Purity of Blood

But with me it was different, if Your Mercies will allow me to find a way to say this. To Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, veteran of the tercios of Flanders and those rough and dangerous times, I represented the word “remorse.” It was not easy to coolly assign me to the list of “downs” resulting from a bad adventure or assault. I was his responsibility, whether he liked it or not. And just as one does not choose his friends or his women, but is instead chosen by them, life, my dead father, fate, had set me in his path. There was no way he could close his eyes to an unpleasant truth: I made him vulnerable. In the life he had chosen to live, Diego Alatriste was as much a whoreson as the next; but he was a whoreson who played according to certain rules. For that reason he was quiet, and kept to himself, which was as good a way as any other to be desperate.

And that was why he was peering into the dark shadows of the street, hoping to spot a constable lurking there, a spy, any enemy at all that he could use to calm the sensation that was griping his bowels and making him clench his teeth until his jaw hurt. He wanted to find someone and then slip toward him in the darkness, without a sound, press him against the wall, gag him with his cape, and without a single word drive his dagger into his throat until he stopped moving and the Devil took him.

Because if we are considering rules, those happened to be his.

VII. MEN OF ONE BOOK

God never deserts crows or rooks, not even notaries. And he did not completely desert me. For, believe it or not, I was not tortured unbearably. The Holy Office had its rules, too, and despite their cruelty and fanaticism, some of them were observed to the letter. I received my share of slapping and lashes, I cannot deny. And no few privations and rough interrogations. But once they confirmed my age, those not-yet-lived fourteen years kept at a safe distance the contraption of wood, rope, and wheels that at every questioning I could see in the far corner of the room. Even the beatings they gave me were limited in number, intensity, and duration.

Others, however, were not as lucky. I do not know whether the woman’s scream I had heard on my first day had come with or without the help of the rack. If the latter, unfortunately, she had been installed upon it, her limbs pulled with turn after turn of the wheel, until her bones were cracked from their sockets. I continued to hear screams frequently, until suddenly, they ceased. That was the same day I found myself again in the interrogation room and finally met the unfortunate Elvira de la Cruz.

She was small and plump, and in no way resembled the romanticized vision I had concocted in my mind. But no matter, not even the most perfect beauty could have offset that mercilessly shaved head, those red-rimmed eyes sunken in dark circles of insomnia and suffering, and, beneath the filthy serge of her habit, the bruises of cuffs around her wrists and ankles. She was sitting down—soon I learned that she was unable to stand without help—and her gaze was the most vacant and desolate I had ever seen: an absolute emptiness born of the pain and exhaustion and bitterness of one who knows the depths of the darkest pit ever imagined. She must have been about eighteen or nineteen years old, but she looked like a decrepit old woman. If she shifted slightly in her chair, it was slowly and painfully, as if her joints were all crippled. And sadly, that was exactly what had happened.

As for me, although it is not a sign of good breeding to boast, they had not torn from me a single one of the answers they wanted. Not even when one of the torturers, the redheaded one, took on the task of measuring every inch of my back with a bull’s pizzle. But although I was covered with welts and had to sleep on my stomach—if that agonizing and restless state somewhere between reality and the ghosts of imagination can be called sleep—they did not get one word from dry, cracked lips now crusted with blood that was mine, not poor de la Cruz’s. No words, that is, other than groans of pain or protests of innocence. That night I was returning home alone. My master, Captain Alatriste, was nowhere around. I have never heard anything about the de la Cruz family. I am an old Christian, and my father died for the king in Flanders…. And then I would start from the beginning again. That night I was returning home…