The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet Read Free Page B

seats, galleries, and balconies—and when María de Castro, in her role as Petronila, spoke these lines:
    Count me, Bargas, as good as dead,
My mind is gone, I am not myself . . .
the musketeers, who, as I mentioned before, were very hard to please indeed, showed clear signs of approval, standing on tiptoe in order to get a better view; and, in the upper gallery, the women stopped munching on hazelnuts, limes, and cherries. María de Castro was the most beautiful and most famous actress of her day; she embodied, as no other actress, the strange, magnificent human reality that was our theater, a theater that always hovered between, on the one hand, holding up a mirror to everyday life—at times a satirical, distorting mirror—and, on the other, presenting us with the most beautiful and thrilling of fantasies. La Castro was a spirited woman, with a lovely figure and an even lovelier face: dark, almond eyes, white teeth, pale skin, and a beautiful, well-proportioned mouth. Other women envied her beauty, her clothes, and her way of speaking the verse. Men admired her as an actress and lusted after her as a woman, and this latter fact met with no opposition from her husband, Rafael de Cózar, who was equally celebrated as an actor and as one of the glories of the Spanish stage. I will have more to tell of him later, but for now I will just say this: Cózar specialized in playing fathers, witty knaves, saucy servants, and rustic mayors, roles which—to the delight of adoring audiences—he performed with great style and swagger. Theatrical talents aside, however, Cózar had no qualms about allowing discreet access to the charms of the four or five women in his company, on receipt, naturally, of an agreed fee. The women were, of course, all married, or at least passed as such in order to meet the requirements of edicts that had been in effect since the days of the great Philip II. As Cózar said, with pleasing effrontery, it would be both selfish and lacking in charity—that theological virtue—not to share great art with those who can afford to pay for it. His own wife, María de Castro (years later it was learned that their marriage was, in fact, a sham), proved to be a mine more profitable even than those of Peru, although he always held in reserve—as the most exquisite of delicacies—that Aragonese beauty with chestnut hair and the sweetest of voices. In short, the clear-headed Cózar fitted, as few men else, this dictum by Lope:
    The honor of the married man is a castle
In which the enemy is the castle’s keeper.
    Let us, though, be as fair as the present story demands. The truth is that La Castro did sometimes have less venal ideas and tastes, and it was not always jewelry that made her lovely eyes shine. Men, as the saying goes, are there to be kissed, cozened, or cuckolded. As far as kissing goes, I will just say, dear reader, that María de Castro and Diego Alatriste were rather more than just friends—the captain’s ill humor and the quarrel with Caridad la Lebrijana were not unrelated to this fact—and that afternoon at the Corral de la Cruz, during the second act, the captain kept his eyes fixed on the actress, while I kept looking from him to her. I felt concerned for my master and sad for La Lebrijana, of whom I was very fond. Then again, I was also thrilled to the core to be there, reliving the impression La Castro had made on me three or four years earlier, on my first visit to the theater to see El Arenal de Sevilla , in the Corral del Príncipe, on that memorable day when everyone, including Charles, Prince of Wales and the then Duke of Buckingham, was embroiled in a fight in the presence of Philip IV himself. I may not have thought the lovely actress the most beautiful creature on earth—that title belonged to another woman known to you, dear reader, a woman with devilish blue eyes—but I was as stirred by her looks as every other man present. I could not have imagined then how María de Castro