The Plaza de Zocodover

I promised you the plaza by a fresh candle, and the steward, all unknowing, has provided one; there is a Providence in small wax. Let me keep the promise the way the day itself was kept — in order, in public, and in costume.

It began the night before, as the Office's great days do. The machinery of an auto de fe reaches back into the cells hours ahead of its audience: confessors moving door to door through the secret prison on their last-eve rounds — mine was an old friar with tired kind eyes who had visited me through both winters and never once asked the second question, and I have hoped since that his order values him, for the Office worked him like a mule and he carried other men's terrors up and down those corridors nightly with the patience of a well; then the notary, with the summons to hear that on the morrow I would be relaxed — no; forgive me; the word jumped, and a man who lived under that word's shadow may be excused the stumble even now — that on the morrow I would appear at the public auto, my causes determined. They do not read you the sentence in the cell, mark; the sentence is theater, and theater must not leak. And last the garb: brought folded, correct, by a porter with an inventory — the sanbenito of the penitent, the coroza, and, folded beneath them, with intent I was left all night to construe, a woman's gown. I sat with that bundle till morning, reader. I had built the pacing-league for nights of that dimension, and I walked it, and somewhere before the bells I arrived where survivors arrive: they could dress the body; the account stayed mine. I have made harder marches on worse rations.

Sunday, the eighteenth of December, 1588. Cold, as Toledo is cold in Advent — stone cold, river cold, the crowd's breath standing over it like the dust over the Morisco columns. They assembled us in the dark, the day's whole repertory, penitents by degree — each with his sponsors of the Office walking at his elbow, each carrying the candle they give you, green wax, unlit or lit by your case's standing; the procession formed behind the green cross draped in black, and the streets of that stacked city — streets I had ridden as the surgeon of the district, salutes at every corner — were lined two deep at dawn with the faces of ordinary Sunday Spain come to see justice dressed. I will tell you the strangest mercy of a public shaming, which no one who has not marched in one can know: it is very long, and length is anesthetic. The first hundred faces cost. The second hundred cost less. Somewhere in the thousands the faces became weather — became the crowd-sound I had learned at fairs, at musters, at the gates of Seville — and I marched through my own catastrophe the way I had marched through the Alpujarras, at mule height, one boot after the other, attending to my feet.

The Plaza de Zocodover, when the procession broke into it, was dressed as I have described great theaters dressed: scaffolding and stages built for the day, the tribunal's high boxes, the green cross over all; the whole crooked heart of Toledo packed to its balconies — families on cushions their grandmothers had bequeathed them for exactly these mornings, vendors working the fringes, because no solemnity in Spain is so solemn that no one sells nuts at it. On the stages, we. I have wondered since — idly, at this table, in the voice the reader now knows — what the takings were that Sunday, nuts and wine and window-rents together, and whether any man in that plaza reckoned that the day's whole engine, stages, sermons, dinners after, was paid for out of the sequestered estates of the penitents on display. We were not only the entertainment, reader. We were the treasury. I know no other theater where the players buy the house.

Mine they had considered carefully, I have said. I wore the coroza — the tall paper mitre of shame, that makes a man a foot taller precisely so that more of the crowd can see how low he stands — and the penitent's habit marked with the insignia of my offense, for the reading of those who could not hear. But the true curatorship, the touch I have turned over more nights than any other of that day, was the double dress, and the Spanish tellers keep it, so I am spared proving it: they showed me to the crowd first in the dress of a woman, and then in the dress of a man. Both habits, one penitent, before all Toledo.

I have never decided which of us understood that gesture better, the tribunal or me. Their intent was plain enough — behold the imposture, see the woman under the man, let the costume confess what the prisoner would not. But stand where I stood, on that stage in the December cold, turned out before the multitude in first the one habit and then the other, and tell me what the crowd actually saw. They saw both. The Holy Office, which had labored eighteen months to prove me one thing disguised as another, chose for its great public statement to exhibit me as — both. The crowd of Toledo got, gratis, on a Sunday, the very spectacle of two natures that the fiscal had sworn was the Devil's illusion; the tribunal staged with its own hands, before ten thousand witnesses, the plain truth it could not bring itself to write in the sentence. I do not say the irony warmed me; nothing warmed me on that scaffold. I say that a man may stand in a paper mitre, in the wrong dress and then in the right one, listening to a city look at him, and still be keeping accounts — and my account of that hour has a line in it the tribunal never audited: they showed Toledo exactly what I am. It has been a strange comfort. I commend it to no one.

There was a sermon — there is always a sermon; the auto is a mass wearing a courtroom — and it was long, and it was about the triumph of the faith over error, and I attended to it as I attend to weather. Then the sentences, read from the stage in the liturgical drone that turns men's lives into proclamation, case by case down the day's docket. Understand that I was one item of many: the auto processed its bigamists and blasphemers, its renegades and its Judaizers, each stood up in turn while his life's verdict went over the plaza's heads — the crowd attending closely only at the famous cases, and mine, God mend them all, was famous; I felt the plaza's attention arrive like a change of wind when the notary's voice reached the name Céspedes.

Hear now the arithmetic of what was read, and mark what was not in it, for after such an indictment the absences are the whole story of my survival. They did not rule on the sodomy. They did not rule on the pact. The two charges that could have delivered me to the fire or the galleys — the impossible crime, the infernal contract, the keystone and the crown of the fiscal's architecture — the judges, when the day came, declined to decide. I built you my defense in the last chapter and I will not now pretend to know what weight it carried behind their faces; no penitent audits the judges' souls. But what stands in the record stands: they had my philosophers, my two honest certificates, my unemployed Devil — and when they rose to speak, on the very charges where the Devil was load-bearing, they said nothing at all. A tribunal that could prove its Devil does not decline to name him at the theater built for the purpose. They could not carry the keystone, so they quietly walked around the arch — and convicted me on the one charge that required no anatomy, no philosophy, and no Hell: bigamy. That I had married María del Caño while the death of Cristóbal Lombardo, mason of Jaén, stonemason of three months of my sixteenth year, stood unproven in any parish book. The little clause I told you to mark, reader, chapters ago — no one ever proved him dead — there it came at last, up the whole ladder of the Holy Office, to be the entire lawful residue of the case of Eleno de Céspedes. Some tellers add that they found against me too for contempt of the sacrament, the bigamist's shadow-charge; the tellers of my life disagree, as is their office and their nature. What no teller disputes: of witchcraft and the unspeakable sin, no conviction. The greatest examining machine in Christendom took my body, my papers, my wife, my goods, and eighteen months of my one life, and at the end of it all it condemned — a widower's paperwork.

I abjured de levi — the lesser abjuration; hear the size of that adjective, de levi, for lightly suspected error; the machine's own formula conceding, at the last, in its own grammar, how little of its indictment had survived its deliberations. I spoke the formula they set me, aloud, on the stage, hand on the cross. I would speak it again tomorrow. A man who has held his tongue at the right moments all his life knows an oath's exact weight to the grain, and that one was light in the mouth — lighter than the paper mitre, infinitely lighter than the bundle they had left me overnight. And then the penalties, which were not light, and which I will render as the record renders them, and no further. Two hundred lashes, to be given in the public streets, one hundred through Toledo and one hundred through Ciempozuelos — Ciempozuelos, mark: her town; they routed my shame past the doorways of her family, past the oven her neighbor shared, past a workshop where a man once lent me tools to test my hands; and I have my own view of which hundred was designed to fall on whom, and I have never written it down, and I will not now, because her family reads no books but if ever a page of mine should stray to that street I would have it carry nothing but my thanks. And after the lash, ten years: ten years of confinement in service, without wage, in a hospital, tending the sick poor — the sentence under whose candle, reader, every word you have read of me was written.

Of the lash itself, one paragraph, and I set its boundary now, as I have set every boundary in this book, in my own hand. The sentence named the streets and the strokes, and the streets of Toledo got their procession; what my back and those stones settled between them I do not spread on any table, this one included. I will tell you that a surgeon on the receiving end of the whip is denied even ignorance — I knew the name of everything as it happened to it, layer by layer, and I have wondered since whether that knowledge was the punishment's sharpening or its blunting, and have concluded, on the evidence, both, which is this book's finding about knowledge generally. I will tell you that the same witnesses who could not number the men in a room at Yepes should not be trusted to count strokes either, and that I decline to audit them; let whoever needs the figure choose his teller. And I will tell you what I thought about, because it is the only part of that day's business that belongs in a memoir rather than a surgery: I thought, stroke by stroke, of every back I had ever dressed after another man's sentence — the war's backs, the wards' backs, the boy from Úbeda's back once, for a matter of camp discipline I had thought unjust and said so — and of what those backs had taught me before mine matriculated: that flesh keeps no opinion of the whip; that it heals at its own pace regardless of the justice or injustice of the blow; and that this impartiality of the body, which I had pitied in my patients as their helplessness, is in fact their mercy and was now mine. The back does not know what the sentence said. Only the man does, and the man had already decided, somewhere on that scaffold between the two costumes, that they could have the skin. The accounts stayed mine.

And María. The tribunal, having examined her months into the wreckage of her life, arrived at its finding: that she had been deceived — that she had not known — and was innocent of all of it; and they released her. I have promised you honesty about the layers of things, so: the layers. That she walked free — that no lash, no sentence, no folio followed her out of that building; that the machine, having taken eighteen months of her youth on my account, at least did not take more — I received as the one mercy of the eighteenth of December, and I do not put the word mercy in irony there; it is the single use of it this chapter will permit, and I have rationed the word all book for exactly this line. What the finding said of me, and of us, and of what she knew — the tribunal has its verdict and the tellers have theirs, and I told you in Ciempozuelos, in the doorway, at the beginning: what passed between María del Caño and me is ours. The Holy Office pried at that door with the instruments of an empire and got a verdict it could live with. You, reader, whom I like better, get the door itself, shut, with my hand flat on it. Of our parting — whether there was one, what it held, what was said or could not be, whether two people were permitted even the decency of a last ordinary sentence — I will write nothing at all. It is the one page of my life they could not sequester, because I never let it be written anywhere. Not even here. Especially here.

So closed the day's theater. The crowd went home to supper, well satisfied, as crowds are, by other people's weather; the stages came down by Wednesday, I am told; the plaza went back to selling mules and nuts over the boards where the kingdom's justice had stood, which is either a scandal or the deepest wisdom in Castile, and after two years among the sick poor I incline to the second reading. And in the days after, when the processions were done and the ledgers of the auto were closed, a familiar of the Office walked me — correctly; always correctly — down through the cold stone streets from the precinct of the tribunal to the doors of the Hospital del Rey, and handed me, with a receipt, into the administration of my sentence. I remember the door. I had passed it a hundred times in my visiting years. It is a good door, heavy, indifferent, of the kind I have been walked through all my life; and it opened on the smell I knew before any other smell of my trade — poverty, sickness, vinegar, wax — and on rows of beds with the whole misery of Toledo in them, three winters' worth of my future patients turning their heads to see what the machine had sent them. What it had sent them, though not one soul in that ward knew it yet, was the only surgeon in Spain with a royal licence, a saint's bibliography, and a receipt for his own delivery.

Now the survivor's arithmetic, quickly, before the candle goes — because it is the arithmetic, not the pathos, that I want this chapter remembered for; pathos is the crowd's take-home, and I was not writing for the crowd even when I was their Sunday. On the fourth of July, 1587, I stood accused of sodomy, witchcraft, imposture, usurpation, deception, sacrilege, and bigamy: matter enough, well carried, for the fire — and it was well carried; I have paid the fiscal his professional due throughout, he cut a masterly garment. On the eighteenth of December, 1588, I walked off the scaffold owing Spain the skin of my back and ten years of exactly the work I had chosen freely at Madrid a lifetime before. The judges kept their folios; I kept the body, the name, the art in my hands, and the whole of my account. I have been congratulated on this outcome — there are men in this very hospital who call it luck, and worse men elsewhere who have called it proof of favor from below, the Devil looking after his own; the fiscal's arch outliving the fiscal. I call it a narrow cut by a competent hand, and I know exactly whose hand, having trained it since Granada on cloth and Christendom alike. It was the closest work of my life, done lying down, in the dark, over eighteen months, with the instruments all on the other side of the table. I do not celebrate it. One does not celebrate an amputation that saves the patient. One changes the dressing, and notes the date, and goes on — which is, reader, precisely what the next chapter does, and it is the last, and I find I am not ready for it to be the last, and I will be by tomorrow's candle. The wards are quiet. The fevered woman sleeps. Somewhere west of here a bridge-town I have never seen is not expecting me. Goes on, I said. So it does, and so do I.