CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

A FULFILLED RESPONSIBILITY

When Yonah brought the breviary to the prison the young priest led him down a dank stone corridor to a cubby where they could sit unobserved. He accepted the breviary as if it were an item bewitched. Yonah watched as he opened it and read what was written behind the cover.

“‘To my son, Francisco Rivera de La Espina, these words of daily prayer to Jesus Christ, our heavenly Savior, with the undying love of his father on earth. Bernardo de la Espina.’”

“What a strange sentiment, from one who was a convicted heretic!”

“Your father was not a heretic.”

“My father was a heretic, señor, and burned at the stake for it. In Ciudad Real. It happened when I was a boy, but I have been informed. I am acquainted with his history.”

“Then you are falsely, and certainly not fully, acquainted, Padre Espina. I was there, in Ciudad Real. I saw your father daily in the days before his death. When I knew him I was a youth and he was a man, a most skilled and tender physician. About to die, and lacking the presence of even one other friend, he asked me to try to find his young son, and to deliver his breviary to you. Everywhere I have traveled, these many years, I have searched for you.”

“You are certain about what you tell me, señor?”

“Absolutely. Your father was innocent of the charges for which he was killed.”

“You know this for fact?” the priest asked in a low voice.

“For firm fact, Padre Espina. He made his daily devotions from this book, almost up to the moment when he was put to death. When he marked it for you, he was leaving you his faith.”

Padre Espina appeared to be a man accustomed to controlling his emotions, yet he was betrayed by paleness. “I have been raised by the Church. My father has been the shame of my life. My face has been rubbed into his supposed apostasy like a puppy’s into piss, so it would not happen again.”

His appearance did not favor his father greatly, Yonah thought, except that he had Bernardo de la Espina’s eyes. “Your father was steadfastly the most believing Christian ever I have known, and one of the finest men of my memory,” Yonah told him.

*   *   *

They sat and talked for a long time, their voices low and steady. Padre Espina said that after his father’s burning, his mother, Estrella de Aranda, had entered the Convento de la Santa Cruz to be a nun, leaving her three children to the charity of several families of cousins in Escalona. Within a year she had died of a malignant fever, and by the time her son had reached the age of ten years his relatives had handed him to the Dominicans, and his sisters, Marta and Domitila, had taken the veil. All three had disappeared into the vast world of the Church.

“I have not seen my sisters since we stayed with our cousins in Escalona. I don’t know of Domitila’s whereabouts, or if she still lives. I learned two years ago that Marta is in a convent in Madrid. I dream of visiting her someday.”

Yonah told him a few things about himself. He spoke of the fact that after he had been a jail boy in Ciudad Real he had apprenticed, first with the armorer Manuel Fierro and then with the physician Nuño Fierro, leading to his becoming the physician of Saragossa.

If there were things he held back from the young priest, he could sense that there were also matters about which Padre Espina could not allow himself to speak freely. But Yonah gathered that he had been assigned only temporarily to the Office of the Inquisition, and that he had little stomach for its activities.

He had been ordained eight months before. “I shall be leaving here in a few days. One of my teachers, Padre Enrique Sagasta, has been made auxiliary bishop of Toledo. He has arranged for me to be assigned as his aide. He is a noted Catholic scholar and historian, and he encourages my wish to follow his path. So I am about to begin an apprenticeship, as you had done.”

“Your father would be proud of you, Padre Espina.”

“I cannot thank you enough, señor. You have given my father back to me,” the priest said.

“May I return tomorrow to see my patients?”

Padre Espina was visibly uncomfortable. Yonah knew he didn’t wish to appear ungrateful yet was unable to grant too much lest he bring trouble to himself. “You may come in the morning. But I warn you, it may well be the last visit that will be allowed.”

*   *   *

When he appeared next day, he learned that Doña Sancha Berga had died during the night.

Don Berenguer received the news of his mother’s death stoically. “I am glad she is free,” he said.

Each surviving member of the family had been notified that morning that they were formally condemned for heresy and would be executed at an auto-de-fé in the near future. Yonah knew there was no delicate way to broach what was burdening his soul.

“Don Berenguer, burning is the worst way to die.”

Between them there flashed shared knowledge of horrible, drawn-out pain, of flesh as charring meat, of blood boiling.

“Why do you tell me so cruel a thing? You think I am unaware?”

“There is a way to escape it. You must reconcile yourself with the Church.”

Berenguer looked at him and saw a disapproving Catholic he had never noted before. “Indeed, must I, Señor Physician?” he said coldly. “It is too late. The sentence is cast in steel.”

“Too late to save your life, but not too late to buy a quick end from the garrote.”

“You think I cut my flesh on an idle whim, and bound myself to my mother’s faith only to renounce it? Have I not told you of my determination to die a Jew?”

“You can die a Jew in your heart. Merely tell them you repent, and buy release. You are forever a Jew, because by Jewish law consecration to the faith is passed from mother to child. Since your mother was born of a Jewish mother, so were you. No declaration can change that. By the ancient law of Moses you are a Jew, and by stating that which they are eager to hear, you will gain a quick strangling and avoid the torture of a slow and terrible death.”

Berenguer closed his eyes. “Yet it is a coward’s way, robbing me of the one noble moment, the single satisfaction I am able to find in my dying.”

“It is not cowardly. Most rabbis are agreed that it is not a sin to accept conversion at the point of a sword.”

“What do you know of rabbis and the law of Moses?” Berenguer stared at him. Yonah could see realization manifest itself in the other man’s eyes.

“My God,” Berenguer said.

“Are you able to have contact with the others of your family?”

“Sometimes they lead us to the courtyard for exercise at the same time. It is possible to exchange a few words.”

“You must tell them to seek Jesus and gain the mercy of a quicker end.”

“My sister, Monica, and her husband, Andrés, are devout Christians. I shall advise my brother, Geraldo, to do as you suggest.”

“I am not to be allowed to see you again.” He walked to Berenguer and embraced him, and kissed him on both cheeks.

“May we meet in a happier place,” Don Berenguer said. “Go in peace.”

“Peace be with you,” Yonah said, and called for the guard.

*   *   *

That Wednesday evening, in the middle of a game of draughts that Yonah was winning, Friar Bonestruca left the game board and began to caper in front of his children. For a little while it was charming. Bonestruca made wry faces and soft, merry sounds as he leaped this way and that. His children laughed and pointed. Squinting, Dionisio ran toward his playful father to see him better, and threw a small wooden ball at him.

On and on the friar frolicked. His smile vanished, the sounds grew less merry and more gutteral, and still he capered and leaped. His face grew rosy with effort and then dark and bitter, yet still the tall figure caroused and whirled, his black habit billowing, his bobbing face become ugly with rage.

The children grew silent and frightened. They huddled away from him, watching wide-eyed, the girl Hortensia openmouthed as if soundlessly screaming. María Juana, their mother, spoke to them quietly and herded them from the room. Yonah wished he could go too, but he could not. He sat at the table watching the terrible dance as it slowed and slowed. Finally it ceased, Bonestruca dropping in exhaustion to his knees.

Presently María Juana came back. She wiped her friar’s face with a moistened cloth and left again, this time to return with wine. Bonestruca drank two glasses and then allowed her to help him back to his seat.

It was a while before he looked up. “I am taken sometimes by spells.”

“I see,” Yonah said.

“Do you, indeed? And what is it that you see?”

“Nothing, señor. It is a manner of speech.”

“It has happened in the company of the priests and friars with whom I carry on my duties. They are watching me.”

Was it the sick man’s imagination? Yonah wondered.

“They have followed me here. They know of María Juana and the children.”

It was probably true, Yonah decided. “What will they do?”

Bonestruca shrugged. “I think they are waiting to see if the spells are a passing thing.” He frowned at Yonah. “What do you think is the cause?”

It was a form of madness. Yonah thought this but couldn’t say it. Nuño had told him once, when talking of insanity, that he had noted a commonality in the history of some of the persons whom he had treated. The shared fact was that the afflicted person had had malum venereum when young and had become mad only after years had passed. Nuño had not drawn a theory from this observation, but he had found it interesting enough to pass on to his apprentice, and now it came to Yonah’s mind.

“I can’t be certain, but … perhaps it has to do with the pox.”

“The pox, is it! You are wrong, Physician, for I have not had the pox for ever so long. I think it is Satan, come to wrestle for my soul. It is grievous labor fighting the Devil, but I have managed to drive off the archfiend each time.”

Yonah was speechless but he was saved by Bonestruca’s attention being reclaimed by the draughts board. “Was it your turn to land a blow with your soldiers, or my own?”

“It was yours, señor,” Yonah said.

He was disturbed and played poorly the rest of the evening, while Bonestruca appeared to be refreshed and clear minded. The friar ended the game in short order and was cheerful and content with his victory.

*   *   *

Despite what Padre Espina had said, on the following day Yonah went to the prison and attempted to see Don Berenguer, but in Espina’s place there was an older priest who looked at him and merely shook his head, sending him away.

The auto-de-fé was held six days later. The morning before the executions, the physician Callicó left Saragossa and rode far away, going to visit patients at the far edge of the district, a trip that forced him to spend several days away from home.

He had fears that this time he had overstepped, and that under torture Berenguer might reveal the presence and identity of another Judaizer, but it did not happen. When Yonah returned to Saragossa there were those among his patients who were happy to fill him in on the details of the act of faith, which had been well attended as always. Each member of the Jew Bartolomé family had died in a state of grace, kissing the cross held to their lips and then strangled before the burning by quick rotations of the screw that tightened the steel garrote.