“In matters of the heart
When you very least suspect it,
From a bow flies a dart,
With your honor as its target.”
We heard the voice of María de Castro rehearsing the opening lines of the second act. Hers was, without a doubt, the sweetest voice in Spain, skillfully trained by her husband, who, in that respect, although not in others, always ruled with a firm hand. The sound of her voice was interrupted occasionally by hammering from the scene-shifters, and Cózar, who was using don Francisco’s script as a prompt, would call for silence as majestically as an archbishop from Liège or a grand duke from Moscow, characters whose mannerisms he had honed on the stage. The play was to be performed there, in the open air. To this end, a stage had been set up as well as a large awning to protect the royal personages and the main guests from sun or rain. It was said that the count-duke was spending ten thousand escudos on fêting the king and queen and their guests with both play and party.
This is truly not a lie:
When in love, we who die
Live, and in living,
We as yet are dying.
These, by the way, were not lines of which don Francisco was particularly proud, but as he himself remarked to me in private, they were worth exactly what he was being paid for them. Besides, such plays on words, verbal sleights of hand, and paradoxes were very much to the taste of the public who attended the theater, from the king himself down to the most insignificant rogue, including the innkeeper Tabarca’s mosqueteros. And so, in the opinion of the poet—who was a great admirer of Lope de Vega, but who liked to put everyone in his proper place—if the Phoenix could sometimes allow himself such knowing jokes to round out an act or draw applause in a particular scene, he saw no reason why he should not do the same. What mattered, he said, was not that a man of his talent could produce such lines as easily as a Moor could make fritters, but that they amused the king, the queen, and their guests, and, more especially, the count-duke, who held the purse strings.
“The captain should be here soon,” Quevedo said suddenly.
I turned to look at him, grateful that he should still be thinking of my master. I found, however, that he was watching María de Castro as impassively as if he had not spoken a word, and indeed he said nothing more. For my part, I could not stop thinking about Captain Alatriste either, still less after my interview, given most reluctantly, with the king’s favorite. I was hoping that once the captain arrived and met with Guadalmedina everything would be resolved and our lives would return to normal. As for his relationship with La Castro—she was asking now for some cooling water to drink, and her husband solicitously had some brought for her—I had no doubt that he would cease to play the gallant to that very dangerous leading lady. As for the lovely actress herself, I was surprised how at ease she seemed to be in El Escorial. I understood then how an arrogant, self-confident woman, raised to such heights, might grow quite puffed up with vanity when she enjoyed the favor of a king or some other powerful man. Needless to say, the actress and the queen never met; the actresses only entered the palace garden for rehearsals and none were actually lodging on the palace grounds. It was also said that the king had already made the occasional night visit to La Castro, this time unmolested by anyone, still less by the husband, for it was well known that Cózar slept very soundly indeed and could snore like a saint even with his eyes wide open. All of this was common knowledge and would soon reach the ears of the queen. However, the daughter of Henri IV had been brought up as a princess and knew that such matters must be accepted as part of her role. Isabel de Borbón was always a model queen and lady, which is why the people loved and respected her until her death; and no one could imagine the tears of humiliation our unhappy queen would shed in the privacy of her rooms over her august husband’s licentious behavior, which would, in time, so rumor had it, engender as many as twenty-three royal bastards. In my view, the origin of the queen’s invincible loathing for El Escorial—she would only return there to be buried—lay not just in the building’s grim atmosphere, which fitted so ill with her own cheerful disposition, but in memories of her husband’s dalliance with La Castro, whose moment of triumph, by the way, was short-lived, for she was soon to be replaced in the king’s capricious favors by another actress, the sixteen-year-old María Calderón. Philip IV was always more attracted to lowborn women—actresses, kitchen maids, serving wenches, and whores—than to ladies of the court. It must be said, though, that unlike in France, where some royal mistresses ended up having more power than certain queens, in Spain, appearances were always preserved and no courtesan ever held sway at court. Prim old Castile, which had embraced the rigid Burgundy etiquette brought from Ghent by the emperor Charles, insisted that nothing less than an abyss should separate the majesty of its monarchs from the rest of vulgar humanity. This is why, once the affair was over—for no one could ride a horse once ridden by the king nor enjoy a woman whom he had made his mistress—the king’s concubines were usually forced to enter a convent, as were any daughters born of such illegitimate loves. This provoked one court wit to pen the following inevitable lines:
Traveler, this house, this monument
Is not what it appears:
The king first made it a bawdy house
And then a holy convent.
Such incidents, plus the money squandered on parties, masked balls, and festive lights, on corruption, wars, and bad governance, all contribute to painting a moral portrait of the Spain of that time, which, though still a powerful and much-feared nation, was unstoppably going to the devil. Our lethargic king was full of good intentions, but incapable of doing his duty; during his long forty-four-year reign, he placed all responsibility in the hands of others and devoted himself to fornicating, hunting, indulging his every pleasure, and plundering the nation’s coffers. Meanwhile, we lost Rosellón and Portugal; Catalonia, Sicily, and Naples rose up in revolt; Andalusian and Aragonese nobles conspired against us; and our regiments, unpaid and therefore hungry and indisciplined, could only stand by, impassive and silent, still faithful to their glorious legend, and allow themselves to be destroyed. To quote the admirable last line—with all due respect to Señor de Quevedo—of don Luis de Góngora’s sonnet “On the Fleeting Nature of Beauty and Life,” Spain was reduced to “earth, smoke, dust, and shadow—naught.”
As Captain Alatriste said to me once during a mutiny near Breda: “Your king is your king.” Philip IV was the monarch Fate gave me, and I had no other; he was the only king that men of my class and my century knew. No one offered us a choice. And that is why I continued to fight for him and was loyal to him until his death, both as an innocent youth and as a scornful, clear-sighted, battle-worn man, and much later, too, in my more charitable maturity, when, as captain of his guard, I saw him transformed into a prematurely old man, bent beneath the burden of defeat, disappointment, and regret, broken by the ruin of his nation and by the blows of life itself. I used to accompany him alone to El Escorial, where he would spend long hours in silence in the solitude of that ghostly pantheon containing the illustrious remains of his ancestors, the kings whose mighty inheritance he had so wretchedly squandered. The Spain that came to rest on his shoulders was very great indeed, and he, alas for us, was not a man to bear such a weight.