If you seek a winning knave;
Avoid black-hearted spades,
For they will dig your grave.
The songs continued, as did the drinking and the talk, and more comrades kept arriving. Sallow-skinned and menacing, with broad hands and face, and a huge mustache whose ferocious waxed ends reached almost to his eyes, Ganzúa was a strapping man in his late thirties and still as sharp as a razor. He had dressed for the occasion in his Sunday best: a purple, slightly darned doublet, slashed sleeves, green canvas breeches, shoes for promenading in, and a four-inch-wide belt with a silver buckle. It was a pleasure to see him looking so smart and so solemn, accompanied, encouraged, and cheered by his confreres, every one of them wearing a fine hat and looking for all the world like a Spanish grandee, gaily downing the wine, of which several pints had already been drunk and which showed no signs of running out because—not trusting the wine sold by the prison governor—they had brought a large supply of pitchers and bottles from a tavern in Calle Cordoneros. As for Ganzúa, he appeared not to be taking his early-morning appointment too much to heart, and he played his part with courage, decorum, and a proper sense of gravity.
“Death, my friends, is of no importance,” he would declare now and then with great aplomb.
Captain Alatriste, who understood this world well, went over and very courteously introduced himself to Ganzúa and company, passing on greetings from Juan Jaqueta, whose situation in the Patio de los Naranjos, he explained, meant that he could not have the pleasure of coming with him that night to bid farewell to his friend. Ganzúa responded equally courteously, inviting us to take a seat, which Alatriste did, having first greeted a few acquaintances who were all busily eating and drinking. Ginesillo el Lindo—a fair-haired, elegantly dressed ruffian, with an affable look and a dangerous smile, and long, silky, shoulder-length hair a la milanesa—greeted him warmly, delighted to see him well and in Seville. Ginesillo was, as everyone knew, effeminate—by which I mean that he had little taste for the act of Venus—but he was as brave as any man, and as deadly as a scorpion with a doctorate in the art of fencing. Others of his ilk proved less fortunate, and were arrested on the slightest pretext and treated by everyone, even by other prison inmates, with terrible cruelty, which only ended when they were burnt at the stake. In this frequently hypocritical and contemptible Spain, a man could, with impunity, lie with his own sister or daughters or even his grandmother, but, as with blasphemy and heresy, committing the abominable sin of sodomy meant only one thing: the pyre. By contrast, killing, stealing, corruption, and bribery were considered mere bagatelles.
I took my place on a stool, sipped some wine, ate a few capers, and listened to the conversation and the solemn arguments that each man offered Nicasio Ganzúa by way of consolation or encouragement. Doctors kill more people than the executioner, one said. Another colleague pointed out that behind every bad lawsuit there’s a sly scribe. Another said that death, though a nuisance, was the inevitable fate of all men, even dukes and popes. Someone else cursed the whole race of lawyers, who had no equal, he affirmed, even amongst Turks and Lutherans. May God be our judge, said another, and leave justice to the fools. Yet another regretted that the sentence imposed on Ganzúa would deprive the world of such an illustrious member of the criminal classes.
“My only regret,” said another prisoner who was also at the wake, “is that my own sentence hasn’t been signed yet, although I’m expecting it any moment. It’s a damned shame it didn’t arrive today, really, because I would gladly have joined you on the scaffold tomorrow.”
Everyone thought this the sentiment of a true comrade and, praising its aptness, pointed out to Ganzúa how much his friends admired him and how honored they were to be able to keep him company at this time, just as they would be the following morning in Plaza de San Francisco—those of them, that is, who could walk the streets without fear of constables. They would all do the same for one another one day, and whatever a fellow ruffian might suffer, he would always have his friends.
“You have to face death with courage, just as you’ve always faced life,” said a man with a much-scarred face and a fringe as greasy as the collar of his shirt. He was El Bravo de los Galeones—a sharp-witted rogue from Chipiona.
“On my grandmother’s grave, that’s true,” replied Ganzúa serenely. “No one did me a wrong they didn’t pay for later, and if ever a man did, then come the Resurrection, when I step out into the new world, I’ll really let him have it.”
All nodded sagely: this was how real men talked, and they all knew that at his execution the following day, he would neither blanch nor turn religious; he was, after all, a brave man and a scion of Seville, and everyone knew that La Heria did not breed cowards, and that others before him had drunk from that same cup and never quailed. A man with a Portuguese accent offered the consoling thought that at least the sentence had been imposed by the king’s justice, and therefore almost by the king himself, and so it was not just anyone who was taking Ganzúa’s life. It would be a mark of dishonor for such a famous rogue to be dispatched by a mere nobody. This last remark was roundly applauded by the other men there, and Ganzúa himself smoothed his mustaches, pleased with such a measured assessment of the situation. The idea had come from a ruffian in a knee-length buff coat; he had little fat on him and little hair, and what hair he had grew gray and curly and abundant around the noble, bronzed dome of his head. It was said that he’d been a theologian at the University of Coimbra until some misfortune had set him on the path of crime. Everyone considered him to be a man of the law and of letters, as well as a swordsman; he was known as Saramago el Portugués; he had a stately air about him, and was said to kill only out of necessity, hoarding all his money like a Jew in order to print, at his own expense, an endless epic poem on which he’d been working for the last twenty years, and in which he described how the Iberian Peninsula broke away from Europe and drifted off like a raft on the ocean, crewed entirely by the blind. Or something like that.