Cervantes Street (14 page)

As a graduation present, my parents gave us a large and handsome house near our ancestral home. I hoped the move to Madrid would signal a new start for our marriage, and that Madrid’s distractions would bring some gaiety into our lives. Perhaps furnishing the house would provide a pleasant diversion for Mercedes. As befitted our station, our home was one of Madrid’s elegant residences. Momentarily, the old spark in Mercedes’s eyes came back. But as the months passed, and we settled into our new life, she became once more solely concerned with Diego’s well-being. Leonela had come to live with us as Mercedes’s maid-in-waiting. She supervised the servants, arranged the furniture, hung the portraits of our ancestors, oversaw the work of the gardener, planned our meals with the cook.

Through my family’s influence, I was secured a position as an officer in the Department of Collections of the Guardas of Castile. My office was in charge of collecting everywhere in the kingdom the taxes that financed the king’s army, navy, and public works. My work required that I travel throughout Spain to supervise the books kept by our auditors. I enjoyed seeing all of Spain and visiting its remotest corners. Yet I always looked forward to returning home, where Diego would receive me with his sweet smile, kisses, and hugs. My son hadn’t stopped crying, but now he wept silently, and only while he slept. Some nights I would sit by his bed and watch his fitful crying, tears falling out of his eyes so copiously that his pillow would be wet by morning. The most eminent doctors in Madrid came to visit Diego and proclaimed him small for his age; otherwise, he was in good health. One day, when he was old enough to understand, I asked him, “Tell me, my son, are you in pain at night? Show me where it hurts.”

“It doesn’t hurt, Papá, but it’s sad here,” he answered sweetly, as he placed his little hand on his chest, on top of his heart.

I kept this conversation to myself. I became convinced my son’s crying was a sign from God. Could Diego be one of His saints? Had he come into the world to shed tears for the sins of humanity? For my sins?

Mercedes and I had no choice but to accept Diego’s chronic crying as no more than an idiosyncrasy. It was in our interest not to allow the situation to be known all over Madrid. If the Holy Office found out about it, how would they interpret my son’s crying? How would they react? Would he have to appear in front of them?

Mercedes became more distant, yet there was little discord between us. It was apparent to me, and perhaps even to my parents, that I loved her more than she loved me. The intimacy of our youth was gone, and this saddened me. It was hard to pinpoint at what exact moment we had begun to live separate lives. Was it after Diego’s birth? Had my unvoiced suspicions created a distance between us? She spent most of her time with Diego and Leonela. I tried to reignite the old bond: I brought Mercedes lavish presents from my trips; I inquired about her life when I was not around. Her usual reply was a litany: “Diego’s health requires my constant attention, Luis. He’s not like other children. I have no other life. I want no other life. If my son is not well, I am not well.”

* * *

There was so much corruption among the officials in government that I wanted to do my work with exemplary probity. My assiduousness caught the eye of my superiors and, before long, His Catholic Majesty rewarded my vigilance with an important position in the Guardas. I would be based in Madrid, in a building that belonged to Las Cortes.

It could not be good for Diego to spend all his time surrounded by women. Despite the doctors’ pronouncements, no friends were allowed to visit him, for fear of the illnesses of childhood. Diego was bright, full of questions, and loved to hear stories read to him. My dreams of becoming a poet had been derailed by the path fortune had laid out for me. I had little time to read and savor poetry, let alone write it. But when I noticed Diego’s interest in stories, I began to hope he would grow up to become the poet I knew I’d never be. My work and the education of my son became the center of my life.

Mercedes’s remoteness was now a permanent state. I thought that if she became less anxious about Diego’s health, she might return to being the Mercedes I had known all my life.

Then word reached Madrid that the passengers on the vessel
El Sol
, including Miguel and his brother Rodrigo, had been captured on their way to Spain by Algerian corsairs. Why had I been cursed with Miguel’s shadow? What would I have to do to never hear about him again?

One night soon after I heard the news, I was dining in my chamber alone, as had become my habit since we moved to Madrid, when there was a knock on my door. My attendant opened it and Mercedes came in, apparently upset. Something important must have happened: it had been awhile since she had visited my chambers. “I’ll ring for you when I’ve finished my supper,” I said to my servant and waved my hand in the direction of the door. Mercedes sat at the table across from me. I moved my dinner plate aside and took a sip of wine. By the light of the candle, she looked spectral, as if she hadn’t slept in a long time. The gleam in her eyes perturbed me. “Has anything happen to Diego?” I asked.

“No, Diego is well, thank God. He’s already asleep.” She went on, “Leonela came home with the news about Miguel de Cervantes and his brother. Why did you lie to me, Luis? Why did you tell me he had died at Lepanto?”

That she could be interested in Miguel after so many years hurt me, and it made me want to hurt her back. So I had not been imagining things—there was a basis for my suspicions. I said, “I didn’t think you’d care whether he lived or died. As I got to know him better, I realized he was no friend of mine, but someone who wanted to harm me. I didn’t want to hear his name mentioned again in my home. As far as I’m concerned, he’s dead.”

“From the time we were children, Luis,” she began, her voice quivering with anger, “I admired your rectitude, your sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. Unlike me, unlike most people, I thought you were incapable of lying. You represented the best of Spanish manhood; I was sure I would never meet a better man than you. That’s why I grew up loving you, not the way one loves a cousin, but the way a husband is loved; that’s why I accepted the idea that one day we would get married. I didn’t know what romantic love was—except for the way it was talked about in the novels of chivalry—so I confused the admiration you inspired in me for love.”

I should have asked her to say no more and leave my chamber. Better, I should have left it myself. I knew that the longer she went on, the more irreparable would be the damage done to our marriage. Instead, I hung my head and kept silent, though I wanted to scream,
If I became a liar, Mercedes, it was because Miguel de Cervantes forced me to do so. Unlike him, I was not born an impostor!

Mercedes’s features became distorted; her pallor intensified. She got up from her chair and paced in front of me, with her fists clenched against her breasts.

“While my feelings for you were genuine and pure,” she continued, “I knew I didn’t love you the way a wife is supposed to love her husband. I thought that because of your wonderful qualities, and with the passage of time, I would come to love you the way I ought to. But from the moment I saw Miguel de Cervantes, something that had lain dormant in my heart was stirred.” Her eyes teared, and her open hands, which she rested on her cheeks, trembled in tiny spasms. Mercedes seemed incapable of measuring her words, or of comprehending the effect they had on me. “Miguel brought laughter into my secluded world. He awakened my fantasy; he made me dream. He represented the world from which I had been sheltered. How often I had thought of those unfortunate women who dressed as men to go out in the world—to see all the things that are impossible to examine with your own eyes when you are a woman forced to spend most of your life behind the walls of your familial home. When Miguel came through our front door it was as if the world—that part of the world that I could only intuit—had been brought to me. He represented a knowledge of things I didn’t know and for which I was hungry.”

The reasons for her betrayal were untenable. If she had confided in me how much she longed to see the outside world, I would have shown her what lay beyond the walls of our grandparents’ home. Yet, despite the jabbing pain I felt in my heart, a part of me was relieved. My suspicions were not unfounded after all: I had not maligned Mercedes; I did not have to ask her forgiveness; she was not the pure example of womanhood I had taken her for. It was as if in an instant my life, everything I had loved and believed in, had been sullied. At that moment I wanted to die. I would have run out of that room and killed myself, if I didn’t know that suicide is the worst offense to God.
I will live for Diego
.
I will live for my son
. And then I thought,
I will not rest until Miguel de Cervantes is dead
.

Mercedes had more to say: “Believe me when I tell you that I fought my feelings for him.” She shook her head with violence and let out a sharp sob of a wounded beast that made me shudder. “But my passion was stronger than me. I have loved Miguel all these years, and always will.” There was hatred in her gaze; I felt faint when I realized that it was aimed at me. “I agreed to marry you, Luis, because I believed you when you told us at the dinner table that Miguel had died in battle.” She paused. There was absolute silence in my chamber, but a chorus of voices clamored in my head. The volume of her voice reached a crescendo. “Why did you lie to me? If you hadn’t, perhaps in time I might have forgotten Miguel and come to love you as my husband. Now I can never forgive you for your lie, Luis. Never. Never.”

“I did it because I loved you,” I blurted out pathetically, not wanting to believe that
my
Mercedes was bent upon humiliating me. “I did it because I didn’t want to lose you. I didn’t want to see you dishonored by a man unworthy of you.”

The horrible words she said next have festered in my brain and heart from that night: “Do you remember that scene in my bedchamber, when Miguel professed his love for me and I turned him away? We staged that, so you would not suspect us anymore and we could continue seeing each other. It was hard for me not to laugh knowing you were behind the curtain. But I didn’t want to harm you; I just couldn’t live without Miguel’s caresses.”

The way she said “we” made me feel as if she had sliced me into hundreds of pieces and then sprinkled them with salt. “Basta!” I screamed, rising from my chair and rushing out of my chamber before I strangled her to death. From that moment on, the tranquility in which I had spent most of my days vanished, never to return.

For a true Castilian, honor is everything. My honor, my surname, and my blood were one. Mercedes’s dishonorable behavior dishonored my family and me. And a man despoiled of his honor was better off dead. If her reputation was stained in my eyes, my whole life was a fraud. Still, I wanted to find something good in my wife. How was it possible that I had been so mistaken about her? If the woman I thought I had known from the time I was a child was a complete stranger to me, if I had been mistaken about Mercedes, what could I believe in? If I had been so obtuse about her true nature, what kind of oblivious life had I led? If I could not tell the truth from a lie, who was I? Had I played any role in her dishonesty? If she was a villainess, perhaps I was not blameless. If she had been corrupted by her proximity to Miguel, was I not just as guilty for having brought him into her life?

My wife, the only woman I had loved, the woman I had continued to love despite the joylessness of our marriage, the woman who had been my paradise on earth, the mother of my only son, in an instant had become my torturer. And I, who thought of myself as one of the luckiest men, because unlike so many others I had heard of, I would never have to place my wife in a house guarded by iron rails to safeguard her chastity, I now knew that I could never again trust Mercedes. Without trust there could be no true love. And I, who had dreamed that our marriage would be the perfect union of two souls, two different people becoming one flesh, one blood, now saw my wife cast in a lewd light. I had been cruelly deceived. Was the Mercedes who had appeared to me in the guise of one of God’s angels really Satan in female guise?

Anyone who met Mercedes was immediately struck by her exquisite diamondlike perfection. But that diamond had cracked, and an excremental vein had ruptured its crystalline pool of light, rendering it worthless. That day, and for many days afterward, I wanted to strangle Mercedes and watch life ebb out of her as her eyes went dark.

Over the past several years, my loathing of Miguel had, if anything, abated. But after Mercedes’s confession I wanted desperately to do violence not just to her, but above all to him. From that night on, the tenacious weed of hatred found in my soul fertile ground and shot out roots that choked everything alive inside me. The very ground I stood on felt barren and scorched, as if it had been razed by hell’s flames. The measures I had taken to prevent Miguel from returning to Spain were not enough. My fantasies of the ways in which he would die grew more elaborate: I would have him poisoned; I would send a paid murderer to Algiers to kill him; but first, I would have his brother’s head hacked off, while Miguel watched, before he himself was decapitated.

* * *

I no longer had anything that deserved to be called a life. My dreams reenacted Miguel’s and Mercedes’s betrayal, and I could not control the nightmares of fire-breathing, winged gargoyles that howled demonic tirades into my ears. I would wake up covered in sweat, feverish, gasping for breath, my head throbbing, my fists clenched, my jaws locked, my limbs aching, as if the ceiling of my bedchamber had crumbled on top of me. I dreaded going to sleep. Often I would stay awake all night, praying. I had the sensation I went through life sleepwalking.

My feelings were unchristian, I knew. I despised who I had become; my self-loathing was unbearable. I was convinced that God would punish me horribly if I continued to stew in hatred. My own shadow frightened me. My own reflection made me shudder: the flames of hell flickered in my eyes.