Torquemada by Howard Fast Page A

face and Alvero asked him in a whisper, “Why? Why, Thomas? Why are you doing this to me? What devil drives you?”
    Torquemada reached out, grabbed the chain that was around Alvero’s neck and lifted it over his head. “Still you wear it,” Torquemada said. “Nothing can change you and no danger can teach you the meaning of fear.”
    â€œAs I wear my honour.”
    â€œHonour?” Torquemada repeated, raising a brow and holding the ampule up before him.
    â€œI care nothing for that,” Alvero said fiercely. “That thing you hold in your fingers means nothing and it never meant anything. It is a memory, that’s all it ever was, a meaningful memory. It was my father’s and before him it belonged to his father and so when I kept it I had a memory of both of them. But in the nightmare that you and your kind have made of Spain, it becomes more than a memory. In this madness with which you hunt down anyone who has a spoonful of Jewish blood in his veins—it becomes a matter of pride. Shall I repeat that word for you, Torquemada? Pride! There is a Spanish word for you, Thomas. A good Spanish word. Do you know, my dear Thomas, I am a Christian but I am also a man and a Spaniard. If I threw away that thing that you are holding in your hand I might remain a Christian but I would cease to be a man and I would become the kind of Spaniard that Spain has sufficient of.”
    â€œYou doom yourself,” Torquemada said sadly.
    â€œGoddamn you to hell!” Alvero shouted. “I was doomed the day the King of Spain asked you to taste my blood and share my wealth!”

10
  
    AFTERWARDS THE THING THAT ALVERO REMEMBERED most about the torture chamber of the Inquisition was that time ceased. He was taken there first on the day before Holy Week began. The first time he was there they did little to him that was of any importance in terms of what became his existence – the method and meaning of torture. They pricked his skin with needles and they burned the flesh on his back with a hot iron, but it was enough to distort his time sense, and after that he had no idea nor was he ever able truly to recollect how many additional times they took him to torture.
    He remembered things but he did not really remember the pain. Out of one time he remembered Thomas’ face, cowled, expressionless, lit by a moving flame that passed back and forth like the pendulum of a clock. All the time that he, Alvero, stared at Thomas’ face someone was screaming. It came as an afterthought to Alvero that he himself had been screaming, and that what he heard was the sound of his own screams.
    Another time, all the while they were torturing him his gaze was fixed on an image of Christ on the cross which hung upon one wall of the torture room. This was a Gothic Christ, very lean, very realistic, red blood pouring from a wound in the image’s side.
    When he remembered, it always seemed to him that the image moved, tilted crazily and finally crashed upon the floor, but he knew that this was hallucination.
    Most of his memory was of the ceiling of the Inquisition torture room. The ceiling was stone, and it was always wet and on its wet surface some sort of mould grew. Alvero remembered the ceiling very clearly from the time they had him on the rack. He would be looking at the ceiling and screaming with pain, when suddenly his vision would be blurred by the masked face of one of the torturers. That was the total symbol of the room. They were all masked with a black hood that had two eye holes and a third hole for breathing.
    Another memory was of a single masked man. In Alvero’s memory he was naked from head to foot, although in actuality he wore an apron of sorts over his nakedness. He was very heavily muscled and so strong that he often substituted his fingers for the instruments of torture. Even though he wore a mask Alvero always remembered him laughing with pleasure.
    There was a time