Purity of Blood

It was deepest night when, with his cape tight around him and hat pulled low, the captain emerged beneath the dark arcades of the Plaza Mayor and walked the short distant toward Calle Nueva. No one among the few stragglers out and about paid any attention to him, except for a lady of the night who when she met him between two arches offered, without much enthusiasm, to reduce his weight by twelve cuarto coins. He crossed through the Guadalajara gate, where a pair of guards were dozing before the closed window shutters of the silver shops, and then, to avoid the constables who tended to station themselves in that area, went down Calle de las Hileras to El Arenal. Finally, he again turned up the hill toward San Ginés alley, where at that hour refugees from the law were wont to gather in the cool night air.

As Your Mercies know, the churches of the period were havens of asylum, where no ordinary law could reach. So anyone who stole, wounded, or killed—all the things they called being “about their work”—could take sanctuary in a church or convent, where the priests, highly jealous of their privileges, would defend him tooth and nail from the royal authorities. So popular was it to plead innocent and seek protection that some of the principal churches were chock-a-block with clients enjoying the sanctity of their refuge. In those crowded communities, one tended to find the cream of society; there was not enough rope to do honor to their genteel gullets. Because of his profession, Diego Alatriste himself had once had to recur to that practice. Even don Francisco de Quevedo, in his youth, had found himself in similar, if not worse, straits when in Venice, he and the Duque de Osuna staged a coup and he had had to escape disguised as a beggar.

The fact is that places such as Los Naranjos courtyard of the Seville cathedral, for example, or a good dozen places in Madrid, among them San Ginés, had gained the dubious privilege of taking in the flower of the city’s braggarts, cutthroats, thieves, and carousers. And all this illustrious brotherhood, which after all had to eat, drink, satisfy its needs, and conduct its personal business, took advantage of the night hours to take a walk, commit new villainy, settle accounts, or whatever opportunity presented itself. These felons also received their friends there, even their whores and cronies, so that by night the area around these churches—even church buildings themselves—became the criminals’ tavern, even their brothel. There, real or invented feats were aired, death sentences were carried out by hired steel, and there, too, throbbed the colorful and ferocious pulse of the dangerous underbelly of Spain: the world of scoundrels, thieves, and other caballeros of the low life, men whose portraits never hung on the walls of palaces but whose existence was recorded in immortal pages. Some of which—and not the worst, certainly—were written by don Francisco.

Mercilessly, they tortured Grullo,who, with the truth at the end of a rope,said, “It wasn’t me”—the defense

of rack and wedding day: No hope.

Or this very celebrated one:

In the house of roguesat the foot of the gallows,for being the cutpurse I was

they sent me into shadows.

San Ginés alley was one of the favorite sites of these refugees, and at night when they came out to get a breath of air, the alley came to life and temporary stalls were set up to satisfy the fly-by-nights’ hunger. It was a dignified assembly that evaporated as if by incantation as soon as a constable showed his face.

When Diego Alatriste arrived, there were some thirty souls in the narrow alleyway: bullies, petty thieves, a few whores settling accounts with their customers, and idlers and rabble standing around talking or drinking cheap wine from wineskins and demijohns. There was very little light—only a small lantern hanging beneath an arch at the corner of the alley. That area was almost entirely in shadow, and more than half the people present were swathed in their cloaks, so that the atmosphere, although lively with conversation, was tenebrous; entirely appropriate for the kind of appointment that brought the captain there. It was also a place where someone overly curious and inquisitive, or perhaps a constable—if he was not with a patrol and well armed—might in the blink of a “Jesus God!” find it permanently difficult to swallow.

The captain recognized don Francisco de Quevedo despite the collar drawn across his face, and casually made his way toward him. The two of them drifted off to one side, away from the lantern where the poet had been standing, cape collars up and hat brims down to the eyebrows, a look very much in style among the men in the alley.