Thrown into Nature

14. Against Toothaches

Urbi et Orbi, L’Amour des amours. Jesús’ wife gave birth to a pair of twins. Not exactly on the day the doctor and I went to their house, but two days later, and shortly before the doctor arrived, so in the end the delivery was performed by an old woman. “She was so blind,” Jesús said, “that I was astonished she didn’t miss one of the twins.” Jesús is very proud. Proud and saddened at the same time. Why he is saddened is completely clear, in my opinion, when you take into account the fact that even before this he had four mouths to feed, but why he is proud perhaps requires clarification. He is proud because he fathered twins. He doesn’t know anyone else with twins, I only know one person, while the doctor, after considerable reflection, was able to think of two. Thus, it really is a rare thing.

Jesús wanted to name the twins Pedro and Pablo, after the saints. But he already has a son named Pablo. The local priest suggested naming him Pablo-Hiero, as two names with a hyphen, but Jesús’ wife categorically refused to give the boy that name and was stubborn in her refusal. “I would’ve given her a good beating any other time,” Jesús said, “which would have cleared the problem right up, but now isn’t quite the moment for that.” In the end, the news got around and even reached Cardinal Rodrigo de Castro himself, the archbishop of Sevilla, who personally wanted to baptize the twins as part of the consecration of a new church in the Santa Cruz neighborhood. He suggested calling the child Pablo Junior, but the mother again refused. She didn’t want him to be called Pablo at all like her other son. They finally decided to name him Rodrigo, after the cardinal. But since Pedro and Rodrigo somehow didn’t go together, the other twin was christened Alvaro, after the cardinal’s nephew. So in the end they named them Alvaro and Rodrigo.

In the meantime, the doctor was called to the prison to examine the Cervantes. The fact of the matter was that the higher-ups had decided to release him, thus the prison authorities wanted to let him go in good shape, so he couldn’t complain about them afterwards. They did this from time to time with someone they considered more important or who could create problems for them in some way. Cervantes could stick it to you good in some play, and besides, he was a royal servant, after all. In principle, the prison doctor was Hernando Alemán. He did a slapdash job, and if you are a Sevillian prisoner and expect him to take care of you, you are sorely deceiving yourself. And why should he care, when his salary was thirty ducats a year, two and a half per month? I earned more as a student of Dr. Monardes. Dr. Alemán would’ve starved to death on that salary if he didn’t have a private practice as well. My point is that he usually didn’t take care of the prisoners at all, unless somebody well nigh went and died, but in cases when the authorities wanted to cover their asses and free someone healthy, he would examine him and treat him insofar as he could, and afterwards the poor fellow would sign a document saying he had no complaints. Only then would they let him go. Cervantes’s case was far better than most, in the sense that he actually was healthy except for a toothache. The prison authorities were prepared to solve the problem immediately by simply having Dr. Alemán pull the tooth, but Cervantes (who indeed had only a few teeth left in his mouth, as I was subsequently able to confirm) asked to keep it. He even suggested to the authorities that he sign the document saying he was healthy and then get the tooth treated once he was out, but the authorities refused. Why? Why is a good question. Who knows why? They simply refused. Perhaps inexplicably, yet very categorically. You’ll never understand the Spanish authorities if you ask why this, why that. The Spanish authorities are a very complicated thing. In order to understand them, you must ask: “What is in the way?” If there is some large obstacle, that means something won’t happen. In any other case — it might. Anyway, Cervantes then requested that Dr. Monardes be called in to treat his tooth. Dr. Alemán would not normally have paid him any attention and would have just yanked his tooth in the end, but his son was also a novelist, so he, it seems, felt a certain sympathy for Cervantes. For this reason, he promised to call Dr. Monardes and actually did it. Cervantes, however, did not have the money to pay the doctor’s high fee. Instead, he promised to praise him in one of his works. “My very next one”—was what he said.

It goes without saying that Dr. Monardes was not the least bit impressed by this suggestion. Yet he decided to show some good will, and besides, he didn’t want to refuse Dr. Alemán and the royal authorities in principle.

“Do we have any appointments today?” he asked me in the morning.

I opened the notebook and said: “Not today. Tomorrow you have a visit to Father Luis del Alcazar, the Jesuit, to check on his fever.”

“And nothing else until then?” the doctor asked.

“Nothing else,” I replied.

“Good, then let’s go see Cervantes,” the doctor said. “This one will be on me, since I knew his father. .”

After all, the prison was spitting distance from us, also on Sierpes Street, near the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s palace. It was an enormous prison, or rather, an overcrowded one. Eighteen thousand people passed through it a year.

“If you believe the figure published by the municipal authorities, señor,” I said as we walked there, “there could be eighteen thousand people in that prison at the moment. That would mean that every sixth person in Sevilla was a prisoner!”

“That’s the spirit of this city,” the doctor replied. “Everyone has come here to get rich quickly. Even the beggars came here for that once upon a time. There are typically lots of prisoners in such places.”

This was surely true as well, but I would add that the prison in Sevilla was not a municipal prison, but rather a royal one, so it held people from all over Spain. Señor Frampton had also spent some time there. It was a true Tower of Babel inside. I wondered where all those people slept at night. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they slept stacked up on top of one another.

No, it was not like Arcadia, as Cervantes would say. Instead of green fields and clear streams — jagged stone walls and bars; instead of pretty young shepherds and shepherdesses, called “pastors” in Arcadia, by the way — angry guards on the one side and cut-throats on the other.

We entered a clean room with whitewashed walls. This was where they examined the prisoners who were to be released. Cervantes was waiting for us inside. I was seeing him for the first time. He was of average height, with an oval visage, chestnut hair, a smooth open forehead, lively eyes, a hooked but well-proportioned nose, a coppery beard and fair complexion, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, with a pot belly and plump legs.

The doctor greeted him and shook hands with him (as did I), looked at his tooth, and started in on the treatment. First, he cleaned the tooth of impurities with a piece of cloth soaked in tobacco juice, then used tweezers to place a small ball of tobacco in the hole in the tooth.

“That,” said the doctor, “will prevent any further decay of the tooth and will leech out the puss. Spit, but be careful not to spit out the tobacco. I’ll come back tomorrow to change the tobacco. In two or three days your toothache will be gone.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Cervantes replied.

“Tell me, just between friends, did you really steal that money?” the doctor asked.

“Not a cent of it!” Cervantes replied emphatically. “If I had stolen it, they would know that by now. All the walls have ears here.”

The doctor involuntarily glanced at the wall. I did, too. Yes, of course. We should have thought of that. It makes perfect sense.

“You take after your father.” Dr. Monardes shook his head. “Back in the day, in order to practice medicine, Rodrigo claimed left and right that he was licensed, but it turned out he was only a bachelor of sciences.”

“But he wasn’t any worse than any licensed physician,” Cervantes replied.

“That’s true,” the doctor agreed. “Actually, who knows whether he was even a bachelor. But that’s neither here nor there. He really was good. In our trade, that’s the only thing that counts. And in your trade, as well.”

“That is surely the case in all trades, señor,” Cervantes said.

“Yes,” agreed the doctor.

“Absolutely!” I chimed in. Incidentally, I am not even a bachelor of sciences. It’s not necessary. It had crossed my mind to while away a year or two at the university, why not, but they want money on top of everything, which was just going too far.

The doctor continued talking to Cervantes and making little ambiguous jokes with him, which made it clear that he didn’t believe him all too much — not him, nor the so-called “honest men”—but then Cervantes said something which I have committed to memory: “That is the philosophy of the ancient cynics, señor,” he said. “As old as the world itself and with many merits. But the bad thing about it is that even if Christ himself were to descend to earth once again, you would never believe it. You would think he was simply some charlatan, who says and does those things for his own benefit, led by hidden goals and intentions. You would suspect him of hypocrisy. The cynics say that the world is bad, and that people are hypocritical, vain, and deceitful, and that everyone is only out for his own gain. When everyone believes that, the world remains just as bad as it was, if not worse. It will never get any better that way.”

“It will never get any better that way.” Dr. Monardes nodded seriously. “It will change through cold common sense. Through medicine, knowledge, and science. That’s the only way it will happen.”

“That change will hardly be very significant, señor,” Cervantes said.

“Who knows? We’ll see,” replied Dr. Monardes. “In any case, if some people had not discovered the healing power of tobacco, that little ball would not be in your mouth right now and your tooth would not be saved.”

“Well, I guess that is something,” Cervantes laughed. “Today the tooth, tomorrow the whole jaw.”

“I was just giving you a concrete example,” the doctor replied. “From now on, you can exercise your own reason and try to imagine just how far it could go. Even though that would be pointless. No one knows how far it could go, nor could anyone possibly know. The moralists keep chattering away. .”

“I’m not a moralist,” Cervantes said.

“The moralists keep chattering away,” the doctor continued, while putting his things back into his bag, “about how we can change people, rather than how we can change the circumstances. People cannot be changed, but circumstances can. By the way, our friend Ficino in Italy claims that people can be changed, too. Through education, he says. Who knows? Perhaps. In any case, circumstances certainly can be. Forget the people and change the circumstances. That will actually work. Until tomorrow, Cervantes. And be careful not to spit out the ball of tobacco.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Cervantes said and got up from the bed he had been sitting on. “I’ll be careful.”

Thus our first visit to him ended.

On our way out, I spotted Rincon among the people in the corridors and turned to him.

“What are you doing here?” I asked in surprise. At first, I thought they had thrown him in prison.

“I’ve got friends here,” he replied. “I come to visit them now and again.”

“Aha,” I said, lifted my hand in farewell, and hurried on after the doctor, who hadn’t noticed that I had made this detour and who had now stopped and was looking around for me.

“Where did you disappear to?” he asked. “I thought something had happened to you.”

“I saw Rincon,” I said.

“What? Rincon here?” the doctor said in surprise.

“He’s here for visiting hours,” I explained.

“I see,” the doctor nodded.

The next day we came back to replace Cervantes’ ball of tobacco. And on the third day, they released him. His toothache had disappeared and he no longer felt any pain. He still felt some slight tingling when he chewed on that side, but with time that would disappear as well, the doctor said. Cervantes stopped by the doctor’s house after being released, and the three of us went to drink a glass of jerez to his health at the Three Horses. Cervantes’s family had scattered, nobody lived here anymore. Most of them had gone to Madrid. He only had some distant relatives on Feria Street, and afterwards he was thinking of stopping by there as well. And after that he was going to leave the city and go to Madrid or perhaps Barcelona — he hadn’t yet decided. “I’ll decide on the way,” he said. We chatted a bit at the Three Horses and then went our separate ways — he set off towards Feria, while we went back to Sierpes. Cervantes was in a good mood, happy, as was to be expected. “Free again,” he kept saying. “Freedom is quite something.” I love seeing people in good moods, happy people. They radiate such vitality, such hope. They radiate freedom. The doctor is almost never like that. For some reason, he always looks slightly annoyed. He also radiates vitality, but his is of a different sort, a different sort entirely.

“I’ll put you in my very next work, señor. Without fail!” Cervantes cried, already a dozen feet from us, his hand raised in a parting wave. “I’ve thought up something about two dogs. It’ll be good. Keep an eye out for it.”

“Fine. Thank you very much,” the doctor replied rather oddly.

Then Cervantes turned his back on us and continued on down the street at a brisk pace, a large sack swaying on his back.

“Perhaps you are the second dog,” the doctor turned to me.

“That’s fine with me,” I said, nevertheless somewhat offended by his remark. “I love dogs. I grew up with them. My father had two dogs in his yard, and in our garden at Rojas. .”

“Yes, yes, fine,” the doctor waved dismissively. “You walk on ahead, you keep bumping into my legs.”

We continued on our way.