Purity of Blood

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “We say good-bye here, boy,” said Malatesta.

  I stared at him, confused. I must have looked terrible, with the dried blood of poor Luis de la Cruz all over my face and clothing, along with the usual wear of a journey. For a moment, I thought I saw a frown on the Italian’s brow, as if he was not happy with my state, or my situation. I simply stared, uncomprehending.

  “They take over here,” he added finally.

  He nearly smiled that slow, cruel, and dangerous smile of his that revealed teeth as white as the eyeteeth of a wolf. But it vanished immediately, as if he had changed his mind. Perhaps he judged that I was already so browbeaten that he would not humiliate me further. Actually, he did not seem all that comfortable. He observed me a moment longer, and then, his expression unreadable, put his hand on the door.

  “Where are they taking me?” I asked.

  My voice sounded weak, so unfamiliar it could have belonged to someone else. The Italian did not answer. His eyes, black as death, stared at me without blinking. When Gualterio Malatesta looked at you, you always wondered if he had eyelids.

  “There.”

  With his chin, he gestured toward the city over his shoulder. I saw his hand on the door as the hand of the executioner, and the door as the stone on my tomb. I tried to find some way to prolong what instinct told me was to be my last moment of sunlight for a while.

  “Why? What have I done?”

  Again he did not answer. He simply stared. I could hear mules being brought up, and as they harnessed the new pair the carriage shook. I saw several men, armed to the teeth, pass behind the Italian, and in their midst the black and white robes of a pair of Dominican priests. One glanced toward me as he went by, indifferent, as if instead of seeing a human he were observing an object. That look was the most frightening thing I had as yet experienced.

  “I am sorry, boy,” said Malatesta.

  He seemed to have read the horror in my thoughts. And may the Devil take me if in that moment I did not believe he was sincere. It was but an instant, however—those four words and a flash in the blackness of his gaze. When I tried to pursue the shred of compassion I thought I had glimpsed, I met only the impassive mask of an assassin. The carriage door was beginning to close.

  “What news of the captain?” I asked with anguish, frantic to stay a few more instants in the sun.

  Not another word from Gualterio Malatesta. A beam of sunlight shone on his somber face. And then I did see an expression I could not doubt, a quick flash of rage and spite. It lasted only a second, and then it was gone, hidden behind the cruel grimace, the dangerous, bloodthirsty smile that twisted his pale, cold lips. But my heart leaped with joy, for I knew, with every bone in my body, that Diego Alatriste had eluded the ambush.

  Malatesta slammed the carriage door, and I was again in darkness. I heard shouted orders, a horse galloping away, and then the coachman’s whip. The mules started off, and the carriage began to roll toward a place where not even God would be on my side.

  The hopelessness of being in the hands of an all-powerful apparatus devoid of emotion, and thereby of pity, struck me the moment I emerged from the coach into a dismal inner courtyard that dusk made even more somber. After my shackles were removed, I was led to an underground room by four constables of the Holy Office and the two Dominicans I had seen at the post house.

  I will spare Your Mercies the details, but after I was stripped and thoroughly searched, I was subjected to a preliminary interrogation by a scribe who demanded to know my name, age, the names of my father and mother, those of my four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, my current dwelling, and my place of origin. Then, in a routine tone, the scribe tested me on elementary Christian knowledge by making me recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria. Finally, he asked me the names of any persons who might be connected with my situation.

  I asked what my situation was, but he did not tell me. I asked why I was there, and he did not answer that either. When he persisted in asking for names, I did not answer, pretending to be confused and afraid—although if I am to be frank, I didn’t need to pretend. When my questioner persisted, I burst into tears, and that seemed to be enough for the moment, for he put his quill into the inkwell, scattered powder over the page, and put away his sheets of paper. On the strength of that experience, I resolved to resort to weeping any time I found myself in a tight spot, although I feared that weeping would not require any great effort on my part. If there was one thing I would not lack for, I surmised in my misery, it would be reason for shedding tears.

  After that, believing the interview was over, I found it had been only a proem, a prologue: the first act had not yet begun. This I learned when I was taken into a square room without windows or embrasures, lit by a large candelabrum. The only furnishings were a large table, another smaller one holding writing materials, and a few benches. The two priests I’d seen at the post house were seated at the large table, along with a third individual wearing a large gold cross around his neck. With his dark beard and black robe he looked convincingly like an officer of the court, or a judge. At the smaller table was a scribe very different from the one who had conducted the preliminary questioning, a crowlike man who put down the smallest detail of what was said, and, to my growing fear, probably things I had not said. Two constables, one tall and strong-looking and the other redheaded and thin, were my guards. On the wall hung an enormous crucifix, the occupant of which had undoubtedly passed through the hands of this very tribunal.

  As I learned from that point on, the most fearsome thing about being a prisoner in the secret dungeons of the Inquisition was that no one told you what your crime had been, or what proof or witnesses they had against you—nothing about anything. The inquisitors limited themselves to posing question after question, and the scribe to noting it all down, while you addled your brain trying to decide whether what you were saying weighed on the side of your release or of your condemnation. It was possible to spend weeks, months, even years there without knowing the exact reasons, with the added aggravation that if your answers were not satisfactory, they would resort to torture in order to facilitate your confession and obtain the proofs they needed. And when you were tortured, you would begin to answer willy-nilly, not knowing what you should be saying. Everything led to desperation, to the conscious or unconscious betrayal of friends, of you yourself, and at times to madness and death. That was one way of dying other than being led in your white robe and conical hat to the scaffold, with a garotte around your neck, a pyre of dry kindling beneath your feet, and your neighbors and former friends shouting their approval, enchanted with the spectacle.

  I did at least know why I was there, though there was little consolation in the knowledge. And because I knew that, after the first questions, I soon found myself in serious straits. Especially when the younger priest, the one who had glanced at me with such indifference, asked for the names of my accomplices.

  “Accomplices in what, Ilustrísimo?”

  “I am not called Ilustrísimo,” he replied darkly, his large tonsured bald spot gleaming in the light from the candelabrum. “I am asking for the names of your accomplices in the sacrilege.”

  The roles had been assigned, as in a play. While the man with the dark beard and black cloak sat in silence, like a judge who listens and deliberates before handing out his sentence, the two priests were skillfully playing their parts: the younger, the role of implacable inquisitor; the other, plumper and more placid in expression, the benevolent confidant. But I had lived in Madrid long enough to smell a ruse, so I determined not to trust either one, and to act as if I didn’t see the man in the black robe.

  An added complication was that I did not know how much they knew. And I hadn’t the least idea whether my sacrilege—as it had just been defined—was the one they were referring to. Because, in talking with someone who has the power to make you regret it, it is just as dangerous to ask for one card too few as one card too many. Indeed, it can be ruinous even to say, �
�I’ll stay.”

  “I have no accomplices, Reverend Father.” I addressed the plump one, but with little hope. “Nor have I committed a sacrilege.”

  “You deny,” the younger asked, “that in the company of others you profaned the convent of the Adoratrices Benitas?”

  Well, that was something, even if that something gave me gooseflesh when I imagined the consequences. It was a specific accusation. I denied it, of course. And following that, I denied knowing—even by sight—the wounded man whom, on my way home, I had accidentally run into behind the low wall on Caños del Peral hill. I also denied that I had resisted arrest by the agents of the Holy Office. I denied everything to the end, everything I could, except the unarguable fact that I had been holding a dagger when the long arm of the Inquisition reached out to pull me in, and that another man’s blood still crusted my doublet. As it was impossible to deny that, I plunged into a maze of circumlocutions and explanations that had no bearing on the case. Finally I unleashed the tears, as a last resort in fending off new questions.

  That tribunal, however, had seen many tears fall, so the priests, the man in the robe, and the scribe simply waited until my jeremiad had ended. It appeared that they had time to burn—not a direction I wanted my thoughts to take—and that, aside from their indifference, neither cruel nor reproachful, and their asking the same questions over and over with monotonous persistence, was the most disquieting aspect of the interrogation. Although I tried to maintain the air of nonchalance and confidence appropriate for an innocent, that was what terrified me about those men: their coldness and their patience. After a dozen “No” and “I don’t know,” even the plump cleric had dropped his mask, and it was obvious that I would have to travel many leagues to find a hint of compassion.

  I had not eaten a bite in more than twenty-four hours, and I was beginning to feel faint, even though I was seated on a bench. Having exhausted the ploy of the tears, I began to consider the possibilities of a faint. Considering the way I was feeling, it would not be a pretense. That was when the priest said something that hurtled me toward an honest swoon.

  “What do you know of one Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, often known as Captain Alatriste?”

  This is it, Íñigo, I thought. The end. End of denials, and pointless blather. From here on, anything you say, even what you confirm or disprove before that scribe who is setting down your every last sigh, can be used against the captain. So you are through talking, let that take you where it takes you. Despite my situation and my whirling head, and despite the boundless panic sinking its claws into my entrails, I decided, calling upon my last shreds of strength, that nothing, not those priests, not the secret dungeons, not the Supreme Council, not the Pope of Rome, would tear a word from me that would endanger Captain Alatriste.

  “Answer the question,” the younger priest ordered.

  I did not. I concentrated on the floor before me, on a paving stone split by a crack with as many sharp turns as my luck. And I was staring at the same crack when one of the constables standing behind me, obeying an order issued by the priest without a change of expression, stepped forward and struck a blow to the nape of my neck that was like being clubbed. From the force of it, I calculated that it came from the taller and stronger of the two.

  “Answer the question,” the priest repeated.

  I stared at the crack without a peep, and was stunned by a blow stronger than the first. Tears as sincere as the pain in my bruised neck flowed despite my attempt to contain them. I swiped them away with the back of my hand; this was not the moment I wanted to cry.

  “Answer the question.”

  I bit my lips so there would be no chance I would open my mouth, and saw the crack in the floor speeding toward me as my eardrums rang, boom, like the tympanum of a drum. This time the constable had knocked me to the ground. And the stones were as cold as the voice I heard above me.

  “Answer the question.”

  The words came from a great distance, like echoes in a bad dream. A hand pulled me onto my back, and I saw the face of the redheaded guard bending over me, and behind him, that of the priest who had been questioning me. I could not contain a moan of desperation and hopelessness, because I knew that nothing would get me out of that place, and that they had all the time in the world. As for me, I had barely started down the road I was going to travel to hell, and I was in no rush to continue. So I fainted, just as the redhead had grabbed my doublet to drag me to my feet. And—I call as witness the Christ looking down on me from the wall—this time I did not have to feign at all.

  I do not know how many hours went by in the damp cell where my only company was an enormous rat that spent its time peering at me from a dark drain in one corner. I slept and chased bedbugs in my clothing to keep occupied, and three times I wolfed down the hard bread and bowl of nauseating pottage a somber jailer set at the door to my cell with a great clatter of locks and keys.

  I was plotting a way to get close enough to the rat to kill it, for its presence filled me with terror every time I felt myself drifting off to sleep, when the red-haired constable and the one round as a tub—God had been as generous with him as with me—came for me.

  After making our way through ever more sinister corridors, I found myself in a room similar to the first, but with certain shadowy additions in regard to company and furnishings. Behind the table, joining the man with the dark beard and robe, the scribe with the crow’s beak, and the Dominicans, there was a third priest of the same order, whom the others treated with great respect and servility. Just seeing him, I was afraid. He had short gray hair cut in the shape of a helmet across his brow. His cheeks were sunken, the hands emerging from the sleeves of his habit were fleshless claws, and it was especially the fanatic, feverish gleam of eyes that seemed consumed with fever that caused me to wish never to have him as my enemy. Compared with him, the other two priests were Little Sisters of the Poor. And there was something more. At one side of the room stood a rack with ropes waiting to tear limbs from their sockets. In this room, there was nowhere for me to sit, and my legs, barely able to hold me as it was, began to tremble. A big fish was needed here for so many cats.

  Again I will spare Your Mercies the details of the interminable interrogation to which I was subjected by my old acquaintances, the Dominicans, while black-robe and the new inquisitor listened and kept their silence, the constables stood like rocks behind me, and the scribe kept dipping his quill into the inkwell to note down each and every one of my answers, and my silences. This time, thanks to the participation of the new arrival—he kept passing the interrogators papers that they read attentively before posing new questions—I was able to form an idea of what I had fallen into. The horrifying word “Judaizer” was pronounced at least five times, and with each mention my hair stood on end. Those eight letters had delivered many people to the stake.

  “Did you know that the blood of the de la Cruz family is not pure?”

  My head reeled with those words, for I was not unaware of their sinister implication. Ever since the Jews had been expelled by the Reyes Católicos, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, the Inquisition had rigorously pursued the remnants of the Mosaic faith, particularly the conversos who were secretly faithful to the religion of their grandfathers. In a hypocritical Spain that gave such importance to appearances, where even the lowest of the low paraded himself as an hidalgo and old Christian, hatred of Jews was widespread, and papers, purchased or authentic, documenting one’s purity of blood were indispensable if one were to obtain position or high office. And while the powerful grew rich in scandalous business dealings, shielding themselves behind masses and public charities, a violent and vengeful people killed their hunger and boredom by kissing relics, buying indulgences, and enthusiastically persecuting witches, heretics, and Judaizers. And as I once said when referring to Señor de Quevedo and others, not even the finest Spanish minds were strangers to that climate of hatred and repudiation of heterodoxy. For example, consider these words from the great L
ope de Vega.

  Cruel nation, which Hadrian exiled,

  only to make its way to Spain,

  has oppressed and defiled

  our Holy Christian empire,

  and with persistent barbarity

  defamed the Spanish Monarchy.

  Or that other great playwright, don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who would later put these words in the mouth of one of his famous characters:

  Oh, the accursed swine!

  Many burned at the stake,

  and it gave me such joy

  to see them blaze, that I said,

  as I fanned the flames,

  “Heretic dogs, behold a judge

  of the Holy Inquisition.”

  Not to forget don Francisco de Quevedo—the same Quevedo who, in the dark of night, without hesitation hastened to effect a point of honor and aid a friend of converso blood, himself composed no few verses and lines of prose reviling the tribe of Moses. In our day, with the Protestants and Moors burned or exiled, the incorporation of the Kingdom of Portugal during the reign of our good and great Philip II had provided an abundance of secret or public Jews into which to sink our collective teeth, and the Inquisition kept sniffing around them like the jackal noses out carrion. And Jews were another of the reasons that brought the king’s favorite, don Gaspar de Guzmán, the Conde de Olivares, into a confrontation with the Supreme Council. In his attempt to keep the vast heritage of the Austrias intact, as he squeezed dry the exhausted purses of vassals and threatened the selfish interests of nobles, waged a war in Flanders, and struggled to break the backs of Aragon and Catalonia, the Conde-Duque, as he was known, weary of the monarchy’s being held hostage to Genoese bankers, wished to replace them with Portuguese brokers. Their purity of blood might be in doubt, but their money was old Christian, clean, and available to fill Spain’s empty coffers. That plan put the favorite at cross-purposes with the councils of state, the Inquisition, and the papal nuncio himself, while our lord and king, good-natured and extremely religious, weak in matters of conscience as in many other things, wavered indecisively. In the end, he chose to beat the last maravedí out of all his subjects rather than contaminate the Faith.