Inquisitor Dreams

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Dying,” said Rosemary. “Alzheimer’s. All they really have for it where we are right now is a name and a few research clues.”

  “Al-… Is it Moorish?”

  “No. It’s memory. It makes you forget. Everything, eventually.”

  A second woman, dressed in crisp white trousers and pale yellow tunic, came to the other side of the bed and held a handleless drinking vessel to the man’s mouth, trying to slip a tiny, bent white tube between his lips. He moaned and twitched his head away. She moistened his mouth with a damp cloth and left the room.

  “He’s reached the point,” Rosemary said grimly, “of forgetting how to swallow.”

  “My God! And yet he still lives?”

  “They’re experts in keeping people alive.”

  The second woman returned, bringing two similarly clad assistants and a pole as tall as herself. It rolled on its own small, wheeled platform; and had near its top a crosspiece from which swung a clear membrane pouch or bladder filled with water or another fluid. A long, clear tube dangled from this bladder, like a very thin intestine but much more stiff.

  The first woman moved away to the foot of the bed. The three rolled the pole to its head, took the hand she had relinquished, and started jabbing and prodding at it with a large needle.

  The man twitched, jerked, thrashed, made strangled little cries in his throat. The woman at the foot of the bed turned her back on the scene and buried her face in her hands.

  “Why do they torture him?” Don Felipe cried.

  “They want to help him,” Rosemary answered. “They’ve already given him pain blankers. With needles, the only way he can still take them. That hurts him, too. Now they’re giving him basic nourishment.”

  Never had Don Felipe relished the duty of witnessing even in conspectu tormentarum. Now he too turned away, staring at the far wall, which seemed to be one huge window, glazed with marvelously large panes of glass that glinted behind complicated coverings made of many blades of very thin metal. He became aware of murmuring outside, as of seawaves dashing against the hospital. The more he tried to close his ears to the man’s incoherent protests, the more clearly he heard this outer tumult. The more he recognized it as the rumbling of a mob.

  “Right to life!” the voices were chanting, over and over. “Stop the killing! Respect life! Respect life! Everyone has the right to life! Everyone!”

  An explosion silenced them, but only for a heartbeat. Then someone shouted, “Dirty cocorkian!” and thunder followed. With a shock, Don Felipe understood that it issued, not from any stormcloud, but from the throats of the mob. It was dull cheering. Stunned, he hardly understood why, he turned back to the man in the bed.

  The first woman, she who had sat beside the sick man, her hands on his, now said: “No.” Turning, she looked at the people of the hospital and told them, “No more. It’s hurting him too much. There’s no hope, so let him die.”

  They looked back at her, nodded, and slowly took away the pole with its pouch, tube, and needle. The second woman lingered longest, straightening his pillow and coverings, stroking his hand and head, moistening his lips once more with the damp cloth. Last, she laid one hand on the first woman’s shoulder for the space of a Gloria, as though to comfort her.

  Her assistants wheeled the pole to the door; but, as they opened it, the mob burst inside, thrusting them back to the bedside.

  “Murderers!” shrieked one woman at their head, pointing her finger at them… or was it a hand gun? “Euthanasiasts! Co-corkians! Atheists!”

  Other limbs of the mob began beating at the hospital people, trying to force them to return with the bladder and jab its needle somehow into the victim’s arm after all. When the hospital people collapsed or fled, several of the mob caught up bladder and needle and scrambled toward the bed as if to insert it themselves.

  The man moaned in agony. Don Felipe looked at him again, and it was Ihesu, lying atop the bed with arms extended on His Cross. Blood welled forth from the nails to pool on the floor. Another great splotch of Holy Blood reddened the bedclothes where His feet must be. He moaned again.

  Don Felipe found himself on his knees, with no memory of kneeling.

  And yet the sight was… horrible, grotesque. He thought that he had never fully understood… Ihesu—the Son of God, God Incarnate—in His suffering had been as misshapen, as painful to behold, as any victim of stake or torture chamber. What, truly, did he—did all Christians—worship when they worshipped the Crucifix? God? Or pain? Ah, Ihesu, Mary, Joseph—had Holy Church made a false god out of suffering? Was it idolatry to worship God’s agony and, with it, whatever suffering they themselves could cause their fellow mortals?

  Rosemary still stood, but her hand gripped his shoulder.

  The woman who had sat beside the dying man stepped forward between bed and mob… and she was Mary, God’s Mother. “No,” she told them, tears flowing down her face, but her voice steady and quiet. “It is finished. Let him die.”

  She who led the mob shouted, “Only God has the right to let people die!”

  “And is God not attempting to take my dear one?” the Holy Mother replied. “But by your actions you believe neither in God nor Heaven, or you would not bend all your power so furiously to deny our Heavenly Papa that same right you claim to champion on His behalf, of gathering souls to Himself.”

  “Is this what it will be,” Don Felipe whispered, “to die in future centures? This—this tug of war between God’s manifest will and man’s medicine? Is the stake not almost better?”

  He woke rejoicing that he lived in his own century, when physicians could still do so little to prolong life beyond God’s limits.

  Chapter 31

  The Death of Don Felipe

  “I am very old,” he mused tranquilly, dozing in the sun-washed courtyard. “So old that at times I grow confused as to which of my friends are still in this world and which already in the next.”

  “The line isn’t as hard and fast as people think,” said Rosemary.

  He looked up and saw her standing beside his chair. “Great-granddaughter,” he greeted her pleasantly, gesturing at the nearby bench. “Can you sit and chat awhile? With prudence, we can still talk freely, here in Rome.”

  “We always could talk freely, here in your head.” She extended one hand to him. “Come on, Great-grandfather. We can talk while we walk.”

  He accepted her hand and stood, allowing her to draw him along. His step felt easier than it had for several winters. That was fortunate, for, when they entered the colonnaded portico, he found that it stretched away before them an interminable distance.

  “Anyway,” Rosemary said as though reminding him, “you’ve been in Rome almost fifteen years.”

  “So many? They have seemed only a few.”

  She nodded. “The effect of age.”

  The carved stone pillars to their right, looming up each one in turn, cut their view of the courtyard into sunny panels, while casting slanted shadows upon the wall to their left.

  Each time that he looked out between two columns, he saw a different scene: himself, Gamito, and Hamet playing as boys in the hills around Alhama de Karnattah… himself at his studies in Rome, in his little student’s room, making his decision to turn priest… himself interviewing, as Gubbio looked on, that seemingly sincere young cleric Don Fadrique Osorio, who had proved so poor a vicar but made—they said—a fairly decent end in the reformed monastery to which he had been sentenced… the long years in the secret cells, with their strange tranquility like that of a hermit father’s desert retreat… that day when, after long prayer and meditation, he had accepted the rare solitary inquisitorship of little Ainsa… his first meeting with that excellent New Christian cook Diego Sos, who had become a better servant to him, in some ways, even than Gubbio, and still cooked faithfully for the family here in Rome… his marriage night, and all those other precious and holy hours spent enhancing and bringing to ever greater perfection the Oldest Sacrament of all… that stra
nge hour when, after a night of sickenss and fever dreams which had nothing to do with either Rosemary or Raymonde, his good secretary Don Martin had brought him the appointment to chief inquisitorship of Daroca… himself in attendance at the quiet deathbed of that quiet, faithful little scribe Fray Pablo de María… his last pastoral visit (never guessing it to be the last) with good Fray Giuliano, growing gray and perhaps just a shade less lean in service to Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida, still grieving for his lost Calé but soberly rejoicing in his new Franciscan houses… the evening Diego Sos and Don Martin had saved a starving pup from the streets, to nurse back to health… the hurried, half-secret journey from Spain to Italy… the reunion with his dear Jewish friends in the Eternal City… his daughter’s marriage to a man almost as greatly to her liking as her parents had ever been to each other’s… the birth of his first grandchild, followed so shortly by the peaceful passing of its other grandfather, Sagesse Labaa, aged before his time but who had recovered in his last years some measure of sanity… news and rumors of the new Ecumenical Council his present holiness, Paul III, had called to meet in Trento…

  “I shall somewhat regret,” Don Felipe mused, “the chance to watch this Tridentine Council unfold. But for my age, I might have wished to journey north in the hope of witnessing a little of it in person.”

  “It’s going to make marriages like yours heretical,” Rosemary reminded him.

  “I did not say that I would agree with all its changes. Never, never could I regret union with my dearest Pilar! Only mourn that we lost so many years together… that I could not watch my daughter grow to womanhood.… I would have reached my century mark in 1555. Ten years yet. That will be the same year that the then-reigning pope will decree a ‘ghetto,’ as you call it, for the Jews of Rome.”

  “Glad you’re finally taking my word for things.”

  “You told me that, did you not, in order for Gamito and his family to be warned again?”

  “And then you bought this house from them.”

  “As you warned us in time before the sacking of Rome in… the exact year escapes me, but I think I did not yet fully trust all of your revelations at that time. Nevertheless, I warned them, and, thank God, reading the signs of the times, they took the warning and fled as they would have fled a plague, first taking the precautions that allowed them to return and build their life here anew.”

  “Made a regular habit of taking property off their hands, didn’t you?” Rosemary observed, alluding to his purchases before the expulsions of 1486, 1492, and this year just past.

  “At a fair price,” he remembered with satisfaction. “Always at a fair price.”

  “Fair and then some. You’ve been a good friend to them.”

  “Gamito was my oldest remaining friend.… I could have fallen under suspicion a second time, back there in their Catholic Majesties’ Spain, had I ever given voice to my hope of our meeting again in Paradise. Yet I fear that certain members of Gamito’s family suspected my motives, comfortably though we have lived while charting out the safest route for them and their offspring through the centuries.”

  “They’ll forget your game plan in a generation. They don’t believe it now by more than a quarter.”

  He sighed. “Well, we have done our best. For the rest, they must shift for themselves, even as we all and every one of us need ultimately do.”

  In a shorter time than he would have thought possible, they stood at the end of the elongated courtyard. Here the colonnade stopped and, with it, the courtyard sunlight. Beyond, the cloistered walkway lengthened into grayer and grayer shadow, ending in a dark fleck the size of a baby’s smallest fingernail.

  “Have you seen my grandchildren?” He inquired, with all the pride befitting a nonagenarian grandfather, as he and his guide entered the sunless part of the walkway. “Two thus far. Two very fine young sprigs.”

  “She’s going to have five in all. The one that ties you to me isn’t born in your lifetime. Grandmother Pilar midwives the whole lot of ’em, though.”

  “Pilar. Pilar, my beloved.… And you, great-granddaughter? Have you borne… Are you to bear children?”

  She shook her head. “A couple of godchildren, though. They turn out fine. Don’t worry,” she added. “My not having children doesn’t stop your line. Not with five grandchildren to get it going.”

  “Abraham,” he remarked. “I appreciate, now, the emotions of Father Abraham.”

  “Not afraid of flattering yourself, are you?”

  “Have not the figures of the Old Testament been given to us as types of experience, human as well as divine?”

  “Whew!” said Rosemary. “The time comes—may already have started by 1545—when religious thinkers insist the Bible is one hundred percent solid history. Turning any poor old agnostic with a grain of sense off the whole subject.”

  “How does one meaning preclude the other?” His guide had never, in all these years, lost the power to puzzle him.

  “Well, if you know how Father Abraham felt, I know how the angels felt, all those years he wouldn’t believe them.”

  Already, they had reached the walkway’s end. The dark fleck, once the size of a baby’s fingernail, was grown before them into a simple and unadorned wooden door, having neither lock nor latch nor handle, its lintel not quite as high as Felipe’s forehead.

  He looked sadly at his descendant. “Great-granddaughter, are you doomed, like Virgil, to remain forever outside, guiding wanderers to the very gates of Heaven, yet never yourself gaining admittance?”

  “You’re talking about Dante’s Virgil, not the real one,” she replied, putting one hand to the door and pushing it open.

  He staggered a pace or two backward. Light poured through the open doorway, true; but no beauty. Or, rather, beauty in the colors, but none in the scene they formed.

  A wide plain stretched before him, tilting upward at a dizzy slope to a far horizon so high it left little space for the firmament. The parched ground, studded here and there with bushes and shrubs—startling for the spiny luxuriance of their foliage—lay scored everywhere with yawning crevasses of depth beyond guessing. To left and right, brutal fencing walled the enclosure: heavy upright posts with something like dark spiderwebs, each filament thick as a man’s wrist, between them, black against the thin line of smoky sky. Most of these webs held human shapes spreadeagled at their centers in the place of spiders; only here and there one of the webs showed a ragged hole and seemed otherwise empty.

  In a direct line with the doorway, on the apex of the slope, a buttressed stone wall completely blocked the sky. The sun, if it existed here, must lie behind that fortress: the light bathing this landscape was a shadowless diffusion, at once glory and gloaming, mournful and lurid.

  And all this slope swarmed with creatures almost as grotesque as the denizens of Hieronymus Bosch’s most fantastic canvases. Many skeletal, some few puffed and bloated, almost all twisted with agony or unnatural exertion until the once human form could be recognized only in patches, they writhed and trundled with no visible purpose save to drive one another by means of whip, spiked wheelbarrow, and stranger devices.

  Stabbed with fear, Don Felipe searched the scene and gradually made out that, though the few tormented the many and though their roles seemed fixed and unchanging, those who wielded the whips and other implements appeared no more demonic than their victims. Wringing some courage from his observation, he cried, “God grant that this is Purgatory!”

  “You see it the way you can understand it,” said Rosemary. “I see the death camp at Dachau. Don’t worry. We’re heading for the convent at the back of it.” Stooping low, she ducked through the doorway into the purgatorial vision.

  With reluctance, he bowed his head and followed, as he had done so often in the dreams of his lifetime. Pointing at the stone fortress, he tried to ask in a full sentence if it were truly a convent, but all that he heard from his own mouth, in a kind of croak, was the word, “Convent?” Suspicions of some perv
erted Rabelaisian abbey tumbling through his mind, he coughed to clear his throat and added, more successfully, “A convent of what order?”

  “Carmelites. That’s on the original plane, after the war. Here, it takes in everybody.”

  Walking briskly, she wove in and out among the gargoylish beings. Busily and multitudinously as they swarmed over the plain, they did not cram it; open spaces abounded between them. The boundaries of such spaces, however, were in constant flux and change, as the creatures fled one another, formed and reformed into Laoccoönian groupings, or floundered in individual anguish. This made it a delicate task to find a clear path through the loose-knit throng, and Felipe followed close on his descendant’s heels.

  The denizens of the plain ignored them, neither purposely molesting them nor offering to turn aside. Thus, occasional blows caught one or other of the pair. Rosemary paid them no attention. Finding them little worse than the buzzing of gnats, Don Felipe soon learned to do likewise. As for the slope, that proved far more steep in appearance than in feel; since it was both solid and gritty underfoot, walking would have been easy enough had the plain been emptier of twisted humanity. The noise, however, fell on him fiercely. All or most of the unhappy creatures chattered, jabbered, shrieked, and wailed constantly. He would have thought it impossible for himself and his guide to hear each other shout in the midst of this din, until Rosemary spoke again, in a normal voice, and somehow he understood her clearly.

  “Even these poor floaters,” she remarked, “can come inside whenever they’re ready.”

  He began to observe degrees in their deformity. At last he glimpsed one arm straighten a little before his eyes. “Then this is, indeed, Purgatory!” he exclaimed in triumph.