The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives

by Tim Darcy Ellis

  “The very best,” I replied. “Tongue like a razor blade.”

  His father smiled. “Listen to this. I saw to it myself, by de Praet himself, to be a spymaster one day, to root out traitors and heretics.”

  “Young Johannes, a spymaster?” I stopped dead in my icy tracks and looked around to see who else was listening in.

  Johannes must have noticed something. From shop windows, the street was lit by candles that cast an eerie, silvery light on the ice and snow. The whole town seemed suddenly silent, as if all noise was muffled by the snow until, proud and upright, he broke the silence and declared, “Yes, sir, and you can tell your Friday night friends that the eyes and ears of the Spanish king are open.”

  My Friday night friends? Eyes and ears? I cannot let you lead me to them, diary, to the one I love, just coming of age, whose hair is black and wavy and yet somehow almost blue in the light. Don’t let me mention her name or where she lives. No more talk of the one whose skin is olive but soft like butter. Diary, you may root me out, but you won’t lead me to the others. The words you force me to write are my chains and shackles, no? This young Van der Poel, the clever student, whose fees keep me here—he has you on his side? Well, I’m not a clever little fish for nothing. I’ll find a way to play this.

  * * *

  The town feels empty now that the English militias have gone. They marched east in their meagre boots across the muddy landscape to finish off the Arumer Zwarte Hoop: brave men and women who are fighting to shake off the yoke of the Spanish king. Will there be any mercy? How will mothers be able to feed their children if the fathers are lined up and hanged, just like the sons of Haman in the Book of Ester? It’s a cruel world, but the only way to change it is to stay in it. To do so, I must jump through hoops. I must be one step ahead.

  After classes, then, I strolled through the geldmuntstraat and the kraanplein. I found some comfort from the lacy stonework of the city’s churches that seemed like familiar old clothes. The carvings, the gargoyles and griffins—they said something new, though. Was it a warning or a comfort?

  Walking slowly onwards, a mother reined in her children like a sheepdog. How odd that God blesses her with so many when he blesses the king of England with just one. The windows of the grand houses caught a reflection of weak sunlight that glinted across the cobbled squares where I bathed in the warmth outside the tavern. It took me home to the endless summers, the embrace of my mother and the laughter of my sisters.

  Once inside the tavern, I sat down at a quiet table and called the girl whose name I never remember, the one who leans her bosom right into my face. I asked for some chicken broth and beer. But what was I getting into? This was the place where I’d arranged to meet Álvaro de Castro. Although I arrived a whole hour early for the sake of casual spying, I was already too late.

  He sat there in the corner, grinning. He was in his early years, dressed in a dark-green brocaded shirt, a dark man with lightly curled black hair, taller than me and leaner – not what I’d been expecting.

  “Valenciano! I am de Castro, but you can call me Álvaro, late of the cities of London and Antwerp, but a Burgueño, a Spaniard at heart and looking to spread my wings.” The light of youth shone through his dark, expansive eyes. His olive cheeks were narrow, but his jaw was strong and prominent.

  “Very good,” I replied cagily, taking everything in as the pretty girl thrust the comforting broth under my nose. She let the flap of her skirt fall open around her leg so that I could feel the sweet touch of female flesh. “Bring him some too, please,” I mumbled. I offered de Castro my wooden spoon and my broth, and he took it and ate.

  “Ha ha, I see you want me to talk.” He laughed and gave me back my broth. “Tell me, Master Juanito Vives, what is life like for the secret Jews here in this pretty town?” I thanked God he spoke in Castilian. “Sweet son of Abraham. I am looking for work!”

  I tried to hush him up, but he continued.

  “Got a pretty Dutch girl into trouble, I did, blonde as Spanish sands with a Venus mound to lose your face in.” He grinned, and though his front teeth were slightly twisted out of place, they did not take away from his handsome looks. “Her family don’t want a Spaniard, much less a Marrano for a grandson. They are demanding I be drawn between two horses!” After a sigh he asked, “What are the girls like here, my friend Juanito?”

  He was a stallion, the power of his late youth charging at me like a horse that had bolted.

  “And how is the Sabbath here?” he asked. “Is sand thrown on the floor? Is there a Kiddush cup of pure silver, or is it merely pewter? Pray tell, is it just a hollow wooden bowl?”

  What cruel trick of Sir Thomas was this?

  “Quietly, señor,” I said. “Sir Thomas sent you, but this is nonsense. You know we are third generation Cristianos? You are the Cardinal’s page, are you not?”

  It had finally reached Bruges. I knew the Inquisition had reached Utrecht and Ghent, where New Christians were rooted out on old accusations.

  I asked him what he knew of my work.

  “I know you challenge Aristotle, that you champion the new learning, and that you elevate merchants’ sons to be new and better nobles.”

  He was right, but that was not what I was asking.

  “I also know you write Torah without ever mentioning it,” he continued. “I know you are a soul in torment.”

  “You do not know that.”

  “I do,” he muttered with a chuckle.

  “What are your skills, my Burgueño? Why would I take you under my wing for a printer and a clerk?”

  “Sir Thomas More has already paid you, and if you don’t do as he asks, you’ll be stuck here forever.”

  “Madre mia!” I exclaimed. “And what have you got on him that he pays you to spy on me?”

  “Do you think he’s the one who’s controlling this game? Do you think he’s cleverer than one from our tribe?”

  “Just tell me who you are and what you can do for me.”

  “A bookbinder in Antwerp, an illustrator in Amsterdam, a translator in London. In London, with my Cardinal’s recommendation, I became known to Sir Thomas and his five lovely daughters!”

  “Meg, of whom he talks so sweetly—is she one of his daughters?”

  “The brightest and sharpest, with eyes like the night sky and a tongue like a viper,” he replied.

  ‘And pretty, too?’

  “You’ll have to find that out for yourself, my friend.”

  “Enough of this talk. You’re one of the Burgos boys. They’re famous for what they’re willing to give and take.”

  He didn’t defend himself, but recounted the struggles of the de Castro family, a story I did not believe for a second. His father sent him for an altar boy at the grand cathedral to quell rumours and to find out what they say about us, to get recommendations and references. And with those references, he ran away to Amsterdam, London and Antwerp.

  He smiled and, bringing his elbows forwards, as if drawing an invisible prayer shawl over his head, he regaled me with stories of streets of silver and gold, of inks and copper plating, of antimony and of lithographs and printing machines as heavy as olive presses. He hailed from a long line of scriveners who translated Castilian, Arabic, English, and Hebrew.

  “These are common skills, though. I really don’t think Sir Thomas gave me enough.”

  “You want to know what else?” he said, expressionless, like a cat about to pounce. “I’ve learned that the future is among the English and the lands in which they’ll settle.”

  That set my mind buzzing with possibilities. Perhaps this was the future of our people. Perhaps I was sent here to help accomplish this.

  “Take me in and I’ll write you sonnets to win the hand of the girl you love. You will not regret it, my good Nuevo Cristiano,” he said with that warm Spanish grin that I had not seen for a very long time.<
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  “I need to see your work,” I told him. In that instant, I felt that here was a person who, after many years, might see me buried in the proper way and might know what prayers to say at that time every year afterwards. But I was getting carried up in his spell, and I couldn’t have this.

  “You see, Valenciano, good son of Ferdinand! I knew you’d want me!” He threw me a song sheet, with black ink on fresh vellum and red and green on either side of the flowing script. It was from the pen of the great Jewish-Spanish poet Ibn Gabirol. Reading it in that smoky tavern brought a salty tear to my eye.

  At dawn I came to you, my rock, my strength;

  I offer you my dawn and evening prayers.

  Before your majesty I stand in fear,

  Because your eye discerns my secret thoughts.

  What is there that man’s mind and mouth

  Can make? What power is there in my body’s breath?

  And yet the songs of man delight you; therefore I

  Will praise you while I still from God have breath.

  He turned to me. “When do we start our great work?”

  The sudden softness of his words seemed like the brush of my father’s hand against my face. I was no more than five, jumping up to him, full of piss and vinegar. He turned and swathed my face in the tassels of his love.

  Now the memories come, unlocked.

  Father, bent in the middle, chin like a ship’s prow, skin bleached white by the candles beneath him, is in the cellar, with the sand on the floor that made him think of Moses in the desert. He is kneading his tassels with the six hundred and thirteen knots for each of the commandments.

  It is early, before the sun lights the Plaza de la Figuera and the Calle de la Cerrejeria. We gather, hearts pounding. We are the Viveses. There are our neighbours, the de Pintos, and last to arrive are our friends, the Elazars, now known as López, who are here from beyond the mountain. The prayers have finished, we’ve drunk a sip of wine from a silver Kiddush cup, and Beatriz, my middle sister, the fiery one, the one who threatened to assassinate the king and poor hot oil on Torquemada himself, starts singing:

  A la una yo naci,

  When it struck one, I was born,

  A las dos yo en grande si,

  When it struck two, I grew up,

  A las tres con mi amantė

  At three I was with my lover

  A las quatros me case

  And at four I married he.

  A tear runs down Father’s cheek, for what happened to Beatriz’s lover a week before the wedding—well, no one could ever talk about it, the medical dissection of a living man. Mother rushes to wipe away his tear, as if showing emotions would be risking too much. Eva and Leonora join in the melody, and we cannot help ourselves. Tears and smiles come at once, but we move to happier songs and are in a circle, holding hands and dancing, laughing with hands over our mouths until our ribs hurt. At the hour before dawn, silently, they disperse in cloaks of black, like bats.

  “They are magic cloaks,” my mother, with whom no man would dare disagree, says. “They will not be seen in the darkness.”

  Fourteen hundred and ninety-three was the year of my birth, just a year after Columbus sailed to the New World and swapped Spanish disease for Aztec gold. Mother whispered in my left ear, curled tight like a seashell, “This possession is a theft,” and her words became ingrained in my conscience. The other calamity of the year before my birth was The Alhambra Decree, the edict of the expulsion of the Jews:

  Dare they return, so much as to take another step…

  They say that Columbus could not get a ship out of Seville because too many of us were moving eastwards to welcome the Sultan, or westwards to the respite of Portugal. Some of the braver ones went to the northern lands: places with strange names like London, Bristol, Antwerp. Should we have taken a ship, too? Or were we wise to sit in Valencia and wait for the monarchs to change their minds and see the error of their ways? We made an outward show of Mass while inwardly keeping the past alive.

  * * *

  But that was then, and this is now, and I had no choice but to take him under my wing. Sir Thomas had spoken to de Praet and they’d already prepared the empty room next to mine. In those early weeks, though I always kept my door locked, he would just turn the handle and try to get in. It was a rigid surveillance, and everything in my world changed. I couldn’t be seen visiting my Friday night friends. I wouldn’t risk leading him to the home of the one I love. I would not be drawn on my Nuevo pedigree, and I’d take him to Mass at St. Donation on a daily basis. The tzitzit tassel of my great-grandfather’s prayer shawl, perhaps woven in the fourteenth century, had to go. And so did that fragment of an ancient Mishnah, the white yarmulke Mother gave me. But you, diary—the written evidence, the clever trap—I couldn’t put on the flames. And neither would six weeks of suffocation get you, for you are like the lover I have no power over.

  Let’s be quick, diary. I have a chance. He has gone to chase a girl or a boy, and I have you and the evening to myself. He accompanies me to class and teaches me English. He works with the zeal of an expert and a skilled man, sitting for hours as he works with vellum, leather, brilliant inks while concentrating with the will of a monk at daily lauds and matins. Yet he also makes the boys laugh until they sweat and then calms them with a glance, and after lessons he plays games with jacks, balls, and bright polished stones of carnelian.

  It seems that I wrap envy up in my bag along with my books and wear a thin smile. He is better at being me than I! He holds them in his grasp, and they return their affection for him by calling him Señor Álvaro. When I have only ever been addressed as Master Vives.

  I throw them a discourse on ethics, a lesson in Greek, a book from Homer, and with a “Thank you, Señor,” they run from the hall laughing, one clipping Álvaro’s ear. He catches one under his dark green cloak and stabs a finger into his ribs until the boy convulses with laughter. I pretend I have to work, but instead I strain my ear at his door to hear the muffled, indecipherable chanting that is like a babbling brook.

  Against this chanting, blackbirds start to chatter, singing songs of courage. Small white flowers emerge from winter’s frozen soil, dangling a promise of less bitter weather. They seem to tell me, “You can trust him.” There are days of clear glass-blue skies that promise a new life, a new way. Then, as if on celestial command, the clouds appear again with a sudden squall that seems to bode warning: “Tell him nothing—never.” He asks me of my friends in the town, but I will reveal nothing.

  Earlier, when I saw him dart into the streets below, I got into his room that he had, for once, not locked. I turned over papers, trying not to disturb anything. I found it beneath his translations of my City of God, a tightly set Castilian sonnet.

  Mi Primavera Burgueña, por verte, lo que yo daría…

  Si, por vivir en esos claros días, sentarme con mis gentes, ay…que alegrías!

  Pero No! Lamento la libertad perdida, vidas desintegradas, agonias malditadas!

  Alerta! Alerta… a las escuras…. sentinelas, caras mascaradas, con sus manos cenizadas!

  Hijos de Israel, encarcelados, humillados… quemados!

  Hijos de Israel, esparriados, pero en fez… fuerte y agrupados!

  Si, juntos, lado a lado, nuestra hermandad otra vez prosperara…

  Con tan solo encontrar al Salvador, que será un hombre sagrado.

  A-ti-ri-ti…A-ti-ri-tando! El Señor Vives, Kabalista, a nuestro lado!

  Si! Lo proclamo desde todas las alturas y sin ninguna duda…

  Porque su pluma, humanidad y sabiduría formaran canales…

  Regando los jardines de mis gentes convertiendolos en eterna hermandades!

  Y, yo, y
los Hijos de Israel, seremos los pequeños granos de arena…

  Y, el, sera El Pastor de mis gentes, como fue también, El Gran Moshe, el profeta!

  My Burgos Spring, to see you, how much I would give…

  Yes, living those clear days, to sit with my people… what happiness to bring

  But no, I lament freedoms lost, disintegrated lives, damned agonies

  Beware, beware… in the shadows…sentinels, masked faces, ashen hands.

  Children of Israel, imprisoned, humiliated… burnt alive!

  Children of Israel, scattered, but in faith, strongly bonded!

  Yes, together, side-by-side, our brotherhood will again prosper!

  Together in search of our Saviour who will be a sacred one.

  A-ti-ri-ti, A-ti-ri-tando! Señor Vives, the Kabbalist, at our side.

  Yes, I proclaim from on high…there is no doubt!

  Through his writings, humanity and wisdom, he will form channels

  That will water the gardens of our people, to again create our brotherhood

  And I, and the children of Israel, his flock of lambs,

  And he, the great shepherd, as our great prophet Moshe.

  Dare I let myself believe this is real, or is it like you, my diary—a spider’s web and the cleverest trick of all?

  14 March 1523

  Time passed in this “not knowing.” I barely recognised that I hated it because I was so familiar with it. The winter that should have given way to spring stayed a while, and we did our minstrel’s dance of truth and half-truth, deftly stepping over the lies.

  In early March the snow finally melted, and the dreaded news came. There was a man from Ghent named Mendoza who was caught in a mourner’s Kaddish and a yarmulke on his head. As there is only an edict against us, and no Inquisition, he was carted back to Spain to face the auto-da-fé. Álvaro was unmoved as he told me. Louis de Praet openly rejoiced.