Cervantes Street (20 page)

Though I feared I’d be hanged or lose my ears and nose, the honorable thing was to assume responsibility. “Your Excellency,” I said, “it was I alone who persuaded these men to follow me. Therefore, I alone am responsible.”

Arnaut Mamí and El Dorador consulted with each other in whispers. Mamí pointed with his middle finger at Don Diego de Mendiola and Fernandito de Caña. Two guards pushed the prisoners to the corner of the room where I saw a torture device had been set up. Our men had their feet clamped in a wood gadget, and were then elevated by their ankles with a rope.

Don Fernando de Caña dropped to his knees. “Please, sir, take me instead of my son. I beg you, Your Excellency. If the boy is harmed, it will kill his mother.”

“Quiet,” Mamí said softly. He gave all of us a chilling smile and summoned one of his men. The man tied a scarf around Don Fernando’s mouth.

A Turk began to beat the soles of Don Diego’s and Don Fernandito’s feet with a cudgel. “If any of you opens his mouth, I’ll have your tongue cut off,” Mamí warned. The torturer flayed our men until the skin on their feet peeled off and their bones showed. Fortunately, they had lost consciousness. Or were they dead?

With a flick of his hand, Mamí put an end to the cudgeling. The blood of Don Diego and Don Fernandito was ebbing through their feet. “When they open their eyes again, burn them at the stake,” he said.

Don Fernando fell to the floor. He lay on his side, struggling to free his limbs. Copious tears washed his red face.

It was unbearable to see Don Fernando watch the torture of his young son. I felt guilty: it would have been more dignified to die fighting the Janissaries than to end our lives in this manner. I began to throw up so violently I almost choked on my own vomit.

The captive spectators started to protest and pray in different languages. Mamí addressed them, his face distorted by rage: “Pay good attention, you miserable rabble. This is what will happen to you if you are foolish enough to try to escape. Take them back to the bagnio.”

The captives were herded away, and food was brought in for Mamí and El Dorador. They talked, ate, and drank, oblivious to our presence. Don Fernando still lay on the floor, though he looked so still, his eyes closed, that I thought he was dying. The Hinojosa twins and I remained standing. The brothers seemed to have lost the ability to speak. They trembled, sweating profusely, and terror showed in their eyes.

After Mamí finished eating and washing his hands, he said, pointing at Don Fernando and the Hinojosas: “Take them away and throw them in a dungeon. They will be khazouked in public, as an example. But leave the cripple here.”

One of the brothers fainted. My knees were so weak I thought I’d follow him. In one of Algiers’s plazas I had once witnessed this torture: a prisoner was tied to a chair, which was then raised off the ground by a chain. A pointed lance was placed under the man’s anus, and then pushed in, while the man was still alive. Great pressure was put on the blade until it cracked the prisoner’s skull, and the point of the blade, gleaming red, came out of the man’s head.

When I was the only remaining captive among El Dorador, Mamí, and his servants, Algiers’s infamous torturer said to me, “Cervantes, no man has ever tried to steal my property, and those men were mine.” He instructed one of his executioners, “See to it that he gets two thousand lashes.” That was practically a death sentence. “When you’re done with the beating, circumcise and castrate him.” Mamí got up from his divan, walked over to me, and placed the spiky point of his rapier against my Adam’s apple. Then, in a change of heart, he instructed his men: “I don’t want him killed. Anyone who’s willing to risk his own life for the sake of others deserves my respect. I just want this Spaniard’s spirit broken.”

An imposing Moor pressed the jagged point of his dagger to my spine and took me away. We arrived at a remote part of the palace, an enclosure that consisted of a square of soil surrounded by tall walls. A wooden plank raised by chains indicated the entrance to a cell dug in the ground. “Get inside,” the man said. As he lowered the plank, the cell was so shallow I had to crouch on the bare soil with my knees pressed to my chest. The humid hole reeked of urine, shit, and dried blood. A crack on the plank was wide enough to allow a sliver of sunlight to enter. The only comfortable position for me in that dungeon was lying flat on my back.

The following day, my jailer uncovered the plank and handed me a cup of water and a piece of bread. I was terrified that the feeding was just a prelude to a lashing. I chewed and drank, staring at the ground.

“Don’t you remember me, Miguel?” The man spoke with a Cordovese accent. I was surprised he had addressed me by my first name. The Moor smiled; he looked vaguely familiar. “It’s me, Abu. We were childhood friends in Córdoba.”

I spat out the hard piece of bread I had been chewing. The last time we had seen each other we were children. “Abu,” I said, as if to make sure I was not dreaming, “I wondered what had happened to you.” I was too astonished to move from my spot.

Abu extended his hand and pulled me out of the hole. Then he embraced me.

When we moved away from each other, I said, “I thought you died in the insurrection in the Alpujarras.”

“No, we left Spain when all the Moriscos were expelled. We went to Morocco first. My father died of a broken heart. Spain was his country, the place he loved, where his family had lived for hundreds of years.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your father. Is your mother here with you?”

“Soon after my father died, my mother followed him. She had left her heart in Córdoba. After she died, I came here and found employment working for Arnaut Mamí.”

I shook my head. My misfortune was nothing compared to what had happened to my friend’s family. “And Leyla?” I asked.

“She married a merchant; they live in a village in Tunisia, on the coast.” After a pause Abu added, “You’d better get back in the cell. We should not be seen talking to each other. Spain is no longer my homeland. We are supposed to be enemies now. But I will always be your friend, Miguel. Every day I will lash you a few times, and then will lash the ground. You must cry as if I am lashing you, just in case there’s anyone nearby listening.” He pulled out of his pants pockets a frayed copy of
Lazarillo de Tormes
and handed it to me. “I brought it from Spain. It’s the only book I have in Spanish. I know you enjoyed stories. You can borrow it to keep you company while you’re a prisoner here.”

* * *

During the brief hours when a thin shaft of afternoon sunlight pierced the darkness of my dungeon, I read and reread Lazarillo’s adventures until I memorized the little book. It was
Lazarillo
—more than the much-appreciated handfuls of food that Abu provided with some regularity—that sustained me and sweetened the hours in that fetid hole and made time move faster. Lazarillo’s picaresque adventures took me back to the Spanish soil from which I had been uprooted so long ago, and his tribulations and unbreakable peasant spirit alleviated momentarily the wretched conditions of my existence.

Confined to that damp, shallow grave, I learned to experience the passage of time in a new way. There was light—never more than a thread of it—and then there was monotonous gloom. Sometimes the darkness, and the eerie silence that accompanied it, seemed to last so long that only my bodily functions, and the chilling screams of the tortured in the dungeons of Arnaut Mamí, reminded me that I was still alive. I learned that I could illuminate the innumerable hours of soul-killing darkness with my glowing memories of Córdoba. So I revisited in my memory that city whose name was synonymous with pícaro; the city where alluring women sat knitting while facing each other on their window seats and pretended never to lift their dark eyes off their needlework—but when one of them met your gaze, great passions were awakened and men could lose their minds; that city of fabled leather artisans where the making of wool and silk was a great talent; that city that always resounded with tapping tambourines, shaking cymbals, and the piercing wails of the Moorish flutes imploring to the heavens. In my torture cell in Algiers, where water was more precious than gold, I remembered the city of my childhood whose cool streams flowed down from the springs in the Sierra Morena, making song as they splashed out of Córdoba’s fountains and then rushed down mosaic-lined channels in the Alcázar, filling the ponds that teemed with fat orange fish, and irrigated the flower beds in their gardens and the fruit trees in their orchards. The waters of the sierra brought with them cool breezes that felt like the caresses of hands oiled with balsams imported from the New World.

During those times when I began to lose hope—the only thing I possessed—I remembered too, with gladness in my heart, that city in whose gardens countless doves sang in unison all morning long, their music rising with the heat of the day, until your head was so swollen with it that you felt lost in the crescendo created by their feverish chorus; that city where flocks of swallows swelled at sunset, flying in such great numbers and so tightly together that they resembled airborne carpets sweeping the cross-topped towers of the churches and the needlelike tips of the minarets of the mosques. But foremost, I remembered that Córdoba was the birthplace of Seneca, whose philosophy of stoicism became important to me as I grew older, helping me on many occasions to take the blows of adversity with equanimity and forbearance.

In the darkness of the hole in the ground where I spent my days and nights, I found a measure of solace remembering my favorite place in Córdoba, the magnificent former mosque. Córdobeses did not care to notice that the spirit of the place was not Christian. My mother took the whole brood there to Sunday Mass. But I enjoyed much more visiting it with Abu, whose family had converted to Christianity. I was transported by Abu’s stories about the learned Arab rulers who had built the mosque, men whose exotic names—Abd Ar-Rahman, Al-Hakim II, Al-Mansour—seemed more fitting for mythological creatures than for human beings. As we walked around admiring the arches laminated in gold leaf and lapis lazuli hugging the columns of cool and smooth pink granite, dazzled by the imbricate designs of the panels of mosaics, and the patterns that the sunlight made on the tiled floors as it filtered through the circular stained-glass windows, the building became an enchanted place created not by mortal men for other mortals, but by magicians for a people who worshipped color and elegant design as elevated manifestations of the divine.

Abu also told me about the treasures hidden in the ruins of Medinat Alzahara, the fabled city not far from Córdoba that had virtually disappeared five centuries before, leaving few traces. During school holidays we searched the region, hoping to unearth a treasure that was said to be as great as that of El Dorado. It would take us hours to walk from Córdoba to the slopes of the Sierra Morena, where Medinat Alzahara once stood. For all our zeal, we uncovered only fragments of ancient glazed ceramics. I would carry these pieces in my pocket, fingering them often and dreaming of a city that Abu said had been the most beautiful and civilized in Europe.

The Moriscos were forbidden to use Arabic in public, but Abu’s family spoke it at home. He had one sister, Leyla, older than us by a few years. She had blond hair and golden eyes, like many Moorish women in Algeria. Sometimes the women of the household got together to dance for each other, and Abu and I spied on them. Leyla moved with the grace of a feral cat. Her eyes were like almonds dipped in honey, and her arched eyebrows and eyelashes were as black as the hairs of a panther. Swathed in transparent veils, shaking her tambourine, she transported me to the gold-colored desert dunes of Arabia, and to lush oases that could have rivaled the Garden of Paradise.

Abu’s parents were as poor as mine. To help out his family, after school he worked in the hammam where the old men paid boys a few maravedíes for scrubbing and massaging them. I started frequenting the bathhouse with him. I was entranced by the world of the Arab baths, centuries old, built by the Romans, where men exposed their nakedness without shame. In Algiers, in the rare occasions when I had a few extra coins, I had visited its hammam
,
which reminded me of those early and happy times. In Córdoba’s bathhouse there were three pools—one icy; one warm, like the waters of the Guadalquivir in August; and one hot, like boiling soup. My favorite corner of the building was the steam room, where people seemed to vanish and flit about like naked ghosts.

But not all my memories of Córdoba were pleasant. In Mamí’s torture cell, where all my fears multiplied like maggots feeding on carrion, I also began to relive the terrors of my childhood. My great-grandfather, Ruy Díaz Cervantes, was the first member of our clan to settle in Córdoba. For generations, the Cervantes family was known as makers of wool and cloth, an industry normally reserved for Jews. My grandfather Juan Cervantes had inherited a handsome fortune, which had dwindled over the years. His round, black eyes regarded the world and its creatures through the lenses of scorn and bitterness. I remembered my mother saying that he had the face of an old vulture that had “feasted on poisonous snakes all his life.” Even as a child, how I pitied my grandmother who had to share a bed with a man who excreted hatred through his pores. My father was the special target of his bile. It’s true that Father was impractical and reckless, but he was also kind and brimmed with gaiety. Grandfather Cervantes showed publicly his disappointment in his son, who was a failure as a doctor, and even as a barber. Frequently the cupboards in our kitchen were bare. Ham bones were saved for weeks, and boiled with cabbage and onions in salted water until they were as white as pebbles in the river. Many days that was our entire sustenance. Often, my mother had to ask for my grandmother’s charity and suffer the ridicule of my grandfather. One day my grandfather came by our house at suppertime and said to Father in front of all of us, “Look at your miserable children. They are as uncouth as a herd of wild pigs. And the girls, wearing those wretched rags, look like washerwomen. They will never get married.”