The Scroll of Seduction Read online

  My hands were cold when I opened the bundle of documents while sitting on the bed in my pajamas, the bedspread pulled up over my legs. I could hardly contain the anxiety I felt about revisiting the gulf that separated my life into a before and after. I pulled out five manila envelopes and a few books. I smiled when I saw Dr. Stella Cerruti’s Human Sexuality among them. These were books my mother had kept under lock and key so they didn’t fall into my hands. I could almost hear her: “Your time will come; right now you’re still too young.” I wondered if she ever knew I had learned how to open her desk drawer by slipping a knife behind the bolt. That was how I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as well as that book on sexuality, full of black-and-white cross-section illustrations of male and female genitalia. For fear of being caught, especially with that book–which seemed like a bigger transgression than Huxley at the time–I only managed to read the section on coitus. Back then, I was dying to know what it was that people did on the famous “wedding night;” my friends and I used to speculate all the time. From the feelings that were beginning to awaken in my own body, I was sure it had something to do with the body part that my mother called down there. “Don’t touch yourself down there,” “Make sure to wash down there.” I was sure that the secret goings-on between men and women that were never named but were implied by “sleeping with a man” had to do with couples somehow joining up at the crotch. What I couldn’t figure out, though, was how they managed to pull off the intricate stunt required in order for the whole operation to work. I knew nothing about erections, so the only way I could imagine it happening was if either the man or woman lay down on his or her side and slid down, legs spread at an angle, until locking into the genital embrace which–by virtue of its position–would make it impossible for their faces to be anywhere near each other. All in all, it seemed like an excruciating, uncomfortable, as well as unpleasant phenomenon devoid of all romance, although I tried desperately to make sense of it, sketching countless naked men and women in my notebook. Once I learned that blood rushes to the penis, causing it to inflate like a tire so that it can penetrate the vagina, I wondered what pleasure could possibly be found in that. It did, though, seem more practical, and it explained the horizontal position one most often saw in drawings of naked couples. I laughed when I pulled out that book, recalling my childish naïveté.

  One by one I emptied the manila envelopes onto the bed and sifted through the contents, separating the remnants of everyday life (receipts from the laundry and other services) from things like letters, notes, and annotations. In among the subscription receipts, invitations to birthday parties from my friends, telephone numbers jotted on blank cards, and snapshots of me as a little girl, I saw a postcard that my mother’s Colombian friend Isis, who lived in New York, had sent from Italy. I was struck by her tone. “You should have come with me. It would have done you good.” At my parents’ funeral, Isis stuck right by my side the whole time. She cried more than anyone in my family. Her head just kept convulsing, and she kept apologizing for having insisted that my mother come visit her in New York. “I had no idea the plane would crash, Lucía, I’m so sorry.” Isis wanted me to come live with her. She only had one daughter. She said I could go to a girls’ school in New York and then to college at Columbia. She would try to raise me the way my mother would have wanted. I loved Isis. I had always called her “tía”–auntie–and I was used to seeing her around the house; she’d come for weeks and stay in the guest room. But my grandparents had other plans. They thanked her politely for the offer but did not accept. The two of them had already discussed it and decided to send me to Spain. They didn’t think the United States was the best environment for an adolescent. American society was too liberal, and they didn’t approve of its values, which they considered excessively materialistic. Isis realized there was no point arguing. When I said good-bye to her at the airport, she told me to call her whenever I wanted. Maybe my grandparents would at least let me come spend the holidays with her. And when I turned eighteen and finished high school, then I could make my own decisions, she said. By that time, my grandparents probably wouldn’t object if I decided to go to college in New York. When I felt nostalgic and homesick, I toyed with her offer, but I wasn’t free-spirited enough to disobey my grandparents. To do that I would have needed more of a motive than the desire to feel at home again, to feel like someone’s daughter again; after all, it would have been just an illusion. I found a thick stack of letters from Isis, others from my maternal grandfather, index cards with dates and captions that made no sense to me, and two spiral notebooks full of scribbles. The papers from the first group, though they were insignificant, had a sort of archaeological value: they allowed me to reconstruct my mother’s daily life and gave me insights into what was involved in running the house. Looking through them, I could picture her sitting at her writing desk after I had gone to school, paying bills, making shopping lists, figuring out what to eat that week, what had to be taken to the dry cleaner’s. Those documents, more than anything, seemed to bear witness to the way her life was suddenly cut short, to all that remained undone, those errands and chores that were undertaken mechanically but with a sense of continuity that could be seen in her innocent notes: tell gardener to spray ferns, take Ernesto’s suit to the tailor. Tears rolled silently down my cheeks as I read through them. But it was no longer the disconsolate, desperate sobbing it had once been. Now I cried sad tears, old tears. My mother’s writing took on the strange, disembodied aspect of an old manuscript or a work of art in a museum, when the artist’s life seems so remote it’s hard to imagine that person holding the brush in a distant past.

  NEXT I READ ISIS’S LETTERS AND THE OBSERVATIONS IN THE spiral-bound notebooks. As soon as I came across the first sentence alluding to the problems tormenting my mother, my mouth went dry. I was tempted to stop, but my curiosity won out. And I plunged headfirst into the drama that the letters and endless index cards allowed me to reconstruct. Isis was skeptical at first; incredulous at the letter my mother must have written her in which she told about a series of anonymous phone calls–a woman’s voice–she had received detailing my father’s infidelity. Why would he waste his time with that sort of thing? Isis wanted to know. But in subsequent letters, she consoled her, because apparently my mother was certain, and Isis talked about “the proof” and begged my mother to make sure it was incontrovertible, because things could be falsified, jealousy could make people turn remarkably cruel. Then there were letters, all dated close together, in which Isis begged my mother not to act rashly, to keep her cool, and to realize that she was an extraordinary woman, not to fall prey to insecurity, to confront my father. Next Isis commented on my mother’s obsessive detective work, the results of which I now had before me: dates, places, things she had found in his pockets, words he had said to her and that were jotted down in the notebook, jumbled together with painful comments my mother made to herself: halfway down the page, the question “My God, what is wrong with me?” or “I’m going mad.” The words mad and crazy scribbled repeatedly in the margins, beside the name “Ernesto,” with the o retraced again and again in graphite pencil. Isis insisting that she forget about it. It was just a passing phase, it wouldn’t last. It happened to plenty of men. It didn’t mean that Ernesto didn’t love her. She had to relax, let it pass. Then came the idea of a little getaway, taking him to another city, seducing him, making him fall in love all over again. My mother had seen the other woman. Young. Pretty. You’re pretty too, Isis said, you’re gorgeous and you always have been. And more notes: “E. came home at 11 P.M. He reached for me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. I hate him. How could he?” Isis insisting on the trip. The letters becoming less frequent. Complaints about my mother not writing back. “Celia, please, I am so worried. If you don’t come see me, I’m coming to see you. Write to me. Please.”

  I didn’t sleep at all that night. Mother Luisa Magdalena knocked on my door early the next morning. She found me in such a state that she left and
came back with a cup of thick hot chocolate that she made me drink as she sat beside me, rearranging her purple habit and glancing down curiously at the piles of papers stacked up on the floor. “They’re letters and things from my mother.” “Ah,” she replied. She asked if I didn’t think it was better to let my mother rest in peace rather than rummaging through things she wouldn’t have wanted me to see. “She is in peace,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do to disturb her now, and it’s been a revelation for me. It’s unbelievable, the way you can live with a man and woman your whole life, love them and be loved by them, and not know anything about them. Anything at all,” I said. She said it was natural. I was so young when they died.

  Mother Luisa Magdalena was tall and thin, and she had long features that made her look harsh and stern. She hardly ever smiled, and the girls respected her because she had a way of imposing her authority categorically, but without saying a word, just a glance was enough. When I was new at the school, I was afraid of her. One morning I woke up with a fever and she came to take my temperature. Before she left, she bent over me, stroked my head, and smoothed the sheets. Her affectionate touch unlocked the place where I stored dusty memories of hugs and kisses, terms of endearment. After she left, I was wracked by an overwhelming nostalgia and sobbed disconsolately. It occurred to me that behind her stern facade, Mother Luisa Magdalena was in need of love too. I ended up crying for both of us. I stopped being afraid of her that day. I became affectionate toward her. It changed our relationship. We became friends.

  “It must be so hard for you, growing up without your parents,” she said, “and yet you never talk about it. I sometimes wonder how you do it. You must be very strong. I lost my mother when I was seventeen and my religious vocation was like a refuge to me, my only consolation. I entered the convent when I was nineteen; now I’m fifty-four.”

  I remember how she reacted when I asked her if she regretted it. She smiled. She said that at first she’d thought she wouldn’t make it. She missed music, and the hustle and bustle of the streets. She said that reading Santa Teresa of Ávila had been her salvation. She was a passionate woman who had found her beloved in Jesus Christ.

  THE WOMAN WHO I GLIMPSED BENEATH MOTHER LUISA MAGDALENA’S habit persuaded me to tell her about my discovery and even show her some of my mother’s index cards. I couldn’t keep it closed up, couldn’t contain the anger and the confusion I felt. I didn’t understand why my mother would have chosen to live with the anguish and anxiety that her notes and letters betrayed rather than leave my father. It would have been less painful, and then she wouldn’t have taken that trip to rekindle the flame in her marriage. And if they hadn’t taken the trip, I would still have my parents, divorced but alive.

  “Loving Christ must be very safe,” I said. “There’s no jealousy, no risk of being disillusioned. I can’t believe my father did that to my mother. My dad was so sweet to me, but obviously he made my mother suffer endlessly. She was insanely jealous. I can’t believe something like that happened between them. I always thought they loved each other so much.”

  “Well, I’m not the one to tell you about jealousy, my child,” Mother Luisa Magdalena said, smiling sadly, “but in Spain we once had a queen who was so jealous she lost her mind….”

  I must have started. What a coincidence: even the nun was thinking about her!

  “Juana the Mad,” I said.

  “Do you know her story?”

  “A little. But I know someone who knows all the details.”

  “Well, you’d like the story. I don’t know any specifics and I think a lot of what people say is more invention than anything else, but that was a very sad time in our history. Juana was supposed to be queen when her mother, Isabella of Castile died, but instead they locked her up in a town called Tordesillas, near Valladolid. They say her husband’s love affairs drove her mad. When I was a little girl, my parents took me to the Santa Clara Monastery, where Philippe the Handsome’s coffin was kept for some years. It made a big impact on me, hearing about that queen, locked up in a castle for so many years, and about her daughter Catalina, who grew up there. She slept in a tiny, dark room next to her mother’s. At some point they opened a window for her so she could watch the children play below.”

  “Was Juana’s husband unfaithful or did she imagine it?”

  “They say he was unfaithful, but they also say that the two of them fell madly in love at first sight, and that they loved each other passionately. They had six children. Catalina was born after her father’s death. There’s a book by Michael Pradwin about her in the library here. I could get it for you if you like.”

  EVENTUALLY I SHARED WITH MANUEL WHAT I HAD LEARNED ABOUT my parents and how my whole life’s memories changed because of what had happened between them. Queen Juana’s plight became a reference point for me. I gravitated to her story, seduced by her anguish and the consequences her tragedy had for Spain. According to Manuel, the country’s destiny changed forever because of her.

  “SO HOW ARE WE GOING TO CONJURE UP JUANA’S SPIRIT? WITH A Ouija board?” I asked, in jest.

  He didn’t smile back. Sitting opposite me, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring insistently. I straightened up in my chair and glanced back over at the closed window.

  “I don’t know if you know anything about dream catchers, little nets that are woven and used by Native Americans to trap dreams. Well, I suggest we make one. I have a dress made in the style of the time. I want you to dress like Juana. I want you to imagine yourself in her place as I tell you the story, identify with her passion, her confusion. Some people make intricate time machines in order to travel to other times. What I’m proposing is a trip that requires nothing more complicated than silk and velvet. And through my words, she’ll come to you and we’ll both get to know her. I don’t know why, but ever since I first saw you, I was sure that you’d be able to understand her. Not a moment goes by when I’m with you that I don’t feel her presence near me.”

  I STARED AT HIM, NOT KNOWING WHAT TO SAY. THE IDEA BOTH attracted and scared me. I already knew for sure that Manuel’s voice would be able to transport me to another reality. It was like a current, and time swam in it, untroubled. He talked about the past the way people talk about the present. My maternal grandfather had been like that: a fabulous storyteller who had fanned the flames of my imagination since I was a little girl. I thought about Scheherazade and the caliph and how she saved her life by spinning tales. I wondered what Manuel thought he would get out of it. I was well aware of the power of words; after all, words were what had led me there, to that strange proposal, that afternoon.

  LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER OUR VISIT TO EL ESCORIAL, I GOT A LETTER from Manuel. It was late afternoon when Mother Cristina handed me a letter postmarked from within Spain. I didn’t recognize the writing. Through the flimsy, white envelope I could see the colors of a photograph. In the afternoons, the nuns passed out squares of chocolate with slices of baguette. I had never tried bread and chocolate together before coming to Spain, but ever since that first day when I followed the other girls’ example, placing the chocolate between two pieces of bread like a sandwich and biting into it, I fell in love with the combination. It was delicious, and I usually ate mine sitting on a bench behind some bushes, next to the niche with the Virgin Fatima statuette. Rather than play basketball with the rest of the girls, I liked to spend that time of the afternoon reading. And that afternoon in particular I put the envelope in my pocket and took several pieces of bread and chocolate to my little spot. When I ripped open the envelope, I found a postcard. It was a reproduction of a fifteenth-century painting of a young woman with delicate features, her hair parted down the middle. It was Juana of Castille as painted by Juan de Flandes in 1497. Disconcerted, I read the back of the card.

  “Lucía, Juana of Castille was sixteen years old when she married Philippe the Handsome. She felt lonely in Flanders, like you do. She was far from her family. Let me know if you need anything in Madrid. Feel free to w
rite to me at this address: calle San Bernardo, 28, 4°, Madrid, 00267. Warm regards, Manuel de Sandoval y Rojas.”

  I ANSWERED HIS LETTER THE VERY SAME DAY. I WROTE DURING study period that night. After nine o’clock, the nuns had what they called their “great silence,” they only spoke if it was strictly necessary. We were supposed to keep quiet too while we sat in the big hall at tables lining the rectangular, high-ceilinged room with its tall windows. Mother Sonia, who was in charge of supervising us, sat behind a desk on a dais in front of the blackboard. At regular intervals, perhaps marked by the time it took her to recite the rosary, counting the polished, olive-pit beads that hung from her waist, the nun would get up and wander slowly up and down the rows of girls. Her footsteps were almost silent, as if she were levitating, but the coarse material of her habit as she moved, her rosary beads clicking against one another, and the overpowering smell of wool that trailed behind her were like the wake of a huge ship gliding stealthily through the sound of turning pages and pencils scratching on paper.