MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES« Inquisition! A word traced in the blood and tears of mankind, doomed to remain the eternal execration of nations. »The Prisons of Europe · Volume VI
From Madrid’s triple enclosure to the crypts of the Holy Office: an inquiry into the subterranean oubliettes entered alive, never to be quitted save as ash.
No man ever crossed the threshold of the Inquisition’s palace as a free creature; one entered already a phantom. On this moonless autumn night in Madrid, the closed litter came to a soundless halt before the ponderous carriage gate on the Calle de Torija. Not a clash of iron, not a curse from the driver: the myrmidons of the Holy Office, the dreaded familiars, glided across the cobblestones like spectres draped in black serge. A wicket grating slid back flush with the worm-eaten timber, revealing the vitreous eye of a porter who uttereth not a syllable. In these abodes of dread, silence was the primal instrument of torment. The manuscript regulations, bound in pigskin and annotated in Torquemada’s own claw, decreed that the faintest sigh audible from the corridors was to be chastised with thirty lashes of the scourge.
The man thrust into the inward murk knew not even what imputed blasphemy, what denunciation from an envious neighbour, or what drop of Moorish blood had earned him this descent into the netherworld. Stripped on the instant of his watch, his rings, his shoe buckles, and the very silver buttons from his doublet, he heard the yellow-fingered registrar record his nothingness in the ledger of committals: “Received this day a body, to be kept in absolute secrecy until the good pleasure of Their Excellencies.” A bunch of gargantuan keys chimed. Three walled courtyards, severed by massive oak portcullises bound in iron, were traversed. Then, the stairs began.
They wound down in a spiral into the entrails of the earth, down where saltpetre blooms in chalky crusts upon weeping granite. The air grew thick with the foul reek of rancid tallow, human excrement, and sodden stone. Behind a blind door, two feet thick, a bolt screeched with the sound of muffled thunder. The captive was flung into a cell eight feet square, whose sole glimmer came from an oblique vent, barred three deep with criss-crossed iron, opening only onto a pitch-black passage.
For weeks on end, the prisoner saw not a living soul, save for a mute jailer who slid to him, every eight-and-forty hours, a bowl of foul water and a loaf of mouldering bread. The Inquisition never hurried its quarry; it allowed time to gnaw away at reason, to waste the muscles and dissolve the will. Then came the hour of the first “admonitory audience.” Flanked by two hooded figures whose eyes alone flared through two slits in their felt cowls, the wretched captive was dragged to the chamber of torture, the terrible Cámara del Tormento.
« May it please your Grace to speak the truth; for if you refuse to confess your errors, the torments decreed shall by no means be imputed to the judges, but solely to your own obstinacy. »
At the far end of the vaulted hall, beneath a yellowed ivory Christ whose gaze seemed averted, sat three inquisitors behind a table draped in green damask. To their right, the clerk’s quill raced across the parchment, poised to record not merely confessions, but the faintest death rattle, the slightest convulsion of agony. The captive was stripped and bound upon the trestle of infamy. The physician of the Holy Office, his fingers pressed against the frail wrist, monitored the pulse so that life might not slip away before the soul had surrendered.
They applied first the garrucha, or strappado: his wrists bound behind his back, a cord passed through a pulley anchored to the crown of the vault, the body was hoisted to the roof, then let drop with a sudden wrench to halt one foot above the flagstones. The shoulders cracked; the bones dislocated with the dull snap of a broken bough. When he confessed nothing, they proceeded to the toca. A strip of linen gauze was forced down his throat, while a continuous trickle of water dropped from an earthen pitcher, swelling the cloth and subjecting him to the hideous, lingering agony of suffocation without release in death. At each swoon, the clerk penned coldly: “The accused groaneth: ‘Mercy!’, casteth up a torrent of water mingled with blood, yet persisteth in his heresy.”
When torture failed to shatter a man, the secret dungeons undertook to bury him alive. The clandestine registers preserved at Toledo and Seville lay bare the monstrous carceral apparatus perfected as early as the fifteenth century. Beneath the ordinary cells lay the pits known as the bajos, or wells of oblivion, hewn directly into the living bedrock, devoid of light and air, wherein the condemned rotted away with their ankles riveted into baulks of rot-proof timber.
In these abysses perished the freest voices of Spain. The Archbishop of Spalato, Marco Antonio de Dominis, died there of slow languor before his corpse was salted, boxed, and burnt months later upon the public square. There, too, Doctor Agustín de Cazalla, once imperial chaplain to Charles V, awaited for years the pyres of Valladolid alongside his entire household, condemned to hear through the stone the weeping sighs of his siblings without ever being permitted to grant them absolution. The captives reckoned the turn of seasons only by the frost that froze sweat upon their limbs in winter, and by the maggots swarming upon rotten straw during the sweltering heat of August.
Upon the limestone walls of the gaols of Saragossa and Cordoba, desperate nails scratched misshapen calendars, inverted crosses, or harrowing farewells that no human eye was ever destined to behold: “Lord, grant that my martyrdom may serve to wash away my father’s sins,” could still be read on the stones of a subterranean cell in Palermo. The judicial procedure strictly forbade all intercourse with the world; a prisoner’s family knew not whether he still walked beneath the vault of heaven or had already been reduced to dust beneath the flagstones of the tribunal.
Nothing short of the hurricane of the Napoleonic Wars was required to force open these sepulchres to the light of day. In December 1808, the legions of Napoleon Bonaparte marched into a simmering Madrid. A detachment of French cavalry and sappers, commanded by officers steeped in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, marched straight upon the palace of the Inquisition to execute the imperial decree mandating its immediate abolition.
The inquisitor fathers, displaying an affable demeanor with crucifixes resting upon their breasts, met the soldiers at the threshold with a deceitful serenity. They swore upon the Gospels that the palace harboured not a single prisoner, that vulgar fables had led the French astray, and that the oubliettes were merely pious granaries for corn. The high command was already wavering, nonplussed by such consummate assurance, when a colonel of voltigeurs noted the unevenness of the flagstones in the grand chapter house. A sapper emptied a waterskin across the paving: instead of spreading into a pool, the water vanished instantly between two seams concealed beneath a heavy woollen carpet.
The pickaxes struck the marble. Amid a rumble of falling masonry, a flagstone swung open, unmasking a black chasm whence issued a gust of air so mephitic that the grenadiers fell back, coughing out their lungs. Torches were lowered at the ends of cords. What the French troops beheld froze the blood of those veterans of Austerlitz: chained to the wall, naked, their hair matted with filth and their beards trailing over their bellies, living spectres blinked their eyes, dazed and terrified by the glare of the resinous flames.
Among them was an aged man confined there for four-and-twenty years for having possessed a clandestine translation of Rousseau. When his irons were shattered with sledgehammers and he was brought up beneath the Spanish sun, the man buried his face in his gnarled hands and implored that he be returned to his darkness: his eyes could no longer endure the light of the living. On the morrow, the populace of Madrid, thronging the square, watched a dense black smoke rise into the heavens: the dossiers of infamy, the registers of committal, and the torture engines of the Holy Office were blazing at last in a colossal auto-da-fé of deliverance.