The Confusion (111 page)

“And you, Moseh?”

“They can see perfectly well I’m half Indian, so they’ve pegged me as a
mestizo
spawned by one of those crypto-Jews who went up to Nuevo Leon a hundred years ago.”

“But that lot was exterminated in the
autos da fé
of 1673.”

“Ridding a country of Jews is easier than purging every last phant’sy and suspicion from an Inquisitor’s mind,” Moseh returned. “He supposes every Indian between San Miguel de Allende and New York has a Torah concealed in his breech-clout.”

“He wants to find that you are a heretick,” said Edmund de Ath.

“And hereticks burn,” Moseh added.

“Only if they are
unrepentant,
” said Edmund de Ath, and his eyes followed the lines of Moseh’s tunic until they found the rosary. “So you have made the decision to pass as a Christian, and avoid the stake. As soon as you are set free you’ll go far away and become a Jew again. That is exactly what the Inquisitor
suspects
.”

“Go on.”

“He has been asking me questions about you. He would like for me to testify that you are a sham Christian and an unrepentant Jew. That is all he needs to burn you over a crackling mesquite fire…your only choice then would be to accept Christ as they were tying you to the stake…”

“In which event they’d charitably strangle me as the flames were rising—or, I could live for a few minutes longer as a devout Jew.”

“Albeit an uncomfortable one,” Jack concluded.

“Jack, he would also like for me to testify that you and Moseh prayed together in Hebrew, and observed Yom Kippur aboard
Minerva
.”

“Go ahead, it just confirms I’m an infidel.”

“But now that you are pretending to be a Catholic you’ve burned that excuse—any lapses make you a heretick.”

Jack now became mildly irked. “What is your point? That you could, with a few words, send me and Moseh to the stake? We already knew that.”

“There must be something more,” Moseh said. “A
witness
they would not torture. Edmund has been accused of
something
by
someone
.”

“Under normal circumstances there would be no guessing who my accuser was,” said de Ath, “since the Inquisition keeps such matters a secret. But here in New Spain, no one knows me except for those who disembarked from
Minerva
in Acapulco. Obviously you two did not denounce me to the Inquisition.” De Ath said this deliberately, and looked Jack and then Moseh in the eye, examining each for signs of a guilty conscience. Jack had been subjected to this treatment countless times in his life, first by Puritans in English Vagabond-camps and subsequently by diverse Papists eager to hear him confess all his colorful sins. He met the gaze of de Ath directly, and Moseh looked back at the Belgian with a sorrowful look that showed no trace of guilt or nervousness. “Very well,” said de Ath,
with a faint, apologetic smile. “That leaves only—”

“Elizabeth de Obregon!” Moseh exclaimed, if a whisper could be an exclamation.

“But she was your
disciple,
” Jack said.

“
Judas
was a disciple, too,” de Ath said quietly. “Disciples can be dangerous—especially when they are not right in the head to begin with. When Elizabeth returned to awareness in that cabin on
Minerva,
mine was the first face she saw. I believe now that my face must somehow haunt her nightmares, and that she seeks to exorcise it in flames.”

“But we thought—”

“You
imagined
I was exerting some sinister influence on a susceptible mind—I know you did,” said de Ath. “In fact, I was ministering to one who was not right in mind or body. Ever since that disastrous expedition to the Islands of Solomon she had been a little daft—confined to a nunnery in Manila. Finally her family in Spain arranged for her to come home, which is how she ended up on the Manila Galleon. To outward appearances she was entirely sane. But the fire on the Galleon burned away what was left of her good sense. By treating her with tincture of
opium
, and staying by her side at all times, I was able to keep her madness in hand as long as we remained aboard
Minerva
. But when I became the
cargador
for your enterprise, my responsibilities took me down to Lima. Elizabeth came here to Mexico City. I am afraid she has fallen under the influence of certain Phanatiqual
Jesuits
and
Dominicans
. Churchmen of that stripe loathe such as me, because I keep a civil tongue in my head when talking to Protestants. I fear that they have preyed upon Elizabeth’s mind and that in her madness she has said things about me that have made their way to the stupendous and omniscient annals of the
Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición
. The Inquisitor wants to make me, and by extension every other Jansenist, out to be a heretick. Along the way he would like for me to utter words that would send both of you to the stake.”

Jack sighed. “Now I’m
glad
we did not invite you to the feast—you are so depressing to talk to.”

Edmund de Ath attempted to shrug, but this hurt a lot, and all the muscles on his skull stood out for a few moments, making him look like a woodcut in an anatomy book that Jack had once seen flying through the air in Leipzig. When he could speak again he said, “It is just as well—my faith would not allow me to participate in your
Sukkoth
even though you cleverly disguised it as a betrothal-feast.”

Moseh laced his fingers together and stretched his arms, which was a noisy procedure. “I am going to bed,” he said. “If they are looking
for reasons to burn you, Edmund, and if you are not giving them any, it follows that Jack and I will soon be dangling from the ceiling of the torture-chamber while clerks stand below us with dipped quills. We’ll need our rest.”

“If any one of us breaks, all three of us burn,” said de Ath. “If all three of us can stand our ground, then I believe they will let us go.”

“Sooner or later one of us will break,” Jack said wearily. “This Inquisition is as patient as Death. Nothing can stop it.”

“Nothing,” said de Ath, “except for the Enlightenment.”

“And what is that?” Moseh asked.

“It sounds like one of those daft Catholicisms: The Annunciation, the Epiphany, and now the Enlightenment,” Jack said.

“It is nothing of the sort. If my arms worked, I’d read you some of those letters,” said de Ath, turning his head a fraction of a degree towards some scrawled pages on the end of this table, weighed down by a Bible. “They are from brothers of mine in Europe. They tell a story—albeit in a fragmentary and patchwork way—of a sea-change that is spreading across Christendom, in large part because of men like Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes. It is a change in the way men think, and it is the doom of the Inquisition.”

“Very good! Well, then, all we must needs do is hold out against the
strappado,
the
bastinado,
the water-torture, and the thongs for another two hundred years or so, which ought to be plenty of time for this new way of thinking to penetrate Mexico City,” said Jack.

“Mexico City is run out of Madrid, and the Enlightenment has already stormed Madrid and taken it,” de Ath said. “The new King of Spain is a Bourbon, the grand-son of King Louis XIV of France.”

“Feh!” said Moseh.

“Eeew,
him
again!” said Jack. “Don’t tell me I’m to peg my hopes of freedom on
Leroy
!”

“Many Englishmen share your feelings, which is why a war has been started to settle the issue, but for now Philip wears the crown,” said Edmund de Ath. “Not long after his coronation he was invited to the Inquisition’s
auto da fé
in Madrid, and sent his regrets.”

“The King of Spain failed to turn up for an
auto da fé
!?” Moseh exclaimed.

“It has shaken the Holy Office to its bones. The Inquisitor of Mexico will probe us once or twice more, but beyond that he’ll not press his luck. Scoff all you like at the Enlightenment. It is already here, in this very cell, and we shall owe our survival to it.”

T
HE
P
RISON OF THE
I
NQUISITION
lay not far from the Mint where, in theory, every ounce of silver that came up out of the mines of Mexico
was turned into pieces of eight. In practice, of course, somewhere between half and a quarter of Mexico’s treasure was smuggled out of the country before the King could take his fifth, but still the amount that came down into Mexico City sufficed to mint sixteen thousand pieces of eight every day. This was a large enough number to mean almost nothing to Jack.
A couple of thousand an hour
began to make sense to him. The booming and grinding of heavy silver-carts on the cobblestones beyond the prison walls gave a feeling of the sheer mass of metal involved.

One afternoon he was taking the air in the prison courtyard, letting the sun shine on some fresh thong-wounds that twined around his body like purple vines. It was a still and sultry day. Mexico City spread for no more than a mile in each direction and so Jack was able to hear something from every quarter: rugs being flapped out of windows; iron wheel-rims on stone pavers; whip-cracks; disputes at the Market; protesting mules, chickens, and swine; aimless chantings of diverse religious orders—the same noises as any city in Christendom, in other words, though the thin bony air of this high valley seemed to make sounds carry farther, and to favor harsh sounds over soft ones. Too, there were certain sounds unique to this country. The chief food was maize and the chief drink was chocolate, and both had to be ground between stones as the first step in their preparation, so any group of human beings in New Spain that was not positively starving to death was attended by a dim gnawing sound.

Jack had tied a strip of cloth over his eyes so that he could lie in the sun comfortably, and had unrolled a straw mat on the stones of the courtyard to even out the bumps somewhat, but except for a few negligible layers of skin, hair, and straw, his skull was in direct contact with the stones. Even if he stopped up his ears with his fingers, blocking out the noises of living things, certain vibrations of a mineral nature were still conducted into his head through that route, and even when no carts happened to be passing by, Jack fancied he could sense the omnipresent grumble of those grinding-stones, thousands of granite molars chewing the maize and cacao of this country. Which might be mistaken as the deepest ground-note, the continuo-line of this neverending Mass that was Mexico City. Except that there was another note even more pervasive. Jack did not hear it for a while, or if he did he could not disentangle it from the city’s other noises. But after he had been lying there for some time he went half to sleep and had some strange vision that, if he’d been a Papist, probably would have been accounted a miracle and got him nominated a Saint. The vision was that his body was a body of light, rising up and
growing as it rose, as bubbles do when they come up out of a black depth, but that it was bound with thongs of darkness, somewhat as the light of a lanthorn appears to be gibbeted by the straps of iron that clasp it all round. At any rate, something about this sun-intoxicated state of mind, and the general drugged stupor that followed a torture-session, caused the brocade of sounds to unravel itself and come apart into its several threads, yarns, warps, and woofs. And in this way Jack became aware of the sound of the Mint.

Years before, he had seen a coiner at work making thalers in the Ore Range, and so he knew that underneath all of the ceremonies and offices, this Mint must be nothing more than a few men with hammers pounding out the coins one at a time. To make sixteen thousand pieces of eight per diem, they had to have several coiners working at once, each with his own hammer and die. Each hammer-blow was another eight bits given the sacred imprint of the King of Spain and sent out into the world. Sometimes several coiners would bring their hammers down in quick succession and Jack would hear a cluttered barrage of rings, other times there would be anomalous pauses during which Jack phant’sied the whole Spanish Empire was holding its breath, fearing that the silver had run out. But for the most part the coiners worked in a shared rhythm, each taking his turn, and the rings of the hammers came steadily, about as frequently as the beats of Jack’s heart. He put his hand to his breast to prove it. Sometimes his heart would beat in perfect synchronization with the coiners’ hammers for several beats in a row, and Jack wondered whether this was more true among persons who had been born and raised in this city.

Like a heartbeat, the sound of pieces of eight being born was not normally audible, but if you sat very still you could sense it, pervading the streets of Mexico City as the blood did the body; and Jack already knew that in certain remote places like London, Amsterdam, and Shahjahanabad, you could detect its pulse, just as you could count a man’s at a certain place on the wrist, far away from the beating heart.

Jack had never had much use for Spaniards, having always tended to view them as Englishmen gone spectacularly wrong, grapes that had turned to vinegar, a reasonably promising folk who’d been made utterly deranged by being trapped between
la France
and
dar al-Islam
. But lying there in the fist of the Inquisition listening to the grinding of the tortilla-stones and the ringing of the coiners, Jack was forced to admit that they were as vast and queer in their own way as the Egyptians.

Jack would never have accused himself of being a wise man, but he prided himself on cunning. Wisdom or cunning or both told him that he’d best ignore de Ath’s ravings about the Enlightenment and keep his attention fixed on nearer and more practical matters. The crypto-Jews who occupied the cells of this prison were an odd lot, but they knew quite a lot about the workings of the Mexican Inquisition—as how could they
not
. It was the rule in most Inquisition prisons to keep every prisoner in solitary confinement, for years at a time if need be, in the hope that he or she would finally break down and confess to some heresy that the Inquisitor had not even suspected, or even dreamed of—supposedly whole new categories of Sin had been discovered, or invented, in this way. But the only rule that Diego de Fonseca enforced in
his
prison was that the inmates were not supposed to leave, and he’d even bend
that
rule for a few hours or a night, if you promised to come back.