The Scroll of Seduction

by Gioconda Belli

  On New Year’s Eve we ate dinner early. The Denias weren’t in the habit of waiting up for midnight with the traditional twelve grapes and revelry. Manuel did make one concession to festivity, though, bringing out an almond tart. He was serving it when Águeda, in an unexpectedly sharp tone, asked when I was supposed to go back to school. Her demeanor and her cold stare startled me. The dry tart got stuck in my throat.

  “January 7.”

  “Well, that’s right around the corner. We’ll have to decide what we’re going to tell the nuns when they come looking for you.”

  “Auntie,” Manuel said parsimoniously, “we’ll say that she left here to go back to the convent, that we put her in a taxi and haven’t heard back from her.”

  “Easier said than done. They’ll investigate. We’ll be the chief suspects in her ‘disappearance.’ I hope you’ve thought well and hard about this.”

  “Well, I thought we were all on the same page so far.”

  “Yes, I was. But the more I think about it, the more complicated it gets. I don’t know if it’s such a good idea for her to write those letters.”

  “I’m a little worried about that part too,” I admitted. “The other option is for me to go to New York. That’s where Isis lives. You know, my mother’s friend; I’ve told you about her.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Manuel said, suddenly stern. “And that’s the end of this conversation. Águeda, you and I will discuss this later.”

  Nothing else was said. Águeda looked down and jabbed a fork violently into her crust. Manuel seemed to possess some sort of bizarre psychological ability to dominate her. All he had to do was raise his voice or get his feathers ruffled and look like he was ready for a cockfight and she–that self-confident, secure woman–would suddenly shrivel up, reduced to a powerless, frail old lady. Her wrath was visible only in her eyes. It scared me to see her looking at Manuel that way. Her pupils sparkled with a caustic, purple, pained glimmer.

  I couldn’t eat any more. I felt the apple of good and evil stuck in my throat. I stayed down in the library while Manuel went upstairs to talk to his Aunt Águeda.

  In the old Denia palace, with its austere, quadrangular Castilian architecture, it was impossible to overhear their argument. I caught snatches of random words and the angry tone. I covered my ears with a sofa cushion. I thought that Águeda must finally be showing what she’d felt all along. It hadn’t made any sense for her to be so calm and blasé about everything, given what had happened. To a certain point, I was relieved to see her behaving like a normal aunt. But then, her discomfort also made me face up to the precarious reality I had been avoiding by spending all my time with Juana and her ghosts. I felt a painful, empty feeling in my stomach.

  The argument ended suddenly, and at almost the same instant Manuel walked into the library, looking flustered. He strode over to the table where he kept the cognac and poured himself a glass, downing it in one gulp.

  “Manuel, Águeda’s right. It would be better if I went to New York before they start searching for me. The other plan is really starting to seem ludicrous.”

  “I said no. You’re not going anywhere,” he declared categorically, pouring himself another glass.

  “But–”

  “But nothing. Let me handle this. I know what I’m doing. Águeda will get over it. Believe me, I know what I am saying. She’s jealous, that’s all. She’s always resented having to share me with other women. Not even my mother escaped her. But she’ll get over it. Relax. I’ll tell you about the Denias. This is a good time for it. Go get changed, and put on the black dress.”

  IT PAINS ME TO SAY IT, BUT THE PROCESS THAT TURNED MY CONFINEMENT into a persistant, inconsolable torment began when my son charles and Daughter Leonor came to Tordesillas, on November 4, 1517. I’d been there nine years. The last few had been quite peaceful, thanks to Don Hernán. On November 6–my birthday–I awoke just like any other day. I was informed that Guillaume de Croy, Seignior de Chièvres, whom I remembered from Flanders, was here to see me. Not knowing what it was about, I welcomed him without much ceremony. He appeared before me, gushing and reverential, spoke of Charles and Leonor, and asked me if I had any desire to see them. I said of course, there was no need even to ask such a question.

  I had no idea they were so close. They’d arrived two days earlier, though I had been told nothing of it. De Chièvres walked over to the door and opened it. Two youths stood before me. The last time I saw Charles and Leonor, he was five and she was seven. Twelve years had passed. Now he was seventeen and she was nineteen. I could see the specter of Philippe in their faces, mixed in with the lost beauty of my younger portraits. I recognized the children who’d been born of our love. They bowed before me. I closed my eyes. Living in a state of delusion, deceived and lied to by everyone, I could not trust my eyes. Are you really my children? I was stupefied, overcome, I devoured them with my eyes. My son had Philippe’s face without Philippe’s beauty; the face of a tired, lusterless young man. Leonor, on the other hand, looked majestic and had my mother’s light skin and blond hair. We sat down to talk. They behaved like the Burgundian prince and princess that they were, both in manner and language, as they hardly spoke a word of Spanish. I spoke to them in French, which surprised them. Every question I asked seemed to leave them aghast, as if they could not quite work out my ability to hold a conversation and were more confused by my sanity than they would have been at finding a deranged madwoman. Leonor laughed easily at several things I said, but Charles showed the same distrust I remembered so well from when I returned from my first trip to Spain and he came with his father to meet me at Blankenburg. Since then, he had never acknowledged me. It saddened me to see him so uncomfortable, so distant. Visiting me was clearly a formality for him, and he made no attempt to hide it. Overcome by the devastating pain of having lost them irrevocably so long ago, I insisted they should go to bed early and rest.

  And then I was alone with de Chièvres, Charles’s first chamberlain and trusted advisor. He set about very kindly informing me of all the prince’s wonderful qualities. It must be a comfort to me, he said, to have a son like him to further the interests of the kingdom. He was of the opinion that I should hurry and abdicate in his favor so that, while I was still alive, he could learn all he needed to know to be a good sovereign. If I gave my royal consent, the Cortes would authorize him to rule with me. I would not oppose it, I said. I presumed my father had agreed, which was reason to rejoice. All I demanded was the respect owed to me as queen: recognition for my royal stature and that he would rule in my name and with me, like my father should have done.

  The Cortes imposed eighty-eight conditions before allowing Charles to be king. Three of them were in regard to the governing of my household and the dignity with which I was to be treated, as proprietary queen. Another specified that if God saw fit to return my good health, Charles would step down and allow me to rule. It was this clause that turned him into my enemy.

  After Charles, avowed by me, began his rule, his attention turned to his sister Catalina. Everyone around me knew how I loved her. Catalina was my stability, my anchor, she was what kept me afloat. Charles, who’d had a very pampered upbringing with Marguerite of Austria in Malines, was horrified by her modest dress, her games at the window. So he and his advisors hatched a plan to steal her away, to take her from me. And because there was no way to reach her room without crossing mine, they dug a tunnel through the wall and covered it with a tapestry, and then one night they forced Catalina through it, lowering her down onto the street. I reacted as anyone could have expected: I begged for death. I began a radical fast and abandoned myself to the most terrible and inconsolable despair. My servants and Don Hernán must have told Charles about my state. For once, my prayers were answered and my rebellion had a positive result. Three days later, I had Catalina back. She ran to my arms. We both wept. Juana Cuevas, my servant, told me later that the princess had warned her brother, saying that if I became distressed, nothing would s
top her from coming back to me.

  Catalina returned, but that episode was just the beginning of what was to come.

  Just three months after his first visit, Charles withdrew kind Don Hernán, the Duke of Estrada, from my service. In his place, on March 15, 1518, he sent Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas and his wife, Doña Francisca Enríquez, the Marquises of Denia. My peace of mind and body ended the moment Don Hernán walked out the door. When we said our good-byes, I lamented the fact that no one had consulted me. “We are both servants of others, Doña Juana,” said the gentle man who, through it all, had attempted to be my friend and had, within the confined space of my captivity, managed to make me feel I was still a woman.

  The Denias built a wall of faces, hands, and eyes around me. They forged a barrier of silence and oblivion to cloister me and conceal whatever evidence of my reason could threaten those who would stop at nothing to usurp my reign. Circles of hell, was how I referred to the nooses they used to strangle my voice. And there were three: in the first circle, two women kept guard, one inside and one outside my rooms, day and night, denying me the relief of privacy, the solace I could get from my own unemcumbered self. In the second circle were the twelve women allegedly charged with my care. And beyond them, in the third circle, were the twenty-four monteros, elite armed guards, who surrounded me. I was forbidden to go to San Antolín. I was forbidden to attend mass at Santa Clara. The Marquis of Denia, pale, gray-haired, his eyes cold and blue, was the very picture of courteousness. But with every bow, he stabbed me in the back and still expected me to ignore it. Just like Mosen Luis Ferrer, he used the plague or my father’s authority to justify my internment.

  Why had I gotten it into my head that my father was dead? he once inquired when I expressed my doubts. He was ill, true, but he was laid up at a monastery, spending his days praying to our Lord. I should write to him. He would be so happy to have news from his daughter Juana.

  “You write to him, Marquis,” I said. “You are his cousin; you write to him. You may give him my regards.”

  The Denias were despots to my few loyal servants but went to church to display before wooden statuettes the devotion they didn’t feel for their fellow human beings. I always considered religious ceremonies to be just public rituals that did little or nothing to ennoble the spirit. Even back in Flanders I was not particularly devoted. But the marquises worried about my soul, and so they arranged for masses to be said inside the palace so that they could force me to worship God and dispense with my need to go out under the sun. I categorically refused to attend these services and I only went to church when they allowed me to walk along the palace’s exterior corridor to San Antolín. Once at the tower there, I would go down the spiral staircase to the Aldarete Chapel. I did this more to look at the view than to pay my respects to a God who had forsaken me.

  I waged an all-out war against the Denias, using the few arms at my disposal. I lay in wait constantly, so that no one could take me by surprise. But I knew nothing of what went on outside the palace walls, and that was one weapon my jailers could always count on. While I was locked up, rotting away, Spain was being plundered. The riches from America were shipped off to Flanders. Foreigners were appointed to the highest positions of power. A seventeen-year-old boy was named cardinal of Toledo, and Adrian of Utrecht became governor of Castile. When my son Charles left to be crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, on May 20, 1520, the people rose up in arms, having wearied of the constant abuse by the Flemish.

  Juan de Padilla, a native of Toledo and the son of Don Pedro, one of my most faithful defenders, was the leader of the rebellion. The Santa Junta de las Comunidades, or Holy Assembly of Communities, as the rebels called themselves, said they were rising up “in service to the queen, Doña Juana.”

  I often sought Denia out to ask him about my children, and the state of my realms. He would become flustered and look uncomfortable. On one occasion I held him six hours, refusing to let him go until he gave me a report, but the man was a liar. To explain why my son was to be crowned emperor he tried to make me believe that my father-in-law Maximilian had abdicated in Charles’s favor, as if I could not guess that he had died.

  Just two days after this conversation, I found out Denia had ordered that the corridor I used to walk to San Antonlín be sealed off. I ran to berate him and order him to have it reopened. We were quarreling when Bishop Rojas, president of the Council of the Kingdom of Castile, arrived, asking me to sign a decree condemning the Comuneros who had risen in arms.

  Denia could not keep me from meeting with the bishop. And it was he, pale and sweaty, fearful of the chaos that had spread like wildfire, who told me that my father had died four years ago. From his lips too I learned that indeed Maximilian had died, and judging by what he said, I gathered that the rebels were up in arms, protesting at the way my son had left Spain’s rule in the care of foreigners. The uprising was gaining strength, he said. Unhappy peasants discontent with their lot had joined the rebels.

  “Believe me, Bishop,” I said, “everything you have said is news to my ears and hard to discern from a dream. No one has told me the truth for sixteen years; I am mistreated by all, and the marquis here is not the first to deceive me.”

  The bishop looked at the marquis. For the first time in all those years, he was frightened; I saw it on his face and felt overcome with joy, especially when I listened to his contrite attempts to justify himself, claiming he had been forced to lie to me to “cure me of my passions.”

  I REFUSED TO SIGN THE DECREE THE BISHOP HAD BROUGHT UNTIL I could verify what I’d been told. On August 29, I received the Comunero leaders, Juan de Padilla, Juan Bravo, and Francisco Maldonado. I heard out their grievances and their grounds, and I entrusted them to do what they felt most benefited the interests of the kingdom. It was all so sudden and so overwhelming that I panicked at my own ignorance. My life was so full of falsehood that I doubted my ability to distinguish truth from lies.

  In mid-September, an authority from the Santa Junta and the Cortes expelled the Denias and the ladies who kept me locked up. I went out onto the balcony to greet the crowds packed into the plaza in front of the palace. The leaders of the rebellion, and the people themselves, urged me to defy Charles and govern the kingdom on my own, expelling the Flemish and impeding the flow of riches and tithes from Spain.

  It was marvelous to feel so much affection coming from people who had never even seen me. But if freedom made me feel light on my feet with joy, doubts weighed me down and paralyzed me. So many years of confinement had turned me into a fearful woman. And what did I know about government anyway? I had spent my whole life defying and despising authority. Who was to say that these men would not imprison me too were I to do what I thought right and not what they wanted me to? I never had any great desire to be queen. I said so more than once. And if it meant warring against my children, I had none at all. I couldn’t forget that those who were offering to serve me hated Charles and needed my support to oust him. I needed time, time to think, to discern the truth. Suddenly, an enormous responsibility had been thrown on my lap, one that I had not chosen. I decided to take my time and meanwhile refused to commit and didn’t seal or sign anything.

  Yet again, nobody understood me. I had scarcely salvaged my desire to dress in a way befitting my rank, the authority to appoint my own household, the freedom to venture outside the walls of the palace, when the Comuneros lost their patience and tried to force me to sign their decrees. They even threatened to starve Catalina and me if I continued stubbornly to wait. Perhaps in the end my fears damned me and I lost the only opportunity I had to change my fate, but I told them again and again that I needed time to heal, time for my mind to clear the fog caused by so many lies and so many tears.

  The nobles struck back with renewed vigor and put down the rebellion. A traitor paved the way: Pedro Girón, who took over from loyal Juan de Padilla as commander of the Comunero army. Girón let them through so they could retake Tordesillas. The rebellion
lasted only seventy-five days. Between December 5 and 6, Tordesillas surrendered to the royalists.

  I awaited the grandees on the palace courtyard, holding Catalina’s hand.

  One signature of mine would have sufficed to put an end to Charles’s power in Spain, but instead of showing me his gratitude, my son didn’t even have the courtesy of granting me the quiet freedom I deserved. On the contrary, Charles reinstated the Denias and left them to ride roughshod over me. Vicious and arrogant, fully endorsed by Charles, the Denias came back to run my household. And I did not free myself from them until the day I died.

  “UNTIL THE DAY SHE DIED?” I ASKED.

  “April 12, 1555. It was Good Friday. Juana was seventy-six years old. She’d been imprisoned in Tordesillas since 1509, when she was twenty-nine. The first Marquis of Denia died. His son, Luis, came after him. But Juana was told that the old man had fallen ill. They never told her the truth. The Denias kept her forever entangled in a web of falsehoods, they forced her to live in an upended world; a world of darkened rooms without windows, populated by hostile faces that mocked her and tormented her mercilessly. She died covered in sores, with gangrene, a rebel to the end, refusing the treatments they offered her, refusing mass and religious ceremonies almost right up until her last day. When she died, the Denias and her children plundered what remained of her treasures. Remember the golden cross you wore on Christmas Eve? Juana always had it with her. It was a gift from her son Ferdinand–probably the only unselfish gift she ever received in Tordesillas–and she loved it dearly. And what did Charles do, knowing how his mother detested the Denias? He gave it to them when she died. Juana must have turned over in her grave.”