The Samurai's Daughter Page 9

  He took her hand and kissed it.

  Their engagement was announced the following week. Doña Inmaculada was pleased. Don Rodrigo was suspicious, and sought his son out to have it out with him. Carlos told her what was said. It took place at Don Rodrigo and Doña Inmaculada’s palace in Sevilla.

  “Your mother insists I congratulate you and so I shall,” Don Rodrigo had said. “But you should be aware that this most unexpected announcement will not change the intention of my will in any way. Since you seem to have the blessing of Soledad Medina, I leave it to her to bestow any additional riches upon you.”

  “No one is more aware of your iron will than I, sire,” Carlos replied. “Once a course is chosen by you, God himself could not bend it.”

  “Do not blaspheme, boy.”

  “The blasphemy was yours, Father, in sending me to the seminary—a blasphemy that brought about my sister’s marriage to a selfish brute you shared your mistress with, that led to her violation, and to her subsequent relations with the samurai, that led directly to her death. You are a fine one to accuse me of blasphemy.”

  Carlos was too strong and grown to receive a father’s blow. Rodrigo simply turned and left the room. He did not attend the wedding, and made a point of never setting eyes on his son again. Inmaculada gave Carlos the estate in Carmona. Doña Soledad gave them a townhouse in Sevilla next to the Casa de Pilatos, thirty rooms and twelve servants, and an account set up for its permanent upkeep. Caitríona promised to remain as Soledad’s companion, and did so.

  Some months after the wedding, when Caitríona was alone with Doña Soledad at La Moratalla, my great-aunt engaged her in conversation as they sat outside by the main fountain, near a grove of pomegranate trees. Carlos had left them after a weeklong visit.

  “Might I ask you a most personal question, Caitríona?” said my great-aunt.

  “You certainly may,” she replied.

  “I, and a wide swath of Sevilla society, have long been privy to the particulars of Carlos’—inclinations—and I am wondering if he possessed sufficient backbone to share them with you before the wedding.”

  “He did, my lady.”

  “I see.”

  “Though I am still young,” Caitríona said, “I have seen enough of the world to learn how to distinguish between men who prefer ladies and those who prefer the company of other men.”

  “Quite,” Doña Soledad said before taking a sip of her favorite sherry. “In my day,” she went on, “with rare and colorful exceptions, it was not so easy to make those kinds of distinctions. People one would have sworn were conventional were well skilled at procuring the sorts of companions they truly preferred. I’ve known many men, and women, from the most respected families, including my own, who had numerous children, but who in fact coveted most ardently members of their own sex.”

  “I suppose,” Caitríona said, “it is possible as well to maintain an interest in both sexes. In any event, we had a very frank discussion before announcing our betrothal. I am not in love with him, nor is he with me. But we understand each other, and we have come to like each other, and we agree that the marriage is to our mutual benefit. It provides him with respectability, and it guarantees my son a certain security.”

  “Carlos has just been here for a week,” said my great-aunt, taking another sip of her wine. “What goes on with you two at night?”

  Caitríona laughed at the dowager’s boldness.

  “We read to each other, and talk about our lives, like good friends.”

  “You know,” said Doña Soledad with a grin, “I can’t recall the last time I had this kind of discussion, if at all. And yet it is a topic that people devote much thought to, throughout their lives.”

  “I have never spoken of it with anyone either,” Caitríona replied. “My own mother was unapproachable with respect to these sorts of questions. The closest I ever came were a few brief discussions with the woman in Venice that Soledad María was given to, who was not a bad woman at all, but a wise and even generous lady, who had done the best she could under terrible conditions.”

  Doña Soledad had no desire to hear any more about the woman from Venice.

  “Getting back to you, dear,” she said. “I feel I must raise two issues. First—and I regret not having had this conversation before your wedding—you did not have to marry my nephew in order to secure a future for your son. You have me for that. I know I shall not be about for much longer, but I assure you I have already broached the topic of his and your welfare with my Fugger bankers.”

  “I am so very grateful, my lady. After all you have done for me, I simply could not find it within myself to bring such a thing up.”

  My great-aunt made her customary gesture, waving Caitríona’s comment away.

  “The second issue,” she said, “is more thorny. I haven’t brought it up before because of the vast amount of pain surrounding it, but as an old woman with little faith, in anything really, I have nevertheless permitted myself to consider one small detail with which I’ve managed to sustain my life thus far. Unless you and Signor Sarpi hid some observation even more chilling than the ones I insisted upon hearing, I’ve clung to what I hope is the fact that neither he nor you actually saw the deaths of the samurai and the child. Is that so?”

  All the merriment within Caitríona’s heart vanished as she listened to these words, and by the end she found herself weeping.

  “Yes. That is true. But—”

  “And I also recall,” Doña Soledad continued, interrupting her, “that Signor Sarpi mentioned there were no muskets involved.”

  “That is true as well.”

  “You see what I am getting at.”

  “I cannot speak for you, madam,” Caitríona said. “But had you been there, and seen what I was forced to see, I most seriously doubt you could harbor such a hope.”

  “Nevertheless, you did not see them killed,” Doña Soledad said, her voice shaking.

  “No, my lady.”

  “And so they might still return.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “And what would happen if they did, now that you have married Guada’s brother?”

  “I would curse myself, and die from happiness.”

  Doña Soledad took Caitríona’s hand with both of hers and forcefully kissed it.

  – XXI –

  Then a terrible thing happened that, in many ways, should have liberated my uncle Carlos. Instead, it poisoned his soul. While Carlos was entertaining his mother at the estate in Carmona, and while Caitríona was with Doña Soledad in Sevilla, Don Rodrigo took my mother’s little boy, Rodriguito, on a hunting trip. The boy was mauled by a boar, and died hours afterward, and late that same evening, insane with grief, guilt, and alcohol, my grandfather, Don Rodrigo Fernández de Córdoba, shot himself in the head. By the time Doña Inmaculada returned from Carmona, her husband and grandchild were already buried. Owing to the sinful manner of his death, it required a large donation by Doña Soledad to assure that Don Rodrigo was buried in holy ground.

  The death of his father and nephew affected Carlos badly. The inheritance that had been taken from him, now restored, was not experienced as a victory. Rather than celebrate, if only inwardly, and enjoy the tragic but fortuitous twist of fate that gave him what he had always believed to be his, it increased his greed and insecurity. He began to spend more and more time in his parents’ palatial house that he would now inherit along with everything else. It was only for appearance’s sake that he continued to spend a few nights a week with Caitríona in the home given to them by Soledad Medina. Upon inheriting his father’s position as a grandee of Spain, he was called to Madrid for an audience with the young king, Philip the Fourth. During his absence, Caitríona returned once again to the Casa de Pilatos.

  Rosario Sánchez de Úbeda and her son Francisco were in Sevilla when the memorial service for Don Rodrigo and the little boy was held at the cathedral. As a young woman, Rosario had married the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, then a man forty
years older than she. By the time their son Francisco was born, the duke was dead. Many women in Sevilla looked down on her—out of envy for her youth and beauty, because she was a commoner from a small village, and because she had no title. To the annoyance of Doña Inmaculada, Rosario was invited to Soledad Medina’s house after the service, and it was there she met Caitríona. Though four years older than Caitríona, Rosario got on well with her. She was distraught to learn what had happened to Father and me, and even though Caitríona suspected that Rosario’s grief implied an unspoken degree of intimacy with Father, she comforted her.

  It was a difficult time for my grandmother. Doña Inmaculada was alone in a home she no longer owned. For the first time in her life, religion failed her. She had relied upon it in her youth, when she first realized her husband was unfaithful to her. She had relied upon it when her parents died, and when her only son entered a seminary, uninterested in conventional relations. She clung to it when my mother was raped by her own husband, and clung to it more ferociously still when my mother ran off with Father and then died a year later. The Archbishop of Sevilla, numerous priests, and convents had profited financially from her sorrows. But with the death of the little boy and the suicide of Rodrigo, coupled with the reemergence of her angry firstborn, who was triumphantly taking over her properties, she felt old and abandoned by God. She had been raised in great luxury to marry a grandee of Spain, to lead a life of elegant piety above the common folk. But where had it gotten her, she had asked me once. During this period of her life, when she should have been at her most comfortable and serene, she felt singled out as the object of some cruel celestial joke.

  With Carlos often at court in Madrid, she wandered about her palatial home feeling like a stranger. When she did manage to pray, it was for an early death. At a particularly low point, she sought reconciliation with Doña Soledad, and received it. When my great-aunt saw the state Inmaculada had fallen into, she opened her arms and held her close until both were reduced to tears.

  “What is to become of me?” my grandmother asked.

  Despite Inmaculada’s initial coldness toward them, Caitríona and Rosario were kind to her. They made a point of deferring to her, and she was humbled by it. Her spirits gradually improved. The relief she felt being back in Doña Soledad’s good graces and the attention paid to her by the younger women were a balm. Her bitterness abated. Her once exacting standards eased.

  With the arrival of spring, and with Carlos still in Madrid, Caitríona invited Inmaculada to Carmona, where she encouraged her mother-in-law to put the house back as she remembered it.

  “But the estate is no longer mine,” she said.

  “I think it should be yours again,” Caitríona replied. “And I will say as much to Carlos. We have too many houses as it is. I’m sure I can bring him around to it.”

  In mid-April Inmaculada received a letter from Carlos returning the property to her. In truth he had never been happy there. In his mind, the estate was a punishment meted out by his father.

  One afternoon there, at the end of the month, shortly before returning to Sevilla, Caitríona and my grandmother sat in a room with a commanding view of the green fields that rippled from Carmona toward Marchena.

  “Carlos has told me that you tend my daughter’s grave,” Inmaculada said.

  “I do so whenever I can, madam,” Caitríona replied, “at the behest of Doña Soledad.”

  “I was not a good mother to her,” Inmaculada said. “As she got older, she resembled her father more in character than I, and he adored her. I tried as best I could. But it wasn’t sufficient. It is another sin I try to atone for.”

  “Mothers and daughters,” Caitríona said softly. “From what I have seen, it is rarely easy. Like fathers with sons.”

  “Did you get on with your mother?” Inmaculada asked.

  “I did, by and large,” Caitríona replied, “if only because her sons were so hateful to everyone. In comparison, I was a relief to her.”

  Caitríona told me that at this point, Inmaculada probably realized that it had been a mistake to bring up the topic of her mother. Soledad Medina had related the tale to Inmaculada concerning the terrible story of the woman’s enslavement, and she saw the effect it had on Caitríona’s countenance.

  “I’m sure she would have loved you anyway,” my grandmother said. “I only bring it up because you are close to the age Guada would have been, and you both loved the same man, and had a child with him, and now you are my daughter-in-law.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “I feel closer to you than I did to her. That is the truth. I am ashamed to speak it.”

  Caitríona said that Inmaculada, still beautiful despite her wrinkles and graying hair, stared out at the fields more intensely then, filling the silence between them with tears. Caitríona put her own sad memories aside and reached out to her. Inmaculada took her hand and squeezed it without averting her eyes from the view. “Forgive me, child,” she said. “Forgive me.”

  – XXII –

  While Caitríona and Inmaculada were in Carmona, Rosario visited Doña Soledad to keep her company at the Casa de Pilatos in Sevilla. One day they sat in the shade, in the large rear garden, by a row of freshly trimmed boxwoods. Rosario’s young son, Francisco, had fallen asleep on a large cushion beneath the branches of a lemon tree. The two women reminisced about the late Duke of Medina-Sidonia.

  “I wanted to have a child by him,” Doña Soledad said, studying the liver spots on her hands.

  “I had no expectations,” Rosario replied. “My first husband did all he could to get me pregnant, but nothing ever came of it. I assumed the fault was mine. And then when it happened with the duke, I worried because of his age, I worried that something might turn out wrong with the boy.”

  “Bah,” Soledad said. “Men are like lions, lying around and rutting into old age if they can, while women perform all the dreary tasks. Even I, who had various households filled with servants, did infinitely more work than my husband, whose singular interest was whoring.”

  This made the both of them laugh.

  Soledad Medina had been fair in her youth. She admired Rosario’s dark beauty. She saw what the duke had been taken by and desired: the young woman’s silken olive skin, the lustrous, long, coal-black hair, the white teeth and bright eyes, the smoothness and freshness of her.

  “You mustn’t be done with men so soon,” the older woman said. “It would be a crime for beauty like yours to be wasted in a town as dull as Sanlúcar. You must stay here longer, and we can organize a ball with Caitríona and Inmaculada.”

  Years later, when we had grown close to each other, Rosario told me that as she entertained Doña Soledad’s proposal that day, planning for a ball she very much doubted would ever take place, she considered the fact that this unexpected friendship with such an eminent woman, and the friendship that had blossomed between her and Caitríona, had come about as a direct result of Don Rodrigo’s and the little boy’s deaths. She looked at Doña Soledad and wondered how long she might live. She looked at her sleeping son, so young and beautiful. She said that life suddenly overwhelmed her at that moment. She pictured her bedchamber in Sanlúcar, sixty kilometers to the south of her, quiet and empty, the wide bed where her son was made, where the duke had died, where Doña Soledad had made love with the duke before Rosario was born, the Alpujarran rug on the floor beside it, the balcony overlooking the dunes.

  The duke was buried in his grave. All that had been his life was over. My father too was gone, and my mother, in whose service Rosario had once worked. She looked once more at the old noblewoman, and then at her sleeping boy, and for some reason she recalled the horrific story the duke always repeated when he had too much to drink. How, to lighten the ships of his floundering invincible armada, the men were forced to drive the cavalry horses overboard into the sea off the coast of Ireland, horses that had once been foals in Spain, born from Arabian mares, just like she’d been born out of her mother. Rosario looked d
own at herself in that moment and wondered what would become of the dress she was wearing after she died. What would become of Francisco when he grew up, and how would he remember her?

  She told me that after a short while Doña Soledad fell asleep in her chair. Her head was tilted to the side. A thin rivulet of spittle trailed down the noblewoman’s soft, powdered chin. Rosario imagined the horses unable to reach the shore, submerged under the dark murky ocean, eyes wide with fright, their elegant legs still in motion.

  – XXIII –

  Though the relationship with my Uncle Carlos would begin badly, it improved over the years. By the time the tales I am chronicling here drew to a close, he moved to Italy. We try to see each other at least once a year. On one of those occasions, at his residence in Rome, he described his first audience at court in Madrid with King Philip IV.

  He had not been to the capital since his early teens, since the dismal occasion when his father brought him to a brothel there. Don Rodrigo’s foolish idea had been to try to make a man of his effeminate heir. Returning on his own almost twenty years later as an adult in all his finery, his inheritance secured, a married man of substance, he did his best to hide any evidence of provincialism. He allowed himself to be seduced by Madrid’s pomp and circumstance, its elevated opinions of itself. He began to understand why his father had spent so much time there, a city where a man of his status had the world at his feet.

  The king’s closest advisor, the powerful Count-Duke of Olivares, received Carlos in an upper tower of the Alcázar Palace. The room was stark with a high ceiling. Spring light streamed in through tall windows. Olivares was posing for a portrait, standing as still as he could by a table covered with a thick red velvet cloth. The portraitist, handsome and smaller in stature, was working at a massive easel. The artist and his subject were friends, and were engaged in leisurely conversation when Carlos was announced. Olivares was a large, corpulent man with a small head who kept his hair short and mustache long. He was dressed in black for the occasion, mirroring the practice of Spanish royalty that embraced austerity and eschewed ostentation. But, unable perhaps to repress a vein of vanity, the count-duke’s black tunic displayed a large red cross that identified him as a Knight of the Order of Santiago. Stuck into a leather belt and plainly visible as well was a large key identifying him as the king’s Sumiller de Corps.