The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives

by Tim Darcy Ellis

  * * *

  I went back into the world. The drive to be a great man in my own right, not just a clever little fish swimming alongside the great fish, was born. The desire to shape words into action seemed to be fuelled by an incredible new strength. It was as if I was working in a mighty blast furnace, like a blacksmith from a Norse myth. Once I finished writing, I would go to Spain and get my sister, risk everything, and then it would be published, my greatest work known as Of Concord and Discord. What words! What heresy! Surely, we must have a League of Nations, a united body from many lands to subvert wars and build a peaceful New World. Moreover, there must be an abolition of the Holy Inquisition and a National Health Service, with trained professionals funded by a tax, not the charity of the church. What I wrote about the church—no one would believe it: “They live by the people’s charity, and nevertheless they are pleased with being feared and are proud of inspiring terror and of injuring the very people who support them.”

  It was published and spread around Europe—even back to England—reaching farther than the plague. In horror, I realised I could become the new Luther but was unable to run if the officers of the king of Spain came after us. But he had other entanglements now: Rome, the French, and his growing empire. I had stared death in the face already and seen it so many times that it had lost its sting. I was all in the writing, hidden beneath piles of correspondence. I hardly noticed the geraniums coming into bloom or heard the children playing late in the street, my own little boy, Zeek, among them, shrieking and glowing with sweat and vigour. He’d come, eat, and then sleep comfortably, placated by his new home, the place that I prayed he would always have for sanctuary.

  When I was least expecting it, the truly great thing happened.

  1 October 1529

  It was early autumn now: breezy and cold. But there was a kindness in the light that I couldn’t quite articulate. Was it the kindness of healing? The light bounced off the windowpanes and lit up the streets, and there were the promises of the season: chestnuts, storytelling, nights snuggled together by the fireside. And there was a new smell that Henry the hound picked up before we did: the early falling of leaves, the winter kale being brought into the market, the salted fish.

  I approached the door of our house by early evening, but I found myself standing there, transfixed, unable to move. Was it fear that coursed from my temples down to my feet like a lightning strike? Was it hope, that most difficult visitor, the one I found so hard to give a home? Henry looked at me as if he had the answer. I looked at him and found myself saying, “What is it, Henry?” He stood on his hind legs at the front door, as only a giant poodle can, and sniffed it, twitched his nose, and cocked his head. He wagged his tail and put his wet nose to the lock and door handle.

  I turned it, and it opened. We entered and found nothing but silence. The oil lamps weren’t lit. There was no smell of the tallow or of food slowly cooking or of my wife’s gentle songs. Where was the sound of laughter that usually greeted me when I got home? Slowly, I walked forwards in the dim light and opened the kitchen door.

  There were two figures at the table, but they were both immobile. Zeek, who played with his soldiers on the floor, didn’t look up. My eyes adjusted to the poor light, and Henry crept forwards, assessing whether to attack or to welcome.

  “Marguerite?” There was nothing—no movement and no response.

  The skinny figure straightened at the neck and cocked its head. It was almost lizard-like in its movement, but it was a woman’s figure—skinny and tattered. As she looked up, a face gradually revealed itself, worn, lined with pouches under dark eyes, skin as thin as paper. The face had something in it that I knew. She smiled, and I knew who this was.

  The years fell away, and I fell to my knees, hands outstretched before me. “Oh my. How can this be?” I almost couldn’t get the word out. “Beatriz?” I prayed that this was not a vision, a delusion, that my mind, after all it had been through, wasn’t collapsing in on itself. But then something in her face lightened. She sighed, and I recognised the dark eyes of my mother, the lined forehead of my father.

  “Yes, Juanito, it is I.”

  I simply stood in the moment: the culmination of all the moments, the final play of my struggle. The backdoor opened, and Zeek and Henry came towards me. I tried to speak, but words did not come. I needed to touch her and to know that she was real.

  “Don’t get up, little one,” I said, giving her a gentle caress. Anything more would have crushed her frail bones.

  She began to shake and to tremble, fighting tears.

  “My Juanito, my little one, my very own brother.”

  She was there at Father’s death and Mother’s exhumation. With a price on her head, the other two could neither shelter nor hide her. She hid in warehouses, slept under a hessian cloth, and found a church tower that had once been a minaret. From there, she watched the streets every day, certain that I would come looking for her. From her secret high place, she saw our family house taken and the ancient Arabic books ritually burnt by the priests on the street. It was then that she became the warrior Jewess. The same night the priest’s family moved in, she stole through the air vent into the cellar and smeared the four pillars with goose fat. “One for my mother, one for my father, one for my brother, and one for my sisters,” she said.

  “But why goose fat? To remember us? We never kept geese.”

  “Goose fat burns, Juanito. I tied rags, laid straw, lit it, and ran. The house and the one next door that once belonged to the silversmith were gone by morning. I’m not as holy as you, brother. I’m not beyond vengeance.”

  “How did you get away?”

  Zeek sat on the floor, knees to his chest, totally enraptured. Henry put his wet nose in her hand, as if congratulating her.

  Without food or water and with an army after her, she threw herself on the order of St. Cecilia and the nuns from Navarre, a happier, more tolerant place. Beatriz, who they called Magdalena, became a repentant, fleeing her terrible family that had killed her bastard baby. It was there one night that a young nun told her, as the moon rose to its zenith, of the tale of the warrior Jewess, Beatriz Vives.

  “She must be a terrible one,” my sister said.

  “Worse than a sorceress,” the nun replied. “She cut children’s necks and used the blood for Jewish rituals, then set fire to the cellar. All they found were charred bones.”

  One night a search party of men banged on the door of the convent, and the sisters put her in a chest, beneath linen packed so tightly that she almost suffocated. The following day, with a black mourning veil to cover her face, she climbed the wall of the convent and was gone. Across rocky mountain paths, she trekked to a village known as Almassera and a cave where we had once played as children. She thought I’d be coming for her. She trapped rabbit at sunrise and stole grain by night from a farmhouse. It was the smoke that alerted the villagers—a farm boy had been spying on her. Fearing for their lives and hoping for a handsome reward, they trapped the warrior Jewess. It was early summer by then and I had been on my way back to Bruges.

  “Juanito, there were twenty with pitchforks, axes, and torches,” she explained. She thought it was the end, that her darling brother would not be coming for her. The soldier at the head of the pack told her, “The Queen of England, and his Excellency, Don Zuniga de Mendoza, have spoken for you. You must come quickly.”

  The queen, whose words had seen Father chained to the stake, had done what she said she would do. All of my efforts were not in vain. As she’d helped the pauper apprentices, she’d helped me. And that dear man with the grey hair, with whom I was once incarcerated, had spoken the truth. The wretched Jew had succeeded.

  The brotherhood, now disbanded, had succeeded. They placed six pesos in a leather purse about her neck and dragged her to the quay in front of a jeering crowd, who kicked and spat at her, a chain about the neck. The ship was soon gone a
nd sailed through the pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar to make its way to Lisbon, where she thought she’d be safe. She slept with the homeless waifs and the rats under the arches of the great sea wall until the pepper ship arrived from Africa, bound for Antwerp. She was given scraps of bread no one else would eat, and although she would kneel and pray with them every night as she had learned to do in the convent, she was known as La Judia and was kicked around the decks like an old bucket. At Antwerp, with no language and no money, she met a family who knew a few words of Spanish. They gave her bread and cheese and pointed her to Bruges. She set out in the night, sleeping in ditches and hiding in barns. She hid in the trees, where the songs of birds urged her to keep going. On the third night from Antwerp, almost dead with fatigue, she came to a group of gypsies who gave her a woollen cape, a meal of roasted squirrel, and soup of nettles. They pointed her to Bruges, and she trudged on. Finally, she saw the city of tall buildings and shiny windows and found herself in the street, asking, “Vives, the scholar?” And so she came across our house in the Verversdijk, knocked on the door, and slumped in a heap before Marguerite opened the door.

  As she told me the story, the pain of the past ten years welled up inside. I couldn’t speak and just held Beatriz’s sweet, frail hand.

  The pain was gone. I looked up, and instead of the timber-beamed ceiling, I saw blue skies and heard the chattering of nightingales. We were in the hills around Valencia, where father took us on Sundays. We were holding hands, running into the farmer’s fields, playing chase, laughing though our hair was stuck to our foreheads with sweat. Mother was singing.

  Now is the time of the living.

  * * *

  This will be the end of the writing now that I have her here, my treasure, getting stronger and prettier day by day. Her hair is shiny now and she is able to eat. I have my wife and the boy and his best friend, Henry. You have to go, then, diaries, piss-stained writings and my ring with its Star of David. And also, the sketch of my friend, Sir Thomas More. You can go in this wooden box because I cannot bear to see your full and beautiful head as the game in England plays out. God be with you, Sir Thomas, and the queen and Meg, too. God be with the secret Jews of England, too, with your secret synagogues and Kabbalistic rituals. May you, in time, prevail and live in a better land. Yes, it’s you, the hidden men of history that make the world a better place.

  Where the new wall is going up, beneath the floors on the other side, I’ll place the writings. I had a great teacher for hiding books: my father! He placed his Arabic books beneath the floorboards of our home in La Juderia, and they weren’t found in his lifetime. No one will know that this was once a house of secret Jews until many years have passed and the persecution of the Jews is over.

  Farewell.

  It ought to be the duty of the public officials to take pains to see that men help one another, that no one is oppressed, no one wronged by an unjust condemnation, and that the strong come to the assistance of the weak in order that the harmony of the united body of citizens may grow in love day by day and endure forever.

  —Juan Luis Vives, 1525

  Historical Note

  The dates and times of major events of Vives’s life as described in the two diaries are accurate as far as can be ascertained. The dates of his arrivals and departures from England and the death of his father, as well as the dates of his incarceration in England, are known and followed faithfully. The letter he signed in support of Catherine of Aragon on the orders of Wolsey is thought to be the reason he was arrested. It is known that he was incarcerated for a time with the Spanish ambassador, Inigo Mendoza de Zuniga.

  That Vives knew the More family well and stayed at their various homes is also fact. Vives’s wife was Marguerite Valldaura, who came from a family of Jewish origin from Valencia and who settled in Bruges. She never came to England despite being personally invited by the queen. Her father dealt in cloth and diamonds, and her brother, Nicolas Valldaura, became a physician. Vives’s friendship with Álvaro de Castro, “whom he loved like a brother” and with whom he stayed in London, is well-attested. Gasper de Castro is also recorded in state documents in London in the 1550s. Beatriz, Vives’s sister, joined him in Bruges in 1531. One of Vives’s brothers-in-law who remained in Valencia went before the Inquisition.

  Sir Thomas More was imprisoned in the Tower of London by Henry VIII and executed on 6 July 1535, ostensibly for refusing to accept the annulment of the marriage of Henry and Catherine. His last letter from the Tower, “The Agony of Christ,” was passed to his daughter Meg. In her will, she left it to Fray Pedro de Soto of Valencia, home of the Vives family. It now resides in the Corpus Christi Museum in Valencia. At More’s execution, he commented that his beard had committed no crime and thus should be spared the axe. His head was placed on a pike on London Bridge for a month after his execution, and Meg obtained it, possibly by bribery. She kept it for years under her bed, and she is thought to be buried with it in Canterbury. His hair shirt is preserved and currently on display at Syon House, formerly Syon Abbey.

  The Flying Horse Inn in Houndsditch was present in the seventeenth century, and it is possible that a tavern existed there earlier as this area escaped the ravages of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Of the secret Jews of sixteenth-century London, there are tantalising glimpses. The Chancery Court records record several Londoners with Jewish surnames such as Cohen, Isaacs, and Levy. The Domus Conversorum, or house of the converts, was continually inhabited at this time. An Edward Scales left the Domus in 1527. The musician Ambrosius Moyses is attested to in the historical record as a court musician, an early violin player who sometimes was known as John Anthony.

  Elements of Vives’s conversation with Catherine of Aragon on the barge to Syon House are mentioned in his writings. She asked him which of the two he would choose: good fortune or adversity. She commented that she would choose an equal share, and if then she still had to choose, she would choose the latter, feeling that it would strengthen her. The reported speech at the Christmas gathering of Sir Thomas More, 1523—“Only any non-donkey of any man except Socrates and another belonging to this same man begins contingently to be black”—are the actual words of Vives, who used them to illustrate that the exclusivity of academic writing was often nonsense. He was a lifelong proponent of clarity in writing.

  That Henry VIII had Jewish sympathies is generally acknowledged, and there are no records of Jewish persecutions during his reign apart from the temporary imprisonment in 1541 of the court musicians. It is thought that there may have been up to nineteen Jewish musicians in Henry’s court. The imprisonment may have been an attempt to placate the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The king had a long association with Marco Raphael, the German rabbi mentioned in the text, and the king personally came to the defence of the wealthy financier, Diego Mendes of Antwerp, who was imprisoned on the accusation of Judaism.

  The character of Johannes Van der Poel is fictitious, although Bruges became the model for secular care of the poor along the lines of On Assistance to the Poor. The students of Vives were instrumental in bringing this about.

  Vives died on May 6, 1540, and his wife died twelve years later. Both were forty-eight years of age at death. Evidence from the history of the Jews in Spain and Portugal after the 1492 expulsion shows that many small communities of crypto-Jews lived as Catholics whilst practising Judaism in secret, sometimes for hundreds of years. An isolated community, the Belmonte Jews of Portugal, survives into the present day and finally has a synagogue in which the community may worship in peace.

  Vives and his wife were both buried in the tenth-century church of St. Donatian in Bruges, which was destroyed by occupying French troops in 1799.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives has been an absolute labour of love: an escape from a sometimes challenging world, and a leap back into another reality.

  I am deeply grateful to Rafael Cordero, w
ho indirectly gave me the reason to write the story - unbeknownst to him - and helped with the research, Spanish translation and poetry. He encouraged me at times - as well as taking an avid interest in Vives himself - when the task seemed overwhelming.

  I’m eternally grateful to my feedback group - especially to Sylvia Brimson and Vicki Nicholson who read my first draft and who were kind enough to be honest with me. I am very grateful to my mother, Helen who received a rain-soaked copy of the first draft that had been thrown over the fence by a mailman, dried all the pages on radiators and commented that ‘that there wasn’t enough sex in it’.

  Thank you to my first agent, Selwa Anthony, who did her best to get a publishing deal with one of the big four. I am very thankful to my dear friend, the late Dr Vivienne Schnieden, who listened with great patience and enthusiasm and who encouraged me in all my creative endeavours. Sincere appreciation and love go to Rabbi Jacki Ninio and the community of Emanuel Synagogue in Woollahra. Friends Wayne Hawkins and Nick Smart deserve a special mention. Thanks go to my editor Bill Hammett.

  Getting to publication has taken a while, and I have to mention Regina Ramos, who told me to stop being a perfectionist and ‘‘just do it.” My publisher Tellwell, have been utterly professional and patient. In particular, thank you to Rhea and Anne Marie. I want to congratulate Ferdika Permana for the cover design and photographer Colin Hutton and Trevillion Images for the cover art.

  None of this would have been possible without a great story. My most profound gratitude and respect go to Señor Vives himself: an utter inspiration of strength, goodness and wily survival skills whose life story provided me with great material.