"Honor is not just the right and possession of the n.o.bility," the dwarf orated, "it belongs to all of us who act as men should act. We Spanish are the greatest nation in the world. Our armies are the most powerful, our king the most generous, our culture the most glorious, our men the bravest, our women the fairest and the most virtuous."

Cheers erupted in the audience.

After each speech a singing guitarist serenaded us with ballads extolling the courage of Spanish men, particularly their love of women, honor, and war.

My ornaments are arms,

My pastime is in war,

My bed is cold upon the hill,

My lamp yon star;

My journeyings are long,

My slumbers short and broken;

From hill to hill I wander still,

Kissing thy token.

I ride from land to land,

I sail from sea to sea,-

Some day more kind my fate may find,

Some night kiss you!

Now the play moved quickly. The English freebooter returned again to ravish the soldier's clearly compliant wife, but this time found the soldier waiting for him.

After the dwarf took several bows and made another long speech, a sword fight flared between himself and the buccaneer. After dispatching the blackguard Britainer, he turned to the audience, saying it was now time to settle with his wife.

On this point the men in the audience were unrelenting. Male honor rose and fell on their women's fidelity. No matter how much he loved his wife or loathed her despoiler, her chast.i.ty's loss-or the rumor thereof-meant blood revenge. On this count his reputation brooked no slight or doubt or even hesitation.

The audience was blind hot. One man screamed for her head, complaining that she had not forced the brigand to kill her. Another shouted back at him that it wasn't her fault. The marauder's refusal to run her through revealed dishonor on his part, not hers. The two men started pummeling each other, which quickly led to drawn swords. Again the two actresses intervened. Separating the men, they lured each of them to the farthest corners of that blanketed alleyway with sugary words, sensuous smiles, and outrageously preposterous promises.

The actors had no more than got back into position when the dwarf suddenly stopped the action. "Amigos, my apologies. But I have been reminded that since we mount a second production, our troupe is due second recompense."

The picara women, who had extricated themselves from the swordsman with startling aplomb, again sashayed through the crowd, pa.s.sing their hats. Despite jeering complaints, the money poured in torrents.

I stared at the women, dumbfounded. The performing of comedias seemed little more than rape, pillage, and highway robbery set in a theater-at least the way it was practiced in New Spain. As for the actresses, they only confirmed for me the incomprehensible power of women over men. Madre de Dios, the things these voluptuous vixens make us do worldwide, time out of mind. We are indeed helpless in their hands. At the drop of a garter, a quick come-hither smirk, or the flimsiest hint of chast.i.ty debauched, we are irretrievably lost.

True, most of the women I had known were Veracruz prost.i.tutes, but I had seen great ladies from a distance. What little of them I had observed confirmed everything I glimpsed at the Jalapa fair. Women inevitably reduced the brave and the brilliant to drooling imbecility, all the while still believing that as machos hombres we were the ones in charge.

After the two actresses ransacked the crowd, our hero-soldier-dwarf returned to the stage. Not that he was any happier for it. The predacious pirate was now servicing the Spaniard's wife with such stupefying regularity that not even her oaf of a husband accepted her claims to "fanatical resistance" and "fighting the brute off."

"Ever hear of suicide?" the frustrated soldier-dwarf finally asked her, at his wit's end.

"I lacked the means, blessed husband," she responded, with an eager-to-please grin.

"You lying strumpet!" the actor-dwarf-soldier thundered. "All decent women hide poison in their bosoms for exactly these occasions, so when kidnapped by pirates, they can quickly dispatch themselves and not disgrace their cherished husbands, beloved brothers, and doting fathers."

Murmurs of approval rose from the men in the audience.

At last, under questioning, the truth came out. She was not his wife after all but a Moorish wh.o.r.e who, while he was away in Italy, had murdered his faithful bride and taken her place.

The good soldier promptly decapitated her, hurling her heretic soul howling into h.e.l.l, her infernal descent daringly dramatized by a hideous h.e.l.l-bent fiend, dragging her offstage, presumably to the bottomless pit. All this was enthusiastically enacted to the wild cheers of the audience.

I thought-and hoped and prayed-that the play was over, but then another character was summarily introduced, the daughter of the soldier. The daughter, a little girl, was portrayed by the shorter of the two dancing women.

The dwarf-soldier discovered that his little girl was dying from the plague. He went to her side and prayed for her. In answer to his prayers, an angel pulled her from her bed and up to heaven-with a rope hung over the branch of a tree.

"G.o.d recognizes His own," the hero told the audience, some of whom now had tears rolling down their cheeks.

The play was similar in theme to Peribanez and the Comendador of Ocana, one of Lope de Vega's masterpieces. Fray Juan had let me read the play because Vega was the great master of the Spanish theater, which of course was the greatest producer of comedias in the world. The point of Vega's play was that "honor" was not the exclusive possession of the n.o.ble cla.s.s but could be found in a simple peasant. Peribanez, a peasant, was not n.o.ble by birth; but was n.o.ble in heart and soul. When his honor and human dignity were violated by the comendador who l.u.s.ted for his wife, Peribanez avenged himself upon the powerful aristocrat.

The comendador made Peribanez a captain in order to send him away from Ocana and leave the coast clear for his seduction of Casilda, Peribanez's wife. But the crafty n.o.bleman had not counted on the courageous loyalty of Casilda, who stood ready to fight and die for her honor. Peribanez uncovers the n.o.bleman's wicked plot, witnesses his wife's willingness to sacrifice herself, and slays the comendador in mortal combat.

The play put on at the fair was a pale imitation of de Vega's tale, but it had the same result of theatrical fare everywhere: to separate the audience from their hard-earned lucre.

Apparently, this was the way it was done: Challenge a man's honor, then watch the feathers fly. Nothing inflamed the audience's emotions like chast.i.ty besmirched and vengeance exacted. I personally preferred the complex emotional struggle of a prince drugged, lied to, and raised as an animal. But emotional complexity failed to fire our hot macho blood. Clearly, a play had to dramatize manliness, courage, and pureza de sangre, purity of blood. Honor was derived from who one was and from what one was-all of which was contingent on bloodlines. Not even riches, t.i.tles, and family names could compare with purity of blood, particularly when it was backed up by the willingness to die for it, which was universally heralded as hombria, the quintessence of Spanish manhood.

While I had no honor myself, due to my impure blood, I understood the code of hombria. Wealth, learning, even great skill, such as that of a fine writer or an esteemed scientist, were dismissed by the gachupins as the paltry achievements of Jews and Moors. Fort.i.tude was the true measure of a man, along with the l.u.s.t to dominate-men by the warrior's sword, women by his pa.s.sion.

I had started to descend from the tree when the dwarf announced an added attraction if further money could be raised.

"These beautiful senoritas will dance a zarabanda for you!" he enthused.

A zarabanda was a deshonesto dance-wicked, shameless, lecherous, and sly-in which women luridly flung their skirts and lasciviously pumped their hips. Of course, by now these women could show the men little they had not already seen. Still, everyone was game. The men cheered, stomped, and poured more money into the hats; and the deshones...o...b..gan.

The zarabanda blazed hotter and hotter, and the skirts flew higher and higher, driving the audience into an hysterical frenzy. Even the two priests could not look away. They feigned disapproval, rising as if to leave, but somehow never made it back beyond the blankets. Nor did they order the dance stopped, which was no doubt the better part of ecclesiastical zeal. The audience might well have ripped off their heads. In truth, they, too, were men and did not want the performance to stop.

Now the two male actors and the dwarf went into the audience with their collection hats. The more frequently the dinero flowed, the louder they shouted commands to the women, and the higher the skirts flew.

Only when the women were so exhausted that their legs no longer kicked and their skirts no longer soared and their secret gardens no longer filled the eyes did the priests rush up to the dirt stage and insist the show desist.

Even so, they met with opposition. A drunk knocked one of the priests out cold, while the other endured a withering barrage of obscene insults, culminating in his "manifest lack of hombria."

The altercation was ugly enough without physical and verbal a.s.saults on the priests. It was time to part. Violence was common fare on the Veracruz streets and held no charm for me. The actors apparently concurred. On my way down the tree, I noticed them sneaking away.

In truth, I had enjoyed myself. I did wonder how the soldier could have mistaken the actress for his own wife. Maybe I had missed an important plot point. Or maybe she was simply more attractive. Who knows?

I burned with curiosity as to the prince of Poland. How would he turn out?

Nor were these idle questions. Though I did not know it at the time, from those two plays I had learned lessons that would prove invaluable.