The Scroll of Seduction by Gioconda Belli Read Free Book Online Page A

her children be raised as worthy princes and princesses of Castile and Aragon, which implies a number of duties. I learn to play the clavichord, to dance, to knit. If I behave well, Teresa takes me to the kitchen and prepares rose sugar sweets for me. If I am rowdy or laugh too loud, I get a smack because experience shows that physical punishment cures recklesness in girls and that pain is a healthy way of disciplining our bodies. I have started classes with my tutor, the Dominican Andrés de la Miranda. He left his monastery in Burgos in order to become our private instructor. In Latin class, my younger sister María puts her head down on the table and sleeps. I can’t sleep because Father Andrés is very strict and admonishes me, describing the torments of hell. He burned the tip of my ring finger with a charred stick to help my imagination visualize the sensation of the burning flames that will consume me if I don’t learn to be a good Christian. I kicked and screamed, but my mother, who came when she heard me calling to her, smiled at the monk and approved of his barbaric methods. Don Andrés talks about the large numbers of infidels who roam free in our kingdom and worship other gods. Beatriz Galindo contradicts him and extols the benefits of living alongside Jews and Moors. Secretly, she shares poems and stories of courtly love with me. I devour them on the nights my parents are busy with court festivities. I dream of becoming an adult and no longer having to live through wars, persecutions, and fear.
    I, Lucía, remember the nun at the Catholic school in my country who, when I was a small child, also invited me to hold my finger over a lit match, to demonstrate the torments of hell. And then there is Mother Aurora, a fair-skinned nun with a glass eye, who often supervises us in the dormitory, and who told me that taking a shower for more than half an hour is tempting the devil.
    Those are vestiges of the mentality that led to the Inquisition, Manuel says. Your parents were the ones who chose Torquemada as the Great Inquisitor, he adds. In securing an austere and intolerant court they seeked to debilitate the alliance between the traditional nobility and the corrupt, licentious priests, as well as raise their own status in the eyes of Rome. Their strategy worked. Those were the years when they abolished the classic, white mourning attire, and substituted it for all-black apparel. They cultivated a severe, penitent mind-set, which suspected color, the pleasure of the eyes, or the the delights of food. They shaped the “Castilian” spirit and made Castilian Spanish–with its harsh, guttural, masculine sounds, which only Latin American Spanish has managed to soften–into the official language of the land.
    Poor Juana, growing up surrounded by punctilious governesses averse to fun and affection. Poor Juana, having a tutor like Miranda, who got his kicks by making note of the different types of heresy, from the common to the exotic, in dossiers that he always carried with him and that she read behind his back.
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    I WOULD READ THE CONFESSIONS OF CURANDERAS, THE WOMEN FOLK healers who read the future in the bowels of rabbits. That sinister world seemed no darker to me than the corridors of our palaces, traversed night and day by whispering clerics who stared at me, even as a child, with obsequious compassion and thinly veiled concupiscence. Few were the joys I found among the men entrusted with my education and care. Perhaps my father’s rejection was contagious and the three princesses born after Juan reminded them of the vagaries of a womb that seemed only to give birth to one female after another. María, Catalina, and I would always be reminders to my father that his virility had produced only one male heir to the throne: our weak, scrawny brother Juan, who I surpassed both on horseback and in archery skills; I never shot an arrow from my crossbow that wouldn’t hit its