Free The Scroll of Seduction by Gioconda Belli Page A

to go shopping or run errands, I went on Saturdays.
    Manuel was waiting for me, cigarette in hand as usual. He was wearing a black wool coat, which made him look paler. His blue eyes were watery planets, floating in the pallor of his face. I let him whisk me through the museum halls. He wanted to show me a painting by Francisco Pradilla, Doña Juana la Loca. We stopped briefly before Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. I had spent hours staring at that triptych, I told him. There was always something new to discover, and it never ceased to excite my imagination. “All of Dalí can be found in that painting,” he said. That was precisely what made it so fascinating to me, I said. One could imagine so many other painters dumbfounded before it. One could find later in those painters’ works their attempts to go further, to unravel the past and future of those figures.
    â€œBosch is so unique, isn’t he? He introduces a taste of hell in paradise, he plays on the duplicity of every possible reality,” Manuel said. “You got a glimpse of that yourself, when you saw from your mother’s letters what lay behind the apparent paradise you perceived. I thought a lot about that, and about you, this week. That’s why I wanted you to see Pradilla’s painting. He’s not particularly well known, but he was a marvelous artist. When you see Juana’s face, you’ll be able to imagine your mother’s innermost thoughts.”
    We spent a long time looking at that painting. The figure of Juana, wearing a nun’s habit, was at the center of the canvas. The image was passive, dark, and for some reason I took her to be in motion. She seemed to want to stop anyone from glancing curiously at Philippe’s coffin, keep anyone from approaching him. Manuel said that Juana had tried to take her husband’s body to Granada to bury him beside Isabella the Catholic. From a historian’s perspective, he thought her ulterior motives had been, on the one hand, to surround herself by the Andalusian nobility who favored her while ridding herself of the Flemish courtiers who had surrounded Philippe. On the other hand, by placingPhilippe’s body next to Queen Isabella’s, she sought to legitimize his royal claim, thus ensuring the succession of her son Charles. Legend had it, however, that her nocturnal journeys were a testament to the lovesickness of a queen who refused to leave her lover’s side, and who claimed she could not travel by day, since her husband was a bright sun, and two suns could not shine at the same time in the world.
    â€œThey said she was so jealous that she wouldn’t let any women near the body,” Manuel added. “All fallacies, of course.”
    I wondered if maybe my mother had felt something similar to the proud impotence revealed by the woman in the painting on display. When she realized that she and my father would die together, she might have felt, amid the terror of the plane crash, relief at knowing that my father was now hers forever. Manuel kept looking at the painting and then back at me, as if he were trying to gauge each of my reactions.
    We had a sandwich at a restaurant with tiled walls where, according to Manuel, they served the best sangria in Madrid. The sweetness of the fruit juice camouflaged the taste of alcohol and made my cheeks burn. Afterward, Manuel hailed a cab and gave the driver his address.
    We sat very close to each other in the car. I could feel him tense his legs to keep his balance as the taxi took the corners. I didn’t move away. When we got to Manuel’s apartment, he lit a fire in the fireplace. It was the middle of September, but autumn had already taken on a winter chill. He spoke and smoked, his face shrouded in a rosy halo. He was saying something or other about some books he’d read that week. I was having a hard time paying attention. I was trying to calm down and not let on how flustered I was,