against the carpenter, or the plow against the plowman? Did not a loyal knight in arms owe unquestioning loyalty to his liege lord here on this sinful earth? And should not the priest outshine the secular knight in obedience to the voice of God as it spoke to him through his spiritual lords? Was not the length of the Spanish peninsula distance enough to worship his lost Morayma from afar, without the additional safety of the sea between? True, the work of a bishop’s secretary might prove much different from that of a village pastor or a university instructor, but he would have the task of finding and approving a vicar for Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida…
“Hey, my lad!” a jovial voice cut into his meditations. “Do you read the future in that cup, like a witch telling fortunes in a bowl of water?”
Felipe looked up. A tall and skinny Italian stood before him, perhaps a year or three older than himself, his once brightly-colored cap set to one side of a lean but lively face with thin lips and dark eyes.
“I am an ordained priest,” Felipe answered stiffly, annoyed at this stranger’s having addressed him as “lad.”
“Ah! But belonging to none of the holy brotherhoods, as your fine clothes tell me. Well, your priestliness might render you all the more eager to hear what I have to say.” Without waiting to be invited, the newcomer swung his frame into the empty chair at Don Felipe’s small table.
Suddenly amused, the new priest told him, “Young man, you interest me strangely.”
“Host me to a good cup of wine, and I promise to interest you still more.”
Felipe counted out the coins, added something to the amount in honor of the generosity it behooved priests to show, and pushed the money across the table, more or less expecting the stranger to take it and never return.
Instead, the Italian got his wine and settled himself more comfortably than before.
“I am listening,” said Felipe.
“Well, friend priest…” The Italian took a long drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and casually pointed at a table near the window. “Do you see that man with the pair of ladies?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recognize them?”
After a moment of study, Felipe shook his head. “No.”
“Not even when I tell you that the man is a fruiterer of some prominence?”
“I do not question your word,” Don Felipe replied with growing curiosity. “But I fail to perceive how any of them may concern me.”
“The man, no, except in so far as he is one of my own satisfied customers. Nor, I fear, should the blonde lady, with whom he is so obviously smitten, concern you. But she who dares to flaunt her tresses in their natural raven black—ah! Is she not a morsel for the very gods?”
Felipe considered her again. She was indeed a beauty. His gaze traveled over her as appreciatively and calmly as if she had been a fine marble sculpture surviving from classical times. “She is everything you say. What of it?”
“What of it?” The Italian looked slightly taken aback for a moment. Recovering, he went on, “But perhaps you think she is unavailable. I tell you, no. That lovely lady, that tempting delight, is one of my own sweet nymphs and, at the moment, our fruiterer having opted for her fellow nymph, she is free.”
“By the way you call her ‘one of your own,’ implying slavery, I take it you are not approaching me to save her soul.”
A laugh and a wink. “‘Saving her soul’! As good a way as any to speak of it. And popular, I have heard, with the old hermit monks of the desert.”
The young priest replied quietly, “I will not hear you slander those holy saints.”
“Saints, do you call those desert fathers? Well, perhaps, in their dotage, when they had no better use for their feeble strength.” Another wink. “Come, come, friend priest! Look around you. Your brothers of the cloth—both in Orders and merely ordained—your bishops, your cardinals, the Curia, the very popes themselves, one after the other…all of them understand that God has given our flesh certain needs, and that the best way to satisfy those same needs is not in a brothel. Now, look again at my lovely Isabella, there. No slave, she! Bred up gently as a lady, ready to be good as any wedded wife—better, indeed, than most wedded wives, for she will never turn shrew, nor give herself airs, nor beggar you with demands for scarves and jeweled trinkets. Priests’ women know their places! ‘A fruitful vine in the recesses of your home,’ as King David tells us. For three ducats only—no more than that—you will enjoy her company all the rest of this day and the whole long, joyous night until tomorrow morning. After that, if you and she should come to a more permanent understanding—as I am sure is more than likely—I ask a mere five ducats a month for myself. Or, if you should prefer a nice, quiet marriage—as I know many of your fellow priests do—deal with me in the place of her parents.”
Felipe looked again at the lady, then back to her procurer. “Other men, alas! would no doubt find your offer a sore temptation. But my love and loyalty have been pledged already, to a lady as good and beautiful as she is unattainable. For her sake, I have made myself a spiritual Abelard.”
The Italian stared at him. “What tale is this? If you wish to haggle over the trifling little price I ask—”
“No tale, my friend.”
“Then… Then why in God’s name did you not say so at once? You have made me waste my time!”
“Let me speak for a moment as a priest,” Don Felipe replied, allowing a bit of unction to flow into his voice. “Your time was much better wasted in talking with me, than spent in successful pandering. God made both your soul and the lady’s for better things.”
Still gaping at him, the Italian sat back, took another swallow of wine, and then started laughing, so suddenly that he snorted up a noseful and so violently that even the need to spew it out hardly interrupted his mirth. “So now, I suppose,” he said at last, still choking a little, “you will want us both to sit down and hear you preach at us concerning our sins?”
“That sounds a profitable way of spending our evening.”
“Profitable in heavenly coin only.” Chuckling again, the Italian pulled out a tattered handkerchief and began to wipe the wine as best he could from his face, hands, garments, and the table. “Well, it is my bad luck. Or the malice of the gods. Friend priest, that man is indeed a wealthy fruiterer of the city, but the blonde lady is his wife and the dark one, I believe, either his sister or hers. I know them only by having seen them and asked folk about them. They know me not in the slightest. You were the first on whom I tried this pleasant little scheme, and see what it has earned me!”
“You would have taken my three ducats,” Don Felipe mused, “and then slipped away at once. You would have had to enjoy the ensuing jest in your imagination only. You could hardly have risked staying to watch it.”
“I would have taken your money, pretended to arrange an assignation for the pair of you, then gone to their table, paid her some such little compliment as any lady may accept even from a complete stranger, nodded in your direction, and so out the door, leaving her none the wiser and you to cool your heels at your choice of Rome’s lovely fountains, or whatever trysting place you had named, from Vespers until…dawn, if your patience lasted so long.”
