by Green, Toby
For a moment, turn back to the messianic ambience of the Carvajal household in Mexico City in the 1590s. Here was a house in the Indian neighbourhood of Tlatelolco where fear had for a time been defeated by longing. After Luis the Younger’s reconciliation in 1590, they were inspected by a Franciscan friar, Pedro de Oroz, who noted with approval the religious images which the Carvajals had placed in their home as evidence of their sincere attachment to the Catholic Church.*1
Yet not all of the neighbours of the Carvajals were as convinced. One was a Portuguese woman called Susan Galván.1 Galván was fifty years old and, one can surmise, bored with her lot. She liked nothing better than to meddle in the affairs of others and then gossip as to what she had found. To have a family of reconciled heretics living nearby was therefore a welcome distraction.
Galván soon befriended the Carvajals’ servant, a Chichimec Indian from the northern Mexican deserts. She asked her what the Carvajals drank and what they ate. She was told that none of the them ate pork or bacon, and that they used olive oil or butter rather than lard when they cooked. These practices were seen in Iberian societies as proof that a person or family was not a Catholic but a crypto-Jew or a crypto-Muslim, neither faith permitting the eating of pork. Excited by this information, Galván nosed her way into the kitchen of the Carvajal household so that she could see with her own eyes what sort of fat was used to grease the saucepans.
When the second trial of family members began, Galván gave evidence. She declared that she had always suspected that the Carvajals still lived as Jews. On top of her culinary evidence, she had been told by the Chichimec servant that the Carvajals dressed in clean clothes on Friday nights, and that they wore their best clothes on Saturdays as if it were a festival. Indeed, one Saturday had Galván herself not seen Luis the Younger’s sister Leonor sitting on a cushion doing nothing, wearing a dress of black velvet? When she had seen this idleness on an ordinary workday – which just happened to be the Jewish sabbath – Galván had been suitably scandalized, her thrill disguised by a mask of moral censure.
Reading through the case records, it becomes plain that Galván spent much of her time acting as an unpaid spy for the Inquisition. She noted the sort of clothes that the Carvajals wore and the days on which they wore them. She pried into their cooking arrangements. Thus, for the bored, the gossips and the acid-tongued, the Inquisition provided a notable social service: it was now not only legitimate to watch one’s neighbours, it was a social duty, as the edicts of grace, with their admonitions for citizens to report anything that seemed contrary to the faith, made clear.
The way in which every aspect of life was affected in Mexico was summed up just a few years after the auto of 1596 in which Luis the Younger and his sisters Isabel and Leonor had died. In 1604 Antonia Machado, the granddaughter of a relajado, was prosecuted for wearing silk clothes with a golden fringe,2 something forbidden to someone with this sort of blood tie to a convicted heretic.*2 One can imagine the righteous scandal as this was observed in the whitewashed streets of Mexico, which were kept clean by African slaves and what remained of the Aztec population after the epidemics: one was not shocked by the genocide where up to 95 per cent of the indigenous population had been lost in the preceding century;3 nor by the scarred faces of those Indians who had survived the disease; nor by the torture in the mines and the slavery of the miners – no, one was disgusted, affronted and scandalized by this descendant of a relajado having the temerity to wear silk!
It is difficult to maintain a sense of proportion. By focusing on one or two minor anomalies, bigger anomalies and evils could be overlooked. The Inquisition, defining conformity in religious terms as always, was keen to prosecute all religious deviants. Yet at the same time conformity and normality were increasingly defined in racial terms; thus the descendants of deviants had to be punished as well.
These twin vectors of marginalization were ideologically incompatible, and revealed the contradiction in Iberian psychology between a conservative and almost medieval world view, which concentrated on religious deviance, and the emerging modern world view which saw differences in racial terms. But, as we have seen, the Inquisition was able to straddle these two positions. The extraordinary adaptability of the persecuting mentality meant that it was able to switch horses with all the panache and killer instinct of a champion jockey offered a prize ride. Yet concern with conformity could only thrive if some groups could be shown to be nonconformist. Thus, as the 16th century turned into the 17th and the obsession with purity intensified, every aspect of daily life was chewed over in the search for what was deemed abnormal.
WHILE THESE PARTICULAR Mexican cases concerned details of daily life such as those which preoccupied the Inquisition in Portugal and Spain, in general the Inquisition in the overseas colonies was most concerned with imposing a different type of conformity: the acceptance of broader European ideals.
For the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa and Africa, failure to wear Portuguese-style of clothing was enough for people to be prosecuted. In 1585 the General Council of the Inquisition in Portugal ordered the inquisitors in Goa to proceed against Christians who live in the land of the infidels and dress in the manner of the infidels as if they were apostates and separated from our Holy Faith, even if there is no proof of them performing the rites and ceremonies of the infidels’ – the proof of apostasy resided in their ‘adopting their style of dress, which is different to that of the Christians’.4 Then in 1619 Manoel da Silva was thrown into jail in the town of Cacheu in modern Guinea-Bissau under inquisitorial law. The sole evidence against Silva was that, although he claimed to be a Christian, he had been observed in the town of Buguendo*3 and in neighbouring Bichangor*4 dressed ‘like a local black’ in a boubou (kaftan) and with rings through his nostrils. Da Silva, who had been born in Malacca, was sent from Cacheu to the jail in Ribeira Grande in Cape Verde, where the future governor of Nuevo León Luis de Carvajal had once lived, and was then deported to Angola.5
Clearly such accusations could only occur if the members of a society were encouraged to watch out for this sort of thing, even in places as distant from Portugal as Goa and Guinea-Bissau. While Portuguese authority waned significantly in the Estado da India in the latter 17th century6 – as Portugal fought its long war of independence against Spain between 1640 and 1668 – the power of the Inquisition there remained significant. One of the main crimes it tried in Goa, particularly from the mid-17th century onwards, was the ‘sorcery’ of crypto-Hindus who were supposed to have converted to Christianity. Successfully identifying this crime required detailed observation of daily life to pick up on heretical practices. This was the territory in which, as the French traveller Pyrard de Laval had written in 1619, the Inquisition was ‘much more severe than in Portugal’.7
In Brazil, as in Goa, the Portuguese Inquisition was particularly concerned with sorcery. Denunciations of superstitious practices again required detailed observation of behaviour. They became particularly common in the early 18th century, when a common charm found in Brazil was the bolsa de mandinga. These bags often contained pieces of marble, or six-pointed stars, or pieces of paper covered with Kabbalistic signs. They were highly prized by those who carried them and were said to protect the wearer against injury by knives or bullets.8 They were also used by Brazilian slaves living in Lisbon, and three inquisitorial cases centred on them in 1730–1.9
There was an extraordinary degree of superstition and non-Catholic practice in the patchwork world of the colonies. In Brazil in the early 18th century one African slave, Joana, used to lace the food of men she desired with the second batch of water with which she had washed her vagina.10 Another slave, Marcelina Maria, cooked an egg, slept with it between her legs and gave it to the man that she desired; she had also been taught that when she had sex with a man she should wet her finger in her vagina and then make the sign of the cross upon each of her eyes so that the man would never leave her.11 In Mexico powders were ground up by slave women and thrown over men
so that they would desire them; some carried earth taken from a graveyard and others special herbs, all intended to achieve the same end of sex with a desired man.12 In Brazil slaves were sent to touch objects of desire with charms so that they would fall under the sway of the slave’s master or mistress.13 There was no shortage of obsession with sex, superstition about sex and attempts to induce others to have sex; in this atmosphere and in the sultry afternoons of the tropics one suspects that, in spite of the best efforts of the Inquisition, there was no shortage of actual sex either.
Such, then, was the ‘tropic of sins’, as one scholar has put it,14 a world alien to the climate, ideologies and social requirements of Iberia. Many of those whose lives and approaches to reality were picked over in such detail by the Inquisition were slaves who had been brought to the New World from Africa and had maintained some of their ancestral beliefs.15 Yet although this meant that slaves were therefore subjected to inquisitorial attention, it is not a little solace that they themselves often became quite adept at using the Inquisition in their own interests.
Cartagena de las Indias 1648–50
IN 1648, THE SLAVE Manuel Bran*5 was arrested in Cartagena de las Indias, accused of spitting on crosses and denying the existence of God.16 When one considers his life history, this attitude towards the religious faith of his oppressors is hardly surprising.
Manuel had been born in Cape Verde and went as a babe in arms along with his mother who was taken to be a slave in the Azores. In the Azores he served as a page to an archdeacon, cultivating his master’s vines and doing whatever was asked of him. When he grew into adulthood he married a Spaniard called Leonor de Sossa, a servant of his master, and had a child with her. The child died at the age of four. Then his master the archdeacon ordered him to sail in the service of the brothers Don Diego de Lobo and Don Rodrigo de Lobo. They took him to Brazil and then to Cartagena, where Rodrigo de Lobo sold him as a slave. He never saw his wife again.17
In such circumstances the hostility of slaves towards the religion of their masters is no surprise. The hierarchy of values was expressed by one case from Brazil, in 1737, where the plantation owner Pedro Pais Machado killed two slaves for allegedly injuring one of his oxen; one of the slaves was murdered by being hung by his testicles until he was dead.18 Only a few years later one of the wealthiest residents of Bahia in Brazil, Garcia de Avila Pereira Aragão, had a three-year-old slave girl brought to him, and held her face over a fire of hot coals. He then fanned the fire with his other hand. Aragão also tortured a six-year-old slave boy by dripping hot candle wax on him, laughing with glee as the boy screamed in pain.19
Such pornographic details exploit the tragedies of these human beings, who were exploited enough in life. But if these cases help us to grasp something of the impossible ocean of desire and the insatiable demand for satisfaction opened up by the power relations within the New World, thinking about them today may not be entirely lacking in merit. What we glimpse in these terrible sadists are, perhaps, emotions analogous to those which we have seen in some of the most lubricious inquisitors, the Luceros and Salazars and Mañozcas of the world.
In such an environment one is heartened that slaves often renounced God when they were being whipped, or put in fetters;20 their real meaning was, of course, ‘I renounce your God’. This was not only an expression of rebellion but also a means of escape; if the blasphemy was reported to the Inquisition, they might be incarcerated in the inquisitorial jail for a year or more and thereby escape further beatings at the hands of their masters. Some fabricated visions and pacts with the devil and then, once in the inquisitorial jail, confessed that their masters had treated them so badly that they preferred to be prisoners of the Inquisition.21 In 1650 in Mexico the slave Juan de Morga decided to take his chances. He blasphemed at the drop of a hat, accused himself of bigamy and then declared that he had entered into a demonic pact; Morga finished his confession by explaining, ‘I serve a very cruel man in [the mining centre of] Zacatecas, and as long as they keep me here I shall continue to live by this law and to deny God’.22
The fact that the Inquisition was a better option for many slaves than their daily life says much about the horror of their existence in the New World. Yet one should not conclude that the Inquisition was therefore entirely benign towards them. The Inquisition was charged with handling the mistreatment of slaves in Mexico, for instance, but although this was a daily occurrence only three cases were brought between 1570 and 1620.23 The ‘deviant’ cultural practices of slaves were moreover part of a panoply of difference which was anathema to an institution like the Inquisition, which desired – or pretended to desire – uniformity of practice and belief. Such were the realities and the different peoples in the colonies that the Inquisition was always fighting a losing battle there. It was only by being vigilant over so many aspects of slaves’ daily lives and devilish predilections that a modicum of ‘normality’ could be imposed.
Lisbon 1637
JUST THREE YEARS before the revolt of Portugal against the Spanish king Philip IV and the end of the joint monarchy tensions were reaching their peak in Iberia. In Peru the large colony of Portuguese merchants had been hit by a series of inquisitorial arrests (led, it will be no surprise, by Juan de Manozca) which had seen the incarceration of eighty-three people and the questioning of 110 more. The belief spreading in Spanish society that the Portuguese were Jews led to these traders being accused of a crypto-Jewish plot.24 Eleven of them would be killed in the great auto of 23 January 1639.
Events and feelings in the colonies and the homelands were, then, connected. But in many parts of Portugal denunciations to the Inquisition frequently reflected the more parochial, daily concerns of the citizenry. This was the case in Lisbon in April 1637, when information began to be received concerning a ‘witch’, Cecilia da Silva, who lived in the countryside outside the city. Silva, if witnesses were to be believed, was an extremely dangerous person whose heretical activities needed to be stopped at all costs.25
One witness described Silva’s activities in some detail. She had portraits of St Erasmus, whom, the old woman Silva said, did whatever she asked. Silva could see devils painted alongside St Erasmus, and said that she knew how to perform spells so that these devils would do her bidding. Many people had come to see her because of this and given her money and offerings, and all this had made Silva a rich and doubtless envied member of the community.
The effects of Silva’s notable powers were especially severe on a certain Antonio de Bairros, a trader who lived in the same area as she did. For many years Bairros had been having an affair with one Marta Gonçalves, who was a great friend of the witch. It was publicly rumoured that the affair had only lasted so long because of Silva’s spells, and one day a servant of Bairros called Antonia had seen a slave belonging to Marta Gonçalves arriving with an offering for Silva and a message complaining that Bairros did not come to her house any more. Why bring an offering if not for some service in return? Why complain about Bairros? In a society where the slightest event could be seen to come within the purview of the Inquisition, this was inflammatory indeed.
One of the most diabolic aspects of Bairros’s ‘bewitchment’ was that Marta Gonçalves was ‘old and with facial deformities’; his wife in contrast was beautiful, young and gentle. Yet the spells of the witch Silva were so strong that Bairros had nothing to do with his household, which was the cause of great sadness to his wife. Bairros himself described the occult forces which drove him to humiliate his wife and himself in full view of the gossips: ‘Many times some inner force has constrained him to go to the house of Marta Gonçalves whilst standing in the street or many times even when lying in bed . . . Often he sees himself in his house with his wife and children and then finds himself in the house of Marta Gonçalves without knowing how he got there, and many times he finds himself taken there as if with chains of iron’.
All this was said to be witchcraft; and yet one suspects that the accusers of Cecilia de Silva, marv
elling at Bairros’s infidelity with this ‘ugly old woman’ Gonçalves, were poorer students of human psychology than they were of the daily activities of one another. It may well have been precisely Gonçalves’s apparent repulsiveness which was so attractive to Bairros, this respectable trader who had married a respectable wife. In Bairros the inner drives and contradictions which make all of us human needed an outlet, an outlet which could be found in this person who symbolized everything that he had outwardly rejected in himself and in his choice of spouse.
Cases such as this reveal that it was by no means just in the New World that superstition was rife; indeed, the archives of the Inquisition make it plain that Portugal and Spain were countries riddled with superstition at the time. Denunciations of witchcraft centred on women living alone, stealing cattle by night, their houses filled with clues of their participation in the occult such as strands of hair and loose teeth.26 Diviners were accused of reading events in distant places by gathering all sorts of peculiar objects such as beans, a whelk, a rag and various coins. Two of the beans would be put in the mouth of the person seeking information, one to represent them and one their loved one. Ten beans were thrown onto the table, and read by seeing to which object they landed nearest. Sometimes these diviners would even pass on their occult knowledge to a friend, who would then give up the practice after they found, to their great surprise, that it was never accurate.27
This was a widely credulous society. Yet while people at large were often finding indications of pacts with the devil in the behaviour of their neighbours – observed in minute precision – the Inquisition itself was less credulous. As we saw in the Prologue, Portugal and Spain were among the few European countries that experienced no mass witch-hunts during these years, and indeed the Inquisition often sent people packing when they came to denounce the diabolic pacts of their neighbours.28 By the early 18th century inquisitors in Portugal no longer believed that witches went to coven meetings and could use spells to curse others.29