Purity of Blood

These readings, the abjurations de levi and de vehementi—lighter and stronger recantations—were met with screams of anguish from those sentenced to unendurable punishment, resignation in others, and the public’s approval when the maximum penalty was applied. The priest who denied the presence of Christ in the host was condemned to the stake amid roaring applause and nods of satisfaction. After brutally scourging his hands, tongue, and tonsure as a sign that he was stripped of his sacred orders, his tormentors led him to the stake, which had been set up on the esplanade outside the Puerta de Alcalá. The old woman accused of witchcraft—of too easily finding treasures hidden by fleeing Jews and Moors—was sentenced to a hundred lashes, with the additional punishment of life imprisonment—and little that mattered, for such an elderly lady! A bigamist got off with two hundred lashes and exile for ten years, the first six to be spent rowing in the galleys. Two blasphemers received exile and three years in Oran. A cobbler and his wife, reconciled Jews, were sentenced to life imprisonment and a de vehementi abjuration. The twelve-year-old girl, a Judaizer, received a sentence of wearing an identifiable brown habit and serving two years of confinement, at the end of which she would be placed in a home with a Christian family to be instructed in the Faith. Her sixteen-year-old sister, a Judaizer, was condemned to life imprisonment without appeal. Their own father, a Portuguese tanner, had denounced them, under torture; he himself was sentenced to a de vehementi abjuration before being burned at the stake. He was the man who had been brought in on muleback because he could not walk. The mother, her whereabouts unknown, would be burned in effigy.

Accompanying the priest and the tanner on their way to the stake were a merchant and his wife, also Portuguese Jews, an apprentice silversmith—clearly a grievous sin—and Elvira de la Cruz. Everyone but the priest recanted in due form, and showed repentance. They would be mercifully garroted before being burned. The grotesque effigy of don Vicente de la Cruz, and those of his two sons, the dead one and the one who could not be found, were set atop long poles. His daughter wore the white sanbenito and conical hat, and in that garb was led before the judges to be read her sentence. With bone-chilling indifference, she recanted, as asked, all the crimes she had committed and would ever commit: being a Judaizer, a criminal conspirator, and violating a sacred place, among other charges. She looked totally forsaken up on that platform, head low, her Inquisitorial robes hanging like a sack over her tortured body. After recanting, she heard her sentence confirmed with resigned apathy. I was moved to pity despite the accusations she had made against me, or had allowed to be made. Poor girl, she was the victim and instrument of brutes without scruples or conscience, however much they paraded their God and their holy faith.

After Elvira was taken away, I saw that it was not long before my turn. The plaza began to whirl before me; I was numb with terror and shame. Desperate, I looked for the face of Captain Alatriste or some friend to find comfort, but I found nothing, not one trace of pity or sympathy. Nothing but a wall of hostile faces, jeering, expectant, sinister. The face a mob adopts when treated to free barbaric spectacles.

But Alatriste saw me. He was again beside one of the columns of the arches, and from there could see the bench where I sat with other penitents, each of us flanked by a pair of constables as mute as stones. Preceding me in the fateful ritual was a barber accused of blasphemy and of making a pact with the Devil—a short, wretched-looking man who sobbed with his face in his hands because no one was going to save him from his hundred lashes and years of flogging fish in the galleys of our lord and king.

The captain moved on a little, placing himself where I could see him if I looked in that direction, but I was not capable of seeing anything, sunk as I was in the torment of my own nightmare. Beside Alatriste, a pillicock garbed in his best was ridiculing those of us on the platform, pointing us out, between gibes, to his companions, and at a certain moment he made some jeering comment about me. Up to that point, the captain’s habitual restraint had tempered his impotent rage, but now that anger made him turn, without a moment’s reflection and, as if accidentally, swing an elbow into the churl’s gut. The man whirled about with an angry frown, but his protest died in his throat when he looked into the gray-green eyes of Diego Alatriste, staring at him with such menacing coldness that he closed up like a tulip at eventide.