Arturo Perez-Reverte: The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

An important point, pray listen to me:

With moneyed Moors she asks a lot,

With Christians she does it for free.

Diego Alatriste drew aside the curtain. He was not in love with that woman, nor with any other, but María de Castro was the most beautiful actress of her day, and he enjoyed the rare privilege of occasionally having her all to himself. No one was going to offer him a kiss like the one she was now placing on his lips, when, later, a span of steel, a bullet, disease, or time itself would set him sleeping forever in his grave.

2. THE HOUSE IN CALLE FRANCOS

The following morning, we, or, rather, Captain Alatriste, came under a hail of harquebus fire from Caridad la Lebrijana, upstairs in the Inn of the Turk, while we, downstairs, heard only their voices. Or, rather, her voice, because she was the one who spent the most powder. The matter under discussion was, naturally enough, my master’s fondness for the theater, and the name of María de Castro was uttered several times, attached on each occasion to a different epithet—“strumpet,” “trollop,” and “trull” being some of the milder ones—which was quite something coming, as it did, from La Lebrijana. After all, although she was, by then, almost forty years of age and still preserved the dark charms of her youth, she herself had worked unashamedly as a prostitute for several years before setting herself up with the money earned through her labors as the honest owner of that tavern situated between Calle de Toledo and Calle del Arcabuz. The captain had made her no promises or proposals of any kind, but on our return from Flanders and Seville, he had once again installed himself and me, as before, in the rooms above the inn; that winter, moreover, she had warmed his feet and other parts in her own bed. This was hardly surprising, for, as everyone knew, she was still madly in love with the captain, and had even waited for him chastely while he was in Flanders; for there is no more virtuous and faithful woman than one who leaves the profession in good time—be it via the nunnery or the cooking pot—before she ends up covered in buboes and left to die in Atocha Hospital. Unlike many married women who are honest because they have to be, but who dream of being otherwise, women who have walked the streets know what they are leaving behind, and how much they gain by that loss. La Lebrijana, as well as being exemplary, loving, still alluring, and voluptuous, was also, alas, a woman of spirit, and my master’s dalliance with the actress was more than she could bear.

I have no idea what my master said on that occasion, if, of course, he said anything. Knowing my master, I feel sure that he simply stood firm under fire, without breaking ranks or opening his mouth, very much in the manner of an old soldier waiting for the rain to clear up. By God, though, it took a long time; indeed, the battle at Ruyter Mill and at Terheyden put together were small beer compared to that quarrel, during which I heard turns of phrase one wouldn’t even use against the Turks. When La Lebrijana resorted to throwing things—the sound of shattering crockery reached us down below—the captain picked up sword, hat, and cape and went out to take the air. I was sitting at the table next to the door, where I sat every morning, making the most of the good light there to study don Antonio Gil’s Latin grammar, an invaluable book loaned to me by my teacher Pérez—an old friend of the captain’s and mine—in order to further my education, which had been much neglected in Flanders. At sixteen, I was determined to pursue the profession of soldier, but both Captain Alatriste and don Francisco de Quevedo were most insistent that having a little Latin and Greek, a neat hand, and a knowledge of good literature would take any reasonably intelligent man to places that the sword never would, especially in a Spain where judges, functionaries, scribes, and countless other rapacious crows were always bombarding the poor and the uneducated—which was almost everyone—with mountains of paperwork, the more easily to strip and plunder them. Anyway, as I was saying, there I was, copying out Miles, quem dux laudat, Hispanus est , while Damiana, the serving wench at the inn, was scrubbing the floor, and the usual customers at that time of day, the Licentiate Calzas, fresh from the Plaza de la Provincia, and the former sergeant of horse, Juan Vicuña, maimed in Nieuwpoort, were playing ombre with the apothecary Fadrique, the spoils being a few rashers of bacon and a large pitcher of Arganda wine. It had just struck a quarter past eleven on the clock of the Jesuit church opposite when a door slammed up above; we heard the captain’s footsteps on the stairs, and the old comrades exchanged glances and shook their heads disapprovingly before returning to their cards. Juan Vicuña declared the suit, the apothecary put down the ace of spades, and Calzas trumped it. At this point, I got to my feet, covered up my inkwell, and closed my book; then, picking up my cap, dagger, and cape, I gingerly tiptoed out so as not to dirty the newly scrubbed floor, and set off after my master through the door that gave onto the Calle del Arcabuz.

We walked past the fountain at Relatores to Plaza de Antón Martín, and, as if to prove La Lebrijana right—for I was following the captain with a heavy heart—we then walked up to the mentidero , a place where people gathered to meet and talk. This was one of the three most famous mentideros in Madrid; the other two were to be found on the steps of San Felipe and in the courtyard outside the palace. The one that concerns us, however, was in the quarter inhabited by writers and actors, in a cobbled square where the streets of León, Cantarranas, and Francos meet. Nearby was a reasonable boardinghouse, a baker’s, a cake shop, as well as a few good inns and eating houses. Each morning, the little world of the theater congregated there—writers, poets, actors, and owners, as well as the usual idlers and others who came merely to catch a glimpse of a famous face: one of the handsome young men from the stage perhaps, or an actress out for a stroll with a basket over her arm and accompanied by her maid or indulging herself at the cake shop once she had heard mass at San Sebastián and given alms at Nuestra Señora de la Novena. The actors’ mentidero was justly famous, for in the great theater of the world that was Madrid, the capital of all the Spains, the place was like a gazette full of tittle-tattle. People stood around in groups discussing a play that had already been performed or was about to written; jokes did the rounds, either spoken or scribbled on scraps of paper; people’s honor and reputations were destroyed in less time that it takes to say credo ; the more famous poets strolled up and down with their friends and admirers; and starving young men longed to be able to emulate those who occupied that glorious Parnassus and who defended it as fiercely as if it were a bulwark besieged by heretics. The truth is that never in the world was there such a concentration of talent and fame. I need mention only a few of the illustrious names who lived within two hundred paces: Lope de Vega in Calle de Francos and don Francisco de Quevedo in Calle del Niño, the same street in which don Luis de Góngora had also lived until his sworn enemy Quevedo bought the house from under him and put the swan of Córdoba out in the street. Tirso de Molina lived there, too, as did the brilliant Mexican Ruiz de Alarcón. “The little hunchback,” as Quevedo dubbed the last-named, was removed from the stage by his own cantankerousness and by other people’s loathing when his enemies wrecked his play The Antichrist by breaking a flask of some foul-smelling liquid right in the middle of the performance. Good don Miguel de Cervantes had lived and died near Lope’s house, in Calle del León, on the corner of Calle de Francos, just opposite the Castillo bakery; and between Huertas and Atocha stood the printer’s where Juan de la Cuesta had produced the first edition of Don Quixote . And then there was the church, Las Trinitarias, in which lay Cervantes’s remains, and where Lope de Vega used to say mass, and amongst whose community of nuns lived a daughter of Lope’s and a daughter of Cervantes’s. And since “Spaniard” and “ingratitude” are two concepts that always go hand in hand, I should also point out that nearby was the hospital where the great Valencian poet and captain Guillén de Castro, author of The Youth of El Cid , would die five years later, so poor that he was buried in a pauper’s grave. And speaking of poverty, I will just remind you that that most honest of men, unhappy don Miguel de Cervantes—whose modest wish to be sent to the Indies, citing the fact that he had lost an arm in the Battle of Lepanto and been a slave in Algeria, was refused—had died ten years before the events I am now relating, in the sixteenth year of the century, penniless and abandoned by almost everyone he knew. Alone and without ceremony, he was borne to his grave in Las Trinitarias along those same streets—with no public report of his exequies—and then promptly forgotten by his contemporaries. Only much later, when other countries were already eagerly devouring and reprinting translations of his novel Don Quixote , did we wretched Spaniards begin to lay claim to him, a fate which, with very few exceptions, we have always meted out to our finest sons.