Cervantes Street (2 page)

My despondent mood changed to happiness. I kissed her face and hands. “Thank you, Andreita. Thank you, sister.”

* * *

That night, when I saw the actors on the stage in their outlandish costumes, their faces painted with loud colors, speaking in a Spanish more eloquent and persuasive and loaded with more double meanings than I’d ever heard before, and becoming people other than themselves, I felt as if, for the first time, I could breathe freely. I wanted to be around these characters constantly. Perhaps if I spent time with them, I told myself, I would learn their art and someday I, too, could act in plays and say those beautiful speeches, and play princes and princesses, kings and queens, Christians and Moors, scholars and fools, thieves and knights.

The next morning back in school, my teacher and classmates seemed dull, colorless, and made of coarse materials. That spring, every day after school, I went to visit the actors. In exchange for helping to clean the horses’ dung and feeding them, and fetching water from the fountain inside the city walls, I was tolerated with good humor and allowed to see the performances for free.

I made friends with Candela, who was twice my age. She helped in the kitchen and took care of her small siblings. Candela’s eyes were as green as the new leaves in the orange trees in early spring; her hair was as black as the blackest piece of coal; and she was not bashful like all the other girls I knew. As she did her chores, she sang romances and danced barefoot. The men could have eaten her with their eyes. Candela had never set foot in a school, and her clothes were ragged and dirty. When I mentioned this to Andreita, she sent with me a package of clothes that my sisters had outgrown. I was happiest when I was around Candela, who treated me with the tenderness older sisters reserve for their little brothers.

“Look at the lovebirds,” the actors would tease us, making me blush. “But she could be his mother.” Or, “Candela, you’ve bewitched this boy. Why don’t you make love instead to a real man?” And, “Look at the smoke coming out of Miguelín’s ears. You’d better drag him to the river, Candela, and douse his head in the water before his brains stew.”

Candela laughed and kissed me on the cheek. To the men she yelled, “Go pick the fleas that breed in your posteriors!” She was the first girl I kissed, not counting my sisters.

My mother was so taxed making sure that we had enough to eat, and clean garments to wear, that she did not notice I had fallen under the magical spell of the world of the theater until one day when a neighbor asked her at the market if I was training to become an actor, since I was always visiting Maese Pedro’s troupe. That night, before I went to bed, Mother took me to the kitchen to be alone and sat me on her knees. “Please, Miguel,” she entreated me, her voice and her eyes filled with disappointment, “stay away from those disreputable actors who live such miserable lives. Please don’t become a useless dreamer, like your father. One in the family is enough. God gave you a good brain, so use it to learn a profitable trade.”

I put my arms around my mother’s waist and promised, “I will study hard, Mamacita, and enter an honorable profession. Don’t worry anymore.” I refrained from promising I would stop visiting my friends.

When the troupe got ready to leave Córdoba in early June, I considered running away with them. I mentioned what I was thinking to Candela.

“My father won’t allow it,” she said. “Already the authorities suspect us of stealing children. Our lives are hard, Miguelín. People come to see our plays, and love to be entertained, but to them we are all dishonest pagans, and as bad as the Gypsies.” She took my face in her hands. The tips of our noses almost touched; I could breathe in her lemony breath. My eyes reflected in the liquid green mirrors of hers. “Just wait a few years. When you grow up, then you can join us, if you like.”

I shook my face free. “It’ll be years before I grow up.”

“Go, go, feed the horses,” she ordered me and walked away, calling her siblings, “Martita, Julio. Come here this instant.”

The rest of that year, and for a few years afterward, from June to April, I dreamed about the return of the actors. Each June, as the troupe began to pack, Maese Pedro would say to me, “Next year, Miguel, if your parents give you permission, you can come with us.”

By the time I turned twelve, Candela had married an actor in the troupe, she had her own children, and, though friendly, she treated me as if our old intimacy had never been.

* * *

Later that day, when our caravan had left La Mancha behind us, what I had been dreading happened: the bailiff and his men caught up with us and stopped us for a search. As the troopers approached the wagon in which I was riding, I started to tremble. I began to choke with fear, as if I had swallowed a pork bone. We were commanded to come down off our wagon.
It might be better if I take off my wig and give myself up to the authorities before they discover my deception,
I told myself. Just as I was about to turn myself in, and ask for their clemency, Maese Pedro pulled me by the elbow, slapped me so hard I tasted blood, and shouted, “Where are you going, you shameless wench? Stop making eyes at the troopers! Why did God curse me with a whore for a daughter?”

The troopers laughed, and ogled me. A dribble of urine snaked down my legs.

Doña Matilde started yelling, “Pedro, may God forgive you! You’re much too cruel to the poor girl. If she’s bad, it’s because you’re bad. Come here, hija mia.” She enveloped me in her arms and shoved my nose between her gelatinous and sweaty breasts. “With a father so cruel it’s a wonder she hasn’t run away from us,” she said to the troopers. Doña Matilde patted my wig. “There, there, Nicolasita.”

The snickering troopers moved on to search the wagon behind ours. It wasn’t until we were given the sign to continue on our way that I dared hope I might reach Sevilla undetected after all.

* * *

The following day, and the next day after that one, my spirits sank and soared, plunged to Hades and spiraled to the heavens. But as we traveled away from autumn, as we entered the lush and dense gardens and forests of Andalusia, so bursting with green that I imagined the jungles of the New World must be like this, I felt hopeful and revived.

My heart beat faster the more ground our caravan covered on that verdant world, that land of towns and cities planted with palm trees and flaming pomegranate bushes and orange trees, always in fruit; that land whose forests and meadows were filled with the music made by the endless variety of songbirds of that region of mirth and sunlight. As a boy, I had loved the first days of March on Andalusian soil when the hot breezes gusting from the Sahara, cooling as they sweep the surface of the Mediterranean, arrive on Spanish soil, breathing life into dormant trees and brown grasses, awakening the seeds and bulbs in the ground, spurring the growth of buds in the fruit orchards, painting the hills and hillocks a light olive with the first leafing of the trees. By early April, the song of the returning nightingales, serenading the oncoming evening, promised a trove of sensual pleasures that the hours of darkness would uncover. As the sun set, its silken light draped first the tops of the mountains, then the valleys, and released, as it fell, the scent of honeysuckle, intoxicating you by the luxurious promises hidden in the approaching darkness. The whole of Andalusia was a beckoning land that mesmerized you, like the seductive thrusts of the hips, the eyes, hands, and feet of the dancers in the teahouses of Córdoba, with bells rasping around their ankles and wrists as they shed veil after veil and wrapped the heads of gawking men with supple, translucent fabrics.

My heart filled with delight when, in the distance, I spotted the vast wheat fields to the east of Córdoba. If the wheat was in full ripeness, one could believe they were fields of gold. Delight turned to pure happiness when the hills of the Sierra Morena to the west of the city spread before my eyes with the soft shapes of a curvaceous odalisque lying naked on a carpet in a seraglio.

But my heart grew sad when I remembered the year before Andalusia’s Moorish people had started the rebellion of the Alpujarras to protest the treatment they received in Spain. Now they were fighting ferociously in the mountains near Cádiz and Málaga. If my childhood friend Abu were still alive, surely he would be fighting with the rebels. And his sister Leyla, on whom I had a boyhood crush, must be a married woman and a mother.

This time, however, Maese Pedro’s troupe was bypassing Córdoba as my best chance to escape the law was to get to Sevilla as soon as possible and hide myself among the throngs of the city. So it was with a heavy heart that I left behind the city of ancient palaces and great mosques, the court of the Umayyads; the city where I saw large numbers of Moors for the first time.

* * *

Two days later, we camped on the outskirts of Sevilla. Four years had passed since my family and I had left the city in disgrace. Now I was returning to Sevilla as a fugitive.

Sadness and joy, dread and hope, all commingled in my chest as we set up our camp that first night. Could the bailiff have gotten to Sevilla ahead of me? I wallowed in despair contemplating the wreckage of my future. Without my right hand, there was no point in going to the Indies; without my right hand, I had no chance of climbing the highest mountains of the Andes to find the treasure of El Dorado that would make me the richest man in Christendom. Without my right hand, I might as well be flogged to death or burned at the stake. How I wished there was some kind of magic that could transform me into a new person, the way actors metamorphosed themselves into characters. Then I would have chosen to become, once again, a young man with an unblemished past, and I would have stayed in Sevilla.

My turbulent state of mind was relieved somewhat when I reminded myself that this was no dream, that I was once more in Sevilla, city of wonders. While I felt in danger of being discovered, I was happy to have returned to the city where my literary vocation was born. Although I had seen Maese Pedro’s troupe perform in Córdoba, the actors on the stage in Sevilla were marvelous, and the pasos and plays they produced were things of beauty, written by our great writers. I fell under the spell of the artistry of these fabulous performers—I did not care that actors were held as low in esteem as the Gypsies, that to most people the theater was to be enjoyed but also to be mistrusted, because it was believed to incite depraved behavior. My favorite playwright was Lope de Rueda, whose fictional creations—gossipy barbers, wanton priests, miserly hidalgos, dissolute students, rogues, lewd whores—were more vivid and interesting than their counterparts in real life. There was nothing higher to aspire to, I told myself, than to create people like these. I could only imagine how powerful Lope de Rueda must have felt creating characters out of his observations of humanity. I wanted the fame and financial rewards of the successful writers of comedies, who were greeted at street corners by Sevillanos with cries of “Victor! Victor!”

Years later, I poked fun at Sevilla and its citizens through the snouts of two talking canines, Cipión and Berganza, in my
Exemplary Novel
,
The Colloquium of the Dogs
. “Sevilla,” says Berganza, “shelters the destitute and gives refuge to the worthless. In its magnificence, it has ample room for all sorts of scoundrels, but no use for virtuous men.”

That first night camping outside the city gates, the uncertainty of my situation kept me awake, staring at the starry sky and remembering how when I was young in Sevilla, the scent of orange trees in permanent bloom attenuated the sweet reek of bodies buried under rose beds, or at the foot of trees. Sevillanos believed that the loveliest and most fragrant roses and sweetest oranges were those fertilized by the flesh of Nubian slaves. This tang of human decay and fruit trees in bloom was the first thing a visitor noticed upon nearing the city.

The Guadalquivir was barely more than a sandy stream as it ran past Córdoba; but as it got close to Sevilla, it swelled into a wide olive-colored river. At dawn, the river bustled with barges, swift sloops, feluccas, shallops, tartans, and piraguas. The smaller vessels carried merchandise destined for the bellies of big ships that sailed to the West Indies and beyond.

The river fed my wanderlust, making me hunger for the world beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula. The river was the road that led to the Mediterranean and the West, to the Atlantic Ocean and the Canary Islands, halfway to the wondrous New World. Young Sevillanos who became sailors—often for the rest of their lives—were referred to as those who had been “swallowed by the sea.”

There was no more thrilling sight than the fleets of cargo ships, accompanied by powerful galleons to protect them from English corsairs and privateers, sailing off twice a year for the world Columbus had discovered. The ships sailed away with the hopes of the Sevillanos, who would send off their men with festive songs of farewell. When fortune smiled on these adventurers, they returned from the Indies laden with gold and glory.

As a boy, my imagination was set afire, my eyes bulged, as I watched the ox-drawn carts on their way to the royal chambers, carrying open trunks that brimmed with glowing emeralds, shining pearls, and stacks of blinding bars of silver and gold. Other carts transported bales of tobacco, furs of animals unknown in Europe, spices, coconuts, cocoa, sugar, indigo, and cochineal. For weeks after the arrival of the ships, I remained intoxicated by these sights. A great desire awakened in me to visit New Spain and Peru.

In the heart of the city, buildings faced each other so closely that I could run down the cobblestone passageways with arms outspread to touch the walls on either side. These were the streets that schooled me in the customs and costumes, religions and superstitions, foods, smells, and sounds of other nations. Merchants arrived in Sevilla with white, black, and brown slaves from Africa. The names of the countries they came from—Mozambique, Dominica, Niger—were as exotic as their looks. I would get dizzy from hearing so many languages that I didn’t understand, whose origins I couldn’t pinpoint. What stories did they tell? What was I missing? Would I ever get the chance to learn a few of them and visit the places where they were spoken?