This time the girl did not burst into tears when we entered the room. On the contrary, as soon as she saw us, she smiled happily, then rolled over to the other side of the bed and covered her face with the pillow. Her mother scolded her, wrested the pillow from her hands, and forced it under her head. The girl started sniffling.
“Stay like that, my dear, stay just like that,” the doctor said, moving her hair and looking at the scabs. “Everything is fine,”—he turned to the mother shortly—“she’ll get better.”
“I am free to go now?” asked the girl, who had stopped sniffling.
Then in ten minutes she did so many things that if I were to describe them in detail, it would fill several pages. For example, she got up, started singing “Dark-eyed Chiquita” softly to herself — a popular song in Sevilla, mainly among the women — and went, with something I would call smooth leaps, over to the window. Her fragile body seemed to float through the air. She looked out the window, mercilessly crumpling her skirts with her hands, stopped singing and began humming instead, then laughed and said: “Some clown is dancing flamenco and collecting money in a hat.”
Fortunately, no one paid her any attention. The doctor at that moment was speaking with her mother and surely thought that the girl was just talking nonsense. Shortly thereafter the whinnying of horses could be heard from outside, but the lass had already turned her back on the window, run to the bed, snatched up her brother, and begun hugging him in a frenzy. Her little brother, a seven- or eight-year-old boy by the name of Pedro, began snorting, his cheeks bulging.
“Let him go, you little hussy!” cried her mother, bounding over to the bed and forcefully tearing the boy out of her arms.
The girl began to cry again, threw herself down on the bed, covered her head with the pillow, and continued sobbing beneath it. In the meantime, her father had appeared. He opened the door, peeked inside, surveyed the above-described scene, then pulled his head back out and shut the door from the outside. The little boy also wanted to leave, but his mother wouldn’t let him. The girl suddenly sat up on the bed with a sad face and eyes red from crying and starting taking off her stockings.
“What are you doing?” her mother asked.
“I want to be barefoot,” the girl replied curtly and hurled the sock onto the floor.
How nice, I thought to myself, that unlike that little boy, we can always leave. The doctor seemed to be thinking along the same lines as well, since he said goodbye to the mother and the girl, promised to come to see how things were going the next day, and opened the door. We almost ran into the father, who was standing right outside, looking at us with a tortured expression.
“Goodbye, señor,” said the doctor.
“Goodbye, señores,” the man replied.
I nodded as I passed him. It was on the tip of my tongue to wish him a pleasant day, but somehow I decided against it.
“Jesús,” I called loudly, as soon as we stepped out into the yard, “where are you, Jesús?”
Jesús was around the corner, quietly waiting for us on the coachbox.
On the following day, the doctor sent me to check on the girl, Luisa. I didn’t feel like going at all, let alone by myself, but it couldn’t be helped. My apprehensions, however, were unjustified. This time the girl behaved very demurely, looking down bashfully most of the time and giving one-syllable answers to my questions. Perhaps the effect of the tobacco had worn off, I don’t know. Fortunately, it was not necessary to treat her with tobacco again and the doctor’s prognosis was that the scabs would disappear within a week.
Returning from there with a light heart, I came across a truly impressive sight. I saw that crazy Dr. Vallejo from Madrid — a one in a million chance. At first I wasn’t sure it was really him, but when I asked around at the Three Horses, it turned out that I was right. This Vallejo was a strange doctor, more likely a charlatan, who went around from city to city and nobleman to nobleman with the hope of finding someone who would give him the money to develop his so-called “vaccine.” This “vaccine,” so he says, is something like a disease, which, if taken in small doses, makes you resistant to the cause. According to him, you could cure almost every infectious disease this way. This would be, he claims, the greatest, most revolutionary idea in medicine from our era. But for every disease the quantity of the “vaccine” was supposedly different and so forth, thus he needed money to research this business. Sly dog. From what I understood, he had gone to Count Azuaga, who had a summer villa near Sevilla, in the hopes of squeezing some cash out of him. The count was a polite man, with a sense for the humorous in life and a certain taste for madmen, as well as for sly dogs, thus instead of throwing him out on his ear, he received him politely, even arranged a reception in his honor, to which he invited the powerful landholders in the vicinity, so they could see such a specimen with their own eyes and hear his cock-and-bull stories from his own lips, after which the count assured him that since he would probably die far earlier than the doctor due to his failure to use the “vaccine,” he would will him the estate, so that he could develop his great medicine in peace, and then sent him politely on his way. From there, I came to understand, the said Vallejo had gone to Señor Espinosa, but Espinosa is a very busy man and sent him away without such ceremonies. Incidentally, I asked Dr. Monardes what he thought of Vallejo’s so-called “vaccine.”
“Ha ha,” laughed Dr. Monardes. “He wants to convince us that something which at one of its extremes causes sickness and death, but which at its other extreme is entirely ineffective, and consequently again causes death, becomes curative somewhere in the middle. Now, don’t misunderstand me,” the doctor clarified. “Taken by itself, that is a completely trivial idea and applies to all medicines. But with the huge and decisive difference that no medicine is created from that which it heals, but on the contrary, it is a different substance, with opposite properties. It has a nature inimical to the nature of the illness. This Vallejo essentially wants to convince us that plague can be cured with plague, cholera with cholera, and so on. Are you even listening to what you’re saying, Guimarães?”
“Please, please, señor.” I raised my hand, protesting vigorously. “I was just asking.”
“Impossible!” the doctor snapped. “Complete and dangerous nonsense. One should have an open mind, receptive to new knowledge, but not so open that his brain falls out”—here the doctor quoted a famous English proverb—“and if the Inquisition were to busy itself with something sensible, instead of persecuting so-called heretics, it would have locked up that charlatan long ago.”
The lass Luisa really did recover, at least in the sense that her scabs disappeared after a few days. This came about by rubbing them with an infusion of ground-up, three-year-old tobacco leaves from Trinidad. The results were astounding. On his visit to the girl’s house at the end of the week, the doctor took advantage of the opportunity to speak with her father. This business is a bit complicated, thus I will attempt to explain it with a preface of sorts. The doctor had a house in “The Skulls,” as the region of Sevilla around the Puerta de Jerez was known; he rented out the house in question. But he had long since gotten it into his head and had been trying — although not very energetically — to buy up a relatively large piece of land next to it and to include it in his yard. The land was empty and belonged to the municipality, because it was an ancient Roman burial ground — hence the name, and indeed, you really could find some bone or other there if you dug a meter or so into the ground. I’ve even heard that during floods sometimes bones come floating to the surface. For this reason, the municipality had put a ban on building anything whatsoever there, as it considered the space a cemetery. The doctor, as well as many others, had built houses there before the municipality made this decision, which, in a rapidly growing city like Sevilla, became the object of endless disputes, and the municipality perhaps would have given permission to build there if the church, which objected to such building, hadn’t gotten involved. To confuse matters completely, the king’s people also got involved in the dispute, as they wanted to build a station there to tax the wine and foodstuffs that entered Sevilla through the Puerta de Jerez. The merchants, who until then had pressured the municipality to get rid of the ban, were now divided and began arguing amongst themselves — which side they were on, of course, depended on whether they imported goods through the port, where they were taxed in any case, or whether they transported them via Puerta de Jerez, where they were not taxed. Of course, not everyone could bring their goods in through the Puerta de Jerez — those who traded in transoceanic goods had to stop at the port, like it or not. Even if they were sneaky enough to stop at the Port of Cadiz and from there to continue overland, they would still get taxed at the Port of Cadiz. Thus, the merchants who traded in goods from outside the country were for repealing the ban, while those who traded in local goods were against it. So this is the situation the doctor was trying to pick his way through and somehow acquire that bit of land next to his house in the Skulls.