2023-09-26 04:05:36
Where there is light there are shadows. And where there was an empire where the sun never set, there was also an equally large reverse where the light never reached. Without falling into the Black Legend or the usual clichés, the writer Sandra Aza signs the novel ‘Blood Libel’ (Planet), which moves its plot through the Madrid of the underworld where Felipe IV made his sexual debut and bad life populated the brothels and traditional casinos. «I have always liked it very much because of the contrast that existed in that time of brilliance and also of so much poverty. Madrid was absolutely an effervescent, sparkling, magical city… All the greats were there: Góngora, Quevedo, Lope de Vega... “History with a capital letter and stories with a lower case letter,” says the author.
The beginning of the novel takes readers to the Madrid winter of 1620, in the midst of a change of reign, where a young woman will appear raped and buried next to a horribly mutilated child. Converts, criminals, inquisitors… The mob will hold the notary Sebastián Castro and his wife responsible for the crimes, accused of being secretly Jews and of having killed the child following the dictates of black magic. The family tragedy will lead his son, Alonso, to live an odyssey to escape and also seek justice.
«The popular hatred that existed against the Jews is very present in the novel, and many used it for their benefit, so that they intended to use the inquisition as an instrument to resolve particular disputes. What I also try to reflect is that The Inquisition did not allow anonymous complaints and it was not so easy to use. They were immediately rejected because the denunciation had to be signed with your name and surname, which meant swearing on the Holy Scriptures that you were telling the truth,” he recalls.
In Baroque Madrid the nights were extremely dangerous. Rogues, gamblers, ruffians, thieves, bandits and slaughterers… Crime skyrocketed during the reign of Philip IV. In the middle of the century, between 1654 and 1658 alone, there were four patricides, five beheadings, five attacks, six acts of extreme cruelty, eleven poisonings, four homicides, 42 murders, eight suicides, etc., etc. Not to mention the unsolved deaths, which in 1658 alone exceeded 150 cases. «For all kinds of good people, the night was a danger, a place where only thugs or the homeless, who had no choice but to be there, were at large. If a good man went out into the street at night, they could rob him or murder him, but women had the added bonus that they could also rape and kill them,” points out the writer of ‘Blood libel’ (Planet).
«It is one thing that it was a dark time and another thing, backward»
The rape with which the novel begins is a reminder that until very recently the night was a forbidden place for women, a place where there were herds of beasts lurking in the shadows and where a homeless woman was at double risk of death. «The woman had very little value. And if we talk about a woman who was homeless… If the bailiffs saw her, they would immediately arrest her and take her to the Galera house, which was a kind of women’s penitentiary. A life sentence, because she could only get out of there in three ways: married, becoming a nun or as a servant of a noble house. “It was suicide.”
Rape was the order of the day at a time when there were no cell phones, no DNA evidence, no fingerprints, no identification cards, no identification of any kind. «If you met a woman on the street, then you rape her, you kill her, you just leave her there. It was very difficult to resolve those types of cases. Very little was done at the legal or police level,” says Aza.
The Golden age In all their greatness and also their baseness, they envelop a thriller where nothing is what it seems, not even the myths about the Spain of the time. «One thing is that it was a dark time and another thing, backward. That poverty and those contrasts were typical of the time in Europe, but that does not mean that Spain was backward. Above all, regarding the Inquisition, I wanted to show the mechanisms and how the European inquisitions were much worse. The Spanish Inquisition had an absolutely regulated, absolutely rigorous procedure and they did not dedicate themselves to burning or torturing everywhere.
Auto de Fe in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid, Francisco Rizi, 1683 ABC
A society that, for obvious reasons, was very literary, addicted to poets and playwrights. «It is another proof that Spain and the Spaniards are not at all uneducated, nor ignorant, nor of everything that has been attributed to us. In Spain there was genius and ingenuity at a level not only in literature, but in all types of arts and science. Great in their field who were also appreciated by the public. And it is that youa work like Don Quixote had its journey and was a kind of best seller not only speaks well of Cervantes, but also of his readers. It speaks of a certain cultural background and a very demanding public where playwrights waited for the premiere date and, depending on how happily the work went, they claimed authorship or remained in the shadows. You have to remember that if the public didn’t like it, they would throw away all kinds of vegetables, rotten eggs…
«It was not freedom of expression, it was bravery. “They said what they thought and then assumed the consequences.”
The classic image of the period also insists on presenting the Spanish as muzzled beings, without the ability to express themselves, but if the sources are reviewed, what appears is a society where, without reaching what is understood today as freedom of expression, it admitted a quite striking level of criticism of the government and social customs. «You went to a lying place and there you had Quevedo giving the politician on duty a turn and a half. It wasn’t freedom of expression, it was bravery. They said what they thought and then assumed the consequences, as happened, for example, to the Count of Villamediana, who was banished more than once from Madrid during the time of Philip III for putting the King to shame. Some verses against the government or against the monarchy were anonymous, but others were signed with names and surnames,” Aza considers.
«No other European country has a Don Quixote. No other country has a Golden Age and no other European country built an empire that lasted centuries. The Spanish character is strong, it has will, it has courage…. It’s okay to go with your head down. We have every reason in the world to raise our heads and say that we are great and we don’t know it,” defends the author of ‘Blood Libel’ (Planeta).
Sandra Aza, trained in Law but always fascinated by History, had quite advanced knowledge about the Golden Age when she imagined the novel, but, nevertheless, she soon discovered that she was still far from being able to write her work with the level of detail. and documentation I wanted. «When you already face a blank page and you have to describe, for example, the house of a poor person of the time, that is when you realize that you have general data, but then you have to go into detail, what the houses were like, how they dressed, what they were called. those clothes. This entire documentation process has been very exhaustive and continued throughout the writing. Each chapter presented you with a challenge », he points out.
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