The Scroll of Seduction by Gioconda Belli Read Free Book Online

you.” And he started to brush my hair, straightening it, and then slowly, gently pulling it back. Touching my ears and neck every once in a while, he slowly braided my hair and then secured it with the tortoiseshell clip.
    Instantaneously, I looked completely different. Dignified. Elegant. Finally Manuel looked at me, and we smiled into the mirror. His eyes came back to the present. He took my hand and twirled me around and then went to the far side of the room to look at me from afar and get the whole effect.
    â€œExtraordinary,” he said. “Welcome to the Renaissance.”

CHAPTER 3
    I n the Madrid early afternoon, with the mezzanine windows half-opened to a partly cloudy day, dressed like a princess, I sit on the sofa that Manuel places in the middle of the room. He sits behind me. And tells me to close my eyes. He speaks in a low voice, slowly, deliberately. He susurrates. I let the voice take me with it. I sink into it and emerge someplace else. I am Juana.
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    AND IT IS TOLEDO. NOVEMBER 6, 1479, THE DAY OF MY BIRTH. Beatriz Galindo, an olive-skinned woman with Castilian features, black hair pulled back into a low bun, and small, sparkly eyes, is there when her friend, Queen Isabella, my mother, delivers me. Finally, my head pokes out, and amid relieved cries and a solemn silence, the midwives wrench me from my original vortex and present me to the uncertain world I am about to join. I can feel slender hands, calluses on palms. No longer protected, enshrouded, my exposed skin registers the weave of the fabric swaddling me. I feel myself transported, from precipice to precipice, from one set of arms to another. The world is deafening and the brightness unforgiving. I want to go back to the warm, wet depths of the womb. I am hungry and distressed and I want to cry. A breast appears before me. Soon I will recognize it as belonging to my nurse, María de Santiesteban. My mother will not feed me; she has to feed the kingdom, and I am but her third child.
    â€œI want my daughter to learn Latin, Beatriz,” I hear my mother say. “I want her to enjoy the pleasures of the intellect. Given that she will never be queen, she ought to be a princess with a brain.”
    â€œYes, Isabel. Now you rest. She’ll be beautiful,” says Beatriz. “Look how delicate her features are. She’s a Trastámara.”
    â€œI shall call her Juana. Juan was named after John the Baptist. She will be commended to John the Evangelist.”
    In a little while, Ferdinand, my father, will come in to greet my mother and to meet me. He’ll glance at me indifferently. I am not the son he had hoped for, and he casts his cold eyes over my tiny body, swathed in wool, startling me from my sleep and making me wail and holler. My mother comforts me. She rocks me for the first time, in front of my father. I recognize her warmth and her heartbeat; I recognize the body I used to inhabit, the castle where I was once my own cloistered room. Her proximity makes me feel whole again, makes me feel intact. My nose nestles her breast, searching for that familiar scent, that part of me that has been taken away. Lying in her arms, I no longer feel my father glower or notice the cold.
    Manuel’s voice, so close to my ear, whisks me through time, and my first few years blur into a series of shadowy images.
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    WE’RE A FAMILY OF NOMADS. MY ROYAL PARENTS ARE WAGING A WAR, and their itinerant court moves from castle to castle. First they battled the supporters of Juana la Beltraneja in the War of Succession. After their victory in 1485 they continued to consolidate their power and moved to end the domination of the Moors by conquering their last stronghold: Granada. They set up court wherever it is militarily convenient. My sister, María, was born, and now my wet nurse breast-feeds her, and a woman named Teresa de Manrique becomes my governess. I have hardly any time to play, because my mother has demanded that