Thrown into Nature

4. Female Swelling

In Peñana, it was not a sick man who awaited us, but a sick woman. She was lying swollen in a bed with the curtains pulled aside, groaning. Her enormous white stomach seemed to take up half the bed.

“Relax, woman,” the doctor said, putting his hand to her forehead, “we’ll set things aright. What month of swelling are you in?”

“The eighth,” she replied and kept moaning.

Since I knew what to do in such cases, I asked them to bring kindling, lit a fire, and waited next to it with a large tobacco leaf across my knees.

“What’s your name?” I heard the doctor’s voice behind me.

“Maria,” the woman replied.

“Why do I even bother asking?” the doctor murmured.

When the fire was sufficiently kindled, I pushed aside two coals with a pair of tongs and began turning the leaf above them like a pig on a spit. The leaf must be heated up, it must get hot, but not burn. Since I am quite experienced at this task—“roasting the tobacco,” as Dr. Monardes calls it — I was ready very soon. It used to take me two or three leaves to get the desired result. However, with practice one can achieve unbelievable skill in all manner of things.

I took the hot leaf, tossing it from hand to hand, went over to the bed, and carefully placed it on the swollen woman’s navel.

“Ouch!” she said.

“This is Señor da Silva,” the doctor explained, “my assistant. This leaf will warm you up, it will draw all your humors up and via the umbilical cord it will reach precisely where it needs to go.”

But the leaf did not have the desired effect. Typically, it is not sufficient on its own. The woman kept groaning, and after waiting a bit to confirm that the leaf alone would not do the trick, the doctor dug around in his inside pocket and took out a cigarella.

“Woman, this,” he said, holding the panacea upright with three fingers before her eyes like a spear, “is a cigarella! I would like you to take a very gentle puff on it, hold the smoke in your mouth without inhaling, and then let it out. Do this two or three times. Then you must swallow the saliva. But puff very gently,” the doctor said again, handing her the lit cigarella, “otherwise you could harm the fetus.”

“It won’t make her miscarry, will it?” The husband, who had been standing with me in the opposite corner of the room, turned to me in alarm.

“Nonsense!” I said, cocking my head to the side, as was my wont in such cases. “Why would she miscarry?! What you see before you is Nature itself, not some basket of eggs! This is strong stuff!”

I thought of that sonnet by Pelletier in L’Amour des amours, where he describes how the Earth in its youth collided with some kind of heavenly body in the form of a medusa and miscarried the Moon. “Tossed from the womb unripe,” those are his exact words. He’s talking about the moon, of course, that it is unripe. Otherwise, Pelletier says, the Earth would have given birth to another planet. Mars, who had caused the Earth to swell, was extremely disappointed, he turned his back and grew completely cold to her. From then on, the couple, at one time fused by the hot flame of love, parted ways. The Moon, born prematurely, circled stillborn in space. But nowhere does he say what happened to that Medusa. The first time I read the book, I impatiently leafed through the whole thing to the very end to see whether it mentioned what had happened to Medusa, but I didn’t find anything. I was so fired up that after that I carefully reread the whole thing line by line, but again didn’t find anything. I did, however, discover a great poet. Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say.

The cigarella did the trick. The woman calmed down, her pains subsided. She was lying on the bed with a sweaty brow and her big white belly, swollen like. . like I don’t know what — like Achilles’ shield, like a round hill above a river, like a marble cask, like a stack of hay. Nature had filled her up and stretched her seams to bursting. How awful — I thought to myself — to be so close to Nature, to be so completely under her power. Nature does what she likes and won’t spare you for a second. Unless mighty tobacco is firmly squeezing her throat with his sturdy fingers!

“It’s quieted down,” the woman said, placing her hand on her belly, slightly below the tobacco leaf.

“I’ll say! How could it not. .” The doctor said, shaking his head.

Then he turned to the husband and said, “I’ll leave this cigarella here, in case you need it. But don’t you smoke it up prematurely!” He raised an admonishing finger at the man.

“No! Of course not!” the chap replied, releasing a torrent of words and empty twaddle. The doctor listened to him with an air of boredom, pursing his lips. I, however, lost patience and lashed out at him.

“Shut up!” I said. “We’re not here to listen to your drivel.”

And he shut up. The last thing we needed was to miss crazy old Lope thanks to this windbag.

When we got outside, the doctor said to me: “Guimarães, I must reprimand you. You should not have lashed out at the man like that. The woman is sick, but he is the one paying. Never forget who is paying. When all is said and done, he is the important one for us.”

“Of course he’ll pay, to hell with him, what else can he do?” I replied.

“That’s true, but still,” the doctor insisted. “This will be very important for you in the future, in principle.”

Then we got into the carriage, set out for Sevilla, and willy-nilly we began talking about Woman.

“The human female,” the doctor said, “is Nature’s favorite weapon. I am sure that in her eyes, woman ranks highest in the hierarchy of all creatures, far higher than you or me. There is no creature higher than she. You will object that females of all species reproduce, some of them far more profusely than the human female. For example, bees, caterpillars, and so forth. That might be true — but then again it might not — but that is not the point. Woman not only reproduces Nature, but besides she can sing, speak, play music, deck herself out in front of the mirror. . and think,” the doctor continued after a short pause. “She can laugh, leap, talk, sing. That verges on the impossible.”

“Yet Nature does not spare her, either, she torments her as well,” I said. “She is that reckless.”

“Oh, she doesn’t do it out of recklessness,” the doctor replied. “You must have a proper understanding of such things if you wish to become a good physician.” He raised his index finger. “Nature acts through abundance. She gives birth to such an abundance of creatures that she can afford to be indifferent to every one of them individually. Human females, for example, are so numerous, that even if half of them were to disappear in the next second, this would not have any particular consequences, except that it might become a bit quieter.”

I thought of Jesús at the theater and how he exclaimed: “By all the saints! My wife is dead, she refuses to do the laundry!”

“Certain inconveniences would result, too” I said.

“Minor ones,” the doctor replied. “In any case, there would be enough women left for Nature to continue reproducing. Like the leaves on the trees, Guimarães. Who pays attention to a single leaf? Even if they all were to fall at once, they would come back again next year.”

“Yes, but certain things are very rare, unique,” I objected.

“That odious old man Plato says the same thing,” Dr. Monardes nodded. “By the way, nearly all old men are odious, for easily discernable reasons. But I’ll expand on that thought some other time. As for the things you were talking about — well, Nature will fritter them away in any case. As she cannot multiply them to abundance, she doesn’t know what to do with them. So there’s no sense in talking about that. That’s the whole point, that’s the secret and the key — the abundance. Everything tends toward abundance. Life tends towards abundance and death tends toward abundance. Absolutely everything. Because of this, nothing makes much sense. With the exception of medicine, of course.”

“Your wisdom tends toward abundance as well, señor, yet it is still very meaningful,” I said. I had assumed the stance I assume when I am deeply impressed. I learned it from Francisco Rodrigues. He claimed that it was very ancient, that it came from antiquity itself and was thought up by some Rodin character, if I’m not mistaken. This Rodin character himself was supposedly Greek. I don’t know where Francisco Rodrigues learned all these things. I assume he learned them on Magellan’s ship. Three years at sea is a long time. Everyone would have talked about everything he’d ever seen, heard, read or that had ever crossed his mind. When you think about how something that took you a year can then be retold in five minutes, or a half an hour at most, it’s even a bit frightening. Once you start telling your story, you can easily reach the conclusion that you’ve wasted your life and your time.

“Abundance, Guimarães,” the doctor went on, rather encouraged by my reaction, it seems to me, “that is the secret of all things and their inherent goal. If they were made in a slightly different way, that would have been their only goal, but since they are so abundantly made, they. .”

“Señores,” at that moment we heard Jesús’ voice as he stopped the carriage, “I’ve got to make a quick stop. . I can’t hold it any longer.”

He passed by us with rather stiff movements, crossed the road, and squatted in the tall green grass.

Does even that tend toward abundance? I wondered.

“Jesús,” Dr. Monardes called to him. “What are you doing in that grass? You’ll pick up some tick.”

“I can’t s. . on the road, señor,” he replied. His backside gleamed a faint white amidst the grass in the dusky air, like an old, time-worn silver coin on a hunk of dung, as Pelletier would say (perhaps).

“Why not?” the doctor replied. “The road is already covered with crap.”

“I can’t,” Jesús said again. “It’ll scare the horses.”

“I see. . what?” the doctor exclaimed.

“The horses, it’ll scare the horses, señor.”

“Ah, I understand,” the doctor said, but from the look he gave me it was clear that he didn’t understand much. I didn’t understand either, but the absolute last thing in the world, really the very last, that I would sit down to think about is what Jesús the coachman is trying to say.

“Come on, Jesús,” the doctor shouted after a while. “We’ll miss Lope.”

“Oh no, by no means, señor,” Jesús shouted back. “I’m coming, I’ll be right there.”

After a minute or two he really did appear, hastily hitching up his pants.

“It’s only human, señores!” he said as he passed by us.

“Yes,” the doctor replied. “Where there’s one, there’s also the other.”

I quickly grasped his meaning and laughed. Leaving modesty aside for the moment, I must share with the reader — so he will not be wondering in the future — that I grasp things quite quickly; I discover that which was left unsaid and master new knowledge at an impressive speed and, as people who know me say, with astonishing insightfulness. I am not proud of this, nor do I boast about it; rather, I have humbly come to accept these qualities of mine as a fact of life. After all, I could not be anything other than what I am. Fortunately, and unlike many others, I do not have to be something else. This thought fills me with deep satisfaction, despite the fact that for now I am rather poor. However, this usually does not last long for people like me. Take Dr. Monardes, for example. .

“Sevilla, señores.”

Yes, indeed.

At the Maria Immaculata Theater, Jesús is standing on stage with his arm raised toward the sky, yelling: “By all the saints! My wife is dead, she refuses to do the laundry!”

He lets out a sob and starts tearing his shirt, which was probably sewn especially for the occasion from some yellow and red checkered tavern tablecloth. Next, he kicks the bucket, which is once again full of water, and splashes several people in the front rows, who begin grumbling in dissatisfaction, but at that moment Lope’s people on the left side of the stalls drown them out by hollering ecstatically and clapping their hands as they jump to their feet. Gradually, everyone stands up and begins clapping. I do, too, willy-nilly. Jesús, grinning from ear to ear, runs to the side and leaves the stage. Don Garcia de Blanco chides his beautiful daughter for not wanting to marry the wily Moor Alfonso, who pretends to be a nobleman from Aragon, but who is really a merchant from Granada, a Morisco. Standing next to the don is the local priest, Father Rodriguez, his hands meekly clasped across his chest; he also urges the beautiful maiden Maria to marry the “nobleman” Alfonso. The wily Moor has promised him one hundred ducats for his help. Afterwards the pair intends to swindle Don Garcia and divide his properties between them. The beautiful maiden sobs. She runs off stage, followed by the priest and a brooding Don Garcia, who walks slowly, his hand on his brow.

Then, amidst showers of applause, her true love appears on stage — the Caballero Morales, riding a horse, his unsheathed sword in one hand and the banner of Hernàn Cortes in the other.

The horse is covered in a yellow cloak that’s embossed with the red lions of the Habsburgs, while Enrique’s dirty, decrepit boots are visible beneath it, along with two other feet. No, they are not Jesús’s. He got lucky this time.

Caballero Morales gives a speech about love. He has fought in the name of love in America, against the Turks, against the Berbers, in Italy, and in the Low Countries. He has killed many an enemy. After wild applause, he waves his sword and the banner of Hernàn Cortes. The horse romps from one end of the stage to the other. From my seat in the balcony I can see very well who is whinnying beneath the footlights to the left — it is Jesús, of course. Good choice.

Lope’s people down below have been on their feet since the caballero’s appearance and have not stopped clapping and shouting the whole time. I am also on my feet. Finally, Caballero Morales swears upon the Holy Blood that he will win the heart and hand of the beautiful maiden Maria or die, and exits the stage, so I can sit down again. Relieved, I light a cigarella. The surrounding darkness carries me off, the stage seems to drift away from me, and I hear the lines floating from it like a faraway hum, like the babbling of a brook, wrapped in the vapors of the cigarella.

People are like this small, darkened theater — I think to myself — they put on their plays inside. And when you step outside, Nature begins. There everything is bathed in a completely different light. No matter whether it’s day or night — a completely different light begins. The streets begin, and the buildings, the Guadalquivir, the bridges in the distance, people scurrying to and fro, the hills begin, the roads, the clouds, the olive groves, the vineyards, the rivers, the wind. . And it has no end. It stretches forth infinitely, in all directions. Nature.

I notice with a start that everyone around me is on their feet and quickly get up. The cigarella hinders me, so I toss it down into the stalls. I don’t know what happens to it afterwards. But I do know what is happening on stage.

Caballero Morales is embracing the maiden Maria, his sword still in his hand. Next to them, run through, lies the perfidious Moor. Don Garcia de Blanco, raising his palm, solemnly blesses them. Off to the side, Jesús, followed by a few more representatives of the peasantry, gives the treacherous priest a boot to the backside, kicking him off the stage step by step while waving the banner of Hernàn Cortes. At that moment Jesús’ wife appears. Come on now, Lope, that’s really too much — I think to myself — now you’ve even got people rising from the dead. But no, she hadn’t died, but rather had gotten lost in the forest. The two of them embrace; then she starts bawling him out about something. The caballero and Maria, locked in an embrace, approach them. Smiling, the caballero takes Cortes’ banner from Jesús and gives him two small coins as a sign of gratitude. While Jesús and his wife bow before him, the horse once again appears on stage, this time with six legs beneath it. Caballero Morales and Maria get on, the caballero says a few lines to the audience about their happy future, and the pair exits stage right, waving. Jesús had said that morning that it would be a tragedy, but Lope clearly changed his mind at the last minute.

Then Don Garcia begins reciting his closing monologue. However, the audience in the stalls has started to leave — nobody feels like listening to closing monologues. Lope’s people vainly try to stop them by blocking their way — but there are too few of them. They’ve got to get rid of that old-fashioned practice of closing monologues. People don’t want to listen to monologues anymore — they want action, they want something to happen. It’s not like it used to be. This actor, however, is good — he quickly finishes his monologue and shouts “Long live the king!” Everyone stops in their tracks. Lope jumps up on stage and starts bowing, his hand on his heart. Soon all the actors have joined him, holding hands. Jesús is there, too. That’s our Jesús — I’d say he did a very fine job. The others were very good as well. When all is said and done, Lope isn’t so bad. Although he’s far from perfect, he really does have a knack for certain things. If I think about it, I could even say what things precisely. The audience around me is applauding enthusiastically. Well, well, Dr. Monardes is climbing up on stage to shake hands with Jesús. I would go up there myself, but I’m too far away. I wave to them to get their attention. Jesús finally sees me and points me out to the doctor. They both lift their hands in greeting; I do the same. I wonder where Dr. Monardes’ daughters are. Some imbecile kicks me in the shin. Yes, I need to make my way towards the exit.

This mob could trample you like nothing. I sweep along with the crowd, my hand on my purse, and just when I think it will never end — here I am outside, on the street. I take a breath, relieved. The night is a warm June night, a barely perceptible breeze creeps gently across my face, the light of the torches glows all around and long shadows stretch from the people like swaying X’s. Up ahead, beyond the stretch of houses, several stars shine meekly in the distance, the sky looks cool, it looks lighter tonight. The night of Andalusia, Pelletier, the sky of Andalusia. What a pity you’ve never seen them. Or perhaps you have seen them?

What about my purse? My purse is right where it should be. The mosquitoes of the Guadalquivir buzz around my ears. I light a cigarella and they disappear. Perhaps they are already dead. I search the hubbub and the people surrounding me, trying to spot Dr. Monardes and Jesús. Then suddenly I remember those little islands down the Guadalquivir, the ones the water yieldingly skirts. I’ve passed by there and sometimes I’ve wondered what is on them, what would I see, if at the same moment I were there, looking towards the road I am travelling along? Dr. Monardes and Jesús, as I see them now, coming out of an exit on the ground floor, advancing with small steps in the tangle of people, which gradually scatters and dissolves into the street, as if someone is untangling it strand by strand. I call out, raise my hand to get their attention, and head over to them.