Homero Aridjis: 1492

My grandfather was born in Seville on the sixth day of June in the year of Our Lord 1391, the very same day Ferrán Martínez, the Archdeacon of Ecija, incited the Christian rubble to burn down the gates of the Jewish aljama, leaving fire and blood, looting and death in his wake. While my great-grandmother Sancha cried out in the throes of labor, Ferrán Martínez and his followers slit the throats of women and children, reduced the synagogues to rubble and left four thousand innocents lifeless. My father’s grandfather watched my great-grandmother on her bed and, through an unglazed window, the rapacious faithful pillaging books and tiles, hides and cloths, lamps and perfumes, furnishings and jewelry, bricks and plates. More than once Ferrán Martínez burst into a house where some woman was shielding her small daughter against a wall, and this man of little learning but exemplary life glimpsed himself in a shattered mirror, saw his reflection heady with death in the bloody shards, and lifted the dagger of faith to plunge it into a little girl whose mother begged for the baptismal waters that could save her child.

Milling around the Archdeacon, the mob rooted, raped and ravaged like a thousand-handed beast among collapsing furniture, torn clothes, pockmarked walls and floors. Threats and groans, unheeded words and whispers troubled the air and the sensitive ears of the woman in labor who flinched at the slightest sound, convinced that the fury raging in the aljama had entered her own body. Great-grandmother’s house stood back-to-back with a Jewish house, and any disaster that befell one echoed in the other, for their rear rooms were secretly joined by a narrow door, which was subsequently blocked with earth and stones.

Great-grandmother gave birth to grandfather in agony, shrieking as if her belly and infant had been pierced by the awful archdeacon’s sword, or as if at that very instant one of the many dead littering the aljama’s streets had entered the newborn baby’s body, condemning itself to live all over again in the world. Great-grandfather picked up his son mournfully, studied him in the blood-red light and, holding him up to his mother-in-law and sister-in-law, gravely announced that the child’s name would be Justo Afán, Justified Zeal, since it had been born thirsting for justice. Then, after peering through the window at the dying dragging themselves through the smoldering fires of the aljama and at the lurking shadows of the guilty encumbered with the spoils of their crimes, he turned towards the women and said, “I will have no other child than this in my lifetime, for in a world where Cain walks about freely brandishing an ass’s jawbone, who wants to put more Abels in his path? I may have learned late, but now I understand that just as seeds scatter over the fields to bear goodly fruits, evil advances through the villages, cities and kingdoms to destroy the crops of the righteous.”

This said, he laid Justo Afán in his mother’s arms, staring into her eyes as if henceforth their conjugal love would exist only in that look, in the other world and in dreams, and without so much as a backwards glance, with only the clothes he wore and the food still in his belly, he closed the door of his house behind him, never to return.

Twenty years later my father was born, although my grandfather never knew him, having succumbed to the plague, with much nausea and vomiting of yellow bile, four days after a tumor the size of a pine nut appeared in his right groin. People said he died discredited by all, because of his excessive dealings with women, and because Doctor Mosén Sánchez had sliced into him and found a gallbladder the size of a pear, oozing green bile. My grandmother was not troubled when she learned of the infidelities that had ostensibly brought about her husband’s death. As she explained to her friends and relations, since he hadn’t been hers before birth, nor would he be after death, there was no reason for him to belong to her while he was alive.

A rumor spread that he had been infected by Death garbed like a nun, who had thrown a ball of blue flame through the open window of his room; they also said he had caught the disease from a nun disguised as a whore when they made love in the putrid fields near the city dunghills. In fact, there was no time to mourn him, as he was cremated hastily at night to keep the neighbors ignorant, although everyone already knew. My grandmother would have her whole life to lament his absence, so what difference could one night make? However, she apparently never mourned him again and banished him with an inscrutable rigor from her days and her speech to such an extent that when his name was mentioned in her presence she had to make an effort to remember of whom they spoke. Perhaps she was pretending, but only she knew the truth, she, Blanca de Santángel, mother of my father, Ricardo Cabezón.

At that time, Fray Vicente Ferrer – or the Angel of the Apocalypse, as he called himself – driven by an intense proselytizing fervor, swept through the aljamas in the cities of Aragón, Castile and Catalonia, converting Jews to Christianity. Crucifix in hand, he preached in churches and public squares and burst into synagogues to consecrate them in the Catholic faith. He was born in Valencia around the year 1350, the son of a scrivener who lived in Calle de la Mar, and it is said that his mother felt no discomfort before he came into the world, as her pregnancy was curiously easy. The town’s bishop heard the barking of dogs in her belly several times and interpreted this as a sign that she would give birth to a son “who would be the mastiff chosen to guard the Christian flock and awaken it with his barking from sinful sleep and frighten away the infernal wolves.” Thus, from the age of six, he never cared to play with other children, summoning them instead to his side and preaching to them from above like a hoary old man. Early on he acquired the habit of fasting twice a week – Fridays on bread and water – and of listening to whatever preachers crossed his path, however uncouth or coarse they might be.

At the age of eighteen, he entered the Monastery of Santo Domingo and assumed the Friar Preachers’ habit. Santo Domingo himself was his model, and he read the sacred books the saint had read, and gestured and walked as he imagined Domingo had done. Three years later he was sent to the Convent of Santa Catalina Mártir in Barcelona, and thence to Lérida, where he devoted himself to the study of theology and practiced the rules of his own Treatise of the Spiritual Life, frequently lifting his eyes from his book to focus on the wounds of Jesus Christ, to whom all his reading and learning were consecrated.

After his return to Valencia, while he was praying at the altar of the Virgin or before a crucifix, the devil repeatedly appeared to him in the form of San Antonio or as a hideous black man who exhorted him with threats to abandon the monastic life. One night in his cell, while poring over San Jerónimo’s book about the perpetual virginity of the Virgin, he implored Mary to intercede before Christ on his behalf that he might die chaste, and suddenly a voice said to him, “God does not grant to all the grace of virginity, nor will it be given to thee, but rather will it be taken from thee very soon.” However, the mother of Jesus appeared to him in glorious splendor immediately afterwards and reassured him that these were the devil’s wiles and that she would never forsake him.

Nevertheless, the demon took possession of a woman called Inéz Hernández, who feigned sickness so that Fray Vicente would be summoned to reconcile her with God and set a penance for her sins. Once he was in her room, she undressed and would have fornicated with him, but Fray Vicente fled in terror, and when the woman tried to shout, she was bewitched and struck dumb. Her parents quickly brought exorcists to drive the devil from her body, but the demon refused to emerge until the man who had stood in the fire without being burned came back. Fray Vicente returned, and from the moment he crossed the threshold the woman was rid of the evil one. Upon entering his cell on another occasion, he encountered a harlot who tried to seduce him, urging him not to fear, as she was a genuine woman and not the devil. Enraged, he reminded her so vividly of the endless torments of hell awaiting those who abandoned themselves to the fetid delights of the flesh that the woman repented and renounced the life of pleasure forever.

Meanwhile, the “devil’s son,” the Aragonese Pedro de Luna, had been elected pope in Avignon under the name of Benedict XIII. He summoned Fray Vicente to be court chaplain and confessor, and Vicente remained at his side until one day, as the friar lay at death’s door, Jesus Christ appeared to him in a vision, flanked by Santo Domingo and San Francisco, and revealed that soon he would be cured of his illness, that several years hence the schism in the church would begin to heal, and that he must go into the world as an apostle preaching against the grievous vices of the time. “Warn them,” Christ said, “of the danger in which they live, tell them to mend their ways, as Doomsday is near.” Touching His hand to the friar’s cheek, He added, “Arise, my Vicente.” And that touch was so efficacious that whenever he preached about the Last Judgment, the marks of Jesus Christ’s fingers appeared on his face as a seal or signature by which God authenticated his preaching. Fray Vicente, nearing sixty years of age and racked by quartan fevers but impelled by that vision and that command, left the court at Avignon behind to roam the sinful realms of man and the dusty roads of the world, in bloody penitential processions.



Translated from the Spanish by Betty Ferber