“It came this morning with the post from Spain.”
I took the letter the captain was holding out to me. It was written on fine paper; the seal was intact, and my name was on the front:
Señor don Diego Alatriste * Attention of Íñigo Balboa * In the Bandera of Captain don Carmelo Bragado, of the Cartagena Tercio * Military post of Flanders
My hands trembled as I turned over the envelope sealed with the initials A. de A. Without a word, and feeling Alatriste’s eyes on me, I slowly walked some distance away to where the Germans’ women were washing clothes by a narrow branch of the river. The Germans, like some Spaniards, took as their women former whores who assuaged their desires and also relieved them of the misery of washing soldiers’ clothing. In addition, some sold liquors, firewood, tobacco, and pipes to those who needed them, and I have already written how in Breda I saw German women working in the trenches to help their husbands. Near the makeshift laundry, where a tree that had been felled and trimmed for cutting firewood lay across a large rock, I sat, unable to tear my eyes from those initials, incredulously holding Angélica’s letter in my hands. I knew that the captain was watching me the whole time, so I waited for my heart to stop pounding and then, trying not to reveal my impatience, I broke the seal and unfolded the letter.
Señor don Íñigo:I have had notice of your pursuits, and I am pleased to know that you are serving in Flanders. Believe me when I say that I envy you for that.I hope the rancor you hold for me over the difficulties you must have suffered following our last meeting is not too great. After all, I did one day hear you say that you would die for me. Take it therefore as one of life’s tests, and remember that along with the bad times life can also offer satisfactions such as serving our lord and king or, perhaps, receiving this letter of mine.I must confess that I cannot help but recall you every time I pass by the Acero fountain. However, I understand that you lost the handsome amulet I gave you there—something unpardonable in such an accomplished gallant as yourself.I hope to see you someday here at court bedecked in sword and spurs. Until then, count on my memory and my smile.Angélica de Alquézar
P.S. I rejoice that you are still alive. I have plans for you.
I had finished reading the letter—I read it three times, passing from stupor to happiness, and then to melancholy—and had sat for a long time staring at the folded paper lying on the thick patches that repaired the knees of my breeches. I was in Flanders, at war, and she was thinking of me. There will be occasion—should I still have the desire, and the life, to continue recounting to Your Mercies the adventures of Captain Alatriste as well as my own—to detail the plans Angélica de Alquézar had for my person in that twenty-fifth year of the century, she being twelve or thirteen years old at the time and I on the road to fifteen. Plans that, had I divined them, would have made me tremble with both terror and delirium. I shall tell you here only that her beautiful and evil little head, graced with blue eyes and blond curls, would—for some obscure reason that can be explained only by the secrets that certain women hold in the depths of their souls from the time they are young girls—place my neck and my eternal salvation in peril many times in the future. And she would always do it in the same contradictory manner: coldly and deliberately. Yet I believe that at the same time she sought my misfortune, she also loved me. And that was how it would be until she was taken from me—or until I freed myself from her, God mend me, nor am I sure which was the case—by her early and tragic death.
“I wonder if you have something to tell me,” said Captain Alatriste.
He had spoken very softly, with nothing nuanced in his tone. I looked up. He was sitting beside me on the large rock beneath the tree. He held his hat in his hand and was staring with an absent air toward the distant walls of Breda.
“There is not much to say,” I replied.
He nodded slowly, as if accepting what I said, and lightly stroked his mustache. Silence. His motionless profile made me think of a dark eagle resting high on a cliff. I noted the two scars on his face—one on an eyebrow and the other on his forehead—and the one on the back of his left hand, a memento Gualterio Malatesta had bestowed at the Las Animas gate. There were more scars hidden beneath his clothing, eight in total. I looked at the burnished hilt of his sword, the cobbled boots tied around his legs with harquebus cords, the rags visible through the holes in the soles, the mended tears in his threadbare brown cape. Perhaps, I thought, he had once been in love. Perhaps, in his way, he still was, and that included Caridad la Lebrijana and the silent blonde Flemish woman in Oudkerk.
I heard him sigh softly, barely a breath expelled from his lungs, and then he made a move to get to his feet. I handed him the letter. He took it without a word and looked at me closely before he started reading, and now it was I who stared at the distant walls of Breda, as expressionless as he had been a moment before. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the hand with the scar rise to stroke his mustache again. Then he read. Finally I heard the crackle of the paper as he folded it, and once again I held the letter in my hands.
“There are things…” he began after a moment.
Then he stopped, and I thought that was all he would say, which would not have been strange in a man given more to silences than to words.
“Things,” he continued finally, “that they know from the time they are born. Though they are not even aware that they know them.”
Again he cut himself short. I heard him shifting uncomfortably, seeking a way to finish.
“Things it takes us men a lifetime to learn.”
Then silence again, and this time he did not say anything more. Nothing in the vein of “Take care, guard against our enemy’s niece,” or other comments that one might have expected under the circumstances, and that I, as he undoubtedly knew, would have immediately ignored with all the arrogance of insolent youth. For a while he stared at the distant city, then put on his hat and stood up, settling his cape over his shoulders. And as I sat and watched him on his way back to the trenches, I wondered how many women, how many wounds, how many roads, and how many deaths—some owed to others and some to oneself—a man must know for those words to remain unspoken.