Uproar followed the announcement of the discovery. With cries of “Sacrilege!” these thieving drunkards fell upon the Jew. They beat him. They flung a rope about his neck, dragged him from the inn and haled him into the presence of the Provisor of Astorga, Dr. Pedro de Villada. The reverend doctor discharged there the functions of an agent of the Holy Office. He was fully experienced in inquisitorial affairs, and he was upon the eve of being promoted to the dignity of inquisitor in the court of Avila.
Villada received the wafer, heard the accusation, and took a short way with Benito when the latter refused to explain himself. He ordered him two hundred lashes, and finding the man still obdurate after this punishment, he submitted him to the water-torture. Under this the wretched fellow at last betrayed himself. Of precisely what he said we have no record taken at the time; but we have his own word for it—as reported afterwards by Yucé Franco to whom he uttered it—that “he had said more than he knew, and enough to burn him.”[168]
Having, as is clear, obtained from him an admission of his own guilt, Villada now proceeded, as prescribed by the “Directorium,” to induce him to incriminate others. We know the methods usually employed; from these and from what follows it is quite reasonable to assume that recourse was had to them now.
Following Eymeric’s instructions, Villada would, no doubt, admonish him with extreme kindness, professing to cast no blame upon Benito himself but rather upon those evil ones who had seduced him into error, and he would exhort the prisoner to save himself by showing a true penitence, pointing out that the only proof of his penitence he could advance would be a frank and free delation of those who had led him so grievously astray.
From the occasional glimpses of this Benito Garcia vouchsafed us in the records of the trial of Yucé Franco, we perceive a rather reckless personality, of a certain grim, sardonic humour, gleams of which actually pierce through the dehumanization of the legal documents to ensnare our sympathy.
He is imbued with contempt for these Christians whose religion he embraced forty years ago, in what he accounts a weak moment of his youth, and from which he secretly seceded again some five years before his arrest. He is weighed down by remorse for having been false to the Jewish faith in which he was born; he believes himself overtaken by the curse which his father launched upon him when he took that apostatizing step; he is out of all conceit with Christianity; since seeing the bonfires of the Faith he has come to the conclusion that as a religion it is an utter failure; it has been his habit to sneer at Jews who were inclining to Christianity.
“Get yourselves baptized,” was the gibe he flung at them, “and go and see how they burn the New-Christians.”[169]
In the prison of Avila—when he gets there—his one professed aim is to die in the faith of his fathers.
But it would seem that when first taken in the toils of the Inquisition, and having experienced in his own person the horrors of its methods, he realizes the sweetness of life, and eagerly avails himself of the false loophole so alluringly exposed by the reverend doctor.
In his examination of June 6 he betrays to Villada the course of his re-Judaizing. He relates that five years ago, whilst in talk with one Juan de Ocaña, a converso whom he believes to be a Jew at heart under an exterior of Christianity, the latter had urged him to return to the Jewish faith, saying that Christ and the Virgin were myths, and that there is no true law but that of Moses. Lending an ear to these persuasions, Benito had done many Jewish things, such as not going to church (although he whipped his children when they stayed away, lest their absence should betray his own apostasy) nor observing holy-days, eating meat on Fridays and fast-days at the house of Mosé Franco and Yucé Franco—Jews of the neighbourhood of Tenbleque—and wherever else he could eat it without being detected. Indeed, for the past five years, he admits, he has been a Jew at heart, and if during that time he did not more completely observe Jewish rites and practices, it was because he dared not for fear of being discovered; whilst all the Christian acts he had performed had been merely a simulation, that he might appear to be a Christian still. The confessions he had made to the priest of La Guardia had been false ones, and he had never gone to Communion—“believing that the Corpus Christi was all a farce (creyendo que todo era burla el Corpus Christi).” He even added that whenever he saw the Viaticum carried through the streets, it was his habit to spit and to make higas (a gesture of contempt).[170]