future of those figures.

  “Bosch is so unique, isn’t he? He introduces a taste of h
ell in paradise, he plays on the duplicity of every possible reality,” Manuel said. “You got a glimpse of that yourself, when you saw from your mother’s letters what lay behind the apparent paradise you perceived. I thought a lot about that, and about you, this week. That’s why I wanted you to see Pradilla’s painting. He’s not particularly well known, but he was a marvelous artist. When you see Juana’s face, you’ll be able to imagine your mother’s innermost thoughts.”

  We spent a long time looking at that painting. The figure of Juana, wearing a nun’s habit, was at the center of the canvas. The image was passive, dark, and for some reason I took her to be in motion. She seemed to want to stop anyone from glancing curiously at Philippe’s coffin, keep anyone from approaching him. Manuel said that Juana had tried to take her husband’s body to Granada to bury him beside Isabella the Catholic. From a historian’s perspective, he thought her ulterior motives had been, on the one hand, to surround herself by the Andalusian nobility who favored her while ridding herself of the Flemish courtiers who had surrounded Philippe. On the other hand, by placing Philippe’s body next to Queen Isabella’s, she sought to legitimize his royal claim, thus ensuring the succession of her son Charles. Legend had it, however, that her nocturnal journeys were a testament to the lovesickness of a queen who refused to leave her lover’s side, and who claimed she could not travel by day, since her husband was a bright sun, and two suns could not shine at the same time in the world.

  “They said she was so jealous that she wouldn’t let any women near the body,” Manuel added. “All fallacies, of course.”

  I wondered if maybe my mother had felt something similar to the proud impotence revealed by the woman in the painting on display. When she realized that she and my father would die together, she might have felt, amid the terror of the plane crash, relief at knowing that my father was now hers forever. Manuel kept looking at the painting and then back at me, as if he were trying to gauge each of my reactions.

  We had a sandwich at a restaurant with tiled walls where, according to Manuel, they served the best sangria in Madrid. The sweetness of the fruit juice camouflaged the taste of alcohol and made my cheeks burn. Afterward, Manuel hailed a cab and gave the driver his address.

  We sat very close to each other in the car. I could feel him tense his legs to keep his balance as the taxi took the corners. I didn’t move away. When we got to Manuel’s apartment, he lit a fire in the fireplace. It was the middle of September, but autumn had already taken on a winter chill. He spoke and smoked, his face shrouded in a rosy halo. He was saying something or other about some books he’d read that week. I was having a hard time paying attention. I was trying to calm down and not let on how flustered I was, not let on that his fantasies and mine were both having an effect on my mind and body. He asked about school. The life of a student at a convent boarding school was not an especially riveting topic, I said. But I had questions I wanted to ask him, I continued, things that had come up in the silence of morning mass, or the long, quiet hours of study hall.

  “Why are you so interested in Juana the Mad? How did you first start studying her? What made you want to know so much about her, about that time period?”

  “It’s a family matter,” Manuel said, blowing smoke and staring at me with a certain irony. “My ancestors were quite involved in Doña Juana’s care. I grew up hearing stories about her, and in a certain way, as a historian, I wanted to discern reality from fiction. You must know that historians have a passion for the task of weeding out the fallacies that accumulate about a certain person or event over time.”

  “So your ancestors were historians too?”

  “Not exactly. In fact, my ancestors’ role in the queen’s life was somewhat odious. Maybe that’s why I feel I owe it to her to make amends, at least to her memory.”

  His father’s name, Sandoval y Rojas, came from the line of the marquises of Denia. When King Ferdinand of Aragon died, Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas–and later, his son, Luis–were commissioned by Juana’s son Charles I of Spain–who was also Charles V of Germany–to govern her household in Tordesillas.

  “But ‘govern’ is a euphemism,” Manuel said. “They were actually commissioned to keep the queen isolated and not let her speak to or have contact with anyone. She was surrounded by servants who were loyal to the marquis, whose complicity was essential in the creation of a fictitious world for Juana. You already know, I’m sure, that she was locked up there for forty-seven years.” Manuel stood up and brushed some ashes from his trousers, as if the task required all his concentration.

  “I know that, but I still don’t understand,” I confessed, standing up to get a glass of water from the kitchen. “I mean, I really don’t know much at all about Juana the Mad.”

  “You’re not the only one. The truth is, we know very little about those who came before us. We inherit their anxieties, but not their experiences. I can assure you, though, that when I’m done telling you her story, you’ll feel like you were part of her, that you and Juana are not so different from each other after all. If you’d been in her position, you would have felt the same sorts of passions, the same rage, the same desperation…maybe even the same devoted love. We’ll bring the queen back to life. That’s the only way we’ll be able to understand her and judge her fairly. But you already know my conditions. I’ll come downstairs to help you with the dress.”

  We went back down to the darkness of his room, and once again I took my clothes off, this time more slowly, feeling my embarrassment give way to pleasure, as if every part of me was being freed from obscurity and brought into the light for the first time, as if by being discovered by someone else my body was able to discover itself. Sitting on a bench with his legs open, elbows on his knees and chin in his hand, Manuel watched me, though we both avoided looking into each other’s eyes.

  Finally, he fastened the ribbons that crisscrossed my back and were tied into a knot at the waist. The donning of the dress and the entire ceremony had a curious effect on my psyche. It was as if my skin’s contact with the voluminous skirt, the silk, the velvet, stirred up opaque memories of other times, and my will was overtaken by voices from history that flowed back and forth between Manuel and I like lost souls obliged to tell their secrets. I wondered if maybe in a previous life I had lived in that age, if the fact that Manuel and I had met was not a coincidence at all but rather something inevitable, the result of a chain of events that inescapably led to that afternoon, and to that apartment in Madrid.

  Manuel sits behind me. He whispers. I am Juana.

  IT IS 1485, AND THE KINGDOM OF ARAGON HAS RECAPTURED NAPLES from the French. Tensions persist, however. Border skirmishes break out regularly in Roussillon and Fuenterrabía. In order to seal a pact with the house of Hapsburg aimed at isolating the French King Louis XIII, my parents decide to arrange a double marriage. My brother Juan–the crown prince–and I will marry the children of Maximilian of Austria and Mary of Burgundy. Juan will wed Marguerite of Austria, and I will marry Archduke Philippe.

  To banish the image of interminable conflicts, backwardness, and anarchy that reigned in Europe and in our country before my parents’ ascent to power, they envisage our marriages as an occasion to display the magnificence of their kingdoms. Let it no longer be said that the Spanish court lacks the splendor and sumptuousness of its neighbors. My mother will personally oversee the formation and organization of the armada that–after accompanying me to Flanders–will return with Princess Marguerite, the future queen of Spain.

  According to the terms of marriage, both brides will forego the traditional dowries. Each groom will provide for the upkeep of their respective houses and courts with rents allotted for this purpose. Later, this arrangement will prove disastrous for me, but at the time no one doubts the wisdom and goodwill behind such a disposition.

  Ignorant of the details my parents discussed with the Burgundian ambassadors, I concerned myself only with impressing them. I wore a crimson dress made of heavy velvet, with a low neckl
ine. I tied a black silk ribbon around my neck and hung from it a ruby pendant my mother had given me for my engagement. Attired thus, with my hair in a bun that pulled my skin so tight it made my eyes even more almond-shaped, I peeked over the balcony of the great hall just when I was sure I would not go unnoticed. The nobles did not take long to see me. It made me happy to note the approval revealed by their murmurings in French, their smiles and bows. Having achieved my aim, I withdrew once more. Not long after, Leonor–one of my mothers’ ladies-in-waiting–appeared. Giggling, she told me that one of the ambassadors had asked permission to have Michel Sittow, the Flemish artist, paint my portrait. That way, the Burgundian court and my future husband would know before I arrived that those who described my beauty were telling the truth.