"You are doing the king's work in exchange for not being sent to the Filipinas. If I want you to put on a dress and be a puta, you will do that, too."
Mateo drummed the guitar and sang an old Spanish ballad.
Yesterday I was King of Spain,
Today not one village;
Yesterday I had towns and castles,
Today I have not one;
Yesterday I had servants,
And people to wait upon me;
Today there is not a battlement
Which I can call my own.
Ill-fated was the hour
And the day luckless
When I was born and fell heir
To so great an heritage
Since I was to lose it
In one day, all together!
Why do you not come, Death,
And take this wretched body
Which would be grateful to you?
"Yes, like King Don Rodrigo," Don Julio said, "death will someday claim each of us. Sooner for some than others if the orders of the king's servant are not obeyed."
Don Julio started for his bedroll, and I stopped him with a question.
"What about my pay?"
"Your pay? Your pay is not to be hanged as a thief."
"I lost money because of Sancho. I will need money for expenses. To buy information in the marketplaces."
Don Julio shook his head. "If you have more money on you than usual, you will raise suspicion. Better that you remain poor. And heed my caution: To offer money in the marketplace for information about the Jaguar Knights would invite danger," Don Julio told me before he went back to shouting at the indios patching the wall, "but no more than robbing the burial places of kings. There may be some danger but also a reward if you are successful, however less than a king's ransom. Better than all of that, you won't be hanged for tomb robbing."
After he left, I lay on the ground and listened to Mateo's guitar and watched him drink wine. Knowing that his temper toward me was gentler when he had a bellyful of wine, I waited until the goatskin was empty before asking a question that had been burning in my mind.
"You and Don Julio referred to Sancho as a woman. How can that be? He's a man."
"Let me tell you, Bastardo, the story of a man that is a woman." Mateo drummed a tune on the guitar. "There was a woman named Catalina, and she became a man called Sancho. This is the story of a nun who became an army lieutenant..."
An amazing story. Some parts Mateo told me that night, the more profane parts I learned later myself. Sí, amigos, I would again meet up with the man called Sancho—the woman called Catalina. And like me, from a prison cell, she later wrote down the events that had shaped her life. Hers were to be published after careful censorship by the Holy Office. But I had heard her true story from her own lips, and now I embellish upon Mateo's account to share her actual words with you.
Share with me now the story of Catalina de Erauso, soldier, swordsman, womanizer, bandit, and scoundrel—the lieutenant nun.
SIXTY
Doña Catalina de Erauso was born in the town of San Sebastian in Guipúzoca province. Her parents were Capitán Don Miguel de Erauso and Doña Maria Pérez de Galarrage y Arce. When she was of the tender age of four years, they placed her in a convent of Dominican nuns. Her aunt, Sor Ursula Unzá y Sarasti, her mother's older sister, was the prioress of the convent.
Catalina lived in the convent until she was fifteen years old. No one asked her if she wanted to be a nun and spend the rest of her life cloistered behind the stone walls surrounding the convent. No one asked her if she had great curiosity about the world outside the gray walls. She had been given to the convent like a puppy, barely weaned.
In the year of her novitiate, when she was to make her final vows, she quarreled with one of the sisters, Sor Juanita, who had taken the veil after the death of her husband. There were those unkind who said that her husband willingly entered death to get away from her. She was a big, strong woman. When their quarrel became fisticuffs, it took all of Catalina's girlish strength to defend herself. When her strength failed her, God placed a heavy brass candleholder in her hand. Afterward, the nuns lay Doña Juanita on her bed to see if she would regain consciousness.
Doña Catalina's punishment depended upon Juanita's fate, and she pondered what was to become of herself. The answer, like another command from God, came on Saint Joseph's Eve when the entire convent rose at midnight to perform prayers through the night. Catalina went into the choir and found her aunt on her knees. She handed Catalina the keys to her cell and bid her to fetch her breviary. After she entered her aunt's cell, Catalina noticed that the key to the convent gate was hanging from a nail on the wall.
With the light from a lamp, she found a pair of scissors, needle, and thread, a quantity of pieces of eight that were lying about, and the keys to the convent doors and the gate beyond. Catalina left the cell and went through the prison-like doors, the voices of the choir following her from the chapel.
Through the last door, she shook off her veil and opened the gate. She stepped out of the gate and onto a street she had never seen before. Her heart was beating in her throat. For a moment Catalina was unable to move. Her most earnest desire was to turn and flee back into the convent. Gathering her courage and curiosity, she walked down the dark and deserted street, going in the direction her feet moved rather than with any organized plan.
Catalina passed farmhouses and barking dogs outside of town. An hour down the road, she came across a chestnut grove. There she remained in hiding for three days, eating chestnuts off the tree and drinking from a nearby river, but not venturing farther. Laying out her nun's garb, she planned and replanned before taking out the scissors and cutting out a suit of clothes. From the blue woolen habit, Catalina made a pair of knee-length breeches and a small cape; with a green petticoat, she created a doublet and hose.
Catalina often was asked why she chose to become a man. Perhaps it was because she had been in the exclusive company of women for her entire life and she wanted to experience something different. And it was easier to disguise herself as a man with a partition of nun's clothes than a woman.
Putting on the man's garb, perhaps she felt more comfortable with herself than she had ever been. After all, this was not a world for women; the world was for the enjoyment of men. To partake of her share of life's pleasures, perhaps she felt she needed to wear pants. On that day, at the age of fifteen, she resolved to never again wear the clothes of a woman. Catalina had found her true self.
Setting out again, still not knowing where her feet would take her, she tread this way and that way, down roads and past villages, until she came to the town of Vittoria, some twenty leagues from San Sebastian. She had no more idea of what she would do in Vittoria than any other place, but she still had a pocketful of pesos. Here Catalina indulged in food with substance. She remained in the town for several days and became acquainted with a certain professor of theology, Don Francisco de Cerralta.
Don Francisco, thinking she was a picaro lad, alone and wandering in the world, took her in as his personal servant. Discovering that she could read Latin, he kept Catalina in his quarters for long hours, working side-by-side with him. One night he awoke her and insisted she come to help him with an aged document he was translating. When she made to put on her pants, he grabbed her arm and told her to come along in her nightshirt, that he was in a hurry. He was dressed in his own nightshirt that, like hers, came down to the knees.
Seated next to him on a bench with the manuscript and candles on the table before them, she suddenly felt the man's hand on her thigh. On several occasions in the past, he had found a reason to pat her hindquarters, letting his hand linger as he did. He had made up for his indiscretion by buying her new clothes.
Now he leaned forward, straining to see a smudged bit of print, and as he did his hand slipped down to her knee and then back, pulling her nightshirt back, slipping his hand along her bare thigh.
"You're a handsome
boy," he said, "soft as a girl."
At fifteen years of age, Catalina had had no experience being around a man, and the only thing she knew about men were stories of endless lust and disgust told by the nuns at the convent. She had heard stories of women sneaking into another woman's cell to be with her at night, and there was many a time when she lay in bed at night and wished that a particularly buxom nun would come to her bed, but she had never heard of a man wanting to fondle another man. In truth, she may have been more curious about what he had in mind than aroused by his behavior.
As he caressed her naked thigh with his hand, she saw that his other hand was also busy. He had pulled back his nightshirt and exposed his virile part. Occasionally at the convent the nuns had had to care for small children, so the shape of a pene did not come as a surprise to her. The surprise was how big, red, and angry his male member looked. He grasped it in his hand and pulled up and down on it, as one would pull on the teat of a cow to milk it.
He took Catalina's own hand and put it on his pene. Curious, she squeezed it and then pumped it for him. It seemed to give him great pleasure, but other than satisfying a little curiosity, she did not find the act stimulating.
As she pumped his pene, he pulled her nightskirt back all the way and explored between her legs to find her virile part. When he found the hole between her legs, he gasped in surprise.
"You're a girl!"
"And you are a sodomite."
Catalina punched him in the nose. Not because he was a pervert who thought she was a boy he could sodomize, but because he had insulted her by calling her a girl. Catalina had determined that she was no longer a girl.
A small built, skinny little man, he went backward off the bench. He got to his feet with blood running from his nose. "I'm calling the constable and having you arrested!"
"I will tell the constable what you do to boys and that you raped me."
He turned purple and his eyes bulged. Catalina thought he was going to fall dead before her eyes. "Get out of my house, get out!"
There was little of her own possessions to throw into a small sack, so she added a silver candlestick holder from the fireplace mantle and some gold coins she found lying carelessly about.
More adventures and misadventures lay before her, though Catalina was soon to embark upon her greatest quest. Her wanderlust feet would take her to Valladolid where the king was holding court, and she worked as a page for a royal secretary, to Navarre where she spent two years as the secretary for a marqués, and even back to San Sebastian where she came face-to-face with her mother in Church but went unrecognized. What bitch cur would remember the puppy cast off when it was barely weaned?
Catalina had discovered her true romantic inclinations when the marqués' wife invited her into her bed when her husband was on a hunting trip. Although Catalina had filled out and was a strong youth, the marqués' wife was larger than her, at least in terms of her width. Knowing that she would expect Catalina to penetrate her, Catalina had appropriated a phallic-shaped ivory horn that the marqués used as a paperweight and used it to give her pleasure. Catalina soon devised a way to tie the horn to a leather strap around her belly and legs so that she did not have to hold onto it when it was inside a woman.
Ah, but the juices that flowed in her soul when her lips tasted the lips of another woman, when her tongue caressed her breasts. As for men, there were none who stirred her desires. And why should they? Was she not a man? Her one regret was that she could not grow a beard. Each morning she scraped her face with her knife to stimulate the growth of hair, but only a bit of dark fuzz appeared above her upper lip and a couple of strands on her chin.
Everywhere Catalina went people talked of the New World, of the fortunes to be made there, the adventures to be had. Finally she could no longer resist the call of the New World and set about to find passage.
She talked her way as a cabin boy aboard a ship setting out for Panama and Cartagena de Indias. But what a surprise awaited her aboard ship. It was a brutal, stinking existence. The food was rotten; the smell was foul. Half the seamen were criminals forced aboard, and the other half were too stupid and brutish to live ashore. There were no women aboard, and the young boys were looked upon by the grown sailors as keg holes to insert their lust.
As a cabin boy, she had the captain's ear, and she was left alone by the sailors. The only time one of them bothered her was when a swine in the galley put his hand on her buttocks when she was getting the captain's dinner. She sliced the offending hand with her dagger, and the captain had the man keelhauled after she told him that the villain had tried to enlist her in a mutiny. She watched as they keelhauled him, tying his feet to a rope and throwing him off the side of the ship, then pulling him under the keel with a rope that went under the ship to the other side. He came up bloodied with half his clothes torn off of him from scraping the barnacles and other crustaceans that make the wood bottom of the ship as rough and sharp as a bed of stones.
It came as no surprise to her that she would be able to draw a man's blood with a dagger. Catalina had become enthralled by manly sports of swords and dueling. Realizing that to a man, his steel blade was literally an extension of the garrancha between his legs, she acquired her own rapier and dagger. She spent all her spare time practicing with the sword and dagger. She had always been big-boned, and as she finished her growth, she was as tall as most men and carried nearly the muscle. What little she lacked in physical power she made up for with a violent temper that caused her to throw herself at a foe and strike the person down while they were still forming a plan of attack.
Of great importance to her was that her breasts did not expose her female origins, but she was fortunate to have no more breasts than those of a young girl. To ensure that they did not grow large enough to expose her, she applied a poultice sold to her by an Italian. It hurt a great deal, but her breasts never grew large enough to expose her.
When the ship entered the waters of the Indies, it broke off from the great flotilla that had sailed from Seville and set a course with others for Cartagena. Approaching the bay of Cartagena de Indias, they encountered a squadron of Dutch ships and drove them off. They arrived at Cartagena, where they were to stay for eight days to unload and take on cargo. From there they went north to Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus of Panama.
By the time the ship reached the Isthmus, Catalina had tired of the base life aboard a ship. She decided to abandon ship at Nombre de Dios. To ensure she would be able to present herself with some dignity, she went ashore, telling the guards that the captain was sending her ashore to fetch something for him. She had five hundred of the captain's pesos and his new silk doublet in her bag.
In Nombre de Dios she was cheated out of her money by unscrupulous card players, who took her for a fresh youth just off a ship. When it became apparent that the devil had dealt the cards, Catalina drew her sword and dagger and drew blood from two of the three scoundrels. She escaped with her life and the clothes on her back, and once more needed employment.
Her reputation as a fighter and ability to read and write held her in good stead with a merchant, who wanted her to protect his goods and act as his selling agent in another town. She set up shop doing the merchant's work, and things went along on an even keel for a while. She was actually beginning to enjoy being respectable when she was insulted at a comedia by a man named Reyes and sliced him bad enough to require ten stitches. Shortly thereafter Catalina drew Reyes's blood again and killed his friend. She was arrested for the offense. Her master attempted to extricate her from the mess, but in the end, money passed hands and he was forced to send her off to Lima to get her away from the blood feud and the constable.
Lima was a great city of the New World, capital of the opulent kingdom of Peru, which included over a hundred Spanish towns and villages. The city was the home of the viceroy, an archbishop, a university, and many splendors.
Catalina went to work for a grand merchant of the city, who was very satisfied with her servic
es. However, the merchant became concerned because there were two young ladies in the house, his wife's sisters, and she became accustomed to frolicking with them. One in particular had taken a fancy to her. One day the merchant caught her with her head up the girl's skirt and fired Catalina on the spot.
Abruptly she found herself homeless and with no friends or money. Six companies of soldados were being raised to fight in Chile and she joined on, receiving immediately an allotment of nearly three hundred pesos.
The soldiers shipped out to Concepción in Chile, a port that goes by the name "the noble and the loyal" and is large enough to have its own bishop. There, to her surprise, she met her brother, Miguel de Erauso. She had four brothers and four sisters, and she had never met Miguel. Naturally Catalina did not let him know that she was in any way related to him, much less his sister. When he found out that her name was also Erauso and the area she was from, he took her as a friend. She spent several idyllic years in Concepción. The good times came abruptly to an end when her brother caught her visiting his mistress and they fought. She ended up being banished to Paicabí, a miserable outpost where war was constant with the indios.
There was nothing to do in Paicabí except eat, drink, and fight. They even slept in their armor. Finally a force of five thousand was gathered to meet an indio army of much greater size. They engaged them on open ground near Valdivia, which the indios had sacked. They gained the upper hand and slaughtered many of the indios, but when the victory was nearly complete, indio reinforcements arrived and they were driven back. They killed many of her men, including her own lieutenant, and rode off with the company flag.
When she saw the flag being carried off, she rode after it, with two other horse soldados at her side. They chased the flag carrier through an almost solid wall of indios, trampling them under their horses' hooves and slashing them with their swords. They took wounds in return, and one of Catalina's companions took a spear in the throat. He went down but the remaining two of them hacked their way to the indio cacique who had stolen their company's standard. As she reached him, her companion was dragged from his horse by a dozen indios. She had taken a painful blow to her leg, but she surged on. She came up behind the cacique and slashed him in the back of the neck, grabbing the standard as he went down. She then turned to fight her way back.
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