“What about the trunk?” I asked. “How big was it? Are there any descriptions?”
“When Doña Juana arrived in Tordesillas in 1509, they took a very careful inventory of all her belongings. Eight days before she died, the Denias took another one. During the forty-six years Juana spent there, her treasures dwindled considerably. Her father led the way, robbing her of huge quantities of gold and silver. My ancestors got in on the act too, of course, helping themselves generously. Then her son Charles finished off, absconding with all that was left under the pretext that it was for Catalina’s trousseau, since she was to wed the king of Portugal. Just picture it, Lucía: Charles ordered the trunks to be taken from his mother’s room while she slept. And then, so she wouldn’t realize what he’d done, he had them filled with bricks. But Juana figured out what had happened. She made them open one of the trunks and saw the bricks. And rather than accuse her servants, she realized who had really robbed her and said that she hoped her children would enjoy themselves. Juana’s classy response shamed Charles. Embarrassed, he ordered that nothing else be touched, and he kept his word for a year. But after that, he started raiding Juana’s things from Tordesillas again. Every time he visited his mother–which was not very often–he left with everything he could get his hands on that seemed valuable, or anything his wife Isabel wanted. But the trunk in question disappeared eight days before she died. It was made in Flanders, small and rectangular with a gold lock and rose-colored engravings. There are statements from Juana’s washerwoman Catalina Redonda, her two sisters, Marina, Doña Francisca de Alba, and other servants, all insisting that she always kept it carefully hidden in a place that only she had access to. They said that whenever the queen got it out, she’d make her ladies and servants turn their backs so they couldn’t see what it held.”
“She must have been afraid they’d steal the few jewels she had left,” I said. “What makes you think it held documents she’d written?”
Manuel smiled and smoothed his hair, staring at me with eyes that betrayed how enthused he was about his own theories.
“There’s a reference in one of García del Campo’s documents–he was the quartermaster of her chamber–that mentions a document holder containing ‘all of Her Majesty’s writing.’ Think about it. ‘All of Her Majesty’s writings.’ The way he calls them ‘writings’ shows he didn’t know how to qualify what Juana had written, and ‘all’ means there were a lot of them, so I think Juana wrote quite a bit. We knew she could, after all. She’d studied with Beatriz Galindo. Her written Latin was as good as her Spanish. And what would Juana write, Lucía? She wasn’t religious. One of the grounds for calling her mad was her lack of devotion. Since her early days in Flanders, she hardly went to services, to mass. She had intelligent friends. Erasmus of Rotterdam, for one. I’ve always thought that his The Praise of Folly, though it’s dedicated to Sir Thomas More, was a sort of homage to Juana, a vindication of her. It was one of the books she had on her nightstand when she died. It’s not unreasonable to think that she might have taken solace in writing.”
“You’re right,” I said, admiring the queen. “Take me to the room upstairs,” I begged. “Please? I was always good at working out puzzles. If you’d just let me help you. Two minds are better than one.”
“You think you’re the heroine in a novel, that you’re going to find the hidden treasure, don’t you? Keep in mind that writers who write thrillers build their imaginary plots very carefully. I’ve seen it done. They assemble them as if it were a mathematical equation: first x happens, resulting in y, and so on. It’s all tied together so that cause and effect follow one another in an orderly fashion, but real life doesn’t work that way.”
“But I was the one who noticed the difference between your grandfather’s study and the way the room is now. You didn’t pick up on that.”
“You had me obsessing over that clue like a fool. And you were right. There’s no obvious logic or reason to explain why they made the room smaller. There’s a dividing wall. I found a way through it, and it leads to a narrow space, but there’s no trunk in it. Just a bunch of old junk, broken objects that no one’s bothered to throw away. But you win. I’ve already lost the game. Maybe you can see what I missed.”
He produced a key from his pocket and held it up. It was a copy of Águeda’s. She saw herself as the only guardian of the Denia treasures, but he had as much right as she did. We’d wait for her to go to bed. His aunt had always taken sleeping pills, he said. That’s why she hadn’t heard his nighttime expeditions. She would never have allowed them, he added.
“After having lived alone with all those things for so long, she feels like they’re an extension of herself. And she’s never liked to be touched.”
We crept up after midnight. Manuel took a flashlight and some candles from one of the kitchen drawers. The third floor was warmer than the rest of the house. On the first two floors, the heating barely made a difference in the January cold that sneaked in through the cracks in the windows. It was very dark. The humming of the dehumidifiers was hardly audible, but I found it comforting. I didn’t like the idea of going into the room at that time of night. But we went in. Manuel flicked the switch and locked the door from the inside. The ceiling lamp cast a dim light. We crossed the room and went over to the far wall. It all looked the same to me, but Manuel walked over to one of the glass-front cases. Inside was a beautiful image of the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception and other gold and silver liturgical objects inlaid with precious stones. I helped him pull the case back from the wall. I couldn’t see anything different behind there; just the same wood panels that bordered the room, each one topped with a rounded molding.
“This is it,” he said. “This is where you go through.”
Manuel took a chisel from the floor and slipped it beneath the molding, then started to pry at it gently.
“It’s not exactly a door. It took me ages to figure out that the molding in this panel isn’t just decoration, like the others. It can be pried open, and the panel comes all the way off. Not as sophisticated as a secret door, but you can imagine that when it gave and I saw that it could be removed, I couldn’t contain myself. I was convinced I had found the secret hiding place.” He was still levering away with the chisel, and soon the molding, which seemed to have a pressure fit gave way with a crack, and the wood panel came all the way off.
Manuel lifted it off and put it on one side. I felt a gust of stale air, and dust hit my nose and eyes. I coughed.
Hoisting up a leg, he slipped through the opening and then helped me through. Rather than a room, it was more like a false-bottom suitcase, a narrow space, no wider than the two little vaulted windows covered over with black paper, the windows from the picture. Broken chairs, latticework, doors, and curtain rods were all pushed up against the back wall, which was covered in a layer of grime. A pile of cardboard boxes sat in front of the windows, with a series of iron fittings leaning up against them, and a small, round table where Manuel sat the candles. The collection of useless, broken objects lined the room in a disorderly fashion, amid dust and cobwebs. A frayed tapestry hung on the wall. The darkness, cramped space, and stale air made me feel breathless and claustrophobic. Wanting to run out of there as fast as possible, I covered my nose. Dust billowed up in clouds the second we touched anything. I stepped very carefully. Curiosity forced my body to move against its will, to overcome my discomfort. I walked the short length of the room and went over to Manuel, who was poking around by some leather suitcases that must have belonged to his grandparents.
“We should open all the boxes,” I said. “And the suitcases.”
“I already have. There’s nothing here. I went over everything you see inch by inch. What do you think I’ve been doing these past few nights? I’m telling you, there’s nothing here,” he whispered, as if anyone could hear us.
“But don’t you think that’s odd? Why would they go to the trouble of dividing the room? Who needs an attic when the house is so big? It
stinks in here,” I added. “Old clothes.”
“There are a few overcoats in one of the boxes. And a rat’s nest. I think that’s what smells so bad.”
“Yuck!” I felt a shiver run through me. It wasn’t an unbearable smell, but it was bitter and unrelenting, and if I thought about it I knew I wouldn’t be able to breathe.
In the semidarkness, Manuel swung the flashlight back and forth. The tapestry was a Virgin of the Annunciation. I could just make it out in the flashlight’s dim beam. A woman’s face with a fixed stare. I lit a candle.
“Careful,” Manuel said, turning around. “What are you doing?”
“I want to look at the tapestry. That flashlight is not bright enough.”
Manuel glanced down at his flashlight and then back at me, offended. It was old, aluminum, and very weak.
“I’ve had this since I was a kid,” he said, shining it on the wall. “Anyway, what about the tapestry? It’s all frayed and faded. I’m surprised they haven’t thrown it out.”
“Exactly,” I replied. “And it’s nailed to the wall.”
“Probably harder to get it down than just leave it where it was.”
I drew all the way up to it with my candle.
“And look,” I said, “it’s a Virgin of the Annunciation with dark hair and eyes. I’ve never seen one like that. They’re always blond.”
“The tapestry,” Manuel whispered behind me, finally taking my hint, then getting more excited. “The hole they took Catalina out by was covered by a tapestry. That’s why Juana didn’t know about the tunnel they’d dug. But, of course, I kept wanting to see a trunk, Lucía. Like an idiot, I expected to see the trunk. But wait. Let me think a minute.” He lit a cigarette and inhaled desperately, as if it were oxygen. The smell of tobacco was comforting there. “It’s so obvious, really, isn’t it? The hiding place behind the tapestry. Ages ago, I looked behind every single one in the house, behind every painting too. And then what happens? I get this far and then it doesn’t even occur to me here. Just like it didn’t occur to me that they’d built this wall to hide the obvious.”
He’d gone into a state of rapture, contemplating the wall.
The tapestry was nailed to a wooden frame that was attached to the wall. Manuel felt all the way around it. He’d have to use the chisel to get the nails out, he said. He handed me the flashlight. It flickered on and off, petering out slightly.
“Shit,” he said. “I didn’t think to change the batteries.”
His hands were shaking slightly. His cigarette dangled from the corner of his lips. It upset me to see him so worked up. I was nervous too, and my hands were cold. I felt like an archaeologist on the verge of a great discovery, but his excitement seemed to border on anguish. He yanked at the tapestry urgently, as if he were clawing desperately from inside a coffin, having been buried alive. What would happen if, rather than an exorcism, the find resulted in a reiteration of the curse that had plagued his family for so long? To come face-to-face with Juana’s condemnation would be daunting, despite the centuries gone by, despite the fact that his blood held almost no trace of the Denias who’d imprisoned her. I was scared that this obsession would haunt us all: me, because of the child I was carrying, Manuel and Águeda because of the power they ascribed to the past. The nails were coming out. Dust tickled my nose. Suddenly, the flashlight went out altogether.
“Damn it!” Manuel shouted. “Hang on.”
I passed him a candle, which he lit with his lighter. Then we lit two more and dripped candle wax onto one of the old tables to hold them down. Finally, all of the nails on one side were out. Manuel held up a candle so we could see into the space behind it. I could hear his surprise, his breath.
“What can you see, Manuel?”
“There’s a door!” he cried. “A door,” he repeated.
He was panting.
“A door!” I couldn’t believe it.
We had to take the tapestry all the way off the wall. His impatience was contagious. We were both sweating. Hot wax was dripping onto my fingers and burning my skin. I don’t know how much time passed before I helped him yank the tapestry off the wall and heave it over to one side. A narrow door stood in front of us. Manuel pushed it. It opened into a short, nearly circular space that seemed to have been hollowed out of one corner of the house and ended at a few steps that led down. We must have been in a really ancient part of the house. The walls were rough and uneven. Manuel was talking to himself, something about when the third floor was remodeled. His grandfather must have known about this, he whispered. We crept toward the stairs. Manuel had one candle. I had another one. I was leaning my hand into the darkness looking for support when I touched what felt like a wood engraving.
“Manuel,” I said.
He stopped. We both saw the niche in the wall at the same time; it had a wood cover carved with Mudejar patterns. Crisscrossed over it were two narrow cords and a wax seal stamped in red: a coat of arms: five stars and a wood beam, the Denia coat of arms. Manuel held the candle up to the wax seal and touched it, incredulous. Beads of sweat were forming on his white skin. I was shivering. He handed me his candle and yanked on the cords. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw that the cover to the niche was open, and there, inside it, was the trunk.
It was more like a small chest, covered in dark, almost black leather, with three lighter, vertical bands all the way around it. It was as if it had come from the dead, rather than just the past, like a strange replica of Juana’s coffin in the monarch’s crypt in Granada, resting beneath the sculpted tombstone of her parents, the king and queen. I clapped my hand over my mouth, trying to contain my irrational fears.
“Don’t touch it, Manuel,” I said. He looked at me like I was mad. “We know where it is now. Let’s just leave it, some things are better left unknown.”
He pushed me aside and then handed me his candle. Wax trickled down, burning me.
“Put that down and go get a few more,” he commanded.
I dripped wax on the floor and stuck the candle into it, then ran to get the two or three that we’d left on the table. Manuel shouldn’t open that trunk, I thought, thinking of curses and spells in horror stories, archaeologists who died after discovering secrets in Egyptian tombs. I felt ridiculous, superstitious. I came back with the candles, and he handed me his lighter, telling me to light them and prop them up on the floor. Manuel’s face had transformed. He was concentrating intently, but he also had a smile that seemed to have come from his childhood. He gazed at the trunk lovingly as he slid it toward him, carefully, delicately, as if he were holding a hand that had been reaching out to him for centuries, a hand, I thought, that could just as easily yank him back into the past forever.
Once the trunk was on the floor, I held the candle while he rushed to open the tiny gold-and-rose-colored locks. He was babbling to himself, unintelligible sounds that only he could understand. I felt like a voyeur, witnessing his unbridled love for Juana; if it wasn’t madness, it certainly resembled it. He loved her the way Juana loved Philippe, a love beyond death. A love of death, maybe. Manuel wished I were Juana, but in reality he was the one who resembled her. Not the Juana he wanted me to embody, but Juana the Mad who’d been imprisoned by her ancestors.
Manuel pulled two folders from the trunk, one looked modern and one ancient. He sat down on the floor in that cramped space, and I followed suit. Like him, I couldn’t take my eyes off the folders. The passageway, the stairs, my curiosity to know where they led, would have to wait. Paler than normal even, Manuel looked like a man possessed. I don’t think he was even aware of my presence. Beside him, silent, expectant, terrified, I trembled for other reasons too. After flipping through the newer folder that held who knows what documents, he opened the older one. I saw several sheets of parchment and got the chills. I recognized that distinctive medieval calligraphy, slightly faded, the words scrunched together with no spaces, no punctuation.
While he was absorbed in the text, I leaned against the cold wal
l and rubbed my eyes. I felt a deep, sweeping sadness pressing down on my brain.
“Manuel, I’m here. Read it to me too. Read it out loud.”
“All right,” he said. “Close your eyes.”
* * *
IT’S JANUARY. 1525. A COLD WIND RISES THROUGH THE BATTLEMENTS making the bells of San Antolín toll lightly. Night has fallen over the Duero. The frost-covered water glimmers in the moonlight. Catalina has left to marry the king of Portugal. The ambassadors took her away, sobbing. My daughter, that flesh of mine living outside my flesh, without which I am no longer Juana nor anyone who wishes to live, has taken her memories of this prison to the royal court where she will soon learn the deceits of liberty. We were free here, she and I, amid these towers. Locked up behind these walls and belfries that are home to storks, we lifted up our hearts, Sursum Corda, and saw with no eyes, heard with no ears, ate with no mouths, wakeful while the world slept. But she will do well, my Catalina. I do not deceive myself into thinking that this slow death is life. Meanwhile, I will start my journey, the journey that will end on the other side of the Styx in the land of the dead where my parents live, where I will find Phillipe, my brother Juan, my sister Isabel. Nobody there will attempt to strip me of my sanity because power disputes will be done forever.
I know I shall live a long time. Life clings to me as one of its own. It recognizes me, like a cloud does water. Further on, my granchildren perhaps will take pity on me, the sons and daughters of Ferdinand, María, Isabel, Leonor, and Catalina, my offspring. I will take whatever they might wish to grant me and continue to rebel against the Denias who, despite being closest to the beating sounds of my heart and my words, refuse to see me for who I am and choose to view me in the dark light of their own fantasies.
The Scroll of Seduction Page 33
