“If you lacked intelligence,” he says with a sigh, “if you wanted for brains, if you were an unenlightened man—none of that would impede the realization of the pit that awaits you in your terrible destiny. Your attitude is one of futile insolence. Have the theologians’ responses not been satisfying to you? They were carefully planned and studied, and well-articulated.”
Hernández rubs his throat, tired out by his whispering tone, but still he makes a disproportionate effort to communicate with the prisoner, and to persuade him.
Francisco listens attentively. This priest wishes him well, of course, and he has risked himself to come to this dungeon and offer assistance. He is affectionate, transparent. His presence and his gentle voice act as a balm. He’s obviously making a great effort to reach his heart; and yet, he cannot see beyond his own skin. Hernández looks at Francisco, talks to him, and thinks of him without imagining himself in Francisco’s place. With kindness and concern he implores only that Francisco cease being who he is.
“Are you not, perhaps, blinded by pride?” he asks cautiously.
“Pride?” Francisco repeats. “No. It’s something more precious. I’d say that I’m sustained by an ambiguous dignity.”
The Jesuit replies that dignity would not make him be so cruel to himself and his family; only pride could produce such bullheadedness. Francisco is not surprised by such an argument, and he asks about his family, since the Jesuit has mentioned them. Hernández, disturbed, reminds him that he is forbidden from sharing information.
Francisco says, “We were talking about cruelty, weren’t we?”
The clergyman despairs, and tells Francisco he can still be saved.
“Only the soul,” Francisco completes the prayer.
“If you don’t repent, you’ll be burned alive. If you repent before they read your sentence, you’ll be burned in death.”
“They’ll kill me no matter what.”
“The ways of the Lord are inscrutable—”
The two men stare at each other in the candle’s tenuous light, eyes shining. The priest has not been explicit, but he insinuates that the execution could still be lifted. He is offering life in exchange for a modification of belief. Then Francisco puts two and two together starkly, brutally: This kind examiner of the Holy Office doesn’t care whether he lives or dies, only that he modify his faith. In other words, he is offering life as a kind of bribe.
Silence, stillness, and tense expectation magnetize the armored dungeon. The damp cold sinks into the bone. Hernández picks up a blanket that’s balled up at the foot of the bed and draws it over Francisco’s back, then pulls his hood close around his own neck. Francisco shivers under the paternal gesture and can only reciprocate with a wounding frankness. He mumbles a reproach in a grateful tone.
“It’s a form of moral violence to demand a change of faith. Some men are taller than others, smarter than others, more sensitive than others, but we are all equal in our right to think and believe. If my convictions are a crime against God, only He is in a position to judge. The Holy Office is usurping God and committing atrocities in His name. To maintain its terror-driven power it even prefers for me to pretend that my beliefs have changed.” He pauses and then unleashes the flagrant contradiction. “The Gospel says, ‘love thine enemy.’ Why can you not love me?”
Andrés Hernández clasps his hands. “Please!” he begs. “Give up your bad dream! Get out of your confusion! Christ loves you—return to His arms! Please—”
“Christ is not the Inquisition, but rather its opposite. I am closer to Christ than you are, Father.”
Hernández’s eyes fill with tears. “How can you be close to Christ when you deny Him?”
“Christ the human being is moving; he is the victim, the lamb, he is love and beauty. Christ the God, on the other hand, for me, for those of us who are targets of persecution and injustice in His name, is the symbol of a voracious power that demands we denounce our brothers, abandon our families, betray our parents, burn our very ideas. Christ the human being perished at the hands of that same machine that may put an end to my days. That is the machine that you call Christ the God.”
The Jesuit crosses himself, prays, and asks for these blasphemies to be forgiven. “He knows not what he says,” he mutters, paraphrasing the Gospel.
“Isn’t it possible that my death sentence,” Francisco says, “is related to you inquisitors’ lack of confidence in your own faith?”
“That’s absurd—please, have mercy, by the heavens. Do not close to the light, to life. I don’t want you to be taken to the fires! You are my brother! I have heard you recite the beatitudes from memory with Catholic emotion. Your blind stubbornness, though stirred by the devil, is brave. A person like you should not die.”
Francisco raises his hot calloused hands, and places them over the ones grasping the crucifix. He responds with sad irony. “I am not the one who issued the death sentence.”
“Your obstinacy issued it.”
“The Holy Office, Father! The Holy Office. And it does so in the name of the cross, the church, and God. In the name of all of them. The Holy Office won’t even take full responsibility for its death sentences. It tries to act as though its hands are clean, hypocritically clean, like the hands of Pontius Pilate.”
Hernández kneels before the prisoner, grabs his shoulders, and shakes him.
“I beg you, on my knees. I’m humiliating myself to wake you up. What more do you need to return to the fold?”
Francisco closes his eyes to keep his tears from falling. How can he make this man understand that he is more awake than ever? The sobs emerge as if from a shameful spring. Both men have reached the limits of their strength, but still their thoughts cannot converge. Both feel overflowing affection and admire each other’s respective perseverance. They say goodbye to each other with a gesture that is almost an embrace. Then the glow at the tiny window intensifies, as if it had witnessed an unbelievable act.
129
With swollen eyelids, Andrés Hernández informs the tribunal of his failure and begs them to have mercy on such an illustrious prisoner. Mañozca insists that Francisco has definitively lost his mind, which matters not. The sentence stands: he will be burned alive during the next Act of Faith.
A race then begins between the Inquisitorial machine and its victim. Locked up, disarmed, and debilitated, Francisco appeals to a final resource to mock their spectacle of execution. What can such a wounded and solitary man still do? No one visits him now. He only matters as meat that can be barbecued in public. They provide his meager rations and, every once in a while, empty his chamber pot. Nothing more.
“But I’ll surprise them,” Francisco mutters. “How long does it take to prepare an Act of Faith? Three, four, five months? That’s enough time.”
He receives the small bags of food and only keeps the paper, flour, and water. He cuts the paper and shapes a notebook. With the flour and water he makes a paste with which he glues the remaining pieces to make more sheets. He will spend these months writing. But he will not eat. The Holy Office will know that it cannot control everything, that it is terrible but not omnipotent. It will only be partially defeated, but it will be defeated. Francisco’s career now consists of dying of his own volition, before they kill him.
He will help God detach his soul from his body before they drag him to the fires. He will not give them the pleasure of final repentance, and he will deny them the pleasure of hearing his moans as he burns. He wants to gain an advantage over his tormentors. His pulse quickens with the insane hope of making it in time for this final contest. Francisco’s disadvantage, however, lies in not knowing the date of the Act of Faith. Because of this, his fast must be severe. During the first four days he is hounded by the known discomforts of previous fasts: dizziness and cramps. Then he moves into a paradise of lightness. Hunger dissolves, the intestine’s sounds disappear, pain goes up in smoke, and he sails toward another dimension.
The small knife that was once a
nail, and the quill that was once a chicken bone, accompany him in his everyday tasks. For many hours he works on his writing materials, and during others he writes down his thoughts. Then he hides the pages.
The prolonged deprivations consume his already emaciated body. He can’t stay on his feet for as long as he could before, and his abject fatigue forces him to reduce his hours of work. He is sheathed in a soft, relaxed weakness. His physical deterioration is a counterpoint to his spiritual vigor. He can taste victory. Each passing day is a day gained. When they come to read him his sentence and put on his shameful sanbenito to take him to the altar of sacrifice, they won’t find anything more than his insensible remains.
The warden discovers this remarkable strategy late in the game, and runs to confess his guilt before the judges. He is horrified. He fears—and with good reason—that they will punish him in one of those ways that make history. He points out that the prisoner regularly receives his food and that he had stopped asking for hearings. Nothing suggested the need for any special supervision. How could he have suspected such a cursed scheme? How could he have thought that an admitted Jew would be capable of putting himself through such deprivations as have only been recorded in the lives of saints? When the warden entered Francisco’s cell, he recounts, trembling, he found a skeleton wrapped in skin as thin as silk.
130
Francisco floats between the veils of half consciousness. His mouth barely articulates his refusal to eat. He is close to his goal and knows he will win. He is offered cakes, fruit, stew, milk, chocolate. A doctor orders for him to be moved carefully so that the broken parts of his skin can be dried out and healed. Even the Jesuit Andrés Hernández and the Franciscan Alonso Briceño are sent to persuade him to interrupt his intolerable fast.
Another event, however, changes the direction of Francisco’s life as well as the entire history of Lima’s Inquisition. The prisoner’s ears, muted by the effects of malnutrition, manage to decipher some of the words: “great complicity,” “massive arrests,” “Jews discovered.” Soldiers, people, cries, and laments fill the gloomy corridors, and new adobe piles on the walls, ditches are dug, the cells multiply. A seemingly minor denunciation had exhumed a vein of secret Jews that sent the zealous Holy Office into a fever. The boredom of long proceedings for the wretched poor is now convulsed by the arrest of notable figures. Rich ones.
Gaitán burns the letter he was about to send to Spain, requesting yet again to be relieved of his duties. These recent discoveries have changed his mood. Now he prefers to stay in Lima, because he never suspected that such plunder would reach his hands. The Act of Faith to condemn a few monks, sorcerers, and repentant Jews will be postponed indefinitely. Now they must work hard on this interminable line of prisoners that’s entering the dark cells like a snake. When the Act of Faith takes place, dozens of incredible sinners will be added, and the massive undertaking will shake the world.
What had happened? Very simple. A young man named Antonio Cordero, who had lived in Seville and now worked for a rich merchant in the City of Kings, remarked that he made no sales on Saturdays or Sundays and, also, that he did not care for pork. His boast was passed on to a familiar of the Holy Office. The inquisitors sniffed out their prey and resolved to modify their routine for the first time. They kidnapped Cordero and did not confiscate his goods, to keep his networks from taking precautions. The captive, who was so reckless when free, produced, in the torture chambers, the greatest disaster his brothers could have imagined, informing on his boss and two friends, who were immediately sucked into the grim fortress. The secret Jewish community of Lima did not recognize the danger posed by these people’s disappearance, since, without the confiscation of assets, they dismissed the idea that the Holy Office was involved. On the eleventh of August, 1635, however, a surprise raid took place that ripped dozens of people from their homes, sent prestigious families into mourning, and extended a systematic persecution to the far edges of the Viceroyalty.
The inquisitors’ enthusiasm was so great that nervous letters were sent to Spain filled with facts and hyperbolic predictions. In one of them, they declared that “there are so many Jews that they could be their own nation,” “the prisons are now full,” “people go about their lives in shock and do not trust each other because when they least expect it they can find themselves without the friend or acquaintance whom they so valued.” They underscored the threat posed by Jews: “This lost nation was taking root here in a manner that, like a bad weed, was threatening to strangle Christianity.”
Among the arrested people, there are three women. The judges determine that their diminished physical strength might make them surrender more names. In the first stage, however—before the trials are conducted—it is urgent to capture as many criminals as possible. Some of them have already escaped into the jungle or the mountains, or they have attempted to secretly embark for other lands.
The correspondence through the walls repeatedly transmits a sweet name: “Mencia de Luna.” “Mencia de Luna, young-Jewish-tortured.” She has not returned to the prison. Her name resounds like a desperate tribute. Francisco strains to count the blows along the walls, to construct words, to come out of his bedridden stupor. Just beyond the walls of his cell, a young woman has been sacrificed. Without realizing it, he drinks a few drops of milk and chews the flesh of an olive. A shaky thought enters his bruised mind: he is surrounded by a multitude of victims and he must not abandon them. What to do? He spits the olive pit into his hand and stares at it in surprise. He’s just broken his fast! Why? He rubs his temples and opens his eyes wide as if he could read, on the sooty wall, the message that would explain his sudden change. There must be some explanation. He hasn’t done it out of fear. He has done it because of the tragedy sweeping through the Viceroyalty. His struggle should not head toward death, because he’ll have plenty of it soon enough. Now he needs to go back to struggling for life, to maintaining the resistance. As he was doing before.
He picks up a piece of bread, breaks it, and chews slowly. His mouth hurts. He has to recover his strength so he can plan his next steps. It’s logical to assume that the tribunal would now have postponed the Act of Faith until the new trials have been completed. Another time of action has arrived.
He is astonished to feel a new surge of energy. This change in circumstances demands a change of strategy. But he must think it through. First he has to learn about this catastrophe of which the walls are speaking. What’s happened? What will happen? He was almost dead from fasting, but now, as if resurrected, he has to offer help to his brothers in misfortune. How?
131
As always, each new prisoner is forced to denounce others, and all Portuguese people—or individuals who’ve lived in Portugal—are inevitably suspect. In this manner, the number of arrests grows exponentially. The tribunal decides to increase the number of dungeons. Its success emboldens it to bring a new complaint before the king, regarding that cursed agreement of 1610: “They have our hands tied,” they protest, “forbidding us from obstructing anyone’s travels, or from requiring a license from those who wish to travel, but the current situation calls for us to have the power to refuse passage to those who lack authorization from the Holy Office.”
The prisoners from the first big raids include an extremely prominent resident of Lima. The Holy Office had struck the blow at twelve thirty, when the streets were brimming with people. The officials and their carriages spread out strategically and the operation was completed in an hour. “The city was stunned and amazed,” the inquisitors would later say. The highest authority of the Jews of Lima was shackled to the wall of his dark dungeon: Don Manuel Bautista Pérez.
Francisco had heard him spoken of at the university. He was said to be a cultured, generous man, esteemed by priests and laypeople alike, and a celebration was being prepared for him in thanks for his donations. Later, it was discovered that he’d been given a tribute full of praise in the presence of faculty and students. This Manuel Bautista Pérez cont
ributed, with his gifts and initiatives, to the improvement of the City of Kings, and he was held in high esteem by the viceroy and city hall. He behaved like a devoted Christian and was thought of as a moral man with an excellent reputation.
Nevertheless, the Holy Office gathered forced denunciations from thirty witnesses, and the prisoner could not resist against such an avalanche of proof. He practiced Judaism in secret, and was a leader in his abominable community. His people called him “the oracle of the Hebrew nation,” and some referred to him as “rabbi.” According to the denunciations, he held gatherings in the upper floors of his home, presided over religious ceremonies, and taught the dead laws. In his library, Christian books were discovered that in fact were there to hide his identity. He was, according to informants, “the great captain,” who was known, respected, and loved by the other sixty-three people who’d been arrested, including the deceased Mencia de Luna.
The correspondence through the walls transmit Manuel Bautista Pérez’s name. His fall into the Inquisition’s claws marks the collapse of the last pillar holding up the prisoners’ hopes.
Francisco rushes to call the guards and request a change of diet in order to break his fast. The Jesuit Andrés Hernández and the Franciscan Alonso Briceño attribute this news to the success of their own persuasions, and they file a report heralding the start of a long-awaited repentance. The inquisitors receive this news without being moved, as they are sick and tired of Francisco. And now they have their hands full with the big fish who has just been netted.
The elderly rabbi is taken to the torture chamber. He walks with such firm steps that the warden doesn’t dare pull on his chain. The torturer, on meeting his gaze, looks away quickly. Without giving him time to realize what’s about to happen, he tears the man’s groin on the rack. The inquisitors order the session to be stopped immediately; this specimen is too valuable. The man is returned to his cell, unconscious, and a doctor is sent to give him medical attention.
Against the Inquisition Page 49