The Confusion

NOT SHOWING UP FOR AN auto da fe was regarded as a Bad Idea everywhere in the Spanish Empire, and especially in Mexico City. Every scrap of land in the town was owned by the Church, and the Holy Surveyors of Rome had (or so Jack phant’sied) come out here and planted Trinitarian transits on the land that had been miraculously reclaimed from Lake Texcoco and hung holy plumb-bobs made of saints’ skulls and stretched cords of spun angels’ hair, driven crucifixes into the ground at strategickal Vertices, and platted the land into quadrilaterals, each one butted snugly against the next; angels might slip through the interstices, but never Indians nor Vagabonds. These parcels had been entrusted to various religious Orders, viz. Carmelites, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians, Benedictines, et cetera, each of which had lost no time in erecting a high stone wall around its property-line to shield it from the intrigues and supposed heresies of the neighboring Orders. This accomplished, they had got to work filling in the middle with churches, chapels, and dormitories. The buildings sank into the soft ground almost as quickly as they were built, which made the place seem much beyond its true age of about a hundred and eighty years. At any rate there was no place to live in Mexico City that was not controlled by one Order or another, and consequently no way not to show up for an auto da fe without its being noticed by someone who’d be apt to take it the wrong way.

In spite of-or on second thought, maybe because of-their tendency to live cloistered behind high walls, the men and women of these diverse Orders loved nothing better than to dress up in peculiar clothing and parade through the streets of the city, bearing religious effigies or fragments of saints’ anatomies. When Jack had been abroad in this city as a free man, these never-ending processions had been an absolute menace, and an impediment to commerce. Sometimes one procession would collide with another at a street-corner and monks would come to blows over which Order had precedence. An auto da fe was one of the few occasions significant enough to get every single nun from the city’s twenty-two convents and every friar from its twenty-nine monasteries all processing at one time, in more or less the same direction. So all of them were present.

Of course Vagabonds always found a way to exist. Around here they seemed to dwell outside the walls, which was where important people liked them to stay. Not ten years earlier, they had gathered in the zocalo in sufficient numbers to burn the Viceroy’s palace down. Since that event, Count Montezuma had tended to get a little jumpy whenever rabble gathered near his dwelling in large numbers; his rebuilt palace had high walls with plenty of loop-holes for broadcasting grapeshot into any inconvenient crowds. The Vagabonds, criollos, the mountain-dwelling Indian peons, the desperadoes from the mining-country up north, these were only permitted to gather in the City on certain occasions, and an auto da fe was one of them. Of course they had no formal place in the procession of processions that wound its way through the streets to the zocalo, but cheerfully insinuated themselves among and between the nuns and monks, the three-or four-hundred-strong staff of the Cathedral, the asesors, fiscals, alquaciles, and familiares of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and diverse priests, friars, nuns, oidors, and fiscals who happened to be passing through en route to or from Manila or Lima. Despite the now well-known fact that the new French King of Spain had snubbed the auto da fe of Madrid, all of the King’s representatives in Mexico City turned out: the Viceroy and all his household and courtiers, the various ranks and hierarchies of civil servants, the officers of foot and of horse in their ostrich plumes and polished helmets, and as many of the garrison’s soldiers as could be spared from guarding the five gates and innumerable walls of this City.