About an hour later, when the visit was over, and I was following don Francisco de Quevedo through the porticos of the Queen’s Courtyard, the jester Gastoncillo caught up with me, tugged discreetly at the sleeve of my doublet, and pressed a tightly folded piece of paper into my hand. I stood for a moment studying it, as it lay unopened in my palm; then, before don Francisco saw the note, I slipped it into my purse. I looked around, feeling bold and gallant, the bearer of a secret message, like some character out of a cloak-and-sword drama. “Dear God,” I thought, “life is beautiful and the court is a fascinating place.” The palace, where decisions were made as to the fate of an empire that bestrode two worlds, reflected the pulse of the Spain which, just then, I found so intoxicating. The two courtyards, the queen’s and the king’s, were full of courtiers, suitors, and idlers who came and went between the palace and the mentidero outside, through the archway where, in the shadows or silhouetted against the light, I could see the checkered uniforms of the old guard. Don Francisco de Quevedo, who was, as I have said, very much in vogue at the time, was constantly being stopped by people greeting him deferentially or asking for his support for some plan or proposal. Someone sought a favor for his nephew, another for a son-in-law, someone else for his son or brother-in-law. No one offered anything in return, no one made any personal commitment. They were content—like pirates—to go around demanding favors, as if these were their right; and all of them, of course, claimed to have the blood of the Goths flowing in their veins; and all were in pursuit of the dream nurtured by every Spaniard: to live without doing a stroke of work, to pay no taxes, and to swagger about with a sword at their belt and a cross embroidered on their doublet. To give you an idea of just how far we Spaniards would go when it came to petitions and requests, not even the saints of the churches were free from such importunate demands; people placed letters of entreaty in the hands of statues, asking for this or that worldly grace, as if the images were mere palace functionaries. Indeed, at the church of the much-solicited Saint Anthony of Padua, a notice was placed underneath the saint, saying: “Closed for business. Please try Saint Gaetano.”
Don Francisco de Quevedo was familiar with this game, for, in the past, he himself had felt no qualms about asking for favors—not all of which met with luck or good fortune—and now, like Saint Anthony of Padua, he listened and smiled and shrugged, never promising more than the bare minimum. “After all, I am only a poet,” he would say as he made his escape. And, sometimes, grown weary of some particularly importunate supplicant and unable to find a polite way of getting rid of him, he would end up simply telling him to go to hell.
“Christ’s blood,” he would mutter, “we’ve turned into a nation of beggars!”
This was not so very far from the truth, and would become truer still in the years to come. Spaniards did not consider a favor to be a privilege but an inalienable right, so much so that the fact of not possessing something our neighbor possessed blackened both our bile and our soul. As for that proverbial, much-vaunted Spanish virtue hidalguía, or nobility—a lie that even Corneille and many others like him had swallowed whole—I will say only that it may have existed once, when our compatriots had to fight to survive and valor was only one of many virtues impossible to buy with gold, but no more. Too much water had flowed under too many bridges since the days when don Francisco de Quevedo himself wrote, by way of an epitaph:
Here lies virtue, rough as sin,
Less rich, ’tis true, but feared the more,
With the vanity and dreams it’s buried in.
In the times I am describing, virtues, assuming always that they even existed, had almost all gone to the devil. We were left with nothing but the blind pride and lack of loyalty that would finally drag us into the abyss; and the little dignity we retained became the province of a few isolated individuals, or else appeared on the stages of our theaters—in the poetry of Lope and Calderón, and on the distant battlefields where our veteran troops were still fighting. It has always made me laugh to hear men declare, with a twirl of their mustaches, that ours is a dignified and gentlemanly nation. Well, I was, and am, a Basque and a Spaniard; I’ve lived my century from beginning to end, and along the way I’ve encountered many more San cho Panzas than Don Quixotes, more base, despicable, wicked, ambitious people than valiant, honest folk. Our one virtue was that when there was no alternative, some, even the very worst of us, died like men, standing up with sword in hand. The truth is, though, that it would have been far better to live and work for the progress we so rarely enjoyed; alas, kings and royal favorites and priests obstinately denied us this possibility. Each nation is as it is, and what happened in Spain happened. Yet, since we all went down in the end, perhaps it was better like that, with just a few desperate men salvaging the dignity of the unspeakable rump—as if it were the tattered standard from the Terheyden redoubt—by praying, blaspheming, killing, and fighting to their last breath. And that, at least, is something. When anyone asks me what I admire about this poor, sad land of Spain, I always repeat what I said to that French officer in Rocroi: “Count the dead.”
If you are gentleman enough to escort a lady, wait for me tonight at the Puerta de la Priora when the angelus is rung.
And that was all the note said; there was no signature. I read it several times, leaning against a column in the courtyard while don Francisco chatted with a group of acquaintances. Each time I read those words, my heart started pounding in my breast. During the time that Quevedo and I had been in the presence of the queen, Angélica de Alquézar had displayed no particular interest in me. She sat surrounded by her whispering companions, and even her smiles were subtle and contained, although, having said that, her blue eyes did occasionally fix on me with such intensity that I feared my legs might buckle. I was a handsome youth at the time, tall for my age, with bright eyes and thick black hair, and I cut quite a decent figure in my new clothes, and in the cap, complete with a red feather, that I was holding now in my hands. That is what had given me the courage to bear the scrutiny of my young lady, if the word “my” can be applied to the niece of the royal secretary Luis de Alquézar, for she was always herself alone, and even when I knew her mouth and her flesh—and I could not have imagined then how soon I would do so for the first time—I always felt like a temporary guest, an interloper, uncertain of the ground I was treading on and expecting, at any moment, that the servants should throw me out into the street. And yet, as I have said before, despite all that happened between us, despite the scar from the knife wound I bear on my back, I know—at least I want to believe that I do—that she always loved me. In her fashion.