The Scroll of Seduction (5 page)

I
n the Madrid early afternoon, with the mezzanine windows half-opened to a partly cloudy day, dressed like a princess, I sit on the sofa that Manuel places in the middle of the room. He sits behind me. And tells me to close my eyes. He speaks in a low voice, slowly, deliberately. He susurrates. I let the voice take me with it. I sink into it and emerge someplace else. I am Juana.

 

AND IT IS TOLEDO. NOVEMBER
6, 1479,
THE DAY OF MY BIRTH.
Beatriz Galindo, an olive-skinned woman with Castilian features, black hair pulled back into a low bun, and small, sparkly eyes, is there when her friend, Queen Isabella, my mother, delivers me. Finally, my head pokes out, and amid relieved cries and a solemn silence, the midwives wrench me from my original vortex and present me to the uncertain world I am about to join. I can feel slender hands, calluses on palms. No longer protected, enshrouded, my exposed skin registers the weave of the fabric swaddling me. I feel myself transported, from precipice to precipice, from one set of arms to another. The world is deafening and the brightness unforgiving. I want to go back to the warm, wet depths of the womb. I am hungry and distressed and I want to cry. A breast appears before me. Soon I will recognize it as belonging to my nurse, María de Santiesteban. My mother will not feed me; she has to feed the kingdom, and I am but her third child.

“I want my daughter to learn Latin, Beatriz,” I hear my mother say. “I want her to enjoy the pleasures of the intellect. Given that she will never be queen, she ought to be a princess with a brain.”

“Yes, Isabel. Now you rest. She'll be beautiful,” says Beatriz. “Look how delicate her features are. She's a Trastámara.”

“I shall call her Juana. Juan was named after John the Baptist. She will be commended to John the Evangelist.”

In a little while, Ferdinand, my father, will come in to greet my mother and to meet me. He'll glance at me indifferently. I am not the son he had hoped for, and he casts his cold eyes over my tiny body, swathed in wool, startling me from my sleep and making me wail and holler. My mother comforts me. She rocks me for the first time, in front of my father. I recognize her warmth and her heartbeat; I recognize the body I used to inhabit, the castle where I was once my own cloistered room. Her proximity makes me feel whole again, makes me feel intact. My nose nestles her breast, searching for that familiar scent, that part of me that has been taken away. Lying in her arms, I no longer feel my father glower or notice the cold.

Manuel's voice, so close to my ear, whisks me through time, and my first few years blur into a series of shadowy images.

 

WE'RE A FAMILY OF NOMADS. MY ROYAL PARENTS ARE WAGING A WAR,
and their itinerant court moves from castle to castle. First they battled the supporters of Juana
la Beltraneja
in the War of Succession. After their victory in 1485 they continued to consolidate their power and moved to end the domination of the Moors by conquering their last stronghold: Granada. They set up court wherever it is militarily convenient. My sister, María, was born, and now my wet nurse breast-feeds her, and a woman named Teresa de Manrique becomes my governess. I have hardly any time to play, because my mother has demanded that her children be raised as worthy princes and princesses of Castile and Aragon, which implies a number of duties. I learn to play the clavichord, to dance, to knit. If I behave well, Teresa takes me to the kitchen and prepares rose sugar sweets for me. If I am rowdy or laugh too loud, I get a smack because experience shows that physical punishment cures reck
lesness in girls and that pain is a healthy way of disciplining our bodies. I have started classes with my tutor, the Dominican Andrés de la Miranda. He left his monastery in Burgos in order to become our private instructor. In Latin class, my younger sister María puts her head down on the table and sleeps. I can't sleep because Father Andrés is very strict and admonishes me, describing the torments of hell. He burned the tip of my ring finger with a charred stick to help my imagination visualize the sensation of the burning flames that will consume me if I don't learn to be a good Christian. I kicked and screamed, but my mother, who came when she heard me calling to her, smiled at the monk and approved of his barbaric methods. Don Andrés talks about the large numbers of infidels who roam free in our kingdom and worship other gods. Beatriz Galindo contradicts him and extols the benefits of living alongside Jews and Moors. Secretly, she shares poems and stories of courtly love with me. I devour them on the nights my parents are busy with court festivities. I dream of becoming an adult and no longer having to live through wars, persecutions, and fear.

I, Lucía, remember the nun at the Catholic school in my country who, when I was a small child, also invited me to hold my finger over a lit match, to demonstrate the torments of hell. And then there is Mother Aurora, a fair-skinned nun with a glass eye, who often supervises us in the dormitory, and who told me that taking a shower for more than half an hour is tempting the devil.

Those are vestiges of the mentality that led to the Inquisition, Manuel says. Your parents were the ones who chose Torquemada as the Great Inquisitor, he adds. In securing an austere and intolerant court they seeked to debilitate the alliance between the traditional nobility and the corrupt, licentious priests, as well as raise their own status in the eyes of Rome. Their strategy worked. Those were the years when they abolished the classic, white mourning attire, and substituted it for all-black apparel. They cultivated a severe, penitent mind-set, which suspected color, the pleasure of the eyes, or the the delights of food. They shaped the “Castilian” spirit and made Castilian Spanish–with its harsh, guttural, masculine sounds, which only Latin American Spanish has managed to soften–into the official language of the land.

Poor Juana, growing up surrounded by punctilious governesses averse to fun and affection. Poor Juana, having a tutor like Miranda, who got his kicks by making note of the different types of heresy, from the common to the exotic, in dossiers that he always carried with him and that she read behind his back.

 

I WOULD READ THE CONFESSIONS OF
CURANDERAS,
THE WOMEN FOLK
healers who read the future in the bowels of rabbits. That sinister world seemed no darker to me than the corridors of our palaces, traversed night and day by whispering clerics who stared at me, even as a child, with obsequious compassion and thinly veiled concupiscence. Few were the joys I found among the men entrusted with my education and care. Perhaps my father's rejection was contagious and the three princesses born after Juan reminded them of the vagaries of a womb that seemed only to give birth to one female after another. María, Catalina, and I would always be reminders to my father that his virility had produced only one male heir to the throne: our weak, scrawny brother Juan, who I surpassed both on horseback and in archery skills; I never shot an arrow from my crossbow that wouldn't hit its target. If what happened to me when we were crossing the Tajo on our way to Toledo–when my mule lost its footing and fell into the strong river current–had happened to Juan, there would be no more crown prince. But I didn't lose my composure, nor was I paralyzed by fear when the icy water cut my breath and soaked my velvet dress, making it heavy as armor. I grabbed the mule by the ears and tugged her out of the deep water. Then I clung to her and dug my heels into her side to make her swim to shore. Though I was trembling, I was calm and triumphant, especially when I saw the faces of all those ladies and gentlemen and all those servants, staring at me, pale and dumbfounded, incredulous, relieved and full of admiration at my bravery. I was only ten years old, but I was my mother's daughter. So often I had seen her from my bedroom window at dawn, leading the cavalry on her way to battle the enemy.

To reward my courage I was taken to see my parents as soon as we reached the palace. My father embraced me and tugged on my braid affectionately. I think it was then that I recognized the part of him that
lived in me, and he saw his own reflection in my eyes. He was proud of me. My mother held me tight. I didn't mind the rancid smell that clung to her, ever since she vowed not to bathe until Granada was taken back from the Moors.

Juan and Isabel were brought up to rule as king and queen. The same was not true for the rest of us. Only the two oldest accompanied my parents and saw them often. I applied myself to my studies of Latin and romance languages, and mastered the clavichord, in hopes that news of my progress would make my parents notice me, send for me to read aloud to them, or play for them one night. I was probably twelve when Beatriz Galindo, La Latina, gave me a book for my birthday that mesmerized me. It was called
Delectable Vision of Philosophy and Liberal Arts,
by Alfonso de la Torre. Until I read it, I had never thought about how extraordinary it was that our species had managed to deduce the existence of the soul, of internal and external realities, nor had I noticed the unrelenting insatiability of our thirst for knowledge. I had never wondered where the artistic impulse came from, never questioned the need for beauty, never considered that, as a woman, I could play a more active role in my household. Though I would never be queen, given the line of succession, I could propose to leave my mark, take more conscious control of my destiny, flatter my intellect over my vanity. Because I
was
vain. Why not admit it? Ever since my mother let me exchange my black dresses for crimson ones, even though the material cost twice as much, I had begun to take great delight in ordering new clothes. The mirror did not lie when it reflected my beauty as superior to that of my sisters. I was the spitting image of my Aragonese grandmother. The resemblance was so striking that my mother teased me, calling me “mother-in-law.” But people also said I looked like Isabel of Portugal, my mother's mother, who lived in Arévalo in a fortified castle on the Adaja River. I was flattered to hear that I had inherited her dark-skinned beauty, so different from my mother and older sister's fair complexions. Nevertheless I didn't like being compared to her, because I often heard the ladies at court whisper that she was mad. They said she had a guilty conscience because she had forced her husband Juan I to execute his faithful but malevolent servant Don Álvaro de Luna, and it had driven
her insane. Apparently, my grandfather never got over having obeyed her and died thirteen months later, in a deep state of depression, claiming that he hated being king and would have been happier as the son of a farmworker. They say that my poor grandmother, mortified, saw Don Álvaro's ghost everywhere, and insisted that the river that passed under her window whispered the dead man's name. My mother, however, had more lyrical memories of her childhood in Arévalo. Her eyes would water when she spoke of her childhood independence, the freedom she had to roam the Castilian countryside at will, until she felt that its tenderness had made its way into her very soul. When she was upset, she said, all she had to do was close her eyes and imagine the plains and the hills of Castile, the paths beside the rivers, to regain her inner peace. I think that from that experience my mother assumed that her own children would not miss her, not suffer when she was gone, and that we would learn to value ourselves and not be dependent on the family for affection. And though it might have worked well for her, I felt empty when she was gone, as if my heart had also left. As I grew, that longing for affection turned into physical pain. I would dream of affection and cuddling.

 

I OPENED MY EYES. I SUPPOSE THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE THE STATE
I was in while Manuel spoke is to call it an interlude. The outside world faded into another reality, projected from inside me onto my retina. I don't know if it was the dress, his soft, gentle voice calling me Juana, or my lively, adolescent imagination, but I was completely swept away by his narration. A voice within me spoke out, completing Manuel's story, making comments and observations; I felt seduced and captivated by the same sort of fascination that makes us follow the complicated thread of convoluted dreams. I felt like my mind, wide as the sea, had been storing those images for years, just waiting to let them emerge, ready to project them the moment they were summoned. I felt what it was like to be born (sort of like being naked in front of a man for the first time), and to have a life determined by decisions that others made on my behalf. (I think the weight of that dress contributed to the latter, confining me in a silken suit of armor.)

“Manuel, what time is it?”

“Four o'clock.”

“I have to go back to the convent in an hour.”

“You will, but for now, close your eyes again.”

 

IN ORDER TO COMPREHEND MY MOTHER'S COLDNESS, I NEEDED TO
understand what her succession to the throne had entailed. It hadn't been easy. People at court had been talking about it my whole life, but it wasn't until I reached adolescence that I managed to put two and two together and reconstruct the past that had turned my mother into the formidable woman whose presence I longed for, but who also inspired in me the silent devotion others felt in temples in the presence of God.

My mother had truly loved her half-brother Enrique, the son of her father King Juan from his first marriage. When King Juan died, the crown was passed to Enrique, and he became King Enrique IV. Six feet tall and blond, this was a brother who liked to laugh at courtly ceremonies and received nobility on cushions on the floor, dressed as a Moor. He convinced my grandmother that it would be better for my mother and her brother Alfonso to go and live at court in Valladolid, far from the isolation of Arévalo.

Grandmother didn't want them to go, but she couldn't refuse. It was after her children left that she went mad. My mother was ten and Alfonso was nine. They spoke more Portuguese than Spanish. That was about when Princess Juana, the daughter of Enrique and Juana of Portugal, was born. My mother and uncle were there for her baptism and heard the king proclaim her future heiress of Castile. How could my mother have guessed that one day her succession to the throne would lead her to be at war with that child? King Enrique's licentious lifestyle, his fondness for boys, his disastrous affairs with courtly ladies, all contributed to the rumors that led to his nickname “the Impotent.” Since impotent men cannot father children and since the handsome Beltrán de la Cueva was not only Enrique's favorite–the king had named him governor of his royal household and grandee of Castile–but was also on quite intimate terms with the queen, the noblemen began to insinuate that he had fathered the princess, calling her
“la Beltraneja.”
But de
spite all that, rather than do away with Don Beltrán, the king bestowed on him more and more titles. He named him Count of Ledesma, arranged for him to marry a niece of Cardinal Mendoza, and to top it all off, named him alderman of the Order of Santiago, the largest landholder in the whole kingdom of Castile, with the exception of the king himself. This favoritism was too much for the nobles, especially the archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso de Carrillo. Carrillo, who commanded a great army, had been protector and tutor to both my mother and her brother since their arrival at court. Enrique's excesses and the question of his daughter's legitimacy led Carrillo and other noblemen to advocate that the crown be passed to my uncle Alfonso.