—𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐁𝐋𝐄; 𝐨𝐫, 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐑 𝐎𝐅 𝐒𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐀.
—𝐁𝐎𝐎𝐊 𝐎𝐍𝐄: 𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐁𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐔𝐌 (𝟏𝟕𝟖𝟗 - 𝟏𝟖𝟎𝟖).
>>Reader, it is impossible we should know what sort of person thou wilt be -Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749).
>>Gracias te doy, Dios Criador del Cielo y de la Tierra, porque ya que determinaste que tomase la pluma una criatura tan vil, quisiste fuesen sus vuelos á tu Gloria, sus descensos á la vida de los hombres, sus cortes á los abusos, sus lineas à la verdad, el papel à la inocencia, y la tinta al amor. - Antonio Bilbao, Destrucción y conservación de los expósitos (1790)
If what I am told is true, then I was born somewhere in January of the year of Grace 1789.
It could be a lie, of course, a consoling tale for the obscurity of my beginnings. Perhaps I shall never know. Suffices to say that the aforementioned 1789 was not an uneventful year, and that I being born in its earlier days, may hinted that my life, from then on, would be an agitated one; the Revolution set off in the neighbouring France, the monarchy fell and, a few years later and with a deafening clamor of freedom, the former king’s head fell too. In those days, Europe was still governed by the same absolute sovereigns of old, and it was only then, when they saw to what lengths a discontent populace would go, that they realised that the antiquity of their rule nor their God given rights among the rest of the mortals, would be enough to protect them from the same fate. And for a decade —a miserable, miserable decade—, they fretted, and they raged, and they warred.
Spain would not be an exception.
The king, Carlos IV, who was still picking the golden laurels of his father’s rule after barely a year on the throne, must have looked over his shoulder to see how unrest ensued, and fell terror stirring his blood; for he was a Bourbon, like the one who paid with his life for the wastefulness of his reign.
Thence, thinking his throne and his neck at peril, he hastened to close the border with the insurgent France, and censor any whisper of enlightenment that dared reach his royal ear. The safety of those measures was illusory, as time would tell. The court festered with suspicion; the King was weak, the Queen was detested, and the succession, sustained only by two sickly princelings, was fickler than never before. A storm loomed on the horizon, yet it lingered and lingered, never fully befalling, never fully consummating its threat. In the streets, there were shadows in the eyes of men and women. Even if they spoke not of it, they all shared the same fear. None believed they would live to see it fulfilled, however. They were wrong.
It was, above all, a year of much many trouble; therefore, there was nothing extraordinary that, when sor Piedad opened the heavy doors of the Inclusa del Hospital de Nuestra Señora de Gracia of Zaragoza, she found a deserted infant sleeping on the steps below.
It was also unremarkable thing that the child was a girl, too. By the end of that decade of struggles and scarcities, Spain and its less fortunate people had become well-acquainted with the privations of poverty. A family would bring six and often more living children into the world, but there was not enough sustenance for so many, and the abandonment of babies became a common sight. And a daughter, among all things —a little vermin, which would not work as much as her brothers and would need a dowry— was thought a greater burden than three additional sons. So when the nun found the sleeping babe, she casted a brief glance about her surroundings, as if looking for the deserting parent, and having found no one, she took her in.
As soon as sor Piedad brought her inside, she sensed that the child in her arms would not last long. The Inclusa was the largest establishment that kind in the region and for centuries, it has housed hundreds upon hundreds of children, but the conditions left a lot to be desired, and premature death befell often and spared few of the youngest foundlings. In the eyes of most, that did not matter; the children had no parents to love them, and an early entrance to the kingdom of Heavens was much more agreeable than a life of want and loneliness on Earth. As the infant was very little then and did not appear too robust, she was hastily christened, given a proper Christian name, and placed in a cradle with two other nurslings. By then, all agreed that the baby was to die —perhaps for the best.
I severely disappointed them, by living instead.
Morillo had long lived and toiled before I ever came to be.
He had been born some more than thirteen years before that nun opened the door to find me abandoned on the steps, in an obscure hamnet stranded in the golden fields of Zamora, more than a hundred leagues away from Zaragoza. If it was God, or, in His abscence, fate, which had the power to determine the circumstances of men’s births, then it surely could not have made ours more disimilar.
His childhood years he spent in possession of great health, a robust, spirited boy making mischief and bringing grief to his parents, whilst mine I spent in the walls of the Inclusa, sick and nervous, abstracted to myself. His natal Fuentesecas was poor and it was only through will and will alone that he learnt his first letters, while the Zaragoza I lived flourished with the arts and trades. Even from the beginning, he was meant for the arms, as I was for the quill. And despite all, he was luckier than I would ever be: He was a man, and he was son to two wedded parents. Even among the dispossessed there existed was hierarchy, between the more and the less fortunate; and I, a foundling girl, occupied perhaps the lowest position among all.
I have always mulled over that insurmountable distance that seemed to separate our paths from the very beginning. While I stuttered my first words, whatever those were, he was seeing the sea for the first time, sailing from Ferrol; while I scratched pots and pans for the Lafoz family, he courted his wife; and while I came of age, he fought and bled in Trafalgar, was imprisoned and became a widower. The three years that followed I spent in Zaragoza, making plans for a future that would ultimately not come to fruition, and he spent living in a small town of Badajoz, working as a shepherd, leading a quiet, lonesome life. Our paths, one would think, would have never crossed.
Time, as it seemed, proved us both wrong.
My name, or at least, the first of the many I would receive, was Águeda Gracia.
I was christened with that name, because I was brought to the care of the nuns the day they celebrated of the feast of saint Águeda, a Roman martyr of the early days of Christendom. For all the sorrows it brought me, it was a beautiful name; it meant “virtuous” in Greek. Given that there was a tradition to eat buns during the festivity —as my namesake had her breasts removed during her martyrdom— and that, once reached a certain age, I was not particularly remarkable in that department either, a boy once made a deplorable attempt on wit by throwing one of the buns at my feet, saying “there are, Águeda’s breasts!”. The joke, as unfunny as it was, persisted a long time.
The first seven years of my life were spent in the walls of the Inclusa, and if truth be told, there was nothing I excelled at. I was neither prettier nor uglier than my fellows, nor was I smarter or braver or taller. If anything, only three things distinguished me from the rest: firstly, that I was as short-sighted as a mole. Secondly, that I was quiet. Lastly, that I was strange. An explanation for this would have been much welcomed, but nobody could give me an answer as to why I was that way. Whatever that was, it further alienated me from the other children.
There, I learned to write and read my first letters, one of the few lessons I enjoyed at my stay in the Inclusa, and I read as often as I could; and since the only book considered decent enough for us to read were the Holy Scriptures, one could find me under the shade of the old walls, or in a corner of the garden, hunched over its pages, lost in the tale. The nuns mistook my habit of reading the Bible for piety, and congratulated me for my devotion. I was also taught how to knit, but I found it less enticing than reading, and once I left the place, I forgot altogether how to do so. The rest of the time, I spent dreaming.
Nothing bounded me to my past, whatever it was, or to my parents, whoever they were or had been. Exiled from the games of my mates and considered strange by the adults, my mind would fly as high and free as the swallows that flapped their wings above the yard, and I would walk around and think thousands of stories and imagine hundreds of adventures. I imagined my family, too; my mother must have been a lady of quality, the daughter of a grandee, married to a nobleman pf well-earned fame, who loved her dearly. I must have been stolen from my cradle by envious enemies of my father, and they must have searched for me. Somewhere far or close to those walls, they still did.
The kind reprimands of sor Piedad did not stop this peculiar behaviour, and one day, tired of my oddities, an older nun pulled me aside.
“Do not do that” she warned me.
“Walking around, aimlessly, rubbing your hands together and smiling at nothing” she reprimanded me “You look as weird as the lunatics and the half-wits they care for in the Hospital. Do you want to join them? Is that what you want?”
I denied, frightened. At the other side of the Inclusa, not too far from where the children played and lived, the Hospital has long taken care of many mentally-ill patients. We never saw them, as they dwelled at the other side, but cries and their moans would often echo in the night, cutting through the silence, and I would curl up in bed with fear.
”That is how they began” she said, unforgivingly “You don’t want to be where they are.”
I did not, so I stopped. But at nights, while everyone else was asleep, I would stay up, dreading to hear the laments of the unfortunate patients, and I would feel so anxious that I would stand up and walk around until I became tired. They never knew that, of course. Else, things would have been worse.
Some time later, the nuns summoned me to speak to me. A wealthy family of the city, the Lafoz, was searching for a young girl, healthy, obedient, and who would work for them as a scullery maid; they believed that it would be an act of supreme Christian mercy to take a piteous foundling into their home as a servant, to have them scratch pots and pans and eat their scraps. The nuns thought I would be suited for this purpose. The decision had been taken already, and I complied, as quietly as I always did.
The day of my departure, sor Piedad called for me and held me in her arms, embracing me lovingly. She kissed my forehead and told me that she wished the best for me.
“You are an orphan now, Águeda” she said, “It is better that way”. It would take me years to understand what she meant by that.
There were no farewells. Instead, I was handed a little bundle with my clothes and taken to the house of the Lafoz by foot. Though I knew the nuns waved at me from behind, I chose not turn back.
I was seven years of age then. Twelve years later, the war began.
Wooh! This took AGES to edit, but I loved every moment of it. It feels a bit tacky but so do all my first chapters. Tagging @unanchored-ship / @ricardian-werewolf / @marianadecarlos / my Liege @lordbelami <3
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