Purity of Blood

The inquisitor stood before his lectern, slowly, ceremoniously, preparing to read my name. Just then a caballero dressed in black and covered with dust erupted into the loge of the royal secretaries. He was in mud-spattered traveling clothes, high riding boots, and spurs, and he had the appearance of having ridden—whipping his mounts from post house to post house—without rest. He was carrying a leather lettercase, which he took straight to the royal secretary. I saw that they exchanged a few words, and that Alquézar, taking the lettercase with an impatient gesture, opened it, glanced at it, looked in my direction, then at Fray Emilio Bocanegra, and back to me.

The black-clad caballero turned, and at last I recognized him.

It was don Francisco de Quevedo.

X. UNFINISHED BUSINESS

The fires burned all night long. People stayed very late by the Alcalá gate, even after the penitents were nothing more than calcified bones in a pile of embers and ashes. Rising columns of smoke were stained red in the light of the flames. Occasionally a breeze stirred, carrying to the crowd a heavy, acrid odor of wood and burned flesh.

All Madrid spent the night there, from honest married women, somber hidalgos, and highly respectable people, to the lowest of the low. Street urchins dashed around at the edges of the coals, as constables cordoned off the area. There were vendors galore, and beggars, making hay. And to each and every one, the spectacle seemed holy and edifying—or at least that was the view they affected in public. Poor, miserable Spain, always disposed to overlook bad governance, the loss of the fleet of the Indies, or a defeat in Europe, with merriment—a boisterous festival, a Te Deum, or a few good bonfires—was once again being faithful to herself.

“It is repugnant,” said don Francisco de Quevedo.

He was a great satirist, as I have already mentioned to Your Mercies, the consummate Catholic in the mode of his century and his nation, but he tempered all that with his deeply ingrained culture and limpid humanism. That night he stood motionless, frowning, watching the fire. The fatigue of his breakneck journey showed on his face and in his voice. Although in the latter, his weariness sounded as old as time.

“Poor Spain,” he added in a low voice.

One of the fires collapsed, sputtering, in a cloud of sparks, illuminating the figure of Captain Alatriste by his side. People burst into applause. The reddish glow lighted the walls of the Augustinian monastery in the distance, and the nearby stone pillory at the crossroads of Vicálvaro and Alcalá roads, where the two friends stood a bit back from the crowd. They had been there since the beginning, quietly talking. They stopped only when, after the executioner made three turns of the rope around Elvira de la Cruz’s neck, the brush and wood crackled beneath the novitiate’s body. Of all the penitents, the only one burned alive was the priest. He had stood firm until the last, refusing to reconcile before the priest attending him, and confronting the first flames with a serene countenance. It was sad that when the flames reached his knees—they burned him slowly, showing great piety, to allow him time to repent—he broke down, ending his torment with atrocious howls. But, with the exception of Saint Lawrence, no one, as far as I know, attains perfection on the grill.

Don Francisco and Captain Alatriste had been talking about me. I was sleeping, exhausted and at last free, in our lodgings on Calle del Arcabuz, under the maternal care of Caridad la Lebrijana. I’d fallen into a deep sleep, as if I needed—which was in fact the case—to reduce my adventures of recent days to the confines of nightmare. And while the fires burned at the site of the stakes, the poet had been telling the captain the particulars of his hurried and dangerous journey to Aragon.

The course suggested by Olivares had mined pure gold. Those four words that don Gaspar de Guzmán had written in the Prado meadows—Alquézar. Huesca. Green Book—had been enough to save my life and hobble the royal secretary. Alquézar was not only our enemy’s surname, it was also the name of the town in Aragon in which he had been born. And to that town don Francisco de Quevedo had hastened, changing post horses along the camino real—one dropped stone-dead in Medinaceli—in his desperate attempt to win the race against time. As for the green book, which was what the birth registry was called, it contained the catalogues, family genealogies, and listings kept by individuals or parish priests, and records that served as proof of ancestry.