Purity of Blood

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  All of which, to put it in a nutshell, was like making bread from hosts, or the other way ’round…however you look at it, a disaster. And as time went on, by midcentury, with the Conde de Olivares’s fall from favor, the Holy Office’s bill came due for collection and it unleashed one of the cruelest persecutions of converted Jews known to Spain. That was the ruin of Olivares’s project, and many crucial Hispano-Portuguese bankers and suppliers took themselves off to other countries such as Holland, and with them their wealth and their commerce, to the benefit of the enemies of our crown. In other words, it all ended with our royally fucking ourselves over. And I say “ended,” because between the nobles and the priests here, and the heretics there, and the whore who gave birth to them all, we bled till there was no blood left to bleed. The skinny dog gets the fleas, and we Spanish do not need anyone to ruin us; when it comes to the killing blow, we can deliver it ourselves.

  So, in short, there I was, a beardless youth in the midst of all these maneuverings and machinations, and I was about to pay with my young neck. I sighed disconsolately. Then I looked toward my questioner, still the younger Dominican. The scribe was waiting, his pen poised above the paper, looking at me as if I were someone who presented every qualification for becoming good charcoal.

  “I know no de la Cruz family,” I replied finally, with all the conviction I could muster. “Therefore, I have no way of knowing about the purity of their blood.”

  The scribe bent his head as if he had awaited that answer, his pen scratching as he performed his filthy office. The lean old priest never took his eyes from me.

  “Do you know,” my tormentor asked, “that Elvira de la Cruz has been accused of inciting Hebrew practices among her fellow nuns and novices?”

  I swallowed. Or rather, I tried. Blood of God, I tried. But my mouth was dry as a pebble. The trap had closed, and it was a devilishly malefic one. Again I denied any knowledge, more and more afraid to hazard where all this was leading.

  “Do you know that her father and brothers and other accomplices, as Judaizing as she, attempted to free her after she was discovered and confined by the chaplain and the prioress of the convent?”

  Now there was an unmistakable scent of scorching meat on the air, and I was the roast. Once again, I wanted to say no, but this time I could not get the words out, and I had to shake my head. But my prosecutor, or whatever he was, did not change expression.

  “And you deny that you and your fellows are a part of that Judaic conspiracy?”

  At that, as frightened as I was—which was not a little—I was slightly irritated.

  “I am a Basque, and an old Christian,” I protested. “As good as my father, who was a soldier, and who died in the king’s war.”

  The inquisitor gave a dismissive wave of his hand, as if every Christian died in the king’s wars, and that meant nothing at all. Then the thin, till now silent, priest leaned toward the questioner, whispered a few words into his ear, and the younger man nodded respectfully. He turned toward me, and for the first time spoke. His tone was so menacing and cavernous that all at once I saw the young priest as the non plus ultra of understanding and sympathy.

  “Repeat your name,” the lean priest ordered.

  “Íñ…Íñigo.” I was so frightened by the Dominican’s severe gaze, the feverish eyes sunken deep in the sockets, that I had stumbled over my own name. He continued, implacable.

  “Íñigo and what more.”

  “Íñigo Balboa.”

  “And your mother’s name.”

  “Her name is Amaya Aguirre, Reverend Father.”

  I had already gone through all this, it was in the papers, so the repetitions made me even more apprehensive. The priest gave me a fierce, strangely satisfied look.

  “Balboa,” he said, “is a Portuguese family name.”

  The ground seemed to drop from beneath my feet, for I did not have to be told the effect of that poisonous dart. It was true that my surname was common on the Portuguese border, a region that my grandfather had left to enlist under the banners of the king. Suddenly—I have previously told Your Mercies that I was a bright enough lad—all the ramifications of my situation blazed with such meridional clarity that if there had been an open door I would have shot out of it like a flash.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced toward the rack, sitting to one side, waiting. That the Inquisition never used it as punishment but, rather, as an instrument for extracting the truth was a fact I did not find comforting. My one hope was that according to the rules of the Holy Office itself, torture could not be used against people of good reputation, royal ministers, pregnant women, servants—to make them inform against their masters—or anyone younger than fourteen…that is, me. But I was close to that fateful fourteenth, and if these men were capable of finding me Jewish ancestors, they could at their whim add the necessary months to make me eligible for their rope trick. And though the rack made men sing, it was not exactly a guitar.

  “My father was not Portuguese,” I protested. “He was a soldier from León, like his father, who at the end of a campaign remained in Oñate and married there. A soldier and an old Christian.”

  “That is what everyone says.”

  Then I heard the scream. It was the terrible scream of a desperate woman, muffled by distance but so piercing that it found its way along passages and corridors and through a closed door. As if they heard nothing, my inquisitors kept looking at me, unperturbed. And I shivered with fear when the lean priest shifted his eyes toward the rack and then back to me.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  The scream came again, a whiplash of horror, and yet again there was no reaction from the others, as if I had been the only one who had heard. Deep in their malevolent sockets, the Dominican’s fanatic eyes were two sentences of death at the stake. I trembled as if I had ague.

  “Th-thirteen,” I stammered.

  There was an anguishing silence, broken only by the scratching of the scribe’s pen. I hope he put it down right, I thought. Thirteen, not one year more.

  That was when the thin priest bore in on me. His eyes gleamed even more brilliantly, with a new and unexpected glitter of scorn and loathing.

  “And now,” he said, “we are going to talk about Captain Alatriste.”

  VI. SAN GINÉS ALLEY

  The gaming house was swarming with people betting their asses, even their souls. Amid the buzz of conversations and the coming and going of cardsharps and bootlickers hoping for tips, Juan Vicuña, a former sergeant of the horse guard wounded at Nieuwpoort, was crossing the room, trying to avoid spilling the Toro wine he was carrying in a jug, and looking around with satisfaction. On the half-dozen tables, cards and dice and money were changing hands, inspiring sighs, Holy Mothers! and flashes of naked greed. Gold and silver coins shone beneath the tallow lamps suspended from the domed brick ceiling, and business was all he could ask.

  Vicuña’s watering hole was in a cellar on Cava de San Miguel, very close to the Plaza Mayor; and in it, deals of every sort allowed by the mandates of our lord and king were struck, and also, as Your Mercies may have adjudged, others, scarcely concealed, that were not. The variety was as diverse as the players’ imaginations, which in that day was considerable. They were playing ombre, polla, and one hundred—games that bled you slowly—as well as seven-up, reparólo, and others referred to as “quick and slick” because of the speed with which they left a man without money, speech, or breath. About them, the great Lope had written:

  Like drawing out his sword

  for one who has occasion,

  so the game is the persuasion

  for one who seeks reward.

  True that only a few months before, a royal decree had been issued prohibiting gaming houses, for our fourth Philip was young, well-intentioned, and—amply aided by his pious confessor—he believed in things such as the dogma of the Virgin Mary, the Catholic cause in Europe, and the moral regeneration of his subjects in the Old and New Worlds. Forbidding g
ambling, like the attempt to close the bawdyhouses, however—not to mention hopes for the Catholic cause in Europe—was wishing for the sky. Because if anything besides theater, running the bulls in the plazas, and something else I will mention in good time, impassioned Spaniards living beneath the rule of the Austrian monarchy, it was gambling.

  Towns of three thousand inhabitants wore out eighteen thousand packs of cards each year, and card games were as often played in the streets—where sharps, cheats, and shills improvised games in which to fleece the naive—as they were in legal or clandestine houses, jails, brothels, taverns, and guardposts. Important cities like Madrid and Seville were anthills of meddlers and idlers with coins in their purses, ready to join in around the desencuadernada—the book without a binding, which was what a packet of cards was called—or a Juan Tarafe, a name the lowlife gave to dice games. Everyone gambled, common people and nobility, gentlemen and rogues; even ladies, who though they were not admitted into dens like Juan Vicuña’s, were assiduous patrons of the better gaming houses, as well versed in clubs, trumps, and points as the next one. And as may be expected of a violent, proud, and quick-to-draw-steel people like we were, and are, quarrels born of a game often ended with a “God’s bones!” and a fine collection of stab wounds.

  Vicuña made it across the room, though not before carefully eyeing some scholars of the art, which is what he called the charlatans expert in palming and marking cards, men who always had a winner up their sleeves, heedful of where it fell. He also stopped to give a warm greeting to don Raúl de la Poza, an hidalgo from a very wealthy Cuenca family, a black sheep with a taste for the spicier side of life, who was one of his best clients. A man of fixed habits, don Raúl had just arrived, as he did every night, from a brothel on Calle Francos—where he was a regular—and now would not leave until dawn, in time to attend seven-o’clock mass at San Ginés. Escudos were scudding across his table like sea foam on a stormy day, and always churning around him was a court of swindlers and sycophants who snuffed his candles for him, served his wine, and even brought a urinal if he was deep into the game and did not want to abandon a good hand. All in exchange for the barato, the real-or-two tip that came their way after every useful service.

  That night, de la Poza was in the company of the Marqués de Abades and other friends. That made Vicuña feel easier, for it was a rare day that three or four swaggering churls were not waiting to relieve de la Poza of his winnings as he left.

  Diego Alatriste thanked his host for the Toro wine, quaffing it in one long draught. He was in his shirtsleeves, unshaven, sitting on a straw mattress in the discreet room Vicuña had outfitted in his gaming house so he would have a place to retire and rest. A shutter allowed him to see into the main room without being seen himself. Boots on, sword on the taboret, loaded pistol on the blanket, vizcaína dagger on the pillow, and eyes sharp when from time to time he glanced through the latticed wood, it was obvious that Alatriste was on his guard. The room had a back, nearly secret, door to a passageway that emerged under an arch in the Plaza Mayor. Vicuña noted that the captain had arranged his belongings so that they could be gathered up in a quick retreat toward that door, should it be necessary. In the forty-eight hours he’d spent hiding there, Diego Alatriste had not relaxed except to nod off for forty winks. Even so, late one afternoon when Vicuña came in quietly to see if his friend needed anything, he had been met by the menacing barrel of a pistol pointed right between his eyebrows.

  Alatriste did not betray his impatience by asking questions. He handed the empty jar back to Vicuña and waited, looking at him with clear, unwavering eyes whose pupils were dilated in the dim light of the oil lamp on the table.

  “He will be waiting for you in a half-hour,” said the old sergeant, “in San Ginés alley.”

  “How is he?”

  “Fine. He has spent the last two days in the house of his friend the Duque de Medinaceli, and no one has bothered him. His name has not been made public, and the Law, the Inquisition, no one, is after him. The event, whatever it was, has not become public.”

  The captain nodded slowly, reflectively. That quiet was not strange, it was logical. The Inquisition never set bells pealing until it had the last of the loose ends well tied up. And things were still half finished. The absence of news might be part of the trap.

  “What are they saying in San Felipe?”

  “Rumors.” Vicuña shrugged his shoulders. “That there was swordplay at La Encarnación gate, that someone died…They put it down more to the nuns’ swains than anything else.”

  “Have they been to my lodgings?”

  “No. But Martín Saldaña smells something. He was at the tavern. According to La Lebrijana, he said nothing specific but hinted a lot. The corregidor’s catchpoles are not showing themselves, he said, but there are people around watching. He did not explain who, although he mentioned familiares of the Holy Office. The message is simple. He is not dancing this chaconne, whatever it is, and you had better guard your hide. Apparently this is a delicate business, and it is being carried out with zeal. No one is claiming any knowledge of it.”

  “What do you hear of Íñigo?” The captain looked at Vicuña steadily, with no visible emotion. The veteran of Nieuwpoort hesitated, uncomfortable. With his one hand, he kept turning the empty jug around and around.

  “Nothing,” he answered finally. “It’s as if the earth swallowed him up.”

  For a moment, Alatriste sat without speaking. He stared at the wood planks between his boots and then stood up.

  “Have you spoken with Dómine Pérez?”

  “He is doing what he can, but it is difficult.” Vicuña watched as the captain put on his rough-skinned buffcoat. “You know that the Jesuit Order and the Holy Office do not exchange confidences, and if they have the boy it may be a while before the dómine learns of it. As soon as he hears anything, he will tell you. He also offers you the Jesuit church, if you want safe haven. He says that the Dominicans cannot take you from there, not even if they swear you killed the papal nuncio.” He glanced through the lattice toward the gaming room, and then looked back toward the captain. “And whatever it is you’ve done, Diego, I hope to God you have not actually killed the nuncio.”

  Alatriste asked for his sword and slid it into its scabbard. He cinched it on, and then stuck his flintlock pistol into his belt, after pulling back the hammer to be sure it was well oiled.

  “I will tell you about it another time,” he said.

  He prepared to leave as he had come, without explanation and without thanks. In the world that he and the veteran sergeant of the horse guard shared, these terms of the arrangement were understood.

  Vicuña laughed a loud, soldier’s laugh. “By all that’s holy, Diego. I am your friend, but I am not curious. Besides, I would hate to die of noose poisoning. So it would be best if you never tell me.”

  It was deepest night when, with his cape tight around him and hat pulled low, the captain emerged beneath the dark arcades of the Plaza Mayor and walked the short distant toward Calle Nueva. No one among the few stragglers out and about paid any attention to him, except for a lady of the night who when she met him between two arches offered, without much enthusiasm, to reduce his weight by twelve cuarto coins. He crossed through the Guadalajara gate, where a pair of guards were dozing before the closed window shutters of the silver shops, and then, to avoid the constables who tended to station themselves in that area, went down Calle de las Hileras to El Arenal. Finally, he again turned up the hill toward San Ginés alley, where at that hour refugees from the law were wont to gather in the cool night air.

  As Your Mercies know, the churches of the period were havens of asylum, where no ordinary law could reach. So anyone who stole, wounded, or killed—all the things they called being “about their work”—could take sanctuary in a church or convent, where the priests, highly jealous of their privileges, would defend him tooth and nail from the royal authorities. So popular was it to plead innocent and seek protection t
hat some of the principal churches were chock-a-block with clients enjoying the sanctity of their refuge. In those crowded communities, one tended to find the cream of society; there was not enough rope to do honor to their genteel gullets. Because of his profession, Diego Alatriste himself had once had to recur to that practice. Even don Francisco de Quevedo, in his youth, had found himself in similar, if not worse, straits when in Venice, he and the Duque de Osuna staged a coup and he had had to escape disguised as a beggar.

  The fact is that places such as Los Naranjos courtyard of the Seville cathedral, for example, or a good dozen places in Madrid, among them San Ginés, had gained the dubious privilege of taking in the flower of the city’s braggarts, cutthroats, thieves, and carousers. And all this illustrious brotherhood, which after all had to eat, drink, satisfy its needs, and conduct its personal business, took advantage of the night hours to take a walk, commit new villainy, settle accounts, or whatever opportunity presented itself. These felons also received their friends there, even their whores and cronies, so that by night the area around these churches—even church buildings themselves—became the criminals’ tavern, even their brothel. There, real or invented feats were aired, death sentences were carried out by hired steel, and there, too, throbbed the colorful and ferocious pulse of the dangerous underbelly of Spain: the world of scoundrels, thieves, and other caballeros of the low life, men whose portraits never hung on the walls of palaces but whose existence was recorded in immortal pages. Some of which—and not the worst, certainly—were written by don Francisco.