I who always strive and strain
To seem to have poetic grace
Though Heaven denies me again and again.
But then, that was the nature of the lost world I am describing to you, when the mere name of Spain made the earth tremble. It was all barbed quarrels, arrogance, ill will, cruelty, and poverty. As the empire on which the sun was setting was gradually crumbling, as we were being erased from the face of the earth by our misfortune and our own vile deeds, there, amongst the rubble and the ruins, lies the mark left by those remarkably talented men who, while they could not justify it, could at least explain that age of greatness and glory. They were the children of their time in the evil that they did—and they did a great deal—but they were also the children of the genius of their time in the brilliant works they wrote—and they wrote so much. No nation has given birth to so many men of genius at any one time, nor have the writers of any one nation recorded as faithfully as they did the tiniest details of their age. Fortunately, they live on in libraries, in the pages of their books, within reach of whoever cares to approach and listen, astonished, to the heroic, terrifying roar of our century and our lives. Only thus is it possible to understand what we were and what we are. And then may the devil take us all.
Lope remained at his house, the secretary Prado left, and the rest of us, including Lopito, finished the evening in Juan Lepre’s tavern, on the corner of Calle del Lobo and Calle de las Huertas, sharing a skin of Lucena wine. The talk grew animated. Captain don Alonso de Contreras, an extremely likable fellow, who enjoyed a good fight and good conversation, recounted tales of his life as a soldier and that of my master, including that business in Naples in the fifteenth year of this century, when, after my master had killed a man in a duel over a woman, it was Captain Contreras himself who helped him to elude justice and return to Spain.
“The lady didn’t escape unscathed, either,” he added, laughing. “Diego left her with a charming scar on her cheek as a souvenir. And by God, the hussy deserved it—and more.”
“Oh, I know many such women who do,” added Quevedo, ever the misogynist.
And on this theme, he regaled us with some lines that he had thought up there and then:
“Fly, thoughts, and tell those eyes
That make my heart so glad:
There’s money to be had.”
I looked at my master, incapable of imagining him slashing a woman’s face with a knife. He, however, remained impassive, elbows on the table, as he stared into his mug of wine. Don Franciso caught my look, cast a sideways glance at Alatriste, and said no more. What other things, I wondered, lay behind those silences. And I shuddered inside, as I always did when I got a glimpse of the captain’s dark inner life. It is never pleasant to grow in years and understanding and thus penetrate into the more hidden recesses of one’s hero’s mind and life, and, as I grew more perceptive with passing time, I saw things in Diego Alatriste that I would have preferred not to see.
“But then, of course,” said Contreras, who had also seen the expression on my face and feared perhaps that he had gone too far, “we were young and spirited. I remember one occasion, in Corfu it was . . .”
And he launched into another story. Along the way, he mentioned the names of various mutual friends, such as Diego, Duke of Estrada, a comrade of my master’s during the disastrous attack on the Kerkennah Islands, where they both nearly lost their lives trying to save that of Álvaro de la Marca, Count of Guadalmedina. The count, of course, had since exchanged his soldierly accoutrements for the post of confidant to Philip IV and, according to Quevedo, now accompanied the king each night on his romantic sorties. Forgetting my earlier gloomy thoughts, I listened to them talk, fascinated by their accounts of galleys and ships being boarded, of slaves and booty. The way Captain Contreras told them, these events took on fabulous proportions: the famous incident when, with the Marquis of Santa Cruz, they set fire to the Berber fleet off La Goleta; the description of idyllic places at the very foot of Mount Vesuvius; the youthful orgies and acts of bravado, when Contreras and my master would spend in a matter of days the money they had earned from pursuing pirates around the Greek islands and the Turkish coast. Between swigs of the wine we were clumsily spilling all over the table, Captain Contreras felt moved to recite some lines written in his honor by Lope de Vega and into which he now introduced my master’s name by way of a tribute:
“Contreras’s valor was fully tested,
And laurels hard won, in the fight for Spain.
Alatriste and he were never bested
During that bloody Turkish campaign.
Even their slightest, most modest feat
(For a blade of steel cannot deceive)
Brought them praise and honor sweet.”
Alatriste still said nothing—his sword hanging from the back of his chair and his hat on the floor on top of his folded cloak—he merely nodded now and then, uttered the occasional monosyllabic comment, and managed a faint, courteous smile whenever Contreras, Quevedo, or Lopito de Vega mentioned his name. I listened and watched, drinking in the words, captivated by every anecdote and every memory, and feeling that I was one of them—and that I had every right to feel so, too. After all, I may have been only sixteen, but I was already a veteran of Flanders and some other rather murkier campaigns; I had both the scars to show for it and reasonable skills as a swordsman. This confirmed me in my intention to join the militia as soon as I could and to win my own laurels so that, one day, as I recounted my exploits at a tavern table, someone might recite a few lines of poetry in my honor, too. I did not know then that my wishes would be more than granted, and that the road I was preparing to take would also lead me to the farther side of glory and of fame. True, I had known war in Flanders, but had done so with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the innocent, for whom the militia is a magnificent spectacle; the true face of war casts a dark shadow over heart and memory. I look back now from this interminable old age in which I seem to be suspended as I write these memoirs and—beneath the murmur of the flags flapping in the wind and the drumroll that marks the quiet passing of the old infantry whose long-drawn-out death I wit- nessed in Breda, Nördlingen, Fuenterrabía, Catalonia, and Rocroi—I find only the faces of ghosts and the lucid, infinite solitude of someone who has known the best and the worst of what that word “Spain” contains. And now, having myself paid the price demanded by life, I know what lay behind the captain’s silences and his abstracted gaze.
The captain bade good night to everyone and set off alone up Calle del Lobo before crossing Carrera de San Jerónimo, wrapped in his cloak and with his hat pulled well down. Night had fallen, it was cold, and Calle de los Peligros was deserted; the only light came from a candle burning in a niche in the wall containing the image of a saint. Halfway along, he felt the need to stop for a moment. “Too much wine,” he said to himself. He chose the darkest corner, drew back his cloak and unbuttoned his breeches. He was standing there in the corner, legs apart, relieving himself, when a bell tolled in the nearby convent of Bernardine nuns. He had plenty of time, he thought. It was half an hour until his rendezvous in a house farther up on the right, beyond Calle de Alcalá, where an old duenna, a seasoned bawd and matchmaker experienced in her profession, would have everything ready—bed, supper, washbowl, water, and towels—for his meeting with María de Castro.