The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (246 page)

Consequently Jack, while lying in the sun of the courtyard recovering from various torture-sessions, had already had plenty of opportunities to listen to his fellow-inmates holding forth on the dark glories of the Inquisition. At the drop of a hat they’d tell the tale of the
auto da fé
of 1673 or of 1695, how many were burnt and how many merely humiliated. Even allowing for routine exaggeration, there was no avoiding the conclusion that an
auto da fé
was a colossal event, something that happened only once or twice in an average person’s lifetime, and a spectacle that
peons
would travel for days just to witness.

None of which was exactly comforting—until it was learned, a week or two after the arrival of Edmund de Ath, that the Inquisitor had scheduled an
auto da fé
for two months hence, which put it shortly before Christmas. Obviously such an enormous pageant could not be re-scheduled once a date had been set, and so if the three
Minerva
prisoners could only hold out until mid-December they would probably be punished and set free. But in the meantime the Inquisitor had every incentive to break them.

A single gifted torturer acting free of bureaucratic restrictions probably could have gotten Jack, Moseh, and Edmund to say anything he wanted them to in a few minutes’ work. But Inquisition torture was ponderous and rule-bound. A large staff of doctors, clerks, bailiffs, advocates, and Inquisitors had to be present, and by the looks of things it was no easy task finding openings on so many important men’s schedules. Torture-sessions would be arranged a week in advance and then cancelled at the last minute because some important participant had come down with a fever or even died.

In spite of these difficulties, during the month of November, men rammed a length of gauze down Jack’s throat into his stomach and then poured water down it until his abdomen swelled up, and it felt as if gunpowder were burning inside of him, filling his guts with smoke and fire. Edmund de Ath was tied to a table and thongs tightened round various parts of his body until the skin burst under the pressure.

But Moseh went into the torture-chamber and came out half an hour later looking rather all right—fine, in fact—so unruffled, really, that it made Jack want to share some pain with him, when he sauntered over and joined Jack and Edmund de Ath under the patchy shade of the vines. “I confessed,” he announced.

“To being a heretick!?”

“To having money,” Moseh said.

“I didn’t know that you’d been
accused
of that.”

“But when you are in the hands of the Holy Office you
never
know. You just have to figure it out, through silent meditation, and give them the confession that they
want
. I’ve been ever so slow. But finally it came to me the other day—”

“Through silent meditation?”

“No, I’m afraid it was a bit more mundane. Diego de Fonseca came to my cell and asked me for a loan.”

“Hmmm—I knew he was meagerly compensated, but that he is begging from his own prisoners comes as news to me,” said Edmund de Ath.

“The
alguaciles
brought you straight to this prison from Acapulco—you never had to
buy
anything in Mexico City,” Jack said. “
We
came here once or twice selling quicksilver to the owners of mines. Food is cheap enough, which explains why there are so many Vagabonds in the suburbs. But the scarcity of all other goods, and the over-supply of silver, make this an expensive place to be respectable.”

Moseh nodded. “I talked to many old Jews in New Amsterdam and Curaçao who told me that in the old days the Inquisition supported itself by confiscating goods from Jews. But here in Mexico they did their job so well that they’ve run out of Jews—they’ve been reduced to stealing the occasional burro from some mestizo who took the Lord’s name in vain. So finally I had what you might call a little Enlightenment of my own, and I understood what the Inquisitor really wanted. I confessed to nothing except having a lot of silver, and offered to make due penance for this crime on the morning of the
auto da fé
. With that my ordeal—
our
ordeal—was over and done
with.”

DECEMBER
1701

N
OT SHOWING UP FOR AN
auto da fé
was regarded as a Bad Idea everywhere in the Spanish Empire, and especially in Mexico City. Every scrap of land in the town was owned by the Church, and the Holy Surveyors of Rome had (or so Jack phant’sied) come out here and planted Trinitarian transits on the land that had been miraculously reclaimed from Lake Texcoco and hung holy plumb-bobs made of saints’ skulls and stretched cords of spun angels’ hair, driven crucifixes into the ground at strategickal Vertices, and platted the land into quadrilaterals, each one butted snugly against the next; angels might slip through the interstices, but never Indians nor Vagabonds. These parcels had been entrusted to various religious Orders, viz. Carmelites, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians, Benedictines,
et cetera
, each of which had lost no time in erecting a high stone wall around its property-line to shield it from the intrigues and supposed heresies of the neighboring Orders. This accomplished, they had got to work filling in the middle with churches, chapels, and dormitories. The buildings sank into the soft ground almost as quickly as they were built, which made the place seem much beyond its true age of about a hundred and eighty years. At any rate there was no place to live in Mexico City that was not controlled by one Order or another, and consequently no way not to show up for an
auto da fé
without its being noticed by someone who’d be apt to take it the wrong way.

In spite of—or on second thought, maybe
because
of—their tendency to live cloistered behind high walls, the men and women of these diverse Orders loved nothing better than to dress up in peculiar clothing and parade through the streets of the city, bearing religious effigies or fragments of saints’ anatomies. When Jack had been
abroad in this city as a free man, these never-ending processions had been an absolute menace, and an impediment to commerce. Sometimes one procession would collide with another at a street-corner and monks would come to blows over which Order had precedence. An
auto da fé
was one of the few occasions significant enough to get every single nun from the city’s twenty-two convents and every friar from its twenty-nine monasteries all processing at one time, in more or less the same direction. So all of them were present.

Of course Vagabonds always found a way to exist. Around here they seemed to dwell outside the walls, which was where important people liked them to stay. Not ten years earlier, they had gathered in the
zócalo
in sufficient numbers to burn the Viceroy’s palace down. Since that event, Count Montezuma had tended to get a little jumpy whenever rabble gathered near his dwelling in large numbers; his rebuilt palace had high walls with plenty of loop-holes for broadcasting grapeshot into any inconvenient crowds. The Vagabonds,
criollos,
the mountain-dwelling Indian
peons,
the
desperadoes
from the mining-country up north, these were only permitted to gather in the City on certain occasions, and an
auto da fé
was one of them. Of course they had no formal place in the procession of processions that wound its way through the streets to the
zócalo
, but cheerfully insinuated themselves among and between the nuns and monks, the three-or four-hundred-strong staff of the Cathedral, the
asesors, fiscals, alquaciles,
and
familiares
of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and diverse priests, friars, nuns,
oidors
, and
fiscals
who happened to be passing through en route to or from Manila or Lima. Despite the now well-known fact that the new French King of Spain had snubbed the
auto da fé
of Madrid, all of the King’s representatives in Mexico City turned out: the Viceroy and all his household and courtiers, the various ranks and hierarchies of civil servants, the officers of foot and of horse in their ostrich plumes and polished helmets, and as many of the garrison’s soldiers as could be spared from guarding the five gates and innumerable walls of this City.

Jack and Moseh had made it their business to know about the men who ran the Mint, and so as they and the other prisoners were marched out into the
zócalo
and made to stand in ranks before the grandstands that had been erected there, Jack was able to pick them out easily. The
Apartador,
the head of the Mint, was a Spanish count who had bought the office from the previous King for a hundred thousand pieces of eight, which was a bargain. He was there with his wife and daughter, all wearing the finest clothing Jack had seen since his last trip to Shahjahanabad (Jack, as a king, had been obliged to show up for the annual ceremony at which the Great Mogul sat crosslegged
on one pan of an enormous scale, and silver and gold were heaped up on the opposite pan by his diverse
omerahs,
king, courtiers, and foreign emissaries until the jewel-covered crossbar finally went into motion and became level, leaving the Mogul suspended on his pan, balanced by his annual revenue, and modestly accepting the applause and gun-salutes of his subjects; on that occasion, Jack had done his part by heaving a big sack of coins onto the pan—taxes collected by Surendranath in the few wretched bazaars of Jack’s domain—at least half of which had been pieces of eight minted decades earlier under the direction of some predecessor of this Count who was now peering down at Jack from the highest bench of the grandstand). Arrayed below him and his family were those Treasurers not currently on duty (Moseh had estimated these earned fifty to sixty thousand pieces of eight annually), the Assayers and Founders (some fifteen thousand annually), and farther down, in humble but still very good clothing, a plethora of Cutters, Clerks, Under-clerks,
Alcaldes,
and various ranks of Guards; close to the very bottom, numerous Foremen and
Brazajereros
who stoked the fires, and finally the brawny young
criollo
men who actually struck metal with metal and turned disks of silver into pieces of eight: the Coiners.

Seated near all of the Mint people were the three merchants who supplied them with most of their business. Technically any miner who came into the city with silver could have it minted, but in practice most miners sold their pigs to these few merchants who had made it their business to act as middle-men, and make sure that the Minters were duly wined, dined, coddled, and bribed at all times. They were not easy to pick out in the midst of their enormous and well-dressed families, but finally Jack caught sight of one of them looking right back at him through a spyglass. The fellow recognized Jack in the same instant, took the glass away from his eye, and made a remark to a younger man seated next to him. For to the churchmen of Mexico City, Jack and Moseh and Edmund de Ath might be foreign hereticks, but to anyone connected to the Mint they were the men who had the quicksilver, and who could modulate the flow of pieces of eight by putting more or less of it on the market.

They did not look the part of quicksilver magnates today. All three of them were wearing dunce-caps, and large sack-like yellow over-garments with giant red Xs on them, called
sanbenitos.
If these had been decorated with pictures of angels, devils, and flames, it would have signified that their wearers were to be burnt at the stake outside the city gates at the end of the day. The red X, on the other hand, meant only that the wearer was a Blasphemer in Recovery who would have to wear this garment whenever he ventured out of doors
for the next several years. Jack had never been the sort to care about clothing, but he knew that the decorations he wore today were of high import not only to himself but to everyone connected with the Mint—which meant everyone in Mexico City, except for the hapless Inquisition, which was run out of Rome and had no way to dip its fingers into the running river of silver except by arresting and shaking down the likes of Jack and Moseh. At any rate, the fact that he and his comrades were wearing red Xs was probably influencing a market somewhere even at this very moment. And given that all news eventually reached Amsterdam, Jack now devoted half an hour or so to a little phant’sy about a blue-eyed woman sitting in a coffee-house along the Damplatz, hearing this bit of news, and connecting it to a certain Vagabond she had run around with when she was young.

He knew that his sons must be somewhere inside the city, or else his
sanbenito
would be decorated with pictures of flames. It took a full hour for his eyes to find them, which was not so terribly long since the
auto da fé
was an all-day event. The stands filled one end of the
zócalo
(they had been a-building for two months) and everyone in them was gleaming and glorious to some degree, whether it was the Archbishop who reigned over the ceremony from the highest and most central altar, or the coiners’ wives in their best dresses. But there was an undeniable tendency for the costumes to become more drab as they got farther from the Archbishop, so the transition to the common folk standing on the pavement in their undyed homespun stuff was almost seamless. Beyond that point they only got plainer and browner as they spread around the edges of the
zócalo,
to the point where they almost faded away into the rough-hewn stone walls. In such a place Jack finally saw three men, two brown and one black, holding the reins of some burros. Their faces were shaded under the vast brims of their
sombreros
. But Jack could have recognized them from the burros alone. Those animals were still crusted with the yellow dust of the high country and the sweat of traveling through it, and each of them had smallish saddlebags sewn of the heaviest ox-hide and scored in countless places from brushes with cactus-thorns. Those were the saddlebags used to bring silver down to the mints. This morning they were hanging limp on the burros’ flanks. Their contents had been transferred to the vaults of the Inquisition, where they rested safe among piles of documents listing every heresy that had ever been committed or imagined in the New World.

The ceremony was all in Latin. Sunstroke probably would have slain them all if it hadn’t been December. About four hours into it, Jack noticed that Moseh was humming to himself, which was the one thing Jack would never have expected. He was tempted to bend his
head close to Moseh’s, but given that he was wearing a dunce-cap three feet high, the movement would have been about as subtle as dancing a tarantella on the Lord’s Table. So he stood straight, along with everyone else in Mexico. To his other side Edmund de Ath was muttering some Latin phrases of his own, but rather than closing his eyes and bowing his head, he seemed to be staring straight forward into a phalanx of wealthy nuns seated below and to the left hand of the Archbishop. Jack had nothing but time, and so he looked at each nun in turn until finally he recognized Elizabeth de Obregon staring right back at him.

The
auto da fé
continued there until shortly after sundown and then devolved: the nuns and monks marched away in color-coded processions and the poor people staged a bread-riot. Which seemed like an interesting story, but Jack wanted no part of it. He and Moseh and Edmund de Ath made rendezvous with Jimmy and Danny and Tomba, and out of the city they went.

When finally it was safe to talk out loud, Jack said to Moseh, “Never was a Jew so happy during an
auto da fé
—have you been chewing those
Peruvian
leaves that the Spaniards are so fond of?”

“No, I was watching the sun swing low over the mountains and pondering matters
astrologickal
. First: This is the shortest day of the year in the
Northern
Hemisphere and the longest in the
Southern,
which is good for us at both ends.
Here
it made the ceremonies an hour or two shorter than they might have been, and much cooler. Down
Tierra del Fuego
way, the weather’s as balmy as it ever gets, and the days exceptionally long. If van Hoek knows what he’s doing—which I think he does—he’ll be venturing into the Straits of Magellan about now. Which brings me to my Second observation, namely: a new year is about to begin. It is the second year of the Eighteenth Century, and van Hoek will celebrate it (God Willing) by rounding Cape Horn, and I will celebrate it by trading this cursed
sanbenito
for a
poncho
and this dunce-cap for a
sombrero
and riding north, beyond the reach of the Inquisition. It is the Century of the Enlightenment—I can feel it!”

“You
have
been chewing leaves from Peru,” Jack concluded.

T
HAT NIGHT THEY LODGED
at an inn where they had to suspend their boots and stirrups from the ceiling in order to prevent them from being carried away and eaten by rats. They paid an outrageous price and departed before dawn, and after getting clear of certain fœtid suburbs where Vagabonds dwelt, they began the first leg of their journey north: traveling through the high Valley of Mexico. This was quite a bit more interesting to Edmund de Ath than to the others, who had
seen it before. The Belgian was silent as they trudged over marshy plains gouged with the remains of failed flood-control projects, and splotched here and there with weirdly colored mineral springs. From cocoa and vanilla plantations rose gaudy churches and monasteries thrown up by Spaniards who had made ludicrous amounts of money, and in some cases half torn down by the thieves and Vagabonds who infested this country far in excess of Europe.

Moseh’s ineffable Leadership Qualities had caused a whole retinue of
sanbenito
-and-dunce-cap-wearing crypto-Jews to fall in step behind them. They paraded through inexplicable concentrations of Negroes and Filipinos and over foamy puddles of congealed lava, past sugar-works smoking and steaming. At riverbanks they struck complicated bargains with Indians, naked except for loincloths and lines of tattooed dots on their faces, and were towed across on
balsas
made of planks lashed across bundles of air-filled calabashes, while other Indians back-carried the burros across fords. They steered clear of settlements or else rode through them as directly as possible, for now that they were out of the city, most of the townspeople were
criollos
(mixed-blood, born here) who bore a mad hostility towards Europeans. They’d have drawn much unwanted attention, and
criollo
boys would have been darting out and chucking stones at them, even if they
hadn’t
been wearing
sanbenitos
.