Sister Pilar: Truly, you are as well stocked with proverbs and fables as our sister Assumcion. You, doubtless, collect them at fairs and peasants’ weddings, but ... (she breaks off suddenly, bites her lip, colours, and takes up her book).
Trotaconventos: Ah, well, wisdom can walk in a homespun jerkin as well as in the purple of King Solomon, eh, Don priest? And as to Sister Assumcion, what if her speech be freckled with a few wholesome, sun-ripened proverbs? They will not show on her pretty face when the nuns of Seville meet the nuns of Toledo in the contest of beauty, eh, my pretty? (Sister Assumcion laughs and tosses her head.) But the reverend chaplain is looking sourly! It is rare for Trotaconventos to meet with sour looks from the cloth. Why, there is not a canon’s house in los Abades that does not sweetly stink of my perfumes: storax, benjamin, gum, amber, civet, musk, mosqueta. For do they not say that holiness and sweet odours are the same? It was Don Miguel de Caceres—that stout, well-liking canon, God rest his soul, who lived in the house the choir-master has now—and I used to keep his old shaven face as soft for him as a ripe fig, and I saw to it that he could drink his pig-skin a day without souring his breath; well, he used to call me ‘the panther’ of Seville; for it seems the panther is as many-hued as the peacock, and the other beasts follow it to their destruction because of the sweet odours it exudes. And there were words from Holy Writ he would quote about me—in odorcur or words to that effect. Nor were the other branches....
Jaime Rodriguez (who had been fidgeting with impatience at Trotaconventos’s verbosity, as usual shrilly and excitedly): Doubtless the words quoted by the late canon were, in odore unguentorum tuorum curremus—in the track of thy perfumes shall we run. They come in the Song of Songs, the holy redondilla wherewith Christ Jesus serenades Holy Church, and truly....
Trotaconventos (calmly ironical): Truly, Don Jaime, you are a learned clerk. But as I was saying, it is not only for my perfumes that they seek me in los Abades. Don Canon is wont to have a large paunch, and Trotaconventos was not always as stout as she is now ... there were doors through which I could glide, while Don Canon’s bulk, for all his puffing and squeezing, must stand outside in the street. So in would go Trotaconventos, as easily as though it were your convent, ladies, her wallet stuffed with redondillas and coplas, and all the other learned ballads wherein clerks are wont to rhyme their sighs and tears and winks and leers, and thrown in with these were toys of my own devising—tiring-pins of silver-gilt, barred belts, slashed shoes, kirtles laced with silk, lotions against freckles and warts and women’s colics....
The nuns, except Sister Pilar, who is apparently absorbed in her reading, are drinking in every word with evident amusement and delight, Jaime Rodriguez grows every moment more impatient and bored.
Jaime Rodriguez: Er—er—the Roman dame, Cleopatra, the leman of Mark Antony, was also learned in such matters; she wrote a book on freckles and their cure and....
Trotaconventos: I do not doubt it, Don Jaime. Well, in would go Trotaconventos, and round her would flock the pretty little uncoiffed maids, like the doves in the Cathedral garden when one has crumbs in one’s wallet. And I would feed them with marzipan and deck them out with my trinkets, and then they would sigh and say it was poor cheer going always with eyes cast on the ground and dressed as soberly as a nun (she winks at the Nuns) when they had chest upon chest packed as close as pears in a basket with scarlet clothes from Bruges and Malines, and gowns of Segovian cloth and Persian samite, and bandequins from Bagdad, all stiff with gold and pearls and broidered stories, rich as the shroud of St. Ferdinand or the banners of the King of Granada, lying there to fatten the moths till their parents should get them a husband. And I would say, ‘Well, when the dog put on velvet breeches he was as good as his master. There’s none to see but old Trotaconventos, and she won’t blab. I’d like to see how this becomes you, and this ... and this.’ And I would have them decked out as gay and fine as a fairy, and they strutting before the mirror and laughing and blushing and taking heart of grace. Then my hand would go up their petticoats, and they would scream, ‘Ai! ai! Trotaconventos, you are tickling me!’ and laugh like a child of seven. And I would say, ‘Ah, my sweeting, there is one could tickle you better than me.’ And so I would begin Don Canon’s suit. Ay, and I would keep him posted in her doings, telling him at what procession she would be at, or in what church she would hear ‘cock’s mass.’ Or, if it was to a pretty widow his fancy roved, it was I that could tell him which days she was due at the church-yard to pray at her husband’s grave ... aye, as the proverb says, when the broom sprouts the ass is born to eat it.
Sister Assumcion (with a malicious glance at Jaime Rodriguez): But another proverb says: Honey is not for the mouth of the ass.
Trotaconventos (with a wink): And yet another says: Honey lies hid in rocks; and it was not only to the houses of lords and merchants that I went on Don Canon’s business. How did I win my name of Trotaconventos? It was not given me by my gossips at the font. I was not taught in my catechism that on the seventh day God created man and woman, and on the eighth day He created monks and nuns ... were you so taught, Sister Pilar?
Jaime Rodriguez, with a petulant sigh, gets up and goes and examines the arabesques on one of the walls.