Cervantes Street Read online

  Although my mother extended Miguel invitations to stay for supper, he always claimed his parents were expecting him. At first, it was unclear to me where he lived. When I showed interest in his domicile, he waved in the direction of the center of town, away from the towers of the Alcázar—our lofty neighbors. Going in and out of our house, it was an everyday occurrence to see carriages accompanied by corteges, transporting the royal family and other important personages as they made their way to and from the Alcázar. Notable Madrileños, carried by their slaves on the finest palanquins, went by our door as frequently as peddlers hawking their wares in the poorer neighborhoods.

  Months after we had become close, Miguel finally invited me to visit his home. His family lived in a crumbling two-story house near the Puerta del Sol, on a gloomy street reeking of cabbage soup, urine, and excrement. These were dwellings without cisterns, whose inhabitants collected their water from the public fountains. The shuttered windows kept a wood strip open to peek out on the street life. This was a part of Madrid hardly frequented by hidalgos and duennas; instead, it was home to beggars, to mutilated, suppurating, shoeless people, and grown men and children who walked about practically naked, fighting with the street dogs and rats for a bone without flesh.

  Miguel had mentioned that his father was a surgeon. But on my first visit to the Cervantes home, I discovered Don Rodrigo Cervantes was not a university-educated doctor, but one of those barber/doctors who bled penniless ill people. Don Rodrigo’s barbershop and clinic were housed in one large, dark, pestilent room on the first floor of their home. When we came in, Don Rodrigo was busy with a patient. Miguel said, “Good afternoon, Papá,” and his father nodded in our direction without acknowledging me, as if he were so distracted he hadn’t seen me.

  We walked across the airless room—where you could practically breathe in sickness—housing people asleep or moaning in makeshift beds that were no more than wooden planks covered with dirty straw. Then we ascended the broken wooden steps that led to the family’s living quarters on the second floor. One smoky oil lamp burned in the parlor, shedding its weak light on a threadbare carpet with a few worn-out cushions on it, a table made of crude wood, and a wooden crucifix hanging above the entrance. Everything in the room was impregnated with the acrid smell of the cabbage used as the main ingredient in poor man’s soup.

  Miguel led me to his bedroom, a windowless area off the main chamber, with a curtain of rough cloth full of holes in place of a proper door. I had to bend my knees and lower my head to enter it. Miguel shared the one cot with his brother Rodrigo, the youngest of the family.

  When we returned to the parlor, we found seated on a cushion, with a crying baby in her arms, a young woman who Miguel introduced as Andrea, his older sister. He mentioned that Magdalena, the other sister, was in Córdoba visiting relatives. Miguel was finishing the introductions when his mother, Doña Leonor, came out of the kitchen. My presence took her by surprise, I could tell, from which I deduced that the family was not used to visitors coming upstairs. Miguel’s mother was tall and thin, with the haggard look of an ascetic. In her youth, she must have been good-looking, but now her face resembled a frieze of tiny mosaics broken and reassembled, to expose a landscape of crushed hopes.

  When Miguel mentioned my full name, she became slightly awkward. “Don Luis Lara,” she said, pronouncing each syllable slowly as if to make sure she had heard right. “Welcome to our humble home. Your visit honors us.” Despite her disheveled state and modest garments, Doña Leonor had the good manners of a woman of some education and refinement. I learned later, she came from landed gentry of old stock. She turned to Miguel, “You could have mentioned you were bringing Don Luis to visit. I would have at least prepared a refreshment for him.”

  “It’s my fault, Doña Leonor,” I interjected. “Miguel didn’t know I was coming. I insisted on stopping by to pick up a schoolbook. Forgive me for my rudeness.”

  At that moment a boy came running up the stairs yelling, “Miguel, Miguel, Father needs you downstairs!”

  “Rodrigo, what happened to your manners?” Doña Leonor reprimanded him. “Don’t you see we have a visitor? Don Luis must think we scream in this house all the time.”

  “This is my little brother. I’ll be back soon,” Miguel said to me as he left with his brother.

  Doña Leonor insisted that I stay for a refreshment. Before returning to the kitchen, she addressed Andrea: “Let me take the young one to her crib. Keep Don Luis company while I prepare him a cup of chocolate.”

  Andrea handed the now quiet baby to her mother. We were left alone in the parlor, sitting on cushions across from each other. She was the first one to break the silence. “Don Luis should know that the baby girl my mother took to her crib is Constanza, my own daughter, though my parents tell everyone that the baby is theirs.” Her astonishing revelation came out of her lips with a bluntness that was almost savage.

  Andrea’s hair hung down to her waist like a black silk mantilla. She was dressed plainly in a gray dress, and wore no adornments. Her features were classically perfect and the skin of her face unblemished. Her eyes shot the same steely shafts of defiance that the women who prowled the seamy alleys of Madrid hurled at men, demanding that you engage their services. Andrea had a dimple on her chin that was like a well where men’s desires went in and didn’t come out again.

  “It’s not my fault, Don Luis, that God, if I am to believe what people say of me, made me beautiful. For a girl of humble parentage, beauty is her only dowry.” She paused and grimaced. Because she whispered her words, I had to lean in her direction until I was so close I could feel her breath brushing back my eyelashes. Her proximity was perturbing. She was indeed exceptionally beautiful. But hers was a beauty etched in acid. Smoothing the hair around her face with both hands, she took a deep, sorrowful breath. With an exaggerated lisp, penciling the air with the pink tip of her tongue, she went on: “I met a lad in Sevilla who delighted my eye and whom my heart chose as the object of its adoration. Yessid was his name. His intentions toward me were honorable. My love for him was as true love is: undivided and unconstrained. He was a carpenter, but what made him unacceptable as my husband in my father’s eyes was that he was of Moorish descent. This, despite the fact that Yessid’s family had converted to our religion, and he was a true Christian. Nonetheless, my family forbade me to see him. That’s all we need, my father said to me when I informed him that Yessid wished to ask for my hand in marriage. After many generations, we still haven’t been able to establish our own purity of blood. If you marry a Moor, our family will never be free of the stain. I’d rather see you dead. I forbid you to see Yessid alone again. And that young man had better not show his face around here anymore.” She paused, pained by her confession. Then Andrea took another drawn-out breath before she continued, “Don Luis is young, but I’m sure you’re already acquainted with the enslaving tyranny of love. Yessid was broken-hearted, and he returned to the mountains near Granada to live with his parents. Later, I heard the news that he had taken his own life by hanging.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Andrea didn’t seem to have heard me. She studied her hands, caressing her shapely fingers for a moment. She had more to say. “From the time I was old enough to help my father with his patients,” she went on, raising her face and holding my gaze, “I’ve worked with him taking care of ill people. If I had had a dowry, I would have joined a religious order and gone to the Indies to succor the ill and to spread our faith among the natives. In his infinite wisdom, God had something else in store for me. That’s how I met my evil seducer, a rich Florentine merchant by the name of Giovanni Francesco Locadelo, the father of my daughter. He had been wounded at sea near our coast by Turkish corsairs, and was taken to Sevilla where he required a nurse by his side all the time. I took the work, happy to have an opportunity to help my parents, and to distract myself from my loss.

  “I nursed the Florentine through his long convalescence, staying up man
y nights cooling his forehead with wet rags to bring down his fever. When his health improved, he was grateful to me. At first, he said that I was like a daughter to him. I didn’t know this was his first step in his malevolent plan to seduce me and rob me of my virginity, the only prize I owned.”

  I wanted to look away, to stare at the smoky ceiling, but Andrea’s eyes were glued to mine.

  “One day he told me he had grown to love me and asked me if I would consent to marry him. I said no without giving him explanations. I had vowed secretly to remain Yessid’s widow for the rest of my life.

  “However, as the Italian’s entreaties continued over a period of months, to punish my father, I let him seduce me. Weeks later, when I told Don Giovanni I was gravid with his child, he announced he was well enough to return to Florence where he had been recalled on urgent business.”

  I began to perspire, and she noticed.

  “Forgive me, Don Luis, for making you uncomfortable with my woeful tale. But I’ve never told this story to anyone, and I feel I cannot go on another day without unburdening myself.” She looked in the direction of the kitchen to make sure her mother was not in the room. Then she continued with urgency, “So, before he left Sevilla, to assuage his conscience—though to everyone else he explained he was doing it out of gratitude and because I helped him to regain his health—he presented me with a jacket made of silver cloth, and one of crimson gold; a Flemish desk; a table made of walnut wood; sets of the finest bed linen; silk sheets; pillows made in Holland; embroidered tablecloths; silver fountains; gold candelabra; Turkish carpets; braziers; one convex mirror, framed in gold leaf; paintings by Flemish masters; a harp; two thousand gold escudos; and many, many other gifts. In other words, he gave me a rich woman’s dowry to attract unscrupulous men who would not mind that I was not virginal anymore. This was enough to appease my father. He was more content to see me a dishonored wealthy woman than a happy one married to an honest lad of Moorish ancestry.

  “Where are all these riches? you are probably asking yourself,” she said, with a sweep of her hand, to call my attention to the pitiful furnishings of the room. “Not for the first time, Don Luis, my father accrued major debts from gambling, and was in danger of being sent to jail until he was an old man. He sold what he could of the spoils of my disgrace, and pawned the rest. That’s how he was able to pay his creditors and still have enough money leftover to move the family to Madrid.

  “As you know, Don Luis, honor and virtue are the only true ornaments a woman has. Without them, a beautiful woman becomes hideous. To save my honor—by which they meant to save the honor of the family—before we left Sevilla my parents tried to convince me to give away my daughter as a foundling. I swore I’d kill her, and then kill myself, if they did that. Everyone in Sevilla knows what happens to those pitiful babies left at the door of a convent in the cover of night: the wild pigs and dogs that roam the streets before dawn are likely to eat the infants before the nuns find them in the morning. Usually, all that’s left of those unfortunate angels are the dark bloodstains on the ground, and sometimes little chips of bone and tiny pink pieces of flesh.”

  I felt faint. I wanted to run away from that room and her awful confession. But Andrea would not stop. “You know how it is, if a girl loses her virginity outside of marriage: she’s labeled a hideous fiend, a basilisk. I offered to take my daughter with me and go to the mountains near Granada and become a shepherdess. That way, my parents would not have to be shamed by my disgrace. Thank God and His Holy Mother, my parents relented in their plan to give away my daughter, and so we left Sevilla together. In Madrid, no one knows us. My parents invented the absurd story that I am the widow of a man named Nicolás de Ovando who died in Sevilla of a violent fever. That’s why you find me here, Don Luis, buried alive, my heart turned to wood. I tell you, if I didn’t have my daughter, I would have—God forgive me!—killed myself long ago.”

  When she had finished her dreadful tale, Andrea rose from her cushion. Her beautiful face was as livid as the head on a marble statue—perfect, but lifeless. Without saying another word, she vanished down the dark corridor that led to the back of the living quarters, where her child was crying once again. Sitting there alone by the lamp’s weak light, I felt that in that room I had been introduced to some unspeakable darkness of the world. I shook my head, trying to expel the evils to which I had been exposed. Why had Andrea confided her awful secret? How did she know I would not use this shameful story to ruin her family’s honor? All that occurred to me was that she seemed to blame her father for her tragedy.

  I decided not to mention what had transpired to Miguel, or to anyone else. By confiding in me, my friend’s sister had entrusted me with an unwanted burden; worse yet, her monstrous secret had made me her prisoner.

  Almost thirty years later, reading Miguel’s Don Quixote Part I, I recognized Andrea as the original of Marcella, the beautiful shepherdess who is blamed for the death of a man madly in love with her. I wondered whether Andrea ever read her brother’s novel, and how much it must have stung to have her sibling reveal to the world her disgraceful past. There you have the main difference between Miguel and me as writers. Miguel de Cervantes (he had added the de by then) lacked imagination; he was just a borrower from life, whereas I came to develop the conviction that true literature is not an excuse for poorly disguised autobiography. In the degenerate times in which I had been condemned to live, that was not apparent to anyone. But in the future, I was convinced, the truly great writers would be those who wrote anew—and not just rewrote—stories that needed to be perfected. In the future, all long, tedious novels—including Miguel’s Don Quixote—would be whittled down to their essence, so that the whole story could be told in a handful of pages.

  The next time I visited Miguel’s home, many of the objects Andrea had mentioned as part of her “dowry” were on display. The shabby main room had been transformed into an elegant, colorful chamber. Miguel’s father must have had a windfall at the gambling tables, for he had reclaimed the articles he had pawned.

  * * *

  I learned what true domestic unhappiness was after I set foot in Miguel’s home. Doña Leonor constantly displayed her contempt toward her impractical, spendthrift husband. He was an avid reader, and prided himself on his knowledge of Latin. Don Rodrigo (as people called him, though he had no right to that honorific title) made more money writing sonnets commissioned by young men to woo their ladies than as a doctor. He entertained the young lovers who engaged his services, as well as his neighbors, by reciting poetry and playing the vihuela. His consulting room and barbershop, he reminded everyone, served as a cultural gathering place for superior minds. It was something to hear him sing the couplets he composed, which he would do without much prodding, to the friends and customers who dropped by to drink and talk.

  “Don Luis, people heal quicker when there’s music and poetry around,” he explained to me. “Gaiety is the best cure for all illnesses.” To put his philosophy in practice, while he bled his patients, he would sing romances to them, accompanied by the vihuela. No wonder more people trusted him with their beards than with their health. The wounded men who came to have their gashes sewn up looked like dangerous criminals who could not go to a hospital. The fascination Miguel had all his life with low-life characters began with the people who patronized Don Rodrigo’s barbershop. I was repelled and yet also attracted by this rabble, whom I had always seen from afar, and whom, without knowing Miguel, I would never have come in contact.

  “Don Luis,” Don Rodrigo said to me once, after he had gotten to know me better, “this is what I have to do to keep body and soul together. But I’m really a poet at heart. I know you can see that.”

  During holidays, and after school every day, Miguel was supposed to help his father bleed patients, kill flies, and wash the chamber pots and blood-splattered floor. He was deeply ashamed of these tasks and had no interest in learning his father’s skills. “Why should I learn about leeches and hair?” he co
nfided in me once, bitterly. “When I am Court Poet, I will not have to bleed people to relieve them of their bad humors. The beauty of my verses will cure them of all their illnesses.”

  Miguel inherited his love of poetry from his father. But he was determined to make something of himself, not to be a failure like his progenitor. “You don’t know how many times I’ve had to take soup to my father in jail,” Miguel told me one night in a tavern after he had had too much wine. “Sometimes my mother and my little brothers and sisters went hungry so he could keep his big belly full.” I felt sorry for my friend that his life had been so harsh.

  Though Doña Leonor prized an education, and was proud that nuns had taught her to read and write, she begrudged Miguel the cost of the paper to write his compositions. Buying paper for his classes meant there were other things the household would have to do without. Doña Leonor lost no chance to remind everyone within earshot that it was her dwindling inheritance that supported the family. She had inherited a vineyard in Arganda, which provided a small income to feed and clothe the Cervantes children.

  Years later, when I was ready to begin my Don Quixote, I modeled some of its most important characters after Miguel’s parents. Here I would like to stress the difference between autobiography (cannibalizing one’s own life) and biography (which relies on the writer’s powers of observation). It was from the figure of the father that I began to hatch the idea of a dreamer who ruined his family. Don Rodrigo was the model for the mad Don Quixote, and Miguel’s mother would be transformed into the realistic housekeeper and the practical niece. I repeat, it was I who conceived of turning these people into fictional characters. The grave mistake I made was that one night when we were out drinking, and I had imbibed a little too much wine, I mentioned my brainchild to Miguel (keeping to myself that my characters were based on his parents). He then went ahead and stole the idea from me, publishing the rambling and inartistic first part of his Don Quixote before I had a chance to complete mine.