Purity of Blood (16 page)

“What plot are you referring to?” And in the darkness, Alatriste smirked and twisted his mustache. “I thought I just heard you say that you know nothing at all.”

“The Devil take you, Captain.”

“They want me to wake with the Devil, that is true.”

“Well, blast it, do not let that happen.” Saldaña adjusted his cape more comfortably around his shoulders, and his pistols and all the iron he wore at his waist clinked lugubriously. “That person I was speaking of is going around making inquiries about you. He has recruited half a dozen of those big talkers to fillet your innards before you have time to say ‘good day.’ The bastard’s name is…”

“Malatesta. Gualterio Malatesta.”

Martín Saldaña’s quiet laugh was heard again. “The very one,” he confirmed. “Italian, I believe.”

“From Sicily. Once we worked together. Or rather, we did half a job together. We have crossed paths another time or two since then.”

“Well, by Christ, you did not leave a pleasant memory behind. I believe he very much wants to see you.”

“What more do you know of him?”

“Very little. He has the support of powerful sponsors, and he is good at his trade. Apparently he went around Genoa and Naples, killing right and left on behalf of others. They say he enjoys it. He lived a time in Seville, and he has been here in Madrid about a year. If you want, I can make further inquiries.”

Alatriste did not answer. They had come to the far end of El Prado de Atocha, and before them lay the empty darkness of the gardens, the meadow, and the start of the road to Vallecas. They stood quietly, listening to the chirping of crickets. It was Saldaña who spoke first.

“Use caution on Sunday,” he said in a low voice, as if the place were filled with indiscreet listeners. “I would not like to have to put you in shackles. Or kill you.”

Still the captain said nothing. Wrapped in his cape, he had not moved. Beneath the brim of his hat, his face was darker than the night.

Saldaña breathed a hoarse sigh, took a few steps as if to leave, sighed again, and stopped with an ill-humored “I swear by all that’s holy.”

“Listen, Diego,” Saldaña continued. Like Alatriste, he was staring into the dark meadow. “Neither you nor I have many illusions about the world it has been our lot to live in. I am weary. I have a beautiful wife and employ that I like and that allows me to save a little. That makes it necessary, when I am carrying my lieutenant’s staff, for me not to know my own father. I may in fact be a whoreson, but I am
my own
whoreson. I would like for you—”

“You talk too much, Martín.”

The captain had spoken softly, in an abstracted tone. Saldaña removed his hat and ran one of his broad hands across a skull barely covered with hair.

“You’re right. I talk too much. Maybe because I am getting old.” He sighed for the third time, eyes still focused on the darkness, listening to the crickets. “We are both getting old, Captain. You and I.”

In the distance, they heard bells marking the hour. Alatriste did not move. “We haven’t many years left,” the captain said.

“Not many at all,
pardiez.
” The chief constable put on his hat, hesitated an instant, and then walked back to the captain, stopping at his side. “There are not many who share our memories and silences. And of them, few are the men they used to be.”

He whistled an old military tune. A little song about the old
tercios,
raids, plunder, and victories. They had sung it together, with my father and other comrades, eighteen years before in the sacking of Ostend and on the long march from the Rhine toward Friesland with don Ambrosio Spínola, when they took Oldenzaal and Lingen.

“But it may be true,” Saldaña said in conclusion, “that this century no longer deserves men like us. I am referring to the men we once were.”

Once again he looked toward Alatriste. The captain slowly nodded.

The thin moon cast a vague, formless shadow at their feet.

“It may be,” the captain murmured, “that we do not deserve them either.”

IX.
AUTO - DA - FÉ

The Spain of the fourth Philip, like that of his predecessors, was enchanted with the ritual burning of heretics and Jews. An
auto-da-fé
attracted thousands of spectators, from aristocracy to the lowest townsman. And when one was celebrated in Madrid, it was witnessed from the loges of honor by Their Majesties the king and queen. Even Queen Isabel, who, because she was young, and French, was at first repelled by such activities, eventually became an enthusiast, like everyone else. The only thing Spanish the daughter of Henri the Béarnaise never accepted was to live in El Escorial, which she always found too cold, too grand, and too sinister for her taste. She was, however, subjected to that vexation posthumously: having never wanted to set foot inside it, she was buried there after her death. Though it is not such a bad place to be, God knows, laid to rest alongside the imposing tombs of Emperor Charles the Fifth and his son the great Philip, ancestors of our fourth Austrian monarchy. Thanks to whom—great leaders that they were, whether for bad or ill, and to the despair of Turks, French, Dutch, English, and the whore who birthed them all—Spain, for a century and a half, had Europe and the world by their tender testicles.

But let us return to the bonfire. Preparations for the fiesta, in which, to my misfortune, I had a reserved place, began a day or two before the event. There was great activity by carpenters and other workmen in the Plaza Mayor, where they were constructing a high platform fifty feet long facing an amphitheater of stair-stepped benches, draperies, tapestries, and damasks. Not even for the wedding of Their Majesties had such industry and facilities been on display. All the streets into the plaza were blocked so that coaches and horses would not clog free movement, and for the royal family, a canopy had been rigged on Los Mercaderes, as that location offered the most shade. Since the
auto
was a long ceremony, taking the whole day, there were stands, protected from the sun by a canvas, where one could get a cool drink and something to eat. It was decided that for the convenience of the august persons of the king and queen, they would enter their loge from the palace of the Conde de Barajas, using an elevated passageway over Cava San Miguel that communicated with the count’s houses on the plaza.

Expectations resulting from this level of preparation were so high that vying for tickets to a seat at a balconied window often deteriorated into a battle royal. Many people of influence paid good ducats to the Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty’s household to obtain the best locations, including ambassadors, grandees, the king’s courtiers, council presidents, and even His Holiness the Papal Nuncio, who never missed a bullfight, a tournament of tilting, or an outdoor roasting, not even for a
fumata blanca
in Rome.

On a day like this, meant to be memorable, the Holy Office wanted to kill several partridges with a single shot. Resolved to undermine the Conde de Olivares’s policy of rapprochement with the Jewish Portuguese bankers, the most radical inquisitors of the Supreme Council had planned a spectacular
auto-da-fé
that would strike fear into the heart of any who were not secure in the purity of their blood. The message was clear. However much of Olivares’s money and favor they might have, Portuguese of Hebrew blood would never be safe in Spain. The Inquisition, relentlessly appealing to the religious conscience of our lord and king—as irresolute and easily influenced as a young man as he was when old, pleasant by nature but lacking character—preferred a ruined nation to one whose faith was threatened. And that preference, which in the long run had its effect—predictably, a most disastrous effect—upon Olivares’s economic plans, was the principal reason why the trial was being hastened: to serve as an efficacious example to the public. What ordinarily would take months, even years, of assiduous instruction was completed in a few weeks’ time.

Because of the haste, details of complex protocol were greatly simplified. Sentences were usually read to the penitents the night prior to the dreaded day, following a solemn procession of officials carrying the green cross destined for the plaza and the white one that would be raised above the stake. This time they were left to be made public on the day of the
auto-da-fé,
when everyone was already present for the festivities. Prisoners destined for the
auto
had arrived from the dungeons of Toledo the day before. They—we—were about twenty, and were housed in cells the Holy Office maintained on Calle de los Premostenses, darkly referred to as Calle de la Inquisición, very near the Santo Domingo plaza.

I was brought there on a Saturday night, having communicated with no one since I was taken from my cell and placed in a coach with closed curtains and a heavy guard. I never left the coach until I descended by torchlight in Madrid among the armed civilian
familiares
of the Inquisition. They led me down to a cell, where I was given a tolerable dinner, a blanket, and a straw mattress. I anticipated a restless night as I listened to footsteps and the noise of locks and bolts outside my door, voices coming and going, a lot of scurrying about, and objects being rolled and dragged. With which I began to fear that I could look forward to a very difficult day on the morrow.

I racked my brain, searching through dangerous moments I had witnessed in the playhouses of the
comedias,
hoping that, as always happened there, I would find a way out. At that point, I was certain that whatever my crime, I would not be burned because of my age. But the prospect of beatings and imprisonment, perhaps for life, were strong possibilities, and I was not certain which seemed worse. Nevertheless, the resilience of youth, the terrible times I had survived, and the exhaustion of the journey, soon took their natural course, and after a period of wakefulness in which I asked myself over and over how I had come to that sad fate, I sank into a merciful and restorative sleep that eased the restlessness of thought.

Two thousand people had stayed up all night to be assured of a place in the Plaza Mayor, and by seven in the morning there was no room for another soul. Blending in among the multitude, with the brim of his hat over his face and a short cape thrown over his shoulders and across the lower part of his face, Diego Alatriste made his way toward the de la Carne section of the plaza. The arches were jammed with people of every state and condition: hidalgos, clergy, artisans, servant girls, merchants, lackeys, students, rogues, beggars, and assorted rabble pushed and shoved in their quest for a good view. The balconied windows of the surrounding buildings were black with people of quality: gold chains, silver trimmings, fine cottons, one-hundred-
escudo
laces, nuns’ habits, and men clad in the uniforms of chivalric orders, some bedecked with the insignia of the Golden Fleece. And below in the street, whole families assembled, including children, carrying baskets of victuals and drinks for luncheon and tea. Mead vendors, water sellers, and peddlers of sweets made hay while the sun shone down. A merchant with religious prints and rosaries hawked his merchandise at the top of his lungs; on a day such as this, he argued, these articles carried the blessing of the pope and plenary indulgences. A few feet away, a man who claimed to have been mutilated in Flanders, but who had never glimpsed a pike in his life, was plaintively begging, and squabbling over his place with a malingering cripple and another man hoarsely whining about scald head, a condition visible in the scales on his hairless head. Elegant young bloods were punning and playing with words, and whores were cajoling and wheedling. One woman, pretty but not wearing a mantle, and another who was, but whose mud-ugly face showed evidence of mercury poisoning—the kind who swore not to stroll down the garden path until they captured a grandee of Spain or a Genoese banker—were pleading with a common artisan, who had been flashing his sword and putting on airs, to loosen his purse strings and treat them to a tray of fruit or some candied almonds. And the poor man, who in all the excitement, had already let go of the two pieces of eight he had on him, congratulated himself for not bringing more—unaware, foolish man he was, that true señores never pay, or even pretend to; instead they make a show of
not
paying.

It was a luminous day, perfect for the momentous events to come, and the captain, his gray-green eyes dazzled by the blue spilling down the eaves onto the plaza, squinted against the sun as he elbowed his way through the crowd. It smelled of sweat, of too many people, of fiesta. He felt a hopeless desperation building inside him, impotence at confronting something that exceeded his limited forces. That machinery of the Inquisition was moving inexorably forward, leaving no opening for anything other than resignation and fear. He could do nothing; he himself was not safe there. He roamed among the crowd with his mustache pointed over his shoulder, retreating the minute someone looked at him a little longer than was wont. In truth, he kept moving just to be doing something, not to be glued to one of the columns in the arches. He asked himself where the devil don Francisco de Quevedo might be at this hour. His journey, whatever the result, was now the one thread of hope before the inevitable.

It was a thread he felt snap when he heard the trumpets of the guard, making him turn and look toward the crimson canopy-covered balcony on the façade of Los Mercaderes. Our lord and king, the queen, and the court were taking their seats amid the applause of the throng. Our fourth Philip, grave, impassive as a statue, made not a flicker of movement, not a foot, not a hand, not his head, as blond as the gold passementerie and the chain across his chest. Our queen wore yellow satin and a headdress of plumes and jewels. Guards with halberds took up posts beneath Their Majesties’ balcony, Spanish on one side and German on the other, archers in the center, all of them impressive in their rigid order.

It was a handsome spectacle for anyone not in danger of being burned alive. The green cross was installed above the platform, and on the fronts of the buildings were hung, in alternating sequence, the coat-of-arms of His Majesty and that of the Inquisition: a cross between a sword and an olive branch. Everything was rigorously canonical. The spectacle could begin.

They had brought us from our cells at six-thirty in the morning, between constables and the
familiares
of the Holy Office armed with swords, pikes, and harquebuses. We were led in a procession through the Santo Domingo plaza, down San Ginés, and from there, crossing Calle Mayor, into the plaza by way of Calle de los Boteros. Marching in file, we were escorted by armed guards and mourning-clad
familiares
carrying sinister black staffs. There were clerics in surplices, dirges, lugubrious drums, cloth-covered crosses, and masses of people in the streets. And in the center of it all, here we came. First, the blasphemers, then the bigamous; after them, the sodomites and the Judaizers and the followers of Mohammed; and last, the practitioners of witchcraft. Each group included wax, cardboard, and rag representations of those who had died in prison and those who were fugitives, to be burned in effigy.

I was near the middle of the procession, among the minor Judaizers, so dazed that I thought I was in a dream from which, with a little effort and great relief, I would awake at any moment. We were all wearing sanbenitos, long white garments the guards had dressed us in as they took us from our cells. Mine bore a red St. Andrew’s cross, but the others were painted with the flames of Hell. There were men, women, even a girl about my age. Some were weeping, and others were stone-faced, like the young priest who had denied at mass that God was in the host, the
forma sagrada,
and who refused to retract what he had said. One woman denounced as a witch by her neighbors, too old to stand on her own, and a man whose legs had been crippled during his torture, were riding mules. The most serious offenders were wearing cone hats, and all of us were carrying candles. Elvira de la Cruz was clad in sanbenito and cone hat, and when we were lined up, she was among the last. After we began to walk, I could no longer see her. I went with my head bowed, afraid I would see someone I knew among the people watching us pass by. As Your Mercies may imagine, I was mortified with shame.

As the procession filed into the plaza, the captain searched for me among the penitents. He could not find me until they made us climb up onto the platform and take a seat on the graduated steps, each of us between two
familiares.
Even then he had difficulty, for as I have told you I tried to keep my head down; in addition, the platform was easily seen from the windows, but the view of people standing in the arches was obstructed. The sentences had not yet been read publicly, so Alatriste was tremendously relieved when he saw that I was among the group of minor Judaizers, and not wearing the cone hat. That at least eliminated the stake as my possible fate.

Dominicans in their black-and-white habits could be seen moving among the black-clad constables of the Inquisition, organizing everything. The representatives of other orders—all except the Franciscans, who had refused to attend because they considered it a grave insult to be assigned a place behind the Augustinians—were already in their seats in places of honor, along with the Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty’s household and councilors from Castile, Aragon, Italy, Portugal, Flanders, and the Indies. Beside the Inquisitor General, in the area reserved for the Tribunal of Six Judges, was Fray Emilio Bocanegra, bony and malevolent. He was savoring his day of triumph, as Luis de Alquézar must have been, seated in the loge of the highest palace officials, close to the balcony where at that moment our lord and king was swearing to defend the Catholic Church and to persecute heretics and apostates who opposed the true Faith.

The Conde de Olivares occupied a more discreet window to the right of their august majesties, and was looking very grim. It escaped very few who knew the secrets at court that this entire performance was in his honor.