“I agree that the boy was not to blame,” he said finally.
The women smiled, though not without a little disappointment at being deprived of entertainment. The friend contained a sigh of relief. As for me, it did not matter whether the pretty-boy apologized or not. I was attuned to Captain Alatriste’s profile beneath the brim of his hat, his thick mustache, his chin, badly shaved that morning, his scars, the gray-green, expressionless eyes that had looked into a void only he could contemplate. Then I looked at his worn and mended doublet, the ancient cape, the modest collar washed time and time again by Caridad la Lebrijana, the dull reflection of the sun on the sword guard and dagger grip protruding from his belt. And I was conscious of a dual and magnificent privilege: that man had been my father’s friend, and now he was also mine, ready to fight on my behalf over a mere word.
Or maybe, in truth, he was doing it for himself. Perhaps the king’s wars, the patrons who hired his sword, the friends who embroiled him in dangerous undertakings, the loose-tongued fops and dandies, even I myself, were simply pretexts that allowed Alatriste to fight because—as don Francisco de Quevedo would have said—there was no choice but to fight, regardless of God, and against whatever there was to be against. And don Francisco himself was now hurrying to join us, sniffing a conflict, though a bit late.
I would have followed Captain Alatriste to the Gates of Hell at one word, one gesture, one smile. I was far from suspecting that that was precisely where he was leading me.
I believe I have already spoken of Angélica de Alquézar. Over the years, when I was a soldier like Diego Alatriste—and played other roles that will be told in good time—life placed women in my path. I am not given to the bluff and bluster of the tavern, nor to lyrical nostalgia, but since the tale demands some comment, I shall boil the matter down and state that I loved a certain number of them, and that I recall others with tenderness, indifference, or—most often the case—with a happy and complicit smile. That is the highest laurel a man may hope for, to emerge from such sweet embraces unscathed, with his purse little diminished, his health reasonable, and his esteem intact.
That being said, I shall affirm to Your Mercies that of all the women whose paths crossed mine, the niece of the royal secretary, Luis de Alquézar, was without doubt the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most seductive, and the most evil. You will make the objection, perhaps, that my youth may have made me excessively vulnerable—remember that at the time of this story I was a lad from the Basque country, not yet fourteen, who had been in Madrid no more than a year. But that was not the case. Even later, when I was a man grown and Angélica was in the full bloom of her womanhood, my sentiments were unchanged. It was like loving the Devil, even knowing who he is.
I believe that I have recounted previously that youthful or not, I was obsessively in love with that señorita. Mine was not yet the passion that comes with years and time, when flesh and blood are blended with dreams, and everything takes on a diffuse and dangerous tone. At the time I am referring to, mine was a kind of hypnotic attraction, like peering into an abyss that tempts you and terrifies you at the same time. Only later—the adventure of the convent and of the dead woman was merely a station on that Via Crucis—I learned how misleading the blond curls and blue eyes of that angelic-looking girl could be, the cause of my so often finding myself on the verge of sacrificing my honor and my life. In spite of everything, however, I went on loving her to the end. And even now when Angélica de Alquézar and the others are gone, familiar ghosts in my memory, I swear to God above and to all the demons of Hell—where she is most surely a bright flame today—that I love her still. At times, when memories seem so sweet that I long even for old enemies, I go and stand before the portrait Diego Velázquez painted of her, and stay for hours looking at her in silence, painfully aware that I never truly knew her. But along with the scars that she inflicted, my old heart still holds the conviction that that girl, that woman who inflicted upon me every evil she was capable of, also, in her way, loved me till the day she died.
At the time of this story, however, all that lay before me. The morning that I followed her carriage to the Acero fountain, beyond the Manzanares and the Segovia bridge, Angélica de Alquézar was simply a fascinating enigma. I have already written that she used to ride down Calle Toledo on the way between her domicile and the palace, where she served as a menina, waiting upon the queen and the princesses. The house where she lived, an old mansion on the corner of La Encomienda and Los Embajadores, belonged to her uncle, Luis de Alquézar. It had been the property of the Marqués de Ortígolas until he—ruined by a well-known actress in La Cruz theater, who choked more life out of him than a hangman his victims—had to sell it to satisfy his creditors. Luis de Alquézar had never married, and his one known weakness, aside from the voracious exercise of power that had earned him his position at court, was his orphaned niece, the daughter of a sister who had perished with her husband, a duke, during the storm that lashed the fleet of the Indies in ’21.
I had watched her pass by, as was my habit, from my post at the door of the Tavern of the Turk. Sometimes I followed her two-mule carriage to the Plaza Mayor, or sometimes to the very flagstones of the palace, where I turned and followed my footsteps home. All for the fleeting reward of one of her disturbingly blue glances—which on occasion she deigned to grant me before focusing on some detail of the landscape, or turning toward the duenna who usually accompanied her: a hypocritical, vinegary old woman as worn and thin as a student’s purse. The duenna was one of those creatures of whom it could honestly be said,
Never without her scapular,with more herbs and balms and flummerythan all the nostrums that line the shelvesof the city’s most bustling pharmacy.
I had, as you perhaps recall, exchanged a few words with Angélica during the adventure of the two Englishmen, and I always suspected that, knowingly or not, she had contributed to our being attacked in El Príncipe theater, where Captain Alatriste came within a hair of losing his hide. But no one is completely in control of whom he hates or whom he loves; so, even knowing that, the blonde girl continued to bewitch me. And my intuition that it was all a devilishly dangerous game did nothing but spur my imagination.
So I followed her that morning through the Guadalajara gate and de la Villa plaza. It was a brilliant day, but instead of continuing toward the palace, her carriage rolled down the de la Vega hill onto the Segovia bridge and across the river whose thin trickle was the eternal source of burlesque and ridicule from the city’s poets. Even the usually cultured and exquisite don Luis de Góngora—quoted here with an apology to Señor de Quevedo—contributed the pretty lines that follow.
An ass drank you in yesterday,and today you are the piss it passed.