My answer, set forth in the spirit of scholasticism, is as follows:
If a peasant’s wife dies, he can still eat his cows. But if his cows die, he cannot eat his wife. Not in Spain, in any case. And then he will slip into starvation, menaced by the gravest poverty. Poverty does monstrous things to a man. It turns him into a werewolf, a vampire, he loses his human appearance and falls back into Nature’s slavery, which he had struggled with all his might to wrench himself free from. But you can’t wrench yourself free if you’re poor. And nobody wants to be a werewolf or a vampire. And not just because of eternal life and that you’ll lose your soul and so on. That’s the least of your worries. Rather because such things make life much harder. It is extremely hard to be poor. I even doubt that life is worth living if you’re poor. Those sly dogs were right to think up so many things to make the world look complicated. Otherwise the poor would’ve slit their throats and taken their money. The poor are werewolves, vampires — they can kill you just like that. For this reason you have to constantly bamboozle them with thousands of things. But I, Guimarães da Silva, as a student of Dr. Monardes, of course know that which the sly dogs also know. Namely that there are only two things in the world, two states: having money and not having money. Nothing else exists, or if it does exist, it doesn’t matter. Having money, not having money — that’s everything in this world, the root of all wisdom and the entirety of wisdom itself from beginning to end. Everything else is blah-blah-blah and empty fabrications. The world is very simple, it is an idiot and as simple as a moron. Either you have money or you don’t have money. That’s it. If you don’t, you’ve got to get some. Somehow.
Just look — I, for example, was on my way to becoming Doctor Veterinaris. For the first time in my life the ducats were flowing to me much faster than I could spend them. This somehow makes you optimistic. I decided to expand my activity with a radical, decisive step. I had managed to convince the peasants to put tobacco in their animals’ fodder. That, I told them, would serve as a preventive measure and would protect their animals from more or less all kinds of illnesses. But of course, this couldn’t be done with ordinary tobacco, which they could simply go and buy from the port in Sevilla, but with a specially prepared nourishing tobacco, which I sold to them. Nourishing tobacco differs from ordinary tobacco in that someone says it is nourishing and also finds someone else who believes him and is even willing to pay him for it. Only then does nourishing tobacco become nourishing. In a certain sense it really is nourishing, but only for some.
It crossed my mind to wet the tobacco, bake it or process it in some other way such that it would slightly change color and thus be visibly distinguishable from ordinary tobacco, but I decided against it. If I did that, I would start to resemble someone from that despicable tribe of Birmingham counterfeiters. No, doing such things didn’t suit me. I sold them tobacco just as it was when it arrived in Sevilla on Nuñez de Herrera’s ships. I could have taken it from Señor Espinosa’s ships as well, but since Dr. Monardes was a partner of the Herrera family, I, of course, got it from them a bit cheaper. Here, however, I ran into a major difficulty. For my purposes I needed to rent a warehouse in the port. And not some big warehouse, which I couldn’t afford and had no use for anyway, but a small warehouse, of the kind which was now getting harder and harder to find, or else just part of a big one — some corner to rent. This turned out to be a devil of a job. Not because it was in principle impossible, but because the merchants, and especially those with warehouses, have a completely different concept of money. In the first instant you might think that they must have made some kind of mistake and can only make out numerals with the greatest effort. Their concept of numerals is completely different. What am I trying to say? I will clarify with an example. For example, if you are a citizen of Sevilla and are walking down the street with ten ducats in your pocket, this makes you quite a wealthy citizen of Sevilla, or at least you seem to be by all outward appearances — you can buy whatever you want and you’ll still have something left in your pocket. But if that same you goes with those same ten ducats in your pocket to the merchants at the port, they’ll run right over you as if you were thin air, and not because they mean you any harm or some such thing, but because they truly do not notice you. No, this job was definitely beyond my powers. My good idea would purely and simply have fallen apart, if it hadn’t been for Dr. Monardes’ invaluable help once again. He agreed to sell me, at a friendly mark-up, tobacco from his personal supplies, which he stored in a large structure in his garden, and if my business really took off, he was prepared to give me some space in a warehouse in the port, which he owned together with Nuñez de Herrera’s heirs. But for that he would have to speak with his son-in-law Rodrigo de Brizuela, who represented the Herrera family here in Sevilla. Not that it wouldn’t have worked out, but Dr. Monardes did not like speaking with his son-in-law de Brizuela.
After this difficulty was resolved, my new initiative got off to quite a promising start. I rented another cart (so as not to soil Dr. Monardes’ carriage), and Jesús and I went around to the villages, selling the peasants nourishing tobacco.
“How should I mix it?” asked José from Dos Hermanas, whom I went to first.
“One handful per bucket,” I said. “Two for ideal results. You’d best use a handful and a half.”
He decided on one handful per bucket and bought quite a bit of tobacco, since he had lots of animals. Then the other villagers in Dos Hermanas bought some as well. And so on. My business was taking off. I didn’t feel like healing wounds and so forth at all anymore, but it couldn’t be helped, I kept doing it because of the nourishing tobacco. If I could’ve just dealt with the latter, I definitely would have preferred it, of course. Medicine, which until then I had always considered an enormous privilege, began looking to me a bit like a thankless profession. Especially veterinary medicine. You go around, stepping in animal shit, manure and mud, you struggle with these big unreasonable animals, they are in pain, you have to constantly watch to make sure they don’t kick you, because then you’ll have to heal yourself, you constantly have to deal with various peasants who are completely devoid of any artistic flair whatsoever — work-worn, stingy types, rooted in the ground, one would say they were talking trees. . How different Jesús is from them — I now realized this for the first time. Yes, if I didn’t know it from medicine, I would never have believed that people in the cities and those in the villages are one and the same animal species. Jesús dances flamenco, collects tips in a hat; he may be foolish, but he’s crafty. Actually, I’m not so sure he’s all that foolish. And if he had to work like those crazy peasants, he would surely get sick and die. Nobody can work like them. Well, perhaps Dr. Monardes. But definitely not Jesús. Despite this, I would far prefer his company to theirs. The problem is, however, that you can’t sell him nourishing tobacco. There’s no way.