Scarpia

by Piers Paul Read

  Would the young Lieutenant Scarpia make such a husband? Doña Inez knew next to nothing about him and her husband, when questioned, turned out to know little more. He was from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and had many obscure quarterings on his coat of arms. Scarpia clearly was not rich, but nor, perhaps, given his lack of connections in Spain, would he expect to arrange a marriage that would make his fortune. She calculated that Scarpia was probably the best they could hope for and that, if the two young people were brought together, nature would take its course.

  Vitellio Scarpia, as we have seen, was handsome – slim with thick black hair, pale skin and an intelligent look in his blue eyes – sometimes angry, sometimes kindly, always acute. All this would seem to complement the apparent docility of Celestina. She was not a great beauty according to Castilian taste; she was shorter than the ideal, with wide, low-slung hips and a large bosom. Her black hair, however, was thick and shining; her teeth even and white; her lips pink and plump; her nose delicate and small; her brown eyes unusually large and with an expression that, normally docile, showed occasional mockery, irony, even impertinence – glances which her parents failed to notice but which were intercepted across the table by Scarpia and, covertly, returned.

  Twice a week, Scarpia was invited to dine with his commander and his wife and daughter. Sometimes other officers or visiting dignitaries were present. Sometimes they were not. When it became warm enough – and it quickly became warm enough in southern Spain – Scarpia with one or two other young officers would accompany Doña Inez and her daughter on picnics in the bare hills behind the city. He was attentive towards Celestina and it was clear to all that the two took pleasure in one another’s company. At the regular fiestas, they would dance but then retire to their respective corrals – Scarpia to stand among his fellow officers and young men from the town, Celestina to sit with the other young women under the eyes of the duennas, their enticing eyes half hidden behind their fluttering fans.

  The enticing eyes of Celestina more often than not settled on Scarpia. If they settled on anyone else, it was simply a feint to avoid the humiliation of seeming too obvious. The looks, and also the touch of her hand when they were dancing – a hand that, again, did not give itself away with a squeeze but made quite clear by the way it lingered in his that it would have been quite happy to have been held for longer – had the intended effect on Scarpia: each night, as he lay in the narrow bed in his quarters – a modest, low-roofed set of rooms built into the battlements – he would imagine himself holding Celestina, kissing her soft lips, caressing her silken shoulders, running his fingers through her thick hair. Yet the obstacles to making a reality out of these imaginings were considerable. Scarpia felt that he was too young to marry and, if he were to marry, it should not be to someone unknown to his parents and without their consent. Scarpia was impetuous and romantic, but he was not incapable of calculation, and it had been made clear to him by his mother – one might say drummed into him – that those sequins and ducats and dollars given to him as he set out for Spain were not a down payment but the entirety of what he could expect from his family.

  Spoletta, who felt that Scarpia’s future was also his, saw the danger posed by Celestina. He saw that his master was being pulled one way by prudence and another by desire. Spoletta would have seduced the girl and left it at that; but he understood that Scarpia, as a cavaliere, had to take other factors into account. Spoletta also saw, as Scarpia did not, that what was to be done or not done lay in the hands of women – Celestina, her mother and Celestina’s maid Tula, who canoodled with Spoletta when both were off duty. It was Tula who told Spoletta that her mistress, pining for Scarpia, had decided that the time had come to move things along. A note was passed by Tula to Spoletta and, reluctantly, by Spoletta to Scarpia. ‘Think! To see the stars at midnight from the ramparts by the winch.’

  There were a number of winches on the ramparts of the Alcazar used to raise cannon balls, gunpowder or provisions from below; but there was one in particular close to the steps from the chapel which Celestina and Scarpia had agreed in earlier conversations was the spot from which there was the best view of the sky and the sea. It also had the advantage that there was an alcove in the ramparts behind it with a stone bench where one could sit without being seen. And there was dead ground between the jefatura where Celestina lived with her parents and the winch, which made it unlikely that she would be seen by the sentries whose duty, after all, was to look out to sea for British warships or Barbary pirates.

  Scarpia kept the assignation: for the first time, the two young lovers kissed and embraced; and, as Scarpia felt Celestina’s body press against his, he made protestations of eternal affection. Celestina, too, murmured words of love, and the name Vitellio over and over, as his arms encircled her waist, his hands rose and became entangled in her hair, and his lips left her lips to stray onto her bare shoulders.

  They stepped into the alcove and sat on the stone bench hand in hand to exchange further whispered words and intimate gestures. How delightful for Scarpia to feel the smooth warm flesh that he had imagined; and for Celestina to discover that she could inspire such devotion and desire. It was almost four when there was to be a change of the guard before Scarpia and Celestina decided that it would be wise to return to their respective quarters. They discussed another tryst – not the next night, when Scarpia would be on duty and so under the eye of his men – and not the night after that, because Celestina was to go away for a week to visit her aunt in Valencia – but in eight days in the same place and at the same time.

  3

  Celestina was unable to keep this rendezvous because, two days later, the diligence in which she was travelling with her maid Tula to her aunt in Valencia was seized by Barbary corsairs. The Arabs’ longboats had emerged suddenly out of the early-morning mist and they surrounded the coach as it left the village of Vera. Celestina, Tula and the other passengers were the first to be rowed out to their galley. Most of the able-bodied inhabitants of Vera followed before the nightfall.

  Celestina and Tula were now to be counted among the million Europeans who had, over the previous two centuries, been seized from the shores of the Mediterranean to be ransomed or sold in the slave markets of Tunis and Algiers. Scarpia and Celestina’s parents were tormented by visions of Celestina at the mercy of a lascivious Moor, but they also knew it was possible that, coming from a good family, she would be held intacta in the hope of a ransom greater than the price she might make on the market. Such ransoms were arranged by religious orders, the Lazarists and Redemptorists, whose humble friars acted as intermediaries between distraught families and the Algerian Dey. Their negotiations were sometimes successful; the fetters and manacles of freed slaves are still to be seen on the wall of the cathedral in Minorca; but more often they failed. Though charitable funds were available to pay the ransoms, they were insufficient to redeem every captive – particularly the young, the strong and the beautiful whose price, inevitably, was high.

  A month after Celestina’s abduction, a Redemptorist friar returned from Algiers with the news that her captors were indeed open to a pre-emptive offer for Celestina and mentioned a sum. It was immense, and wholly beyond the means of her parents or the religious orders. Even the king who, though he was mindful that Celestina was the daughter of one of his officers, was loath to set a precedent that would involve a future outlay that the royal treasury could not afford. Rather than encourage such abductions by paying ransoms, better to spend the money on equipping warships with gunpowder and shot. King Charles ordered Admiral Barceló to take his fleet and bombard Algiers.

  Celestina’s parents, having come to see Scarpia as their daughter’s future husband, now treated him as a son: he dined at the jefatura almost every day. The atmosphere at table was hard to bear as the evasive replies to their appeals to relatives, religious orders and government ministers were read out aloud at table. It became clear to Scarpia that the ransom would not be raised and his mind turned to other
solutions. When the Redemptorist friar returned to Almeria on his way back to Algiers, Scarpia asked if it might be possible to mount a counter-kidnapping as audacious as that of the Barbary pirates. Was there someone in Algiers who might know where Celestina was being held? Could he be bribed to lead a small party of disguised men to rescue her?

  The friar was evasive. He had to be careful not to compromise his neutral standing with the Dey, but the project was not altogether impossible: there were people in Algiers – covert Christians or venal slaves – who could discover where prisoners were held and guide visitors through the narrow alleyways of the Casbah. On his return to Algiers, he would make enquiries and prepare the ground.

  *

  Scarpia now petitioned Admiral Barceló to be allowed to join the force that was to mount a punitive expedition against Algiers. The admiral, remembering Scarpia from the siege of Gibraltar, and how grateful he had been for his escapade, petitioned the king to have him seconded temporarily from the garrison at Almeria to the contingent of marines. The order for the transfer came to Celestina’s father who, understanding the reason for Scarpia’s request, countersigned the order and gave Scarpia his blessing. In Cadiz, a Lazarist friar recently returned from North Africa told Scarpia that a covert Christian had been found who would lead him to Celestina. He gave Scarpia Arab clothes and made a map from memory of the city of Algiers on which was marked the small jetty where a small party might land unobserved and the house where they would find their guide.

  The fleet set sail. Scarpia, in command of a contingent of marines, was not on the admiral’s flagship but on an auxiliary galleon, the Santa Fe. He left it to Spoletta to befriend the sailors and, on the fourth day, as they approached Algiers, Spoletta reported that he had found five men who for ten Spanish dollars – two apiece – would in the dark or during the action lower a boat and row to the shore.

  All went according to plan. Soon after the bombardment started, Spoletta shouted ‘man overboard’. Permission was given to lower a boat to retrieve him and, preoccupied by the bombardment, the ship’s captain did not notice that it did not immediately return. As the sailors rowed towards the jetty Scarpia and Spoletta covered their uniforms with Arab kaftans. They could hear the boom of the cannons and see the fires started by Admiral Barceló’s cannonade.

  The sailors lay low behind the jetty while Scarpia and Spoletta disembarked. At the house marked on the map, a man was waiting who at Scarpia’s whispered ‘Benedicamus Domino’ replied with a ‘Deo gratias’ and then silently beckoned for them to follow him through the narrow alleyways on the edge of the city. Distracted by the bombardment, no one showed any interest in the three men. They stopped by some gates to a courtyard. ‘She is there,’ said their guide. ‘It is the house of a janissary . . . a Turk.’

  While the guide waited outside, Scarpia and Spoletta climbed over the wall into the courtyard. A dark figure stood by the door into the house watching the fires in the centre of the city. He turned as they approached: Spoletta ran him through with his sword. Were there other guards? Where were the slaves held? With Spoletta, Scarpia passed through the door and glided silently up a shallow stone staircase. The corridor at the top was dark and silent. Light came from an open door. Scarpia, with Spoletta behind him, crept up and looked in. On the far side of the room by an arched opening looking out over a garden stood two figures – one a man, the other a woman. The man was tall and swarthy – his figure loosely clothed. The woman, naked, stood sheltering behind him, her left arm raised, the fingers fondling the tight curls at the base of his neck. The man was watching the fires visible through the palm trees over the tiled roofs; the woman could see nothing but his shoulder which occasionally she bumped with her lips, giving gentle kisses.

  Scarpia’s eyes were at first caught by the pink orbs of the woman’s low-slung buttocks. He looked sharply away, as if ashamed of his intrusion, and found his eyes resting on a deep divan with rich-coloured cushions and drapes in disarray. It required no imagination to realise that the couple, alarmed by the sounds of the bombardment, had risen from a bed of love and, apparently in no danger, were watching the spectacle as if it were a firework display. And now Scarpia, overcoming that first brief embarrassment, realised that the plump buttocks and broad hips of the woman were familiar – that he had seen them often covered in cotton and silk in the Alcazar of Almeria.

  Scarpia stepped forward, Spoletta behind him, both men with swords drawn. ‘Celestina!’

  She turned. So did the man. She gave a cry as one hand fell to hide her pudenda and the other rose to cover her breasts. The man had moved even before she did, dashing towards a sideboard on which lay his scimitar.

  ‘Vitellio, no!’ cried Celestina; then, ‘No, Spoletta,’ because it was Spoletta who had intercepted the Turk and held him, his back against the wall, at the point of his sword.

  Scarpia, still confused by the nudity of his beloved, and yet to make sense of what he had seen, turned and took from the divan a garment. ‘Put this on,’ he said. As he stepped forward to hand it to her, he opened his arms to embrace her; but as soon as she had snatched it, she stepped back.

  ‘Vitellio, you must go.’

  ‘No, you must come. We have a boat . . .’

  ‘Oh, Vitellio, if only you had come sooner. Now it is too late.’

  Scarpia looked at her, now dressed in the silken kaftan, in anguish and confusion. How could he have come sooner? How could it be too late? ‘Celestina, my dearest,’ he said, ‘I have come to take you home.’

  ‘This is now my home.’

  ‘With him?’ Scarpia turned to the Turk, his body still motionless but his eyes darting to and fro in search of some advantage, or for a sign that Spoletta had dropped his guard.

  ‘He bought me,’ said Celestina. ‘I am his.’

  ‘But you are mine,’ said Scarpia. ‘I am here to reclaim you.’

  ‘It is too late,’ said Celestina again. ‘I have been with him and . . . Vitellio, I love him.’

  Now the anguish sank and the rage returned. ‘You love that? A Turk?’

  ‘He is a man, Vitellio. He has been kind to me and . . . I love him.’

  ‘Then love his corpse,’ said Scarpia, turning in a fury and lunging at the man’s chest.

  ‘Bravo,’ said Spoletta, pressing forward the point of his own sword and severing the artery in the Turk’s neck so that, even as the man fell and writhed from Scarpia’s thrust, blood gushed in intermittent spurts onto the patterned tiles of the floor.

  Celestina shrieked, ‘No, no, Vitellio,’ and ran to her groaning, gurgling lover.

  ‘And you, you whore . . .’ said Scarpia, raising his sword to strike Celestina.

  ‘No, no,’ said Spoletta, taking hold of his arm. ‘Not her. Not a woman. But this one – we will send his soul to Hell.’ He turned and drove his sword through the breastbone of the bloodied man, who then stopped twitching and lay still.

  There were the sounds of voices. ‘Come,’ said Spoletta, ‘we must go.’ He drew Scarpia towards the door. Scarpia staggered backwards, his eyes still on Celestina, sobbing over her lover’s body. She turned, her face streaked with blood and wet with tears. ‘Take me, then,’ she sobbed. ‘I have nothing to stay for.’

  Scarpia hesitated.

  ‘No,’ said Spoletta. ‘E rotto. Leave her. You’ll find another.’

  ‘But her father, her mother.’

  Abruptly, Celestina stopped weeping, went to the divan to take up some more clothes and put on slippers, and followed Scarpia and Spoletta as they went back down the shallow stone steps, across the courtyard and through the gate. As they ran down the narrow alleyways behind their guide, they heard cries behind but reached the jetty unimpeded. Ducats were thrust into the hands of their turbaned friend, and gold dollars into those of the sailors. Celestina sat alone, a bundle in the back of the longboat, and as a bundle she was carried on the back of a sailor up the webbing onto the ship’s deck.

  The next morning, the punitive bombar
dment completed, the fleet returned to Cadiz. When it turned out that the man overboard was in fact a girl swathed in silk and smeared with blood; and that five sailors, an officer in the marines and his servant had been absent from the action, the sailors and Spoletta were flogged. Scarpia, saved from the indignity because he was an officer, was confined to his cabin until the boat reached Cadiz. There, Celestina was sent back to her parents in Almeria while Scarpia was detained for two months in comfortable quarters in the Castillo de Santa Catallina.

  In the event, there was no will among the authorities to proceed with a prosecution for desertion. A number of the junior officers could not but admire Scarpia’s act of daring. The ship’s commander feared ridicule if it was revealed in open court that the five sailors and two marines had gone missing without being noticed. Admiral Barceló retained a soft spot for the wild young Sicilian, and King Charles, who was appraised of the case, again remembered the loyalty of the older Scarpia to Tanucci. It was therefore decided that there would be no charges but that Vitellio Scarpia would forfeit his commission, be dismissed from the service and expelled from Spain.

  There was one concession. Scarpia was given a permit to travel to Almeria to visit the girl he had rescued and her family. But, as soon as he was released from the Castillo de Santa Catallina, Scarpia, with his servant Spoletta, took passage on the first ship they could find – a French sloop sailing for the Italian port of Civitavecchia. It would be more than a year before a letter reached him from his former commanding officer in Almeria, Colonel Rodriguez Serrano – dignified words of thanks written on a stiff card on which was pasted a fragment of a bone of St Idaletius, giving the news that Celestina was now married to one of his officers, a Lieutenant Alfonso Valdivia, whom Scarpia remembered as decent but dull.