A bright and horrifying line followed. What appeared to be a troupe of clowns savagely beaten and now muttering, weeping, mad, or silent.
They trudged barefoot, arrayed in red, yellow or black sacks covered in a bestiary of demons emerging from amid the lewd tongues of painted flame, pointed and insane. Each clown surmounted with a peaked hat emblazoned with still more fire. Some robes were drawn-and-quartered by a gash-red cross, as if Father-Son-and-Holy-Ghosted by sword. Man, woman and child, each carried a green or yellow candle, and walked with a noose around the neck, macabre neckties dressing them with a grim and dark formality. At the end of the procession, several men, beaten until barely more than stew, carried in cages pulled by mules.
An auto-da-fé, part of the newly created made-in-Spain Inquisition. Bartolemeo’s master had warned us about this, but, oy, a broch, this was persecution dressed like the birthday party of the boy Satan.
People lined the streets bawling religious songs.
“The Jews,” a man shouted. “Those vermin caused the plague.”
We pushed our way into the crowd, wishing and not wishing to see more of this demonic circus. A girl, but a season older than Moishe—dark curls beneath a coloured scarf—sobbed beside us, tear-soaked face half-covered with a handkerchief.
“My father,” she whispered. She gestured toward a rickety man in one of the cages. He gripped the bars, held himself in a crouch. His frail head with its wispy beard and sallow face bobbed as the cage moved forward. He was saying something, singing weakly, but in the din we could not understand.
Moishe turned from the procession, looked steadily at her, but said nothing.
Ach, what could you say?
Sorry?
As long as you have your health?
I lost my father, too?
Men, women, children. All threw rotten food and dreck that dripped from those in the cages. The girl’s father did not respond but kept muttering, clinging to the bars.
The crowd walked alongside the procession and Moishe, the girl and I followed. We arrived at a large square outside the city walls. On a large platform, the rich, the aristocratic, the clergy.
Four huge statues of Old Testament prophets stood mutely at each corner, their blind eyes staring grimly into the crowd.
The quemadero. The place of execution.
“The architect for this place,” the girl said, indicating a tall man in a black robe. “But a Jew first.”
A priest in red robes climbed the few stairs to a raised dais on the platform, and began to proclaim, “If a man does not keep himself in Me, he becomes dead and is severed like a dry branch; such branches are taken up and put in the fire and burned. John, chapter fifteen, verse six. We know what should become of these heretics.”
“Laudamus Te” from the choir. The crowd joined in. All around us: “We praise, we bless, we worship, we glorify.”
Several of the condemned fell to their knees, weeping.
Perhaps they did not like the musical selection.
Then they confessed their heresy, the secret Judaizing of their deeds and hearts, their repentance.
“We accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our saviour for the wages of sin are death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
They collapsed before the platform, watering the ground with their tears.
Soldiers strode toward the centre of the quemadero.
“Stand,” a sergeant ordered. The penitants staggered up or were hauled. Then briskly, the soldiers reached around their necks with a red silk cord and strangled them.
May they rest in peace. Aleyhem ha’shalom.
The soldiers: their time will come.
When parrots and Jews take over the world.
When is that?
When the Messiah comes to earth and shines my shoes.
When I get shoes.
My luck, they’ll be horseshoes.
The garrotted bodies were carried by pairs of soldiers, then secured to stakes planted throughout the square in a mockery of trees. Then a marquesa stepped from the platform, her brocaded skirts fluttering behind her. A priest passed her a lit torch, and, after a nod from another, she made the sign of the cross over her own mortal body and touched the torch to the kindling at the foot of the stake. The pyre ignited, a burning bush inverted.
The greatest pain wasn’t apparent in the quickly sagging body, curling in the heat, the yellow sack now florid with real fire. It was in the burning horror on the face of the girl, on the faces of the still living, the about-to-die.
A shout like a shtoch in hartsn, a stab in the heart, from somewhere in the crowd. A brief commotion as someone collapsed. The soldiers looked over. The crowd attempted to become invisible. The commotion stilled.
Another brocaded dybbuk descended the stairs and received a lighted torch. Then another. The faces of the living burned even more fiercely. The girl gasped for air, her shoulders heaving.