In 1691, the same year as the bonfires, the Majorcan Inquisition was fighting another legal battle: with the Viceroy and the Royal Court, over a prisoner. Her name was Catalina Font, she was known as «la Comendadora», and she was accused of witchcraft. Both courts claimed her.
In the royal prison her cellmates were afraid of her. One day la Comendadora told them she did not want to be at odds with them and gave each of them an apple «to make peace». «And we would not have it». One of them, terrified, threw the nails she kept in her room out of the window, so they could not be used against her.
The nails had their reason. According to the witnesses, to kill someone you only had to drive a nail into the root of a tree: when the iron reached the tree's heart, the tree and the man died together.
In 1694 she was in prison again. At midnight she would undress and lie on the floor, and there was no way to wake her. Her cellmates burned her foot with the oil lamp, and even then she did not stir. The Majorca of 1691 was not only that of the conversos: it had its witches, its jurisdictional quarrels and its fears too.
