Hunger's Brides (147 page)

Thus was I about to send myself to the stake still upholding my negative
finezas
, in defence of free will, I who have always hated making choices. This was not the calculation of longitude at sea. There were no prizes for making discoveries such as these—or that the
ostrakis aneilon
used in Hypatia's death were likely to have been the tiles of ostracism, that the infallibility of Caesar Pontifex was modelled on the Egyptian cult of the living God Serapis, that doubt itself has become heretical and that the punishments of Hypatia and Galileo were less for witchcraft or heresy than for a new kind of treason. One from within. And with each passing night it was becoming harder to imagine standing my ground before the holy officers, because through Magda they might know things even about my own life that I did not. Even as I dreaded how these would be revealed to me, when, in what tones of irony and triumph, it
became more urgent to anticipate what might be coming. Truly frightening was the eagerness with which my mind returned to that room, to confront the false witnesses, who were now almost always Magda, examining me. And in the midst of my rousing defence of heretics, it was Magda the scholar who had drawn the link from oyster shells to turtle shells—and I had stood revealed then as a hypocrite, as she forced me to admit it: I had always seen that Amanda had my father's eyes, that she had been his choice, and that what I had most envied of Amanda was not her secret knowledge, nor merely her grace, nor even her gift with a gesture. It was her heart. I am not a child anymore—certainly I could bear this coming from one such as Magda, but only for so long as I can cling to my faith that they will not bring Amanda before me in chains.

After I had slept a little, I saw how far things had gone. They had made of me an officer of the prosecution.

It is my friends who have shown me this. For if it had become a new torment to answer to those who clearly wished me well, surely this means I had given my adversaries too much credit, for intuition, for special knowledge of me, for the genius of a cruel empathy. Much of what they know of me holds true for all—and what I fear, everyone must. There is a curious remark Núñez has made more than once.
Gaps will not be tolerated
—and well do I know that the fear of these can be intolerable. I have already sensed it in Núñez's vaunting of the perfection of his memory.
Nothing is ever lost beneath the eyes of God
—before the eyes of God, perhaps, but beneath them, much is lost upon us. The weakness I have smelled was fear—but hardly mine and his alone. For it is precisely what the holy officers do not know and cannot see that is a torment, for them as it has been for me. I detect it in the careful reports Gutiérrez had filed of our every meeting, against some future treachery among his compeers. This same fear abides in the inventories of Dorantes, in the careful comparison of the first with the second. It lies in the method of their interrogations, scribes trained to record in teams so as to miss nothing—they have made a special lexicon for the language that goes beyond speech, a shorthand to mark the crack of bone, the sinew's snap, the long vowels without consonants or stop. And if I permit myself a memory of my tour with Magda to the workshops of Santo Domingo, I see it even in the instruments their smiths and forgers make—the branks and gags and pears—for the plugging of gaps.

These sealers of windows, these cloisterers, with their mortar and
shutters and locks, they too fear all that escapes them. They cannot rest until they have seized it, known all, had this allness tallied, until they have entered into their logs all the testimonies. Until the record is complete and buried in the archives. Just as I had once made myself trace the constellations, to make a friend of Night, they are as children afraid of the dark, who cannot bear to see the sky until they have made an inventory of all the stars. How many stars does Núñez remember, I wonder, when he closes his blind eyes at night? How many more than I can—and is the difference enough for him? In this, I have come to understand him, and through him, them. It was not empathy or cunning, on my part or theirs. It is this fear we share. Through it, I had become one of them.

And so as if by a long ride in the desert was I returned to the dilemma of my confession and perhaps, I thought, to the beginnings of a solution. A confession not full, for there can be no such thing, but of a fullness that yet gave the enemy no comfort, no rest, no peace—for whose conscience did not trouble him in the night, whose mind did not contain an inventory of secret doubts? Who is to say what Núñez feared most, a missing manuscript or darkness, or what he dreaded—if there was a dread we shared—more than the images conjured in the scent of smoke.

Gaps will not be tolerated, yet are everywhere. It would be for me to forge a confession of these, and let the holy armourers see what I had glimpsed, through long trials in the night, that mail is lighter and just perhaps stronger than plate.

But this was the solution to a false dilemma. The true one is a question of not armour but armaments. And in the wait to face the Holy Office, I have come to see the mind itself as a sword. The more one knows and the more keenly one remembers and sees what one has missed, the more sharply cuts the edge. It is whetted on knowledge, it lies between you and your adversary. We either take the haft or are taken by the blade. But even the rapier's hilt is a parabola; and some nights, how heavy its handle lies in the hand. I have not found any higher purpose for my gifts but if such a mind as mine has any purpose at all, surely it is not to wound me—needlessly conjuring images such as Abuelo's papers burning before my eyes. Lately, these come no longer as taunts nor even innocent fears I must learn to avoid but flails I have summoned willingly to hurt myself. Nor am I the only one wounded thus. I have only to look at the change in Antonia these past months, who is so eager to learn from me, who has already learned too much. My cheeks flush as I
remember what I have taught her about self-pity and three-sided blades. But I will try to lay shame aside with their other instruments and not make of this too a gift to my adversaries. And this also have my friends taught me.

Yes, there is some knowledge of me in the punishments and torments the holy officers inflict, but how much, and how much of this is from me? What brought Galileo Galilei to his knees? It was not that they had found someone more clever—a Jacobi Topf, some anti-Galileo of the Soul—nor that Galileo was old, or ill, or almost blind. It was not even quite the pain and the fear imposed on an old man's mind, but the special shape he alone could give these. More likely, Rome and Florence supply the same crude materials as are furnished here. Time. Doubt. Fear. With these, we forge the instruments ourselves, from our own faculties, and yes, the soul is to be the crucible.

It is not that a fated few bear within them some secret flaw—neither is this to be found in a single trait or faculty. It is not that we contain the seeds of our own fall, but that the shape of that fall—forced upon us—takes its imprint from us, our whole selves. Not only our conscience but our reason, memory, heart. Our imagination. And also our defiance, freely willed and chosen. So many olive branches Galileo was offered. What is a heretic, even one who recants, and why could he not take the olive branch? Why could he not curb his strength in strength, and not wait to have it broken? And what was it that brought a book collector and astrologer to attack the mulatto with whom he shared his cell, to try to murder him with his bare hands in total darkness? What had he seen, what had been summoned for his sight, if not the most appalling vision of himself?

But, then, I could not be sure if these were fantasies at all … or rather prophecies a mind in that dark had driven me to fulfil.

W
hether I could recant. The one question left, for me. The rest I leave for others.

Truly, who can say what secret springs and silent vectors have carried us to any given moment, and what hidden currents had brought me to speak of the negative
finezas
on a moment's impulse that for two years I had found myself unable to repent by choice, and left me unable to imagine anything I would not say—no matter the danger—to evade the judgements of the holy officers upon them? What is it now that I still cling to, through great pain and perhaps tragedy, like a child to a fable? Is it to the fable of trout, there and not there, at the bottom of a pool, or to a certain wise way Xochitl had of making me laugh? Or I wonder if it is to the gesture of two trout speared, together on a platter, or to some notion of justice written in an anagram.

Or only the weight of my grandfather's hand I've felt on mine, all these years, each time I took up a pen to write.

But surely I who have gone to such lengths, who once took such elaborate steps not to look back, cannot now find it so difficult to turn my back on that past, again. Not after I have been given so many fresh reasons to remember old regrets.

Recant or refuse. This choice is not false, not a fantasy, though dangerous, nor is it complicated. Once the question is put and the decision
commanded, any third option—silence, indecision—is merely an illusion, to be dispelled by a torture that is not at all a figment. And then the question is put again. I who have lost so many, to come so far, for all I claimed to care for—is it all to end here in a battle that cannot be won? Recant or refuse, a simple dilemma but the true one. I know this in my heart. What is it I cling to?