Captain Alatriste Read online

  "Can we not come to some agreement?" Alatriste asked.

  The Italian stood in silence a moment. Then shook his head. "No," he said. "You went too far the other night." His throaty voice sounded tired. The captain could imagine that, like him, the Italian had had his fill.

  "So now?"

  "Now it is your head or mine."

  A new silence. Alatriste's erstwhile accomplice made a slight move, and Alatriste responded, without relaxing his guard. Very slowly they circled, each taking the other's measure. Beneath the buffcoat, the captain could feel his shirt soaked in sweat.

  "Will you tell me your name?"

  "It has no bearing on this."

  "You hide it, then—that is the sign of a scoundrel." Alatriste heard the Italian's harsh laugh. "Perhaps. Yet I am a live scoundrel, and you, Captain Alatriste, are a dead man."

  "Not this night."

  His adversary seemed to be taking stock. He glanced toward the inert body of his henchman. Then he looked at me, still on the ground beside the third of the figures who had been lurking in the plaza, and who was now stirring weakly. He must have been badly wounded by my pistol shot, for we could hear him moaning and asking for confession.

  "No," concluded the Italian. "I believe you are right. This is not the night."

  He seemed to be readying himself to leave, but as I watched, I saw him flip the dagger in his left hand from grip to blade. Then, all in the same movement, he flung it toward the captain, who somehow miraculously dodged it.

  "Underhanded dog!" grunted Alatriste.

  "Well, by God," the other responded. "You surely didn't think I would ask your permission."

  Again the two swordsmen stood studying each other. The Italian ended that with a twirl of his blade, Alatriste responded with another, and again each cautiously raised his sword, and steel brushed steel with a faint metallic ching, before they lowered their swords again.

  "Devil take it," the Italian sighed hoarsely. "There is no end to this." He began to back away from the captain, very slowly, his sword held horizontally between them. Only when he was safely away, almost at the corner post, did he turn his back.

  "Incidentally," he called as he was fading into the shadows, "the name is Gualterio Malatesta. Did you hear? And I come from Palermo. I want that burned into your brain when I kill you!"

  The man I had shot was still whimpering for confession. His shoulder was shattered, and splinters of his clavicle were protruding from the wound. Very soon, the Devil would be well served.

  Diego Alatriste gave him a quick, impersonal look, went through his purse, as he had earlier with the dead man's, and then came over and knelt beside me. He did not thank me, or say any of the things one might expect would be said when a thirteen-year-old boy has saved a man's life. He simply asked if I was all right, and when I replied that I was, he tucked his sword beneath one arm and, putting the other around my shoulders, helped me to my feet. His mustache brushed my cheek for an instant, and I saw that his eyes, paler than ever in the light of the moon, were observing me with strange intensity, as if he were seeing me for the first time.

  The dying man moaned again, again pleading for confession. The captain turned back, and I could see him thinking.

  "Run over to San Andres," he said finally, "and fetch a priest for this miserable fellow."

  I stared at him, hesitating; it seemed to me that I had glimpsed that bitter, ill-humored grimace on his lips.

  "His name is Ordonez," he added. "I recognize him from Flanders."

  Then he picked up the pistols and started off. Before I obeyed his orders, I went back to the carriage guard on the corner to look for his cape, then ran after him and handed it to him. He tossed it over one shoulder and lightly touched my cheek—with a show of affection unusual in him. And he kept looking at me with the same expression he had had when he asked if I was all right. Half embarrassed, half proud, I felt a drop of blood from his wounded hand drip onto my face.

  IX. THE STEPS OF SAN FELIPE

  A few days of calm followed that sleepless night. But as Diego Alatriste continued to refuse to leave the city, or hide, we lived in a perpetual state of alert; we might as well have been in a campaign. Staying alive, I discovered, can be much more tiring than letting oneself be killed, and requires all five senses. The captain slept more during the day than he did at night, and at the least sound—a cat on the roof, or the creak of wood on the stairs—I would awaken in my bed to see him in his nightshirt, sitting up in his, with the vizcaina or a pistol in his hand.

  After the skirmish at the Gate of Lost Souls, he had tried to send me back to my mother for a while, or to the house of a friend. I told him that I had no intention of abandoning our camp, that his fate was mine, and that if I had been capable of getting off two pistol shots, I could fire

  off another twenty if the occasion demanded. A position I reinforced by expressing my determination to run away from any place he might send me. I do not know whether Alatriste was grateful for my decision, for I have told you that he was not a man given to revealing his feelings. But at least I had made my point. He shrugged and did not bring up the matter again.

  In fact, the next day I found a fine dagger on my pillow, recently purchased on Calle de los Espaderos: damascened handle, steel cross-guard, and a long, finely tempered blade, slim and double-edged. It was one of those daggers our grandfathers called a misericordia, for it was used to put caballeros fallen in battle out of their misery. That was the first weapon I ever possessed, and I kept it, with great fondness, for twenty years, until one day in Rocroi I had to leave it buried between the fastenings of a Frenchman's corselet. Which is actually not a bad end for a fine dagger like that one.

  All the time that we were sleeping with one eye open, and jumping at our own shadows, Madrid was ablaze with celebrations occasioned by the visit of the Prince of Wales, an event that was by now official. There were days of cavalcades, soirees in the Alcazar Real, banquets, receptions, and masked balls, all topped off with a festival of "bulls and canes" in the Plaza Mayor that I remember as one of the most outstanding spectacles of its kind ever seen in our Madrid of the Austrias. The finest caballeros in the whole city—among them our young king—took part, wielding lances or pikes and pitting themselves against Jarama bulls in a glorious display of grace and courage. This fiesta of the corrida was, as it continues to be today, the favorite celebration of the people of Madrid—and of no few other places in Spain. The king himself, and our beautiful Queen Isabel—though a daughter of the great Henri IV, the Bearnais, and through him Elizabeth of France—were very fond of them. My lord and king, the fourth Philip, was known to be an elegant horseman and a fine shot, an aficionado of the hunt and of horses—once, in a single day, killing three wild boars by his own hand but losing a fine mount in the process. His sporting skills were immortalized in the paintings of Don Diego Velazquez, as well as in poems by many authors and poets such as Lope de Vega or Francisco de Quevedo. These lines by Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca are from his popular play La banda y la flor:

  Shall I tell what gallant horseman

  Decked out in high boots and spurs,

  Arms at a pleasing angle, the hand

  Held low to rein in his steed,

  Cape neatly arranged, back

  Ramrod-straight, eyes alert,

  Trotted elegantly through the streets

  Beside the carriage of the queen?

  I have already said elsewhere that in his eighteenth or twentieth year, Philip was—and would be for many years—congenial, fond of the ladies, elegant, and beloved of his people. Ah, our good, mistreated Spanish people, who always considered their kings to be the most just and magnanimous on earth, even when their power was on the decline; even though the reign of the previous king, Philip the Third, had been brief, but with time enough to be calamitous left in the hands of an incompetent and venal favorite; and even though our young monarch, a consummate horseman, if lethargic and incapable in affairs of government, was
at the mercy of the accomplishments and disasters—and there were many more of the latter—of the Conde, and later Duque, de Olivares.

  The Spanish people—or at least what is left of them— have changed a great deal since then. Their pride and admiration for their king was followed by scorn; enthusiasm by acerbic criticism; dreams of greatness by deep depression and general pessimism.

  I well remember"—and I believe this happened during the festival of the bulls honoring the Prince of Wales, or perhaps a later one—that one of the beasts was so fierce that it could not be hamstrung or slowed. No one—not even the Spanish, Burgundian, and German guards ornamenting the plaza—dared go near it. Then, from the balcony of the Casa de la Panaderia, our good King Philip, calm as you please, asked one of the guards for his harquebus. Without losing a whit of royal composure or making any grandiose gestures, he casually took the gun, went down to the plaza, threw his cape over his shoulder, confidently requested his hat, and aimed so true that lifting the weapon, firing it, and dropping the bull were all one and the same motion.

  The public exploded in applause and cheers, and for months the feat was celebrated in both prose and verse. Calderon, Hurtado de Mendoza, Alarcon, Velez de Guevara, Rojas, Saavedra Fajardo, and Don Francisco de Quevedo himself—everyone at court capable of dipping a quill into an inkwell—invoked the Muses to immortalize the act and adulate the monarch, comparing him now with Jupiter sending down his bolt of lightning, now with Theseus slaying the bull at Marathon. I remember that Don Francisco's sonnet began with a clever wordplay, in which he combined the continent of Europe and the mythic figure of Europa.

  In leaving dead the rapist of Europa,

  Of whom you are lord, as monarch of Spain...

  And the great Lope, addressing his lines to the charging bull eliminated by the royal hand, wrote:

  Both blessing and tragedy was your death,

  For, though life gave you no reason to live,

  Greatness came with your dying breath.

  This even though at that point in his life, Lope did not need to fawn on anyone. I tell these things that Your Mercies may see what Spain is, and what we Spaniards are like, how our good and gentle people have always been abused, and how easy, because of our generous impulses, it is to win us over, and push us to the brink of the abyss out of meanness or incompetence, when we have always deserved better. Had Philip IV commanded the glorious tercios of old, had he retaken Holland, conquered Louis XIII of France and his minister Richelieu, cleared the Atlantic of pirates and the Mediterranean of Turks, invaded England and raised the cross of Saint Andrew at the Tower of London and before the Sublime Porte, he could not have awakened as much enthusiasm among his subjects as he did with his elan in killing a bull.

  How different from that other Philip IV, the widower with dead, weak, or degenerate sons, whom I myself would have to escort—along with his retinue—more than thirty years later across a deserted Spain devastated by wars, hunger, and misery, tepidly cheered by the few miserable peasants with energy enough to gather along the roadside. Bereaved, aged, head bowed, traveling to the border at the Bidassoa River to undergo the humiliation of delivering his daughter in marriage to a French king, and in so doing, sign the death certificate of that unhappy Spain he had led to disaster, squandering the gold and silver from America in vain frivolities, in enriching officials, clergy, nobles, and corrupt favorites, and in filling the battlefields of Europe with the graves of courageous men.

  But it is not my wish to skip over years or events. The time I am writing about was still many years from such a dismal future, and Madrid still the capital of the Spains and the world. Those days, like the weeks that followed, and the months the engagement between our Infanta Maria and the Prince of Wales lasted, both town and court spent in entertainments of every nature. The most beautiful ladies and most genteel caballeros outdid themselves to fete the royal family and their illustrious guest during ruas along Calle Mayor and into El Prado park, and in elegant paseos through the gardens of the Alcazar, past the Acero fountain, and into the pine forests of the Casa de Carnpo, the royal country estate.

  The strictest rules of etiquette and decorum between the courting pair were, naturally, respected; they were never alone for a moment, always—to the despair of the impetuous young swain—watched over by a swarm of major-domos and duennas. Indifferent to the quiet diplomatic tussles unleashed in the chancelleries—for or against the union—the nobility and the common people of Madrid tried to outdo each other in their homage to the heir to the English throne, and to the compatriots joining him at court. Tittle-tattle flew on street corners and in drawing rooms: the infanta was learning the English tongue, and Charles himself was studying Catholic doctrine with theologians, with the goal of embracing the true faith. Nothing was further from reality in regard to the latter, as would be proved later. But at the moment, and in such a climate of goodwill, whispers about the charm, consideration, and good looks of the young heir merely added to his popularity.

  This reputation would later serve to offset the caprices and insolence of Buckingham, who, as he gained more confidence—he had just been named a duke by his king, James—and as both he and Charles came to realize that the negotiations for the marriage would be arduous and long, was revealing all the earmarks of a spoiled, bad-mannered, arrogant young man. Something that serious Spanish hidalgos found difficult to tolerate, especially in regard to three matters that were sacred at the time: protocol, religion, and women. Buckingham's uncouth behavior reached such an extreme that, on more than one occasion, only the hospitality and good breeding of our caballeros prevented their slapping the Englishman across the face with a glove in answer to some insolence or other, which would have led to settling the question with seconds and swords, at dawn, in El Prado park or at the Puerta de la Vega. As for the Conde de Olivares, his relationship with Buckingham went from bad to worse after the first days of obligatory political courtesy, and in the long run, after the engagement was dissolved, there were unfortunate consequences for Spanish interests.

  Now that years have gone by, I wonder whether it would not have been better had Diego Alatriste skewered the Englishman that famous night, despite his scruples and no matter how noble the accursed heretic had showed himself to be. But who could have known? At any rate, our friend Buckingham would get his comeuppance in his own country, when some years later a Puritan lieutenant named Felton—upholding, they say, the honor of a certain Milady de Winter"—gave him what he deserved: more stabs in the gut than a missal has prayers.

  Well, to sum up: Those particulars are plentiful in the annals of the epoch. I recommend them to the reader interested in more details, for they have no direct relation to the thread of this story. I shall say only, in regard to Captain Alatriste and myself, that we neither participated in the festivities, to which it had been thought best not to invite us, nor had any desire to do so, should the invitation have been given. The days after the altercation at the Gate of Lost Souls went by, as I have said, without incident, undoubtedly because the puppeteer pulling the strings was too occupied with the public comings and goings of Charles of Wales to tend to such small details—and when I speak of small details, I am referring to the captain and me.

  We were aware, however, that sooner or later the bill would be delivered, and it would not be inconsequential. After all, however cloudy it may be, the shadow is always sewn to one's feet. No one can escape his own shadow.

  This is not the first time I have referred to the mentideros devoted to gossip—meeting places for the idle and centers for all the news, rumors, and whispers that traveled around Madrid. There were three main mentideros—San Felipe, Losas de Palacio, and Representantes—and among these, the one in front of the Augustinian church of San Felipe, between Correos, Mayor, and Esparteros, was the most crowded. The steps were at the entrance to the church, and because the building was not on a level with Calle Mayor, they were higher than the street, leaving room beneath for a row of small shops,
cubbyholes where toys, guitars, and trinkets were sold. Their roofs, in turn, formed an area paved with large flat stones: a kind of elevated promenade protected with railings. From that theater box one had a wonderful view of people and carriages passing by, and could comfortably stroll from one group to another.