I had not been put to the question. I knew that children as young as ten had been tortured and I can only suppose that my mother saved me from it by surrendering her body. By the time we joined the procession to the auto-da-fè she knew she was with child. After the torture and the repeated rapes, she could barely walk. I tried to help her, but was struck aside by one of the officials.
The ceremony went on from early morning until evening, and all the while we stood under a relentless sun in the great central square where the ceremony took place. There must have been at least two hundred of us, and several thousand citizens seated on banks of benches all around, eagerly watching the spectacle. As the penitents were assembled together before the rostrum where the Inquisitor General and his officials were sitting in their magnificent robes, I caught sight of my father. Like us he was wearing the sambenito; once I would have cried aloud with relief, but lately I had learned much. I pressed my lips together and bit down on them to keep myself silent. His confession had been accepted. If he had been sentenced to be burned, he would have been wearing a robe painted with devils dragging heretics down to Hell. There were perhaps thirty of these, men and women sentenced to be ‘relaxed’ – a strange term, loaded with irony – that is, handed over to the civil authority, because the ecclesiastical authority was not permitted to carry out the sentence of death. It was decreed that the death of the condemned heretics must be accomplished without effusion of blood, so the victims would be burned alive. No blood would be spilled.
But my father, thank God, was not amongst the relaxed. As confessed penitents we would all be severely punished, my mother, my father and myself. All our property would be confiscated. My father would never again be allowed to practice medicine or work in a university. We would suffer some humiliating penance. But we were alive. At the time it seemed to me that was all that mattered.
Then the burning began. I dream of it still. The screaming. The smell. Dear God, the smell. And the greasy fragments flying through the air, like a shoal of tiny fish swimming in the smoke, and settling on our hair, our clothes, lying on our tongues with the taste of defilement, filling our lungs with the ashes of our countrymen.
As the cold November dusk set in and the formal ceremony of the auto-da-fè came to an end, we were escorted to another prison, a large chamber with windows high up in the walls. About fifty of us were confined to this one room, and we were told that our penance would be carried out the next day. We were to be stripped to the waist and paraded through the streets of Coimbra while we were scourged, as a warning to the populace. My father worked his way across the room as discreetly as he could and stood quietly beside us. He touched our hands briefly, but we did not embrace, for any sign of affection would have caught the attention of the two guards by the door. If he was surprised by my hair, hacked short and caked with filth, and my boy’s clothes, he gave no indication.
‘Christoval is well, Baltasar,’ my mother whispered, laying a slight emphasis on my new name. ‘Your son has shown himself brave and patient in all we have endured.’
I coloured with shame. I had endured nothing in comparison with her. Soon she would have to tell my father that she had been raped, but it was not my place to do so. I did lean close to him and whisper, ‘Mother was tortured, Father, the strapado and the half drowning. She has suffered. You also?’
As we had walked from the auto-da-fè to our new prison I had noticed how he limped, setting each foot down as though he walked on hot coals. He nodded, and gave my hand a squeeze.
‘I too had the strapado and the water, and also the burning of the feet. But they will heal, they will heal. They will let us go after the scourging and I will be able to salve them.’
‘They will not let us go home, Father,’ I said. My voice caught in a sob which I could not suppress. ‘All our goods, all your books and instruments and medicines, everything will be taken away or destroyed.’
‘We have friends,’ he said gently. ‘We must go to them secretly, but they will help. I think we will leave the country, go perhaps to Antwerp.’
We dared not talk any more, for we were attracting the notice of the guards.
The next morning they formed us up into a procession not far from my father’s university, outside the Cathedral of Coimbra, the Sé de Coimbra, which has the appearance more of a fortress than a church. With the sleet-laden wind howling down from the north it made a grim backdrop to our shame. They forced us to strip to the waist. Then began the longest walk of my life. We went barefoot, stumbling over the wet cobbles, along the main streets of Coimbra, up and down the ancient alleyways, our feet cut and bruised by the stones, retracing our steps to the cathedral and starting off in a new direction. The whips they used to scourge us had several thongs of thin leather, and at intervals along these thongs were sewn small pieces of broken bone as sharp as knives. The men who carried out the work were skilled at it; the lashes fell on the back with a harsh crack and then were drawn slowly downwards, so that the splinters of bone gouged the skin like a plough breaking the earth. Then the lash was whipped back behind the scourger’s head, the better to swing it down again with greater force.
At the first lash I screamed with pain. I could not stop myself. My father had set his jaw tight as locked box and would not cry out. My mother, who was staggering as if she were sleep-walking, began a dreadful low moaning which went on and on, as monotonous as a dying animal, for the whole of that dreadful parade. I thought, at the first blow, that I could never experience worse pain, but that was a foolish thought. As my back became one bloody mess of torn flesh, the scourge could not find any new areas of skin – and the men were conscientious in seeking it out. Again and again the leather and bone scored deeper into flesh already broken and bleeding. After several hours, a kind of insensibility set in. I was nothing but a scalding fire of pain, so that I stumbled along in a trance. It came to an end at last. We were driven into the cathedral and made to kneel, which we did thankfully, for we could barely stand, and we were led by a priest in prayers of penitence and thanksgiving.
I felt the world swimming around me and barely stopped myself from sprawling on the floor, but I knew I must not be taken up unconscious, for I feared that if they discovered I had concealed my sex they would punish me even more. I concentrated my gaze on a chipped paving stone, trying to trace patterns in it. Why did the Inquisition stipulate so precisely that blood must not be drawn from those who were to die, yet all day they had drawn blood in rivers from the penitents? Was this some privilege to be enjoyed only by those accepted as Christian? My upbringing and religious teaching had been a mixture of old Jewish and New Christian doctrine. We attended both church and secret synagogue. From what I had been taught of the kindness and humanity of Jesus, I could not comprehend the practices of the Inquisitors. Did it make one a good Christian, truly faithful, to suffer as we had suffered?
After that interminable service, shuddering from pain and shock, we were given back our upper garments, and turned out into the night, where a cold wind from the ocean was carrying more sleet inland. I screamed again when the rough cloth touched my back, but my father took my hand, held my mother up by the arm, and hurried us away. All around us, the other penitents were slipped aside down dark alleys, eager to melt into anonymity. We staggered along as best we could, until we came to a small door in a high wall that I recognised as the garden door of a house belonging to one of my father’s Christian colleagues from the university.