Land of Burning Heat

by Judith Van GIeson

  Claire wondered how the police would react to learning that the Santoses had a hidden Jewish connection. Romero was more likely to find it relevant than his boss. Claire had to consider whether she had any business pursuing a line of investigation if the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Department rejected it. Was it egotism on her part to think her experience and knowledge could ask and answer questions they could not?

  Chapter Twenty-two

  WHEN SHE GOT HOME, SHE TURNED ON THE COOLER, let the cat out, took the documents August had given her to her courtyard and set them on the banco. Before she began to read she picked the dead flowers from her datura, which grew faster with less encouragement than any plant she had ever seen. A few summer showers and it covered the floor of her courtyard and climbed the wall. On the night of the full moon she had as many as fifty flowers. As the tendrils approached her front door, she had the sensation that one night they would turn the knob, slither into the house and down the hallway, enter her bedroom and wrap themselves around her neck in the same way the Inquisition had reached out of the past.

  It was one hundred degrees or more in the courtyard. The sun had been beating on the adobe walls all morning. The bricks soaked up the heat and reflected it back at Claire. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a lemonade with ice. She took the drink outside and sat down in a sliver of shade in the corner where the banco met the house.

  Last night’s white satin datura flowers turned brown and shriveled in the heat and the light of the sun, yet the plant had to absorb the sun’s energy in the daytime to blossom at night. Mystics of many religions had gone into the desert to find their visions in the dryness and the heat. But the temperature in the desert dropped thirty degrees once the sun went down. What happened to a mystic’s vision in the darkness? Did it blossom into something pure and white or did it develop long tendrils that reached out to garrote the nonbeliever?

  What Claire disliked about religion was that the burning heat of vision too often turned into a heated passion for destruction. She thought about all the slaughter that had been carried out in the name of the God she knew, the Christian God: the Jews and Muslims garroted and burned at the stake, the millions of Indians killed during the Conquest. It had happened elsewhere in the names of other gods, but she knew more about this part of the world. She knew all the ways in which the Conquest had been despicable. What kind of a God would allow millions of people to be slaughtered in his name? It was not a God she could connect with.

  She sipped her lemonade, sank deeper into the shadow and read through the documents, fascinated once again by the relationship language had to events. In this case elegant language described horrific events. She read that Joaquín Rodriguez was “relaxed to the secular arm” and led through the streets on a “saddled horse”. Someone stepped out of the crowd and Joaquín spoke words interpreted as repentance and conversion. He was garroted until he appeared dead then burned to a cinder. The events were witnessed by Manuel Santos, among others. Claire wondered about the sincerity of the conversion that allowed the Church to strangle Joaquín before they burned him. Was it a true conversion or a convenience that allowed the church to save face? She wondered about the relationship between Manuel Santos, the Inquisitor, and Manuel Santos, the settler. Manuel Santos the Inquisitor, had to be a Catholic in good standing. Manuel Santos the settler, had been a pretend Catholic. What was the connection between the Santos men and Joaquín Rodriguez? Why had Joaquín’s last words turned up hidden inside a cross under a house owned by the Santos family? The Spanish kept detailed records of everything they did, but to find a particular record could take months of searching through archives written by hand in a language in which Claire was not fluent. She looked through the other papers August had given her. Raquel had gone to her death at the stake screaming at the Inquisitors. Daniel was never tried; too young perhaps, to be judged by the Inquisition.

  Another place to turn was the scholar Peter Beck’s exhaustive, pedantic, duller-than-dust study, which should be on the shelves at Zimmerman. She put that off till the next day, went inside and called Harold Marcus.

  “Hello,” he said. “What’s it like out there?”

  “Hot.”

  “Ah, for the dry heat. It’s so humid here I feel like I’m swimming. If only I had gills. Did you talk to Tey Santos?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “You were right. Tey is a diminutive for Ester. She lit the candles, covered the mirror and put the pebble on the tombstone. A mezuzah hidden in a closet in Isabel’s house disappeared, and she showed me the hollow in the doorjamb where it had been. She admitted that the Santoses are Jews.”

  The line crackled as if an electrical storm danced somewhere between NM and DC. “I knew it. The symbol you saw in the flower on Isabel Suazo’s grave could be a shin.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew alphabet and first letter of shema, the prayer Jews say. It means ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.’ Tey Santos is living history. I want to meet her, bring along a tape recorder, record her experiences while she is still alive. Can you arrange it?”

  The scientist in Harold had surfaced, eager to put Tey under a microscope. “It’s a very personal, private matter,” Claire said. “Tey’s family has been practicing their religion in secret for hundreds of years. It’s not something that’s easy for her to talk about. She doesn’t see much relationship between her religion and modern-day Judaism although she does feel a connection to the Jewish people.”

  “She’s an incredible resource. We can’t let her go to waste.”

  Actually she’s a person, not a resource, thought Claire, not someone you want to subject to the methodological method. “She won’t agree to talk to you.” Her voice assumed the deep freeze tone WASPs used to put people in their place. “The religion is passed down from woman to woman in the Santos family. One reason Tey talked to me is that I am a woman. She wasn’t able to tell the story to Isabel before she died, so she told it to me. I’d be violating a confidence if I sent you to talk to her. She used the same phrase Joaquín Rodriguez did, by the way—Adonay es mi dio.”

  “God in the Spanish singular. The Sephardic Jews were willing to speak the name of God out loud.”

  “She said sometimes they named a son Jesus as protective cover. Her grandson is named Jesus.”

  “They named boys Adonay, too. You don’t see people naming their son God in English.”

  “She told me the Jews were known as the people of the book.”

  “We followed the Old Testament. There was a time when it was considered a sign of Judaism to be able to read,” Harold said.

  “You’ll be happy to know that she agreed to a DNA test.”

  “That’s good. We’ll know then whether she’s related to the old bones. I’ll set it up with the OMI. We still won’t know for sure whether the skeleton is Manuel Santos, but it would be a reasonable assumption given the date of the bones.”

  Reasonable assumption wasn’t enough for Claire. “I want to know for sure. I want to know how Joaquín Rodriguez’s last words ended up under the floor of Isabel Santos’s house. I want to know if there’s a connection between the two Manuel Santoses. Is there anyone there who could help?” The Smithsonian was the place people turned to for American history, but she didn’t know what information they’d be able to provide about the Mexican Inquisition.

  “I’ll ask around and see what I can find out,” Harold Marcus said.

  “Thanks,” Claire replied.

  ******

  She hung up the phone and stared out her window at the piñon-studded mountains wanting to share her discovery with someone who would understand how much it meant to her. She had visited Barcelona with Pietro, sighed with him under the Bridge of Sighs, walked along Las Ramblas and down a narrow calle lined with the fluid shapes of an Antoni Gaudi building, gone to the house of the alchemist, explored the old Jewish quarter without f
inding any trace of Sephardim. Barcelona was a city that kept its secrets, which was one of the things she liked about it.

  She went to her computer, opened a file and composed an E-mail. “Pietro,” it began.

  “I’ve discovered that the Santos family is descended from conversos. Their ancestry must go back to Medieval Spain. They have been living in New Mexico and practicing Judaism in secret for four hundred years. It has been a wonderful discovery for me.”

  Her eyes returned to the window. What to say next?

  “Do you remember the time we spent in Barcelona searching for the Jewish quarter. Kissing under the Bridge of Sighs, going to the harbor to see the statue of Columbus and imagining his voyage to the end of the world? Do you ever wish we could go back there again?”

  It wasn’t the appropriate communication to send to a man with a sick wife. And if someday his wife were to die was not a thought she should allow to enter her mind. There were times when being a WASP woman felt like being shipwrecked on a remote and vacant island. She couldn’t imagine Pietro’s life in Italy would ever be a vacant island. Full of family and chaos, maybe, but never empty.

  As E-mail was not an exact science and anything written had the possibility of being inadvertently sent, Claire deleted her message, and turned toward the window. The sky remained an unfettered blue. If it was going to rain the thunderheads would be building by now. She picked up the phone to call John Harlan, who knew something about remote islands of the heart, but she changed her mind, put the phone down, went outside and followed a path that led through the foothills into the mountains. Eventually it reached the top of the peaks, but she only went to the elevation where high desert cactus segued into piñon/juniper forest. She sat down on a favorite rock and stared at the line where piñon and juniper turned to stone at a higher elevation. Her eyes focused on that spot while her mind focused on the empty place where people turned to God.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  WHEN SHE GOT TO WORK IN THE MORNING she looked up The Inquisition in Mexico by Peter Beck on the computer. There were numerous books on the Inquisition in general but few on the Mexican Inquisition. She wrote down the call number for Peter’s book. That afternoon she walked through the stacks following the numbers until she came to the B’s and Peter Beck. His book turned up exactly where it was supposed to. It was a massive volume, heavy enough to serve as a weapon.

  After dinner that evening she down on her sofa and opened Peter Beck’s exhaustive and exhausting opus. She went first to the copyright page and learned that this was a first edition published ten years ago. It had remained the definitive study, still in use as a textbook, still earning a royalty for Peter Beck. She turned next to the last page to see how long it was—1235 pages. Each one of these pages was packed with the small, dense print of a university press book. No space breaks, no dialogue, no white space on the page. The length was formidable, the subject depressing, the style stultifyingly dull. There were many things she would rather be doing than reading Peter Beck’s plodding prose—washing the dishes, watching the news, vacuuming the carpet, polishing her silver, talking to her cat.

  An index made the job easier. There was an extensive bibliography listing sources in Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, French, German and English establishing that Peter Beck’s knowledge was encyclopedic and his scholarship impeccable. Claire skimmed through the bibliography encountering one of her all-time favorite books—History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru by the nearly blind scholar William Prescott. He had marvelous material to work with—criminals and kings, Cortes and Montezuma, Pizarro and Atahuallpa, rooms full of beaten gold ornaments, captives with their still warm hearts ripped from their chests. Prescott’s imaginative and evocative style did it justice.

  Peter Beck’s material wasn’t quite as marvelous and it demonstrated the crudest, most self-righteous and inhumane side of human behavior. His material had the potential to be revealing and interesting, but his style got in the way. Claire consulted the index and turned to the first entry of the name Rodriguez on page 562. It was at this point that Joaquín’s uncle Tomás arrived in the New World and quickly established himself as a trader. He petitioned the court to bring in family members from Portugal and Spain to expand his trading network. The request was granted even though the Rodriguezes were a known converso family. The crown was willing to overlook their ancestry as long as Tomás remained useful to them. The family members he brought to Mexico included Ester, Raquel, Joaquín and Daniel, the wife and children of Tomás’s deceased brother David who had lived in Portugal. Unfortunately for the family, Tomás became too successful.

  Fearing his power and coveting his wealth, the Inquisition arrested him in 1594, confiscating his property and letting him languish in jail until he died of natural causes.

  Joaquín Rodriguez came under suspicion as soon as Tomás was arrested. He was questioned then released. A year later he was arrested again when a neighbor accused him of being a fervent Judaizer. Joaquín learned at age fifteen that his ancestry was Jewish and he became passionate enough about it to circumcise himself in the Rio de los Remedios. He was tried for the crimes of heresy and apostasy at age twenty-five in 1595. He refused to repent, but eventually, under repeated torture on the rack, he gave up the names of his mother, Ester, his sister, Raquel, and his brother, Daniel. Raquel was twenty-two at the time and Daniel was sixteen. Raquel was burned at the stake in 1596. Joaquín and his mother were garroted. Daniel was considered too young to be tried for the crime of heresy and was assigned to the care of a Catholic family after his own family was incarcerated. That was the last entry Claire found for Daniel Rodriguez. She wondered whether his new family succeeded in turning him into a good Catholic. She wondered what effect seeing his family executed had on a sixteen-year-old boy.

  It was the material of a soaring and epic novel but Peter’s prose kept it grounded. Claire longed for the graceful similes and metaphors of Prescott or some of the flowery, elegant prose of the “Inquisition Case of Joaquín Rodriguez”. She had read that document several times by now and she was sure that Peter had read it many more times. The only difference she found in his book was based on an eyewitness account that Claire hadn’t seen. In this version Joaquín rode to his death on a saddled horse with a green cross tied between his hands. A young man stepped out of the crowd also holding a cross and embraced Joaquín. The two men spoke to each other in soft voices. As Joaquín was led to the burning ground, the young man confronted the witness Manuel Santos to tell him that Joaquín had repented and converted, which was enough to save him from being burned alive. The young man may have been known to Joaquín but his identity was never established. Between the lines Claire saw that the inability to identify him galled Peter Beck.

  The Rodriguez martyrs—Joaquín, Ester and Raquel—were given a single chapter in a long and brutal history. The Inquisition continued with varying degrees of severity until the Mexican Revolution. There were long periods when crypto Jews were more or less ignored interspersed by times when they were actively persecuted. After this chapter the Rodriguez name did not appear again. No mention was made of Joaquín’s last words, although Peter quoted liberally from his journals. The only Santos Claire found in the index was Manuel, the witness who became corregidor. His name reappeared from time to time until he participated in his last Inquisition in 1614, proving that he was not the same Manuel Santos who came north with Oñate’s expedition.

  Claire put down the book and checked her watch surprised to learn that it wasn’t bedtime yet. She had expected to be kept awake well into the night, but the index made her job easier. Peter Beck had spent years on the Mexican Inquisition and had researched and written the definitive book. Still, it was impossible to answer every question relating to an auto-de-fe that went on for hundreds of years. She wondered if he had moved on to another project when he finished The Inquisition in Mexico or if he continued searching for previously undiscovered material, assuming he wa
s willing to concede that there was any undiscovered material. Even if he wasn’t, people might have come to him with new information once the book was published.

  As she still had an hour left before bedtime she decided to search the Internet to see if Peter or anyone else had come up with new material relating to Joaquín Rodriguez. She went to the Google search engine, typed in the name Joaquín Rodriguez and got 23,322 replies. The o’s in Google stretched across her screen, each one representing a page of entries. Her allotted hour could extend to a week or a month if she let it. Scrolling through the list she discovered that many of the entries were in Spanish, some were in Portuguese, others were in French. Since Google offered instant translation Claire tried it out on a Portuguese entry; she found that language more difficult to read than either French or Spanish. Instant translator got the literal essence of the words but missed all subtleties of rhythm and meaning. Some of the mistakes were amusing. The overall clunkiness of the prose reminded Claire of Peter Beck’s style. She visualized his brain as a computer program trying without success to imitate the subtlety of a human mind as it organized his voluminous research. A thought like this convinced her it was time to go to bed.

  Nevertheless she continued scrolling through the list without opening any more websites. The beginning sentences told her if they were about Joaquín Rodriguez, the Jewish mystic who was killed by the Inquisition in 1596. She skipped ahead to page 20, then 30, then 40. The deeper she delved into the entries, the further removed the Joaquín Rodriguezes became from the Inquisition. She found doctors named Joaquín Rodriguez, students, writers, and on page 50 she found one who was a Colombian drug lord. It was sad to see the name of the poet and the mystic affixed to a drug dealer and to think the men might be distantly related. She moved on the very last o in “Google” and found a Joaquín Rodriguez who was a scientist in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Even on this page, however, she found listings for her Joaquín. In fact she had found him on every page she searched. To eliminate all entries she would have to search every page and look at all 23,322 of them. That was impossible, but she wasn’t ready to stop either. She had the hunter’s heightened awareness of being on the scent. The clock in the lower right hand corner of her computer screen was marking time but she avoided looking at it.