“You ask about my brother,” Martín replied. “We were laborers in Navarre, in the kingdom of Aragon. The King promised us justice, the Lieges, too, who so zealously safeguarded justice — but for themselves, only to find more ways to oppress their serfs and pile so many more taxes upon our shoulders, in coin and kind, that several lifetimes wouldn’t be long enough to pay. And since my brother was the oldest of the family and couldn’t pay the debts we owed to our Liege, and as we’d contracted new debts with some of the villagers not as unfortunate as we were, the Liege demanded the debts he was owed, and he informed my brother that in these lands the Liege could treat his vassals well or badly, according to his whim, and take away their belongings when it pleased him and deprive them even of their names, and there was no King and no statute that could protect them. And as my brother could not pay he took refuge in the church, and the Liege denied him even that asylum, and when he captured him he reminded my brother that we, the poor of the land, had no rights, whereas the Liege had the right to do as he wished, kill us, and choose the manner of our death: hunger, thirst, or cold. And as a warning to the slaves, our Liege ordered my brother killed by hunger and thirst and cold, and in the worst of winter he left him upon a little hillock, naked and surrounded by troops, and after seven days my brother died on that hill — of hunger and thirst and cold. From a distance, we watched him die, and there was nothing we could do. He became like the earth, hungry, thirsty, and cold; he became one with the earth. I fled. I came to Castile. I hired out for this work. No one asked me where I came from. No one cared to know the name of my land. They urgently needed laborers for this construction. The Liege of my land orders death for all who flee. I made myself one of you, exactly like you, and hoped no one would recognize me here.”
“Fighting against the Moors and defending the frontiers, we at least earned the right to abandon our Liege, if we left him our property; thus, from the Liege’s chattel we could become the King’s villager, and the Liege cannot seize us in royal territory; that’s why I came here,” Nuño said.
“Your land was very far south,” Martín sighed.
“And yours far to the north,” smiled Nuño.
“North and south, it doesn’t matter,” murmured Jerónimo. “Our lives have very little value, for the life of a Jew is estimated at two hundred days’ salary, and that of a laborer at only one hundred.”
“I say you’re all fools,” laughed Catilinón, “and everything you say is laughable, pointless; you’ve been more concerned with your dignity than with your life, while others just like you who have been obedient and submissive have courted favor and in the end were freed, even earned their right to be called gentlemen.”
“And do you know what it cost them, churl?” Martín answered in a rage. “The Liege’s right to mount their virgins. Accepting the fact that marriage between two serfs is not permanent and that a family is not even a family — for the father has no authority, since the Liege owns our land, our lives, our honor, and our deaths. Yes, even the serf’s corpse belongs to the Liege.”
“Patience and obedience,” Cato winked cockily, “for those who don’t flee or rebel or dispute with their Lords pass from serfs to vassals, from vassals to laborers, from laborers to landholders, and there’s always a way to a fortune for the person who knows where to look.”
“And what will your road be, poor Catilinón, for here we all chew the same chick-pea, we all cook with the same measure of oil, and every man of us washes with the same square of Castile soap.”
And cock-of-the-walk Cato crowed: “A man like me would make a good servant for some high Lord. And a servant sees his Liege mother-naked, and hears him when he shits.”
The old man who tended the forge sighed, rose, and declared: “When my father came to these lands he was so poor and desperate that he sold himself as a serf to El Señor’s father. He had to present himself at the church with a cord around his neck and a maravedi coin on his head to signify his lowly rank. El Señor promised him protection, a job, and land to work. But now the land no longer yields any fruit; we might as well sow in the sea, for the land’s going bad on us and God and his saints seem to have fallen asleep; brothers, we’ll have eaten up our own livelihood in this construction, and in so doing we’ll have dried up the land that once nourished us. We need to think about what’s going to happen in the future, and forget what’s gone before.”
ALL MY SINS
He sees him kneeling on his prie-dieu, his hands folded upon the velvet armrest and his dog drowsing at his feet. He will spend the morning contemplating the man contemplating the painting.
The painting: Bathed in the luminous pale air of Italian spaces a group of naked men with their backs turned to the viewer are listening to the sermon of the figure standing in front of a small stone temple in the angle of an enormous empty piazza whose rectilinear perspectives fade into a gauzy, greenish, transparent background. Everything in the figure of the orator bespeaks his identity: the sweet nobility of his bearing, the white drapery of his tunic, the admonitory hand with the forefinger pointing toward Heaven; the blend of energy, pain, and resignation upon the face, the straight nose, thin lips, the chestnut-colored beard, the golden highlights in the long hair, the clear forehead, the very fine eyebrows. But something is lacking and something is overdone. The head is not encircled by the traditional halo. And the eyes are not directed toward Heaven as they should be.
El Señor buried his head between his interlocked hands and over and over repeated (each word amplified by the preceding word, because in this crypt the echo would be inevitable): Should anyone say that the formation of the human body is the work of the Devil and that conception in the maternal womb is diabolical, then anathema, anathema, anathema it be.