Wicked games

A remarkable woman known as Juana la Loca -- Juana the Mad -- has mostly fallen through the cracks of history. Her parents were Ferdinand and Isabella, the celebrated Spanish monarchs who sent Columbus on his fateful voyage, and her son was Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, whose realm sprawled across 16th century Europe from Spain to Germany. Juana, queen of Castile, was driven to madness by the death of her young husband, or so the story goes, and lived out most of her life in utter obscurity, a prisoner of her father, and later her son, in the lonely palace of Tordesillas.

“And I did not free myself from them,” Juana the Mad is made to say in Gioconda Belli’s “The Scroll of Seduction,” “until the day I died.”

In a lush novel that draws in equal measure on history and human passion, Belli seeks to restore Juana to her rightful historical place. Juana’s story was a real-life romance that ended tragically -- she was married off at age 16 to a Flemish prince called Philippe the Handsome, who turned out to be both lover and adversary -- but Belli embellishes the facts of history with her gorgeous prose (ably translated by Lisa Dillman). Indeed, the story she tells is often frankly and even shockingly erotic, especially since her protagonists are so young, and she brings a similar sensuality to every observed detail -- apparel, adornments, the preparation and serving of food.

Juana is not the only heroine in “The Scroll of Seduction.” Belli invents the modern-day character of Lucia, a beguiling 17-year-old from an unnamed Latin American country who is orphaned when her wealthy parents die in an airplane crash and ends up at a convent school in Madrid. Lucia meets a middle-aged historian named Manuel de Sandoval y Rojas when he moonlights as a guide and conducts her on a tour of El Escorial, the magnificent 16th century palace-museum-monastery northwest of the capital. He soon recruits Lucia to participate in a strange and ultimately spooky exercise: Manuel dresses Lucia in a red velvet gown like one Juana might have worn and succeeds in conjuring up Juana herself. “A voice within me spoke out, completing Manuel’s story, making comments and observations,” Lucia reports. “I felt seduced and captivated by the same sort of fascination that makes us follow the complicated thread of convoluted dreams.”

Manuel, a bachelor with a strange attachment to his elderly aunt, is so creepy that it’s hard to understand why an adolescent as bright, imaginative and self-possessed as Lucia would place herself in his hands. After all, each session begins with Lucia stripping off her clothing as he watches and then allowing him to lovingly dress her in a provocative costume. “If the solitude of death is hell,” he intones, “then copulation is heaven.” We can easily see why Manuel is aroused by these preliminaries, but exactly what is turning Lucia on?

Still, the lonely young woman is perfectly willing to go along with the dangerous game Manuel is playing with her. “I preferred Juana’s ghost,” Lucia explains, “over the many other ghosts that stalked me.” Soon, we are seeing the world of 16th century Spain -- and the most intimate moments in the marriage of Juana and Philippe -- through the eyes of the long-dead queen. “He clung to me desperately, alternating love with the resentment he felt for knowing himself under my spell,” Juana announces. “He called me a witch ... and a whore, but we were two halves of the same whole and we fit together as perfectly as water fits inside the jug that holds it.”

Before Belli reinvented herself as a poet and memoirist (“The Country Under My Skin”), she was an activist in the Nicaraguan underground and served in the Sandinista government when it came to power in 1979. She is plainly interested in politics, and she insists that Juana’s ambition to ascend to her mother’s throne was as problematic as her husband’s adultery and brutality. “In his heart of hearts he admired my stubborn defiance,” Juana says. “As for me, I knew my majesty was indissoluble.”

Juana the Mad, in fact, is made out to be a proto-feminist. When Philippe asks the legislative council called the Cortes to crown him as the reigning monarch of Castile in place of Juana, she protests that she is the only rightful successor to Queen Isabella: “It infuriated me to see so many men in that room sitting around, deciding my fate, as if some natural order had invested them with more wisdom than mine or that of my own mother when she elected to name me her heir.” Later, to protest her plight, Juana locks herself in her room and refuses to eat, bathe, change her clothes or attend Mass, a gesture that was seen as evidence of insanity. But Juana herself offers a very different explanation: “Again I expressed my resistance using my weapon of last resort: my body.”

At certain moments, “The Scroll of Seduction” bears a passing resemblance to “Jane Eyre,” “Like Water for Chocolate” and “The Historian” -- to say nothing of “The Da Vinci Code.” But Belli has succeeded in putting her own stamp on the life story of Juana the Mad. The surprises she invents -- sometimes for the historical figure of Juana and sometimes for the fictional characters of Lucia and Manuel -- cannot be revealed here without spoiling the mounting tension of her tale and its well-crafted climax.

“You think you’re a heroine in a novel,” Manuel taunts Lucia toward the end of the story. “Keep in mind that writers who write thrillers build their imaginary plots very carefully.... It’s all tied together so that cause and effect follow one another in orderly fashion, but real life doesn’t work that way.” This is a wink and a nod from the author, who clearly takes pleasure in putting her characters, real and imagined, through their paces. Her readers will take pleasure in it too. *