Free Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer

said and did, I left it for later. Don’t forget what I was in the middle of. I had to recount my adventures again, silently invoking Marco Polo, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Italo Calvino, and the annals of geography. It turned out very well: they were all hanging on what I said, they were scared when they were supposed to be scared and they laughed when they were supposed to laugh. I saw Doña Francisca María Juana again.”
    “De Abramonte Soler y Torrelles.”
    “De Soler y Torrelles Abramonte, you would cut a sorrier figure than I at court, and I saw the old fart who alternately drooled and snorted. Fernando closed and opened his eyes more continuously all the time and wiggled his nose and possibly his ears. Isabel, in contrast, went so far as to soften her mouth and smile at me and it seems that was the height of privilege. And speaking of privileges, I even ate with their majesties that night, which is saying a lot.”
    “How was the food?”
    “Rather meager. Frugal, which sounds more elegant. And better we not speak of their majesties’ table manners. Nor of mine, because without forks there’s not much one can do in the way of delicate gestures. The little priest wasn’t there, thank goodness. But it was there that they told me about Columbus. By then I had already begun to get used to it all and I felt like a little picture in a history text, but that was too much. And more so when I asked if I could meet him and they told me they expected him the next day at court, when he was going to inform them of how the preparations for the expedition were going. I don’t know if it was the food which, in addition to being scarce was a sticky, lumpy mess, or the prospect of meeting him personally even if he wasn’t the real one, which in fact he was, but I had a sort of weight in my stomach. Luckily the supper didn’t last long because it seemed one had to go to bed early. Which I did. Early and in company.”
    Another thunder clap, more hisses, more coffee.
    “As I had already suspected that would be the case, or more probably just because that was what I wanted, I got rid of the servants, I took off that ridiculous outfit, I chewed on my nails thinking about coffee, cigarettes, a book by Chandler, Jackaroe, television, anything, and I waited. She came around midnight, when I had already put out the candles but I still didn’t want to admit defeat and go to sleep. I learned the old man had a post that obliged him to go out to inspect the barracks or the markets or I don’t remember what before dawn, and so he went to bed at six in the evening, got up at eleven-thirty, locked her in, and left.”
    “And how did she get out?”
    “Do you think the key has been invented that will keep a woman locked up? Give me a break. And she had accomplices, of course. She left as lookout an old woman who, next to the husband, looked like Miss World, and she came straight to my bed.”
    He was quiet.
    “Trafalgar, don’t get discreet on me.”
    “This time, I’m sorry, but yes, I am going to be discreet.”
    “And how am I going to write your memoirs?”
    “I’ll probably tell you one day. The one thing I’ll tell you is that I was not the first one to put horns on the old man. Rather than annoy me—you know I am a confessed libertine and for that reason I like them chaste and modest—it made me happy, because it was only right the girl have her revenge for the pawing of such a husband. She knew how to get even, I assure you. At dawn, the old woman knocked on the door and she went off in a rush. I ask, do you think you’re in Castile in the 15th century that you don’t make more coffee?”
    “So much coffee is going to ruin your appetite.”
    “Bet you it won’t. I’ll treat you to lunch.”
    “No, my treat.”
    “We’ll see.”
    “What do you mean, we’ll see? You’ll stay to lunch and that’s that. Anyway, go on.”
    “I spent a cushy morning, more desperate by the minute for a smoke and a cup of coffee,