CHAPTER FIFTEEN

AUTO-DE-FÉ

A new phase began for the prisoners on a morning when guards came and shackled Espina and took him in a wagon to the Office of the Inquisition for questioning.

It was night when they brought him back with both thumbs bloody and splayed, ruined by torture with the screw. Yonah brought him water, but he lay on the floor of his cell with his face to the wall.

In the morning Yonah went back to him.

“How is it you are here?” Yonah whispered. “In Toledo we knew you for a willing Christian.”

“I am a willing Christian.”

“Then … why do they torture you?”

Espina was quiet. “What do they know of Jesus?” he said finally.

*   *   *

The men kept coming with the wagon and took the prisoners away one by one. Juan Peropan returned from his interrogation with his left arm dangling, broken at the wheel. It was enough to unhinge his wife, Isabel. At her own interrogation she avoided torture by agreeing hysterically to everything her questioners suggested.

Yonah served wine to the alguacil and two of his friends to whom Isadoro was relating the details of Isabel’s confession.

“She placed full blame on the husband. Juan Peropan never stopped being a Jew, she says, never, never! He forced her to buy Jew meat and fowl, forced her to listen to unholy prayers and participate in them, forced her to teach them to her children.”

One by one she had provided evidence against every prisoner accused of Judaizing, buttressing the charges against them.

Isidoro Alvarez said she even testified against the physician, a stranger to her, agreeing Espina had confided to her that he had fulfilled the covenant of Abraham by performing thirty-eight ritual circumcisions on Jewish babies.

The questioning of each of the accused took a number of days. Then one morning on the balcony of the Office of the Inquisition a red banner was displayed, indicating that soon capital punishment would be administered at an auto-de-fé.

*   *   *

Having abandoned all hope, Bernardo Espina suddenly became eager to speak of Toledo.

Instinctively, Yonah trusted him. Scrubbing the floor of the corridor one afternoon, he paused next to Espina’s cell and they talked. Yonah related how his father had gone to the empty Espina home and then to the Priory of the Assumption, only to find that the priory was abandoned.

Espina nodded, showing no surprise to hear that the Priory of the Assumption had been discontinued. “One morning Fray Julio Peréz, the sacristan, and two armed guards were found slain outside the chapel. And the relic of Santa Ana was missing.

“There are deep churchly currents here, young Toledano, cruel enough to swallow with ease the likes of you and me. Rodrigo Cardinal Lancol lately has become our new pontiff, Pope Alexander VI. His Holiness would not have suffered gladly a priory that allowed so sacred a relic to vanish. The friars doubtless have been scattered within the Hieronymite order.”

“And Prior Sebastián?”

“You may be certain he is a prior no longer, and that he has been sent to a place where he will serve out his priestly life in hard fashion,” Espina said.

He made a bitter face. “Perhaps the thieves have united the relic with the ciborium fashioned by your father.”

“What kind of men would commit the sin of murder to steal sacred objects?” Yonah asked, and Espina smiled wearily.

“Unholy men who give the appearance of holiness. Throughout Christendom, the pious always have placed enormous faith and hope in relics. There is a vast and rich commerce for such objects, and deadly vying for them.”

Espina related how Padre Sebastián had charged him with discovering what had occurred in the murder of Meir. It was hard for Yonah to hear his observations about the scene of Meir’s murder, and then Espina spoke of his own detention by Fray Bonestruca, the inquisitor.

“Bonestruca? I was told it was Bonestruca who enraged the mob and sent it to my father. I have seen this Bonestruca,” Yonah said.

“He has a strangely beautiful face, is it not so? But his soul must carry a heavy load.” Espina told Yonah that Diego Diaz had seen Bonestruca and a knight riding in the footsteps of Meir Toledano.

“Bonestruca was there when Meir was killed?” Yonah whispered.

“Almost certainly. And stole the ciborium your brother was seeking to deliver,” Espina said. “He is a man who would easily destroy anyone who learns something that might bring trouble to him. I knew when I was released after his questioning that I must go away or he would collect me again, the second time for good. I was trying to think where I could move my family when Padre Sebastián sent for me. When the prior told me the relic had been taken as well as the ciborium, it was as if he had gone mad. He wept. He ordered me to recover the relic, as though that were in my power if only I wished to do it. He ranted about the enormity of the crime, and he begged me to redouble my efforts to find those who had moved so terribly against him.

“But only hours later, as I was crossing the Plaza Mayor, Bonestruca and I passed one another. The friar stared at me. That was all it took.”

Espina shook his head. “I was convinced that if I stayed in Toledo even a moment more, I would be seized. I bade my wife to take our children to the protection of kinfolk, and I fled.”

“Where did you go?”

“North, into the high mountains. I found hidden places, traveled between small settlements where they were greatly pleased to see a physician.”

Yonah could believe they had been pleased. He remembered the tenderness with which this man had treated his mother and recalled that his father had said Espina had prenticed with Samuel Provo, the great Jewish physician.

Espina had lived a noble life, serving others. This physician who had abandoned the religion of his fathers nevertheless was a worthy man, a healer, and yet he was condemned. Yonah wondered if perhaps these conversos could be saved, but he saw no way. At night their guard was Gato, a mean-spirited man who slept all day and watched the cells with malevolent wakefulness. During the day, when opportunity might arise for Yonah to kill the napping Paco with his sharpened hoe, neither the prisoners nor Yonah himself would get very far in Ciudad Real. The city was an armed camp.

If God wished them to be saved, he would have to show Yonah some way.

“How long was it before they found you?”

“I had been abroad almost three years when they took me. The Inquisition casts a damnably wide net.”

Yonah was chilled, knowing it was the same net he must elude.

He saw that Paco was awake and the guard’s hard gaze was on them, and he resumed his scrubbing.

“A good afternoon, Señor Espina.”

“A good afternoon … Tomás Martín.”

*   *   *

The Inquisition was careful to place executions in the hands of the civil authorities, and in the Plaza Mayor the alguacil directed laborers to raise seven wooden stakes, next to a quemadero, a circular brick oven being hurriedly assembled by masons.

Inside the jail some of the prisoners wept, some prayed. Espina appeared calm and resigned.

Yonah was washing the corridor floor when Espina spoke to him. “I must ask something of you.”

“Anything I am able…”

“I have a son of eight years, name of Francisco Rivera de la Espina. Lives with his mother Estrella Duranda and his two sisters. Will you deliver to this boy his father’s breviary and blessings?”

“Señor.” Yonah was astonished and dismayed. “I cannot return to Toledo. At any rate, your house is empty. Where is your family?”

“I know not, perhaps with her cousins, the Duranda family of Maqueda. Or perhaps with the Duranda family of Medellín. But take the breviary, I beg you. It may be that God will someday make it possible for you to deliver it.”

Yonah nodded. “Yes, I will try,” he said, though the Christian book seemed to burn his fingers as he took it.

Espina thrust his hand through the grate of the cell.

Yonah grasped it. “May the Almighty be merciful to you.”

“I shall be with Jesus. God watch over you and sustain you, Toledano. I would ask you to pray for my soul.”

*   *   *

A crowd gathered early in the Plaza Mayor, more thickly than for any contest with the bulls. The day was cloudless, a touch of autumn chill in the breeze. There was an air of suppressed excitement buoyed by the shouting of children, the muted rumble of conversation, the cries of food vendors, and the sprightly songs of a quartet: a flutist, two guitarists, and a lute player.

By midmorning, a priest appeared. He raised his hand for silence and then led the assembled in endless Paternosters. By now the square was dense with bodies, Yonah among them. Spectators had filled all the balconies of the buildings overlooking the plaza and were crowded onto all the roofs. Soon there was a disturbance in the plaza as the watchers closest to the stakes were driven back by Isidoro Alvarez’s men to make way for the arrival of the condemned.

The prisoners were brought from the jail in three farm carts, two-wheeled tumbrels pulled by burros. They were paraded through the streets to the jeers of spectators.

All eleven of the convicted Judaizers wore the pointed hats of the punished. Two men and a woman wore yellow sanbenitos marked with diagonal crosses. They had been sentenced to return to their home parishes to wear the sanbenito for long periods of penitence and reconciliation, Christian piety, and the disgust of their neighbors.

Six men and two women wore black sanbenitos decorated with demons and hellfire, signifying that they would die by immolation.

At the Plaza Mayor the condemned were pulled down from the tumbrels, their garments taken from them, and the crowd reacted to their nudity with a rustle and a surge like the sea tide, everyone wishing to scrutinize the nakedness that was an ingredient of their shame.

Through his numb gaze Yonah saw that Ana Montelban appeared older naked than when clad, with long, flat breasts and gray hair between her legs. Isobel Peropan looked younger, with the round, firm buttocks of a maiden. Her husband was prostrated with grief and fear. He could not walk but was supported and dragged. Each prisoner was taken to a stake, and their arms were pulled behind the posts and tied.

The hairy body of Isaac de Marspera was free of bruises; the butcher had escaped torture because his rebellious and constant use of Hebrew prayer had made his guilt obvious, but now for his defiance they had selected him for the quemadero. The opening left in the wall of the oven was small, and three men pushed and crammed his large body inside, while people cast gleeful insult and Isaac roared back the Shema. His lips didn’t stop moving while masons worked quickly to brick up the entrance.

Espina was praying in Latin.

Many hands piled the bundles of brush and wood around them. The fagots rose to provide a semimodesty, covering their lower trunks, hiding bruises and abrasions, scars and the shameful stains of fright, and building around the quemadero until it was no longer possible to see the bricks of the oven.

The quartet began to play hymns.

Chaplains were standing next to the four prisoners who had requested reconciliation with Christ. Their stake had been fitted with garrotes, bands of steel fastened about their necks, to be tightened by screws set behind the posts. For their piety the blessing of churchly mercy was now showered upon them and they were strangled prior to the burning. Isobel Peropan went first; she had been condemned despite pleas of guiltlessness and her dooming denunciation of the others, but the Inquisition had granted her the mercy of the garrote.

It was applied next to Espina and to two brothers from Almagro as Isidoro went down the line with a lighted torch, touching off each pile of dry fagots, which ignited with a great crackling.

As the flames rose so did the sounds of the people who responded according to their temperaments with shouts of awe and wonderment, exclamations of fear, or screams of merriment and glee. Men and women held up children that they might glimpse on earth the fiery hell from which the Lord God would save and protect them providing they obeyed father and priest and did not sin.

The fuel around the quemadero was burning with a great roar. Isaac the butcher was within, baking like a chicken in an oven except, Yonah told himself faintly, a fowl was not roasted alive.

The condemned writhed. Their mouths opened and closed but Yonah could not hear their cries for the noise of the crowd. Isabel Peropan’s long hair went up in a burst, creating a yellow and blue halo about the purpled face. Yonah could not bear to look at Espina. Smoke billowed and blew, concealing all, giving reason for his weeping eyes. Someone was poking his shoulder, shouting in his ear.

It was Isidoro. The alguacil pointed to the dwindling wood, cursed him for a lazy lout, told him he must go help Paco and Gato load a wagon with fresh fagots.

*   *   *

When the wagon was laden he didn’t return to the plaza. In the silent and empty jail he collected his sack and the broken hoe and brought them to where Moise cropped peacefully in the shade.

Once mounted, he startled the good little burro with his heels and they departed from Ciudad Real at a brisk canter. He didn’t see the trail or the countryside. The auto-de-fé was a foretaste of the cruel way he would die when he was caught. Something in him screamed that he must seek out a sympathetic priest. Perhaps it was not too late to beg for the chrism and lead a life of careful Catholic rectitude.

But he had made promise to his father’s memory, to God, to his people.

To himself.

For the first time, his hatred of the Inquisition was stronger than his fear. He couldn’t erase the images, and he spoke to God not as a supplicant but in demanding fury.

What can be the Divine Plan that causes so many of us to be Hanged Men?

And, For what purpose have you made me the last Jew in Spain?