Aldonza’s mother and an Officer of the Inquisition are sitting across a table from each other in a basement dungeon. They stink to high heaven, both of them. Remember, it is illegal to bathe. I am writing this just to make you remember; it is Inquisition-era Spain, and it is illegal to bathe. I feel like you haven’t gotten this enough into your head, the madness of this. I need you to get it.

“Do you know what you have been accused of?” asks the man.

“Whatever I say next, you’ll think that that’s what I’ve done,” says Aldonza’s mother, “so I think I’ve been accused of nothing. I think someone has seen me sitting around doing nothing, and they said to themselves, ‘that woman there, she is doing too much of nothing— very suspicious, how much nothing she’s doing,’ and they came and told you that I was just too innocent, something must have been wrong, and now here I am.”

“Someone has seen you bathing,” says the man, like he has dropped down a heavy millstone onto her feathery, bird-bone hands. Crunch! Crack!

“It’s illegal to bathe in Inquisition-era Spain, did you know that?” “Me? Bathing? That seems unlikely, given the smell in this room...” says Aldonza’s mother, “unless you’d like to take full responsibility?”

Maybe he’ll have her killed for that, but it was too good to pass up.

She’s young in this story, did you know that? This happened before she married Aldonza’s father, before Aldonza was born– though of course she is still Aldonza’s mother; the girl has come splashing backward like sloshing laundry-water over all the earlier moments of the woman’s life. “If you’d like to bathe,” she says to the man, “I promise not to tell.”

The man laughs, actually. She’s going to live, actually, because she’s made him laugh. He tells her that– really, honestly– he doesn’t see the point of all this. He thinks it’s ridiculous, not being allowed to bathe, why? Just because it was the Moors who brought bathing to Spain? What’s so bad about North Africa anyway? He’s heard that there are beautiful cities in North Africa. He’s heard that there are lots of different kinds of amazing food in North Africa, all sorts of spices and flavors.

“Colorful food,” he says, to say it. “Sometimes,” he says, “I wonder what it tastes like, food cooked in oil.”

Because it’s also illegal to cook food in oil in Inquisition-era Spain, it’s also illegal to wear clean clothes– do you remember that? Do you remember that it’s also illegal to eat meat on Fridays? It’s illegal to eat food while sitting on the floor or on a pillow. “I’ve heard stories,” says the man, “about how they eat food in Morocco, all sitting on pillows on the floor, with a little table, no higher than your shins– and doesn’t that seem so comfortable? You can sit, or you can even lean a bit back while you eat, or prop yourself up on one of your elbows– that’s what I hear. I don’t know, it seems comfortable to me. Sometimes,” he says, “I wish I could try something like that.”

He says he’s thought about trying it, and maybe he wouldn’t get caught if he did it just once. How would anybody catch him? How would anybody ever know if he just did it in his home, away from the windows? “What sort of horrible thing would happen, I mean, if I ate on the floor just one time? Would all the buildings of Madrid and Barcelona and Toledo and Seville come tumbling down?”

Sometimes, he says, he wonders how it is that his Kingdom can hate a place or a group of people so much that they make it illegal to be even a little bit like them, even just a little bit like how they are. Sometimes, he says, or maybe a lot of the time, he wonders why the Moriscos don’t just go back. Doesn’t it seem like they would be so much happier there? He asks Aldonza’s mother why she’s never gone back, and she tells him that she’s never been to Morocco or to anywhere else, actually, aside from Spain— and she’s hardly been all that many places throughout Spain, either. She’s just a simple country girl, is all she is, she tells him.

He tells her that he wishes he didn’t have to do things like this– sit across a table with someone like this and bury them under ridiculous questions. Has she been a part of any secret prayers lately?

“Don’t answer that, don’t answer that,” he tells her, laughing. She doesn’t have to answer that; he doesn’t really care about that; he doesn’t want to know that. Please don’t tell him that, actually, because he doesn’t want to have to do anything about that. He doesn’t want to have to start a whole thing– Aldonza’s mother seems nice, she seems like a good kid, she really does, and she’s having a rough enough day already, isn’t she?

“Nobody wants to get dragged down here on a Wednesday, I know,” he tells her, “Or a Tuesday, or a Friday, or any day. I don’t want to be here, either– wasting both of our time, really. If I weren’t stuck down here asking stupid questions, I’d be with my wife and my daughters, I think. I don’t spend nearly enough time with them, I think. I’ve been spending way too much of my time down here, sitting across from people who didn’t do anything.”

The man asks Aldonza’s mother if she has any children, and she answers that in about six years she’ll have a daughter of her own, but that will be a huge shift for her. She tells him that right now, she can’t imagine having any children, and she can’t even imagine imagining it— it’s so far away from everything she thinks she wants right now.

“Yeah, I remember being so young.”

The man asks Aldonza’s mother what she would be doing if she weren’t stuck here right now with her family — off making trouble somewhere?

“Don’t answer that, don’t answer that,” he laughs, and she’s laughing, too, now. They talk a bit more, she and the man, and then after that, he tells her what needs to happen for her to finally get out of here, for him to finally get out of here, for both of them to go home and be done with this, finally.

“Obviously, you can confess,” he laughs. “You can tell me about all those secret prayers I mentioned, or you can tell me where you’ve been hiding all your secret copies of the Quran, or you can say that you’ve been spitting out your bacon after chewing it, or how you’ve been speaking Arabic behind closed doors– or maybe you’ve been plotting to kill the King,” he says, and then he says haven’t we all been plotting to kill the King at one point or another, but of course it doesn’t count if you’re plotting around tax time, so he’s probably safe, saying that.

“That’s not the good way out of this room, though, confessing all of that, and I don’t think you’ve been doing all of that, anyway,” says the man. “Maybe you know someone who is. The better way out of this room is to tell me the better place to start looking.”

He has a quota, you know? There’s a pace that these things need to happen at, never mind the world. The world is starting to become that pace, maybe, says the man, with a sigh, with a shake of his head. Maybe, he says, people have spent so much time now not caring about the pace of the world that the world has started to care less about the pace of people. Everything is go, go, go, going, going, going.

He’s had a long week, sorry, says the man. He’s had a lot on his mind, sorry. “You probably aren’t going to give me any names, are you, says the man, and that’s okay, that’s probably the right thing not to do, I mean, would he really be giving out names, either? People should stick together, he thinks. People stop being people when they stop sticking together, he thinks.”

“That leaves just sitting here and talking,” he says. For a few more hours, probably, so that the other Officers will be satisfied. “The way it is is that I’ve got to really put the screws to you so to speak, I mean, only so to speak, don’t worry, I’ve just got to keep you here long enough and seem to be yelling at you enough that the other Officers will be sure that I’ve gotten everything out of you that there is to get out of you. I’m going to shout at you in a minute, by the way, something like ‘Do you know what I’ll do to you if you keep lying to me?’ or ‘We have your sister in the other room’— we don’t, don’t worry, that’s a bluff, nine times out of ten— ‘I wonder what will happen to you if she tells me what I want to know before you do?’—stuff like that. But honestly, we can keep talking a while longer. I like sitting and talking. I get a lot out of just sitting and talking, really.”

They sit, and they talk. They talk about church on Fridays and Sundays, and they talk about the Priest. “Have you ever noticed how he...?" "Oh, and do you remember when...?" “You must have been just a baby when that happened." "No, I remember it." "Oh, I was thinking of another time, actually, when he..." "I was only..." Have you ever spoken to that old one-armed bookseller in the marketplace?" “People sometimes talk about the old man in the crumbling old manor up on the hill. Quijana, yeah. Lorenzo, I think, or not, that was his father. "People talk about that family. I hear a lot about that family, you know." "We’ve been hearing about that family up there for a long time— it’s just the one old man, now, but his younger brother, did you know?" "We’ve been looking at that family for a long time."

“It really is ridiculous,” says the man, leaning back in his chair, tipping his chair back a little, as relaxed as a person can be in a place like this. He took the chains off of Aldonza’s mother’s wrists ages ago– she’s up and walking around the room– she’s trying to see if she can see the stars at all, through the thin crack between the thick curtains over the narrow windows up near the ceiling.

“Ridiculous, the things that people get dragged away for, dragged here for. You know, once I had to interview a woman for a whole night and a half because someone overheard her mentioning that Friday was her favorite day of the week– it should have been Sunday, of course, that was the problem. We tortured a man once for saying that anti-Zionism isn’t the same thing as anti-semitism. Once, another man, in the thumbscrews, he had– allegedly– smiled at someone in the marketplace– one of the prisoners. We did that."

"Can you believe that we did that? Sometimes,” says the man, “I can’t believe that we did that. Or a boy— can you believe that?— just a boy— and he wasn’t even caught bathing, it wasn’t even that. He was only washing his hands— or that’s what people said. Only washing his hands– and what’s wrong with that? Well, of course, you know what’s wrong with that,” says the man.

“I’m sure you know. It’s part of the ritual of praying, isn’t it? For Muslims, right? In North Africa. In Morocco– what is it called again? It’s ‘Wudu’, right? Isn’t that what it’s called? ‘Wudu’?”

Aldonza’s mother suddenly goes silent. The smile vanishes from her face. She walks away from the wall with the windows and sits back down in her chair. She answers, quietly, calmly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

The man lets out a snort.

“Hmm.”-- it won’t be so easy, then. The officer leans forward, across the table. “Alright,” he says. “Alright. Let’s continue, shall we?” “Let’s do it.” “So. You’ve been accused of bathing. Three key witnesses have testified that, at various times, they have seen you washing yourself. How do you respond to this?”

The night stretches long into the morning.