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“I hear Quiteria Escárcega has two lovers and lets them both take her at the same time,”
“There is no greater burden than a fool for a wife.
Because she had never known the pleasure of excitement, she didn’t understand the impulse to bring someone else into that glimmering state, the instinct to multiply her delight, to offer it up in a glass to be shared.
“A servant who can’t speak?” her husband said. “Dios, we should all be so blessed.”
“No, señor,” she said. “It is only that I have nothing to say.” She had plenty to say. About the thin stew and those pearl earrings and the price of salt and about the unpleasant surprise that even magic could become drudgery. But it was nothing they wanted to hear.
Money was a wonderful tonic for fear.
There is a fine line between a saint and a witch, and I wonder if you are prepared to walk it.”
There was nothing more dangerous than a woman with a pen in her hand.
“Spanish,” she lied. “No great miracle has ever been worked in Castilian.” “And why is that?” “Because it is a language that spends its power in command and conquest.
But who knew how long any of it would last, lost to exile and the Inquisition, magic bleeding away with the bodies of Jews and Muslims, their poetry silenced, their knowledge buried in the stones of synagogues made into churches, the arches of Mudéjar palaces.
“Fear nothing, Luzia Cotado, and you will become greater than them all. Now sing for me.”
“Is he cruel to you? Has he hurt you?” “He is a man and so the answer must be yes.”
Hair that had survived the destruction of the temple, the Roman legions, the long road to Morocco, that had endured conquest, and conversion, to be tied up like a secret in her little white cap. Hair of the sands, of sun-washed stones, of a horizon she would never see. Desert hair.
“What does a beetle think of the boot that crushes it? It is a very excellent boot with a most impressive sole and made of the finest leather.”
“No one can,” Santángel said. “Not even God.” “You think he’s a fraud?” “Fortún Donadei or God?”
Did she have a lover? And why did the thought make him want to find this mysterious suitor and bury a knife in his heart?
Maybe she had wanted him to. See me. See that I am more than this charade of mumbling humiliation.
It had never occurred to him that his wife could be happy, or that he might be the one to make her happy, or that in doing so he might be made happy in return.
“All empires are the same empire to the poor and the conquered. But not all empires are the same. The Dutch and the English will build markets for their goods, colonies for their taxes, new routes of trade. They will bleed the world for an age. Spain builds nothing, just spends its stolen wealth on wars that have no end.
“Do you want your vanity stroked?” “I’m a man, so the answer is always yes.”
Just that morning, when Luzia had said she thought anticipation might unravel her, his mind had been overtaken by the thought of twining a strand of her hair around his finger, of releasing it and watching the curl spring back. Unravel. A single word might drive him mad. It stuck in his mind like a thorn, infecting him with a kind of fever, the thought of Luzia Cotado unraveling.
“I didn’t come here to win!” Gracia bellowed. “I came here to find a husband!”
In the gardens, one of Pérez’s guards turned to the man he’d stood watch with for the better part of two years and said, “Don’t you think it’s time we stopped pretending?”
“Because he made a deal with the devil?” Valentina winced. She shook her head. “Because he is a man, Luzia.”
All this spectacle, all this misery, and she didn’t fear hell more than being shut up in a house with her lawful husband.
