Hunger's Brides Page 16

  At the southwest corner the gates swing open. A young monk rushes to open the carriage door. The Archbishop, a lean and vigorous man of seventy, steps lightly out. He walks into the courtyard and down the eastern corridor. All is in readiness. The antiphon and hymns have been sung in the pink chapel, where a special Mass has been held for the Inquisitors before this final battle. The rosary was said at Prime. For the fourteen prisoners condemned to the stake, fourteen pairs of Jesuits have been sworn in. For confession, a Dominican, for contrition, a Jesuit.

  In shifts they have begun to attend to the prisoners, exhorting the condemned to repent so as to receive absolution before death.

  All the prisoners have been given breakfast. At the mouth of a passageway joining the prison to its outermost patio, the young Inquisitor, Sáenz de Mañozca, takes up position under his uncle’s watchful eye. In the dim courtyard, lit by one or two torches and the first glow of a false dawn, the Inquisitor orders that the prisoners be brought out in single file. He reads out each sentence, and hands to the prisoners the costumes they are to wear in the coming day’s production: for the condemned, the short corozas† and black sambenitos of sackcloth; for the reconciled, the tall corozas and yellow sambenitos with the double cross of Saint Andrew. To the penanced, he hands the same yellow sacks, but bearing a single cross.

  Those prisoners who will not stop protesting their innocence, the Archbishop orders gagged.

  The vigilants out in the little plaza know it has begun when the bells of the cathedral begin to toll. And after them, all the bells of all the churches in the capital. A carillon—of discordant timbre and pitch and period—a tolling to make the hottest blood run cold. Sixteen familiars of the Inquisition come out first, ahead of three parish crosses draped in black. Next come the Indians with the exhumed remains of heretics who’ve fraudulently received a Christian burial and are now found out at last.

  Behind them, others carry painted effigies. Father de Moedano’s effigies are revered as the most lifelike. Some of his faces are of people dead for years, yet all who knew them see. His memory for heretics is remarkable.

  Out into the bright morning stumble the condemned, sad jesters in their black sacking emblazoned with flames and devils, in their dunce caps painted with serpents. The women hold little green crosses.

  But the onlookers have been expecting to see fourteen condemned prisoners, not thirteen.

  During the night, Isabel Núñez has confessed and repented of her Judaizing. But this will not be known until ten days later, when she and another whore of Babylon—stripped to the waist—are each tied to the back of an ass and whipped through the streets. Two hundred lashes each.

  Thirteen prisoners … The number raises a perplexed murmur all along the procession route to the amphitheatre. Scores of bleachers and platforms have been built and rented out along the way. By eight o’clock, the Procession of the Green Cross is within a few blocks of the plaza of the Indian fliers, the Plaza del Volador. The bullfights have been cancelled, the barbershops shuttered, the market stalls boarded.

  The amphitheatre has been built to hold eighteen thousand. It covers the south, east and west; to the north it is open to the palace balconies and to a ructious mass of spectators unable to get seats. The total number in the square would exceed thirty thousand but for a hastily delivered order forbidding, on pain of excommunication, further entry into the desperately crowded square.

  To the left, on the west side, is a grandstand constructed to accommodate the noble families of the realm and the officers of the Church, the most eminent being seated at the base. The various dignitaries, families and Inquisition officials can be seen retiring, throughout a long, hot day of sentencing, to comfortable lounges under the grandstand for the taking of rest and refreshments. The prisoners’ dock is pyramidal, and the prisoners are distributed equitably. No side of the square is favoured. Between the dock and the grandstand is a large mahogany table to record the proceedings upon. The secretaries of the Holy Office sit in a row of heavy, carved chairs, each with its own canopy. Across from the table rise two pulpits for sermons and the reading of the edicts. Between these is a massive scaffold for the prisoners’ sentences to be read from.

  For the past hour, the armies of Christ Triumphant have driven the squadrons of Satan through the Plazuela del Marquez, then down the Calle de Mercaderes de San Agustín and up to the corner of the Calle del Arco. The Green Cross has at last reached the approaches of the square. Close behind the file of the condemned, and surrounded by the University’s rectors, the warden of the Inquisition’s prisons leads a white mule. On its back sways a lacquered chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It contains the charges against the condemned.

  Here the situation gets out of hand.

  Throughout the course of the procession, Tomas Trebino de Sobremonte has never ceased to trumpet his guiltlessness. Even knowing he is to burn alive, as the one unrepentant Judaizer, defiantly he swears through his metal gag to practise the law of Moses to the death. Wildly gesticulating, violently shaking his head, Trebino roars back his insolence to a crowd hurling fierce insults and exhortations to repent. As he makes his way through the streets, a hard-pressed company of infantry struggles to protect him from the incensed mob armed with paving stones and staves.

  But when, still mouthing abominations, he nears the entrance to the square where thousands have been kneeling in hushed adoration of the Green Cross, the crowd closes in to silence him.

  The soldiers panic, unwilling to die protecting a heretic. Yet the mob is so dense that they cannot get out of the way, and they fight back to save themselves. Before wading into the fray, the Archbishop sends someone through the empty back streets to the cathedral, with an order to silence the massive bells. The Archbishop waits. Each contingency and response has been anticipated—for the rigour of his forethought, the providence of his planning, he is rightly famed. Before long all the bells of the city fall silent and a languid stillness blankets the square, damping the fires of Christian fury.

  The Archbishop, mounted on the back of his little mule, enters the sea of men and the waters part. At nine o’clock that morning, calmly, slowly, the Archbishop’s venerable mule rounds the corner of the University with both troops and prisoners in tow … Combatants in the everlasting war between God and Nature, Spirit and Flesh, they shuffle awkwardly down the little flight of steps and into the throng in the now silent plaza.

  In reverence the crowd kneels until the Archbishop has taken up his station atop the scaffold. He sits under a black velvet baldachin, its coping adorned with gold brocade and golden fringes. The Inquisitors file in behind him.

  By now the prisoners have occupied the dock. On the lowermost benches, Indians hold the effigies. Next, those prisoners to be penanced; above them, those to be reconciled. At the tip of the pyramid, and all around the uppermost rung, huddle the condemned, each between two Jesuits ceaselessly whispering.

  Cloaked in shame in their sackcloth and dunce caps they sit, the bedraggled crew of a foundered ship, faces drained by insomnia, white with terror or fury.

  The accused are prodded to stand. The crowd rises from its knees as the Archbishop sits—erect, without reclining—in a great white throne of marble. Behind him, the exchequer plants the Standard of the Faith. Before him stands an ebony table. Upon it a great book and a little brass bell. Visible beneath the table are glimpses of the Archbishop’s sandalled feet.

  Feet like fine brass.

  All through the day of judgement he will toy absent-mindedly with a great key. It hangs on a thick golden chain in his left hand. From time to time his right hand reaches out and rings the little bell to accelerate the proceedings: time is short.

  The Inquisitors settle onto cushions around his table, and throughout the proceedings are seen lounging like Persians, leonine eyes alert.

  After the adoration of the Green Cross, still draped in black, after the reading of the Proclamation of the Faith, after the Bull conferring papal authority on t
he Holy Office of the Inquisition, the most profound silence reigns over the expectant multitude.

  Each slow step rings out as the Dean of the Cathedral labours up to the pulpit. He salutes the Tribunal on his right, and glancing up at the Archbishop begins his sermon.

  … Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgement of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters …

  The lacquered chest bearing the suits against the accused is brought forward. Four secretaries scuttle to and fro, conveying the heavy briefs to the pulpits, from which the charges are read in slow, rhythmic alternation. Three secretaries at a table sit scrabbling intently, quill hands lightly convulsed, to capture every nuance of the proceedings, just as they have done at interrogations.

  … And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened …

  Over the hushed plaza a little bell rings out with the sound of glass cracking in a flame. Then from a rostrum on the high scaffold at the centre of the amphitheatre, the sentences for each case are called out. Clasping the ceremonial black staff in front of his chest, the warden of the secret prisons brings each prisoner in turn to stand alone at the foot of the scaffold.

  All eyes are on the Archbishop as he cants slightly forward to consult his notebook.

  … And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire …

  First to be judged are the dead. Among them an eighty-year-old woman who lasted a full six months in prison. Her remains and effigy are consigned to the flames.

  Now it is the turn of the living.

  An exultant roar goes up as Tomas Trebino is sentenced first—to burn alive. Merciful, the Tribunal orders that the other twelve, before burning, be garrotted. From the prisoners’ dock to the scaffold, the warden weaves back and forth like a shuttle.

  … And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth …

  Among those condemned to die, it may be that one face at least, that of an old woman, is suffused with the peace of a loving god. The warden brings her, the last of the condemned, forward to hear her judgement. Ana de Carvajal staggers to the base of the scaffold. She is sixty-seven. Her breast cancer is so advanced, and she so wraithlike, that the heart-shaped tumour is visible beneath her sambenito.

  She, too, is the Inquisition. In the auto of 1590, her father was burned in effigy. In 1596, her mother burned garrotted, her brother Luís burned alive. In the auto of 1601, when Ana was nineteen, the Holy Office reconciled her: but to lapse into the cult of the Pharisees was to be condemned to the flames.

  Now, forty-eight years later, the Inquisition finds she has relapsed. At last her long wait is over.

  … How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow …

  Again the little bell rings. The warden brings forward the scores of the reconciled one by one. Since reconciliation comes at the price of confiscation of property, many in this group are wealthy. Among them are several women, and chief among these is Juana Enriquez, widely resented for the refinement of her manners and dress, for the luxury and glamour of her parties and balls, for her coaches and the bevies of servants that once followed her wherever she went.

  Gone now the servants.

  In yellow sackcloth before the scaffold she stands alone. She hears her fate read. Two hundred lashes. Confiscation of all estates. Banishment from the realm. Shrill cries of satisfaction rise from the crowd. Babylon, the Great, is fallen.

  … And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning …

  Next, Simón Váez Sevilla: the richest man in the New World. At the foot of the scaffold, he stands in sackcloth, a green candle in his soft hands, a noose around his white neck: all behold the arrogant kingpin of a mercantile network of false converts spanning both oceans—the whole globe—from Malta to Manila.

  Two hundred lashes. Confiscation. Banishment. Perpetual and irremissible prison. The crowd bellows another note in its paean to Apollo.

  … For true and righteous are his judgements: for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand …

  The condemned are led away through the jeering crowd to the quemadero, the burning ground. From the chapel, the last terrible strains of De Miserere die out.

  The reconciled and the penanced are made to abjure their errors once more, to swear not to relapse, and to kiss a little iron cross thrust against their lips. The tension mounts; teasingly the black baize draped over the Green Cross falls away inch by inch in little tugs, as each sinner submits and returns to the bosom of the Church.

  When at last the Green Cross stands clear of its black cloak of mourning, a great clamour of joy and triumph goes up, like the sound of many waters. Kettledrums, trumpet blasts, shouts—Long live the Faith!—the choir singing Te Deum now like larks, soldiers firing volleys into the air….

  The Archbishop’s eyes are as a sheet of flame.

  … And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God … that ye may eat the flesh of kings …

  An uncanny scene surrounds Tomas Trebino as they attempt to strap him to the back of an ass for the procession to the quemadero. The creature goes mad the instant it feels Trebino’s weight. Braying wildly, it charges into the other animals brought to carry the condemned. One beast after another balks. The animals, normally docile, are so restive now that the prisoners, many of them aged, will have to walk to meet their death. It is an outrage to all aficionados, who for months to come, in taverns all over New Spain, will denounce this breach.

  Only by firing repeatedly over the heads of the maddened crowd can Captain Mendoza’s escort prevent the wildly ranting Trebino from being torn apart along the route.

  He will not walk at all unless permitted to walk backwards. For a few steps he does, until his Jesuits call out for him to be carried.

  The rest of the condemned, some silent, others crying or ceaselessly muttering—the satanic, half-mad citizens of Gog and Magog—crawl along the Alameda. For hours, hundreds of watchers have been clustering like pine cones in the branches of the giant trees that line the boulevard. Thousands more have scrambled up onto the piping of the aqueduct and squat like sagging rows of buzzards above the newly renovated Plaza de San Diego.

  The stakes on scaffolds above the pyres are arranged over a rectangular area covered with lime. The shoddy construction also scandalizes many: the steps are narrow and unsteady; the arrangement of ropes and pegs on each stake does not allow the condemned to sit comfortably. It is a disgrace.

  Eleven chests are stopped, eleven breaths. Eleven pairs of Jesuits may rest.

  The last to mount and be strangled is Símon Montero. Hands bound behind his back, he does a little dance of contempt and clowns for the crowd, then feigns a stumble on the narrow steps to force his confessors to keep him from falling to his death.

  “The carpentry,” he cries out in the instant before his garrotting, “is better in Seville—”

  The order is given to light the pyres. Silent Indians work the bellows.

  … And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years … And cast him into the bottomless pit …

  Tomas Trebino has also reached the terminus.

  He falls silent, watching everything set alight around him. Effigies, chests of bones, strangled companions. Ana de Carvajal. Perhaps he has read Dante, and the scene is not without the slim comfort of some small precedent. His confessors mistake his silence for mortal terror. They remove his gag that he might repent. Instead the blasph
emer launches into an attack on the poet of Revelations. Trebino exhorts John the Witness to join him in the fire, that the great saint might repent and confess his own crimes.

  The executioner holds Tomas Trebino’s head steady as they light his beard on fire.

  Trebino struggles to look down through the flame. With his foot he drags a block of wood to the stake as if to say, begin.

  On that day Nature in all her elements is forced to submit. Fire consumes him. Air receives the smoke. His charred bones are wrestled from the jaws of street curs and buried in shallow earth. His suet is scattered over the waters of a reeking canal.

  His quintessence is consigned to oblivion.

  In the suffocating closeness of the coach, our mingled perfumes ill mask the fetor of our bodies: María, Magda and I ride slowly home through the alleys of the New Jerusalem, covered in silence and ash.

  Since I am not yet in a position of open defiance, soon enough I will oblige and give them an accounting of sorts. Gaps will not be tolerated. It is why the repeated questions, it is why the careful notes. It is a kind of fussiness, after all.

  But the Inquisition is no conclave of rattled nuns. And it is not the want of charity, chastity and grace that the holy officers so fear and loathe but the slattern of Incontinence. Against her they are bulwark and bung, caisson and closter, dike and dam. This is the craft of clots and clods, of pears and branks and the surgeon’s beaked mask.

  These officers and learned doctors, these are the humble stop-gaps. Craft is enough, all is craft. The meekness that inherits the earth.

  And who is their Jacobi Topf? Is he born, have we met somewhere, will we yet?

  But gaps are everywhere … and lie in silent shapes just where there seems no gap at all. Their shrine and studio is memory. And how they shift and gape at this latest charge: that Uncle Juan’s parents were secret Jews.

  So differently now those days echo in my memory. For then, what Aunt María feared more even than my recklessness was her own daughter. Magda, the one who served the breakfast. And how unfathomably wise it was to dam the fountain, not comical at all. And the whimsy of finding Uncle Juan brave was not at all whimsical: for however sincere his efforts to be a good New Christian, he could never quite turn his back on the parents who would not abandon an older faith.