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.
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.
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.)
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