Purity of Blood

That night, finally, I could sleep peacefully. But the next morning I began to miss my cellmate. Its absence left me time to reflect on other things, such as Angélica’s treachery and the stake where I could, and almost certainly would, end my brief life.

As for their burning me to a crisp, I can say, without braggadocio, that I spent no time at all worrying about that. I was so exhausted by the prison and the torture that any change would seem like a liberation. I often busied myself in calculating how long it would take to burn to death. Then again, if one recants in the proper form, they will use the garrote before lighting the pyre, and the end will come more gently. Whatever they did, I consoled myself, no suffering is eternal; and ultimately there is peace. Furthermore, in those days dying was a common occurrence, easily accomplished. I had not committed sins enough to weigh down my soul to the point of preventing my rejoining, in whatever place, that good soldier Lope Balboa. At my age, and having a certain heroic concept of life—do not forget that I was in these straits because I had not informed on the captain or his friends—the situation was made bearable by considering it a test in which, again begging your pardon, I found I was quite pleased with my performance. I do not know if in truth I truly was a lad with natural courage; but the Lord God above knows that if the first step toward courage consists of comporting oneself as if one were indeed courageous, I—let the record show—had taken not a few of those steps.

Nevertheless, I was hopelessly melancholy, filled with a deep anguish—something akin to wanting to cry but which had nothing to do with the tears of pain or physical weakness that were sometimes spilled. It was instead a cold, sorrowful sadness related to the memory of my mother and my little sisters, the captain’s look when he silently approved of something I had done, the soft green hillsides around Oñate, my childhood games with boys who had lived nearby. I regretted that I had to bid farewell to all that forever, and I mourned all the beautiful things that had awaited me in life, and that now I would never have. And especially, more than anything, I was sad not to look for one last time into the eyes of Angélica de Alquézar.

I swear to Your Mercies that I could not hate her. Just the opposite, knowing that she had played a part in my misfortune left a bittersweet taste that heightened the sorcery of her memory. She was wicked—and she became more so with time, I swear in Christ’s name—but she was breathtakingly beautiful. And it was precisely the combination of evil and beauty, so tightly entwined, that fascinated me, an agonizing pleasure as I suffered every torment because of her. By my faith, one would think I was enchanted. Later, as the years went by, I heard stories of men whose souls had been stolen by a wily Devil, and in each of them I recognized my own rapture. Angélica de Alquézar held my soul in thrall, and she kept it as long as she lived.

And I, who would have killed for her a thousand times, and died for her another thousand without blinking an eye, will never forget her incomparable smile, her cold blue eyes, her snowy white skin, so soft and smooth, the touch still on my own skin, now covered with ancient scars, some of which, pardiez, she herself gave me. Like the one on my back, a long scar from a dagger, as indelible as that night, long after the time I am writing about here, when we were no longer children, and I held her in my arms, both loving and hating her, not caring whether I would be dead or alive at dawn. When she, so close to me, whispering through lips red from kissing my wound, spoke the words I shall never forget, in this life or in the next: “I am happy I have not killed you yet.”

Frightened, prudent, or perhaps astute, if not all of those things, Luis de Alquézar was a patient crow, and he had the cards to play the game by his rules. So he was careful not to give the advantage to anyone. Diego Alatriste’s name was not broadcast anywhere, and he spent the day, like all the previous ones, out of sight in the room in Juan Vicuña’s gaming house. But during that period, the captain’s nights were more active than his days, and in the dark of the next one, he made another visit to an old acquaintance.