The Remarkable Adventures of Adam de Mattos

The
Remarkable Adventures
of
Adam de Mattos

by
Lisa Maraventano

Copyright ©2016 by Lisa Maraventano
Cover Art by CreateSpace

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without permission. Contact LisaMaraventano@gmail.com.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN-13: 978-1518839856

To Marilo

Prologue
Adam de Mattos was twenty-two years old the day he graduated with the class of 1995 from the University of California. He had a bachelor’s degree in Literature and no clue how he would earn his living. He was quite good-looking, a quality which had given him favor when his efforts and indeed his personality would not have been sufficient. He was six foot tall, one hundred and eighty pounds with brown-black hair and dark brown eyes. He was broad shouldered, long-legged, with a square jaw. These features were from his grandfather—also named Adam de Mattos—who had died last year but had been born in Portugal and moved to America as a child. The true reason for the arresting good-looks of our Adam de Mattos is that his mother was Japanese. The Japanese combined with the Portuguese and English and Native American blood of his paternal grandmother to produce a distinctive, unusual face with high, wide cheekbones and an engaging smile.
Adam had been planning to work for his grandfather after graduation. His grandfather had spent decades in California real estate and while Adam had little interest in it, he knew it was the best opportunity for him. When his grandfather died, there was a terrible period of probate and scrambling around after the money and property by his aunts, uncles, and even his father. In the end, Adam inherited ten thousand dollars and lost not only his grandfather but his own future as well. To top this off, last month his girlfriend of the past year dumped him for being too boring and she was an accounting major. So Adam wandered aimlessly through his finals and finally ended up walking across the stage to get his diploma when his name was called and that was all he knew he was going to do with his life.
His parents took him out to dinner at a place along the Sacramento river and then home where he slept in his old room in the house his parents had owned for seventeen years.
Wandering around Tower Books two days later, Adam found himself in the travel section. He had never thought much about travel. What did people see in it? He flipped open a Lonely Planet guide to Europe. It claimed you could travel on a shoestring.
The pictures and descriptions were amazing: Prague, Venice, Amsterdam. What silken daydreams unfold in the mind at merely their pronunciations.
Adam kept reading. Would it be a complete waste of his inheritance, his one start at post-college life to go backpacking around Europe?
Boring. He was boring.
Why wouldn’t he be?
He’d played it safe his whole life, parked, stranded securely in the middle of the pack all through public school, all through college. He’d sat bench in football, won a few unimportant awards for track, had a 3.2 GPA as long as he could remember. He’d lived with his parents in Sacramento and then went forty-five minutes west to Davis for school. He’d lived in dorms and apartments, ridden his bike, gone kayaking some. Went to Berkeley or San Francisco for concerts on occasion.
Not only was he incredibly boring. He was bored.
Adam continued flipping through the travel book while the wild hair established permanent residence. Maybe the rest of the world wouldn’t care, but Adam de Mattos was thoroughly excited. He was going to Paris! And Rome! And London! And Madrid!
Adam bought the book and a notebook and headed to nearby Curtis Park. He munched on the big bean burrito he’d picked up on the way and began scribbling out an itinerary, plans. There was a new feeling in him. It was hard to identify. He had felt it once before, maybe five years ago when due to various reasons Callie Moynihan had decided he should take her to prom instead of the dimwit she’d been waiting on to ask her. Part of his mind struggled to put a name to the feeling while he continued flipping through the Europe guide and writing down names of cities to visit. Anticipation? Elation?
Hope.
It was the hope that life could and should be better than it had heretofore actually been.
A fortnight later, Adam stepped off the plane in Dublin.

Shipwreck
A few weeks after his arrival in Europe, Adam awoke with his face in the sand. He coughed and spluttered, saltwater puking up out of him. Pain. Shattering pain in his right leg, his right arm. He tried to move. His body did not respond to his will. Concentrating fully, he tensed the muscles of his left arm, put pressure from his biceps to his elbow and managed to crank his torso up forty-five degrees from the sand. His left knee bent, and he used his thigh muscle to slowly angle his way up, eventually able to flop back onto his rear and sit up. This herculean effort only gained him the advantage of being able to identify why he was in such acute pain: his right leg and arm were gashed and scraped and apparently broken. Woozy from the sight of his own bloody and torn flesh, his head reeled around on top of his neck as he struggled to remain sitting up.
He heard a strangled cry. Turning his head to the left, he saw a young girl dressed in old-fashioned garb—a long skirt with an apron over it, corseted bodice—drop a wooden bucket she was carrying and rush toward him. She was on the sand next to him within seconds and gabbling in a language he didn’t understand as she fretted over his wounds.
“Whoa there, hold on,” Adam muttered as she prodded the torn flesh on his shin. “Ouch!” he yelled involuntarily and she stopped, sitting back on her haunches in wide-eyed silence. She was a very beautiful girl, maybe sixteen years old. The skin of her cheeks and neck and shoulders was pale and unblemished; her sparkling dark eyes and thick eyelashes contrasted superbly against the pure setting. She chattered again in something he was starting to recognize as possibly Spanish but unlike any Spanish he’d heard before. He understood a word or two in every fifty. After a few minutes, she got up and ran off, grabbing her bucket as she went. Adam lay back on the sand and stared at the brilliant blue sky.
“Where were you?” he asked the sun. He tried to remember what had happened yesterday. A violent storm had blown up, exploding around the fishing boat he was on in thunder and lightning strikes until the water was shelled into furious compliance. The sea allied with the storm, heaving, tossing the boat like a toy. Adam couldn’t remember much more. He recalled holding on for dear life as the boat shuddered, he remembered the two Portuguese sailors yelling at each other over the wind. He remembered a loud crack like a tree splitting. That was all. His next moment of consciousness was ten minutes ago.
In a few minutes more, Adam heard the voice of the strange girl behind him. He turned his head and was confounded to see with her four men also dressed in old-fashioned costume with two long poles, rope and some long boards. Next thing he knew a primitive stretcher was constructed beside him, the poles secured by the ropes, the long boards between the poles. The men brusquely maneuvered him onto the stretcher and speaking the same unintelligible language as the girl, on cue hoisted the poles and began carrying Adam up the beach to a rustic shack a quarter-mile inland. The men brought Adam inside and dumped him with little ceremony onto the bed in one corner of the room. Grunting, sweating, the men accepted the drink she offered them and then departed back to their own work, their own lives. Adam, no wiser as to where he was or who these people were than he’d been on the beach, tried to move to a sitting position on the bed and was instantly halted by the frenzied attention of the girl. She brought him the wineskin and held it to his lips. It was actually quite good wine, Adam thought, or he was just thirsty. It was like nothing he’d ever tasted before, light and sunny and delicious. The girl’s chemise did a more than adequate job of covering her cleavage under the tight lacing of the bodice but Adam admired the smooth skin of her throat while he drank.
She chattered at him and fussed about, smoothing his hair back from his brow and motioning for him to lie flat. She was busy at the hearth and soon he knew why. She dipped cloths into boiled water and began to clean his scrapes. A halloo sounded outside the door. The girl called over her shoulder and a middle-aged man missing most of his teeth and wearing a ratty and somewhat smelly velvet gown and hat entered the domicile. Adam realized then that this must be a dream. The man looked like no one so much as the picture of Rabelais from the introduction of Gargantua and Pantagruel he’d read in March or perhaps a version of Shylock. Somehow his subconscious was twisting all the literature he’d read into his own fairy tale while he slept. But if that were true, why the hell was he in so much pain? He didn’t remember ever dreaming pain before.
And the pain became even more intense as Shylock Rabelais revealed his trade. He was a bonesetter. Adam, in deference to dreams and to young, pretty girls, tried not to scream and swear and cry. It seemed most unmanly and unworthy of a literary hero—even if it was only his own dream. But excruciation dominated intention and scream he did. The girl fussed and soothed his head and shed tears down her cheek and murmured soothing words he didn’t understand and finally the ordeal was finished. The bonesetter handed the girl a sachet of dried poppy and she handed him two gold coins which were a large part of the dowry she was supposed to bring to her wedding in two months. But she couldn’t fret about that when this man obviously needed her help.
Exhausted, Adam lay half-conscious, staring at the ceiling. It was not a sheetrock ceiling like at home, nor even hewn logs like in a cabin. It seemed to be made of earth. Clay? He couldn’t tell. He turned his face to the stone wall and fell asleep.
After some time, Adam roused from deep sleep and became aware of the girl sitting beside him on a rustic wooden chair. Her full skirt and apron were spread across her lap and she was busy sewing and singing quietly.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Startled, she looked up and began speaking rapidly. A few more of the words were making sense to him. It was Spanish but much different than the Spanish he had learned in high school and used sporadically on trips to Rosarito, Mexico.
“Como se llama?” he tried. She stopped speaking and smiled.
“Delfina,” she replied. “Y usted?”
“Adam.”
“Adán,” she repeated. Yes, that had been his name in Spanish class.
He continued trying to speak with her in Spanish, she correcting many of his words, his grammar and certainly his pronunciation. “TH” replaced “S”. He had learned something about that in school. He knew there was a region in Spain where they did that.
He broached the subject of location. “Donde estoy?”
“El Puerto de Santa Maria.”
Adam was unfamiliar with that town. “No se. En Espagne?”
Delfina laughed, a lovely high sound that made him smile. “Si, claro, Espagne. Entre San Lucar y Cadiz.”
Cadiz? He had a vague idea where that was. Near Gibraltar. “Hacimos en viaje en barco en Lisboa. Hay un…” he trailed off. He started to pantomime storm.
“Una tormenta?”
“Si, tormenta.” What an accurate name.
She went to the hearth and brewed him a tisane which dulled the pain. Soon he slept again. Day after day she fed and cared for him, administered his pain medicine and sang him to sleep.
After a few days of tender care, Adam had recovered sufficiently to become suspicious. No electricity. Well, maybe she was poor and this area was undeveloped. He didn’t know. No sound of cars going by though. No telephone. No paper products. No plumbing. No nothing. Only the basic elements of life: food, shelter, clothing. Crucifix on the wall. Oil lamp for light. Open hearth, hearty stew cooked over the fire. Every day. Usually with mussels she collected and maybe an onion. Some rice. Bit of bream. Olives. No real doctor came by, only that strange figment of his imagination the bonesetter checked on him once, and the apothecary delivered more dried poppy. Delfina wore the same clothes every day. Adam did too, but he was a victim of shipwreck.
One day when Delfina was not there, curiosity got the best of Adam and he decided to go outside. He’d been lying on the bed for well over a week now. Today he was feeling pretty well physically and anxious mentally. He wanted to get in touch with his folks. They might not yet be worried about not hearing from him but he still felt he should let them know he was banged up and stranded in Spain instead of blissfully hiking the Alps or something. Adam realized he shouldn’t put any weight on the right leg and he couldn’t use his right arm on a crutch yet, even if there was one near by. So he did the thing there was to do, as ungraceful as it was. He crawled. As he reached the timber door jamb, he pulled himself up and stood with all weight on his left leg. He opened the door. Brilliant white sunlight poured in. He felt like he was in the opening shot of The Searchers or in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy sees color. The world outside was a world, the world apparently, but not his world. It was more than just a different country. This was a different time. The road outside the door was a dirt path really. It went left toward the sea and right toward some other buildings quite far away. There were no power poles, no pavement, no cars or trucks in sight. But he could see three galleons in the sea.
What was going on?
He saw Delfina running toward him, her wooden bucket of mussels swinging wildly on her arm. She was scolding him thoroughly from a distance but the wind carried off her words. When she reached him, she was panting, her chest heaving under the kirtle and chemise, sweat on her temples. She braced her arm on the other side of the doorframe as she caught her breath.
“What in the name of our sainted mother are you doing, sir?” she asked in Spanish. “You shouldn’t be out of bed!”
“I know. But I missed you.” He smiled.
Delfina tried not to let his smile affect her but her stomach did a little somersault. “Get back to bed this instant!”
“I am up now. Why don’t you just get me the chair if you please and let me sit in the sun.”
Bucket at her feet, hands on her hips, Delfina’s lips twitched in consternation. She was so pretty and sweet, Adam thought. Like a nice little sister he never had.
She fetched the chair with alacrity, brought her bucket indoors and began boiling water for his tisane and the stew. Adam basked in the sun with a lizard for a half hour and tried to make out the figures of the men and women he saw in the distant village.
“Why do you live over here on the edge of town?” he asked her when she appeared with the cup of opiate brew. He realized instantly from the expression on her face that this might not have been the most sensitive or even sensible question. Obviously, this is where she had to live in the most literal sense.
But Delfina was honest as well as kind and pretty so she decided to answer him truthfully. There were beans for the stew today so she brought out the other chair and a bowl to shell them while she spoke. “This little house belonged to my mother’s family. My mother died last fall.”
“I am sorry.”
Delfina continued splitting open beans. “My father had the worst luck of any man in Spain. Here every Andalusian is getting rich off the New World but my father put all of his money into a ship which sank. Then he borrowed money from the wrong people. When that next investment failed, they killed him. From poverty, shame and heartbreak, my mother died last year. The only thing left for me is this little hut which was my mother’s father’s fishing shack. Aunt Lucinda, my mother’s sister, helps me as much as she can. She is the one who introduced to me my fiancé, Eduardo Villaronga. We are supposed to be married in June.”
“Who is he?”
“He is a farmer. He lives northwest of here on the road to Seville.”
“Do you want to marry him?”
“I did.” She got up brusquely and hurried inside. He heard her by the hearth, meddling.
He thought about her story for some time, her mother. In a few minutes, she was back.
“Tell me more about the farmer,” Adam asked.
“He is a good man. He’s not too old, and he’s not fat or bald or mean. I could do much worse.”
“Wow. Sounds awesome,” Adam said in English.
Delfina tilted her head sideways like a puppy, trying to understand. “He grows oranges and olives. He also grows girasoles. Do you know what those are?”
When Adam shook his head, she described a tall flower, taller than a man with yellow petals and a head full of seeds. 
 “Oh, sunflowers,” Adam understood. “Girasoles?”
“Si, they come from America. Eduardo started growing them a few years ago and is very successful with them. Also, they are quite pretty.”
“Ah, yes, they are my mother’s favorite flower.”
Delfina smiled. She liked sunflowers as well but it was impossible to say that they were his mother’s favorite flower. They were a new crop. Sometimes, Adam didn’t make sense. “I should tell you Aunt Lucinda wants me to start staying with her and my uncle at their house at night. She doesn’t think it is a good idea for me to sleep here anymore while you are here. Now that you are better.”
Adam smiled ruefully. “She thinks I might get certain ideas?”
Delfina blushed and bowed her head so that a curtain of lush, dark hair hid her flaming cheek. She finished shelling the beans and scurried inside to prepare his meal.
“Delfina, I have a question to ask you,” Adam said later that evening. She was tucking him in, tenderly as a mother would a child. She had been worrying about the dark spots that looked like bruises along his back. They didn’t seem to be getting any better. Adam sometimes had the feeling he was a living doll to her, awakening maternal and nurturing instincts in her. He gave her someone to take care of. Since his arrival, she had a new incentive for getting through the day.
“Of course, Adam. What is it?” She did not mind whatsoever prolonging the evening with him. He was right: he had awakened feelings in her. But he was wrong in that they were not maternal. He did give her life meaning and purpose. She did want to take care of him, for the rest of their lives. She had fallen in love.
“Please don’t…” he didn’t know how to say freak out in Spanish, or this version of Spanish they were speaking.
“What?” Delfina asked somewhat breathlessly. She pulled the chair up to the side of the bed and waited.
Adam worked on phrasing his question just right. “You know I was shipwrecked in a storm. My body was obviously injured. You have been taking such wonderful care of me. The thing is, I think my mind may have been injured as well.”
Delfina frowned, a worried crease between her brows. “In what way, my—Adam?”
“Well, could you please tell me what year it is?”
Delfina threw back her head and laughed. She had never heard anything so humorous in all her life. “What year it is? It is the year 1630, of course! Adam, you are such a comedian,” Delfina stood, brushed back Adam’s thick hair from his forehead, refrained from further touch or goodnight kisses although she desperately wanted to kiss him. She walked across the room and blew out the candle. “Good night, silly Adam,” she whispered from the doorway.
“Good night, fair Delfina,” Adam whispered back. But his mind was turning over what she had said. It only confirmed the suspicion he’d had for some time, that he was dreaming a long, involved dream. Why couldn’t he wake up?

Adam did wake up the next morning still caught in the dream. The same ceiling overhead, the same sad little bed, the same intense pain in his body as it tried to heal. “Wake up!” he hollered at himself. He punched himself in the shoulder with his left fist. He yelled out in frustration.
Delfina rushed in. “What is the matter?” she anxiously asked. “Are you all right?”
“Pain,” Adam muttered.
Delfina hurried to the hearth and rekindled the fire. She set out the things to brew the tisane.
Adam didn’t want more painkiller clouding his mind. The pain wasn’t as bad as the confusion was. How long would this dream last? And where was he really?
“No,” he said, pushing the mug of brew away. “I want a clear head. How many days have I been here?”
“This is the twelfth day,” Delfina answered, worried. Delfina hadn’t slept at all as she thought over last night’s conversation. Adam didn’t even know what year it was and all Delfina had done was laugh at him. She felt terrible about that. Her poor Adam! Perhaps she should get help. Maybe her aunt and uncle…but no, her uncle would probably call in the authorities and Adam would be taken away. Delfina didn’t know where to turn.
“Delfina?” She heard her name called by a male voice outside the door. “Are you home?”
When she opened the door, Delfina saw her fiancé Eduardo standing outside holding a bouquet of roses. It was the first time she had ever been very glad to see him. “Eduardo! What are you doing here?”
“I thought it might be time to visit and to meet this mysterious stranger who washed up on shore,” Eduardo smiled past her at Adam sitting up on the bed inside the hut. “How are you, amigo?”
Adam smiled. He took an instant liking to the slim young man on the doorstep. Eduardo was of average height, with thick wavy black hair and warm brown eyes that shone with intelligence, good humor and kindness. “Getting better,” Adam answered. Delfina invited Eduardo in and shyly took the flowers from him. They seemed far too elegant for the clay jar in which she placed them to wilt away in this impoverished dwelling. Nevertheless, she liked them very much.
“My mother loved roses,” Eduardo explained as he sat in the wooden chair near the hearth. “There are two dozen plants in the courtyard at my house. I have tried to keep them up but they are not in the same condition she left them. Perhaps you will have a talent with them,” Eduardo smiled.
Delfina felt her cheeks flame and she turned toward the fire. She stirred the pot beginning to bubble with the day’s meal. Thinking of moving into his house brought a thousand mixed emotions to the surface. On one hand, she would love the security and comforts of a real home and having a proper household to run. On the other hand, that meant mortgaging her entire future. All decisions from that day forth would be subject to this stranger’s approval. To have a real, fine bed it would be his bed. How much she would have to pay before she felt like she had anything of her own. Glancing back at Adam who was engaged in jovial conversation with Eduardo, Delfina fled outside and down to the water’s edge to cool off. It was the beginning of May. In June she would be married. One month left of life as she knew it. For better or worse.
After Delfina’s abrupt departure, the men shrugged at each other and laughed. Neither said, “Women!” but both of them thought it loudly and then continued their talk. Eduardo helped Adam when he stumbled over words or searched for phrases as he tried to describe leaving Portugal with two fisherman on a summer evening. How the storm had blown up out of nowhere. The lightning striking the boat and the massive crack like a tree trunk splitting open.
“Well, you are safe now, my friend. We shall try to get you back on your feet and back to your people when you are ready.” Eduardo grinned. “In the meantime, I see in you a worthy adversary.”
Alarmed at the word, Adam repeated it. “Adversary?”
“Yes. I have the great feeling you are a chess player, señor. Am I right?” Eduardo smiled.
Adam smiled in return, a glint lighting his eye. “Oh? You think you can beat me at chess, do you? When shall we play?”
“I will bring a board tomorrow. We can play every day—until the wedding!” Eduardo stood and grabbed Adam’s good shoulder. “Until tomorrow, my friend. Please tell Delfina farewell for me.”
“Until then,” Adam replied as he gripped the other man’s forearm, more grateful than he could describe for the chance to have something solid to hold onto. Eduardo came daily for their chess game. Both began as excellent players and improved each other through the coming weeks. As their friendship grew, Adam’s spirits improved as well. Being injured and stranded in the seventeenth century was not ideal but Adam knew it could be worse. He had food, shelter, companionship and he was getting better each day. Adam knew he would have to face the future before long. What that future held, he could in no way foresee. In the meantime, Adam enjoyed whatever each day brought with it.

A fortnight before the wedding, Delfina knew she must act or fate would have its way with her. Drunk on the sherry she took from her uncle’s cellar, she slipped outside into the soft night air. The only way to outwit fate is to make the first move, she told herself. It had been a favorite saying of her father’s; tonight she didn’t ponder the destiny that philosophy had brought him. Under the full moon near the end of May, she allowed her longing to navigate her way down the dirt road to the door of the little house.
Once inside, she shut the door. Silently kicking off her slippers and removing her dress, in a simple chemise she tiptoed barefoot across the hard-packed earth floor to the bed where Adam slept, snoring softly. He was lying on his left side, his face toward the wall, back toward her. Moonlight filtered through the ill-fitting shutters at the window. Delfina stripped off the chemise and a frisson went through her as the night air slid over her naked skin.
Lifting the blanket from him, she slipped in behind him. She had never lain next to a man before, never even been kissed. She was not afraid. On the contrary, her own boldness further intoxicated her. Drunk with the power of making her own choice then dealing with the consequences instead of following blindly duty tradition expectation Delfina began the long-desired exploration of Adam’s body. He was lithe, long, muscular. After six weeks of admiring him as she nursed him, her fever for him had heightened to this maddening degree. Her fingertips found the hemline of his shirt and wandered beneath the fabric, touching his abdomen, the rough hair below his navel. Then her fingers explored his chest. The rest of his chest above his navel was smooth and bare. He stirred under her touch. Her hand flitted down, along his thigh. He was so hard, all muscle. He turned onto his back with a soft groan. Even in the dim interior of the cottage awash with moonlight, she sensed his arousal. She ran her hand lightly along the top of his thigh and paused. He slept in thin cotton breeches.
She didn’t yet dare. Instead, she skipped that area and moved her hand again to his taut abdomen with the rough hair then back up his chest. His arm curled around her. His hand stroked her hair. Such an innocent gesture bathed her in intense pleasure. She wished she could purr. Her hand moved to his collarbone, traced his jaw. Her fingertip drew slowly across his lower lip. Back and forth. His mouth opened. The tip of his tongue caressed the pad of her index finger. She thought she might die of happiness. His eyes finally cracked open, glittering black in the pale light. “Delfina?”
“Yes, Adam?” Her finger teased his lip some more.
He didn’t say anything else. His limbs felt extremely heavy from the strength of the tisane she had brewed him tonight. Languorous, sensual, his foggy mind shrouded his conscience and the instincts and desires of his body animated his movement. He twined his fingers in the silky strands of her hair and pulled her head toward him. The pressure of his arm brought her mouth to his. She felt the delicious sensation of a kiss. So strange, so intimate, her lips on his, his tongue seeking entry to her mouth. Her lips parted. She felt the flickering inside her as he tasted her. The warmth and wetness of it. She felt herself melting, becoming liquified. His arm was curled around her back, his fingers still in her hair. She moved, sliding her breasts against his chest. She gasped at the exquisite feeling of her nipples against his skin. Adam ran his other hand down her spine. She thought she would surely die from this pleasure, she could not contain it within her skin, her mind. It was overwhelming her. His hand slid over her rear, feeling contours, kneading flesh. Delfina thought she would at least faint, she didn’t know how to process all of the sensations flashing through her like lightning.
Adam moved, turned her on her back. The glittering of his eyes in the moonlight was feral as he gazed at her breasts. He bent his head and flicked his tongue over the nipple and watched her writhe in response. Then his tongue teased the other one. On his knees between her legs, his palms gently passed over all her bare skin and then fastened to her breasts. She whimpered but bit her lip. She needed to be silent, no one must know she was here. The illogic of this escaped her. She really wanted everyone to know that she belonged to this stranger and no other. He had stolen her heart that day on the beach and now she freely gave him her body.
Her legs parted farther in instinctive invitation. Adam bent his head to hers again and kissed her fiercely. She could feel him digging into her, only the thin fabric of his pants between them. This hurt. The pleasure subsumed the pain; by design, it became part of the pleasure. Adam kissed her neck, the indentation above her collarbone, her throat, the space between her breasts. His hands still held them, squeezing. His mouth moved back to hers. Before he kissed her again, she whispered the words that burned inside her: “I love you, Adam.”
An icy north wind blew away the fog in Adam’s brain. The words penetrated with the blasting force of reality and he froze. “Delfina?” Of course, who else would it be?
“Yes.”
He rolled onto his back and groaned. His hardness deflated. “Oh, my God. What are you doing here?” he whispered.
“Don’t you love me, Adam?”
“Of course I love you! But not that way. Not the way you want, apparently. Jesus, you are supposed to marry Eduardo in a few days. What are you doing here?” he asked again, keeping his voice low.
“I can’t marry him! I love you!”
Sitting up, Adam ran his fingers through his hair as Delfina draped herself across his back, her breasts crushed as she held him to her.
He was shaking his head. “Delfina, sweetheart, querida, you can’t do this. This has been a terrible mistake.”
“Adam!”
“Shh. No, honey, we can’t let anyone know. You would be ruined. What were you thinking?”
“I love you!”
“I have nothing! I don’t even…” he refused to elaborate. Not the time to tell her he was from a different time. “Eduardo is a good and honorable man. You know I like him immensely. I would never do this to him. How much of that damn poppy did you give me tonight? Good grief, woman!”
“But you said just now you love me!” Delfina was heartbroken.
Adam took her shift from the back of the chair and gathered it in his hand. He slid it down over her body. It would be better if she were not naked. In truth, he did not want to make love to her since she was betrothed to his friend. But she was very tempting in her innocent beauty. Now she had tears streaming down her face as she tried to comprehend his rejection.
“I do, of course. I love you for the way you saved and nursed me. For your kindness. For your beauty, too, I will admit. But this is Spain. In 1630. I cannot marry you. And I can’t love you or make love to you unless I could marry you, my sweet. You know this. I don’t understand what has gotten into you. You are such a good girl.”
“Adam, that’s what has gotten into me! I don’t want to be a good girl and marry that man and always regret I was never with you! I had to try…I still have to try!” Delfina tangled her fingers in his hair and brought her mouth to his in a wild kiss. For the hell of it, Adam wound his arms around her and kissed her delicious mouth one more time. But then he shoved her off him. “You must go, Delfina.” He stood on wobbly legs and half-dragged her to the door. She sniffled and left.
 Adam lay awake after she went. He replayed the last six weeks in his mind. How had he not noticed she felt that way about him? She had rescued him from the beach, fed him, clothed him, nursed him back to health. Her dark eyes sparkled each time she looked at him. She was constantly blushing. Adam had thought that was simply how modest seventeenth-century maidens acted. He hadn’t thought about her developing a crush on him, wrapped up as he was in himself. He vowed to not be so selfish in the future. He didn’t understand why he had been transported to this time and place. But he suddenly realized it wasn’t only about him. He had an affect here. He would have to make sure he didn’t do any damage, especially to those who had shown kindness to him and to those he cared about.
The next few days Aunt Lucinda brought Adam’s food and made sure he was all right. The excuse was that Delfina was busy preparing for the wedding. But Adam knew she was avoiding him. He was relieved. When Delfina did come back, there was acute awkwardness between them so more excuses were found to have Lucinda or Eduardo bring Adam what he needed. Adam knew he would soon have to fend for himself. His body was nearly healed. He could walk again. His arm still pained him and he wore it in a sling. That night with Delfina had awakened something in him more than passion. Adam felt ready for life—and love—again. But not with Delfina, tempting as she was in her innocent allure. Eduardo was crazy about her, Adam knew from the many hours spent with him. Delfina was truly lovely, sweet and kind. They were well-suited for each other whether Delfina realized it yet or not. Adam knew she was scared. But you should be scared, Adam thought, when you get married. It is partially terrifying, like any grand adventure should be.

The first time Adam saw the Doña Maria was at the festival of Corpus Christi.
On a warm Sunday evening in June, Adam walked down the cobbled streets to the square in front of the cathedral. Horns blew. Drums beat. Little girls in white dresses promenaded out. The whole town seemed gathered to watch the procession of the Host into the street. Colorful flags snapped in the breeze. Red, orange and white. The perfect weather, the profusion of potted plants enlivening the entry to the church, flowers and dresses, music, Adam stood, glad to be alive. To sense sight and sound and touch, taste and smell. To interpret these perceptions into thoughts, to react, to smile. To breathe in and out.
This was the simple and indescribable gift of being alive.
Joy flooded Adam’s blood like wine. Primed, Adam was ready to fall in love. And then it happened.
The Doña Maria stepped out of the church next to another woman. Both were wearing white lace mantillas. They proceeded behind the raised cross, appearing to be some kind of mistresses of ceremonies. Adam took little time to analyze the beautiful woman’s role in the parade. His main priority was to memorize each feature of her perfect face. He was struck with such immediacy and precision by what Shakespeare called the “blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft” that all Adam could do was stare in awe at the vision before him. Maria had typical Spanish coloring and features: dark eyes, dark hair, high cheekbones, full mouth. Most of the women in his vicinity shared these traits. But Maria had the fortunate gift of beauty wherein the common features coalesce into a whole so sublime and pleasing to others of our human race that we are all struck by its power. Maria had owned this power since childhood whether for good or ill. She was now in full possession of her beauty. Her hair was thick and lustrous. Her skin was unmarred by any evidence of age, either lines or blemishes. Her full mouth set in neutral expression still hinted at, teased with the possibility of undiscovered sensuality. Her dark eyes trained to be downcast in public still managed to observe and penetrate her surroundings and the minds of the men who were constantly watching her. She knew what they wanted.
She knew also what she wanted, or at least what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to attract suitors of a certain caliber, family, social standing, wealth that would elevate her gentle family and secure the future for her and for them. A comfortable future. That is paramount. Security. Money. Money to buy the little items and big items that guarantee shelter, food, clothing—the necessities of life. Necessities. Silk and lace. Frivolities. Things that say to the world I am this class I am worth this.
Maria was not resentful of her duty, not in the least. It was what she was bred and born to do. Like all ladies of her class and of her time, like all ladies, all women, all females, the expectation to marry and procreate, beget, was ordained.
Adam watched the beautiful young woman over the heads of the others in the great crowd surrounding the procession of the Host. Silver and gold flashed in the bright sunshine of the Sunday sky as the flags snapped in the breeze. Music trumpeted through the air and the jealous children not chosen for the honors of the day darted through the throng. Adam trailed along the sideline, his eyes following Maria. She mesmerized him.
The procession wound through the streets of El Puerto de Santa Maria. It ended in a huge hall set up for a public banquet and ball. Adam gained admittance and waited and watched. The beautiful woman sat at the head table while the meal was served. He heard her addressed as Doña Maria. Adam ate with the rest of the common folk crowding the long trestles. There was fresh bread and roasted meat and decent wine and enormous fish and a dozen types of fresh fruit, plenty for everyone. Soon enough, the tables were cleared and dancing began. Maria left the table and danced with three different fellows in fine clothing before she retired to a corner for a moment of peace.
Adam saw his chance. Enacting a scene from Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet seemed the best way about it. She was hiding behind a large gold marble column catching her breath from the dancing. Knowing she was unlikely to understand a word, Adam recited: “If I profane with my unworthiest hand /This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this—” but that’s as far as he got. Maria jumped at the first touch of his hand on hers and instinctively slapped his face. They both were shocked at her sudden action. Maria stood, her mouth in an O-shape while the red handprint on his cheek became clearly visible. She snapped her mouth shut for a split second and then began scolding him like a shrew in rapid, incomprehensible Spanish.
“Lentamente, por favor, señorita,” Adam requested.
Maria took a deep breath and shook her head. He was foreign. She should have known; she had never seen him before. There were many foreigners coming through Santa Maria in those days but none had ever dared to approach her before. “Well, then,” she said at a rate he could understand. “You may need me to speak slowly but you certainly try to move too quickly! You must not speak to me without the permission of my father and a proper introduction. The insolence!”
“And why must I not, Maria? What will happen?” he smiled into her outraged eyes. His smile had helped him out many times before and it did not fail him now. He saw at once how her outrage was disarmed. The tiny crinkle at the corner of her eyes and the slight twitching of her cheeks betrayed her. But still she feigned indignation.
“What will happen he asks in his poor Spanish? Ay, Dios mio, what will not happen? Do you have any fishhooks on that Portuguese ship you must have ridden on, senhor? You will be strung on them and gutted like a merluza!”
“Merluza, huh? Do you like merluza?” He asked, grinning fully now. It was a cheap, common fish and not the best. But people ate it.
She made a guttural sound of frustration in her throat but he finally got her to smile, he saw as she turned her back to him.
“My name is Adam,” he called to her back. “Adam de Mattos.”

Adam de Mattos. The name rang in her ears for days after the banquet. How smug he was. How annoying. How forward. How unforgettably good-looking. And charming.
This would not do.
Maria forced herself not to think about him. How tall he was. Or how dark his eyes. Or that irritating smile. Whenever she thought of the smile she had to press her lips between her teeth to keep her from smiling back at even the memory of it. Oh. She took a deep breath. She wanted to go for a walk. It was almost mid-June. The afternoon sweltered. Her family was in siesta. She was supposed to be napping as well but lately she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t do anything but think of that voice and that smile: Adam de Mattos.
Which was really not good. Don Pablo Romero Martinez been inquiring after her lately, gauging preliminary reaction to his suit. He was a wealthy landowner from the eastern part of Andalusia with large holdings near Ronda. His grandfather had helped wrest it from the Moors and was considered one of Spain’s mighty heroes. Maria knew little of Ronda except that it had been a city since Roman times. Some Roman engineer had constructed a marvelous bridge, she had been told.
What did she care about bridges or Romans or soldiers or even Moors? It all seemed remote and boring and dull. Even the thought of marrying Don Pablo who was quite handsome and rich did not interest her very much. All the years of preparation, practicing the downcast eyes and shy smiles and limiting her education to that befitting a lady of her class seemed wasted when her fiery nature could so easily erupt. She had slapped the face of a stranger without a second thought! And then for that stranger to turn out to be…Adam de Mattos. What was the purpose of it all? How could she work lace if she didn’t have the delicacy of a…dishrag? Frustrated, rebellious, Maria slipped outside into the summer afternoon and headed to the garden. The thin shade of the olive and almond trees did little against the blinding sun. Maria hoped her skin wouldn’t burn and her mother berate her for trespassing this afternoon.
Sighing, she pinched the petals of a pink rose and rubbed the velvety softness between her fingers, avoiding the thorns attached to its stem. No birds were out. It seemed the whole world had stopped.
Maria moved to the edge of the garden and tried the little postern door in the wall. It was unlocked! Oh, dear. Should she step outside and see if the world were still there? Or not?
She opened the door. The little lane that ran from her father’s house toward the town was vacant and dusty. She walked along the wall of their house toward town. She would stop in a moment. She was just stretching her legs. No one would know. Lost in thought—about Adam de Mattos—she wandered some time. If she was stealing this time from her home and her duties, she might as well let her thoughts run wild as well.
It had only been a moment. Maybe three minutes of encounter. At the most. She tried to replay every look. Every word. There was something so different about him. So unrestrained, unrefined. Unreal. He did not seem to be part of the world she was used to. He was part of this stopped world she never witnessed during siesta, when all was white hot light and stillness. She looked up from the dusty road as she smelled oranges. Oh, dear. Had she wandered as far as the neighbor’s orange grove then? She hadn’t meant to. She turned around to head back home.
Sitting under a tree several feet back from the road, to her amazement she saw the object of her unchecked thoughts as if they had conjured him. She saw his lazy grin and the mischievous twinkle in his eye. It was as if he knew there was going to be trouble for the two of them and he couldn’t wait for it to start. He looked as if he wanted desperately to be trouble for her.
And that was true. He did. Because if she had not been thinking of him, as she had been so determined to not do the last few days, he had been thinking of her constantly. His vow to behave himself in this time and place had flown out the window the moment he laid eyes on Maria. He was certain she was the reason he was here. So he had found out where she lived. And he had loitered here in Eduardo’s orange grove for hours every day hoping foolishly for an opportunity such as this one. He had thought of the silken darkness of her hair, her smooth skin, her black eyes. He had felt that sting of her slap over and over again. Her look of pride and power afterward that had been quickly replaced by her shock at her own boldness—which outdid his. Their exchange of words. He tried to reconstruct phrases of the rapid speech he had not understood, tried to decipher the insults she’d heaped so quickly upon him. She was incredible.
He rose to his feet and stood under the orange tree, waiting.
She kept walking. “Maria,” she heard her name softly called. She stopped and looked at the top of her dusty shoes. Some integral part of her knew that her destiny would be determined in her very next action. Would she make the shoes keep going down the dusty road back to the unlocked postern door? Or not?
“Maria…”
Yes, Holy Mother, Maria guide me now, she prayed silently. Named in your honor, beloved mother, you hold my life in your hands at this moment…Queen of Heaven, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
“Si, Adam?” She turned her face toward him. His hands were outstretched with the palms up. But he stayed put under the orange tree whose ripening fruit dangled on the tips of the branches where they were once nothing more than sweet-smelling flowers.
She ran to him.
“What do you want?” she muttered, looking at her shoes again, catching her breath from the sprint.
“Tú, solamente.”
She looked up and planted her hands on her hips. Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, really? And who are you to want me, senhor? You must go back whence you came. Lisboa, Porto, donde?”
“I cannot go back to where I started. I must only go on where I am. But I want you to come with me.”
“Where? Do you have anything to offer for me?”
“Offer for you?” he repeated, not certain he had understood correctly. “Like a good at a market? Is that what you are?”
She reached her hand up to slap him again but stopped herself in time. She stood taking a deep breath, her bosom rising on the inhalation, her hand in the air and the sun striking her so that she seemed to him like some reminder of home, like the Statue of Liberty. He smiled at the unlikely comparison and that blasted smile of his undid her and she laughed.
He laughed with her. She put her hand back on her hip and scolded him again looking like a fishwife. She wore her everyday clothes and plain black shoes now covered in dust. Her hair was falling loose from her chignon and she had indeed gotten a bit sunburned on her walk. Adam stepped forward to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear. He had hardly understood a word of what she said but her voice was music to him. He spoke to her in English. “You are beautiful, my Maria.”
“I must go,” she said at a tempo he could comprehend.
“Please, stay.”
“No. The house will wake up soon. I must be there when they do.” She turned to go.
“If I did have something to offer for you, would you…”
She stopped and looked back at him. “Would I what?”
“Would you marry me?”
Maria’s eyes widened. The nerve of this man! This was not how one proposed marriage to a lady of Spain. No manners. No manners at all. “I cannot marry you, Adam de Mattos,” she replied as calmly as she could while she shook her head in perplexity.
“But if you could, would you? I must know.”
She sighed long in exasperation, more at herself and the world and her destiny and even the Holy Mother whom she revered with all her soul for allowing this untoward thing to happen than at him. “Of course, my heart. Adios,” she said and fled with all the speed a girl who had done such a brave and stupid thing could.
Adam looked after her as she tore down the road. It was meant to be. This was why he was here. In Spain. In 1630. Maria. He sang a bit of the song from West Side Story: “All the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word!”
Now he just had to figure out how to possess all that would be required to “offer for her.” God, money. God—money! He hit the trunk of the orange tree in frustration and five little fruit fell to the ground. Adam made a face of vexation and wound his way back to the hovel he called home.

It was Delfina and Eduardo’s wedding day. Ever since she had come to him that night, Adam and Delfina had avoided each other like the plague. Which was really here in seventeenth-century Spain and did indeed need to be avoided. It came in on ships and sailed up the river with the gold. But on this sunny day in June, El Puerto de Santa Maria was ready for a wedding. A nice little local girl marrying a kind, prosperous farmer who was madly in love with her delighted the established community. In a decade they would have seven children, the old women predicted. Four sons and three daughters and they would all live happily ever after. The olives, sunflowers, and oranges would grow on the farm and light up the mountain with silver and gold and sunshine. The ordered rows up the hillside comforted the townspeople when they looked north. Yes, all was growing as it should. Delfina was a well-made girl who could bear the seven children and fatten up Eduardo with good cooking. They looked forward to the wedding feast and the good wine. Church bells rang and the sanctuary filled up with well-wishers. Adam sat between the bonesetter and the apothecary. He did not look at Delfina as she walked slowly to the altar. A tear welled up at her eyelid as she concentrated on looking straight ahead, knowing she was passing Adam by. Alas, there was nothing else to be done. She would marry Eduardo and have seven children and eventually, eventually this hole in her heart would heal. She would become fat with Eduardo and the pleasures of the table and the farm and family would replace any foolish fantasies of a young girl. She looked at the priest and the altar and finally at the man who waited for her. He was as slender and straight as a young poplar. Eduardo even seemed to shiver and shimmer in the light streaming through the high window in the church transept like silver poplar leaves.
He was nervous, she realized.
Her resolve strengthened with that awareness. He doesn’t need to be nervous. I will be a good wife, she vowed. I will make him happy. I will have babies. I will cook. I will take care of the house. I will. Before she knew it, she had repeated the vows the church asked of her while she’d silently stated her own. I will. The couple was sealed by the church as man and wife, from this day forward. Adam could tell as they recessed down the aisle Delfina didn’t spare him another thought. He was forgotten. And that was as it should be. Congratulations, best wishes, Eduardo and Delfina.
Practically the whole town was at the wedding feast. The last three years of Eduardo’s farming had been quite good. He had many business and family connections in the town. His neighbors the Montez family were there, Don Pablo with them. Doña Maria didn’t know what to think of this. Perhaps her own wedding would be not many months from now. Like the bride, Maria must shut Adam from her mind and heart for her own future security. He was less than a peasant—a pauper! She had not been able to find out much about him until one day she heard two women gossiping at the marketplace about the poor wretch washed up on shore last month. That was Adam!
The gossips hinted that Delfina herself had spent a little too much time with him but that her aunt had put a stop to it. Jealousy burned in Maria’s heart that afternoon. Was it true? Had Adam made inappropriate advances to poor orphaned Delfina as well? What a scoundrel!
Maria’s anger was rekindled when she noticed Adam among the wedding guests. What was he doing here? He didn’t belong! If he had nearly compromised Delfina, he certainly had no business being at the wedding. And if he had come here to approach Maria again, she would allow him no such familiarity, especially in public. Maria sat fuming as she drank her light wine and picked at the piece of pastry in front of her. Don Pablo noticed her brooding and her continual glances at the dark-haired stranger sitting near Barber Alva. Two of Maria’s other suitors also noticed her distraction. One, Ricardo de Silva was a young man who recently inherited his uncle’s modest estate east of Sanlucar. The other, Alfonso Baldo was a merchant who had built a small fortune outfitting ships bound for the New World. Both knew if Don Pablo seriously pressed his suit for her hand, they had no chance. He was much more rich and powerful. But they were in no way going to allow an outsider to intrude. Maria was meant for an Andalusian man of rank, wealth and power. She was raised to be an asset to a Don. Maria was not for some poor, queer-looking Portuguese sailor without a penny to his name. In fact, he should leave town.
A few cups into them, Ricardo and Alfonso decided that Adam should indeed leave town and were willing to make certain of it. Don Pablo watched Maria make her way across the room to follow Adam who had left by a side door.
“Adam, wait!” Maria called after him.
“What are you doing?” Adam said, hurrying toward her. “You can’t be out here!”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Why? Nothing’s changed. I am trying to find a way but—”
“Not about that. It’s about…” Suddenly, she lost her nerve. What if it were true? Oh, this was torture, this being in love.
“What? Tell me quickly. Then go back inside.” Adam looked over her head back at the hall they’d just left, the same banquet hall where he’d first talked to her. He saw a shadow move.
“Are you in love with Delfina?”
Startled, Adam shook his head. “What? Where did you hear this nonsense?”
“The market—“
“You can’t listen to talk in the market! Goodness, Maria, I didn’t know you were the kind of girl who would—“
“Well, are you?” she demanded.
“No,” he replied emphatically. “I am grateful to her. She is like a sister—I love her like a sister. She took good care of me for many days. But I am in love with you! You know that.”
Maria was surprised how much she enjoyed hearing those words. She had no idea she had craved them so. Still, she pressed him. “Well, was she in love with you?”
 Adam lied. He did not lie to lie to Maria. He lied because he was loyal to his friends. Delfina needed protection now. “No. Delfina is very much in love with Eduardo. She is happy to marry him today.” Adam knew it would become true, and that was good enough. “Now go back inside. I think someone may have seen us.”
Maria started to go but then turned back to him. “One more thing.”
“What?” Adam looked nervously back to where the dark shape had been. There was nothing now.
On impulse, Maria reached her hand up behind his neck, stood on tiptoe and kissed him. Quick, just a peck on the mouth. Then, once again, she ran. But Adam stood, rooted to the spot in the earth where Maria had kissed him. He didn’t care if he ever moved again.
Adam watched as Maria returned inside. He looked up to the heavens which had granted him this strange fate. For weeks, he had felt trapped in a dreamworld he couldn’t escape. He realized now he never wanted to. All he wanted was to find a way to win Maria’s hand and settle down to a peaceful happily ever after. Dreaming about this future, Adam didn’t sense the men coming from behind. Before he could react, one of them had his arms imprisoned and the other one began a systematic thrashing which before long rendered Adam unconscious. Ricardo and Alfonso threw Adam’s limp body over the rump of Alfonso’s horse and rode deep into the countryside. They dumped him unceremoniously and headed back to town, feeling jubilant.
Adam woke up with his face in the dirt. He tried to move. Reminded of the shipwreck, he dreaded feeling the pain that would accompany his re-entry to consciousness. Yes, there it was, but not as intense as last time. He moved some muscles: his face, his arm, his legs, various muscles in his core and shifted position until he was now sitting in the dirt around the base of a tree. All of his limbs responded to him. Nothing seemed to be broken this time. He pulled in a deep lungful of air and his ribs ached from being kicked. The half-moon hung shrouded by thin clouds in the night sky. The same night?
How surreal that a night so magical and sublime could end like this. Adam shook his head, half-laughing, half-trying not to cry. Where was he?
He moved again, attempting to stand. He had never been beaten up before. He had seen it in a thousand movies, read it in a few books. He had even seen a bar fight once at a pool hall in West Sacramento. But he hadn’t been involved beyond witness. God, is this what it felt like? Every inch of him seemed sore, as if his brain couldn’t process what had happened so all the pain receptors were firing at once. He breathed deeply again, leaning against the tree to help hold him up. How far was he from El Puerto?
Not that it mattered. Delfina and Eduardo, his only real friends in this time and place, were married. It was their wedding night. Eduardo had been magnanimously tolerant of him but certainly would not appreciate an interruption this evening. So now he was truly alone.
Who knows? Maybe he was back in his own time now. This could be a field outside Sacramento, golden hayed stubble that hurt to walk on barefoot. Where were his shoes?
Adam’s lovely leather boots that God alone knew how Delfina procured for him and at what cost. Gone. Adam inventoried the rest of his clothing. His pants were gone too. His fine jacket. He was left in a loose linen shirt that came mid-thigh and nothing else. Wonderful. But was he home? He looked around for some sign. A streetlight in the distance or headlights from a car or electric lines or telephone poles. There was nothing nearby.
The razor sharpness of the dry grass did hurt his feet when he stepped cautiously away from the support of the tree. He heard something: a high whining noise pitched for dogs and then descending into human-hearing range. Up and down the notes repeated until Adam finally realized it was a violin. He walked carefully through the field and his feet finally found a dirt trail he followed less painfully toward the music. As he neared, he saw the dim glow of firelight and the outline of hunched shapes gathered around it. Not a single human voice though. All sat mesmerized by the wild, forlorn music emanating from the shrieking violin. The musician stood as a dark shadow, the flames dancing at his feet. Occasionally firelight flashed on the wood of the instrument as it moved against the shoulder. If this wasn’t a dream, Adam thought, it might as well be. His bedraggled, bruised body felt the pulsing energy of the music and responded, nearly dancing him down the dirt trail in the moonlight. Tangled in time, confused and battered, uncertain of the future and…well, scared, Adam let the emotion and daring and pleading and chaos of the music render in him what words and thoughts could not. He got closer to the fire, too close, because abruptly the music stopped and several burly men were on their feet, some with blunt weapons.
In his halting Spanish, Adam called out, “I mean no harm! I am lost and…hurt.”
Suddenly, two women were scurrying toward him. The men objected, issuing harsh warnings which the women ignored with an insult cast backward. Two little old ladies reached Adam who was a hundred feet away from the gypsy camp. They took his hands in theirs and shouldered him toward the fire. The men still stood, ready to defend their tribe but the ladies knew it would be unnecessary. Here was a prodigal son in need of aid. They sat him down and other women joined in the fussing as the men grumbled and passed liquor among themselves. One women held a lit brand while another dabbed at the dried blood on Adam’s face with a wet rag. They murmured to each other as they washed away the dirt and blood how guapo was the face beneath the grime. Someone handed him a mug of a hot drink, something alcoholic which burned his throat and warmed his blood. Adam was relieved and grateful for the ministrations of the women, relaxing back against the broad bosom of the one behind him, smiling sheepishly into the dark eyes of the one still wiping at his face. Their mothering was balm. Taking a shaky breath, Adam drank another sip of the warm concoction and then tore off a bite of stale bread from the small loaf he’d been given. The woman on his left replaced the mug and loaf with a bowl of some warm stew and a wooden spoon. Adam ate hungrily although he’d feasted at the banquet earlier. Something about being beaten and left for dead in the middle of nowhere and then returning yet again to the living awakened his appetite. Plus, the ladies seemed to expect it of him. The men had realized who this strange man was: nobody. So they drank their liquor and joked around and chased a couple of the prettier señoritas—who were not allowed anywhere near Adam, guarded as he was by the older women. Then the violinist picked up his instrument again and began to play.
This time the music was fun. Spirited. Lively. A dance. One of the other men strummed a guitar in accompaniment. One of the pretty señoritas began to move her lithe and sensuous body in a repeating S. S. S. Curves. Undulations of the river, a flowing of motion with no lines or corners. Until the music sharpened; with it, her movements sharpened. A clap. A foot stamp. A pause with arms lifted. Then, the staccato series of sharp notes beat with feet and hands. The violinist dropped out in a seamless transition to the headline act of this evening’s entertainment. Accompanied by the guitar, the woman danced by herself. Strength, awareness and independence were in each movement. She was enough, all alone. Beauty. Power. Desire.
Then a man rose up, on the outskirts of the dance. He began to move. Called by her beauty as she was intrigued by his courage, the man and woman joined their dance. The heat between them as they danced together kindled the fire in every onlooker. Still surrounding Adam on all sides, the older women stopped attending him. They were watching the dancers with deep satisfaction and quivering chins as they got into the performance. Youthful passion was well remembered. The excitement of those days framed by flame lived in their minds and hearts as their offspring lived and walked the earth today. This was the creation of life. This was what men and women and sex could do. They had drawn inside themselves the essence of this music, this dance and become filled with it. In the darkness of past evenings, when their blood was hot and their men were hot and they were hot, life had sprung up inside these women and they had given up what they loved most—ah, being alive!— to raise up the next generation. But they remembered it all, every touch, every nuance of the passion that had burned and then consumed them.
Adam saw the conception of flamenco. The art form alive in Adam’s time was conceived and carried and born on nights like these hundreds of years before. In the blood of lost virginity and lost babies and born babies, in the hot nights of passion, in the mixing of the blood of the displaced of Andalusia, the struggle and the glory was taken up in the body of a woman of a man and of the simplicity of a single extraordinary instrument to explain without words the allure of being alive. The reach was everything. Great pauses with arms outstretched, symbol of the reach. To reach, to extend, to attain. To bring and give glory to the Creator of all.
The women were coals, not ash yet, with plenty of warmth left in them. When the dancing was finished and Adam was full of food and drink, they tucked Adam into a bedroll and he slept soundly.

Adam stayed with the gypsies as summer died and autumn aged. In the days, he helped the women cook and wash. He settled their petty disagreements with charming smiles and soothing words. The men let him alone since he showed no romantic interest in their women and knowing he was not long in their world. One he befriended; he learned guitar from Alejandro after showing him the few chords he knew and the few riffs from rock songs he’d learned in his past life.
Adam thought constantly of Maria. He had spent every waking moment since the orange orchard racking his brain trying to decide how he could earn enough to marry her. Eventually, he decided he could not. He wasn’t torn by the desire to preserve the fabric of time. If some knowledge he had of the future could help him build a fortune now, he had no scruple against using it. The problem was, here in the gypsy camp, he could not think of anything. Night after night, watching the dancing and hearing the couples make love afterward, Adam’s thoughts turned to something else. He wanted Maria. But he also simply desired. He was lonely, alone. And young, handsome and strong.
One evening, after mutton stew from a poached sheep and a broached keg of sherry, the entire camp was feeling euphoric. The freeze had come and winter approached. The Romani knew harder times were imminent. Staying alive became the theme winding through their collective mind.
On this night, a guest arrived. Adam sat among the youths who had by this time begrudgingly accepted him although they still ignored him. The challenges they had offered him through the weeks had been met with a good-natured grin, dodged by submission. Adam had been in no hurry to be beaten up again. He was thought of as a coward and he didn’t mind. He didn’t drink much, helped prepare the food he ate, was a superb fisherman thanks to his Portuguese grandfather’s teaching and therefore carried his weight in the community. Plus, he made the cranky old ladies giggle like teenagers and they cooked better when they were in a good mood. The guest was a woman, known to the tribe, who visited each year when the weather turned cold. Her name was Marcela.
She had come by carriage from Seville. She had a tall Negro driver, three maids and a footman with her. Obviously wealthy, she had come to pay her respects to the people she loved and had brought behind the carriage a wagonload of provisions for the coming months. She took a cup of the sherry and drank it with Timo and Tito, the twin brothers in their forties who were the leaders of the camp. They accepted her gifts with grace and presented her with a ruby and gold ring whose origin she did not question. She slipped the ring on her right forefinger and kissed each man on the cheek while the rest watched in silence.
Then she sat back on the cushion her manservant had placed for her and sipped another glass of sherry. Xavier took up his violin. He bowed to her and placed the violin under his chin. He shut his eyes, held up the bow and began. Sarasate had tried to formalize this music in his brilliant work. But this music of the moment contained more than could ever be transcribed. This music described the end of summertime, the long fall into barren, colder months. The yearning for heat and food and comfort and the ability to withstand the lack.
Adam watched Marcela as she too closed her eyes and let the suffering and gladness seep into her being. He wondered about the physics of music, how it can pluck the heartstrings through vibration. It tore through flesh and bone and penetrated into the souls of its hearers. Mostly, he watched the rapturous expressions on the exquisitely beautiful face of the enigmatic Marcela. Who was she? What was she doing here? She was obviously known to the gypsies. But she did not look like one of them. She had the skin of a lady, unblemished by hard life. The years had kindly matured her, refined her beauty to its most delicate and perfect form.
The violin music ended and there was a reverent hush for several minutes. Marcela stood and Alejandro reached for his guitar. The manservant reached for Marcela’s midnight blue velvet cloak. Underneath, she wore a radiant scarlet gown that mirrored the flame of the campfire. It clung to her voluptuous figure through the bodice and ended in a spectacular flourish of ruffle. She stood on the tablado perfectly still. Her chin tilted up to the stars and the faint light cascaded over the bones of her face, her delicate skin, her bare shoulders. She raised her arms to heaven, to the moon and stars, and waited. No one breathed.
And then, and then, and then…
She began.
If Adam had anticipated wild abandon, tempest and storm, he was wrong. The softest, lightest, finest music drifted from guitar in response to the gentle warm and flowing dance she brought to them this evening. When she finished, an explosion of uncharacteristic applause broke from her audience. Her dance was the reply to Xavier’s song. It would be all right. There were moments in life for doubt and defiance, for struggle and survival. But there were also moments in life for tenderness and generosity and for the nurturing of one another through kindness and love. Every gypsy heart was stirred by this dance in a way they were not used to. The passion of the fight, the battle for survival as outcasts and heathens was overcome by the reminder that we are human after all, the highest of created things on this earth and we should never be ashamed. We are who we are, crazy/sinful man loved deeply by the one who desired us to be here in this life, in this moment, doing just this.
Marcela nodded appreciatively at the applause and her cloak was restored to her. But she could not sit again just yet. She drifted from the campfire into the darkness of the surrounding night.
Adam got up to follow her based solely on intuition. She was different. He was different. That was a match. A pairing, a grouping of two.
The gypsies did not begrudge this. It was as though Adam had come to them to be a gift to their lovely, lonely Marcela. Nearly twenty years ago, she had arrived as he had, bleeding and lost. She had been healed there with the same warmth of the older women now ash. Marcela had been a wealthy orphan who eschewed life in society and lived in the wild as a shepherdess. Until one day, in spring when the world was full of the need for new life, she had found a shepherd boy she found irresistible. In Adam’s time, it was called spring fever or simply hormones. In her day, she had thought it was love. She had made love with the shepherd for weeks on end until one day of course she became pregnant. In a few more weeks, she had started to miscarry. The blood terrified the boy. He had left her with the gypsies and she had never seen him again.
Heartbroken and weak, she had returned to Seville, to her inheritance, to her house. She had lived alone since.
“Hello,” Adam said softly to the shadowy figure under a wild pomegranate tree. He was afraid he would startle her and she would disappear again as suddenly as she had arrived.
But she simply replied, “Hello.”
He approached cautiously but she stayed still. Her wildness had been tamed by long years of solitude. He stood silently by her as she looked off into the night. After several minutes, she turned and faced him. Their eyes had adjusted to the depth of the dark and they could see reasonably well. All was black and white and gray and silver. “Who are you?” Marcela asked.
“Adam de Mattos, at your service, señora,” he replied as he had heard the gentlemen of El Puerto de Santa Maria say.
“Ah, well, Adam de Mattos, I am pleased to meet you. Here in the faint moonlight with a band of gypsies. It is not how I normally meet such a gentleman. And how came you to be here, caballero?” she smiled.
Adam’s bruises had long since faded and his cuts had healed. He stood several inches taller than she who was used to being as tall as most men. His handsome face was similar to other Portuguese men she had met but had an unusual quality she could not identify. He was broad-shouldered with a strong jaw and dark eyes which gleamed in the dim light. His perfect, white teeth flashed in a friendly smile. “It is a long story.”
“And are you content to stay among the gypsies? Or…” Marcela paused.
“I am content to serve you, señora, if you have need.”
Marcela laughed. “Oh, you are, are you? Well then. Have you been to Seville, sir? I return there this evening.”
“You mean to travel tonight?” Adam was surprised.
“Who would dare to harm me with you at my side?” But Marcela truly counted on her friendship with the gypsies and the fighting skills of her driver and manservant to protect her. She was famous in these parts and no one bothered her.
Adam took her hand and bowed over it in the most courtly fashion he possessed. “If that is your wish, señora, I would be most honored to accompany you back to Seville.” Adam had no idea what he was getting into. But it seemed a most fortuitous opportunity to move on. The pretty señoritas had begun to flirt with him and he knew that would cause difficulties. And spending winter with the gypsies—even with Marcela’s supplies—seemed a cold and hungry future.
“Well, then, let us go,” Marcela smiled. She placed her arm in his and allowed him to escort her back to the gypsies. As they took their leave, no one shed a tear. In the gypsies’ itinerant life, strangers came and went. If they were helpful and kind as Marcela and Adam were, they were friends for life. If not, the resultant enmity often greatly reduced the strangers’ normal lifespans.
The Negro man Elías climbed to the carriage box and the footman held open the door for the three maids, Marcela and Adam. The wagon was left for the gypsies and its driver became the second footman. The reins of the harness attached to four fine dappled horses were gathered up in Elías’s strong hands and the party set off. Marcela reached her long, thin arm through the window and waved a lace handkerchief in farewell. Xavier took up his violin and sang them down the road in one last piercing, poetic goodbye.

Seville

The carriage rumbled quietly along the road all through the night. Adam drowsed through the trip, his mind hypnotized by the wheels. It was the first vehicle he had been in since he had arrived here. How long ago was that? He thought it was about six and a half months now. Delfina had told him the day she found him was April 16, 1630. Now it was early November. Fallen dry leaves cartwheeled along the road in the cold wind.
His former life became daily less real. He knew who he was or at least who he had been. He could remember cars and television and electricity and America. He tried to remember what had happened. He had landed in Dublin on June 25, 1995. He had toured the city and then taken the ferry to Wales. He had hiked in Snowdownia and traveled south to Saint David’s then on to Pembroke, Bath and Cornwall. After visiting the site of the Battle of Hastings, he went to France through the Chunnel. He had visited Bayeux and Mont Saint Michel before heading farther west into Brittany. There he learned Galicia had also been settled by the Celts. Intrigued, he bypassed the rest of France to save for “later” and headed for northern Spain. San Sebastian in Basque Country was a great place with pintxos and txacoli wine. He had stayed there longer than he thought he would in a hotel on the mountain overlooking the bay. Then he had rented a car and traveled through the rainforest of Asturias. He hiked in the Picos Mountains, toured the cathedral in Oviedo and finally made it to Santiago de Compestola. Not quite a pilgrim but still. He followed the Way of Saint James to the noon mass at the cathedral. Standing in the throng of the faithful, Adam had stared at the feet. Women, men, old and young, so many shoes. All of us trying to get somewhere we feel drawn to. In that case, Adam decided, it was time to see Portugal. He wanted to be where his origin was. He had loved his grandfather very much. Losing him suddenly had torn a huge hole in his life. Adam traveled to Lisbon seventy years after his grandfather had left it. He stood in awe of the Torre de Belém as the sun set behind it. He found a pensão and stayed several days. Adam had a rudimentary grasp of the Portuguese language. His great-grandmother had never learned English. When Adam was little, he and his father and grandfather would spend Sunday afternoons with her. Adam knew enough Portuguese to get by. While he was in Lisbon, he learned more of the language every day. He made friends with fisherman near the monument and impressed even the most skeptical with his skill at fishing. After a few days, an old man and his middle-age son invited him out on their boat. The sea had been calm as they sailed away from the harbor. They had hauled in several hundred pounds of swordfish when quite suddenly the wind picked up. It whined then howled and the sea changed in abrupt response. The sailboat pitched wildly. Adam heard a huge crack like a tree splitting from a lightning strike. And that was all he could remember until he awakened on the beach in Spain. Three hundred and sixty-five years ago.
At one point, several months ago, he had thought he had come here to find the Doña Maria. But as each day passed, the memory of her face grew dimmer just as his memories of home did. What if each new day you were new? What if you only lived in the present moment, whatever that moment was? What if the past and even the future held no meaning or memory for you? How would you live? Adam tried to hold on to the former things as best he could, especially the beautiful and lovely Maria. But his mind was so troubled, so overwhelmed by all that had happened that eventually he chose to think very little. Riding in this carriage tonight had reminded him of his former life, of cars and trains and things that go. But he had discovered all the “go” of the modern world was unnecessary to survival. There are only a few things we need and all we will ever truly have: air, water, food, rest and someone with whom to share life.
Company had been lacking in Marcela’s life for some time. She had had a few other lovers in the years since the shepherd of her youth, men who wanted little from her. She’d wanted less from them. She also had Elías, a slave she’d bought and freed ten years ago. She detested slavery and thought this was at least one thing she could do for one person. In gratitude and for his living, Elías had stayed with her as her driver. He had friends in Seville, other Negroes slaves or free whom he visited almost nightly. The other company she had was her manservant Carlos, his wife Esmerelda and their two teenage daughters, Olivia and Yolanda. These were her three maids. Esmerelda had worked for Marcela’s parents since she was a young girl and had kept the house in good order during the five years Marcela had lived in the wild. But the social difference between master and servant was strict in Spain and good servants guarded the boundary even more fiercely than did the employer.
Marcela had no family and very few friends. Her own company was all she needed most of the time. But in Adam’s time, it would be discovered that a woman reached her sexual peak around the age of thirty-eight. Marcela was a few months past her thirty-seventh birthday. She was longing for passion in the same way Adam was, intensely consumed by the desire to touch and to kiss and to make love to another. Sitting next to Adam for the long ride back to Seville, she felt the heat of his body seep through to hers. She had invited him back on impulse, of course. He was good-looking and charming and strong and living with that band of gypsies where he didn’t belong one bit. Marcela loved her Romani friends but she knew their vices and faults. She was surprised Adam had been with them so long and stayed so sweet. She felt like rescuing him.
After her miscarriage all those years ago, Marcela had been bitterly depressed. It was then the women had taught her what she had come to the wild to try to learn on her own. In modern times, it has become the phrase: “Wherever you go, there you are.” For some, this is the worst news of their lives.
Twenty years ago after staying with the gypsies for a month, Marcela had returned to Seville to restore her health. She had lost a tremendous amount of blood with the miscarriage. She had recovered slowly. And they were right; wherever she went, there she was. Marcela came to terms with the fact that her lover had disappointed her and she had lost their child. What Marcela couldn’t bear was that she couldn’t have what she wanted of the world. Wherever she went, there she was. The world wasn’t going to change. She could change, though. She could detach and cease to let it affect her. She let Esmerelda take care of her and the house. She managed the investments her father had left her with their manager Alfonso de la Cruz. She learned business. Through the years, she built up a vast fortune knowing full well it was in vain. There was no one and would be no one to pass it on to. Spain was a place of incredible wealth in those days. No one questioned her desire to be part of it.
Carlos came into the household after Esmerelda fell in love with him. They were married. Marcela rejoiced at their wedding and at the births of Olivia and Yolanda. She was a kind mistress and the family was very loyal to her. Marcela had plans to arrange for the girls’ futures. She planned to dismiss them all soon with more than enough money to set themselves up in a town where their history of service wouldn’t hamper the girls’ ability to find genteel husbands. She had dowries for each of them as well. Marcela had as yet not told them of her plans; the girls were still young, only fourteen and sixteen.
When Adam arrived in Seville early the next morning, he was astounded by the glittering, gilded beauty of the city. The morning light shone on the Guadalquivir River, turning it into a golden ribbon through the city’s center. Elías drove over a bridge and deep into the quarter of town homes near the Giralda. The bells tolled nine o’clock. Esmerelda, Olivia and Yolanda had slept most of the drive and were now awakening. The girls tried not to stare at Adam, keeping their eyes downcast on their hands folded in their laps. They thought he was very handsome, even in his gypsy clothes of a loose linen shirt and ragged tan breeches. His brown-black hair was down to his shoulders, very straight. He did not have the clipped beard and mustache they were used to seeing on gentlemen, merely unshaven stubble. Adam knew the girls were not supposed to look at him so he kept his eyes averted. Most of the time. Every now and then he caught them sneaking a peek at him and he smiled softly at them. To him, they were dressed quite finely in petticoats and printed dresses. Esmerelda studied him unabashedly. It was not proper to bring home a man from a wandering gypsy camp, of course. But her dear Marcela could do no wrong in her eyes. If Marcela invited him home, Esmerelda would somehow make it fitting. She was already calculating what she would order from the tailor, the butcher, the grocer, the baker.
At last the carriage stopped in front of a building on Calle Santa Maria de las Estrellas. “Here we are,” Marcela stated. Carlos held open the door. Adam exited the carriage and held out his hand to help Marcela descend as he had seen other gentlemen do with their ladies. However, his knowledge of manners was extremely limited. He knew a few things from watching movies like Elizabeth and Pride and Prejudice and from witnessing the behavior of the few gentlemen he had been near in El Puerto de Santa Maria. He wasn’t exactly sure what his role here in Seville would be. But he would do his best not to embarrass his hostess.
The wrought iron gate was opened and Marcela, Adam and the servants entered through the arched stone gateway into an enormous courtyard. A fountain stood in the center of the courtyard surrounded by plants. Bougainvillea climbed up to the second story rail. Adam stopped and looked around. “This is your house?”
Marcela smiled. “Yes. It was my family’s. Esmerelda will show you to your room.”
With that, Marcela headed toward a staircase. Adam called, “Wait!”
 “Yes?”
“What am I supposed to do?” So much for manners, he thought.
But Marcela didn’t mind the breach of etiquette. “Rest. I will see you at dinner. About eight o’clock.”
 Esmerelda led Adam up a different staircase to a room on the third floor. “Yes, rest, señor. But I should have the tailor here later today to begin outfitting you.”
Adam looked down at his clothing and realized he really was in a bedraggled state. “Gracias, señora.”
 Esmerelda inclined her head and left him in a twenty by twenty foot bedroom. Adam hadn’t slept on a decent mattress in over six months. He sat down on the featherbed and was surrounded by a cloud of softness. The damask covering in golds and blues seemed too beautiful to be real. Adam had not realized he had missed such comforts so much. He had become used to dirt. He wasn’t sure if he really was ready to return to civilization, even if it were seventeenth century civilization. He was different somehow.
But then he pulled the covers down and climbed in between the soft cotton sheets and slept deeply for hours until Esmerelda knocked on the door around four in the afternoon. Yolanda rolled in a tea cart laden with delicious-smelling dishes and Esmerelda introduced the young Italian tailor she’d brought. Giovanni measured Adam quickly and began showing him various cloth. Esmerelda approved or disapproved each choice, having the final say. Then she had the tailor begin trying on some of the finished garments he’d brought with him, items from around the shop or rejected by other customers—something to put on Adam’s body so he could look respectable at dinner. Carlos had hauled in a small bathtub and Yolanda and Olivia were busy scurrying back and forth filling the tub with warm water. By the time eight o’clock arrived, Adam was dressed in a pair of garnet velvet breeches, a white silk shirt and a dark brown doublet with medallions of gold thread embroidered on it. He wore brown hose and shoes that looked like girls’ tap shoes, with an inch of heel. Esmerelda had tried to force him into a ruff collar, but he had rebelled. He hid behind Yolanda then Olivia until they were all giggling and Esmerelda gave up. Faced with such undignified behavior, she felt she had no choice.
Adam met Marcela in the courtyard and they proceeded to the dining room. Marcela was dressed informally, in a velvet-trimmed brocade robe that went from collar to floor with loose, long sleeves. The bream in sauce, roast pheasant and marzipan dessert were deliciously rich after months of stew and coarse bread. Adam leaned back in his chair contentedly and stared at Marcela’s fine beauty through the candlelight. She had commanded him not to thank her anymore so instead he looked admiringly at her and then smiled.
Marcela’s gut clenched at that smile. It was very disarming. She thought he was incredibly handsome. “I have something to show you,” Marcela said quietly.
Adam felt every ounce of the fine wine they’d consumed with dinner that night. “What?” he said softly back to her.
“Come with me,” she invited, rising from her chair.
Adam followed Marcela meekly. Through the courtyard, up the twisting stairs. She opened a door of a room on the second floor and Adam gasped. It was a bathroom. A real, proper bathroom with colorful tile walls and floors and an enormous tub in the center of the room. It was filled with steaming water and gardenias floated on the surface. Candles were lit all through the room. The shocking part of it was there was a shower against one wall. Marcela went over and turned a knob. Hot water steamed forth from the iron faucet set high and flowed into a drain placed beneath it. The thought of a hot shower—
“Would you like to try it?” Marcela asked.
Adam nodded mutely. She began unfastening his shirt, his hose, his breeches. She slipped one garment off after another until he was unclothed in front of her, aroused. She lightly brushed his skin with her fingertips, touching him in the barest caress. Her lips touched his shoulder soft against his skin. “Do you mind if I join you?” she whispered huskily.
In answer, Adam reached to attempt to undo her robe. His fingers were clumsy. Marcela laughed throatily and deftly undid the clasps and tie and stood naked in front of him.
The pressure in Adam’s loins was nearly unbearable. Soon the hot water cascading over him melted away the weeks of confusion and there were only two salient facts. One, he was in a shower. And two, a delicious, willing woman was in there with him. She took the bar of white soap and lathered him thoroughly, her fingers stroking his feet, his legs, his buttocks. She looked up at him, his hardness outlined between them and she raised her eyebrows. Then she rose and continued over his taut abdomen, across his chest. He was her toy to play with as she pleased. She turned him around and washed his back. The scent of gardenias in the soap, from the flowers in the tub bathed the air in an alluring perfume he inhaled deeply, trying to draw fortitude into his being. He could not stand much more. She stood in front of him, the nipples of her enormous breasts brushing his skin. Now he could resist no longer. He grabbed her bottom is his hands and hoisted her onto himself in one powerful thrust. She gasped and moaned, her head thrown back. He held her back with one arm as the water flowed over their bodies, his other hand still full of her rear. He was young and strong and virile. But practicality, slippery soap and tile called for some rearranging. He slid out of her and turned her around. She bent over so the water cascaded down her back as he entered her. He grabbed her buttocks and pounded into her. The water flowed all over them, over her breasts, teasing her nipples as she grabbed onto the knobs and held fast. He thrusted furiously, ejaculating, staying hard and continuing. She had known taking this young lover was a good idea, she thought, as she felt her own climax building. She had known one other lover with the power to do this and her intuition had been right about Adam. The affirmation added to her arousal and she felt the explosion she craved ignite in her deepest self and clinch repeatedly against his hard cock. Waves of pure pleasure enveloped her. This was ecstasy.
She had spent thousands in gold to have this shower installed. The best climax of her life had been under a waterfall with the shepherd boy nearly twenty years ago. Adam had so reminded her of him that she knew he was the one with whom to try out this investment. Replete, they rinsed away the vestiges of soap and sex and she led him to the tub. They soaked in the warm water, content for a time.

Marcela established Adam in the city. She introduced him to old Alfonso her manager as her second cousin. Her mother had been Portuguese; no one questioned her claiming a long lost relative as her apparent heir. Over the winter, during the long evenings, they dined early at home and retreated to Marcela’s bedroom. Adam’s experience with women was rather limited. He had lost his virginity his senior year in high school in a brief romance with an easy girl. Most of college, he’d been relegated to the friend zone by girls. Finally, he had gone out with the accounting major Samantha for a year. But their lovemaking had been as dull as accounting. Perhaps it was the long months spent with the gypsies, watching the dancing in the evening—but something had awakened the fire in Adam. He found he could make love to Marcela all night. He came again and again in her soft, willing body while she writhed beneath him, on top of him, in front of him. She possessed an unlimited energy in bed, taking all that she had missed from life inside her on those cold, endless nights.
In the daytime, for a few hours after waking late and before siesta when they would make love again, Marcela taught Adam about her business in Seville. Her father had literally been in the business of making money.
Gold. Gold. Gold. Seville was bringing it in by the boatload. Spain had established colonies around the globe. The ships sailed up the river bringing gold from the New World. Other ships brought silks, spices, ivory, jewels, tobacco, perfume, chocolate—luxuries from all over the world.
There was an infamous old priest who wandered the streets and prophesied about the madness for gold that infected the people. Adam watched one afternoon from a street-side cafe. Father Stefano stood on the corner and shouted: “Woe to you who lust after gold. Plague is coming. Turn your eyes to heaven and ask the Lord to save you! Your bodies will not be saved but if you confess your sins to God and give your money to the poor, your souls will be saved!”
People ignored him as they walked by, curbing their desire to spit on him. How dare he prophesy doom when times were so good? After hundreds of years of fighting for their country, Spain was here, now, a world power, rich, taking over the New World and establishing the True Faith among the heathens! What more could the Lord require of them? He was the One who had blessed them with might and power and the strength to defeat the Infidels and convert the heathens!
But the Lord had answered what was required of them through the prophet Micah: to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. In tumult and then arrogance, these requirements had been laid aside in the fight first for survival and then dominance.
“‘The poor are always with us,’ old man!” a young Spaniard with a little too much wine in him yelled at the priest as he walked by with his group of friends.
The father glared at him. “You too shall taste fire and the sword! Your body will burn and your side will be pierced and poison will flow out of you before you give up your soul to hell!”
The young man made a rude gesture and continued walking on with his cohorts.
Adam sighed and put a coin on the counter. The head of Philip IV was marked on it. Adam hadn’t been very interested in money back in the United States. Money was poisonous, his grandfather taught him. His grandfather compared it to lead. There was usefulness in lead but if not used properly, there was an element in it which poisoned the blood. Happiness was what mattered. Money was a tool to buy fun. Fun and happiness were not the same thing but they were closely linked. “Now, I am very good at making tools,” the original Adam de Mattos had often told his namesake. “But I am much better at using them to do the work for which I made them.” And then he would buy him an ice cream or tickets to a baseball game or even his first car.

Spring came to Seville. Subtle changes in the rain, in the vegetation and then suddenly, it was April and everything was beautiful. The people felt fine and dressed in new clothes as they walked and shopped and went to church and visited one another. The days were gloriously sunny with cool breezes and everything seemed clean and fresh. Adam had been with Marcela for about five months now. The anniversary of his arrival in Spain was imminent. At some point—he could never really identify when—-he had quit thinking about his life before. He accepted life as it was now. He had even let the fantasy of Maria slide into the pool of memory he rarely dipped into. Adam was happy living with Marcela. They shared quiet companionship in view of others and were passionate lovers in private.
Adam had become friends with Elías, Marcela’s driver. Frankly, he missed black people. California has such racial diversity. Adam had never noticed before how his friends were always black, Hispanic, Asian or a mix because he too was a mix. He had some white friends as well. What he hadn’t had was racial uniformity. Adam felt drawn to talking to Elías simply for a little variety in perspective.
At first Elías was standoffish. But after several weeks of Adam pestering him in the courtyard or stable or tagging along when Elías went out, he softened toward him. Elías was about the same height as Adam, six feet which was remarkably tall in those days. He too was handsome with broad even features, good teeth and dark eyes that seemed to absorb all that was happening around him. Adam was so good-natured, amiable and unthreatening that eventually Elías trusted him. Adam cracked jokes about everything—most of which Elías didn’t understand. Adam loved good food and wine, played guitar in the evening in the courtyard, read a great deal, enjoyed heading off to fish whenever possible and seemed to be good at all games and sports. Chess, cards, draughts, boules, billiards—anything Elías wanted to play.
One evening Elías and Adam had gone out to find a bottle of rare port Marcela was in the mood for. Passing outside the cathedral as the sun set behind it, Elías spotted one of his friends walking toward them. “Juan! How are you?”
“Eh, hello, Elías, how’s it going?” The two dark men greeted each other with gripped right hands and a slap on the other arm.
“S’alright. How’s Arletta?”
“Ain’t seen her, man. She gone.”
Elías and Juan continued talking about things Adam knew nothing of. Juan eventually tilted his chin at Adam. Elías introduced them. “This is Adam de Mattos, Señora Marcela’s cousin from Portugal.” Elías offered the established lie as truth. This was who Adam was now.
“This is Juan de Pareja. We grew up together until Señora took me.”
 “Nice to meet you, Señor Pareja.”
Juan chuckled at that. He was a slave. His too had only a mistress; the master had died last year. His house was four blocks from Marcela’s. It was the yellow house on Mariposa Street. Elías and Juan had worked there together for fifteen years before Marcela bought Elías and set him free. Juan de Pareja had never been jealous; his own destiny was even more fascinating. “You too, señor. I gotta be going.” Juan de Pareja told them.
“See you ‘round, man!” Elías said in parting. “Juan’s a great guy,” Elías told Adam as they continued to walk toward the specialty shop that carried the port. “If you ever need a favor, you only need ask him.”
Adam couldn’t predict when he would need a favor from a Sevillian mulatto slave. However, since so much of his life had been unpredictable recently he filed this information into his memory bank.
Adam and Marcela drank a glass of the port that evening after dining on spring lamb. “I need to tell you something, Adam.”
“What, my love?” Such endearments had become common for him. He hardly ever thought of Maria’s face when he said them anymore.
“It is a long story.”
“Is that why you wanted the port? To go with the story?” Adam smiled at her, trying to get her to laugh. She was being so serious.
Marcela tried to curve her lips into the warm smile she knew Adam wanted to see. But the effort was short-lived. She had too much on her mind tonight. The difference in their ages rarely bothered her. He was a man; she was a woman. He was handsome; she was still very beautiful. But she had been beautiful before he was born. She was fifteen years older than he was. By the time she was fifteen, her beauty was legendary throughout Andalusia. And when she was fifteen, an event happened that troubled her to this day.
Marcela refilled both of their glasses and took a small sip of hers. Then she began. “Many years ago, my parents died—my mother when she bore me and my father ten years after. I was given to the guardianship of my father’s younger brother. Uncle Pedro was kind but not very bright. He fell under the influence of a nefarious soul named Don Tresto. Only the management of Alfonso de la Cruz kept the business intact.You know my family had the commission from the crown for the minting of money once the Ordinance of the Medina del Campo was passed. For over a hundred very profitable years, my family had run the mint in Seville. My grandfather had supervised the construction of the new mint in 1586. My father Guillermo was in charge of the escudo stamp that came about thirty years ago. They used to say there wasn’t blood in the veins of the Sepulveda family but molten gold. Don Tresto was a drunken cad from Madrid. He had lost all of his family money gambling and was determined to have me marry him. He hounded my uncle about it relentlessly while befriending Uncle Pedro and flattering his ego. I witnessed this during the spring I was eleven and I suppose I went mad for a while. I really don’t know what made me run except I knew I just had to get away from them both. I couldn’t be this wealthy orphan girl turned into a puppet, held by strings and forced into a life I didn’t want. I knew Uncle would make me marry Tresto if I stayed and I had no intention of marrying some fat, old man who was after my money. I ran away.”
“I know. You told me that.”
“Well, like I said, that summer I turned twelve. But I had already begun to look like a woman. So I decided it was best if I stayed away from the world of men altogether. I was fortunate to meet some shepherdesses who were willing to outfit me and let me go around with them. We had a great time, those girls and I. In winter, I would sleep in one of the little huts they had. I would send a letter a couple of times a year to my uncle, to Alfonso and Esmerelda, telling them I was fine. Everything was going all right until I was fifteen years old. By then, if I ever ran into a boy, he was after me.” Adam knew why. Marcela still had great breasts. They were very large and full and round and high and—he tried to pay attention to the story but he had started staring at her chest. “Yes, that was it. They could only see my tetas. Nothing else.”
Adam looked up into her eyes and smiled. “Well, they are lovely. But I know there is much more to you than that.”
“Si, claro. But then you are an exceptional man willing to treat a woman as your intellectual equal. That is not common, you know, my sweet.
“But back to the past…One day, a scholar from the university in Salamanca who had returned to live in his village saw me. I was up in the woods taking care of a few goats. It was a hot day and I was feeling adventurous. The goats were napping. I decided to go for a little swim in a pool near a spring up there in the mountains. So I took off my clothes and hung them on a cork tree to air out in the breeze. I laid in the sun on a huge boulder. Then I waded into the pool and swam around and floated on the water and had a marvelous time. But this astrology student apparently watched me from a hiding place the whole while! He had come up to the hills to reconnect with nature or some horseshit. I was so embarrassed when I found out. He came out from a crevice in the rocks and told me how he loved me…And then he tried to—what a jackass! I remember his pimply red face and his bad breath as he tried to force me to kiss him. He had his hands all over me. It was only because I kneed him hard in the balls that I got away!
“Well, then he wouldn’t leave me alone. He loved me. I was Bathsheba to his David, et cetera et cetera. He followed me around, left his work in town and began dressing like a shepherd. He made me furious and crazy! I hated him! But he loved me, he said. He loved me so much he would die if I didn’t return his love. He was repulsive to me. I wished he would die! He was the last man I would ever love after the way he’d tried to—well, mate with me as if I were an animal just because we were in the woods. I thought his friend was a little attractive but Grisostomo—oh, uck!”
“Well, what happened?”
“The idiot did kill himself. He claimed it was for me in the awful poetry he left behind. All his friends hated me. But I couldn’t even feel bad. I was rather glad he was gone. At least I could have some peace for a change! The whole summer he’d stalked me. I could hardly go anywhere without him showing up. At his funeral, I tried to explain my side of it to his friends but they wouldn’t listen. They said I was a temptress, a vixen, a slut.
“I tried not to let it hurt me but it did. I had thought the friend Ambrosio might show some compassion. I did actually like him a little bit. But he was the worst of them all. He judged and condemned me—told anyone who would listen what a horrible person I was.” Marcela took in a ragged breath and picked up her glass of port. She stared into the cup as if it contained the lost summer days. “Finally in September, the furor was dying down. I had turned sixteen that August. I kept out of the way, going deep into the Andalusian hillsides between Espera and Arcos de la Frontera. Ambrosio tracked me down and met me as I came along the road into Arcos one day. He told me he couldn’t stop thinking about me, how really he loved me in spite of the fact that he had claimed to despise me. He wanted to marry me. I still didn’t want to get married but I liked Ambrosio enough to flirt with him a bit. He was very handsome,” Marcela smiled sheepishly at Adam and then refilled her cup. She drank a sip and stared over the rim into the middle distance.
Adam sat quietly, waiting as long as he could. “Well, then what happened?” he finally asked.
“You might not believe me,” Marcela admitted. “Even I find it hard to believe.”
 In the fifty weeks since it had happened, Adam had never told anyone he had traveled through time for much the same reason Marcela seemed reticent now—-the fear of not being believed. “Don’t be afraid, querida. I will believe you.”
“Well, Ambrosio became my first lover. One night, we were sleeping in a field in a little haystack like I often did. The harvest moon shone over the field which was golden stubble. Dark trees lined the boundary of the next farm to the east. There was a little creek that way. Fog often hung in tendrils over the creek on autumn nights like that one. But then the fog seemed to move, to come toward us. To take shape.” Marcela gulped down the rest of her port. She let the burn in the back of her throat ease before she finished. “It was the ghost of Grisostomo.”
“Marcela!” Adam exclaimed.
 “I told you you might not believe me. But it was he. When he came close enough I could see his ugly old face that had once been described falsely as a ‘blessing.’ Ha! That face has been a curse to me since I first glimpsed it.” Marcela slammed her cup on the table between them and went to look out over the edge of the terrace toward the city lights.
Adam followed her to the railing and took her hand in his. He waited quietly until she spoke again. “Ambrosio panicked, of course. He went running through the fields and ended up in the pasture of a bull. He was gored to death that night under the full moon.”
“How awful!” Adam said.
“Yes. But it served us right, I guessed. I stayed away from men for a long time after that—until I met Tomas about a year and a half later. I fell in love.”
“Did you ever see the ghost again?”
“Well, yes. That is why I told you this tonight. I have seen the ghost again. That bastard comes to haunt me whenever I am happy. And usually, not too long afterward, I am made unhappy. The first time, Ambrosio died. The next time, Tomas deserted me. A couple of more times, and more lovers and I parted ways. And now, sweet Adam, Grisostomo has appeared again. I am afraid that our end may be near.”
“Marcela! Don’t be ridiculous, my darling!” Adam crushed her in his arms. Her full, round breasts pressed against his chest and her dark hair cascaded over his arm. “I will not leave you. You have given me all I have and so much joy. We are one now, you and I. I don’t know how I can marry you now that you’ve told everyone I am your cousin, but if you wanted to find a way—”
“Shhh, mi corazon,” Marcela said, her forefinger pressed to his lips. “That’s enough. Thank you. I just wanted to tell you…to tell you, in case things change.”
Adam crushed her lips to his and opened her mouth with his tongue. She was a mystery, his Marcela, but she had given him more and taught him more about love and life than anyone ever had except maybe his grandfather. He had no intention of letting her go, for anyone or anything or any jealous, bitter phantom from the past.
He took her hand and led her upstairs to the enormous bed in the center of her room. At first, she was still melancholy and unresponsive. But Adam had made love to her so many times he knew exactly how to please her. He lightly brushed the skin over her high cheekbones and traced his fingers along her throat and shoulder. Very softly, he followed the lines of her body past her breasts and stomach to her thighs. She quivered and then relaxed. Tenderly, he stroked the outside of her thighs while his mouth hovered over her sex. His lips touched her then and she pulled his head to her. His tongue aroused an overwhelming desire in her to be taken by him. At the crucial moment, he plunged into her with powerful force as he crushed her breasts with his chest. She gripped his hips with her legs as she thrashed against the mattress. He drove into her furiously knowing how close she was to the edge of climax. He felt it begin to ripple against him as she threw her head back and cried out. His penis stiffened and engorged to its maximum size and then burst inside her clasping body. His lips placed gentle kisses on her neck as he collapsed on her, sealed within her. She loved the feeling of being made one but eventually his weight got heavy and reality returned. She tapped him and shoved a little until he rolled off and gathered her into his arms. She ignored the disapproving glare from the ghost in the corner, closed her eyes and fell asleep.

April 16, 1631

“Plague! Plague is in the city!” Adam woke up to screaming in the streets on the anniversary of his arrival in Spain. This type of alarm happened sometimes. Up the Río Guadalquivir, the galleons loaded with gold and silver from the Americas would sail into Seville. The imposing Torre del Oro with its pennants snapping in the wind dominated the river as the symbol of the time. Although built by Moors four hundred years before, the tower currently belonged to Spain just as the world itself now did. Through courage, fortitude, intelligence and divine blessing, power and place had been wrested from infidels to build this magnificent kingdom. Jubilant exultation poured forth in the bars as men said to each other: “Our time has come!” “El Dorado has been found!” “We’re rich!” “Spain is on the map—Spain writes the map!” The conquering empire was now named Habsburg. Might was right.
Wealth was the reality. But the indisputably essential component of health was constantly jeopardized by the frequency of strange men in Seville and Spanish sailors visiting strange ports. Plague came to the city. The rot and festering paralyzed all. Many would die, their bodies burned. Quarantine crippled the whole town as it survived a season of terror and loss. Then, slowly, the city would recover and begin to frenziedly reach for new heights of prosperous imperial dominance and royal preference.
Adam went out at dusk that evening to try to get some opium to help Marcela. She was in tremendous pain. It wasn’t plague, thank heaven, but something was terribly wrong with her. Against the regulations which required all to stay indoors until the plague was gone, Adam crept along the walls of the buildings on Mariposa Street heading toward the apothecary who took care of Marcela.
“Adam? Is that you?” A voice came from behind him. Adam turned around and found himself face to face with Doña Maria. She was going against all propriety calling after him in the street like this.
“Maria! What are you doing here?” Adam exclaimed.
Maria surveyed him coldly. “I live here,” she replied.
“In Seville?” Adam was dismayed. “For how long?”
Maria was overwhelmed with mixed emotions. Adam looked better than ever, dressed in a well-tailored suit of clothes, his thick hair dark under his rakishly tilted hat. But he was also the cad who had abandoned her to her fate after awakening her to love. She reigned in her emotions and answered as calmly as she could. “I’ve been here since last August. What are you doing here?”
Adam noticed the chill in her reply and couldn’t blame her. “Uh, I live here too.” Stalling for time to compose his thoughts, Adam pulled on Maria’s hand. “Come on. We have to get out of the street before the watch comes. I know a place.”
Adam led Maria down the block to the yellow house. Juan de Pareja let them in and left them alone in a pebble courtyard canopied by an enormous fig tree strung with lanterns. Adam took her hands in his. “Maria. I can’t believe it’s you.”
She pulled her hands away and stepped back from Adam. “I thought you were dead. No one saw you after the night of Delfina’s wedding.”
“No…”
“What happened?”
Adam removed his hat, ran his hands through his hair and took a deep breath. “I told you someone was watching us that night…somebody jumped me, beat me up and left me for dead in the middle of nowhere.”
Maria narrowed her eyes. “I noticed your Spanish has improved.”
“Yes.”
“So where were you?” Why didn’t you come back for me?
“I lived with some gypsies on the plains around Lebrija.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know—until winter time.”
Maria was frustrated. If he didn’t want to tell her what had happened, what did she care? He hadn’t come for her. He was alive and she was alive and he hadn’t come for her.
“I thought you were dead,” she repeated. “I thought if you were alive, you would have found me by now.” She tried her best to sound indifferent but her voice betrayed her.
“I am sorry, Maria, I am,” Adam attested as he took a step toward her.
She kept her distance. “I guess it wasn’t real then.”
“What?” Adam asked.
She didn’t answer for a long time as she looked at him in the golden, dim, flickering light of the lanterns. “Love.”
Adam rushed forward and grabbed her by the arms. “Don’t say that!” He felt as guilty as he was. “Please! I do love you. I am just an idiot, that’s all. I had nothing to offer for you and I knew that meant there was no future for us. And then things happened …. I didn’t think I should come for you,” Adam let the words pour out.
“But Adam—” Maria hesitated.
“What?”
She broke out of his grasp and backed away. “If you had really loved me, would any of that have mattered?”
“Maria, you know you are being unfair. You were the one it mattered to, not me! Fine clothes and a carriage and a house—I couldn't care less. I was content with the gypsies for the most part.” Adam scrubbed the palm of his hand against his cheek and jaw.
“What were you not content about?” she asked, her intuition already confirming her suspicion.
“I got lonely,” Adam admitted.
“Ah. So that is why you never came for me. You found another woman,” she stated much more matter-of-factly than she felt.
“No. Yes. She found me. She brought me out of the gypsy camp. She helped me get started in business.” Adam knew he was making a fool of himself so he decided to go the whole distance. “If you are still free, Maria, I do have something of my own to offer for you now.”
“Who is she?” Maria demanded.
Adam ignored the question. “Are you still free? Are you married?”
“Who is she?” Maria repeated, stamping her foot.
“Her name is Marcela Sepulveda.”
“Marcela…oh, Adam. How could you?”
“Are you married, Maria?”
“No, I am not married. There is some arrangement with Don Pablo. When he returns from his year of military service in the Netherlands, we will be betrothed. That is all I have been told.”
“Do you know Marcela?” Adam asked.
“All Sevilla knows Marcela. She is the richest woman in town. You live there as her lover, I suppose,” Maria said contemptuously.
“She has made me her heir as her cousin,” Adam replied.
“Her cousin!” Maria scoffed.
“Well, that is what she claims. Her mother was Portuguese—” Adam started to explain but Maria cut him off. She was furious and feeling vindictive.
“Oh, yes, I know all about her sainted mother. She was a paragon of virtue, so they say. No one knows how she brought Marcela into the world—well, it killed her to do it.”
“Maria, please!” Adam implored. “You don’t realize how you sound.”
“I have been waiting to see you again, Adam. Hoping and praying and believing—even when all common sense told me this was exactly what was going on!” Maria’s eyes were snapping with anger. “That you no longer cared for me, that you weren’t coming for me and were leaving me to my destiny. No matter that you’d awoken in me discontent for all I’d been raised to do—”
“Maria—”
“I am just upset with myself for being a fool. We came to Seville late last summer when plague hit El Puerto. My mother died. So did my little brother,” Maria informed him.
Adam was shocked and tried to embrace her. “Maria, I am so sorry—”
She shook her head, shook his hands off her. “No, no matter. We have a house here. But my father has taken their deaths hard. He sits in his study all day with his books and old maps and too much wine. Sometimes—like just now—I need to escape even for a few minutes. Ever since I met you that day on the road I crave freedom.” Tears welled and slipped down her cheeks.
Again Adam tried to reach out to her but she pushed him from her. She wiped away her tears. “No, don’t. You have…you have disappointed me, Adam.”
The words rang in Adams’s memory. His mother used to say that. Her voice would get very soft when she was angry. It became almost a whisper.
Adam’s temper flared. He hit the stone wall with the flat of his hand. Then he ran his other hand through his thick hair and he stood up straight. He looked her in the eyes. “I am sorry, Maria. You are right. I did not do everything I could to get back to you. I didn’t think I should. I did not have any money,” he reminded her coldly.
“Why did you think I would care so about money?” Maria wanted to know.
“You just seemed to…” Adam looked meaningfully at Maria.
She felt contrite. “Before I met you—maybe. Maybe you are right. But I don’t care anymore, Adam,” she assured him. “If I have learned anything this last year, it is that I don’t care about any of it anymore.” Despite her resolve, Maria’s emotions spilled out in a torrent of words. “All I care about is being happy. Really living! Being free to do what I want for one minute of my life! For the rest of my life! You were the one who helped me discover that. Death is all around us, Adam. I want to live before I die!” Tears flooded out with the words.
This time she did not resist when Adam took her in his arms. “Sh, sh, stop crying. It will be all right, I promise. It’s not too late.” Adam held her fast and stroked her sleek black hair. “We have found each other again and…well, you’re not married. Do you think your father might give me permission? How could I make that happen?”
Maria sniffled against his chest and tried to gather her thoughts. She put voice to the first one that materialized. “What about Marcela?”
Adam paused to consider. He led Maria over to a bench and sat next to her under the fig tree. She rested her head on his shoulder. Adam didn’t know if Don Montez would even receive him much less bestow upon him his daughter’s hand in marriage. Marcela did have a reputation in Seville, even Adam knew that by now. But money had an even greater reputation. Adam was very wealthy now. Marcela had been wise in setting him up in business. Though she staked him, she had made sure Adam built up his fortune in his own name, not hers. She had more than enough. She had thought if a time such as this came where he wanted to stand on his own feet—or if, God forbid, she suddenly died, Adam would be his own man, not dependent on her. She valued independence. “I don’t know. I can talk to her. But she is very sick…” He hadn’t meant to reveal that.
“Plague?” Maria looked aghast.
“No, no, something else. I was out to get opium for her. She is in much pain.”
Maria didn’t say anything.
Adam took one of Maria’s slender white hands into his. He traced the tips of her fingers as they sat silently next to each other on the wooden bench. After several quiet minutes, Adam spoke. “Maria, I am so very sorry. I knew when I met you that you are the reason I am here. I love you more than I can explain, more than I allowed myself to even feel. I should have gone back for you. I was afraid. I was afraid since I had nothing and am nobody that I wasn’t good enough for your family or for you. That you couldn’t possibly really love me. That we weren’t made for each other and that I would be disappointed and rejected by you. That is the truth. Fear. Fear of failure prevented me from even trying. I felt at home with the gypsies who had nothing, who were nothing according to the rules of the world.
“Can you forgive me? I promise from this day forth if we are ever separated I will come for you. I will move heaven and earth and time itself to find you, Maria.” Adam gathered her in his arms and kissed her. She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back fully, completely, forgiving him everything. Something had torn loose in her that day on the dusty road when she had gone to him under the orange tree. Something huge and irreversible.
She had given her heart to this person. It would never be whole and hers again.

Easter morning, April 20, 1631

“I have it, querida.” Adam bent over the emaciated form of Marcela. In a few short weeks, she had deteriorated from the robust, voluptuous woman who had danced in the firelight of the gypsy camp to skin and bones. The shadows under her eyes were dark purple. There was a glittering sheen over her eyes as she met Adam’s worried gaze. As he had done every few hours for the past two weeks, he tilted a small thick glass bottle to her lips and she gulped down half its contents. In a few moments, languorous relief from the intense pain in her gut filled her veins. She could rest. Her body could rest, but her mind became sharper than when the pain dominated all thinking. Adam held her claw-like hand in his strong, firm grip and willed her to recover. Although Maria was here in Seville, wanting him, waiting for him, he still loved this woman before him for who she was: his redeemer, his benefactress, his true friend. In the many weeks of their time together, Marcela’s rare beauty, her kind heart and generous nature had restored in Adam what the months living with gypsies had depleted. It was softness to counter the hardness of life. Both are real—the good times and the bad. Both are real. As a young man, Adam needed to learn this. Life is not just made up of one or the other, where the lucky get happily ever afters and the unlucky suffer. No. Both are real. In every life, there is sadness and loss and despair. So too in every life there is laughter, sunshine and joy. There is the gathering in of clear, happy days to store up. Those memories shore up the heart and are to be relived during the winter, the dark time. For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health—we pledge these in our wedding vows when two lives become one. Because in infinite wisdom God knows there will be both. That is the human experience. Pain and pleasure, defeat and victory. One truly triumphs when one can accept both with alacrity, with peace, with understanding that either state is temporary. That this too shall pass. Hold on to what is good! Paul says. Hold on to what is good. And the peace that passes understanding shall be with you.
Adam wept at Marcela’s bedside, taking in the lesson of life. Both are real. To love and be loved is an enormous risk of pain but the benefits are always worth the risk. To stay safe unloving alone cut off from the source of life—love—cannot even be really called living. Marcela watched the silent tears fall from Adam’s eyes and felt peace. All her years of loneliness had held the silent fear there would be no one to weep for her at her deathbed. And here he was, this darling beautiful boy who had made her last days on earth wonderful.
“Adam,” Marcela whispered. She had little strength left. Nowadays she might be locked in a hospital room and plugged into a dozen monitors but she would die anyway. The pancreatic cancer was advanced and metastasized throughout her body.
“Yes, Marcela?” Adam wiped his eyes.
“Help me sit up.”
Instantly Esmerelda was there as well to help prop the skeletal form against several cushions. Marcela indicated she wanted the shutters open. Spring light flooded the room. Esmerelda brought a bouquet of lilies to Marcela who inhaled their scent.
“Ah, you know me so well. I love these lilies,” Marcela smiled into Esmerelda’s eyes. “You are all right? Everything is ready?”
“Yes, my lady. All is arranged as we discussed. We will be heading to Málaga as soon as…”
“Yes, my dear. I wish you all much happiness. You deserve it.” Marcela squeezed Esmerelda’s hand and then Esmerelda left her mistress and Adam alone.
“I don’t have much longer—“
“Don’t say that—“
“Please! Don’t interrupt! I have tried to help those I love to have what I will leave behind. It is my wish that you live a long and happy life enjoying the material gifts I can give you. You know the status of my finances and business and hopefully all will devolve upon you as I have instructed. But Adam, there is one thing left.”
“What, my sweet?”
“I want to know the truth. I want to know where you came from.”
Adam wasn’t prepared for this question although he instantly realized he should have been. Marcela had never inquired into Adam’s past life, had accepted him completely. But on occasion, he caught her staring at him as if she were trying to figure him out.
So he told her.
Marcela leaned back against the cushions and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she was smiling. The sunlight shone brightly in the room and Adam could see her clearly for the first time in days. She looked eerie with her yellowish skin and the purple dark shadows blotching the former beauty of her face. “That is why you believed me, then.”
“What do you mean?”
“About Grisostimo. About ghosts. You too have experience with the strange happenings of this world.”
Adam had not thought about Marcela’s ghost story in some time. Suddenly, the truth struck him. The ghost had presaged unhappy times indeed.
Marcela spoke again, her voice raspy but the words were clear. “Adam de Mattos, man of the twentieth century, you are indeed remarkable. The hope of a woman’s heart is that she will be loved for who she is—as a person, an equal, a partner in life. Not as property or possession or a well-dressed trophy to adorn a man’s arm or bed. But as flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone, a part of you come to life as your companion. Thank you for loving me in this way through winter, into spring.”
Marcela lingered through three more days. And then she passed away. The hour of her death was marked by the bells of the Giralda, the simple tolling of noon. But Adam heard in their ringing the goodbye song of a free spirit truly free at last.

Sold

Wednesday May 7, 1631

A fortnight later, Adam went to call on Don Montez. Marcela had been entombed. Esmerelda, Carlos and the girls were gone. Marcela’s business and fortune had been transferred to Adam after the paying of an enormous tax to the crown. Adam was now incredibly wealthy. He stood in the courtyard of the Montez house nervous and confident at the same time. Finally, the servant who had brought him to the courtyard indicated Adam should follow him to meet Don Montez. Glancing up, Adam glimpsed Maria watching him from the third floor balcony. She crossed herself and Adam smiled at her.
Entering the darkened room where Don Montez sat brooding behind a large desk eradicated any trace of a smile from Adam’s face. The room smelled sour and seemed sad. Books lay in disheveled heaps. The drapes were drawn against the May sunshine. “Good afternoon, señor.”
Don Montez looked up, startled. “Who are you?”
The servant repeated what he had told his employer moments ago. “Señor, this is Adam de Mattos. He has come to speak with you.”
Grunting, Don Montez indicated that Adam should sit down in the leather chair opposite the desk. “What about, young man?”
Adam was flustered. Maria’s father seemed barely lucid. Yet this man’s word could prevent or permit. Drawing a deep breath, Adam began. “Sir, as your man said, my name is Adam de Mattos. I am here to discuss with you the future of your daughter.”
“Maria? What about her?”
 “I would like to ask for her hand in marriage.”
“Ha!” Don Montez slapped a beefy paw onto his desk, knocking over a near-empty bottle that dripped its dregs of amber liquid onto the worn carpet at his feet. “She has been promised.”
“Yes, sir. But perhaps we can renegotiate if I can offer her a better future.”
“Better than Don Pablo Romero Martinez? I doubt it!”
“Sir, I am the great-nephew of Guillermo Sepulveda. Due to recent misfortune—the untimely death of his daughter—I am now in possession of his estate as heir.” Adam was then quiet, letting that information seep in to Don Montez’ addled mind.
A light dawned in the eyes of Maria’s father. “Truth? Sepulveda’s money?”
“Yes. Sir, I have much to offer your daughter.”
“But I don’t think any amount of money is enough to go against Don Pablo. He is very powerful.”
“Yes, I know. But he is away.”
“Ah, and the mice will play, is that it? Or are you a rat, young man?”
“Neither mouse nor rat, I assure you, señor. I am a practical businessman. As I am sure you are as well.”
Don Montez leaned back in his chair and focused on Adam. Suddenly, he stood from his chair and went to the door. “Maria!” he bellowed.
Adam heard her light footsteps as she ran down the stairs. “Yes, father?” she said breathlessly as she reached the doorway to her father’s study.
“Come in here.” Don Montez turned and went back to his chair. Maria looked into Adam’s eyes as she entered the room. A silent question and shrug as answer passed between them.
“Maria, this fellow is here to ask for your hand. Do you know him?”
“Yes, father.”
“Why have I not met him before?”
Maria decided it was best not to remind him this was the same young man washed up on the shore of El Puerto de Santa Maria a year ago. “We have only known each other a short while, father.”
Grunting, Don Montez accepted the half-truth. His mind was full of another issue. “Do you prefer this man to Don Pablo? Apparently, this man is very rich.”
Maria pressed her lips together. Adam had been right a year ago…she was a marketable item. “If it is your wish, Father, I will marry him.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, young lady. We have made an informal arrangement with Don Pablo. One I will not lightly counteract—not without some added incentive.”
Adam held his breath. He knew that the challenge was about to be laid down. If he could accomplish it, Maria would be his.
“Do you think Senhor de Mattos would be able to help me recover what I have lost, daughter?”
Maria’s eyes widened. Her father had an obsession. For the last fourteen years, he had told her stories of a treasure…
“Father, we will have no need of—“
“I have need of it! I must see it once more before leaving this earth! You can see my time is ending! If I can see it once more and see you well settled, I can die in peace!”
“Papa, please! It is dangerous—“
“So what? Then you can marry Don Pablo.”
Adam had no idea what they were talking about. “It will be all right, Maria. I am sure I would be happy to please your father with his request.”
Don Montez seemed delighted. “Ah, good man! Yes, perhaps you are the one who can fulfill an old man’s wish and satisfy his daughter’s heart as well. You have the looks of such a hero. But do you have the strength?”
“Sir, I will endeavor to find out. If you will but explain what it is you wish me to do.”
“Can I trust him, Maria?” Her father looked at her. Tears shone unshed on her eyes. Such foolishness. Her father had been corrupted by greed and she had never seen it as clearly as now.
She nodded.
“Gold, senhor.”
“Yes, what about it?”
“It is what it is all about. Pure, unrefined gold taken from the heart of the Aztecs and brought on ship to Sanlucar. My partner Jorge and I were inventorying the items brought in on the San Jose. There was a chest, a plain, little chest about the size of a log for the fire filled with unmarked gold. We thought no one would miss it.”
“Then what happened?”
“Jorge smuggled the chest off the ship when we docked at Coria del Río on the way to Seville. He hid it there. He told me where. We were going to go back for it in a few months. But then the Japón came.”
“The Japón?”
“Yes, the little monkeys from the China Sea. Terrifying.” Don Montez shuddered.
“Is the treasure still there, señor?”
“That is what you must find out. I want to see the treasure again. I saw it on the ship when she was newly arrived from Mexico. The sight of it has haunted me since.”
“Did Jorge go back for it?”
“No. He died of malaria that summer. I had my family—I didn’t want to risk being attacked by the Japón if I tried to recover the treasure myself. It is most likely still there. Jorge hid it well.”
 “Don Montez, surely you realize I possess more gold than a thousand such chests. You want me to risk my life and your daughter’s future for one last chance to see meaningless metal?”
“Yes!” He drew out some paper from his desk and wrote a contract. “No such written contract for Maria exists with Don Pablo. You find the gold, she is yours! If not, she goes to Don Pablo.”
Maria stood in silent fury at being treated thus. She was a prize for the highest bidder. How could her father barter her so?
Don Montez continued, “For the memory of my friend and for my own I want to recover this chest.”
“But you were stealing it!” Adam made one last attempt to reason with him.
However, Don Montez had lost his wits when he lost his sweet wife. He had two things only on his mind: the treasure, and death. Anything else confused him. “Basta! Get out!” he yelled. He had told the young man how to earn his daughter’s hand. There was nothing more to say.
Adam did not like Don Montez. He withdrew from the study, Maria on his heels. They stopped to talk in the courtyard. “Maria, this is ludicrous. It is not that I mind going to find this stolen treasure. I just hate to see you treated this way.”
Maria came into Adam’s arms. Feeling the strength of them around her reminded her how it felt to be loved. Her beauty had long been a commodity her father was using for himself. Since she was a toddler, she had heard tales of this lost treasure. Now he was exploiting Adam’s love for her to get back the gold. The man in that room did not seem to be the same man as the father she held in her heart from times past: the one who played hide and seek with her, raced her up the stairs or made shadow puppets on the wall during long winter nights. But now, at eighteen years old, she realized that those memories were as thin and wavering as glass. Since suitors had pursued her through her father with their manly talk behind closed doors, Maria as herself had ceased to exist for him.
She blinked away the tears and stepped out of Adam’s embrace. She smiled up at him through wet lashes.
“Do you still love me, Maria?” Adam asked. “I too have disappointed you.”
“I love you, Adam. You have always treated me like a human being. And you have only acted human as well—fallible. Besides, you can always make it up to me.” She smiled with a glimpse of former coquetry.
“That will be my pleasure, señorita.”

Wednesday night

Elías and Adam were now the only two living in the house on Calle Santa Maria de las Estrellas. Most of the rooms had been shut up by Esmerelda and the girls prior to their departure for Málaga. The men ate store-bought food and drank too much. For a week, they had been battling each other in a tournament of chess. Adam was losing tonight—he had drunk much more.
The doorbell rang at midnight. Adam and Elías looked at each other over their half-finished game. “Who do you think that is?” Adam asked.
 Elías replied, “There is only one way to find out.”
Both men headed downstairs and to the front door. Adam pulled open the courtyard gate and then the wooden double doors while Elías stood ready at his back.
Maria stood in the door’s archway swathed in a dark, hooded cloak. Elías raised his eyebrows and left them alone.
“What are you doing here, Maria?” Adam asked incredulously. “The Watch is out.” He took her in his arms. Her hood fell back as she clung to him.
“Oh, Adam! Are you still going on that ridiculous treasure hunt?” She had been feeling worse and worse about the prospect all evening.
“You know I must to gain your father’s consent,” he said gently to the top of her head.
“You could be killed!”
“Don’t worry, beloved. I am not afraid of the Japón.”
“Everyone with an ounce of sense is fearful of them.”
“Perhaps I have no sense,” he smiled.
“I didn’t think so. Nor have I. I will go with you.”
“Maria, you can’t.”
“Why? Because I am a woman?”
 “No, because you aren’t Japón.”
“What are you talking about?”
Adam realized he couldn’t tell her. So instead, he leaned down to kiss her. She wound her arms around his neck and pressed herself into him.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to marry you, Adam. I want to be your wife. I belong to you. Take me as your wife—tonight!”
“You don’t know what you are saying. Let me take you home.”
“Let this be my home from now on.”
“Maria, be reasonable.”
“Adam, before I met you, I was the most reasonable, sensible girl on earth. I got up early and said my prayers. I did my lessons. I knit lace. I was obedient and dutiful. In the last year, with the fever for gold so high and the plague taking those I loved most, like my father I have lost my reason. You are the only reasonable thing in this world to me now. I don’t want to lose you to the diseases that have stolen my family.”
“Of course not, my love.”
Maria grabbed the lantern Adam had set down and headed to the staircase.
“Where are you going?” Adam called to her retreating back. She didn’t answer.
He followed her as she opened doors to the rooms of the house. “This was all hers,” Maria said matter-of-factly. “Now all yours?”
“Yes.”
“I guess I should be grateful to Marcela Sepulveda. But I can’t just yet. I am still too jealous. I want all that she has had.”
“What does that mean?”
“I think you know.”
“Are you drunk?” Adam asked.
“A little,” Maria replied with a lopsided smile.
Maria found the room she had been looking for. The vast canopied bed occupied the center of the room. The room had been closed up for the last few weeks. Maria pulled off the dust covers and threw them in the corner. Then she slipped out of her clothes in the dim light of the lantern. Her body was beautiful. She pulled back the covers and climbed onto the mattress. “Make love to me.”
Adam had lived for more than a year in this strange dream land. He didn’t know what would happen if he broke the rules of this world. He too was a little drunk. He decided he didn’t really care what would happen. He was going to act as he wished.
He laid Maria back on the bed. Her smooth silken thighs parted. He did not cover her with his body as she expected. His head stopped at the juncture of her legs.
“Have you ever touched yourself here?” he asked. His palm lightly cupped her sex. She shivered and squirmed.
She thought about lying. But told some truth. “Maybe once. On accident.”
“You found out that it causes extreme pleasure.” It was a statement. There was no criticism or judgment of her. She liked that.
His lips pressed between her legs. “Adam, what are you doing?” she asked in alarm, her fingers gripping his hair.
“There are secrets in bed, Maria. Things no one has ever told you. And no one else has to be told.”
“I knew it,” Maria said fiercely.
Adam grinned to himself. He did love this girl. He stroked her thighs gently, the flank and then the inner thighs. She shuddered. He wanted to explain to her how to come instead of just trying to make her. “Passion is like building a tower of blocks and the best part is when you knock it all down and it is nothing again—everything is scattered all around you.
“Here is a block,” he said, beginning to work his fingers against her. “We will build one by one. But when the time comes for it to fall, let it go please. That is the best part.” His tongue darted out and touched her most sensitive spot. Her thighs quivered.
Her head was thrown back and she gasped. “This is right? This is what happens?”
“Just let it happen. Trust me.”
His tongue melted against her soft flesh, tasting, warm, wet, rhythmic. His fingers gently pushed into her. Her flesh parted. Instinct demanded she clutch her breasts, squeeze the nipples. He continued devouring her until he felt his fingers clenched inside her. She rippled against him, his mouth still pressed against her. She moaned in ecstasy letting the explosion nullify thought and reason. She did feel her wits and will and consciousness scatter in all directions. This is what he had been trying to tell her. A huge wave of pleasure and release surged over her entire body. Like he had asked her to, she let go of the tension he’d built in her. The precarious balance of the blocks was brought crashing down with the inevitable force of gravity.
The room was the same. The bed was the same. The night was the same. But all had changed. Now she knew what the world, the bed, the night was. It was for this. The secret life between a man and woman. Her eyes wide with wonder and lust, she came back into herself. And wanted more.
She kissed Adam, tasting herself on his tongue. She stripped off his clothes. Studying him in the lamplight, Maria tentatively touched his erect penis. “What do we do with this?”
“Maria. You are still technically a virgin. Be satisfied.”
She shook her head. “I want to know a few more secrets…”
He wouldn’t take anymore. He turned her on her back and touched the head of his penis to her, arousing her even more. He thrust into her and she cried out.
“No more virgin,” she whispered hoarsely.
“No.”
He continued pumping into her as she clawed his back and tensed around him. He had apparently done a pretty good job explaining climax to her—or perhaps she would have naturally known. Nevertheless, Adam and Maria made love all night. He lost count of the times. All he knew was that she couldn’t get enough of him in the exact same way he couldn’t get enough of her. The way their lips met and meshed, their tongues, learning how to kiss each other perfectly. He found out she loved her long, silky black hair stroked. She relaxed completely against him as he twined the soft strands around his finger. She loved her neck kissed but not her ear. He was the opposite. They spent the night discovering all they could about each other as lovers.
As the sky first lightened in the east, Maria was dismayed to see Adam getting out of bed to don his breeches.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“Coria del Río,” he answered, his back to her as he pulled on his dark brown leather boots.
“Why? It is pure folly!” Maria pulled on his shoulder so that he turned toward her.
Gently, he put his forearms on each of her shoulders and looked her directly in the eyes. “It is the only hope of doing this right. Coria del Río is an hour’s ride away. I will be back before sundown. Don’t worry.”
“I don’t think we can do it as expected anymore. I thought that was what last night changed forever.”
“But if I can get your father’s approval, we can get married tomorrow. It will be fine, Maria.”
“Why are men so stinking pig-headed?”
“I’m pig-headed, huh?” Adam snorted like a pig and snuffled her with his nose as though he were rooting for truffles. He rooted her armpit and her breast and her neck and her navel. She squealed like a sow, choking on laughter. Her limbs flailed against the mattress as he straddled her, his nose poking different body parts. From the back of her knee his head moved upward. He snorted triumphantly as he found the valuable truffle then rooted happily as a pig feasting on his find. She smacked at his head a few moments and then gave herself up to being his meal.

Thursday—Road to Coria del Río

A half-hour later as the first edge of the sun blazed gold at the horizon, Adam saddled his horse and rode southwest toward Coria del Río. Ruffalo was a large black gelding with a white star on his forehead and two white socks on his hind legs. Marcela had bought him for Adam in January. Thinking about Marcela as he rode briskly away from Seville, Adam was grateful to her. In their brief months together, Marcela had given Adam everything he needed to survive in Renaissance Spain. A living, a fortune, a home, a horse. He grieved her loss. She had even given him Maria in a way. A parting gift. “Gracias, Marcela,” Adam spoke to the air. The leaves shimmering on the trees overhead seemed to answer in cheerful, benevolent reply: you’re welcome. It was my pleasure to give it to you. Take pleasure in all of it.
It wasn’t difficult on this lovely May morning to enjoy the good things life offered. Sunshine and birdsong, an empty road and a willing horse. A body satiated by lovemaking, a young body deprived of sleep but fortified by a heart full of love. Adam breathed deeply the intoxicating fresh air as the city shrank in the distance. The sun crested in the east behind him and flooded the road before him in glittering light. Don Montez had described the hiding place of the treasure. It weighed as much as a man, he told Adam. But Ruffalo was strong and before the day was over would carry both Adam and the gold back to Seville.
Coria del Río rose in front of him. Adam detoured north of the town and rode Ruffalo through the brush along a creek that fed the river. Here on the Arroyo de Porzuna one half-mile west of the river he should find a collapsed stone bridge. The chest was buried adjacent to one of the fallen ramparts on the north bank. The rampart should be marked with red paint, Montez had told him. But if not, it was the western rampart and the chest was on the east side of it. Adam found the rampart and removed the spade he’d wrapped in a blanket and tied to the back of the saddle across the rump of the horse.
He wanted to whistle while he worked but realized he should keep quiet and dig. A foot of earth gone. Two feet. Three. One more foot, according to Montez. The spade’s edge struck something. Easy.
Adam dug around the edges of the object which was indeed a wooden chest bound with iron straps. Adam worked to dislodge the chest from the ground, scraping away dirt and pebbles. He had unearthed all four sides and was making his way beneath the chest. He soon had enough leverage underneath to start to pry it out. Ruffalo was tied to a tree nearby. Adam vaguely heard him snort and stamp his feet with impatience. Standing down in the hole, he bent over to position the spade as deep beneath the chest as possible. He leaned on the spade handle, hoping it wouldn’t break before the chest moved. He felt a shift and the chest became loose. He reached down to try to lift it. The treasure was very heavy. Adam strained to pick it up. In this position, Adam was petrified to feel something cold and metal across the back of his neck. He froze.
The sharp blade of a samurai sword could sever his head in a single stroke. Adam felt the blade withdraw and looked up to see a fully-outfitted samurai standing over Adam in the open hole.
“Come out,” came the guttural order. “Bring box with you.” The man spoke in heavily-accented Spanish which Adam had a hard time comprehending. Some life-saving force clarified the words and Adam obeyed the order.
He lifted the chest from the hole and climbed carefully out with it—no sudden moves. Adam had watched Shōgun enough times growing up to know a bit about the samurai of this age. What he did not really understand was what they were doing here in Coria del Río.
Don Montez was not entirely insane. He had been correct about the time of the Japón’s arrival. Fourteen years ago, Hasekura Tsunenaga had come as an ambassador to Spain with twenty-two samurai and one hundred and twenty merchants, sailors and servants. He had left behind six samurai whom the crown had seen fit to install here along the river. This warrior untied Ruffalo and pointed for Adam to march carrying the heavy gold. The samurai led the horse as they walked into town.
The town wasn’t much, a collection of houses along the Guadalquivir with a port and a few cantinas where the ships stopped for refreshment on their way to Seville from the coast. The six samurai gathered together in the largest of the cantinas with bottles of sherry which has similar alcohol content to sake. They opened the chest. Various noises of approval emanated from each of them. Gold was ever-present in this time and place but a chest with this magnitude of pure gold had never been seen with their own eyes. Really it was only a pile of dull yellow-brown lumps of rock. But all seemed to know that it held great value simply because mankind had chosen to give it great value.
Adam seemed forgotten as he sat in the corner. Ruffalo was loosely tied to a post outside the door of the cantina. Adam had a vague idea of making a run for it. But his curiosity combined with his respect for the skill and lethality of these warriors kept him rooted to his chair.
After a quarter of an hour, their attention turned to him. They studied his face.
In Spanish, they asked questions. “Who are you?”
“My name is Adam de Mattos.”
“You are Portuguese?”
“Yes. But also from California.”
“California? In New Spain?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you know of this treasure?”
Adam told them the truth. “The woman I want to marry…her father’s partner buried the treasure here fourteen years ago. But then you came and he was too scared to come get it.”
This delighted the samurai who laughed and banged on the wooden tables. They drank more sherry and offered Adam some.
“You—you look Japanese.”
“Well, I am.”
Shock, round eyes. “How?”
“My mother.”
A sword drawn. “You lie! Now we cannot believe a word. It will be best to kill you and to keep this gold.”
“Do I?” Adam lifted his shirt and turned his back. The dark marks had faded since his infancy but were still clearly visible.
This brought more hollering and banging on the table. “Kan-pai!” they all shouted. This literally meant dry glass and precipitated serious drinking. The samurai enveloped Adam in their celebration. They were so homesick the Mongolian spots on Adam’s back instantly brought him into their complete confidence. He was one of their blood! No matter how diluted or distant, there was one more of them here in this forsaken place.
“Why are you here?” Adam asked after a few rounds.
“Why are you here?” came the echo.
“Why are any of us here?” another shouted.
“Ah, the poet-warrior!” These phrases had made up a haiku which set the Japón on another round of drunken laughter. The poet-warrior Mishima stood and began to declaim several audacious verses. “Sit down! Sit down!” they hollered but he ignored them.
He finished his recitation: “We are here like all are here—because of, because of, because of…”
“A woman!” the rest yelled.
“Fair of face and black of heart—” one man chimed in.
“Smooth and soft bodies lure us in,” another complained.
“Cold, cruel natures crush us in their grasp.” Each samurai had something to add.
“Gentlemen, be civil. These are the weaker sex.”
“Ha! To be that weak! My mother was like this blade: beautiful, shining, hard and could cut to the bone!”
There was laughter all around.
“Your mother—“
 “Ah, watch it!”
Reveling, the noise grew.
The doorway filled with a silhouette in full skirts and mantilla.
Instantly the men sobered. This was the woman they had been left for. Their order was to guard and keep the personage of Magdalena de Salazar y Tsunenaga and her son safe for all time. “It is time for church, gentlemen.”
She wasn’t sure if the priest would appreciate these inebriated fellows attending mass but she wasn’t about to let them get into the habit of skipping out. Her beloved, devout husband had entrusted her to their safekeeping and their souls’ redemption to her good influence before he returned to Japan. She had found them all lovely wives and already their children were populating the town as they would for centuries to come. The Japón of Coria del Río were the original Nikkei, the Japanese diaspora throughout the globe.
After church and a siesta the sobered samurai considered what to do with the chest of gold and Adam de Mattos. It was decided they were willing to let him return with it (less a few pieces) to Seville and Maria and live happily ever after—if one could with a Spanish woman!They asked him to return often. Two samurai volunteered to go with him halfway to Seville as his guard. The road was dangerous, they told him. Bandits and gypsies robbed highway travelers everyday.
Thanking his new friends, Adam said goodbye to four of the samurai and ventured forth with Isamu Mishima and Toshiro Higashi. Leading Ruffalo laden with the chest of gold strapped securely on him, Adam did now whistle as they walked. The samurai could not whistle and the next half hour was spent teaching them. Perhaps they should have used more situational awareness but on a bright May afternoon, still tipsy but chastised and absolved, sanctified by the Host, none of them was looking for potential threats.
And so they were ambushed. From around a boulder half a dozen bandits came flying at them, knives and clubs ready. Isamu and Toshiro drew their swords and dispatched two immediately. Ruffalo reared, the chest breaking open and spilling gold into the dusty road. Adam was fending off an attacker who had a knife aimed at his throat. Struggling, the man’s wrist in his hand, Adam fought for his life with all his strength. A giant of a man clubbed first Toshiro from behind and then swung his enormous club at Isamu. Both samurai went down, unconscious. Ruffalo reared again and the rest of the gold dropped to the ground. Then he galloped away. “Enough!” yelled the apparent leader of the band. The man struggling with Adam backed off. “Pick up the gold. Put it here,” he held out an empty grain sack and the bandits began stuffing it with gold. “You too!” the leader ordered, motioning to Adam.
Adam fell to his knees, briefly asked God for help since he was already in position, and gathered up a share of the treasure. Then his wrists were bound and he was gagged and tied to a long rope. They dragged him along from the scene of the robbery and headed back into the countryside. Adam hoped he might recognize someone from his time with the gypsies but these were all strangers to him. Dragging and kicking him along, the bandits finally reached their hideout, a cave up in the hillside used by such bandits and smugglers in the centuries past and yet to come. “What is this you have brought me?” said a voice deep in the cave. Adam couldn’t see anything inside, only heard the gravelly, slurred voice from within.
“A tribute, my lord. A sack of gold and a slave for the market.”
“Mm, yes, and a handsome one. Take the horses and get him to Cadiz. We have a boat for Tangier at midnight.”
Tangier? Adam panicked and tried to run. The club came down.

Not again, Adam thought. For the third time in his life, he awakened bruised and battered from a pounding not of his choosing. The first was the shipwreck; then Maria’s suitors. Now what?
He was on a boat again, he realized from the rocking of the floor beneath him. Nausea threatened to overwhelm him. Sitting up, his head reeling, Adam was on the floor of a vessel, his hands still tied at his wrist in front of him, ankles also tied. The gag had come loose and he spat it out. He was thankful when the nausea receded. He tried to remember what he could but the last word in his mind was Tangier. Shit.

Thursday—Road to Coria del Río

Maria did not wait until sundown to find out that Adam would not return that day. After their night together, she had no intention of returning meekly to her father’s house and waiting to be purchased from him with a trunk of purloined gold. In the night when she lost her virginity, she gained her self-possession. She had given up freely the treasure she was supposed to guard with her very life—each moment spent hidden away from the world. Now she was liberated from its confinement, down from the pedestal. She was a fallen woman.
But life on the ground was all right. It was real. It was dirty and tough and didn’t always go the way you wanted it to. But it was better than being cooped up like an exotic bird in a cage or a freak in the circus. She had felt like a fishwife once, standing in Eduardo’s orchard the day she gave her heart away. And she hadn’t really minded it. There had been dust on her shoes and her face was scorched by the sun. But she had felt vital and true.
Perhaps Mary hadn’t failed her after all—at all. She had set the girl on her destiny. Her toes had turned that day toward the ripening fruit on the tree, fragrant sunshine bound in skin. The months since then had been painful as she outgrew the chrysalis molded for her by obligation. But what was her obligation? To secure the future of the family.
By definition, to secure something was to fix or attach it so as not to give way, become loose or lost. To do that in the future meant that in the present it was unfixed, unattached. So Maria convinced herself with this logic as she walked southwest toward Coria del Río. Elías came with her. Because while she was brave, she was not a complete idiot. The house was locked up and left behind.

Friday—Tangier, Morocco

Adam stood dressed in white linen trousers and shirt on the slave block at the marketplace in Tangier. The morning sunshine was hot on his black head but Adam felt nothing. He had been stoned with hashish during the ablutions performed prior to being put on the stage. The traders knew from experience a well-dressed and docile slave—especially one as handsome as this one—fetched a higher price. Since 1471, Tangier had been under Portuguese control. Fernando de Mascarenhas, future first Count of Torre, had been the governor since 1628. He had brought his wife and children with him to this post in Morocco. And for their companion, they had brought with them their disgraced relative the Comtesse du Maine Elisabetta de Medici, great-grand-niece of the former queen of France. Elisabetta had been invited because she was very vivacious and entertaining while rather unorthodox. She had been disgraced in France for being the same thing. Tangier seemed a perfect place for her.
The Comtesse sat behind a curtain in her carriage and watched the slave auction. This was one of her unorthodoxies. She tended to buy her lovers. Once she became bored of them, she set them free. Her agent was bidding for her. Adam was quite her type: exotic, handsome, tall. She had instructed her agent to go as high as twenty thousand reís for him but no one was bidding against her now. In a moment, he would be hers.
Adam was instructed to follow the agent over to the carriage. Elisabetta moved the curtain back to see Adam face to face. She knew he was high. She didn’t mind. She herself enjoyed a hookah now and again. “What is your name, sir?” she asked in Portuguese.
“Adam de Mattos,” he replied.
She was startled. She hadn’t known he was Portuguese. He looked Oriental to her. This might change things. She couldn’t afford to offend her cousin’s husband. She was barely tolerated by him as it was. “Well, Senhor de Mattos, I am sure an unlucky turn of events landed you here, my pet. We shall bring you home and find out all about it. Do you mind riding in the carriage with me?” She usually had the agent walk her new slaves home but Adam seemed quite harmless.
The cretinous driver opened the carriage door and Adam climbed in. Sitting on a cushioned velvet seat seemed more surreal at this point than waking up in the hold of a stinking ship. For a moment, he longed for the monotony of a couch and television. How boring the future was. Boring—that word. Hadn’t that gotten him into all this trouble in the first place? He should have just put the money from his grandfather in a Certificate of Deposit in the Bank of America and applied to grad school. He could have been a high school English teacher by this fall.
The wheels clattered along the streets before reaching a three story white-washed residence facing north to the sea. “Here we are, mon cher! Allons-y!”
The driver opened the door and Adam climbed out. He reached out his hand to help the Comtesse descend. She was as tall as he was. Adam was beginning to sober up a bit. He suddenly realized he was now owned by an Italian-blooded middle-aged giant French comtesse living in Portuguese-governed Tangier, Morocco in 1631 while his parents were waiting for him three hundred and sixty-five years later and his girlfriend could be knocked up in Seville. Boy, he’d fucked up. He clicked his heels together and repeated “theres’ no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” Nothing happened. Alas, no ruby slippers.
“You speak English?” the Comtesse asked in the same language. They were the first English words he’d heard beside his own in thirteen months. Before he thought about it, he grabbed Elisabetta in a bear hug and kissed her cheek. The driver panicked thinking Adam was attacking his mistress and stabbed him in the side with his knife. Blood oozed out and stained the white linen in an instant as Adam crumpled to the driveway.
“You idiot!” the Comtesse yelled. “He was just hugging me!” She couldn’t stand her moron of a driver but the governor insisted on this fool for her—he was one of his spies.
The butler and another manservant came out of the house, staunched the wound and helped poor Adam into the house. They set him up in a small room off the kitchen where the cook and the kitchenmaid could help him mend. Luckily, the driver had poor aim and only punctured the skin; no vital organs were harmed.
Around noon the Comtesse came to visit. The flustered kitchen workers scattered this way and that to clear a path for her to the back room. Elisabetta was a widow, six feet tall, forty-two years old and the mother of three grown sons who remained in various manors and castles in Le Mans and the surrounding countryside. She took pity on this young man who was probably the same age as her youngest boy. She would have to go to the slave market again to satisfy her less-than-maternal urges. “So, Adam de Mattos, I am here to help. What is it you need?”

Thursday/Friday—Coria del Río

In the early evening the day Adam had left, Maria and Elías found Ruffalo on the road to Coria del Río hobbled by the reins around his front leg. Ruffalo rolled his eyes, snorted at them and recognized Elías’s scent.
“Hello, there, boy,” Elías said approaching the horse slowly. Foam dripped from Ruffalo’s mouth and sweat creamed his sleek body. The saddle had slipped sideways and the empty chest was still bound to it. Elías untangled the reins and readjusted the saddle. Maria tried not to panic. “Adam?” she called to the surrounding hillside. There was no answer. They continued walking with the horse the rest of the way to Coria del Río. As they entered the town, six samurai came marching toward them, speaking in thickly-accented Spanish.
A lady came out of a house. “What has happened?” Magdalena asked. Piecing together the story with Maria, Elías and the two attacked samurai, Magdalena’s anger ignited. This was too much! She sent Elías, the samurai and twenty armed Spanish soldiers into the hills to find the bandits and discover what had happened to Adam de Mattos.
Maria spent an uneasy night under Magdalena’s roof, praying to the Virgin that Adam was safe. Magdalena joined her in prayers. In the morning Maria had breakfast with Magdalena’s beautiful fourteen year old son who looked much like Adam—more than anyone she’d ever seen. Finally, the posse returned, dragging with them three injured bandits and the bag of gold. The rest had been killed, including the enormous gout-ridden ringleader who was too fat to leave the cave. The bandits were interrogated and then executed.
“So, you will go on to Cadiz?” Magdalena asked Maria once it was all over.
“Yes. But first I would ask one more favor of you.” She requested paper and a quill and ink. She wrote three words in her rudimentary fashion.
Maria filled the chest with stones from the river bank. She placed the note on top of the stones with one lump of gold. Then she gave Magdalena the gold-filled sack. “For your son. Please have this chest delivered to my father.”
“Of course. Best wishes on your journey, Maria. May the Virgin protect you.”
“And you, dear lady.”
Elías rode out on Ruffalo and Maria on a palfrey Magdalena had provided. Cadiz was four hours away by horseback. Once she was there, she had to find a way to Tangier before Adam was lost to her forever.
Later that day, Don Montez was terrorized by the appearance of four samurai at his door. But they merely delivered the chest he had longed to see again for so many years and then peacefully departed. Don Montez took the chest to his study and reverently opened the lid. He looked in confusion at the single lump of gold and the multitude of river rocks. He picked up the note.
It read, “Paid in Full.”

Friday—Tangier, Morocco

Adam recovered in the displaced cook’s little room off the kitchen. Once the bleeding had stopped, the Comtesse had him moved to an upstairs bedroom. She brought in his manumission papers late that afternoon. “Here you go,” she said to him in English. She had spent time in London as the mistress of the Prince of Wales the year after her husband had died of a heart attack. It was rumored her husband had died in bed and that made her quite the desirable mistress for the next decade and a half. Once she reached forty and her looks began to go, she found life rather dull back in Le Mans as the dowager Comtesse. When the invitation to Tangier had arrived from her favorite cousin, the governor’s wife, Elisabetta had jumped at the chance. Her eldest son the Comte and his wife were none too sorry to see her leave. Elisabetta had dyed yellow hair piled high on her head and hanging in ringlets down her neck. Her dark green eyes still sparkled with mischief and she was always cracking off-color jokes that may have shocked even the grooms. She oozed a spent sexuality just as her slightly wrinkled décolletage oozed over the top hem of her bodice. Adam thought she was marvelous. She reminded him of a grown-up but still naughty Goldilocks, trying out new things to find what she liked best. For now, she enjoyed holding these conversations in English as much as he did.
The Comtesse had promised to put him on a boat to Cadiz as soon as his wound was healed to her satisfaction. “I would take you myself, my dear boy, but I am not allowed back in Spain. I said some rather disapproving words to the king.”
“King Felipe?”
“Yes. You know his wife is a cousin of mine. Well, he is so determined to consolidate power within his family I accused him of aiming to marry his son to his daughter,” the Comtesse laughed. “He threw a fit! I was banned from court and then all of Spain when I didn’t apologize. And I still won’t. It is true! I wouldn’t be surprised at any inbreeding he does! Fat lot of good it does him, too, what with the Dutch in full rebellion. He’s lost half his lands! He and that awful Duke of Olivares are ruining the country. My poor darling cousin the Queen is stuck in a dreadful situation. I wouldn’t trade places with her for all the gold in America!” The Comtesse laughed and pulled some tobacco from a little silk pouch attached by a ribbon to her waistband. She then proceeded to roll the tobacco but it crumbled everywhere.
“Oh! I never can get this right and I can’t find my pipe! They brought that Pocahontas over to England when I was there and she got me hooked on tobacco. She showed me how to roll it but I am such a klutz!”
 “Here, let me help, Elisabetta,” Adam offered. “Get me a bit of paper.” For once, his knowledge of the future came in handy. He crumpled the tobacco into the fine paper of the Comtesse, rolled it tight, sealed it with spit and lit the cigarette for her with the candle at his bedside.
She drew the smoke in and smiled quite happily. “Oh, you are clever. What a pity you must leave to find your señorita. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay with me?”
“If only I could, lovely Comtesse. But I cannot.”
“Hmm,” she sighed, discontent. “Well, at least teach me to roll these little papelates before you go.”

Friday—Port of Cadiz

Maria and Elías reached Cadiz as the sun set into the Atlantic Ocean. Asking around after a young man sold into slavery was dangerous business. So all they did was ascertain that a ship had indeed sailed for Tangier the night before. Maria wept into her hands as she sat on a bench across from the port. Elías stood guard and glared at anyone who noticed her. Finally, she dried her eyes on her handkerchief, wiped her nose and stood. The May twilight lingered as each spring day grew progressively longer. Head high, hair blowing back in the wind, Maria tried to think about tomorrow. How she would find him. But she couldn’t concentrate on her hopes. Exhausted, she allowed Elías to escort her back to the inn.
Around midnight, Elías heard a muffled scream from the room where Maria had retired. Instantly alert, he bolted upstairs from the common room where he’d been allowed to sleep in a corner. He pounded on the door. Sleepy onlookers with lighted tapers appeared in the hallway. When there was no answer, Elías broke down the door. Maria was gone. Elías rushed to the open window and looked down at the street below. He saw a man with a struggling woman go around the corner to the right. Bolting back down the stairs, Elías rushed into the street and followed them. Maria turned frightened eyes toward him. The man with the eyepatch had a hand over her mouth. And a pistol pointed at him. “Stay back!”
Elías stopped in his tracks. He noticed there were a half dozen followers gathered behind him.
The abductor continued. “I am Don Pablo Romero Martinez! This woman is my wife. She has run away with this Moor! He should be gutted!”
Elías didn’t know what the other man was talking about. But Elías was a man of quick instincts so he immediately turned, pushed through the sleepy men and ran down the street in the opposite direction. Don Pablo fired a shot and someone screamed. Elías didn’t stop to see what had happened. He ran and ran.
Maria still struggled against Don Pablo but he holstered his pistol. He held tight to her arm and angled it up her back until she felt it would break. He continued dragging her down the street to a waiting carriage. He shoved her in and she tried to scream. He slapped her face hard and told her to shut up. He yelled at the driver to get moving. The horses trotted south out of the city around the bay.
More angry than scared, Maria huddled into the opposite corner of the carriage from him, hoping for an opportunity to fling open the door and throw herself into the road. Anything would be better than being taken into the night by Don Pablo.
He seemed to read her mind as she glanced at the door. “Don’t do it, my pretty. There is no escape.”
“How did you find me?”
“Sheer coincidence.”
“I thought you were in the Netherlands.”
“I was. I spent ten miserable months there. Then I went out on a patrol and was injured by a stiff-necked Dutchman now dispatched to hell. Nevertheless, he did me a favor by precipitating my return to Spain. They put me on a boat for Cadiz. And here I am. You can imagine my surprise when I saw you of all people standing on the wharf this evening. What are you doing here, Maria?”
“Nothing.”
“Surely your mother wouldn’t let you wander the streets at dusk with a Moor in a place like that.”
“My mother is dead. The plague, last year.”
“My sympathies. She was a sweet if not particularly bright woman.”
Maria nearly jumped out of her seat to slap his face. He caught her wrist mid-strike. Gripping fiercely, he twisted her arm again. “You’re hurting me!”
“Good. Now shut up and sit back down. I am sorry your mother is gone. Where is your father?”
She didn’t want to talk about her family anymore. Against all odds, she had ended up on a midnight ride in a carriage with Don Pablo. Perhaps the Virgin had forsaken her after all. “Where are we going?”
“Home, my little bird. We will live happily ever after in our home sweet home.”
Maria tried to imagine. “Ronda?” she asked.
“Yes, my little bird. To my castle in Ronda. And I don’t intend to leave again for a very long time. I have had more than enough of Habsburgs and empire and endless, pointless war. That little Dutch idiot did me a great favor,” Don Pablo rubbed the side of his face which was gouged with a deep cut running three inches above and below the eyepatch.
“You lost your eye?”
“Yes. But I only need one to see. Look, I saw you tonight.”
“Would you were dead in a ditch in Flanders.”
“Almost, sweetie. But not quite. Now shut up and go to sleep. We will be driving all night.”
Maria did shut up but she couldn’t sleep. She could do nothing but stare into the shadows at the disfigured face of Don Pablo and dread what morning would bring.

Saturday—Port of Tangier

The sun rose above the horizon and sent the placid water shimmering in reflection. Elisabetta herself had risen early to see the young Adam de Mattos off on the the first ship out from Tangier to Cadiz. “My sweet boy, take care of yourself. That wound is not yet well-healed.”
“I will, Comtesse.” Adam still wore his white linen pants the slave traders had dressed him in and his own brown leather boots from Seville. His bloodied shirt from yesterday had been replaced by a finely woven long blue cotton shirt belted with a strip of fringed gold linen.
Elisabetta foisted a wad of reís at him, insisting like a grandmother he might need some money for the road. “I don’t know why you are in such a hurry to be off.”
“I know, Comtesse. But I made a promise.”
“Yes, you told me. Would that any man have ever kept a promise to me!”
“Well, I promise you this. When I am back in Seville, with slippers on my feet and a good glass of port wine at my elbow, I will write you a letter in English and tell you all about my adventures.”
“I hold you to it, mon cher.” She kissed each of his cheeks. “Bon voyage!”
Adam embarked and waved to the statuesque lady on the dock.
The crossing was smooth and placid. Adam tried to envision what the next steps were once he reached Cadiz. He would have to find a way back to Seville. He would have to admit to Don Montez the treasure was lost. He would then have to convince Don Montez Maria belonged to him anyway—without revealing that they had slept together. Then they would get married. And if Maria was pregnant from their night of lovemaking, no one would be the wiser because in nine months from now—or a little less—Señora de Mattos would be a respectable lady of Seville. And first babies were often early.
The boat docked in the harbor of Cadiz. Adam was the first one off. He had promised Maria if they were ever separated he would move heaven and earth—and time itself—to be with her. Three weeks ago that was. It seemed like a lifetime.
Marcela. It had been the end of her lifetime. Those quiet winter afternoons and long, love-filled winter nights seemed so long ago. He was glad he had been there for her during the last months of her life. And then last fall and summer with the gypsies. A million years ago. Before that, Delfina. She was a mother now. Just a few leagues from where he stood now, little Ferdinand nursed at his mother’s breast. And Maria…he hoped she was waiting for him at her father’s house in Seville. She must be worried sick. He had said he’d be back before sundown two days ago. She’d called him pig-headed. And, he had to admit, she had been absolutely right.
Adam walked up a side street to try to find someone to take him to Seville. There was an inn nearby. As he walked past it, something unexpected caught his eye. Ruffalo?
What was he doing here? Perhaps the bandits had brought him down? But no, Ruffalo had run away. Stopping to inquire, Adam went inside. He heard the whole story, everyone was talking about it: the Moor who’d run off with Don Pablo’s wife.
Trying to figure out how this could be the day’s gossip, Adam helped himself to his horse and rode south through town. Elías was leaning against a large banyan tree eating a loaf of hot bread. Adam stopped to dismount. “What is going on?”
“Where’ve you been? Maria’s been kidnapped.”
Stunned, Adam tried to process the information. Elías told all he knew. There was no time to lose. “We need to get you a horse,” Adam said.
“There was a palfrey we left at the inn but I won’t go back there. They will arrest me—or worse.”
A man was passing by with a donkey. Adam called out, “Señor, can I buy your donkey from you?”
The old man didn’t bother to stop walking as he replied, “He is not a very good donkey. He hardly does any work. He is a very poor donkey, not for you.”
“Please, señor. It is very important. Will this be enough?” Adam took from his pocket the handful of mille-reís Elisabetta had insisted he take. It was enough for ten donkeys.
The old man stopped now, surprised, and nodded. He pocketed the bills and took his baskets off the donkey. Adam indicated Elías should mount.
“On that?”
“Of course. I bought it for you.”
“I thought you bought it for you.”
“What?”
“I ain’t riding no donkey,” Elías said stubbornly.
“Fine. I will ride the donkey,” Adam said. Elías mounted Ruffalo and they trotted out of the city, four donkey steps to every two of the horse.
“Where are we going?” Elías asked after an hour’s ride north.
“Ronda.”
“Where is that?”
“High on the Andalusian plain, past Arcos. The Romans lived there.”
“Ah, the Romans. What did they want with so much of the world? I have never understood. I would be content with one woman, two rooms and three meals a day.”
“You and me both, brother. But the Romans—well, I think they just wanted to see how far they could go. Some people are like that. Their reach continually exceeds their grasp.”
Elías shrugged. The sun was heating up the day. Ronda was a full day’s ride. Elías wondered how he’d gotten caught up in this love affair gone haywire. He liked Adam all right. He was a good chess player, decent guitarist and great fisherman. But now Elías seemed to be risking his life for him. This was a dramatic change in their friendship.
“Hey, Adam,” Elías called over his shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“Are we going up here to fight Don Pablo?”
 “We are going up here to get Maria back.” Adam looked at the broad shoulders of the man riding his horse. “Why? You don’t want to go? You can take this donkey and head back to Seville.”
Elías smiled at the road. “Nah. Think I’ll stay on the horse. I was just wondering. You got any fighting experience? That man has a pistol. And who knows what else.”
“Actually, I don’t have much fighting experience. Before I came to Spain, I mostly read books.”
“Books?”
“Yeah. I never really did all that much. Besides read.” And watch movies.
“Well, I hope you learned a few things reading all of those books. Because you are about to be tested.”
“Yeah. Me too.”

Saturday—Road to Ronda

The carriage had broken an axle two hours before they should have arrived in Ronda. Don Pablo was furious. The driver was trying to repair it but it was no use. “We will walk,” Don Pablo announced. He grabbed Maria and marched her forward down the road.
Ronda was an ancient city founded over two thousand years before by the Celts. High above sea level, Ronda perched above the Guadalevín River running through the El Tajo canyon. Divided in two by this canyon, inhabitants of Ronda built magnificent bridges to span the steep slopes, one built by Romans and another completed in 1616. Remote as it was and with its commanding view of the plains surrounding it, Ronda had a long history of occupation and conquest. It had been a hold out for the Moriscos through the sixteenth century. Don Pablo’s grandfather had been instrumental in defeating Al-Fihrey on a vengeance mission ordered by Phillip II. In return, his family had been given hereditary title to the lands. Here, Don Pablo was lord. His current heir, his nephew Francisco, was the first person Maria and Don Pablo encountered as they came into the outskirts of the city.
“You there, idiot nephew!” Don Pablo called out. “Go get the priest!”
 “Uncle! I thought you were in the Low Countries,” Francisco said, startled. His uncle didn’t like him much. He considered him weak for always fooling with the animals, calling him St. Francis.
“Obviously, I am back. Now go!”
“Yes, sir. Right away.” Francisco ran up the road ahead of his uncle and the scared-looking girl he was dragging along with him. He wondered what this was about. The reason he preferred the animals was that they were usually kind and uncomplicated. Even the bulls seemed friendlier than his family had ever been.
Don Pablo watched his stupid nephew run for the church. “There. We will be married in an hour. And then—“
“I will never marry you!” Maria spat at him. “I’d rather jump off the cliff!” She tried to break free to do just that but Don Pablo held tightly to her and cuffed her again.
“After you produce a healthy son for me, I will throw you off myself!” Don Pablo roared. “And you don’t need your arms to work to do that.” He cranked her arm back behind her again. “So do you want me to break this one for you?” He smiled cruelly at her.
Her eyes cast daggers at him. If only she had a real dagger, she would slit his throat.
“Now come along. I do at least want you looking presentable for our nuptials. And I need a drink,” Don Pablo muttered as he forced her the last half-mile into town.

Elías and Adam could see the city up ahead.
“We need a plan,” Elías called over his shoulder. “In fact, someone may have seen us already. I never saw a place with such a view.”
Adam looked up at the imposing city. “Let’s make a run for it before they send someone out.” Adam kicked his donkey who baulked. Luckily, Ruffalo was more obedient to his rider’s commands and the donkey didn’t want to be left behind. Jostling along on its back, Adam imagined the spectacle they were: the tall, black man on the magnificent black horse and him tagging along in the horse’s dust. He tried to make a plan. Elías was right, they needed one. Of course, Don Pablo had no idea they were coming after Maria. They had that on their side.
“Do you have any weapons?” Adam called to Elías’s back.
“My knife.”
The knife reminded Adam of his wound. He felt something wet against his skin and realized it must have started bleeding again. “Look! There they are!”
Don Pablo was dragging Maria to the church. Elías and Adam clattered across the bridge and halted in front of them. “What’s this?” Don Pablo looked up. Adam jumped off the donkey’s back as Elías rode the horse on a ways.
Maria had never been so thankful to see someone in her life. Adam had indeed come for her.
“You!” Don Pablo recognized the insolent young man from Delfina’s wedding.
“Yes, it is I, Adam de Mattos. Hand over the Doña Maria—or meet your death!” Adam channeled all the swashbuckling heroes of every old movie he’d ever watched.
Don Pablo laughed. “Now this is something! And how do you propose to kill me? With your good looks?”
“A duel.”
“A duel? So be it. What shall the weapons be?”
“Whatever you choose, señor.”
“Ah, fantastic. I have not had time to disarm before my wedding. I happen to have on my person two pistolas. One for you,” he handed over the one in his right holster. “And one for me,” he said, drawing forth a second pistol from his left side. “On the bridge. Twenty paces. One shot each.” Of course, the pistol he handed Adam had been fired last night into the crowd and Don Pablo hadn’t had a chance to reload it yet. But since this was a farce in his mind and he was just going to kill Adam, there was no need for anyone to know.
They stood back to back on the bridge, high above the river cascading over the rocks. “One,” Don Pablo said, stepping forward.
“Two,” Adam counted as he moved in the opposite direction. He cocked the pistol.
“Three,” Don Pablo continued.
They moved their paces away from each other on the bridge.
Maria once free had rushed to where Elías still sat astride Ruffalo. She pressed her lace handkerchief to her lips as she watched in fear.
Adam took a deep breath of air, not daring to think. It had come to this, the end of a long journey.
“Seventeen,” Don Pablo called from a distance.
“Eighteen,” Adam called back.
“Nineteen!”
“Twenty!”
The men turned and fired. The sudden turn brought forth from Adam’s wound a gush of blood through his shirt. His instincts from his youth in Sacramento hurled him to the ground upon hearing the gunshot. Maria screamed. Don Pablo waved his pistol in the air. “Death to all infidels!”
Elías spurred Ruffalo forward toward the bridge behind Don Pablo. Don Pablo turned quickly to see the enormous horse charging at him and his instincts commanded him to leap out of the way. The bridge was rather narrow and thus Don Pablo fell off of it as Elías rode to check on his friend. The shriek of Don Pablo as he fell into the canyon echoed against the walls of the cliffs before being suddenly caught off at his landing. He was dead.
Handkerchief fluttering, Maria ran behind Elías and the horse and caught up with them where Adam had fallen. On her knees, she cradled his head in her lap as he stirred. “You’re alive!” she cried in disbelief. “Of course. He missed.”
Maria looked at him uncomprehendingly. The circle of blood on his shirt was growing wider. Adam looked down at it. He sat up and pressed Maria’s handkerchief against his side to slow the bleeding. “Oh, that.” He smiled, “It is only a flesh wound.”

Epilogue
Santa Maria de las Estrellas—la Casa de Adam de Mattos
Dear Comtesse,
I sit here at my desk with slippers on my feet and the half-drunk bottle of port at my elbow. My wife Maria is asleep in our bed. The candle is burning low but I could not sleep without composing this letter to you, my dear.
Adam proceeded to write out the story of what had occurred since leaving Tangier. Pausing to consider before adding his signature, Adam thought over all that had happened to him during his time in Spain. He concluded the letter with sincere, heartfelt words.
Kindness to strangers is never wasted. And gracious hospitality is the rarest gift. Your kindness and generosity toward me shall not be forgotten as you were instrumental in my current happiness. And so, as a man of my word, I keep my promise to you, dear noble lady. May you ever be as lovely as you remain in my memory.
Yours truly,
Adam de Mattos,
caballero de Seville