Hunger's Brides (22 page)

“I
remember
them,” said Magda, in a tone of reminiscence. “Minstrels coming down the street in bright colours, trumpets blaring, fifes piping …”

“Every block or two,” said Aunt María, “the procession would pause for the chief constable to dictate the Proclamation to the crier.” He called out to all the nobles and their families an invitation to attend, wearing their finest, a general
auto de fe
on the eleventh of April.

Since I was now a noted Poetess, it might interest me to know that María had always preferred the Portuguese ‘
auto-
da
-fé
.'

“Our Castilian phrase means simply ‘act of faith.' But for the Portuguese, Juana Inés, it means ‘the act that
gives
faith.' We will give you some help with this today.”

The coach clattered towards the Monastery of Santo Domingo. A light rain fell. The streets were quiet, with everyone at Mass at one of the fifty churches throughout the city. My aunt and cousin began to describe the days leading up to the
auto
, when at least thirty thousand celebrants made their way to the capital, swelling its population to four hundred thousand. The city's fifteen thousand carriages, most now in use at once, found room to pass only with difficulty even at three in the morning. All the plazas stood brightly lit, packed with people come to refresh themselves with glasses of
atole
or chocolate or
pulque
. On almost every corner Indian ladies were selling tortillas and tamales. Every inn in the capital was full. Each morning found thousands of revellers rolled up in blankets, asleep in the plazas and under the arcades, or in doorways and alleys.

Our carriage lurched to a halt beside the canal—we had nearly run down a beggar, a man of about fifty, with the aspect of a Gypsy or a Moor. Barefoot, in grimy rags, he carried a little bundle slung over his shoulder as if he were travelling, yet with nowhere to go, as he wandered back and forth across the road. The stench from the canal was overpowering. A carcass must be floating there, and the canal silted in. Magda and María had not brought the roses for colour or cheer but as nosegays. They fed at them now like ghastly hummingbirds.

Magda asked if I ever heard from my father, if I thought he might ever come back. It was the first word anyone in that house had ever spoken of him. I could not meet her gleaming, hateful eyes as she then turned to me and recounted the stories that were in circulation all that year of 1649—tales of new and hideously effective tortures and of the vast sums
wasted on bribes to Inquisition officials … who were of course utterly incorruptible.

“Some of the accused had been turned in by their own children,” said Magda, glancing past me at her mother. “Others by neighbours or in-laws or friends. They said the familiars of the Inquisition were everywhere gathering testimony.”

Aunt María spoke, not turning from the window. “One neighbour whispered that the admiral of the Leeward Fleet had been arrested for Judaizing. Another said no it was the
proveedor general
of the Windward Fleet. His wife had grown so arrogant as to demand that all requests for appointments with her be made in writing.”

“Mother even knew her a little, didn't you, Mother?” Before María could answer Magda exclaimed, “One woman was arrested—you know what for? Just smiling at the mention of the blessed Virgin!”

I remembered then that my cousin had been the one to serve me breakfast, and the pleasure she had taken. I felt my stomach lift as we lurched through a pothole. The closeness in the cab was becoming unbearable.

I caught a glimpse of the cathedral. We jarred over the rough paving for another two blocks, then turned east and came to a little square. María called for the driver to stop—we were getting out.
Gracias a Dios
. Aunt María held the door as I stepped down. Opposite us on the north side of the square was a small pink church built of the rough
tezontle
blocks I knew from the mountains. Early Mass had just let out, and over the heads of those streaming through the tall doors I could see a rose-coloured altar and pillars of pink marble spirals. The windows must have been stained in the same colour, for pale rose diagonals fell through the smoke in the nave.

The square looked festive at first. Indian musicians with their pipes and drums. A company of mummers calling to the passersby to gather round. Running the full length of the plaza's west side was a string of workshops, which I was surprised to see open. But then with Guadalupe's feast day coming on Wednesday, perhaps they were rushing to finish a special commission from the temple. Out in the open air, I looked about for the courage to tell María I'd had enough.

Occupying the entire block across the street to the east was an austere building with none of the flourishes for which the city's masons are noted. And it was towards that building we now walked. The iron gates
were on the southwest corner. Two girls my age were giggling and flirting with the guards stiffly standing one to each side of the entrance. Overhead hung a banner on a silver staff, but angled in such a way that I could not read it until we were at the gates.

I had thought the building had three storeys; it was two—each no less than four times our height. I could see the banner's emblem now. It was a wooden cross, rough and unplaned, knots like the swellings of lesions all down its sides. Just inside the gates were several counters and offices arranged around a small patio, achingly bright in the sun. Running east and north were two long corridors. There was an impression of coolness. A cool draft of air flowed past my ankles. I thought of a deserted hospital.

A scribe scuttled by with an armload of heavy cases. Aunt María pointed out the warder with his keys heading down the eastern corridor. He had a blanket rolled under his arm.

Here were the Palaces of the Inquisition. In these palaces there were many rooms. He went to prepare a place in one.

I backed away.

They made no move to stop me. I walked blindly into the plaza. I could feel Magda and María close behind, one to each side. An Indian lady was selling herbs and cures, her white hair coiled at her nape just as Xochitl wore hers. This
curandera
clearly had faith in her exemption from the Holy Office's jurisdiction, and I was afraid for her. The mummers looked to be university students and though I did not stop, by the direction they were facing and by the twisting and clowning and groans, I knew their skit to parody what happened across the street. And I was afraid for them, too, but did not stop until I had passed the musicians and reached the workshops and stalls.

There was a little apothecary, with his stoppers and funnels, alembics and spouts. A printing press and bindery, its stamps and dies. Then a shop with inks, quills and papers for scribes. A candlemaker, and the smell of fats reducing in the back, and on tables his candles in ranks of white, black and green. Next door was the engraver, his vitriols and acids and etching tools in neat ranks on a shelf. Standing at a high bench with his heavy needles was the maker of awnings and sacks. Then a carpentry, with all the planks and rigging, screws and vises. Here was a supplier of surgical equipment: scalpels, forceps and specula, beaked masks.

Next door a Sunday crowd had gathered to watch a smith at his forge. Behind me the music drummed and piped jarringly to the hammering at the anvil. I could feel María and Magda standing close.

A row of humble craftsmen at their shops. Scents of pine and glue, solvents and printers' inks. I thought of Grandfather, tried to summon the feelings that being with him brought. I so wanted to lose myself in them now, to make an escape in my mind. Watching the farrier at his forge, it seemed he was indeed a prince among these journeymen. Young and narrow-hipped, bent to his anvil, he was cased in sweat like a warhorse, his naked torso armoured against flame and shards by a scorched apron of ox hide.

I took in all the terrible power of shoulder and veined forearm and yet the delicacy in his wrists as he angled the tongs and banked and rolled the hammer.
The art is in the wrists, Angelina
. Yes Grandfather, you were so very right, for smiths and armourers and the
jinete-matador
†
—a kind of empathy in the wrist, to capture the very image of life. It is a craftsmanship of temper and temperance and temperature. Of edges, brittleness and breaking points, of heating, folding and collapse. A building up, a grasping, a hammering at stresses—relief, release, relaxation.

Such a flurry of enterprise on a Sunday, special commissions for the Church. And now I understood, and knew what this place was. These were the busy, fussy craftsmen who forged the pears and branks and gags, who built the gambrils and gibbets and gallows, who raised the bleachers and rigged the scaffolding. Supplied the inks and quills, laid out the instruments and the restraints, saw meekly to the fit.

I knew all about this—for Grandfather I had distilled all the essential qualities. I wanted very much to find again comfort in these: measurement, contour, surface, articulation…. I tried hard to picture Abuelo's face, any face at all—even the mask of Amanda's features when she was hurt. I tried to make my thoughts fly straight, my eyes bend neither right nor left, to hold to all the faces I had lost, to solve the riddle hidden there. Fear was the riddle now, the thing I had not known.

Subdued, I took my place next to Magda in the cab, with María coming in after me. I made no protest. Only to be away from that music, that ringing, that craft. The horses' hooves rasped and chiselled over the flags.

Five companies of the Soldiers of the Bramble were picketed all night around the square, to guard the Green Cross and the Palaces of the
Inquisition. The streets around them for once were bright with torchlight. The eleventh day of April, 1649.

The drama starts in the darkness two hours before dawn, as the Archbishop's carriage approaches the Holy Offices. The night's revellers, both afoot and in the many well-stocked carriages, pause in their debauches to cross themselves as the black carriage passes. Whispers of the Archbishop's arrival fly like startled swallows through the cells of the Inquisition's secret prison.

His Illustriousness, the Archbishop don Juan de Mañozca,
is
the Inquisition—forty years' service in the tribunals of the Holy and General Office, member in perpetuity of its Supreme Council and second only in rank to the Inquisitor General in Spain. It was Juan de Mañozca who in his younger days had brought the Holy Office to the wild slave port of Cartagena. It was the then famous don Juan de Mañozca who detected and grimly prosecuted the Great Complicity in Perú. And it is his nephew, Juan Sáenz de Mañozca, who under his famed tutor has risen to become the Inquisitor of this
auto
.

At the southwest corner the gates swing open. A young monk rushes to open the carriage door. The Archbishop, a lean and vigorous man of seventy, steps lightly out. He walks into the courtyard and down the eastern corridor. All is in readiness. The antiphon and hymns have been sung in the pink chapel, where a special Mass has been held for the Inquisitors before this final battle. The rosary was said at Prime. For the fourteen prisoners condemned to the stake, fourteen pairs of Jesuits have been sworn in.
For confession, a Dominican, for contrition, a Jesuit
.

In shifts they have begun to attend to the prisoners, exhorting the condemned to repent so as to receive absolution before death.

All the prisoners have been given breakfast. At the mouth of a passageway joining the prison to its outermost patio, the young Inquisitor, Sáenz de Mañozca, takes up position under his uncle's watchful eye. In the dim courtyard, lit by one or two torches and the first glow of a false dawn, the Inquisitor orders that the prisoners be brought out in single file. He reads out each sentence, and hands to the prisoners the costumes they are to wear in the coming day's production: for the condemned, the short
corozas
†
and black
sambenitos
of sackcloth; for the reconciled, the tall
corozas
and yellow
sambenitos
with the double cross of Saint Andrew. To the penanced, he hands the same yellow sacks, but bearing a single cross.

Those prisoners who will not stop protesting their innocence, the Archbishop orders gagged.

The vigilants out in the little plaza know it has begun when the bells of the cathedral begin to toll. And after them, all the bells of all the churches in the capital. A carillon—of discordant timbre and pitch and period—a tolling to make the hottest blood run cold. Sixteen familiars of the Inquisition come out first, ahead of three parish crosses draped in black. Next come the Indians with the exhumed remains of heretics who've fraudulently received a Christian burial and are now found out at last.

Behind them, others carry painted effigies. Father de Moedano's effigies are revered as the most lifelike. Some of his faces are of people dead for years, yet all who knew them see. His memory for heretics is remarkable.