I thought of the night that I walked back to Sevilla, but despite this I said: “What’s the big deal? They just fly through the air. It’s not like walking over land. I can’t imagine it’s particularly tiring.”
“That’s what you think,” Rincon objected. “But if you were in their place, you’d be singing a different tune. The ones that get tired and lag behind the flock fall into the sea and die.”
“That’s right,” Cortado nodded. “I’ve seen them in the sea near the Greek islands. They land on the mast, take a rest and fly off again. But if there’s no mast, then where do you land? I’ve even seen how they fall into the sea. They fall in and drown.”
“Drowning is a really painful way to die,” Rincon said. “It’s not like getting stabbed and that’s that. I’ve seen a drowning man. That’s painful business.”
I was about to ask him whether he hadn’t been holding the man’s head under at the same time, but luckily the wine had not scrambled my wits to such an extent, so I was able to stop myself in time. Such jokes can suddenly make your life miserable. Instead, I told them about the girl with the bad breath who was going to get married. It turns out (Cortado knew this) that she was supposed to marry one of the soldiers from the royal guard whom they had found tied up in the Sierra Morena.
“Well, no harm done. She’ll stink of garlic, he of shit, a perfect match,” I said. Just look at how fate brings like things together, or else Nature makes more alike those which have come together, I thought to myself and the vivid picture of the girl running back and forth across the courtyard sprang into my mind. “Well, what do you know! It’s a small world!”
“It is a small world,” Cortado nodded, laughing.
“Come on, now,” Rincon shook his head. “The world is enormous. Sevilla is small.”
“Exactly. That’s what I meant to say,” Cortado agreed.
When I thought about it, that, in fact, was what I meant to say, too. We made a toast to Sevilla. Say what you will and despite everything, Sevilla is a beautiful city.
How nice, I thought to myself, that I came to Sevilla. And that I’ll become a doctor. I’ll heal people, I’ll make money.
My whole life was before me. Well, almost my whole life.
Rincon lifted his hand and signaled to Don Pedro to bring us more wine and tapas.
9. Against Aching Joints
Before, Don Pedro was nowhere near as strong as he is now. He has always been as fat and maybe even a little fatter, but not as strong. He suffered from bad aching of the joints, which seized him periodically. Don Pedro had not taken a cure for many years, then underwent treatment, to no effect, with Dr. Bartholo, until one rainy autumn he turned to Dr. Monardes for help. The case was one of Dr. Monardes’ greatest medical successes and became legendary. In general, one of the best ways to become famous and to summon a great wind in the sails of your career, so to speak, is to cure the owner of a pub. This is one of the most important conclusions I came to from this story. I suppose that the same is true, in descending order, for the owner of a barber shop, for vendors at the market, for curates, especially in village churches, and possibly even for the sisters from the convents who sell sweetmeats in the morning. I will keep this in mind in the future and perhaps will work half-price in such cases, unlike Dr. Monardes, who was unyielding in this respect, and, incidentally, in all other respects as well.
But getting back to this unprecedented, unbelievable, and legendary case. I had the good fortune to accompany Dr. Monardes at the time and to see everything with my own eyes.
When we arrived at Don Pedro’s large house on San Francisco Square, behind the pub, we found him in bed. His joints were aching all over his body, especially his knees, fingers, and also his waist.
“Don Pedro,” Dr. Monardes told him frankly, “you are too fat. Take a look at me,” the doctor continued, gesturing towards himself, “you and I are more or less the same age, but see how I look and how you look.”
He was right. The difference was staggering.
“Ah, well. .” Don Pedro replied from his bed.
“I will help you,” the doctor said, “but if you go on eating this way, if you continue to be so fat, the results won’t be very impressive or long-lasting. The weight of your flesh is straining your bones, Don Pedro, and the pressure is starting to wear on your joints. It’s like a coat on a hook — the heavier the coat, the more the hook sags. Remember that. I will help you and you will start feeling better, and when one starts feeling better, one is all too likely to forget such things. That’s why I want you to promise me that you will try to lose weight. And try seriously. You’ll simply eat less, Pedro. There are more complicated ways to do it, but that is not only the simplest, but also the best way.”
“I promise,” replied Don Pedro. At that moment, I suspect he would’ve promised anything.
“Good,” the doctor replied, and we started the procedure.
The procedure is complicated, even though to the untrained eye it may not seem so. First, a large leaf of tobacco is ground up in a mortar and then boiled. After that, the tobacco juice is strained and left to cool slightly — but only slightly! In the meantime, another tobacco leaf is heated up amidst the coals, but you must be very careful about exactly how much you heat it — this determines precisely which components remain within it and in what quantities. If the leaf catches on fire, you may as well toss it out — it won’t do you any good in such a case. As soon as it starts smoking lightly — and I mean lightly! — you must pull it out of the coals immediately. The reader would not believe how many leaves one must burn up all for nothing while mastering this skill. What’s more, the coals are always different and you somehow have to learn to judge by sight how hot they might be, and act accordingly. Moreover, the large tobacco leaves, although they are called by one and the same name, are always different sizes, and for this reason you must also develop a very flexible intuition. De facto, it turns out that in every case you are holding leaves of different sizes over coals of different temperatures and pulling them out at different moments — no two cases are identical. Thus, you must somehow learn to sense the tobacco intuitively, to cultivate a special mastery, which I, fortunately, already possess — after countless hours in Dr. Monardes’ laboratory, under his angry shouts that you are an idiot, that you’ll burn up his entire supply (absolutely impossible!) before you learn the simplest things, that he brought himself a world of troubles with you, that if you don’t get it this time he’ll boot you back out onto the street (but he doesn’t boot you out), and other such things, all of this in the hot and heavy air of the laboratory where you’re sweating like a negro and can hardly breathe, and your head is spinning from the tobacco fumes. And the worst part is that you yourself begin to feel like a total idiot and seriously begin to wonder whether you aren’t by chance some sort of imbecile from birth, and until now you simply never noticed it — you begin to ask yourself this in all seriousness as you see how Dr. Monardes simply waves and does with the greatest of ease that which you’ve been slaving over for an hour, that which in his hands looks so simple, while you have a devil of a time — sweaty, wrapped in vapors, flushed, dizzy, and exhausted. And all of this is repeated for each of the various diseases, for which the leaves must be burned differently. The same goes for the juices as well, by the way — which leaves, how finely ground, how long they must be boiled, and so on. But in the end you learn. And even you, despite supposedly being trained for this, are surprised at how much more complex things actually are than they seem from the outside. But that’s what a profession is all about. That’s what it means to have a profession, especially if you are good at it.