Arturo Perez-Reverte - The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

Then all talk stopped, for at that point the guitars ceased playing. The musketeers at the back of the yard hissed furiously and cursed impatiently, demanding silence in their usual ill-mannered way. There was a furious fluttering of fans in the ladies’ sections up above and below; women ceased signaling to men and vice versa; the sellers of limes and mead withdrew with their baskets and demijohns; and, behind the shutters on the balconies, the people of quality returned to their places. On one such balcony, I spotted the Count of Guadalmedina—who paid the vast sum of two thousand reales a year to ensure a good seat at all the new plays—along with a few gentlemen friends and some ladies. At another window sat don Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, accompanied by his family. Our king was not, alas, there, even though this fourth Philip of ours was very fond of the theater and often attended, either openly or incognito. On this occasion, however, he was still tired from his recent exhausting journey to Aragon and Catalonia, during which don Francisco de Quevedo—whose star was still in the ascendant at court—had formed part of the entourage, as he had in Andalusia. The poet could doubtless have had a seat as a guest on one of those upper balconies, but he was a man who liked to mingle with the populace, preferring the lively atmosphere in the lower sections of the Corral, and, besides, there he could enjoy the company of his good friend Diego Alatriste. For while Alatriste may have been a soldier, swordsman, and a man of few words, he was also reasonably well educated, having read good books and seen a great deal of theater; and although he never gave himself airs and mostly kept his opinions to himself, he nevertheless had a sharp eye for a good play and was never taken in by the easy effects with which some playwrights larded their work in order to win the favor of the ordinary people. This was not the case with such great writers as Lope, Tirso, or Calderón; and even when they did resort to the tricks of the trade, their inventive skill marked the difference between their noble stratagems and the ignoble impostures of lesser writers. Lope himself described this better than anyone:

Whenever the time comes to write a play

I put Aristotle under lock and key

And stow Terence and Plautus out of the way

So that I’m deaf to their shouts and pleas,

For even mute books have something to say.

This should not be taken as an apology by that Phoenix of Inventiveness for employing stratagems lacking in taste, but, rather, as an explanation of why he refused to conform to the tastes of those learned neo-Aristotelian scholars, who, as one man, censured his wildly successful plays, yet would have given their right arm to put their name to them or, better still, to take the money. The play that afternoon was not, of course, by Lope but by Tirso, although the result was similar, for the work, a so-called cloak-and-sword drama, contained much wonderful poetry and turned, inevitably, on love and intrigue, but touched also on more somber themes: for example, Madrid as a place of deception and delusion, a place of falsehood where the valiant soldier comes to be rewarded for his valor and finds only disillusion; it also criticized the Spaniards’ scorn for work and their hunger for a life of luxury beyond that appropriate to their station. For this, too, was a very Spanish tendency, one that had already dragged us into the abyss several times before and one that would persist for years to come, exacerbating the moral infirmity that destroyed the Spanish empire, that empire of two worlds—the legacy of hard, arrogant, brave men who had emerged out of eight centuries spent cutting Moorish throats, with nothing to lose and everything to gain. In the year one thousand six hundred and twenty-six—when the events I am relating took place—the sun had not yet set upon Spain, although it very soon would. Seventeen years later, as a lieutenant at Rocroi, I would hold on high our tattered flag, despite the battering from the French cannon, and would myself bear witness to the sad fading of our former glory as I stood in the midst of the last squadron formed by our poor, faithful infantry. When an enemy officer asked me how many men there had been in the old, now decimated regiment, I said simply: “Count the dead.” And it was there that I closed Captain Alatriste’s eyes for the last time.

But I will speak of these things when the moment arrives. Let us return to the Corral de la Cruz and that afternoon’s performance of a new play. The resumption of the play aroused the same state of expectancy that I described earlier. From our bench, the captain, don Francisco, and I were now gazing across at the stage, where the second act was just beginning. Petronila and Tomasa came on again, leaving to the spectators’ imagination the beauty of the garden, which was only hinted at by an ivy-clad shutter placed at one of the stage entrances. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the captain lean forward and rest his arms on the balustrade. His aquiline profile was lit by a bright ray of sunlight that found its way through a tear in the awning erected to shade the audience from the glare, for the Corral faced west and was on a hill. Both female players looked very striking in their male costumes; this was a fashion which neither pressure from the Inquisition nor royal edict had managed to expunge from the theater, for the simple reason that people liked it too much. Similarly, when some of Castile’s more Pharisaic councilors—egged on by certain fanatical clerics—tried to ban plays in Spain altogether, this was again thwarted by the ordinary people, who refused to have this pleasure taken away from them, arguing moreover, and quite rightly, too, that part of the price of every ticket went to support good works and hospitals.

However, to go back to the play, the two women disguised as men stepped out onto the stage and were warmly applauded by the audience—packing yard, tiered seats, galleries, and balconies—and when María de Castro, in her role as Petronila, spoke these lines:

Count me, Bargas, as good as dead,

My mind is gone, I am not myself . . . the musketeers, who, as I mentioned before, were very hard to please indeed, showed clear signs of approval, standing on tiptoe in order to get a better view; and, in the upper gallery, the women stopped munching on hazelnuts, limes, and cherries. María de Castro was the most beautiful and most famous actress of her day; she embodied, as no other actress, the strange, magnificent human reality that was our theater, a theater that always hovered between, on the one hand, holding up a mirror to everyday life—at times a satirical, distorting mirror—and, on the other, presenting us with the most beautiful and thrilling of fantasies. La Castro was a spirited woman, with a lovely figure and an even lovelier face: dark, almond eyes, white teeth, pale skin, and a beautiful, well-proportioned mouth. Other women envied her beauty, her clothes, and her way of speaking the verse. Men admired her as an actress and lusted after her as a woman, and this latter fact met with no opposition from her husband, Rafael de Cózar, who was equally celebrated as an actor and as one of the glories of the Spanish stage. I will have more to tell of him later, but for now I will just say this: Cózar specialized in playing fathers, witty knaves, saucy servants, and rustic mayors, roles which—to the delight of adoring audiences—he performed with great style and swagger. Theatrical talents aside, however, Cózar had no qualms about allowing discreet access to the charms of the four or five women in his company, on receipt, naturally, of an agreed fee. The women were, of course, all married, or at least passed as such in order to meet the requirements of edicts that had been in effect since the days of the great Philip II. As Cózar said, with pleasing effrontery, it would be both selfish and lacking in charity—that theological virtue—not to share great art with those who can afford to pay for it. His own wife, María de Castro (years later it was learned that their marriage was, in fact, a sham), proved to be a mine more profitable even than those of Peru, although he always held in reserve—as the most exquisite of delicacies—that Aragonese beauty with chestnut hair and the sweetest of voices. In short, the clear-headed Cózar fitted, as few men else, this dictum by Lope: