Thrown into Nature

13. For the Healing of Scabs

Luisa, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old lass from Sevilla, had scabs on the back of her neck. Her parents called us to treat her. The girl wore her hair long, so the scabs couldn’t be seen, and they were not painful unless pressed, thus they had gone untreated for many years. Her parents said that she had had them since childhood. Recently, however, a new one had appeared, and the girl had asked to be treated. This, of course, was not a problem for us — tobacco heals scabs wonderfully. I stayed at the house on Santa Cruz while the doctor rubbed the scabs with tobacco, after which I parted with him and went to check on the health of a man whom the doctor had been treating for pain in the lower back. Around an hour later I returned to Luisa’s house, and what I saw downright astonished me. The girl was acting crazy. Moreover, shortly after I came in, she burst into such violent sobs that you’d think she were being sent to the gallows, and by all appearances it was somehow connected with me.

“Let’s go outside,” the doctor grabbed me by the elbow and nodded to the girl’s mother, who stayed in the room along with her little brother (her father had meanwhile gone out on business). “You seem to be upsetting the young lady somehow,” the doctor said once we were out in the yard, as he lit a cigarella with satisfaction.

“I didn’t do anything, señor. I don’t even know her at all. I saw her for the first time in my life today,” I said. And that was the truth.

“I know,” replied the doctor. “The girl isn’t in her right mind. She’s acting crazy.”

“Perhaps the lass has fallen in love with someone? That happens to them constantly at this age.”

“I don’t think so,” answered the doctor. “Her parents don’t know of her having fallen in love with anybody.”

“But would they really know if she had fallen in love with someone?”

“Oh yes, and how!” the doctor exclaimed. “Don’t forget, I have two daughters.”

“So why is she acting so crazy, then?” I wondered aloud.

“From the tobacco,” the doctor replied.

“But what all did you do to her, señor? Did you give her too much or what?. .”

“No, it was nothing out of the ordinary,” the doctor replied. “Tobacco simply has a bad effect on young girls. That’s not due to tobacco, but to Nature herself. Nature exerts terrible pressure on young girls for her own ends. It thrashes around inside them like an eel. A terrible business, I know that from my daughters. Young girls constantly look half-crazed, not quite in their right minds, somehow. This is Nature’s doing. Just add a little tobacco to that jumble as well and it turns into a complete mess. Once they marry and have children they start to pull themselves together little by little. Nature starts leaving them in peace.”

“Yes, she’s done her job,” I suggested.

“Something like that,” the doctor nodded and was seized with a fit of that prolonged, dry cough that had been bothering him lately.

“You haven’t caught cold, have you, señor?” I asked politely.

“No,” he replied. “I think it’s from tobacco.”

“From tobacco, señor?”

The doctor nodded, his cheek bulging, threw down his dying cigarella, and started coughing again.

“But I don’t cough, señor.”

“I’ve been sustaining myself with tobacco for twenty years longer than you have,” replied the doctor. “There seems to be something in tobacco which causes such a cough. After many, many years.”

Today is a bad day for tobacco, I thought to myself.

“Let’s go inside to see what the girl is doing,” said the doctor. “If she starts bawling again when she sees you, go outside and wait for me in the carriage with Jesús. Where is he, by the way?”

“He moved around the corner, señor.”

“And what is he doing there?” the doctor wondered.

“Nothing. Just sitting there.” I didn’t dare tell him. In fact, Jesús was stomping out flamenco and collecting money in a hat. He had now started doing it in the city, too, whenever possible. I was amazed that the doctor didn’t notice the horses whinnying from time to time. He surely thought some carriages were just passing by on the street.

This time the girl did not burst into tears when we entered the room. On the contrary, as soon as she saw us, she smiled happily, then rolled over to the other side of the bed and covered her face with the pillow. Her mother scolded her, wrested the pillow from her hands, and forced it under her head. The girl started sniffling.

“Stay like that, my dear, stay just like that,” the doctor said, moving her hair and looking at the scabs. “Everything is fine,”—he turned to the mother shortly—“she’ll get better.”

“I am free to go now?” asked the girl, who had stopped sniffling.

Then in ten minutes she did so many things that if I were to describe them in detail, it would fill several pages. For example, she got up, started singing “Dark-eyed Chiquita” softly to herself — a popular song in Sevilla, mainly among the women — and went, with something I would call smooth leaps, over to the window. Her fragile body seemed to float through the air. She looked out the window, mercilessly crumpling her skirts with her hands, stopped singing and began humming instead, then laughed and said: “Some clown is dancing flamenco and collecting money in a hat.”

Fortunately, no one paid her any attention. The doctor at that moment was speaking with her mother and surely thought that the girl was just talking nonsense. Shortly thereafter the whinnying of horses could be heard from outside, but the lass had already turned her back on the window, run to the bed, snatched up her brother, and begun hugging him in a frenzy. Her little brother, a seven- or eight-year-old boy by the name of Pedro, began snorting, his cheeks bulging.

“Let him go, you little hussy!” cried her mother, bounding over to the bed and forcefully tearing the boy out of her arms.

The girl began to cry again, threw herself down on the bed, covered her head with the pillow, and continued sobbing beneath it. In the meantime, her father had appeared. He opened the door, peeked inside, surveyed the above-described scene, then pulled his head back out and shut the door from the outside. The little boy also wanted to leave, but his mother wouldn’t let him. The girl suddenly sat up on the bed with a sad face and eyes red from crying and starting taking off her stockings.

“What are you doing?” her mother asked.

“I want to be barefoot,” the girl replied curtly and hurled the sock onto the floor.

How nice, I thought to myself, that unlike that little boy, we can always leave. The doctor seemed to be thinking along the same lines as well, since he said goodbye to the mother and the girl, promised to come to see how things were going the next day, and opened the door. We almost ran into the father, who was standing right outside, looking at us with a tortured expression.

“Goodbye, señor,” said the doctor.

“Goodbye, señores,” the man replied.

I nodded as I passed him. It was on the tip of my tongue to wish him a pleasant day, but somehow I decided against it.

“Jesús,” I called loudly, as soon as we stepped out into the yard, “where are you, Jesús?”

Jesús was around the corner, quietly waiting for us on the coachbox.

On the following day, the doctor sent me to check on the girl, Luisa. I didn’t feel like going at all, let alone by myself, but it couldn’t be helped. My apprehensions, however, were unjustified. This time the girl behaved very demurely, looking down bashfully most of the time and giving one-syllable answers to my questions. Perhaps the effect of the tobacco had worn off, I don’t know. Fortunately, it was not necessary to treat her with tobacco again and the doctor’s prognosis was that the scabs would disappear within a week.

Returning from there with a light heart, I came across a truly impressive sight. I saw that crazy Dr. Vallejo from Madrid — a one in a million chance. At first I wasn’t sure it was really him, but when I asked around at the Three Horses, it turned out that I was right. This Vallejo was a strange doctor, more likely a charlatan, who went around from city to city and nobleman to nobleman with the hope of finding someone who would give him the money to develop his so-called “vaccine.” This “vaccine,” so he says, is something like a disease, which, if taken in small doses, makes you resistant to the cause. According to him, you could cure almost every infectious disease this way. This would be, he claims, the greatest, most revolutionary idea in medicine from our era. But for every disease the quantity of the “vaccine” was supposedly different and so forth, thus he needed money to research this business. Sly dog. From what I understood, he had gone to Count Azuaga, who had a summer villa near Sevilla, in the hopes of squeezing some cash out of him. The count was a polite man, with a sense for the humorous in life and a certain taste for madmen, as well as for sly dogs, thus instead of throwing him out on his ear, he received him politely, even arranged a reception in his honor, to which he invited the powerful landholders in the vicinity, so they could see such a specimen with their own eyes and hear his cock-and-bull stories from his own lips, after which the count assured him that since he would probably die far earlier than the doctor due to his failure to use the “vaccine,” he would will him the estate, so that he could develop his great medicine in peace, and then sent him politely on his way. From there, I came to understand, the said Vallejo had gone to Señor Espinosa, but Espinosa is a very busy man and sent him away without such ceremonies. Incidentally, I asked Dr. Monardes what he thought of Vallejo’s so-called “vaccine.”

“Ha ha,” laughed Dr. Monardes. “He wants to convince us that something which at one of its extremes causes sickness and death, but which at its other extreme is entirely ineffective, and consequently again causes death, becomes curative somewhere in the middle. Now, don’t misunderstand me,” the doctor clarified. “Taken by itself, that is a completely trivial idea and applies to all medicines. But with the huge and decisive difference that no medicine is created from that which it heals, but on the contrary, it is a different substance, with opposite properties. It has a nature inimical to the nature of the illness. This Vallejo essentially wants to convince us that plague can be cured with plague, cholera with cholera, and so on. Are you even listening to what you’re saying, Guimarães?”

“Please, please, señor.” I raised my hand, protesting vigorously. “I was just asking.”

“Impossible!” the doctor snapped. “Complete and dangerous nonsense. One should have an open mind, receptive to new knowledge, but not so open that his brain falls out”—here the doctor quoted a famous English proverb—“and if the Inquisition were to busy itself with something sensible, instead of persecuting so-called heretics, it would have locked up that charlatan long ago.”

The lass Luisa really did recover, at least in the sense that her scabs disappeared after a few days. This came about by rubbing them with an infusion of ground-up, three-year-old tobacco leaves from Trinidad. The results were astounding. On his visit to the girl’s house at the end of the week, the doctor took advantage of the opportunity to speak with her father. This business is a bit complicated, thus I will attempt to explain it with a preface of sorts. The doctor had a house in “The Skulls,” as the region of Sevilla around the Puerta de Jerez was known; he rented out the house in question. But he had long since gotten it into his head and had been trying — although not very energetically — to buy up a relatively large piece of land next to it and to include it in his yard. The land was empty and belonged to the municipality, because it was an ancient Roman burial ground — hence the name, and indeed, you really could find some bone or other there if you dug a meter or so into the ground. I’ve even heard that during floods sometimes bones come floating to the surface. For this reason, the municipality had put a ban on building anything whatsoever there, as it considered the space a cemetery. The doctor, as well as many others, had built houses there before the municipality made this decision, which, in a rapidly growing city like Sevilla, became the object of endless disputes, and the municipality perhaps would have given permission to build there if the church, which objected to such building, hadn’t gotten involved. To confuse matters completely, the king’s people also got involved in the dispute, as they wanted to build a station there to tax the wine and foodstuffs that entered Sevilla through the Puerta de Jerez. The merchants, who until then had pressured the municipality to get rid of the ban, were now divided and began arguing amongst themselves — which side they were on, of course, depended on whether they imported goods through the port, where they were taxed in any case, or whether they transported them via Puerta de Jerez, where they were not taxed. Of course, not everyone could bring their goods in through the Puerta de Jerez — those who traded in transoceanic goods had to stop at the port, like it or not. Even if they were sneaky enough to stop at the Port of Cadiz and from there to continue overland, they would still get taxed at the Port of Cadiz. Thus, the merchants who traded in goods from outside the country were for repealing the ban, while those who traded in local goods were against it. So this is the situation the doctor was trying to pick his way through and somehow acquire that bit of land next to his house in the Skulls.

Luisa’s father, Don Pablo, was the royal chief deputy for taxes in Sevilla. He was precisely the one responsible for collecting royal duty in the port. Señor de Leca had personally appointed him to this post. Don Pablo, of course, knew the royal deputy for buildings in Sevilla, who represented the king on the municipal commission for public works and who was responsible for the royal buildings — the prison, Torre del Oro, where the customs duties were collected, the cavalry barracks, and the royal warehouses at the port. He was precisely the one who would also be responsible for the taxation station that would eventually be built near Puerta de Jerez. But this would come about not at his insistence, but at the insistence of Don Pablo, who was responsible for the royal taxes. The curious thing is that the king’s people had chosen exactly the same spot which Dr. Monardes also hoped to acquire — the road simply passed by it. Dr. Monardes spoke with Don Pablo about whether the royal officials wouldn’t agree to move their station elsewhere or simply to make it smaller, such that they could split the parcel, say, in two with Dr. Monardes. Of course, to this end, which seemed the most realistic in both señores’ opinions, the royal officials would first have to receive the land from the municipality, and then to decide that they didn’t need such a large station and to sell part of it to the doctor. That could come about quite cheaply, since they themselves would receive the land free of charge — for the needs of the kingdom. Don Pablo promised to speak seriously with the royal deputy for buildings. That, however, did not solve the problem at all, since, as was said, the land belonged to the municipality and the royal deputy for building had only one vote on the municipal commission for public works, and in the end the decision had to be made by the municipality. But it was still something. Depending on how matters developed, Dr. Monardes and Don Pablo would meet again to discuss what further steps to take. Dr. Monardes also treated the bishop of Sevilla and could speak to him as well, if necessary. Unfortunately, the doctor did not have significant connections in the municipality — the municipal councilors were primarily Dr. Bartholo’s clients. Dr. Monardes had strong ties to royal officials, church leaders, and noblemen, but not to the municipal councilors. Of course, he also treated the powerful merchants such as Espinosa, and Espinosa could have helped, but within the municipality he had exactly as many sworn enemies as he did faithful friends, thus this business couldn’t be resolved with his help alone. Besides, Espinosa wasn’t the kind of person who would help you out just like that, unless he had some personal interest in it, and this business was far too trifling for him to have a personal interest in it.

“Our social system is very complicated, señor,” I said conciliatorily, as the doctor and I walked down the street.

“It’s not the least bit complicated,” Dr. Monardes replied. “Our social system is completely simple. They are all simple. I know history well,” Dr. Monardes continued, “and I’m telling you that only two systems have ever existed in the world, in Aristotle’s sense. . Have you read Aristotle?”

“Yes,” I replied. “To a point.”

“I see,” the doctor said, somehow ambiguously. “Aristotle says that four systems of government exist. Democracy, where the people govern. .”

“What do you mean, the people govern?” I didn’t understand. “Who do they govern?”

“Listen to me now.” The doctor waved his hand, slightly irritated. “One system, he says, is democracy. Another is aristocracy. There, the most worthy govern. It would’ve been better if he’d called it meritocracy, but never mind. He had no way of making use of Latin terms. The third is monarchy, in which the king rules. And the fourth is plutocracy, when the richest rule. I argue,” continued the doctor, who, truth be told, had been developing a certain inclination towards dabbling in politics for years now, “that nothing has ever existed in the world besides monarchy and plutocracy.”

“Here we have a monarchy,” I took the opportunity to note. “Don Felipe is a monarch.”

“Yes. But besides a monarch, he is also a plutocrat,” said the doctor. “Because Don Felipe is a very rich man. That’s precisely the interesting thing. The monarchy exists in a mixed form.”

“But, señor, I wasn’t talking about that at all,” I took the liberty of noting. “I had something entirely different in mind.”

“I know what you had in mind. But that’s not interesting,” the doctor replied. “The monarchy, I would say, is simultaneously a monarchy and a plutocracy. And just look at the aristocrats. They are far from being the worthiest men, yet they really are some of the richest. That, consequently, is the first possibility: a monarchy, a mixed system. But if the monarchy or dictatorship falls, then a pure plutocracy begins. No other system exists in the real world. This, by the way, makes a lot of sense. In the first case, power is obtained through force, through the force of weapons at first. Take Caesar, the first emperor. Some scribblers might tell you that Octavian was the first, but don’t you believe them. Caesar was the first. How did he become emperor? Through force. He obtained it through the force of weapons. That’s how he obtained power, and that’s how he maintained it. After all, who owns the armies? Whom do they belong to? While in the other case,” the doctor continued, placing a fig in his mouth, “power is obtained by the force of money. Where the power of weapons ends, the force of money begins. Marcus Licinius Crassus. Toss this pit. Sometimes you can even buy a whole empire with money. Didius Julianus. And other times with the force of weapons you can steal the richest people’s money and put it in your own pocket. Emperor Maxentius. It is telling, by the way, that both Julianus and Maxentius met bad ends. But that’s it, those two systems. There’s no place for a third under the sun. And whoever combines these two shall stay in power forever and last throughout the ages.”

“Aristotle is a windbag,” I noted confidently. “He loves to think up various things. He’ll take two things and turn them into four, and make himself look very clever that way.”

“That’s more or less how it is,” the doctor agreed.

He continued walking along in silence, handing me the pits from the figs. I hurled them into the gardens along the street.

“But what about the pope, señor. .” I said after a moment. “He doesn’t have weapons. Fine, so he does have money, that’s true, but. . that’s not the point. You understand what I’m trying to say, señor.”

“Yes, I understand,” the doctor nodded. “But that is a very long story. And at the end we’ll still arrive back at those two things, but after lots of chatter.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “But if our system is simple, señor”—I added after a pause—“why is it so hard from someone to get a hold of a plot of land in the Skulls? Perhaps it isn’t as simple as it looks, after all?”

“It’s completely simple,” the doctor shook his head vigorously. “The system is simple, but very confused.”

“Simple, but very confused?” I repeated.

“Simple, but very confused!” the doctor nodded categorically.

We continued walking down the street. And where is Jesús, the reader might ask. Had Dr. Monardes caught him dancing flamenco and fired him? No, Jesús hadn’t been fired. The doctor had let him go home, since his wife was due to give birth. Dr. Monardes was to perform the delivery personally. That’s precisely where we were headed now — we were walking down the streets of the Triana slum towards Jesús’ house to see how his wife was.

“What a repulsive place!” the doctor said and started coughing violently. “The smells make your head spin and irritate your lungs.”

I personally didn’t find the smells unpleasant. To me, it smelled like oranges, horses, fried meat, river mud, and tobacco. Nothing was irritating my lungs. And my head? My head was perfectly fine. My mind was clearer, sharper, more focused, profound, and insightful than ever, I would say. I missed the animals. Not that I would return to them, of course. And in fact, it wasn’t the animals. I am missing something, Pelletier says, but what it is, I don’t know. More precisely, those aren’t Pelletier’s words, but the Earth’s, right after she collides with the Medusa, miscarries, and loses the Moon. I am missing something, but what it is, I don’t know. Exactly at that moment, Mars turns his back and begins to move away, finally reaching as far away as he is today.