The Family Mansion

by Anthony C. Winkler

  She had the money. That was all that mattered.

  She didn’t even know his name.

  Chapter 2

  He had a long imposing name, for as a male child of sixteenth-century Spain, he was expected to memorialize dead uncles or cousins or nephews, preserve the identity of his mother’s family name, and earn the goodwill of saints by acknowledging them in every recital of his full name.

  In all its splendor, his full name was Carlos Antonio Maria Eduardo Garcia de la Cal Fernandez. Uncle Eduardo, his mother’s beloved brother, was thereby remembered; Antonio would no doubt catch the eye of powerful St. Anthony; Maria memorialized his mother and pacified the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God. As for the rest of it, Garcia was a sop to the previous generation on his father’s side, and de la Cal simply an embellishment of Fernandez, which was a boring and common name that his mother detested even though it signified her marital bond to his father.

  His mother had played with the family name many times now, at the birth of almost every child, and since she’d had sixteen of them, she was able to give full rein to her imagination. Record keeping was sloppy in those days, and a woman who kept birthing children was entitled to indulge her fantasies over their potential greatness, even as she lost most of them to commonplace diseases such as diphtheria and measles almost as fast as she could bring them into the world. Yet with all this vainglory embedded in his name, he was still known to his friends and most others as Carlos.

  He was not a big man. European men of his time were not tall, although they had inherited from their fathers a voracious appetite for slaughter that would make up in ferocity what they lacked in size.

  Nor was he particularly handsome. His face was misshapen and his features gnomic. His nose and eyes and mouth looked as if they were compressed together in too small a space, like the face of a badly sewn cloth doll. And already, although he was only twenty-five, so fissured and worn from too much sun was his face that it looked older and yellowish like the wrinkled skin on an old chicken’s leg.

  If he was lucky, he would live another ten years. If he was unlucky, he would be carried off earlier by any of the bacilli passed around by bad hygiene, improperly prepared food, and the general nastiness common to sixteenth-century Europe.

  He was, moreover, an unthinking man. Catholicism had been so thoroughly beaten into him as a child by a succession of harsh nuns and priests that he believed nothing that had not been filtered through the prism of his teachings. Whatever his church said he accepted unquestioningly. This rigorous Catholicism had made him a curious mixture of animal carnality and spiritual wistfulness. He was always wishing he were better, but constantly berating himself for being worse. Right now, as he stood on the edge of the street, he was tormented by a relentless guilt over his most recent sin—fornication. Even in the open air, the smell of the whore still lingered in his nostrils. He desperately longed to find a priest or pardoner who would absolve him, for he was conscious that should he die at this moment, his soul would plunge straight to hell.

  With this terrible thought on his mind, he stood for a brief moment outside the building in which the whore lived, feeling both sinful and aggrieved by the quickness with which she had dispatched him, and although he tingled with that inexpressible relief men feel after having ejaculated deep inside a woman, he also felt that he had been robbed. For a moment or two, he thought about barging into her room and demanding at least a partial refund.

  Twenty maravedis for a blink of her time! For an entire day’s work as an able seaman, he made only thirty-three maravedis. He had been inside her for no more than a minute or two—surely she should’ve charged him only ten maravedis. It was worth no more than that, and he would tell her so. He abruptly turned and headed for the doorway out of which he had just come.

  But he stopped before his foot had crossed the threshold.

  Many such women had men around them as protectors. Perhaps she had a boyfriend or guardian armed with a sword or a pike. He had been stabbed once, a long time ago, in a barroom brawl in Málaga after just returning from a voyage to Gambia. He had gotten into a fight with another seaman—his first serious fight—and while he flailed his dagger around and screamed curses at his opponent, the other man calmly lunged and stabbed him in the chest. The wound had festered. He had come down with a bad fever and couldn’t go to sea for three months. Quibbling with a whore over money was not worth the risk of being stabbed. And with fresh sin on his soul, this was the wrong time to risk being killed.

  He sighed heavily, like a horse blowing after hauling a particularly heavy load, and wished that he were a divinity, if only long enough to teach that dirty woman a lesson. It was a fantasy he’d had all his life. Other boys would dream of becoming a bishop or a scholar or a mapmaker. He would dream of being godlike.

  It was a dream he shared with no one. In his heart, he knew that it was a sinful dream. Nevertheless, he often fantasized about what he would do to his enemies or to people he hated if only he had godlike powers.

  In truth, he had no overt enemies, being a little man who would prefer to retaliate sneakily against anyone who crossed him rather than confront his provoker openly.

  But he hated many people, many on sight. Whenever he saw someone in the street who wore a splendid hat or a brocaded coat, he felt hatred. He himself was a poor seafarer who dressed in linen pants and a loosely fitting doublet. He wore a simple pair of goatskin shoes that were thinning in the soles.

  It did not seem fair that others should have so much more than he. Had he not been his mother’s favorite? Did he not have an immortal soul as worthy of redemption as anyone’s? Why should he be dressed in threadbare clothes and leaky shoes while others sashayed past him gleaming with tooled leather and silken splendor? Such contrasts were the work of the devil.

  So he took his revenge by wishing upon the splendid one some horrible disease such as the worm that ate you from the inside, crawling out of your limbs, your belly, laying its eggs under your skin or behind your eyeballs. He did not know the name of the disease. He only knew that a friend of his friend Rodrigo knew someone who had had it and who had personally witnessed the suffering it caused. This unfortunate man had signed on with a noa exploring the west coast of Africa and had picked up the worm, perhaps from breathing bad air. If he were a divinity, he would cause such things to happen to the rich. But he was just a man, so he could only dream.

  Yet though he had a mad dream of being born divine, he was not mad. He knew the difference between the real world in which he scrounged daily and the dream world to which he occasionally retreated for solace. And standing in the street of Cádiz, Spain, on this Thursday evening of March 8, 1520, he knew that he had to quickly find a place to sleep. With only forty maravedis left to his name, he also needed to find a ship that would hire him on as a seaman.

  When he had first stepped into the whore’s room, he had hoped that she would like him well enough to ask him to spend the night. Such a wonderful thing had happened to Manuel a year ago, or so his shipmate had boasted. But such things never happened to him.

  He sighed again. He was standing on a narrow dirt side street near the waterfront, and the shadows that stretched out all around him foretold the falling night. He could smell the tang of saltwater in the breeze. Over the roof of a distant building across the street, he could glimpse the masts of tied-up ships. He knew what he had to do, but he stood there outside the whore’s lodgings glancing around as if he were lost.

  He was not lost. He was in Cádiz. But he was befuddled and nearly penniless. All he had to his credit was his serpentine name—Carlos Antonio Maria Eduardo Garcia de la Cal Fernandez.

  * * *

  Cádiz, already an old city even in the sixteenth century, having been founded by the Phoenicians in 1000 BC, lay at the center of the exploratory movement ever since Columbus had made his historic voyage to the New World. Only a few months earlier, Magellan had set out to sea on the first attempt to sail completely around the wo
rld. With Charles V sitting on the throne, Spain was prosperous and powerful. Her reach extended to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Artois, and Franche-Comté, Aragón, Navarre, Granada, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spanish America. The Jews had been expelled almost thirty years earlier, and the suppression of the remaining Muslims had begun with Isabella’s decree of the 12th of February, 1502, which separated all Muslim males under the age of fourteen and all females under the age of twelve from their families and turned them over to the church to be brought up as Christians. It would spark another interval of bloodletting in the name of God—a favorite pastime of Europeans.

  None of this was known to him, however, for he barely knew how to read, and there were no newspapers or magazines to tell him what was happening in the world. Even so, it is unlikely that he would’ve been interested. He did not have a mind for current events. He was only interested in keeping his belly full and finding someplace warm to spend cold nights. He did not care about causes or principles. He knew that the world was round, for he had glimpsed its curvature from the crow’s nest of a ship sailing the deep sea, but he did not care whether or not anyone actually proved it.

  As he stood on the street, the stench of raw sewage rose up all around him and made his eyes run. It was evening and the citizens of Cádiz were emptying their chamber pots in the street, leaving a ghastly, fetid trail of freshly deposited excrement whose malodorous vapors gave off a poisonous stench.

  Looking around him at the dingy shops and unreinforced masonry houses, smelling the pungent refuse splattered all over the rutted dirt road still muddy and drooling with runoff from the recent rains, he remembered again why he loved the sea, why he could not abide land and land-bound people. It was the stench of land that he abhorred, the perpetual miasma that arose from it. Wherever people herded together in great numbers, they gave off a collective stink that bedaubed even the breeze. Everything they touched, everything they brushed against, absorbed their stench. The land, the plants, the very animals became impregnated with their stink.

  At sea a boat had its stink spots too, but it was a localized stench like a laborer’s armpits that one could walk away from. Moreover, the sea breezes were natural cleansers that would sweep away any miasmatic buildup and freshen both man and vessel with the delicate aroma of saltwater.

  When the sea was kittenish with him, when his ship was scudding along in a following breeze and the workload easy, he would feel light-headed with exhilaration and joy and wonder how any man with a heart could live anywhere else.

  But he was a hardened enough seaman to know that the ocean was fickle and unforgiving. He had already suffered shipwreck. He had lost crewmates on other voyages. Once, after a hurricane, he had drifted clinging to flotsam for eight hours before another ship happened by and saved his life.

  So he had no illusions about the sea. It was not a romance for him. All he knew was that land was dirty and stank and was filled with strange people and customs that could drive a man mad and goad him to the deadly sins of covetousness and envy. The sea, on the other hand, was clean and sweet smelling like a freshly bathed and powdered woman.

  He was eager and ready to go to sea again, to escape the nasty clutch of land. If he could find a ship about to sail and sign on, perhaps the master would allow him to sleep on the deck, and he wouldn’t have to pay a night’s lodging. If that did not happen, and if the cheaper inns were full, he would have to sleep on the streets. He had done that many times before. He did not want to do it tonight, for at this time of the year, the night chill could bite down to the very bone.

  He set off toward the waterfront, headed for the tangle of masts looming above the rooflines of the surrounding buildings. As he crossed the street, he took care, like everyone else around him, to step cautiously around the piles of excrement that mounded everywhere in his path like poisonous toadstools.

  Madre de Dios, he asked himself, was there a more wretched place on this earth than the infernal land?

  Chapter 3

  Cádiz is nestled on the tip of an isthmus strategically located on the Atlantic Ocean near the narrow mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. Not far away, across the Straits of Gibraltar, looms the dark forehead of vast Africa with its ancient lands of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia—kingdoms once populated by Berbers, a motley Afro-Asiatic people who sprang from an unknown origin and covered caves with painted images dating back to 6500 BC Next to Algeria on the simian brow of Africa lies Morocco, another ancient kingdom repeatedly overrun by invaders, from the Phoenicians of the twelfth century BC and later the Carthaginians, the Romans, and the Vandals—all of these, kingdoms that came and went on the world stage like surging swarms of locusts.

  Carlos knew about none of this history though its teachings and lessons had been subtly imprinted on his soul and informed his outlook in ways that he could only act out but did not understand. He was barely able to read, having had only three years of schooling at the hands of an overworked village priest who was ahead of his time in his belief in public education. What Carlos was proudest of was that he had learned to write his first name in a shaky cursive hand and did not, like most of his shipmates, have to mark an imbecilic X when he signed up to work on a ship.

  On his way to the quay, he encountered a beggar whom bone disease had twisted into a misshapen caricature of the human body, and desiring God’s mercy after his sinful encounter with the whore, Carlos dug deep into his pocket and fished out a single maravedi, which he flipped to the wretched man, drawing peals of extravagant blessings that God would surely not overlook.

  He was whistling merrily when he finally came to the waterfront. The smell of fish assailed his nose and, as he turned a corner, a tangle of masts and rigging hung like an enormous spiderweb above ships tied up abeam on the quay. A gale churning over the Atlantic had sent many vessels scurrying into Cádiz as a haven from the storm, where they now bobbed disheveled and weather beaten.

  Scattered over the quay was a familiar ensemble of castaways, adventurers, ship jumpers, whores, scavengers, cutthroats, pickpockets, and foreigners—the same found in dirty waterfronts all over this rounded earth. Some scruffy characters ambled aimlessly past the ships; others slouched against the stained walls of stone warehouses, staring blurrily at memories of distant shores or long-lost sweethearts left behind in faraway homelands. Here and there men skulked in the shadows, scanning every stranger with a vague predatory curiosity. Some seamen huddled together in boisterous discussion about voyages and adventures they had survived. On a few of the tied-up ships, sailors squatted on deck splicing ropes or patching sails. One grommet was cleaning the foredeck of a noa with soapstone. Trolling the banks of the quay for customers were a couple of painted, aged whores. Beyond the ships and the human jetsam unfurled the open ocean, crinkled and gray in the distance, and far out to sea Carlos could glimpse an ominously dark squall line that made a sailor give thanks for solid land underfoot.

  He walked slowly down the quay, eyeing the lashed-together vessels, appraising each one with a practiced eye. He passed frigates, dismissing out of hand those equipped with oars. An impatient master who found himself on a windless sea would have his men break their backs with rowing. For similar reasons, he turned up his nose at an opulent-looking brigantine and passed up several coastal barks. He had a personal distaste for hybrid vessels that combined sails with oars. Such ships were usually not only ungainly under sail, but nearly impossible to row.

  He strolled past a weather-beaten noa, looming bulky over the neighboring vessels, her high forecastle and raised quarterdeck giving her a top-heavy profile.

  A noa was not a bad ship. Christopher Columbus himself, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, dead these past fourteen years now, God rest his soul, had chosen a noa—the famed Santa Maria—for his flagship. Yet Carlos still preferred a vessel that did not brandish a broad beam and high freeboard at capricious seas. Such a vessel was wonderful for running before a following wind but handled poorly to windward.

  What he wanted was
to find a sturdy sailer such as a caravel, particularly one headed for the New World. He had been to Africa. He had scoured the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, sailing as far away as Crete. He was tired of these old seas and their nasty ports.

  On waterfronts all over the Mediterranean and Atlantic the talk was of the New World and the strange, exotic people who lived in it. Carlos had never seen one of these creatures himself, but he’d heard many drunken exaggerations about them. The women, it was said, walked around naked as the day they were born and gave freely of their affections to strangers. One sailor who claimed his cousin’s brother-in-law had shipped on the second voyage of discovery with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself swore that there were so many lovely available women that the intemperate man could easily kill himself with too much lovemaking.

  He was musing quietly to himself about sailing to an exotic land where all the woman were lovely and willing when he heard a voice hailing him. One of the blessed saints had heard his prayers, perhaps St. Anthony, and answered them, for right before him was a caravel whose low rakish waterline bespoke a ship loaded and ready for sea. Painted on her bow was her name, Santa Inez.

  From her raised quarterdeck, a man in his later years, who carried himself with the authority of a master, was calling him.

  “I said, are you looking for a ship?”

  * * *

  At first, Carlos admitted nothing. He had learned a long time ago that in a new situation it was better to listen than to talk. So he was cryptic and noncommittal in his replies, irritating the stranger, who said he was from Mallorca. He said he was master of this ship, which would sail tomorrow for the New World, but he was shorthanded because unexpected death had visited his crew. If he was an experienced sailor looking for a ship, here was opportunity.