An Evening of Art & Letters - Miami, 10.22.09.

Excerpt from INSOLENCE

Fire Consumes the Library of Alexandria

Emperor Theodosius ordered the Library of Alexandria set on fire to punish a sage’s braggadocio. The sage insinuated that power derived from brute force was fleeting: Remove the Emperor’s legions and his power smoke is on a windy afternoon.

Why did a sage act so incautiously?

It often happens that men of great intelligence have lacunas of common sense as great or greater in magnitude. The sage’s lack of common sense was apparent to everyone, in particular to his wife. The sage, his friends and disciples nicknamed Genius, in the early hours had been meditating on the nature of power. His wife interrupted him, having to run down to the market for a loaf of bread.

Genius, she said, keep an eye on the infant.

The six-month old infant had learned to roll on his side and back all the way to the edge of the bed. Genius kept an eye on the infant for maybe 30 seconds. The thread of his early meditation pulled him out to the porch, where the nature of power proved more compelling than his paternal duty. Genius went pacing around while the infant went rolling and fell into the chamber pot. It was filled to the rim with the previous night’s deposits, slang for urine and other excretions. The mother presaged danger and ran the last stretch home, a steep climb up the knoll. She found Genius out pacing deep in thought, and inside the house the infant drowning. She pressed the infant’s abdomen until he spat the last drop of deposits from his lungs, and proceeded to hammer Genius with the loaf of bread.

To be so smart, she rightfully castigated him, you are an ass.

Genius reacted like any 2nd century gentleman and scholar would: Young lady (he had married a woman half his age), have you forgotten your station in life?

She, still enraged, still screaming, still banging him, reminded him how lucky he was, and to thank his Gods, Apollo, or Poseidon, or whomever, that what she in her hand was a loaf of bread and not a two-by-four.

Genius left the house, telling himself, civilization, alas, has pitfalls. For one, can’t have the wife stoned at will. Or maybe he could put a heretic theory in her mouth, and let vehement Christians do the rest. He was wearing a splendid white tunic and sandals laced with gold, his long silver hair shone under the sun. Before heading to the palace for lunch with the Roman Emperor, he stopped at the Library of Alexandria for three servings of poetry, one serving of Plato (the irrelevance of the material world to the essence of man and his immortality), and one serving of medical science, or esthetics, an essay by the physician Galen on proportion and beauty, how one finger must relate to other fingers and the hand to the arm, and limbs to thorax, etc.)

Had Genius meditated on the nature of words instead of power, he would have kept his mouth shut at lunch with the Emperor. Instead he unleashed another defect abundantly evident in public intellectuals, what Alexandrians called the Prima Dona syndrome. When guests left or were too drunk to count, Genius reiterated, he simply had to, his view on the nature of power, and once his tongue got rolling, oh, it knew no boundaries, and the rolling tongue of public intellectuals always headed to the boulevard of self-aggrandizement.

Oh, yes, take away the goons, and what is left of the Emperor’s power? But eliminating the power of knowledge ingrained in the sage’s brain was beyond brute force, as was beyond goons destroying the intangible power stored within the walls of our temple of wisdom, our excelsior Library!

The emperor motioned a subaltern to approach. He whispered to his ear an order, and turning to the sage suggested having a last drink out in the terrace.

It does have an excelsior view of the city, he said.

Oh, yes, the sage concurred.

And the nature of fire manifested itself violently. The emperor had ordered the subaltern to set the Library on fire. Fire raged across the library and a cloud of smoke mushroomed over Alexandria.

Now, smiled the Emperor, tell me about your power.

Interview: Author Raúl Guerrero

[Transcript of an interview held in NYC.]

We are at the New York Public Library. Fifth Avenue. Author Raúl Guerrero will discuss his new book, INSOLENCE.

Why the New York Public Library?

Everything starts here—pointing to the door of the Manuscripts and Archive Division—two manuscripts are found, misfiled under banking history. These manuscripts attest the life and work of one extraordinary 16th century woman, not a queen or a member of some powerful aristocratic family, no, Francisca Pinelo is an autodidact intellectual, and a professional accountant… A woman determined to claim her place in a world programmed to relegate woman to the kitchen, and bed. Non-conformists face the whip. Corporal punishment was within a man’s arsenal for disciplining all the women under his roof.

But this is not a book about battered wives…?

The epochal age of exploration, the epic of the New World, the Renaissance, the backdrop against which the novel unravels, coincides with the Spanish Inquisition’s reign of terror. Not very auspicious terrain for insolent women. Serious offenses were dealt with fire.

The question is: What is serious?

Exactly. Since time immemorial men have manipulated laws and institutions to repress women. In al-Andalus, the Islamic Spanish nation, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the most advanced nation in Europe, it was common for men to invent some transgression and have the wife lapidated. The commissars of Inquisition in 16th century Spain had many choices to silence women, and I mean silence them permanently: witchcraft, heresy, learning, Lutheranism…

But Francisca Pinelo will not conform.

She was determined to get a college education, for example. Universities were for men only. So she marries a handsome nobleman with more hair than brains. She is impulsive enough for love at first sight, but she is an accountant, she can be calculating. She sees in her handsome nobleman a passport to Salamanca. Impersonating her husband off she is to fulfill her dream.

You can fool some people sometimes… But fooling a dorm packed with target-pissing scholars seems impossible.

Fortunately for Francisca, armor-smiths had advanced the artificial penile industry quite a bit. And she convinced her father to pay for what the armor-smith called a mighty dove (paloma, “dove,” is Castilian slang for penis.)

How did that go?

Salamanca had in store a dark secret. She was not her mother’s daughter; her real mother had been burnt at the stake for being an educated Jew. Francisca Pinelo learns from autopsy-style reports—her mother’s comrades were doctors, writing autopsy-like reports—how her mother’s vocal cords were severed, and the doodling on her face with acid. In minute detail she learns how her mother was murdered. Francisca Pinelo, the smart happy Catholic girl, is left without identity.  In her quest to reinvent herself, she sets out to rewrite history, her own idiosyncratic Estoria. She also wants revenge—that immeasurable propeller of history. Francisca Pinelo takes on the Inquisition. She goes after the commissar who tortured and killed her mother.

Not an easy task, I suppose.

Not at all. The commissar now is head of Intelligence, head of the espionage apparatus.

INSOLENCE at this point turns into an action novel, a historical thriller?

INSOLENCE does have elements of the classical thriller, a high dosage of suspense, and action... But also is a love story, a story of betrayal and redemption. Francisca Pinelo is a girl, she wants to love and be loved. And her husband, the handsome bon-vivant Don Miguel, what he lacks in brains makes it up with that arrogant Spanish thirst for glory. He abandons a pregnant Francisca in Salamanca to join Emperor Charles in one of his innumerable wars. But he loves her, he claims. Ultimately that love is put to the test.

II

We meet for the second part of this interview at the Gallery of the Spanish Society of America. The Gallery is a Jewel of Spanish art and a heaven for researching every-thing Spanish. Raúl Guerrero spent many hours within these walls researching and imbibing the history that gives Insolence the ambience.

Privilegium Imperatoris, Charter Issued by Alfonso VII, king of Castile and León. Castile, Spain; 12th century. 14 7/16 x 11 5/8 in. (36.7 x 29.5 cm) The Hispanic Society of America, New York.

One of the manuscripts the faceless narrator finds is Francisca Pinelo’s Estoria Privada. She chronicles the evolution of Hispania from the Roman Empire to modern Spain. She chronicles the tumultuous first millennium from year one in our Christian era to the establishment of Castile, arguably the birth of the modern Spanish State.

Francisca Pinelo uses Spain, or Hispania, as a pretext for a history of the world.

And what a great pretext. No other country synthesized the world as Spain did. For one, no other country conjugated the three dominant religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Francisca Pinelo guides us through the rise of Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the advent of the Germanic Visigoths, the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the establishment of El-Andalus, Europe’s most advanced nation, the Islamic nation in Europe, and the formation of the Christian Spanish resistance, originated by Pelayo, a sort of 8th century Che Guevara, fighting a guerilla war in the Cantabria Mountains and Asturias, which eventually leads to the plains and the Establishment of Castile. What Francisca Pinelo accomplished is phenomenal. In less than hundred pages she puts together a an anecdotic history of the world, and she does it with a timeless sense of humor.

Quite an ambitious project…

Such ambition demands what they called in the first millennium, a very firm pair of rocks, or to put it in the succinct words of the distinguished Georgetown Professor and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, Big Cojones!

Covering one thousand years in one hundred pages has to be schematic by definition. What holds the story together? What thread connects one thousand years of anecdotes?

Apostle James (again his loud laugh.) James the old was one of Jesus’ first disciples, one of the original Apostles. When Christianity went international, when they decided they were not going to convert Jews and the future was in gentiles, James went from Palestine to the other end of the world, to Galicia, the North West end of the Iberian Peninsula, which many considered the end of the world, terra finis.

   The Roman Empire in the time of Jesus

Once he finished his evangelization In Hispania, James returned to Palestine where an irate mob clubbed him to death. Jesus taught that Christian Martyrs should be buried where they preached, so his disciples took him back to Galicia by boat and inland across the Peninsula in a cart pulled by an ox. At a turn of the road the bull refused to continue. Naturally the disciples beat the bull, but the bull didn’t move. Maybe, suggested one disciple, it is a divine sign. The other disciple looked around. It was already getting dark and the sky seemed filled with stars, a veritable field of stars. You know, he told his fellow disciple, I think you are right. This is a divine sign. They buried James on the spot, and reported burying him under a field of stars, which translates to Gallego, the vernacular of Galicia, as Compostella.

James in the Galicia vernacular is Tiago, so Saint James becomes Saint Tiago, or Santiago. And Santiago becomes the symbol of Christianity in Spain. When turmoil makes pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Rome dangerous, one Spanish King seizes the opportunity to turn Santiago de Compostella into the new destination for European pilgrimage. Santiago becomes the number one European tourism spot. That’s what pilgrimage was, tourism with a cause. Both the Mother Church and the Crown get rich. A political adviser to King Alphonse, the Chaste King, takes Santiago's stardom to the next level. He suggests using the iconic saint as the Christian symbol for a crusade against Islam, the guiding star to reconquer Iberia for Christianity. So Santiago escapes his glass urn and joins the freedom fighters in the battlefield, killing Moors left and right. He earns the appellation Moors Slayer. Santiago holds together Francisca Pinelo’s narrative.

III

Back at the New York Public Library, inside the lecture hall.

Tell us about our faceless narrator finding these two amazing documents, her Estoria and a compilation of her diaries.

What was he to do? What was any reasonable writer to do with such finding? He decides to translate Estoria Privada from the archaic Castilian to modern English, his accented English…

Your alter ego?

Our accents are identical (laughing.)

And her diaries…

He sets out to compose a biography of Francisca Pinelo based on her diaries, the novelized biography. After all, she hands him a fascinating story ... As it turns out, the narrator is soon lost in Francisca Pinelo’s labyrinth. He is about to give it all up, and turn the documents to an academic. But serendipity comes into play in this very lecture hall, or, as our narrator puts it (Raul Guerrero reads from Estoria privada, the book within the book):

Two years into the project I found myself lost, ready to turn the documents over to some academic. Then, as they used to say in 16th century Castile, Lady Fortune returned to the matrimonial chamber. I attended a lecture on the Spanish Inquisition by Dr. Jennifer Jones, a medievalist with Columbia University, author of Literary Bonfires, an index of works burned by the commissars of the Inquisition, an expert on Spanish manuscripts.

Medievalists were in great demand, said Dr. Jones. She was very busy, but she accepted to collaborate. She was moved by Francisca. Imagine being a woman in sixteenth century Spain, let alone an insolent writer.


Dr. Jones guided our narrator through the labyrinthine manuscripts, and annotated both the translation and the biography. Her notations in brackets are interspersed in the novel.

Having her notes as an integral part of the novel is like having a personal guide along your History safari...

Anyway, to make a long story short, as the marketing guys say, the end result is a sizzling historical thriller (again he lets out a loud laugh.)

INSOLENCE

[Excerpt from Chapter 2.]

Writing her journals led Francisca to reading more and with gusto, but she showed no signs of putting down calculations, nor was she writing poetry. Was she philosophizing? Was Francisca in effect a smart woman? Mr. Pinelo felt mortified for having encouraged her to read, and voraciously. Men didn’t like tall women, even less smart women. A most respectful client considered a tragedy that his only son married a woman smarter than he was. He disinherited him.

What if Francisca didn't marry? Mr. Pinelo examined the pros and cons, using his double-entry accounting system. A father incurred exorbitant expenses rearing a daughter for a perfect stranger to come claiming her when she was at her best. Not only that, the father had to give out a dowry. It didn’t make sense. Where did European men get their supremacy notion? Other cultures were more civilized. Men in Africa gave the father of the bride pounds of lard, cattle, or large tracks of land. Mr. Pinelo, an accountant, trained to stay focused, dismounted the horse of the hypothetical to analyze specifics. How a day would be in the life of an unmarried Francisca? He imagined high karat conversations out in the garden, discussing books, devising business strategies, or solving numerical puzzles. The devil’s advocate, a tenuous voice in the back of his head, asked: And solitude? What about her womb withering without purpose? It was a tenuous voice. Mr. Pinelo deloused it.

Mr. Pinelo taught Francisca the principles of accounting, the science of lending for interest, which the Catholic Church sneered at, and the book of law Las Siete Partidas prohibited, but for which he had devised loopholes. He taught her taxation, business law, and advanced math for commercial calculations. Francisca proved not bad at calculations. Mr. Pinelo started taking her along. Her presence vexed some clients. The more superstitious, convinced women brought bad luck, asked her to step out. Others grew fond of her intelligence and welcoming smile. In time, most clients requested her presence. Father and daughter traveled to Trujillo, Salamanca, Valladolid, Toledo, Madrid (a small town then, or they said, the city of the future), Burgos and southwards to Seville. Seville was their favorite destination. Francisca spent hours visiting the Dutch bookseller in Calle del Mar. The Dutch brought books on every subject from all over Europe. Francisca’s intellectual hunger was vast.