Benito is moved into a chamber immediately under Yucé’s. To while away the tedium of his imprisonment, and with a light-heartedness that is a little startling in a man in his desperate position, Yucé sits by his window thrumming a viol or guitar one day towards the end of March or in early April. The instrument may have been left with him by the gaoler who was in the plot. What was no doubt expected comes to pass. Yucé’s music is abruptly interrupted by a voice from below, which asks: “Can you give me a needle, Jew?” Yucé replies that he has no needle other than a cobbler’s.[182] The speaker is Benito Garcia, and it is certain that spies have been set to overhear what passes. We know that their conversation took place through a hole in the floor contrived by the gaoler, who was acting upon the instructions of the inquisitors.[183] Yucé is very circumspect in all that he says; but Benito is entirely reckless during those first days of their intercourse. And yet, whilst he admits that he considers himself lost already through what “that dog of a doctor” (by which he means the Reverend Inquisitor, Dr. Villada) extracted from him under torture in Astorga, he shows himself at other times not without hope of regaining his freedom. He mentions a man named Peña, who is the Alcalde of La Guardia. This man, he says, is interested in him, and has--or so Benito fancies--influence at Court which he would exert on Benito’s behalf did he but know of the latter’s position. At another time he vows that, if ever he gets out of prison, he will quit Spain and take himself off to Judea. He is convinced that all this trouble has come upon him as a punishment for having abandoned the Law of Moses and denied the true God to embrace the religion of the Begotten God (_Dios Parido_). But apart from these, there are no lamentations from him; more usually he is sardonic in his grievances, as when he complains that all he got in return for the money he gave for the souls in purgatory were the fleas and lice that all but devoured him alive in the prison of Astorga; or that all the recompense he enjoyed for having presented the Church with a holy-water font was to be subjected to the water-torture by “that dog of a doctor in Astorga.” He vows that he will die a Jew, though he should be burnt alive. He inveighs bitterly against the inquisitors, dubbing them Antichrists, and Torquemada the greatest Antichrist of all; and he alludes derisively to what he terms the frauds and buffooneries of the Church. It was from Benito that Yucé, to his surprise, received news of his father’s arrest and of the fact that Ça Franco lies in that same prison of Avila. He was informed of this during their first talk, when Benito reproved his music. “Don’t thrum that guitar,” Benito had said, “but take pity on your father who is here and whom the inquisitors have promised to burn.”[184]