The picture that Diego had in mind of the celebrated maestro did not coincide in any way with reality. After having studied Escalante’s manual down to the last comma, he imagined him to be an Apollo, a compendium of virtues and manly beauty. He turned out to be a disagreeable, meticulous, spruce little man with the face of an ascetic, disdainful lips, and pomaded mustache, a man to whom fencing seemed to be the one true religion. His students were of the finest lineage all except Diego de la Vega, whom Escalante accepted less on Tomas de Romeu’s recommendation than because Diego passed the admission examination with honors.
The maestro handed Diego a foil. “En garde, monsieur!” Diego adopted the preparatory position: right foot forward, the left at a right angle to the body, knees slightly bent, torso half turned, face forward, right arm extended over the right foot, the left held behind the body at approximately the same angle as the foil arm.
“Lunge! Recovery! Thrust! Engage! Coupe! Press! Bind!” Soon the maestro stopped issuing instructions. From feints they passed quickly through the entire array of attacks and parries in a violent and macabre dance. Diego warmed to the test and began to fight as if his life were at stake, with a fervor near anger. For the first time in many years Escalante felt sweat running down his face and soaking his shirt. He was pleased, and the trace of a smile began to lift the corners of his thin lips. He never praised anyone easily, but he was impressed with the speed, precision, and strength of this young man.
“Where did you say you had learned to fence, caballero?” he asked after crossing foils with him for a few minutes.
“With my father, in California, maestro.”
“California?”
“To the north of Mexico ”
“You need not explain, I have seen a map,” Manuel Escalante interrupted curtly.
“B-beg pardon, maestro,” Diego stammered. “I have studied your book and practiced for years ”
“I see that. You are a diligent student, it seems. But you must curb your impatience and acquire elegance. You have the style of a pirate, but that can be remedied. First lesson: calm. You must never fight in anger. The firmness and stability of the blade depend on equanimity of mind. Do not forget that. I shall receive you Monday through Saturday mornings on the stroke of eight. If you miss even one time, you need not return. Good afternoon, sir.”
With that, he dismissed him. Diego had to struggle not to whoop with joy, but once outside he jumped up and down around Bernardo, who was waiting at the door with the horses.
“We will become the best swordsmen in the world, Bernardo. Yes, my brother, you heard me right, you will learn what I learn. Oh, you are right, the maestro will not accept you as a student, he is very particular. If he knew that I have one-fourth Indian blood, he would kick me out of his academy. But don’t worry, I intend to teach you everything I learn. The maestro says I lack style. What is that?”
Manuel Escalante fulfilled his promise to polish Diego’s art, and Diego kept his to pass on those skills to Bernardo. They practiced fencing every day in one of the large, empty salons in the home of Tomas de Romeu, almost always with Isabel present. According to Nuria, that girl had a devilish curiosity about men’s ways, but she covered up Isabel’s antics because she had taken care of her ever since her mother had died at her birth. The brash girl talked Diego and Bernardo into teaching her to handle a fencing epee and to ride astride, as women did in California. With Maestro Escalante’s manual, she spent hours practicing alone before a mirror, under the patient gaze of her sister and Nuria, who were working their cross-stitch embroidery. Diego had a selfish reason for resigning himself to the younger girl’s company: she had convinced him that she could intercede on his behalf with Juliana something she never did do. Bernardo, on the other hand, seemed always pleased to have her around.
Diego’s milk brother had an equivocal position in the hierarchy of the house, where about eighty people lived, counting servants, employees, secretaries, and “distant cousins,” as the poor relatives that Tomas de Romeu housed under his roof were called. He slept in one of the three rooms placed at Diego’s disposal but did not go into the family salons unless summoned, and he ate in the kitchen. He had no particular responsibilities, and had time left over to wander around the city. He came to know the different faces of boisterous Barcelona, from the castles and mansions of Catalan nobles to the crowded rat-and lice-infested rooms of the lower classes, a hotbed of fights and epidemics; he roamed the ancient section constructed upon Roman ruins, a labyrinth of twisting alleyways scarcely wide enough for a burro to pass through, the popular markets, artisans’ shops, the stalls where Turkish merchants sold baubles and bibelots, and the always bustling docks. Sundays after mass, he lingered to admire the groups dancing delicate sardanas, which to him seemed a perfect reflection of the solidarity, order, and lack of ostentation of the people of Barcelona.
Like Diego, he learned Catalan; otherwise he could not have understood what was happening around him. Spanish and French were the languages of high society and the government; Latin was used for academic and religious matters, and Catalan for everything else. Bernardo’s silence, and the dignity he conveyed, won the respect of everyone in the de Romeu mansion. The servants, who affectionately called him el Indiano, were not sure whether he was deaf, but they assumed he was, and so spoke freely in front of him, which allowed him to learn many things. Tomas de Romeu was entirely unaware of his existence; for him servants were invisible. Nuria was intrigued by the fact that he was an Indian, the first she had met face to face. Thinking he would not understand her, for the first few days she made monkey faces and gestured theatrically, but when she learned that he wasn’t deaf, she began speaking normally to him. And as soon as she was told that he had been baptized, she began to like him. She had never had a more attentive listener. Convinced that Bernardo could not betray her confidence, she fell into the habit of telling him her dreams, true epic fantasies, and of inviting him to listen to Juliana read aloud at the hour for chocolate. As for Juliana, she addressed him with the same gentleness she exhibited with everyone. She understood that he was not Diego’s servant but his brother, having shared Bernardo’s mother’s milk, but she made no effort to communicate with him because she supposed that they had little to say to one another. Not so with Isabel; Bernardo became her best friend and ally. She learned the Indians’ sign language and how to interpret the inflexions of his flute, though she was never able to participate in the telepathic dialogues Bernardo shared with Diego. It didn’t matter anyway. They didn’t need words; they understood each other perfectly. They came to love each other so much that over the years Isabel became Diego’s rival for second place in Bernardo’s heart. Light-in-the-Night always came first.
In the spring, when the air in the city smelled of ocean and flowers, strolling groups of students came out to fill the night with music; be smitten suitors offered their serenades, watched from a distance by French soldiers, because even that innocent diversion might mask sinister designs on the part of the guerrillas. Diego practiced songs on his mandolin, but it would have been ridiculous to plant himself beneath Juliana’s window and serenade her when he lived in the same house. He tried to accompany her after-dinner harp concerts, but she was a true virtuoso, and he was so clumsy on his instrument like Isabel on the harpsichord that they left their audience with migraines. The best he could do was entertain Juliana with the magic tricks he’d learned from Galileo Tempesta, added to and perfected during months of practice. The day he stood before her prepared to swallow Tempesta’s Moroccan dagger, Juliana felt faint and nearly fell, while Isabel examined the weapon, looking for the spring that hid the blade in the haft. Nuria, outraged, warned Diego that if he tried a cheap sorcerer’s trick like that again in the presence of her girls, she herself would stick that Turk’s knife down his gullet. In the first weeks Diego was in the house, the woman had declared an unvoiced war of nerves with him; somehow she had found out that he was a mestizo. It seemed the last straw that her master would take a youth into the bosom of the family who did not have pure Spanish blood, and as if that weren’t enough, one who had the brass to fall in love with Juliana.
However, as soon as Diego set his mind to it, he won the chaperone’s dried-up heart with little attentions: flowers, marzipan, a print of some saint. Although she continued to answer him with grumbles and sarcasm, she could not help but laugh trying to hide it when he did something clownish like climb up on the roof and threaten to jump headfirst if she didn’t make him some pastries.
One night Diego had to suffer through a serenade Rafael Moncada, accompanied by several musicians, gave beneath Juliana’s window. To his chagrin, Diego learned that not only did his rival have a seductive tenor voice, but more impressive yet, he sang in Italian. He tried to make Moncada look ridiculous to Juliana, but his strategy failed; for the first time she seemed charmed by Moncada’s attention. She felt conflicting emotions when she was around her suitor, a mixture of instinctive distrust and cautious curiosity. When he was present, she felt bothered and naked, but she was also attracted by the self-confidence he exuded. She did not like the scornful and cruel expressions she sometimes glimpsed on his face, a look that did not correspond with how generous he was when he distributed coins among the beggars after mass. Whatever her feelings, her admirer was twenty-three years old and had been courting her for some months; soon she would have to give him an answer. Moncada was wealthy, he came from an impeccable family, and he made a good impression on everyone except her sister Isabel, who detested him without hiding or explaining it. There were solid arguments in favor of his suit; Juliana held back only because of an inexplicable presentiment of disaster. In the meantime, Moncada continued his siege with delicacy, fearful that the least pressure would frighten her. They saw one another at church, at concerts and plays, during the paseos in the parks and streets. He often sent her gifts and tender notes, but nothing compromising. He had not succeeded in being invited to Tomas de Romeu’s home or in getting his aunt Eulalia de Callis to include the de Romeus among her guests. His aunt had stated with her habitual firmness that Juliana was a very bad choice: “Her father is a traitor, a lover of the French and all their ways, and that family has no rank, no fortune nothing to offer,” was her jewel-hard judgment. But Moncada had had his eye on Juliana for a long time; he had watched her blossom and had determined that she was the only woman worthy of him. He thought that with time Eulalia would yield before Juliana’s undeniable virtues; it was all a question of manipulating the matter diplomatically. He was not disposed to give Juliana up, and certainly not his inheritance, but he never doubted he could have both.
Rafael Moncada was too old to be serenading and too proud for that kind of exhibitionism, but he found a way to do it with humor. When Juliana came out on her balcony that night, she saw him costumed as a Florentine prince with a lute in his hands, all brocade and silk from head to toe, his doublet trimmed with otter and his hat with ostrich plumes. Several servants were holding elegant crystal lanterns to illuminate him, and at his side the musicians, attired as operetta pages, strummed melodic chords on their instruments. The crowning effect, however, was undoubtedly Moncada’s extraordinary voice. Hidden behind a curtain, Diego burned with humiliation, knowing that Juliana was on her balcony comparing Moncada’s magnificent warbling with the hesitant mandolin he had tried to impress her with. He was muttering curses when Bernardo came and signaled him to follow and bring his sword. His brother led him to the servants’ floor where Diego had never been, even though he had lived in that house nearly a year and from there through a service gate to the street. Hugging the wall, they arrived unseen at the place where his rival had stationed himself to thrill Juliana with his ballads in Italian. Bernardo pointed to a portal behind Moncada, and Diego’s fury melted into diabolic glee: it was not Moncada singing, but another man hidden in the shadows.
Diego and Bernardo waited to the end of the serenade. The group broke up and drove off in a pair of coaches as the last servant handed some coins to the real tenor. After making sure that the singer was alone, the youths took him by surprise. He hissed like a serpent and put his hand to the curved knife waiting in his sash, but Diego was faster, and touched the tip of his sword to the substitute’s neck. The man retreated with awesome agility, but Bernardo tripped him and threw him to the ground. He cursed when again he felt the tip of Diego’s rapier pricking his throat. At that hour the only light in the street came from a timid moon and the lamps of the house enough to see that the man was a strong, dark-skinned Gypsy, nothing but pure muscle, sinew, and bone.
“What the devil do you want of me?” he spit out insolently.
“Nothing but your name. You may keep that dishonestly earned money.”
Diego replied.
“Why do you want my name?”
“Your name, I say!” Diego demanded, increasing the pressure of the sword tip enough to draw a few drops of blood.
“Pelayo,” the Gypsy replied.
Diego dropped his weapon, and the man stepped back and disappeared into the shadows of the street with the stealth and speed of a cat.
“Let us remember that name, Bernardo. I think that we will run into that ruffian again. I can say nothing of this to Juliana she will think I am acting out of pettiness or jealousy. I must find another way to let her know that the voice is not Moncada’s. Can you think how? Well, when something occurs to you, let me know,” Diego concluded.
One of the most faithful visitors to the home of Tomas de Romeu was Napoleon’s charge d’affaires in Barcelona, Monsieur Roland Duchamp, known as Le Chevalier. He was the eminence grise behind the visible officialdom, with more influence, it was said, than King Joseph I himself. Since he no longer needed his brother to perpetuate the Bonaparte dynasty, Napoleon had begun withdrawing power from him. Now he had a son, a frail child nicknamed “The Eaglet” and crushed since infancy beneath the title King of Rome. Le Chevalier directed a vast network of spies, who kept him informed about the plans of his enemies even before they had formulated them. He held the rank of ambassador, but in truth everyone up to the highest army officers reported to him.