Q by Luther Blissett (most recommended books txt) 📖

Antwerp, 14 May 1538

‘I became Gert “from the Well”. Matthys liked to use that silly name, but he also liked to think that our public encounter had not come about by chance. In any case, nothing was coincidence as far as he was concerned, everything had a meaning in the eyes of God, a meaning that went beyond simple appearance and spoke to men, to us, the elect. Because he thought the Baptists were the elect of the Lord, the chosen ones. It was an enterprise to be taken to its conclusion, something magnificent, something final. My John from Haarlem knew Hofmann, he had been personally baptised by him, and he had read his prophecies. The Day was nigh, the day of liberation and revenge. But I immediately understood that this baker had made a different choice from old Melchior: he wanted to fight this battle, he wanted to fight it with a passion, he was just waiting for a sign from God to declare war on the wicked and the servants of iniquity. He had a plan: assemble all the Baptists and lead them out of the world, this world of servitude and prostitution to which the powerful wanted to condemn them for all eternity. Fine, but how would you recognise the elect? Matthys never tired of repeating that Christ had chosen poor fishermen as his followers and apostles, spitting on the merchants in the Temple. Because that was what it was all about: lucre, the accursed lucre of the Dutch traders. That kind of people would select the faith they professed on the basis of their own interests, and that made them a terrible enemy. The more involved the faith was with indisputable rites and dogmas, the more attached they would be to it: basically the only reason they didn’t sympathise with the Church of Rome was that its greatest supporter, Emperor Charles, oppressed them with excessive taxes and wanted to swagger about the Low Countries like a tyrant, obstructing their business deals. It was of little importance that so many wealthy merchants were sincere in their good faith: that good faith — my Haarlem baker often said — wasn’t enough, what was needed was truth. If good faith were enough, there would be no point in redemption: “Good faith doesn’t abolish errors: many Jews, in good faith, shouted ‘crucify him’. Good faith is an idea of the Antichrist.”

‘But even more surprising than that was the way in which Matthys had unmasked the hypocrisy of the priests and the doctors who had served up the Bible from the pulpits and thrones: that wretched theology of “moral rectitude” and the inevitable “honesty”, often and gladly bestowed only by superior ranks, by the authorities.� “The Gospels, on the other hand, praise the dishonest, they are addressed to the prostitutes, the panders, not repentant prostitutes, but prostitutes as they are, the criminals, the dregs of the earth.” Praise of honesty and morality was, as far as he was concerned, the religion communicated to us by the Antichrist.

‘For that reason, it was among the common people, the artisans, the beggars and the dregs of the streets, that we would find the elect, among those who were endured more than anyone else, and who had nothing to lose but their condition as the world’s rejects. It was there that the spark of the faith in Christ and his imminent return might survive, because the conditions of those people were closer to his choice of life. Christ had chosen the disinherited, the whores and the panders? Then it was among them that we would recruit our captains for the battle.’

‘What was he like? I mean what kind of man was Jan Matthys?’

Eloi’s question comes down slowly like the evening, at the end of that day devoted to the garden and to Kathleen’s smile.

‘He was the most determined madman I had ever met. But that was before we went to M�nster. He was determined, determined enough, perhaps, to devour Hofmann and his rejection of violence. If old Melchior was Elijah, then he would be Enoch, the second witness of the Apocalypse. I had a sample of his strength when a certain Poldermann, a Zeelander from Middelburg, said that he was Enoch: Matthys leapt on to a table and subjected all the brethren assembled there to a furious torrent of abuse. Anyone who didn’t recognise him as the true Enoch would burn in hell for eternity. After which he said nothing for days. His words had been so convincing that some of our number locked themselves in a room without food or water, begging God’s mercy. It was a test of strength, oratory and determination: he won. Perhaps it wasn’t yet clear to him, but I knew that Jan Matthys was already Hofmann’s greatest rival, and something else besides: he knew how to address the rage of the humble. I felt that if he learned to channel that rage, he really would become God’s Captain, with the potential to turn the world upside down and make the last the first, to give a great shake, perhaps a final one, to the fat Province of the North.

‘He had come to Amsterdam with a woman, by the name of Divara, a magnificent creature whom he jealously kept from the eyes of everyone. They said that in his country he was married to an old woman and that he had left her to escape with this very young girl, the daughter of a Haarlem brewer. So Enoch, too, had a weak point, the same one as most men, halfway between his dick and his heart. That woman always frightened me, even before she was the queen, the prophetess, the great whore of the king of the Anabaptists. She had something terrifying in her eyes: innocence.’

‘Innocence?’

‘Yes. That quality that can make you be and do anything at all, it can make you commit the most terrible and gratuitous crime as though it were