Free Iacobus by Matilde Asensi Page A

amazing ability to forget everything that didn’t interest him.
    At night, especially those nights we spent in the open air in the middle of a field, I watched him sleeping by the light of the hot coals, looking for the distant traits of his mother in his face. And, to my distress, I found them. He had the same thin eyebrows and the same hairline, and the ovalness of his face drew the same perfect angles and the same shadows. Someday I would have to tell him the truth. But not yet. It was still not the right time. I wasn’t prepared and I wondered, full of terror, if I ever would be.
    We entered Paris on a hot and sunny summer’s morning, just a few days after Jonas’ fourteenth birthday, crossing the wall of Philip Augustus through the door of the tower of Nesle and coming out on the other side. As we couldn’t stay in the provincial captaincy of my Order, we sought shelter in a guest house in the suburbium of Marais, outside of the walls, in a hostel named Au Lion d’Or. The choice was not accidental: A few houses further down began what was once the populous Jewish quarters of Paris, now almost deserted following the expulsion ordered by Philip, and next to it, towering and majestic, the pointed towers of the monastery residency of the Knights Templar rose high in the sky. You only had to admire those walled constructions in the middle of the swampy ground for a moment and break it down into sectors to understand just how far the power and wealth of the Templars reached. More than four thousand people, including milites, refugees of royal justice, artisans, peasants and Jews had lived inside it. The truly amazing thing was not that Philip IV had the audacity to order the mass detention of its occupants in the middle of the night, no; the thing that was impossible to conceive is that he had gotten away with it. That fortress on the outskirts of Paris seemed really impregnable. Now it was in the hands of my Order and although it pained me to say it, there was nothing left of its prior splendor.
    Our room at the Hostel Au Lion d’Or was large and sunny and had a wide scrinium for working, a small table with a sink and superb views over the fields of the Marais forisburgus (3) . Furthermore, and most importantly, the meals cooked by the owner weren’t all that bad. My wooden bed was in the middle of the room and Jonas’ straw cot was under the window. At first I thought it would be best to swap places to avoid him getting pneumonia but then I changed my mind. Lying there he could look at the constellations and the celestial phenomena. A couple of blankets would be enough to ward off the cold of night.
    If you don’t mind my saying, I would say that the only bad thing about Paris is that it’s full of people. Everywhere you look there are groups of students, actors performing their art, merchants discussing prices, nobles hunting for adventure, peasants, workers, chaplains on their way to their residences or the numerous convents in the city, Jews, vagabonds, paupers, painters, goldsmiths, prostitutes, gamblers, royal guards, knights, nuns … They say that two hundred thousand people live there, and it even got to a point where the authorities had to put heavy chains at the ends of the streets to be able to block them off and moderate the circulation of people, coaches and riders. I had never seen in any other city — and I’ve been to a lot throughout my life —, traffic as terrible as that of Paris. Not a day goes by that somebody isn’t killed from being run over by the carriage of a speed lover. Naturally, with such commotion, robberies are as common as the Pater Noster, and you have to be very careful that your bag of gold isn’t stolen without you even realizing. And to finish off the list of bad things about Paris, I would say that if there is one thing that is more abundant than the people, it’s the rats, rats as big as pigs. Any day in this city can be exhausting.
    In the middle of that craziness I