The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes: a Novel by Stephen Marlowe

Author:Stephen Marlowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628720013
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

XIX

Learning to Cope with April 23rd

I wake with the annual sense of panic. In fact I have lain awake much of the night, listening to the healthy female purr next to me, not quite a snore. So get up, I tell myself. For all you know, this is the final day of your life.

Ritually I curse Cide Hamete. I do not doubt, much less forget, I’m to die on April 23rd. But which April 23rd?

I wonder about this Shakespeare in England. It still sounds like a made-up name. Shake spear! Does he know about April 23rd too? Has he woken with a vague sense of dread, afraid something – the sky maybe – will fall on him today? No, I remind myself. This Shakespeare’s English April 23rd won’t come until the week after next.

Catalina opens a sleepy eye and smiles. A hand brushes at a tangle of black hair. Another hand touches under the covers what she is pleased to call my cock.

‘We’ve never fucked in Madrid,’ says my wife.

We are in the top-floor bedroom of the tall stone house near the Gate of the Sun. The morning after our arrival, I still can’t get over our welcome. Doña Leonor has been almost cordial to the woman she vowed I’d marry over her dead body. But should I be surprised? Doña Leonor’s native Barajas – with its small plaza and parish church, its winter-muddy-summer-dusty streets, its swine and goats, its proud, stiff-necked, hospitable-to-friends, wary-of-strangers people – and Catalina’s village of Esquivias (now my home, though not for much longer) might be the same place. My mother and my wife instinctively understand each other.

Was there a time, I ask myself, when words like fuck and cock came easily to Doña Leonor’s now prudish lips?

Catalina rolls away from me. ‘You’re stiff as a board, all except the part that counts. What’s the matter?’

I haven’t told her about April 23rd.

I say, ‘They’ll hear us.’ This makes me think: Andrea will hear us.

‘So? What do you think they think we do?’

‘Her seamstresses will be here any minute,’ I say.

Catalina brightens. She gets out of bed, walks naked on those sturdy legs to the washbasin, splashes and gurgles. Through a towel she says, ‘Three gowns! Made just for me, by seamstresses who sew for the theatre. I feel so rich. Will you help me choose the patterns?’

‘Sorry, Cat. I have appointments all day.’

I do, including one with Juan Rufo, who wants me to puff a new edition of his Austriada. I have tried to explain this to Catalina, but she refuses to understand.

‘Don’t do it,’ she says. ‘Why help him sell his novel when you want people to buy your novel?’

‘It’s an honour to me that a courtier like Juan Rufo wants me to write a sonnet praising his work. It means my Galatea’s already a succès d’estime.’

‘You get esteem and he gets money? Don’t do it. How many copies has this Austriada of his sold?’

‘Two thousand.’

‘And Galatea?’

‘Almost five hundred,’ I say.

‘Don’t do it,’ she says.

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