The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

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.

We found don Francisco de Quevedo polishing off a pasty as he sat outside a cheap restaurant called El León, which was next to the tobacconist’s, where Calle Cantarranas and the mentidero meet. He called for another pitcher of Valdeiglesias, two mugs, and two more pasties, while we drew up a couple of stools and joined him at his table. He was, as usual, dressed entirely in black, apart from the red cross of Santiago embroidered on his tunic; his neatly folded cloak lay on the bench beside him, along with his sword. He had come from an early appointment at the palace, where he was trying to resolve the seemingly interminable wrangle over who owned the fiefdom of Torre de Juan Abad, and was taking the edge off his appetite before returning home to correct the new edition of his book, God’s Politics, Christ’s Government, on which he was engaged at the time in an effort to stave off criticism from the Inquisition. Our presence, he said, suited him perfectly, as a way of keeping away undesirables; for now that his star was on the rise at court—he had, as I mentioned earlier, formed part of the royal entourage on the recent journey to Aragon and Catalonia—he was constantly being pestered by people hoping for some kind of favor.

“What’s more,” he said, “I’ve been asked to write a play to be performed at El Escorial at the end of the month. His Catholic Majesty will be there on a hunting trip and requires some form of entertainment.”

“Plays are not exactly your specialty,” remarked Alatriste.

“Hell’s teeth, if even poor old Cervantes could have a go at playwrighting, I reckon I can, too. Besides, it was the count-duke himself who asked me. So from now on, you may consider plays to be my specialty.”

“And is he actually going to pay you, or will he, as usual, set it against future favors?”

Quevedo gave a wry laugh.

“As to the future, I have no idea,” he said with a stoical sigh. “Yesterday is gone, the morrow has not yet come . . . But for the present, it’s six hundred reales, or will be. At least that’s what Olivares has promised me. As the poet says:

Ah, see what I have stooped to,

Obliged by his high station,

I to my painful duty,

While he cries inflation.

“We’ll see,” he went on. “The count-duke wants a play full of intrigue, which, as you know, is the kind of play the king likes best. And so, I’ll lock up Aristotle and Horace, Seneca and even Terence, and then, as Lope says, I’ll write a few hundred lines in the vulgar tongue, just foolish enough to please him.”

“Have you thought of a plot yet?”

“Of course. Love affairs, secret meetings, misunderstandings, sword fights . . . the usual thing. I’ll call it The Sword and the Dagger.” Quevedo gave the captain a seemingly casual glance over his mug of wine. “And they want Cózar to put it on.”

At that moment, there was a scuffle on the corner of Calle Francos. People rushed over to see what was happening, and we, too, looked in that direction. Afterward, various people walked past us, commenting on the incident: a lackey of the Marquis de las Navas had apparently knifed a coachman because he had declined to give way to him. The murderer had taken refuge in the church of San Sebastián, and the coachman, on the point of death, had been carried into a nearby house.

“As for the coachman,” declared Quevedo, “he deserved to die for belonging to such a wretched profession.”

Then he looked again at my master and returned to the matter in hand.

“Yes, Cózar,” he said.

The captain sat impassively, watching the ebb and flow of people on the mentidero. He said nothing. The sun accentuated the greenish light in his eyes.

“They say,” added Quevedo after a pause, “that our ardent monarch is laying siege to La Castro. Would you know anything about that?”

“Why would I?” asked Alatriste, chewing on a piece of pasty.

Don Francisco drank down his wine and said nothing more. The friendship they professed for each other excluded both giving advice and interfering in each other’s affairs. A long silence ensued. The captain was still turned toward the street, his face expressionless; and I, after exchanging a worried look with the poet, did the same. Idlers stood around in groups, chatting or else strolling about and ogling the women as if trying to divine what delights their cloaks might conceal. At the entrance to his shop, the cobbler Taburca, still wearing his leather apron and holding a hammer, was holding forth to his stalwarts on the merits, or otherwise, of the previous day’s play. A woman selling lemons passed by, her basket over her arm (“Fresh and tart as you like,” was her cry), and became the object of lewd compliments from two students in cap and gown who were munching lupine seeds as they walked along, bundles of verses stuffed in their pockets, both clearly on the lookout for someone with whom they could exchange some banter. Then I noticed a dark, scrawny individual, with the bearded face of a Turk; he was standing in a nearby doorway, watching us as he cleaned the dirt from under his fingernails with a knife. He had no cloak on, but he carried a dagger, a long sword in a baldric, and wore a much-darned, tow-stuffed doublet, the floppy, broad-brimmed hat of a ruffian, and a large gold earring dangling from one earlobe. I was about to study him more carefully when someone came up behind me, casting a shadow over the table. Greetings were exchanged, and don Francisco rose to his feet.

“I don’t know if you two have met before. Diego Alatriste, this is Pedro Calderón de la Barca.”

The captain and I both stood up to greet the new arrival, whom I had seen occasionally at the Corral de la Cruz. I immediately recognized the downy mustache and the pleasant, slender face. He wasn’t grimy with sweat and soot this time, nor was he wearing a buffcoat; he had on elegant city clothes, a fine cape and a hat with an embroidered hatband, and the sword he wore at his belt was clearly not that of a soldier. Nevertheless, he wore the same smile as he had at the sacking of Oudkerk.

“The boy’s name,” added Quevedo, “is Íñigo Balboa.”

Pedro Calderón looked at me for a while, as if trying to place me.

“A comrade from Flanders, I believe,” he said at last. “Isn’t that right?”

His smile grew broader, and he placed a friendly hand on my shoulder. I felt like the luckiest young man in the world and savored the astonished look on the faces of Quevedo and my master. Calderón was claimed by some as the heir to Tirso and to Lope, and his star was beginning to shine brightly in the theaters and at the palace.

His play The Mock Astrologer had been performed with great success the previous year, and he was, at the time, putting the finishing touches to The Siege at Breda. No wonder, then, that don Francisco and my master were so astonished that this young playwright should remember a humble soldier’s page who, two years before, had helped him save a library from the flames in a Flemish town hall. Calderón sat down with us, and for a while there was much pleasant conversation and more wine, which the new arrival accompanied with no more than a bowl of olives, for he did not, he said, have much appetite. Finally, we all got up and took a turn about the mentidero. An acquaintance, who had been reading something out loud to a group of guffawing idlers, came over to us with a few of his fellows in tow. He was holding a piece of manuscript paper.

“They say this was penned by you, Señor de Quevedo.”

Quevedo cast a disdainful eye over the writing, enjoying the expectant hush. Then he smoothed his mustache and read out loud:

“The man in this dark tomb,

Who lies here dead and doomed,

Sold body and soul for a wager

And even dead he’s still a gamester . . .

“No,” he said, apparently grave-faced, but with tongue firmly in cheek. “That last line could do with a bit of work—if, of course, I had written it. But tell me, gentlemen, is Góngora such a broken man that people are already writing epitaphs for him?”

There were gales of flattering laughter, the same laughter that would have greeted a barb aimed by Góngora at Quevedo. The truth is that, although don Francisco preferred not to say so in public, he had, indeed, written those lines, just as he had many of the other anonymous verses that ran like hounds about the mentidero; although sometimes, other people’s poems, however uninventive, were also attributed to him. As regards Góngora, that quip about his epitaph was not far off the mark. Quevedo had bought a house in Calle del Niño purely in order to evict Góngora; and that leader of the ranks of culturanistas, ruined by the vice of gaming and his desire to cut a fine figure, and so short of funds that he could only just afford a miserable carriage and a couple of maidservants, was forced to submit and retire to his native Córdoba, where he died, ill and embittered, the following year, when the disease afflicting him—apoplexy, some said—finally attacked his mind. Arrogant and aristocratic in manner, that Córdoban prebendary was as unlucky at cards as he was in his choice of friends and enemies; he clashed with Lope de Vega and with Quevedo, and placed his affections as mistakenly as he placed his bets, linking himself to the fallen Duke of Lerma, the executed don Rodrigo Calderón, and the murdered Count of Villamediana. And any hopes he had of receiving favors from the court and from the count-duke—whom he asked on numerous occasions for positions for his nephews and other members of his family—had died when Olivares famously announced: “The devil take those people from Córdoba.” He had no better luck with his work. Out of pride, he had always refused to publish anything, preferring to distribute his poems amongst his friends for them to read and publicize; then, when necessity did finally force him to publish, he died before he saw his books leave the press, and the Inquisition immediately ordered them to be confiscated as suspicious and immoral. And yet, although I never warmed to the man and disliked his particular brand of Latinate gibberish—all triclinia and grottoes—I still say that don Luis de Góngora was an extraordinary poet who, paradoxically, along with his mortal enemy Quevedo, did much to enrich this beautiful language of ours. These two cultivated and spirited men, each writing in very different styles, but with equal skill, breathed new life into Castilian Spanish, one with his linguistic richness and the other with his intellectual swagger. It could be said that this fruitful, pitiless battle between two literary giants changed the Spanish language forever.

We left don Pedro Calderón with some relatives and friends of his and continued down Calle Francos to Lope’s house—this was how everyone in Spain referred to it, with no need even to mention his glorious family name—for Quevedo had some messages to pass on to him from the palace. I turned to look behind me a couple of times, to see if we were being followed by that dark, cloakless ruffian; on the third time of looking, he had gone. A mistake perhaps, I told myself; my instinct, though, attuned to the violent mores of Madrid, told me that such mistakes smell of blood and steel on some dimly lit street corner. There were, however, other matters demanding my attention. One of these was the fact that don Francisco, as well as being commissioned by the count-duke to write a play, had been charged with composing a courtly ballad or two for the queen, to be performed at a party in the Salón Dorado—the Golden Room—in the Alcázar Palace. Quevedo had promised to take these ballads to the palace himself, because the queen wanted him to read them out loud to her and her ladies-in-waiting, and Quevedo, who was, above all, a good and loyal friend, had invited me to accompany him in the role of assistant or secretary or page or some such thing. I didn’t mind what title I was given as long as I saw Angélica de Alquézar—the maid of honor with whom, as you will recall, I was deeply in love.

The other matter was this visit to Lope’s house. Don Francisco de Quevedo knocked at the door and Lope’s maidservant, Lorenza, opened it. I knew the house already, and later, over the years, visited it often because of the friendship that existed between don Francisco and Lope, and between my master and certain other frequent visitors to that Phoenix of Inventiveness, among them his close friend Captain Alonso de Contreras and another younger man who was, unexpectedly, about to enter the scene. We walked into the hallway, down the passageway and past the stairs leading up to the first floor, where the poet’s little nieces were playing. (Years later, it was discovered that these were, in fact, Lope’s daughters by Marta de Nevares.) We emerged, at last, into the little garden where Lope was sitting on a wicker chair beneath the shade of a vine, next to the well and the famous orange tree that he tended with his own hands. He had just finished eating, and nearby stood a small table on which there were still the remains of a meal, as well as cool drinks and sweet wine in a glass pitcher for his guests. Lope was accompanied by three other men, one of whom was the aforementioned Captain Contreras, who wore the cross of Malta on his doublet and was always to be found at Lope’s house whenever he was in Madrid. My master and he were very fond of each other, for they had sailed together in the Naples galleys, and had met before that as youths, almost boys, when they both set off for Flanders with the troops of Archduke Alberto. At the time, Contreras was something of a ruffian, for at the tender age of twelve, he had already knifed one of his own kind and subsequently deserted from the army when the troops were only halfway to Flanders. The second gentleman, don Luis Alberto de Prado by name, was a secretary in the Council of Castile; he was from Cuenca and had a reputation as a decent poet; he was also a fervent admirer of Lope. The third was a handsome young nobleman with a youthfully sparse mustache; he must have been about twenty years old or so and wore a bandage round his head. When he saw us, he sprang to his feet in surprise, an emotion I saw replicated on Captain Alatriste’s face, for the latter immediately stopped where he was by the well and instinctively placed his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“Well,” said the young man, “Madrid really is a small world.”

It certainly was. Only the previous morning, he and Captain Alatriste, ignorant of each other’s names, had fought a duel together. Even more remarkable, as everyone was about to discover, this young fighter’s name was Lopito Félix de Vega Carpio and he was the poet’s son, newly arrived in Madrid from Sicily, where he had served under the Marquis of Santa Cruz, having enlisted in the galleys when he was just fifteen. He was the illegitimate child—albeit acknowledged by Lope—from the latter’s affair with the actress Micaela Luján; he had fought against Berber pirates, done battle with the French off the Îles d’Hyères, and taken part in the liberation of Genoa, and now he was in Madrid, hoping to sort out the papers that would confirm him in the rank of ensign. He was also, it turned out, keeping watch on a certain lady’s window. Anyway, this present situation was damnably awkward. While Lopito gave a detailed account of what had happened, his bewildered father sat in his chair, his ecclesiastical gown still sprinkled with crumbs, and looked from one to the other, not knowing whether to be surprised or angry. Once recovered from their initial shock, Captain Contreras and don Francisco de Quevedo argued the case with reason and tact; my master, however, greatly upset, offered his apologies and made ready to leave at once, convinced that he would no longer be welcome in that house. Quevedo was saying:

“The boy is, in fact, to be congratulated. Crossing swords with the best blade in Madrid and coming away with only a scratch is either a mark of skill or very good luck.”

Captain Contreras confirmed that this was so and gave further evidence. He and Diego Alatriste had been in Italy together, and he knew that the only reason Alatriste ever failed to dispatch an opponent was because he chose not to. This and other arguments continued to be exchanged, but my master was still preparing to leave. He courteously bowed to Lope, gave his word that he would never have unsheathed his sword had he known his adversary to be Lope’s son, and then turned to go before Lope could say a word. At this point, Lopito de Vega intervened.

“Please, Father, allow the gentleman to stay,” he said.

He bore him no ill feeling at all, because he had fought like a true hidalgo right from the start.

“And although that last knife-thrust may not have been exactly elegant—well, so few are—he didn’t just leave me there like a dog. He bandaged my wound and was kind enough to send someone to fetch me and take me to a barber.”

These dignified words calmed the situation. The father of the wounded man ceased frowning; Quevedo, Contreras, and Prado all praised the young ensign’s discretion, which said much for himself and his purity of blood; Lopito described the incident in more detail this time and in jovial terms; and the conversation resumed its friendly tone, thus dissipating the heavy clouds that had been threatening to spoil that postprandial gathering and bring down Lope’s displeasure on my master, something that the latter would have keenly regretted, for he was a great admirer of Lope and respected him as he did few men. Finally, the captain accepted a glass of sweet Málaga wine, concurred with everything the others had said, and Lopito and he became firm friends. They would remain so for eight years, until ensign Lope Félix de Vega Carpio met his unhappy fate when he drowned after his ship was wrecked on an expedition to Île Sainte-Marguerite. I will, however, have occasion to say more about him in this story, and possibly in a future episode, too, if I ever recount the role played by Lopito, Captain Alatriste, and myself, along with other comrades—some of whom you have met already and others whom you have not—in the attack on Venice launched by the Spanish for the second time in the century—an attempt to take the city and murder the doge and his cronies, who had given us so much trouble in the Adriatic and in Italy by ingratiating themselves with the pope and with Richelieu. But all in good time. Besides, Venice merits a book to itself.

We continued our pleasant conversation in the garden until late into the afternoon, and took advantage of this opportunity to observe Lope de Vega close to. I had met him once on the steps of San Felipe, when I was a young lad newly arrived in Madrid, and he had placed his hand on my head, almost as if in an act of confirmation. I imagine it must be difficult now to grasp just what an important figure the great Lope was in those days. He must have been about sixty-four then, and he still had a very gallant air about him, enhanced as it was by his elegant gray locks and his trim mustache and beard, which he continued to wear despite his clerical habit. He was a discreet man who spoke little, smiled a great deal, and sought to please everyone, and who concealed behind impeccable courtesy his pride at having reached such an enviable position. No one—apart from Calderón—enjoyed such fame in his lifetime, writing plays of a beauty, variety, and richness that were unequaled in Europe. He had been a soldier in his youth, seen action in a naval battle in the Azores, in Aragon, and in the war against England, and at the time of which I am speaking, he had written a good part of the more than one thousand five hundred plays and four hundred sacramental dramas that flowed from his pen. His status as a priest did not prevent him enjoying a long and scandalous life full of amorous intrigues, lovers, and illegitimate children, all of which meant, understandably enough, that despite his great literary reputation, he was never seen as a particularly virtuous man and so received none of the courtly benefits to which he aspired, such as the post of royal chronicler, which he always sought but never attained. Otherwise, he enjoyed both fame and fortune. And unlike good don Miguel de Cervantes, who died, as I said, poor, alone, and forgotten, Lope’s funeral, nine years after the dates that concern us here, was a multitudinous display of homage such as had never before been seen in Spain. As for the basis for his reputation, much has been written about that, and I commend those books to the reader. I later had occasion to travel to England and learn the English tongue. I read and even saw performances of plays by William Shakespeare, and I would say that although the Englishman could plumb the depths of the human heart, and while his characters are perhaps more complex than Lope’s, the Spaniard’s sheer theatrical skill, inventiveness, and ability to keep an audience on tenterhooks, the brilliance of his intrigues and the captivating way in which each plot evolves are all incomparable. And even when it comes to characters, I’m not sure that the Englishman always succeeded in depicting the doubts and anxieties of lovers, or the crafty machinations of servants as ingeniously as Lope. Consider, if you will, his little-known work The Duke of Viseu and tell me if that tragic play is not the equal of any of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Moreover, if it is true that Shakespeare’s plays were in some way so universal that we can all recognize ourselves in them—only Don Quixote is as Spanish as Lope and as universal as Shakespeare—it is no less true that Lope, with his new approach to drama, held up a very faithful mirror to the Spain of our century, and that his plays were imitated everywhere, thanks to the fact that Spanish, then, was a language that bestrode two worlds, a language admired, read, and spoken by everyone. However, it must be said, too, that this was due in no small measure to the fact that it was also the language of our fearsome troops and our arrogant, black-clad ambassadors. Unlike other nations—and in this I happily include that of Shakespeare—only Spain has left such a clear record of its customs, values, and language, and all thanks to the plays of Lope, Calderón, Tirso, Rojas, Alarcón, and their ilk, which made such a lasting impression on the theaters of the world. At a time when Spanish was being spoken in Italy, Flanders, the Indies, and the remote seas of the Philippines, the Frenchman Corneille was imitating the work of Guillén de Castro in order to find success in his own land, and the land of Shakespeare was home only to a bunch of hypocritical pirates in search of excuses to prosper and, like so many others, nipping at the heels of the weary, old Spanish lion, who was, nonetheless, still capable of far greater things than they ever were. To quote Lope:

Forward, Spanish sea-dogs,

In whose veins runs the blood of Goths,

Fill your hands with gold,

With slaves, with treasure,

You’ve earned it, take full measure.

During that conversation in the garden, we spoke about a little of everything. Captain Contreras brought news of various wars, and Lopito described to Diego Alatriste the current situation in the Mediterranean, where my master had once sailed and done battle. Then, inevitably, talk turned to literature. Luis Alberto de Prado read some of his own verse, which, to his great pleasure, drew praise from Quevedo, and Góngora’s name was mentioned again.

“Apparently, the man’s dying,” Contreras told them.

“Good riddance,” said Quevedo tartly, “there’ll be plenty to replace him. Every day, eager for fame, as many overcultivated, turd-mongering poets spring up in Spain as mushrooms in the winter damp.”

Lope smiled from his Olympian heights, amused and tolerant. He could not bear Góngora either, although, paradoxically, he had also always hoped to draw him into his circle, because, deep down, he admired and feared him, so much so that he even wrote these lines:

Bright swan of Betis who so

Sweetly and gravely tuned thy bow.

Góngora—that prebendary-cum-swan—was, however, the kind of man who ate alone and never succumbed to blandishments. At first, he had dreamed of snatching the poetic scepter from Lope, even writing plays, but he failed in that as he did in so many things. For all these reasons, Lope always professed to loathe him, meanwhile mocking his own relative lack of knowledge of the classics—for unlike Góngora and Quevedo, Lope knew no Greek and could barely read Latin—as well as the success of his plays with ordinary people. Of his plays he wrote:

They are ducks who splash in the waters of Castile

Which flow so easily from that vulgar stream

And sweetly flood the lower slopes;

From plain-born Lope expect no high-flown tropes.

Lope, however, rarely stepped into the public arena. He did his best to get along well with everyone, and at that point in his life and his success, he was in no mood to become embroiled in disputes and rivalries. He contented himself instead with gentle, veiled attacks and left the really dirty work to his friends, Quevedo among them, for the latter had no qualms about pouring scorn on Góngora’s culturanista excesses or, indeed, on those of his followers. Góngora could no longer hit back at the fearsome Quevedo, who was a past master when it came to tongue-lashings.

“I read Don Quixote when I was in Sicily,” remarked Captain Contreras. “Not bad at all, I thought.”

“Indeed,” replied Quevedo. “It’s already famous and will, I’m sure, outlive many other works.”

Lope raised a disdainful eyebrow, poured himself more wine, and changed the subject. This is further evidence, as I say, that in that Spain of never-ending envy and back-stabbing, where a place on Parnassus was as sought-after as Inca gold, the pen caused more blood to be shed than the sword; besides, enemies in one’s own profession are always the worst kind. The animosity between Lope and Cervantes—the latter, as I said, had, by then, entered the heaven reserved for just men and was doubtless seated at the right hand of God—had gone on for years and was still alive even after poor don Miguel’s death. The initial friendship between those two giants of Spanish literature quickly turned to hatred when the illustrious one-armed Cervantes, whose plays, like Góngora’s, met with utter failure—“I could,” he wrote, “find no one who wanted them”—fired the first shot, by including in Part One of his novel a caustic comment on Lope’s work, in particular his famous parody of the flocks of sheep. Lope responded with these rough words: “I will say nothing of poets, for this is a good century for them. But there is none so bad as Cervantes and none so foolish as to praise Don Quixote.” At the time, the novel was considered to be a minor art requiring little intellect and fit only to entertain young ladies; the theater brought money, but poetry brought luster and glory. This is why Lope respected Quevedo, feared Góngora, and despised Cervantes:

All honor to Lope, and to you only pain,

For he is the sun and, if angered, will rain.

And as for that trivial Don Quixote of yours,

Its only use is for wiping your arse

Or for wrapping up spices and all things nice,

’Til it finds its just rest in the shit with the mice.

. . . as he wrote in a letter, which, to rub salt in the wound, he sent to his rival without paying the one-real postage. Cervantes would write later: “What bothered me most was having to pay that one real.” And so poor don Miguel was driven out of the theater, ground down by work, poverty, and prison, by a succession of humiliations and by many pointless hours spent waiting in anterooms, quite unaware that immortality was already riding toward him on the back of Rocinante. He, who never sought favors by shamelessly flattering the powerful, as Góngora, Quevedo, and Lope all did, finally accepted the illusion of his own failure, and, as honest as ever, wrote:

I who always strive and strain

To seem to have poetic grace

Though Heaven denies me again and again.

But then, that was the nature of the lost world I am describing to you, when the mere name of Spain made the earth tremble. It was all barbed quarrels, arrogance, ill will, cruelty, and poverty. As the empire on which the sun was setting was gradually crumbling, as we were being erased from the face of the earth by our misfortune and our own vile deeds, there, amongst the rubble and the ruins, lies the mark left by those remarkably talented men who, while they could not justify it, could at least explain that age of greatness and glory. They were the children of their time in the evil that they did—and they did a great deal—but they were also the children of the genius of their time in the brilliant works they wrote—and they wrote so much. No nation has given birth to so many men of genius at any one time, nor have the writers of any one nation recorded as faithfully as they did the tiniest details of their age. Fortunately, they live on in libraries, in the pages of their books, within reach of whoever cares to approach and listen, astonished, to the heroic, terrifying roar of our century and our lives. Only thus is it possible to understand what we were and what we are. And then may the devil take us all.

Lope remained at his house, the secretary Prado left, and the rest of us, including Lopito, finished the evening in Juan Lepre’s tavern, on the corner of Calle del Lobo and Calle de las Huertas, sharing a skin of Lucena wine. The talk grew animated. Captain don Alonso de Contreras, an extremely likable fellow, who enjoyed a good fight and good conversation, recounted tales of his life as a soldier and that of my master, including that business in Naples in the fifteenth year of this century, when, after my master had killed a man in a duel over a woman, it was Captain Contreras himself who helped him to elude justice and return to Spain.

“The lady didn’t escape unscathed, either,” he added, laughing. “Diego left her with a charming scar on her cheek as a souvenir. And by God, the hussy deserved it—and more.”

“Oh, I know many such women who do,” added Quevedo, ever the misogynist.

And on this theme, he regaled us with some lines that he had thought up there and then:

“Fly, thoughts, and tell those eyes

That make my heart so glad:

There’s money to be had.”

I looked at my master, incapable of imagining him slashing a woman’s face with a knife. He, however, remained impassive, elbows on the table, as he stared into his mug of wine. Don Franciso caught my look, cast a sideways glance at Alatriste, and said no more. What other things, I wondered, lay behind those silences. And I shuddered inside, as I always did when I got a glimpse of the captain’s dark inner life. It is never pleasant to grow in years and understanding and thus penetrate into the more hidden recesses of one’s hero’s mind and life, and, as I grew more perceptive with passing time, I saw things in Diego Alatriste that I would have preferred not to see.

“But then, of course,” said Contreras, who had also seen the expression on my face and feared perhaps that he had gone too far, “we were young and spirited. I remember one occasion, in Corfu it was . . .”

And he launched into another story. Along the way, he mentioned the names of various mutual friends, such as Diego, Duke of Estrada, a comrade of my master’s during the disastrous attack on the Kerkennah Islands, where they both nearly lost their lives trying to save that of Álvaro de la Marca, Count of Guadalmedina. The count, of course, had since exchanged his soldierly accoutrements for the post of confidant to Philip IV and, according to Quevedo, now accompanied the king each night on his romantic sorties. Forgetting my earlier gloomy thoughts, I listened to them talk, fascinated by their accounts of galleys and ships being boarded, of slaves and booty. The way Captain Contreras told them, these events took on fabulous proportions: the famous incident when, with the Marquis of Santa Cruz, they set fire to the Berber fleet off La Goleta; the description of idyllic places at the very foot of Mount Vesuvius; the youthful orgies and acts of bravado, when Contreras and my master would spend in a matter of days the money they had earned from pursuing pirates around the Greek islands and the Turkish coast. Between swigs of the wine we were clumsily spilling all over the table, Captain Contreras felt moved to recite some lines written in his honor by Lope de Vega and into which he now introduced my master’s name by way of a tribute:

“Contreras’s valor was fully tested,

And laurels hard won, in the fight for Spain.

Alatriste and he were never bested

During that bloody Turkish campaign.

Even their slightest, most modest feat

(For a blade of steel cannot deceive)

Brought them praise and honor sweet.”

Alatriste still said nothing—his sword hanging from the back of his chair and his hat on the floor on top of his folded cloak—he merely nodded now and then, uttered the occasional monosyllabic comment, and managed a faint, courteous smile whenever Contreras, Quevedo, or Lopito de Vega mentioned his name. I listened and watched, drinking in the words, captivated by every anecdote and every memory, and feeling that I was one of them—and that I had every right to feel so, too. After all, I may have been only sixteen, but I was already a veteran of Flanders and some other rather murkier campaigns; I had both the scars to show for it and reasonable skills as a swordsman. This confirmed me in my intention to join the militia as soon as I could and to win my own laurels so that, one day, as I recounted my exploits at a tavern table, someone might recite a few lines of poetry in my honor, too. I did not know then that my wishes would be more than granted, and that the road I was preparing to take would also lead me to the farther side of glory and of fame. True, I had known war in Flanders, but had done so with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the innocent, for whom the militia is a magnificent spectacle; the true face of war casts a dark shadow over heart and memory. I look back now from this interminable old age in which I seem to be suspended as I write these memoirs and—beneath the murmur of the flags flapping in the wind and the drumroll that marks the quiet passing of the old infantry whose long-drawn-out death I wit- nessed in Breda, Nördlingen, Fuenterrabía, Catalonia, and Rocroi—I find only the faces of ghosts and the lucid, infinite solitude of someone who has known the best and the worst of what that word “Spain” contains. And now, having myself paid the price demanded by life, I know what lay behind the captain’s silences and his abstracted gaze.

The captain bade good night to everyone and set off alone up Calle del Lobo before crossing Carrera de San Jerónimo, wrapped in his cloak and with his hat pulled well down. Night had fallen, it was cold, and Calle de los Peligros was deserted; the only light came from a candle burning in a niche in the wall containing the image of a saint. Halfway along, he felt the need to stop for a moment. “Too much wine,” he said to himself. He chose the darkest corner, drew back his cloak and unbuttoned his breeches. He was standing there in the corner, legs apart, relieving himself, when a bell tolled in the nearby convent of Bernardine nuns. He had plenty of time, he thought. It was half an hour until his rendezvous in a house farther up on the right, beyond Calle de Alcalá, where an old duenna, a seasoned bawd and matchmaker experienced in her profession, would have everything ready—bed, supper, washbowl, water, and towels—for his meeting with María de Castro.

He was buttoning up his breeches when he heard a noise behind him. This was, after all, Calle de los Peligros—the Street of Dangers—and there he was in the dark with his breeches unbuttoned. He really didn’t want to end his days like this. He rapidly adjusted his clothing, all the time glancing over his shoulder, then he folded back his cloak so that his sword was unencumbered. Moving around at night in Madrid meant living in a state of permanent anxiety; anyone who could afford it hired an armed escort to light their way. If, on the other hand, your name was Diego Alatriste, you had the consolation of knowing that you could be just as dangerous, if not more, than whoever you might bump into. It was all a matter of temperament, and his had never been, shall we say, Franciscan.

For the moment, he could see nothing. It was pitch-black night, and the eaves of the houses left the façades and the doorways in deep shadow. Here and there, a domestic candle lit up a blind from within or a half-open shutter door. He stood motionless for a while, watching the corner of Calle de Alcalá like someone studying the slope of a fortification being swept by the fire of enemy harquebuses, then he walked warily on, taking care not to step in the horse dung or other filth that lay stinking in the gutter. He could hear only his own footsteps. Suddenly, where Calle de los Peligros narrowed and the convent wall ended, that sound seemed to find an echo. Still walking, he kept looking to either side, until he noticed a shape to his right that was keeping close to the walls of some tall houses. It might be some perfectly innocent passerby, or someone following him with evil intent; and so he continued on his way, never losing sight of that shape. He walked some twenty or thirty paces, remaining always in the middle of the street, and when the shape passed a lighted window, he saw a man wrapped in a cloak and wearing a broad-brimmed hat. The captain walked on, every sense alert now, and shortly afterward spotted a second shape on the other side of the street. Too many shapes and too little light, he thought. These were either hired killers or robbers. He unclasped his cloak and unsheathed his sword.

Divide and conquer, he was thinking—if, that is, luck was with him. Besides, the early bird catches the worm. And so, wrapping his cloak around his free arm, he made straight for the shape on the right and dealt a blow with his sword before his adversary even had time to make a move. The man slumped to one side with a groan, his cloak and what lay behind it pierced through; then, with his cloak still wrapped about him, his sword unused in its sheath, he withdrew into the shadows of a doorway, moaning and breathing hard. Trusting that the second man would not be carrying a pistol, Alatriste spun round to face him, for he could hear footsteps running toward him down the street. A black cloakless silhouette was approaching, wearing, like his companion, a broad-brimmed ruffian’s hat, and brandishing a sword. Alatriste whirled his cloak around in the air so that it wrapped about that sword, and while the other man was cursing and trying desperately to disentangle his weapon, the captain got in half a dozen short thrusts, dealt almost wildly, blindly. The last one hit home, causing his assailant to fall to the ground. The captain glanced behind him, in case he was in danger of attack from the rear, but the man in the cloak had had enough. Alatriste could see him disappearing down the street. He then picked up his own cloak, which stank from having been trampled in the gutter, put his sword back in its sheath, took out his dagger with his left hand, and, going over to his fallen opponent, held the point to his throat.

“Talk,” he said, “or, by Christ, I’ll kill you.”

The man was breathing hard. He was in a bad way, but still capable of assessing the situation. He smelled of wine recently drunk, and of blood.

“Go to hell,” he muttered feebly.

Alatriste scrutinized his face as best he could. A thick beard. A single earring glinting in the darkness. The voice of a ruffian. He was clearly a professional killer and, to judge by his words, a cool customer.

“Tell me the name of the person paying you,” Alatriste said, pressing the dagger harder against the man’s throat.

“I’m not saying,” answered the man, “so slit my throat and be done with it.”

“That’s what I was thinking of doing.”

“Fine by me.”

Alatriste smiled beneath his mustache, aware that the other man could not see his face. The wily bastard had guts, and he clearly wasn’t going to get anything out of him. He quickly searched the man’s pockets, but found only a purse, which he kept, and a knife with a good blade, which he discarded.

“So you’re not going to sing, then?” he asked.

“No.”

The captain gave an understanding nod of the head and stood up. Amongst professionals like them, those were the rules of the criminal world. Trying to force the man to talk would be a waste of time, and if a patrol of catchpoles were to appear, he would be hard pushed to come up with an explanation, at that hour of the night and with a dead man lying at his feet. So he had better cut and run. He was just about to put away his dagger and leave, when he thought better of it, and instead, leaning forward again, he slashed the man across the mouth. It made a sound like meat being chopped on a butcher’s board, and this time the man really did fall silent, either because he lost consciousness or because the blade had sliced through his tongue. Just in case. Not that the man had really made much use of it, thought Alatriste, as he moved away. At any rate, if someone did manage to sew the man up and he survived, it would help Alatriste to identify him should they ever meet again in daylight. And even if they didn’t, at least the man—or what remained of him after the wound to his body and that signum crucis—would certainly never forget Calle de los Peligros.

The moon rose late, forming halos on the glass panes of the window. Diego Alatriste had his back to the window and stood framed in the rectangle of silvery light that extended as far as the bed on which María de Castro lay sleeping. The captain was studying the shape of that woman and listening to her quiet breathing and the little moans she gave as she made herself more comfortable among the sheets that barely covered her. He sniffed his own hands and forearms: he had the smell of her on him, the perfume from her body that lay resting now, exhausted, after their long interchange of kisses and caresses. He moved, and his shadow seemed to slide like the shadow of a ghost over her pale naked body. By Christ, she was beautiful.

He went over to the table and poured himself a little wine. As he did so, he went from the mat to the flagstoned floor, and the cold sent a shiver over his weather-beaten soldier’s skin. He drank, still keeping his eyes on the woman. Hundreds of men of all classes and stations, men of quality and with nice full purses, would have given anything to enjoy her for a few minutes; and yet there he was, sated with her flesh and her mouth. His only fortune was his sword and his only future, oblivion. How odd they are, he thought again, the mechanisms that move the minds of women. Or, at least, the minds of women like her. The killer’s purse, which he had placed on the table without saying a word—doubtless the price of his own life—contained only enough for her to buy herself some fashionable new clogs, a fan, and some ribbons. And yet there he was. And there she was.

“Diego.”

This was spoken in a sleepy murmur. The woman had turned over in bed and was looking at him.

“Come here, my love.”

He put down his glass of wine and went over to her, sitting down on the edge of the bed and placing one hand on her warm flesh. My love, she had said. He didn’t even have enough money to pay for his own funeral—an event he postponed each day with his sword—nor was he an elegant fop, or a gallant, cultivated man, the sort admired by women in the street or at evening parties. My love. He suddenly found himself remembering the last lines of a sonnet by Lope that he had heard that afternoon at the poet’s house:

She loves you, loathes you, treats you well, then ill. Like a leech or surgeon’s knife, she’s double-edged: Sometimes she’ll cure, but sometimes she will kill.

In the moonlight, María de Castro’s eyes looked incredibly beautiful, and it accentuated the dark abyss of her half-open mouth. So what, thought the captain. My love or not my love. My love or someone else’s love. My madness or my sanity. My, your, his heart. That night he was alive, and that was all that counted. He had eyes to see and a mouth to kiss with. And teeth to bite. None of the many sons of bitches who had crossed his path, Turks, heretics, constables, or bullies, had succeeded in stealing this moment from him. He was still breathing, although many had tried to stop him doing so. And now, as if to confirm this, one of her hands was caressing his skin, lingering over each old scar. “My love,” she said again. Don Francisco de Quevedo would doubtless have got a good poem out of this, fitting it all into fourteen perfect hendecasyllables. Captain Alatriste, however, merely smiled to himself. It was good to be alive, at least for a while longer, in a world in which no one gave anything away for nothing, in which everything had to be paid for—before, during, and afterward. “I must have paid something,” he thought. “I don’t know how much or when, but I must have done so if life is rewarding me with the prize of having a woman look at me as she is looking at me now, even if only for a few nights.”