The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss

Author:Robert Moss [Moss, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 9781577319016
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THE BEAUTIFUL DREAM SPY

OF MADRID

Inquisitor: “Why have you been arrested?”

Lucrecia de León: “Because of the dreams that are written.”

— FROM THE AUDIENCIA AT TOLEDO, JUNE 4, 1590

He embraced her and told her, “You are so beautiful a dead man would rise up and make you pregnant.”

— TESTIMONY OF CAPTAIN IBÁÑEZ AGAINST LOPE DE MENDOZA,

OIDOR (JUDGE) OF THE INQUISITION, APRIL 4, 1591

When she lies down on her narrow bed, a man comes to her. When he touches her, all her senses come aflame, though she does not explain this to the priest who arrives every morning to steal her dreams on the pretext of hearing her confession. The same man comes to her, night after night. It is impossible not to mention something about him to her confessor, since her adventures nearly always begin with the arrival of her dream lover.

“What is his name?”

“He does not tell me.”

“What does he look like?”

“He looks normal. Like any man who is strong and well made.”

“What about his clothes? How much lace does he wear?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

The word ordinary was safe, dull enough to blunt suspicion. The more she used it, the less she had to turn aside questions that might remind her of the delicious pressure of her lover’s touch, his nails turning arabesques along the insides of her thighs, the way he pleasured every part of her body, releasing wave after wave of delight until she was swimming through the air with him.

“And his speech? Is he of the people, or a caballero?”

“Ordinary.”

So the priest wrote down, with his quill, El Hombre Ordinario. The Ordinary Man.1

Sometimes she would play with her confessor a little.

“He spoke to me of the one who is coming,” she might say.

That always got Fray Lucas excited. Don Alonso, his master, would come to question her closely about the one who was coming. Was this a new king of Spain or the Messiah himself? She encouraged their speculations, which made her important and gave her the aura of prophecy. She did not reveal that the one who was most surely coming was herself. It excited her even now, with her family bowing and scraping to the clerics who roosted in the house like blackbirds, that when she slid between the covers tonight, her anything-but-ordinary man would come to her.

“Could he be John the Baptist?” Don Alonso would ask. He was a great student of scripture.

“He never tells me his name.”

“That would be like Baptist John, to efface himself for the glory of the one whose coming he announces. Do you not concur, doncella?”

“I am no scholar, your eminence.”

She could not tell how it began, even to herself. She was not sure whether he had come through a crack in the window or under the door, like a gust of wind, to stand over her bed, or had materialized out of mere air. Or whether she had stepped into his realm. This was possible, though in appearance the room remained the regular room in her parents’ house, down to the crucifix above the bed and the chamber pot under it.

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