Captain Alatriste Read online

  He was reciting as he entered, and clearly feeling fractious. He stopped at my side, adjusted his spectacles, glanced over the verses I was copying down, and raised his eyebrows, pleased to find that they were not lines from Alarcon or Gongora. Then he limped over to the table, with that gait demanded by his twisted feet—he had hobbled since he was a boy, something that had not gotten in the way of his being an agile and skillful swordsman—to sit down with the rest of his companions. And there he grabbed the closest jug.

  "Share. Be not miserly with me,

  But pour divine Bacchus's bounty...."

  He directed this appeal toward Juan Vicuna. As I have said, Vicuna, who was very strong and brawny, had been a sergeant in the horse guard, had lost his right arm at Nieuwpoort, and now lived on his pension, which consisted of a license to run a small gaming house. Vicuna passed him a jug of Valdemoro, and although Don Francisco preferred the white from Valdeiglesias, he emptied it without taking a breath.

  "What news of your petition?" Vicuna asked with interest.

  The poet swiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A few drops of wine had fallen on the cross of Santiago embroidered on the breast of his black sleeved doublet.

  "I believe," he said, "that Philip the Great is wiping his ass with it."

  "That itself is an honor," Licenciado Calzas argued.

  Don Francisco appropriated another jug.

  "In that case"—there was a pause as he drank—"the honor is to his royal ass. The paper was good, a half-ducat a ream. And I wrote it in my best hand."

  He was in a foul mood, for these were not good times for him, not for his prose or his poetry, or his finances. Only a few weeks earlier, the fourth Philip had had to lift the decree—first prison and then exile—that had been weighing over Quevedo since the fall from favor, two or three years before, of his friend and protector the Duque de Osuna. At last reinstated, Don Francisco had been able to return to Madrid, but he was in a monetary fast. His petition to the king, soliciting his former pension of four hundred escudos owed for service in Italy—he had been a spy in Venice, a fugitive, and two of his companions had been executed—had been answered with silence. That had made him more furious than ever, and his fury nourished his bad humor and his wit, which went hand in hand . . . and contributed to new problems.

  "Patientia lenietur princeps," Domine Perez said, consoling him. "Patience placates the sovereign."

  "Well, Reverend Father, it does not placate me one whit."

  The Jesuit looked around with a preoccupied air. Every time one of this group found himself in difficulty, it fell to the domine to speak to his character and his conduct, as befitted his position as man of the Church. From time to time, he absolved his friends sub conditioner without their requesting it. Behind their backs, the captain said. Less devious than the norm among members of his order, the domine took seriously the honored obligation to moderate squabbles. He was full of life, a good theologian, tolerant of human weaknesses, benevolent, and placid in the extreme. He made generous allowances for his fellow beings, and his church was crowded with women who came to confess their sins, drawn by his reputation for being generous at the tribunal of penitence.

  As for the regulars at the Tavern of the Turk, in his presence no one spoke of dark deeds or of women; that was the condition upon which his company was based: tolerance, and friendship. Quarrels and affairs, he often said, I will deal with in the confessional. And when his ecclesiastical superiors reproached him for passing time in the tavern with poets and swordsmen, he responded that saints save themselves, while sinners must be sought out. I will add on his behalf that he barely tasted his wine and I never heard him speak ill of anyone. Which in the Spain of that day— and today as well—was something unheard of in a cleric.

  "Let us be prudent, Senor Quevedo," he added affectionately that day, after his comment in Latin. "You, sir, are not in a position to speak ill of certain things aloud."

  Don Francisco looked at the priest, adjusting his eyeglasses. "I? Speak ill? You err, Domine. I do not speak ill, I merely state the truth."

  And then he stood, and turned toward the rest of those in the tavern, reciting, in his educated, sonorous, and clear voice:

  "I shall speak out, despite appeals.

  You touch first your lips, and then your brow

  Counseling silence or threatening fear.

  Should not a man hold courage dear?

  Must he not feel the thing he says?

  Must he not say the thing he feels? "

  Juan Vicuna and Licenciado Calzas applauded, and El Tuerto Fadrique nodded gravely. Captain Alatriste looked at Don Francisco with a broad, melancholy smile, which the poet returned. Domine Perez, acknowledging that the question the poet had posed was unanswerable, concentrated on his watered muscatel. The poet took up the charge again, now approaching it via a sonnet that he kept revising.

  "I looked upon the walls of my fatherland, Though once strong, now tumbling down "

  Caridad la Lebrijana came and took away the empty jars, asking for moderation before swishing away with a walk that captured all eyes except those of the domine, still absorbed in his muscatel, and of Don Francisco, sunk in combat with silent ghosts.

  "I walked into my home and saw

  A ruin that nothing could assuage;

  My staff, more curved and battered.

  My sword, now dulled by age,

  In all a memory of death:

  Nothing was left...

  nothing that mattered."

  Some strangers strolled into the tavern, and Diego Alatriste placed a hand on the poet's arm, calming him. "The memory of death!" Don Francisco repeated in conclusion, lost in his own thoughts. He sat, however, and accepted the new jar the captain offered him.

  In truth, Senor Quevedo's days at court were spent with orders of arrest or exile hanging over his head. Although occasionally he bought a house whose administrator milked him of the rents, that may have been the reason he had never wanted a fixed residence in Madrid, and tended to take lodgings in public inns. Truces from his adversaries, like periods of prosperity, were brief for this singular man, the hobgoblin of his enemies and delight of his friends, who one moment might be mingling with nobles and scholars and the next scrabbling in his purse for the last maravedi. Changes of fortune ... which so loves to change, and almost never for the better.

  "We have no choice but to fight," the poet added after a few seconds.

  His tone was pensive, as if for himself only; one eye was

  swimming in wine, and the other had gone down for the last time. Alatriste, still holding his friend's arm and bending over the table, smiled with affectionate sadness. "Against whom, Don Francisco?"

  The captain seemed almost not to expect an answer. Quevedo raised one finger. His eyeglasses had slipped from his nose and were dangling from their cord, nearly dipping into his wine.

  "Against stupidity, evil, superstition, envy, and ignorance," he enunciated slowly, and as he spoke, he appeared to regard his reflection on the surface of the liquid. "Which is to say, against all Spain. Against everything."

  I was listening from where I was sitting by the door, intrigued and uneasy. I intuited that behind Don Francisco's bad-humored words lay dark reasons that he himself could not comprehend, but that went beyond simple tantrums and sour character. I, at my tender age, still did not know that it is possible to speak harshly about what we love, precisely because of that love, and with the moral authority that love bestows upon us. Later, I was able to understand that the state of affairs in Spain was very painful to Don Francisco. A Spain still formidable from without, but one that despite the pomp and artifice, despite our young and charming king, our national pride and our heroic battles,

  Spain had begun to doze, trusting in the gold and silver that the galleons brought from the Indies. But all that gold and silver disappeared into the hands of the aristocracy, and of lazy, corrupt, and unproductive officials and clergy who squandered it in vain undert
akings such as financing the costly war renewed in Flanders, where providing a pike, that is, a new pikeman or soldier, cost an eye and a leg.

  Even the Low Dutch whom we were fighting sold us their manufactured products and made commercial deals right in Cadiz, acquiring the precious metals that our ships—which had to outmaneuver pirates—brought from the lands to the west. Aragonese and Catalans were shielded by their laws; Portugal was patched together; commerce was in the hands of foreigners; finances were the purview of Genoese bankers; and no one worked except the wretched peasants, exploited by the tax collectors of the aristocracy and the king. And in the midst of all that corruption and madness, moving against the course of history, like a beautiful, terrifying animal that still slashed and clawed yet at the heart was eaten by a malignant tumor, our poor Spain was worm-eaten inside, condemned to an inexorable decadence that did not escape the clear eyes of Don Francisco de Quevedo. But I, at that time, could see nothing but the daring of his words, and I kept looking anxiously outside, expecting at any moment to see the catchpoles of the corregidor appear with a new warrant for Don Francisco's arrest, to punish his arrogant lack of caution.

  That was when I saw the carriage. It would be shading the truth to deny that I was waiting for it to pass, for it drove up Calle Toledo two or three times a week, more or less at the same hour. It was black, lined with leather and red velvet, and the coachman was not in the coach box driving the mules but, rather, rode one of them—the normal procedure for that kind of carriage. The coach itself was solid but discreet, typical of owners who enjoyed a good position but had no right, or inclination, to parade their wealth. Someone like a rich merchant or a high official who, while not privileged nobility, held a powerful post at court.

  As for me, I was interested only in the contents, not the container. In that still-childlike hand, white as rice paper, that was just visible, resting discreetly on the frame of the small window. In that golden gleam of long, blond curls. And in those eyes. Despite the years that have passed since I First saw those eyes, and the many adventures and troubles those blue irises would bring to my life in the years that followed, still today I am incapable of expressing in writing the effect of that bright, pure gaze ... so deceptively limpid, and of a color identical to the Madrid skies that Don Diego Velazquez, later the favorite painter of our lord and king, learned to paint like no other.

  At the time of my story, Angelica de Alquezar must have been around eleven or twelve years old, and she was already a promise of the splendid beauty she would become, beauty of which Velazquez himself would give a good account in the famous portrait she posed for sometime around 1635. But more than a decade earlier, on those March mornings just before the adventure of the Englishmen, I did not know who the youthful, almost childish girl was who every two or three days rode in her carriage up Calle Toledo toward the Plaza Mayor and the Alcazar Real, where—I later learned—she attended the queen and young princesses as a menina, a lady-in-waiting. That privilege was due largely to the position of her uncle from Aragon, Luis de Alquezar, at the time one of the king's most influential secretaries. To me, the young blonde girl in the carriage was simply a celestial, wondrous vision; she was as far removed from my poor mortal condition as the sun or the most beautiful star is from this corner on Calle Toledo, where the wheels of her carriage and the hooves of the mules arrogantly spattered anyone in their path.

  That morning, however, something altered the routine. Instead of passing the tavern and continuing up the street, allowing me the usual fleeting vision of its blonde passenger, the carriage stopped just before it reached me, some twenty steps from the Tavern of the Turk. The mud had pasted a large sliver from a barrel stave onto one of the spokes, and it had worked its way into the axle, jamming the wheel. The coachman had no choice but to stop the mules and slip down to the ground, or mud, to be exact, to free the wheel. It happened that the group of boys who were always hanging about on that corner gathered closer to jeer at the coachman, and he, annoyed, took up his whip to run them off. He never accomplished it. The street urchins of Madrid then were as pesky and persistent as a swarm of bot flies—In any quarrel, the one born in Madrid wins the laurel, goes an old saying—and besides, it was not every day that they were offered a diversion like a carriage on which to practice their aim. And so, armed with clumps of mud, they began to exhibit a skill with their projectiles that the most experienced harque-busier would have envied.

  I jumped up, alarmed. The fate of the coachman was of no consequence to me, but the carriage was transporting something that at that stage in my young life was the most precious cargo imaginable. Besides, was I not the son of Lope Balboa, a man who died gloriously in the wars of our lord and king? So I had no choice. Resolved to do battle immediately for someone I considered my lady—always from afar and with the greatest respect—I charged the young hellions, and with two blows of my fists and four stout kicks sent the enemy forces flying, leaving me champion of the field.

  The direction of my attack—in line with my secret desire, it must be told—had brought me close to the carriage. The coachman was not a grateful type, so after giving me a surly look, he returned to his work. I was just about to leave, when those blue eyes appeared at the window. The vision froze me where I stood, and I felt blood rush to my face with the speed of a musket ball. The girl, the young lady, focused on me with an intensity that could have stopped the flow of water in the nearby fountain. Blonde. Pale. Painfully beautiful. Why I am telling you this? She did not even smile, she merely stared at me with curiosity. It was obvious that my gesture had not gone unnoticed. As for me, that look, that apparition, more than compensated for my trouble. I lifted my hand to an imaginary hat and bowed.

  "Inigo Balboa, at your s-service," I stammered, although managing to give my words a certain firmness I judged to be gallant. "Page in the service of Captain Don Diego Alatriste."

  The girl held my gaze, never changing expression. The coachman had climbed onto his mule and slapped the reins, and the carriage began to roll. I took one step back to avoid being spattered by the wheels, and at that instant she again placed a small, perfect, white-as-mother-of-pearl hand on the edge of the window frame, and I felt as if I had been given it to kiss. Then the corners of her mouth, perfectly sketched on pale lips, lifted slightly, nothing more than a flicker that could be interpreted as a distant, enigmatic, and mysterious smile. I heard the coachman's whip crack, and the carriage jerked away, carrying with it that smile which I still today cannot swear was real or imagined. And I was left standing in the middle of the street, enslaved by love, watching that girl who to me was a blonde angel. Poor fool that I was, oblivious of the fact that I had just met my sweetest, most dangerous, and mortal enemy.

  IV. THE AMBUSH

  In March it grew dark early. There were streaks of light in the sky, but beneath the eaves of the roof tiles the streets were black as a wolf's mouth. Captain Alatriste and his companion had chosen a narrow, lonely lane that the two Englishmen would have to follow on the way to the House of Seven Chimneys. A messenger had advised them of the hour and the route. He had also brought the most recent description of their victims, to prevent error. Mister Thomas Smith, the blonder and older of the two, was riding a dapple-gray horse and wearing a gray travel suit with discreet silver adornments, high boots also dyed gray, and a hat with a band of the same color. As for Mister John Smith, the younger man, he was riding a bay. His suit was chestnut brown, his boots saddle-colored, and his hat sported three small white plumes. After several days of riding, both were looking dusty and fatigued. They had little luggage: two portmanteaus strapped onto the croups of their mounts.

  Hidden in the shadow of an arched entry, Diego Alatriste looked toward the lantern that he and his companion had placed at a bend in the street so that it would throw light on the travelers before they could see their attackers. The lane, which turned at a sharp right angle, began at Calle Barquillo, near the palace of the Conde de Guadalmedina and, after skimming the or
chard wall of the Discalced Carmelite convent, ended at the House of Seven Chimneys, near the crossing of Calle Torres and Las Infantas. The place chosen for the ambush was in the first section, which had the darkest and tightest turn, where two horsemen taken by surprise could easily be overcome.

  It grew a little cooler, and the captain wrapped himself more tightly in his new cape, bought with the advance, in gold, from the masked men. As he moved, the clink of metal was audible: the vizcaina ticked the hilt of the sword and the grip of the loaded and well-oiled pistol thrust in the back of his belt. It might be necessary, in the worst case, to resort to such a noisy and definitive expedient, something expressly forbidden for pragmatic reasons but in difficult situations an opportune solution. That night, Alatriste had rounded out his attire with a buffalo-hide jerkin that would protect his body from an antagonist's knife, and his own slaughterer's blade hidden in the leg of one of his old boots, the ones with comfortable and well-worn soles that would give him good footing once the dance began.