The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives

by Tim Darcy Ellis

  Could it really be nine years? Yes, that day I strode ocean-weary into the town of silted rivers and wooden bridges, of offal and butchers’ carcasses. The carcasses float out to the ocean and then back in again on the next tide, and it’s no wonder that the river is silting up and the town stinks like an abattoir. Nine years ago, I didn’t have the flecks of grey that invade my dark brown hair like weeds in a poorly tilled field.

  I beg your pardon, diary. Did you say something? It was my father’s finances, generations in the wool trade, that allowed it to happen. But if the terrible thing hadn’t happened when I was seventeen, I would not have left Spain. I made my way through university in Paris and Leuven, there a pupil of Erasmus the Great, promising always to go back one day to Valencia. But no, you’re right. I could not overcome my fear of what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. To my own disgrace, I have not yet gone back.

  And so I reached this town, just twenty years old, full of the Renaissance, but I quickly found I was human rather than humanist, for my heart and eyes were first drawn to the pretty girls with fair hair, plaited and constructed into lofty monuments. All I wanted to do was unfurl those lofty monuments and spend the hours reconstructing them.

  All right, so you push me. Next, my searching eyes and keen nose hit upon a few of my own kind. They were living here silently as good Christian folk, but I could see the signs. We were unable to look one another in the eye in public, but at dawn and dusk, we gathered in warm places by candlelight, singing ever so quietly the old songs.

  So, diary, the town of your birth has become my home, for though these lands are under the control of the Spanish king, there is, as yet, no Inquisition. There is no familiarity with the limpieza de sangre, the impurity of blood, that marks my family in Spain as Nuevos Cristianos, New Christians. The title means that we are always to be regarded with suspicion. Here, I am free to walk the cobbled streets and take deep breaths. Here, I have little fear of being pulled from my bed and taken to a destiny darker and colder than the mid-winter night.

  What’s that? Why do they call me the Striking Man? Well, I’m no giant, and I wouldn’t pitch in for a wrestling match with a Flemish man. My spine is slightly twisted so that my hips go east while my shoulders go west. My teeth, though, are straight and shiny, beacons of my good fortune. My skin is sallow, olive, almost green in winter, but glows when a new girl saunters by.

  Anna-Lise was a Dutch girl who sauntered by. I could pay her with a florin or, if I had one, a Valencian orange. She said, with one tooth missing, that my strike was the glint, the piercing eye. These were her words, not mine. Don’t think me haughty, please, but she said there was a light that hovered about me, a countenance of loving kindness. I wasn’t like the Dutchers, she explained, for I washed every day in the warm scent of lavender, and through vanity clipped my beard while looking in the shiny brass mirror. She left me for a merchant from Saxony with deeper pockets, bigger oranges. I have not been striking enough to capture the heart of the one I long for with every aching sinew, the one for whom my broken heart waits.

  What strikes me is Señor Apoplexia, the alien within. He strikes with little warning and even less control. He will not be tamed and threatens to reveal me and devour liberty. Is that why I am striking? Will the apoplexies lead to the terror of the wrack and the screws, to a deportation in chains to the flames of the Plaza Major?

  A glance around the room then. A quick sniff of the brewing infusion: rosehip for the body, nettle for the mind, camomile for the spirit. A tapestry of a solitary tree hangs high above the stone fireplace. It takes me to mystic places of buried truths in hidden corners. I look through the diamond panes again, and there are my pupil-boys, laughing and throwing soft punches as they rush to their warm homes in tall houses. They are strong now and almost as big as their fathers. And though their northern tongues sound to me like a hammer striking an anvil, their young lives remind me of the joy of waking to a new day. They bring back sweet memories and dreams.

  I don’t think I can write about my great dream for the future. It’s too painful, and there is too much at stake. But how I long each moment for my family to be reunited in a new golden age, or to write about the past. Surely, that is just too hard, too tricky a horse to ride.

  But you’re here, beckoning me to write something. You were meant to be here, yes? And you have unleashed something, like fragments of a lost dream suddenly remembered. In my dream, my three sisters are in our family home in Valencia, my father strumming the guitar as they sing warm songs by candlelight. I look closer into the dream, and they huddle together in the cellar of the granary, not because it’s cold, but because they never knew if it would be the last time. Eva, the eldest, would get up to sing and dance, stepping high and lighting up Father’s face, taking the deeply etched lines off his worried brow.

  Then there’s the other dream: a memory of the fires, of a scream at midnight from a familiar voice—someone I was not able to save. I know I must go back there, and soon, and bring them safely here. But I also know that if I go back, the scream could very well become my own. These fragments of dreams are like leaves on this autumn day. Some are dazzling red and gold, while others are withered, grey, and brown. I must find the strength to weave them all together into a magical cloth. I must bring my fragmented family back together again.

  But I can’t do it yet.

  No, now is for the now, and, sweet diary, you have found a man in the making. The now is for living! Come on, Juanito, El Toro Bravo—The Brave Bull—live! I dare you, write it down—why you choose to live in this world of tyranny and injustice!

  I am consumed with passion for a man, and though you might think that odd when my heart strikes so hard for women, it is because of him that I choose to live. His name is Aristotle, for to be conscious that I am thinking is to be conscious that I exist. And if do I exist, then I should fully exist, repairing the world rather than fearing it.

  Today, thoughts of how I’d repair the world overwhelmed me as I rushed to lectures so fast that I stumbled on the uneven cobbles, tripping over my gown and dropping my manuscripts like a court fool in a comedy. At the lectern, though, I focussed intently on those young scholars. Those wide-eyed poor students in their black gowns and white shirts sat bolt upright. I laughed out loud and began my lecture.

  “All of creation is equal, is it not?” I asked them. “Ha! Yes, we are equal and that must bring change, no?”

  They looked at me as if I were crazy, but I wasn’t frightened to challenge them, for I am the Brave Bull who always gets that matador. Off we went on slavery, heresy, how we treat the little ones, the animals, always quoting the Greeks, the Romans, the Hebrews. Afterwards, I retired to these four wood-panelled walls and slumped to my desk.

  Hildegard, the maid, knocked so loudly that I thought it must be the officers of Louis de Praet, the Spanish king’s man in this town. Had they come to take me back in chains? Hildegard, though, quelled that thought as she burst in muttering a clumsy, “Señor... señor.”

  I grabbed the white silk covering from my head and hid it in my trembling hand under the desk. She ushered me from my seat and pushed me out of her way with hips that have known no rest from childbirth. She brushed the crumbs from my breeches and pinched me on the cheek.

  “Argh! Get off, woman!” I said. It was only then that I realised I was munching on the hardened bread she had left me the previous night, for I was too caught up in Aristotle to eat. She threw more food at me as she cleaned the grate and collected the bones of a chicken, a wine glass, and apple cores.

  “Whatever you do, do not touch my papers and books,” I told her. I prayed that if she did, I wouldn’t murder her and throw her body into the stinky river Dijver. She put them in a neat pile while I watched, helpless. All I could do was laugh. I could challenge Aristotle but not Hildegard. So much for El Toro Bravo.

  She slammed the door. How long had she been here?
Was there an “Adios, señor”? I don’t know, for I was sitting in the corner, ruminating on the success of my famous work, In Pseudo-Dialectecos, in which I wrote what I feel, that the poor should be in the care of the state, not the church. I wrote that academics—crusty old bastards—lack clear speech and common sense, and that a woman’s voice must be heard at all costs. I need to bring what I was taught in secret places to the attention of the world. The poor were under the care of my father’s family so they would not live in fear. Stop!

  Ah, but I cannot stop, for we learned that we might all learn equally, one from the other. My middle sister, Beatriz, always a wild one, hair tied back but still flowing down to her waist, sang a song that Mother taught her. She changed the lyrics to reflect that she would get her revenge on the Spanish king. The song said that though the kol ishah, the woman’s voice, is nothing now but a whisper, one day it will be changed into a roar. I must do them a service while I have the chance. As I think of Beatriz’s song, I am reminded that what I need to hear most of all is a woman’s voice. And though I am not yet permitted to hear it, I know to whom the woman’s voice belongs.

  Diary, you have found a revolutionary! Your writer is in conflict with the most famous thinker of our age, Erasmus of Rotterdam; for if God has not given man free will, then why has he created him at all? Does the alternative God-given justice mean that my aunt and my cousin deserved their fates in the fires of Valencia?

  Will I face that now? Will it help to write about it?

  Diary, you seem to speak, “Go there, Juanito.”

  Well, I can always burn you when I have written this. You’re just vellum, no longer living flesh and blood. I strain my eyes to glance at the past now. I see that we were never safe, a family of secret Jews in Valencia, for we were always looking over our left shoulders, waiting for the day that the king’s axe would fall and the bundles would be lit under our feet.

  Dark waters seem to cloud my memories as if protecting me from the pain. If I try hard enough, I’ll be able to see through them. What was in our secret place, the cellar of our granary? Mother was there until the plague got her. Before then, teaching by example, she’d quietly welcome our guests, taking away their dark cloaks and shawls to reveal silks of bright purple against a sea of white. She gave the men their yarmulkes from a cavity behind a loose brick. Sand was strewn on the floor. Hushed tones reverberated off the walls until it felt like the walls themselves, not the mouths of our guests, were talking.

  “Why sand, Father?” I asked.

  “Oh, my clever boy, to remind us of Moses’s wandering in the desert.”

  I’d thought it was to muffle the sound of our footsteps in the secret places. And if we had not feared the rap on the door, would our guests have meant so much to me or would I have been bored, like my pupils at Mass? I do not know. I must get to work soon. First, I have to find a way to rescue my father and three sisters who still live in Valencia. Then I will find us all a haven—somewhere, anywhere. If not here, perhaps in the New World.

  “Father, why don’t we go to Salonika or Venice, where we might be safe?” I’d ask when I was fifteen and all my siblings were younger than me.

  “Hush, my worrying boy. It will all be over in a year or two. The king and queen are not so stupid as to lose all their best doctors and financiers. It will all go back to how it was. Just be patient.”

  He believed this, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, he still believes it today.

  So, diary, will you be a tool to help me? Will you be my counsel on these matters? No, not yet. You have not proved yourself yet.

  But neither have you betrayed me. It seems cruel to put you on the flames, as my aunt was. That was the terrible event, you see, that made me leave when I was seventeen. And so, under you go, into the hessian sack beneath the floorboard, between two walls bricked up on this side and with cloth placed either side of the loose board so that it will not creak. Away!

  1 December 1522

  It’s a shame, but I can’t quite keep away from you. You’re like a girl that’s got me under her spell, or a new batch of wine I can’t help but drink. Perhaps you’re just that certain someone I can share nonsense with. It’s true. I could write instead to my youngest sister, Leonora, the artistic one, the poetess. She’d love to hear about the winter frost that’s climbing up the windowpanes like the sharp hands of an assassin, but by the time the letter gets to her, it will be spring and long gone. So, I’ll write to her in advance of the season about blackbird chatter and snowdrops while sharing the business of the day with you.

  It was but a few days before the great man, Johannes Van der Poel, arrived at my door. He’s tall for his age, like a spring vine that’s shot up too fast and is a mess of spine and limbs. He’s got a strong jaw, though, and if his face had not been pitted with scars of the pox, he’d be impossibly handsome. That he survived at all when most did not is a sign of great strength. His heart’s desire is to command armies and work for the king, but I’ll beat that out of him. He is but fifteen years of age, and he is my brightest star.

  A firm rap came on the door then, and I uncrossed my legs, put down the quill, and picked up the lute. “Enter, Johannes.”

  “Have you started writing yet, sir?” he asked with a hopeful glint in his blue eyes.

  “How do you think my great works get here, Johannes, if I’m not always and forever writing? On a magic carpet from the Orient?”

  “No, no, sir,” he said as he scratched his face. “Your diary, the little book I gave you. Remember? It would be rude not to use it, sir. I had to save up to buy it. It’s for your secrets.”

  “Don’t pick your scars, boy!”

  He stopped, but he looked at me as if demanding a reply to his question.

  “Well, if I had started writing, I wouldn’t tell you. And if I did, I’d hardly confess what I’d written. That’s the nature of secrets, eh?”

  He relaxed with a deep and contented sigh and laughed. “So, I’ll have to break in when you’re not here?”

  “You wouldn’t understand it,” I replied, rising from my chair and strumming gently on the lute.

  “You’re writing in Hebrew, then?”

  “Why are the sun and the moon round if the earth is flat?” I asked, holding the lute tightly with one hand, fiddling with my grey worsted jacket with the other. He was a sharp tool.

  “If Magellan has just circumnavigated the world, then it must be round.”

  “But why don’t the people on the bottom fall off?” I asked, putting the lute in a corner of the room.

  “There must be a giant magnet in the middle,” he declared.

  I nodded. “Must be.”

  He changed tone. “Why do the Spanish want the New World all for themselves?”

  “Greed and power blind the mind and kill the beautiful. Men have always used scripture to justify such deeds and—”

  “Scripture,” he interjected, “my favourite topic. Why do you go to Mass if you are a Jew?”

  I stopped pacing and started searching his face for a hint of kindness, a sign that this was jest. I found nothing but a steady gaze.

  “Well”—I checked myself as if recalling a long-lost memory—“Grandfather mentioned that his great-grandfather perhaps was a Jew? And there was a crooked-nosed fellow, a pedlar in Barcelona—perhaps he was a Jew?” I stopped and thought about my father. Did he still make sausages from rabbit and chicken, spiced so heavily that they seemed to be made of pork?

  “Will they kill you if they find out?” he asked solemnly.

  “There is nothing to find out,” I replied in a deeper tone, leaning against my chair.

  “But Rhodes has just been taken by the Turks.” He walked around the room, waving his arms as if scything off the head of a Greek peasant. “They massacred them without mercy.”

  He came to a halt and picked up the brass astrolabe
that Father gave me the day I left Spain.

  “I hardly think that’s true, Johannes,” I replied with a frown. “Yes, Rhodes may have fallen, but the Turks are a merciful race.”

  “You had better be careful. Our kings will be in no mood now to protect a crooked-nosed Jew or an Arab-o-phile.” He laughed out loud uncontrollably.

  I asked him to conjugate four simple verbs: to gain, to learn, to lose, to survive. Then, absent-mindedly, I asked him to do another: to die.

  I paced around the small room, catching a glimpse in the copper mirror of swollen veins in my temples. “I am not a Jew. I will have no more talk of it.”

  He nodded.

  “Johannes, do not tell anyone of this conversation. Agreed?”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  Diary, are you my friend or his?

  May God quell my energy and my chattering mind. May I steer clear of the trap. May I burn you, diary, and stop this.

  * * *

  And then the day of the great man was upon us and, though I needed to focus, I was consumed with thoughts of those long summers days when my brown skin glowed and I played with my pandalla, my gang, in our short breeches on the long stone quay. I was always the last to turn home. Instead, I’d sit behind lobster pots and listen to the fishermen mending their nets and to the sailors swapping tales of the New World. I heard that all men are like the fish that swim in the ocean, for there are great fish, middle fish and little fish. Someone shouted, “What type will you be, Juan Luis Vives? A great fish?” All collapsed in laughter. I’d made my intentions clear, without even trying.

  Born a year after the Jews were expelled, I thought that I could never really be any kind of fish at all, for if I became a great fish, I would surely be exposed, and then what? But one day a man who had dove for pearls, called Margaritas, at the behest of the queen spoke of another kind of fish. This one swam with the big ones, cleaning their fins and gills, and was never ever eaten. By their close association, the little fish journeyed to underwater palaces and caverns of silver and gold. This would be me. If I could be that kind of fish, swimming alongside the great fish, perhaps I could rescue my people from the abyss.