Bridge of Fire, page 13
Mariana wept silently, a sound that wrung Francisca’s heart. It was Leonor who went into wild hysteria, screaming and laughing and tearing her hair.
“You must try to get hold of yourself, please, Leonor,” Francisca begged.
She had gone up to her bedchamber with a jug of honeyed wine into which she had mixed a powder, hoping to put Leonor to sleep. But the moment Francisca stepped through the door, her sister, her hair streaming in wild disorder, began dashing about the room, flinging pillows, jars of ointment, and hairbrushes at Francisca.
“Sister, sister—you will harm yourself,” Francisca pleaded, dodging the flying objects.
“Don’t come near me!” Leonor screamed. “I won’t go to jail. I won’t! I’m a good Christian.” She crossed herself swiftly, then went down on her knees. “See how I pray to the Holy Mother Mary. I am not a Jew, I swear it.”
She put her head in her hands and began to sob. Francisca went and knelt beside her, gently taking the girl in her arms.
“It’s going to be all right. All right,” Francisca crooned.
“How?” Leonor lifted a tearstained face. “How can that be so?”
“Don Ruy will say nothing. They will ask him a few questions, then let him go.”
“You know it isn’t true. He will never meet his accusers. They will torture him…Oh, Francisca, I couldn’t bear it if—”
“Shhh!”
Mariana tried to persuade Don Pedro that the only recourse open to them now was to flee. (Juliana and Beatriz had departed posthaste the moment of Ruy’s arrest for Juliana’s daughter’s house in Tacuba.) The family could slip out through the secret gate in the middle of the night with just the clothes on their backs, make their way to the port of Veracruz, and take ship for another country.
“And just how can we escape without being detected?”
Pedro asked. “A man or a pair of men, yes, but three women and a child? It is a ten-day journey, six if one does not tarry. And once we get to the port, what then? All ships sail to the Indies or Spain. The Crown has banned direct voyages to foreign ports. They would catch us like fish in a net.”
“Then let us go into the interior,” Mariana said. “To Leon or Taxco—or even into the jungle. They would never find us there.”
“You don’t know what you are saying, wife. If the Chichimec savages did not finish us off, the mosquitoes and wild animals would. Aside from that, we cannot desert Ruy. Believe me, Mariana, if there was some way I could spirit you womenfolk away, I would.”
“Then we are doomed.”
“Have you no faith in the Lord? He will see us through this ordeal.”
Francisca wanted to tell her father that if God could see them through the ordeal of the Inquisition, then surely He could look after them as they tried to make their escape. Perhaps her father would consider such statements impious. She had caused enough misfortune. Best to hold her tongue. Yet she knew that if it were left to her, they would not remain in Mexico City.
What puzzled Francisca was why Miguel had chosen to report Ruy to the Holy Office, and not her or another member of the de Silva family. Was it because he was jealous of Ruy? Or was it an impersonal choice, a feeling that any one of them, once in custody, would break down and implicate the others?
The news of Don Ruy’s arrest traveled quickly, leaving terror in its wake. A shout of “Plague!” in the streets could not have made the de Silva and de Diaz neighbors bolt their doors and windows with greater alacrity. Friends and business associates who had dined at Ruy’s table now shunned the family, turning away to avoid meeting should they chance on them in the square or at church. When Don Pedro greeted his Christian friends, the de Bustos, at a city function, they looked through him as if he did not exist. They had heard his son-in-law was a converso, and however Catholic Don Pedro still pretended to be, it followed that he was tainted, too.
The Orozcos left Mexico City, vanished, no one knew where. Had they been arrested, too, or had they fled to the vast hinterland of New Spain? The Benavidos put a brave-some said brazen—face on it and went about their business as though nothing had happened. But they took care not to be seen in the company of the prisoner’s family.
Don Pedro again reiterated to a distraught Mariana that it was futile to flee. To quiet her—and Leonor, who daily went into screaming and laughing fits—he contrived hiding places within the house. By hollowing out niches in the thick walls behind the paneling in each of the bedrooms, he managed to provide a temporary feeling of security. Now if the midnight knock came upon their door, they could conceal themselves.
Two weeks went by. Francisca moved into her parents’ house, leaving empty the luxurious dwelling Ruy had so proudly bought for her. Three days after she had gone, agents of the Holy Office took possession of the de Diaz house, claiming it as property of the Inquisition. In addition, they confiscated Ruy’s numerous holdings, his ranches and the shops he owned in the square, his horses, carriages, clothes, and what money they could find. Each candlestick, chest, rug, and peso appropriated was duly inscribed in an inventory that would be part of the judicial proceedings. Everything done by the Inquisition—arrest, trial, execution—was done according to prescribed ecclesiastical law, written down, and noted. Only the final punishment was made public.
Not knowing if Ruy was ill, broken by torture, or dead, a worried, guilt-ridden Francisca succeeded in bribing a guard to carry a message to her husband. “All is not lost,” it read. “Believe in God and be brave.” She was never told if Ruy ever received those encouraging words or if she had paid the bribe in vain.
Three weeks, almost to the day, the dreaded hollow pounding, the voice crying, “Open up!” came to the de Silva door again. The moment she heard it, Francisca, who had not had a restful night’s sleep since Ruy’s arrest, gathered Jorge in her arms and hid behind the paneling in her bedchamber.
Cowering in the narrow space, she held tightly to Jorge, who seemed to know instinctively that he wasn’t to utter a sound. She could hear men’s voices calling one to another, the slamming of doors, the stamping of boots on the stairs.
The door of Francisca’s bedchamber crashed open. “Have a look under the beds!”
She heard the tearing of cloth and could visualize a familiar slashing the bed curtains, the portieres, the wall hangings. Lids were opened and slammed shut.
It was stifling in that small hole. Francisca tried to breathe shallowly, saving whatever air there was for Jorge. Sweat ran down her forehead and between her breasts, a cramp had formed in her right hip, but she dared not move.
“They’re somewhere. By all that is holy, I’ll find the pigs!” The voice was on the other side of the panel, inches away. Francisca’s heart was beating like a drum, the loud thump-thump throbbing in her ears. Surely they must hear it? Any moment the panel would be torn open and she and Jorge exposed.
More footsteps and another voice, a gruff one like the croak of a frog. “They have fled. There are no servants, only an old crone in the kitchen who is stone-deaf.”
“We shall have to dispatch a rider to Veracruz,” another voice said, “and send the alarm to all the villages round about should they have gone by another route.”
Francisca heard the door leading to the street below close. After that she waited a long while before she ventured out.
Wiping Jorge’s brow with the hem of her skirt, she told him over and over, “You were the best of boys. A little man.”
He put his small arms around her neck. “Will they hurt us, Mamá?”
Always the same question, and the answer, of necessity, always false.
“No, hijo mío. I will not let anyone harm you.”
Leonor had again gone into a state of shock, this time a silent one. As the family gathered in the shuttered dining room the next morning to break their fast, she sat staring into space with vacant eyes. No coaxing, no tender words, could bring her out of her trance. She did not (or did not want to) recognize anyone.
“They believe we are gone,” Don Pedro said. “And we must not do anything that would persuade them otherwise. No lights, no fires, no stirring beyond the inner confines of the house. We have enough food to last several weeks, a month, perhaps two, if we eat sparingly.”
“And then?” Mariana asked. Already she seemed to have grown thinner, folds of once rosy flesh creased in sallow dewlaps under her chin.
“Why, then,” Don Pedro said, “they may have forgotten about us.”
“And if they haven’t forgotten?”
He leaned over and patted her hand. “We must put our trust in God, Mariana.”
Francisca would have liked a more concrete, less nebulous answer. She only wished that her faith was as strong as her father’s.
“Papá,” she said. “We are already under siege, prisoners of the Holy Office whether we wish it or not.”
“Being a prisoner in our own home is a far cry from being thrust into a jail cell. Let us hope that God in His infinite mercy will spare us from such a calamity. But if this is not God’s wish and we are apprehended, we must face our enemies with fortitude and admit nothing.”
The following day while they were in the shuttered dining room eating a simple noon meal, the outer door was bombarded once more with the blows of a demanding fist. There were a few moments of startled silence, each questioning the other with a look, for the agents of the Holy Inquisition had not come in daylight before. Then Francisca scrambled to her feet and, pulling a bewildered, frightened Jorge by the hand, made for the stairs. Mariana, with Leonor in tow, was right behind her; Don Pedro, breathing hard, brought up the rear.
As she hurried up the stairs, Francisca’s face burned with an indignation that momentarily replaced her fear. To run like rabbits at a knock on the door, the proud de Silvas reduced to scurrying, hunted animals. God, if she had a sword, she would unbar the door and slash at the first to enter. It was a wild fantasy, and she knew it. She couldn’t fight back. They would not only kill her outright, but slaughter the others as well.
From down below came the sound of a battering ram. Francisca reached her hiding place just as the door crashed open. A few moments later the heavy-booted familiars were boiling up the staircase. Again she heard the slamming of doors, voices calling one to another.
Then suddenly Leonor, from behind the protective paneling in her bedchamber, began to scream.
In a matter of minutes, the others were dragged from their cubbyholes and brought down to the patio.
They were roughly handled, their arms tied securely behind them. Leonor fainted and had to be carried from the house. Mariana wept; Pedro, trying to console her, was dealt a blow across the mouth that sent him reeling. Jorge, the only one left unshackled, flew to his mother’s side, only to be torn away.
“You can’t!” Francisca screamed, struggling to free herself. “Turn me loose! Jorge! What are you going to do with my child?”
“Never fear,” said the one with the frog’s voice, his small, bloodshot eyes raking Francisca, “he will be given to a good Catholic family. In time he will forget he was ever a pig of a Jew.”
As the familiars started to lead their prisoners away, Francisca balked, trying once more to reach her son. For her pains she was rewarded by a slash of the whip across her back. She had one last view of his tearstained face as he was hoisted into the arms of a mounted familiar.
“Mamá!”
It was a cry for help, a baffled wail, a desperate plea to his mother not to forsake him. She had promised that no harm would come to him, promised she would protect him. And now they had taken him from her, to do God alone knew what. More than anything that happened, this cruel separation was the hardest to bear.
She had never hated Miguel as much as she hated him at that moment.
They placed Francisca in solitary confinement. The cell was small, cold, and damp. The only light came from a high slitted window and a crude oil lamp, a feeble wick afloat on a saucer of rancid oil. A slop jar in one corner exuded a foul odor. In another corner a heap of dirty straw stirred with the movements of what she suspected were rats. There was a stool, a rough table, and a dirty tick mattress that Francisca soon found was infested with fleas.
When she asked after her father, mother, and sister, she was answered with a shrug. A meal was brought to her the first night, thin, greasy gruel with chunks of pork swimming about in it. Pork was forbidden under Hebraic law, and she would not touch it. But when she realized that this was a test, that her jailers, well aware of the Jewish dietary laws, had purposely given her this dish, she consumed it.
Afterward she had second thoughts. She must decide how she would answer the inquisitors when they began their questioning. Should she admit she was a Jewess, but one who was anxious to renounce her faith and embrace the church? By doing so, some fortunate souls were able to escape the stake, receiving minor punishment. In these cases the accused were required to wear penitential garments, the sanbenitos, and to renounce their own faith in favor of Catholicism.
Or should she deny ever having been a follower of Judaism? It would be a useless lie, since Don Ruy must have confessed enough to implicate them all. She did not blame her husband. Stronger men than he had been broken by the relentless questioning or brought to cringing confession by fear of the torture chamber. She herself did not know how steadfast she could be if she were hung from the ceiling by weights, said to be one of the preferred methods for breaking a heretic since it did not draw blood.
Francisca had no wish to be a martyr. On the other hand, she was determined to try her best not to crawl or beg for mercy. For her mother and her poor sister she would ask clemency, but not for herself. Yet despite the resolution to be courageous and stand up to her accusers, she was terrified. Fear was like a winding sheet, wrapping itself with cold, clammy fingers about her body, and chilling her heart. That first terrible night in the flickering darkness she went on her knees and silently prayed for strength.
Soon Francisca lost count of time. She had no idea whether it was day or night, morning or noon. She could have been in prison a day or a week. When the light in the dish went out, she banged her fists upon the door and cried out for another. Darkness, total Stygian blackness, was the enemy of hope, and she fought it with every ounce of her faith, fought it with thoughts of her family, who were suffering because of her, fought it with thoughts of Jorge and how she must outwit the inquisitors so she could be reunited with him.
In the past her jailer appeared at the door at regular intervals bearing food. Sometimes he removed the slop jar and brought her an empty one, sometimes he did not. Francisca’s request for a light, like her request for news of her family, was met with silence. The warder was a shrunken man with a limp and, Francisca believed, without a tongue. She was beginning to think he was deaf as well as mute when, after a short spell, he materialized with another crude oil lamp. Emboldened by this charitable act, Francisca asked for pen and ink. To her surprise, these were also brought. She set about writing notes to her mother and father, not knowing until later that these missives were delivered directly to the inquisitors in the hope that they would further incriminate the de Silvas.
In her letters to her parents she begged for their forgiveness. “Tell them nothing,” she advised. “They have only arrested you on suspicion. It is me they are after.”
Francisca was not entirely sure this was true. But it was the only thing she could think of that might lift their spirits.
It was not knowing what was happening to them, what had happened to Ruy, where they had taken Leonor or Jorge, that was her constant torment. The unrelieved dimness, her inability to keep clean, the stench, she could somehow bear, but to be held in ignorance as to the welfare of her loved ones sent her to pacing the littered floor. She tried to pray again, but now the only prayer she could remember was one of David’s psalms, “My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?”
Yet why should God listen to her particular plea? Why single her out of the hordes of sufferers, those innocents afflicted with the loathsome diseases, the maimed, the weak and defenseless, the widows and orphans? Why should she put the blame on God? It was a human mind, not God, who had designed the Inquisition; it was she, Francisca, who had loved Miguel and, in a moment of unbridled anger, had betrayed her family’s secret.
If only she could make amends. If only she could somehow extricate them from this horrible situation. But how? Escape, even for herself, was impossible. The cell in which her jailers had put her was like a sealed tomb. The window was too high and narrow; the timbered door was without a grating and bolted from the outside. She had already gone over the floor and walls, inch by inch, trying to find a place where a plank might have been pried loose, a hole gouged out. How that would help her, she did not exactly know. To tunnel her way out of the prison with only a lamb bone or the pins in her hair as tools would take years. But it was better than pacing the floor and wringing her hands.
She was examining the door for the third time when she discovered a peephole in the rotting wood about six inches above her head. Apparently it had been made by someone taller than herself. But by standing on the stool and putting her eye to the splintered hole, she could see the corridor beyond. In terms of escape, the hole did not mean much, but to Francisca it was like the opening of a window on the world. Now when she heard footsteps, she could run to her peephole and look out to see who was passing by.
The first afternoon she saw her mother, flanked by a familiar on either side, being led along the corridor, she wanted to cry out. Were they taking her to the audience hall or to the torture chamber? Mariana looked ill, her face a sickly yellow, her walk slow, like that of an old, old woman. To stand there and watch her pass so close and not be able to give her a few words of comfort, to touch or embrace her, was agony for Francisca. She clung to the door, her neck twisting, her eye straining, until the three figures disappeared from view.
She kept to her post, hoping that her mother would pass again. While she waited, there suddenly arose the same awful, bloodcurdling screams, the cries for mercy, that she had heard before. “God pity me! Pity me! Have mercy!” It sounded like a woman’s voice. Francisca was sure now that her mother had been brought to the torture chamber. The thought of her sweet, gentle mother tied to knotted ropes that were twisted tighter and tighter on her body sickened and enraged her.
