Almazan sensed a misery greater than that of the cords that bound him and the imminent torture. A delirious fear, a fear of the entire soul, caused a sweat of agony to flow over his brow.
Facing him, the inquisitor with the dog-like face opened his mouth as if he were about to yap. The executioner gave the impression of making him a sign, blinking his eye toward the Christ on the ceiling.
Then a voice spoke, atonal, dull, coming from afar, as if it were resonating through wadding.
That voice from another world said: “Almazan, you have been convicted on the crime of apostasy and condemned to be burned alive. Nevertheless, you can repent, and your punishment would be changed to perpetual imprisonment, for the Church is merciful. Make therefore the complete confession that has so far been demanded of you in vain. Tell everything that you know about the order of heretics known as the Rose Cross, their relationships with the Order of Alumbrados, which we have succeeded in extirpating from Spain, and, above all, inform us as to the personality of a certain Christian Rosenkreutz, a lapsed monk from a convent in Germany who has long sojourned in the Orient and who is the founder of the impious society to which you belong.”
Almazan remained silent. Long months of captivity had broken his organism. He tried to respond, but could not do it.
The voice resumed, but it became even more distant.
“Be humble, Almazan. It is your pride that has doomed you. Do not be obstinate in impiety and apostasy. It is in your interest for you to speak, and even in the interest of your companions who are in Granada and who will soon be in our hands, for God wishes the triumph of the Holy Catholic Church. Speak of your own free will, or you will be subject to the third torture of the question and will depart in the midst of suffering without having the merit of your confession.”
The third torture! Almazan knew that the Council of the Supreme Audience had, on the insistence of the Pope, decided that the question could only be administered once. Torture varied in cruelty. But the third, that of fire, was far more terrible than that of the rope or that of water, which were ordinarily given. And all his strength vanished.
Yes, as the muffled voice said to him, it would be better for him to speak of his own free will. Speak? What had he to say? He did not know where Christian Rosenkreutz might be at the moment. Give names? The Spaniards would doubtless have taken Granada tomorrow. They would burn as dangerous heretics a few inoffensive scholars, a few disinterested sages devoted to the cultivation of the mind.
He shook his head imperceptibly.
There must have been a gesture behind him, for the executioner blinked, and the sad and faithful visage of the inquisitor filled with a desolate expression.
Rapidly, an aide pulled from behind a pillar a brazier, which he pushed to the extremity of the rack, from which Almazan’s feet protruded. Another took his shoes off. A third approached holding a pot full of oil, with which, with a long brush, he coated him to the calves.
“One last time,” said the voice, with a sigh.
Almazan closed his eyes.
He opened them a second later and his pupils capsized beneath his eyelids. Then he howled, in order to relieve himself by howling. The brazier, slowly brought nearer to his feet, reddened the flesh by degrees, and then made it swell and sizzle. Almazan had just entered into the red realm of limitless pain.
Oh, the combat he engaged was more terrible than the one he had attempted to deliver to an entire army in rut in the streets of Malaga. It was a combat in which one fought immobile, nailed to a rack, with an infernal Christ above one’s head as a consolation, and in which one had as an adversary the revolt of one’s own body.
He was already vanquished. There was too much suffering. He would talk. The executioner’s aide pulled the brazier away slightly.
“Your pride is boundless,” said the voice, in which there as a vague mildness, a slight triumph. “Return to yourself, Almazan. It’s your salvation that we desire. Speak. You will not betraying anything, for we know. The Church knows everything that the thought of rebellious men nurtures against her. I can tell you the rules of the Order and the belief that it pretends to transmit. To do good. To learn the science of numbers and the unity of matter and the correspondences of the three universes. To know that the soul is reincarnated. To seek perfection through ecstasy. Ecstasy, isn’t that so? That of the Greek philosophers, the Ismailites, the Albigensians, the Vaudois, of all the heretics. You can see that I’m informed. But I want to hear all that from your mouth. Speak. You’re going to speak.”
Almazan saw the brazier drawing nearer to his feet. The executioner had stimulated it with an iron poker. The skin became as white as parchment, sizzled and swelled again, and split.
But Almazan’s suffering did not remain in his feet. It moved. It rose along his legs, it bathed him, it ran through him, it resonated noisily in his brain, it vibrated delicately in every one of his hairs.
And increasingly, the executioner, in front of him, blinked and shook his head, and seemed to be designating, above him, the grating Christ that was leaning a stupid face over his pain.
Almazan understood the exactitude of that symbol. Lying in the low room in the vacillating light of two torches in the midst of executioners and inquisitors, he was the suffering, lacerated man, a prisoner of the Church, without the hope of human pity, and he only had above his head, suspended from the vault of dogma, through the tenebrous space of the faith, the visage of the Prophet, ridiculously travestied, from whose visage the portion of the sun had been extracted, of which a divine caricature had been made.
The voice of the being, still veiled, had a quiver.
“Speak, since I wish it. I am just as good as you, perhaps better. For you do not observe the rules of the Order. They prescribe chastity. Now, are you not doomed in the eyes of your brothers? The Rose and the Cross! They are far away from you. You will never find them again. But there is still time. You can reenter the Holy Church.”
Doubtless the executioner’s aide who was holding the brush paraded it over his legs, for Almazan’s pain increased. He was burning entirely. Every one of his nerves seemed autonomous and brought him a separate and particular suffering. His thought, however, remained active and made him see, with a strange clarity, the details of the things that were surrounding him.
He noticed that the executioner’s aides and the executioner himself had their hoods thrown back over their shoulders instead of wearing them on their heads, according to custom. He examined a part of the inquisitor’s face near his right eye, and was able to distinguish all kinds of memories of his childhood in the smoke of the brazier twisting in spirals in front of him. And at the same time, like a thousand vibrations of living snakes, the pain palpitated within him.
But it was too much. He had understood the mystery of the inflexions of the voice, what the man behind him wanted. It was not names, precise indications, in order to strike other victims. No, it was not a matter of that. What he wanted was to obtain a moral abjuration, the renunciation of the faith higher than all religions, the cult of the truth, that Almazan had glimpsed.
The suffering was too great. A man could not resist it with his feeble strength. Abjure? Make confessions? Well, so be it! He was about to abjure, to say everything that he knew and even more, on condition that that flame was extinguished and he was then left to rest in peace. He was ready to do penance, to beg for forgiveness on his knees, to embrace the knees of the invisible old man.
The coals of the brazier, and the oil, and the burned flesh made a smoke so thick that it extended in a sheet above him, and hid the image of the Christ. And suddenly, instead of that Christ, Almazan contemplated an extraordinary scene.
In a landscape that he had never seen, perhaps under the ruins of a temple, at the limits of a desert, three men dressed in the Oriental style were sitting on the sand, and Christian Rosenkreutz was standing before them. He was about to speak. One of the three men showed him the direction of the Occident, and he appeared to be
saying: “Go, be the bearer of the truth!”
Almazan contemplated their calm visages beneath their turbans and a sky behind them of an unusual blue. Rosenkreutz made a sign with his hand, started walking—and that was all. The smoke dissipated for Almazan’s eyes.
He knew what that scene was. Rosenkreutz had related it to him. It was near the ancient Palmyra, in the ruins of the temple where Apollonius of Tyana had once spent many years in meditation. The good and wise men who held the secrets of knowledge had made Rosenkreutz come from his German convent and had descended themselves from distant lamaseries in Tibet in order to charge him with transmitting in the Occident a part of the eternal truth to those who were worthy of it. And he, Almazan, was one of those. He had been chosen. But he had been chosen mistakenly. For the pleasure of the body he had quit the Brothers of the Rose Cross in Granada. And now, to escape the pain of the body, he was about to deny the truth in which he believed. Was that possible?
Almazan’s flesh was sizzling, with a frightful little noise. The odor of flesh was unbearable. The inquisitor, discomfited, turned away, trying to hide his disgust. And the executioner, with his tic, designated the Christ on the ceiling untiringly.
But Almazan no longer cared about that pitiless Christ, nor the men who were around him, nor the torture of his flesh. Like a vapor drunk by the early morning sun, his soul was detached and rose toward the light of a higher thought.
And doubtless the radiation of martyrdom must have illuminated his visage, for very close to him, he heard the voice speak again, but now somewhat anguished, and coming from so very far away.
“Abjure your faith! They claim that their ecstasy is the same as that of the Christian mystics, and that at a certain height, the verities are confounded. But they lie! Abjure! Abjure!”
And the voice had a desperate tone. Then Almazan succeeded in turning his head slightly, and beside his own, as close as that of a brother, he saw another head looking at him. It was the head of the man who had made autodafés of thousands of books in Salamanca and Toledo, who had burned Jewish rabbis because they studied the Kabbalah, and Catholic scholars because they thought and expressed their thought, the head of the enemy of the Spirit, the little bald and fragile head, the immense receptacle of evil in its pure state.
And then he saw, for the first time, the bright and miraculously empty eyes, the eyes devoid of hatred, devoid of pity, devoid of pride and devoid of desire, of Tomas de Torquemada. Perhaps there was a glimmer of surprise in the distance of the pupils.
But Almazan did not see the face around those immense eyes. He did not distinguish the marble features to which they were appended. He did not see anything. He was in the presence of a void.
In that void, in the empty light of those eyes, he fixed his gaze of a martyrized man, whose soul remained invisible, like a sword a thousand times sharper than that of the archangel. The mysterious thrust gave the impression of being lost in the emptiness, but it penetrated very deeply into a subtle region in which wounds do not heal and survive those who have received them.
Then Almazan made, with all the force that remained to him, with his desiccated lips, the movement of spitting in disgust, and the darkness weighed upon him.
“He will be burned at the next autodafé,” said the voice of the old man, suddenly heavy, full of an infinite sadness, while he drew away slowly, sustained by the inquisitor, as if it were his own life that had been consumed by the torture.
In the corridors of the keep a human rag with feet charred to the bone was transported, and was laid down in his dungeon with the respect he merited.
And later, when consciousness began to dawn in Almazan’s mind, he heard an indescribable orchestra of delight.
Heavy as the walls were, ardent as the fire was with its power to burn and destroy, captivating as the promises of the tempter were, he had triumphed over the weight of captivity, the devouring force of the flame, and the word that halts the impetus of the runner. He was victorious.
XXII. The Autodafé
In the roseate light of the dawn, the door of the Santa Casa opened and the bells of Seville, which were ringing at full tilt, stopped at the same time. The crowd that filled the streets and was suspended from the windows of houses shivered and fell silent momentarily. The mysterious sadness that hovers over human festivals appeared heavier, more anguishing, as if the desolate souls of all the Sundays of the year were concentrated in that dawn.
And the cortege was organized with a solemn slowness. Almazan was clad in the San-Benito of yellow wool on which flames were crudely painted, and the ridiculous figures of demons. He wore on his head the rounded pyramidal bonnet known as a coroza, marked with a red cross. As his feet and legs, as far as the knees, were nothing but vast purulent wounds, he was carried on a stretcher by two Familiars of the Inquisition. To his right stood the Dominican charged with assisting him and obtaining a belated confession. But as the Dominican was aware of the vanity of his effort, he proffered his invitations to repent mechanically, without thinking about it.
“Repent, my brother, repent! Confess to me!” he said, in a low voice, as if he were chanting those formulae for an absent sinner.
The sound of horses, the indistinct murmur of the people, the groans of a few of the condemned, the appeals of the Familiars charged with ordering the cortege, the tread of the fraternities encumbering the neighboring streets, the friction of banners and weapons made a rumor both menacing and triumphant. But Almazan sensed in his soul a tranquility so great that it seemed to him that no tempest could trouble it.
He saw pass by the Charbonniers with their long pikes; the Guards attached to the tribunal of the Holy Office, black from head to toe, with black sword-hilts and stirrups; the fraternity of Saint Peter the Martyr bearing a white cross; the Dominicans bearing a black cross; the Procurator Fiscal preceded by a red cross; the Brothers of Mercy, those of the Holy Trinity, the mendicant monks, the Carmelites, the Benedictines; the Franciscans; the Augustinian Recollects; the Grandees of Spain: the functionaries of the Inquisition; and those who had come without the right, with somber garments and a great candle, driven by pride to figure as processionaries in that cortege of death.
The condemned only numbered thirty. Jaundiced creatures, emaciated by the fetid air of prisons, beneath the enormous yellow coroza, their eyes bulging in terror, rare or despair, their limbs dislocated by torture, they had the appearance of abominable puppets emerged from a realm of nightmares. Those who had repented under torture joined their hands and turned hypocritically grateful visages toward the Dominican crucifix. The courageous impenitents hoped for death ardently and sought the librating pyre with their eyes.
Behind Almazan, between two Familiars, was a woman from Triana, young and rather beautiful, who was about to be burned for witchcraft. She had heavy and mobile breasts that were visible under her robe and an animal face that caused the soldiers of Santa Hermandad to quiver with desire. One of them dropped his halberd, which made a metallic din on the pavement.
The woman from Triana, as if she were responding to an appeal, raised herself up, twisting, convulsed with hysteria and in a heart-rending voice, never extended, extrahuman and singularly sonorous, cried: “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Save me!”
And the mystery of the sound of the voice troubled those who heard it to the point that many of them looked to the right and the left to see whether Jesus Christ might appear.
Someone ran forward to plunge a gag into the mouth proffering the invocation. But at that moment, at a signal given by the mastery of the Chapel Royal, all the Orders, all the fraternities and all the processionaries intoned the Miserere. The cortege set forth.
Insults and vociferations burst forth as Almazan passed by. Fists were waved at him. There were women who tried to reach him, spitting in his direction. The soldiers of the Santa Hermandad contained the people with the shafts of extended lances. A child succeeded in passing between them and pricked his cheek with a sharp stick.
That was because, for the people, Almazan was worse than a heretic, or even a sorcerer. He was the man who had declared several times during his trial that if he had served Abul Hacen in Granada and aided the Moors to defend Malaga, it was because he estimated Arab civilization far superior to that of Spain, where the intolerance of the Church and the cupidity of kings extended a shadow that grew denser every day. He glorified himself for having defended, under the aegis of the Crescent, the arts, philosophy and science. He was a renegade, and proud of it,
Almazan considered with surprise the faces of so many furious men, and it seemed to him that those faces were not unknown to him. He wondered where he had seen them before, and noticed that they all had a certain kinship, a family appearance, that they resembled one another. He had seen somewhere, recently, that square jaw, that thick neck and those eyes that hatred filled with darkness. He remembered. Those men resembled the Christ fixed to the ceiling of the torture chamber. They were turned toward him with the same blind stupidity.
He went forth followed by the clamors of a hundred thousand Christs as avid as the other for suffering. But now, there was no more smoke from the brazier, there was no more temptation to betrayal. The sun of the dead had just risen, dissipating within him dread, the desire for vengeance and remorse. The people could no longer frighten him. He even felt pity for them.
He was internally exalted in the midst of the tumult. He reviewed the past since the days of his youth. His life had been thus: he had cherished the spirit and had fallen into the trap of the flesh. He had delivered the battle that every man must deliver within himself, and he had been defeated. But what did it matter? The experience had still been acquired by his soul. There would be other lives to live and he would triumph in those. He was about to go through the door of fire that led there,
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