Читать книгу The Velvet Doublet - James Howell Street - Страница 5

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I was aroused the next morning at the third hour by a student nudging his dirty foot in my face, and soon thereafter Fray Juan came with a candle and confessed me, and I took the Wafer in chapel with my fellows. We broke our fast on stale bread and a sop of wild honey, and some of the students ventured fraternal overtures but naturally I scorned this presumptuous familiarity.

It took only a few minutes to tidy my quarters and then dawn had brushed through the night and was caressing the meadows of my Andalusia into life. The sounds of creaking tackle and the chant of sailors called me to my window and Santa Maria was in the channel and standing down-river for Cadiz and Palos, and perhaps even the Canary Isles in the Ocean Sea or the terra incognita of Guinea, as the West Coast of Africa is called.

I whispered her name. Santa Maria. She was so free, so gallant and alone, that I honored her with the name of her saint, and never again was I to call her Frivolous Mary in smirking derision or staid La Gallega, under which she was registered.

I watched her out of sight, then gave myself to meditation, knowing that, as a neophyte, I faced several days of solitude. I read the breviary and found it dull, and for lack of else to do I plunged into the depths of Isidore’s wisdom. It was worse than dull; it was drab and ponderous.

All that day I was in seclusion, except for chapel and meals, and the next, and even the next, and on Friday Fray Juan came to confess me again. My only sins were those of the mind. How could it have been otherwise? I received my absolution and penance with bowed head, but when the sacred rites had passed I presumed a jest, for I was one for mischief in my youth.

“My most greivous sin, Father, was boredom and it was accentuated by the sluggish words of the great Isidore.”

He dropped his chin to his chest and stared his concern for me. “Do the sprouts of Triana also judge genius?”

“Even an infant’s nose can smell bad meat.” I was quoting my father. “And if that be arrogance, I am sorry.” But I was not sorry at all.

His eyes rolled upward as though he were seeking the witness of heaven. “Rodrigo.” He held out his hands in a gesture of futility and emptiness. “If arrogance were a mortal sin, then every Andalusian would voyage down the Stygian rivers forever. Without sail or tiller. Arrogance is as natural to an Andalusian as is hauteur to a Biscayan, melancholy to a Galician, and impetuousness to a Catalan. As is patriotism to an Aragonese, pride to a Castilian, and insolence to an Estremaduran. It is the way of Spain. Our breath and our bread, and it will be our doom.”

“Doom?” I suddenly was serious.

“Yes. Spain kindles sparks and France nourishes them into fires, but it is England that gets the warmth while Spain’s obtrusive individualism kindles more sparks for French fires to warm the mean and avaricious spirit of Albion’s ghouls. We husband the world and they glean the fields.”

“But they are barbarians, Father.”

“Aye. So were the Vandals that gave us the Vandalusia that we call Andalusia. The barbarian of today is the prince of tomorrow. The peasant of the morning is the patrician at twilight. We will talk further of these things. You have done well, little brother, and you may attend lectures next week.”

“Your bounty and my gratitude fill my cup,” I said and bowed my thanks.

“And you may spend two hours this afternoon with your father.”

“In Triana?” I asked eagerly, thinking of a peppery soup, a spread of sardines, and perhaps a chicken smeared with garlic.

“No. That will only make you more homesick. At his shop here in Seville.” He reached for his breviary but left Isidore on my bench, and swung open the door. “You will remember, Rodrigo, that you are a member of this college and will conduct yourself to its credit. You will return for vespers.”

He was gone before I finished my profuse and eloquent acknowledgment, and, with hours on my hands and nothing else to occupy me, I returned to the volume that was trying my patience. Such was the method of the Dominicans. They placed an unsavory feast before a boy, then starved his mind until he gobbled up the knowledge and digested it.

After a noontime respite for bean soup and dried fruit, one for our bellies and the other for our bowels, Fray Juan brought my sandals to my quarters and picked off the few bed straws that were clinging to the back of my jacket. He fetched a basin of water and directed me to wash my neck and ears and then, O tempora! O mores! He himself washed my feet and dried them on his habit. He escorted me to the entrance of the monastery and stood watching as I walked away, decorously as befit a student of the College of Seville.

However, the minute I turned a corner of the old wall I began running, and scudded through the streets until I reached the Torre del Oro, where my father kept shop in an alley of merchants. The salesroom and bargaining counters of the mart were empty, and for the first time I noticed how bare the shelves were. No Eastern merchandise at all and no jars of African aloes and other purgatives and poisons. Only pottery gathering dust.

The rumbling and profane voice from the shop’s rear enclosure brought a surge of anticipation to my heart.

“Amir el bahr!” He was calling me admiral as always. “Rodrigo! By the holy well of Zemzem and the flow of Halima who wet-nursed The Messenger!”

And now you meet old Mudarra, my father’s potter, and now you know whence came the name with which I have bowed the stiff necks and proud backs of my enemies.

I hastened into his shop, flinging aside the heavy draperies that hid it from the salesroom, and he greeted me in Arabic:

“There is no God but Allah! Mohammed is His Messenger!”

I struggled through a reply, faltering shamefully over the Arabic words he had taught me:

“Praise be to God, the Origin of all good. And may the blessing of God be on Mohammed, the Prince of Prophets.”

Old Mudarra glowered at me and his sunken eyes judged me wanting. “There are fetters on your brain, Rodrigo. Your gloomy Dominicans have stuffed you with the Latin of Caesar and neglected the sweet Arabic of the Prophet Jesus.” His teeth were few and were broken and yellow, and hung loosely to his wrinkled gums. “Speak forthrightly, you colt of Dominican trickery and chewed pap.”

I tried again, quoting the words of Mohammed himself. “Say unto the Christians, their God and my God are one.”

“Now that is better.” Old Mudarra held out his arms and I ran to him and embraced the bony shoulders under his coarse brown cloak, then kissed his forehead at the edge of his turban.

“Where is my father?” I asked, and looked around at the rumpled couch where Mudarra slept, at his potter’s wheel, and the little trough that brought water from a cask. A supply of damp Andalusian clay, cleaned and kneaded, was by his bench and rows of jugs and bowls were on shelves by the window, taking the sun and hardening before their first turn in the oven outside.

“Your father stepped out for a while.” The old man did not look at me as he spake, but reached for an oil jug and began rubbing a blue compound into its surface, readying it for baking and glazing. His brushes and paints were in orderly array, and they and his wheel were the only things he kept in order.

“I have only two hours,” I explained. “How long has he been gone?”

Mudarra set the oil jug on the bench and the sun caught the blue, turning it deep and seeping it into the clay. Again he glowered at me. “Already the Black Friars have whetted your wits on curiosity and suspicion. Curiosity killed Lot’s wife.”

I laughed and took no offense inasmuch as I long since had grown accustomed to the old despot’s petulant temper and garrulous tongue. He had helped rear me, squabbling always with my Aunt Ronda, and had been my father’s potter for more than twenty years, having come from God knows where, his paints and wheel in a creaking handcart that day he presented himself at the shop. I had heard the story a dozen times, how my father had asked him whence he came, only to be told, “From the womb of Eve, you Gothic punchinello.”

No man ever had talked in such manner to my father, but old Mudarra moved in and, pumping his wheel, had not thrown his first Bermejo bowl for a second time before my father succumbed to his autocratic affection.

Mudarra was a Morisco, which is to say a Moor who has accepted Christianity usually under duress and particularly the threat of expulsion. To him, however, Christianity merely was a protective garment over a heart as loyal to The Messenger as any Moslem seed of Ishmael, as the guardians of the Kaaba, which is the only known handiwork of Adam himself.

The authorities, especially the Inquisitors, counted old Mudarra as a harmless dote, a bit unbalanced in his mind and therefore possessed of devils. It was forbidden, and ill luck, too, to lay hands on one so possessed of the malady of the blessed Magadan, called Mary of Magdala.

I had learned through frequent cuffings never to question him too closely about anything and never at all about his frequent disappearances, when he ostensibly was digging his own clay in the far places of Andalusia, and so on this day of my visit I was most discreet as to inquiries even about my father.

Therefore, with proper patience, I sat down near the water cask and answered his demands about the monastery, concealing my amusement at his obscene denunciation of the Dominicans. His Spanish was more lucid, perhaps, than Friar Juan’s, but without warning he often slipped into Arabic and I had to be alert to reply in the same tongue.

The room was stuffy in the autumn warmth and I was becoming drowsy when the putrid odor suddenly offended my nostrils and then assailed them in nauseating repugnance. I tilted my nose and sniffed and for the first time I noticed the little patches of goat’s hair and chicken feathers in the corner under the cask. There were splotches of dried blood, too, and bits of flesh. These were the offending agents.

Mudarra shifted his eyes from me to the corner and, obviously anticipating my rightful query, he hastened to make explanation. “A fresh chicken for this servant of The Messenger,” he said and touched his chest. “I prepared it myself and cooked it over coals from the oven.”

I knew he never ate meat, that he lived on bean soup, curds, and honey.

However, I gave it only passing thought, assuming he had used a fat hen to lure one of the alley’s chicks to his couch, for Mudarra, although very old and unwashed, was a man of majestic and successful licentiousness.

I moved to a far corner and the first hour of my visit passed without my father’s appearance. I grew restless and then Mudarra, mouthing his contempt for impatience, sought to lessen my anxiety. “Your father is very busy,” he said. “Times are hard.”

“I know. But it is not like my father to leave his shop for so long.”

The old man picked up the oil pot and gently rubbed the smooth surface, squinting at his handicraft. “Your father has taken an associate into the business.”

“A partner!” I was astonished. The shop had been in my family since my great-grandfather founded the enterprise, and only a Bermejo had ever supervised its affairs.

“I did not say a partner,” Mudarra barked at me. “I said associate. He is Luis Harana, a traveler and a gentleman of extraordinary perception.”

Luis Harana? I tasted the name and did not know it.

Old Mudarra gave his hands to his work and his eyes avoided mine. “Luis Harana is a trader of rare acumen.” He mumbled the words and chewed them as though in distaste. “He has aloes and no shop. Your father has a shop and no aloes. It is as simple as that.” His stooped shoulders shrugged the timeless gesture of the East.

“I have never heard of this man,” I said.

“He has taken expensive residence on the Street of Felicity. A widower he is, and with one daughter.”

“A Sevillano? An Andalusian?”

“Mother of man, Rodrigo!” His irascible temper seethed into disapproval. “Already the Dominicans have shaped your tongue only for questions.” He turned his gimlety eyes to me and volleyed an oath in Arabic that spent his anger, and then he said, “Luis Harana is of Catalonia, I think. A converso.”

“Marrano?” The accusing epithet came without deliberation or malice.

“Enough!” Old Mudarra shook his finger in my direction. “I will have no vindictive locution from a foal I warmed with my own breath. Luis Harana is your father’s friend, and do you cry swine to such a man in driveling insolence?”

I was chastened and the shame of my effrontery left me distraught and penitent, and I adroitly shifted the subject to the potter’s art and thereby, through flattery, embellished his vanity and sweetened his spleen. He was expounding volubly the minute differences in the golden pottery of Aragon and the golden luster of Malaga when I heard my father enter the front doorway of the shop, scraping his feet on the threshold.

Mudarra, too, cocked his ears and listened and I bowed my leave of him and darted into the salesroom.

My father was arranging new jars of aloes on the shelves and beside him was a haggard man with a hawkish nose, and there by the window was a girl of my own years; a flower bud from the Gardens of the Moon.

Her hair was primrose yellow, almost molten amber, and the sun through the window framed her into a portrait of celestial radiance. She smiled at me, demurely of course, then lowered her head in maidenly shame for her boldness. I was transfixed to the spot, impaled by a thrust of Astarte’s lance, and I gawked like a dotard on Faggot Day.

My father laughed at my derangement and threw his arm around my shoulders and presented me to Luis Harana, who, in turn, presented me to his daughter, calling her Maraela.

Maraela Harana. The very name sang like the sweet innocent voices of the children’s choir, like reeds swishing along the river in twilight breezes, the call of birds at nesting time, the silver bells for Salve Regina.

And I, blessed with fluency since my tender years, was as mute and as clumsy as a foal dropped in a mire and struggling for the dignity of equilibrium. Again she smiled and I wished for my lost velvet doublet and was bitter toward the Dominicans who had robbed me.

“Your father told me he had a son.” Her voice was softer music even than her name. “But I did not expect one so stalwart.”

My manhood, itself in bud, swelled to rapturous torture and I found my senses and spoke with a confidence that my feelings mocked. “This is an honor that should come only to one more worthy than I.” My bow was proper, but I was terrified lest I bow too low or press the grace of my gesture.

Harana and my father glanced at each other and gave their attentions to the aloes, and I stepped closer to her and saw that her eyes were the blue of my Andalusian noons. And this flower the seed of a converso? There was nothing Eastern about her at all, none of the heritage of Sarah or Hagar, none of the vein of Ur.

I was sagacious enough, albeit in my youth, to know that Jews and other Semites had been in Andalusia since Phoenician days and that time had erased all the vestiges of Shem from many of his descendants. But Maraela was as fair as the Gaels about whom my Aunt Ronda so often spoke, as the Rhine maidens whose legends the Goths whispered. Her father, on the other hand, had the cast of Abraham, the black hair of Judah, the piercing eyes of the Desert of Edom.

She did not move from the window, from the sun in her hair, and we talked first of the day and the shop, the aloes and the pottery. She had met old Mudarra, and smiled when she spoke his name and nodded toward his quarters, where he had secluded himself. Then she told me they had come to Seville from Cordova, but originally from Catalonia. “My mother has been with the saints for many years,” she said. “And my father and I have traveled much.”

Our parents, at mention of Catalonia, looked our way and they both joined us, and my father explained to me that he and Harana were associating themselves together for sale of aloes. I congratulated them and expressed my pleasure, meaning every word I spake, for such was the hold of Maraela upon me from the beginning.

My father radiated good cheer as he talked of plans for the business, but Harana was morosely taciturn, his sharp vigilance appraising every sound and every sight. His doublet of Milanese silk was richer than my father’s, although the carriage of the two men weighed the balance of elegance in my father’s favor. Harana also wore an ample skirt to his knees and his long stockings bore testimony of the Italian influence. For all that, however, his legs were shapeless, with none of the sinewy strength of my father’s, a blessing, incidentally, that he had passed to me.

The luxurious silk of Maraela’s raiment shone of the fine looms of Tours and her billowing skirt was caught up in front and attached to a golden chain that encircled her waist. Her braided hair was wound loosely around her head and was held in place by a silk cap, richly embroidered and studded with opulent stones.

My own jacket and coarse stockings were pitifully mean and to draw her attention from them and to me, I began discoursing lucidly on the wisdom of Isidore and pretended surprise that she had never heard of him. My father was proud of me and it showed in his eyes and on his face, banishing for a minute the careworn lines that troubled me.

The time, as with all pleasures, sped so fast that it was falling twilight before I was aware of such prosaic things as hours, and then, remembering Friar Juan’s injunction that I return for vespers, I was seized with a panic and begged their leave to depart in haste, and this I did, racing for the monastery and frothing myself into a most noxious sweat.

I crept into the chapel and felt my tutor’s eyes upon me, even in the gloom, and after benediction I slipped to my stall and lit my stubby candle and buried myself in Isidore’s morass.

The shadows moved and my candlelight flickered on the sallow cheeks of Friar Juan Ruiz de Medina, touching his yellow eyes into luster. He pushed the candle to a far end of the bench and sat by me and I began my excuses for my tardiness to vespers.

He nodded his head slowly, then spoke without rancor. “Tomorrow you will fast, Rodrigo. No food. No water.”

“Yes, Father.” I wished I had eaten at the shop, but the thought of food reminded me of the fetor in Mudarra’s room and I choked back a surge of warm bile.

“The next day you may have bread and water.”

“Yes, Father.”

He wet his finger and toyed with the dripping wax from the candle, and broke off a portion and rubbed it into a ball. “Did you meet Luis Harana?”

It caught me unaware and I jerked upright. But of course he would know my father’s associate. Luis Harana was a man of obvious wealth and a converse, and the Queen’s Inquisitors knew everything. “I had that honor,” I said, recalling my wits for an instant use. “Harana and my father are joining business hands for the sale of aloes.”

“Yes, I know.” He put the bit of wax in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully, his jaw revolving in that relentless motion that I detested. “Aloes are rare now that the Moslems have closed our African trade.”

“Harana is a trader of merit and acumen,” I suggested.

“Yes, I know.”

“I also met his daughter——” I would hide nothing from him, knowing he would find it out anyway. “Maraela Harana. Her refinement and maidenly virtues do honor to her father.”

Friar Juan lifted the candle and sat it between us, the better to see me, and our shadows danced high on the walls, and he looked at me, his eyes more piercing than Luis Harana’s. I returned his gaze without flinching and he put his hand on my arm and said, “Rodrigo, know you the story of the jar of water and the drop of oil?”

“No, Father.”

“Well, it was thus——” He folded his hands in his lap and his chin dropped low. “A drop of oil asked sanction to mingle with the water in a jar and the water said, ‘No! For you can only rise to the top of the jar and spread, and even if the jar be washed, yea, scoured, it will remain oily forever.’ ”

The parable saddened me, for I had heard my Aunt Ronda speak in such manner of Jews and Gentiles, of oil and water. Then I resented his insinuation and spoke out. “The Haranas are conversos, but firm in the faith of our blessed Savior. Or else, Father Juan, my own father would not associate himself with Luis Harana. Remembrance of this truth will do me honor, and I request it.”

“Yes, I know.” He arose and his shadow darkened to the ceiling of my prison. “I am a Dominican friar, Rodrigo. Remembrance of this truth will do me honor, and I request it. Therefore, I am your brother and am to be called Fray Juan, and not Father Juan. And now blow out the candle, little brother. Wax is precious and all treasures we have must go to the realm for the crusade against Granada.” He rested his hand on the door latch. “You will attend the lecture of Benjamin Marino on Monday.”

Then he was gone, but his pronouncement rang in my ears.

Fray Juan Ruiz de Medina, and I his brother? I the brother of the Queen’s Inquisitor, the eunuch of old Quemadero’s shrieking harem? Never! So I swore and called upon St. Christopher to witness.

And in my loneliness, the fancy of my desires cried out for the beauty of Maraela to comfort me, and then her image was before me, banishing the gloom of that hateful place, of that hateful hour.