Profit and Passion - Nicole von Germeten

Скачать книгу

Rodríguez alone in the evening, in various states of undress, almost always without his shoes on and sometimes even completely barefoot, a clear sign of informality and intimacy. Bystanders alleged that Orgaz would lay in one bed with Rodríguez, while her husband slept in another, even while their son was present. Reportedly, an Indian man hosted the married couple, Orgaz, and another woman on the feast day of San Juan. Apparently, the group ate together in the house while Orgaz and Rodríguez touched each other openly in front of her husband: Orgaz allegedly lying propped up and surrounded by her skirts while Rodríguez combed and cleaned the dandruff out of his hair. Another deponent claimed that once, while chatting with the husband in the couples’ doorway at 3:00 p.m., he saw the notary Zaragoza enter their house, eating a walnut. When Rodríguez entered, the notary began embracing and hugging her, putting the walnut from his mouth to hers. The lovers then sat down together very intimately.104 The notary was heard to brag that Rodríguez was his concubine and praised her for her “buenas carnes [loosely: attractive flesh],” a rare archival verbalization of a woman’s private sexual appeal.105

      The lover who seemed most attached to Rodríguez, the blacksmith Hernando Orgaz, showed some agitation in the face of the couples’ disregard of the banishment conditions and their spying neighbors. Allegedly, Vildosola told Orgaz that he should not worry; even though “rogues” tried to disturb them, he should always “come to my house and enjoy yourself with me and with my woman.” Although at times he flaunted his public displays of affection, at other moments Orgaz feared detection and punishment after Vildosola’s initial but ignored sentence of banishment. Since he did not want to stop visiting Rodríguez, he allegedly snuck in and out of the couple’s house under the cover of darkness many times, even going so far as to disguise himself by dressing in an habito de indio.106

      While their neighbors spied on and reported on these nonmonogamous scenes in response to the investigation into Vildosola and Rodríguez’s disregard of the banishment sentence, the couple seemed unconcerned about secular and religious authorities, monogamy within marriage, sin, and even the laws against pandering.107 Of course, two of Rodríguez’s lovers represented church and state through their occupations as a notary and a cleric. Not only did these men disregard the sacrament of marriage openly, as well as a husband’s claim to his wife’s sexual fidelity, but they supported the couple when they suffered from fears of official surveillance and during their imprisonment.108 Perhaps the couple believed that their discerning clientele and the domesticity of their transactional relationships would protect them from any judicial repercussions. However, many people, even children, living in their vicinity embraced their roles as voyeurs and sought to become contributors to the developing viceregal archive of sexual transgressions. I could argue that the couple carelessly publicized their domestic sex work and thus wrote themselves into the surviving documentation, but I think instead that their neighbors wanted to report their offenses as decipherable and legible to the religious authorities. However, exercising some restraint, the surrounding residents and the scribes they spoke to chose to name this as multiple simultaneous concubinage arrangements, not whoring.

      In contrast to the voluminous legal and literary records for transactional sex in early-modern Spain, only fragmentary evidence records sex for sale in the first century of the Spanish viceroyalties. The cases presented in the second half of this chapter stress its domestic, even familial, context. This faint paper trail contrasts with the documenting of intensive brothel inspections and the prosecution of ruffians and clandestinas that took place in some parts of late-medieval and early-modern Iberia, a much more concerted effort to put in writing sexual control and official supervision. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, settlers first followed the fifteenth-century Spanish trend of founding legal brothels, but this pattern soon died off in favor of even older, perhaps more familiar, traditions such as family brothels, independent street solicitation, and liaisons organized by bawds or complicit husbands, often in a domestic setting. Within this urban, plebeian milieu, indigenous and Afro-descended bawds played a role in how sex was sold. All of the individuals mentioned in this chapter named and documented certain specific kinds of exchanges, both creating a New World sexual culture and writing the paperwork that would affect the archives of transactional sex for centuries to come.

images

      From Whores to Prostitutes

       I conjure you, gloomy Pluto, lord of the depths of hell; emperor of the court of the damned. . . . I, Celestina, am the best known of those who summon you, I conjure you . . . through the powerful serpents’ venom from which this oil was compounded, and with which I anoint this thread. Come in all haste to obey my will, wrap yourself within its loops. . . .

       I have everything anyone might want. Because wherever my voice is heard, I want to be prepared to set out my bait and set things in motion on my first visit.

      Put your arms around each other and kiss, for I have nothing left but to enjoy watching. As long as you are at table, everything from the waist up is allowed. When you move away from it, I will set no limits because the King sets none.1

      Before royal decrees mandated brothel closures, the fictional Celestina did it all: consulting women on their beauty regimes, running a brothel where she entertained many couples, and weaving seductive spells into ensorcelled thread, leading lovers to their tragic ends. Her powers revolved around her constant and persuasive talk, her use of dark magical conjurations, and the fact that the crown had not yet made selling sex illegal. This chapter is about how words eventually destroyed alcahuetas such as Celestina, as well as the new terminology for (and thus status of) public women, sometimes known as whores. During the seventeenth century, a significant shift took place in the conceptual history of transactional sex in the Iberian world, a movement toward the creation of the diseased, criminalized, and/or victimized prostitute, who, by the early eighteenth century, began to fill the shoes of the still-working sinful and immoral whore. However, this wording and the new kinds scribal seductions that it generated did not end the exchange of sex for cash, as rich and powerful men (as well as their poorer fellow clients) continued to want it and willingly pay for it. In fact, transforming women from morally corrupt and sinning whores to pity-inducing prostitutes may have even increased their eroticism for their wealthy patrons and the scribes who described them (who may have been at times one and the same person).

      Throughout the seventeenth century, the traditional vocabulary of procuring (alcahueta, consentidora) predominates in the available cases, although the word puta also appears both in marriage disputes and Holy Office investigations, especially when the scribes wrote the precise wording of insults exchanged between litigants.2 When the authorities of this era assume a more elevated tone in their pronouncements, they used vaguer terminology such as “worldly women [mujeres mundanas]” or “women who lead evil lives.”3 A transition occurred when the term prostitute, after 1700, started to become a common label applied with disdain and censure or pity and objectification. The new use of this word explicitly signified trading money for services and put a greater emphasis on greed for rewards, or victimization by a panderer, while both the older and ongoing use of “whore” more vaguely referred (and refers) to a woman with a publicly sexual reputation, who may or may not make an income off her sex acts.4

      Although bilingual Spanish dictionaries mentioned the word prostituir and its translations into French, Italian, German, and English, dating back to the early seventeenth century, the words prostituta and prostitución do not appear in a Spanish monolingual dictionary until the end of the eighteenth century. Before then, French/Spanish bilingual dictionaries translate prostitution simply as abandonnement. The English translation offered is “debauched, exposed to common life.” In 1783, the Spanish definition takes on a more sexual tone: “abandoned to all types of lewdness and sensuality.” In 1788, Esteban de Terreros y Pando defines it as “abandonment to licentious lewdness, infamy,” hearkening back to the traditional understanding of a whore. His definition for prostituta includes references to medieval terms such as “ramera [whore],” as well as the general idea of a prostitute as a lost or public woman, but he also significantly brings

Скачать книгу