The Antiquarian (29 page)

“You do understand that this is hard for me to believe.”

“Of course! On the contrary! How could anyone believe this nonsense? But listen, and listen closely: he did believe. Do you see? Shackermann really believed it!” Manolo insisted. “Do you realize what that means?”

“I think I do,” Bety said, after pausing to think a few seconds. “You mean that, aside from the possible and debatable magical properties of the Stone, there are people like Shackermann who really believe in it, and that means—”

“That's it!” Manolo anticipated Bety's utterance of the conclusion. “The Stone is a coveted object. Not by many, because I don't think that many know of its existence. Shackermann didn't say, but it seemed like information restricted to a very specific, limited group of scholars: experts in tradition like him, kabbalists—people like that. But for those few who do know what it is, it is, without a doubt, an object that is truly priceless.” He pronounced the last word slowly, hanging on each syllable. “The fact that it could be an emerald the size of your fist is beside the point. If Shackermann gave me
the privilege of telling me about the Stone, it wasn't just to sate the curiosity of a young philologist, but to know for a fact that when I continued with the investigation, I would inform him of any discoveries I made. He used me, like I did him. That man wanted the Stone. I don't mean he would have sold his soul for it, because he was a religious, God-fearing man. But he did want it, with all the force of his reasoning. In his entire life, no one had ever tantalized him like I did.”

“So when you got back to Spain, you kept investigating.”

“Sporadically. My regular work took up a lot of time. I spent what would have been my vacation time on it, between projects. I studied a lot of Jewish mysticism in depth, in books like the Babylonian or Palestinian Talmuds, the aegis of Maraba, others such as Yetzirah, Bahir, Shoshan Edouth, Sefer ha-Rimon, and especially Sefer ha-Zohar, but it did nothing to help, other than to increase my already enormous and useless cultural baggage. I wrote down everything I found that I considered relevant in a field notes book. Then, I homed in on the only clue within reach: Casadevall. I gathered information on him from all the historic archives from that period, until I had drawn up a rough biography of his time in this world, but I didn't reach any useful conclusions. He lived a normal life, devoted to his work. He occasionally traveled around Europe, to the most prominent works of the day, especially Narbonne, which was completely normal among architects of that century. Now you tell me: What do you know about Casadevall?”

“Not much. He was a
magister principalis operis ecclesiae
who worked at the end of the fifteenth century on the works of the cathedral under the orders of other architects—”

“Like Jaumé Solà or Arnau Bargués,” interrupted Manolo, unable to contain himself. “What else?”

“Not that much. He didn't work as one of the main architects, but rather for them in administrative matters and supervision of the works.”

“Good. Casadevall held onto his post while other master builders came and went over thirty-six years. He hardly worked outside Barcelona, except for a time that he spent in Narbonne, which has a cathedral coeval with ours, with a similar construction style. Thirty-six years, a long time back then. Like many in his profession, he split his efforts between religious and civil building projects. Several specific parts of the cathedral are his, along with a number of civil buildings that no longer stand. His legacy is small, especially considering that his capacity, judging from what little has been conserved, was superior to that of many of his contemporaries. Do you know his work?”

“No, not at all.”

“In the books of works of the cathedral archive, he is listed as responsible for the works on the original choir, the elevation of the cloister, and the seal of the fourth vault. The vault is a complex but mundane work, just another piece of the overall design of the project and it's not important for what I'm going to tell you now. But after it was erected in 1384, it required a seal in 1410, which Casadevall undertook.”

“So, in short: Casadevall was just another man in the history of cathedrals, an obscure figure, without much significance, if any.”

“An obscure figure? Do you really think so? He may have been; thirty-six years in the background, at the orders of different master builders, and never stepping into the limelight do hint at that. But an obscure man is not one who causes the death of another two hundred years later. Casadevall did or knew something special, something different, that triggered the rage, and judging from the measures taken, even the fear, of the most powerful body of repression that had ever existed.”

“He wasn't just another architect then,” Bety conceded.

“No, no he wasn't,” Manolo confirmed. “He was only what he wanted to be, that's my conclusion. Had he wanted it, the title of
magister principalis
would have gone to him, if only because of his seniority. He kept a low profile because he wanted to, until the day of his death.”

“His death,” repeated Bety, in something of a daze.

“You know what happened,” Manolo stated.

“Yes. One morning in June, he was found dead on a cathedral pew. The years always take their toll, and the living conditions back then were terrible. For a man of his day, he lived many years, and died in the place to which he devoted all his life's efforts. A curious end for a mysterious man.”

“A beautiful death. Anyone would wish to die where they had spent so many years.”

“That's your opinion, like any other. To me, he lived, got old, and true to the absurdity of our existence, he finally died, as we all will one day.”

Their eyes met. Manolo kept quiet, and waited for Bety to speak.

“What about Diego de Siurana? What happened to him?”

“After his arrest in Barcelona and his first round of torture, Diego was taken to Toledo, where he was tortured again. They tortured him by strappado, which dislocated his bones. They used the
toca
, where they forced water down him, damaging his organs. Then they used fire to burn his limbs. Only the presence of a physician prevented the excesses from causing his death. They wanted him to speak by any means necessary. He received a heinous, inhumane punishment. But he didn't say a word. Throughout it all he claimed not to know what they were talking about.

“Diego's torture was no less barbaric than that of other Inquisition victims, but it did differ from the rest in its duration. He was tortured once every two weeks over a span of about ten years. What usually happened was that after three or four sessions, the heretic was sentenced to burn at the stake, jailed for life, or penanced following participation in an auto-da-fé. Diego was the only victim whose torment was so prolonged, at least to my knowledge, and I've read about many, many sentences, so many that not even I can remember them all.”

“Ten years of torture,” Bety murmured.

“Ten years. It's unbelievable that he could have survived as long as he did. In the end, his mutilated body gave up. He may have been stubborn, but he had probably lost his mind long before he died. Even the application of the torture violated the procedure, because torturing a person more than once wasn't allowed, although they tended to resort to the legal term of ‘suspending' the torture only to start over again a few days later. The accused could go back into the torture chamber only if new evidence appeared. And obviously, that wasn't the case for Diego. Once he was dead, the tribunal found him guilty of heresy and his remains were burned during the great auto-da-fé held in Toledo in early July 1627. And the irregularities present in the actions of the Inquisition throughout the process appeared again: his name wasn't on the public list of participants in the auto-da-fé, and is mentioned only in the sentence.”

Manolo's hands, which throughout his story had rested quietly on the table beside Bety's notes, suddenly sprang back to life. They moved with a unique grace difficult to imagine in their owner, and finally ended up open, with palms upward. With that simple gesture, he seemed to confirm the truths revealed.

“I see.”

“You see?”

“It's not that difficult. They wanted to leave no trace of him behind.”

“A good, albeit incomplete, assessment,” he said with his peculiar brand of candidness. “The Inquisition worked in a perfectly regulated way. No one broke the rules. One of the most important was the publication of the list of names before each auto-da-fé. The objective was to make the sins of the participants known to the spectators present, to remind them not only of what they mustn't do, but that the sins purged by those wearing sanbenitos had been committed by their neighbors, friends, brothers, and sisters, and that it could most definitely happen to any of them.”

“Not only did they want to keep any trace of him from being preserved, they wanted to make even the memory of his existence disappear.”

“Exactly.” Manolo then took on a confidential air. “The birth certificates of Siurana are supposed to be in Prades, the town with the parish it belongs to. Well, I visited the archives and his name isn't there, anywhere. It wasn't crossed out; it simply wasn't there. And another thing, the archbishopric's archive in Barcelona should have his name in many documents by virtue of his office, and none of them do, despite it being one of the best historic archives on the church in our country. Diego de Siurana ceased to exist, as if he had never been born, until a curious researcher sifting through the dirty laundry of the past found him in the present.”

“You raised a man from the dead.”

“That's right!” corroborated Manolo, taken by a certain excitement. “That unmatched power that research has over scholars, whatever their specialty, has to do with discovering its secrets. It doesn't matter what secrets. The important thing is to find them, confront the mystery dangling from them.” Manolo nodded. “I found one without realizing it. I conveyed it to the person who could get the most out of it, Shackermann, and when that secret was about to play out on its own, when the final
revelation appeared so near, it disappeared, it vanished before my eyes, it laughed like a flighty courtesan at my abilities, saying, ‘That's your lot! So close, yet so far!'”

Bety could scarcely believe what Manolo was telling her. It was well beyond anything she or Enrique had imagined, on their own or together. In exchange for it, there wasn't much she could tell the man, who appeared to have offered in good faith all of his knowledge on the manuscript and its mysteries. Certain it was impossible for her information to match up to Manolo's, Bety began her story.

“Now it's my turn. My story will be much shorter than yours. I have relatives in Barcelona who are book collectors. One of them recently acquired an entire library from an old
masia
, a family estate. The manuscript was mixed in with other documents. These relatives called on me to help translate the text. I was only too happy to oblige; it's not every day you get an opportunity like that. The translation was tedious, complex at times, above all because of the master's strange handwriting, but I got through it without too much difficulty. There was only one part I couldn't quite translate: the side notes. As you've seen, they're there in part of the text. I deduced that someone worked with the manuscript years after it was written, and wrote their impressions down in those side notes. But there's one thing I don't understand. If the Inquisition meant to make everything about Diego de Siurana disappear, how is it that the Casadevall manuscript, with all its side notes that prove Diego's work, wasn't found and destroyed as well? How could the inquisitors have missed it and allowed it to reach our hands? It makes no sense!”

“One idea does occur to me. Remember at first when I asked you where you'd found it?”

“Yes. And I told you it was in the old Bergués mansion, in Vic.”

“Right. And you don't remember that surname coming up in our conversation?”

“Well, now that you mention it, yes. When we were talking about the life of Casadevall, you mentioned the names of the
magister principalis
, and one of them was Bergués!”

“The name of the architect was Bargués, with an
a
, but it's possible that with the passage of time one of the letters got changed into an
e
, making it into Bergués. Which would make sense: for generations, as was common in those times, the members of that family were builders and architects. It's more than plausible that Diego de Siurana could have been connected to any of them, working as he did in the archbishopric. I find it a possibility that is beautiful in its rationality. I can't tell you how it got passed off to Bargués, but it seems obvious that it was. Friendship? Maybe he knew the secret? He tried to carry on with Diego's investigation and had to back off for fear of the Inquisition? Who knows.”

“Now I understand why you reacted the way you did when I told you it was the Bergués family from Vic.”

“Everything has fit from the very beginning.” Manolo watched her in silence, a blank expression on his face. But Bety felt uneasy, as if he might know that, without lying, she wasn't telling the whole truth. “And now that you've translated the Latin text, you need an expert to help you with the Old Catalan used by Diego de Siurana, as it was clearly him,” Manolo asserted. “Don't worry. Quim brought you to the best.”

Bety nodded, faking serenity. There was no doubt in her mind: Manolo was the best.

And that was exactly what she was afraid of.

“So this is where it all began.”

Enrique was studying the slender arches that sustained the vaults of the cathedral. In the zenith of the vault, the distant crests that sealed the work seemed to float in space, put there by the hand of an unknown giant. Carlos followed his gaze over the surface of the light-hued stone, which had been restored in the early 1970s to recover its original color after six hundred years of progressive blackening.