The Inquisitor's Tongue: A Novel - Softcover

Singer, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573661678 ISBN 13: 9781573661676

Verlag: F2C, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Alan Singer's riveting new novel, The Inquisitor's Tongue, reimagines the Spanish Inquisition as a world in which spiritual horrors and acts of violence are the birth pangs of otherwise unimaginable identities. The novel is the intersection of two narratives. The confession of Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora, a miraculously gifted converso wine taster, is read aloud by a duplicitous priest of the Inquisition as an admonitory lesson to a suspected sinner. The competing narrative is the story of that sinner, another guilt-driven character, referred to only as the 'Samaritan,' who curiously is held in the thrall of Osvaldo's confession. The Samaritan bears the scars of his own history of violence and hidden identity. In the wake of a final apocalypse the two narratives converge, bringing all of the characters together and eliciting the most damning revelation about the identity of the Inquisitor. Set amidst the religious and courtly spectacles of sixteenth-century Spain, The Inquisitor's Tongue is linguistically adventurous, richly philosophical, deeply visceral, tantalizingly sensuous, and wickedly comic. It is a Goyaesque capricho on the follies of the will to identity.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan Singer is the author of four previous novels, most recently Dirtmouth.  He also writes on aesthetics and the visual arts; his most recent work is The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art. Singer is professor of English at Temple University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Inquisitor's Tongue

a novel By Alan Singer

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2012 Alan Singer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-167-6

Chapter One

I am not myself.

You might say, "I am not myself today." But for me, day after day, the days possess their own character more than I do. They are more themselves than I am. I am the colorless air they breathe. The days pass through me—the ghostly presence—as if to urge me to run after them. Their swifter and swifter passage is an admonition to me: to make haste. It is a rout.

Portents abound in the ringing chamber of my vacuity. Yes, "run," "run," "run" is the sound resonating most wordlessly in that ring.

And now there is a leg. An omen? A warning? It has been laid at my door, bent at the knee. The runner will miss it. Still coutoured in its turquoise silk finery and booted to mid-thigh, finished at the top with a cuff of burgundy calfskin—alas the wine taster's color. Livid at its unsocketed stub end, the leg portends what I have already seen in such frenzied imagination that it might have rushed at me from out of my own nightmare.

Who in this ciudad, after all, has not been a witness to the quarterings in the Plaza de la Salvación? Who doesn't know the legs fly first, even before the proverbially winged arms, the shoulders feathering the air with the whitest flutter just before the crimson spray? It is a sight like no other. It twists the braided thread that hooks the eye to the pit of the stomach.

My not being who I am does not distinguish me from all others with respect to this revulsion. But neither does it make more of my presence in the world than the leg itself which is a mere meated bone.

My body (mine?), by its revulsive spasm, filliates a passionate solidarity with the crowd in the Plaza de la Salvación. The throng rings the spectacle of public execution with the most violent peristaltic contractions. The noise of so many wagging tongues has a resonant stench. Garlic, anise, salty anchovy. We—I say this without having decided to join them—are pressed into one skin, perspiring and tensile with excitement, all the better to feel the imminent dismemberment of the victim squirming in the eye of the arena. The victim is already flexing the ropes that tether him to sixteen drumming hooves. Amidst the heat of the surrounding throng there is the sodden, squelched blare of the sacbutt. A crimson kerchief is released from the pinching fingertips of the bald headed bailiff. All of our breaths commingle in the rhythms of the excitable blood, as hot and vehement as the fierce breath of lovers' maws soldered into the double rictus of climax.

The ermine robed tribune of the Auto da fé stands above, upon a balustrade scaffolding. He is stillness itself.

And the first tearing of the joints is so like the orgasmic body, submerging under a translucent flood tide of frothing wavelets, the eddying muscles of pleasure released from their deeps. The crowd steps back from the clearing at the center of the Plaza de la Salvación. The odd foot lifted like a question mark is snatched from the frigid tidal line that separates us from the spectacle of victimization, but ripples through us now, routing any thought that we could wade deeper into this act of witness. The ropes snap taut with the restiveness of the horses' hooves. The blood hisses and spits from the grinding sockets. The nostrils of the horses as large as stone basins bubble and seethe with the heat of the exertion. The muscular chords stretched taut from the tossing manes to the victim's wrists and ankles bleat faintly as the sheathe of white skin begins to fray and unfurl from the raw corpuscle of muscle and ligament underneath, more like shucked leggings and gauntlets than legs and arms.

The revelation that we are all of us held together only by fine crimson threads—they are sprouting like grass where an instant ago the joints were as smooth and firm as the maker's moulding thumb—leaves a gritty dryness in the throat, as if a scorching wind were whirling. Before our eyes the trembling limbs are drawn to viscous filaments, long and scintillating as a grim mash in the maw of some devouring beast.

But I feel nothing by myself. Nothing as myself. Nothing myself. I must look around me at the other faces, engorged with indrawn breath, whites of their eyes whipping the air with disbelief, cheeks rouged with the shame of their own bodily frailty. I look at them to know I must be like them: a doll so easily broken.

A doll! It is the perfect conceit at last—one knows who one is by conceit in the best of circumstances. My wooden head. My glass eyes. The limbs hung slackly inside my silk bloused sleeves and woolen leggings may not even be crudely modeled by the dullest of knife blades to resemble the curvature of life, flexed beneath an impermeable skin. But I am just that. A doll's self.

See the doll propped in his chair at the wine maker's tasting table. See what I see, if I were I.

With the wineglass raised before the doll's lifelike visage, darkened by the blood tones of this lifeless rioja that will shortly wet my tongue with its tears, I see the convexical face of my brother, my mirror, turning in the glinting belly of the goblet. Our mirror eyes were always so sparkling and perhaps as brittle and sharp as the shattering glass. But the goblet is full. It is not broken. The goblet is as full in the cheeks as the bursting of the glass-blower's fermenting breath. The stem of the goblet is roundly modeled and pearly smooth rolling on my fingertips that I may better appreciate the ruby hue of this portraiture in light. My features swirl with the bubbling liquid. Myself and not myself. But no other. And peering into the velvet clarity of those hallmark features—hawkish nose, primped lips, dimpled chin—that twined us together in life, I know how my brother's death has killed me.

Isaac de la Concepción, my twin brother. Dead of the bite of a horsefly, just one day ago. Infected it was, as I am now by such capricious fate.

I drink to you.

Tell me, Samaritan, to whom would the glass be raised if the gesture were yours? To whom would you show such savory compassion? Does the face in the Plaza de la Salvación, the victim's grimace, seem a better choice for your charity? Does the blood pump in your heart for the dismembered victim, more crimson than anything brimming to the lip of the raised glass?

Deceiver. You felt no shiver of communion with that shivering frame. What feeling do you feel capable of yourself ? And why should you imagine that the words of Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora could give you confidence to give an invidious answer to that question? Would you strive to be better than he? Are you more innocent? More unblemished by selfhood?

Will you tell me that your deeds of compassion are more generous, to a fault? Is the pride of such selflessness not a fault?

I am not speaking to Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora. I am speaking to you. Not him.

He is only the character to you.

It supporates. The skin splits. A gash of lush fragrance. A tannic bite in the air. The air drinks before the simmering nectar has moistened any human lip. A greenish pulp. Impossible not to think of its guts. A grit of seed. A grain of sugar's pulse on the tip of the tongue. A fermenting spawn. There is always a harvest. It is the grape that yields. The expressed juice of the novitiate berry awaits its...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: F2C
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1573661678
• ISBN 13: 9781573661676
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 259
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande