He continued walking along in silence, handing me the pits from the figs. I hurled them into the gardens along the street.
“But what about the pope, señor. .” I said after a moment. “He doesn’t have weapons. Fine, so he does have money, that’s true, but. . that’s not the point. You understand what I’m trying to say, señor.”
“Yes, I understand,” the doctor nodded. “But that is a very long story. And at the end we’ll still arrive back at those two things, but after lots of chatter.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “But if our system is simple, señor”—I added after a pause—“why is it so hard from someone to get a hold of a plot of land in the Skulls? Perhaps it isn’t as simple as it looks, after all?”
“It’s completely simple,” the doctor shook his head vigorously. “The system is simple, but very confused.”
“Simple, but very confused?” I repeated.
“Simple, but very confused!” the doctor nodded categorically.
We continued walking down the street. And where is Jesús, the reader might ask. Had Dr. Monardes caught him dancing flamenco and fired him? No, Jesús hadn’t been fired. The doctor had let him go home, since his wife was due to give birth. Dr. Monardes was to perform the delivery personally. That’s precisely where we were headed now — we were walking down the streets of the Triana slum towards Jesús’ house to see how his wife was.
“What a repulsive place!” the doctor said and started coughing violently. “The smells make your head spin and irritate your lungs.”
I personally didn’t find the smells unpleasant. To me, it smelled like oranges, horses, fried meat, river mud, and tobacco. Nothing was irritating my lungs. And my head? My head was perfectly fine. My mind was clearer, sharper, more focused, profound, and insightful than ever, I would say. I missed the animals. Not that I would return to them, of course. And in fact, it wasn’t the animals. I am missing something, Pelletier says, but what it is, I don’t know. More precisely, those aren’t Pelletier’s words, but the Earth’s, right after she collides with the Medusa, miscarries, and loses the Moon. I am missing something, but what it is, I don’t know. Exactly at that moment, Mars turns his back and begins to move away, finally reaching as far away as he is today.
14. Against Toothaches
Urbi et Orbi, L’Amour des amours. Jesús’ wife gave birth to a pair of twins. Not exactly on the day the doctor and I went to their house, but two days later, and shortly before the doctor arrived, so in the end the delivery was performed by an old woman. “She was so blind,” Jesús said, “that I was astonished she didn’t miss one of the twins.” Jesús is very proud. Proud and saddened at the same time. Why he is saddened is completely clear, in my opinion, when you take into account the fact that even before this he had four mouths to feed, but why he is proud perhaps requires clarification. He is proud because he fathered twins. He doesn’t know anyone else with twins, I only know one person, while the doctor, after considerable reflection, was able to think of two. Thus, it really is a rare thing.
Jesús wanted to name the twins Pedro and Pablo, after the saints. But he already has a son named Pablo. The local priest suggested naming him Pablo-Hiero, as two names with a hyphen, but Jesús’ wife categorically refused to give the boy that name and was stubborn in her refusal. “I would’ve given her a good beating any other time,” Jesús said, “which would have cleared the problem right up, but now isn’t quite the moment for that.” In the end, the news got around and even reached Cardinal Rodrigo de Castro himself, the archbishop of Sevilla, who personally wanted to baptize the twins as part of the consecration of a new church in the Santa Cruz neighborhood. He suggested calling the child Pablo Junior, but the mother again refused. She didn’t want him to be called Pablo at all like her other son. They finally decided to name him Rodrigo, after the cardinal. But since Pedro and Rodrigo somehow didn’t go together, the other twin was christened Alvaro, after the cardinal’s nephew. So in the end they named them Alvaro and Rodrigo.
In the meantime, the doctor was called to the prison to examine the Cervantes. The fact of the matter was that the higher-ups had decided to release him, thus the prison authorities wanted to let him go in good shape, so he couldn’t complain about them afterwards. They did this from time to time with someone they considered more important or who could create problems for them in some way. Cervantes could stick it to you good in some play, and besides, he was a royal servant, after all. In principle, the prison doctor was Hernando Alemán. He did a slapdash job, and if you are a Sevillian prisoner and expect him to take care of you, you are sorely deceiving yourself. And why should he care, when his salary was thirty ducats a year, two and a half per month? I earned more as a student of Dr. Monardes. Dr. Alemán would’ve starved to death on that salary if he didn’t have a private practice as well. My point is that he usually didn’t take care of the prisoners at all, unless somebody well nigh went and died, but in cases when the authorities wanted to cover their asses and free someone healthy, he would examine him and treat him insofar as he could, and afterwards the poor fellow would sign a document saying he had no complaints. Only then would they let him go. Cervantes’s case was far better than most, in the sense that he actually was healthy except for a toothache. The prison authorities were prepared to solve the problem immediately by simply having Dr. Alemán pull the tooth, but Cervantes (who indeed had only a few teeth left in his mouth, as I was subsequently able to confirm) asked to keep it. He even suggested to the authorities that he sign the document saying he was healthy and then get the tooth treated once he was out, but the authorities refused. Why? Why is a good question. Who knows why? They simply refused. Perhaps inexplicably, yet very categorically. You’ll never understand the Spanish authorities if you ask why this, why that. The Spanish authorities are a very complicated thing. In order to understand them, you must ask: “What is in the way?” If there is some large obstacle, that means something won’t happen. In any other case — it might. Anyway, Cervantes then requested that Dr. Monardes be called in to treat his tooth. Dr. Alemán would not normally have paid him any attention and would have just yanked his tooth in the end, but his son was also a novelist, so he, it seems, felt a certain sympathy for Cervantes. For this reason, he promised to call Dr. Monardes and actually did it. Cervantes, however, did not have the money to pay the doctor’s high fee. Instead, he promised to praise him in one of his works. “My very next one”—was what he said.
It goes without saying that Dr. Monardes was not the least bit impressed by this suggestion. Yet he decided to show some good will, and besides, he didn’t want to refuse Dr. Alemán and the royal authorities in principle.
“Do we have any appointments today?” he asked me in the morning.
I opened the notebook and said: “Not today. Tomorrow you have a visit to Father Luis del Alcazar, the Jesuit, to check on his fever.”
“And nothing else until then?” the doctor asked.
“Nothing else,” I replied.
“Good, then let’s go see Cervantes,” the doctor said. “This one will be on me, since I knew his father. .”
After all, the prison was spitting distance from us, also on Sierpes Street, near the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s palace. It was an enormous prison, or rather, an overcrowded one. Eighteen thousand people passed through it a year.
“If you believe the figure published by the municipal authorities, señor,” I said as we walked there, “there could be eighteen thousand people in that prison at the moment. That would mean that every sixth person in Sevilla was a prisoner!”