"Angelica comes from 'angel,'" I commented, enslaved. She looked at me with amusement and said nothing for a long while. I felt as if I had been transported to the gates of Paradise. Then her chaperone returned, the coachman caught sight of me, slapped the reins, drove off, and I was left standing there, frozen among the passing parade, feeling as though I had been brutally ripped from some magical place.
Only later that night, when I could not sleep for thinking of her, and the next day on the way back from the theater, did some peculiar details occur to me. No well-brought-up girl was permitted to chat, right in plain sight, with young nobodies she scarcely knew. I began to sense that I was teetering on the brink of something dangerous and unknown. I even asked myself whether Angelica's attention to me could have been connected with the eventful hours of some nights earlier. However you looked at it, any relation between that blonde angel and the ruffians at the Gate of Lost Souls seemed unimaginable. Added to that, the prospect of attending a play by Lope had clouded my judgment. And that, says the Turk, is how God blinds those He wants to go astray.
From the monarch to the lowest townsman, in the Spain of Philip the Fourth, everyone had a burning passion for theater. The comedias had three jornadas, or acts, and were written in verse, in several meters and rhymes. Their hallowed authors, as we have seen in the case of Lope, were loved and respected, and the popularity of the actors and actresses was enormous. Every premiere or performance of a famous work brought out town and court, and through the nearly three hours each play lasted, the audience was in thrall. At that time, the productions usually took place in daylight, in the afternoon after the midday meal, in open-air venues know as corrales. There were two in Madrid: El Principe, also known as La Pacheca, and La Cruz. Lope preferred the stage of the latter, which was also the favorite of our lord and king, who loved the theater as much as his wife, Elizabeth of France, did. And just as much as our monarch loved theater, being especially fond of youthful adventures, he also loved, clandestinely, the beautiful actresses of the moment—chief among them Maria Calderon, or La Calderona, who gave him a son, the second Don Juan of Austria.
Expectation was high that day. One of Lope's celebrated comedias was playing at El Principe! Long before it started, animated groups of theatergoers were wending their way toward the corral, and by noon the narrow street on which it was then located—across from the convent of Santa Ana—was already crowded. The captain and I had met Juan Vicuna and Licenciado Calzas along the way; they, too, were great admirers of Lope's, and Don Francisco de Quevedo had joined us on the same street. So we all went on together to the gate of the theater, where it became nearly impossible to move among the crowd. Every level of society was represented: The elite occupied the boxes overlooking the stage and the benches and standing room for the public, while those further down the social ladder filled the tiers below the boxes and the wooden benches in the yard. Women sat in their own gallery, the cazuekv, the sexes were separated in the corral as in church. And behind a dividing barrier, the open yard was reserved for those who stood throughout the play: the famous mosqueteros, there with their spiritual leader, the cobbler Tabarca. When he passed our group he greeted us gravely, solemnly, puffed up with his own importance.
By two o'clock, Calle El Principe and the entrances to the corral were swarming with merchants, artisans, pages, students, clergy, scribes, soldiers, lackeys, squires, and ruffians who had dressed for the occasion in cape, sword, and dagger, all calling themselves caballeros and ready to clash over a place to watch the play. Added to that seething, fascinating commotion were the women, who swept into the cazuela amid a flurry of skirts, shawls, and fans, and were pinned like butterflies by the eyes of every gallant twirling his mustaches in the boxes and yard. The women, too, quarreled over their seats, and at times an official had to intervene and establish peace in the spaces reserved for them. Confrontations over someone's having slipped in without paying, and squabbles between the person who had reserved a seat and another person who claimed it frequently provoked a "How dare you?" backed with a sword, all of which demanded the presence of a magistrate and attending bailiffs.
Not even nobles were above these altercations. The Duque de Fera and Duque de Rioseco, disputing the favors of an actress, had once knifed each other in the middle of a play; they claimed that it was over their seats. Licenciado Luis Quifiones, a timid and good man from Toledo who was a friend of Captain Alatriste's and mine, described, in one of his irreverent ballads, the ambience that lent itself to slashing and stabbing:
They come to the corral de comedias
Pouring in like rain, and soaking wet.
But if they slip in without paying,
They leave streaming blood—and wetter yet!
Strange people, we. As someone would later write, confronting danger, dueling, defying authority, gambling life or liberty are things that have always been done, in every corner of the world, whether for hunger, hatred, lust, honor, or patriotism. But to put hand to sword, or to knife another being, merely to get into a theater performance was something reserved for the Spain of my youth. When good, it was very good, but when bad, far worse than bad. It was the era of quixotic, sterile deeds that determined reason and right at the imperious tip of a sword.
As we made our way to the corral, we had to thread through groups of early arrivals, and beggars harassing everyone who passed by. Of course, half of the blind, lame, amputee, and maimed were malingerers, self-proclaimed hidalgos brought down to begging because of an unfortunate accident. You had to excuse yourself with a courteous "I'm sorry, sir, I am not carrying any money" if you did not want to be berated in a most unpleasant fashion. The manner of begging is different among different peoples. The Germans beg in a group, the French are servile, reciting orisons and pleas, the Portuguese implore with lamentations, the Italians with long tales of misfortunes and ills, and the Spanish with arrogance and threats—saucy, insolent, and impatient.
We paid a quarter-maravedi at the entrance, three maravedis at the second door, for hospital charity, and twenty maravedis for a seat on the benches. Naturally our places were occupied, although we had paid a lot for them, but not wanting to get into a scuffle with me along, the captain, Don Francisco, and the others decided that we would sit at the back, close to the mosqueteros. I was wide-eyed, taking everything in, fascinated by the people, the vendors of mead and sweetmeats, the buzz of conversations, the whirl of farthingales, skirts, and petticoats in the women's galleries, the elegance of the well-to-do visible at the windows of their boxes. It was said that the king himself often sat there, incognito, when the play was to his taste. And the presence that afternoon of members of the royal guard on the stairs, not wearing uniforms but looking as if they were on duty, seemed to hint at that possibility.