Sufficient and Perfect

Consider, before tonight's entry, how reputations travel in a kingdom. I had never met Francisco Díaz, but I could have recited him: physician to His Majesty, the great man of the bladder and the stone, a surgeon-physician who had done what almost none manage — carried the needle trade up into the company of the Latin men and made them like it. We in the provinces read his methods the way village priests read a cardinal; I had defended one of his procedures across a patient's kitchen table against a physic-doctor twice my pedigree, and won, and been proud of it for a month. When word came down the ladder that the doubt of Eleno de Céspedes had been referred to Doctor Francisco Díaz, I understood two things in the same heartbeat: that I was being taken with entire seriousness at last, and that seriousness is the most dangerous compliment the crown can pay a man.

The weeks of waiting I will enter briefly, because they were their own instruction. A referral of that altitude does not hurry; the great man's calendar is the great man's calendar; and so through the balance of a winter I lived betrothed, licensed, certified by a quorum, and suspended — the banns arrested at the third reading, the town's word circling, the wedding clothes half-made (I was cutting them myself; of course I was; a tailor marries once), and every market day the eyes of two towns taking my measure afresh. I worked. I have said it before at this table and it held that winter as it holds every winter: the hands quiet at wounds quiet the rest of the man. I set the district's bones and lanced its winter throats, and the same mouths that carried the whisper carried their children to my door, in the way of towns, whisper and need keeping separate ledgers; and I learned that a man can live suspended if he must, provided he has work and someone to be suspended toward. I had both. I do not recommend the state. But it can be lived; enter that, for the use of whoever inherits my luck.

The seventeenth of February, 1586. Mark how I keep that date without effort, I who cannot keep my own birth year. He came attended — Doctor Antonio Mantilla of Madrid with him, physic in support of physic, everything in due form; this was to be no inn-yard quorum but an examination fit to stand in registers, which, God and the fiscal being what they are, it eventually did, twice, pointing in two directions. I had prepared for the day the way I prepare for surgery of consequence: sleep husbanded, the morning kept clear, everything in the room of my own body ordered and counted. I had stood examinations before, reader — you have attended two of them in these pages and there were others the record forgets — and I expected the day to be the inn yard again at a higher altitude: eyes, hands, the third person over my head, the tenant asked to step out while the premises were assessed.

It was not. I set down what it was, exactly, because it is the strangest entry in this whole book of examinations, and I have turned it over more nights than any other. The great Díaz examined me as I have examined a thousand bodies — with method, with unhurried craftsman's attention, and with narration: naming what he found as he found it, aloud, in the terms of the art, to Mantilla and to the record and — this is the strangeness — to me, as though the body's tenant were not merely present but a colleague in the assessment. He asked his questions; they were the right questions, the working questions; and I answered as a colleague answers, in the terms of the art, and heard my own voice steady in a room where I had expected to manage it like a spooked animal. Whether he did it from courtesy, from habit, from some intuition I cannot audit, or simply because method was his nature and method does not stoop — I never learned, and it no longer matters. Under those hands, for one hour, the most examined body in Castile was simply a body; structures, conditions, findings; and the man most practiced at being looked at stood in the eye of all looking and found it, of all things on earth, restful. A neighbor looks at you and sees a tale to carry home. A master of the art looks at you and sees the work of God to be described accurately. I have been handled by the parish, the quorum, the midwives, and the Holy Office, and I tell you that accuracy is the only mercy the examined ever ask. It was the one hour of my public life I was granted it, and I have spent ten years paying that hour forward, patient by patient, sheet by slow sheet, in wards the great Díaz will never smell.

What he set his hand to, with Mantilla joining, the record keeps in the very words, and the words have been my scapular ever since, so I will lay them on the page whole: that the said Eleno had his genital member sufficient and perfect, with his testicles formed like any man's. Sufficient and perfect. Reader, men have had verses made about them that said less. I have been called a great many compounded things in my life, from mulata to monster to — we will come to the fiscal's vocabulary in its place. But for one February day in 1586, the King's own physician, on examination, in writing, over his name and his colleague's, found me sufficient, and found me perfect, and I defy any man who has never doubted whether the world would let him exist to understand what those two clerks' adjectives can weigh. The child of Alhama had been entered in registers by owners, priests, and jailers. Now the finest medical hand in Spain had written him into the books, and what it wrote was: a man, and no impediment.

I will not disfigure this account by hiding the rest of their finding, for the folios keep it too, and it belongs to me more than to them. The doctors also noted, behind, a certain crease — a fold, an aperture; let each teller choose his word, they have — which their science remarked and their certificate did not dwell upon. When the world later fell upon that clause like gulls on a gutted fish, it was called evidence of imposture, of the Devil, of everything but the plain thing it was evidence of. I am a surgeon; let me read my own anatomy aloud once, calmly, and be done. They saw what was there. What was there is what I have told you since the night my son was born: that I am of two natures, and that the second kept its residence after the first declared its own. Díaz and Mantilla, men of method, recorded a body that did not fit the register's two columns, and then, being men of their office as well as their science, ruled for the column the sacrament required. I have wondered all my life whether Díaz understood what he had actually written — whether, in the privacy behind those excellent eyes, the greatest reader of bodies in Spain read mine entire and chose, with a stroke of professional tact I would salute across any distance, to certify the half of the truth the law had asked him about. His certificate, read with a surgeon's eye, says both. It says it in the crown's own ink, without daring the word — the word the town had already found for free. The Holy Office would later spend eighteen months and a hillock of folios failing to fit me on one page. The King's urologist did it in a sentence, by accident or by mercy, in February, and I have never decided which, and on my better nights I do not need to.

The impediment fell. The banns, arrested a year at the third reading, were released; Neroni's court, answered by the one authority it could not out-rank, let the file close — imagine the file closing, reader; I did not see it, but I have imagined it often, the string tied, the shelf, the dust beginning; files, we will learn together, do not die, they hibernate. And in that year of 1586 — in the spring, say some of the tellers, and I will let them have their spring; if witnesses are ever to disagree in my favor, let it be about blossom — María del Caño and Eleno de Céspedes were married.

Of the wedding itself the folios keep nothing, which pleases me more than I can write, for it means the day is wholly mine, and I will spend it here the way the poor spend a coin they have hidden from the assessors — slowly, looking at it twice. A church door in the country between Madrid and Toledo, on a morning with weather in it, the spring still arguing with the winter. Her people out in their best, a wall of them, loud even at whisper; my side of the door thinner, as it was always going to be — some Yepes neighbors, two doctors of my acquaintance, the boy I was then training holding the horses — a man who assembles himself owns no wall of cousins, and I had long since stopped grieving it, and grieved it entirely, for one breath, at that door. The clothes I had cut myself, hers and mine both — she had asked it, knowing what it meant, or knowing enough; there is a seam at the shoulder of that wedding coat into which I sewed, where no one will ever find them, three small stitches of the Granada style, the first stitch I was ever taught, my mother's smoke somewhere in the memory of it — a man wants his dead at his wedding and must smuggle them in how he can. And then the priest — the same who had balked; the country is small — performing his office now with the special firmness of a man who has been overruled by a royal physician and means to show the parish that he, too, had always found the matter perfectly regular.

And the vows. I have stood where the words of institutions were read over me many times now, reader, and you have stood beside me at most of them and will stand at the worst yet to come; so mark this one, the one time in this whole book the institution's words and my own truth walked in step. When the vows came to my name — the name I had cut for myself on the road out of Jerez, one letter turned from a dead mistress's; the name a muster clerk took on trust, a licence confirmed on merit, and a town had lately chewed like a bone — it was spoken aloud, in a church, before God and the assembled parish, and joined to hers. Eleno. Do you, Eleno, take. And I said the syllable they give you, the enormous small syllable, and the register took it down, and the register — the parish book, the very species of instrument that had opened this account by writing me down wrong at Alhama — closed over the name I had made as though no other name had ever been possible. That is what a wedding is, under all the linen and the pies: the world, in writing, voluntarily, at last, taking my word.

Then a year. The tellers of my life give it a line — they married and lived near Toledo about a year — and hurry on to Ocaña and the midwives, because catastrophe is what tellers are for. But I was there, and this is my table, and I say the year was the point — the whole point, the thing itself, the estate the long theft had been for — and I will spend on it accordingly, and catastrophe can wait in the yard; it waited for me.

The house at Yepes: whitewash, a yard with a fig and a well, my books at last unpacked onto shelves a carpenter-patient built me at cost, the surgery off the yard with its own door for the carters and their disasters, so that the house-door was the house's alone. The practice thriving as it had never quite thriven — a wife, in a country town, is herself a credential, the last seal on the estate of an established man; households that had hedged now sent for me without hedging; I had, for the first time, more work than a man alone could hold, and took the boy to train, and found — my Valencian would have laughed his bone-saw laugh — that teaching is the rent knowledge pays. And the house itself learning its sounds, which is a process, reader, that no one who has always lived in peopled houses ever notices: the particular sound of a house that has two people in it, which is not double the sound of one — it is a different instrument entirely, tuned in the first months, played thereafter without thought. Her step on the stair over my head while I ground a blade below. The well-rope at morning. The talk of women at the yard wall, hers among them, easy, established, a wife among wives. I would stand in the surgery some evenings, cleaning up after the day's blood, and listen to the ordinary house being ordinary, and feel the wealth of it along my ribs like heat from a wall the sun has been on all day.

The year had seasons, and I want them entered, because happiness in summary is nobody's evidence and this chapter is a deposition too, the only one I ever volunteered for. Summer first, the wedding hardly cold: the practice at full gallop, harvest bones, the boy learning to hold a leg against a man's whole panicked strength and learning, more slowly, my Valencian's law about the patient and the wound; and the house filling with its objects the way married houses do, a chest here, a hanging there, her things and mine negotiating shelf-room like old diplomats. Autumn: the vintage I have spoken of; the fig bearing beyond all sense so that we owed figs up and down the street like a debt; the first quartan fevers with the falling weather, and my wife — I set this down with the particularity it earned — proving herself, unasked, the best assistant the surgery ever had: unsqueamish, exact-handed from her father's workshop, quick to learn which silences of mine meant fetch and which meant stand clear. The room in Ciempozuelos where she had held what wanted holding was, it turned out, no accident; nothing about her was an accident; I had married, among her other qualities, the steadiest pair of second hands in the district, and the district noticed, and the women began, when the matter was womanly, to ask for the surgeon's wife to be present, and the practice grew a second practice at its side, unlicensed, unpaid, and in certain cases worth more than mine. Winter: the wolves down off the hills after a hard month, the roads bad, two night rides I did not take alone because she declared the weather a two-lantern matter and rode pillion with the second lantern, and I let her, over every prudence, because — enter it plainly — I had discovered I liked my life better within lantern-light of her. And the spring again, our anniversary of banns and blossom, the fig greening, the whole cycle coming round complete like a seam closed true, and a man at the center of it who caught himself, one ordinary Tuesday over the whetstone, whistling — and did not stop to diagnose it this time. That is the year, reader, at the resolution the tellers denied it. It ran three hundred and some days. I have counted them since from the far side, the way a ruined merchant counts a manifest.

What does a man remember of his one good year? Small weights, exactly measured — it is the only scale grief leaves you, and grief, be patient, is coming. Waking before her and lying still so as not to spend the moment. Market mornings, the basket between us. Her family's visits, the table crowded, the youngest of them shrieking in the yard, myself at the head of it carving, of all things, like any husband in Castile — I, carving, who had carved to other purposes on other tables, and no one at that table thinking anything of my knife-work except that the portions were fair and the youngest got the crackling. The vintage again, my second as a betrothed-then-married man, the whole town purple-footed and hilarious, and no ankles broken that year, which I publicly lamented as ruinous to my trade and was pelted with grape-skins by, I believe, my own wife's mother. Evenings in the yard in the late light, the fig coming on, her voice from the kitchen door saying my name — my name, in that voice, for no reason that required saying it; called the way you touch a coin in your pocket, to know it is there. I set these things down as memory, not as deposition; no notary attended my happiness, and it needs none. It was ordinary. That was its whole magnificence. I had spent forty years earning my way to unremarkable, and for one year, in a small white house in Yepes, I lived at the very center of the assumption I had built — so far inside it that whole weeks passed, I swear this at the steward's own table, in which I did not once reckon a room by its exits.

But you have read my chapters, and you know I never wholly stopped. The whisper had not died at the church door; whispers do not die, they estivate. Both male and female — it had run through the stubble once and been stamped out by the King's physician, and the ash of it lay in every kitchen within ten leagues, waiting on the weather. I would catch the edge of it, seasons apart: at a fair in the autumn, a cloth merchant from off our roads asking a Yepes man who I was, and the Yepes man's answer running longer than the question wanted, with a pause in it, a pause the length of an old word; a look held a half-breath past commerce at the horse market; once, at a wedding — another couple's — a drunk old woman of the district studying me down the length of the table with the frank unhurried eyes of the very old, who are done pretending not to look, and saying nothing, and I would have paid out every certificate in my coat to know which of the several somethings she was not saying. A surgeon knows how to listen to a heart that carries a flaw: you do not hear the flaw, you hear the rhythm arrange itself around it. I heard the country around me arranging itself, that whole sweet year, around something unsaid; and I chose — it was a choice, made daily, and I would make it again, and I want the record to show the choosing — to go on living in the middle of my life instead of on the walls of it. Let the weather come, I told the dark once or twice, lying still beside her before dawn with the house's instrument playing its two-person quiet; it has come before, and found my seams sewn.

It came in June, in my second summer as a husband, wearing — as I had been promised by a fire in the Alpujarras twenty years before, though I had long stopped watching for him — a magistrate's wand and an excellent memory. The steward's candle is finished, and so, reader, is the good part of my life. I have written the year small and I meant to; small was its glory; but do not let my dryness cheat the accounting: weigh that year against everything this book has cost you and everything it has yet to cost, and know that at this table, tonight, with the whole invoice in front of me — plaza, lash, folios, ward, cart — the year carries it. The year carries it all. Sharpen your patience for tomorrow's ink; from here to the plaza it is proceedings, and proceedings, unlike happiness, keep excellent records.