“Come away,” she said, sobbing. “Come away; there is nothing more to see.” She tugged again, this time with all her strength, forcing me toward her. “Come away—don Gabriel will be looking for you now. And they have captured don Antonio. We must hurry quickly to save the statue and take it to don Francisco. There is no time left.”
“I can’t leave Antonio,” I whispered. “I can’t.…”
“They’ve already taken him.”
Disbelieving, I looked to where Antonio had been kneeling in the dirt, bound and under guard. Somehow, during the executions, they had taken him away.
“Who will rescue the statue of Santiago?” Máriam hissed in my ear. “He would want you to do it.”
I did not answer her. I turned away from the horrible sights—not back toward the carriage, but the other way on foot, as it was far faster to make our way through the crowds. She understood and followed me.
Part of me longed to surrender to the grief, to let myself be taken, to join my mother and father in death. But another part found me lifting my skirts and running in earnest for the living, back beneath the archway of the city wall, down the broad avenue only half filled with pedestrians who had chosen to avoid the crowds by leaving early.
Sorrow dulled my perceptions: I do not remember traversing the distance to San Pablo Street, but soon we were there and running into the large overgrown grove behind Antonio’s house. I remember a blur of images: of Máriam pulling away the stone in the old fence where Antonio and I had played as children; of the dark, stifling tunnel beneath the earth; of emerging once again into my mother’s workshop, where the spiders had been spinning their webs unimpeded.
The statue of Santiago—his killing sword brandished above his head, his expression one of righteous wrath toward the heretic he slew—sat on the dusty worktable where I had left it. I clutched it with both arms—it was heavy with the Torah shield inside and required effort—and clung to it as if it held the spirits of my mother and father. Still dazed, I followed close behind Máriam and obeyed her gestures.
Soon we were in the wagon Antonio had left behind for his own use; I nestled the Santiago statue beneath a tarp left on the wagon bed, while Máriam harnessed the horse she had brought from the near-empty stable. The only gate, however, led us back onto the cul-de-sac and past the Hojeda mansion.
As Máriam drew open the gate, she said grimly, “Pray we encounter no one.”
The gate opened onto the dusty cobblestones not far from where Antonio and Gabriel had fought years before as children, where Gabriel and his cohorts had attacked the hapless Jew—no doubt one of my relatives—who had left the Madonna with my mother.
Máriam gave the horse the whip; it was a strong young gelding, shining and black, and the wagon rattled as the creature lurched forward out into the cul-de-sac. We had barely made it past my father’s house and the Hojeda mansion, when Gabriel’s familiar carriage rolled into the intersection at San Pablo Street.
My husband leaned out the carriage window and yelled a command at the driver; immediately, his carriage hurtled toward our wagon, then pulled to a fast stop sidewise, blocking our way. Máriam barely managed to rein in our horse before we collided with the carriage; our wagon spun about, kicking up dust, and came to an abrupt halt.
Gabriel and Fray Hojeda climbed out of the carriage, their expressions contorted with self-righteous rage, and called to the driver to accompany them. The latter moved to seize our horse’s halter, but Máriam coaxed the horse to move just beyond reach, and made the wagon spin around in an arc as she prepared to make a run past them. Dizzied, I clutched my seat, huddling low in order to keep from falling off onto the cobblestones as the wooden wheels groaned with effort.
Even in my disorientation, I called to Máriam to remain with the wagon at all costs, to abandon me if need be. When Gabriel managed to capture the reins, holding our neighing horse in place, I tucked the Santiago statue more firmly beneath the tarp—foolishly giving away its location—and stood at the edge of the wagon, preparing to jump off.
“Take me!” I shouted. “I’m the one you want!” I looked back to Máriam, silently urging her to take flight in the wagon, but Gabriel still held the halter fast.
Fray Hojeda, sweating and pale, ordered the driver to examine the wagon. The man headed directly for the covered Santiago, but before he could find it, I pulled it from under the tarp and jumped from the wagon, barely managing to stay on my feet without dropping the statue—though how I expected to outrun the three men with my heavy burden, I do not know.
While Fray Hojeda stayed close to the carriage and watched with the driver, Gabriel seized the statue in my hands. I would not let go and made an impossibly strong effort to hold on to it—but inevitably, Gabriel was stronger and pulled it from my grasp. I gave him such a fight, though, that the Santiago slipped and fell to the cobblestones.
I watched in horror as the statue that my mother and I had painted with such care shattered—revealing first the wadding and then, as Gabriel and the driver pulled it free, the golden Torah shield.
Gabriel stared down at it in amazement—at the gleaming gold hidden beneath the yellow wool wadding covered with shards of broken ceramic—then looked up at me wide-eyed.
“It’s true,” he breathed. “You are a crypto-Jew!”
“And you are a monster!” I slapped him with all my strength. “God damn you to hell!”
Behind him, Fray Hojeda called out in a quavering, panicked voice. “God help me!”
We all turned and watched him as he vainly clawed the side of the carriage for purchase; he slid to his knees and loosed black vomit onto the cobblestones before finally falling down.
“Plague,” the driver said, crossing himself and staring at both Gabriel and his brother accusingly. He rushed back to his master’s carriage.
Gabriel instinctively went to his fallen brother’s side; I used the instant to pick up the Torah shield, still half trapped in its casing of wadding and broken ceramic, and push it up into the back of the wagon.
Immediately, I felt an iron grip seize my legs before I could crawl back onto the wagon: Gabriel had coldly chosen his priority. I struggled, but he pulled me facedown into the street, into the dust where he had taken down the old Jew and Antonio.
I lifted my head and screamed at Máriam. “Go! Go!!!”
Before Gabriel pinned me fast, I glimpsed dark figures looming at the intersection, making their way toward us: Armed guards on foot.
“Go!” I screamed at Máriam again. She whipped the horse, and remarkably the wagon finished its arc around the cul-de-sac before heading directly at the coming guards at high speed.
Compelled, I watched as the guards scattered to give way, and Máriam and the golden treasure careened into the intersection, then onto the half-filled street of San Pablo.
And I was left alone in the hands of the Inquisitor.
Twenty
Gabriel had no qualms about leaving his brother out in the street to lie in a pool of bloody vomit; if anything, he seemed to be relieved to be rid of him and ordered the armed guards to deal with him. I did not see what ultimately became of the so recently jubilant Fray Hojeda, except to know that none of the soldiers would go near him but stood around him in a leery half circle as he cried out weakly for help.
With the help of one of his guards, Gabriel dragged me into his house, into the dining hall where he had once swept all the dishes from the table in a burst of passion. I was made to sit in a chair while the guard tied my hands behind my back. Gabriel, far from being concerned about his brother’s grave illness, seemed pleased and revitalized by the prospect of questioning me.
He stood over me, a pale-haired, hawk-nosed giant, his pallid face pushed near mine, his breath warm on my face.
“You are a crypto-Jew. The evidence is clear. That was some sort of Jewish ritual object.”
“I am a crypto-Jew,” I admitted softly. There was no point in denying the obvious, and speaking the truth aloud b
rought relief.
He grinned. The disturbing light in his eyes was the same one I had seen the day he had beaten Antonio and the Jew, the same as when he had swept all the dishes from the table, the same as the instant he had realized that I had no choice but to submit sexually to him. All his shyness, his timidity, had been an act in order to placate his brother, but Gabriel had been no less ambitious—only more patient.
“Tell me the truth,” he demanded. “You and Antonio are working together as spies for don Francisco.”
“I know nothing of either man,” I said.
He struck me across the face with his open hand. The pain caused a flash of blue to shoot across the gray landscape of my closed eyelids.
I opened my eyes, and Gabriel said, “You are a whore who has lain with Antonio Vargas.”
“No,” I said, and he struck me again, this time causing me to bite my tongue. I spat blood on the stone floor but made no other sound.
“You have spoken with don Francisco. The proof is the golden ritual object. You got it from him and were hiding it inside the statue of a saint. How many other statues have you used to smuggle Jewish gold out of Seville?”
“I have never spoken alone with don Francisco,” I lied. “The treasure was given me by my mother. I have never used a statue to smuggle anything out of Seville.”
He struck me again, harder this time, and with his fist; too hard for his purposes, because after a sickening spiral of darkness that pulled me down with it, I fell unconscious.
* * *
When I woke, I didn’t have to ask where I was: I already knew the stench of the Dominican prison. Somehow, I had never noticed the high stone walls in the cell where they had tortured my father, but surely they had been there, their whitewash long worn away, leaving behind a patchy, uneven gray, culminating in a dark beamed ceiling thick with spiderwebs.
I was lying down on my back, my feet slightly elevated above my head. I could not see the shackles binding my ankles and wrists fast to the tilted board on which I rested, but I could feel them. I tried to turn my head to see my captors—I could sense a presence in the room, perhaps more than one—but my arms were stretched so painfully tight above my head that I could not turn it far enough to see them. It was cold in the room, and I was shivering. I thought I was wearing my chemise, but I could not look down at myself to be sure I was not naked.
“Marisol García.” It was Gabriel’s voice. I sensed something tall and dark hovering in the periphery of my vision, but I could not see him. He sounded self-conscious, as if someone else in the room was watching him.
“You have been charged with conspiring to smuggle Jewish gold out of Seville, against the express decree of Her Majesty Queen Isabel. You are also charged with the heresy of crypto-Judaism. How to you plead?”
Gabriel, I said to myself. I was still stunned by my father’s gruesome death, by Máriam’s narrow escape, by Gabriel’s hard fist. I could feel the extreme physical discomfort of being shackled to the board, but my mind and emotions were too numbed to grasp all of these as actual facts. “Am I on the rack?”
I could hear exasperation in his pause.
His tone hardened. “How do you plead, Marisol?”
“I don’t know,” I said, dazed. I wanted to ask where Antonio was, but I did not dare implicate him. If he had been captured, surely Gabriel would mention it to use it against me.
“You must plead guilty or innocent.”
“I plead innocent,” I answered.
“You’ve already confessed to me that you were guilty. Repeat that now for the scribe’s records.”
I had admitted the truth to Gabriel in private, but I had no intention of making the interrogation easy for him.
“I’m innocent,” I said.
Someone stepped forward so that I could see him. It was the auburn-haired executioner, the young one who had lit the kindling around my kneeling father. He grinned impudently at me and pushed another figure into my line of sight.
Antonio staggered forward, visible from the waist up. He was shirtless, his body covered with sweat despite the chill in the room. The wound in his upper arm, near the shoulder, was bleeding so heavily that the stiches were invisible; most likely they had come undone. His bare chest was almost completely hairless; one nipple was blackened and inverted, the skin around it red and blistered.
The smell of scorched flesh was sickening. Antonio’s expression was stern; he looked at me as though he did not recognize me, as if I weren’t present at all—just as my father had.
“One more time, Marisol,” Gabriel’s voice said. “Admit your guilt.”
I remained silent.
As I did, the grinning executioner produced a large black kerchief. He unfurled it over my face, blotting out the sight of Antonio, of the walls and ceiling.
“Now repeat the question,” a third voice said softly—to Gabriel, not me. Fray Morillo was in the room, watching.
Gabriel spoke again. “Are you certain of your plea?”
“As certain as I am of the fact that my father agreed to denounce himself if you would protect me,” I said clearly.
I heard Morillo draw in a breath of surprise; I imagined Gabriel flushing brightly at the accusation.
“Is this true?” Morillo asked softly.
“A filthy lie,” Gabriel answered. “Just like everything else she is saying.” He addressed me. “You and your cohort will pay for this, Marisol.”
Morillo said nothing more.
There was a long hesitation. I waited to feel my bones being pulled from their sockets, to hear the grind of the turning wheel, the clanking of chains, but instead heard water sloshing from a bucket.
Suddenly, the black cloth covering my face was soaked, and there was water pouring down my nose. I opened my mouth to scream, and the water rushed in, reducing my shrieks to a strangled, gurgling noise. Antonio’s shouts were distant, muffled.
The water kept coming until my throat and chest were burning, until I knew I was drowning. And then it abruptly stopped. I drew a gasping breath, sucking in the drenched cloth. My ears were full of liquid; I tried to shake my head to clear them, to hear what Antonio was yelling, but I could not move and water from the cloth slowly trickled into them. The cloth plastered my eyes shut.
I drew another wheezing breath.
This time, I was uncertain whether the voice was Gabriel’s or Fray Morillo’s.
“Will you confess to the crimes of smuggling and heresy?”
“No,” I gasped.
“Will you confess to conspiring with don Francisco Sánchez and Antonio Vargas?”
“No,” I said.
They allowed me a full breath, then another.
The flood came again. The rushing water caught me in mid-breath, and I choked, inhaling some of it into my lungs, swallowing the rest—and still it would not stop coming. I was gagging, spewing, mindless with desperation.
The water stopped.
“Will you confess?”
I thought of don Francisco and Máriam, and wondered whether they and the treasure were safe. Antonio’s breath was ragged; I felt guilt that he was forced to watch, knowing that the sight of someone else’s suffering was more painful to him than his own.
“No,” I answered Gabriel.
This time when the water came, I tried to swallow it. Impossible; it streamed down my throat, filling my mouth and nose until I was forced to breathe it in and gag. My body spasmed uncontrollably. Somewhere in the violent struggle, my mind grew separate and calm. In a dreamlike vision, my mother appeared in the Guadalquivir, and the moon shone, its light silver on the rippling waters.
The flood stopped. My body took one long, hitching gasp of air, then two.
“Will you confess?”
My mother sank into the river, the water lifting her blue-green skirts with the hoops of the verdugado around her waist, then her shoulders. She opened her mouth and chanted, her voice low and sweet, and I chanted with her.
“Shema Yisra
el,” I gasped, “Adonai Eloheinu.”
“You admit to being a crypto-Jew, then, in front of these witnesses!”
“Adonai Echad,” I finished.
I never uttered another word. The water streamed down my throat and nose. I fought to hold my breath, but it was useless: The water flooded into my gut, my lungs, and my body responded reflexively by retching. Once again, my mind detached: Beautiful Magdalena was standing in the river, praying in the light of the moon.
The water came again and again and again. I vomited it up and fainted, but the auburn-haired man forced me awake again to choke on water and my own bile, my lungs burning. On the dark gray inside of my closed eyelids, my mother and Antonio were smiling and waving from the Triana shore on the opposite side of the river.
Abruptly, I was yanked up into a sitting position, resting against Gabriel’s sturdy arm; I could not see his face, but I recognized his smell. Unseen hands pulled the black cloth from my face. Antonio now sat shackled to a chair, wearing only his leggings. From behind me came the smoky scent of a lit hearth, the sound of scraping. Soon the auburn-haired executioner emerged into my field of vision bearing what looked at first like a poker, but they were pincers, glowing white-hot at the tips.
I wanted to close my eyes, yet as with my father, I felt compelled to watch. The red-haired man waved the pincers teasingly in front of Antonio’s chest. Antonio paid no attention to either the pincers or the torturer but stared defiantly at a point just beyond me—at Gabriel’s eyes.
Gabriel spoke into my ear. “Marisol, do you confess to conspiring with don Francisco?”
“Why don’t you ask me?” Antonio demanded. “You were always a coward, Gabriel. Always picking on someone smaller than yourself.”
Against my back, Gabriel’s arm tensed. He repeated, with barely controlled fury: “Marisol, do you confess to conspiring with don Francisco?”
“No,” I said.
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