Events

Private thoughts of Don José de Salamanca y Mayol, composing a letter he has not yet addressed to anyone in particular

The candle is a poor accountant. It keeps no ledger of its own burning, spends itself down to nothing and calls it light. I have never much liked being lectured by an object, but tonight it has a point worth stealing: everything spends itself eventually. The only question of any consequence is whether it spends itself on your terms or someone else's.

Two days now since the decree. I have read the Paragraph eleven times. 

Corruption in the current government running rampant may create conflicts of interests. 

Mendizábal's mouth said that, and meant every word of it as a warning aimed outward, always so meticulous and paranoid, at the men he imagines circling his auctions, not at the man he trusts to help him run them. I find I cannot decide whether this statement is the most useful in Spain this decade, or merely the most honest, since with him those two things are not always the same. Possibly it is both. An honest man's warnings are the safest kind to stand behind, because no one thinks to check whether the man delivering them is exempt from his own decree.

He is no fool. That i know, he built his power under the queen regent, by implicitly allowing her to do as she wishes while the child is young. He built a mechanism that will functionally work exactly as described, for exactly the buyers he can see. That is not a flaw in the man. Personally i don’t see that i corrupted his decree, I simply helped him flesh it out so it would not be struck down by the courts, after all he sees it as his name be left in history with this work of his.

The mechanism itself is not clever. I want to be honest with myself about that too, here in my own study where, my honesty to myself costs me nothing. A domestic name bids. A domestic name wins. A domestic name holds the title, on paper, for a fee, indefinitely or until it is convenient to transfer it again. What sits behind that name is not the law's business, because the law was never written to ask. Simple. Legal, in the sense that matters. Not one man forbids what no man anticipated they needed to forbid. The only genuinely difficult part was recognizing the weakness in the article and striking at it, and well before anyone else troubled to look, the gab was seized, i bet that old fool does not even remember what i did, always thinking about the biggest picture and while looking into things like this, never a bureaucrat enough to understand it, no a politician Mendizábal is through and through.

That recognition is worth more than any single auction. Istúriz keeps the Cortes looking the other way without needing to know why. Narváez keeps the garrisons occupied with a war that conveniently requires all their attention elsewhere. Mendizábal keeps signing, keeps believing, keeps being right, in the narrow sense, about everything except the one thing that would matter. Every piece of this is already in motion and none of it required a single bribe large enough to be memorable. That is good design. A scheme that needs to be dramatic and overbearing to work is a scheme that has already failed on the paper it is written upon.

Now that the seeds have been tolled and the peasants toiled the soil and harvested its grain, its time for the most difficult part. The finding of buyers~.

Now then, the letter.

To the gentlemen of ... lets finish that part later.

Spain's disentailment offers opportunities in land and enterprise presently undervalued relative to their long-term yield. I am positioned, through long-standing domestic relationships, to facilitate acquisition on favorable and entirely discreet terms

Discreet, hmmm. I keep circling that word and keep deciding it is the correct one and no other will do. Not clandestine, clandestine implies something furtive, something that knows itself to be wrong and hides accordingly. This is not that in my mind, simply me using the letter of the law accordingly. what i am doing is simply arranging so that the correct people never have occasion to ask the correct question.

The part I do not put in letters, to anyone, ever though: The land is not the point and the commissions are not the point. A man could grow comfortably wealthy skimming disentailment auctions for a decade and die a footnote in someone else's history, Rodil's history, or Narváez's, or whichever general eventually puts his boot on this country neck and calls it order. I have no intention of being a footnote. I have every intention of being the controller of the paper the footnote is written upon.

Land is capital. Capital, deployed correctly, becomes shares in a bank, and the bank becomes shares in a railway, and the railway becomes the question of who decides where rail goes. Which town lives and which withers, which port matters and which is quietly permitted to silt up. Enough of those decisions, held quietly enough, for long enough, and the question of who sits on the throne becomes almost decorative. 

Thrones are visible. Visible things attract revolutions, attract the law, attract honest men with voices. I want no throne. I want the country underneath it, every rail, every port, every bank that matters, administered, in practice if never in name, by me. Spain does not need a king who owns it. It has one of those, roughly, and look what that has required of everyone downstream, and what has happens to that regent in this regency. But i am young, time, a strength so immortal that even the church cant fix it, all the administration, old and dying, weather fast or slowly, and well, i need capital for my design.

I finish the letter's opening line and set the quill down. Not because I am finished because I am not, not remotely the design is coming along nicely but slowly, but there is no value in writing faster than I think. i pick it up again and dip it in the ink.

The candle i see, is nearly done being a poor accountant for the night. Sighing, i light another. There is more to write.