Against the Inquisition

by Marcos Aguinis

  After a heavy silence, Diego stared directly into his son’s eyes and gave voice to a hard question. “Let’s go to the heart of things. What does ‘practicing Judaism’ mean to you, Francisco?”

  After an instant of reflection, the young man responded without sugarcoating. “It means offending Our Lord and the Catholic Church. It’s a crime.”

  “Your accusation seems . . . vague,” his father responded calmly.

  “Vague? To practice Judaism is to perform filthy rites.”

  “What rites?”

  “Ones that are offensive to Our Lord.”

  “That is what is said, yes. But—what are those rites? Describe them.”

  “It’s already been explained to me that they don’t involve worshipping a pig’s head.”

  “You’re nervous,” Diego said, taking his son’s hand. “But when I was practicing Judaism I never offended Jesus Christ or the church.”

  “That comforts me.”

  “Do you know what those abominable rites consist of? Respecting Saturdays by dressing in a clean shirt, lighting candles, and dedicating the day to study. Another rite is the celebration of liberation from Egypt under Moses. Fasting in September so that God might forgive our sins. Reading the Bible. Also, Judaism is a religion that exalts the importance of one’s fellow man, which is why people gather to pray, study, think. For this reason, we went to the desert as a group.”

  “Did you also confess to all of that?”

  “Somewhat. Each word was dangerous. But when I learned that Diego had been arrested, my precaution collapsed and I broke open like a watermelon. I spoke with the hope that they would reward my honesty, my transparency. The notary broke quills in his hurry to record my words without letting a single one escape him.”

  He looked into the distance, overwhelmed.

  “Do you know how my confession ended?”

  “Giving names—”

  His father’s skin turned cadaverous. “Yes. The inquisitors did not soften. My companions and I had practiced Judaism. And my despair didn’t reach even the wax of their ears. In tears, I confessed that I later read the edifying works of Denis the Carthusian, that I trained myself with that text and, thanks to it, returned to the Catholic faith. I assured them that I would never practice Judaism again.”

  Francisco watched him in silence. His eyes asked the question: “Were you telling the truth?”

  From behind the curtain of clouds, a semicircle of quicksilver reached down toward the ocean. The tenuous wind pushed their hair over their noses and urged them to leave the beach.

  “Sevilla, Chávez, and López de Lisboa feel great gratitude toward you,” Francisco remarked as they headed back toward the harbor.

  “I didn’t denounce them, happily,” he sighed.

  The brushstrokes of evening gave a spectral quality to their path.

  “I am at the end of my life, and I want to offer you some advice.” Diego placed his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Don’t repeat my trajectory!”

  Then he added more words. The wind pulled at them as if they were elastic.

  “My ending is even worse. You are watching it. May it not be yours.”

  Francisco pushed back a fold of his cloak that the wind had draped over his mouth.

  “You don’t want me to practice Judaism. Is that it?”

  “I don’t want you to suffer.”

  He noticed his father’s ambivalence. What was it he really wanted to say?

  They reached the alleys of Callao. At Diego’s door, a black man with a lantern awaited them. A galleon had arrived from Valparaíso with sick crew members, he said. The doctor needed to report to the hospital immediately. Among the travelers was a commissioner from Córdoba: Brother Bartolomé Delgado.

  78

  In distant Córdoba, the delirium of Isidro Miranda had been hidden for years in La Merced monastery, where the old priest with bulging eyes had been locked up. But shards of that delirium escaped like lizards. His mad ravings about Jews infiltrating the clergy frightened all the religious orders. The denunciations were at first considered false, though dangerous.

  The local commissioner, Brother Bartolomé Delgado, had called for an exorcism. The devil had to be removed from his body. Brother Isidro was no longer the submissive man of past days, and had become a blazing eccentric spouting barbarities. The commissioner summoned a Dominican of great reputation and asked him to act immediately and tear Satan from Brother Isidro’s innards. It was determined that, if necessary, tearing out his tongue and even his useless testicles would be condoned.

  The exorcist had a hefty build and a potent voice. He locked himself into a cell with the toothless Isidro, and brandished a cross before his bulging eyes as though it were the sword of El Cid. He intoned formulas and ordered the devil to abandon the man’s body. Satan must have felt the blow because Brother Isidro began to run in circles. His legs became incredibly agile, like those of the Evil One. He was trying to flee from the thundering voice. The two men’s shouts competed in volume and velocity. The exorcist’s cross pursued the back of Isidro’s thin neck as if with the blows of an ax. The devil took advantage of the old man’s last reserves of energy, forcing him to resist. But, in the end, he collapsed. Then the herculean exorcist squeezed, pulled, urged, and tore the tenacious demon from the punished body. He pressed him onto a table sprinkled with holy water and blinded him with the shining cross.

  Brother Bartolomé received a meticulous report of the operation. “The nightmare has ended,” he sighed in relief.

  Nevertheless, the poison that the sickly Isidro had spilled was captured by the antennae of the High Tribunal of the Holy Office. In Lima, the situation was not considered simple, and the demonization of the old monk was in doubt.

  At that point, the whole story took a turn.

  One of the inquisitors—it is believed to be Andrés Juan Gaitán—interpreted the emaciated monk’s denunciations as true. It seemed absurd that a man as perceptive as Brother Bartolomé would have wasted time silencing the man with an exorcism, rather than summoning a notary and recording the information.

  The order was issued immediately. Both monks—the destroyed Isidro and the stunned Bartolomé—were to travel to Lima and submit to trial. One would testify to the practitioners of Judaism he claimed to know of, and the other to his extremely grave acts of concealment.

  Brother Bartolomé suffered several dizzy spells on his journey to the Chilean port of Valparaíso, where he was to embark. He could not reconcile his new circumstance as an arrestee with his role as an official with the Holy Office. He struggled to recognize, in the officials who guarded him day and night, an authority superior to his own. He was assaulted by stabs of cold on hot days. His formerly ample double chin became a rag. When they crossed the Andes, his sheep-like cat died of cold. He buried it in the snow and, on tear-streaked days, hallucinated its golden eyes between the ice-capped peaks.

  Brother Isidro arrived at the port of Valparaíso hanging from his mule, as if the beast were dragging a skeleton. When the galleon was on the high seas, he asked his companion in misfortune to give him his last rites. The former commissioner shivered and, retching with tremulous vision, put on his stole, prepared the sacred oil, and said the sacramental words. The frail teacher and informer felt the cross on his forehead and flew to the next world. But his eyes could not be closed; they kept on emitting flames, like flashes of color.

  The captain of the ship ordered the corpse to be thrown into the sea. Brother Bartolomé then came to his senses and foresaw that the Holy Office would not tolerate a second wasteful act. The first one had been failing to further investigate the practitioners of Judaism named in Isidro’s delirium; the second would be the loss of Isidro’s body. If the Inquisition decided that the deceased should be burned at the stake, they would never forgive his body going to the fish; his corpse had to suffer the purging fires of an Act of Faith. To that end, the commissioner confronted the captain and succeeded in having a trunk empt
ied and then filled with the remains of the deceased.

  A few days later, the feared biological process began. An unbearable fetid odor leaked through the trunk’s seams. They wrapped it in blankets. The captain insisted that the body could not be kept until the end of the voyage. They covered it with onions. Useless. The smell spread everywhere. They decided to put it in a corner of the hold, by the porthole through which chamber pots were emptied, so the excrement might cover up the corpse’s stink.

  One night, the crew was awoken by an explosion. Wood creaked, as if the ship had run aground. The trunk was cracking under the pressure of the decomposing corpse. The furious captain ordered it to be thrown overboard at once. The commissioner grabbed it with both hands, racked by nausea, and threatened to send anyone who dared commit such a crime to the flames. They agreed to put it out on deck, tied to the main mast. Its putrefaction would be relieved by the wind.

  The blankets covering the coffin opened like flags. The lid flew off. The body of the once-frail priest rose like the stomach of a giant. His enormous eyes were braziers that terrorized the clouds. The ship glided over the Pacific as if sustained by an unlikely monster glued to the mast. At the port of Callao it took fifty dockworkers to pull him down.

  Brother Bartolomé left immediately for Lima, escorted by officers of the Inquisition. Several oxen, in turn, dragged the pestilent mountain into which Isidro Miranda had been transformed.

  79

  At the monastery, consternation reigned. Not only was the death of the prior being mourned, but now there was also talk of the unexpected arrest of Bartolomé Delgado and the inexplicable postmortem growth of Isidro Miranda. This event was particularly disturbing for Manuel Montes, who became like a figure made of wax. He stood paralyzed in the tiled gallery, and his absent eyes and strangely unmoving lips repeated an enigmatic phrase: “They have touched evil.” Francisco asked him whether he could help. He received no answer. Not even an acknowledgment. Francisco then learned that Brother Manuel was Brother Bartolomé’s half brother.

  Isidro Miranda’s corpse was buried in a gigantic grave. The Holy Office appreciated the efforts made to deliver the body so they could dispose of it on their terms. If heresy had been committed, the bones could be opportunely exhumed and punished by fire. It was their almost-certain destiny; that monstrous deformation could not be anything but the devil’s work. Although in life he had been a small, fragile being, Brother Isidro had been plagued with disproportionate eyes—a disturbing sign. According to some versions, Satan had tricked the exorcist, and never came out of the old body. The Evil One had remained in the monk’s blood. For this reason, when he died on the high seas, the whole body became a cauldron of pestilence, Beelzebub’s den. His swollen entrails sheltered a stove of sin. His flesh did not submit to the laws of death, but rather to the whims of beasts.

  Francisco was surprised to learn of the blood ties between the obese commissioner of Córdoba and Brother Manuel. Now he could understand the delegation of that harsh paternal role: Brother Bartolomé had wanted him to be guarded up close, and, at the same time, assisted. Brother Manuel had accepted this request and conscientiously fulfilled it. One of them was not as evil as Francisco had thought, the other not so cold.

  The prior’s death had filled every corner of the monastery with bitterness. Feelings of guilt arose, and the lash of flagellations could be heard at all hours. Brother Martín was haggard and more jumpy than he’d been two weeks before.

  Brother Manuel wandered around like Lazarus after wiping off the cobwebs of the beyond. He kept saying, “They have touched evil.”

  “What could it mean?” Francisco wondered. At the library, he found Joaquín del Pilar. He was reading and taking notes, accompanied by thick volumes of Galen and Avicenna. It was not a place for talking, and much less for telling him that their fathers knew each other. He waved in greeting and headed toward the crammed shelves in search of Summa Theologica.

  As he glanced across the gold-lettered spines with an increasing desire to dive into their contents, he read “Pablo de Santamaría, of Burgos.” He gasped. Was this the famous work of Rabbi Solomon ha-Levi, who was baptized during the massacres of 1391, changed his name, donned the habit, and rose to the role of Archbishop of Burgos? Was this the text that served as his invincible sword? The scribes of Spain had copied it with great effort and distributed it throughout the city to break the spines of the few Jews who remained. The intellect that had been at the service of the synagogue became an intellect in service of the church. Francisco reread the title. It was the famous book, without a doubt: Scrutinium Scripturarum. He glanced at Joaquín. He felt a pang of shame. He took out the volume, leaned it on the table, and began to read the “Examination of the Writings.” It was written in an elegant Latin. Two figures debated: Saulo and Pablo. One, Jewish, represented the synagogue, while the other, a Christian, stood for the church. One defended the Law of Moses, the other that of Jesus Christ. Each argued with erudition. Saulo was an old man refusing to see the light of the Gospel, and Pablo a young man pouring that light in streams.

  Francisco lost track of time. He did not stop reading until a hand touched his shoulder. It was Joaquín, gesturing that the library was about to close. He picked up the book and returned it to the shelf it shared with Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, Duns Scotus, and Albertus Magnus. The dense text had dizzied him. Each page was a torrent of references and quotations. Only a man who had studied the sacred writings with utter devotion could achieve such acrobatics with his prose. The author had studied deeply as a rabbi, and then, once again, as a priest and bishop. Nobody could be more of an expert. The arguments and refutations were brilliant. Francisco would have to keep on to the end. Something was rearranging inside him. In the Scrutinium, young Pablo always triumphed. His reasons were stronger. But his success over the browbeaten Saulo did not give the young man any peace.

  He accompanied Joaquín to the tavern around the corner, where students gathered. Noise echoed from walls covered in caricatures and inscriptions. Pots steamed in one corner. Black and mulatto waiters and waitresses made rounds bearing trays. They distributed jugs of wine, bottles of liquor, and bowls of stew. Around the table, patrons shouted and sang. A few reached out to pinch the women and make them spill their jugs or bowls. The ruddy, sweaty innkeeper gave orders from the counter. On recognizing Francisco and Joaquín, the other students made room for them to sit. They nudged and jostled each other on the narrow bench like children. They needed to loosen up after so much studying.

  Francisco grabbed a piece of bread and devoured it before the stew arrived. A classmate mocked his hunger, and another elbowed him in the stomach. He drank wine and elbowed back. They sang. He hurt his mouth in the middle of a drink when a classmate shoved a waitress, causing her to fall on the group. The innkeeper approached, fists up. The woman struggled to get back up while several young men groped her breasts. Joaquín ordered another round of drinks.

  An hour later, Francisco headed back toward the monastery, tipsy and alone. The tavern’s noise and the effects of alcohol made his head spin, as did the grotesque end of Isidro Miranda, the arrest of Bartolomé Delgado, and the ardent dispute between Saulo the Jew and Pablo the Catholic. A dirty drainage canal streamed down the center of the street, shining like a broken mirror. It exuded an unmistakable odor, almost the defining feature of the proud City of Kings. To keep the thick shadows from playing tricks on him, Francisco walked close to the plastered adobe walls. He arrived at the monastery and leaned against the doorjamb. The sky was still covered by its eternal sheath of clouds.

  He walked down a corridor. A few moments later, he was struck by fear.

  80

  Brother Manuel Montes, racked with guilt over his compulsive masturbation, dragged the brazier that heated surgical cauterizers into his cell. He filled it with incandescent embers until it transformed into a fantastic bowl of rubies. They emitted a magical, bloody light. He prayed to a sacred image that hung on his wall. He raised
his hands and showed his palms to the Virgin. He was not thinking of Bartolomé, his half brother arrested by the Holy Office; he was thinking of his own horrible sins. He said, again, looking at his raised hands, “They have touched evil.”

  He stood, swallowed his tears, and took three steps to reach the brazier. He kneeled again. Purple light washed across his bony face. The light fascinated him, and dizzied him. Ashes coated the coals like velvet, and the coals, in turn, were slowly breaking down into pebbles like living eyes. Once again he raised his hands and, with violent decision, crushed them against the embers.

  Snakes of flesh-burned smoke rose between his open fingers and filled the room. Brother Manuel trembled. “They have touched evil.” Unbearable pain made him sink his fingers in farther and destroy them with the blades of burning coals. He was pouring sweat. A grimace of pleasure deformed his dry face. He began to spasm uncontrollably. He was able to submerge his hands even deeper into the merciless rubies before letting out a scream of victory and fainting.

  The burns had reached his bones, consuming joints, nerves, and veins. Two uneven stumps remained. The alarm sounded. He was moved to the hospital. Martín was woken, as were the pharmacist, the servants, and all the monks. Figures rushed and collided in the shadows. Some searched for others, muttering prayers and mea culpas. Martín applied the first treatment. Brother Manuel’s heart beat weakly; the monk could die.

  Francisco was immediately taken to his benefactor’s side. The scene was horrifying. His thin forearms ended in two black, mica-flecked balls. Martín insisted that the man was a saint.

  “What a shame that he won’t be able to use his hands for any more acts of charity,” Francisco replied in repugnance.

  “He’s a saint, he’s a saint!” Martín repeated as he strained to keep the stumps in the air and cover them in emollient substances.

  “A madman,” Francisco said, unsettled.