The Confusion

Jack had tied a strip of cloth over his eyes so that he could lie in the sun comfortably, and had unrolled a straw mat on the stones of the courtyard to even out the bumps somewhat, but except for a few negligible layers of skin, hair, and straw, his skull was in direct contact with the stones. Even if he stopped up his ears with his fingers, blocking out the noises of living things, certain vibrations of a mineral nature were still conducted into his head through that route, and even when no carts happened to be passing by, Jack fancied he could sense the omnipresent grumble of those grinding-stones, thousands of granite molars chewing the maize and cacao of this country. Which might be mistaken as the deepest ground-note, the continuo-line of this neverending Mass that was Mexico City. Except that there was another note even more pervasive. Jack did not hear it for a while, or if he did he could not disentangle it from the city’s other noises. But after he had been lying there for some time he went half to sleep and had some strange vision that, if he’d been a Papist, probably would have been accounted a miracle and got him nominated a Saint. The vision was that his body was a body of light, rising up and growing as it rose, as bubbles do when they come up out of a black depth, but that it was bound with thongs of darkness, somewhat as the light of a lanthorn appears to be gibbeted by the straps of iron that clasp it all round. At any rate, something about this sun-intoxicated state of mind, and the general drugged stupor that followed a torture-session, caused the brocade of sounds to unravel itself and come apart into its several threads, yarns, warps, and woofs. And in this way Jack became aware of the sound of the Mint.

Years before, he had seen a coiner at work making thalers in the Ore Range, and so he knew that underneath all of the ceremonies and offices, this Mint must be nothing more than a few men with hammers pounding out the coins one at a time. To make sixteen thousand pieces of eight per diem, they had to have several coiners working at once, each with his own hammer and die. Each hammer-blow was another eight bits given the sacred imprint of the King of Spain and sent out into the world. Sometimes several coiners would bring their hammers down in quick succession and Jack would hear a cluttered barrage of rings, other times there would be anomalous pauses during which Jack phant’sied the whole Spanish Empire was holding its breath, fearing that the silver had run out. But for the most part the coiners worked in a shared rhythm, each taking his turn, and the rings of the hammers came steadily, about as frequently as the beats of Jack’s heart. He put his hand to his breast to prove it. Sometimes his heart would beat in perfect synchronization with the coiners’ hammers for several beats in a row, and Jack wondered whether this was more true among persons who had been born and raised in this city.

Like a heartbeat, the sound of pieces of eight being born was not normally audible, but if you sat very still you could sense it, pervading the streets of Mexico City as the blood did the body; and Jack already knew that in certain remote places like London, Amsterdam, and Shahjahanabad, you could detect its pulse, just as you could count a man’s at a certain place on the wrist, far away from the beating heart.

Jack had never had much use for Spaniards, having always tended to view them as Englishmen gone spectacularly wrong, grapes that had turned to vinegar, a reasonably promising folk who’d been made utterly deranged by being trapped between la France and dar al-Islam. But lying there in the fist of the Inquisition listening to the grinding of the tortilla-stones and the ringing of the coiners, Jack was forced to admit that they were as vast and queer in their own way as the Egyptians.

Jack would never have accused himself of being a wise man, but he prided himself on cunning. Wisdom or cunning or both told him that he’d best ignore de Ath’s ravings about the Enlightenment and keep his attention fixed on nearer and more practical matters. The crypto-Jews who occupied the cells of this prison were an odd lot, but they knew quite a lot about the workings of the Mexican Inquisition-as how could they not. It was the rule in most Inquisition prisons to keep every prisoner in solitary confinement, for years at a time if need be, in the hope that he or she would finally break down and confess to some heresy that the Inquisitor had not even suspected, or even dreamed of-supposedly whole new categories of Sin had been discovered, or invented, in this way. But the only rule that Diego de Fonseca enforced in his prison was that the inmates were not supposed to leave, and he’d even bend that rule for a few hours or a night, if you promised to come back.