Cervantes Street (24 page)
Everyone rejoiced to be alive. For a few days a spirit of brotherhood blossomed in Algiers. People shook hands with their enemies; strangers embraced and wept on each other’s shoulders, commiserating on their losses; all hatred was set aside, replaced by displays of kindness and charity. Those fortunate enough to have a piece of bread broke it in half to share it with a hungry person.
But there was no drinking water left in the city. Large crowds left in the direction of the mountains to collect water from the icy springs that fed the valley. Those too old or too sick to go in search of water drank from the sea and died bloated, contorted, and screaming. People drank olive oil, turned a jade color, and died sweating green oil. I survived by drinking my own urine.
There was nothing left in the city to eat. The granaries of the rich overflowed with weevils and rodents and rotten wheat. Wild-eyed mothers staggered on the streets, offering their skeletal babies to the sky, begging Allah to take pity and deliver the innocents from the evil that had settled upon the land. Algerians survived by gobbling down the undigested grain in the still steaming mounds of camel and donkey dung. They followed these animals to drink their piss. Then they killed, quartered, and ate them. Cats disappeared from the city. I saw mothers selling their infants to people who bought them for consumption. Cannibalism became common. I witnessed people being decapitated so that the thirsty could drink. People lost their human forms; their eye sockets seemed the size of chicken eggs. Hyenas and jackals roamed the casbah to feed on the dead and dying. The wild beasts lost their fear of people; the sated lions no longer bothered to kill.
* * *
Hassan Pasha’s ships had still not returned from the attack on Malta. A rumor that the beylerbey’s fleet had been defeated and he had been taken prisoner by the Italians spread like flames over dry firewood. Fear spread that the European nations would invade the weakened city, and conquer it without the least resistance.
One morning, guards went about the bagnio announcing to the surviving slaves that Arnaut Mamí was preparing his ships to leave for Constantinople. The slaves taken to Turkey never made it back to Christian soil and were not heard from again. There was no more fight left in me; I resigned myself to my fate.
* * *
On October 10, 1580, shortly before the ship carrying me away from that city where I had known the greatest depths of misery sailed off for Constantinople, a group of Dominican monks, who had arrived just as the locusts moved on, came aboard with my ransom. Mamí was eager to let me go: I had the body of a decrepit of old man, was useless as a worker, and had caused him too much trouble. Mamí grabbed the ransom money, and my days as a captive came to an end.
* * *
“There is no happiness on earth equal to that of liberty regained,” I wrote upon my return to Spain. But the happiness I had yearned for over five years was puny compared to my infinite sorrow. My grief-filled heart had no room left in it for the balm of joy.
In the erosion caused by time and memory loss, the colors of those years have shed some of their hues, the faces of many of the main characters have blurred down to a single expression, a tone in which they spoke, a hardness or softness in their eyes, the shapes of their noses or the lack of noses and ears and sometimes even lips. The pain and the anguish of those years have lost much of their sting; the few happy moments I experienced in Algiers seem happier now than they were in reality.
Many years later, in Spain, I could hardly believe that part of my past had really happened, because it seemed like a fantastical chapter in a chivalric novel written by a capricious historian with no regard for the truth. Former captives lucky enough to return from Algiers tell me that the ignominious Bagnio Beylic, filled with an ever changing fresh supply of unfortunates, stands in the same place; that captives still go there to suffer, and many to die; that the oval window where I saw Zoraida’s hand for the first time is still there, though its shutters have remained closed since her death; that the tale of the tragic love affair between the Moorish woman and the Christian has endured. I’ve been told, too, that some leagues to the west of the city, on the rocky, hilly coast bordering the azure-green Mediterranean, her father’s house still stands; and in the orchard, that sacred stage of the final act of our love, visitors can find the weeping willow under which Zoraida’s father killed what was most precious to us both. What nobody tells is that when Agi Morato took the life of my beloved, he also robbed me of half of mine. It is said, too, that the stream by which Zoraida died is now a bed of sand, of the same color as blood that has dried in the desert and turned to rock. But what does not remain in that land across the sea, only in my dimming memory, is the feel of her warm, smooth skin, and the taste of her scarlet lips, as sweet as currant juice, fleshy and delicate and unlike any lips that ever touched mine again.
People are the way God made them, and often they are much worse.
—Cervantes
A Fair and Gentle Wife
1580-1586
Luis
My experience with Miguel de Cervantes taught me that hatred of an ex-friend who has betrayed our trust—or a woman who has deceived us—outlasts love. Once in a while, I imagined revenge scenarios in which I would hire somebody to travel to Algiers to cause him grave harm. These thoughts frightened me, but I also drew comfort from them. As the years passed, and it began to look as if Miguel would end his days in captivity, my hatred lessened. By the time the news of his liberation from the bagnio reached Madrid, he was a blurry figure of my youth.
But the reports of the red-carpet treatment the city of Valencia lavished upon Miguel and the other liberated prisoners reawakened my odium with an intensity that surprised me. What was so heroic about being ransomed? My aggravation swelled when I learned that the good-hearted Valencianos created a fund to provide the ex-prisoners, whose families had few resources, with the means to return to their hometowns.
In the ten years since Miguel had fled Madrid, I had not answered a single one of his letters. Even somebody as shameless as Miguel de Cervantes must have realized I was no longer his friend. If he ever approached me again, I would discourage—forcefully, if necessary—any attempt to reestablish our old friendship. The chances we would meet again were few, since I had withdrawn from the world of Madrid’s would-be versifiers. I decided to continue living exactly as I had before, as if Miguel were still across the Mediterranean, held captive in a Moorish prison.
Not long after Miguel arrived in Spain, I was relieved to hear that he had been sent on a diplomatic mission to the city of Oran in North Africa. Then, a year later, a letter from my old friend Antonio de Eraso arrived from Lisbon, with the news that Miguel was at the Spanish court in the Portuguese capital looking to get a position in the Indies.
Antonio was a high-ranking official in charge of important business in the Royal Council of the Indies, an agency that made judicial decisions regarding the king’s territories in the New World. As a reward for my loyal service to the crown in the Department of Collections of the Guardas of Castile, I, too, had become an official in the Royal Council, and I had resolved to work indefatigably so that I would make myself indispensable to my king. Corruption was widespread in all the offices of the council. Nepotism was the norm; many officials enriched themselves with the crown’s funds. Influence could make a man wealthy. But the men who worked under my supervision were expected to behave ethically and to remain above reproach.
Miguel had informed Antonio that we had been school friends at the Estudio de la Villa. Since I worked in the headquarters of the council in Madrid, Antonio asked if I would recommend Miguel for a post in the Indies as compensation for his heroism at Lepanto. There was nothing unusual in Antonio’s request: in Spain, only the well connected were awarded government positions. For men without prospects of employment in the service of the crown, and for all sorts of adventurers and rogues, the New World was the Promised Land.
Along with his letter, Antonio also enclosed Miguel’s letter to him. The calligraphy was beautiful and elegant. His years at the Estudio de la Villa had not been a complete waste. The document was a lamentation about waiting for many years to receive his wounded soldier’s pension or employment in the court. Besides his service as a soldier, he stressed his diplomatic mission to Oran. The letter concluded with Miguel’s boast that he was working on a novel called
La Galatea
. Was this a hint to Antonio de Eraso that he would be acknowledged as one of his patrons if he helped Miguel to get employment? Miguel obviously had not forgotten how to ingratiate himself with important people who could help him.
Although Miguel had failed at everything he’d attempted in life, I could not take the chance that he might prosper in the New World. I was not yet ready to return his evil with good. But if I was going to thwart his plan to start a new life, I would have to use impeccable logic to ensure that Antonio did not suspect that personal motives had influenced my decision not to endorse Miguel’s request. In my answer to Antonio’s letter I pointed out that although I was aware of my old friend’s diplomatic mission to Oran, as far as I knew it had been a minor assignment that Miguel had inflated to make himself appear more important than he was. Yet the main reason I could not endorse his petition, I wrote, was that there were still questions about the purity of blood of the Cervantes family. As long as that was the case, granting him a government position would risk the displeasure of the church and, potentially, might embroil the crown in controversy. I concluded my letter: “Let Miguel de Cervantes look for employment here in Spain.”
It did not occur to me that by denying his petition I would force Miguel to return to Madrid. The following winter he was back in our city. His mere proximity was enough to reawaken the beast of jealousy. I was tormented by the thought that Mercedes would cuckold me with Miguel once more, and make me the laughing stock of Madrid. It was imperative that I sever at the root whatever connection they had. Though Mercedes and I had continued to live in the same house after I discovered her betrayal, we maintained very separate lives, and there was no one I could ask to spy on her for me. If my suspicions proved correct, I would have to catch the two of them in the act myself. So I would leave for work at the usual time in the morning and then return to the house a few hours later, making sure to tell one of the servants that I had forgotten an important document in my chamber, or that I needed to consult a law book in my library. This strategy, however, revealed nothing in the behavior of the servants, or in their eyes, to indicate anything was amiss.
My son was too small and fragile for his twelve years, so he was tutored at home. Little Diego already knew Latin and Greek, and had finished his studies of the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. His tutor, Father Jerónimo, and I were both aware that my son was a prodigy. But Father Jerónimo was against Diego embarking too early on his studies of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, the quadrivium necessary as preparation for attending the university.
I decided to mention to Diego that I was leaving Madrid for several days to journey to Toledo on business. I returned with an excuse two or three days before expected, but the unchangeable routines of our home did not reveal any disturbances. I thought of intercepting Mercedes’s mail, yet this meant I would have to make an accomplice of one of the domestics, and I could not bear to let a domestic know what was perturbing me. I could not even confide in the faithful Juan, who had been my personal servant since I was a child.
At night, after I had supped, I would ask Diego about the events of the day, hoping that in his innocence he would tell me whether Miguel had visited the house. I hoped, too, that he would inform me if Mercedes had left the house unaccompanied, or accompanied by Leonela, and stayed away for hours.
No matter how much time I devoted to my duties at the council, my jealous feelings toward Miguel threatened to devour me like a voracious leprosy.
One day I returned home at noontime and asked Isadora, a young domestic who did the cleaning, if her mistress was at home.
“Doña Mercedes left the house with Señorita Leonela, Your Grace,” she said.
“How long ago was that?” It was a simple question, but the girl seemed perturbed and did not reply. “Well, was it more than an hour?”
She lowered her head and mumbled, “I don’t know, Your Grace.”
“Don’t you know how to read the clocks? Be gone,” I said. The girl curtsied, and I was left alone in the hall.
I summoned Juan to my chamber and asked that I not be disturbed. I paced with increasing agitation; it felt as if an incubus were trapped inside my chest, banging with closed fists to be let out. I considered leaving the house to look for Mercedes. But where would I start? Despite my impatience, I would have to wait for her to return home. The clock on the wall of my chamber ticked, and each minute was an interminable agony. What if she took hours to return? I felt like a prisoner in my own chamber. I did not want to disturb Diego’s lessons, or let him see my agitation.
I left for the council, hoping to lose myself in work. Once I was settled behind my desk, I gave word to my assistant not to disturb me for the rest of the day. I forced myself to read obtuse reports and take notes, until my head pulsated, my neck felt as rigid as marble, and my vision blurred. I closed my eyes and sat immobile at my desk; I pretended I was dead so I would not have to move or to think. I lost all sense of where I was. When I opened my eyes, late-afternoon light poured through the windows.
I exited the council building and dismissed my carriers, thinking that a brisk walk in the cool spring air might help quell my agitation and rage. The building that housed the Council of the Indies was in the vicinity of the Plaza Mayor. Beginning in late March, when the first daffodils broke the ground and the weeping willows turned from gold to light green, large crowds took up residence on the public benches. The women sat on the sunny spots of the plaza and picked lice from each other’s hair. The splendidly attired gentlemen who rode their prize horses, and the ladies who passed by in their carriages in their showiest finery, their heads covered in black lace mantillas, were the targets of sarcastic comments from the unsavory crowd. Gone were the days when the common people showed respect to their superiors. I was convinced that this deterioration of our society had begun with the discovery of the Indies. It had given the poor and ignorant the belief that if they just went to the New World, and encountered a bit of good luck, they might return as rich as the wealthiest marquis. Money had become the true new sovereign. Lineage did not count half as much as the weight of the gold coins in your pockets.
