“What news of the captain?” I asked with anguish, frantic to stay a few more instants in the sun.
Not another word from Gualterio Malatesta. A beam of sunlight shone on his somber face. And then I did see an expression I could not doubt, a quick flash of rage and spite. It lasted only a second, and then it was gone, hidden behind the cruel grimace, the dangerous, bloodthirsty smile that twisted his pale, cold lips. But my heart leaped with joy, for I knew, with every bone in my body, that Diego Alatriste had eluded the ambush.
Malatesta slammed the carriage door, and I was again in darkness. I heard shouted orders, a horse galloping away, and then the coachman’s whip. The mules started off, and the carriage began to roll toward a place where not even God would be on my side.
The hopelessness of being in the hands of an all- powerful apparatus devoid of emotion, and thereby of pity, struck me the moment I emerged from the coach into a dismal inner courtyard that dusk made even more somber. After my shackles were removed, I was led to an underground room by four constables of the Holy Office and the two Dominicans I had seen at the post house.
I will spare Your Mercies the details, but after I was stripped and thoroughly searched, I was subjected to a preliminary interrogation by a scribe who demanded to know my name, age, the names of my father and mother, those of my four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, my current dwelling, and my place of origin. Then, in a routine tone, the scribe tested me on elementary Christian knowledge by making me recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria. Finally, he asked me the names of any persons who might be connected with my situation.
I asked what my situation
After that, believing the interview was over, I found it had been only a proem, a prologue: the first act had not yet begun. This I learned when I was taken into a square room without windows or embrasures, lit by a large candelabrum. The only furnishings were a large table, another smaller one holding writing materials, and a few benches. The two priests I’d seen at the post house were seated at the large table, along with a third individual wearing a large gold cross around his neck. With his dark beard and black robe he looked convincingly like an officer of the court, or a judge. At the smaller table was a scribe very different from the one who had conducted the preliminary questioning, a crowlike man who put down the smallest detail of what was said, and, to my growing fear, probably things I had not said. Two constables, one tall and strong-looking and the other redheaded and thin, were my guards. On the wall hung an enormous crucifix, the occupant of which had undoubtedly passed through the hands of this very tribunal.
As I learned from that point on, the most fearsome thing about being a prisoner in the secret dungeons of the Inquisition was that no one told you what your crime had been, or what proof or witnesses they had against you— nothing about anything. The inquisitors limited themselves to posing question after question, and the scribe to noting it all down, while you addled your brain trying to decide whether what you were saying weighed on the side of your release or of your condemnation. It was possible to spend weeks, months, even years there without knowing the exact reasons, with the added aggravation that if your answers were not satisfactory, they would resort to torture in order to facilitate your confession and obtain the proofs they needed. And when you were tortured, you would begin to answer willy-nilly, not knowing what you should be saying. Everything led to desperation, to the conscious or unconscious betrayal of friends, of you yourself, and at times to madness and death. That was one way of dying other than being led in your white robe and conical hat to the scaffold, with a garotte around your neck, a pyre of dry kindling beneath your feet, and your neighbors and former friends shouting their approval, enchanted with the spectacle.
I did at least know why I was there, though there was little consolation in the knowledge. And because I knew that, after the first questions, I soon found myself in serious straits. Especially when the younger priest, the one who had glanced at me with such indifference, asked for the names of my accomplices.
“Accomplices in what,
“I am not called
The roles had been assigned, as in a play. While the man with the dark beard and black cloak sat in silence, like a judge who listens and deliberates before handing out his sentence, the two priests were skillfully playing their parts: the younger, the role of implacable inquisitor; the other, plumper and more placid in expression, the benevolent confidant. But I had lived in Madrid long enough to smell a ruse, so I determined not to trust either one, and to act as if I didn’t see the man in the black robe.
An added complication was that I did not know how much they knew. And I hadn’t the least idea whether my sacrilege—as it had just been defined—was the one they were referring to. Because, in talking with someone who has the power to make you regret it, it is just as dangerous to ask for one card too few as one card too many. Indeed, it can be ruinous even to say, “I’ll stay.”
“I have no accomplices, Reverend Father.” I addressed the plump one, but with little hope. “Nor have I committed a sacrilege.”
“You deny,” the younger asked, “that in the company of others you profaned the convent of the Adoratrices Benitas?”
Well, that was something, even if that something gave me gooseflesh when I imagined the consequences. It was a specific accusation. I denied it, of course. And following that, I denied knowing—even by sight—the wounded man whom, on my way home, I had accidentally run into behind the low wall on Canos del Peral hill. I also denied that I had resisted arrest by the agents of the Holy Office. I denied everything to the end, everything I could, except the unarguable fact that I had been holding a dagger when the long arm of the Inquisition reached out to pull me in, and that another man’s blood still crusted my doublet. As it was impossible to deny that, I plunged into a maze of circumlocutions and explanations that had no bearing on the case. Finally I unleashed the tears, as a last resort in fending off new questions.
That tribunal, however, had seen many tears fall, so the priests, the man in the robe, and the scribe simply waited until my jeremiad had ended. It appeared that they had time to burn—not a direction I wanted my thoughts to take—and that, aside from their indifference, neither cruel nor reproachful, and their asking the same questions over and over with monotonous persistence, was the most disquieting aspect of the interrogation. Although I tried to maintain the air of nonchalance and confidence appropriate for an innocent, that was what terrified me about those men: their coldness and their patience. After a dozen “No” and “I don’t know,” even the plump cleric had dropped his mask, and it was obvious that I would have to travel many leagues to find a hint of compassion.
I had not eaten a bite in more than twenty-four hours, and I was beginning to feel faint, even though I was seated on a bench. Having exhausted the ploy of the tears, I began to consider the possibilities of a faint. Considering the way I was feeling, it would not be a pretense. That was when the priest said something that
