Torquemada (13 page)

“Yes, my son?”

“Am I Christian or Jew?”

“Christian, my son.”

“The Inquisition,” Alvero said painfully, the act of speech becoming increasingly difficult, “accused me of the heresy of Judaizing. I wore an ampule on the chain around my neck. I wore it with a cross. The ampule and the cross lay side by side upon my breast. It was my father's. Inside it on a bit of parchment were the words: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy might. Do you know what this is, Rabbi?”

“I know.”

“Is it a curse?” Alvero asked.

“No, it is not a curse.”

“I am a Christian,” Alvero said, “yet I must die for this thing, for this cursed idiocy I must die – I wore that ampule around my neck.”

“Why did you wear it, Don Alvero?”

“I don't know,” Alvero said.

“Yet you knew the danger?”

“I knew the danger,” Alvero agreed, looking at Torquemada. Torquemada avoided his gaze, stared straight ahead of him, a carven black figure holding a burning and sizzling torch.

“Did you want to be a Jew?” Mendoza asked.

“I don't know. The notion never occurred to me. I never said to myself, Alvero de Rafel, do you want to be a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim. Why should I say such a thing to myself? I was a Christian knight of Spain. I had all that a man could desire for happiness. Tell me, why should I desire to be a Jew?”

“I cannot answer that, Don Alvero.”

“No, I don't suppose you can,” Alvero agreed, “but the man who felt that way, Rabbi Mendoza, no longer exists. What exists sits before you in this cell. Look at me. Look at me – because now I say to you, Rabbi, make me a Jew!”

Without moving, Torquemada said violently, “No!”

The rabbi turned to Torquemada and said quietly, “Peace, Prior. Can I make him a Jew?”

“You can and you must!” Alvero insisted.

“Why?” Torquemada asked Alvero. “Why?”

“So that what you are and what I am will be set apart forever!”

“To burn in hell for all eternity?” Torquemada demanded.

“Yes! Joyfully! Gladly!” Alvero cried fiercely.

“Don Alvero,” Mendoza said, shaking his head. “Is it as simple as that? If God chose the Jews – and one can't imagine why except to suffer so that we bear for eternity what the man, your Saviour, bore for a few hours on the cross – if this is truly the case it does not hold within it an invitation. We happen to be Jews – in a mystery that preoccupies us beyond solution. I cannot make you a Jew—”

Alvero rose to his feet and standing there unsteadily pleaded his case, held out one hand to the rabbi and insisted, “But you can! You must!”

“Listen to me, now,” Mendoza said. “Please, may I beg you, listen to me. There was a Jewish sage of blessed memory who was called the Rabbi Hillel, and to him there came a heathen who said, ‘Rabbi, make me a Jew.' Rabbi Hillel answered, ‘I cannot make you a Jew, for only he is a Jew who knows the Law and follows it.' Then, with great distress, the heathen answered, ‘How can I know the Law when men study it for a whole lifetime and even then do not know it?' To which the Rabbi Hillel then replied, ‘Truly, to know the Law a lifetime is little enough, but that is in one manner of speaking. I can teach the Law to you in a single sentence. This then is the Law,' said the Rabbi Hillel, ‘to love thy brother as thyself. That is the whole of the Law, and all the rest is commentary.' So said the most blessed of all our sages.” The rabbi paused now, and it seemed to Alvero that he was attempting to recapture what he had just said, to contemplate it and to use it in some way – and it also seemed to Alvero that in this he failed as he said, “Do you understand me, Don Alvero?”

“No more than you understand me,” Alvero whispered.

“I understand you,” the rabbi said.

“Then in the name of God – your God or my God, do what I ask!”

“Out of hatred for him?” Mendoza inquired, pointing to Torquemada.

“Shall I love him?” Alvero demanded. He too pointed to Torquemada now. “Look at him! Only look at him! The anointed!” The effort left Alvero exhausted. Trembling, he sank back onto his bed.

“There is no more to do here,” Torquemada said to Mendoza. “Let us go.”

“Don Alvero,” Mendoza said, “listen to me. Think about what I said to you. If you came to me and said, ‘Make me a man,' then what could I say to you? What you are, God made you, and you are no more and no less—”

“You talk in riddles,” Alvero muttered hopelessly.

“As we all do,” Mendoza admitted.

“Enough,” Torquemada said. He walked through the door and waited for Mendoza. When Mendoza had left the cell, Torquemada closed the door and turned the key in the lock.

13

AFTER TORQUEMADA HAD LEFT THE PLACE OF THEACT
of Faith, the monk had continued his reading of the proclamation for the recognition of Judaizers. However, the proclamation was very long, and as the monk continued to intone the endless signs and symbols by which one could recognize Jews, the crowd began to disperse. First the children lost interest and went home to whatever suppers awaited them and to whatever piles of rags constituted their beds. Then the prostitutes drifted away because this was the beginning of their working day, the hour when the first customers would come to seek them out. Then, one by one, the thieves, the purse-snatchers, the loafers and the cut-throats departed.

Only a single person remained as the monk finished reading, rolled up his parchment, delivered his blessing and then walked away into the darkness with the soldier of the Inquisition. This single small person left at the edge of the stone platform was wrapped from head to foot in a dark cloak. She sat upon a low stone with her back against the platform. Perhaps an hour passed and still she sat there and then a voice cried out.

“Catherine! Are you here? Catherine! Is it you?”

Juan Pomas came into the Place of the Act of Faith. The moon was rising now and there was enough light for him to see the small figure huddled at the edge of the platform.

“Is it you, Catherine?”

The cloaked figure rose and stood waiting. Juan Pomas strode over to her and then she opened her cloak and uncovered her head.

“My God, Catherine,” Juan said. “My God – you made me sick with fear – looking everywhere for you. It is late at night. Don't you realize that? You can't stay here alone. This is no place to be alone. It swarms with cut-throats and thieves.”

“Where shall I go, Juan?” she asked simply.

“I'll take you home.”

“Home? Whose home will you take me to? Where is a home that will open its doors tome?”

“Your own home,” Juan answered impatiently.

“I have no home.”

“You make no sense when you talk like that, Catherine. What do you mean you have no home? You don't know how troubled your mother is. She is sick with fear – so sick with it that she had to take to her bed.”

“Are you troubled, Juan?”

“Of course I am.”

“Did you betray him?”

“Catherine, what has come over you? I don't know you any more. Sometimes you say things that I don't understand at all. I don't know what you're saying now.”

“You know what I am saying,” Catherine nodded. “I am asking a very simple question. Did you betray him, Juan?”

Juan stared at her without replying. He swallowed, opened his mouth to speak, allowed the words to die unspoken and looked at her again.

“Go away from me,” Catherine said in disgust.

Instead he moved towards her. He reached out his hand to her arm and she shook it off, leaping back away from him. He came towards her and she stepped onto the rock where she had been sitting and from there onto the platform, crouching there and crying out at him.

“No! Don't touch me!”

“You'll wake all of Segovia shouting like that,” Juan said hoarsely.

“Just go away from here,” she said. “That's all, go away.”

For a minute or so more he stood there, and then he turned round and walked off into the darkness. Catherine collapsed onto the stones of the platform. They were still warm from the sun. She curled up there on the stones, her cloak over her. She must have slept for a while. When she opened her eyes it was still night. There was no sound in the Place of the Act of Faith. The night was cool and she shivered under her cloak. She dropped off again, and a ghastly dream awakened her. In the dream she saw her father on the rack in the torture chamber of the Inquisition. He was screaming and pleading for her to release him from his pain. She woke up weeping. Dawn had come, the first pink colour of the sun over the rooftops of Segovia. The place of faith was empty, silent and abandoned.

Catherine climbed down from the platform and walked into the streets of Segovia until she came to a common fountain. She felt terribly dry and when she reached the fountain she drank and drank. However, she was not hungry. She continued to walk then through Segovia in the opposite direction from her home.

The city was waking, cocks crowed, chickens and goats were released from their pens. Children were turned out to play. The smoke of morning fires rose over the town and the pungent smell of charcoal burning filled the air.

Now Catherine walked through the Jewish quarter. From the houses here the men were emerging and going to worship. Catherine had been in the Jewish quarter before, but only to pass through it on a horse or in a litter. She had never walked in it on foot, close to the life it contained and to some measure partaking of that life.

She was not afraid of the Jews – but neither did she feel that she was a part of them. They were more often bearded than the Christian Spaniards and more heavily bearded. They moved quickly and purposefully. Only Catherine was without purpose as she followed them, and presently she came to their destination, the synagogue.

She had never been inside a synagogue before nor had she any clear purpose in entering one now. She did not say to herself, “I will go into the synagogue.” Neither did she say to herself, “No, I don't want to go into the synagogue.” It was a thing she neither wanted nor avoided – and yet she went in. The synagogue was there and she entered it. If someone had asked her whether she had to enter it she would only have shrugged her shoulders. There were no hard and definite decisions within her.

She was the last person to enter the synagogue, and then the beadle, a tiny man with a snow-white beard, closed the door behind her. Inside the synagogue now there were about forty men but no other woman than Catherine.

She looked around her now, and she had the sense of a building that was very ancient. Unlike a church, its interior was perfectly rectangular. On each side, as she entered, there was a very low balcony. Catherine realized that this area must have been reserved for the women, since the men sat in the lower space. She had heard that men and women sat apart in the synagogue. The women's sections were raised about a foot higher than the central part of the synagogue. They were separated from the central part by solid wooden railings and the railings were joined to the ceiling by a series of posts.

In the women's part of the synagogue the benches – the only seating accommodations were plain, bare benches – ran parallel with the length of the hall. In the men's area the benches were set parallel with the width of the hall. At the front of the synagogue, that is, the part opposite the door, there was a plain pulpit and behind the pulpit an area covered with a crimson drape. The pulpit was raised two steps from the floor, and on the pulpit there was a wooden lectern with an open parchment scroll upon it.

Catherine took her place in one of the side sections. On the pulpit there was a man whom Catherine recognized as the rabbi who had come to their house – the rabbi whose life her father had saved. He took hold of the scroll by its handles and moved it, turning both ends until he came to that section which he sought. Then he saw Catherine sitting alone at the other end of the synagogue. He met her gaze, and it seemed to Catherine that he paused to consider and to examine himself as well as the scroll in front of him. He stood thus for a substantial length of time without opening his mouth, without speaking or moving, and then he turned to the scroll and began to read.

“My God, my God – why have you forsaken me? Why so far from helping me? From the sound of my pleading? Oh my God, I cry out in the daytime but you hear me not. And in the night-time I cry out. I am not silent—” He paused then, laid his hand flatly upon the open scroll and looked at Catherine. Then he looked around at the various faces in the congregation and said to them.

“Forgive me if I speak with a different voice and make a different prayer on this strange morning. Someone has come among us. I was called upon to make a decision but I can make no decision. So I read what my fathers have written—”