Read Online Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer - Free Book Online Page B

thinking that at that moment there weren’t any, I won’t even say baths, not even a toilet or a miserable septic tank in all of Castile, so I put on an enthusiastic expression.”
    “In the end it turns out you’re not brazen faced, as I believed, but rubber faced.”
    “It depends. When they left me alone, which means they left me with three servants who were running all over the place and as far as I could tell didn’t do anything, I stretched out on a bed that had a bunch of curtains but was very comfortable and I went to sleep.”
    “How you can sleep in the midst of the things that happen to you is something that I do not understand.”
    “If I couldn’t fall asleep as necessary, things would have stopped happening to me a while ago.”
    “Should I make more coffee?”
    “I was about to ask what you were waiting for. About two hours later, they came to wake me with a good bit of to-do and they brought me those clothes I told you about, all on top of a cushion. There was even a hat, my God. And a sword. The shoes were both for the same foot and I almost let out a yell but I realized in time that it would be many more years before they made them different. I put everything on and thus I went into the throne room or whatever it was.”
    “Go on, go on, what was it like?”
    “A bore, full of announcements, marches, countermarches, blows of the staff and I don’t know what. And they all had a stench of goat that would knock you over. And it was hot. And I was already up to here with the Spanish monarchy.”
    “Castile and Aragon.”
    “Whatever. The protocol, I don’t even remember the protocol, but do you want me to tell you something? Isabel was quite pretty, not as pretty as Doña Francisca María Juana de Soler y Torrelles Abramonte, and older, but pretty. In the face, at least; as to the rest, I have no idea, with all those infected rags. Fernando had a tic and opened and closed his eyes every five seconds. If he’d been one of the boys at the café, they’d have called him Neon Sign, bet on it. And guess who was at the side of the throne?”
    “The lousy little friar.”
    “Exactly.”
    We heard a hissing in the garden and there was a crack of thunder but the cat was unperturbed.
    “It’s raining,” Trafalgar said. “Didn’t I tell you? The combination of rain and coffee reminds me of the feast of the lightning bolts on Trudu. Do you know what Trudu is?”
    “No, but I imagine it’s somewhere where it always rains and where coffee comes out of the faucets instead of water.”
    “Trudu? No. To begin, there are no faucets and to continue, it rains once every ten years.”
    “Great for growing rice.”
    “Although you might not believe it, they grow rice, though of course not the rice you know. And in addition, the rain.”
    “I don’t care!” I yelled so loud that the cat opened her eyes and even made a comment under her breath. “Keep Trudu, it’s my gift to you, but go on with your presentation at court and with the little friar and with Isabel and with Fernando.”
    “Fernando you can file away without a pang of conscience. Now, Isabel,” he smiled again and two smiles from Trafalgar in a single morning is a record, “was very pretty, yes, but she was a real man with a pair of brass balls. You could see it in her eyes and in the fact that although she had a more than acceptable mouth, she could narrow it until it resembled a stab wound. And her shoulders well back, her neck straight and her hands strong. I said, this girl is going to cause me trouble.”
    “And the little priest?”
    “There you have it, the little priest was the one who gave me the trouble although for the moment he was lying low. That time it did catch my attention that he always appeared at the important meetings, that he was so close to the throne and that nobody seemed to pay him any attention. I went so far as to think he surely wasn’t what he seemed, but with as much care as I had to take with what I