City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  He could not bear to speak. He stared, riveted by her pain. Through the window came the barely audible voices of Holy Week hymn singers walking in procession in the street below.

  “I suppose you mean to mollify me in some way. You think I should be satisfied that I have more dresses than the Princess of Asturias.” Her voice was thick with drink and self-pity.

  He let his reticence torment him.

  “You are here because you want to talk about Inez. Captain Morada told me he has relinquished her to the convent.” Doña Ana seemed to enjoy this fact. He knew she was waiting for him to speak, but he could not.

  Their silence was a third presence in the room.

  Doña Ana gave in first. “Inez must have told you in confession that she did not honor me. She shouted at me in the street. I am sure it was the talk of Potosí. This city is so filled with gossip. I have never been able to control her. It is my own fault. I let an Indian wet-nurse her. Inez drank in savage ways with the mil—” She broke off. “Ah, but then you are the great defender of the Indians, so now you too will hate me.”

  He did not blame the milk Inez drank as an infant for the defects of her character. What the girl had lacked was a proper mother.

  “She hates me,” Doña Ana moaned.

  “No, she does not,” the priest protested. Inez no longer hated anyone.

  “Yes, she does. I can feel that you are here to tell me that she never wants to see me again.”

  “That is not it,” he said softly, “but I do have bad news.”

  “What?”

  He hesitated, lost in her accusing eyes.

  She rose, knocking her chicha cup to the floor. It was empty. “What? I cannot have bad news. I do not allow a single knot in the house. I burn incense to the Virgin every day.” She came to him and grabbed his hands.

  He looked directly into her glazed eyes. They suddenly read his heart and fired with recognition. Her face contorted.

  “Bernardina!” she screeched.

  The maid was in the room and on her knees near to the door before the sound of Doña Ana’s scream faded.

  The trembling lady never let go of his fingers, never took her eyes off his. “Coca. Bring the gum from that tree. Now! And tobacco. Now. Now.”

  The maid hurried out. He said nothing. Then, Doña Ana began to beat on his chest with an energy her wasted body had seemed incapable of. Beating and shouting, “There is not one knot in the house. I tell you I never had one dream. No. You are lying. You are a liar. All Jesuits are liars.”

  He caught her as she fell back, his heart shredded by anguish.

  She fought him off and fell to the floor. She pounded it with her fists. “I did it,” she wailed. “I killed my own daughter. I did it. I killed her.”

  Seven

  THE NEXT MORNING, a frosty Good Friday dawned and fear gripped all but the drunkest, most debauched, most addle-brained Potosinos. Many had spent a strange Holy Thursday scrambling to prepare a suitable welcome for Doctor Nestares, who held their fate in his hands. Others had anesthetized themselves with the drug of acquisition. Panicked that the power of their silver coins would soon diminish, they sought to buy while they could. Goods disappeared from the shops. Prices spiraled upward as shop keep ers realized that their products would hold value even if the currency did not. Late on the night of Holy Thursday, the weary merchants had finally turned out their clamoring customers and closed shop for the holiest days of the year. Dazed citizens trudged home through the stone-paved streets, quaking with an unnamable terror that the center of their existence would not hold.

  When morning came, they turned to God. A desperation for His mercy intensified the usual Good Friday outpouring of penance. Even the most materialistic and impious joined those burning with genuine remorse in an attempt to stay their Maker’s wrath. Beginning at dawn, processions of penitents formed and wound through the streets, calling at all the churches.

  On his way to the Convent of Santa Isabella de los Santos Milagros, Fray DaTriesta, the local Commissioner of the Inquisition, stopped to watch a huge parade pour out of the great stone Church of San Lorenzo and make its way along the Calle Zarate toward the Church of Jerusalén. Before his approving countenance passed children wearing only white tunics and dragging heavy fetters. Their heads were covered with ashes, and they chanted, “Lava quod est sordidum.”

  Yes, thought DaTriesta, wash what is defiled.

  A group of noblemen wearing hair shirts followed. Don Juan de Armuña whipped himself. Blood ran on his back. Don Francisco Casteñeda, his hands bound, wore an iron gag fastened with a heavy lock that clanked as the old man hobbled along. Twenty or so men in black hoods with eyes cut out bore huge crosses on their shoulders. Others dragged heavy logs with outstretched arms. The men of the Cabildo in white robes of rough cloth carried litters with statues of San Pedro and the Pietà. A group of Indian men bore a weighty silver litter that held an image of Our Lady. Indian women wearing crowns of thorns recited the rosary in chorus with their children. Noblewomen dressed in mourning, wearing ashes on their heads, carried candles in the gathering daylight. Doña Niña de Figueroa caught Fray DaTriesta’s eye, folded her hands, and bowed her head. The Commissioner raised his right hand to bless her, but his heart was not in an absolving mood. Sinful as this city was, not even such outpourings of repentance were guaranteed to repulse God’s anger.

  DaTriesta turned his reluctant steps toward the convent to warn that troublesome Abbess not to commit the sin that would finally deliver her into his power.

  At that moment, inside the convent in her tiny private chapel, the Abbess knelt in prayer before the oval image of the Virgin of Carmen with the Christ Child. “My conscience is clear,” she said to God’s beautiful Mother. “It is right to bury Inez here in the convent. I am sure of it,” she told the boy Jesus, who held a globe and red rose. “The girl came here for sanctuary, and I must keep her here. And I must confront whatever secrets lie in my convent.” The possibility of scandal made her stomach tremble. The threatened flames of the auto-da-fé made her sweat. “I came here to serve You, Lord. I will do what is right by Inez. After that, I put my future in Your hands.”

  Even as she spoke these words, she understood that although her life was in God’s hands, the plans she had been formulating in her mind all night were the key to saving her from the Inquisition. There were still unknowns—questions that would not emerge until the first facts came to light. She had instructed Sor Monica and Padre Junipero on what they were to try to learn. Sor Monica must determine what exactly had killed Inez. The priest, because he could move freely about the city, was to find out the meaning behind Inez’s pleading note to Beatriz Tovar, why Inez felt threatened, what was the secret that frightened her, the knowledge of which may have taken her life. Their discoveries would light her way to safety.

  She herself meant to uncover any information Inez might have shared with her sister, Gemita, a sweet, bland girl who had never much attracted the Abbess’s notice. Now she needed Gemita’s trust, but she did not have it.

  “How could I have known that I would need her?”

  The pretty, benign faces in the painting remained impassive to her pleas for help. She would have to find her own way. Nothing in her education had prepared her for this. She smiled ruefully at her own naïveté. She used to imagine that life in a cloistered convent would bring her a peaceful existence.

  Even as a child, she had wanted the convent—at first as her only escape from the strife she found at home. But she grew to love and desire her beautiful vision of tranquillity and a simple life of prayer. She did not even speak to her father of her wish. Girls of her breeding and station had only one duty—to marry the man of their fathers’ choosing, to seal alliances, to secure property.

  Then that happened which made marriage impossible and sealed the fate she so willingly embraced. She buried her screams and accepted the notorious crime as God’s way of sending her to the life He intended for her. She found the peace
she sought. For a while.

  On the day she professed, the Cardinal Archbishop had smiled benignly down on her in the lofty stone church of the Mother House. “What do you request, my daughter?” he had asked.

  “I ask for the blessing of God and for the favor to be received into this congregation,” she had answered. “I offer Our Lord my liberty and my family, and I ask only for His love and Holy Grace.”

  The Cardinal had placed his hand on her head. She had kept her eyes closed. She easily offered God what was left of her family. Her mother was dead and her dear brother, Juan, gone off to the court in Madrid. At that point, a husband was impossible for her, but she wanted none anyway. She had seen in her father and in her brother-in-law, Luis, what husbands were. In place of children of her own, she took God’s. The babies of the poor, and the girls who came to the convent to learn. The willful Inez, who might have been the daughter of her heart, who had come so close to confiding in her.

  “Are you resolved to despise the honors, the riches, and all the vain pleasures of the world in order to pursue a closer union with God?” the Archbishop had asked at her investiture.

  “I am so resolved.” She had heard the determination in her own firm, clear young voice. But now she possessed what she had promised to sacrifice. Honors in her position as Abbess, and riches, too—at least as much material comfort as she ever needed. Vain pleasures? She used to think they were dresses and pretty jewels. Vain pleasure was really the exercise of her will. A will about to break under the strain of having to choose between evils. She straightened her back. No. She would not admit defeat. She bore her weight on her knees.

  “Veni Creator Spiritus,” the choir of nuns had sung at her investiture. Come, Holy Spirit. Never in her life had she so required inspiration as she did on this Good Friday in Potosí.

  Creaking shoes in the passage outside warned her that one of the sisters approached. She blessed herself and, still lacking the answer to her prayers, went out to find the Sister Porter, who kept watch at the convent’s door. “The Commissioner of the Holy Tribunal asks to speak with you, Mother Abbess.”

  “You may show him into my office.”

  The Sister Porter folded her arms into her sleeves and bowed her head. “He wishes you to come to the locutory,” she said apologetically.

  “Yes, of course.” Maria Santa Hilda knew well Fray DaTriesta’s distaste for the company of women. Whenever they occupied the same room outside the convent—as they had yesterday in the Bishop’s mansion—he never looked her in the face. He cleaved to the conviction of many priests—that women were the source of all evil. It was true, she thought petulantly, if you considered that women were the source of all men.

  She went to the entrance of the convent, to the place where the nuns received visitors who could not or would not come inside. She entered the box—like a confessional with a heavy grille—and lowered her black veil over her face. Actually, it suited her to speak with DaTriesta here, where he could not read her thoughts in her eyes. She, on the other hand, saw him very well. She had had this part of the convent constructed so that the visitor’s compartment contained a window facing north that threw maximum light on his face.

  The dry, waspish Commissioner had the kind of severe and ugly looks—a high forehead, little hair, a pointed nose, a big pale mouth—that made him seem much older than his years. He was probably not more than thirty, and the energy of his relative youth gave him a threatening air of being always on the verge of a violent fit of temper.

  The Abbess leaned toward the heavy iron grille. “God be with you, Father,” she said, wishing with all her might that the Lord’s grace would soften DaTriesta’s heart but despairing that it was possible.

  “And with you.” There was a sarcastic edge to his thin, tinny voice.

  She waited for him to tell her what business had brought him to her portal, but he did not speak for such a long time that it became impossible to bear the silence. “How can I serve God in your person this day?” The sharpness of her voice outmatched the disdain she had heard in his.

  “I come to condole with you over the death of your sister de la Morada.”

  Behind the veil and the grille, she allowed herself a wry smile. “Thank you for your kind sympathy, Father.”

  Silence fell again. She realized he wanted information about how Inez had died, but she was determined to make him work for it. She closed her eyes and counted the piercing seconds.

  “I understand there were irregularities in the way she died,” he said finally.

  Maria Santa Hilda started. How could he know that? Padre Junipero was the only one outside the convent who could have told him, and he never would have. She twisted her fingers in her lap and blessed the veil that hid her fear. “We do not know what took her from us, but we are sure her soul is with God.”

  “From what I know, we must assume that she took her own life.”

  The Abbess forced her breath to stay calm. “No, Father. We need make no such assumption.”

  His sparse eyebrows rose. “Have you then determined what killed her when she was locked alone in her cell? Pray tell me what it was.”

  “We have evidence that she locked her door because she feared for her life.”

  “Do you mean you harbor a murderer, Sister?”

  “You have no jurisdiction in my convent.” The sharp words flew out of her mouth. She regretted the wrath they would incur.

  His pale lips curled in a smile. “You have a weakness for intemperate speech, my daughter.” When she encountered him face-to-face, he always averted his small, dark, hard eyes. Here, herself hidden, she saw them clearly. They were brilliant with hate.

  She fought to compose herself. The Grand Inquisitor was coming in three days. If DaTriesta accused her, his superiors could order her to Lima. The convent would have to pay the cost of her journey and the expense of her jailing. Worse, the order would never recover from the disgrace. If the Tribunal decided against her, they could excommunicate her. Nobody on earth could remove the interdiction but them. Without the Holy Sacraments, her very soul would be in danger. “I have done nothing to warrant the wrath of the Holy Tribunal.” She tried to say it simply, but her voice shook.

  “Nothing definitive yet, but I already have several pages on you in the Sumaria, Lady Abbess.”

  Indignation stiffened her spine. “What is it that I have done that so interests you?”

  “I guard this corner of our Holy Empire against Satan’s encroachment.”

  “Satan? What could I possibly want from him? There is nothing he can tempt me with.” She knew the words were proud and a sin of themselves. “What could I ask? Prowess in battle? To win at cards?” Freedom from the likes of you, she thought. She made the sign of the cross on the back of her hand with her thumb. She did not want him to see her bless herself against the sins he drove her to.

  His nostrils narrowed, as if he caught the scent of a decaying animal. “What do I know about what a woman wants from the devil. Perhaps health. The intelligence of a man.”

  “I already have those.” Pride again, but she could not help it.

  “How do I know where you got them?”

  “From the same place you got your gifts, Fray DaTriesta. From Almighty God.” It was folly to defy him, but impossible to forgo her own defense.

  Noise intruded, of a procession approaching to visit the church attached to the convent. Moans of penitents. Children and women reciting the rosary. Their presence gave the Abbess an opportunity to change the direction of the interview. “Perhaps we should not be thinking of these things on this holy day?”

  DaTriesta turned away, as if he had caught a glimpse of her face and could not bear to look on it. “Every day is the right day to preserve the integrity of the Holy Faith.”

  “To be sure,” she said. He put her in mind of those thugs who fought in gangs on the hill of Munaypata—bloodthirsty out of reason. She held up her hands, folded as in prayer. “Individualism, materialism, viol
ence. These are the real evils of our city, Father Commissioner. Can we not fight these together?”

  “Those are the faults of men, Lady Abbess. I do not see how you can fight them.”

  “With prayer, Father.” She lowered her voice and spoke with the false sanctity that marked his every word. It came out sounding like a mockery of his voice. She flinched at the gravity of having given such an insult.

  His seething anger boiled to the surface. “Beware. You have brought our notice on yourself by teaching women to read and write, by putting ideas of independence in their young heads. You would do better to support the feminine virtues: modesty, seclusion, chastity, fidelity.” He named them as if they were mountain peaks no woman could properly climb. “You put your very soul in danger. I do not threaten you lightly.”

  She gripped her arms to her sides and hoped he did not see the chill of fear shake her. “Inez de la Morada came here to repent and serve God. I believe she died in the state of grace. I intend to give her a Christian burial.”

  “I will require you to prove she deserves it. We men of the Inquisition are trained to look for facts. If you cannot substantiate your claims, you will be subject to our censure.”

  She knew what that meant. Once they got her, they would find a way to keep her. Only her selfish and dissolute father would be able to save her. And she would never give him the satisfaction of asking.

  DaTriesta smirked as if her silence meant his victory. “Go to your cell, Lady Abbess. Betake yourself to prayer. You still have time to mend your ways.”

  “I will struggle to be holy,” she said.

  “A struggle that goes on forever,” he said sanctimoniously. “Like all struggles between good and evil.”

  SOR MONICA HAD never threatened a living thing. She regretted having suggested to the Abbess this experiment with the cat. Now her Mother Superior, whom she had vowed to obey, who was also the person she most loved and admired in this world, had asked her to feed the cat the water from Inez’s carafe. And she would have to do it.