Excerpt of Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte
(Page 2 of 9)
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Well, then. My father was the other Spanish soldier who
returned that night. His name was Lope Balboa; he was from the province
of Guipuzcoa, and he, too, was a courageous man. They say that Diego
Alatriste and he were very good friends, almost like brothers, and it
must be true, because later, on the bulwarks of Julich, where my father
was killed by a ball from a harquebus—which was why Diego Velázquez did
not include him in his painting of the Surrender of Breda, as he did
his friend and fellow Diego, Alatriste, who is indeed there, behind the
horse—he swore that he would look after me when I grew out of
childhood. And that is why, when I turned thirteen, my mother supplied
me with shirt and breeches, and a rosary and a crust of bread tied up
in a kerchief, and sent me to live with the captain, taking advantage
of a cousin who was traveling to Madrid. Thus it was that I came to
enter the service, at a rank somewhere between servant and page, of my
father's friend.
A confidence: I very much doubt whether, had she known
him well, the mother who gave me birth would so gaily have sent me to
his service. But I suppose that the title of captain, though
apocryphal, added sheen to his character. Besides, my poor mother was
not well and she had two daughters to feed. By sending me off she had
one fewer mouth at table and at the same time was giving me the
opportunity to seek my fortune at court. So, without bothering to ask
further details, she packed me off with her cousin, together with a
long letter written by the priest of our town, in which she reminded
Diego Alatriste of his promise and his friendship with my deceased
father.
I recall that when I attached myself to the captain,
not much time had passed since his return from Flanders, because he
carried an ugly wound in his side received at Fleurus, still fresh, and
the source of great pain. Newly arrived, timid, and as easily
frightened as a mouse, on my pallet at night I would listen to him pace
back and forth in his room, unable to sleep. And at times I heard him
softly singing little verses, interrupted by stabs of pain: Lope's
verses, then a curse or a comment to himself, partly resigned and
almost amused. That was typical of the captain: to face each of his
ills and misfortunes as if they were a kind of inevitable joke that an
old, perverse acquaintance found entertaining to subject him to from
time to time. Perhaps that was the origin of his peculiar sense of
harsh, unchanging, despairing humor.
That was a long time ago, and I am a bit muddled
regarding dates. But the story I am going to tell you must have taken
place around sixteen hundred and twenty-something. It is the adventure
of masked men and two Englishmen, which caused not a little talk at
court, and in which the captain not only came close to losing the
patched-up hide he had managed to save in Flanders, and in battling
Turkish and Barbary corsairs, but also made himself a pair of enemies
who would harass him for the rest of his life. I am referring to the
secretary of our lord and king, Luis de Alquézar, and to his sinister
Italian assassin, the silent and dangerous swordsman named Gualterio
Malatesta, a man so accustomed to killing his victims from behind that
when by chance he faced them, he sank into deep depressions, imagining
that he was losing his touch. It was also the year in which I fell in
love like a bawling calf, then and forever, with Angélica de Alquézar,
who was as perverse and wicked as only Evil in the form of a blonde
eleven- or twelve-year-old girl can be. But we will tell everything in
its time.
From Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Copyright 1996 by Arturo Perez-Reverte. All rights reserved. Excerpt reproduced with the permission of the Putnam Publishing.
