Inquisitor Dreams

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “That’s right.” Slowly, she stood, seeming to grow from her chair like a plant unfurling its stem to rise straight and tall, ever taller, until she stared down directly into his eyes. “And if you want us to help you get your defense in order, great-grandfather, you’d damn well better take this seriously.”

  “Article Two,” said the fiscal, moving his pointer down the page. “In or about the eighth month of the year 1482, the accused did accept wine from and drink the same with the said unregenerate Jew, Gamaliel Ben Joseph, in the house of one Nathaniel Ben Solomon, a Hebrew resident in Daroca, where the said Nathaniel Ben Solomon practiced the trade, forbidden to his people, of silversmith.”

  “I admit the act, but deny any ceremonial or heretical intent. I drank in simple friendship, in the relief of seeing a boyhood neighbor, feared dead in the siege of Alhama—”

  “So,” Rosemary cut in, “you admit friendship with and fautorship of heretics?”

  “Gamito can be no heretic! He has never been baptized.”

  Rosemary replied, “Did you ever try badgering him to let himself be baptized?”

  “Alhama,” Raymonde said softly. “Would you have preferred that their Catholic Majesties had failed to capture Alhama?”

  “I would have preferred that my entire family—good Catholic Christians all—had not been murdered in that capture—”

  “‘Good Catholic Christians,’” Rosemary mimicked him, “and yet friendly with Moors and Jews. You’d like it better if Granada was still Moorish, wouldn’t you? If the Glorious Reconquest had never happened?”

  “Their Catholic Majesties bear no blame for the death of my family,” he answered stiffly. “Not only was it a misfortune of war, but the entire blame lies at the feet of Manuel Urtigo, soldier in war and bandit in peace, and his followers.”

  “By his own admission,” Raymonde mused, writing on the tablecloth, “my descendant kept company with Jews and Moors in his youth and later.”

  “As did all of us in Alhama in those years!”

  The fiscal remarked, “One could repeat the hoary argument about following the rest of the lemmings over the cliffs, if the allusion is not too cryptic for your milieu.” Moving his pointer to a paragraph midway down the right-hand page, he went on: “Article Three. In or about the year of Grace 1497, the accused did willfully connive and conspire to have set free, with unmerited exoneration and signal honor, the said Manuel Urtigo, suspect of gravest heresy, on pretext that all the witnesses were personal enemies of the said Manuel Urtigo, soldier in war and bandit in peace.”

  “You can’t wiggle out of that one,” said Rosemary. “Your whole Council of Faith witnessed it.”

  The fiscal protested, “Madame Judge, I had been laboring under the impression that we were never in any way to intimate the identity of the witnesses.”

  “Lady God! That time it was obvious. He’d have seen it for himself.”

  “Why did you do this, great-grandson?” asked Raymonde. “Manuel Urtigo is the murderer of your family. Would you have taken your revenge by seeing his immortal soul damned to your Hell forever for lack of effort to wean him from his errors?”

  “I… In all honor, I argued for him as I trust I would argue for anyone arrested on such biased testimony. It was my honest conviction that his crimes were not such as belonged to the Holy Office to judge or punish.”

  “In other words,” said the fiscal, “you desired his arrest and punishment by the secular arm. You considered the Holy Office too merciful a fate for him, the more particularly as it threatened to save his soul.”

  “Hoped the hard-working secular authorities would eventually mop him up for you, huh?” Rosemary echoed the fiscal’s point.

  Raymonde said in tones of gentle protest, “I think it more likely that our kinsman hoped for the chance somehow, someday, to take his own vengeance.”

  Rosemary shook her head. “Too long a shot, too little concern for other people, letting a mad dog like Urtigo loose on society again. However you slice it, what our kinsman did smacks of something or other damnable.”

  “Article Four,” said the fiscal. “By the testimony of many witnesses, the accused does not consume pork, lard, ham, bacon, trotters, headcheese, or anything else appertaining to swine.”

  “Agreed,” Felipe said wearily.

  “Article Five. On the evidence of many witnesses, the accused changes or causes his servants to change the linen, both of his personal apparel and of his table, on Fridays and Saturdays.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Article Six. Many persons have borne witness that the accused habitually lights waxen candles and lamps filled with perfumed oil on the eve of the Sabbath according to Hebraic reckoning, that is, on Friday at or about twilight.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Article Seven. Diverse witnesses have testified that the accused habitually washes his hands before meals and upon arising each morning.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Article Eight. We have it upon the reliable evidence of numerous witnesses that the accused instructs his cook to fry, sauté, baste, dress, and otherwise prepare his meats, pastries, breads, eggs, olla-podridas, and other foods with olive oil rather than lard.”

  “Agreed.”

  “But you must not simply confess to everything, great-grandson,” Raymonde put in. “You must either refute the evidence, or beg for mercy.”

  “Preferably the latter,” said the fiscal. “In fact, as your advocate, I cannot urge you strongly enough to enlarge upon your confession and throw yourself on the mercy of the court.”

  Some dim awareness of the irregularity of these proceedings stirred in Don Felipe’s mind. “You my advocate? You cannot be my advocate—you are my prosecutor!”

  “Things have changed while you were inside, great-grandfather,” Rosemary said sternly. “We’ve had to do some streamlining.”

  “I refuse an advocate!”

  “That is no longer a permissible option, Don,” the fiscal replied. “I fear that you are ‘stuck’ with me.”

  “Are you not grateful, great-grandson?” said Raymonde. “In my time, we were denied both advocate and fiscal. Our inquisitors of old played all these parts in one.”

  The fiscal began again, “Article Nine.”

  Felipe whirled on him. “You cannot continue the accusation after introducing my advocate!”

  Rosemary stood and pointed at both men. “Go on, fiscal,” she ordered in a voice that echoed as though through some great cavern. “Hit him with it.”

  On the banner of the Inquisition behind her, the cross of tree trunks with their limbs lopped off close to the bark was changing before Felipe’s eyes into a living tree. Staring at it, he waited in cold silence.

  “Article Nine,” the fiscal repeated. “During Eastertide in the year of our Lord 1483, for the sake of the aforementioned Gamito Ben Joseph, a Jew, and others of that unredeemed persuasion, the accused did sacrilegiously break, twist, trample upon, and defy the solemn and sacred Seal of Confession, to the great and everlasting scandal of the entire Church.”

  For a moment, Don Felipe could no more speak than if the toca were already engorging his throat. It had come at last—the doom he could not refute. He had confessed it sacramentally and been absolved in the forum of conscience, but what did the innocent absolution of an all but unlettered Irish priest weigh in the scales against the unpardonable sin? He tried twice to swallow, while the tree on the banner put out new green branches reaching to the far ends of the table. At last he seized the book of the accusation and riffled through it wildly, searching for the printed charges, able to find only heretical propositions scattered with woodcut prints of demons and fornicators.

  When inner pressure had stretched him to the point of a waterskin about to burst, he cried, “It is my enemy who has done this! Fray Junípero has instigated these charges and bribed and suborned all the witnesses! It is Fray Junípero de la Sangre Sagrada, who hates me for my efforts to bridle his bloodlust!”


  “You idiot,” Rosemary said, grimly calm. “Why the hell didn’t you put that statement where it belonged, at the beginning of the trial? It’s too late now.” With her left hand she beckoned to the fiscal, and pointed her right at the tree behind her.

  Now its branches had separated from the trunk and hovered over the ends of the table like disembodied green wings, while the trunk, once more stark and lopped, had become a stake rising from a high mound of dry faggots.

  “Liar!” Felipe shouted back at her. “Liar and Mother of Lies! You call me your ancestor! Would you utterly ruin your own chance of birth by destroying my flesh still virginal?”

  “Remember your own Bible,” she snapped, snatching the book from his hands. “‘God is able out of these stones to raise up ancestors to Rosemary.’ Burn him!”

  The fiscal seized his arm.

  “You cannot!” Don Felipe repeated, wrenching free. “Is this not another dream?”

  “All that we say or seem,” the fiscal replied, catching his arm again, “is but a dream within a dream.”

  “I know you now!” Pulling free again, Don Felipe fell back and stared at him. “My God! I know you now—you are the demon of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory!”

  “For my own weak sins and failings,” the other acknowledged, reaching once more for Felipe’s arm. “Punily though they loom beside your own towering misdemeanors.”

  “But this cannot be!” the inquisitor stammered as he strove to elude his tormentor both bodily and verbally. “You, I have never forgotten when awake, but they—” motioning with one arm at the two women—“I never, outside my dreams, remember!”

  Rosemary looked at Raymonde. “Still hasn’t caught on, has he?”

  “Grandson, great-grandson,” Raymonde explained gently, “whenever you see either or both of us, it is no more than partially a dream.”

  “Never its mysteries are exposed,” the fiscal remarked, chaining Felipe to the stake, “to the weak human eye unclosed. And thus the sad soul that here passes, beholds it but through darkened glasses.”

  The great, leafy wings to right and left swung back and forth, fanning the faggots into flame. As the fire touched his knees, Don Felipe screamed and woke.

  * * * *

  He lay a long while awake on his pallet, staring into the dry darkness, wondering if anyone had heard his outcry. Perhaps not. What had seemed in his dream a full-throated shout had shrunk as the effort woke him into a mewling whimper. As for the rest of the dream, he remembered that it had had to do with his trial—assuming he was ever to have a regular audience—and that he had rehearsed before unknown and faceless judges the same list of charges he had reviewed over and over in his mind. Never on paper; it would hardly have been shrewd to allow his enemy any glimpse into his planned defense, and such leaves of paper as he requested had gone for the most innocent of calendrical calculations and pious platitudes. He would not even write down what he had decided to state at once, when and if the time came, as the probable causes for his arrest and the charges he might explain away—although he seemed to recall that, in the dream, he had strangely declined to offer his planned explanations and refutations for those very offenses.

  The dark man of the Purgatory had been in the dream, that much he recollected. Chaining him to the stake at the end.

  As for the fire, that must have been the brain yielding to a moment of idle panic. The Holy Office would never relax nor publicly penance one of its own inquisitors, for fear of scandal. It might, eventually, sentence him privately to conventual reclusion—then, at least, he would have the Sacraments again—but for several years now he had suspected that they would simply let him die while awaiting audience, leaving his disappearance forever ascribed to some unknown accident on his last return from Italy. For himself, he believed that he had ceased to care. He worried only, from time to time, about his servants. Gubbio, if left free, was well able to shift for himself; but had they left him free, or arrested him also?

  Chapter 19

  The Trial

  At last, one April morning in the year of Grace 1509, Don Felipe found himself, somewhat to his own surprise, on the defendant’s tripod in the formal audience chamber.

  It had changed but little since last he sat on the judges’ side of the table. He recognized the same white tablecloth, neatly mended now in a few places by some pious and presumably feminine hand; the dark backs of the inquisitors’ chairs, their carved wood quietly agleam with long polishing; the black tiles of the floor, showing scarcely more wear than a dozen years ago; and the clean white of walls and ceiling, which might have been recently repainted. The banner of the Inquisition, he thought, was a new one: its embroidery seemed brighter and finer than that of the old. Possibly done by the same hand that had mended the tablecloth.

  Also new, at least to the inquisitors’ chairs, were both his judges. Fray Cipriano de la Santa Cruz, his prematurely silver tonsure looking only slightly sparser and his round face seeming to have grown rounder instead of more lined, had been fiscal in Fray Junípero’s time; and in Fray Cipriano’s colleague Felipe thought he recognized Don Julian Herrera de Parmiento y Seveda. It was conceivable that the scholarly old hidalgo had been widowed and taken the cloth; but, seeing that his simple black garb resembled the habit of no religious order familiar to Don Felipe and that his hair, though thinner, showed no sign of tonsure, he more likely belonged to the small new wave, already underway before Felipe’s arrest, of capable or influential laymen raised to the inquisitorship.

  Where, then, was Fray Junípero? Dead, jubilated, or moved to some other tribunal? Was it conceivable that he had achieved a place on the Suprema?

  The little scribe, Fray Pablo de María, looked no more changed than the tablecloth—a little older, a little less fresh, but otherwise the same as ever. He might have been sitting in his place every moment of the last twelve years, moving only to dip his pen, draw it across his paper, and take new sheets as necessary from time to time.

  “Well, well, Don Felipe,” Fray Cipriano began pleasantly, “we had better follow regular procedure. Do you solemnly vow, in the presence of God and His Ever Blessed and Holy Virgin Mother, to tell the truth, entirely and exclusively, within these walls, and to guard lifelong silence about everything that happens here, revealing none of it at any time, neither by act, word, nor sign, to anyone outside?”

  “I do solemnly vow.”

  “Good.” Fray Cipriano nodded. “Please be so good as to state your full name.”

  “Felipe de Bivar y Aguilar, also known as Don Felipe de Nuestra Señora de Agapida.”

  “Your age?”

  “Fifty-three.”

  “The town or other place of your birth?”

  “Alhama de Granada.”

  “Occupation?”

  “The Church.” As they well knew, but let all things be done properly, following regular procedure. “From 1475 until 1485 I served briefly as secretary and afterward as ordinary to his Reverence the bishop of Daroca. From 1485 until my arrest, I served, by appointment of his Majesty King Fernando, as inquisitor here in Daroca. I also hold the benefice of Nuestra Señora del Pilar in Agapida. And, most recently, I served Pope Alexander the Sixth as legate in the matter of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, so called, in Ireland.”

  “Length of time since your arrest by the Holy Office?”

  “Eleven years and, unless my count is somewhere at fault, one hundred and sixty-two days.”

  Don Julian leaned forward and spoke for the first time. “One cannot help but wonder why, in all those years, you never sought an audience yourself.”

  “I assumed that my greater profit lay in patiently abiding the tribunal’s due process and meanwhile searching my own soul, as it were in the desert, not unlike the hermits of old.”

  Fray Cipriano nodded. “And what have your meditations led you to recollect, assume, or suspect of the reasons for your arrest?”

  Don Felipe took a deep breath and cleared his throat. “I believe that Fray J
unípero de la Sangre Sagrada came to feel great personal enmity toward me, growing out of our disagreements, as fellow inquisitors of Daroca, concerning the best or most proper way to conduct various cases. As, for instance, those of Mehmoud Aben Fazoud, also known as ‘El Santon de Aragon,’ and subsequently received into Holy Mother Church as Juan Delgado de Calamocha the younger; Hermía Corchuelo the reputed witch; and especially Manuel Urtigo, called ‘The Scourge of Axtilan,’ on whose case Fray Junípero and I clashed rather bitterly. I also more than once rebuked Fray Junípero for personally handling the instruments of the torture chamber, which handling I interpreted as contrary to the wishes of the Suprema and ill-befitting the dignity and sanctity of the inquisitorship. Of certain innocent appearances I may, during the normal course of my life, have been guilty—as, of occasionally declining pork, bacon, and foods fried in lard, for the sake of my digestion, which is somewhat delicate; of lighting oil lamps or waxen candles on Friday as on any other night, for the sake of my eyes in reading; of changing or causing my servants to change my linens, whether of bed, table, or my person, whenever I judged them soiled, even if this should chance to fall on Friday or Saturday; and of washing my hands whenever I saw them in need of it, which may have been more often than seemly in one of my vocation, but my over-fastidiousness results rather from the sin of luxury than that of heresy. I acknowledge, also, a taste for dishes prepared with olive oil. I learned this taste when a student in Rome, where such foods are commonly consumed by good Catholic Christians with no thought of heretical taint, and where likewise I met my servant Francesco di Gubbio, to the best of my knowledge a faithful Italian Catholic, who often prepared such dishes for me at my instruction. I have partaken of pork, bacon, and lard with great pleasure whenever my digestion seemed capable of them, and all the other things I have always done with no regard either of the day of the week or of mealtimes. Nonetheless, all this would have given Fray Junípero, as a powerful personal enemy armed with the senior inquisitorship, material from which to fabricate charges; and his opportunities would have been ample to suborn witnesses by means of threats and bribery, particularly during my absence as papal legate in the matter of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.”