Aztec Blood

by Gary Jennings

  "Ah, but Mateo is older and wiser than me and has had much more practice playing the gentleman."

  "Mateo does not have to play the gentleman; he was born one."

  "Mateo? The picaro? A gentleman?"

  She put her Chinese fan to her face. Her eyes told me that she had said something that she had not intended. Doña Ana was not a woman you could coerce information from, so I let it pass though I suddenly realized I knew nothing about Mateo's background and family—not even where he was born.

  But I now understood that she and Mateo went back a long ways.

  "As a young girl, you ran off with the autor of an acting troupe. Do I call this man my friend?"

  She smiled her answer.

  "Doña, while you are giving me lessons in gentlemanship, what I can do for you?"

  Her fan fluttered in front of her face again.

  "The count's mouth boasts of his abilities as a lover better than his virile parts deliver."

  She left her chair and sat on the small couch beside me. Her hand went between my legs. I wore fashionable tight silk hose rather than woolen pants. My virile part swelled as she caressed it.

  "He will have you killed if he finds out you are my lover. Danger makes lovemaking so much more exciting, don't you think?"

  Mateo had warned me of her charm—and the count's jealousy. But I admit that I am weak in rebuffing the wiles of a woman.

  ONE HUNDRED AND TEN

  So it came to be that a colonial oaf was made into a gentleman of Seville.

  The main resentment I had about Ana's tutelage was playing the necessary role of the lover of men to appease her count. For that particular costume, after some argument we settled upon a dandified yellow silk shirt and a doublet of what Ana termed "provocative pink."

  "The count's younger brother is a back-door man," Ana told me. "This is how he dresses. If you dress this way, it will convince the count."

  ¡Ayya ouiya! What strange paths life takes.

  In return for my commitment to play the dandy, I was invited into Ana's front door many times—and to join the profane life of Seville's theater community. At a party following one play's opening, I understood why the Church denied actors burial in consecrated ground. Furthermore, such parties underscored the differences between Spain and New Spain. Aftertheater festivities, such as the one I was attending, would have been unimaginable in the City of Mexico. At that particular party in Seville, people dressed like characters from Don Quixote and Amadis de Gaul, and behaved like Roman satyrs at an orgy.

  I wanted to participate in the life of the theater, and Ana was happy to let me escort her in the milieu. Even though she no longer trod the boards, she socialized with actors and had strong opinions about their performances. She was often as caustic as the mosqueteros.

  The first play she took me to was an eye-opener. Mateo had taught me that the best position for a corral de comedias was in a vacant area enclosed by two or three houses, which approximated the corral's layout. In Seville, theaters had the same posture, but were much more elaborate. Positioned between two long houses, the elevated stage was covered by a canvas awning attached to the roofs of the two buildings. In front of the stage was a benched seating area called the banco. Behind the banco was the patio, more commonly called the pit. In this area the common men, such as the butchers and bakers, stood. In the pit, of course, were the dreaded mosqueteros, whose whistles, hoots, thrown garbage, and drawn swords could bring any play to an abrupt end.

  Below the vulgar pit were raised seats called the grada. Covered by a wood roof supported by pillars, people of higher quality sat in the terraced seating. Above the amphitheater-type seating of the gradas were aposentos, box seating, where the very rich sat.

  "The aposentos were originally windowed rooms in the adjoining house, but the theater owner built these to ensure he collected admissions," Ana told me. To the side of the terraced seating was the infamous cazuela. "The stewing pan," Ana said. "This is where the lower-class women watch the play. Mateo says you have attended some plays and have experienced the vulgar antics of the mosqueteros. But you have not experienced true vulgarity until you hear the women of the stewing pan express their disappointment in a play or an actor."

  We went to the play in Ana's carriage. We took along her friend, Felicia, a woman a few years younger than Ana and almost as sensual. To my surprise, the two women went to the play wearing masks—and dressed as men. Not as caballeros, but commoners.

  "Unless it's a religious play, decent women wear masks to performances," Ana said.

  "To keep people from recognizing them?"

  "No, they want to be recognized by their friends. It's for modesty sake. A lady of quality cannot be seen at a play. Except by other ladies of quality."

  "Oh." I did not understand, but it was just another mystery about women of which I was ignorant. "And the men's clothing. Do the women of Seville always dress as men when they attend plays?"

  "Of course not. The purpose of the disguise is to permit us to publicly comment on the play," Felicity said.

  Again, I did not understand how men's disguises gave Ana and Felicity the right to critique a play, but when they stepped from the carriage, carrying bags of tomatoes, I began to suspect there was more to these guises than met the eye. Particularly, when they told me to buy tickets for the patio.

  "We are to stand in the pit?" I asked. "With the mosqueteros."

  Ay, the gleam in their eyes told me that I was in the hands of Mateo-style maniacs. Except I was soon to discover that his dementia had nothing on these two women-in-men's clothing.

  The play was regarded as second only to the tale of Don Quixote as a great masterpiece of Spanish literature. But it was also controversial.

  "The Holy Office vacillates about La Celestina, and it is on and off the Inquisition's banned list," Ana said. "And when they do ban it, their edicts are ignored, troubling them to no end. The familiars would not dare take the autor or his cast into custody. The people would not permit it. Don Quixote incited us to laughter by mocking the hidalgos and the insane chivalry that dominated their writing, but La Celestina touched our souls. The people of Spain are made of blood and fire. They are greedy and generous, foolish and brilliant. They have God in their hearts and the devil in their thoughts. The devious slut, Celestina, and the two lovers represent the best and the worst of us."

  Referred to generally as La Celestina, the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea was not a new play. It was first presented eons ago, in 1499, seven years after the discovery of the New World and over twenty years before the fall of the Aztec Empire. The tragedy of the two lovers was set forth in an astounding twenty-one acts.

  Celestina was a bawd who served as a go-between for two young lovers, Calisto and Melibea. Calisto was from the minor nobility; Melibea was of higher status and wealth, making them unsuitable marriage partners. But they came together as lovers and defied convention, not just by speaking words of love, but by physically consummating their passions.

  The true star of the comedia was Celestina, who was both evil and cunning. Her coarse humor and ironic commentary fascinated audiences everywhere. But her cunning and greed ultimately betrayed her. Paid for her role as go-between, she refused to share her gold with her conspirators. After killing her, they were themselves murdered by an angry mob.

  But nothing would free the lovers of their own fate. Their uncontrolled passions were the instrument of their doom. Calisto was killed in a fall from a ladder to Melibea's window. Melibea—her lover dead, her honor ruined by her virginity's loss—throws herself from a tower window.

  "Their attempt to defy destiny was doomed," Ana explained in the carriage ride to the theater. "Fate and custom foreordained their end—foreordains all our ends, demonstrating the futility of opposing the gods."

  "Who was the author?" I asked.

  "A converso Jew, a lawyer. He first published anonymously because of fear of the Inquisition."

  As I watched it, I could well under
stand the author's fear. The language of the play was often coarse. Celestina made bawdy comments about a young man's "scorpion tail" pene, whose sting produces nine months of swelling. A character accuses Celestina and a girl who lives with her of having "calluses" on their stomach from all of the men who visit. There are suggestions of female bestiality, though not in regard to the lovely and innocent Melibea.

  Those pompous inquisitors from New Spain would throw fits were they to watch twenty-one acts of La Celestina, in which lust, vice, superstition, and evil were main characters. As a sort of heavenly justice, I imagined myself tying them up, pinning their eyes open, and forcing them to watch the play repeatedly.

  The tomatoes? You wonder what they did with the tomatoes? When we entered the pit it was filled with men who chattered endlessly. All of them appeared not only to have seen the play performed before, but some appeared to have come to this particular presentation on more than one occasion. These street merchants and common laborers discussed the actors, the way they delivered their lines, their mistakes and triumphs, as if they themselves were the play's autor. The play was conducted in the middle of the afternoon in order to utilize sunlight. Why were these louts going to a play in the middle of the day instead of working?

  But I, too, soon got used to expecting good performances.

  "It's what we paid our money for," Ana said. "When I first acted, my pay was the coins tossed on the stage during my performance. I went hungry until I learned how to play a character. ¡Bolo!" she screamed at the actress playing Areusa and threw a tomato when she did not deliver a line to her liking.

  Ana and Felicity were not the only ones who knew the exact lines from the play. Some of the favorite lines, usually those which were deshonesto, were spoken by the mosqueteros at the same time the actor uttered them.

  I was quickly enthralled. Soon I was throwing tomatoes myself....

  After the performance we rode back to Ana's large home. On the way I noticed Felicity looking at me more and more with a small smile and seductively bold eyes.

  When we arrived back at her house, Ana instructed us, "Come, we will use my pool to refresh ourselves."

  Her "pool" was an ancient Roman bath. The city had many Roman ruins, and Ana's was not the only house built upon a bath or other edifice.

  I had taken many baths in the warm pool with Ana. I was startled when she suggested that the three of us enjoy a bath together.

  "Felicity's lover has been in Madrid for a month," Ana said.

  He was none other than the younger brother of the count who was Ana's own benefactor and lover, the brother who Ana said preferred men.

  "But he has to keep up an appearance of propriety," she said. "Hence Felicity, who is a fine actor."

  I did not understand what Ana meant by Felicity being a fine actor.

  Ana was already in the water when I slipped into the pool, putting my towel aside as the warm water engulfed me. Felicity sat on the edge with her towel wrapped around her as Ana and I came together.

  Ana leaned out of my arms and pulled aside Felicity's towel. Before she slipped into the water, I saw and understood what Ana meant when she called Felicity a good actor.

  Eh, if Catalina the Bandito could fool kings and popes, why couldn't Felicity—or whatever his name was—dupe the dons of Seville?

  ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN

  Ana's enthusiasm for plays, parties, and lovemaking was inexhaustible, and she kept me busy with all three. My sole regret was that I saw so little of Mateo. At first his name was on everyone's tongue. Stories of a caballero who had returned from the New World with his pockets full of gold made him an instant legend. The stories they told about him! I heard that Mateo had found the lost Island of California, where an Amazon queen sits upon a throne of gold with her feet on the skulls of men who had the misfortune to shipwreck on her shores. But the most notorious tale was that he had found the Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola while exploring the deserts north of the Rio Bravo.

  Ana expressed curiosity about the fabled cities, and I told her the story.

  After the conquistadors had looted the Aztecs and the Incas, they looked further for more golden conquests. In 1528, a party of Spaniards landed on the peninsula that earlier Juan Ponce de León had named Florida, which meant "flowery," when he searched for the Fountain of Youth. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was one of them. This man with a strange name—Cabeza de Vaca, "Head of Cow"—and an africano slave named Estéban, were among sixty men shipwrecked on the coast of Florida. Núñez, Estéban, and two others traveled eight years across the continent, over a thousand leagues, to an area far north of the settled areas of New Spain. There, in a desert land beyond the Rio Bravo, near where the present settlement called Santa Fe is located, they claimed to have seen in the distance seven golden cities. Expeditions to find the cities, including one led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, failed to find anything but poor indio pueblos.

  Eh, but Mateo found the seven cities, had he not?

  I would have expected Mateo to become deeply involved in the Seville theater scene, but although I did encounter him occasionally in the world of plays, he had become engrossed in another one of his other favorite enterprises.

  "Mateo is involved with a duchess," Ana said, "a cousin to the king."

  "Is she married?"

  "Of course. Her husband is the duke, who is in the Low Countries inspecting the army. The duchess is very lonely and demanding of Mateo's time, and energy. Mateo believes that for the first time in his life he is truly in love."

  "Is there anyone in Spain who is married and does not have a lover?"

  Ana thought for a moment. "Only the poor."

  On several occasions, Ana had made cryptic references to Mateo's dark past. During a discussion about a Miguel Cervantes play, Ana cast a little light on Mateo. Ultimately, I was able to draw secrets from her that stunned me and changed my whole perspective about Mateo.

  I knew, of course, a small part of his past, that he was bitter toward Cervantes. However, his hatred for Cervantes related to something deeper. Ana explained Mateo's anger while we rode in her carriage to the play.

  "When Mateo knew Cervantes, he of course was very young and Cervantes quite old. You are familiar with the background of the author of Don Quixote?"

  Ana, who seemed to know everything about the literature of Spain since Roman times, enlightened me. Cervantes had been born into reasonably humble circumstances. The fourth of seven children, his father was a barber-surgeon who set bones, performed bloodlettings, and attended lesser medical needs. The young Cervantes did not attend university but acquired an education through priests.

  After hearing of Cervantes's military service, I was surprised that Mateo would not have more respect for the man. Both had served in Italy and had fought the Turks. Cervantes had been a soldier in a Spanish infantry regiment stationed in Naples, a possession of the Spanish crown, and served in the fleet under Don Juan of Austria, when it routed the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto near Corinth. Though stricken with fever, Cervantes refused to stay below. On deck, he received two gunshot wounds in the chest and a third rendered his left hand useless for the rest of his life. He later fought at Tunis and La Goleta. Sent back to Spain, recommended for a captaincy, Barbary corsairs captured the ship carrying Cervantes and his brother, Rodrigo. They were sold into slavery in Algiers, the Muslim center for Christian slave trafficking. Unfortunately for Cervantes, Letters of Recommendation magnified his importance in the eyes of his captors. But while the letters raised his ransom price, they also protected him from punishment by death, mutilation, or torture when his four daring bids to escape were frustrated.

  Five years of captivity under the Bey of Algiers, four heroic escape attempts, his resounding success in battle, all brought him nothing. He arrived home to find that Prince Don Juan de Austria was both dead and out of favor with the king. The prince's recommendations for promotion were worth nothing.

  Cervantes found humdrum employment. An a
ffair with a married woman produced a daughter out of wedlock, whom he raised himself. He married a farmer's daughter nearly two decades younger than him. The girl had a small piece of property in La Mancha. While visiting La Mancha, he conceived his first published work of fiction, La Galatea, in the fashionable genre of pastoral romance. It would be another twenty years, at the age of fifty-eight years, before his masterpiece, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, was published. In those twenty years he wrote poetry, plays, and worked as a tax collector—and was once imprisoned for discrepancies in his tax-collection account ledgers.

  "One of the plays he wrote was La Numantia," Ana said, and took me to see a performance. "Numantia was a Spanish town that withstood a terrible seize by the Romans. For ten long, bloody years, three thousand Spaniards defended the town with desperate courage against a Roman force of over one hundred thousand. Cervantes chose to set his play in the final days of the siege, at a time when the dead and starving lay in heaps in the city. Infants sucked blood from their mothers' breasts rather than milk. Two Numantian youths fight their way into the Roman camp to steal bread. One is killed, but the other, fatally wounded, comes back with blood-stained bread before dying.

  "Think of the image," she said, "blood-stained bread and babies drinking the blood of their mothers."

  For this play Ana dressed as a woman of quality, wearing a mask of course, and we sat in a box. The mosqueteros were even quiet during the play. "It is a story of great patriotism, of the courage of the Spanish people," she said. "One does not throw refuse at our people. When I first saw this play, I was just a girl. A drunk yelled an insult at the way one of the boys who had given their lives for bread had acted his death scene. The men in the pit almost tore him to pieces."

  Watching the play, I barely breathed during that scene for fear of antagonizing those around me.

  No single hero dominated the four-act tragedy. The people, the city, and Spain herself were the heroes. Characters included Spanish ladies, Roman soldiers, even the Rio Douro.