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Garcilaso’s verses, we walked the streets and plazas of Madrid until nightfall. That night my friendship with Miguel was founded on our love of Garcilaso de la Vega—the great bard of Toledo, the prince of Spanish poetry. Not one of my other classmates shared with me this passion. Garcilaso’s freshness of language, sincerity of sentiment, and stylistic innovations—incorporating Italian lyricism into Spain’s stagnant poetic tradition—plus the fact that he had been a soldier, contributed to making him our hero. That night, as we rhapsodized about the noble Toledano, Miguel remarked, “He died still young, before he was corrupted by the world.” I wondered then whether that, too, was Miguel’s ambition.
    At that time, only young bards and poetry lovers knew Garcilaso’s work. On that first walk, we pledged we would be like Garcilaso and Boscán (Garcilaso’s best friend, a great translator and poet). We were both sick of the sentimental poetry filled with stilted conventions that was then in vogue, and swore—with vehemence—to dethrone the official poets, whose surnames were so detested we would not soil our lips by mentioning them. We shared the same aspiration: to write only about love that arose from a living, breathing woman, a tangible reality—not the vaporous, affected love of the poets that preceded Garcilaso.
    “We will cultivate the lyric,” I said. “Our poems will be a questioning of our minds and hearts. Not the tearful rubbish that’s so popular today.”
    “Yes, yes,” Miguel concurred. “We are manly poets. Poet warriors like Garcilaso, like Jorge Manrique. Not like the weeping poetasters of today.”
    The torches were beginning to be lit on street corners. I started heading for my house, but Miguel continued to walk alongside me. When we reached the front door of my home in the neighborhood of the Royal Alcázar, he made no comment, yet I could see he was in awe of the imposing front door, and the antiquity of the bronze family shield emblazoned on it. I invited him to come in.
    “I appreciate your kind invitation,” he said, “but I should be heading back home. Next time.”
     
    * * *
     
    We became inseparable, to the exclusion of all the other students. Almost every day, we took long walks in El Prado Park. Miguel kept an eye on the ground for chestnuts, which he picked up and put in his school satchel. To me, they were merely food to fatten pigs. To Miguel, they were a delicacy. I soon discovered that despite his sensitive soul, and his complete devotion to poetry, there were vast gaps in his literary education. He knew Garcilaso’s poetry, and very little else. His ignorance of the classics, of Virgil and Horace, for example, was inconceivable in someone with ambitions of becoming not just a poet, but Court Poet. Garcilaso had held this post in the court of Carlos V and I knew how hard it would be for Miguel to achieve this, if his family, as was rumored, as my grandfather had confirmed, were converted Jews. The nobility in the court of Philip II would not have accepted this. Long gone were the days of the Catholic kings, when Isabella’s court had been a haven for Jewish scientists, doctors, and scholars—before she expelled all Jews from Spain, pressured by the Vatican. We lived closer to the days when Jews were routinely burned at the stake in Madrid and all over Spain.
    My Lara ancestors hailed from Toledo. As far back as the times of the Holy Roman Empire, my relatives had lived in houses and castles with library shelves containing, in Castilian, Greek, Latin, Italian, and Arabic, all the books considered essential for a gentleman’s education.
    Among my ancestors I count warriors, illustrious writers, and noble adventurers who gave their lives defending our faith on the battlefields of Europe and in the conquest of Mexico. My father was twice a marquis. My grandfather made his name in the Battle of Pavia in which our Emperor Charles V defeated François I of France.