1664. Carta de Luis Gómez de Vargas, mercader, para su hermano Manuel Gómez de Vargas, sirviente.

Letter from Luis Gómez de Vargas, a merchant, to his brother Manuel Gómez de Vargas, a servant.

The author informs his brother Manuel Gómez de Vargas about his health and his situation, and asks his brother about the same things.

In 1662, Luis Gómez de Vargas was accused of being a judaizer, and was eventually reconciled. He had been seized two letters which he had tried to get to his brother Manuel, who has been imprisoned in a secret jail. Luis had suspected that his brother had been imprisoned because during a hearing he had been called Manuel, and he had deduced that his brother had been arrested too. He tried to bribe the supplier of the jail with a doubloon to convince him to get the letters to his brother. He afterwards confessed that he had written the two letters, claiming that he did not know very well what he had written, because he was in a state of confusion. The first of the two letters was found by the wife of the supplier in a pot, and writing tools were found in the cell of Luis. When interrogated, he related that one day, when he went to take water, he heard his brother singing a song, and since that moment he started feeling a strong desire to write him, but he was afraid of the strong surveillance they were under. He related that a part of the texts he wrote was written as if he was a woman, to confuse the reader in case that the letter were seized. He explained also how to interpret some allusions he made in the letters. The signature was false. The author had also encoded the letter: the text of the encoded letter can be found in the description, and it is slightly different from the text of the original.