On the day of the auto de fe, Marius Ordoño chose to stay in his bed. It was a feast day, so he would have to rise and go to mass later. But for
now, he would just sleep a while longer. He knew if he rose and requested food, Águeda would prepare something for him but she would do it grudgingly. The meat would be tough. The soup would have no salt. He couldn’t help but feel the cook was judging him for Valentina’s absence.
Besides, the kitchen seemed very far away and the morning was a cold one.
When he rose to relieve himself he heard the sound of some stringed instrument being played, and he wandered through the house in his nightclothes, trying to discover the source. At last he arrived in the empty nursery where a window had been left open. In the house across the way, he could see a woman seated at a harp, her hands moving slowly over the strings. He sat down and listened and after a time he wept.
Across the street the woman at the harp played on, unsure of why she’d chosen to return to the music room that morning when it had been so long since she’d sought pleasure in it. She didn’t know whom she was playing for or why she’d chosen such a sad piece. She’d never given much thought
to the residents of Casa Ordoño, and so she didn’t wonder where the women had gone. She played and played, without thought for the way her fingers stung, or for the scullion who had gazed out the window and longed for music, and who would never hear her song.
In the kitchen below, Águeda and her niece played cards, since there was nothing else to do. Her son sat at the table, fiddling with a spoon and brooding. She had gone to mass that morning and prayed for Luzia’s soul. No doubt the scullion had gotten what she deserved for her wickedness, but Águeda could be generous. She made sure to offer prayers of thanks too, that the Ordoños hadn’t been imprisoned or had their property taken, that
she still had a job and could pay her rent, since her husband was long dead
and her son did nothing but mope over Quiteria Escárcega now that the playwright had left for Toledo. Another gift from God. She set a bowl of sweet porridge made with cinnamon and honey before him, commanded him to eat, and said another prayer that it would cure him of his sighing.
The king had arrived in Toledo the previous night. His gout had made the travel unpleasant, along with the news that Pérez had escaped him once again. There were rumors the traitor was sailing for England to find a buyer for his secrets. He cursed himself for his indecision, for letting Pérez proceed with his torneo, for the mad speculation and rumors it had fostered. Today would be the first step in setting all to rights. He would pray with his people. They would be reminded of the cost of heresy and that one might run from Spain but not from God. And when the traitor was caught and La Casilla seized, Philip would make it a holy place. He would let his ministers sell off Pérez’s paintings and his heaps of silver cloth. He would have every image of his labyrinth impresa smashed.
When he entered the Inquisition district, Philip saw the elaborate scaffolding and amphitheater that had been raised in the month since the auto de fe had been announced, and he noted that the stage with the rostrum for the Inquisitor General sat higher than the balcony set aside for the king and his children. Perhaps it troubled him or maybe it pleased him, for Philip was a devout man. Who is to know what thoughts fill the head of a king?
Quiteria Escárcega woke at dawn, ate a boiled egg sprinkled with chopped thyme, and wrote furiously for two hours. She had been surprised to receive Valentina’s letter asking for help and requesting an invitation to Toledo. In fact, she hadn’t quite believed the woman would really make an appearance. But one day a knock sounded at the door and there she was in a surprisingly fashionable cobalt traveling cape, a single sad trunk beside her.
They took up a collection for Luzia among Quiteria’s friends, sent letters and requests for provisions to the warden, and consulted priests and
astrologers on what more could be done. Quiteria had no housekeeper and she’d thought Valentina might complain, but she’d only set to work, washing clothes, scrubbing floors, and arranging Quiteria’s pages in neat stacks that were invariably in the wrong order. She seemed to need occupation and Quiteria didn’t mind the help. Neither of them could cook,
so they muddled through meals of burnt bread and sardines, subsisting mostly on plates of cheese and olives, and plenty of wine.
One evening over glasses of jerez, Valentina had turned to her and said, “Am I not appealing enough to corrupt?”
When Quiteria had met Valentina at La Casilla, she had sensed that beneath the sour expression and the meager jewels was a woman waiting for a chance to live. From the first kiss, she was proven right. Valentina had a glutton’s heart and had spent too many years surviving on scraps. Quiteria was shocked to discover that, after years of infamy and seeking every kind of pleasure, she had finally found a lover who could keep pace with her.
Now Quiteria read back over the pages she’d written, setting them aside carefully so that Valentina couldn’t helpfully tidy them into confusion. Her new play was more complicated and more ambitious than anything she’d attempted before. She just hadn’t quite settled on an ending. When she was satisfied with the scene she’d written for the character of the lovesick prison guard, she went to find Valentina.
Valentina had woken when Quiteria left their bed to work. She took the time to make herself a cup of chocolate that she hoped would restore her energy after a sleepless night and ease the guilt she felt for enjoying such happiness when Luzia was about to die. She was still somehow surprised this day had come. She wasn’t sure what she had believed would stop it, only that she hadn’t thought such a thing could really come to pass.
She knew Luzia would have no more need of fresh dresses or linen, but she did the laundry anyway, pressing the cuffs and collars carefully. Then she and Quiteria walked to the Plaza de Zocodover. The streets were thronged with people, the churches bursting with penitents. They prayed with particular fervor this morning, grateful that they were safe from the Inquisition’s reach and, for this moment at least, purgatory and its punishments.
The parade that snaked from the prison to San Vicente to the plaza began with the carpenters and masons who had erected the amphitheater, the scaffolds, and the balconies. Among them were the coal provisioners and woodsmen who had supplied kindling for the pyres that would burn at midnight beyond the city walls. Hidalgos arrived on horseback, council
members and ambassadors, persons of great renown, in gilded coaches.
“Come,” said Quiteria as they approached the plaza. “I can get us good seats. The inquisitors want us all to behold their might.”
The auto de fe had really begun the night before when the friars and
chaplains and priests gathered to sing psalms and celebrate. In the morning, they said mass, and then breakfast was served to anyone who had a part to play in the ceremony, even those condemned to die. Valentina wondered if Luzia would eat or if she was too frightened.
When the king appeared high above them with Prince Philip and Princess Isabella, she felt a strange sense of disappointment. After all Valentina’s effort and hope, there he was with his children, far more frail than she had imagined.
“He’s just a man,” she said.
“What did you expect him to be?” Quiteria asked.
Valentina wasn’t sure. He wasn’t a saint or even a priest. But somehow she had believed that to be in his presence, to be gazed upon by him would change her, give her value, turn her from common lead into something worth keeping.
Quiteria had warned her that the day would be long. First came the
horrible spectacle of the parade, the crowd shouting at the penitents in their sanbenitos and pointed pasteboard hats, their feet bare. They carried candles or rosaries, and ropes were tied around their necks, the knots indicating how many lashes they were to receive. Most wore yellow banded with red, but
those condemned to die wore black sanbenitos painted with dragons and flames. There were only three of them. From a distance it was hard to see their features, but she recognized Santángel by his height and Luzia by her lack of it. How small she seemed standing on that stage as the crowd jeered and spat at her.
Valentina clutched the sachet of rosemary at her sleeve. For protection.
I’m here, she wanted to shout. I’m sorry. I only wanted a little warmth. I didn’t know what kind of fire I would start.
Another mass followed, and then a sermon delivered from the rostrum.
Only then did they begin to read out the charges and punishments for lesser crimes like fornication or blasphemy. Valentina had to look away when the floggings began.
They paused for the midday meal, and the inquisitors and king retired while the rest of the friars and chaplains ate at long tables.
Valentina and Quiteria bought pies from the stalls. She’d thought she would have no appetite, but the cold and the boredom had left her eager for comfort. She couldn’t reconcile this performance of piety, this purging of
sin, with the Spain she knew. Even in her sheltered time on this earth, she had seen enough drunkenness, swearing, fornication, and corruption to
know that life was sinning. It happened all around them, a constant tide of iniquity.
If she herself had ever been truly pious, she certainly wasn’t now. She hadn’t known what she was reaching for when she’d set out on the road to Toledo, only that she couldn’t spend another day with Marius, angry and ashamed, and more lonely than she’d ever been.
“Did you ever wish for children?” she asked Quiteria. “I have a son. He lives with my husband in Calahorra.”
“You have a husband?” Valentina exclaimed. What man could manage such a woman?
“It was a necessity. He’s a sweet fellow. He’s good with the boy and he
leaves me to my own devices, so long as I return every few years to tell him I love him. I think I’ve always been lacking that thing that would make me a good mother.”
“I would have liked to have children,” Valentina said. At least she had thought so. Knowing how quickly the world could change, how cruel it could be, she was less sure now.
“It’s not too late.” “I am barren.”
“Is Marius the only man you’ve ever fucked?” “Of course!”
“Then take a lover. Do it quickly, and if you conceive, tell your husband the child is his.”
Valentina laughed, then stifled the sound. Despite the tumult around her it felt wrong to laugh, to eat, to think on a future in the shadow of the tribunal. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“I can help with that,” Quiteria said, and Valentina turned to hide her flush.
Was it really possible for her to have a child? It would tie her to Marius in a way she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be bound. When she thought of going back to Madrid, she felt only dismay.
After hundreds of years, if there were so many sinners left, what had the Inquisition accomplished? They might root out Jews and Muslims and
Erasmists and alumbrados, but then what was left? The machine had been built to consume heresy and impiety, so would it simply keep finding heresy
and impiety to feed on? Valentina’s soul certainly hadn’t been saved. The vicar’s threats hadn’t made her good, only scared—and not of purgatory. All this spectacle, all this misery, and she didn’t fear hell more than being shut up in a house with her lawful husband.
“It’s time to return,” Quiteria said. “They’re going to read the rest of the sentences.”
Even those prisoners who had escaped the Inquisition’s grasp or died in prison had their charges read. Small pasteboard figures were brought forward and placed in cages where children threw rocks at them. Trunks painted with flames and devils were placed beside them, full of the bones of those who had been sentenced after death and exhumed from their graves.
They would be burned at midnight too.
“It used to be worse,” Quiteria said. “There was a time when the condemned were whipped through the streets. I don’t like to see things suffer.”
There are different kinds of suffering, Valentina thought. The kind that
takes you by surprise and the kind you live with so long, you stop noticing it.
The day wore on, sentence after sentence, people beaten or sent off to galley service or confinement in prisons or monasteries. They confessed, they repented. Some were banished. Eventually, it was time for the heretics and secret Muslims and Jews who would be banished or exiled. Light ebbed away, as if the sun, like the audience, had grown bored and wished to abandon this wretched sight for happier entertainments.
“The world is a lonely place,” Valentina said.
“I have always found it to be a rather cheerful place,” said Quiteria. “Though on days like this that can be hard to remember.”
Because you are beautiful and charming and talented, Valentina thought but didn’t say.
Maybe this was why she’d come, why she’d washed Luzia’s linen, why she’d sold off Marius’s books to pay for better rations in the prison, why when this was all over, she would join the crowd beyond the city walls, why she wouldn’t turn away when the pyres were lit. It had taken years and
strange circumstances but she understood now that she and Luzia were lonely in a way that only the overlooked could be.
She was sorry she had made her scullion perform milagritos. She was sorry she’d struck her and called her stupid. Mostly she was sorry that when
midnight came and the fires burned, Luzia would be gone, and the world would be lonelier still.
