In the following months, he will request more hearings, but they will no longer be granted.
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On the twenty-sixth of January, 1633, after almost six years of captivity and five days after the twelfth futile theological dispute, the High Tribunal of the Holy Office meets to settle the case. Gaitán, Mañozca, and Castro del Castillo listen to the opinions of the four advisors, though they know beforehand that they will offer no new ideas. The facts have already been proven; the questions have been answered. For all the patience, mercy, and hearings that have been offered, the prisoner has returned nothing but odious obstinacy.
Before the meeting, the officials confess, attend Mass, take communion, and review the rules they must follow in such a grave circumstance. Bernard Gui’s Inquisitor’s Manual says that “love of truth and piety, which must always inhabit a judge’s heart, should shine through in his gaze, so that his decisions may never be dictated by cruelty or cravings.”
One of the advisors asks whether the prisoner’s continued requests for hearings should not first be satisfied. Gaitán’s bony hands press together before his face, and he replies that the requests will never be satisfied as they are a ruse for delaying matters. The other inquisitors now agree—no more benevolent gestures. The secretary reads the sentence and the judges confirm it with their resonant signatures.
Simply and brutally, it says that Doctor Francisco Maldonado da Silva is sentenced “to be relieved to the secular branch of justice and to the confiscation of goods.” In other words: death and expropriation.
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But all is not yet said. The prisons are an anthill in which, under severe vigilance and seeming immobility, the captives carve out tunnels of liberty. The correspondence through the walls is unceasing; for hours, every night, it transmits names, anguish, ideas. Communication is more important than air.
Francisco learns that, fifteen yards away, a prisoner used a piece of rubble to vigorously scratch the adobe and open the gutter that connects two dungeons; he pushed two earth-caked fingers through to the other side, like a celestial invasion. Then he could touch the tips of his neighbor’s fingers and speak to him without judges or secretaries or tormentors. The information had seemed a flood to them, though all it did was relieve their loneliness.
When the warden discovered the infraction, he made the whip sing, the rack creak into motion, the embers burn. Slaves refilled the holes, and the unremorseful prisoner was taken to a new cell, as gloomy as a tomb, from which he’d only emerge to be burned at the stake.
Days later, Juan de Mañozca unfurls the pages an armed black man was carrying from one prisoner to another. “They contain no messages,” the servant apologizes, weeping. Mañozca brings his candle closer to the parchment, and suddenly light falls on letters written in lemon juice. The guard loses a hand in torture, to teach others a lesson. The inquisitor resolves to increase security in the dungeons. Then he discovers something worse: the seeming complicity of the warden. It’s incredibly serious. The knocks on the walls bellow out the news.
The warden weeps like a child at his ferocious interrogation. He is rebuked for allowing the perforation of walls and messages written in lemon juice. Index fingers point at him irascibly, like gun barrels, and explanations are demanded for a recent escape. The warden begins to tremble, and recounts how he himself tried to pursue and catch the young man who’d fled. He falls to his knees and insists that the snitches were lying out of spite. He says it is not true that he took advantage of his own immunity to have carnal relations with a female prisoner, and that he convinced their witness to escape to evade danger to himself. Gaitán takes this opportunity to reproach the warden’s greed in pocketing bribes, as he has bought haciendas worth far more than he could afford on his salary. The warden wets his trousers. He has fulfilled two decades of service, has seven children, and is not in good health. So he is given leave in order for them to be rid of him.
The new warden, a tall and surly man, embraces his role with zeal; he works hard to uncover the prisoners’ startling schemes, and finds a torn, dirty piece of a shirt in his servant’s bag. The look of fright is enough to recognize the crime. The terrified servant confesses that a dying prisoner gave it to him to be thrown in the street of the merchants.
“It’s a message, you idiot! Who were you supposed to give it to?”
The servant is not lying. He doesn’t understand and is remorseful. “In the street of the merchants,” he repeats mechanically.
The official unfolds the rag; a few signs have been marked there with the smoke of candles. He has the man whipped and turns the offending object over to the inquisitors. Mañozca agrees with Castro del Castillo—it’s a text in Hebrew. They read it with difficulty, from right to left, trying to intuit its absent vowels. It only mentions the name of the prisoner they just tortured; the message tells his loved ones that he is still alive. But this punctures the secret. It offers up a fruitful fact: in Lima, there are Jews who are still free. Surely, from the lips of this prisoner, names can spill. Those names will provide captives, funds, glory.
Francisco gains partial news of the vicissitudes that ripple through his surroundings. The Jew from Lima who sent the message using candle smoke stops responding to knocks on the wall. A few days later, vibrations announce his death. In the dungeons, death is not distressing news because it means an end to the anguish. It’s more upsetting for someone to be taken to the torture chamber.
Francisco lies on his stone bench, gaze fixed on a nail in the door. It joins the crossbar to vertical beams, and its head is sticking out. “What is it reminding me of?” he wonders. “My father’s coat hanger in his hovel in Callao? Or is it bothering me that the nail is neither entirely buried nor entirely free?” He gets up and touches it; its thick head protrudes about a half centimeter. An Indian would attribute life to it, would recognize a huaca in the iron and see this being as leaving the prison, slowly, alone. Francisco tries to pull it out and pushes at it with all his might. Useless. For a few days he forgets this attempt, but then that black protruding head calls him again, urges him to persevere. He works at it with a piece of rubble. In the great void of time, any goal can take on grandeur, becoming that inner resting place from which Archimedes claimed it was possible to move the world. Removing a nail becomes as important as defeating Goliath. When at last he achieves it, Francisco basks in a profound relief. A trophy like this one must not be discovered by the ever-vigilant guards; he hides it in the wool of his mattress.
The following day, he starts to file it against a rough stone. As he recites long passages from his beloved texts and composes verses, the nail acquires the form of a small knife, with a sharp tip and blade. Francisco now has a weapon.
“How strange!” he thinks. “This suffocating cell no longer makes me dizzy or dazed. I’m some kind of amphibian that can live where others perish. A mysterious hope is rising in my chest, an unexpected bravery.”
Until now he’s been able to avoid the new warden’s redoubled vigilance, which raises his spirits. He hides away the bones of his food, chooses a chicken bone, and starts to cut it methodically with his brand-new little knife, as if he were a sculptor. The elegant length of a quill is born before his eyes. All he needs is ink and paper to complete his clandestine writing set. It won’t be difficult; he can make ink by mixing coal with water. As for paper, he already has it, the most valuable thing that enters his cell: small bags of flour. He will hoard each piece as if they were manna from heaven. He’ll be able to write again—he longs for it with the ferocity of a wolf—and he’ll violate the fortress of the Inquisition.
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Paper is scarce, and he must not use more words than necessary. His text calls for solemnity. Francisco concocts a risky plan of communicating with the Jews of Rome through prisoners leaving the prison to carry out their sentences in a monastery. He knows that, in Rome, a significant community has formed since the time of the Maccabees, and that they openly practice their faith and en
joy the relative protection of the popes.
He writes his epistle in Latin and makes copies that reach men about to be released. He has persuaded Simón and Pablo to act as couriers. Both servants have been impressed by the story Francisco told them about Luis, the sorcerer’s son. He told them how he was barbarically hunted down in his native Angola, how he was abused in his travels across land and sea, and how his thigh was wounded in an escape attempt in Potosí. He described his musical talents, so powerful as to pull beautiful sounds from the teeth of a mule’s jawbone. He made them tear up with the story of the heroic way he hid the surgical instruments. Pablo and Simón said that they had suffered a similar story. Francisco was startled when, one afternoon, along with his food, they brought him a mule’s jawbone and an olive branch. The prisoner grasped them as Luis used to do, and there in the damp dungeon, he belted out a rhythm that the men listened to with tears in their eyes.
Francisco’s letter was addressed to the synagogue of the Jewish brothers in Rome.
He introduces himself as “Eli Nazareo, Jew, son of Diego Núñez da Silva, master of medicine and surgery, locked up in the prisons of the Inquisition of Lima.” He greets them “in the name of the God of Israel, creator of heaven and Earth, with wishes for your good health and peace.” He tells them that his father taught him the law of God as bestowed upon the people through Moses, and that, for fear of Christian repression, he pretended to deny this faith. “In this as with other commandments, I confess to have sinned foolishly, as only God is to be feared, and only the truth of His justice should be sought, openly, without fear of men.” He refers to his study of the sacred text, and to his memorization of the words of the prophets, every psalm without exception, many of Solomon’s proverbs as well as those of his son Siraj, most of the Pentateuch, and many prayers he himself composed in the tomb of a dungeon, in both Spanish and Latin.
He tells them that he is well aware that his destiny will be merciless if he does not abjure. “In truth,” he writes, “since the day I was imprisoned, I promised to fight with all my strength and to use all arguments against enemies of the law.” He infers that he’ll be burned at the stake, his home will be taken away, and his children will be subjected to perpetual shame. And if he abjures, his assets are still taken, and he is harassed with the wearing of the sanbenito and a stigma on his blood and the blood of his children, for generations to come.
He has been chained for six years now. He knows that his thoughts and arguments in the hearings have not brought the results he’d hoped for. “I’ve worked like someone who plows hard, rocky earth and whose labor in the end produces no fruit.” He recounts that he gave “more than two hundred oral and written arguments, to which there still has not been any satisfactory response, despite the fact that I daily ask for resolution. It appears that they’ve decided not to respond.”
He announces his inevitable end and writes moving phrases: “Pray for me to the Lord, my dearest brothers; pray that He may give me strength to endure the torment of flames. My death is close at hand, and there is no one else to help me, except God. From Him, I hope for eternal life, and the soon-to-be salvation of our oppressed people.”
His epistle, however, contains the intense elixir of attachment to life: “Choose life for yourselves, my deeply beloved brothers.” He reminds them that they form part of a vast community of dignified men, and that they should not abandon hope even if injustice and anguish reign. “Keep to the law, so that the Lord may help us return to the land of our forefathers, so that we may multiply, and so that He may bless us, as it is written in Deuteronomy, Chapter 30.” He praises the traditions of solidarity, study, and love.
He folds the pages. First, he turns over one copy. If the walls’ correspondence tells him that it has arrived at its destination, then he’ll send the second one. One of those will manage to break through the armored fortress and cross the ocean. Then his passion and death will be known. His sacrifice will not be futile, because he will be part of the tragic and mysterious chain unfurled by the just people of the world.
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In the tribunal’s deliberations, the desire grows for an Act of Faith. There are enough prisoners with completed trials. It’s not convenient to keep maintaining them in jail and wasting money on their food. Also, an Act of Faith is an exemplary event that reorganizes spirits; it not only punishes sinners or forces them into reflection, but it also reminds the powerful civil and ecclesiastical authorities that the Holy Office keeps watch, works, and issues sentences with great seriousness.
However, Acts of Faith have extraordinary costs, and the resources flowing into the Inquisition’s coffers barely cover salaries and minor expenses. The exhaustive confiscations don’t bring in enough wealth. It also seems that, in this matter, too, the devil’s work is at hand, because instead of tempting rich people whose goods would give this sacred mission plenitude, Lucifer makes poor people fall; most of the accused are humble, immoral monks, black and mulatto sorcerers, austere Lutherans, and Jews devoted to medicine. It would be more profitable to take down rich merchants and a few Indian overseers with vast properties and bags brimming with gold.
In the projected Act of Faith, there will be many reconciled men and women with light sentences, such as public whippings, a few years in the galleys, reeducation in monasteries, the wearing of a sanbenito, banishment. For people to be deeply moved, however, what’s needed is the smell of charred flesh. The heat and light of fire cut through sinners’ malignant armor. The flames, though they may be lit for a single reptile of a man, fill the whole Viceroyalty with an instructive presence.
The location where the thick stake is placed, its base surrounded by logs that will slowly roast the captive, is interchangeably referred to as the “rocky terrain” or the “burning place.” The people fear and avoid it. It is on the other side of the Rímac River, between the neighborhoods of San Lázaro, with its lepers, and the high hill. The didactic clouds of smoke, when they arise, invade all of Lima, and the screams of the condemned sting the ears of all. The inquisitors recall that fire is one of the four elements named by Aristotle, but he didn’t know—because he lived before Christ—of its cardinal power to purify. For this reason they consider an Act of Faith without fire to be as empty as a procession without a saint.
The dungeons of Lima already contain the man who will justify their blazes. It’s that crazy Jew to whom they offered abundant opportunities for rectification. But—this is inexplicable to them—he has tenaciously rejected the most logical path. He has formulated hundreds of questions that were answered by famous theologians. And at the end of the persuasions, as if to mock them, he repeated a demented right to think and believe whatever he liked. Demanding freedom of thought and belief! Is there anything more grotesque? If one person can believe in whatever comes to mind, then that person’s neighbor can, too, and so can the next neighbor after him. These depraved examples would strike at the Lord’s temples like catapults. All of humanity would roll into the inferno.
“Francisco Maldonado da Silva is a powerful enemy,” Gaitán warns. “He must be eliminated as soon as possible.”
“That’s why we’ve already condemned him,” Castro del Castillo reminds him.
“If before he managed to change his trial, now he’s lost it completely,” Mañozca adds, extending a page written in Latin with weak ink.
The judges examine the letter to the Jews of Rome. They pass the coarse paper around between them. The prisoner’s audacity is yet another intolerable provocation. Gaitán longs to strangle him with his own bare hands, but he accepts for him to be summoned in order to confess this very grave crime.
Francisco—already condemned to death, and transformed into a specter—responds with his habitual frankness. Yes, he wrote that letter.
The inquisitors tremble with shock again. A sinner so wretched cannot possibly be so simultaneously brave. Something about this doesn’t make sense. The only thing they can confirm is that he’s possessed by Lucifer, and th
at this is not a matter of a human being who enjoys free will and his full faculties of reason.
Gaitán bites his thin white lips and says, “We mustn’t delay the Act of Faith, as madmen are also weapons of the devil.”
Opalescent light enters through the tiny window. It is late at night, and all activities have ceased, even the correspondence through the walls. Francisco has startled awake, and he stares at that uncertain glow. He recalls the night on which an identical phenomenon took place, when Brother Martín was punishing himself with the help of an Indian man. He doesn’t hear the whistle of sticks through the air, though, or Martín’s repressed moans, but rather ethereal sandals. They are coming quietly, through a tunnel. Now he hears them better. There’s a single person whose tension ripples through the walls, making the tiny window shine and keeping Francisco’s eyes open, his ears alert. The sandals stop beside his door. Who’s trying to see him at this hour? The bolt rises slowly and a key penetrates the lock. Francisco sits up on his hard bed. The flickering light of a candle slides in between the bars. A familiar figure immediately appears. He closes the door and places the candlestick on the table. He gazes at Francisco with compassion, then pulls up a chair.
The Jesuit Andrés Hernández adjusts the folds of his black habit and speaks in a low, almost whispering voice. To avoid any false assumptions, he explains that he’s received authorization from Antonio Castro del Castillo to speak to Francisco privately. The good Hernández has not resigned himself to Francisco’s persistence.
Against the Inquisition Page 48
