Purity of Blood

to fill Spain’s empty coffers. That plan put the favorite at cross-purposes with the councils of state, the Inquisition, and the papal nuncio himself, while our lord and king, good-natured and extremely religious, weak in matters of conscience as in many other things, wavered indecisively. In the end, he chose to beat the last maravedi out of all his subjects rather than contaminate the Faith.

All of which, to put it in a nutshell, was like making bread from hosts, or the other way ’round…however you look at it, a disaster. And as time went on, by midcentury, with the Conde de Olivares’s fall from favor, the Holy Office’s bill came due for collection and it unleashed one of the cruelest persecutions of converted Jews known to Spain. That was the ruin of Olivares’s project, and many crucial Hispano-Portuguese bankers and suppliers took themselves off to other countries such as Holland, and with them their wealth and their commerce, to the benefit of the enemies of our crown. In other words, it all ended with our royally fucking ourselves over. And I say “ended,” because between the nobles and the priests here, and the heretics there, and the whore who gave birth to them all, we bled till there was no blood left to bleed. The skinny dog gets the fleas, and we Spanish do not need anyone to ruin us; when it comes to the killing blow, we can deliver it ourselves.

So, in short, there I was, a beardless youth in the midst of all these maneuverings and machinations, and I was about to pay with my young neck. I sighed disconsolately. Then I looked toward my questioner, still the younger Dominican. The scribe was waiting, his pen poised above the paper, looking at me as if I were someone who presented every qualification for becoming good charcoal.

“I know no de la Cruz family,” I replied finally, with all the conviction I could muster. “Therefore, I have no way of knowing about the purity of their blood.”

The scribe bent his head as if he had awaited that answer, his pen scratching as he performed his filthy office. The lean old priest never took his eyes from me.

“Do you know,” my tormentor asked, “that Elvira de la Cruz has been accused of inciting Hebrew practices among her fellow nuns and novices?”

I swallowed. Or rather, I tried. Blood of God, I tried. But my mouth was dry as a pebble. The trap had closed, and it was a devilishly malefic one. Again I denied any knowledge, more and more afraid to hazard where all this was leading.

“Do you know that her father and brothers and other accomplices, as Judaizing as she, attempted to free her after she was discovered and confined by the chaplain and the prioress of the convent?”

Now there was an unmistakable scent of scorching meat on the air, and I was the roast. Once again, I wanted to say no, but this time I could not get the words out, and I had to shake my head. But my prosecutor, or whatever he was, did not change expression.

“And you deny that you and your fellows are a part of that Judaic conspiracy?”

At that, as frightened as I was—which was not a little—I was slightly irritated.

“I am a Basque, and an old Christian,” I protested. “As good as my father, who was a soldier, and who died in the king’s war.”

The inquisitor gave a dismissive wave of his hand, as if every Christian died in the king’s wars, and that meant nothing at all. Then the thin, till now silent, priest leaned toward the questioner, whispered a few words into his ear, and the younger man nodded respectfully. He turned toward me, and for the first time spoke. His tone was so menacing and cavernous that all at once I saw the young priest as the non plus ultra of understanding and sympathy.

“Repeat your name,” the lean priest ordered.

“In…Inigo.” I was so frightened by the Dominican’s severe gaze, the feverish eyes sunken deep in the sockets, that I had stumbled over my own name. He continued, implacable.

“Inigo and what more.”

“Inigo Balboa.”

“And your mother’s name.”

“Her name is Amaya Aguirre, Reverend Father.”

I had already gone through all this, it was in the papers, so the repetitions made me even more apprehensive. The priest gave me a fierce, strangely satisfied look.

“Balboa,” he said, “is a Portuguese family name.”

The ground seemed to drop from beneath my feet, for I did not have to be told the effect of that poisonous dart. It was true that my surname was common on the Portuguese border, a region that my grandfather had left to enlist under the banners of the king. Suddenly—I have previously told Your Mercies that I was a bright enough lad —all the ramifications of my situation blazed with such meridional clarity that if there had been an open door I would have shot out of it like a flash.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced toward the rack, sitting to one side, waiting. That the Inquisition never used it as punishment but, rather, as an instrument for extracting the truth was a fact I did not find comforting. My one hope was that according to the rules of the Holy Office itself, torture could not be used against people of good reputation, royal ministers, pregnant women, servants—to make them inform against their masters—or anyone younger than fourteen…that is, me. But I was close to that fateful fourteenth, and if these men were capable of finding me Jewish ancestors, they could at their whim add the necessary months to make me eligible for their rope trick. And though the rack made men sing, it was not exactly a guitar.

“My father was not Portuguese,” I protested. “He was a soldier from Leon, like his father, who at the end of a campaign remained in Onate and married there. A soldier and an old Christian.”

“That is what everyone says.”

Then I heard the scream. It was the terrible scream of a desperate woman, muffled by distance but so piercing that it found its way along passages and corridors and through a closed door. As if they heard nothing, my inquisitors kept looking at me, unperturbed. And I shivered with fear when the lean priest shifted his eyes toward the rack and then back to me.

“How old are you?” he asked.

The scream came again, a whiplash of horror, and yet again there was no reaction from the others, as if I had been the only one who had heard. Deep in their malevolent sockets, the Dominican’s fanatic eyes were two