Cervantes Street (34 page)
As Morricote seemed to have concluded his tale, Sancho joined the conversation once more: “I don’t need to remind Don Miguel I’m a true patriot, a respectful and obedient subject of our great king. But I had to defy his decree because Morricote and his family were the best neighbors the Panzas ever had, and since I do not have the great honor and pleasure of knowing our glorious king, nor have I ever been his neighbor, or think it’s likely I’ll ever be, and powerful bonds of decency and kindness unite me to my friend, I have journeyed with him this far and plan not to abandon him until he has recovered his gold and other valuables and can reunite with his family.”
I had seen countless Moriscos mutilated, burned, stripped of their possessions, ejected from the land they had cultivated for generations, the only country they had ever known, where their ancestors had lived for centuries and where their parents had become dust, indistinguishable from the Spanish soil. “Your secret is safe with me, my friends,” I reassured them.
We embraced. I wished both of them well and made plans with Sancho to see him on my next visit to Esquivias. And, though I was dizzy, both from the excellent wine and from Sancho’s fantastical story and the great joy of encountering him so unexpectedly, so many years later, I climbed back on my horse and continued on my way to Toledo.
* * *
Months later, when I returned to Esquivias, I inquired about Sancho and was told he had bought the finest house in town for Teresa and Sanchica, but that his daughter had refused to give up her business of raising pigs. Sancho had left town once more, with his loyal servant Diego. Though he was old, and his health was not good, he announced that he had been too long on the road to remain in any one place. Teresa told me Sancho had said, “My incomparably virtuous, good, and faithful wife, my beloved daughter and grandchildren, my hunger for adventure is not sated; the open road calls me again, and I still have a great desire to see many places I haven’t yet seen, and I would like to do it before God calls me to His side and I have to give an account of my doings on this earth. The grass may not be greener on the other side,” he had concluded, “but at least it is new and grows on different ground.”
I do not know what became of him, or of Morricote, though I hope he journeyed to the New World, the place I had so desperately tried to reach in my youth, and was never fortunate to visit because that was not my destiny; Fate had decided for me that I would never again leave Spain, that I would travel its roads and meet its people, so that I could write about Don Quixote and Sancho.
The earth seemed to have swallowed up Sancho once more. I wished that, wherever he landed, he found out that his adventures continued in my own
Don Quixote Part II
, where the encounter narrated in this chapter appears, though disguised as fiction.
The False Don Quixote
1587-1616
Pascual Paredes
I blame the way my life turned out on my youthful love of poetry, which, if my memory serves me, Don Quixote—rightly so—calls an incurable vice. It was the innocent remark I made to Don Luis Lara, shortly after I began to work at the Council of the Indies, about the copy on his desk of
The Works of Garcilaso de la Vega with Annotations
by Fernando de Herrera, that made him notice me for the first time. Had I at that moment held my tongue (the one appendage of mine I’ve never been able to control), who knows what would have become of me? That first conversation was the seed that grew into a long association that trapped me in the web of enmity Don Luis had for Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and made me a participant in a story of revenge that cast an ominous shadow on much of my adult life.
By enlisting me as a kind of spy, Don Luis singled me out among all the other dull, unimaginative men who worked in our branch of the council. After Miguel de Cervantes left Esquivias and moved to Sevilla in 1587, my principal duty became to remain informed of Cervantes’s every move, and to pass on this information to Don Luis.
It was thus I escaped the dreary nature of my odious job, my entombment in those stuffy, penumbral, poorly ventilated rooms that smelled of rank ink and dusty documents, where my coworkers hunched over their desks for long hours every day, whispering so as not to call attention to themselves, scratching reams of paper with their quills, entering numbers on waxy parchments and moving them from one column to the other, drafting reports that no one ever read, which were destined for archives visited only by roaches and rats. These pathetic souls paused only to cough, or to scratch themselves, or to blow their noses, or to go relieve themselves, and struggled to stay awake in the afternoons, after they returned to work from dinner and their siestas. I despised their shallow lives, the tedium and sterility of the way they spent their existence, because I knew that, if chance hadn’t intervened, this would have been my own destiny in Spain.
On one of my monthly trips to Esquivias, presumably to supervise the accounts of the local government, I learned that Cervantes had left his wife behind and traveled to Sevilla, where he hoped to get a job working as a collector of grain for the soldiers of the armada, which had begun the ill-fated hostilities against England that helped to precipitate the decline of our empire. This was my opportunity to visit Sevilla, a city I longed to see, so rich in history and famed for its beauty, its Alcázar, its poets and painters. Upon arrival I learned that Miguel de Cervantes had managed to secure one of those positions. He was now an employee of the government, as Don Luis and I were.
“His job title is itinerant collector for the armada,” I informed Don Luis when I returned to Madrid.
He gave me one of his rare happy smiles. I had come to understand that his greatest joy consisted of learning about the bad luck of Cervantes, though securing a position as collector for the crown seemed hardly a misfortune.
“You’ve done an excellent job, Pascual,” Don Luis said.
I could count with the digits of one hand the occasions on which he had praised me for anything I did for him, as if it were his absolute right to expect nothing but perfect service from those who worked under him. I was sitting across from him, sipping a Jeréz. It was late afternoon; his large office was almost dark. Twilight was the favorite time of day for Don Luis, as if the deepening shadows reassured him.
“As someone whose purity of blood has not been established,” he continued, after sipping his glass, and pointing his almost fleshless pinky at me, “this is the perfect occupation for him. I don’t need to remind you that when it comes to extracting money from people, Jews are leeches with an insatiable appetite.”
I chuckled, but immediately straightened my back and assumed a serious expression. The look Don Luis gave me was not of disapproval.
“There is rampant corruption in that world of people who collect taxes for the king, Pascual. Even the most honest man—which, let’s face it, Miguel is not—sooner or later will join the thieves and lowlifes who work with him. He will have to do as they do, if he wants to keep his job. Then he’ll get what he deserves.”
He sipped his sherry slowly, staring at a point behind me. His lips were stretched in the faintest of smiles, but there was something almost frightful in the dreamy eyes. With a wave of his hand, not bothering to make eye contact with me, he bid me to leave the room.
* * *
I became a bloodhound tracking Cervantes’s footsteps in the godforsaken villages he visited in Andalusia. I thanked my lucky stars: it was a much better existence than being glued to a desk. Additionally, I had escaped the sepulchral building of the council, and daily coexistence with my coworkers, who made me think of solitary souls doing penance in purgatory. Also, and this was no small advantage, I got to see more of Spain, which had always been a dream of mine.
One day, after I had finished giving him a report of Miguel’s travels, Don Luis confessed to me: “You don’t know what comfort I derive when, before I close my eyes to go to sleep, I imagine Miguel—dusty, hungry, worn-out, holding the staff of justice in his good hand—entering on an old mule one of those desolate towns in the Andalusian countryside where, as tax collector of the crown, he must be met with hostility and hatred.”
I was glad I would never be important enough in his eyes to become a target of his hatred.
For three years there was little new to report, though Don Luis demanded to know the names of every insignificant village Cervantes visited and how he had been received by the peasants whose grain he had to extract in the name of the armada. Then I learned through one of my contacts in Sevilla that Cervantes had applied for permission to travel to the Indies. I asked my informant for a copy of the document and left for Madrid, riding as fast as I could, barely stopping to eat or relieve myself or sleep. In his petition to the court, Cervantes was specific about the four posts he wanted to be considered for: the comptrollership of the viceroyalty of New Granada, the governorship of the province of Soconusco in Guatemala, the post of auditor of the galleys in Cartagena de Indias, or that of magistrate of the city of La Paz. All of these were important positions, usually given as rewards to those who had distinguished themselves in the service of the king; but often they were secured by the influential families of good-for-nothing señoritos, who were an embarrassment to their kin in Spain. To me it showed that despite the setbacks of his life, Cervantes had a very high notion of his importance. But he didn’t seem to have considered that, at forty-three years of age, he was asking for employment that required the energy of a much younger man.
Don Luis had never shown so much delight to see me as he did on the day I delivered, at his office in the Council of the Indies, the copy of Cervantes’s petition. He extended me an invitation to sup with him that night, at the finest inn in Madrid, the Mesón de los Reyes, where many of the personages who came to the court on business stayed. Though we had taken many walks in public places over the years, and I had often walked with him to his home, he had neither invited me inside for a libation nor suggested a drink at a tavern where we could be seen socializing as equals.
While we waited for our first dish to arrive, Don Luis said to me, “Pascual, I want to show you my appreciation for the work you’re doing for me. As of next month, your salary will be raised by one hundred maravedíes.”
“Thank you, thank you, Your Grace,” I said, shocked. “I kiss your generous hands a thousand times.” My salary was already higher than those of my pitiful coworkers.
“I want to make clear to you, Pascual, that this compensation will not be coming out of the treasury of the council. That would be embezzlement.”
I hurried to say, “I would never have thought such a thing, Don Luis. I—”
“Let me finish. I’m not done yet. I know perfectly well my conduct is above all reproach. I just want you to know that the extra maravedíes will be taken out of my own coffers. I will continue to fight assiduously against corruption in our public employees.”
As the soup arrived, I couldn’t help but wonder if it had ever occurred to him that paying me more than my coworkers, and keeping me busy tracking down Cervantes’s every move, was itself an abuse of his power. But I already understood that Don Luis Lara was the sort of man who would never see flaws in himself. Like all Spanish aristocrats, he thought his excrescencies smelled better than those of his inferiors in rank.
The rest of the evening we talked about the new volumes of poetry that had arrived at the city’s bookshops. Thanks to Don Luis, I could now purchase any new book that interested me, or copies of the classics I hadn’t read. I still kept up with the output of new poets, but I did it to please him, and to continue to have access to the world of writers—not because I drew the same pleasure I had experienced from poetry before I started working for Don Luis and learned how ruthless these sensitive men who wrote beautiful poems and novels could be.
* * *
Cervantes’s petition was denied, and soon after he was again on the road collecting grain. I didn’t find out what role Don Luis played in this scheme, and the truth was I didn’t want to know: that way it was easier for me to continue working as his spy. But after Cervantes experienced what must have come as a crushing failure, Don Luis seemed to have lost all interest in his activities. Regularly, I continued giving him my brief reports, which he listened to with a bored expression—making me feel as if I cared more about Cervantes than he did.
“What a sad creature the cripple of Lepanto has become,” Don Luis once said to me. “To think that at one time he was considered the great hope of Spanish letters. To think we were good friends! That miserable life he’s living will kill him before too long, you’ll see.”
As there was less cause for me to travel to Andalusia to keep abreast of Cervantes’s peregrinations, I became Don Luis’s factotum at the council. Yet he did not ask me to stop spying on the man I secretly began to call the Commissioner of Sorrows.
Then, while retaining his position at the council, Don Luis was appointed as prosecuting attorney for the Holy Office. With a zeal that struck me as fanatical even for such a religious man, he became immersed in his work for the church. His responsibilities kept him in Toledo a great deal of the time; it must have been painful for him to spend so much time in the city where his wife lived in the Lara’s ancestral home, which she had converted into a hospice. Later, though he did not mention this to me, I learned through an acquaintance that young Diego Lara had abandoned his studies in theology at the Universidad Cisneriana in Alcalá de Henares to join an order of the Carmelites in Toledo. I learned, too, that a maid named Leonela, who had been in Don Luis’s service since the days of his marriage, had left his home to join Doña Mercedes. Was I now spying on Don Luis?
It was around this time that I became his confidant, which speaks volumes about his loneliness. He did not seem to have close friends, but like all of us he had a need to share his intimate thoughts with other human beings. In that regard we were similar: my position with Don Luis was the closest I came to intimacy with another person.