Jack sighed. “Now I’m glad we did not invite you to the feast—you are so depressing to talk to.”
Edmund de Ath attempted to shrug, but this hurt a lot, and all the muscles on his skull stood out for a few moments, making him look like a woodcut in an anatomy book that Jack had once seen flying through the air in Leipzig. When he could speak again he said, “It is just as well—my faith would not allow me to participate in your Sukkoth even though you cleverly disguised it as a betrothal-feast.”
Moseh laced his fingers together and stretched his arms, which was a noisy procedure. “I am going to bed,” he said. “If they are looking for reasons to burn you, Edmund, and if you are not giving them any, it follows that Jack and I will soon be dangling from the ceiling of the torture-chamber while clerks stand below us with dipped quills. We’ll need our rest.”
“If any one of us breaks, all three of us burn,” said de Ath. “If all three of us can stand our ground, then I believe they will let us go.”
“Sooner or later one of us will break,” Jack said wearily. “This Inquisition is as patient as Death. Nothing can stop it.”
“Nothing,” said de Ath, “except for the Enlightenment.”
“And what is that?” Moseh asked.
“It sounds like one of those daft Catholicisms: The Annunciation, the Epiphany, and now the Enlightenment,” Jack said.
“It is nothing of the sort. If my arms worked, I’d read you some of those letters,” said de Ath, turning his head a fraction of a degree towards some scrawled pages on the end of this table, weighed down by a Bible. “They are from brothers of mine in Europe. They tell a story—albeit in a fragmentary and patchwork way—of a sea-change that is spreading across Christendom, in large part because of men like Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes. It is a change in the way men think, and it is the doom of the Inquisition.”
“Very good! Well, then, all we must needs do is hold out against the strappado, the bastinado, the water-torture, and the thongs for another two hundred years or so, which ought to be plenty of time for this new way of thinking to penetrate Mexico City,” said Jack.
“Mexico City is run out of Madrid, and the Enlightenment has already stormed Madrid and taken it,” de Ath said. “The new King of Spain is a Bourbon, the grand-son of King Louis XIV of France.”
“Feh!” said Moseh.
“Eeew, him again!” said Jack. “Don’t tell me I’m to peg my hopes of freedom on Leroy!”
“Many Englishmen share your feelings, which is why a war has been started to settle the issue, but for now Philip wears the crown,” said Edmund de Ath. “Not long after his coronation he was invited to the Inquisition’s auto da fé in Madrid, and sent his regrets.”
“The King of Spain failed to turn up for an auto da fé!?” Moseh exclaimed.
“It has shaken the Holy Office to its bones. The Inquisitor of Mexico will probe us once or twice more, but beyond that he’ll not press his luck. Scoff all you like at the Enlightenment. It is already here, in this very cell, and we shall owe our survival to it.”
THE PRISON OF THE INQUISITION lay not far from the Mint where, in theory, every ounce of silver that came up out of the mines of Mexico was turned into pieces of eight. In practice, of course, somewhere between half and a quarter of Mexico’s treasure was smuggled out of the country before the King could take his fifth, but still the amount that came down into Mexico City sufficed to mint sixteen thousand pieces of eight every day. This was a large enough number to mean almost nothing to Jack. A couple of thousand an hour began to make sense to him. The booming and grinding of heavy silver-carts on the cobblestones beyond the prison walls gave a feeling of the sheer mass of metal involved.
One afternoon he was taking the air in the prison courtyard, letting the sun shine on some fresh thong-wounds that twined around his body like purple vines. It was a still and sultry day. Mexico City spread for no more than a mile in each direction and so Jack was able to hear something from every quarter: rugs being flapped out of windows; iron wheel-rims on stone pavers; whip-cracks; disputes at the Market; protesting mules, chickens, and swine; aimless chantings of diverse religious orders—the same noises as any city in Christendom, in other words, though the thin bony air of this high valley seemed to make sounds carry farther, and to favor harsh sounds over soft ones. Too, there were certain sounds unique to this country. The chief food was maize and the chief drink was chocolate, and both had to be ground between stones as the first step in their preparation, so any group of human beings in New Spain that was not positively starving to death was attended by a dim gnawing sound.
Jack had tied a strip of cloth over his eyes so that he could lie in the sun comfortably, and had unrolled a straw mat on the stones of the courtyard to even out the bumps somewhat, but except for a few negligible layers of skin, hair, and straw, his skull was in direct contact with the stones. Even if he stopped up his ears with his fingers, blocking out the noises of living things, certain vibrations of a mineral nature were still conducted into his head through that route, and even when no carts happened to be passing by, Jack fancied he could sense the omnipresent grumble of those grinding-stones, thousands of granite molars chewing the maize and cacao of this country. Which might be mistaken as the deepest ground-note, the continuo-line of this neverending Mass that was Mexico City. Except that there was another note even more pervasive. Jack did not hear it for a while, or if he did he could not disentangle it from the city’s other noises. But after he had been lying there for some time he went half to sleep and had some strange vision that, if he’d been a Papist, probably would have been accounted a miracle and got him nominated a Saint. The vision was that his body was a body of light, rising up and growing as it rose, as bubbles do when they come up out of a black depth, but that it was bound with thongs of darkness, somewhat as the light of a lanthorn appears to be gibbeted by the straps of iron that clasp it all round. At any rate, something about this sun-intoxicated state of mind, and the general drugged stupor that followed a torture-session, caused the brocade of sounds to unravel itself and come apart into its several threads, yarns, warps, and woofs. And in this way Jack became aware of the sound of the Mint.
Years before, he had seen a coiner at work making thalers in the Ore Range, and so he knew that underneath all of the ceremonies and offices, this Mint must be nothing more than a few men with hammers pounding out the coins one at a time. To make sixteen thousand pieces of eight per diem, they had to have several coiners working at once, each with his own hammer and die. Each hammer-blow was another eight bits given the sacred imprint of the King of Spain and sent out into the world. Sometimes several coiners would bring their hammers down in quick succession and Jack would hear a cluttered barrage of rings, other times there would be anomalous pauses during which Jack phant’sied the whole Spanish Empire was holding its breath, fearing that the silver had run out. But for the most part the coiners worked in a shared rhythm, each taking his turn, and the rings of the hammers came steadily, about as frequently as the beats of Jack’s heart. He put his hand to his breast to prove it. Sometimes his heart would beat in perfect synchronization with the coiners’ hammers for several beats in a row, and Jack wondered whether this was more true among persons who had been born and raised in this city.
Like a heartbeat, the sound of pieces of eight being born was not normally audible, but if you sat very still you could sense it, pervading the streets of Mexico City as the blood did the body; and Jack already knew that in certain remote places like London, Amsterdam, and Shahjahanabad, you could detect its pulse, just as you could count a man’s at a certain place on the wrist, far away from the beating heart.
Jack had never had much use for Spaniards, having always tended to view them as Englishmen gone spectacularly wrong, grapes that had turned to vinegar, a reasonably promising folk who’d been made utterly deranged by being trapped between la France and dar al-Islam. But lying there in the fist of the Inquisition listening to the grinding of the t
ortilla-stones and the ringing of the coiners, Jack was forced to admit that they were as vast and queer in their own way as the Egyptians.
Jack would never have accused himself of being a wise man, but he prided himself on cunning. Wisdom or cunning or both told him that he’d best ignore de Ath’s ravings about the Enlightenment and keep his attention fixed on nearer and more practical matters. The crypto-Jews who occupied the cells of this prison were an odd lot, but they knew quite a lot about the workings of the Mexican Inquisition—as how could they not. It was the rule in most Inquisition prisons to keep every prisoner in solitary confinement, for years at a time if need be, in the hope that he or she would finally break down and confess to some heresy that the Inquisitor had not even suspected, or even dreamed of—supposedly whole new categories of Sin had been discovered, or invented, in this way. But the only rule that Diego de Fonseca enforced in his prison was that the inmates were not supposed to leave, and he’d even bend that rule for a few hours or a night, if you promised to come back.
Consequently Jack, while lying in the sun of the courtyard recovering from various torture-sessions, had already had plenty of opportunities to listen to his fellow-inmates holding forth on the dark glories of the Inquisition. At the drop of a hat they’d tell the tale of the auto da fé of 1673 or of 1695, how many were burnt and how many merely humiliated. Even allowing for routine exaggeration, there was no avoiding the conclusion that an auto da fé was a colossal event, something that happened only once or twice in an average person’s lifetime, and a spectacle that peons would travel for days just to witness.
None of which was exactly comforting—until it was learned, a week or two after the arrival of Edmund de Ath, that the Inquisitor had scheduled an auto da fé for two months hence, which put it shortly before Christmas. Obviously such an enormous pageant could not be re-scheduled once a date had been set, and so if the three Minerva prisoners could only hold out until mid-December they would probably be punished and set free. But in the meantime the Inquisitor had every incentive to break them.
A single gifted torturer acting free of bureaucratic restrictions probably could have gotten Jack, Moseh, and Edmund to say anything he wanted them to in a few minutes’ work. But Inquisition torture was ponderous and rule-bound. A large staff of doctors, clerks, bailiffs, advocates, and Inquisitors had to be present, and by the looks of things it was no easy task finding openings on so many important men’s schedules. Torture-sessions would be arranged a week in advance and then cancelled at the last minute because some important participant had come down with a fever or even died.
In spite of these difficulties, during the month of November, men rammed a length of gauze down Jack’s throat into his stomach and then poured water down it until his abdomen swelled up, and it felt as if gunpowder were burning inside of him, filling his guts with smoke and fire. Edmund de Ath was tied to a table and thongs tightened round various parts of his body until the skin burst under the pressure.
But Moseh went into the torture-chamber and came out half an hour later looking rather all right—fine, in fact—so unruffled, really, that it made Jack want to share some pain with him, when he sauntered over and joined Jack and Edmund de Ath under the patchy shade of the vines. “I confessed,” he announced.
“To being a heretick!?”
“To having money,” Moseh said.
“I didn’t know that you’d been accused of that.”
“But when you are in the hands of the Holy Office you never know. You just have to figure it out, through silent meditation, and give them the confession that they want. I’ve been ever so slow. But finally it came to me the other day—”
“Through silent meditation?”
“No, I’m afraid it was a bit more mundane. Diego de Fonseca came to my cell and asked me for a loan.”
“Hmmm—I knew he was meagerly compensated, but that he is begging from his own prisoners comes as news to me,” said Edmund de Ath.
“The alguaciles brought you straight to this prison from Acapulco—you never had to buy anything in Mexico City,” Jack said. “We came here once or twice selling quicksilver to the owners of mines. Food is cheap enough, which explains why there are so many Vagabonds in the suburbs. But the scarcity of all other goods, and the over-supply of silver, make this an expensive place to be respectable.”
Moseh nodded. “I talked to many old Jews in New Amsterdam and Curaçao who told me that in the old days the Inquisition supported itself by confiscating goods from Jews. But here in Mexico they did their job so well that they’ve run out of Jews—they’ve been reduced to stealing the occasional burro from some mestizo who took the Lord’s name in vain. So finally I had what you might call a little Enlightenment of my own, and I understood what the Inquisitor really wanted. I confessed to nothing except having a lot of silver, and offered to make due penance for this crime on the morning of the auto da fé. With that my ordeal—our ordeal—was over and done with.”
Mexico City
DECEMBER 1701
NOT SHOWING UP FOR ANauto da fé was regarded as a Bad Idea everywhere in the Spanish Empire, and especially in Mexico City. Every scrap of land in the town was owned by the Church, and the Holy Surveyors of Rome had (or so Jack phant’sied) come out here and planted Trinitarian transits on the land that had been miraculously reclaimed from Lake Texcoco and hung holy plumb-bobs made of saints’ skulls and stretched cords of spun angels’ hair, driven crucifixes into the ground at strategickal Vertices, and platted the land into quadrilaterals, each one butted snugly against the next; angels might slip through the interstices, but never Indians nor Vagabonds. These parcels had been entrusted to various religious Orders, viz. Carmelites, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians, Benedictines, et cetera, each of which had lost no time in erecting a high stone wall around its property-line to shield it from the intrigues and supposed heresies of the neighboring Orders. This accomplished, they had got to work filling in the middle with churches, chapels, and dormitories. The buildings sank into the soft ground almost as quickly as they were built, which made the place seem much beyond its true age of about a hundred and eighty years. At any rate there was no place to live in Mexico City that was not controlled by one Order or another, and consequently no way not to show up for an auto da fé without its being noticed by someone who’d be apt to take it the wrong way.
In spite of—or on second thought, maybe because of—their tendency to live cloistered behind high walls, the men and women of these diverse Orders loved nothing better than to dress up in peculiar clothing and parade through the streets of the city, bearing religious effigies or fragments of saints’ anatomies. When Jack had been abroad in this city as a free man, these never-ending processions had been an absolute menace, and an impediment to commerce. Sometimes one procession would collide with another at a street-corner and monks would come to blows over which Order had precedence. An auto da fé was one of the few occasions significant enough to get every single nun from the city’s twenty-two convents and every friar from its twenty-nine monasteries all processing at one time, in more or less the same direction. So all of them were present.
Of course Vagabonds always found a way to exist. Around here they seemed to dwell outside the walls, which was where important people liked them to stay. Not ten years earlier, they had gathered in the zócalo in sufficient numbers to burn the Viceroy’s palace down. Since that event, Count Montezuma had tended to get a little jumpy whenever rabble gathered near his dwelling in large numbers; his rebuilt palace had high walls with plenty of loop-holes for broadcasting grapeshot into any inconvenient crowds. The Vagabonds, criollos, the mountain-dwelling Indian peons, the desperadoes from the mining-country up north, these were only permitted to gather in the City on certain occasions, and an auto da fé was one of them. Of course they had no formal place in the procession of processions that wound its way through the streets to the zócalo, but cheerfully insinuated themselves among and between the nuns and monks, the three-or four
-hundred-strong staff of the Cathedral, the asesors, fiscals, alquaciles, and familiares of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and diverse priests, friars, nuns, oidors, and fiscals who happened to be passing through en route to or from Manila or Lima. Despite the now well-known fact that the new French King of Spain had snubbed the auto da fé of Madrid, all of the King’s representatives in Mexico City turned out: the Viceroy and all his household and courtiers, the various ranks and hierarchies of civil servants, the officers of foot and of horse in their ostrich plumes and polished helmets, and as many of the garrison’s soldiers as could be spared from guarding the five gates and innumerable walls of this City.
Jack and Moseh had made it their business to know about the men who ran the Mint, and so as they and the other prisoners were marched out into the zócalo and made to stand in ranks before the grandstands that had been erected there, Jack was able to pick them out easily. The Apartador, the head of the Mint, was a Spanish count who had bought the office from the previous King for a hundred thousand pieces of eight, which was a bargain. He was there with his wife and daughter, all wearing the finest clothing Jack had seen since his last trip to Shahjahanabad (Jack, as a king, had been obliged to show up for the annual ceremony at which the Great Mogul sat crosslegged on one pan of an enormous scale, and silver and gold were heaped up on the opposite pan by his diverse omerahs, king, courtiers, and foreign emissaries until the jewel-covered crossbar finally went into motion and became level, leaving the Mogul suspended on his pan, balanced by his annual revenue, and modestly accepting the applause and gun-salutes of his subjects; on that occasion, Jack had done his part by heaving a big sack of coins onto the pan—taxes collected by Surendranath in the few wretched bazaars of Jack’s domain—at least half of which had been pieces of eight minted decades earlier under the direction of some predecessor of this Count who was now peering down at Jack from the highest bench of the grandstand). Arrayed below him and his family were those Treasurers not currently on duty (Moseh had estimated these earned fifty to sixty thousand pieces of eight annually), the Assayers and Founders (some fifteen thousand annually), and farther down, in humble but still very good clothing, a plethora of Cutters, Clerks, Under-clerks, Alcaldes, and various ranks of Guards; close to the very bottom, numerous Foremen and Brazajereros who stoked the fires, and finally the brawny young criollo men who actually struck metal with metal and turned disks of silver into pieces of eight: the Coiners.
The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Page 216
