Hunger's Brides (179 page)

Why do I always insist? Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Always this sick sick hunger consumes all that is dearest to me. One night of sweetness is all I asked. One night in this dying century. Of bliss. No. Bliss would be much too much. One night of mercy, that's all, no more than this.

I came here to love her loss, adore it, find her silence beautiful, make it all so lyrical. Now is everything else to be stripped from me too—is this the price of one night's rapture? Why do I never learn why can't I accept—
of course
I must lose everything!—the crystal drift of her music in my ear, now my Eyes of wonder for a day restored … my own poetry.

Now S.

I've ruined it, between us, haven't I S?

No no of course not B just a little awkwardness. I never imagined doing that. Let's just give it a day or two. Flatblack coals her eyes, where is her laughter gone? Fled that brightness, musical gleam.

But S what about our film, our tour to the Museum of Medicine, to the Inquisition exhibit? Ah you meant postpone but
said
cancel. No S I know what you meant. You stay here fingering your relics, I'll find another perfect guide with two doctorates and a red velvet dress. Meanwhile I'll go alone instead to Teotihuacan, ruined city old as Rome. The recipe for obsidian wine let me find on my own. Like I was meant to all along.

Recipe—make these filed teeth fastidious.

1 Jan. 1995

The filmscript goes/swell. I have made my resolution. This is to be the screening that starts after the last book is burned. I want this horror show to make us run screaming through the streets. I want to make us gnaw our tongues for pain.
I want to make it feel like hell
.

… It is a fact well known to many here at this symposium and, indeed, a common-place among twentieth-century historiographers of the Spanish Inquisition, that its notorious evils (mass burnings at the stake of witches and other innocents, a plague of sadistic tortures of diabolical cleverness …) have become, in the public mind, grossly distorted into ‘the Black Legend.' Having shrouded itself in secrecy and mystery throughout its history, the Spanish Inquisition must bear its share of the blame.

The unpalatable truth however is that the Spanish Inquisition's only true innovation was the
auto de fe
, the ‘act of faith.' A piece of state theatre that has wrongly become synonymous with the burning of heretics at the stake.

In fact, the execution of heretics was already common practice throughout Christendom, not just in Spain. It is to the credit of the Holy Office (that is, after the first 60 years of holocaust up to 1540) that of the 44,000 cases tried in the Spanish Dominions, the ratio of accused sent to the stake fell to below four percent.
¹⁸
Of these, at least half burned in effigy, having fled, died in prison, or (among those tried posthumously) had their remains exhumed from hallowed ground and incinerated. Of those burned in the flesh, only a small minority were burned alive; most took the opportunity to repent at the last instant and were garroted before their pyre was lit.

These figures compare very favourably with the rate of executions ordered by secular tribunals of the same period. Further, acquittal rates for heresy rose from zero, under the Medieval Inquisition, to between two and eighteen percent in certain jurisdictions of the Holy Office in Spain. In Valencia, nine percent of cases were suspended outright, while a further forty-four percent were penanced: meaning some combination of fines, banishment, imprisonment, and only rare cases of sentencing to hard labour in the galleys. Another forty percent were reconciled: occasioning more severe penalties. Confiscation of estates, flogging, life in solitary confinement (though often commuted), and, not infrequently, the galleys—but still, never for terms longer than ten years.
¹⁹

True, in the face of wave after wave of denunciations, the mill-wheels of the Holy Office did grind slowly, yet prisoners waiting more than 15 years for trial, while not uncommon, were still very much in a minority.
And the Black Legend notwithstanding, the secret prisons of the Inquisition were often models of cleanliness and humane treatment, at least in comparison with their secular counterparts.

In its special treatment of witches, often considering these cases to be of mental disorder rather than heresy, the Spanish Inquisition—a few outbreaks of intolerance excepted—was a beacon of enlightenment and forbearance, especially in contrast to the furious and bloodthirsty campaigns of the Parliament of Bordeaux, the Spanish Inquisition's neighbouring secular jurisdiction to the North.

Concerning torture, the figures are undeniable. After the first sixty years of unrestrained excess, fully ninety percent of all prisoners were never tortured, at least physically. And fewer than a third of accused heretics saw threats of torture eventually carried out.

Only three techniques were ever sanctioned: the
garrucha
(‘pulley'), the
potro
(‘colt'), and the
toca
(‘cloth'). Novel methods were actively discouraged, even as innovation flourished in the secular sphere. Church Inquisitors supervised torture but were never to participate: customarily, it was the public executioner who, after stripping the prisoners naked, conducted events.

Even here, in many cases allowances, if not exceptions, were made for heretics over seventy years of age or under ten, especially females. Physicians were often made available, and few prisoners actually died of their injuries. More than a few made a full recovery from their physical symptoms.

Perhaps the Black Legend has persisted and even grown in the face of recent objective and scientific demystifications because for 350 years, thousands died, fled, or suffered imprisonment, torture, banishment, confiscations, desecrations of family burial sites, defamation—and perhaps millions more, intimidation—for acts and thoughts that in our liberal times we would consider not quite criminal.

Continually and conveniently overlooked is the fact that such abuses, regrettable though they may have been, are dwarfed by the subtle omnipresence, creativity, and sheer efficiency of modern methods of social control … of this century's Inquisitions.