By Fire, By Water by Mitchell James Kaplan
No inquisitor came to query him about his remembrance, or his excuses. No one asked for penitence or offered absolution. Estefan’s belly was shrinking. His beard was growing tangled.
After uncounted months, two constables entered his cell, bundled him in a blanket, and hauled him out to a cart. The cart barrelled and bumped over rugged highways for three days. They threw him like a sack of grain into another dank, penumbral cell.
In moments of lucidity, he wondered whether there was not a meaning to his incarceration, a reason for the events occurring around him. He found himself meditating upon the nature of belief and belonging, upon the unrequited love his adoptive parents had shown him and their loyalty to the half-digested, minimal Judaism they had tried to instill in him. He thought about death, how death might bring fulfillment to his life. His soreness slowly grew familiar.
He tried to conjure from memory the Sabbath blessings. He wondered what function those blessings could provide in a place like this, where time no longer existed. He concluded that time was what the Sabbath was about, marking and dignifying the separation of the weeks. Although he could not know whether today was Saturday or Wednesday, he would reconstruct the Sabbath prayers in his mind, piece by piece, and recite what he remembered, if only in protest, to remind himself he was human.
The rack occupied the place of honor in the center of the torture room. The subject lay on its wooden plate, feet and hands tied to the frame. When the torturer turned a handle, the roller advanced one notch. Each notch pulled the subject’s limbs slowly apart. Muscles stretched, ligaments popped. The pain was excruciating. A full course of torture upon the rack would prevent a man from ever walking again. Few required such extreme measures. Confessions spilled out much sooner than that.
No one could pretend to be courageous for very long. Estefan Santángel was no exception. He groaned, his face drenched in tears, his teeth clattering, his body trembling and sweating. He mouthed to himself, “It will soon be over.”
“I’m sorry. What did you say?” asked Torquemada, sitting near him.
At a table in the corner, a small Latin scribe, tonsured, copied every word.
“I was praying,” Estefan whispered.
“In Hebrew, or in Latin?”
“In His language,” Estefan replied with as much force as he could muster. It came out as a croak.
The inquisitor waited. The tax farmer was sealing his own fate. “I need a confession, Señor Santángel. For your own sake.”
Estefan said something. Torquemada leaned toward the converso, his ear close to his mouth.
“What do you need?”
“I need you to tell me about your secret practice of the Jewish faith. Who taught you? With whom did you pray? Why did you abandon the Christianity that was offered to you, a precious gift, in the holy sacrament of baptism?”
Estefan seemed half-conscious. Torquemada waited. Finally, his eyes closed, Estefan muttered, “The God of the Jews, the God of the Christians, they’re the same God. If Jesus could pray to Him, why can’t I?”
Torquemada shook his head. In his most soothing, pedantic tone, the inquisitor explained, “There are many things you cannot possibly do that our Lord Jesus Christ could do. Can you walk on water? Can you raise someone from the dead? Can you cause a tree to wither?”
The tax farmer did not respond.
“So what makes you think that you, Señor Santángel, of all people, can approach the Father directly, without going through the Son? What makes you so special?”
Estefan closed his eyes. It seemed to him that no amount of torture, no explanation he could come up with, could satisfy his tormentor. It almost seemed, bizarrely and perversely, that Torquemada needed him to come around, to admit that he saw things as the Inquisition did, in order to justify Torquemada’s own convictions.
Estefan tried again. “Please, Father, give me my body back, and I shall gladly expose to you my soul.”
“Who killed Pedro de Arbués? Who stole Felipe de Almazón’s confessions? What was in them that merited such violence?” One of the many techniques in the inquisitor’s arsenal was the use of the non sequitur. His aim was to catch his subject off guard.
“No … idea …”
“The chancellor, your brother, Luis de Santángel. He was surely involved, was he not?”
Estefan swallowed. “No. Luis is no murderer.”
Torquemada sighed, discouraged. He nodded to the tall, hooded torturer, who turned the wheel one more notch. Again, Estefan moaned.
The inquisitor general ushered the scribe and the torturer out of the room and blew out the candle on the sconce, leaving Estefan taut on the rack, in the dark.
Outside the torture chamber, the inquisitor turned to the scribe who had been assisting him. “Hernández, where have you been this past year?”
“I have been living in the Monasterio de Piedra. I had much to contemplate, Father.”
“Don’t we all. But tell me, you worked with Father Arbués, did you not?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall the testimony of an officer in the king’s chancellery, Felipe de Almazón?”
“Yes, Father.”
“To your knowledge, did Arbués share this with anyone else?”
“Certainly not.”
“Did Almazón speak of a plot? Did you hear anything related to the murder?”
The scribe gave this a moment’s thought. “Not that I recall. It’s all in the log.”
“The log is missing. Come with me.”
In his dining room, by the light of a single, fat taper, Luis de Santángel contemplated the pawns and knights on a chess board he had purchased after his son was born. Here, over the years, he had instructed Gabriel when to move boldly and when to devise a subtle strategy, when to surprise and when to challenge. Now he sat alone, trying to play both sides. He pushed rosewood kings and olivewood bishops from square to square, but his mind was elsewhere.
He remembered the expression on his departed wife’s face when, thirteen years earlier, she had clasped their newborn to her chest. The physician could not stop her bleeding. She knew she was dying, but she smiled. She turned her eyes to her husband and wordlessly told him she trusted him to nurture their child.
Had she lived, Santángel asked himself, who would Gabriel be today? He would have received a secret Jewish education, as had all the males in her family. He would have prepared and celebrated a secret bar mitzvah, even while attending Mass and studying Aquinas. He would have learned that faith is more about posing questions than receiving answers. This knowledge would have protected him, perhaps, from the lies of an Alfonso de Espina. Santángel could no longer see his wife, but he still felt her eyes upon him. He felt other eyes, too, those of his mother.
He remembered the morning she had roused him and Estefan, well before dawn, two days after his grandfather had died. He was eleven years old.
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“We are going to visit a garden. A very special garden. A garden of death. Your grandfather wanted this. One day you will understand. Wake your brother. Get out of bed. Get dressed. Nothing showy. Linen, not wool. Brown, not crimson.”
The two boys, Luis and Estefan, groggily rose and dressed, pulling tight the cords around their brown tunics.
“You must never tell anyone. Or you, too, will surely die.”
“Must we go?” the boys whined, practically in unison. At that young age, Estefan sometimes mimicked his older brother.
“We must. You will understand. But never tell anyone.”
In a rickety work cart, led by a burro so as not to attract attention, their majordomo Hernán drove them to the cemetery beside the cathedral. Standing on either side of their mother, whose hands rested upon their shoulders, the two boys watched as Hernán unearthed their grandfather’s coffin.
“Why is Hernán doing this?” Luis swallowed, hardly able to speak. “Is this not a sin?”
“Hus
Little Estefan fidgeted.
As his grandfather’s coffin cleared the earth, the cathedral bells began ringing, announcing matins. Hastily, Hernán refilled the hole and topped it with sod.
Together, they lifted the coffin into the cart. “Your grandfather wanted this,” their mother reminded them in a whisper.
Sitting in the cart with his brother and mother as it rolled through the city, still in darkness, Luis rested his hand on the simple oak box, redolent of mud and worms. How could it contain the silent, insensible body of the man who had kneeled at his bedside so recently, telling him a story about a hidden treasure, a story Luis would repeat to his own son years later?
They transported the coffin to a smaller cemetery in an unknown quarter. A group of men with skullcaps and beards met them. As dawn broke, these men directed them to a part of the cemetery where the grass grew high. Strange signs and symbols adorned the gravestones: gashes and dashes, triangles and circles. The men asked Luis’s mother to tear a part of her dress. Luis’s mother, usually more comfortable dispensing orders than receiving them, complied with a sniffle, like an obedient child.
They had already dug the hole. The transplantation of Luis’s grandfather proceeded rapidly as the bearded men mumbled incantations in a foreign tongue. All this seemed aberrant and perilous. Luis’s mind burned with questions.
As dawn broke, he pushed the chess pieces off the board, found a feather pen and paper, and began writing a heartfelt missive to the king:
My Liege,
…
A terrible scourge has befallen our land. It is a pestilence born not of poison, nor from Divine wrath, but from suspicion, envy, and counterfeit righteousness. Its victims—dare I pen my inmost certitudes?—include not only our most evil, but some of our most noble and more than a few of our most innocent citizens. I know this well, for my own son, whom Your Highness may recall holding in his arms when he was but a newborn, must unfortunately be counted among them, as well as my very brother …
Santángel carefully folded the letter, sealed it with wax, and carried it down to the great room, where he found his majordomo building the morning fire.
“Iancu, see this gets to the king as soon as possible. I want his signature on the delivery log.”
“My lord.” Iancu took the letter, leaving Santángel alone in the vast, empty hall, trying to warm his hands at the small fire.
The chancellor attended High Mass in the cathedral. He had not set foot in La Seo since the night of the murder. The gothic demons and horsemen seemed to snarl at him from the arches of the doorways. The very stones of the walls accused him.
As he took his place in the pews, he noticed a small, familiar statue in a dedicated niche, surrounded by candles. Jacob, wrestling with his mirror-image angel. Under torture, Felipe must have mentioned the coffin of angels buried in his courtyard. Soldiers of the Inquisition, in their quest to retrieve the evidence, would immediately have dug it up. Recognizing the beauty of Felipe’s sculpture, the care and passion with which he had fashioned it, and fearing Felipe’s supposedly heretical intent, they must then have rededicated the statue to the service of Jesus Christ. Tears in his eyes, Santángel turned away from Jacob and the angel.
Monsignor Pedro de Monterubio led the Mass. His adjutant, Raimundo Díaz de Cáceres, administered the Eucharist.
Santángel knelt to receive the wafer of Christ’s flesh into his mouth. He and the priest avoided looking at each other.
“We must talk,” whispered Cáceres after uttering the benediction in Latin.
“Come tonight,” Santángel whispered back.
Santángel found Cáceres waiting outside his manor.
“I have it.” The priest turned his back to the street and removed a large book, similar to the volumes on Pedro de Arbués’s bookshelves, from under his cape. He handed it to the chancellor.
“How? Where?”
“We’re not alone. We have helpers.”
“Have you read it?”
“Not yet.”
“Thank you.” Santángel clutched it to his chest. “Do we know who took this down?”
“No.”
Pedro de Arbués, that cagey realist, had omitted the name of the scribe. “One other thing. My brother. Has he been transferred to the ecclesiastical jail, here in Zaragoza?”
“I shall find out.”
“Please. And if so, let me know what bribe I can use to gain admittance.”
The chancellor spent the night deciphering the sometimes clumsy Latin hand of the late canon’s scribe. In the halting, back-and-forth manner of forced confessions, it told of a man who had learned as a child that Jews were not human. They were dogs.
FATHER ARBUÉS: From whom did you learn this?
ALMAZÓNUS: From you, Father. In La Seo. You preached…
FATHER ARBUÉS: “Beware the dogs, the evil workers, the mutilation.”
ALMAZÓNUS: Yes.
FATHER ARBUÉS: Saint Paul, Philippians three two. Beware the circumcision.
ALMAZÓNUS: Yes.
FATHER ARBUÉS: Do you recall the rest?
ALMAZÓNUS: The rest?
FATHER ARBUÉS: Of that sermon.
ALMAZÓNUS: Not sure.
FATHER ARBUÉS: Saint John Chrysostom?
ALMAZÓNUS: No. No, I don’t.
FATHER ARBUÉS: “Although these beasts, these Jew-dogs, are unfit for nourishment or work, they are fit for killing.”
The interrogation continued along these lines, Arbués probing Felipe de Almazón’s understanding of the underlying issues, for several pages. In a later session, the inquisitor took a different tack.
FATHER ARBUÉS: When did you first learn that you belonged to the species of Jew dogs? When did you …
ALMAZÓNUS: My cousin’s domain. Outside Madrid
FATHER ARBUÉS: His name?
ALMAZÓNUS: Antón María Méndez y Flores, the Marquis of Tarazona.
FATHER ARBUÉS: How did this happen?
ALMAZÓNUS: We jousted, then swam. When he removed his clothes, I saw.
FATHER ARBUÉS: You saw?
ALMAZÓNUS: His mutilation.
FATHER ARBUÉS: He was circumcised? How old were you?
ALMAZÓNUS: Seventeen. I remember because … because his father died that year.
FATHER ARBUÉS: Before this event, or after? His father’s death.
ALMAZÓNUS: A few months before. And then … Antón learned. He learned … about his secret past.
FATHER ARBUÉS: He mutilated himself, this cousin of yours? Or did someone else …
ALMAZÓNUS: Yes. Himself.
At this point, Pedro de Arbués’s questions veered away from Felipe de Almazón’s narrative into a lengthy effort to catalog every relative of the subject, living and dead, to determine whether each may have secretly met with Antón’s father, been exposed to the family secret, espoused heretical doctrines, or otherwise shown signs of deviance. Luis de Santángel thumbed rapidly through these pages, then stopped again.
After he returned from his shattering visit with his cousin, Felipe had attempted to banish any thought that his blood might be impure. He attended Mass more regularly, read the Gospel nightly, meditated with the rosary, confessed his sins.
One afternoon, while rehearsing his lance technique, he fell from his horse and seriously injured his shoulder. The doctor who treated him, Isaac Buendía, an Israelite, prescribed balms and rest. In the privacy of his closed bedroom, during one of this doctor’s visits, Felipe related what he had learned from his cousin.
This particular confession took place in Felipe’s cell, rather than in the torture room:
FATHER ARBUÉS: This was when, precisely?
ALMAZÓNUS: I met my wife at that time, so it was …
FATHER ARBUÉS: Eight years ago.
ALMAZÓNUS: Yes.
FATHER ARBUÉS: What did this physician tell you?
ALMAZÓNUS: Nothing, at first.
FATHER ARBUÉS: And then?
FATHER ARBUÉS: What did you ask him?
ALMAZÓNUS: Is Jewishness a matter of blood, or faith? Do Jews believe in salvation? Who gets saved? What about Christ’s miracles?
FATHER ARBUÉS: What did Dr. Buendía tell you?
ALMAZÓNUS: He finally answered some of my questions.
FATHER ARBUÉS: Which ones?
As dawn approached, the chancellor neared the part of the story he already knew. Under torture, Felipe de Almazón spoke of meetings he had attended, some in the homes of high-ranking functionaries including the chancellor himself. To believe his testimony, the court of King Fernando was as surcharged with covert judaizers as a knight’s wounded leg with maggots applied by a skilled surgeon. Their fraternity had all the attributes of a classic cabal: a secret language, the promise of special proximity to God, a small number of people deemed worthy of trust.
Felipe also mentioned an ancient parchment. He described Serero’s refusal to translate or discuss it: “the Christians” had massacred Jews because of the story it told. This detail, Santángel knew, would have piqued Tomás de Torquemada’s curiosity more than any other words in Felipe’s story.
Sunrise was breaking in the east. Luis de Santángel could not fall asleep with the inquisitorial log in his arms, or even in his house. He carried it downstairs to the fireplace. He stood watching the flames as they crawled across the pages.