I was mired in turmoil, a contorted ball of self-loathing and self-pity.
On the day I decided to answer these voices, something happened. A shiny male blackbird landed on the bar of my window. He sang, “Aren’t I just like Álvaro?” I gave him what was left of the gristle on my lamb shank, and he took it in his beak. But he didn’t fly off afterwards, although I had nothing else for him. He didn’t speak any other words or phrases. He came and went over the next few days with the rhythm of my faceless interrogators. As they arrived, he departed; as they departed, he arrived. I listened to both his voice and his silence. “Just like Álvaro?” He had searching, beady eyes and perfect feathers, a blackness that was unearthly. In song, he gave me a riddle, just as Álvaro had. What was it? After a number of days working on it, catching the rhythm and the pitch of the chirrup, it was revealed. It was a song of forgiveness. A bright sun emerged from behind the clouds, and I realised that my struggle had not been in vain, that others would continue my work, that I had done my very best. And I realised that I must not crack.
* * *
After the fourth week, when they realised I would not talk, something even stranger happened. I was visited by the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza di Zuniga. Though the years were turning against him, he was still as sturdy as a Spanish pine. He helped me to stand, although I must have smelled worse than the floor of an unclean kennel. He said that I looked like a newborn calf, shiny in the eye, ready for the world, just a little unsteady on my knees. He wouldn’t tolerate my apologies for the sorry state of my clothes, my beard, and my tattered clothes.
Had he been sent to prepare me for the final day? Was he here to take me, the exposed Jew, to his own king?
He said it was the end of March and that he had heard of arrests in Houndsditch. This was the Priory of Sheen. No sooner were the words out than three young men took him away. Instead of marching him down the corridor, there was the unlocking of the empty cell next to mine and the sound of a door slamming and a turning of the key.
The Spanish ambassador, the former page of Queen Isabella, was imprisoned alongside the Jew from Valencia. Although the doors were solid, he, too, must have had an unglazed window in his cell. We could hear one another by talking through the window. He had been arrested for speaking for the queen and thrown into Durham House, but the king had decided that his two Spanish prisoners might reveal more if they were overheard talking to one another.
“What jurisdiction has he?” I asked in Aragonese, which the guards would not understand. I choked out words from a dry throat and a tongue that had lost the strength of speech. “They cannot execute the ambassador of Charles V.”
“No Spaniard will be executed,” he replied.
“I have stepped too far and have been found in the wrong places,” I said. “I have served too many masters.”
We talked sideways out of the tiny windows in our prison cells for two days. He compared the king to the Roman Emperors Nero and Caligula.
“Señor, you are a good man,” he said. “If I ever see the emperor again, I will support the cause of your people.”
“You really will?”
“Yes, I will speak for the Jews of Spain.”
“But I am not a Jew.”
“You are a fine Jew, my friend. You must always be proud of that.”
I felt complimented, strangely liberated. “And if we ever get out of here, will you vouch me safe in Spanish lands?”
“For your loyalty to the queen, of course,” he replied.
“And my sisters in Valencia?”
“I will do whatever I can.”
The next day, I heard him storming around his cell, banging fists against the wall. I was going to call to him and offer words of comfort when the door to the long chamber of cells swung open. I heard the heavy steps of several guards.
“Which cell holds Vives?” The voice was piercing.
My cell door was unlocked, and they entered, silencing me with a rough hand to my mouth. My hands were tied behind my back, and I was marched past Zuniga’s cell. The hand over my mouth was momentarily loosened
“I will watch out for you, my friend, from the other side,” I shouted.
“In the name of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, do no harm to this man,” he replied.
We travelled through a myriad of tiny, damp passageways that must have been underneath the main church and ascended to a small chamber. They hurled me inside into semi-darkness. My eyes gradually focussed. There was a large tub of water and a bar of London soap, clean clothes, sheets of paper and ink, all the things I had requested. A tiny candle burnt on a long bench. There was a bed and warm woollen blankets.
What could I do but write? That is where these pages were written, though I may be sentencing myself and others to an early grave. Perhaps it is a trick, now that they know I will not buckle from interrogation. By virtue of the fact that I am writing, it shows me that the angel of hope is still with me. As I finish it, my eyes strained, I hear in the faint spit of the candle flame the words from my boyhood.
“Shalom al-Israel, aleinu ve-al-banenu.”
“Father, what does it mean?”
“Peace over Israel, over us and over our children.”
8 April 1529
What happened next was like an earthquake that struck without warning—the guards, the unlocking of the door, the grabbing. I didn’t have time to set the papers afire as I’d planned. Instead, I dropped them and kicked my piss pot onto them so no man would pick them up.
I was led blindfolded through more passages, past gasping nuns to the corner of a darkened room. The men took my blindfold off and left me there. As my sight gradually returned, I could see a figure, crouched and covered with a dark veil. I could see the eyes, the nose, the parted lips, and the teeth. She turned to me, removed the veil, and said in soft, monastic tones, “My dearest friend, what have they done to you?”
I was ashamed at my appearance, a beard down to my chest and a stench of urine, sweat, and gruel.
“Mistress Roper, I must smell worse than a dead cat. I am so sorry.”
“Shhhh,” she said. “It’s your Meg. Your poor arm. You are so thin—the ribs, the pelvis.”
I apologised again. “Are they to finish me here?” I asked.
“Juanito, you are not finished,” she sighed, her brown hair showing now, long and wavy.
As my vision focussed, I could see the apple green of her dress. I jolted as she put her hand on my left arm, held lifeless on my lap like that of a dead child.
“How so?”
I reached for her with my right hand and found that she, too, was all bone and hanging flesh.
“Meg, my sweetest one, what happened to you?”
“What use is food in this world?” she answered.
I didn’t like this talk, for I had seen the starvation sickness even among the rich.
“You must eat, my love, but first tell me what happened out there?”
She began picking at the cuff of her green dress incessantly. This was a different Meg. After a time of gibbering, she told me of her long journey to the king’s chambers. She had waited there for three days before he would see her. She had not been able to eat or sleep since my arrest. Her guilt had become a monster, slowly killing her, and she had to act.
“No guilt, no guilt,” I said.
She shook her head. “Mea culpa,” she said and then continued. When the king emerged from his chamber, she threw herself at his feet, begging for clemency. He kicked her off, but he caught her eye, her desperation, and against Anne Boleyn’s pleading, he gave Meg a private audience. Anne was at his side throughout, scoffing at the pleas for mercy, telling the king they no longer needed the support of the Chelsea Mores or the Spanish Jews. After an hour of pleading for my life, the king looked at Meg. “I will do this for you, Margaret Roper, and nothing else. Y
ou will not grace my court again. I declare that no one will ever ask me for clemency again.” He pointed to Anne and said, “Not even her.”
The king and Anne Boleyn fought like brother and sister.
“You will do this for her but do nothing for me!” she screeched. Her frantic brother was at her side, egging her on.
“No one talks to me like this,” the king roared. He then softened and turned to Anne. “I would change my kingdom for you, my little duckee. And the price you will pay is sons.”
“And if I only give you daughters?” she asked.
“It won’t happen, it is against God’s will.”
Anne turned and kissed the king on the cheek, inspecting Meg from head to toe before shouting at the king’s guards. “Get her out, now!”
It was true what the gypsy told Meg all those years ago: “The next queen will hate you.”
My legs began shaking at that thought.
“Meg, I would not be shy after all this. You risked everything for me, and yet your husband said I invaded your chamber. Why?”
She sighed, looked at me, and a tear welled in her eye. “Because I have not loved a man but you, señor. I loved you before I found your secret diary, and I loved you again after, even though I had it decoded. I know code when I see it, so I asked Álvaro to work on it and then had it checked by William Grocyn, the preacher, who told Reginald Pole.”
“What did Álvaro tell you my words meant?”
“The truth you are trying so hard to forget—your Jewish heart. That you loved another with all your heart and soul but that you cared for me and loved me as well.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. Álvaro was my brother. He had shielded her from the truth though it had not helped my father.
“Then why break my heart with that letter from your husband?” I asked, lifting her chin and looking into her brown eyes.
“My husband is a powerful man. He has spies everywhere.” She broke away from my touch but looked at me in the eyes until hers glazed over. “You see, he has me in his grip. He can be violent, even to my sisters.”
“Why tolerate this nonsense?”
“Because he has threatened to turn against Father and give evidence to the king of Father’s campaigns against—” She broke off in shame.
I knew well that her father, once my great friend, had launched a vicious attack against the heretics and that he had privately declared against the Boleyn faction. If William Roper told the king everything he knew, then Sir Thomas would be guilty of treason.
Meg had risked her life for mine.
“This sacrifice might hurt you, my sweet. How can I express my gratitude?”
“You don’t need to, for what else could I do when I owed you a life?” she said.
“The king of Spain took that life, not you.”
There was a knock on the door. Our time was almost up.
“If I hadn’t raided your trunk, if I hadn’t spoken to Grocyn,” she said. “If Pole...”
“It’s all right. Justice will be done in the Lord’s own way, and there is still a life that I will yet save.”
“Your sisters, you mean?”
“Well, one of them.”
“The warrior Jewess?” she asked.
“That’s the one.”
Goosebumps spread over my face and cheek, and I shuddered with pride to know that Beatriz Vives, whose very existence dangled by a thread, was indeed a warrior Jewess, perhaps a present-day Lilith.
But I remembered with whom I was sitting. I touched her soft, cool cheek and kissed her on the lips.
The guards entered the chamber to separate us.
“You are not to leave with her,” the tall one said flatly.
“But she has come for me,” I pleaded.
“It is the order of the king. She is to go, and you are to be taken tomorrow to the city. You are not to see her again, nor are you to set foot in the royal palace. You have a day to leave England or you will be brought back here.”
“No, sir. This is my Meg. We must visit the sick in Bedlam and work together for my hospitals. This is not right!” I shouted louder with every word, knowing this was probably the last time Meg would hear my words.
She turned to me and said, “It is as it must be. It was the bargain. Farewell, Juanito.” With that, she was gone.
When I returned to my chamber, I found Zuniga picking through my piss-stained papers, drying them on a rack in front of a set of candles. He had been allowed in specifically to read what I had left there.
“It is as I thought. There is a secret world that lives among us.”
“A secret world that does no harm and that is true to the word of God.”
I offered to give him anything for his silence—a book, the gold my wife had in the cellar of our house—but he would have none of it.
“We have taken enough from you, señor.”
He handed me the papers. The guards came for him next, and he said to the tall one, “It’s nothing but Spanish love songs to his Spanish wife.” Without a struggle, he was gone.
As he left, I shouted, “She lives in the caves. She’s a good woman. Her name is Beatriz. The others’ names are Eva and Leonora.” But he was gone.
* * *
There was no ceremony as I was kicked out of the barge at Billingsgate, with its skiffs and nets, its smell of shore-crabs and street soil. “Fuck off and sward with your own,” said the young man who’d held me to the back wall of my cell with a garden fork. Struggling through crowds at the market, the half-mile to Houndsditch seemed like ten, and I staggered through the throng, slipping on discarded piles of fish guts. I pushed through the hawkers and coney-catchers of Thames, fuelled only by spring’s light and the sparrow’s rapid chattering. I was near The Flying Horse. Would I find there a torched ruin? A new family who had made it their own?
I opened the back gate from Camomile Street, and there, like the calm mystic he was, I found Álvaro de Castro. He was sitting on the back step reading from a book. Sarah Elisha was hanging out washing, and Gasper was teasing Eduardo. Henry the hound looked up, his pink tongue hanging from the corner of his mouth. He yelped for joy, jumped at my frail chest, and knocked me over. They were safe; they had survived.
“Hermano,” said Álvaro, picking me up from the cobbles while looking into my ravaged face.
“Juanito,” said Sarah. “We have been expecting you.”
I fell to my knees, exhausted. “Expecting me? The next world is the only place that’s been expecting me!”
“That is not true,” said Álvaro. “We knew it was not your time.”
Had my incarceration meant so little to him?
“How did you know this when even the king did not know?” I asked him.
“God speaks.”
They gave me food and clean clothes. They also gave me warm water in a wooden tub, soap and perfume, and a sharp razor to trim my beard. There was a letter, too, that he gave me, embossed with the royal seal of the queen. I was to leave England as soon as I was able lest the king change his mind. If there had been a boat, I would have been on it that night, but I needed to talk with Álvaro. When all had left the inn, and Sarah and Benjamin had gone to bed, I cornered him.
“Álvaro, help me.”
“Juanito, you must delve deeply within your soul. Take the path your conscience dictates.”
“But I can’t see my own conscience. I am tortured.”
He knew that I was asking him to open the door once more to the celestial path, to the mystical world, as he had done once before. He looked at me for a minute and took me by the arm, saying, “Come.”
Into the cellar we went, the chief synagogue of England, lighting candles and drawing a Magen David across my body. He gave me the dagger to pierce the cellar’s dank air. “Visualise the four archangels.”
Michael was before me, Gabriel behind. Raphael was on my right, Uriel on my left.
“Now the shechinah, the light of God above your head,” he said.
It was a golden light, and then it happened. Once more the cellar’s brick-vaulted ceiling disappeared, and I could see a beautiful blue sky. This was not the sky of Valencia or of England, but the sky of Flanders. There were children laughing and running in the street. One of them was Zeek. There were burghers walking past, arm in arm. There was my home on Verversdijk. I noticed an open door, and inside there was not my wife but my father, looking up at me with outstretched palms. “Son, you have done well. You have worked and toiled, and you have paid the price. Your great work will be done one day. Now come home.”
I looked into Father’s dark eyes, rushing for his outstretched palms, but before I could get there he was gone. Instead, I saw my wife cooking, laughing, and talking to Henry the giant poodle. The scene then shifted, and I saw Princess Mary sitting at her studies, bereft and abandoned. I saw the queen in her chamber, also abandoned. I saw Mistress Roper sitting alone at her studies, thin and sick-looking, translating a text from Latin into English. Then I saw my father again, and he walked past the princess, the queen, and Margaret Roper. He looked at me and spoke without compromise. “Son, there is nothing more you can do. The only life you can save is your own. You must leave. Pain is the way of the world, and the world wants you, at least for now. Your greater work is not yet done.”
The sky rolled back and there was the warmth of a Valencian sky, the sound of the nightingales seeking out Persian roses. There was the running of children in the streets and the smells of the kitchens of La Juderia, the lavender of my mother. I could hear the tinkering of brass on silver from the home of our neighbour, Eduardo de Pinto, and squeals from indoors as my brother, Jaime, was chased by my sisters. My focus shifted from Jaime to Beatriz and would not leave her.
The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives Page 23