At the beginning of the third year Ximeno was again summoned before the tribunal, which now had in its possession a voluminous file of material linking him to Judaism. Informants as far away as the Italian city of Podi and the German city of Gretz had made depositions damaging to him, and the judges were completely satisfied that they had a secret Jew. Now the problem was to force him to confess and to incriminate others in Avaro who might have masked their evil practices as successfully as he had done. Over a period of four days he was interrogated in minute detail, and when he proved obdurate the tribunal had no alternative; they had to commit him to the torture.
He was dragged immediately to the subterranean vault long used for the purpose of extracting confessions, but he was not, as some might suspect, thrown into the hands of brutal men free to abuse him at will. He was delivered to a skilled and patient priest who had been conducting such interrogations for many years and who was assisted constantly by a knowing doctor who had learned from experience what torment the human body could absorb without expiring. There were few deaths from torture in the dungeon of Avaro.
On the other hand, the ordinary workmen who administered the three tortures which were allowed had become callous experts who had acquired a score of tricks guaranteed to break down the resolve of any secret Jews, so at the moment when Diego Ximeno was thrust into the dungeon these men already knew that he was someone special sent to test their skill. If they extracted a confession, they would be rewarded; if they failed, they would be rebuked. It was therefore a poignant moment when the handsome man of fifty, stalwart even after two years of imprisonment, stumbled into the torture chamber, gained his footing and stood in quiet defiance before the interrogating priest.
“Do you confess, Diego Ximeno?” the priest asked. The prisoner looked at the Dominican with contempt, whereupon the priest, who had often seen that particular look at the beginning of his interrogations, but never at the end, said to the doctor, “The prisoner refuses to speak. Is he qualified for the question?” The doctor studied Ximeno and thought: He’s arrogant and he’s in strong health. This one may take a long time.
The doctor nodded to the scribe sitting at the feet of the priest. It was this man’s job to record confessions and to confirm in writing that humanitarian safeguards were observed in the torture room. “Write down,” the priest directed, “that the prisoner was found qualified for the question.”
With this the Dominican signaled to the workmen, who with lightning force grabbed Ximeno, pinioned his arms and stripped him naked before he knew what was happening. With equal speed they lashed his hands behind his back, fastened twenty-pound weights to each ankle, and by means of a heavy rope attached to his wrists hauled him some forty feet into the air. From below, the foreman of the workmen shouted, “You’ll talk, Counselor.” They left him suspended for nearly an hour, while his arms, wrenched upward from behind, slowly pulled his shoulders from their sockets.
The ache throughout his body had become almost more than he could bear, and the Dominican, seeing his anguish and sensing that he might be ready to speak, came below him and called, “Diego Ximeno, do you now confess?”
Still uninformed as to the specific charges against him, Ximeno bore his pain in silence.
“Diego Ximeno,” the priest pleaded, “if you are in pain now, believe me it is only a beginning. Please confess or we must apply the question.” The prisoner made no response, so the priest returned to his small dais, instructing his scribe to record the fact that the prisoner had been offered mercy.
Suddenly, with terrifying shouts, the workmen dashed at the rope which suspended Ximeno and by means of prearranged holds allowed it to slip so that the prisoner dropped thirty feet, ending with a shattering halt which tore each of his major joints apart with maximum pain. His wrists, elbows and shoulders were mutilated, while the weights on his legs, magnified many times by the precipitous fall and the sudden stop, pulled apart his ankles, his knees and his hips.
Before Ximeno could identify his new pains the workmen pulled him back to the ceiling to initiate one of the worst features of the torture. At times they would shout and drop the rope. At other times they would shout and not drop it. Again, without warning, they would drop it only a few inches. At other times there would be the sickening fall almost to the floor and the hideous wrenching.
Ximeno was now beyond pain, and when the Dominican again begged him to confess the stalwart prisoner refused even to listen, so the rope was let go and he was dropped in a heap, quickly lifted onto a table and subjected to an entirely different kind of torment; for if the hanging and falling had constituted gross pain, which men like Ximeno could school themselves to resist, what was now at hand was psychological torture that few could withstand.
The table upon which he was laid had a small log across the middle, so that his back was severely strained and his stomach drawn flat in a position which of itself induced strangling. Then a funnel was placed in his mouth and his nose was closed. Huge draughts of water were poured into the funnel from an earthenware jar, and as his taut lungs gasped for air he alternately strangled, choked and gulped the water. It was an agonizing, shattering torture.
Before the second jar was poured, the priest returned and begged the prisoner to recant. “The tortures will cease,” the Dominican assured him, but apparently Ximeno was prepared to die and said nothing. The priest departed and the scrivener recorded the fact that the merciful offer had been made.
“This time you’ll speak,” the workmen promised. One leaned hard upon Ximeno’s distended stomach as it arched over the log, and the sudden movement of water throughout his internals almost killed him. Another placed in his mouth a cloth which long experience had proved to be of exactly the right mesh, and through this the water was now poured. Gulping, fighting for air, Ximeno sucked the cloth into his throat, where it embedded itself as the water trickled slowly through. It seemed that he must surely strangle, but at the end of the long agony the workmen suddenly jerked the cloth from his throat, tearing away the membranes and bringing blood.
“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 u
s 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 canonization 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.
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