Quevedo shrugged. “From every side, as per usual,” he replied, still gazing indifferently about him. “You’re not in Flanders now, Captain Alatriste. This is Spain.”
They arranged to meet again that night, at Becerra’s. The accountant Olmedilla, still looking glummer than a butcher’s shop in Lent, withdrew to an inn in Calle de Tintores where he had his lodgings and where there was also a room reserved for us. My master spent the afternoon sorting out his affairs, getting his military license certified, and buying new linen and supplies—as well as a new pair of boots—with the money don Francisco had advanced him for the work ahead. As for me, I was free for a few hours, and went for a stroll into the heart of the city, enjoying the walks around the walls and the atmosphere in the narrow streets, with their low arches, coats of arms, crosses, and retablos depicting Christs, virgins, and saints—streets far too narrow for the carriages and horses that jammed them; a place at once dirty and opulent, seething with life, with knots of people at the doors of taverns and tenements, and women—whom I eyed with new interest since my experiences in Flanders—dark-skinned, neat, and self-assured, who spoke with an accent that lent a special sweetness to their conversation. I saw mansions with magnificent courtyard gardens glimpsed through wrought-iron gates, with chains on the door to show they were immune from ordinary justice, and I sensed that while the Castilian nobility, in their determination not to work, took their stoicism to the point of ruin, the Seville aristocracy had a more relaxed approach and often allowed the words “hidalgo” and “merchant” to be conjoined. Thus the aristocrat did not scorn commerce if it brought him money, and the merchant was prepared to spend a fortune in order to be considered an hidalgo—even tailors required purity of blood from the members of their guild. On the one hand, this gave rise to the spectacle of debased noblemen using their influence and privileges to prosper by underhanded means, and on the other, it meant that the work and commerce so vital to the nation continued to be frowned upon and, consequently, fell into the hands of foreigners. Thus, most of the Seville nobility were rich plebeians who had bought their way into a higher stratum of society through money and advantageous marriages and now felt ashamed of their former trades. A generation of merchants spawned, in turn, a generation of “noble,” entirely parasitic heirs, who denied the origins of their fortune and squandered it without a qualm, thus proving the truth of that old Spanish saying From tradesman to gentleman to gambler to beggar in four generations.
I also visited the Alcaicería, the old silk market, an area full of shops selling rich merchandise and jewels. I was wearing black breeches and soldiers’ gaiters, a leather belt with a dagger stuck in it at the back, a military-style jerkin over my much-darned shirt, and on my head a very elegant cap of Flemish velvet—the spoils of war from what were fast becoming “the old days.” That and my youth both favored me, I think, and adopting the air of a battle-hardened veteran, I idled along past the swordsmiths’ shops in Calle de la Mar and Calle de Vizcaínos, or past the braggarts, doxies, and pimps in Calle de las Sierpes, opposite the famous prison behind whose black walls Mateo Alemán had languished and where good don Miguel de Cervantes had also spent some time. I swaggered past the legendary steps of the Cathedral—that cathedral of villainy—teeming with sellers, idlers, and beggars with signs hanging around their necks and displaying wounds and deformities, each one falser than a Judas kiss, as well as people who had been crippled on the rack but claimed to have been wounded in Flanders and who sported real or fake amputations, which they attributed to days spent fighting in Antwerp or Mamora but which could as easily have been acquired at Roncesvalles or at Numantia, for one had only to look them in the face, these men—who claimed to have won their scars for the sake of the true religion, king, and country—to know that the closest they had come to a heretic or a Turk was from the safety of the audience at the local playhouse.
I ended up outside the Reales Alcázares, staring up at the Hapsburg flag flying above the battlements, and at the imposing soldiers of the king’s guard armed with halberds and standing at attention at the great gate. I wandered around there for a while, amongst the citizens eager to catch a glimpse of the king or queen, should they chance to enter or leave. And when the crowd, and I with them, happened to move too close to the entrance, a sergeant in the Spanish guard came over to tell us very rudely to leave. The other onlookers obeyed at once, but I, being my father’s son, was piqued by the soldier’s bad manners, and so I dawdled and lingered with a haughty look on my face that clearly nettled him. He gave me a shove, and I—for my youth and my recent experience in Flanders had made me prickly on such matters—thought this the act of a scoundrel, and so I rounded on him like a fierce young hound, my hand on the hilt of my dagger. The sergeant, a burly, mustachioed type, roared with laughter.
“Oh, so you fancy yourself a swashbuckler, do you?” he said, looking me up and down. “Aren’t you a little young for that, boy?”
I held his gaze, shamelessly unashamed and with the scorn of a veteran, which despite my youth, I was. This fat fool had spent the last two years eating hot food and strolling about royal palaces and fortresses in his red-and-yellow-checkered uniform, while I had been fighting alongside Captain Alatriste and watching my comrades die in Oudkerk, at the Ruyter mill, in Terheyden, and in the prison cells of Breda, or else foraging for food in enemy territory with the Dutch cavalry at my back. How very unfair it was, I thought, that human beings did not carry their service record written on their face. Then I remembered Captain Alatriste, and I said to myself, by way of consolation, that some people did. Perhaps one day, I thought, people will know or guess what I have done simply by looking at me, and then all these sergeants, fat or thin, whose lives have never depended on their sword, would have to swallow their sarcasm.
“I may be young, but my dagger isn’t,” I said resolutely.
The other man blinked; he had not expected such a riposte. I saw that he was taking a closer look at me. This time he noticed that I had my hand behind me, resting on the damasked hilt of my knife. Then he gazed dumbly into my eyes, incapable of reading what was in them.
“A pox on’t, why I’ll . . . ”
The sergeant was fuming, and it certainly wasn’t incense issuing forth from him. He raised his hand to slap me, which is the most unacceptable of offenses—in the olden days, one could only slap a man who wasn’t dressed in the knightly uniform of helmet and coat of mail—and I said to myself, “I’m done for. Avenging every little slight can all too swiftly lead to death. Here I am in a situation from which there is no escape, and all because my name is Íñigo Balboa Aguirre and I’m from Oñate, and more to the point, because I have just returned from Flanders and my master is Captain Alatriste, and I cannot consider any market too dear where one buys one’s honor with one’s life. Whether I like it or not, every path is blocked, and so when I grasp my dagger, I will have no option but to stab this fat pig in the belly—one thrust and it’s done—and then run like a deer and get myself a hiding place, and just hope that nobody finds me.” In short—as don Francisco de Quevedo would have said—there was, as usual, nothing for it but to fight. And so I held my breath and with the fatalistic resignation of the veteran—a recently acquired characteristic—prepared myself for what would follow. It seems, however, that God spends his spare moments protecting arrogant young men, because just then a bugle sounded, the palace gates were flung wide, and there came the sound of wheels and hooves on gravel. The sergeant, mindful of his duty, immediately forgot all about me and ran to marshal his men, and I stayed where I was, greatly relieved, and thinking that I’d had a very lucky escape.