The Inquisitor's Wife (36 page)

Soon we emerged through another trapdoor into my mother’s ceramic workshop, beneath one of the large worktables she normally kept covered with a tarp. By then, my eyes were so accustomed to the darkness that, even with all the parchment-colored shades drawn, the room looked sad and abandoned. There were no ceramic works left except the magnificent half-painted Santiago, sitting upon the largest worktable. Don Francisco had been right; his granddaughter Luz could never have finished the statue properly, because although the easier sections of the defeated, crushed Moor had been finished, Santiago’s windswept hair and fierce expression—and the fiery eyes of his mount—were still unpainted.

While Máriam hurried to cover the windows with black cloths to blot out any stray speck of light that might escape, I carefully undid the bundle tied to my waist, containing my mother’s prayer shawl, tapers, and golden candlesticks. I unfolded her prayer shawl and put it over my head and shoulders, grateful for the added bit of warmth, as all the fireplaces in the house had gone unlit.

I waited until Máriam finished covering the windows. Then I moved in the darkness to where my mother kept her flint and tinder wood and worked until I got a spark.

Máriam was quick to set the tapers in the candlesticks and place them on the worktable so that I had to face east in order to light them. Before I did, she brought over the Santiago statue and set it midway in front of the candles. At first I was surprised to see her stagger beneath its weight, given that the statues were all hollow. When it stood before me, I pushed against it and realized why my mother had never let me near it: The treasure had already been hidden inside. Clearly, the potter from Triana who had delivered it was part of don Francisco’s conspiracy.

I lit the first candle, then the second and stepped back; in front of them, the white of the unpainted statue glistened. I looked down at Santiago’s cape and the horse’s muscular flank, and saw my mother reflected there.

I blew out the tinder stick and smiled inwardly as the words of my childhood came back to me. They weren’t the right ones for kindling the Sabbath light, but I knew in my heart that they would do.

I raised my hands before my eyes, reverently blotting out the light as my mother had done before me, and whispered:
“Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.” Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, The Lord is One.

I looked upon the light and smiled. And on the shining white surface of Santiago’s unpainted features, I saw my mother smile back at me.

The work itself did not take long; my mother had already crushed the semiprecious stones and earth-based pigments to powder. All that remained was to mix them: dull gray for Santiago’s armor, brown for his hair and eyes, crimson for his flapping cape, real silver for his sword.

As I painted, I could see how the statue had been made precisely to fit the Torah shield, how extra room had been made for it by Santiago’s body leaning forward to press against his mount. And as I continued working, I began to sing—soft, low, and hushed—a song my mother used to sing to me long ago:

“
Durme, durme, querido hijico

Durme sin ansía y dolor

Cerra tus chicos ojicos

Durme, durme con savor.

Sleep, sleep, beloved child,

Sleep without fretting

Close your little eyes

And sleep peacefully.”

And for the first time since childhood, I began to believe that it might be true: that even though my beloved mother had perished, I might yet live to see Sepharad with my own eyes.

*   *   *

Máriam left the tunnel uncovered by gravel so that Antonio could more easily retrieve the finished statue, and we stole back to the Hojeda house without incident. I lay exhausted in bed but couldn’t sleep, vacillating between horror over my father’s likely fate and the joy of knowing that Antonio had always loved me. But any joy failed to linger long before the dread and terror returned. Don Francisco’s honesty—that he and his men could not make another rescue attempt to save my father—had shattered my heart.

I finally dozed off toward dawn and woke sometime later with a start at the sharp rapping at my antechamber door. I bolted from bed and struggled into my dressing gown as I heard Máriam answer the door, and I listened to the short exchange between her and don Gabriel.

She returned with orders for me to dress as soon as possible. Within an hour, I was riding, bleary-eyed, next to my so-called husband, headed for the Dominican prison.

When we arrived, Gabriel remained at my side as we were ushered in, and led me not to the same room where I had spoken with Torquemada, but to a chamber deeper in the bowels of the prison, whose stink grew fouler with every step.

Gabriel finally stopped and opened a large wood-and-iron door. I moved past him and a pair of armed guards into a small antechamber of stone, with a single high, barred window.

As don Francisco had suggested, Fray Hojeda was waiting there. He looked on me with the delight of a glutton being presented with the next course of a feast, but immediately forced his owlish visage into a more threatening expression; his thick gray brows rushed together in a thunderous scowl.

“Doña Marisol,” he said, more a rebuke than a greeting. “Let me explain to you that I am now in charge of your father’s case, and my brother don Gabriel is here as witness for the court. Let me also make it clear that
you
are in command of the proceedings about to commence. At any point, you can make the activity stop simply by offering to tell the full truth of what you know.”

He turned and led me back to a larger inner chamber, one that smelled of piss and vomit. In one corner of the room stood what looked like a ship’s wheel bolted to the ground. Someone had firmly tied ropes attached to the gears on the wheel, then thrown the ropes over a metal rod on the ceiling; shackles had been attached to the end of each rope. In another corner sat a chair, from which more empty shackles dangled; beside it on the floor sat an assortment of gruesome pincers and pokers, not far from the hearth.

But what held my attention was a device the width of a small bed, though greater in length. In place of a mattress lay a number of barrel-shaped horizontal rollers, and atop those rollers lay my father, naked to make his humiliation complete. The flesh of his sun-browned face and neck turned white at the collarbone. A triangle of thick golden brown hair, the pinnacle of which touched the spot equidistant between his nipples—as if pointing to his heart—thinned just enough at his waist to reveal his umbilicus. There the triangle reversed to a delta, its base above his exposed genitals. His arms, the muscles straining, were extended over his head, his wrists chained to a movable bar with a long wooden handle that served as a lever; his ankles were tied to a fixed wooden bar at his feet.

“Papá!” I cried out, before I had a chance to hide the anguish in my tone.

“I am not ashamed, Marisol,” he replied weakly. “Or afraid. Nor should you be.”

Gabriel’s expression was timid and reserved; he lowered his eyes, clearly embarrassed by my father’s nakedness, and moved behind his brother, whose expression was openly gloating.

“I should remind you both, don Diego and doña Marisol,” Fray Hojeda said, “that the auto-de-fé takes place tomorrow morning. Don Diego will be marched through town wearing the mark of a heretic; he will be called on to repent and confess, then his sentence will be read aloud to the public. At that point, he will either be turned over to the church for rehabilitation or to the civil authorities for execution.”

I stared hard at Alonso Hojeda. And saw not a dedicated servant of God, one who regretted inflicting pain in order to save a soul, but rather the same sort of creature as Torquemada: soulless, heartless, rejoicing not in a sinner saved as much as one lost whom he could torment, whose life and happiness he could destroy simply because he relished doing so.

Hojeda addressed my father without a hint of compassion. “I can tell you, sir, based on the raid on the prison by your now thankfully dead cohorts, today is the last chance we shall give you, and to my mind, you do not deserve even that. Confess and spare your daughter the agony of watching you suffer.”

“I will suffer then,” my father said, “and die with honor. My daughter will not yield; I have raised her to be truthful and strong.”

With that, Hojeda turned to me and said with poorly hidden delight, “Listen carefully to what you are about to hear.”

A pale-faced young man with auburn hair stood with his hands resting atop the wooden handle attached by ropes to the shackles on my father’s wrists. The lad might have been pleasant looking, were it not for the deep numbness in his eyes.

Hojeda nodded meaningfully at the young man, who used both arms and a great deal of strength to pull on the wooden lever; the barrels rolled, and the wooden frame near my father’s head inched upward, along with his shackled wrists.

There came the most horrible combination of sounds: the muted twang of sinews pulling free from bone, the ripping of muscle, as if a butcher had torn meat from a beast’s carcass with his bare hands, the muffled cracking of bone—and, most awfully, the loud pop of thigh bones and arm bones being pulled from their sockets.

Added to that was my father’s involuntary scream. Stretched grotesquely beyond his bearing, he could not move.

I fought tears. For a single turn of the lever had brought not only pain—marked by the horrific rictus on my father’s face—but also suffering and deformity to last a lifetime. Sinew ripped from bone could not repair itself, and crippled joints could not easily mend.

Yet there was a wicked genius to it: The shredded muscles beneath my father’s skin were bleeding, his snapped bones weeping blood and marrow. He was torn up inside, as if some beast caged beneath his flesh had been freed to attack with tooth and claw. So much damage, all cleverly covered by his skin, so that the abominable crime of what was done to him remained his tormentors’ secret.

“Stop it!” I shouted.

The ghost of a grin played at the corners of Hojeda’s plump lips. “You can make it stop by confessing the truth: that you and your father are crypto-Jews. You can make it stop by denouncing Antonio Vargas and admitting that you have had an affair with him, that he is no longer fit to serve the Holy Office.”

“But we’re not crypto-Jews,” I protested. “And I have never wanted anything to do with Antonio Vargas. He’s one of your own, working for the Inquisition.”

“He’s always been good friends with your family,” Hojeda insisted. “We all know he was going to marry you.” He paused. “I’ve heard you were consorting with don Francisco.”

I straightened and asked, sounding nervous to my own ears, “When?”

“At the palace, when you sang for the queen,” Hojeda said. “If you were to denounce him as a crypto-Jew, I would release your father today.”

My father groaned. “Marisol … don’t believe him. Your ‘dowry’—I agreed to denounce myself to Gabriel … to protect you from the Inquisition.”

Enraged, Hojeda instantly signaled the torturer, who applied full force to the lever, his muscles straining, the dull look in his eyes grown ghoulish. I covered my ears at the sound of a deep, terrible crunch inside my father’s body, at the sound of his scream.

Hojeda sensed my weakness and leaned forward to whisper in my ear; his breath was putrid.

“Decide now, Marisol … or face watching your father suffer more now, and die at the stake tomorrow.”

“Let me die, Marisol,” my father said. “Make me proud.”

It was the one thing he could have said to give me strength. This time, when the torturer applied his full body weight to the lever, I did not cover my ears, but composed myself.

And when Hojeda asked, “Will you confess?” I did not look away but shook my head and stared straight ahead.

“Tomorrow will be too late,” Hojeda threatened again, but I countered him with an announcement of my own.

“I am leaving now. I have nothing more to say.”

“Walk away if you wish,” Hojeda said. “Only bear in mind that
this
”—he nodded at my father upon the rack—“doesn’t stop when you leave. Every moment you breathe, walk, or enjoy a meal—at that moment, your father is suffering horribly because
you
will not stop it.”

But I left, head held high, the way my father wanted me to, the way he wanted to remember me.

*   *   *

I spent the rest of the day unable to rest as I began to mourn for my father. He would spend a long, anguish-filled night—a sleepless one, not only because of pain but because of the all-night vigil and procession around the prison that the Dominicans had planned.

I stayed in my room until well after sundown and the supper hour, until Blanca came to announce that the master was coming to see me—and he did
not
want Máriam in attendance. Máriam left reluctantly, and I sat waiting in one of the small chairs in my antechamber.

Minutes after, Gabriel entered, his cloak still bearing the chill of evening, his body and tunic faintly reeking of the prison. His expression wasn’t stern but complicitous, even abashed.

“I had to speak to you alone,” he said urgently. “You realize that if there is no intervention, your father will be found guilty and executed tomorrow?”

I looked away, in the direction where the now-broken ugly Madonna had once stood. “My father’s life was my dowry. You always meant to destroy him—to secure your position with the Inquisition.”

Gabriel took no offense but pressed with a strange gentleness: “If there was something that could be done to save him, would you not do it?”

I slowly turned my gaze on him and lifted a brow.

“I am not as cruel or controlled by my brother as you might think,” he said. “While the head of the Inquisition, Fray Morillo, despises my brother, he is more kindly disposed toward me. And I have influence with Judge Diego de Merlo, who will be handing down the sentences given by the Inquisitors and seeing that they are implemented.