Zorro

PART TWO

Barcelona, 1810–1812

I am encouraged to continue. I do so with a light heart, since you nave read this far. The part to come is more important than what happened before. A person’s childhood is not easy to recount, but it is necessary if I am to give you the full picture. Childhood is a miserable period filled with unfounded fears, such as being afraid of imaginary monsters, and of ridicule; from the literary point of view it has no suspense, since children tend to be a little dull. Furthermore, they have no power; adults decide for them, and they do it badly; they drive home into their little ones their own mistaken ideas about reality, and then their offspring spend the rest of their lives trying to break free of those beliefs. That was not necessarily the case with Diego de la Vega, our Zorro, because from an early age he did more or less what he pleased. He was fortunate in that the people around him, preoccupied with their own passions and concerns, paid little attention to him. He reached the age of fifteen with no great vices or virtues, except for a disproportionate love of justice, though whether that is a vice or a virtue, I am not sure. Let us just say that it is an integral part of his character. I could add that another of his qualities is vanity, but that would be to get ahead of the story; that developed later, when he realized that the number of his enemies was swelling always a good sign and that of his admirers as well, especially those of the female gender. Now he is a fine-looking man, but at fifteen, when he arrived in Barcelona, he was still a stripling with protruding ears, and his voice had not yet changed. The problem of the ears was the inspiration for wearing a mask; it filled the dual purpose of hiding both his identity and those fawn like appendages. Had Moncada seen those ears on Zorro, he would have recognized immediately that his detested rival was Diego de la Vega.

And now, if you will allow me, I shall continue my narration, which about here becomes interesting, at least for me, since it was during this time that I met our hero.

The merchant ship Santa Lucia which sailors called Adelita both out of affection and because they were sick of vessels with saints’ names made the journey between Pueblo de los Angeles and Panama City in a week’s time. Captain Jose Diaz had been sailing up and down the Pacific coast of America for eight years, and during that time had accumulated a small fortune with which he planned to find a wife thirty years younger than he and then retire to his village in Murcia. Alejandro de la Vega felt a twinge of unease as he entrusted his son Diego to Diaz; he thought of the captain as a man of pliable morals. It was said that he had made his money from smuggling and dealing in women of carefree reputation. The phenomenal Panamanian woman whose unfettered love of life lighted the nights of gentlemen in Pueblo de los Angeles had come there via the Santa Lucia. However, Diego decided, that was no reason to be uneasy; better that Diego be in the hands of someone he knew, however questionable, than sail alone across the world. Diego and Bernardo would be the only passengers on board, and he was confident that the captain would watch them closely. The crew consisted of twelve experienced men divided into two groups called “port” and

“starboard” to differentiate them, though those classifications had no meaning in this case. While one shift worked their four-hour watch, the other rested and played cards. Once Diego and Bernardo got over their seasickness and grew accustomed to the motion of the ship, they were able to join in normal shipboard life. They made friends with the sailors, who were kind to and protective of them, and spent their time in the same activities as the men. Most of the day the captain was locked in his stateroom with a mestiza woman, completely unaware that the boys in his charge were leaping around like monkeys in the rigging, risking skull fractures.

Diego turned out to be as skillful in acrobatics on the ropes hanging by a hand or a leg as he was in cards. He had luck in being dealt good hands, and he was terrifyingly slick in his play. With a face of purest innocence he fleeced the expert players; had they been betting money, they would have been bled dry, but they bet only beans or shells. Money was prohibited on board ship, precisely to avoid having the crew massacre one another over gambling debts. A heretofore unknown side of his milk brother was being revealed to Bernardo.

“We will never go hungry in Europe, Bernardo, because there will always be someone to beat at cards, and then it will be gold doubloons and not beans. How about that? Don’t look at me like that, for God’s sake you would think I’m a criminal. The bad thing about you is that you’re so holier-than-thou. Don’t you see that at last we’re free? There’s no Padre Mendoza around to threaten us with hell.”

Diego laughed; he was used to talking to Bernardo and answering himself.

As they approached Acapulco, the sailors began to suspect that Diego was doing a little double-dealing, and they threatened to throw him overboard when the captain wasn’t looking; fortunately along came the whales and distracted them. They came by the dozens, colossal creatures whispering in a chorus of love and stirring up the sea with their impassioned leapings. The whales would swim so near the Santa Lucia that the men could count the yellowish crustaceans on their backs. Their skin, dark and slightly textured, told the complete story of each of those giants and that of their ancestors from centuries back. Once in a while one of them breached, falling gracefully back into the water. Their spouts sprinkled the ship with a fine, cool spray. In the effort of dodging the whales and the excitement of reaching port in Acapulco, the sailors forgave Diego, but they warned him to be careful: it is easier to die from being a card shark, they said, than being a soldier in war. Furthermore, Bernardo, with his telepathic scruples, would not leave him alone, and Diego had to promise that he would not use his new proficiency to make himself rich at the cost of others, as he had been planning.

The best thing about life on shipboard, aside from being taken to their destination, was the freedom the boys had to attempt athletic feats that only tried-and-true sailors and freaks in the fair could perform.

As children they had hung upside down from the eaves by their feet, a sport that Regina and Ana vainly tried to discourage with swipes of their brooms. On the Santa Lucia there was no one to forbid the boys to take risks, and they seized the opportunity to develop the latent abilities they had had since childhood, talents that would serve them well in the world. They learned to swing like trapeze artists, swarm up the rigging like spiders, keep their balance eighty feet in the air, descend from the top of the mast holding onto the ropes, and slide along a tightrope to furl sails. No one paid the least attention to them, and in truth no one cared if they did fall and split their heads open. The sailors gave them some basic lessons. They taught them to tie seamen’s knots, to sing in chorus when more strength was needed, to knock their biscuits to loosen the weevils, never to whistle under sail, because it would cause the wind to shift, to sleep in short snatches, like newborn babies, and to drink rum laced with gunpowder to prove their manliness. Neither of them passed this last test; Diego nearly died from nausea, and Bernardo wept all night after he saw his mother. The first mate, a Scotsman named McFerrin, who was much more expert in matters of navigation than the captain, gave them their most important counsel: “One hand for sailing, the other for you.” He told them that at every moment, even in calm water, they should hold on to something. Once when Bernardo had gone out on the poop deck to see whether sharks were following, he forgot. He could not see them anywhere, but he had the feeling that as soon as the cook threw the scraps overboard, they would appear. He was thinking about that, distractedly scanning the surface, when the ship unexpectedly lurched and threw him overboard. He was a good swimmer, and by luck some one had seen him fall and raised the alarm; if they hadn’t, that would have been the end of it, because not even in those circumstances could he get out a sound. His dunking gave rise to a disagreement. Captain Jose Diaz thought that in view of the nuisance and the loss of time, it was not worth the trouble to stop and lower a dinghy to look for him.

If it had been the son of Alejandro de la Vega, perhaps he would not have been so hesitant, but this was only a dumb Indian in both senses of the word. He would have to be stupid to have fallen overboard, he argued. While the captain hesitated, pressed by McFerrin and the rest of the crew, for whom rescuing anyone who falls overboard was an inalienable principle of sailing, Diego dived in after his brother. He closed his eyes and jumped without thinking, because from the ship the distance down to the water looked enormous. He also remembered the sharks, which, if not there at that moment, were never too far away.

The shock of the cold waves left him dazed for a few seconds, but Bernardo reached him in a few strokes and held him with his nose above water. Given that his prize passenger ran the risk of being gobbled up if he didn’t act soon, Jose Diaz authorized the rescue. The Scotsman and three other men had already lowered the boat by the time the first sharks appeared and began their eager dance around the two bobbing figures. Diego yelled until he choked and swallowed water, while Bernardo calmly held him with one arm and stroked with the other.

McFerrin fired his pistol at the nearest shark, and immediately the sea was tinged with a brush stroke the color of rust. That caught the attention of the other predators, which fell upon the wounded killer with the clear intention of having it for lunch, giving time to the sailors to help the boys. The applause and whistles of the crew celebrated the maneuver,

Between lowering the boat, locating the boys, beating off the boldest sharks with their oars, and returning to the ship, a lot of time was lost. The captain considered it a personal insult that Diego had jumped in after Bernardo, forcing his hand, and as reprisal he forbade him to climb the masts but it was too late, because by then they were off Panama, where he was to leave his passengers. The youths sadly bid the crew of the Santa Lucia farewell and went ashore with their luggage, armed with the dueling pistols, the sword, and Diego’s whip as deadly as a cannon as well as Bernardo’s slaughtering knife, a weapon useful for everything from cleaning fingernails and slicing bread to hunting large game. Alejandro de la Vega had warned them to trust no one. The natives had a reputation for thievery, and so they would take turns sleeping and not let their trunks out of sight for a minute.

Panama City seemed magnificent to Diego and Bernardo compared to the small Pueblo de los Angeles, anything would have. For three centuries the riches of the Americas had passed through there, destined for the royal coffers of Spain. From the port goods were transported in mule trains through the mountains, and then in boats down the Chagres River to the Caribbean Sea. The importance of that port, like that of Portobelo on the Atlantic coast of the isthmus, had declined at the same rate that shipments of gold and silver from the colonies dwindled.

It was possible to go from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic by sailing around the extreme southern tip of the continent at Cape Horn, but a mere glance at the map illustrates what an endless journey that was.

As Padre Mendoza explained to the boys, Cape Horn lies where the world of God ends and the world of ghosts begins. Trekking across the narrow waist of the isthmus of Panama, a trip that takes only a couple of days, saves months of sailing, which was why Emperor Charles V, as early as 1534, had dreamed of digging a canal to join the two oceans, a preposterous idea, like so many that occur to certain monarchs. The major drawback in Panama was the miasma the gaseous emanations rising from rotten jungle vegetation and the quagmires of the rivers, sources of horrifying plagues. A sobering number of travelers in that country died from yellow fever, cholera, and dysentery. Some also went mad, it was said, but I suppose that applied to fanciful people little fitted for wandering around in the tropics. So many died in epidemics that the grave diggers did not shovel dirt over the common graves piled with corpses because they knew that more would be added in the next hours.

To protect Diego and Bernardo from such dangers, Padre Mendoza gave each of them a medal of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers and sailors. Those talismans gave miraculous results, and both survived. A good thing, too, because otherwise I would not be telling this story. The stifling tropical heat took the boys’ breath, and the mosquitoes were so big they had to swat them with their boots, but everything else went well. Diego was enchanted with the city, where no one was watching them and where there were so many temptations to choose from. Only Bernardo’s sanctimoniousness saved his brother from ending up in some gambling den or in the arms of a woman of goodwill and bad reputation, where he might have perished from a knifing or some exotic illness. Bernardo did not close his eyes that night, not so much to defend them from bandits as to look after Diego.

The two milk brothers and friends ate at the port, then passed the night in a cheap inn where travelers made themselves as comfortable as possible on pallets on the floor. By paying double, they were entitled to hammocks covered with filthy mosquito nets, where they were more or less safe from rats and cockroaches. The next day they started across the mountains toward Cruces on a good cobbled road the width of two mules, which with their characteristic lack of invention regarding names, the Spanish called the Camino Real. In the high country the air was not as heavy and humid as at sea level, and the view of the countryside below was a true paradise. Against the unbroken green of the jungle, richly colored butterflies and jewel-bright birds flashed like magical brush strokes The natives were extremely decent; instead of taking advantage of the two young travelers, which they had a reputation for doing, they offered them fish with fried plantain and put them up in a hut that was crawling with vermin but at least offered protection from the torrential rains. The boys were advised to stay away from tarantulas and the green toads that spit in the eyes of the unwary, blinding them. They were also warned of a variety of nut that burns the enamel off teeth and produces lethal stomach cramps.

In some stretches the Chagres River was a dense swamp, but in others the water was crystal clear. River passengers were transported in canoes or flat boats with a capacity of eight or ten passengers along with their baggage. Diego and Bernardo had to wait a whole day, until there were enough people to fill a boat. They wanted to take a dip in the river to cool off the blazing heat had stunned the snakes and silenced the monkeys but as soon as they put a toe in the water, the caimans that had been dozing beneath the surface, blending into the slime, came to life. The boys beat a quick retreat, accompanied by the hoots of the natives. Neither of them dared drink the water their amiable hosts offered it was green with tadpoles they simply bore their thirst until other passengers, rough merchants and adventurers, shared their bottles of wine and beer. The boys accepted so eagerly and drank with such gusto that afterward neither of them could remember that part of the trip, except for the strange way the natives had of navigating the river. Six men equipped with long poles were stationed on two long narrow catwalks on either side of the boat. Facing the bow, they buried the tips of the poles in the riverbed and then pushed with all their might to move the boat forward. Because of the infernal heat, they were entirely naked. The trip took about eighteen hours, which Diego and Bernardo passed in a state of anesthetized hallucination, spreadeagled on their backs beneath a canvas protecting them from a merciless sun. When they reached their destination, the other travelers, elbowing each other and laughing, had to push them off the boat. That was how, in the twelve leagues between the mouth of the river and the city of Portobelo, they lost the trunk containing most of the princely wardrobe Alejandro de la Vega had acquired for his son. It was actually a lucky stroke, because the latest European fashions had not as yet reached California. Diego’s clothing was frankly laughable.

Portobelo, founded in 1500 on the Gulf of Darien, was an essential city; treasures going to Spain were shipped from there, and merchandise from Europe was received. In the opinion of the captains of the time, it was the most efficient and secure port in the Indies, defended by several forts in addition to barriers of coral reefs. The Spanish constructed the forts with coral mined from the depths of the sea, workable when it was still wet, but so resistant when it dried that cannonballs scarcely made a dent in it. Once a year, when the Royal Treasure Fleet arrived, there was a fair that lasted forty days; at that time the population grew by thousands and thousands of visitors.

Diego and Bernardo had heard that in the Casa Real del Tesoro, gold bars were stacked up like firewood, but they were in for a disappointment: the city had declined in recent years, partly because of attacks by pirates, but most of all because the American colonies were not as profitable for Spain as they had been. The city’s wood and stone dwellings were discolored by rain, the public buildings and storehouses were overgrown with weeds, and the forts languished in an eternal siesta. Despite all that, there were several ships in the port and swarms of slaves loading precious metals, cotton, tobacco, and chocolate, as well as unloading crates for the colonies. Among the vessels was the Madre de Dios, “Mother of God,” on which Diego and Bernardo would cross the Atlantic. That ship, constructed fifty years before but still in excellent condition, was a three-masted square-rigger, larger, slower, and heavier than the schooner Santa Lucia, and better suited for ocean travel. Her crowning glory was a spectacular figurehead in the form of a siren. Sailors believed that bare breasts calmed the sea, and those of this marvel were voluptuous.

The captain, Santiago de Leon, appeared to be a man of unique personality. He was short and wiry, with carved features in a face weathered by many seas. He limped, owing to a clumsy operation to remove a musket ball from his left leg; the surgeon had not been able to extract it, and the attempt had left the captain crippled and in pain for the rest of his days. The man was not given to complaining; he gritted his teeth, dosed himself with laudanum, and found distraction in his collection of fabulous maps. These charts pinpointed the places that voyagers tried to locate for centuries, with little success, like El Dorado, the city of pure gold; Atlantis, the sunken continent whose inhabitants are human but have gills like fish; the mysterious islands of Luquebaralideaux in the Mer Sauvage, populated by enormous boneless sausages with sharp teeth that move in herds and feed on the mustard that flows in the streams and is said to cure even the worst wounds. The captain entertained himself by copying the maps and adding sites of his own invention, with detailed descriptions, then selling them for a king’s ransom to antique dealers in London. He was not deceiving anyone; he always signed them in his own hand and added a mysterious phrase that anyone in the know would recognize: “A numbered work from the Encyclopedia of Desires, complete version.” By Friday the cargo was on board, but the Madre de Dios did not set sail because Christ had died on a Friday. That was a bad day to begin a voyage. On Saturday the forty-man crew refused to leave port because a redheaded man had walked by them on the dock and a dead pelican had dropped onto the ship’s bridge two ominous signs. Finally on Sunday, Santiago de Leon got his men to unfurl the sails. The only passengers were Diego, Bernardo, an auditor returning from Mexico to his own country, and his whiney, ugly thirty-year-old daughter. This senorita fell in love with each and every one of the rough sailors, but they fled from her as if from the devil; everyone knows that virtuous women on board ship attract bad weather and other calamities. The men reached the conclusion that her virtue was the result of lack of opportunity, not her nature. The auditor and his daughter shared a tiny stateroom, but Diego and Bernardo, like the crew, slept in hammocks strung in the foul-smelling mess deck of the ship. The captain’s cabin on the quarterdeck served as office, command center, dining room, and game room for officers and passengers. The door and the furniture folded for convenience, like most things on board, where space was the greatest luxury. During their several weeks at sea, the boys did not have an instant of privacy; the most basic functions were performed on a bucket in full view of everyone, if the seas were running high, or if calm, perched on a board projecting out over the water and fitted with a hole. No one knew how the modest daughter of the auditor managed, because no one ever saw her empty a chamber pot.

The sailors laid bets about it, at first laughing boisterously but later sobered by fear: constipation that lasted that long had to be the work of witchcraft. Aside from the constant movement and the crowding, the most notable thing about the ship was the noise. Wood creaked, metal clinked, barrels rolled, ropes moaned, and water lashed the hull.

For Diego and Bernardo, accustomed to the solitude, space, and silence of California, adjusting to life on shipboard was not easy.

Diego liked to sit on the shoulders of the figurehead, a perfect place to gaze at the infinite line of the horizon, be splashed with salt water, and watch the dolphins. He would put an arm around the wooden damsel’s head and grip her nipples with his toes. Considering the boy’s athleticism, the captain limited himself to ordering him to tie a rope around his waist; if he fell from there, the ship would pass right over him. Later, however, when he caught Diego at the tip of the mainmast, more than a hundred feet in the air, he said nothing. He had decided that if the boy was fated to die young, he could not prevent it. There was always activity on the ship, and it went on through the night, though most of the work was done during the day. Bells signaled the first watch at noon, when the sun was at its zenith and the captain took a sighting to fix their location. At that hour the cook handed out a pint of lemonade per man, to prevent scurvy, and then the mate distributed rum and tobacco, the only vices allowed on board, where betting money, fighting, falling in love, or even blaspheming was forbidden. At nautical twilight, that mysterious hour of dawn and evening when stars twinkle in the heavens but the line of the horizon is visible, the captain took new sightings with his sextant and consulted his chronometers and the large book of celestial ephemerides that indicate the position of the stars at every moment. For Diego, that geometric operation was fascinating; all the stars looked alike to him, and in every direction he saw nothing but the same lead-colored sea and the same white sky, but before long he learned to observe with the eyes of a navigator. The captain also constantly consulted the barometer that signaled the changes in air pressure that heralded storms and the days when his leg would be more painful.

At first, milk, meat, and vegetables were served at meals, but before a week had gone by, everyone aboard was limited to beans, rice, dried fruit, and the eternal hard-as-marble biscuits seething with weevils.

There was also salted meat, which the cook soaked a couple of days in water and vinegar before tossing it into the pot, hoping it would be less like saddle leather. What a great business deal his father could make with his smoked meat, Diego thought, but Bernardo pointed out that it was a pipe dream to think they could get sufficient supplies to Portobelo. At the captain’s table, to which Diego, the auditor and his daughter though not Bernardo were always invited there was also pickled cow’s tongue, olives, cheese from La Mancha, and wine. The captain put his chessboard and his cards at the passengers’ disposal, along with a handful of books that only Diego was interested in. Among them he found a couple of essays about possible independence for the colonies. Diego admired the example of the United States, which had freed itself from the English yoke, but it had not occurred to him that similar aspirations on the part of Spanish colonists in America might be praiseworthy until he read the captain’s publications.

Santiago de Leon turned out to be such an entertaining conversationalist that Diego sacrificed hours of happy acrobatics in the rigging in order to talk with him and study his fantastic maps. The captain, a solitary man, discovered the pleasure of sharing his knowledge with a young and inquisitive mind. The man was a tireless reader and always carried boxes of books that he exchanged in every port. He had been around the world several times, and he knew lands as strange as those described on his fabulous maps; he had been near death so many times that he had lost any fear of living. The most revealing thing to Diego, who was accustomed to absolute truths, was that this man with a Renaissance mentality doubted nearly everything that formed the intellectual and moral world of Alejandro de la Vega, Padre Mendoza, and Diego’s schoolmaster. At times Diego had questioned the rigid precepts hammered into his brain since his birth, but he had never dared challenge them aloud. When some rule made him too uncomfortable, he quietly ignored it; he never rebelled openly. With Santiago de Leon he dared for the first time to talk about subjects he had never discussed with his father. He was amazed to discover that there were many ways to think. De Leon opened his eyes to the fact that the Spanish were not the only ones who claimed superiority over the rest of humanity; every nationality suffered from the same delusion. In wars, the Spanish committed exactly the same atrocities as the French, or any other army: they raped, robbed, tortured, and murdered; Christians, Moors, and Jews all maintained that their God was the only true God, and held other religions in contempt. The captain was in favor of abolishing the monarchy and making the colonies independent, two concepts that were revolutionary to Diego, who had been raised with the belief that the king was holy and the obligation of every Spaniard was to conquer and Christianize other lands. Santiago de Leon exalted the equality, liberty, and fraternity of the French revolution, though he had never accepted the French invasion of Spain.

On this subject he showed signs of fierce patriotism: he would rather see his country sunk in the obscurantism of the Middle Ages, he said, than awake to the triumph of modern ideas if they were imposed by foreigners. He could not forgive Napoleon, who had forced the king of Spain to abdicate and then replaced him with his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, whom the people had nicknamed Pepe Botellas after his love of the bottle.

“All tyranny is abominable, my boy,” the captain concluded. “Napoleon is a tyrant. What good was the revolution if an emperor replaced the king? Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.”

“The kings’ authority is divine in origin, Captain,” Diego argued weakly, repeating his father’s words without really understanding what he was saying.

“Who has proved that? As far as I know, young de la Vega, God has not spoken to that subject.”

“According to the Holy Scriptures ”

“You have read them?” Santiago de Leon interrupted decisively.

“Nowhere in the Scriptures does it say that the Bourbons are to rule in Spain, or Napoleon in France. Besides, there is nothing holy about Holy Scriptures. They were written by men, not God.”

It was night, and the two were walking back and forth on the bridge.

The sea was calm, and above the eternal creaking of the ship Bernardo’s flute could be heard with hypnotic clarity, seeking his mother and Lightin-the-Night in the stars.

“Do you believe that God exists?” the captain asked Diego.

“Of course, Captain!”

With a sweep of his arm, Santiago de Leon indicated the dark firmament sprinkled with constellations. “If God exists, I am sure He is not interested in designating kings for every star in the heavens,” he said.

Diego de la Vega protested in horror. Doubting God was the last thing on his mind, a thousand times more serious than doubting the divine mandate of the monarchy. The feared Inquisition had burned people at the stake for much less, something that seemed not to worry the captain in the least.

Tired of winning beans and shells from the sailors, Diego turned to frightening them with spine-chilling tales drawn from the captain’s books and fantastic maps, which he embellished by drawing from his inexhaustible imagination, in which there were gigantic octopuses with tentacles capable of destroying a ship as large as the Madre de Dios, carnivorous salamanders the size of whales, and sirens that from a distance looked like seductive maidens but were in fact monsters with snakelike tongues. Never go near them, Diego warned the sailors, because they hold out their smooth arms to embrace an unwary seaman, kiss him, and then slip their lethal tongues down the poor fool’s throat and devour him from the inside out, leaving nothing but a skeleton covered with hide.

“Have you seen those glittering lights on the waves? You know, of course, that they signal the presence of the living dead, Christian sailors who have drowned in attacks by Turkish pirates. Since they were not able to receive absolution for their sins, their souls could not find the way to purgatory. They lie trapped in the wrecks of their ships on the bottom of the ocean and don’t even know that they are dead. On nights like this, those wandering souls rise to the surface. If by any chance a ship sails past, the living dead climb on board and steal anything they can find: anchor, wheel, the captain’s instruments, ropes, even the masts. But that isn’t the worst, my friends they also need sailors. Any they can catch, they drag down to the depths to help them salvage their boats and sail to Christian shores. I hope that doesn’t happen on this voyage, but we must be on guard. If you see any stealthy black figures, you can be sure they are the living dead. You will know them by their capes, which they wear to cloak the rattling of their poor bones.”

Diego found, to his delight, that his eloquence produced collective terror. He told his tales at night, after dinner, at the hour when the men were savoring their pint of rum and chewing their tobacco, because it was much easier to make their hair stand on end when it was dark.

After laying the groundwork with several days of hair-raising stories, he was ready for the coup de grace. Dressed entirely in black, wearing gloves and the cape with the buttons from Toledo, he made sudden brief appearances in the darkest corners of the ship. In that getup he was nearly invisible at night, except for his face, but Bernardo had the idea of covering it with a black kerchief in which he cut two holes for the eyes. Several sailors swore they saw at least one of the living dead. Instantly, word traveled that the ship was bewitched, and they laid that at the door of the auditor’s daughter, who had to be possessed by a devil, since she never used the chamber pot. She was the only one who could have attracted the ghosts. The rumor reached the ears of the nervous spinster and triggered such a brutal headache that the captain had to sedate her for two days with massive doses of laudanum. When Santiago de Leon learned what had happened, he summoned the sailors to the bridge and threatened to cut off all liquor and tobacco if they continued to spread such poppycock. Those dancing lights, he told them, were a natural phenomenon caused by weather, and the apparitions they thought they were seeing were the products of suggestion. No one believed the captain, but he had imposed order.

Once a semblance of calm had been restored, he led Diego by one wing to his stateroom and when they were alone warned him that if any living dead turned up again on the Madre de Dios, he, the captain, would have no reluctance to have Diego flogged.

“I have the right of life or death on my ship; and I’m even more entitled to scar your back for your lifetime. Do we understand one another, young de la Vega?” he growled between clenched teeth, accentuating each word.

It was as clear as day to Diego, but he didn’t answer because he was distracted by the glimpse of a medallion hanging around the captain’s neck; gold and silver, it was engraved with strange symbols. When Santiago de Leon noticed that Diego had seen it, he hurriedly tucked it inside and buttoned his jacket. His action was so abrupt that the boy was afraid to ask the significance of the jewel. Once his anger was spent, the captain was gentler.

“If we have favoring winds, and do not run into pirates, this voyage will last six weeks. You will have more than enough opportunity to be bored, my boy. I suggest that instead of terrorizing my men with childish pranks, you spend your time studying. Life is short; there is never enough time to learn.”

Diego rapidly figured that he had read nearly everything on board that interested him and by now had conquered the sextant, nautical knots, and sails, but he nodded in agreement; he had another science in mind.

He went down to the suffocating hold of the ship, where the cook was preparing Sunday dessert, a pudding of molasses and nuts that the crew eagerly awaited all week. The cook was a man from Genoa who had signed onto the Spanish merchant marine to avoid going to prison, where in all justice he should be for having hacked his wife to death. He had an unsuitable name for a sailor: Galileo Tempesta. Before he took over the galley on the Madre de Dios, Tempesta had been a magician, earning his living wandering from market to fair with his sleight-of-hand tricks. He had an expressive face, prominent eyes, and the hands of a virtuoso, with fingers like tentacles. He could make a coin disappear so smoothly that standing only a hand span away, it was impossible to discover how the devil he did it. He used breaks in his labors in the kitchen to practice; when he wasn’t palming coins or cards and making daggers disappear, he was sewing secret pockets into hats, boots, linings, and jacket cuffs that he used for hiding multicolored handkerchiefs and live rabbits.

“Senor Tempesta, the captain sent me to ask you to teach me everything you know,” Diego blurted out in one breath.

“I don’t know much about cooking, boy.”

“But I was referring to your magic.”

“You don’t learn that talking, that you learn doing,” Galileo Tempesta replied.

The rest of the voyage he devoted himself to teaching Diego his tricks for the same reason that the captain told the boy about his voyages and showed him his maps: because those men had never enjoyed as much attention as they received from Diego. At the end of the crossing, forty-one days later, Diego, among other amazing feats, could swallow a gold doubloon and pull it whole from one of his notable ears.

The Madre de Dios left the city of Portobelo behind and, taking advantage of the Gulf currents, swung north, sailing along the coast of the United States. At about the latitude of Bermuda, she headed into the Atlantic and three weeks later called at the Azores to stock up on water and fresh food. That archipelago of nine volcanic islands belonging to Portugal was an obligatory stop for whalers of every nationality. They arrived at Flores Island well named, since it was covered with hydrangeas and roses on the day of a national fiesta.

First the crew filled up on wine and the island’s typical hearty soup, then played around a while getting into fistfights with American and Norwegian whalers, and finally set off in a group to take part in the running of the bulls. The whole male population of the island, plus visiting sailors, raced in front of the bulls through the steep streets of the town, yelling the obscenities that Captain Santiago de Leon prohibited on board. The beautiful local women, with flowers in their hair and at their necklines, cheered from a prudent distance, while the priest and two nuns prepared bandages and the sacraments to tend the wounded and dying. Diego knew that any bull is always quicker than the swiftest human, but if it charges blind with anger it is possible to outwit it.

The boy had seen so many bulls in his short life that he was not overly afraid. Thanks to his experience, he saved Galileo Tempesta by a hair when a pair of horns aimed at his backside were ready to spear him.

Diego ran and whipped the beast with a stick to head it off as the magician dived headfirst into a clump of hydrangeas amid the applause and laughter of the crowd. Then it was Diego’s turn to bolt like a buck, with the bull at his heels. Although there was a lot of battering and bruising, no one died of being gored that year. It was the first time in history that had happened, and the people of the Azores did not know whether to take it as a good omen or a warning of disaster. That remained to be seen. In any case, the bulls made a hero of Diego. And Galileo Tempesta, deeply grateful, gave the boy a Moroccan dagger fitted with a hidden spring that allowed the blade to retract into the handle.

The Madre de Dios sailed with the trade winds for a few weeks more.

Coasting Spain, she passed Cadiz without stopping and headed toward the Strait of Gibraltar, the entrance to the Mediterranean controlled by the English, who were allies of Spain and enemies of Napoleon. With no major alarms, they followed the coast without putting into port, and finally arrived at Barcelona, the end of Diego and Bernardo’s journey.

To their eyes, the ancient Catalan port resembled a forest of masts and sails. There were ships of every origin, shape, and size. If the youths had been impressed by the little town of Panama, imagine the effect Barcelona had on them. The city lay proud and massive against a leaden sky accented with turrets, towers, and walls. From the harbor it looked like a splendid city, but in the dark of night the face of Barcelona changed. They were not able to debark until the next morning, when Santiago de Leon lowered dinghies to ferry his impatient crew and passengers ashore. In the greasy harbor hundreds of little launches were circulating among the larger vessels, and thousands of gulls filled the air with their squawking.

Diego and Bernardo bid farewell to the captain, Galileo Tempesta, and the sailors who were pushing and shoving to get into the yawl, in a frenzy to spend their pay on liquor and women. The auditor, meanwhile, had to carry his daughter, who had swooned from the foul odors in the air. And with good reason. When they reached shore, a beautiful and lively but unhealthful port awaited; deep in garbage, it was crawling with rats as big as dogs that boldly darted between the legs of a hurried throng. Wastewater ran in open gutters where barefooted children splashed in play and women emptied chamber pots from upper-story windows, yelling “Heads up!” to passersby, who had to jump aside to keep from being drenched with urine. Barcelona, with its hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, was one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Encircled by thick walls, guarded by the sinister La Ciudadela fort, and trapped between the ocean and the mountains, it had nowhere to grow but up. Garrets were added to houses, and rooms were subdivided into tiny cubicles where tenants crowded together without fresh air or clean water. Foreigners in assorted attire walked around the docks, insulting one another in incomprehensible tongues: sailors wearing striped stocking caps and sporting parrots on their shoulders, stevedores rheumatic from carrying too-heavy loads, rude vendors selling jerked beef and biscuits, beggars bubbling with lice and pustules, derelicts with ready knives and desperate eyes. Prostitutes of the lowest degree mingled with the crowd, while the more pretentious among them rode in carriages, competing in splendor with distinguished ladies. French soldiers trooped around prodding pedestrians with the butts of their muskets for the pure pleasure of annoying them. Behind their backs, women cursed them and spit on the ground. Nothing, however, could dim the incomparable elegance of that city bathed in the silvery light of the sea. When they stepped onto shore, Diego and Bernardo were so unaccustomed to walking on land that they staggered and nearly fell, just as they had on Flores

Island. They had to hold one another up until they could control the trembling of their knees and focus their eyes.

“And what do we do now, Bernardo? I agree with you that the first thing would be to rent a coach and try to locate the home of Don Tomas de Romeu. You say that first we ought to claim what is left of our luggage? Yes, you’re right.”

So they pushed their way through the crowd, Diego talking to himself and Bernardo a step behind, alert, fearing that someone would grab his distracted friend’s purse. They passed the market, where bovine old women were selling the produce of the sea, standing in puddles of fish heads and guts that were soaking into the ground beneath a cloud of flies. It was here they were intercepted by a tall man with the profile of a buzzard. In Diego’s eyes, judging from the blue velvet uniform, the gold epaulets of his jacket, and three-cornered hat perched on his white wig, he had to be an admiral. He greeted the man with a deep bow, sweeping the cobbles with his California sombrero.

“Senor Diego de la Vega?” the stranger inquired, visibly taken aback.

“At your service, caballero,” Diego replied.

“I am no caballero, sir. I am Jordi, Don Tomas de Romeu’s coachman. I was sent to look for you. I will return later for your luggage,” the man clarified with a frown, thinking that the youngster from the Indies was making fun of him.

Diego’s ears were beet red, and as he clapped his hat back on his head and prepared to follow, Bernardo was choking with laughter. Jordi led them to a slightly shabby carriage where the family majordomo was waiting. They rolled through tortuous cobbled streets leading away from the port, and soon came to a neighborhood of elegant homes and somber mansions. They turned into the patio of the residence of Tomas de Romeu, a large, dark, three-story house sitting between two churches. The majordomo commented that they were no longer disturbed by bells pealing at all hours because the French had removed the clappers as reprisal against the priests responsible for stirring up the guerrilla fighters. Diego and Bernardo, intimidated by the size of the house, did not even notice how rundown it was. Jordi led Bernardo to the servants’ quarters, and the majordomo escorted Diego up the exterior stairs to the piso noble, or main floor. They walked through salons in eternal shadow and icy corridors hung with threadbare tapestries and arms from the time of the Crusades. Finally they came to a dusty library badly lighted by a few candles and a dying fire in the fireplace. Tomas de Romeu was waiting there. He welcomed Diego with a fatherly embrace, as if he had known him always.

“I am honored that my good friend Alejandro has entrusted his son to me,” he proclaimed. “As of this instant you are a member of our family, Diego. My daughters and I will see to your comfort and contentment.”

De Romeu was a ruddy-faced, paunchy man of about fifty, with a roaring voice and thick sideburns and eyebrows. His lips curved upward in an involuntary smile that softened his rather haughty aspect. He was smoking a cigar and holding a glass of sherry in his hand, he asked a few courteous questions about the voyage and about the family Diego had left behind in California, then pulled a silk cord to summon the majordomo, whom he ordered in Catalan to take his guest to his rooms.

“We will dine at ten. You need not dress, we will be just family,” he said.

That night in the dining room, an immense hall with ancient furniture that had served several generations, Diego met the daughters of Tomas de Romeu. He needed only one glance to decide that Juliana, the elder, was the most beautiful woman in the world. Possibly he exaggerated, but it was true that the girl had the reputation of being one of the belles of Barcelona, as alluring, everyone said, as the celebrated Madame de Recamier of Paris had been in her day. Her elegant bearing, her classic features, and her raven black hair, milky skin, and jade green eyes were unforgettable. She had so many suitors that the family, and the merely inquisitive, had lost count. Gossip had it that they had all been rejected because her ambitious father wanted to climb a couple of rungs of the social ladder by marrying her to a prince.

They were mistaken; Tomas de Romeu was not capable of schemes of that nature. In addition to her remarkable physical attributes, Juliana was cultivated, virtuous, and sentimental; she also played the harp with tremulous fairy fingers and performed charitable works among the poor.

When she wafted into the dining room in a delicate white Empire-style batiste gown caught beneath her breasts with a watermelon-colored sash, a fashion that exposed her long neck and round alabaster arms, with her feet shod in satin and a diadem of pearls in her black curls, Diego felt his knees turn to rubber and all reason flee. He bent to kiss her hand, and in his stupefaction at touching her sprayed her with saliva.

Horrified, he sputtered an apology, but Juliana smiled like an angel and quietly wiped the back of her hand on her nymph’s dress.

Isabel, in contrast, was so ordinary that she did not seem to be of the same blood as her dazzling sister. She was eleven, and not even a good eleven. Her teeth had not quite settled into place, and her bones poked out in various angles. From time to time one eye wandered slightly, which gave her a distracted and deceptively sweet expression because she was of rather peppery nature. Her chestnut hair was a rebellious tangle barely controlled by a half dozen ribbons; she had nearly outgrown the yellow dress she was wearing, and to complete her orphan like looks, she was wearing high-buttoned shoes. As Diego would tell Bernardo later, poor Isabel looked like a skeleton with four elbows, and she had enough hair for two heads. Diego, blinded by Juliana, barely glanced in her direction all night, but Isabel observed him openly, taking a rigorous inventory of his antiquated suit, his strange accent, his manners as out of date as his clothing and of course his protruding ears. She concluded that this young man from the Indies was mad if he thought he would impress her sister, a conviction underscored by his comical behavior. Isabel sighed, thinking that Diego was going to be a long-term project; he would have to be remade almost entirely, but fortunately she had good raw material to work with: pleasant personality, well-proportioned body, and those amber eyes.

Dinner consisted of mushroom soup, a succulent plate of gems of land and sea in which the fish rivaled the meat salads, cheeses, and to end, creme Catalan, all washed down with a red wine from the family vineyards. Diego calculated that with that diet, Tomas de Romeu would never grow to be an old man, and his daughters would end up as fat as their father. While the ordinary Spaniard was going hungry, the tables of the well-to-do were always well supplied. After the meal they went into one of the many inhospitable salons, where Juliana delighted them until after midnight with her harp, accompanied, un musically by the groans Isabel tore from a badly tuned harpsichord. At that hour, early for Barcelona and late for Diego, Nuria, the chaperone arrived to suggest to the girls that they should retire. She was a straight-backed woman of near forty, her fine features marred by a hard expression and the harsh severity of her attire: a black dress with starched collar and a black cap with a satin bow tied beneath the chin.

The rustling of her petticoats, her tinkling keys, and her squeaking boots announced her presence before she came into sight. She greeted Diego with a barely perceptible bow, after examining him from head to toe with aloof disapproval.

“What am I to do with that boy named Bernardo, that Indian from the Americas?” she asked Tomas de Romeu.

“If it were possible, sir, I would like for Bernardo to share my room. In fact, we are like brothers,” Diego intervened.

“Of course, senor. Do whatever needs be done, Nuria,” de Romeu ordered, somewhat surprised.

As soon as Juliana retired, Diego felt the onslaught of accumulated fatigue and the weight of dinner in his stomach, but he had to stay another hour, listening to his host’s ideas on politics.

“Joseph Bonaparte is an educated and sincere man; I am happy to tell you that he even speaks Spanish and attends the bullfights,” said de Romeu.

“But he has usurped the throne of the legitimate king of Spain,” Diego rejoined.

“King Charles IV turned out to be an unworthy descendent of men as outstanding as his father and grandfather. The queen is frivolous, and the heir, Ferdinand, is inept; even his parents have no faith in him. They do not deserve to reign. The French, on the other hand, have brought modern ideas with them. If this country would allow Joseph I to govern, instead of waging war against him, it would leave its backwardness behind. The French army is invincible; ours, in contrast, is in ruins: no horses, weapons, boots and our soldiers are surviving on bread and water.”

“Nonetheless,” Diego interrupted, “the Spanish people have resisted the occupation for two years.”

“It is true that gangs of armed civilians are waging an insane guerrilla war, urged on by fanatics and by ignorant clergy. These masses are striking out blindly; they have no ideas, only resentment.”

“I have heard stories about the cruelty of the French.”

“Atrocities are committed by both sides, young de la Vega. The guerrillas are murdering Spanish civilians who refuse to help them, as well as the French. The Catalans are the worst; you cannot imagine the cruelty they are capable of. Maestro Francisco Goya has painted those horrors. Is his work known in America?”

“I believe not, senor.”

“You must see his paintings, Don Diego, in order to understand that in this war there are no good men, only bad,” sighed de Romeu, and held forth on other subjects until Diego’s eyes closed.

In the next months Diego de la Vega got a glimpse of how volatile and complex the situation in Spain had become, and how far behind the news lagged at home. His father reduced politics to black and white, because that was how it was in California, but in the confusion of Europe tones of gray predominated. In his first letter, Diego told his father about the voyage and his impressions of Barcelona and the Catalans, whom he described as zealous regarding their freedom, explosive in temperament, sensitive in questions of honor, and as hardworking as draft mules. They themselves cultivated their reputation for being tight-fisted, he said, but in private they were generous. He added that there was nothing they resented so much as taxes, especially when they had to pay them to the French. He also described the de Romeu family, omitting his ridiculous love for Juliana, which might be interpreted as an abuse of hospitality. In his second letter he tried to explain the political situation, though he suspected that when his father received it in a few months’ time, it would all have changed.

Esteemed Sir: You find me well and I am learning a lot, especially philosophy and Latin in the School of Humanities. It will please you to know that Maestro Manuel Escalante has accepted me in his Academy and honors me with his friendship, an undeserved honor, of course.

Allow me to tell you something about the situation here. Your close friend, Don Tomds de Romeu, is a great aficionado of all things French shall we say a Francophile. There are other liberals like himself who share his political ideas but still detest the French. They fear that Napoleon will convert Spain into a satellite of France, which apparently Don Tomds de Romeu would look upon with favor.

Just as you told me to do, I have visited Her Excellency Dona Eulalia de Callis. Through her I have learned that the nobility, like the Catholic Church and the common people, await the return of King Fernando VII, whom they call “The Desired.” The people, who distrust in equal measure the French, the liberals, the nobles, and change in any form, are determined to expel the invaders and fight with whatever they have at hand: axes, clubs, knives, picks, and hoes.

Diego found these topics quite interesting they talked of nothing else in the School of Humanities and in the house ofTomas de Romeu but he did not lose any sleep over them. He had a thousand different things on his mind, the main one being contemplation of Juliana. In that enormous house, impossible to light or heat, the family used only a few rooms on the main level and a wing of the second floor. More than once Bernardo caught Diego hanging like a fly from the balcony to spy on Juliana when she was sewing with Nuria or studying her lessons. The girls had been spared the convent school where daughters of fashionable families were educated, thanks to their father’s antipathy to religious instruction. Tomas de Romeu said that behind the convent shutters poor young girls were fodder for evil nuns who filled their heads with demons, and for clergy who pawed them under the pretext of confessing them. He assigned his girls a tutor, an emaciated little fellow with a pockmarked face, who swooned in Juliana’s presence and whom Nuria watched like a hawk. Isabel was also his student, although the teacher ignored her so totally that he never learned her name.

Juliana treated Diego like an unbalanced younger brother. She called him by his given name and spoke warmly to him, following the example of Isabel, who was affectionate from the beginning. Much later, when their lives became more complicated and they went through difficult times together, Nuria, too, warmed up to him. She came to love him like a nephew, but in that period she still addressed him as Don Diego: a simple first name was used only among family members or when speaking to an inferior. It was several weeks before Juliana suspected that she had broken Diego’s heart, just as she never realized she had done the same to her unhappy tutor. When Isabel pointed it out to her, she laughed with surprise; fortunately Diego never knew that until several years later.

It was only a brief time before Diego realized that Tomas de Romeu was neither as noble nor as rich as he had at first seemed. The mansion and lands had belonged to his deceased wife, the heiress to a bourgeois family that had made a fortune in the silk industry. Upon his father-in-law’s death, Tomas was left to handle the business affairs, but he was not especially gifted in commerce, and he immediately began to lose what he had inherited. Contrary to the reputation of most Catalans, Don Tomas knew how to spend money with grace, but he did not know how to earn it. Year after year his income had decreased, and at the rate he was going, he soon would be obliged to sell his house and descend in social level. Among Juliana’s numerous suitors was one Rafael Moncada, a noble with a considerable fortune. An alliance with him would resolve Tomas de Romeu’s problems, but in his defense I have to say that he would never press his daughter to accept Moncada. Diego estimated that his father’s hacienda in California was worth several times more than the properties of de Romeu, and he wondered whether Juliana might consider going to the New World with him. He laid that plan before Bernardo, and in his private language, his brother made Diego see that if he didn’t hurry, another more mature, handsome, and interesting candidate would make off with his damsel. Accustomed to Bernardo’s sarcasm, Diego was not disheartened, but he decided to speed up his education as much as possible. He could see the day when he could claim to be a true Spanish gentleman. He dedicated himself to learning Catalan, a tongue that he thought very melodious, he attended the School of Humanities, and he went every day to classes at Maestro Manuel Escalante’s Fencing Academy for the Instruction of Nobles and Caballeros.

The picture that Diego had in mind of the celebrated maestro did not coincide in any way with reality. After having studied Escalante’s manual down to the last comma, he imagined him to be an Apollo, a compendium of virtues and manly beauty. He turned out to be a disagreeable, meticulous, spruce little man with the face of an ascetic, disdainful lips, and pomaded mustache, a man to whom fencing seemed to be the one true religion. His students were of the finest lineage all except Diego de la Vega, whom Escalante accepted less on Tomas de Romeu’s recommendation than because Diego passed the admission examination with honors.

The maestro handed Diego a foil. “En garde, monsieur!” Diego adopted the preparatory position: right foot forward, the left at a right angle to the body, knees slightly bent, torso half turned, face forward, right arm extended over the right foot, the left held behind the body at approximately the same angle as the foil arm.

“Lunge! Recovery! Thrust! Engage! Coupe! Press! Bind!” Soon the maestro stopped issuing instructions. From feints they passed quickly through the entire array of attacks and parries in a violent and macabre dance. Diego warmed to the test and began to fight as if his life were at stake, with a fervor near anger. For the first time in many years Escalante felt sweat running down his face and soaking his shirt. He was pleased, and the trace of a smile began to lift the corners of his thin lips. He never praised anyone easily, but he was impressed with the speed, precision, and strength of this young man.

“Where did you say you had learned to fence, caballero?” he asked after crossing foils with him for a few minutes.

“With my father, in California, maestro.”

“California?”

“To the north of Mexico ”

“You need not explain, I have seen a map,” Manuel Escalante interrupted curtly.

“B-beg pardon, maestro,” Diego stammered. “I have studied your book and practiced for years ”

“I see that. You are a diligent student, it seems. But you must curb your impatience and acquire elegance. You have the style of a pirate, but that can be remedied. First lesson: calm. You must never fight in anger. The firmness and stability of the blade depend on equanimity of mind. Do not forget that. I shall receive you Monday through Saturday mornings on the stroke of eight. If you miss even one time, you need not return. Good afternoon, sir.”

With that, he dismissed him. Diego had to struggle not to whoop with joy, but once outside he jumped up and down around Bernardo, who was waiting at the door with the horses.

“We will become the best swordsmen in the world, Bernardo. Yes, my brother, you heard me right, you will learn what I learn. Oh, you are right, the maestro will not accept you as a student, he is very particular. If he knew that I have one-fourth Indian blood, he would kick me out of his academy. But don’t worry, I intend to teach you everything I learn. The maestro says I lack style. What is that?”

Manuel Escalante fulfilled his promise to polish Diego’s art, and Diego kept his to pass on those skills to Bernardo. They practiced fencing every day in one of the large, empty salons in the home of Tomas de Romeu, almost always with Isabel present. According to Nuria, that girl had a devilish curiosity about men’s ways, but she covered up Isabel’s antics because she had taken care of her ever since her mother had died at her birth. The brash girl talked Diego and Bernardo into teaching her to handle a fencing epee and to ride astride, as women did in California. With Maestro Escalante’s manual, she spent hours practicing alone before a mirror, under the patient gaze of her sister and Nuria, who were working their cross-stitch embroidery. Diego had a selfish reason for resigning himself to the younger girl’s company: she had convinced him that she could intercede on his behalf with Juliana something she never did do. Bernardo, on the other hand, seemed always pleased to have her around.

Diego’s milk brother had an equivocal position in the hierarchy of the house, where about eighty people lived, counting servants, employees, secretaries, and “distant cousins,” as the poor relatives that Tomas de Romeu housed under his roof were called. He slept in one of the three rooms placed at Diego’s disposal but did not go into the family salons unless summoned, and he ate in the kitchen. He had no particular responsibilities, and had time left over to wander around the city. He came to know the different faces of boisterous Barcelona, from the castles and mansions of Catalan nobles to the crowded rat-and lice-infested rooms of the lower classes, a hotbed of fights and epidemics; he roamed the ancient section constructed upon Roman ruins, a labyrinth of twisting alleyways scarcely wide enough for a burro to pass through, the popular markets, artisans’ shops, the stalls where Turkish merchants sold baubles and bibelots, and the always bustling docks. Sundays after mass, he lingered to admire the groups dancing delicate sardanas, which to him seemed a perfect reflection of the solidarity, order, and lack of ostentation of the people of Barcelona.

Like Diego, he learned Catalan; otherwise he could not have understood what was happening around him. Spanish and French were the languages of high society and the government; Latin was used for academic and religious matters, and Catalan for everything else. Bernardo’s silence, and the dignity he conveyed, won the respect of everyone in the de Romeu mansion. The servants, who affectionately called him el Indiano, were not sure whether he was deaf, but they assumed he was, and so spoke freely in front of him, which allowed him to learn many things. Tomas de Romeu was entirely unaware of his existence; for him servants were invisible. Nuria was intrigued by the fact that he was an Indian, the first she had met face to face. Thinking he would not understand her, for the first few days she made monkey faces and gestured theatrically, but when she learned that he wasn’t deaf, she began speaking normally to him. And as soon as she was told that he had been baptized, she began to like him. She had never had a more attentive listener. Convinced that Bernardo could not betray her confidence, she fell into the habit of telling him her dreams, true epic fantasies, and of inviting him to listen to Juliana read aloud at the hour for chocolate. As for Juliana, she addressed him with the same gentleness she exhibited with everyone. She understood that he was not Diego’s servant but his brother, having shared Bernardo’s mother’s milk, but she made no effort to communicate with him because she supposed that they had little to say to one another. Not so with Isabel; Bernardo became her best friend and ally. She learned the Indians’ sign language and how to interpret the inflexions of his flute, though she was never able to participate in the telepathic dialogues Bernardo shared with Diego. It didn’t matter anyway. They didn’t need words; they understood each other perfectly. They came to love each other so much that over the years Isabel became Diego’s rival for second place in Bernardo’s heart. Lightin-the-Night always came first.

In the spring, when the air in the city smelled of ocean and flowers, strolling groups of students came out to fill the night with music; be smitten suitors offered their serenades, watched from a distance by French soldiers, because even that innocent diversion might mask sinister designs on the part of the guerrillas. Diego practiced songs on his mandolin, but it would have been ridiculous to plant himself beneath Juliana’s window and serenade her when he lived in the same house. He tried to accompany her after-dinner harp concerts, but she was a true virtuoso, and he was so clumsy on his instrument like Isabel on the harpsichord that they left their audience with migraines. The best he could do was entertain Juliana with the magic tricks he’d learned from Galileo Tempesta, added to and perfected during months of practice. The day he stood before her prepared to swallow Tempesta’s Moroccan dagger, Juliana felt faint and nearly fell, while Isabel examined the weapon, looking for the spring that hid the blade in the haft. Nuria, outraged, warned Diego that if he tried a cheap sorcerer’s trick like that again in the presence of her girls, she herself would stick that Turk’s knife down his gullet. In the first weeks Diego was in the house, the woman had declared an unvoiced war of nerves with him; somehow she had found out that he was a mestizo. It seemed the last straw that her master would take a youth into the bosom of the family who did not have pure Spanish blood, and as if that weren’t enough, one who had the brass to fall in love with Juliana.

However, as soon as Diego set his mind to it, he won the chaperone’s dried-up heart with little attentions: flowers, marzipan, a print of some saint. Although she continued to answer him with grumbles and sarcasm, she could not help but laugh trying to hide it when he did something clownish like climb up on the roof and threaten to jump headfirst if she didn’t make him some pastries.

One night Diego had to suffer through a serenade Rafael Moncada, accompanied by several musicians, gave beneath Juliana’s window. To his chagrin, Diego learned that not only did his rival have a seductive tenor voice, but more impressive yet, he sang in Italian. He tried to make Moncada look ridiculous to Juliana, but his strategy failed; for the first time she seemed charmed by Moncada’s attention. She felt conflicting emotions when she was around her suitor, a mixture of instinctive distrust and cautious curiosity. When he was present, she felt bothered and naked, but she was also attracted by the self-confidence he exuded. She did not like the scornful and cruel expressions she sometimes glimpsed on his face, a look that did not correspond with how generous he was when he distributed coins among the beggars after mass. Whatever her feelings, her admirer was twenty-three years old and had been courting her for some months; soon she would have to give him an answer. Moncada was wealthy, he came from an impeccable family, and he made a good impression on everyone except her sister Isabel, who detested him without hiding or explaining it. There were solid arguments in favor of his suit; Juliana held back only because of an inexplicable presentiment of disaster. In the meantime, Moncada continued his siege with delicacy, fearful that the least pressure would frighten her. They saw one another at church, at concerts and plays, during the paseos in the parks and streets. He often sent her gifts and tender notes, but nothing compromising. He had not succeeded in being invited to Tomas de Romeu’s home or in getting his aunt Eulalia de Callis to include the de Romeus among her guests. His aunt had stated with her habitual firmness that Juliana was a very bad choice: “Her father is a traitor, a lover of the French and all their ways, and that family has no rank, no fortune nothing to offer,” was her jewel-hard judgment. But Moncada had had his eye on Juliana for a long time; he had watched her blossom and had determined that she was the only woman worthy of him. He thought that with time Eulalia would yield before Juliana’s undeniable virtues; it was all a question of manipulating the matter diplomatically. He was not disposed to give Juliana up, and certainly not his inheritance, but he never doubted he could have both.

Rafael Moncada was too old to be serenading and too proud for that kind of exhibitionism, but he found a way to do it with humor. When Juliana came out on her balcony that night, she saw him costumed as a Florentine prince with a lute in his hands, all brocade and silk from head to toe, his doublet trimmed with otter and his hat with ostrich plumes. Several servants were holding elegant crystal lanterns to illuminate him, and at his side the musicians, attired as operetta pages, strummed melodic chords on their instruments. The crowning effect, however, was undoubtedly Moncada’s extraordinary voice. Hidden behind a curtain, Diego burned with humiliation, knowing that Juliana was on her balcony comparing Moncada’s magnificent warbling with the hesitant mandolin he had tried to impress her with. He was muttering curses when Bernardo came and signaled him to follow and bring his sword. His brother led him to the servants’ floor where Diego had never been, even though he had lived in that house nearly a year and from there through a service gate to the street. Hugging the wall, they arrived unseen at the place where his rival had stationed himself to thrill Juliana with his ballads in Italian. Bernardo pointed to a portal behind Moncada, and Diego’s fury melted into diabolic glee: it was not Moncada singing, but another man hidden in the shadows.

Diego and Bernardo waited to the end of the serenade. The group broke up and drove off in a pair of coaches as the last servant handed some coins to the real tenor. After making sure that the singer was alone, the youths took him by surprise. He hissed like a serpent and put his hand to the curved knife waiting in his sash, but Diego was faster, and touched the tip of his sword to the substitute’s neck. The man retreated with awesome agility, but Bernardo tripped him and threw him to the ground. He cursed when again he felt the tip of Diego’s rapier pricking his throat. At that hour the only light in the street came from a timid moon and the lamps of the house enough to see that the man was a strong, dark-skinned Gypsy, nothing but pure muscle, sinew, and bone.

“What the devil do you want of me?” he spit out insolently.

“Nothing but your name. You may keep that dishonestly earned money.”

Diego replied.

“Why do you want my name?”

“Your name, I say!” Diego demanded, increasing the pressure of the sword tip enough to draw a few drops of blood.

“Pelayo,” the Gypsy replied.

Diego dropped his weapon, and the man stepped back and disappeared into the shadows of the street with the stealth and speed of a cat.

“Let us remember that name, Bernardo. I think that we will run into that ruffian again. I can say nothing of this to Juliana she will think I am acting out of pettiness or jealousy. I must find another way to let her know that the voice is not Moncada’s. Can you think how? Well, when something occurs to you, let me know,” Diego concluded.

One of the most faithful visitors to the home of Tomas de Romeu was Napoleon’s charge d’affaires in Barcelona, Monsieur Roland Duchamp, known as Le Chevalier. He was the eminence grise behind the visible officialdom, with more influence, it was said, than King Joseph I himself. Since he no longer needed his brother to perpetuate the Bonaparte dynasty, Napoleon had begun withdrawing power from him. Now he had a son, a frail child nicknamed “The Eaglet” and crushed since infancy beneath the title King of Rome. Le Chevalier directed a vast network of spies, who kept him informed about the plans of his enemies even before they had formulated them. He held the rank of ambassador, but in truth everyone up to the highest army officers reported to him.

His life in Barcelona, where the French were detested, was far from pleasant. The best society ostracized him even though he courted the leading families with balls, receptions, and theater performances, just as he tried to win over the masses by handing out loaves of bread and authorizing bullfights, which had previously been banned. No one wanted to seem loyal to the French. Nobles like Eulalia de Callis were afraid not to greet him, but neither did they accept his invitations.

Tomas de Romeu, on the other hand, was honored by his friendship, since he admired everything that came from France, from its philosophical ideas and refinement to Napoleon himself, whom he compared to Alexander the Great. He knew that Le Chevalier was in league with the secret police, but he discredited rumors that he was responsible for the torture and executions in La Ciudadela. He could not believe that a person that refined and cultivated would be involved in the barbarities attributed to the military. The two of them discussed art, books, new scientific discoveries, and advances in astronomy, and they commented on the situation of the colonies in America, such as Venezuela, Chile, and others that had declared their independence.

While the two caballeros shared pleasant hours over their glasses of French cognac and their Cuban cigars, Agnes Duchamp,

Le Chevalier’s daughter, amused herself reading French novels with Juliana behind the back of Tomas de Romeu, who never would have tolerated such behavior. The girls suffered the torment of the ill-starred love affairs of the characters and sighed with relief at the happy endings. Romanticism was not as yet in vogue in Spain, and before Agnes appeared in her life, Juliana had had access only to a few classic authors in the family library that had been selected by her father for educational purposes. Isabel and Nuria sat in on the readings. Juliana’s younger sister made fun of her books, but did not miss a word, and Nuria sobbed uncontrollably. The girls explained to her that none of those things had really happened, that they were only the lies of the author, but she didn’t believe them. The unhappiness of the characters caused her such distress that the girls changed the plots of the novels so as not to sour her on life. The chaperone did not know how to read, but she had a sacred respect for the printed word. From her wages she bought illustrated booklets of the lives of martyrs, true compilations of savagery that the girls had to read to her again and again. She was sure that each saint was a wretched compatriot tortured by the Moors in Granada. It was pointless to explain to her that the Roman Colosseum was right where its name indicated: in Rome. She was also convinced, like any good Spanish woman, that Christ did not die on the cross for the good of all humanity, but specifically for Spain. To her, the most unforgivable fact about Napoleon and the French was that they were atheists, and after each visit she sprinkled the chair Le Chevalier had sat in with holy water. She attributed her employer’s failure to believe in God to the premature death of his wife, the mother of the girls. She was sure that Don Tomas was suffering through a temporary condition: on his deathbed he would come to his senses and call for a confessor to absolve him of his sins, as everyone did in the end, however much they claimed to be atheists when in good health.

Agnes was a small girl, smiling and vivacious, with transparent skin, a mischievous glint in her eye, and dimples in her cheeks, knuckles, and elbows. She had matured early because of the novels she’d read, and at an age when other girls still were not allowed out of the house, she lived the life of an adult woman. She accompanied her father to social events wearing the most daring Paris styles. When she attended a ball, she dampened her frock so that the cloth would cling to her body and no one could miss appreciating her rounded buttocks and virginal but bold nipples. Diego caught her eye at their first meeting; during that year he had left the blandness of adolescence behind and had spurted up like a colt: he was as tall as Don Tomas and thanks to the hearty Catalan diet and Nuria’s coddling, he had gained weight something he greatly needed. His features were taking on their definitive form, and at Isabel’s suggestion he was wearing his hair cut to cover his ears. To Agnes he seemed not at all bad. He was exotic, and she could imagine him in the wild lands of the Americas surrounded by submissive, naked Indians. She never tired of questioning him about California, which she confused with a mysterious, steamy island like the one where the ineffable Josephine Bonaparte had been born. Josephine was her ideal, and she tried to imitate her with her diaphanous dresses and violet scent. Agnes had met the empress in Paris, in Napoleon’s court, when she was a child of ten. While the emperor was off conducting some war, Josephine had honored Le Chevalier Duchamp with a friendship approaching amour. Agnes would always carry the image of that woman in her memory. Though she was neither young nor beautiful, her sinuous walk, her dreamy voice, and her fleeting fragrance made her seem so.

That had been more than four years ago. Josephine was no longer the empress of France because Napoleon had replaced her with an insipid Austrian princess whose one good point, according to Agnes, was that she had given him a son as if fertility were not too, too vulgar. When Agnes learned that Diego was the sole heir of Alejandro de la Vega, the lord of a ranch the size of a small country, it took little effort for her to imagine herself as the mistress of that fabulous territory. She waited for the opportune moment and whispered to Diego, behind her fan, that he should come visit her so they could talk alone, since in Tomas de Romeu’s home Nuria was always hovering over them. In Paris no one had a chaperone that was the epitome of antiquated customs, she added.

To seal her invitation, she handed him a lace and linen handkerchief bearing her full name embroidered by the nuns and perfumed with violet.

Diego did not know what to answer. For a whole week he tried to make Juliana jealous by talking about Agnes and waving her handkerchief in the air, but that ploy backfired when his enchantress offered amiably to help him along in his love life. In addition, Isabel and Nuria teased him unmercifully, so he ended up throwing the handkerchief away.

Bernardo retrieved it and kept it, faithful to his theory that you never know when something may be useful.

Diego frequently was in the company of Agnes Duchamp, who had become a faithful visitor to the house. Though she was younger than Juliana, she nevertheless left her behind in exuberance and experience. Had the circumstances been different, Agnes would not have lowered herself to cultivate a friendship with a girl as naive as Juliana, but her father’s situation had closed many doors to her, and she had few friends. Besides, in her favor Juliana had her reputation as a beauty, and although in principle Agnes preferred to avoid competition, she soon realized that the mere name Juliana de Romeu drew men’s interest and that she benefited indirectly. To rid himself of Agnes’s sentimental insinuations, which were increasing in intensity and frequency, Diego tried to change the image the girl had formed of him.

No more daydreams of a rich, courageous rancher galloping across the valleys of California with his sword at his side; instead he began reporting scraps of supposed letters from his father that announced, among other calamities, the family’s imminent financial ruin. At that moment he had no idea how close to the truth those lies would be within a few years. Then, as a finishing touch, he started imitating the precious mannerisms and tight trousers of Juliana and Isabel’s dance instructor. He responded to Agnes’s novel-inspired gazes with little affectations and sudden headaches, until he planted the suspicion in Agnes’s mind that she was pursuing an effeminate artiste. That game of deceit suited his histrionic personality perfectly. “Why are you acting like such an idiot?” Isabel, who from the first had treated him with a frankness bordering on rudeness, asked more than once. Juliana, distracted as she always was in the world of Agnes’s novels, never noticed how Diego changed when Agnes was present. Compared with Isabel, who could see right through Diego’s theatrics, Juliana revealed a distressing innocence.

Tomas de Romeu fell into the habit of inviting Diego for an after-dinner drink with Agnes’s father, once he realized that the older man was interested in his young guest. Le Chevalier would inquire about the activities of the students in the School of Humanities, the political tendencies of young Catalans, and the rumors Diego heard in the street and from the servants, but Diego, aware of the man’s reputation, was cautious in his replies. If he told the truth, he might put more than one person in jeopardy, especially his companions and professors, blood enemies of the French, although most agreed with the reforms they had imposed. As a precaution, in Le Chevalier’s company Diego feigned the same affected, dimwitted mannerisms he adopted around Agnes, with such success that the father ended up dismissing him as a spineless dandy. The Frenchman was hard put to understand his daughter’s interest in de la Vega. In his eyes the young man’s hypothetical fortune could not compensate for his staggering frivolity. Le Chevalier was an iron man otherwise he would not have been able to maintain his stranglehold on Catalonia and he was quickly bored with Diego’s trivialities. He stopped asking him questions and sometimes made comments he would have kept to himself had he thought better of him.

“On my way back from Gerona yesterday I saw pieces of bodies the guerrillas had hung from trees and speared on pikes. The buzzards were having a feast. I still have the stench on me,” Le Chevalier commented.

“How do you know that was the work of guerrillas, not French soldiers?”

Tomas de Romeu asked.

“I have good information, my friend. In Catalonia the guerrillas are ferocious. Thousands of contraband weapons pass through this city; there are arsenals even in the church confessionals. The guerrillas cut the supply routes, and the population goes hungry when vegetables and bread don’t get through.”

“Let them eat cake, then.” Diego smiled, echoing Queen Marie Antoinette’s famous remark as he tossed an almond bonbon into his mouth.

“This is not a time to make jokes, sir,” Le Chevalier replied, annoyed.

“Starting tomorrow it will be forbidden to light torches at night because they are used to send signals, or wear a cape because muskets and knives can be hidden beneath them. What would you say, caballeros, if I told you that there are plans to infect the prostitutes who service the French troops with smallpox!”

“Please, Chevalier Duchamp!” Diego exclaimed with a scandalized air.

“Women and priests hide weapons in their clothing and use children to carry messages and light explosives. We will have to search the hospital because they hide weapons beneath the bed covers of women who are supposedly in labor.”

Only one hour later, Diego de la Vega had managed to warn the director of the hospital that the French would be arriving from one moment to the next. Thanks to the information provided by Le Chevalier, he was able to save more than one of his companions from the School of Humanities and a number of endangered neighbors. On the other hand, he sent an anonymous note to Le Chevalier when he learned that bread destined for a barracks had been poisoned. His intervention foiled the attempt, saving thirty enemy soldiers. Diego was not sure of his reasons, but he detested treachery of any kind, and he simply liked the game and the risk. He felt the same revulsion for the guerrillas’ methods that he did for those of the occupation troops.

“There’s no point in looking for justice, Bernardo, because there is none, anywhere. The only positive thing to do is to try to prevent more violence. I am sick of so much horror, so many atrocities. There is nothing noble or glorious about war.”

The guerrillas relentlessly harassed the French and stirred up the people. Farmers, bakers, masons, craftsmen, merchants ordinary people during the day, they fought by night. The civilian population protected them, furnished them with food, information, mail, hospitals, and clandestine cemeteries. The tenacious popular resistance wore down the occupation troops, but it also kept the country in ruins. To the Spanish cry, “Blood and guts!” the French responded with identical cruelty.

For Diego, the fencing lessons were his most important activity, and he never arrived late for a class, knowing that the master would dismiss him and never take him back. At fifteen minutes before eight he was at the academy; five minutes later a servant opened the door, and at eight on the dot he was standing before his fencing master, foil in hand. At the end of the lesson the maestro often asked him to stay a few minutes and discuss the nobility of the art of fencing, pride in strapping on the sword, the military glories of Spain, and the obligation of every caballero with a sense of honor: to defend his good name, even though duels were banned by law. Those themes led to others more profound, and during those discussions that sober little man, who had the starched and prissy demeanor of a fop and was sensitive to the point of absurdity when it came to his own honor and dignity, revealed the other side of his character. Manuel Escalante was the son of a merchant from Asturias, but he had escaped the undistinguished fate of his brothers because of his genius with a sword. Fencing elevated him in rank, allowed him to invent a new persona and to travel throughout Europe rubbing elbows with gentlemen and nobles. His obsessions were not historical duels or titles of nobility, as it seemed at first view, but justice. He sensed that Diego shared his concerns, although being so young, he did not as yet know how to articulate them. The master felt that finally his life had a high purpose: to guide this young man to follow in his footsteps, to convert him into a paladin of just causes.

Escalante had taught fencing to hundreds of young caballeros, but none had proved worthy of that distinction. They lacked the burning flame that he immediately recognized in Diego because he himself had it. He did not want to be carried away by his initial enthusiasm; he decided he would get to know this youth better and put him to the test before he shared his secrets with him. He sounded him out during their brief conversations over coffee. Diego, inclined always to be frank and open, told him, among other things, about his childhood in California, the escapade of the bear with the hat, the pirates’ attack and Bernardo’s muteness, and the day the soldiers burned the Indians’ village. His voice trembled as he remembered how they had hanged the tribe’s ancient chieftain, beat the men, and taken them off to work for the whites.

On one of his courtesy visits to Eulalia de Callis’s palace, Diego ran into Rafael Moncada. He called on Her Excellency from time to time, more the result of his parents’ requests than his own initiative. Her mansion was on Calle Eulalia, and at first Diego believed that the street had been named for his family’s old friend. It was a year before he found out that the mythic Eulalia was the favorite saint of Catalonia, a virgin martyr whose torturers, according to legend, cut off her breasts and made her roll in a tunnel of slivers of glass before they crucified her. The mansion of the former governor of California’s wife, one of the city’s architectural jewels, was decorated inside with an excess that shocked the sober Catalans, for whom ostentation was an inarguable sign of bad taste. Eulalia had lived in Mexico for a long time and had been infected with that country’s taste for the baroque. In her personal retinue were several hundred people whose livelihood came primarily from chocolate. Before he died of apoplexy in Mexico, Dona Eulalia’s husband had set up an operation in the Antilles to supply the chocolate shops of Spain, and the family fortune ballooned. Eulalia’s titles were neither very old nor very impressive, but her money more than compensated for what she lacked in bloodlines. While the nobility were losing their income, privileges, lands, and sinecures, Eulalia was growing increasingly wealthy thanks to the aromatic river of chocolate flowing from America directly into her coffers. In other times the most aristocratic nobles, those who could prove that their blue blood dated from before

1400, had sneered at Eulalia, who belonged to the self-made peerage, but these were not times to quibble. What counted now, more than ancestors, was money, and she had plenty of that. Other landowners complained that their campesinos refused to pay taxes and rents, but she did not have that problem she entrusted a carefully selected group of thugs with collections. Another factor in her favor was that most of her income came from outside the country. Eulalia had become one of the most recognizable citizens of the city. She made a grand entrance wherever she went, including church, with several carriage loads of servants and dogs, her retainers outfitted in sky-blue livery and plumed hats that she herself, finding her inspiration at the opera, had designed. Over the years she had gained weight and lost originality, and she was now a gluttonous matriarch robed in eternal black mourning and surrounded by priests, pious old women, and Chihuahua dogs, horrid little beasts that looked like skinned rats and relieved themselves on the draperies. She was completely divorced from the fine passions that had tormented her during her resplendent youth, when she colored her hair red and luxuriated in milk baths. Now her interests had dwindled to defending her lineage, selling chocolate, ensuring a place in paradise after she died, and working every way she could to obtain the return of Fernando VII to the throne of Spain. She loathed the liberal reforms.

Because of his father’s orders, and in gratitude for how well Her Excellency had treated his mother Regina, Diego de la Vega tried to visit Eulalia on a regular basis, even though that obligation seemed like a major sacrifice. He had nothing to say to the widow, except for three or four formulas of courtesy, and he never knew in what order to use the forks and spoons at his place at table. He knew that Eulalia de Califs strongly disliked Tomas de Romeu, for two reasons: first, because he admired all things French, and second, because he was the father of Juliana, with whom, to her chagrin, Rafael Moncada, her favorite nephew and principal heir, was in love. Eulalia had seen Juliana at mass and had to admit that she was far from ugly, but she had much more ambitious plans for her nephew. She was discreetly negotiating an alliance with one of the daughters of the duke of Medinacelli. The desire to prevent Rafael from marrying Juliana was the one thing she and Diego had in common.

On Diego’s fourth visit to Dona Eulalia’s palace, several months after the incident of the serenade beneath Juliana’s window, he had occasion to get to know Rafael Moncada better. He had come across him several times at social and sporting events, but except for nodding to him in greeting had had no further relations. Moncada thought that Diego was a humdrum young fellow. Except that he lived beneath the same roof as Juliana de Romeu, nothing else made him stand out from the design of the carpet. That night Diego was surprised to find that Dona Eulalia’s palace was extravagantly lighted, and dozens of carriages were lined up in the courtyards. Until then, she had invited him only to gatherings of artists and to one intimate dinner, during which she questioned him about Regina. Diego thought she was ashamed of him, not so much because he came from the colonies as because he was a mestizo. Eulalia had treated his mother very well in California, even though Regina was more Indian than white, but after living a while in Spain, she had been infected with the scorn the Spanish felt for the people of the New World. The widely held opinion was that because of the climate and contact with Indians, criollos the Spanish born there had a natural predisposition toward barbarism and perversion. Before introducing Diego to her select friends, Eulalia wanted to have a very good sense of who he was, so she ran a few trials to be sure that he looked white, dressed well, and had passable manners.

That night Diego was shown to a splendid salon where the cream of Catalan nobility was gathered, presided over by the matriarch dressed, as always, in black velvet as a sign of her unrelieved mourning for Pedro Fages, but dripping with diamonds, and seated in a huge chair with a bishop’s canopy. Other widows buried themselves in life beneath a dark veil that covered them from the combs in their hair to their elbows, but not Dona Eulalia. Her jewels were displayed on the opulent bosom of a well-fed hen, her decolletage revealing the beginnings of enormous breasts as smooth and round as summertime melons. Diego could not tear his eyes away, dizzied by the glitter of the diamonds and the abundance of flesh. Her Excellency offered a plump hand, which he kissed as required; she asked about his parents and without waiting for the answer waved him away.

In the adjoining salons, most of the gentlemen discussed politics and business, while young couples, overseen by the mothers of the young ladies, danced to the strains of an orchestra. There were gaming tables in one of the rooms, gambling being the most popular entertainment in European courts, where there was no other way to combat tedium, aside from intrigue, hunting, and brief affairs.

Fortunes were bet, and professional players traveled from one grand home to another to fleece the idle nobles, who, if they could find no players of their own class to lose money to, enriched unsavory characters in gambling dens and dives. And there were hundreds of those in Barcelona. At one of the tables Diego saw Rafael Moncada playing blackjack with a group of caballeros, one of whom was Count Orloff. Diego recognized him immediately by his magnificent bearing and those blue eyes that had inflamed the imagination of so many women during his visit to Los Angeles, but he did not expect the Russian nobleman to recognize him. He had seen him only once, when he was a boy. “De la Vega!” Orloff called out, getting to his feet and embracing him enthusiastically. Surprised, Rafael Moncada looked up from his cards and for the first time truly registered the fact that Diego existed. He looked him over from head to foot as the handsome count recounted to one and all how this young man had captured several bears when he was barely a pup. This time Alejandro de la Vega was not present to correct the count’s epic version of events. The men applauded amiably and turned back to their cards. Diego stationed himself near the table to observe the particulars of the game, not daring, though the men were only mediocre players, to ask whether he could join in because he did not have the funds to match their bets.

His father sent him money regularly, but he was not generous: he believed that privation shaped character. After only five minutes, Diego realized that Rafael Moncada was cheating, as he knew perfectly well how to do that himself. In another five he decided that although he could not show Moncada up without causing a scandal that Dona Eulalia would never forgive, he could at least put a spoke in his wheels. The temptation to humiliate his rival was irresistible. He planted himself beside Moncada and watched him so insistently that the man became uncomfortable.

“Why don’t you go dance with the pretty young things in the other room?” asked Moncada, making no attempt to veil his insolence.

“Because, caballero, I am intensely interested in your very peculiar style of playing. I have no doubt that I can learn a great deal from you,” Diego replied, smiling with equal insolence.

Count Orloff immediately caught the intent of those words, and nailing Moncada with his gaze, he let him know, in a tone as icy as the steppes of his country, that his luck with cards was truly miraculous. Rafael Moncada did not answer, but from that moment he was unable to pull any tricks, since the other players were watching him with conspicuous attention. For an hour Diego did not move from Moncada’s side but stood looking over his shoulder until the game was over. Count Orloff saluted, clicking his heels together, and retired with a small fortune in his purse, prepared to spend the rest of the night dancing, well aware that not a single woman at the party had failed to take notice of his elegant bearing, his sapphire eyes, and his spectacular imperial uniform.

It was one of those leaden Barcelona nights, cold and damp. Bernardo was waiting for Diego in the courtyard, sharing his wineskin and hard cheese with Juanillo, one of the many lackeys attending the carriages.

The two had been keeping warm by dancing on the brick paving. Juanillo, an irrepressible talker, had finally found a person who would listen without interrupting him. He identified himself as the servant of Rafael Moncada something Bernardo already knew, the reason in fact that he had approached him and launched into an endless story filled with gossip, the details of which Bernardo classified and stored in his memory. He had proved before that any information, even the most trivial, could at some point become useful. He was still talking when Rafael Moncada, in a foul humor, came out and called for his carriage.

“I have forbidden you to speak with the other servants!” he spit at Juanillo.

“He’s just an Indian from the Americas, Excellency, the servant of Don Diego de la Vega.”

Following an impulse to avenge himself upon Diego, who had put him on the spot at the table, Rafael Moncada whirled around, lifted his cane, and brought it down hard across Bernardo’s shoulders, dropping him to his knees, more surprised than hurt. Bernardo heard him order Juanillo to get Pelayo, but Moncada did not make it into his carriage because Diego had come out into the courtyard in time to see what happened. He pushed Moncada’s footman aside, grabbed the door of the coach, and confronted Moncada.

“What do you want?” the latter asked, taken aback.

“You struck Bernardo!” Diego exclaimed, livid with rage.

“Who? Are you referring to that Indian? He was disrespectful, he raised his voice to me.”

“Bernardo could not raise his voice to the devil himself he’s mute. You owe him an apology, sir,” Diego demanded.

“Have you lost your mind?” Moncada cried, incredulous.

“When you struck Bernardo, sir, you injured me. You must apologize, or my seconds will call on you,” Diego replied.

Rafael Moncada burst out laughing. He could not believe that this criollo who had neither education nor class would challenge him to a duel. He slammed the door and ordered the coachman to leave. Bernardo took Diego by the arm and held him back, pleading with his eyes for him to calm down, that it wasn’t worth making such a fuss, but Diego was beside himself, trembling with indignation. He shook off his brother’s grip, mounted his horse, and galloped off toward the home of Manuel Escalante.

Ignoring the inappropriateness of the hour, Diego beat on Manuel Escalante’s door with his cane until it was answered by the same aged retainer who served coffee after his lessons. The servant led Diego to the second floor, where he had to wait half an hour before the maestro appeared. Escalante had been in bed for some time, but when he presented himself he was, as always, trim: spotless dressing gown, his mustache neatly slicked with pomade. Diego poured out what had happened and asked Escalante to serve as his second. He had twenty-four hours in which to formalize the duel, and it had to be done discreetly, behind the back of the authorities, because the penalty was the same as for any homicide. Only members of the aristocracy could duel without consequence; their crimes were treated with an impunity Diego did not enjoy.

“A duel is a serious matter that concerns a gentleman’s honor. It has a very strict etiquette and norms. A caballero does not fight a duel over a servant,” said Manuel Escalante.

“Bernardo is my brother, maestro, not my servant. But even if he were, it isn’t fair to mistreat someone who is unarmed.”

“Not fair, you say? Do you truly believe that life is fair, Senor de la Vega?”

“No, maestro, but I plan to do everything in my power to make it so.”

Diego replied.

The procedure turned out to be more complex than Diego had imagined.

First Manual Escalante had him write a letter asking for an explanation, which he personally carried to the home of the offender.

From that moment on, the maestro dealt with Moncada’s seconds, who did everything they could to prevent the duel, as was their duty, but neither of the adversaries wanted to back down. In addition to seconds for both parties, a discreet physician and two impartial witnesses were required who had cool heads and familiarity with the rules. Manuel Escalante was responsible for finding those parties.

“Just how old are you, Don Diego?” the maestro asked.

“Almost seventeen.”

“Then you are not old enough to fight a duel.”

“Maestro, I beg you, let us not make a mountain out of that grain of sand. What difference do a few months make? My honor is at stake, and that is not limited by age.”

“Very well, but Don Tomas de Romeu must be informed. It would be insulting not to tell him, considering that he has honored you with his confidence and hospitality.”

So de Romeu was also designated to serve as a second for Diego. He tried his best to dissuade him, for if the youth should be killed, he could not imagine how he would explain it to his father but he pleaded in vain. He had attended two or three of Diego’s fencing classes in Escalante’s academy, and he did not doubt the young man’s skill, but his relative tranquility was shattered when Moncada’s seconds notified them that he had sprained an ankle and could not duel with a sword.

They would use pistols.

The time and place were set for the Montjuic forest at five in the morning; at that hour there was a little light, and because the curfew was lifted, they could travel freely through the city. A light mist was rising from the ground, and a delicate dawn light was filtering through the trees. The countryside was so peaceful that the encounter seemed even more grotesque, but none of those present, except Bernardo, noticed it. In his role as servant, the Indian stood a certain distance away, not participating in the strict ritual. In accord with the protocol, the adversaries greeted each other; then witnesses checked their bodies to be sure that they were not wearing protection against bullets. They drew lots to see who would face the sun, and Diego lost, though he believed that his good vision would compensate for that disadvantage. As the person offended, Diego had the choice of pistols, and he chose the ones that Eulalia de Califs had sent his father in California many years before, now cleaned and oiled for the occasion. He smiled at the irony of Eulalia’s nephew being the first to use them. The witnesses and the seconds checked the weapons and loaded them. They had agreed that it would not be a duel to draw first blood; both combatants would have the right to shoot in turn even if they were wounded, as long as the physician authorized them to continue. Moncada chose his pistol, since the weapons were not his.

Then they drew lots again to determine who would shoot first Moncada won that, too and measured the fifteen paces that would separate them.

At last Rafael Moncada and Diego de la Vega faced one another. Neither of the two was a coward, but they were pale, and their shirts were soaked with icy sweat. Diego had reached this point out of rage, and Moncada out of pride; it was too late now, they could not consider the possibility of withdrawing. At that moment they realized that they were gambling their lives without being sure of the cause. Just as Bernardo had earlier pointed out to Diego, the duel was not because of the blow Moncada had struck, but because of Juliana, and although Diego had emphatically denied it, in his heart he knew Bernardo was right. A closed coach was waiting some distance away to bear off the corpse of the loser with as little fuss as possible. Diego did not think of his parents or of Juliana. In the instant that he took his position, with his body in profile so as to present the minimum target to his opponent, the image of White Owl came to his mind with such clarity that he actually saw her standing beside Bernardo. His strange grandmother looked just as she had when she waved goodbye to them as they left California: the same pose, the same rabbit-skin cloak. White Owl raised her shaman’s staff with a haughty gesture that he had seen her make many times and shook it vigorously. Diego felt invulnerable; his fear magically disappeared, and he could look Moncada in the face.

One of the witnesses, the one who had been named director for the duel, clapped his hands once to set them on their marks. Diego took a deep breath and without blinking an eye faced Moncada’s pistol, which he had raised to fire. The director clapped twice for him to aim. Diego smiled at Bernardo and his grandmother, readying himself for the shot.

The hands clapped three times, and Diego saw a spark and simultaneously heard gunpowder exploding and felt a burning pain in his left arm.

He swayed, and for a long moment it seemed that he would fall, as the sleeve of his jacket pooled with blood. In that misty dawn, a pale watercolor in which the outlines of trees and men were a wash of faint color, the red stain gleamed like lacquer. The director indicated to Diego that he had but one minute to respond to his opponent’s shot. He nodded, and assumed the position to fire with his right hand as blood dripped from his left, which hung useless at his side. Opposite him, Moncada, diminished, trembling, standing sideways, squeezed his eyes shut. The director clapped once, and Diego raised his weapon: two, and he pointed; three… Fifteen paces away, Rafael Moncada heard the shot and felt the impact of a cannonball. He fell to his knees, and several seconds passed before he realized that he was not injured:

Diego had fired into the ground. Then he vomited, shivering as if from a high fever. His seconds, embarrassed, went to him to help him to his feet, and to tell him quietly that he must control himself.

In the meantime, Bernardo and Manuel Escalante were helping the physician rip open Diego’s jacket sleeve; he was on his feet and seemingly calm. The bullet had grazed the meaty part of his upper arm without touching the bone or doing great harm to the muscle. The doctor applied a cloth and bound the arm to staunch the bleeding until he could clean and stitch it later. As the etiquette of the duel demanded, the combatants shook hands. They had cleansed their honor; there were no unresolved offenses.

“I give thanks to God that your wound was slight, sir,” said Rafael Moncada, by now in total control of his nerves. “And I ask you to forgive me for having struck your servant.”

“I accept your apology, caballero, and remind you that Bernardo is my brother,” Diego replied.

Bernardo took him by his sound arm and practically carried him to the coach. Later Tomas de Romeu asked Diego why he had challenged Moncada if he was not prepared to shoot him. Diego replied that he had never intended to carry a death on his conscience; all he had wanted was to humiliate him.

The two men made a pact that they would say nothing to Juliana and Isabel about the duel. That was a man’s matter, and they must not offend feminine sensibilities. Neither of the girls believed the story that Diego had fallen off his horse. Isabel pestered Bernardo so unrelentingly that he ended up telling her with a few gestures what had happened. “I have never understood all the fuss about male honor. You have to be slow in the head to risk your life over a trifle,” Isabel commented, but she was impressed; Bernardo could tell because her eye wandered when she was emotional. From that instant, Juliana, Isabel, even Nuria, fought over the privilege of carrying Diego’s food to him.

The physician had prescribed rest for a few days, to prevent complications. These were the happiest four days in the young man’s life; he would gladly have fought a duel every week if it earned him Juliana’s attention. His room filled with a supernatural light when she entered. He awaited her in an elegant smoking jacket, sitting in a chair with a book of sonnets on his knees pretending to read, although all he had been doing was counting the minutes she had been gone. On those occasions, his arm was so painful that Juliana had to spoon the soup into his mouth, cool his brow with orange-blossom water, and entertain him for hours playing her harp, reading Lope de Vega to him, and playing girls’ games. Distracted by Diego’s wound, which though not serious was nonetheless of concern, Bernardo had forgotten that he’d heard Rafael Moncada ask his servant to summon Pelayo, remembering only when he learned through the servants, several days later, that Count Orloff had been assaulted on the night of Eulalia de Callis’s party. The noble Russian had stayed at the palace until very late, then called for his carriage and started back to the residence he had rented for his brief stay in the city. On the way, a group of armed ruffians had stopped his coach in an alleyway and easily subdued the four footmen. After stunning the count with a vicious blow to the head, they took his purse, his jewels, and the chinchilla cape he always wore. The attack had been attributed to guerrillas, although that had never been their mode of operation. The general reaction was that all traces of order in the city had evaporated. What good was it to have a safe-conduct for the curfew if decent people were no longer safe in the streets? It was the last straw that the French could not maintain a scintilla of security! Bernardo reported to Diego that the stolen purse contained the gold Count Orloff had won from Rafael Moncada at the gaming table.

“Are you sure you heard Moncada name Pelayo? I know what you are thinking, Bernardo. You think that Moncada had some role in the assault on the count. That is a bit strong, don’t you think? We don’t have proof, but I agree with you that it is a suspicious coincidence. Even if Moncada had nothing to do with this, he is still a rogue. I do not want to see him anywhere near Juliana, but I don’t know how to stop him,” Diego admitted.

In March of 1812, in Cadiz, the Spanish approved a liberal constitution based on the principles of the French Revolution, though with the difference that it designated Catholicism as the official state religion and outlawed the practice of any other faith. As Tomas de Romeu often said, there was no reason to keep fighting Napoleon when, after all, they agreed on the essential points. “It won’t get any farther than paper and ink, because Spain is not ready for modern ideas,” was the opinion of Le Chevalier, and he added with a gesture of impatience that it would be fifty years before Spain crept into the nineteenth century.

While Diego spent long hours studying in the ancient halls of the School of Humanities, practicing his fencing, and inventing new magic tricks to seduce the immovable Juliana, who as soon as his wound healed had gone back to treating him like a brother, Bernardo explored Barcelona, dragging Padre Mendoza’s heavy boots, which he never could get used to. Around his neck was the magic pouch containing Lightin-the-Night’s black braid, which by now held the warmth and odor of his skin; it was part of his own body, an appendage of his heart.

His self-imposed muteness had refined his other senses. He could follow a course by scent and hearing. He was solitary by nature, and in his situation as a foreigner he was even more alone, but he liked that. He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul. He missed the open spaces of his early years, but he also liked this city with the patina of centuries: the narrow streets, the stone buildings, the dark churches that reminded him of Padre Mendoza’s faith. He liked best the port, where he could gaze out at the ocean and communicate with dolphins from distant seas. He walked silently, invisibly, among the throng, taking the pulse of Barcelona and the nation. It was during one of his wanderings that he saw Pelayo again.

A filthy, beautiful Gypsy woman was standing at the entrance of a tavern, tempting passersby, in her broken Spanish, to let her reveal their destinies, which she could read in the cards or in the map of their hands. Moments before, she had told a drunken sailor, to console him, that a treasure awaited him on a distant beach when in fact she had seen the cross of death in his palm. A few minutes later the man realized that his money pouch was missing and concluded that the Gypsy had stolen it. He rushed back in a mood to get what was his. His eyes were smoldering, and he was foaming like a rabid dog as he grabbed the supposed thief by the hair of her head and began shaking her. Her yelps emptied the tavern of its customers, who began jeering and cursing if one thing united a crowd, it was their blind hatred of the Romany, and to make things worse, thanks to the war it took very little to fire up a mob. They accused the woman of every vice known to humanity, including stealing Spanish children to be sold in Egypt.

Grandfathers could recall lively fiestas when the Inquisition had burned heretics, witches, and Gypsies alike. Just at the instant the sailor opened his knife to carve the woman’s face, Bernardo intervened, butting him like a mountain goat and shoving him to the ground, where he lay weakly kicking amid a cloud of alcohol fumes. Before the crowd could react, Bernardo seized the Gypsy by the hand, and they ran for their lives. They didn’t stop until they reached the barrio of La Barceloneta, where they were more or less safe from the enraged crowd.

There Bernardo dropped her hand and turned to leave, but she insisted that he follow her several blocks to where a wagon brightly painted with arabesques and hitched to a sad, big-hoofed Percheron was sitting in a side street. The inside of that vehicle, battered by the abuse of several generations of nomads, was a Turkish cave crammed with strange objects: a waterfall of colored kerchiefs, a jumble of little bells, and a museum of almanacs and religious images in little boxes nailed everywhere, even on the ceiling. Bernardo breathed in a mixture of patchouli perfume and dirty clothes. A mattress strewn with ostentatious brocade cushions was the only attempt at furniture. With a gesture the woman invited Bernardo to make himself comfortable and immediately sat down before him with her legs tucked beneath her, studying him with her piercing gaze. She pulled out a liquor flask, took a swallow, and passed it to him, still breathing heavily from their escape. She had dark skin, a muscular body, fierce eyes, and hennaed hair. She was barefoot and was wearing two or three long ruffled skirts, a faded blouse, and a short jacket with crisscrossing laces; a shawl was tossed over her shoulders, and she had tied a kerchief around her head in her tribe the sign of a married woman, although she was a widow. A dozen bracelets tinkled at her wrists in chorus with little silver bells on her ankles and gold coins sewn onto the kerchief across her forehead.

She told Bernardo that she used the name Amalia among the gadje, that is, people who weren’t Gypsies. Her mother had given her another name at birth, which only she knew; its purpose was to mislead evil spirits by keeping the girl’s true identity a secret. She also had a third name, one she went by among the other Gypsies. Ramon, the man of her life, had been cudgeled to death by farmers in the market in Lerida, accused of stealing hens. She had loved him since she was a girl, and their families had arranged the marriage when she was only eleven years old. Her in-laws had paid a high price for her because she had good health and a strong character, and she was well trained for domestic chores. In addition to those selling points, she was a true drabardi; she had been born with a natural gift for telling fortunes and for healing with spells and herbs. When she was young, she had looked like a wet cat, but beauty had nothing to do with selecting a wife. Her husband had a pleasant surprise, then, when the pile of bones turned into an attractive woman, but that pleasure was countered when they discovered that Amalia could not have children. Her people considered children a blessing; a sterile womb was grounds for a divorce, but Ramon loved her too much.

At the death of her husband, Amalia sank into a long period of mourning, from which she would never recover. She was not supposed to utter the dead man’s name, in order not to summon him from the other world, but secretly she wept for him every night.

For centuries her people had roamed throughout the world, persecuted and despised. The ancestors of her tribe had left India several hundred years before and made their way through all of Asia and Europe before ending up in Spain, where they were treated as badly as in other places. The climate lent itself to their nomadic life, however, so they had settled in the south of that country. There were few nomadic families like Amalia’s left. Hers had met adversity again and again, and so Bernardo’s unexpected intervention had touched Amalia’s heart.

Her people never had relations with the gadje unless for commercial reasons, otherwise the purity of their breed and their traditions would be endangered. Out of basic caution, the Romany stayed out of the mainstream; they never trusted strangers, and they reserved their loyalty for their clan. But it seemed to Amalia that this young man was not exactly a gadje; he was from another planet, a foreigner everywhere. Maybe he was a Gypsy from a lost tribe.

Amalia, it turned out, was Pelayo’s sister, which Bernardo would discover that same day when Pelayo himself came to the wagon. He did not recognize Bernardo; the night they had caught him singing to Juliana in Italian, on Moncada’s behalf, he had seen nothing but Diego and felt the sword tip pressing against his throat. Amalia explained what had happened to Pelayo in the brittle sounds of Romany, her Sanskrit-derived language. She asked her brother’s pardon for having violated the taboo of not mixing with gadje. That grievous sin could condemn her to ma rime a state of impurity that warranted rejection by the entire community, but she was counting on the fact that rules had been relaxed since the beginning of the war. The clan had suffered greatly during that time, and families had been scattered. Pelayo reached the same conclusion, and instead of scolding his sister, as he would have before, he calmly thanked Bernardo. He was as surprised as Amalia at the Indian’s generosity, since they had never been treated well by a foreigner. They had realized that Bernardo was mute, but they did not make the common mistake of thinking he was also deaf and slow-witted. As a group, they scrambled to survive by taking on any job that fell into their hands; usually that meant selling and breaking horses, as well as treating them if they were sick or injured. They also made money with their small forges, working metals iron, gold, silver to fashion everything from horseshoes to swords and jewelry. The war frequently made them move on, but at the same time it worked in their favor, because in the furor of killing each other both French and Spanish ignored them. On Sundays and feast days the Gypsies would set up a ragged tent in some plaza and put on a small circus. Bernardo would soon meet the rest of the group, among whom a certain Rodolfo stood out, a giant covered with tattoos, who coiled a fat snake around his neck and lifted a horse with his bare hands. Over sixty years old, he was the eldest of the large family, and therefore the one with the most authority. Petrina, a tiny nine-year-old girl who folded herself like a handkerchief to fit inside a vessel for storing olives, was the main attraction of the pathetic Sunday circus. Pelayo did an acrobatic act on one or more galloping horses, and other members of the family delighted their public by throwing daggers at one another with their eyes blindfolded. Amalia sold raffle tickets, read horoscopes, and told fortunes with a classic glass ball, all with such unerring intuition that she frightened herself with her lucid successes. She knew that the ability to foretell the future can be a curse, since if it is not possible to change what is to happen, it is better not to know at all.

As soon as Diego de la Vega learned that Bernardo had struck up a friendship with the Gypsies, he insisted on meeting them so that he could learn more about Pelayo’s dealings with Rafael Moncada. He never imagined that he was going to take a liking to them and feel so comfortable in their company. By that time in Spain most of the tribes of the Roma people, as they called themselves, were living a sedentary life. They set up their camps on the outskirts of towns and cities.

Little by little they became part of the landscape, until the local population got used to seeing them and stopped bothering them, although they were never accepted. In Catalonia, on the other hand, there were no fixed camps; the Romany of that part of the world were nomadic.

Pelayo and Amalia’s tribe was the first to come along that wanted to stay in one place; they had been there for three years. Diego realized from the first moment that it was not a good idea to ask questions about Moncada, or anything else, because the Gypsies had very good reason to be suspicious and to keep their secrets to themselves. Once the wound on his arm had completely healed, and Pelayo had forgiven him for the nick his sword had made on his neck, Diego was able to get his permission to join the improvised circus, along with Bernardo. They made one brief appearance, which was not as stunning as they had hoped because Diego’s arm was still weak, but it was good enough to allow them to join as acrobats. With the help of the rest of the company, they put together an ingenious tangle of posts, ropes, and trapezes modeled on the rigging of the Madre de Dios. They entered the ring wearing black capes that they removed with a grand flourish, revealing tights of the same color. In that garb they flew through the air quite recklessly, as they had on a pitching ship at twice the height. Diego also made a dead hen disappear and then pulled it from the neck of Amalia’s blouse, and with his whip he put out a candle placed on the head of the gigantic Rodolfo, without disturbing a hair. They never mentioned these activities outside the world of the Gypsies; Tomas de Romeu’s tolerance had its limits, and he surely would not have approved. There were many things that de Romeu did not know about his young guest.

One Sunday Bernardo peeked from behind the artists’ curtain and saw that Juliana and Isabel, accompanied by their chaperone, were in the audience. On the way back from mass, where Nuria insisted on taking them even though the idea greatly displeased Tomas de Romeu, the girls had seen the circus and insisted on going in.

The tent, patched together from yellowed pieces of sail discarded in the port, had a center straw-covered ring, some wood benches for the moneyed spectators, and space in the rear for the hoi polloi, who had to stand. In that ring the giant lifted his horse, Amalia squeezed Petrina into the olive vessel, and Diego and Bernardo did their trapeze act. In the same spot, at night, Pelayo organized cockfights. It was not a place where Tomas de Romeu would have wanted to see his daughters, but Nuria could not stand firm when Juliana and Isabel joined together to bend her will.

“If Don Tomas finds out that we’re involved in this, he will send us back to California on the first available ship,” Diego whispered to Bernardo, aghast to see the girls in the tent.

Then Bernardo remembered the mask they had used to frighten the sailors on the Madre de Dios. He cut holes for eyes in two of Amalia’s kerchiefs, and they tied those on to cover their faces, praying that the de Romeu sisters would not recognize them. Diego decided to cancel his magic act, since he had often performed it in the girls’ presence.

Even so, they had the impression that the girls recognized them, until later that evening when he heard Juliana reporting the details of the spectacle to Agnes Duchamp. Whispering, behind Nuria’s back, she told her friend about the intrepid black-clad acrobats who risked their lives on the trapezes, and she added that she would give each one a kiss if only they would show their faces.

Diego was not as lucky with Isabel. He was celebrating their escapade with Bernardo when the girl came into the room without announcing herself, as she often did despite her father’s strict prohibition not to get too friendly with Diego. She planted herself before them, arms akimbo, and announced that she knew who the trapeze artists were and that she was ready to expose them unless they took her the next Sunday to meet the Gypsies. She wanted to see whether the giant’s tattoos, which looked as if they were painted on, were real, and whether the lethargic snake might not be embalmed.

In the following months, Diego, whose blood was boiling with the pent-up desires of his seventeen years, found relief in Amalia’s bosom.

They met at tremendous risk. By making love with a gadje she was violating a basic taboo, for which she could pay dearly. She had been a virgin when she married, the custom among the women of her people, and she had been faithful to her husband till the day he died.

Widowhood had left her in a kind of never-never land: still young, she would be treated like a grandmother until Pelayo, charged with finding her another husband once she dried the last tear of her mourning, fulfilled his obligation. Lives were lived in full view of the clan.

Amalia did not have time or a place to be alone, but occasionally she was able to meet Diego in some quiet alleyway: there she would take him in her arms, always with the insufferable fear of being caught. Amalia did not entangle Diego with romantic demands; after the ugly murder of her husband, she had resigned herself to being alone forever. She was twice Diego’s age and had been married for more than twenty years, but she was not expert in matters of love. With Ramon she had shared a deep and faithful affection absent raptures of passion. They had been married in a simple rite in which they shared a piece of bread anointed with drops of their blood. That was all that was required. The mere fact that they had made the decision to live together sanctified the union, but they gave a bountiful wedding banquet anyway, with music and dance that lasted three whole days. Afterward, they took a place in a corner of the communal tent. From that moment on they were never apart; they traveled the roads and byways of Europe together, they went hungry in hard times, they fled aggression in many places, and they celebrated at the slightest excuse. As Amalia told Diego, she had had a good life. She knew that Ramon, whole again, was waiting for her somewhere, miraculously recuperated from his martyrdom. When she had seen his body, mutilated by the hoes and spades of his murderers, the flame that lighted her within had gone out, and she had never again given a thought to sensual pleasure or the consolation of an embrace.

She had decided to invite Diego to her wagon out of simple friendship, and when she saw how on edge he was for want of a woman, it had occurred to her to help him; that was the extent of it. She ran the risk that the spirit of her husband would return, transformed into a mulo, to punish her for her posthumous infidelity, but she hoped that Ramon would understand her motives: she was not motivated by lust, only generosity. A bashful partner, she made love in the dark, without taking off her clothes. Sometimes she quietly wept. Then Diego would dry her tears with soft kisses, deeply moved. With her he learned to decipher some of the hidden mysteries of a woman’s feminine heart.

Despite the severe sexual norms of her tradition, Amalia, moved by unselfish sympathy, might have done Bernardo the same favor if he had given her so much as a hint, but he never did; the memory of Lightin-the-Night was always foremost in his mind.

Manuel Escalante watched Diego de la Vega for a long time before deciding to talk to him about the most important thing in his life. At first he had distrusted the youth’s arresting magnetism. To Escalante, a man of funereal seriousness, Diego’s lightheartedness was a character flaw, but he had been forced to revise that judgment the morning he witnessed the duel with Moncada. Escalante knew that the purpose of a duel is not to win, but to confront death with nobility and thereby gauge the quality of the soul. For the master, fencing and with even greater reason a duel was an infallible formula for revealing the true measure of a man. In the fever of combat, the essential personality emerges: there is little advantage in being expert with the blade if the swordsman is not imbued with sufficient courage and serenity to confront danger. Escalante realized that in the twenty-five years he had been teaching his art, he had never had a student like Diego. He had seen others with similar talent and dedication, but none had a heart as strong as the hand that held the sword. The admiration he felt for the young man turned into affection, and fencing became the excuse to see him every day. He was ready long before eight, but he was too disciplined and too proud to come into the room one minute before the stroke of the hour. The lesson was always conducted with the greatest formality, and almost in silence; however, during the conversations that followed he shared his ideas and personal aspirations with Diego. Once class was over they washed off with wet towels, changed their clothes, and went up to the second floor, where the maestro lived. There they took their usual seats in uncomfortable carved wood chairs in a dark modest room ringed with books on sagging shelves and polished weapons aligned on the walls. The same ancient servant, who never stopped mumbling to himself, as if endlessly praying, served them black coffee in small rococo porcelain cups. Soon they passed from subjects connected with fencing to others. The maestro’s family, Spanish and Catholic for four generations, nevertheless, could not claim purity of blood because their ancestors had been Jewish. Escalante’s great-grandparents had converted to Catholicism and changed their name to escape persecution. They had succeeded in eluding the merciless harassment of the Inquisition, but in the process they had lost the fortune accumulated over more than a hundred years of good business dealings and modest habits. By the time Manuel was born, there was only a vague memory of a past of comfort and refinement; nothing was left of their properties, artworks, or jewels.

His father had made his living in a small shop in Asturias, two of his brothers were craftsmen, and the third had disappeared in north Africa.

The fact that his closest relatives were devoted to commerce and the manual trades embarrassed the maestro. He believed that the only occupations worthy of a gentleman were those without tangible products.

He was not alone. In Spain in those years only poor campesinos worked, each of them providing food for thirty idlers. But Diego learned of his maestro’s past only much later. When Escalante first told him about La Justicia, and showed him his medallion, he had said nothing about his Jewish heritage. That morning in the sola, as they were drinking their coffee, Manuel Escalante took a key from a fine chain around his neck, went to a small bronze coffer on his desk, solemnly opened it, and showed what it contained to his student: a gold and silver medallion.

“I have seen one like this before, maestro,” Diego murmured, recognizing it.

“Where?”

“Don Santiago de Leon, the captain of the ship that brought me to Spain, wore one.”

“I know Captain de Leon. Like me, he is a member of La Justicia.”

Escalante’s secret society was one of many in Europe during that time.

It had been founded two hundred years earlier in reaction to the power of the Inquisition, the fearsome arm of the church that since the sixteenth century had labored to defend the spiritual unity of Catholics by persecuting Jews, Lutherans, heretics, sodomites, blasphemers, sorcerers, seers, devil worshipers, warlocks and witches, astrologers, and alchemists, as well as anyone who read banned books.

The wealth of the condemned passed into the hands of their accusers, so that many victims burned at the stake because they were wealthy, not for any other reason. For more than three hundred years of religious fervor, the people celebrated autos-da-fe, cruel orgies of public executions, but in the eighteenth century the strength of the Inquisition had begun to wane. The trials continued for a while, but behind closed doors, until the entire institution was abolished. The work of La Justicia had been to save the accused, smuggling them out of the country when possible and helping them begin a new life elsewhere.

They provided clothing and food, obtained false documents, and when possible paid ransoms. During the period when Manuel Escalante recruited Diego, the orientation of La Justicia had changed; it combated not only religious fanaticism but other forms of oppression as well, such as that of the French in Spain and of slavery in foreign lands. La Justicia was a hierarchical organization with a military discipline, in which women had no place. Each step of the initiation had its colors and symbols, the ceremonies were held in secret places, and the only way to be admitted was through another member who acted as sponsor. The participants swore to pledge their lives to the service of the noble causes embraced by La Justicia, never to accept payment for their services, to keep their secret at any price, and to obey the orders of their superiors. The oath was elegantly simple: “To seek justice, nourish the hungry, clothe the naked, protect widows and orphans, give shelter to the stranger, and never spill innocent blood.”

Manuel Escalante had no difficulty convincing Diego de la Vega to stand as a candidate for membership in La Justicia. Mystery and adventure were irresistible temptations for Diego: his only uncertainty had to do with the clause about blind obedience, but after he was convinced that no one would order him to do anything against his principles, he overcame that stumbling block. He studied the coded texts the maestro gave him and subjected himself to training for a unique form of combat that demanded both mental agility and extraordinary physical skill. A precise series of movements with swords and daggers were performed on a design laid out on the floor; this was called the Circle of the Maestro and was the same design reproduced on the gold-and-silver medallions that identified the members of the organization. First Diego learned the sequence and technique of the combat; then he devoted himself for months to practicing with Bernardo, until he could perform the movements without thinking. As Manuel Escalante had indicated, he would be ready only when he could catch a fly on the wing with a single casual swoop. Otherwise he would never best a longtime member of La Justicia, as he would have to do to be accepted.

Finally the day came when Diego was ready for the ceremony of initiation. The fencing master led him through places unknown even to the architects and builders who prided themselves on knowing the city like the palms of their hands. Barcelona had grown upon successive layers of ruins: the Phoenicians and Greeks had passed through without leaving much trace; then came the Romans, who had left their mark on the city but were replaced by the Goths and finally the conquering Saracens, who remained for several centuries. Each culture contributed to the city’s complexity; from the archaeological point of view the city was like a layered phyllo pastry. The Jews had dug out refuges and tunnels in which to hide from the agents of the Inquisition. When they abandoned them, those mysterious passageways became caves for bandits, until gradually La Justicia and other secret sects took over the buried entrails of the city.

Diego and his maestro wove through a labyrinth of sinuous alleyways deep into the barrio of the ancient Goths; they passed beneath hidden gateways, descended stairs worn by time, dove into underground recesses, clambered through cavernous ruins, and crossed canals where no water ran, only a dark viscous liquid that smelled of rotten fruit.

Finally they stopped before a door marked with cabalistic signs; it opened to them after the maestro gave the password, and they walked into a room with the look of an Egyptian temple. Diego found himself in the company of twenty men wearing brightly colored tunics adorned with a variety of symbols. All were wearing medallions similar to those of Maestro Escalante and Santiago de Leon. He was in the sect’s tabernacle, the heart of La Justicia.

The initiation ritual lasted through the night, and during those long hours Diego met all the challenges to which he was subjected, one after another. In an adjoining space, perhaps the ruin of a Roman temple, the Circle of the Master was drawn on the floor. A man stepped forward to challenge Diego, and all the rest gathered around as judges. The man introduced himself as Julius Caesar, his code name. Diego and his opponent shed shirts and shoes, stripping to their trousers. Their bout demanded precision, speed, and a cool head. They would engage one another with sharp daggers, with the apparent intention to kill, attacking as if to sink their daggers to the hilt but at the last fraction of a second holding back. The tiniest scratch on the nearly naked body of the opponent meant that the attacker was immediately eliminated. Neither could step outside the area of the design on the floor. The winner would be the one who could pin his opponent’s shoulders to the ground in the very center of the circle. Diego had trained for months, and he had great confidence in his agility and endurance, but the moment the fight began, he realized that he had no real advantage over his antagonist. Julius Caesar was forty, slimmer and shorter than Diego, but very strong. He stood with his feet planted and elbows out, neck rigid, all the muscles of his torso and arms tensed, veins swollen, dagger gleaming in his right hand, but his face was absolutely calm. He was a formidable adversary. At the order to commence, the two began to dance around the circle, seeking the best angle to attack. Diego made the first move, throwing himself forward, but Caesar gave a great leap and, as if he were flying, flipped in the air and came down behind Diego, giving him barely enough time to whirl and crouch down to avoid the weapon slashing toward him. Three or four passes later, Julius Caesar shifted the dagger to his left hand. Diego was ambidextrous himself, but he had never had to fight anyone who was, and for an instant he lost his focus. His opponent seized that moment to aim a kick at Diego’s chest that tumbled him to the ground, but Diego immediately sprang back up and using that momentum thrust his knife toward Caesar’s neck; had it been actual combat he would have sliced the older man’s throat, but Diego’s hand stopped short, as demanded, and he believed he had scored. As judges did not intervene, he assumed there had been no contact, but he had no opportunity to make sure because the man had locked him in a wrestling hold. Each defended himself from the other’s dagger while with legs and free arm he struggled to force his opponent to the ground. Diego managed to break free and again circled, readying himself for a new charge. He felt on fire; he was red in the face and streaming sweat, but his adversary was not even breathing hard and his face was as tranquil as it had been at the beginning of the match. Manuel Escalante’s words came to mind: never fight in anger. Diego drew two deep breaths, giving himself a moment to calm down, though watching Julius Caesar’s every move. As his mind cleared he realized that just as he had not expected an ambidextrous opponent, neither had his antagonist. He shifted the dagger to his other hand with the quickness he had learned for Galileo Tempesta’s magic tricks and attacked before the other man realized what had happened. Caught by surprise, Caesar stepped back, but Diego thrust a foot between his legs and pushed him off balance. As soon as he fell, Diego was on him, pressing with all his strength, his right arm across the man’s chest and his left fending off the struggling man’s dagger. For a long moment they rocked back and forth, muscles taut as steel, eyes burning into the opponent’s, teeth clenched. Diego not only had to hold his man down, he also had to drag him toward the center of the circle, a difficult task given that his opponent was scrapping with all his strength to prevent it. Out of the tail of his eye, Diego calculated the distance, which seemed enormous; never had an arm’s length seemed so long. There was only one way to do it. He rolled over. Now Caesar was on top of him, and he could not contain his grunt of triumph at having gained the advantage. But with superhuman strength Diego rolled once again, and that placed his adversary precisely on the symbol that marked the center of the circle.

Julius Caesars calm changed to something difficult to read, but it was enough to tell Diego that he had won. With one last effort he pinned his adversary’s shoulders to the ground.

“Well done,” said Julius Caesar with a smile, dropping his dagger.

After that, Diego had to take on two more members with his sword. The judges tied one hand behind his back to give the advantage to his opponents, as neither of those men knew as much about fencing as he.

Manuel Escalante’s training paid off royally, and he was able to vanquish his challengers in fewer than ten minutes. Intellectual challenges followed the physical ones. After demonstrating that he knew the history of La Justicia, he was given difficult problems for which he had to offer original solutions demanding wit, courage, and knowledge. Finally, when he had successfully overcome every obstacle, he was led to an altar. There he saw the symbols he must venerate: a loaf of bread, a scale, a sword, a chalice, and a rose. The bread symbolized the obligation to help the poor; the scale represented the determination to fight for justice; the sword represented courage; the chalice held the elixir of compassion; and the rose reminded the members of the secret society that life is not only sacrifice and labor, it is also beautiful, and for that reason alone must be defended. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Maestro Manuel Escalante, as Diego’s sponsor, placed the medallion around his neck.

“What will your code name be?” asked the Supreme Defender of the Temple.

“Zorro,” Diego replied without hesitation.

He had not been thinking about it, but in that instant he had a clear vision of the red eyes of the fox he had seen during another rite of initiation many years before in the forests of California.

“Welcome to La Justicia, Zorro,” said the Supreme Defender of the Temple, and all the members chorused his name.

Diego de la Vega was so euphoric that he had passed the tests, so awed by the solemnity of the sect’s members, and so overwhelmed by the complex steps of the ceremony and the high-flown names of the hierarchy Caballero of the Sun, Templar of the Nile, Maestro of the Cross, Guardian of the Serpent that he could not think clearly. He agreed with the dogma of the sect and felt honored that he had been admitted.

Only later, as he remembered the details and recounted them to Bernardo, would he judge the rite a little childish. He tried to make fun of himself for having taken it so seriously but his brother didn’t laugh. He simply pointed out how similar the principles of La Justicia were to those of the okahueoi his tribe.

One month after being accepted by the assembly of La Justicia, Diego surprised his maestro with an outlandish idea: he planned to free a group of hostages. Every attack launched by the guerrillas immediately unleashed a barbaric reprisal from the French. Soldiers would take four times as many hostages as they had lost and hang or shoot them in a public place. This swift response did not dissuade the Spanish it merely fueled their hatred, but it broke the hearts of the unfortunate families trapped in the middle.

“This time they’ve taken five women, two men, and an eight-year-old boy, maestro, who will pay for the death of two French soldiers. They already killed the parish priest in the doorway of his church. They are holding these prisoners in the fort and are going to shoot them Sunday, at twelve o’clock noon,” Diego explained.

“I know that, Don Diego, I have seen the notices all around the city.”

Escalante replied.

“We have to save them, maestro.”

“To attempt that would be madness. La Ciudadela is impregnable. And in the hypothetical case that you succeeded in your mission, the French would execute two or three times that many hostages, I assure you.”

“What does La Justicia do in such a situation, maestro?”

“There are times that one must resign oneself to the inevitable. Many innocents die in a war.”

“I will remember that.”

Diego was not inclined to resign himself; among other reasons, Amalia was one of those who had been taken, and he could not desert her.

Through one of those blunders of fate that her cards had forgotten to warn her about, the Gypsy happened to be in the street at the time of the roundup by the French and was captured along with other persons as innocent as she. When Bernardo brought him the bad news, Diego gave no thought to the obstacles he would face, only the necessity of intervening and the irresistible thrill of adventure.

“In view of the fact that it is impossible to get inside La Ciudadela, Bernardo, I will have to settle for the palace of Le Chevalier Duchamp. I want to have a private conversation with him. How does that seem? Ah, I see that you don’t like that idea, but I can’t think of another. I know what you are thinking: that this is some kind of schoolboy prank, like that time with the bear when we were boys. No, this is serious there are human lives to consider. We can’t allow them to shoot Amalia. She is our friend. Well, in my case, she’s something more than a friend, but that isn’t the point. Unfortunately, brother mine, I cannot count on La Justicia, so I am going to need your help. It will be dangerous, but not as much as it would appear. Here is my plan…”

Bernardo threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender and prepared to back his brother, as he had since they were born. Occasionally, when he was especially tired and lonely, he was convinced that it was time to return to California and face the undeniable truth that their childhood was behind them; Diego did show regrettable signs of being an eternal adolescent. Bernardo wondered how they could be so different and yet love each other so much. While for him destiny was a heavy weight on his shoulders, his brother was as carefree as a lark. Amalia, who knew how to read the enigmas of the stars, had explained why they had such different personalities. She said that they were born under two different signs of the Zodiac, although in the same place and during the same week. Diego was a Gemini, and he was a Taurus, and that was what determined their temperaments. Bernardo listened to Diego’s plan with his usual patience, without showing the doubts that troubled him, because deep down he had faith in his brother’s inconceivable good luck. He knew that Diego arrived at his own conclusions, and then did something about them.

Bernardo carried out his assignment, which was to strike up a friendship with a French soldier and get him to drink until he passed out. He then removed the man’s uniform and donned it himself: a dark blue jacket with a crimson military collar, white breeches and shirt, black leggings and tall headgear. In that uniform he was able to lead a team of horses into the palace gardens without attracting the attention of the night guards. Security around the sumptuous residence of Le Chevalier was somewhat lax because it had never occurred to anyone to attack it. At night, guards were posted with lanterns, but with the tedious passing of the hours their vigilance relaxed. Diego, dressed in his black acrobat costume, with cape and mask, the attire that he called his Zorro disguise, used the dark shadows to approach the building. With a spark of inspiration, he had pasted on a mustache he found in the costume trunk of the circus, a black tracing on his upper lip. The mask covered only the upper part of his face, and he was afraid that Le Chevalier could recognize him; the fine mustache was to distract and confuse him. Diego used his whip to pull himself up onto a balcony on the second floor; once he was inside, it was not difficult to locate the wing of the family’s private quarters, since he had been there several times with Juliana and Isabel. It was about three in the morning, an hour when no servants were around and the guards were nodding at their posts. The palace was decorated not with typical Spanish sobriety but in the French manner, with so much furniture, draperies, plants, and statues that Diego had no difficulty moving through the palace unseen. He went down countless corridors and opened twenty doors before he came to the bedchamber of Le Chevalier, which turned out to be unexpectedly simple for someone of his power and rank. Napoleon’s personal representative was sleeping on a hard soldier’s cot in a nearly bare room lighted by a candelabrum in one corner. Diego knew, from indiscreet comments Agnes Duchamp had made, that her father suffered from insomnia and took opium in order to get some rest. One hour before, his valet had helped him disrobe, brought him a glass of sherry and his opium pipe, and then installed himself in a chair in the corridor, as he always did, in case his master needed him during the night. The valet slept very lightly, but that night he never noticed when someone brushed by him. Once inside Le Chevalier’s room, Diego tried to exercise the mental control shown by the members of La Justicia; his heart was galloping, and his brow was wet. If he were caught in this room, he was as good as dead. Political prisoners were swallowed up in the dungeons of La Ciudadela forever, and better not even think of the stories of torture. Suddenly the thought of his father struck him like a blow. If Diego died, Alejandro de la Vega would never know why, only that his son was caught like a common thief in someone else’s home. He took a minute to calm himself, and when he was sure that his will, his voice, and his hand would not tremble, he went over to the cot where Duchamp was floating in the lethargy of opium. Despite the drug, the Frenchman was immediately awake, but before he could yell, Diego covered his mouth with a gloved hand.

“Silence, or you will die like a rat, Excellency,” he whispered.

He touched the tip of his sword to the chest of Le Chevalier, who sat up as far as the sword would allow and nodded that he had understood.

In a whisper, Diego laid out what he wanted.

“You give me too much credit. If I order those hostages to be released, the com andante of the plaza will take others tomorrow,” Le Chevalier answered in the same low tone.

“It would be a pity if that should occur. Your daughter Agnes is very precious, and we do not want to hurt her, but as Your Excellency knows, many innocents die in a war,” said Diego.

He put his hand to his silk jacket, pulled out the lace handkerchief Bernardo had retrieved, and waved it in the face of Le Chevalier; though he could not see his daughter’s embroidered name in the pale light, her father had no difficulty recognizing it from the unmistakable scent of violets.

“I suggest that you not summon your guards, Excellency, because at this moment my men are already in your daughter’s room. If anything happens to me, you will not see her alive again. They will leave only when I give the signal,” Diego said in the most amiable tone in the world, sniffing the handkerchief and stuffing it back into his jacket.

“You may escape with your life tonight,” Le Chevalier growled, “but we will track you down, and then you will regret you were ever born. We know where to find you.”

“I think not, Excellency. I am not a guerrilla, and neither do I have the honor of being one of your personal enemies.” Diego smiled.

“Who are you, then?”

“Shhhh! Do not raise your voice. Remember that Agnes finds herself in good company… My name is Zorro, caballero. At your service.”

Forced by his captor, the Frenchman went to his desk and scribbled a brief note on his personal stationery, ordering the release of the hostages.

“I would be grateful if you would add your official seal, Excellency.”

Diego indicated.

Grumbling, Le Chevalier did as Diego directed, then called his valet, who came to the doorway. Behind the door, Diego held his sword pointed at the servant, ready to eliminate him at the first suspicious move.

“Send a guard to La Ciudadela with this letter,” Le Chevalier ordered.

“And tell him he must bring it back to me immediately, signed by the officer in charge, so I can be sure I am being obeyed. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Excellency,” the man replied, and hurried off.

Diego suggested that Le Chevalier should return to bed and keep warm.

It was a cold night, and they might have a long wait. He regretted, he added, that it was necessary to impose in this manner, but he would have to stay with him until the signed letter was returned. Did he have a chessboard or some cards with which they could pass the time?

The Frenchman did not deign to reply. Furious, he slipped beneath the covers, watched by the masked man, who made himself comfortable at the foot of the bed, as if they were intimate friends. They tolerated one another in silence for more than two hours, and just when Diego had begun to fear that something had gone wrong, the valet knocked at the door and handed his master the paper signed by a Captain Fuguet.

“Hasta la vista, Excellency.” And Zorro’s parting words were, “Please be kind enough to give my greetings to the beautiful Agnes.”

He felt sure that Le Chevalier believed his threat and would not raise the alarm before he was safely away, but as a precaution he bound and gagged him. With the tip of his sword he traced a large letter Z on the wall, then with a mocking bow bid his host farewell and dropped from the palace wall to the ground. There he found his horse where Bernardo had hidden it, its hooves wrapped in rags to silence sound. He rode away without raising an outcry because no one was in the streets at that hour. The next day soldiers pasted notices on the walls of public buildings that as a sign of goodwill on the part of the authorities, the hostages had been pardoned. At the same time, a secret hunt was begun to find the dastardly sneak who called himself Zorro. The last thing the leaders of the guerrilla forces could understand was this sudden mercy for hostages, and they were so confused that for a week no new attempts against the French were carried out in Catalonia.

Le Chevalier could not prevent the news from spreading that an insolent brigand had gained entry to his very bedchamber, first among the servants and the palace guards, then everywhere. The Catalans howled with laughter at what had happened, and the name of the mysterious Zorro passed from mouth to mouth for several days, until other matters engaged the public’s attention, and he was forgotten. Diego heard about it in the School of Humanities, in the taverns, and in the de Romeu home. He bit his tongue not to boast of his exploit in public, and he never confessed to Amalia. The Gypsy believed she had been saved by the miraculous power of the talismans and amulets she always wore and the timely intervention of her husband’s ghost.