A Woman of Seville Read Free Page B

surly hands at the back of my neck, loosening the clasp on the ruff. If I resist, it’ll give him more pleasure. What he likes most is to prise my petals open after they’ve retracted. The more I squeal and avert my face, the more passionate his kisses become. But I can sometimes divert his attention by plying him with spicy condiments and brandied preserves. Then he may fall asleep without exacting his full due.
    I stand before the mirror, augmenting my hair, and as I always do when I consider my face at this ruefully expectant time, just before he arrives, I wonder by what calamity of mistaken roads I’ve come to be here, confronting a visage of just such a person as myself with just such a misplaced expression.
    And I confess to you that tending to Bishop Rizi’s probing sex that needs to be milked each dawn like acow’s distended teat, is not as bad as watching my mother fall asleep when I was nine and sleep for a week and not ever wake up. It is nowhere near as bad as the drunken-when-I-wasn’t-drunk childhood years that followed, when I wandered about in a cloudy haze. The knocking phase I remember clearly: my father locked in the pantry with the cooking woman and my constant knocking on the pantry door to get their attention. They inside, at their foul business, upsetting pots and pans. My knocking and knocking. The cooking woman shouting at me to leave off.
    Nothing in my present life is as woeful as watching my father wasting away, coughing blood, then marrying the cook a month before he died. No slights from others sound as cruel as my step-mother telling me I was too fetching and that she wanted to scratch my eyes out for it. And no hardship is as grim as my first year in Seville—1605—the year of the drought.
    ‘The padres will put us in the orphanage,’ warned my friend Hortense who’d fled the village with me. We were walking down a Sevillian street when the famous dust-storm struck. I shut my eyes, choked on flying soil. Before I knew what had happened someone had pulled me into a tavern for safety. A mature woman offered me a hot meal and a cot for the night. In the darkness, later, a strange man forcedhimself upon me, forced himself into me. I laughed with embarrassment. Why was he doing this? It was a mistake. He hasn’t recognised me for the wrong person. Instead of fighting him off, which I would have done now, I started talking to him like he was a decent human being.
    ‘It’s not rape when the man pays,’ responded the female procuress, met by my delayed outburst of tears. She handed me enough money to keep me alive for a week. At dawn I ran away, thinking it was Armageddon, the dust still hanging in the air. Nowhere could I find Hortense. I decided to sleep in a graveyard, close enough to the church to keep the fornicators away, but not so close as to be pocketed by the orphanage.
    When my money ran out I knocked on more doors, offering to do anything for a cup of clean water. Knocking on doors or pulling chimes still produces anxiety in me now, years later, when I don’t have to beg for a thing. But perhaps I’m haunted by my earlier knocking on the pantry door? Whatever the cause, I will call, shout even, before I resort to knocking in the customary way.
    I tell you honestly that tending to Bishop Rizi’s needs, knowing full well what I’m doing and feeling in charge of my destiny, is nothing to that first year in Seville when I had to face the onslaught of male hands spouting like jutting gargoyles from doors and windows; male snake-arms ridingup my skirt and sliding down my bodice wherever I went. From no man was I safe; both young and old accosted me. Whichever way I turned men were laughing lasciviously, moist purple tongues lolling out of mouths, tongues longer than any I’d ever seen sliding out of orifices and chasing me down the street.
    There are four gates into Seville, we are told so often, and I have no doubt that my fate would have been different had I entered the