The Scroll of Seduction

by Gioconda Belli

  Our encounter took place in Tórtoles on August 29. I traveled there from Hornillos, a tiny village where I spent four months after leaving Torquemada, and where my retinue caused considerable damage for which I had to compensate the inhabitants. Even their church was destroyed by the fire caused by the candles that burned beside Philippe’s coffin. His very body was nearly incinerated by the carelessness of those charged with watching over him.

  Located in the province of Burgos, Tórtoles was–by virtue of its size–more suited to receive the king of Aragon. He was not the kind who could settle anywhere, like I did.

  More than four years had gone by since I had last seen my father. I confess that when we met, I was stunned not so much by the filial affection that overpowered me but by the blow of seeing how readily the nobles who had pledged their loyalty to me rushed to join his entourage. In the end, I was forced to appear before him surrounded by only those few ladies who were still in my service. What could I do but admit my disadvantage? I would have liked to appear distant and inscrutable, so that he would realize that although I was his daughter, I was now a queen and thus his equal. Fool that I was! I had forgotten his uncanny ability to ease my suffering with nothing but a glance. I approached him and raised my black widow’s veil. The moment I met his eyes, his attempt to bend his knee and kiss my hand seemed incongruous to me. I dropped down to embrace him, overwhelmed with a feeling of love and relief. Right then and there, as he held me in his arms, I settled my contradictions. I closed my eyes as a line from the Pater Noster crossed my mind: “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Let my father’s will be done. At last, I would rest.

  With the understanding that I remained queen and that I would have the last word, I granted him the regency and administration of the kingdom. I stayed a short time in the village of Santa María del Campo, and then I decided to reside at the Villa de Arcos, three leagues from Burgos. My father would have liked me to move there, but I had no desire to return to the city where Philippe had died.

  The Episcopal Palace in Villa de Arcos, where I set up my residence, was a simple yet beautiful stone building that shared its cloister with the parish church, which meant that I could see the church’s nave and watch over Philippe’s coffin without leaving the premises. There were three other large residences in the area, enough to house the small entourage that would be attending Catalina, Ferdinand, and I.

  Little Ferdinand had come back to me after the death of his father. He arrived in Simancas accompanied by the kind Pedro Núñez de Guzmán, who had been charged with his upbringing. I was moved by how faithfully he had kept the memory of me, despite all the time that had passed. My little four-year-old man not only identified me as his mother, he clung to me, so hungry for my cuddles and kisses, that he made me feel needed and loved. When I suckled Catalina, he wanted me to nurse him as well, which I would have done willingly if the sorrows and fatigue of the last months had not taken its toll on the amount of milk that flowed from my breasts. Those days, nothing made me happier than hearing Ferdinand’s carefully vocalized words, so unusual for a child his age. He spoke with astonishing fluency, and he loved when I recited the epic song of “El Cid” for him. At night, snuggled up in bed with Catalina and Ferdinand, no nightmares visited my dreams. I, who had never much played or spent time with my children, found in Ferdinand’s innocence, in his spontaneous and generous love as well as in Catalina’s tiny warm body, a safe harbor to love and be loved, a saving grace. I promised myself I would become a true mother for them and that I would never again let them be apart from me.

  Eighteen months I spent in Villa de Arcos, shepherding my sorrows until slowly they allowed me to rein them in. I sensed I was emerging step by step from a rocky valley blanketed in fog, at whose end I would find the crossroads where Philippe and I would go our separate ways: he toward death and I back to life.

  Although I didn’t take it seriously, I was flattered to hear the rumor that King Henry VII of En gland–the same one who had gone down to Portsmouth incognito to catch a glimpse of me all those years ago–had asked for my hand in marriage. I began to laugh aloud with my ladies again. I was slowly recovering the spirit that once inhabited my skin: strong, daring, and avid for music, dance, and beauty.

  But after the winter of 1508, as the promise of warm days announced itself with the arrival of summer and I began to long for leisure and lengthy walks in the Castilian countryside, my calm was shattered into a million splinters. My father decided to travel to Córdoba to punish the Andalusian nobles who still refused to submit to his authority, and to take little Ferdinand with him. He feared that, in his absence, the nobles could take the throne away from Charles–who was still in Flanders–and name Ferdinand, who all of them considered more Spanish than his brother. Rather than protect Charles’s rights, my father was just worried that this maneuver would strip him from the regency of Castile, something the nobility had already tried to do shortly after Philippe’s death.

  I didn’t want to be separated from my son. I dreaded the idea of him growing up to be a pawn of others’ power struggles. But everything I did–begging first, screaming after that, trying to impose my queen’s authority, and even locking myself with him in my room like any mother determined to protect her child–was futile. Forcefully they snatched him from my arms, oblivious to the boy’s cries and to my own.

  My father’s cavalcade left Arcos, and I closed myself up in my rooms desolate, bitter, and enraged. I refused to eat or bathe. Again I expressed my resistance using my weapon of last resort: my body.

  “LOOK, LUCÍA. HERE’S WHAT THE BISHOP OF MÁLAGA WROTE TO Ferdinand the Catholic:

  ‘After Your Highness left, the queen was peaceful, both in word and deed, so she has not hurt anyone nor spoken slander. Let me also add that since that time she has not changed her shirt, or her headdress or washed her face. She sleeps on the floor and eats from plates set in front of her in the same place, refusing table or cloth. And many days she won’t attend mass.’”

  “I can imagine what she must have felt. I can feel her fury like a bitter taste in my mouth,” I whispered. “Poor Juana.”

  “When Ferdinand returned from Andalusia, he commanded that Juana be moved from Villa de Arcos to Tordesillas whether by ‘patience, entreaties, or threats.’ He personally supervised the operation, which included moving Philippe’s body and little Catalina along with Juana. In this day and age, we would call that a coup d’état.”

  “But why did he feel the need to do that?” I asked. “Juana was quite obedient.”

  “She was obedient but not docile. And Ferdinand had many enemies among the Castilian nobles. He was afraid that if they had free access to the queen, they might take advantage of the quarrels between father and daughter to convince her to act against him. He was afraid that Juana, furious at having been separated from little Ferdinand, might retaliate. He was afraid she might name Emperor Maximilian regent until Charles was old enough to rule. He felt that if Juana continued to be free, she might put his interests in jeopardy. Knowing that no one would object if he pulled her out of the game, Ferdinand preferred not to run those risks. He felt he could do anything if he used her “madness” as a justification. After all, Philippe had already paved the way.”

  “You have to admit, though, that Juana’s behavior was somewhat unrestrained: her love for Philippe, her subservience to her father, the ways in which she chose to rebel that left her open to people’s scorn.”

  Manuel gaped at me, his brow furrowed, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. To see him there, comfortably reclined on the sofa by the fireplace, pressing the tips of his long fingers together, made me think of the day I first met him at the Hotel Palace.

  “Love, that strange word. Juana had no one on her side, and her father was very powerful. It happens to this day. Just look at our own family histories: my mother died alone in a hotel room. You mother died for love too, even if she took your father with her.” Manuel stood up and
began pacing in front of the fireplace. “My grandparents were incredibly cruel to my mother because she fell in love with a nobody. In a way, they drove her to what she did, to kill herself. In this world we usually receive the worst blows from the people we love the most. Therefore the crimes of passion, the madness of love. Lovers give each other a bunch of arrows and then hang a bull’s-eye on their chests. In theory, both agree not to attack, but if the pact is broken…a bloodbath ensues.”

  “How is it that you know so much about all this?” I asked sarcastically.

  “I’m a historian,” he said with a wry smile. “Just look at Ferdinand, fifty-three years old, and he marries Germaine de Foix, the niece of the king of France, who was only seventeen. He tried everything to have a son with her, and in the end, the concoctions Germaine gave him to try to arouse his virility were what killed him. Love, the loss of love. From Troy to the Anglican Church, what other abstract concept has had so much influence on the course of history? And as far as Juana’s methods go, back then, no one understood them. She was very modern in that sense; she believed in her own, individual strength. In the end, the very thing that, according to some people, caused her downfall enabled her to survive as long as she did in Tordesillas.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Manuel’s classes had been dismissed for Christmas vacation. It was snowing in Madrid, which was unusual. Through the kitchen window, the yard was a beautiful, ghostly white. I was coming to the end of Jane Eyre and drinking chamomile tea in the library. There was nothing more befitting that silent mansion full of secrets than sitting around reading Brontë. The fictional world that Manuel and his Aunt Águeda inhabited was not without its charms. And in that world, I was Juana. As enamored of and possessed by the queen’s ghost as they were.

  Browsing through the packed bookshelves in the library, I found several genealogical references to the Denias, some of which were quite amusing. They hailed from Valencia. One of the first Sandovals, Sando Cuervo, had met his death saving King Pelayo’s life as the king crossed over a gorge on a beam of wood. Another ancestor had accidentally killed King Enrique I with a tile. The Denia coat of arms showed Don Pelayo’s black beam of wood. Later, five stars were added when the family became related to the Rojases by marriage. I also found facsimiles of Charles V and the Marquis of Denia’s letters regarding the care of Doña Juana. There were full of polite expressions, but it didn’t take much to see the degree of complicity between the Denias and the emperor when it came to the web of falsehoods in which they kept Juana, denying her information about what was going on beyond the four walls of Tordesillas Palace. Using the excuse that the presence of other ladies “disquieted” her, Denia surrounded Juana with women in his own family who were part of the conspiracy to keep her isolated. So that she could never escape vigilance, the marquis ordered that there always be one woman inside her rooms, while another kept watch at her door. Juana had absolutely no privacy. Her every move was monitored by the household staff.

  What stunned me the most as I read through the correspondence was to corroborate that her own son Charles had no qualms about putting her away, nor about doing everything he could to keep her from receiving news or getting in touch with the outside world. In his letters to Denia, he even approved the use of physical force in “extreme cases,” leaving it to the marquis to judge which of the queen’s actions might be worthy of that label.

  THE DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS, MANUEL WALKED INTO THE KITCHEN and up to his Aunt Águeda. He snuck up unexpectedly and took the key hanging from the key chain at her waist–the one that opened the wooden box where she kept all the keys to the rooms on the upper floors. Sitting there drinking coffee, I could see her stiffen at his playful affection when he grabbed her waist as she was laying silverware out on the kitchen table.

  “I think I remember where the nativity scene is,” he said. “I’ll go bring it down so we can have a little Christmas spirit around here.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said, turning toward the door. “You don’t know where things are. You haven’t been up there in so long.”

  “Oh, Auntie, don’t worry. If I can’t find it, I’ll call you, but I don’t want you to come with me. I want you to let Lucía and I go up there alone.” He spoke with authority, as if to a child. I couldn’t see either of their expressions, just Manuel’s back, but I gathered this wasn’t the first time they’d had this discussion.

  “All right, all right, but don’t touch anything. Leave everything the way it is.”

  She went back to her silverware, her back bent over the table. I saw a look of sulking distrust come over the face framed by the blond, impeccably coiffed hairdo. She looked like a cat forced to remain in place, claws at the ready. Manuel had me go upstairs ahead of him. The third floor smelled of wax and cleanliness. From there one could get a view of the floor below the staircase, the circular foyer inlaid with the precious stones arranged in a circle, like a solar system full of multicolored planets. Manuel stopped in the hallway by two heavy, modern doors with several locks on them. He opened the one on the left, unlocking it with several keys, one of which I remember was very long.

  Since the room was very dark, I couldn’t make out anything until Manuel turned on the wrought iron lamps hanging from the ceiling and opened the curtains. I found myself in a sort of overcrowded but impeccably clean museum, with tall, glass-encased bookshelves lining the walls and an assortment of Castilian-style furniture arranged in groups by type: armchairs with bronze appliqués, platforms, footstools, tray tables, bureaus, braziers, objects whose names I learned that afternoon as Manuel pointed them out. Judging by the doors on the hallway, the large rectangular salon at some point must have been several contiguous rooms. Behind the glass doors of the shelves lined against the wall there were antique books, crucifixes, ciboria, large vessels such as the ones used in religious ceremonies, small daggers, glasses, combs, board games, rings, brooches, silver candlesticks, mirrors, objects that sparkled even in the dim light from the lamps above. In one corner stood a tall wooden container, filled with tapestries and rugs, all neatly rolled up and labeled with little white tags. Besides them, the only discordant element in the tidy organization of the room was a series of old boxes and trunks stacked one on top of the other.

  “Doña Juana’s riches were lost along the way. Some of them were lost on the ships that sank on her first voyage to Flanders and her two voyages back to Spain. The Flemish carted off some of her things when Philippe died. Then her children, Charles, Catalina, and Leonor, plundered the bulk of her jewels even when she was still alive. What we have here is just a minuscule sample of what remained in my family. I haven’t been able to determine exactly everything they kept, but look, for example, this is the solid gold crucifix that Juana gave her son Ferdinand”–he pointed–“and there are eight missals with priceless miniatures, tapestries, altarpieces. Did you know that back then they calculated what altarpieces were worth not by the painter’s skill but by how much gold they contained?”

  Manuel went up to a long, low piece of furniture with vertical dividers and pulled out paintings depicting religious scenes: the Nativity, the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi. He said they’d been painted by Flemish masters: Van der Weyden, Memling. Priceless.

  I wandered back and forth, incredulous, drinking up everything with my eyes, fascinated. To be amid the objects that at one time had been a part of Juana’s daily life was like seeing the scattered pieces of a loved one’s existence after her painful, tragic death. I imagined her hands handling these utensils, the pressure of her fingers around a glass or a crucifix, the sweat of her palms. It was as if memories became condensed, giving me a feel for visions I had only partially imagined, making them present, palpable.

  I’d say that lingering among Juana’s belongings, I felt my identification with her reach a level that even to me bordered on hallucination. I felt as if I was her returned to life, revisiting her lost past. My body got chilled and I shivered, apprehensive, looking at
Manuel, wondering whether he carried with him his family’s cruel streak.

  He had no idea of my frame of mind. He was rummaging around in drawers, looking for the nativity scene, I guess. Suddenly he pulled out a photo album.

  “Look what we have here!! Family pictures. Let’s take them down to the library. Let me show them to you.” He handed me the leather-bound album and kept fumbling around, moving things back and forth.

  I think I grabbed onto the picture album in the hopes that looking at more modern family members would allow me to break the inexplicable, powerful spell that had me confused between reality and imagination. I sat on a leather armchair that was flanked by different kinds of tables and opened the album. It was filled with Denia family pictures. I recognized them by their coloring. Thin, well-dressed men and women, the women wearing coquettish feathered hats, from the early twentieth century, or perhaps the end of the nineteenth. It was hard to know for sure. I wondered if there would be a picture of Manuel’s mother. I flicked through the pages and came to a series of pictures of the house. There was one of the third floor, of the very same room we were in. Águeda had said it was her father’s study. I guessed he must be the man with the eye patch sitting behind the desk, wearing a suit and bow tie. The study with its tall wood panneling looked very classy. My mind, with no particular intent, began to supersimpose the previous layout of the room to the current one, trying to place where this or that would have been. I noticed the absence of two windows that, in the photograph, could be seen behind Manuel’s grandfather. It was puzzling. Those windows were nonexistent in the present-day room, there wasn’t even a trace, as is usually the case when windows are sealed over. Surely you’d be able to see some sign of them on the wall, I thought. Instead, the room seemed smaller, as if it had been shrunk by a feat of magic.