The Source

by James A. Michener

  “Now speak,” the workmen whispered, and when he refused, the bloody cloth was again inserted in his mouth. Six jugs of water, six strangling, terrifying, mortal jugs, were poured into him while strong hands pressed on his stomach, so that his lungs, his bowels and his heart seemed to explode.

  He did not talk. So he was hauled at last to the final torture, where, spread in complete agony on the cold stones, his joints inflamed and his throat torn, he was given a few minutes of respite, during which he heard the priest begging him yet once more to avoid the worst agony which was now at hand. He remained silent, whereupon the soles of his feet were smeared with a mixture of pepper, oil, menthol and clove, and when the unguent was well into his pores fagots from an open fire were brought and passed back and forth across his feet, raising horrible blisters and sending throughout his body pain of an absolute magnitude. He fainted.

  He awakened some time later in his cell. His mattress had been removed and he was lying naked on the stones, his heap of clothes beside him. He was unable to move either his arms or legs. His feet ached beyond human endurance, and his mouth had already become so scarred that each breath was agony. For four dreadful days he lay there hoping to die, and on the fifth, when his blisters were at their worst, his joints inflamed and his throat a mass of sores, he was dragged back to the vault, where the priest said, “Diego Ximeno, we have proof beyond question that you are a Jew. Please, for God’s mercy, confess and let us end this business.” Ximeno said nothing.

  The Dominican honestly wanted to save the accused from further pain, so he pointed to the door of the torture chamber and said, “Diego, believe me, of a hundred misguided people we have to bring down here, we set at least ninety free. To resume their normal lives. To rejoin the Church as corrected Christians.” He waited but Ximeno said nothing. “It’s true, we punish them here, but when they confess they go free with nothing worse than an unhappy memory. Diego, if you tell us now the names of the other Jews, you will go free, like the ninety, with nothing worse than a few scars on your ankles. Please, please speak.” But Ximeno said nothing.

  This time the workmen used different tactics. Pulling him to the ceiling they eschewed tricks and set about dropping and raising him as rapidly as possible, until it seemed that his heart must be torn out of his body. Then, after a few minutes, they lugged him like an inanimate object to the water table, pressed him down upon the log until his back nearly cracked and proceeded immediately with the cloth and six jugs of water. Later, at the fire, they went right to work and burned him so horribly that again he fainted. With disgust they dragged him, unconscious, back to his cell and heaved him through the air, smashing him against the wall.

  “Let’s hope we killed him,” they muttered, for his obstinacy was a reflection upon them. They had proof that he was a secret Jew, and his refusal to confess was preposterous.

  Of his tortures on the third day he remembered nothing, but they were in no way different, for the Inquisition did not permit its workmen to cut a man’s flesh, to blind him or to meddle with his private parts, and if a prisoner remained silent in the face of rope, water and fire, as Ximeno had done, it was permissible nearly to kill him with these means but it was not permissible to do more. At the end of the third incredible session the doctor stood over the inanimate hulk by the fire and said, “This one can stand no more.”

  The Dominican looked at the distorted, blistered body and cried, “Why don’t they confess and save themselves this agony?”

  The doctor asked, “Do you suppose this one really is a Jew, Father?”

  “At first I was sure,” the Dominican replied. “But after this …” He turned away.

  Toward the end of 1542, when Ximeno had been nearly three years in solitary confinement, for which his estate still had to pay rent week after week, the sad-eyed Dominican came at last to see him: “Diego, tomorrow your day of judgment is at hand. You are to be burned at the stake.”

  The prisoner still made no response, and the priest begged, “Diego, please, for the mercy of God, confess, so that when you reach the stake the executioner will be permitted to strangle you before the fire begins.”

  Again there was no comment, and the distraught priest cried, “Diego! Do not force us to do this horrible thing. Your soul is already in the hands of God. At least allow your body to go in peace.”

  But the resolute prisoner said nothing, and the priest departed.

  At four on Sunday morning two young Dominicans entered the cell bearing a sackcloth uniform into which Diego Ximeno was forced to climb. Over it the priests threw a long yellow robe on which had been painted little red devils throwing into the fires of hell heretics and secret Jews. Finally they jammed on the prisoner’s head a tall conical hat, yellow and adorned with swirling flames. “You must follow us, Counselor,” said the two young friars of Avaro, who in happier days had often sought his assistance, which he had freely granted.

  At the door of the prison Ximeno was handed a lighted taper, which signified that he was to be burned, and he came at last to the barefoot procession itself: sixty-three who had confessed minor crimes against the Church, like reading Erasmus, and who would escape death to live the rest of their lives in dismal isolation—pauperized, forbidden employment, anathematized; nineteen who had confessed major crimes, like naming their sons Moses or refusing to eat congers eels, and these would be burned, but at the last moment they would be strangled so as to escape the fire; and six like Diego Ximeno, who had refused to confess either to Judaism or Lutheranism, and they would be burned alive without strangling.

  It was a long procession, headed by the dignitaries of the Church; and a longer day, marked by sermons, pleas and accusations. More than forty thousand persons packed the plaza to hear the solemn proceedings, for the day had been widely advertised throughout the region and all who attended were granted special dispensation, for that day they would see where the path of heresy led.

  Late in the afternoon the inquisitors came finally to the cases of those to be burned, and justification for this act was cited from the specific words of Jesus Christ Himself as reported in the holy gospel of St. John: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” But once the verdicts of death had been read, the Church dignitaries solemnly washed their hands of the matter and left the scene, while the prisoners were turned over to the secular arm of the state with the plea that they be treated kindly and that no blood be spilled.

  The secular arm then marched the condemned to an entirely different part of the city, where stakes had been set into the ground and fagots piled high, and as the prisoners marched, the populace screamed at them, threw things, cursed and reviled them. Those prisoners suspected of being Jews went through a particular Gehenna, for they were tormented with special taunts: they had known God and had turned their backs on Him; they had crucified Jesus; they were worse than the swine they refused to eat. And with each step that the suspected Jew took, two friars clung to him, crying, “Jew, confess that your religion is false. Confess that God is three and not one.” And to many Jews on the death march this vilification of their religion was worse than the taunts of the crowd. At the burning place the citizens watched with horrified fascination as Diego Ximeno, silent and austere, climbed unaided onto the pile, ignoring the pleas of his accompanying friars that he save himself from the final agony. Below him secretaries waited with pen and book, ready to write down whatever he might scream in his torment. This had become a matter of some importance, for there were many in the town who were beginning to believe that Ximeno was not a Jew, and such a belief might become embarrassing if it led to local sanctification. But as the flames leaped at his throat Ximeno summoned forth the same iron control that he had shown in the torture room, and he died confessing nothing, so that at the moment of his death the people who had known him well began to whisper, “He was not a Jew. He was a saint,” and the first steps of his canonizatio
n began, much to the disgust of the Inquisition, which had intended something quite different.

  Of all the watchers who saw the burning of Diego Ximeno, none witnessed it with greater apprehension than Dr. Abulafia, a distinguished medical man whose Jewish ancestors had become Christians in 1391 and who, as a good Christian himself, had risen to a place of prominence in the city. He was married to a Christian lady of impeccable lineage. He ate pork, was not circumcised, nor were his sons, and he had never been suspected by anyone, not even during the worst rigors of the Inquisition, of being a Jew. Upon the distribution in 1540 of the list of signs whereby secret Jews could be trapped, some of his acquaintances had jokingly reviewed the items with him, saying, “At least nobody can accuse you of being a Jew, Abulafia,” and not even his friends had considered reporting him to the inquisitors. He was a flawless man.

  With horror he had stood in the public plaza to hear the formal charges against his old patient, Diego Ximeno, and during the procession to the burning grounds he had twice stationed himself in positions where the condemned man would have to pass close to him; but Ximeno, in a kind of mortal trance, had stared straight ahead, refusing to see the doctor. When Ximeno climbed to the stake Dr. Abulafia positioned himself with the secretaries waiting to catch any words the doomed man might utter, but again nothing happened. Yet at the last moment, when Ximeno’s hair was ablaze and his skin had begun to char, he did cast one final, lingering glance at Dr. Abulafia, and their eyes met through flame.

  When the fires burned down and there were left only iron chains soiled with greasy soot, Dr. Abulafia walked dumbly homeward, and it was now he who was in a trance. At home Doña Maria asked, “Why are you so pale?” and he replied, “I’ve just seen Diego burned,” and his wife replied, “He must have been guilty. These are not things for us to worry about.”

  Abulafia was unable to eat supper, nor did he wish to play with his two sons. He went to his study to examine patients, but he became dizzy and thought he would faint. By exercising will power he succeeded in maintaining control, saying to himself: If I faint now it might be fatal. Who knows which of these patients was sent to spy on me this night? So he worked on.

  Dr. Abulafia was a tall man with dark, sympathetic eyes. Handsome and much respected by the people of Avaro, he had a gentle manner with the sick which enabled him to earn more money than most of the doctors in town. He was a skilled surgeon, enjoying a favorable reputation in cities as far distant as Toledo, where he had once treated Emperor Charles. He sprang from a family whose contributions to Spain dated back to the year 400 C.E., and he should have felt secure this ghostly night, when the smoldering fires of the burning still hovered above the city, but he did not. The execution of Diego Ximeno haunted him, so at the earliest chance he closed his office. Avoiding his family he went to a small inner room containing no books, no papers, no pictures. The walls were white, the table and chair rudely made, and he sat staring straight ahead and thinking. He was afraid to write anything down, which he desperately wanted to do, for his wife or some spy might find his writing and give it to the Inquisition. He was afraid to mumble the words his brain formed lest someone be listening and overhear un-Spanish syllables. He was not free to recite any litany, nor to consult books, nor to read manuals, nor to do anything other than sit.

  He stared at the wall for nearly an hour, trying to cleanse his mind of the terrible things it had seen that day, but flame and the penetrating eyes of Diego Ximeno haunted him; when he tried to concentrate he saw only the eyes of the counselor, but finally the dreadful visions faded and letters of the Hebrew alphabet began to form in space before the whiteness of the wall, and they began to move hither and about, forming in alternation consoling or condemning patterns. Still he stared, as the letters took meaningful patterns recalling concepts which he had suppressed for many months; then they assumed the form of symbols which evoked other meaningful concepts, and still he sat, motionless, wanting to write down the letters with pen and paper but terrified of doing so; and after a long interval of watching, the Hebrew letters turned to fire and marched purposefully across the wall, and he began to breathe in short gasps. His stomach contracted and these preliminary letters started to fade from sight until the wall was lonely and bare.

  Then, from an immeasurable distance behind the wall, came four letters of extraordinary force, too powerful to be looked at directly. He dropped his eyes. The letters came through the wall and across the room right to his forehead; and now without using his eyes he could see them in all their terrible majesty, and they were broken, YH on one side and WH on the other, and try as he might he could not bring them together to form the unspoken, the unspeakable Name; and slowly the letters receded until they stood again upon the wall, and now he could look upon them with his eyes, and they stood accusingly there, YH to one side and WH to the other, and he had not the power to fuse them into one word. For the word he sought was the sacred Name of God Himself, and this Name Abulafia could not speak; for he felt himself to be a man of sin: he could have joined Ximeno at the stake but through cowardice had not done so. After a long while he stopped looking at the accusing letters and found himself muttering an ancient Hebrew prayer, and it was for the salvation of Diego Ximeno’s soul; for Dr. Abulafia knew with certainty that the counselor had been a secret Jew and that the Inquisition was therefore justified, according to its rules, in burning him alive.

  On the day in 1540 when he heard that Ximeno had first been arrested, Dr. Abulafia had said to himself, trembling in this white room, “Diego will confess, and he will tell them that I, too, am a Jew.” Then his agony of cowardice began. With unmanly apprehension he watched the prison where Ximeno was kept, expecting each day to be called before the Inquisition with word that the counselor had incriminated him. The three years that Ximeno had lain in silence were to the doctor an eternity, for he could visualize the tortures that his friend was suffering. In recent years several patients, having been set free after preliminary questioning in the torture chamber, had come to Dr. Abulafia with distended joints or horrible scars on their feet and they had wanted to tell him how they had acquired these marks, but he had refused to listen. “The sacred Inquisition does its duty and does it justly,” he told them, for he could never be sure which were spies saved from their own burning in order to trap him.

  In the refuge of this silent room he had prayed: “God of Moses our Teacher, save Diego.” And when weeks passed and the Inquisition did not come to arrest him, he said to himself: Maybe Ximeno is not going to confess, and he grew ashamed at having entertained such self-seeking thoughts. A few days ago the broadsheet had come fluttering through the streets, announcing that the next burning of heretics would be headed by Counselor Ximeno, and Dr. Abulafia had suffered fresh moral confusion until at last he had been driven in a kind of self-sacrificing mania to station himself along the path of Ximeno’s march to the fagots, willing to step forward and identify himself if the doomed man gave the signal; but with a fortitude Abulafia considered impossible, Ximeno had marched in silence, protecting the names of others that he alone knew to be secret Jews. Yet as he passed, Abulafia saw something that he would never forget. Ximeno’s face was a mask which revealed nothing, but his bare feet were marked by gaping scars which could have come only from burns. And at the end there had been the last fraternal glance.

  Now on the night of death Dr. Abulafia sat again in the white room and asked himself: How many other secret Jews in this city did Ximeno protect through his courage? And when he contemplated the fortitude of the martyred man he had to cry aloud, whether spies heard him or not, “Praise God for those who have the strength to die for the sanctification of the Name.” And he continued with a soaring, poetic invocation to the good Jew who had that day allowed himself to be burned alive rather than escape his agony by incriminating others who would be hounded to death after he was gone.

  Dr. Abulafia had met Ximeno twenty years ago, in the winter of 1522. It was an accident, an accident of words:
at a formal dinner celebrating the patron saint of Avaro he had asked innocently, “What is this Kabbala the Jewish people speak of?” And after a series of cautious probings the counselor had revealed himself as a master of the Kabbala, that esoteric body of mysticism that had grown up in Germany and Spain as a pathway to the understanding of the Hebrew God. Ximeno had given Dr. Abulafia a manuscript of the Zohar, the arcane book of Kabbalism, believed to have been composed centuries before by a mystical Jew in Granada, and had initiated him into its mysteries. Abulafia had found much to his liking, for while he had never been able honestly to accept the Christian principle that God was of one substance and three manifestations, he found the austere monotheism of Hebraic teaching equally difficult. There was in life, and his Spanish nature sensed it, an additional spirit of flight, the wild movement of the human soul seeking some kind of further identification with God; and only in the Zohar did Abulafia find a solution that satisfied him.

  Between the immensity of God and the insignificance of man the Zohar postulated ten spheres of divine manifestation, each of which man can approach or even encompass: the supreme crown of God, the wisdom of God, the intelligence, the love, the power, the compassion, the everlastingness, the majesty, the root foundation and the kingdom of God. These ten spheres, through which God emerges from his unknowable state, can be represented in the form of a tree, but it is known that the sap of this tree, the vitalizing power, is and must be the ultimate spirit of God.

  It was through the exploration and contemplation of these spheres that Ximeno and Abulafia reached the mystical point at which sometimes, after having manipulated the letters of the Hebrew alphabet for hours, they would come close to the ultimate secret of God Himself. Then the four separate letters of the mystical tetragrammaton, YHWH, would appear on the paper before them, properly fused into the Name, and they would become aware of the actual presence of God Himself.