Catalina Read online

  Catalina

  Markus Orths

  Prologue

  The town of San Sebastian, on the Bay of Biscay, produced a number of individuals who almost made it into the history books. One such was Manuel Pessoa, a whaler, who was actually the true discoverer of America. In 1397, after the whaling and cod-fishing grounds off the Basque coast had been exhausted by overfishing, he sailed his boat to Iceland and from Iceland a further 1700 nautical miles south-westwards. There he became the first European to set foot on the shore of Newfoundland, and thus, in effect, of North America. But this was of far less interest to him than the Basque whales that abounded in those coastal waters; unsuspicious, placid creatures just waiting to be slaughtered. The wily Pessoa breathed not a word of his discovery to his fellow-fishermen, for what, after all, was the dubious, unprofitable fame of an explorer, compared to the secret knowledge of untapped whaling grounds? And so, year after year, he shipped mountains of whale-meat to San Sebastian, boiled down tons of blubber into highly lucrative train-oil, and hacked heaps of bones and teeth off the whales’ skeletons, all of which brought him not fame but ever-increasing wealth. He was quite content to tell no one but his own children about his discovery of a land that had no business being where it was, since on all the charts available at the time that area was as white as the crests of the waves.

  Or as white as the steam rising from boiling water, which grew to be such an obsession with the Basque engineer Blasco de Garay that in 1543 he set out for Valladolid, brimming with conviction, to lay before the ruling monarch the idea in which he so passionately believed. His concept was for a ship to be propelled by a wheel, and for that wheel to be driven entirely by the power of steam. However, the monarch that Blasco de Garay found himself dealing with was Charles I, son of Philip the Fair and Joan the Mad—the very same Emperor-King who had not scrupled to demolish a wing of the sublime Nasrid palace in the Alhambra and replace it with a clumsy stone monstrosity: the effect is like that of a cowpat dropped in the middle of a summer meadow. Although Charles was unreceptive to the engineer’s idea, Blasco de Garay refused to be deterred and set about raising money from private sources in order to bring his plans to fruition. Unfortunately he achieved this only many years later, at an age when the brain is starting to decline. No doubt some errors crept into his final calculations, for the first steamship known to man, instead of advancing through the water, blew itself sky-high before plunging beneath the waves, where both it and Blasco’s idea were lost from view for a very long time.

  This happened within sight of the harbour from which in 1588 a man named Miguel de Oquendo y Dominguez de Segura set sail for England with the Spanish Armada. An amazing man, this, who rose from the position of simple shepherd to become a master shipwright and ultimately captain of the Santa Ana, one of the finest ships of his day. As well as being a shining example and a symbol of how far a man can go if he really sets his heart on something, Oquendo was also the originator of the expression ‘from shepherd to ship’s captain’, which became a common saying, and was carried from the Basque country to the New Colonies, where it is still bandied about, in only slightly altered form, four centuries later. But history dealt Oquendo a poor hand, for he sailed with the Invincible Armada on the very campaign in which it forfeited that epithet, and when the battered remnants of the fleet eventually returned, humiliated and beaten by the English gunners, and the Santa Ana herself limped into the harbour of San Sebastian more or less a wreck, Oquendo died, a broken man, after only a few days on land.

  Five streets away stood a certain house, a house that was called the Whale. (In those days every Basque house was given a name because, for the Basques, only something with a name existed.) And the Whale was where Catalina de Erauso was, if not born, at any rate conceived.

  Part One

  Chapter one

  Losses

  Catalina’s mother, Maria Perez de Galarraga y Arce, was a woman of considerable inner depth. One might have assumed that this showed itself in her extreme piety and the uncommon strength of her faith. On Sundays she stayed in church longer than necessary, and on Fridays she ate virtually nothing, at most lentils or dried cod. As a young woman, she attended the reciting of the rosary at the convent of San Sebastian el Antiguo and went to the Franciscans for the Stations of the Cross, to the Jesuit monastery for the adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and to the Carmelites for the annual celebrations in honour of the foster-father of Christ. She had twice made the pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James at Compostela, and had a great enthusiasm for saints in general: she had built up a whole collection of small pictures of them, and was the proud possessor of eighteen saints, all arranged in alphabetical order, starting with St. Agatha (against volcanic eruptions), St. Augustine (against losses of all kinds), St. Blaise (against throat infections) and St. Florian (against fires), plus twelve pictures of the principal saint, the Mother of God, whom Maria Perez de Galarraga y Arce knew by all her names, so that when she had a request to make she could pray not only to the Virgen de la Esperanza but also to the Virgen de la Soledad, de los Dolores, de los Remedios, de la Misericordia, de los Desamparados and de las Maravillas, as well as to Nuestra Senora del Rosal. But a glance into her journal would have shown that those inner depths harboured something quite different, something waiting impatiently to be released, and when, on 14 February 1572, the twenty-year-old Maria Perez de Galarraga y Arce forfeited that sonorous name by marrying the Basque merchant Miguel de Erauso, it seemed to her during the whole course of that day as though the feeling lodged deep within her were climbing up inside her body, through her belly and up to her throat.

  After the wedding, Maria entered, for the first time, the house her husband had bought for her. Miguel had named it the Whale in memory of Maria Perez’s grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, for he had been none other than Manuel Pessoa, the discoverer of America, whose story Maria’s grandmother would still recount to her. The Whale was a town house in the centre of San Sebastian, close to the church. It had a modest central patio, and the alcobas—the ground-floor bedrooms—were quite dark; Miguel led Maria straight to the upper floor, where a gallery looked down into the inner courtyard.

  Ines, the maid, brought Maria a tray with a cup of chocolate and a plate piled high with bucaros—pieces of aromatic clay from the West Indies. Maria drank the chocolate and ate the clay biscuits. Then Miguel sent Ines back downstairs and showed Maria the two salons. The first of these had a tiled floor, tapestries on the walls, mirrors and some small pictures. The second was divided into two by a wooden screen. On one side, for the women, a quantity of cushions were arranged on a taffeta-covered dais, while on the other side chairs and stools were provided for the men. Maria Perez stepped out onto the wrought-iron balcony, which had brass knobs at the corners. Leaning over it, she tried to catch the sound of the sea, but all she could hear was the splash of the neighbours’ chamber-pots being emptied into the street. She went into the bedroom, where she found incense sticks burning and her pictures of saints hanging on the walls. She had asked Miguel to put the pictures up in the house—‘in the house’, she had said, not ‘in the bedroom’. Maria Perez took them down, carried them out of the bedroom and put them in the salon, then came back to Miguel, shut the door, let down the drapes over the small metal-grilled windows that had oiled parchment in place of glass, took off her wedding dress with its hoop petticoat—this was long before 1639, when a decree would ban the guardainfante, denouncing it as a ‘whorish’ fashion—knelt down before Miguel de Erauso, unbuttoned his breeches and shoved his member into her mouth. Though unsure how to set about putting on a lascivious look, she gave it her all, gazing up at her husband, squeezing her breasts together, sucking, turning her tongue into a whisk, trying out all the things she had
often pictured in secret or discussed with other girls.

  In this she perfectly reflected the mood of the times, for the Spaniards had fallen into an absolute mating frenzy, coupling frantically with each other as if they had all gone mad—or rather not as if they had gone mad, but as if, on the contrary, they suddenly had a clear vision of their future, a foreknowledge of the plagues that would ravage the land in the coming decades, and therefore felt the need to ensure a sufficient population to give Death enough material to work with. They were all shagging away for dear life; the grandes—princes, marquises and counts who were allowed to keep their heads covered in the Queen’s presence; the caballeros of the chivalric orders of Alcantara, Montesa, Calatrava and Santiago; the impoverished hidalgos ennobled in recognition of their services during the Reconquista; the burghers of the towns, the craftsmen and shopkeepers, the soldiers, the countless poets and students, the peasants who had to pay most of the taxes, the shepherds and woodcutters, the ore processors and smiths, the vagrants and beggars, tinkers, town criers and muleteers, the grocers, peddlers and invalids, the porters and puppeteers, the innkeepers, eating-house cooks, coopers and executioners, the pimps, procurers and card-sharps, the Moors, gypsies and slaves. And no one shagged more insatiably than that reputed ascetic, King Philip the II.

  He might spend his days brooding over his state papers and putting off important decisions until tomorrow, but as soon as the sun went down he metamorphosed into a man obsessed with the succession. He brought his cousin Maria of Portugal to an early grave through child-bearing, and for four years mounted his second wife, Mary Tudor of England, to no avail; leapt with growing enthusiasm on Elizabeth of Valois, only fifteen at the start, who gave him two useless daughters and then died when the doctors failed to detect her third pregnancy; and finally mated successfully five times with Anne of Austria, begetting four infants who entered this world only to depart from it again, while the fifth, at long last, had both qualities required in a ruler: it stayed alive, and it was a boy.

  They were all at it, whenever and wherever they could be, at customs posts and in taverns, at court and in the gutter, in the Alcazar in Madrid and in Seville’s Triana quarter, on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, in the Sierras and the Pyrenees, the boundless pastures of the Extremadura and the iron ore mines of Navarra, the olive groves of Andalusia and the forests of the eastern regions. And if they did not get results straight away they ate leek soup and red meat, which were considered ‘hot’ and supposedly heightened the sexual urge, they swallowed all manner of powders, ate crushed whalebone or drank the blood of slaughtered goats, to such good effect that in a single century the country’s population doubled. Spain’s very air seemed fecund with sperm, and the neighbours’ rutting cries and shrieks of pleasure were ringing out from behind their parchment windows when Maria Perez climbed onto her husband and rammed his stiff organ into herself like a knife, so that his testicles were immediately bathed in red. Maria did not cry out but concentrated hard as the two of them inexorably approached the end. Miguel too was at first wholly absorbed in what was happening, until he suddenly realized that he was engaged in a process of creation, of procreation, and in a final surge, just before the dams burst, he cried, “What shall we call him?”

  Maria paid no heed; her ears were directed inwards. She dug her nails into her husband’s back and shouted ‘Miguel!“ Then they sank down together in a pool of sweat, blood and seminal fluids. Miguel de Erauso stroked his wife’s hair and said, ”Fine by me’.

  Six months and many copulations later, Maria Perez had still not become pregnant. There had to be some explanation for this. Her piety, which had been submerged under their marital orgies, now surfaced again with redoubled strength. Her diary shows her starting to recall all the ‘obscenities’ of which she had ’been guilty‘ in the bedroom. She suddenly believed that those ’sins‘, which for six months she had been describing as ’delights‘, were at the root of her failure to conceive. And so it came about that at night Miguel de Erauso found not a naked wife waiting for him but a white sheet with a hole cut in the middle and beneath it Maria Perez, who informed her husband that from now on she intended to regard sexual intercourse in its true light, as an act that was indispensable for procreation but whose sinful side-effects, such as the immoderate expression of lust, she renounced from this day forth.

  Despite this, another four months still produced no result, and with each day that passed Maria Perez became more inclined to listen to the advice of her grandmother Isabel. The old lady’s ancestral belief in the old Basque divinities had been channelled into a form of Christian superstition that now found fertile ground in Maria, who by this time was ready to clutch at any straw. Isabel impressed upon her granddaughter the information that the entry of the seed into the womb was a necessary but by no means sufficient precondition for conceiving a child. In addition to sexual intercourse, further rituals must be performed to win God’s favour. She, Isabel, knew whereof she spoke: had she not herself conceived thirteen children? Admittedly eleven of them had got lost on the way or been stillborn, so she could not speak with authority about giving a child life, but about conception she certainly could. So Maria Perez spent the next few weeks following her grandmother’s outlandish precepts: she rubbed her abdomen against various old trees and statues of martyrs, prostrated herself on a saint’s tomb, drank gallons of water from holy springs, brewed an infusion using scrapings from statues and water from a grotto, and, screwing up her eyes in a grimace, forced herself to swallow it; she prayed to St. Margaret of Antioch, St. Nicholas and St. Anne, and daily licked the dust from all the statues of the Madonna in the churches round about.

  In her desperation she would even have undertaken the arduous pilgrimage to the shrine of Notre-Dame des Oeufs at Greoux-les-Bains, holding two eggs in her hand, one to be eaten on the spot, the other to be buried there and only dug up again on the following September 8th. Fortunately she was spared that journey, for at long last, well into October 1574, she achieved her goal—thanks to another of her grandmother’s superstitious practices.

  This practice was supposed to be carried out on the square in front of the church—at midnight, naturally. Maria was anxious to avoid any mistake and followed her grandmother’s instructions to the letter. At the risk of being attacked, she walked through the dark streets of San Sebastian all alone—without her husband, who knew nothing of all this, without her grandmother, who was too old, without Ines, who was already asleep, and without having hired a man at the market to escort her. Maria Perez placed her hand on the carvings on the great church door and touched the iron ring and the big keyhole that was on a level with her breast. At the first stroke of the bell she held out her right forefinger, while with her left she felt for the keyhole. Then she took a deep breath and looked up one last time to check that there was no moon, because that might spoil everything, but heavy clouds had gathered, and the town of San Sebastian was cloaked in unrelieved blackness when, with all the strength she could muster, Maria Perez forced her right forefinger into the keyhole of the church door, ramming it in as far as it would go, not into the larger upper half, which would have been amply big enough, but into the part intended for the tail of the key, which was far too narrow. She was later to compare the pain to that of childbirth. In vain she tried to offset the pain by biting her tongue. She recited the prayer that Isabel had taught her, and it seemed to flow from her lips of its own accord; she spoke it aloud, with her finger thrust deep into the cold iron hole—your right finger, Isabel had said, to make sure it’s a boy.

  A trace of bile rose to Maria’s mouth. The worst was yet to come: with her teeth clenched and her eyes and lips squeezed tight shut, she pulled her finger out of the hole with a jerk. It felt as if far more than just skin was left behind.

  Wasting neither time nor tears, she started to run back to the Whale. All at once everything went black, and she fell, involuntarily plunging her injured hand into the filth of the street. Picking herself u
p, she tried to wipe the dirt off her finger, but it was almost unbearably painful to touch. She arrived home wet and dirty. Her finger, having lost not only the skin but also the outer layer of flesh, was reduced to a stringy mass of blood. But Maria Perez did not mind this at all when she found, soon afterwards, that the pain and sacrifice had been worthwhile.

  Maria comported herself perfectly during her pregnancy. She knew very well, having been told it many times, what a huge influence sensory impressions and the thoughts and imagination of a pregnant woman could have on the baby, and how something fleetingly heard or seen, an image or a harmless fantasy in the mind, could become a terrible reality in the womb. In the street she would avert her eyes at once if she encountered a misshapen individual, or a dwarf, a cripple, a beggar covered with festering sores, or a witch, for such monstrous sights would pass through her eyes into her mind and spirit, and thence directly to the infant inside her, leaving it disfigured. Instead she spent most of her pregnancy quietly and serenely at home, contemplating pictures of the Holy Family. She would spend hours staring fixedly at the infant Jesus. If she could absorb His perfection into herself, she thought, then her own child would follow the model upon which she gazed and become an exact reflection of the original, a true likeness of God.

  After five months she no longer left the house except to go to mass, but even there she kept her eyes tightly closed while the priest placed the stole around his shoulders, for she knew that if she saw him do it the umbilical cord would wrap itself around the child’s neck and strangle it. Maria Perez would not allow herself even to think about the dangers of childbirth. Some expectant mothers died because they were malnourished or deformed by rickets. There were any number of miscarriages and stillbirths, or babies that tried to come out the wrong way, feet first, and suffocated in the birth canal. The dead babies were given a fast-track baptism, since otherwise they would be condemned to wander in limbo for all eternity. And it was not uncommon for the surgeons to announce in the middle of a delivery that the problems were too great, whereupon they would abandon the process and slash the woman open like a sack of flour—the only hope, according to them, of saving the mother and her child. This intervention would result in the death of both, and they would stuff the baby back into the place it had been so reluctant to leave, crudely stitch up the woman again, and give her a rudimentary burial in the graveyard.