The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives

by Tim Darcy Ellis

  “Father, here is some spring water.”

  I struggled to my feet, enmeshed in a sea of bodies. Someone drew my cassock back from my eyes, and I found myself looking deeply into hers. She didn’t balk. Unflinching, she said again, “Father, you must drink.”

  “I didn’t want you to see this, sweet girl.”

  “Drink.” She held my head and brought a leather bottle to my lips as young Maria tidied my cassock until my body’s shaking slowly eased. The soldiers with their captives had gone. Her face came into focus, and I felt that I had seen love itself.

  “I was wrong, wasn’t I?” she said. “I thought you were a weak man, like papa said, but I can see you are not at all.” She smiled, and it looked like a spray of white lilies. She turned to young Maria as if to leave. I wouldn’t let her, reaching for her wrist, but finding I had a sudden crippling pain in my shoulder and had no strength in my grip.

  “Come, my love, to England. We will be safe there, and we can be wed.… Don’t shake your head like that. Stay and listen for a minute. I’ll meet you tonight at the ringing of the last bell of St. Donatian under the window of St. Luke, and we can take horses to Calais. Please.”

  She wrenched her wrist back so hard that my clavicle popped again.

  “Señor, even if I secretly loved you, I wouldn’t leave my family for anyone.”

  She turned, and with her arm in Maria’s, started marching off, and then she stopped dead. Had she changed her mind?

  “Look at me and listen, Juanito.” She called me Juanito, which in itself was enough to cure me of my broken shoulder, my broken heart. “Get to Douwe’s, the apothecary, get calendula and arnica, and get the shoulder bound tight. Adios, my secret.”

  Did she really say that or was it the mirage of a dying man?

  * * *

  Back in my room, I try to work out what happened. How could I have left my own father and my own sisters? What ghastly, self-serving thing am I? For penance, if I can’t get to England, I must get to Eelko, to a woman named Claudia and give her the money I had set aside for my escape to England. I determined that I would do it on the morrow. A pain pierced my left shoulder, and I knew I’d have to get to Douwe’s soon, but that pain—it took me back to the place that I hate most of all, a place I can no longer avoid.

  Here, there is a whitewashed wall, an oven always baking, a row of copper pots and measuring spoons that only a woman would understand; and here there are the cool hands and the scent of Mother.

  “Do not show yourself,” she would say as I made my way to school and attended Mass every day with a confused mind. I held on to my urine all day until I got home and rushed to the courtyard and urinated for two minutes, the waters gushing out of me and smelling like a drain. Why not show myself? I asked one day and then found out why. Miguel Fernandez declared it to the entire school.

  “Here come the filthy Jews.”

  However many Hail Marys I said or how many times I genuflected and praised the Lord Jesus Christ, I was ever more regarded with suspicion, ever more rattled and bullied. “Jew scraps” were held down; I was kicked around the grounds like an old leather ball. I vowed at the tender age of thirteen that I would fight the bullies and expose them, that in time I would see that the wrongs were righted.

  Nevertheless, in my family group, in my closed circle, I was not bullied. In fact, I was known as El Señorito sin Reglas, The Little Lord without Rules. I led my gang of rascals, La Pandalla do los Vives, through the streets and to the quay of old Valencia. Moshe, known as Miguel, and Elijah, known as Enrique, would run to the Passé Caro and the Calle del Barco, always behind me, and I panicked when they raced to my shoulder. I determined there and then that when I was grown, I would never run behind. I could not perform, with my east-west hips and backwards spine, the cartwheels, back flips, somersaults, and twists that brought the others into the very heart of the quayside’s deep waters. On those days I would advocate fishing at the end of the quay and then, quickly bored by our fruitless endeavour, we would climb slowly to the tops of the towers and declare ourselves kings of the city and, on brave occasions, kings of the Jews. I would crave to sit on Father’s knee, and sometimes he would let me. I truly felt like the King of the Jews. Father would tell me about the great Moses ben Maimon and the thirteen principles of faith. He would get lost in the telling and mother would continue. She came from knowledge, and however hard he studied, he could not escape the fact that, first and foremost, he came from wool and commerce.

  “First, my son, there is the knowledge of the mind, and second there is the knowledge of the soul.” In her telling, something awoke deep in my spirit, and it was there that the will to learn, to be recognised for my learning and to disperse the truth of the Torah to a deaf world, was born. How, though, was I to be recognised if I was a Jew? My dilemma arose, my struggle and my conflict. I vowed to fight it all my life. I would not let being a Jew hold me back. The world would hear the voice of a Jew but would not know it until we were safe.

  The diary speaks to me: What happened next, Juanito? Delve deeply, revisit it. Find the strength.

  All right then. All went well until the summer of fifteen hundred and four. There was an inquisition. There are those who go missing, but I hardly saw it, blinded by my parent’s love. At the age of twelve, it all changed.

  * * *

  There are muffled laughs and jokes along the way, but I know this is not a day for laughing, and for once I do not lead. At the front of the monastery of San Cristóbal, we take our stand. The priests stand on a raised platform, with the hated cardinal bedecked in red, bejewelled in gold from the New World and pearls from deep inside Asia. There is an audience of four hundred townspeople—students, merchants, holy men. There is a drum roll, and then, helpless and hapless, six men and four women are brought before the priests. Each has a chain of iron around the neck; each has a shaved head and a towering hat known as a sanbenito and is wearing a white tunic with a yellow Magen David on the chest. I become dizzy and almost fall. This could easily be my own mother and father, my cousins and the sweet townspeople of La Juderia.

  In an instant, the drum rolls cease and the cardinal, dressed in a hat fashioned at the gates of hell, takes over the proceedings. There is little that I can hear, but I make out some of the words: synagogue, Sabbath, Jew and the name, Rabbi Bahbout. I look up, startled. Bahbout? The quiet man who leads prayers in my cellar? Scanning the backs of these men and women, I see a man, sixty, stooped with age, a crease in the back of his neck. It looks like an axe wound and there is something familiar about its look. Then, Amalia March and Jacob March, my mother’s sister and my sixteen-year-old cousin. This cannot be. Please God, if you exist at all, intervene and stop this.

  “Blessed be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” With that, the accused men and women turn around, and in his face, I see the creases of the eyes and the withered mouth. But the eyes are still shining. I realise that I am looking at my own rabbi, the man who behind oaken doors blessed our courtyard with its ever-flowing fountain and its tiles of red and blue, the man who performed my own circumcision.

  There is a chorus replying to the chorus of “Blessed be the fathers.” The drums roll again and there is more silence. Thoughts spiral through my head; my forehead meets my left hand as a kite meets the earth. Thud. The fear in the air whizzes like flies in summer. I know this will not end with a penance and a warning. These men and women will be sacrificed to teach us all that this is now the era of fear. The cardinal stands up and speaks with a snarl.

  “In the name of the Holy Father in Rome, of the children of Christ, I pronounce you guilty of Judaising. There is but one punishment that befits you all, the punishment of fire.”

  The nuns, the brides of Christ, smile and jump for joy. Then she looks at me, the one I fear the most—Sister Concepciõn. She looks at me with a sly sideways look that says, “One day this will be you.”


  I cannot go on, but the diary speaks again. “What next, Juanito?”

  It is one week later. There is not a bird in the sky. Has the horror of what is about to happen frightened them away? There are nine stakes that have been raised overnight, bundles of sticks all around them. There are pigs’ heads nailed to the stakes. Luis Velasquez, shoulders rounded like the dome of a minaret, is physically sick. I do not want to look but cannot turn my eyes away. Out they come, the nine convicted Jews. They are chained to the stakes, their heads next to the pigs’ heads.

  There are clouds of smoke and a groaning as Rabbi Bahbout, the first to feel the flames, tries hard to disguise his pain. There is the scream of Amalia and the smell of burning human hair, followed by the screaming of my cousin, Jacob, only a little older than my sister, Beatriz. Next is the terrible unified screaming, the Hebrew words, the licking of the flames stoked by the afternoon winds until that screaming becomes a chorus of death. I cannot avert my eyes or control my shaking. Moshe comes to me, puts his arm around my shoulder, and places his hand across my brow, but the smell of the crackling flesh reaches me still, and I can control myself no longer. My knees give way and I crouch, curled into a ball, speaking to the shiny cobbles. “No, dear God. No.” I do not care who sees me. I look up as the last scream peters out and there is nothing but ash and the charred bodies chained to the stakes.

  Now, from somewhere, somewhere deep inside my head, I can hear the words of the ancient rabbi. “Juan Luis Vives. Can you hear me? Our suffering is over. Now you must live.”

  But I must not listen to ghosts.

  I am standing in the Plaza Mayor. I am twelve years old and Moshe, my cousin, touches the nape of my neck and tries to pull me away, but I will not be moved. A Sister of Mercy comes to me and points her walking stick against my left ear and says, “Get up, child.” I obey her and hate myself for it. What can my face look like? Contorted and disfigured. She looks deeply into my eyes and says, “Learn well from this day.”

  I renew my vow. No one will know the truth.

  Is it any wonder that I do not want to go back? Perhaps Catherine of Aragon, if I can befriend her and mould her daughter, could guarantee me safe passage there so that I can bring my family to England? Although it may still be a secret life, surely it would be a safer life? In the future, if it’s true that the king is more flexible than ours, then there is hope. And if England is not safe, perhaps a new Jerusalem lies in the New World?

  * * *

  And so, we wouldn’t go to the tall house after the letter arrived, even dressed as monks, for who was watching us and who would take a bribe for giving false evidence? Every step we took had to be a step in the right direction, had to be witnessed by the right people in the right places, for who knew when we might need an affidavit? But a new thrill coursed through me, for I was getting closer to her, and I knew that on Thursdays she went to the Graskampf tailors on the windy street known as the Konewinkel.

  I found myself there, searching for lace to send home to my sisters. Finally, she arrived with the ringing of a bell above the shop door. She wore crimson and black, hair in a neat hood, and her mother nowhere to be seen.

  “What chance, Señorita!” I said. “What are you looking for? These are beautiful. Feel them.” I grabbed a silk scarf and put it into her hand, making sure I touched her soft fingers as I did. She chuckled as I asked her, “Will you let me buy you that one?”

  “No, you cannot, Señor Vives.”

  “Please, it’s Juanito.”

  “No sign of your suave friend today?”

  Why must she mention him? Did I not exist in my own right?

  “Forgive me, my lady, but what is in the recesses of your heart and soul?”

  She looked at me as if she thought me insane, which very possibly I was.

  “What nonsense! What a question!” She thought for a moment. “But I can see you’ve thought long and hard about it. I’m here for a new gown.”

  I was mesmerised by the long hair peeking from her hood, her piercing dark eyes.

  She blushed and continued. “I am for my parents, for my sewing, my cooking... my faith in Jesus.” She said the latter very loud. “I’m... for my sister and my brother.” She stumbled over her words, so I stopped her with a finger to her lip, took her into a quiet corner, and spoke in Spanish.

  “No, Marguerite. What are you really for in your heart and soul?”

  Did she realise that I was asking as if my future depended on it? Then her breathing changed as her voice became enchanting, like the voice of God in female form.

  “I am for integrity, for what is real and what is humane. But I think I am mostly for love.”

  “I, too, am for love,” I replied, taking her hand.

  “No,” she replied, “what are you really for?”

  “Yes, first I am for love, second for my people, and then for my learning and my teaching, for spreading the truth of the word, not these horrible lies.”

  “As I thought,” she said. “You are for you.”

  “I am for me?”

  “Yes, before your family. You are for recognition, for fame.”

  Could she see into the recesses of my soul? As I’d tried to understand what was truly her, she had exposed what was truly me. I wanted to scream, “No!”

  “In this precious moment, I am for you, my sweet,” I said. “Can’t you see that?”

  She shook her head. “Yes and no. I still think mostly you are for you.”

  “But if I could sweep you away to a magic land, to a safe place, then I would.”

  “Then what you will not do for your father you will do for me? Fly, señor. Fly!”

  “One day I will just do it. I’ll prove it to you. I promise!”

  Her mother, sister, and their two whippets entered the shop. Clara called in her high-pitched sparrow voice, “Marguerite, where are you?”

  What could I do but hide behind the acres of linen, scrambling along the floor to the back door. Marguerite was all giggles, and Maria clearly saw that something was going on and spoke to her quickly in Flemish so that her mother would not understand. I squirmed my way to the door, the giggling of the shop girls seeming like a hive of bees chasing me down.

  I ran all the way back to my room, where I found Álvaro in a sea of inks and quills. I told him what had happened, and he laughed as roughly as an English sailor. “You should play her like a lute, not attack her with questions like, ‘What are you for?’ ”

  He began teaching me from his repertoire of lovemaking skills, for I had been stuck in the safety of books all these years, suppressing the thing that I needed most of all: love. First, he showed me how to move towards a woman so she would get a scent of me and ache for me to get closer. Next, he showed me how to pull back at exactly that moment to keep her guessing. When she thought all was hopeless, I would calm her and make her think I was the gentlest, most misunderstood thing on Earth. And when she was alone and frightened, I would comfort her with a “shhh” and a gentle kiss.

  Who is the master here? Does it really matter?

  Later, he removed himself to his room and bolted the door. There were muffled tones, sacred words. I pressed my ear to the hard oak-panels and strained to hear, but I did not recognise the words. Was it Aramaic, the language of the Zohar and the Kabbalah?

  As I sit here, tired, with the candle burning very dimly, I ask myself what is his mission, his true purpose.

  30 March 1523

  Early the next day, just as the sun was up and the spring pollen was in the air, I travelled to Eelko. After asking at the marketplace, I found Claudia with a son, Zeek, perhaps three years old. He sat on the back step of the cottage, playing with a wooden soldier. As I approached, he looked at his front gate as if expecting to see his father.

  “Where’s Papa?” he asked. “Have you got him, mister?”

  How I wi
shed that I had, that I’d come here to bring his father home, or at least his body, which had been thrown into a pauper’s grave. I think he somehow knew that his father was not coming home, now or ever. I sat with them, mostly in silence, until Zeek’s shallow breathing changed, and he started telling me about his toy soldiers, the ones that would one day fight and defeat the Spanish. I gave Claudia what little coin I had left from the silk purse of Sir Thomas More.

  “If you need me, go to the tall house on the Verversdijk and ask for the teacher, Master Vives.” I kissed her stunned cheeks and bent down to kiss the boy on the head and was gone.

  I found myself back in the cold and bleak lecture hall. Sadly, it was time to discuss Leviticus, with all its “you shalls” and “you shall nots.” Johannes Van der Poel, pockmarked face and blond hair, stood up, tall as a sunflower.

  “I’ve got one for you now, master. A tricky one. You shall not be a Jew in the Netherlands. Should we add this to the list of commandments?”

  “My, what a strange question. A relevant one, though, now that you’re celebrating a Jewish Sabbath with Jewish friends. Doesn’t it say in this very book that we must make the foreigner welcome?” It was then that I broke into a stammer. “Is it not na-na-tural for one to sp-sp-end one’s free t-t-time with the people who come, not only from one’s country, but also from one’s hometown?”

  He pinned me with a cold, confident stare. “Actually, I heard that the Valldaura family is from Toledo, not your hometown, and yes, we must make them welcome unless, of course, they are really furtive Jews trying to persuade others to join them. You’ve been taking de Castro there to persuade him to join them. Even a maid can tell the difference between Hebrew and Spanish.”