In which Diego Velázquez visits the Morisco boy Luis de Pareja a final time
‘Oranges,’ says Father Rastro, picking up his frothy glass.
‘The first oranges of spring,’ the servant nods, clearing away some bowls and utensils from an earlier meal. Rastro sniffs his juice as if it were a rose in bloom and drinks heartily. I’m looking at the orange pulp coating the inside of my glass. My top lip is wet, for in my excitement I’ve drunk too fast.
Luis has just told me an astonishing story, so after farewelling the lad in the courtyard, I requested an audience with Father Rastro to verify the news. He received me immediately and with much courtesy.
‘So you will be going with them?’ I inquire.
‘I sought God’s advice,’ says Father Rastro, ‘I believe it is the right thing to do.’
‘The Council of the Inquisition would have objected,’ I say.
Rastro shakes his head. ‘They have agreed to let us go in the hope that we bring some Christians home to Spain.’
I don’t like the sound of this. ‘Are the Moriscos to be used as ransom?’
‘Definitely not. The boys will be reunited with their families, if we can find them. It is a separate affair. In the meantime we have begun negotiations to exchange two Christian prisoners in Algiers, for two Muhammadan sailors we’re holding in Málaga. One of the Mercedarian friars in Algiers is my older brother, Felipe Rastro.’
I nod. Luis has mentioned this imprisoned brother a number of times. The boys seem to think he’s a glamorous individual for some reason, though I can’t imagine why.
‘When do you embark?’
‘A week after Holy Sunday. We should arrive in Rabat by May.’
‘And the Cordobans, Telmo and Arauz?’
‘They will remain in the convento,’ Father Rastro sounds pleased at this circumstance. ‘It is their choice,’ he adds.
‘They would not wish to forfeit their weekly visits to Paula Sánchez,’ I say with a smile, but immediately regret my audacity.
Rastro looks uneasy. He places his hands flat on the table and rises out of his chair. He turns, walks to the window and lifts the catch. Two startled pigeons buffet the pane of glass as they flutter away. Rastro opens the window wider and leans forward, so that his head is jutting out of the frame. From the courtyard below hammer blows resound and one of the builders bellows an instruction.
As Enrique Rastro takes in some air, I notice with satisfaction, that the Inquisition guards are no longer manning the surrounding roofs. On returning to Seville, Father Rastro showed a firm hand and ordered them off Mercedarian property. He examined the injured Moriscos, listened to the stories of their numerous escapes and for the first time—concerned about their physical safety—seriously considered their pleas for freedom.
Telmo and Arauz were allowed to visit Paula once a week, but they couldn’t move in with her. Their request was not considered; neither the Castle nor the Church would approve of Morisco children residing with a former sinner, in a place of former (if not perpetual) sin.
Rastro is now attempting to close the window, his composure restored. Just as he’s drawing the window shut, he reaches for a feather lodged on the sill between the latch and the frame. He discards the mottled plume, then secures the catch.
‘He did not want me back in the convento,’ was Paula’s reedy lament to me when our paths crossed near the cathedral last week, ‘but to make up for my exclusion, he let the boys come to me.’
Well, that may be the best solution. Love knows to fly direct. And he shies away, this priest.
‘So, Master Velázquez,’ Rastro says, ‘I hope you will come down to the docks to wave us all goodbye.’
‘Four Moriscos?’ I query again.
‘Four, yes. Luis, Benito, Remi and the young scholar, Camilo Contreras. He wants to find his family of origin too.’
The scholar priests, Rastro tells me in some amusement, didn’t want to lose Camilo. They’ve been fighting to keep him in the seminary, but to no avail.
Father Rastro seats himself and asks me if I will also oblige. I sit, but a little uncomfortably; still rattled by the risks associated with the intended venture.
‘It is the Mercedarian pledge,’ he says, intuiting my thoughts.
‘Your brother. Has he been a prisoner long?’
‘He left Spain in 1600,’ says Rastro. ‘It was to have been my first Holy assignment, but he went in my stead. We thought it would be a quick exchange, but all our attempts to return him have been unsuccessful. And Pope Paul has since discouraged our Mercedarian custom. His Holiness finds the sacrifice excessive.’
‘Your brother went for you,’ I repeat his words, conveying what I hope is my admiration. But I would do as much for my younger brothers, I suppose.
‘My brother had been ransomed before and returned safely. I was young, only twenty-five, and feared the mission,’ Rastro admits.
I sympathise. Or try to look sympathetic. Twenty-five sounds old to me, not young. And don’t people get more cowardly with age? Not Father Rastro apparently.
‘My mother would have wanted me to give Felipe his reprieve,’ Rastro says then hesitates while he considers his empty glass. ‘To take his place, if all else fails.’
So I see how it goes. If the planned exchange miscarries, Father Rastro will offer himself as a human ransom and let his long-suffering brother return. He seems resolved to pursue this plan. The outcome will decide the mission’s merit. It may prove rash. Who could know beforehand?
I leave the convento, but not before I’ve promised to farewell Rastro and his charges on the docks next month. We will both be relieved of our guilt, somewhat, on that day. Luis de Pareja will get the chance to be reunited with his mother and sister, and Enrique Rastro with his long-lost brother.
I return home by a circuitous, contemplative route, finding myself in Catarina’s street by chance. A Loyola sister appears ahead of me on the path, walking arm-in-arm with her mother. The daughter is veiled from head to toe like a Moor. The diaphanous veil swims around her as she walks. It might be a maid rather than one of the girls; the stature is too heavy for a Loyola sister. But I catch her eyes as she turns to enter the gate and I know they belong to Catarina. She looks at me but without recognition. No flirting, no interest. The urgency gone. The veil covering her nose and brow. If she has the pockmarks I wouldn’t know.
The two women enter as one. The gate closes without either looking back and seeing my rude stare. I cross the street to buy some oil from a vendor. Keep an eye cocked on the house.
And the house keeps an eye on me. There’s a snap of the gate and the smallest sister rushes across the street holding an urn in her arms. Is she coming for water? She stops in front of me.
Opens her mouth a couple of times like a fish, then speaks, ‘She says sorry.’
This little girl, whose name I don’t know, hands me what she’s holding. It’s not an urn, as I imagined, but a cage with a dead bird inside. It’s a goldfinch and it’s probably mine. The cage I certainly recognise.
I take my belongings from the child but I don’t know what to say. I look from the dead finch to the girl with her bird breast and beetle-bright hair.
‘It went all quiet last night and died,’ she whispers.
I haven’t seen my bird for nine months so there’s no surprise. Birds do have short lives. The feathers are still brilliant. Buff, yellow, red and white. The one eye I can see is shiny. Goldfinch, you once overflowed your cage; now you’re just lying there spent. The little sister gives up waiting for me to say something. She shrugs and skitters away.
I walk home carrying my goldfinch cage in my left hand. Holding it still so that the bird doesn’t knock about. When I’m back at Pacheco’s I paint a likeness of my dead goldfinch, lying at the bottom of its cage in a pool of colours. I take out the bird, remove five feathers, one of each colour and arrange them in a narrow quill-holder. The weightless corpse I wrap in fine linen and bury in the garden beside the bones of the former loved Pacheco dogs. But I can’t stop the feather lust. In the following weeks I go to the market and collect lots of dead birds that have expired in their cages. I carry them back to Pacheco’s where I paint them on an old panel, one after another. Canaries, pigeons, rooks. The birds get bigger with each purchase; their inaction and silence get more terrible. The birds stay dead. The strings of their voices snapped. A double effacement of song and flight. Falling to death they fall so much further than we do when we die.
I’m remorseless. Hawks, roosters and a massive white swan with a long limp neck I harvest in my feather-lust. Until one day I come home with an ostrich that stinks out Pacheco’s studio and makes him curse and retch. My master drags the putrid ostrich carcass outside and burns it on a pyre, and I stand there watching in dismay as the ostrich feathers pop out of its skin in the purple heat and blow away with the fan force of the fire. I know that some of these feathers land in the patios of San Vicente, for a few appear again in millinery splendour on my aunt’s new hat in church the following Sunday.
The toll of beautiful, feathered dead and ruined love peters out, the ostrich ending my pillory of despair. Its head, its wrinkled neck would have been too human to paint, even if I’d got the chance.
Now comes the post-Lent fiesta as we speed round the bend of March into April and Marius Rosano is strutting across the square with a cornucopia on his head. He has bought a native headdress from the Americas. His mane is magnificent and he boldly struts, tossing his pagan tresses this way and that, ‘Look at me, look at me.’ I’d rather not. I nip behind the curtain of a bazaar. If Marius finds me in here I’m done for. But if I stay in the square he will eventually descend on me in all his finery. And he may tell me something I do not want to hear. He will tell me Catarina is scarred by the pox or he will tell me she is inviolate no longer. In this vain mood he’s bound to hurt me. He will take something from me, he always does. Most friends do, but he more than most. I protect my girl in the blue cap from all that would harm and spoil her. I hold her close to my chest and wipe away the sweat the blue cap has made from rubbing against her brow.