The Inquisitor's Wife Read Free Page A

rather, known of him, since his family, the Hojedas, avoided us, although their family home stood across the street from ours. Even though my father, Diego García, was a solid Old Christian who sat on Seville’s city council, the Hojedas weren’t pleased when he built a palace across from theirs. My father often entertained his fellow civil servants and important higher-ups in the local government; he’d once welcomed the powerful Duke of Medina Sidonia to our home. I was his only surviving child—I watched my mother suffer seven ill-fated pregnancies—and grew up overseeing his lavish parties when my mother was in ill health. Gabriel’s family was never among the guests, despite my father’s open invitation.
    The Hojedas were a suspicious lot, Old Christians who owned most of the looms that wove Seville’s finest silk. The father, don Jerónimo, was twenty-five years older than my father and already white-haired when I was born. Stern and scowling, don Jerónimo was a major donor to the Dominican parish of San Pablo, many of whose priests taught that conversos could never be trusted because their tainted Jewish blood poisoned their souls. (Not all Dominicans believed this, however; indeed, there were many who were themselves conversos, and many who were Old Christians who held fast to church law, which taught that all Christians, convert or not, were equally beloved by God.) When don Jerónimo’s second son, Alonso, was old enough for schooling, the old man sent the boy to the local Dominican cloister to become a monk. By the time I was born, Jerónimo’s first wife was long dead and his second wife had died six years earlier giving birth to her first child, his youngest son, Gabriel—my groom.
    Gabriel’s half siblings were all much older than he was; he grew up with an ailing, aged father and was raised by servants. During his youth, he spent as much time as he could outdoors, playing with other boys in the narrow neighborhood street that separated us. His older brother, Fray Hojeda, visited him often. Tall and heavyset in a white Dominican habit beneath a black cloak, Hojeda reminded me of a great owl. His head was round as an orange, with no indentation at the bridge between his eyebrows. His profile continued in one unbroken curve from the top of his sloping forehead to the tip of his oddly long nose. His eyes were heavy lidded and large, the opaque murky green of the River Guadalquivir. The judgment in his gaze never failed to humiliate me, for I had come to hate myself for what I was—a conversa, with Jewish blood in my veins, a taint that no amount of spiritual scrubbing could ever wash away. I would often see Gabriel and his older brother speaking together solemnly at their front door, usually conferring about their father’s health or Gabriel’s future. When Gabriel reached eighteen, don Jerónimo—after much loud argument with Fray Hojeda on the second-floor balcony across from ours—sent Gabriel off to the university in faraway Salamanca, where he studied canon and civil law. Upon his return to Seville four years later, Gabriel didn’t marry as was expected but worked as a city prosecutor and lived with his father until don Jerónimo passed away several months ago.
    I grew up watching Gabriel play in the street, but because we attended the Franciscan church instead of San Pablo, I encountered him face-to-face only twice. The first time, I was eleven and screaming, and he seventeen, red-faced, and sweating. He’d been kneeling on the dusty cobblestones between our houses, his left arm wound around a struggling fourteen-year-old boy’s neck, his right pulling back in order to deliver another blow to the boy’s head. I’d cried out Gabriel’s name. I remembered how he had looked up, startled, to gape at me, an angry girl, and how, still staring at me, he slowly released his grip on his victim. I remembered too how quickly the rage in his eyes evaporated only to be replaced by a strange light.