A Woman of Seville (9 page)

‘Dogs are dirty,’ Telmo mutters between gritted teeth. ‘We’re not allowed to play with them.’

I suddenly remember Moors don’t let dogs inside their homes. Oh, I’m so stupid. Now I’m in a quandary, with a dog to hide and time to kill. I’m going to have to change the boys’ minds.

‘But it is a little, indoor lap-dog and he isn’t dirty. I washed him only yesterday. He cannot harm you. Tickle him and you’ll see,’ I plead.

Telmo and Arauz watch me patting the spaniel. They smile scornfully, as if they think I’m an idiot. They aren’t interested in being converted to dog-love. The visit seems to drag on forever before I cut it short. The only fortunate thing that happens is that I’m not discovered harbouring the animal.

I’m not sure whether to bring the spaniel back, but when the next day comes round I think, oh well, I’ve nothing left to lose. I’ve had to get used to this little creature for their sake, so they can jolly well get used to it too.

The boys don’t recoil in horror at the spaniel again,
but they shy away from touching it. After four visits I decide to keep the dog hidden in my basket. See if they notice or care that he’s missing. Curiosity indeed gets the better of the boys. They want to know where my dog is. ‘Here he is,’ I say, revealing the spaniel. The dog’s leaps and flurries across the tiles certainly hold the boys’ attention on this day. But when the golden-haired spaniel jumps up and licks their faces, Telmo and Arauz make ugly faces, say ‘yuk’, and push the dog away. It starts barking, instinctively offended. I pick it up and pat it. The dog nestles close to my bosom, ceases barking and starts panting. Hopefully Father Rastro hasn’t been alerted. But if he’s been eavesdropping outside the door, he’ll be pleased to hear what follows, as Telmo and Arauz have started chatting in Aljamiado, the Latinised version of Arabic that is their mother tongue. The boys are talking animatedly. They ask me the dog’s name. I give them the choice of name, so they choose Alanis, the name of my old dog. The first sign of acceptance. When the spaniel piddles on the tiles the boys rush to help me clean it up so the priests won’t find out. They’ve become my accomplices. We make fun of Father Rastro; we call him Father Fishface because of his limpid, watery eyes, and we mock some of the other priests that have big noses, big ears, fat lips, fat guts. And so I’ve changed sides, thrown my weight in
with the boys, and with our combined strength we are able to pull a sunken cargo out of the sea.

‘This is propitious, Paula. They have taken a liking to you,’ says Enrique, a little miffed that I could do what he couldn’t. Still, he grants me my due.

As I strut down the street on my way home this afternoon, my high-heeled shoes clacking like castanets, I forget to cover an eye as I usually do. Who cares if they recognise me and spit? I’ve healed a boy! Not one, but two. I’m either a day closer to being embraced by Enrique Rastro or a day further away from being embraced by him. When I get home I drop a copper coin in a sealed jar on my dresser. There are now one hundred and twenty coins in the jug, one for each day I’ve visited the Mercedarian convento. I shake the jar and jangle the coins. I shake it and I shake it and I shake it. This is money I’ve truly earned.

One afternoon Telmo and Arauz start talking about the disastrous boat trip. They tell me about the rickety vessel with its flimsy sail. The wild storm. The last time they saw their mother and their father. While the brothers narrate their story, they continue to pat the spaniel that is lying on its side between them, delirious from the affection it’s receiving.

What he remembers most, Arauz says, was being forced into the hull with the animals. Arauz was sitting on a
packing case, squeezed between his parents. There was so little room he had to sit hunched up, with his knees pressed against his chin. When the boat lurched, his knees would knock his jaw and his teeth would chatter.

‘Then the water came pouring down into the hull; it was like a bath filling up, wasn’t it Telmo? All the animals went swimming up on deck. Sheep and goats and mules. The animals knew what to do, didn’t they Telmo? I saw you riding on the back of a giant pig.’

‘I can’t remember that,’ Telmo replies grimly. ‘When I got up on deck, I couldn’t find anyone I knew. Then I saw Arauz and grabbed hold of his shirt. The boat tipped on its side and we slid straight into the sea. I didn’t let go of Arauz. A sailor dragged us onto a raft. There were a lot of people in the water, holding onto luggage and animals. Some people were tipped upside-down, weren’t they, Arauz?’

Arauz laughs and his body twitches. ‘I thought they’d lost their money and were searching for it down below. But they were drowned.’

‘Did you see any of your family again?’ I have to make myself ask this question. To my relief, the boys shake their heads.

‘We didn’t see them in the water. We thought they would be on one of the rafts and we would meet up with them when we got back to Tarifa.’

I’m glad the boys have told me their story. I was waiting for it to happen, knowing how important it would be, like vomiting after you’ve suffered an attack of nausea you felt like dying for. Afterwards, the three of us stay sitting on the tiles, stroking the spaniel. ‘Nice doggy,’ the boys say, and ‘he’s a slobberer’. I have to hand it to them for being so stoical. They look pale and shocked though, as if it all happened yesterday.

When I leave their cell I sit down for a while on a bench in the Aljive courtyard. I literally can’t walk any further. As it’s not possible to burst into tears with the friars coming and going, I keep blowing my nose into my handkerchief. The friars look alarmed to see me sitting out here in the open. A couple of them put their hands together in prayer as they pass. I’m too upset for Telmo and Arauz to care much about my own dishonour. I already knew the facts of the boat tragedy, so why was hearing it from the boys’ lips so distressing? The storytellers have carved their grief into my skin. When I was listening, all their feelings crossed over and became
my
feelings. It was
my
family who drowned and it was
I
who came so close to death.

When I recover my physical strength I get up from the bench, but I don’t seek out Enrique Rastro, as is my custom. I take myself straight home. I’m grateful to Bishop Rizi that I have a secure house to go to, that I need not
consider propositions from slip-sliding sailors on the street. Tonight I will be recovering upstairs and Prospera will be minding the locks downstairs. And I won’t go out, not even if the ladder-man clinks his bell. I will light three candles and stare into the flames as I kneel in the dark. Maio will be purring on the rug, Alanis snuffling on the bed and I will be holding the porcelain doll that the widow in the shop that sells the miniature clothes and shoes repaired for me after I dropped it on the tiles and broke its head.

‘How far away from Seville could we climb with our ladders?’ I ask the ladder-man one evening. ‘Could we move to another city?’

Earlier tonight, Bishop Rizi threw a fisherman’s net over me to stop me scrambling away. With the net he pulled in a stray cat, a pine sapling and one of my shoes. I had shaken myself free, but the heel of my shoe got caught in his net. I know where my shoe fell, down the side of a building, so I will retrieve it tomorrow in the light. I’m much more nimble than I used to be. I have developed strong calf muscles and ample biceps and a few times I’ve been
happier up the ladder than down. I suspect that I’m close to experiencing that ‘balancing bliss’ that skilled ladder-men speak of. Soon I’ll become a true ladder-woman and be inducted into the guild. There’s a candlelit ceremony that happens, apparently, and the guild leader slips over your head a ribbon from which swings a tiny copper ladder the size of a Crucifix. My ladder-man always wears his, and at the ball I saw that Hortense had a big wooden ladder hanging from a chain round her neck. When she leant over to pull up my skirt I saw it dangling in the cleft between her bosoms.

‘Would it be possible to climb all the way to Cordoba?’

I still yearn for the golden city, to see the red and white arches of the Mezquita. The ladder-man smiles. He takes his slate and draws a map with houses all the way from Seville to Cordoba.

Fat chance of that being the case. ‘Okay, I get it. We need buildings to climb.’

But I have excited an interest. His eyes are lively. He has something to prove. He writes with his chalk. ‘Where to, Paula?’

‘To the citadel of balance,’ I say, for it is a place I heard ladder-men talking about at the ball. It is their Holy temple, their Mecca.

The ladder-man gestures with an extended arm. It’s way too far, he indicates. He does wavy motions to show me it’s over seas.

‘But there’s a little one, here in Seville,’ I proclaim. He looks at me doubtfully. Makes his hands big then very small to show that the Seville replica is not much in comparison to the real citadel that is the size of a barrio. But yes, he assents, he will take me there if I wish.

‘To our very own Sevillian citadel of balance!’ I yell. (I’d stamp my foot if I hadn’t lost my right shoe. I forget that shouting doesn’t help the ladder-man understand. There’s nothing wrong with his hearing.)

Then he draws a picture of Maio on the slate. ‘We must take my cat? Why would that be?’

‘You will see,’ is all he will explain in chalk.

We leave the next night. We must cross the river for the pilgrimage, but we don’t choose to go by boat. We go the same way as last time. Into a carriage and over the bridge and out of the carriage and up a wall. I have Maio in a pillow sack with lots of little holes punched in the fabric so he can breathe. After a while Maio stops snarling about his conveyance and I hear him purring. He’s easy to please.

To the citadel of balance the three of us (plus two ladders) come. It is in cathedral quarter so we have a lot
of climbing to do. It’s really not easy to cross a whole city by roof and balcony. I can see why ladder-men confine themselves to a single barrio. We climb at night and during the day when the sun is burning down we sleep with members of the guild. Alongside them in their shelters. I had warned the Morisco boys, Telmo and Arauz, that I would be crossing the Mercedarian roof, and they both appeared at their dormitory window on the first night and waved to us. They had wanted to come with us, but I’d told them the journey was too far, and they wouldn’t be back by morning. I feel strange and a little wicked being up here on the Mercedarian roof at night, but it’s also liberating. I’m the one looking down on the priests for a change. Hee, hee! But I don’t laugh for long. A bat winging past flies into the side of my head and for the rest of the night one of my ears is ringing.

In the morning we visit the shelter of guild leader Alonso who lives on top of the soap factory in San Salvador. Alonso has a sick wife and child asleep in his bed. What to do? The guild leader has a solution. We each sleep on a giant cake of soap that Alonso has dragged up through the loft from the factory floor. These cakes of soap are enormous, the size of a pallet. They’re transparent, the colour of treacle or tree sap. I want to lie down, and so does the ladder-man, but I don’t know what to do about Maio.

‘I’ll take care of Scratcher,’ says Alonso, and he opens the sack and pushes Maio into an empty chicken coop.

The soap is soft and I feel more comfortable than I do when lying in bed at home. ‘See, what did I tell you!’ grins Alonso. ‘I often sleep on the moulds before they harden.’

And much to my surprise the combined smell of black olives and orange blossom is soporific. I have no trouble falling asleep. When I get up later in the day I find that my body has left an impression of its shape in the soap. Would it be worth selling to a sculptor? I’m always on the lookout to make a few maravedís. But straight away Alonso rushes over with a mortarboard and returns the soap to its original flatness. ‘Don’t want it to set like that,’ he says as he smoothes my effigy away.

The ladder-man’s taking a good nap. We wander over to his square and understand why he hasn’t surfaced yet. He’s sunk so far into the mould of soap that he can’t climb out. And since he’s mute he couldn’t tell us he was sinking. Alonso and I drag him from the hard soap he’s encased in. We have to wash him down with buckets of water but even so, his eyes are running for the rest of the day. I will always go to sleep holding his hand after this, so he can squeeze me awake if he gets into strife. But I have to admit, for myself, sleeping on soap was much nicer than sleeping on cushions.

‘I’m purchasing a giant cake of soap of my own,’ I say to Alonso in parting, shaking his very clean hand.

‘Good for you. But don’t leave your soap out in the heat of the day. You’ve seen what can happen,’ he warns, passing me a sack with a small body inside that I assume is Maio.

Our last place of rest will be the palace Alcázar. I’ve taken lots of walks in the palace gardens with grandée friends but I’ve never stepped inside the royal palace. I’ve pre-arranged sleepover accommodation with Harmen Weddesteeg. He’s painting there on a month’s assignment for the royals. He will paint three portraits: the Duke and his dog, the Duke and Duchess standing alongside the same dog, the Duke on his steed and the same dog beside them yet again. But Harmen tells me in excitement, he has already accepted a fourth commission to paint,
The Death of the Virgin
. He’s going to propose me for the role of the Virgin and he wants to do a preliminary sketch when we visit, to show the Duke how I will be perfect for the part. The Duke, I suppose, might have some qualms about a woman such as me, posing as Our Lady.

The ladder-man and I have to do a lot of lever work with our ladders to get up onto the roofs of the Alcázar palace. This is our hardest act so far. Luckily Harmen is waiting for us on the highest terrace wearing a giant straw
hat and squeezing orange juice to quench our thirst. We drink a gallon of juice. This man is too good to be true. Strange that he doesn’t have a wife, that I know of (in Seville). And he’s amused to meet my ladder-man.

‘So you really exist? I thought Paula was making you up.’ They smack hands together the way rivalrous men do, and Harmen sneezes and confides in a whisper, ‘He smells of soap, your friend.’

The painter doesn’t bother talking to my ladder-man, which hurts me a bit. If he knew the books the ladder-man read each night, he’d be impressed. But I’ve warned him in advance that the ladder-man can’t answer back, so maybe Harmen’s just being courteous.

He’s received permission for us to enter through the ceiling and rest in his painting studio for the day. We climb down into a roomy attic and here I drop Maio from his sack onto the floor. He slinks around and piddles in a corner on a pile of rags. The painter doesn’t seem overly concerned; he gives Maio a sardine and a piece of hard cheese. The ladder-man and I head downstairs to find a chamberpot and washtub. When we return, Maio is asleep on a rug. Harmen rubs his hands together and tells me we’ve no time to waste. He leads the ladder-man to a straw manger for siesta. I go behind a screen to put a black velvet costume on.

When I come out, Harmen makes me lie down on a
wooden box that looks like a coffin. He tells me to lay my hands across my chest like a statue on a sarcophagus. I have to look as if I’m dead and so it’s best if I fall asleep. Then I’ll look more dead than when I’m awake. I try to sleep but I stay awake. I’m too uncomfortable to fall asleep. I need a bolster under my head, but Harmen says the Virgin didn’t have a bolster so I can’t have one either. He pulls out his watchchain and swinging the watch back and forth before my eyes, he tries to work a sleeping trance on me. He saw this trick performed by a gypsy in Amsterdam who put to sleep a persistently vomiting child. It doesn’t work on me alas, and much to Harmen’s dismay, I throw up a pint of orange juice down the front of my black velvet gown. Harmen sponges the velvet vigorously and takes the Lord’s name in vain. Then he pours me a goblet of brandy and tells me to drink up. I don’t normally drink strong liquor so the brandy has a quick effect. I drop off to sleep with the midday sun slanting across my body.

When I wake up, Harmen has finished the sketch. I have a look over his shoulder. It really does look like I am dead. I have acquired the severe profile of the Virgin. I can see how I will look in ten years’ time. I start to cry as I look at the picture. For a moment I can’t work out why. Then I know. Here, before me, is my last vision of mother. She looked like this on her deathbed when she went to
sleep for all time. When the ladder-man hears me crying, he wakes up and comes over to us, all flecked with straw. When he sees the drawing, he trembles and makes the Sign of the Cross. He finds it unnerving that I look so dead.

Harmen isn’t dampened by our despair. He goes down on one knee and plays blind for old times’ sake. ‘I’ve lost my sight to you again, Paula.’ But not his heart, I remember. It never happened; he was never even tempted. And that’s how low I’ve sunk. To make an honourable gentleman like Harmen Weddesteeg immune to the feeling I might otherwise have engendered in him. But Harmen has always treated me respectfully. I can’t really complain. And today he pays me well for sleeping the day away. It’s the easiest modelling assignment I’ve ever had, though not without its drawbacks. I get a very sore back the next day, and in the future Harmen will admit that while I was asleep, he tied me to the crate with a rope in order to stop my constant tossing and turning. And that’s when I learnt that Harmen has a sneaky, ruthless side.

I hope the Duke likes the image and I get the commission, for it’s a lot easier to model asleep than awake. In parting, Harmen puts a good-luck charm around my neck. It’s a little baby Jesus on a chain and it dangles precariously. The ladder-man bends over and kisses the baby as if it is a child of our love. Harmen laughs and follows suit. Then he warns me that
after models play Saints they are vulnerable to the lure of dead spirits. ‘Take no chances, Paula. You are possibly stranded somewhere between earth and Heaven,’ he says and shakes some incense over me to ward off any evil bats or hobgoblins we might come across on our travels tonight. ‘Keep telling yourself you’re back with the living and you’ll be okay.’

I nod. We all know about the famous model who played Saint John. Celebrating in a tavern after the final sitting, and blind drunk, he’d fallen into the fireplace and was scalded to death. The vat of burning oil in the painting had claimed him with the same searing certainty with which it had claimed Saint John.

The ladder-man and I clamber off into the night, each of us with a ladder over a shoulder and a bag of belongings tied to a wooden rung. Maio has not been forgotten. He hangs in a sack round my neck. Our final destination is one more night away. To the citadel of balance we come. Te-dum. And we meet a few returning pilgrims on the way. All ladder-men of course, and in high spirits, telling us we are in for a treat and warning us not to eat too much before we arrive. (I wonder what that’s all about.)

We cross the final few buildings and the citadel comes into view, a round dome on the top of an old courthouse. We enter the portico of the dome and a citadel watchman welcomes us inside. This man is a wag. He has two cherries
dangling from stems over each of his ears. Cherry earrings! He wants to know if we’ve brought a ‘creature of balance’ along with us. My ladder-man points to my bag and nods. I let Maio out and he dashes off and disappears under a curtain before I can stop him.

‘You can’t go in there after the cat,’ the watchman warns, as I head towards the curtain. ‘Not yet.’

‘But I’ll get Maio back, won’t I?’ I ask him.

‘Yes, when you leave, it is possible,’ he says, but he’s not giving me any assurances.

‘What is the purpose of the creature of balance?’ I ask.

‘To ensure you have understood the art.’

‘Of falling into balance?’

‘That’s one of them,’ he replies, and looks at my ladder-man knowingly.

The citadel watchman begins weighing our respective ladders. He tut tuts. ‘Not a multiple of two,’ he shakes his head. I can’t understand what this means.

Then he wraps a ribbon around each of our ladders with a number on it and says he’ll store them safely in the cloakroom with the other ladders. Off he goes, initially just with the ladder-man’s property under his wing. My ladder-man looks a bit anxious but not as much as he did at the ball. He’s a bit more attached to me than he is to his ladder now, I can confidently boast.

‘I want to take my ladder inside with me,’ I say when the watchman comes back to collect it. I’ve been carrying my ladder for three days. I didn’t know I could get so attached to a frame of wood, but it seems I have.

‘You’ll be fine without it, girlie. Hold on to the señor instead. That’s what he’s there for.’

The ladder-man puts his arm around me, which I appreciate, but I still won’t let go of my ladder. When the citadel watchman reaches for it, I hang on even tighter. Some fierce, possessive desire takes hold of me. I’m a mother about to lose a child.