Catalina

by Markus Orths

  All went well until, in the summer of 1601—Catalina was then sixteen years old—the convent admitted that beanpole of a woman whom she had met once before in her life, Beatriz de Aliri. For some days before her arrival the nuns had done nothing but whisper about what ‘poor Beatriz’ had experienced, or rather, endured, in the past few weeks. The known facts of the case were that Beatriz had lost both her one-year-old daughter and her husband in quick succession, and that despair had driven her to the convent. But inventive rumour had it that the child had died by the hand of the husband, and that Beatriz had killed him. The truth, as always, was more complex.

  Chapter four

  Holding in and breaking out

  As early as the year (of Our Lord) 1391, outbreaks of violence against the Jews in Spain had culminated in the massacre of untold numbers of those so-called false believers. To avoid being slaughtered, thousands of them had converted to Christianity. These converted Jews were known as conversos. But that did not spell the end of their persecution. In 1460 a Franciscan monk by the name of Alonso de Espina published a polemic against the conversos in which he lashed out at them with a logical deduction inspired, it would seem, not so much by a love of logic as by a delight in venting an intense hatred. His argument went like this: the conversos are not (true) Christians but (for the most part) still (clandestine) Jews; nonetheless, they are baptized; therefore, as baptized Christians who practise Christianity improperly they are heretics and ought at the very least to be killed. Further pogroms took place in the years 1467 and 1473, but whereas, at least according to some of the self-styled true believers of his day, Henry IV was weak and ineffectual—he was, they said, a vile, dirty man who was not averse to sexual congress with animals and even, it was claimed, with the false conversos, also known as marranos (pigs)—it was under the real ‘Catholic Monarchs’ that all those secret and sinister non-Christians living in Spain once again found themselves in acute peril.

  The Catholic Monarchs were Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. Isabella was the First in more than name: she was the one who set the agenda. That was well known even at the time, and one sign of this is that her head—heavy with so much thinking and decision-making—presses down more deeply into the stone cushion on her tomb than her husband’s does. For Ferdinand simply went along with whatever his wife proposed. It was Isabella who could no longer stomach all that tomfoolery with religion in her domains: her goal was unity of belief, the final, irreversible enthronement of the one true doctrine, the universal, natural, God-given Catholic faith. It was she who in 1478 had, to this end, invented the Inquisition, whose workings have so often been described and whose mission it was to track down, interrogate, torture and eradicate heterodox believers of whatever kind; it was Isabella who in 1492 sent Cristobal Colon to China to instruct the pro-Christian Grand Khan of the Mongols in the Catholic faith and incite him to wage a holy war against the Muslims; she it was, too, who reconquered Granada, the Moors’ last stronghold, in that same year. True, the history books accord the glory of the reconquest to Fernando; people called him ‘the Bat’ and ‘the Hidden One’, he was the saviour of Spain who completed the Reconquista, but once again it was Isabella who on 2 January 1492 insisted on personally driving the last Moors out of Granada, symbolically, so to speak, mounted on her horse and resplendent in her red and white armour. The Muslims were left with no choice but to head for the Strait of Gibraltar and sail back to where Isabella thought they belonged, or to embrace the Christian faith. Muslims who chose the latter course were known as moriscos.

  But for all their zeal the Catholic Monarchs too failed to banish the Jewish and Muslim faiths completely from the country. Just as in earlier times the Christians had held their own against the Romans, so the Muslims and Jews who had undergone forced baptism devised ingenious stratagems which enabled them to go on practising their respective faiths in secret. The Muslims adopted the doctrine of tagiyya, which permitted an ostensible conversion to Christianity. Muslim prayer books were secretly handed down from one generation to the next. If the moriscos were forced to go to confession, they said that they had nothing to confess; if forced to observe holy days, they celebrated the Feast of St. John, which coincided with the Muslim feast of Ansara, so that they could start the day with their ritual ablutions. The conversos too had their subterfuges. They would say, “In the name of the Father‘, but never ’and of the Son‘, they deliberately made the sign of the cross incorrectly, and they ate unleavened bread all year round so that no one would notice when their true, Jewish faith required them to do so during the feast of Passover.

  Leo de Aliri, the man Beatriz had married—the shadowy figure Catalina had briefly glimpsed during the time she spent in the Aliris’ house—was descended from one of those conversos. He was a master of dissimulation. No one could see how parts of the Torah which he knew by heart appeared before his mind’s eye during the night, no one noticed that he would regularly cough or just mumble inaudibly when the congregation spoke the words accompanying the sign of the cross, and he had spent a long time honing his technique of crossing himself extremely fast and very convincingly, so that it would have taken a keen observer indeed to see that he omitted to touch his left shoulder.

  Leo had come to northern Spain via Andalusia and Extremadura, and a convoluted set of circumstances had brought him together with the Catholic Beatriz. The two of them had immediately discovered a common interest of a kind conducive to an intimate relationship, and this interest found its expression in a secluded corner somewhere among the streets of San Sebastian. They had to get married: Beatriz was pregnant. This placed Leo in an exceedingly difficult position. The conversos generally chose like-minded co-religionists as spouses, since this made it far easier for them to observe their clandestine religion at home. Now Leo was forced to practise secrecy even in his own house. However, since Beatriz lost not only her first child but the next two as well, she was so preoccupied with begetting, conceiving, having her womb scraped out and mourning that she failed to pick up any signs of her husband’s true religious orientation. At that time, incidentally, no one could understand why babies in the land of the Basques seemed so particularly disinclined to be born alive. Not until 1939 was the god identified who could be blamed for these botched acts of creation. He was given the name Rhesus. It turned out that this Rhesus—who was, perhaps, more of a monkey than a god—had endowed twenty-seven per cent of all Basques with a so-called negative factor. This meant that the babies ensconced in their mothers’ wombs ran the risk, quite simply, of being poisoned by their mothers’ negative blood if, as was quite often the case, the blood flowing through the child’s own veins was positive.

  Beatriz and Leo de Aliri did not let up on their procreative activities, and at last they succeeded in producing a living child. And now, like it or not, Leo had to attend the baptism of his own daughter. But the conversos had a solution for everything, so that night, when he thought his wife was asleep, Leo performed a special counter-ritual current among the Jews, which was intended to cleanse the infant’s body, heart and blood of the Christian God who had been implanted there through baptism. Unfortunately for Leo, Beatriz was not asleep at all, but was standing in the doorway, covertly watching her husband and thinking, with a glow of maternal satisfaction, what a touchingly caring man the father of her child was—so besotted, so adoring that he could not bear to be parted from the baby even in the night. But as Beatriz stood there, invisible in the shadow of the door, and began to look more closely at what he was doing, the huge pile of stones in which her head had been buried all those years, blinding her to the truth, suddenly flew apart in a single, soundless explosion. She understood what was going on, saw her husband kneeling beside the child, saw not her husband now but a stranger engaged in exorcizing Christ, the Lord, from her own daughter’s body as if He were a devil.

  Leo was murmuring Jewish prayers, he had a little book open in front of him and was reciting verses which Beatriz had never heard
before, he was singing, under his breath, religious melodies quite unlike those that were sung by decent Christian folk. She grasped the full extent of the catastrophe, its enormity, its irrevocability: she was living with a Jew, had for years been consorting with a Jew in the most wanton manner, had sullied her pure Christian soul forever with the stain of Jewish perversion.

  Now, it is not altogether clear how the heavy vase that stood on the tall cupboard came into contact with Leo’s skull: whether, as Beatriz testified to the investigating authorities, he lost his balance while performing the counter-rite, stumbled and crashed into the cupboard, thereby causing the vase to fall—a divine punishment, one might say, for what he was doing to the child; or whether Beatriz herself was guilty of reaching the vase down from the cupboard and hurling it at the back of her husband’s head, her towering height adding extra force to the blow, before he had a chance to turn round. The baby was crying; Beatriz picked her up. She waited for her husband to regain ‘consciousness. But he never did, because he was dead. Why the baptized investigators were so ready to believe the ’accident‘ version of the story, who can say, but the facts are that Beatriz was not found guilty and that the baby followed her father to the grave two weeks later, having suffered an attack of scarlet fever that proved fatal. Beatriz saw this partly as a consequence of the rite performed by the child’s father, but also as a punishment of Job-like severity imposed on herself, not because she had killed someone—if she had—but because she had lived as the wife of a Jew without realizing it. No option remained for her now but to wash away her guilt, and this called for a washing facility commensurate with her great sin: a life in the seclusion of a convent.

  Alongside the torments of guilt and self-pity, alongside her longing for repentance and her hope of forgiveness, a deep rage began to build up inside Beatriz de Aliri. If one could identify its successive stages, the sequence would go something like this: first there was only rage at herself, for not having noticed far sooner what was going on. Then came rage against her husband, for it was he, after all, who had so wickedly deceived her. Next, her rage was directed against what her husband had done to her, for which Beatriz used the word ‘pretence’. Her rage against what her husband had done craved expansion, grandeur, universality; it developed into a rage against all pretence in the whole wide world, a rage against all hypocrisy and false witness, a hatred of the very spirit of the age in which she lived. But Beatriz came to realize that a rage against something general and abstract lacks an appropriate outlet, and so in the final stage of her fury she returned to the specific and concrete, once more focusing her rage on a tangible object. She vowed to herself that she would—‘so help me God’—dedicate herself to the fight against ‘hypocrites of every kind’. In an access of lofty Christian rhetoric she swore that she would become a ‘tool of God’ in the ‘struggle for a life that is honest and transparent’, the struggle to ‘eradicate and unmask that most dreadful of all sins, the sin of pretence.“ So, at any rate, she declared in one of her letters of confession, which was tucked into the convent chronicle and consequently never sent off.

  Beatriz quickly picked up a trail that promised a worthy battle with which to open her campaign. Here was this convent brat, sixteen years old, Catalina—the fact that their paths had crossed before was, to Beatriz’s mind, no mere coincidence but the work of Providence—and they all had her down as some kind of saint. That girl? Never! Beatriz watched Catalina closely. Whenever she was given an instruction she would acknowledge it with a silent, submissive nod before turning to go and carry it out, and for the merest fraction of a second there would be the twitch of a muscle in her face, one blink too many or a slight pursing of the lips which gave her away. This was anything but selflessness, Beatriz thought: on the contrary, it was arrogance, it was pride, it was self-infatuation taken to its extreme. Whenever Beatriz saw her kneel and pray, it seemed as if a light shone down upon Catalina’s cheeks. This, Beatriz thought, was the most deep-dyed, nauseating hypocrisy. When Catalina’s lips moved in silent prayer, she gave every appearance of true fervour, but in fact, Beatriz thought, she prayed only in order to be seen praying. Whatever Catalina did, Beatriz thought, she did to increase the awe in which she was held, to elicit some new, still more extravagant praise from the prioress. It was high time, thought Beatriz, that someone put a stop to her tricks. And after everything that had happened to her, Beatriz de Aliri considered herself ideally suited to the task.

  With a certain sense of the dramatic, Beatriz now devised a plan. First she approached Catalina and talked to her—so far as this was possible, for point nine of the Rule of St. Augustine forbade ‘idle conversation’ and ‘gossip’. Then, being much the older of the two, she gave the young girl all kinds of jobs to do—harmless, everyday things. Her manner was friendly, polite, appreciative. But as time went on her instructions became increasingly devious and malicious. She summoned Catalina to her cell and told her to clean it. Catalina obeyed without a murmur. While she was doing this, Beatriz confided to her that she had an irrational fear of dirt and could not possibly crawl into the corners herself. She needed Catalina’s help, she said, and asked her to come by and clean the cell every day. From then on Catalina had to dress Beatriz, had to empty her chamber-pot for some trumped-up reason or other, had to help her wash herself. But all these humiliations failed to bring Catalina to the point where, as Beatriz secretly hoped, she would drop her pretence and, in a huge eruption of protest, finally show her true colours.

  Sterner measures were called for. Beatriz tipped her chamber pot over and ordered Catalina to scrape up the faeces. When Beatriz was in bed with a bout of food poisoning from some fish she had eaten, Catalina had to catch the greenish vomit, wipe Beatriz’s mouth and clean up the bed, which was wet and black from her diarrhoea. On top of all this, for some weeks now Beatriz had been constantly finding fault with Catalina and criticizing her for being clumsy. Systematically stepping up the torture, Beatriz subjected her to more and more accusations and complaints; soon she could do nothing right, and Beatriz continually found new words with which to berate her for her stupidity and ugliness.

  When Catalina endured all this with apparent ease, when she performed every task, however disgusting, without the least hint of rebellion, when she seemed to regard each new torment as another golden opportunity to display her self-mastery and showed no sign of being about to concede defeat, it was Beatriz de Aliri whose patience finally ran out. On the night of 13th August, she crept along the corridors with a candle in her hand, opened the door of Catalinas cell, slipped inside and eyed the sleeping girl with undisguised hatred. She wished she could tear the deceitful skin from her face, plunge her hands into her breast and drag out what was hidden there. After observing Catalina for some minutes, Beatriz slowly bent over her.

  Catalina opened her eyes and took fright, but she was unable to cry out. There, only inches away, she saw that face that had been thrust close to hers once before, and she was bewildered. “You’re so good,” Beatriz said suddenly. She said it calmly and sweetly. She set the candle down beside the bed and put her hands around Catalina’s throat, very gently. “You’re so good,” she said, several times more, but the tone of her words changed from plaintive and half-admiring to vindictive and full of hatred. “You’re so good!” she shouted, and gradually her hands became throttling hands that made Catalina choke for breath. Then Beatriz sat up, drew back her long arm and rammed her fist with all her might into the face lying before her. Catalina spat, and her pillow turned red. The flame near the bed was smoking. Catalina looked at the blood. Then at Beatriz, who was waiting. Waiting for something to happen. For Catalina to defend herself, to hit back. And Catalina’s fingers clenched into fists, her muscles tensed, her arm longed to rise, longed to strike—at last—a single retaliatory blow. Relief. But at that moment Catalina saw with vivid clarity her mother’s raised index finger, her mother’s right forefinger held up in admonition—but that finger was not there, it was missing, an
d the absence of the finger was like a cruel, stabbing pain. Catalina opened out her fist, kept her hand under the covers, gazed up at Beatriz and dispatched one last smile from her face —a gentle, excruciatingly forgiving smile—as if she were pushing it off a cliff. Beatriz turned pale; she stared wide-eyed at Catalina, rose heavily from the bed, turned, and left the cell without another word.

  Catalina knew that this was her most spectacular victory. She wanted to celebrate it, silently, alone in the cell, with her unclenched fist still lying under the bedclothes. But she felt no exhilaration. The sense of triumph would not come. Catalina threw off the covers and stood up. She went over to the picture of the saint on the wall and laid it on the bed. It was weeks since she had last stood under the line she had drawn in blood. Pressing her nose to the wall, she placed one hand on the top of her head, touching the wall, then tilted her head back and looked up: she was very nearly there. And now her heels rose from the floor, her torso stretched and her neck strained upwards as far as it would go, until her hand covered the line.