DONNA ISABELLA ANGELICA Y BANANAS
From the portrait by Baloona (early Spanish)
SPAIN has ever been the home of romance and beauty and fiery passion, but never in its whole history has it bred such a tremulously beautiful love story as that of Donna Isabella Angelica y Bananas. A romance of two passionate hearts in such a vivid setting cannot but fail to make the eye kindle and the pulses throb. Compared to it, Lancelot and Elaine become cardboard puppets, Dante and Beatrice figures of clay utterly devoid of life, while Paolo and Francesca appear merely idiotic.
Picture to yourself, if you will, the Spain of the Middle Ages; if you can't, it doesn't matter. Isabella Angelica was born at Seville in 1582, the daughter of Don Juan de Cabarajal and Maria his wife. Don Juan owned the Castello del Hurtado, having been left it by his infamous but regal uncle, Don Lopez a Basastos.
The Castello lay surrounded in the foreground by turrets and moats, in the middle distance by orange groves and extraordinarily verdant meadows; while in the background the majestic Pyrenees, rearing their snowy peaks in serried ranks of symmetrical splendour, imparted to the whole thing the semblance of rugged grandeur which is the birthright of every true Spaniard. Isabella Angelica's childhood dawned and waned in these exquisite surroundings: she would play with her tutors various games, some of them traditional, such as "catch orange" and "raralara,"[19] and now and then frolics of her own invention, for history tells us she was ever a merry little trickster. It was not until she was seventeen that the true radiance of her beauty became apparent. Her mother had been wiser to guard the child more closely than she did, for do we not read in Dr. Polata's "From Girl to Woman" that between the ages of nineteen and twenty she was constantly seen mounting the Pyrenees in a daring fashion and entirely unattended? But still, doubtless owing to her charming nature, which was a sweet composition of mischief and kindliness, she remained unspoilt by this undesirable contact with a rude world which should, until her marriage, have been outside her girlish ken.
When she reached the age of twenty—"the very threshold of womanhood," as Fernando Lope so beautifully puts it—she was betrothed to Pedro y Bananas, a noble fresh from the vice and debauchery of the Court at Valladolid. Knowing naught of love or passion, she consented without hesitation, being but a tool in the hands of her parents, and a few months later the wedding took place with enormous pomp in the Cathedral at Seville.
After the ceremony the bride and bridegroom repaired to the Palazza Bananas, the country seat of Pedro, who, though poor himself, had had many costly estates handed down to him.
Here, so report tells us, after subjecting Isabella Angelica for three years to the vilest insults and utmost cruelty, Pedro left her temporarily and returned to the Court, now at Castille. Poor Isabella Angelica! This was the gay world she had dreamed of—the ecstatic life she had hoped and fully expected to live!
Then suddenly with the departure of her husband, she found peace—peace in the rocky solitudes, in the scented gardens and rolling foothills; and here this poor, lonely woman found fulfilment of all her maiden dreams—"Love!"
No one knows the authentic story of her first meeting with Enrique Baloona. Some say he was fishing for bolawallas[20] and she came graciously up and asked him the time; others aver that he was passing beneath her lattice and she dropped a fluted hair-tidy at his feet. But anyhow, from the time they first met they never parted until it was absolutely necessary. They pursued the course of their love through the long, tranquil summer days and nights—every word they uttered one to the other was sheer poetry. Enrique, who was a fully qualified academician, painted the portrait reproduced on page 124. It is alas! the only one in existence, all the others having been destroyed by the Inquisition.
But alack! as is the way with all beauty, it is but short-lived. The end of their peaceful passion came with the announcement of Pedro's return from the Court, now at Aragon. Isabella Angelica, history relates, was beside herself with misery. Enrique also was considerably upset. Together the doomed couple arranged a plan of escape. They flew together to the Villa Morla, a notorious abode of illicit lovers. It was here that the enraged Pedro caught up with them and killed Enrique with a look. Isabella Angelica was then taken against her will to join the Court. At last at Madrid. For two years, Dr. Polata tells us, her heart was numb with anguish; then gradually the life at Court, still at Madrid, began to take effect on her malleable character. She became intensely vicious: much of the sweetness portrayed in Enrique's portrait vanished, leaving her expression cross and occasionally even sullen. All the world knows of her meeting with the Infanta, so we will not dwell upon it. One day her husband died unexpectedly. Cruel-minded courtiers suspected Isabella Angelica, but she was so obviously crushed that their suspicions were allayed. Her heart exulted—she had killed him with a poisoned pen-wiper. No one knew. Poor Isabella Angelica! Her tragic love affair had indeed transformed her from the appealing girl of yesterday to the recklessly unhappy woman of to-day, forced on to the path of cruelty and vice by unlooked-for circumstances. She performed this deed and that with almost mechanical diabolicism; some say she knew not one day from another. In 1597 she was offered an exceedingly good position by the Inquisition, which she immediately accepted. It was, she felt, her only chance of happiness—to have the opportunity of inventing a few good tortures would comfort her; and why not? People of to-day, narrow and unsympathetic, may censure her as being spiteful and unkind, but in those days things were—oh, so different!