THE DAY OF THE MAGDALENA

The crosswinds of history continued to whip my face. Icy, wintery ones that blew furiously in the winters through the gutter Calle Real up Calle Real down. there was no other distraction. The three P's of that winter: pipes, walks and home. Eolo bulges threateningly at Segovia brandishing his heralding trident of flu and pneumonia. That place was the place where the old walled city made us bald and showed its ass of living rock. The windy whims of Pluto blow that blows you incubated plague and death. It was the route where the hearses descended on their way to the Santo Ángel cemetery. Whenever I walk down that hill, gloomy thoughts come to my mind and I always stop to meditate in front of the window of the Cervantes bookstore. My countrymen are people with a bad temper who, under the guise of familiarity and good-naturedness, keep the letter of the convert up their sleeve. Some have bad ideas about us and in the past the Bravos, the Coronels, the Dávilas made war. Beneath the noble profile, the hidalgos of dripping -go on, hide the tragic face and comunero of envy and gossip that lead to civil war. In the same way that Jerusalem had the mania of stoning her prophets, here the one who slacks off has his head cut off. They always walked with brown beaks but their pulse did not tremble when it came to stoning the hetairas. The priestesses of taste sweetened the old city a bit, covered in acibar and rancor. One day Cirila, who was the madame, the teacher bee, the abbess of that Monastery of Venus, by another name La Farela, had to come out to beat a mob of youngsters who were pounding the doors and windows of that Cupid's dovecote walled to the convent of Visitation nuns:

"Are you not ashamed of you horny dogs against this tabernacle that keeps the mysteries of the Eucharist of delight where many of you were engendered?" exclaimed the abbess of Venus, who had been a cook before becoming a friar. She professed but had love affairs with a chaplain of Moorish origin, she left the convent of San Vicente down there and professed in the oldest trade in the world.

I well remember Cirila that afternoon, which was none other than that of July 22. Raising all the upright and repentant, they celebrate the right hand of the Sinner. She appeared under the lintel of the gate of happiness and regrets half naked with her tits in the air, made a Eumenide. In the presence of her imposing presence we all ran away from the door of the mancebía and my friend Carrasco, the son of a civil guard sprained a skin.

—Afufa, this aunt kills us

Oh, what voices Cirila, who was Galician, used to hit. Dejected, we gave up the idea of edging those doors and windows like parapets lined with sheets of zinc. Some jumped into the academy stables and others went down to take refuge in the arcades of the Santa Eulalia atrium where a hackberry tree cast its shadow in the heatwave. The madame did not stop calling us sons of bitches.

—If I go there, I capo you and leave you without a pilila.

The voice of the poor woman, full of anger, resounded throughout the alley of Santa Isabel. The heraldic ghosts of the palace of the Marquis of Buitrago disturbed the sad rooms of that haunted house, which no one had entered since it was closed in the 16th century. Then Agapito Marazuela, a neighbor of that neighborhood, who was rehearsing his popular tunes to the dulzaina, putting an end to the exercise, left the whistle in a corner and stuck his head out of the balcony and looked at us with one eye covered. The cemetery chaplain began a mass for the dead with them and the quatrains of the Dies Irae by Tomás Selano were heard

"What the hell is going on?" Is the world sinking? Did the doomsday trumpet sound?—asked the Domine Cabra who had just opened the House to pupils.

His oratory and his house of Latinism gave in from the back with the brothel. Altars, taverns, brothels, councils were always in secret communication through Old Castile and this is not by chance. But the clergyman, Cerbatana, does not use such fussiness, not because of virtue, but because a shake with the famous Emerenciana, a party girl from Teruel, cost ten maravedíes. The Domine listened to the voices and insults of the priestess of love as if they were responses from Jeremiah:

"I swear that the maiden seems a bit alienated," he said, laughing to himself at the strands of their beards through which hunger was creeping, and he retired to his chambers. He pouted and said that those voices were an excuse to leave his students without dinner. They would fast for the conversion of the sinner.

Apparently (and this was the explanation given by Uncle Braguetita, a regular customer), Doña Cirila was furious because a captain from the Flanders tercios had arrived bellowing like a father bull in desire for a female and had taken his best pupil and almost discovered her.

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