by Théo Varlet
The first report came from Cristobal Alvarez, secretly affiliated to the Holy Office. Cristobal Alvarez had been accepted as a domestic by Fray Geronimo, Master of Arts at the University, and had succeeded in winning his confidence. He deposed on oath that the day before last, his master had taken him outside the city two hours before the gates were closed. The said Geronimo, accompanied by Alvarez, had waited for nightfall reading his breviary in the little orange-grove that was about a league to the south of the Puerta del Sol. When darkness fell, he had headed, still in the company of Alvarez, toward the Moorish camp a league and a quarter further away. After an exchange of kabbalistic formulae—in Arabic—the sentinel had taken them to an officer. The officer had taken them to the tent of the Emir Abdul Khan. There, Geronimo had gone in alone, but Alvarez, left at the door, had heard his master talking for a full hour with the Emir in a tone of the most amicable familiarity.
Impassive in appearance, the Grand Inquisitor drank in the notary’s shrill voice like a celestial harmony.
This would do it. This evidence, so long awaited, was sufficient—even if it had been the only evidence—to prove the Franciscan Geronimo guilty of heresy and have him thrown into the prisons of the Holy Office this evening, where torture would extract further confessions from him. If he denied it, he would be condemned anyway, for obduracy. Either way, he would perish on the pyre—and his Order would never recover from the blow. Tortorado and the Dominicans would be triumphant...
Behind the hatred that the Grand Inquisitor had borne Fray Geronimo for many years, however, there was something other than a question of discipline, a rivalry between Dominican and Franciscan. In the eyes of his enemies, Geronimo was guilty of a double sin that was inexpiable: not content with eclipsing all the scholastic doctors in Valencia with the power and brilliance of his genius, of sustaining propositions with a heretical odor and extracting from the books of pagan Antiquity a science corruptive of youth, he scarcely concealed his sympathy for the civilization of the Moors, of which one of the most refined representatives was this Abdul Khan, now Emir, and formerly his disciple here in Venice—before the king of Castile, Alphonse XI, El Vengador, had expelled the hereditary enemy from the city, forced Grenada to pay tribute to him, and blockaded the pillars of Hercules with his fleet to prevent the arrival of reinforcements from Africa.
A refined civilization, the inheritor of an ancient tradition less complete but more alive than that of the Byzantine Emperors, at the other end of Europe! The Caliphs still ruled in Cordova, in their Alhambras with golden mosaics, where jets of rose-water, and even of quicksilver, fell back into lapis-lazuli bowls supported by marble lions, with carbuncles or amethysts for eyes, amid slaves and concubines, naked beneath their silver lame gauze, with hair sprinkled with sequins and anointed with rare essences; amid choirs of handsome children and sweet music.
The Caliphs, enthroned over guards of Emirs constellated with jewels, over the sons of the desert in white burnooses, ready to fight to the death at a sign from the Master...
The people, obedient to the simple and undogmatic faith of the Prophet, devoting themselves to ritual ablutions and reciting the verses of the Koran at the hours when the muezzins chanted their appeals from the height of minarets perforated by arabesques in stone lacework...
And, in the Universities, crammed with students, the Sages of Islam transmitting the sacred fire, in the expectation of a renewal, of a luminous awakening of the thought of the world, asleep for seven centuries, since the invasion of the Barbarians and the dismantling of the Roman Empire...
Certainly, Geronimo would not go so far as to deny Spanish patriotism the right to take back from these African invaders the captive lands of their ancestors; he did not prefer Mohammed to Christ, and he invested his hope for the regeneration of the world in the Catholic faith—but his high intelligence reproved the brutal method of merciless warfare adopted against the Moors by the kings of Spain, who went so far as to dream of a general castration of their Muslim subjects!
Before his most reliable disciples, the bold innovator advocated, along with the free exercise of the Christian, Islamic and Judaic religions, a political alliance: a fraternal fusion of the two peoples, whose qualities would thus be completed and their faults attenuated. In his generous utopia, a new Spain, to which Portugal would be joined, would emerge from that unanimous collaboration: from the Pyrenees to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the Ocean to the Interior Sea, everything would blossom in joy and prosperity; on the plateaux of the Sierra as within sight of blue waves among the orange groves, there would only be one people at work, cultivating an immense garden punctuated by cities in which concord, wisdom, elegance and just freedom would flourish.
That would require—and Geronimo almost admitted it—the crushing of the Monster, the origin of all the evils in which Spain was then struggling, of the somber decline into which it had sunk, and from which it would emerge five hundred years later, for an era of unprecedented but temporary era of material prosperity. He abhorred, with all his luminous genius, that octopus with a thousand atrociously vigilant tentacles, which garroted minds and stifled every generous or new idea—heresy!—by means of the san benito and the auto-da-fé. He detested the Inquisition.
With the immeasurable power that it had gradually wrenched from the weakness of popes and usurped from the bishops previously charged with pursuing heretics and delivering them to the secular arm, the Holy Office—omnipresent by means of its spies, omnipotent by means of its hirelings, its tortures and its executioners, and even the royal troops that the inquisitor could requisition at will—exercised over consciences a frightful terror. It had gradually lowered upon them a monstrous candle-snuffer that had eventually brought them to the level of an egalitarian ignorance, which would soon enthrone the immobility of stupor and death in all the brains of the unfortunate Peninsula!
Tortorado raised his eyes toward the bay-window open to the night, and stared with a smile of hatred at the distant light shining in a high window of the University. There, leaning his orange-colored hair—already marked with an infernal glow, for alert eyes!—over the studious lamp, the Franciscan Geronimo was lunged in accursed sciences. Oh, he had no suspicion of what awaited him!
The Grand Inquisitor’s nose quivered when the notary passed on to the second report.
This one, Tortorado knew by heart; he had dictated the terms to Myriam himself…and in his dark soul, the image of the young Israelite was evoked. He saw her again as he had the first time, naked on the torture rack; he saw that virginal body once again, striped with blood by the whip: that body which had immediately set him ablaze with desire...
She denied the participation of her father—Melchisedech, the chief rabbi of Valencia—in the ritual assassination of a Christian child and the profanation of a consecrated host. But seven of her coreligionists, witnesses to the crime, had confessed: the father and daughter were doomed...
Exercising his authority, Tortorado had stopped the procedure, saved the father and saved the daughter. The latter, seemingly converted and baptized, had become his mistress, his slave, body and soul. No resistance possible! He held her by means of the trial, permanently in suspense; at any moment, he could have her thrown into prison again and burned for having relapsed. Meekly, therefore, she spied for the Holy Office. Every Friday—she was just a trifle thin, thought Tortorado, with the same frightfully jovial smile that he had when killing flies (his favorite pastime)—under the pretext of confession, she came to make her report to him.
The last time, she had reported this: She had already retired to her bedroom at dusk the previous evening, when someone scratched at the street door and a visitor came in. She recognized the tread of the Franciscan from the University who passed beneath the windows every day: the red-haired monk. Getting up with one bound, she went down the stairs stealthily, and through a gap in a door-curtain that she parted slightly, she saw Geronimo seated at the table with her father, in front of a large book illust
rated with magical symbols.
“You recognized him? You’re sure that it was Geronimo?” Tortorado had said, when she described the scene. And when she hesitated, he had grabbed her by the hair and brutalized her, with a pleasure preliminary to other criminal carnal delights.
And while listening to the notary of the Holy Office read him the official version of the report, he closed his eyes and saw the young woman again as he dragged her across the floor and tore off her tunic and chemise, in order to beat her more effectively on her bare flesh—that demonic flesh for which he had damned his soul, the precious soul of a Grand Inquisitor!
“That’s good, Don Arcos. The Holy Office is enlightened. And you, Martinez, write:
“The Franciscan Fray Geronimo, Master of Arts at the University of Valencia, is accused of maneuvers prejudicial to the safety of His Majesty, of Spain and its Catholic faith. He is accused of participation in the Kabbalah and satanic evocations. He will have to answer for these crimes and other minor heresies before the sacred tribunal of the Inquisition. To that end, the order is given to the captain of the guards of the Holy Office, Juan Cabramontilla, immediately to take possession of the person of the said Geronimo, and to take him, duly enchained, to the prison of the Holy Office, from which he will be extracted tomorrow in order to be interrogated by the Ordinary, submitted to questioning by water9 in case of his denial of the crimes imputed to him by witnesses worthy of faith, and in case of confession, burned at the imminent auto-da-fé: all for the benefit of his immortal soul.
“Written in Valencia, in the palace of the Holy Office, this Monday, June 27 in the Year of Our Lord 1341, at eleven o’clock in the evening.
“Clerk: Martinez.
“Inquisitor of the Faith: F. Tortorado.”
When the document was signed and sealed with a large cachet of green wax with the arms of the Holy Office, Tortorado struck a gong. In the corridor, heavy and rhythmic footsteps approached, and a halberdier in a tight-fitting leather jacket appeared, coming to a standstill on the threshold.
“Take this order to the captain,” the inquisitor said, handing the arrest warrant to Martinez, who passed it to the soldier.
The latter took it, saluted, turned round and disappeared. His footsteps drew away over the floor-tiles. A minute later, on the floor below, there’re was a sound of command being issued and the clink of weapons. A patrol left the palace, and could be heard crossing the square and heading toward the University.
Impassively, Tortorado, with his hands in his sleeves but his infamous bulbous nose quivering in his ascetic face, watched the distant high window, in which the studious light was about to go out.
“We’ll save the soul of that stray lamb,” he murmured.
“With God’s aid,” Fernando Arcos added, piously.
“And the executioner’s,” Martinez concluded.
“Amen,” chanted the others.
In the window in the University, two shadows passed in front of the light. A feeble cry of indignation carried all the way to the palace, in the vast silence of the night...
The light went out.
II. The Capture of Valencia
It might have been midday when the little expeditionary company traversed the dry bed of the Seille and set off across the sun-drenched plain, on the far side of which the silhouette of Valencia was tremulous in the hot air. Ali, the Moorish leader, had appeared astonished at first to see Renard send his men off at that scorching hour, but he had had rapidly come to a decision and, having ordered two of his horsemen to return to the camp, where the Emir might be becoming anxious, he and the other eighteen joined the reconnaissance mission.
The nine Spanish prisoners marched at the head; then came the principal force, commanded by Adjutant Etcheverry: ten troopers armed with Lebels, two light machine-gunners, and two sappers, revolvers at their sides and picks over their shoulders. To safeguard his dignity with regard to the cavalrymen who were following in good order, Lieutenant Renard had installed himself in the motorcyclist’s side-car. By his side marched Nénesse, very proud of his new importance as an interpreter, and the cameraman Lénac, sweating beneath the weight of his apparatus.
Although it was not far—five or six kilometers at the most—the journey took a good hour. The terrain was rocky, encumbered by low and stunted vegetation—kermes oaks, the adjutant declared—and impenetrable thickets of Barbary figs with grimacing profiles and prickly pears, which it was necessary to go around.
In Valencia, where the bells redoubled their tintinnabulation, an extraordinary effervescence reigned. In the crenellations of the ramparts and the towers, warriors were crowded, their weapons glinting in the sunlight. On the terraces of the edifices that loomed up behind them, framed with palm trees, on the minarets of the churches and the cupolas of the cathedral, confused and variegated crowds had gathered.
Two hundred meters from the hermetically-sealed gate, with its iron-barred and nailed battens, Renard called a halt.
These hostile dispositions disrupted his plan, which was not to attack the city but to confer with its governor. By way of precaution against a possible sortie, however, the two light machine-gunners were positioned in readiness. Three Spanish prisoners, waving a white flag—constituted by a handkerchief—went forward as negotiators. They were warned that, at the first sign they gave of running away, their companions would be put to death.
On the tower overlooking the closed gate a party of bare-headed black and white monks could be made out, carrying banners and crucifixes, grouped around an individual with a miter and crosier in a gold-spangled dalmatic. The crowd fell silent. The disordered clanging of bells had ceased, and one alone, grave and raucous, continued to toll like a knell.
When the three negotiators appeared in the open space at the foot of the walls, a powerful voice rose up from the tower, in a funereal chant that the monks punctuated with responses: “Vade reto! Vade retro Satanas!” The bishop, brandishing his crosier in his left hand, launched his right in a gesture of malediction, and the final words of the anathema vibrated in the tragic silence:
“…In ignem aeternum cum haereticis et daemonibus!”10
From the entire city, a formidable modulated “Amen!” rose up; ten thousand voices roared: “A muerte los Moros!” and immediately, a volley of arrows and arbalest darts departed from the battlements, and felled the three negotiators, instantaneously transformed into huge porcupines. Other arrows fell a few meters short of the troopers arranged to either side of the machine-gunners. One, more vigorously launched, pierced the shoulder of one of the Moorish cavalrymen who were watching the bare-headed and bound hostages with their scimitars drawn.
Reprisals were not long delayed. With howls of rage, the men with the burnooses took hold of the wretched captives by the hair and cut off their heads with two sweeps of the blade. Meanwhile, the machine-gunners and Lebels fired a salvo, without waiting for Renard’s order. The latter had stood up in his side-car with a grand gesture.
On the ramparts, the brief silence of stupor was succeeded by cries of agony and the clamor of a frightful panic. The bishop and the monks disappeared. In the crenellations, the last archers, firing with frenetic obstinacy, were felled in their turn, and in less than sixty seconds, the silhouettes of the ramparts and terraces, previously swarming with people, stood out empty of human presence against the indigo of the sky.
Frightened by the detonations, the Moors’ chargers had reared up, and were carrying their riders away at a gallop, but the latter had already had time to finish their work, and it was while brandishing the severed heads of their enemies that they launched themselves toward the ramparts. There, one after another, they whirled the hideous projectiles around, and with guttural exclamations of effort, sent them like missiles for a slingshot over the walls, behind which cries of rage and vengeance rose up. Then they came back and a moderate gallop, and, with smiles of satisfaction on their bronzed faces, wiped their scimitars with their fingers and shook the blood on to the
sand.
Renard had succeeded in ordering a cease-fire, but war had now been declared. It was not sufficient to have cleared the battlements and scared the population. It was necessary to enter the city and impose themselves upon it by force if they wanted to stay in Port-sur-Seille.
The poilus discussed the situation.
“What do you think of the new war?”
“It’s a funny business!”
“I think it’s devilishly hot, and there’s aren’t any bistros so far.”
“No, the aviator was right, it’s the cameraman putting one over on us.”
“Bah! We just have to act; we don’t need to understand.”
“If we can just nab the city...
“There are nice tarts there, and even more priests.”
“But there aren’t enough of us!”
“They’ve only got arrows and spears, and we’ve got the Moors with us...”
On Etcheverry’s advice, the motorcyclist was dispatched to Port-sur-Seille to get the sticks of dynamite with the aid of which the two sappers would be charged with blowing up the gate. While awaiting his return, as the heat was becoming abominable, the expeditionary force went to take shelter in the shade of a clump of palm trees, which formed a sort of small oasis a few hundred meters away in the direction of the sea, provided with a delightfully cool grass-bordered spring. They dipped wine-bottles into it and relaxed, collars unbuttoned, in their shirt-sleeves, repeating the fateful: “We just have to act; we don’t need to understand.”