The Fugitive
1569
Sheltered by the moonless sky, I rode on a narrow little-trodden path of La Mancha with the stars as my only guide. As I galloped on the dark plain, anguish raged in my chest like a sail flapping in a storm. I clapped spurs to the horse and whipped its flanks. My mount snorted; the pounding of its hooves on the pebbly ground pierced the quiet of the Manchegan countryside and echoed with painful intensity in my head. Crying “ale, ale,” I incited my stallion to exert greater speed, hoping to outrun the bailiff and his men.
The night before, I had been playing a game of cards in the Andalusian’s Tavern. Antonio de Sigura, an engineer who had arrived in Madrid to build roads for the court, lost a large sum of money quickly. I was feeling the effects of too much wine and not enough food in my stomach and decided to quit playing while I was still ahead. The engineer insisted that I keep playing. When I refused, he said, “Why is it I’m not surprised, Miguel Cervantes? I wouldn’t expect honorable conduct from those who come from dishonorable stock.”
The men nearby snickered. I got up from my chair, kicked one leg of the table, and demanded an explanation.
Antonio de Sigura shouted, “I mean that your father is a stinking Jew and an ex-convict and your sister a whore!”
I grabbed a carafe, smashed it on de Sigura’s head, and overturned the table. When I saw the engineer’s face awash in wine and blood I felt I was going to evacuate my bowels down the legs of my pants. I stood in front of him, shaking, waiting for de Sigura to make his next move. He wiped the liquid from his eyes with a handkerchief and then pulled out his pistol. Because I was a commoner, I was not allowed to carry a sword. My friend Luis Lara drew his sword in a flash and offered it to me. As de Sigura aimed at me, I jumped toward him and plunged the tip of Luis’s sword into the engineer’s right shoulder. He dropped to his knees, with the tip of the sword still jutting out from his back shoulder dripping scarlet. He opened his mouth in the shape of a huge O. As he pitched forward, I pulled out the sword and flung it on the floor. The swiftness of the violence left me stunned. Next, I heard commotion in the room as many customers scrambled out of the tavern yelling, “Run, run, before the bailiff arrives!”
In the confusion, the wine racing in my brain, I quit the tavern and bolted down Madrid’s shadowy streets as if a pack of hungry hounds trailed after me. I realized that the rash act had irrevocably changed my life forever: my dream of becoming Court Poet had become a chimera.
* * *
The following morning, in the friend’s house where I was hiding, the news reached me of the sentence meted out by the authorities: I would lose my right hand and be banished from the kingdom for ten years. Both forms of punishment were unacceptable to me. But if I stayed in Madrid, it was just a matter of time before I was denounced, arrested, and then crippled forever. I sent word to my best friend, Luis Lara, about my predicament and asked for a loan so I could escape from Spain. Later that afternoon, his personal servant delivered a hefty leather pouch. “My master says this is a gift, Don Miguel,” the servant told me, as I counted sixty gold escudos. “He says you should leave Spain and not come back for a long time.”
So later that night, I slipped out of Madrid by a back way. Fleeing in disgrace, the worst punishment of all was that I would not see my beloved Mercedes for a long time. It was unimaginable I would recover from this cruel parting with my first love. I was sure love would never again be as pure, as idealistic, and that I would mourn the loss of Mercedes for the rest of my life. I was certain that no matter how far from home I wandered, or how long I lived, I would not find another woman like Mercedes who united beauty, modesty, and intelligence in one body. The next time I saw her—if there were a next time—I was sure she would be a married woman.
My plan was to join Maese Pedro’s troupe of actors and magicians in the outskirts of Tembleque, in La Mancha, and ride south with them to Sevilla, where I would hide until I could board a ship bound for foreign lands. From abroad, I would appeal the sentence and wait in safety until I was pardoned, or the incident forgotten. I had met Maese Pedro when I was seven and living in Córdoba. Every year in late spring, his troupe would arrive and set up camp outside the city walls.
From the time I was a boy I had longed to go abroad, but this precipitous flight was not the way I had envisioned the start of my travels. Yet the thought of losing my right hand to the sharp-edged blade of the law—the same hand that I used to write my verses, the hand with which I wielded a sword and caressed Mercedes’s face—was insupportable. One-handed, forced to beg, I saw myself as an exile dying on foreign soil—like the old, skeletal slaves who roamed the roads of Spain, the ones who were granted their freedom when they could no longer do hard work. This thought made me desperate to quit Spanish soil. I’d rather cut my throat than live as a useless man, I said to myself as I fled Madrid.
I had been on the road practically all my life. My father’s poor head for business had forced our family to forever be on the move, dragging our pathetic possessions, running from his creditors and the imminent threat of his incarceration. Early on, I had learned that it was only a matter of time before I had to say goodbye to my favorite teachers, my new friends, the streets and plazas I grew accustomed to, the houses I called home, all too briefly. The mule-drawn cart on which we Cervanteses traveled from splendid cities to dismal towns was my most permanent home. We had lived in so many places I could barely remember their names: Alcalá de Henares, my birthplace; Valladolid, which we left when I was six; the next ten years in Córdoba; then a few glorious years in Sevilla, which my family left in disgrace to return to Castile, to Madrid.
That first night as a fugitive, I remembered my mother grumbling, in those moments when she could no longer contain her frustration at father’s peripatetic ways, “We are no better than those bands of Gypsies traveling the roads of Spain. My children are being educated like thieves and loose women. Your father will only stop chasing rainbows when his bones are dust in the ground.”
I consoled myself by thinking that to be a poet in Spain often meant to be an outlaw. I had turned out similar to so many Spanish poets: an exile, like my beloved Garcilaso de la Vega. Looking back, I wonder if my fate would have resembled that of Gutiérre de Cetina—who had died violently in Mexico; or maybe I would be like Fray Luis de León, who languished in jail for many years in Valladolid. Or would I follow in the footsteps of Francisco de Aldana, who died in Africa fighting for the Portuguese king Don Sebastian? Perhaps in another, less unjust country, in a place where a poor but talented young man had real chances of advancing himself, things might be different for me. Away from Spain’s rigid society, and hollow, pompous, and hypocritical conventions, I might amount to something. I believed there was greatness in me. And this belief was something that nobody—not even Spain’s almighty king—could kill.
If I wanted to be master of my own destiny, and choose my path to manhood, my only two options were fame as a poet or glory as a soldier. To become the most famous poet and warrior of my time—now that was a worthy goal. Another cherished dream was to become a celebrated playwright like Lope de Rueda. First, though, I had to make sure I left Spain with my right hand still attached to my arm, so that I could return covered in riches and honor—because a glorious destiny awaited me, I was sure.
* * *
I rode into Tembleque at dawn where Maese Pedro’s troupe, gathered in the town’s main square, was getting ready to start their journey south.
“I throw myself at your mercy, Maese Pedro,” I said, when I was taken to him. Then I explained to my old friend why I was in danger of losing my right hand unless I fled Castile.
“Say no more, Miguel,” he responded. “You’re almost a member of our family.” He paused, looked me up and down, and added, “But you cannot travel with us like this. We must find a disguise for you.”
So it was that dressed in women’s clothes and wearing a wig, I rode in the same wagon with my thespian friend and his wife, Doña Matilde, pretending to be their daughter Nicolasa.
That first day on the road, I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure the bailiff and his men were not running after my scared behind. But as the hours passed, and I began to think that I might be able to evade the law, I fell into reminiscing about the first time I saw Maese Pedro’s troupe in the Plaza del Potro. I was on my way home from the Colegio de Córdoba, the Jesuit school where I learned the little Latin I know. The actors were performing a show about doomed lovers who died dancing and singing and looking beautiful. After the show was over, the colorfully dressed thespians, pretending to be great and low personages of the world (the men dressed as women), came from behind the makeshift stage and mingled with the audience to announce the theatrical production of the night. I became mesmerized. Who were these people? How did they achieve this kind of magical metamorphosis?
I ran all the way home and entered the kitchen where my mother and sister Andreita were making a cocido, and screamed, “Mamá, mamá, can I go see the play the actors are putting on tonight?”
My mother gave me a scolding look. “So that’s where you’ve been, instead of coming home after school to do your homework?”
“Oh Mother,” I continued, still breathless. “It’s a play about a Moorish princess who converts and elopes with her Christian lover. I have to see it.”
“Enough of that, Miguel. Where would I find a maravedí to send you to see actors? Go and do your homework.” She went back to chopping vegetables.
“Mother,” I pleaded.
“Basta, Miguel.” She stabbed the green head of cabbage destined for the soup. “Go study your lessons.”
In the windowless cubicle in which I slept with Rodrigo, I crouched in the darkest corner against the damp walls. Andrea found me there, biting my fingernails, shaking with anger. She sat next to me, roped an arm around my shoulders, and said, “I’ve saved a few reales”—she earned them knitting and embroidering—“and I, too, would love to see this play. We’ll go together tonight. Now, Miguelucho, make Mother happy and study your lessons.”
My despondent mood changed to happiness. I kissed her face and hands. “Thank you, Andreita. Thank you, sister.”
* * *
That night, when I saw the actors on the stage in their outlandish costumes, their faces painted with loud colors, speaking in a Spanish more eloquent and persuasive and loaded with more double meanings than I’d ever heard before, and becoming people other than themselves, I felt as if, for the first time, I could breathe freely. I wanted to be around these characters constantly. Perhaps if I spent time with them, I told myself, I would learn their art and someday I, too, could act in plays and say those beautiful speeches, and play princes and princesses, kings and queens, Christians and Moors, scholars and fools, thieves and knights.
The next morning back in school, my teacher and classmates seemed dull, colorless, and made of coarse materials. That spring, every day after school, I went to visit the actors. In exchange for helping to clean the horses’ dung and feeding them, and fetching water from the fountain inside the city walls, I was tolerated with good humor and allowed to see the performances for free.
I made friends with Candela, who was twice my age. She helped in the kitchen and took care of her small siblings. Candela’s eyes were as green as the new leaves in the orange trees in early spring; her hair was as black as the blackest piece of coal; and she was not bashful like all the other girls I knew. As she did her chores, she sang romances and danced barefoot. The men could have eaten her with their eyes. Candela had never set foot in a school, and her clothes were ragged and dirty. When I mentioned this to Andreita, she sent with me a package of clothes that my sisters had outgrown. I was happiest when I was around Candela, who treated me with the tenderness older sisters reserve for their little brothers.
“Look at the lovebirds,” the actors would tease us, making me blush. “But she could be his mother.” Or, “Candela, you’ve bewitched this boy. Why don’t you make love instead to a real man?” And, “Look at the smoke coming out of Miguelín’s ears. You’d better drag him to the river, Candela, and douse his head in the water before his brains stew.”
Candela laughed and kissed me on the cheek. To the men she yelled, “Go pick the fleas that breed in your posteriors!” She was the first girl I kissed, not counting my sisters.
My mother was so taxed making sure that we had enough to eat, and clean garments to wear, that she did not notice I had fallen under the magical spell of the world of the theater until one day when a neighbor asked her at the market if I was training to become an actor, since I was always visiting Maese Pedro’s troupe. That night, before I went to bed, Mother took me to the kitchen to be alone and sat me on her knees. “Please, Miguel,” she entreated me, her voice and her eyes filled with disappointment, “stay away from those disreputable actors who live such miserable lives. Please don’t become a useless dreamer, like your father. One in the family is enough. God gave you a good brain, so use it to learn a profitable trade.”
I put my arms around my mother’s waist and promised, “I will study hard, Mamacita, and enter an honorable profession. Don’t worry anymore.” I refrained from promising I would stop visiting my friends.
When the troupe got ready to leave Córdoba in early June, I considered running away with them. I mentioned what I was thinking to Candela.
“My father won’t allow it,” she said. “Already the authorities suspect us of stealing children. Our lives are hard, Miguelín. People come to see our plays, and love to be entertained, but to them we are all dishonest pagans, and as bad as the Gypsies.” She took my face in her hands. The tips of our noses almost touched; I could breathe in her lemony breath. My eyes reflected in the liquid green mirrors of hers. “Just wait a few years. When you grow up, then you can join us, if you like.”
I shook my face free. “It’ll be years before I grow up.”
“Go, go, feed the horses,” she ordered me and walked away, calling her siblings, “Martita, Julio. Come here this instant.”
The rest of that year, and for a few years afterward, from June to April, I dreamed about the return of the actors. Each June, as the troupe began to pack, Maese Pedro would say to me, “Next year, Miguel, if your parents give you permission, you can come with us.”
By the time I turned twelve, Candela had married an actor in the troupe, she had her own children, and, though friendly, she treated me as if our old intimacy had never been.
* * *
Later that day, when our caravan had left La Mancha behind us, what I had been dreading happened: the bailiff and his men caught up with us and stopped us for a search. As the troopers approached the wagon in which I was riding, I started to tremble. I began to choke with fear, as if I had swallowed a pork bone. We were commanded to come down off our wagon. It might be better if I take off my wig and give myself up to the authorities before they discover my deception, I told myself. Just as I was about to turn myself in, and ask for their clemency, Maese Pedro pulled me by the elbow, slapped me so hard I tasted blood, and shouted, “Where are you going, you shameless wench? Stop making eyes at the troopers! Why did God curse me with a whore for a daughter?”
The troopers laughed, and ogled me. A dribble of urine snaked down my legs.
Doña Matilde started yelling, “Pedro, may God forgive you! You’re much too cruel to the poor girl. If she’s bad, it’s because you’re bad. Come here, hija mia.” She enveloped me in her arms and shoved my nose between her gelatinous and sweaty breasts. “With a father so cruel it’s a wonder she hasn’t run away from us,” she said to the troopers. Doña Matilde patted my wig. “There, there, Nicolasita.”
The snickering troopers moved on to search the wagon behind ours. It wasn’t until we were given the sign to continue on our way that I dared hope I might reach Sevilla undetected after all.
* * *
The following day, and the next day after that one, my spirits sank and soared, plunged to Hades and spiraled to the heavens. But as we traveled away from autumn, as we entered the lush and dense gardens and forests of Andalusia, so bursting with green that I imagined the jungles of the New World must be like this, I felt hopeful and revived.
My heart beat faster the more ground our caravan covered on that verdant world, that land of towns and cities planted with palm trees and flaming pomegranate bushes and orange trees, always in fruit; that land whose forests and meadows were filled with the music made by the endless variety of songbirds of that region of mirth and sunlight. As a boy, I had loved the first days of March on Andalusian soil when the hot breezes gusting from the Sahara, cooling as they sweep the surface of the Mediterranean, arrive on Spanish soil, breathing life into dormant trees and brown grasses, awakening the seeds and bulbs in the ground, spurring the growth of buds in the fruit orchards, painting the hills and hillocks a light olive with the first leafing of the trees. By early April, the song of the returning nightingales, serenading the oncoming evening, promised a trove of sensual pleasures that the hours of darkness would uncover. As the sun set, its silken light draped first the tops of the mountains, then the valleys, and released, as it fell, the scent of honeysuckle, intoxicating you by the luxurious promises hidden in the approaching darkness. The whole of Andalusia was a beckoning land that mesmerized you, like the seductive thrusts of the hips, the eyes, hands, and feet of the dancers in the teahouses of Córdoba, with bells rasping around their ankles and wrists as they shed veil after veil and wrapped the heads of gawking men with supple, translucent fabrics.
My heart filled with delight when, in the distance, I spotted the vast wheat fields to the east of Córdoba. If the wheat was in full ripeness, one could believe they were fields of gold. Delight turned to pure happiness when the hills of the Sierra Morena to the west of the city spread before my eyes with the soft shapes of a curvaceous odalisque lying naked on a carpet in a seraglio.
But my heart grew sad when I remembered the year before Andalusia’s Moorish people had started the rebellion of the Alpujarras to protest the treatment they received in Spain. Now they were fighting ferociously in the mountains near Cádiz and Málaga. If my childhood friend Abu were still alive, surely he would be fighting with the rebels. And his sister Leyla, on whom I had a boyhood crush, must be a married woman and a mother.
This time, however, Maese Pedro’s troupe was bypassing Córdoba as my best chance to escape the law was to get to Sevilla as soon as possible and hide myself among the throngs of the city. So it was with a heavy heart that I left behind the city of ancient palaces and great mosques, the court of the Umayyads; the city where I saw large numbers of Moors for the first time.
* * *
Two days later, we camped on the outskirts of Sevilla. Four years had passed since my family and I had left the city in disgrace. Now I was returning to Sevilla as a fugitive.
Sadness and joy, dread and hope, all commingled in my chest as we set up our camp that first night. Could the bailiff have gotten to Sevilla ahead of me? I wallowed in despair contemplating the wreckage of my future. Without my right hand, there was no point in going to the Indies; without my right hand, I had no chance of climbing the highest mountains of the Andes to find the treasure of El Dorado that would make me the richest man in Christendom. Without my right hand, I might as well be flogged to death or burned at the stake. How I wished there was some kind of magic that could transform me into a new person, the way actors metamorphosed themselves into characters. Then I would have chosen to become, once again, a young man with an unblemished past, and I would have stayed in Sevilla.
My turbulent state of mind was relieved somewhat when I reminded myself that this was no dream, that I was once more in Sevilla, city of wonders. While I felt in danger of being discovered, I was happy to have returned to the city where my literary vocation was born. Although I had seen Maese Pedro’s troupe perform in Córdoba, the actors on the stage in Sevilla were marvelous, and the pasos and plays they produced were things of beauty, written by our great writers. I fell under the spell of the artistry of these fabulous performers—I did not care that actors were held as low in esteem as the Gypsies, that to most people the theater was to be enjoyed but also to be mistrusted, because it was believed to incite depraved behavior. My favorite playwright was Lope de Rueda, whose fictional creations—gossipy barbers, wanton priests, miserly hidalgos, dissolute students, rogues, lewd whores—were more vivid and interesting than their counterparts in real life. There was nothing higher to aspire to, I told myself, than to create people like these. I could only imagine how powerful Lope de Rueda must have felt creating characters out of his observations of humanity. I wanted the fame and financial rewards of the successful writers of comedies, who were greeted at street corners by Sevillanos with cries of “Victor! Victor!”
Years later, I poked fun at Sevilla and its citizens through the snouts of two talking canines, Cipión and Berganza, in my Exemplary Novel, The Colloquium of the Dogs. “Sevilla,” says Berganza, “shelters the destitute and gives refuge to the worthless. In its magnificence, it has ample room for all sorts of scoundrels, but no use for virtuous men.”
That first night camping outside the city gates, the uncertainty of my situation kept me awake, staring at the starry sky and remembering how when I was young in Sevilla, the scent of orange trees in permanent bloom attenuated the sweet reek of bodies buried under rose beds, or at the foot of trees. Sevillanos believed that the loveliest and most fragrant roses and sweetest oranges were those fertilized by the flesh of Nubian slaves. This tang of human decay and fruit trees in bloom was the first thing a visitor noticed upon nearing the city.
The Guadalquivir was barely more than a sandy stream as it ran past Córdoba; but as it got close to Sevilla, it swelled into a wide olive-colored river. At dawn, the river bustled with barges, swift sloops, feluccas, shallops, tartans, and piraguas. The smaller vessels carried merchandise destined for the bellies of big ships that sailed to the West Indies and beyond.
The river fed my wanderlust, making me hunger for the world beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula. The river was the road that led to the Mediterranean and the West, to the Atlantic Ocean and the Canary Islands, halfway to the wondrous New World. Young Sevillanos who became sailors—often for the rest of their lives—were referred to as those who had been “swallowed by the sea.”
There was no more thrilling sight than the fleets of cargo ships, accompanied by powerful galleons to protect them from English corsairs and privateers, sailing off twice a year for the world Columbus had discovered. The ships sailed away with the hopes of the Sevillanos, who would send off their men with festive songs of farewell. When fortune smiled on these adventurers, they returned from the Indies laden with gold and glory.
As a boy, my imagination was set afire, my eyes bulged, as I watched the ox-drawn carts on their way to the royal chambers, carrying open trunks that brimmed with glowing emeralds, shining pearls, and stacks of blinding bars of silver and gold. Other carts transported bales of tobacco, furs of animals unknown in Europe, spices, coconuts, cocoa, sugar, indigo, and cochineal. For weeks after the arrival of the ships, I remained intoxicated by these sights. A great desire awakened in me to visit New Spain and Peru.
In the heart of the city, buildings faced each other so closely that I could run down the cobblestone passageways with arms outspread to touch the walls on either side. These were the streets that schooled me in the customs and costumes, religions and superstitions, foods, smells, and sounds of other nations. Merchants arrived in Sevilla with white, black, and brown slaves from Africa. The names of the countries they came from—Mozambique, Dominica, Niger—were as exotic as their looks. I would get dizzy from hearing so many languages that I didn’t understand, whose origins I couldn’t pinpoint. What stories did they tell? What was I missing? Would I ever get the chance to learn a few of them and visit the places where they were spoken?
During those years, I felt as though I were living in the future, in a city that had nothing to do with the rest of Spain. Pícaros from every corner of the world—false clerics, false scholars, impostors of every imaginable and unimaginable kind, pickpockets, swindlers, counterfeiters, sword swallowers, gamblers, assassins for hire, soldiers of fortune, murderers of every sort, whores, Don Juans (whose profession was to ruin the most beautiful and chaste maidens), Gypsies, fortune-tellers, fire-eaters, forgers, puppeteers, ruffians, bon vivants, and snake charmers—came to Sevilla and made the city their stage. Life there was dangerous and thrilling, as festive and bloody as a bullfight. Successful gamblers were as admired as the bullfighters or famous military heroes. It was common to hear a child say that when he grew up he wanted to be a gambler like Manolo Amor, who on one occasion had gambled away an entire fleet of galleons that was not his.
Sevilla was the place where I belonged. It was created for me and I wanted to be its historian. Sevilla was mine and it owned me.
Most Sevillanos stayed inside during the hottest hours, and went out only at night, when the evening breezes, sweeping up the Guadalquivir from the Mediterranean, cooled the city by a few degrees. Then it was as if a curtain rose, and the proscenium that was Sevilla became a magical stage for the theater of life. Lying there on my blanket in the outskirts of the city, I imagined I heard in the recesses of my brain the clacking sounds of castanets, coming from every street and plaza. The clacking was a reminder to strut with the arrogant elegance of a peacock displaying all its colors. People rushed out of their homes to sing on the plazas and dance the salacious zarabandas, which were forbidden by the church. In the plazas, illuminated by torches, beautiful and lascivious women dancers (young and old alike) wiggled their behinds with impudence and rapped their castanets with fury, turning the instruments into weapons that could seduce and then snuff the life out of you.
The dancers’ looks were an invitation to dream about the countless pleasures of the body; and the movements of their hands spoke intricate languages and summoned the spectators with seductive signs to caress the dancers’ amber-flushed cheeks. It was thrilling to see the male dancers leap high in the air, spinning in circles, as though to exorcize demons that were eating them from the inside out. Midair, these men seemed half-human, half-bird. From midnight until dawn, the loveliest señoritas were serenaded by their inflamed wooers. Brawls often broke out during these serenatas, and the corpses of unfortunate lovers were found in the mornings, beneath the balconies of their inamoratas, glued to puddles of coagulated blood.
Sevilla was a city of witches and enchanters. You had to be careful not to cross a woman, because any female, aristocratic or peasant, married or unmarried, old or young, beautiful or ugly, Christian or Moor, slave or free, could have satanic powers. Witches made red roses bloom in their homes in December. They could make or break marriages, could make grooms hang themselves or evaporate on the eve of the wedding, could make pregnant women give birth to litters of puppies.
Unlucky men who crossed the enchantresses were turned into donkeys. As husbands and lovers disappeared, new donkeys materialized and the women who owned these donkeys took delight in making them carry heavy loads. It was common to see a woman whose husband had vanished go around the city addressing every donkey she saw by her husband’s name. When an ass brayed in response, the woman would drop on her knees, cross herself, and give thanks to God that she had found her husband. If she wanted her man back, she had to buy the donkey from its owner. Then she would go back home, happy to have found her spouse, and spend the rest of her life trying to undo the enchantment. Or she might be just as happy to keep her husband in donkey form. It was said that some of the happiest marriages in Sevilla were between a woman and her ass.
The Holy Office whipped many women in public plazas for the extraordinary pleasures they boasted of receiving from their equine lovers. Debauched cries and crescendos of lust traveled to remote villages in the mountains where herds of wild asses brayed with envy. Gypsies took to bringing donkeys that brayed anytime a desperate woman addressed them. If a donkey became erect and tried to mount a young wife who called him by her husband’s name, or a donkey tried to kick an old, withered harpy who claimed him as her husband, or scurried away when an ugly one threw her arms around his neck, that, too, was considered proof of having found her husband. When a Sevillano allowed inflated notions to swell his head, he was told, “Remember, today you are a man, but tomorrow you may well be a donkey.”
During Holy Week people did penance for all the sins they indulged the rest of the year. Then alone would Sevillanos fast and drag themselves on their knees to the cathedral. But Sevilla’s cathedral was not oppressive. Instead, it was filled with light, color, ostentatious displays of gold and jewels, illuminated as much by its oil lamps and its candles as by the iridescent light that poured in through stained-glass windows. It was a place where we went to experience the splendors of the world, not a glum building where we expiated our sins. It seemed to me, as a young man, that God had to be more receptive to our prayers in a place like this, where everybody knew that hope, joy, and beauty were part of His covenant with us. I used to walk out of Sevilla’s cathedral content, as if I had just eaten a mariscada and washed it down with wine.
Often, in those days, I escorted my mother on her visits to the cathedral. Our enjoyment of the place was a secret between the two of us that excluded the rest of the family and gave us respite from our dingy house, with its worn-out, secondhand furnishings and leaks in the ceiling of every room. The cathedral’s sumptuous altars seemed to relieve Mother, momentarily, of the pain caused by Father’s impecuniousness. She loved music above all things. It’s true Father played the vihuela at home, but nothing he did gratified her. Only in the cathedral could she listen to music. Her face glowed, her eyes gleamed as the sounds of the clavichord or spinet swelled. Singing made Mother happy. Her untrained voice was clear, and it could hit many of the high notes. I’d only heard it when she sang romances in the kitchen, as she went about her chores, on those occasions when my father left to visit relatives in Córdoba. In the cathedral she would let her voice spill out and rise, with the same abandon and ecstasy I heard in the lament of the singers in Andalusia.
After church, she would hook my arm in hers, and we would stroll along the banks of the Guadalquivir and stop to gaze at the foreign ships and glorious armada galleons. One evening, grabbing my hand by the wrist, she implored me, “Don’t stay in Spain, Miguel. Go far away from here to someplace where you can a make a fortune for yourself. In the Indies you will have a brilliant future awaiting you, my son.”
She did not mention my father’s name, yet I sensed she was pushing me to look for a life completely different from his. Because I was a dreamer, like my father, she feared that, like him, I would become a ne’er-do-well. She had begun to see me as another unrealistic Cervantes male: I would live surrounded by criminals, constantly borrowing reales from my friends and relatives, incapable of understanding how to put food on the table. But if I let my imagination flow, the wide waters of the Guadalquivir would eventually lead me to the Indies in the West, or to Italy in the East, or to burning Africa in the South, or to the Orient, beyond Constantinople, to the splendors and mysteries of Arabia, and perhaps even to the fabled court of the emperor of China.
Those dreams of my youth had been pulverized by my immediate reality. The next day, Maese Pedro returned from Sevilla with the news that the bailiff was looking for me and there was a reward for my capture. I said goodbye to my dream of going to the New World. “Miguel,” he said, “I think your best chance of escaping lies with asking the help of my friend Ricardo, El Cuchillo. He is the chief of a caravan of Gypsies leaving for the Carpathians tomorrow; every year they pass through Italy on their way home. Get ready and I’ll take you to him as soon as it gets dark. And remember, don’t haggle over the price he charges you and you’ll get to Italy safely.”
The Gypsies had set up an encampment in the woods west of Sevilla, on the bank of a stream. Maese Pedro pointed at a man sitting by a bonfire who wore a hat that resembled a crow spreading huge wings over his head. Children surrounded him, listening raptly to what he was saying. We dismounted and walked toward him.
When he recognized his visitor, El Cuchillo clapped loudly, and the children scampered squealing into the darkness. The men embraced with the affection of old friends. Maese Pedro spoke first: “Ricardo, I’ve never asked a favor from you before today. I’ve known Miguel,” he said, throwing an arm around my shoulders, “since he was a boy.” He proceeded to explain the gravity of my circumstances.
El Cuchillo listened, pulling gently at his pointy beard with bony, weathered fingers. His fingernails bulged with dirt. The wrinkles on his face were pronounced, as if his face had been sliced horizontally with a blade, leaving it runneled and channeled—hence his nickname. The Gypsy removed his hat, shook his head to let down a thicket of silvery hair, and replied, “I want to be paid the full amount in advance. But I warn you, Don Miguel, if you do anything foolish, I’m not risking my balls for your culo. Is that understood?”
* * *
So in Gypsy rags, with a black kerchief tied around my forehead, and golden hoops dangling from my ears, I left Spain. The City of the Caesars was my final destination. Relieved as I was to leave la madre patria before my right hand was lopped off, I was anxious about traveling with people who dwelled in caves and wild forests and who most Christians regarded as sorcerers and cannibals. When Gypsies camped near a town, parents would keep their children indoors and sleep in the same bed with them at night. Gypsies were infamous for kidnapping children and selling them in Berber lands to the Moors. It was also said that they fattened stolen infants, roasted them during their festivities, cut them up, and tossed the tender pieces of flesh into their pucheros, a soup made with dry horsemeat, chickpeas, mushrooms, and purslane.
The Gypsy women who practiced palmistry were feared and despised even more than the men. Their powers were said to be as formidable as the devil’s. If a Gypsy palm reader approached you, her eyes shining with seduction, and you refused to hear your fortune told, she would—without forewarning—turn into a frightful Fury, spitting out bone-chilling curses.
As a boy in Sevilla, I saw a man refuse to have his palm read. The tumorous-faced harpy started screaming: “You son of a whoring bitch! May the devil’s curse fall on you for turning a deaf ear on an old woman in need!” When the man walked away, a big, smoking black rock plunged from the sky and thumped his head with such force that it was severed and rolled—wailing—down the street, as the body stumbled around looking for it. From that moment on, I made a point of never crossing a Gypsy woman. It was because of their devilish powers that even the forces of the king left them alone as much as possible.
From the moment we were on the road, I kept hearing the words Maese Pedro had whispered to me as we said our goodbyes: “Miguel, always keep an eye on your purse. Make sure the Gypsies don’t leave you the way you came into the world. After you shake hands with a Gypsy, remember to count your fingers. Roma people, as you know, are the biggest thieves and rascals in the world. Other than that, they are no worse than the rest of humanity.”