Джеймс Миченер - The Source

The Dominican honestly wanted to save the accused from further pain, so he pointed to the door of the torture chamber and said, “Diego, believe me, of a hundred misguided people we have to bring down here, we set at least ninety free. To resume their normal lives. To rejoin the Church as corrected Christians.” He waited but Ximeno said nothing. “It’s true, we punish them here, but when they confess they go free with nothing worse than an unhappy memory. Diego, if you tell us now the names of the other Jews, you will go free, like the ninety, with nothing worse than a few scars on your ankles. Please, please speak.” But Ximeno said nothing.

This time the workmen used different tactics. Pulling him to the ceiling they eschewed tricks and set about dropping and raising him as rapidly as possible, until it seemed that his heart must be torn out of his body. Then, after a few minutes, they lugged him like an inanimate object to the water table, pressed him down upon the log until his back nearly cracked and proceeded immediately with the cloth and six jugs of water. Later, at the fire, they went right to work and burned him so horribly that again he fainted. With disgust they dragged him, unconscious, back to his cell and heaved him through the air, smashing him against the wall.

“Let’s hope we killed him,” they muttered, for his obstinacy was a reflection upon them. They had proof that he was a secret Jew, and his refusal to confess was preposterous.

Of his tortures on the third day he remembered nothing, but they were in no way different, for the Inquisition did not permit its workmen to cut a man’s flesh, to blind him or to meddle with his private parts, and if a prisoner remained silent in the face of rope, water and fire, as Ximeno had done, it was permissible nearly to kill him with these means but it was not permissible to do more. At the end of the third incredible session the doctor stood over the inanimate hulk by the fire and said, “This one can stand no more.”

The Dominican looked at the distorted, blistered body and cried, “Why don’t they confess and save themselves this agony?”

The doctor asked, “Do you suppose this one really is a Jew, Father?”

“At first I was sure,” the Dominican replied. “But after this …” He turned away.

Toward the end of 1542, when Ximeno had been nearly three years in solitary confinement, for which his estate still had to pay rent week after week, the sad-eyed Dominican came at last to see him: “Diego, tomorrow your day of judgment is at hand. You are to be burned at the stake.”

The prisoner still made no response, and the priest begged, “Diego, please, for the mercy of God, confess, so that when you reach the stake the executioner will be permitted to strangle you before the fire begins.”

Again there was no comment, and the distraught priest cried, “Diego! Do not force us to do this horrible thing. Your soul is already in the hands of God. At least allow your body to go in peace.”

But the resolute prisoner said nothing, and the priest departed.

At four on Sunday morning two young Dominicans entered the cell bearing a sackcloth uniform into which Diego Ximeno was forced to climb. Over it the priests threw a long yellow robe on which had been painted little red devils throwing into the fires of hell heretics and secret Jews. Finally they jammed on the prisoner’s head a tall conical hat, yellow and adorned with swirling flames. “You must follow us, Counselor,” said the two young friars of Avaro, who in happier days had often sought his assistance, which he had freely granted.

At the door of the prison Ximeno was handed a lighted taper, which signified that he was to be burned, and he came at last to the barefoot procession itself: sixty-three who had confessed minor crimes against the Church, like reading Erasmus, and who would escape death to live the rest of their lives in dismal isolation—pauperized, forbidden employment, anathematized; nineteen who had confessed major crimes, like naming their sons Moses or refusing to eat congers eels, and these would be burned, but at the last moment they would be strangled so as to escape the fire; and six like Diego Ximeno, who had refused to confess either to Judaism or Lutheranism, and they would be burned alive without strangling.

It was a long procession, headed by the dignitaries of the Church; and a longer day, marked by sermons, pleas and accusations. More than forty thousand persons packed the plaza to hear the solemn proceedings, for the day had been widely advertised throughout the region and all who attended were granted special dispensation, for that day they would see where the path of heresy led.

Late in the afternoon the inquisitors came finally to the cases of those to be burned, and justification for this act was cited from the specific words of Jesus Christ Himself as reported in the holy gospel of St. John: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” But once the verdicts of death had been read, the Church dignitaries solemnly washed their hands of the matter and left the scene, while the prisoners wore turned over to the secular arm of the state with the plea that they be treated kindly and that no blood be spilled.

The secular arm then marched the condemned to an entirely different part of the city, where stakes had been set into the ground and fagots piled high, and as the prisoners marched, the populace screamed at them, threw things, cursed and reviled them. Those prisoners suspected of being Jews went through a particular Gehenna, for they were tormented with special taunts: they had known God and had turned their backs on Him; they had crucified Jesus; they were worse than the swine they refused to eat. And with each step that the suspected Jew took, two friars clung to him, crying, “Jew, confess that your religion is false. Confess that God is three and not one.” And to many Jews on the death march this vilification of their religion was worse than the taunts of the crowd. At the burning place the citizens watched with horrified fascination as Diego Ximeno, silent and austere, climbed unaided onto the pile, ignoring the pleas of his accompanying friars that he save himself from the final agony. Below him secretaries waited with pen and book, ready to write down whatever he might scream in his torment. This had become a matter of some importance, for there were many in the town who were beginning to believe that Ximeno was not a Jew, and such a belief might become embarrassing if it led to local sanctification. But as the flames leaped at his throat Ximeno summoned forth the same iron control that he had shown in the torture room, and he died confessing nothing, so that at the moment of his death the people who had known him well began to whisper, “He was not a Jew. He was a saint,” and the first steps of his canonization began, much to the disgust of the Inquisition, which had intended something quite different.

Of all the watchers who saw the burning of Diego Ximeno, none witnessed it with greater apprehension than Dr. Abulafia, a distinguished medical man whose Jewish ancestors had become Christians in 1391 and who, as a good Christian himself, had risen to a place of prominence in the city. He was married to a Christian lady of impeccable lineage. He ate pork, was not circumcised, nor were his sons, and he had never been suspected by anyone, not even during the worst rigors of the Inquisition, of being a Jew. Upon the distribution in 1540 of the list of signs whereby secret Jews could be trapped, some of his acquaintances had jokingly reviewed the items with him, saying, “At least nobody can accuse you of being a Jew, Abulafia,” and not even his friends had considered reporting him to the inquisitors. He was a flawless man.