Francisco holds tight to the verses that exalt freedom, beauty, and dignity, but he trips at the vile spectacle that boils around him. It’s a horrific rite that revels in pain and death.
The ceremony begins with worship of the cross, which stands on a central altar, richly adorned with an image of Saint Dominic, silver candelabras, bouquets of flowers, and golden incense burners. Francisco’s brow furrows, and he draws back into his dream state. How long will he have to wait? In waves, sermons reach his ruined ears: different voices, but always the same effort to secure glory, truth, devotion. Someone reads, in Spanish, the papal edict of Pius V that supports the Inquisition and its ministers while rebuking heretics and their misdeeds. He peers through the bars of his eyelashes to see the oath of the viceroy, the Royal Court, the members of city hall, and all the city residents as they raise their right hands, faces entranced, and utter “Amen” in a great wave of voices.
Juan de Mañozca reads the resolution of the Holy Office. A vibration of sadistic pleasure runs through the plaza. The spectacle moves decisively into a voracious phase. Those who repent before the implacable words are uttered will receive mercy—so it is said, repeated, implored. Many thousands of pricked ears absorb the cries, the demented pleas. And many thousands of eyes stare at the rows of wretched people displayed on the platform, who will now be subjected to the punishments they deserve.
The warden raises his jet-black staff and turns to the first prisoner. He sinks the tip of his staff between the man’s ribs, as if he were a filthy dog, and doesn’t speak to him, but rather pushes him cruelly and grotesquely toward a short bridge that is visible from anywhere in the plaza, so that he can stand there, alone and shamed, stripped of protection, as his personal sentence is read aloud. Then the man is pushed back to the sound of suppressed giggles from the devoted mob.
He sinks his staff into the next prisoner. He repeats the task with the third, fourth, seventh, the eighteenth, as one official after another enjoys the honor of reading each sentence as if reciting poetry.
The sun spills heat over the plaza until the crowd can no longer take in any speeches; it longs for action. The captives have been condemned to whippings, prison, and forced labor in galleys. All that’s left are the ones to be “relieved” to the secular branch for their execution.
The warden pushes a Jew called Antonio Espinosa, and the staff twists furiously between his ribs because the man is broken, trembling, raising his hands, and begging for clemency. The multitude shouts, waking those who are dozing. Over their closely gathered heads, vague whistles of joy rise and fall when the staff fails to push forward the next Jew, Diego López Fonseca, who must be carried and dragged by the hair so he can stand on the bridge and hear the punishments that will be inflicted on him. Now it’s Juan Rodríguez’s turn; in jail, he pretended to have gone mad, to make the judges laugh and confuse them; now he recognizes his behavior as evil lies, and he weeps, implores.
It’s time for the old doctor Tomé Cuaresma, who is recognized by people throughout the plaza. The staff pushes him obscenely, and nervous coughs arise; the gray-haired victim leans on the handrail, head down, and when he hears that he’ll be burned alive he starts to shake and cry. He stretches out his fingers, wanting to speak, but his throat emits no sound. Then something happens that moves the crowd: the inquisitor Antonio Castro del Castillo abandons his seat of honor and walks toward the trembling old man. He gazes at him, holds the cross that hangs on his chest close to the prisoner’s face, and orders him to beg for mercy. The disconsolate doctor is on the verge of fainting, and stammers, “Mercy—mercy!” A triumphant roar sweeps across the plaza. The inquisitor smiles brightly and returns to his place beside the viceroy so the ceremony can continue. Faith has triumphed, although that man will still be executed.
Only a few Jews remain, the worst ones.
The staff pushes Sebastián Duarte, brother-in-law of the rabbi Manuel Bautista Pérez. When he passes his relative, without the guards noticing, the two embrace as a farewell. The scene produces rage among the spectators, who spit out insults and demand more zeal from the soldiers.
Francisco keeps his eyes open and follows each of the condemned men intensely, as if his tranquil spirit had hands that could reach out to those anemic faces and enfold them in tenderness, say how much he loved them, say that they are not alone, that their pain will pass. He has an extraordinary vision of man’s precariousness. He has never been able to see it so sharply. Soon he will be dust, and all ambitions and perversions and nonsense will cease to matter. He is sustained—he has been sustained—by what he loves: God, his family, his roots, his ideas, and those pastel-colored memories flecked with blue that moved him so much in faraway Ibatín.
Now it’s the “great captain’s” turn, the rabbi, the “oracle of the Hebrew nation,” as is written in the text read aloud sarcastically by an official. Manuel Bautista Pérez listens to his sentence with majestic bearing. In his brain, another multitude seethes: the martyrs who preceded him and whom he will now join.
There is a pause. There is only one more, the most odious of sinners.
One more—the demented man who dared defy the Act of Faith itself, revealing his rebellion. He is a monster because he knows he’ll die for his errors and still digs in his heels. The sweaty crowd stands on tiptoes, having only one opportunity in life to see such a thing.
The prisoner looks vulgar, despicable; he is thin, with long gray hair and a long beard that makes him seem deformed. He doesn’t wait for the warden’s staff to arrive to humiliate him like an animal. He rises by himself, with obvious effort, and walks, with all the elegance his muscles will allow, toward the bridge where he will hear what he already knows. The cone-shaped hat that transformed him into a grotesque being slips off his head. Suddenly he radiates an unfathomable nobility. Thousands of eyes see something confusing. On the bridge, his images overlap, as an effigy of mist had appeared in place of the man. For the first time on this day bursting with heat and madness, silence breaks out.
Everyone yearns to hear the description of his extraordinary transgressions. The official’s voice is streaked with uncertainty, fatigue, and sudden restraint. Francisco’s hair begins to rise, like wings. The shameful sanbenito grows light, undulating like silk. The crowd fans its ears, because the words seem to be evaporating. This solitary, upright man evokes something mysterious. A thousand yards away, in the “burning place,” the fires are almost ready, but there, on the bridge, softly caressed by the breeze, they do not see a prisoner who will be devoured by flames, but a dignified and just man. His image is brushed with magnificence.
The historian Fernando de Montesinos, respected author of many works, rises from his place in the stands to study the marvel up close. The tribunal has entrusted him with the difficult task of writing down a detailed account of the Act of Faith. He has already interviewed Francisco, has extracted several pages of personal information from him, and was able to write about his studies, travels, offenses, and audacities. Now he must keep his senses alert to record all the details of the Act. Everything matters: the decorations, the sentences, the protocols, the prisoners’ behavior, and even supernatural phenomena. The breeze that plays with the condemned man’s hair transforms into a wind that swiftly grows strong. The oppressive heat is suddenly fractured by icy stabs coming in from the sea. From Callao, a black mantle advances, swollen and furiously struck by lightning. Attention has been so focused on the spectacle that the storm’s beginning has gone unnoticed, and Montesinos raises his eyes in fright; this too must be included in his report.
Suddenly a collective cry of horror accompanies the saber’s blow that breaks the awning over the main platform. Montesinos shields his eyes with his hand and manages to hear the words uttered by Francisco, suddenly golden in the light. Later, in his report, he will transcribe it exactly:
“The God of Israel made it so, that He might see me face-to-face from heaven!”
Epilogue
The prisoners se
ntenced to execution are led to the fire between walls of soldiers to prevent the hordes from attacking them. Monks walk with the condemned men; they hail from all the religious orders and keep preaching to the condemned until the final moment. Among the military officers who oversee the funereal march is the contrite Captain Lorenzo Valdés.
Tomé Cuaresma says that he has no need of the Holy Office’s mercy, and dies without repenting. Manuel Bautista Pérez looks at the executioner with disdain and orders him to do his job well.
Francisco Maldonado da Silva doesn’t speak, cry, or moan. The books he wrote with such great effort in prison are tied around his neck. Several witnesses observe the moment in which the blue flames reach the pages and a whirlwind of letters spins insistently around his hair like a crown of sapphires.
The officials in attendance—the senior clerk of justice, the notary, and the secretary of the Holy Office—endure the smoke and the smell of human flesh until they can be sure that the condemned ones have been turned to ash.
The historian Fernando de Montesinos covers his nose with his handkerchief and fulfills the Inquisitorial command to write down a complete account of the colossal Act of Faith. His long text is immediately printed by order of the Most Illustrious General Inquisitor. Nobody suspects then that, through this document, the victims will ascend to immortality.
The Central Council of Spain, however, is alarmed by the scale of the massacre, larger than anything the Inquisition has done in all the Americas, and it orders the three inquisitors to transmit “separately” and “in good conscience” their own feelings with regard to what has occurred.
Gaitán answers that the sentences “were justified.” Castro del Castillo answers that, before giving his vote, he held Mass and entrusted himself “very much to God, and with great humility.” Mañozca does not answer, and that same year his services to the Tribunal of Lima are terminated.
The Act of Faith of 1639 shakes the Jewish communities of Europe, which circulate reports about the martyrology that’s taken place in the Americas. In 1650, the famous work Hope of Israel appears, written by Menasseh Ben Israel, which narrates the savage event and devotes several emotional paragraphs to the martyr Francisco Maldonado da Silva. In Venice, the doctor Isaac Cardoso publishes another book that expands on the frightening history and extols the heroism of “Eli Nazareo.” Later, in Amsterdam, the Sephardic poet Miguel de Barrios writes a poem about the heroic Latin American who fought and died to defend his right to freedom of conscience.
In 1813, the Holy Office of Lima is abolished, and the people plunder the Palace of the Inquisition to erase the terrible proof that still kept hundreds of families on edge. Nevertheless, two years later, it was reinstated, and panic returned. But in 1820, by order of the last viceroy, it was eliminated forever.
In 1822, the most significant blow is delivered to the Inquisition in the Americas: the liberator José de San Martín orders for all the belongings of the dreadful tribunal to be transferred to the National Library, as that is where—these are his exact words—one can find ideas, which are “tragic to tyrants, and precious to those who love freedom.”
Acknowledgments
In creating this book, I have been graced by the help of many people and institutions who offered me their rich information, particularly the National Academy of History, the National Academy of Letters, the Simón Rodríguez and Torcuato di Tella foundations, the Library of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary, and the generous contribution of books and documents by the Cordoban historian Efraín U. Bischoff and the Tucumanian historian Teresa Piossek Prebisch. I dedicate special recognition to Marcelo Polakoff, who, full of enthusiasm for this project, obtained additional information from archives and libraries. The brilliant Peruvian anthropologist Luis Millones offered me orientation, references, and materials from his own archives.
As this is a historical novel, it would be incongruous to name the entire long bibliography that exists, and that I consulted, in order to reconstruct the era and its people, as many minor names and scenes arise from the literary necessity of giving flesh and emotional depth to long-ago or uncertain events. But it is appropriate, at least, to acknowledge my debt to three relevant authors whose research into the colonial era in the Americas and the life of Francisco Maldonado da Silva deserve great praise: José Toribio Medina, Boleslao Lewin, and Günter Böhm.
My wife Marita read and discussed most of the chapters with generous dedication, offering sharp observations that kept me alert in the forest of characters and events. My son Gerardo designed and oversaw the processing of the materials and records of successive versions.
I thank my agent Diane Stockwell of Globo Libros Literary Management for her lucid work and polished efficiency in achieving this edition, as well as Amazon Publishing for launching this book into a broad universe of readers.
About the Author
Marcos Aguinis is a prize-winning, internationally bestselling author. Born the son of European Jewish immigrants in Argentina in 1935, Aguinis learned at age seven that his grandfather and the rest of his family in Europe had been killed by the Nazis. Describing this as the defining moment of his life, Aguinis says it is what drove him to write, in an effort to repair the “broken mechanism of humanity.” He published his first book in 1963 and since then has published thirteen novels, fourteen essay collections, four short-story collections, and two biographies covering historical, political, and artistic themes. Aguinis was the first author outside of Spain to win the prestigious Planeta Prize for his book The Inverted Cross, and his novel Against the Inquisition was praised by Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa as a “stirring song of freedom.” When democracy was reinstated in Argentina in 1983, Aguinis became secretary of culture for his brave fight against dictatorship and the defense of human rights, and sponsored the renowned “cultural renaissance.” For more information, visit www.aguinis.net.
About the Translator
Carolina De Robertis is a writer, professor, and literary translator of Uruguayan origins. She is the author of the novels The Gods of Tango and Perla, as well as the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain, and is also the editor of the anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times. Her own books have been translated into seventeen languages. Her award-winning translations from the Spanish include Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, Roberto Ampuero’s The Neruda Case, and writings by Raquel Lubartowski, Rodrigo Hasbún, and Pedro Almodóvar, among others. She is the recipient of Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Stonewall Book Award, and numerous other honors. In 2017, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts named De Robertis to its 100 List of writers and thinkers who are “shaping the future of culture.” She teaches fiction and literary translation at San Francisco State University.
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