Purity of Blood (8 page)

I was ready to sprint from that place like a hare, but the new arrival uttered a mournful moan that made me turn and look at him. There was enough moonlight that I was able to recognize the younger of the two de la Cruz brothers, the one called don Luis, who had fled from the convent badly wounded. As I went toward him, he staggered to his feet and looked at me with frightened eyes that glowed feverishly in the scant light. I ran my fingers over his face, as blind men do to recognize people, and he fell toward me, prey to something that for an instant I took to be a faint, but, when I put out my hands to steady him, I learned was loss of blood from his wounds. Don Luis was perforated with stabs and shot from a harquebus, and when he collapsed into my arms I smelled sweat mixed with the sickeningly sweet scent of blood.

“Help me, boy,” he murmured.

He had spoken so quietly that I could barely hear his words, and the breath it cost him to speak seemed to have weakened him further. I tried to get him to stand, pulling him by one arm, but he was very heavy and his wounds made him nearly lifeless. All I got from him was a prolonged moan of pain. He had lost his sword, and the only weapon he had left was the dagger at his waist—I had touched the grip when I tried to lift him.

“Help me,” he repeated.

In his present state, he seemed much younger, closer to my own age; and everything that had impressed me earlier, his elegance and charm, had vanished completely. He was older than I, and a handsome man, but he had as many holes as a sieve. I was unhurt, and his only hope, which made me feel strangely responsible. So, restraining my natural inclination to leave him there and look for safe haven as fast as my legs could carry me, I stayed on.

I pressed as close to him as I could, pulled his arms around my neck, and tried to lift him onto my back, but he was limp and slippery from his own blood. I swiped my hand over my face, despairing, and as I did, bathed myself with the viscous liquid dripping on me. Don Luis had fallen back again against the stone wall, and was now suffering very little. I tried to feel for one of the large holes through which his soul was escaping, thinking I would plug it with a linen handkerchief I had pulled from my pouch, but by the time I found a hole and put my fingers in it—like Doubting Saint Thomas—I knew that it was futile, and that the young man was not going to see the dawn.

I felt unnaturally lucid.
It is time to get going, Íñigo,
I told myself. The shots and the din had faded from the plaza, and the silence, if possible, was even more menacing. Again I thought of the captain and don Francisco. By now they could be dead, imprisoned, or fleeing; none of the three possibilities was encouraging, however much my confidence in the poet’s sword and my master’s serenity inclined me to believe they were safely away or taking refuge in one of the few churches open at this early morning hour.

I got up slowly. Luis de la Cruz was on the ground, curled into a ball and no longer moaning. He was dying, and all I heard was his breathing, growing steadily weaker and more irregular, punctuated from time to time by a sinister gargle. He was not strong enough to ask me to help him or to call me “boy.” He was drowning in his own blood, which was spreading slowly into a large dark pool gleaming in the light of the moon.

A single shot from a pistol or harquebus rang out in the distance, as if it had been fired at someone being pursued, and I clung to that sound, hoping it might have been aimed—unsuccessfully—at the fleet shadow of Captain Alatriste running to safety in the darkness. As for my own young hide, it was time to find sanctuary for it. So once more I bent over the dying man. I pulled out the dagger that would be of no help to him in his journey, and stood up, ready to quit that unhappy place.

But, could that be music? A kind of
ti-ri-tu, ta-ta
from someone whistling behind me. The sound turned me to ice, and my fingers, sticky with the blood of Luis de la Cruz, tightened on his dagger grip. I turned very slowly, holding the dagger high, and as I did, moonlight glanced from the blade. At the far end of the low stone wall was a familiar shape: a dark silhouette cloaked in a cape and a black wide-brimmed hat. Recognizing who it was, I knew that the trap was lethal, and that I had sprung it.

“So, boy, we meet again,” said the shadow.

Gualterio Malatesta’s gruff, grating voice resounding in the silence of the night was a sentence of death. Your Mercies will ask why the Devil I stood there, flat-footed, instead of flying out of there like a soul in the arms of the Devil—or one fleeing from him. The reasons are two. For one, the Italian’s appearance had left me as frozen as a post sunk in the ground; the second, my enemy was standing directly in the path I had to take to escape the pocket where poor Luis de la Cruz lay. Whatever the reason, there I was, holding the dagger before me as Malatesta calmly looked me over, as if he were already at the Gates of Hell.

“We meet again,” he repeated.

Then he moved away from the wall, almost as if too lazy to stir himself, and took a step toward me. Only one. I could see that his sword was still in the scabbard. I shifted my dagger slightly, and again it gleamed softly between us.

“Give that to me,” he said.

I clenched my teeth but did not answer. I did not want him to know how frightened I was. Beside me, on the ground, the dying man uttered one last moan, and then, no more death rattles. Ignoring my naked blade, Malatesta took two more steps in my direction, and bent down with interest.

“Less work for the hangman.”

As he spoke, he prodded the dead youth with one foot. Then he turned back toward me. Despite the darkness, I could tell he was surprised to see me still holding the dagger.

“Drop it, boy,” he muttered, almost as if I weren’t there.

Now I could see other shadows, armed men coming toward us; and yes,
they
were carrying pistols and unsheathed daggers and swords. Light shone around the corner, beamed above our heads, and started down the hill. I watched the black shadow of the Italian gliding across Luis de la Cruz. The young man lay motionless, curled up on the ground. Had it not been for the open eyes staring straight ahead, I would have said he had fallen asleep in a large red puddle.

The lantern was coming closer, and now Malatesta’s shadow fell on me. He was silhouetted against the light, and metallic reflections sparked off the approaching men. Still I had not lowered the dagger. And when the lantern stopped beside us, it lighted one side of the Italian’s thin, pockmarked and scarred face, reminding me of a sinister moonscape. Above his mustache, which he wore trimmed in a thin line, eyes as black as his clothing studied me with amused attention.

“You are a prisoner of the Holy Inquisition, boy,” he said, and in his mouth the terrible words, accompanied by a smile that was pure menace, sounded like a mockery.

I was too terrified to reply or to move, so I did neither. I stood stock-still, the dagger held high. I imagine that to anyone looking on, my inaction could have been interpreted as resolve. That may have been why I caught a flash of curiosity, or interest, in my enemy’s black gaze. Almost immediately, some of the constables encircling us made a move to take me, but Malatesta stopped them with a gesture. Then, slowly, as if giving me the opportunity to reflect, he drew his sword from the sheath: an enormous sword with an interminable blade, huge quillons, and a wide guard. He contemplated that blade for a few instants, then slowly raised it until it glittered before me. Compared with that monster, my dagger seemed ridiculous.

But it was my dagger. And so, although my arm was beginning to feel as if it were made of lead, I held it steady, not flinching, staring into the eyes of the Italian like someone hypnotized by a snake.

“The lad has gall.”

I heard laughter from among the shadows behind the lantern. Malatesta reached out with his sword and ticked the tip of my dagger. The sound made the hair rise on the back of my neck.

“Now drop it,” he said.

Again someone laughed, and that laughter fired my blood. I swung with all my might, hoping to rip Malatesta’s sword from his hand, and the sound rang out like a challenge. Suddenly, before I could react, I saw the tip of his sword two inches from my face, motionless, as if he were considering whether or not to run me through. Again I struck out with the dagger, but his blade had disappeared and I swung into empty space.

There was renewed laughter. I felt an infinite sorrow, a grief that brought tears, not to my eyes—which my pride kept dry—but to my heart and throat. And I learned that there are some things no man can tolerate though it cost him his life or, precisely, because that life would not be worth living if he yielded. And in my sadness I remembered the hills and green fields of my childhood, and chimney smoke on the damp morning air, and the memory of my father’s hard, rough hands, the scratchy whisper of his soldier’s mustache the day he embraced me for the last time—I being but a boy—as he went off to meet his fate below the walls of Julich. And I felt the warmth of our hearth, and I could see the figure of my mother bent over by the fire, sewing, or cooking, and hear the laughter of my little sisters playing nearby. And I longed desperately for the warmth of my bed on a cold winter morning. And then it was the sky, blue as Angélica de Alquézar’s eyes, that I longed to have overhead when life ended—rather than darkness and lantern light, so somber and sad. But no one chooses his moment, and this was, without doubt, mine.

I am going to die,
I told myself. And with all the vigor of my thirteen years, and all the desperation of the many beautiful things that I would now never know, ever, I focused on the gleaming tip of the enemy steel and commended my soul to God, clumsily, with a quick prayer my mother had taught me in her Basque tongue as soon as I could speak. Then, sure that my father would welcome me with widespread arms and a smile of pride on his lips, I gripped the dagger, closed my eyes, and, blindly swinging, threw myself against Gualterio Malatesta’s sword.

I lived. Later, every time I tried to remember that moment, I could re-create it only through a rapid succession of sensations: the last glint of the sword before me, the fatigue in my arm raining blows right and left, my forward lunge toward nothing, not sword, not pain, not resistance. Then suddenly, contact with a solid, hard body, and clothing, a strong hand restraining me, or rather embracing me as if fearing I would hurt myself. And trying to free my arm to use the dagger, and as I struggled without a sound, a voice with a vaguely Italian accent whispering, “Easy there, easy!” almost with tenderness, pinning me as if I were going to wound myself with my own weapon. And then, as I kept swinging, with my face buried in dark cloth that smelled a little of sweat and a little of leather and metal, the hand that seemed to embrace or protect me slowly twisted my arm, not cruelly, until I had to drop the dagger. Near tears, and wishing I could cry, I seized that arm with rage, like a pit bull ready to die on the spot. And I did not let go until that same hand closed into a fist, and a blow behind my ear shattered the night into a thousand pieces, and I sank into a sudden deep and brutal sleep. A black, bottomless void that I fell into without a cry or a moan, prepared to meet my Maker, like a good soldier.

Later I dreamed that I hadn’t died.

And I was terrified by the certainty that I was going to wake up.

V. IN GOD’S NAME

I awakened suddenly, hurting all over, in the darkness of a moving coach with drawn curtains. I felt a strange weight around my wrists, and when I moved, heard a metallic clicking that filled me with dread. My wrists were secured with iron cuffs, and they in turn were fastened by a chain to the floor of the coach. Through chinks in the curtains I glimpsed light, and learned that it was well past dawn. Whatever the actual time, I had no idea how long it had been since I was captured. The carriage was moving at a normal pace, and at times, on a hill, I would hear the crack of a whip and shouts of the coachman as he laid into the mules. I also heard the sound of horses’ hooves, dropping back and then catching up. I was being driven, then, out of the city, chained, and with an escort. And according to what I had heard when taken prisoner, I had fallen into the clutches of the Inquisition. I did not have to stretch my imagination to conclude the obvious: If anyone had a black future ahead of him, it was I.

I wept. I burst into disconsolate tears in the dark pitching of the carriage. No one could see me there. I cried until I had no tears left, and then, snuffling, I pushed back into a corner to wait, rigid with fright. Like every Spaniard of the time, I had heard enough about the practices of the Inquisition—that sinister shadow that had loomed over our lives for years and years and years—to know my destination: the dreaded secret dungeons of the Holy Office, in Toledo.

I am sure, Your Mercies, that I have spoken of the Inquisition. One thing I know: it was no worse here than in other countries of Europe, although the Dutch, English, French, and Lutherans, who were our natural enemies, proclaimed it part of the infamous Black Legend they called upon to justify the sacking of the Spanish empire in the hour of her decline. True it is that the Holy Office, which was created to guard the orthodoxy of the Faith, was more rigorous in Spain than in Italy and Portugal, for example, and worse yet in the Antilles. But the Inquisition also existed other places. And furthermore, with that excuse or without it, the Germans, French, and English sent more nonbelievers, witches, and wretched poor up in smoke than all the victims burned at the stake in Spain.

Here, thanks to the punctilious bureaucracy of the Austrian monarchy, each and every human they turned to cracklings—many, but not all that many—was duly recorded under history of trial, name, and surname. Something that cannot be claimed by the vile frogs of the most Christian King of France, the accursed heretics farther north, or an eternally treacherous, vile, and piratical England. For when
they
got their fires going, they did it joyfully and wholeheartedly, with no order or harmony, and according to whim and self-interest—damned, hypocritical swine. Added to that, secular justice was as cruel as its ecclesiastical counterpart, and the general public equally so, owing to a lack of culture and the masses’ fondness for seeing neighbors drawn and quartered.

It is also the fact that the Inquisition often acted as an arm of the government under such kings as our fourth Philip, who left in its hands the oversight of new Christians and Jewish sympathizers, the persecution of witches, bigamists, and sodomites, even the authority to censor books and combat the smuggling of weapons, horses, and legal and counterfeit currency. The latter responsibility was due to the argument that smugglers and counterfeiters greatly harmed the interests of the monarchy, and he who was enemy of the monarchy—the defender of the Faith—was also, to keep it short and simple, the enemy of God.

Nevertheless, despite the slander of foreigners, and even though not all trials were resolved at the stake and one might find examples of piety and justice, the Inquisition, like any excessive power placed in the hands of man, was ominous. And the decadence we Spanish were suffering across the world—seeds that produced, and will continue to produce, fields of thistles and nettles—can be explained, primarily, by suppression of liberty, cultural isolation, loss of confidence, and the religious obscurantism created by the Holy Office. So great was the fear it spread that even collaborating agents of the Inquisition, its so-called “family”—a post that could be bought—enjoyed complete immunity. To say the words “a
familiar
of the Holy Office” was the same as saying spy or informer, and of those there were some twenty thousand in the Spain of our Catholic Philip.

Your Mercies should be aware of what the Inquisition meant in a country like ours, in which a charging bull could not move Justice as quickly as pieces of eight, where everything up to the Most Holy Sacrament was for sale, and where, in addition, every man and woman alive had a quarrel to be adjudged. No two Spaniards—and by my faith this is still the case—took their breakfast chocolate the same way: one drank only chocolate from Oaxaca; another took his black; this one with milk; that one with fried bread; and yet another in a bowl with sweet French bread. Similarly, it was necessary no longer to
be
a good Catholic and old Christian, but only to
appear
to be. And nothing made one seem a more enthusiastic defender of the Faith than to betray those who were not, or those who because of old rancor, jealousy, envy, or quarrels made good prospects. Who knows? Some of those prospects might actually be nonbelievers.

As was to be expected, denunciations fell like rain, and “I have it on good authority” and “Everyone knows” rattled down like hail. When the implacable finger of the Holy Office pointed toward some poor wretch, he immediately found himself abandoned by patrons, friends, and relatives. Son accused father, wife accused husband, and prisoner betrayed accomplices, or invented them, if he hoped to escape torture and death.

And there was I, at thirteen, trapped in that sinister web, knowing what awaited me and not daring to think about it. I knew stories of people who had taken their own lives to escape the horror of the prison I was being carried to. I must confess that in that dark carriage, I came to understand why. It would have been easier and more dignified, my thoughts ran, had I speared myself on Gualterio Malatesta’s sword and ended everything quickly and cleanly. But there was little doubt that Divine Providence wished me to suffer this test. Curled in my corner, I sighed deeply, resigned to confronting what lay ahead without hope of rescue.

Although it would not have hurt my feelings, I mused, had Providence, divine or otherwise, assigned that Herculean labor to someone else.

During the rest of the journey I thought of Captain Alatriste. I hoped with all my soul that he was safe, maybe somewhere nearby, planning to free me. But I did not hold that hope long. Even if he had escaped the extremely clever trap set by his enemies, this was not a chivalric romance filled with fabulous feats of knight-errantry; the shackles clicking to the swaying of the coach were not fantasy but real. And so, too, were my fear and loneliness, and my uncertain fate. Or certain, according to the point of view. The fact is that later, life—the passing years, adventures, loves, and the wars of our lord and king—caused me to lose faith in many things. But I had already, young as I was at the time, ceased to believe in miracles.

The carriage came to a stop. I heard the coachman unhitch the mules, and knew that we had stopped at a post house. I was trying to calculate where we might be when the coach door opened. The sudden glare dazzled me—for it was now the late afternoon of the next day—and for a few seconds I was blinded. I rubbed my eyes, and when I opened them, there stood Gualterio Malatesta, observing me. As always, he was in severe black: gloves and boots, the plume in his hat, and the line of mustache that accentuated the fineness of his features, forcing the contrast between the first impression of pulchritude and, at closer look, a face so marred by pockmarks and scars that it suggested a battlefield. At his back, across a broad sweep of land and about half a league away, I could see Toledo glowing in the golden light of the setting sun, its ancient walls crowned by the palace of Emperor Charles V.

“We say good-bye here, boy,” said Malatesta.

I stared at him, confused. I must have looked terrible, with the dried blood of poor Luis de la Cruz all over my face and clothing, along with the usual wear of a journey. For a moment, I thought I saw a frown on the Italian’s brow, as if he was not happy with my state, or my situation. I simply stared, uncomprehending.

“They take over here,” he added finally.

He nearly smiled that slow, cruel, and dangerous smile of his that revealed teeth as white as the eyeteeth of a wolf. But it vanished immediately, as if he had changed his mind. Perhaps he judged that I was already so browbeaten that he would not humiliate me further. Actually, he did not seem all that comfortable. He observed me a moment longer, and then, his expression unreadable, put his hand on the door.

“Where are they taking me?” I asked.

My voice sounded weak, so unfamiliar it could have belonged to someone else. The Italian did not answer. His eyes, black as death, stared at me without blinking. When Gualterio Malatesta looked at you, you always wondered if he had eyelids.

“There.”

With his chin, he gestured toward the city over his shoulder. I saw his hand on the door as the hand of the executioner, and the door as the stone on my tomb. I tried to find some way to prolong what instinct told me was to be my last moment of sunlight for a while.

“Why? What have I done?”

Again he did not answer. He simply stared. I could hear mules being brought up, and as they harnessed the new pair the carriage shook. I saw several men, armed to the teeth, pass behind the Italian, and in their midst the black and white robes of a pair of Dominican priests. One glanced toward me as he went by, indifferent, as if instead of seeing a human he were observing an object. That look was the most frightening thing I had as yet experienced.

“I am sorry, boy,” said Malatesta.

He seemed to have read the horror in my thoughts. And may the Devil take me if in that moment I did not believe he was sincere. It was but an instant, however—those four words and a flash in the blackness of his gaze. When I tried to pursue the shred of compassion I thought I had glimpsed, I met only the impassive mask of an assassin. The carriage door was beginning to close.

“What news of the captain?” I asked with anguish, frantic to stay a few more instants in the sun.

Not another word from Gualterio Malatesta. A beam of sunlight shone on his somber face. And then I did see an expression I could not doubt, a quick flash of rage and spite. It lasted only a second, and then it was gone, hidden behind the cruel grimace, the dangerous, bloodthirsty smile that twisted his pale, cold lips. But my heart leaped with joy, for I knew, with every bone in my body, that Diego Alatriste had eluded the ambush.

Malatesta slammed the carriage door, and I was again in darkness. I heard shouted orders, a horse galloping away, and then the coachman’s whip. The mules started off, and the carriage began to roll toward a place where not even God would be on my side.

The hopelessness of being in the hands of an all-powerful apparatus devoid of emotion, and thereby of pity, struck me the moment I emerged from the coach into a dismal inner courtyard that dusk made even more somber. After my shackles were removed, I was led to an underground room by four constables of the Holy Office and the two Dominicans I had seen at the post house.

I will spare Your Mercies the details, but after I was stripped and thoroughly searched, I was subjected to a preliminary interrogation by a scribe who demanded to know my name, age, the names of my father and mother, those of my four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, my current dwelling, and my place of origin. Then, in a routine tone, the scribe tested me on elementary Christian knowledge by making me recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria. Finally, he asked me the names of any persons who might be connected with my situation.

I asked what my situation
was,
but he did not tell me. I asked why I was there, and he did not answer that either. When he persisted in asking for names, I did not answer, pretending to be confused and afraid—although if I am to be frank, I didn’t need to pretend. When my questioner persisted, I burst into tears, and that seemed to be enough for the moment, for he put his quill into the inkwell, scattered powder over the page, and put away his sheets of paper. On the strength of that experience, I resolved to resort to weeping any time I found myself in a tight spot, although I feared that weeping would not require any great effort on my part. If there was one thing I would not lack for, I surmised in my misery, it would be reason for shedding tears.

After that, believing the interview was over, I found it had been only a proem, a prologue: the first act had not yet begun. This I learned when I was taken into a square room without windows or embrasures, lit by a large candelabrum. The only furnishings were a large table, another smaller one holding writing materials, and a few benches. The two priests I’d seen at the post house were seated at the large table, along with a third individual wearing a large gold cross around his neck. With his dark beard and black robe he looked convincingly like an officer of the court, or a judge. At the smaller table was a scribe very different from the one who had conducted the preliminary questioning, a crowlike man who put down the smallest detail of what was said, and, to my growing fear, probably things I had not said. Two constables, one tall and strong-looking and the other redheaded and thin, were my guards. On the wall hung an enormous crucifix, the occupant of which had undoubtedly passed through the hands of this very tribunal.

As I learned from that point on, the most fearsome thing about being a prisoner in the secret dungeons of the Inquisition was that no one told you what your crime had been, or what proof or witnesses they had against you—nothing about anything. The inquisitors limited themselves to posing question after question, and the scribe to noting it all down, while you addled your brain trying to decide whether what you were saying weighed on the side of your release or of your condemnation. It was possible to spend weeks, months, even years there without knowing the exact reasons, with the added aggravation that if your answers were not satisfactory, they would resort to torture in order to facilitate your confession and obtain the proofs they needed. And when you were tortured, you would begin to answer willy-nilly, not knowing what you should be saying. Everything led to desperation, to the conscious or unconscious betrayal of friends, of you yourself, and at times to madness and death. That was one way of dying other than being led in your white robe and conical hat to the scaffold, with a garotte around your neck, a pyre of dry kindling beneath your feet, and your neighbors and former friends shouting their approval, enchanted with the spectacle.