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The Defenestrations
Chapter 1
by Jessica Zafra

Part 1

He should’ve known better.

Granted, it does not follow that if your forebears met untimely deaths through a window, a similar doom awaits you. Windows, as far as we can tell, cannot commit murder.

And yet, if he had given a modicum of thought to his family history, he might’ve been a bit more attentive. He might have noticed his surroundings. He might have read the Warning signs in several languages, seen the stanchions and the heavy rope, and the two workmen arguing loudly beside the famous window. He might have heard the tour guide shout, “Watch it!”

But Inigo Villa-Real, 22, social media influencer, was not someone who let thought get in the way of his actions. “Don’t think, do,” declared the T-shirt he had collaborated on with a fast fashion retailer. In the time you spent thinking of whether to publish this photo or that story, someone could post it first and get all the likes. He didn’t have to be right, he just had to be first, and anyway “right” was whatever got the most likes.

So he kept his eyes on his phone screen as he walked backwards into our story.

Part 2

The window looked like every other window at Prague Castle, and there was no particular reason why it was chosen for this purpose. A window on a higher floor would’ve been more effective. But all that was required was a window of sufficient size, at a distance from the ground that would lead to grave damage if not the grave itself, a window that was there.

In 1618 the city of Prague in the kingdom of Bohemia in the Hapsburg Empire was convulsed by dissension between the Catholics and the Protestants. It is hard to imagine a time in history in which societies were not riven by factional discord. No doubt when the first human had the idea of walking erect on two legs, she was attacked by neighbors accustomed to crawling on their hands and knees. Who does she think she is? You think you’re above us?

In this case the discord boiled over into violence, not that this was out of the ordinary, either. History really is rather predictable and boring, if we were to examine it from a distance, as through a large, open window, but we do not see it until we fall right through.

The Protestant members of the Bohemian Estates had sent a letter to the King in Vienna expressing their grievances. We will not go into the details because this story is not about them. The King sent a condescending response which made them angrier. The time for negotiations was over.

On the morning of 23 May 1618, the Protestant conspirators went to the Castle and occupied the offices of the royal administration. Six of the officials had expected this kind of trouble, and conveniently arranged to be out of the office. Of the four officials who were present, two were moderates and were allowed to leave. The two remaining officials, who had stood against the Protestant conspirators for many years, were seized and thrown out the window. One of them clung to the window sill until someone pounded on his fingers with the hilt of a dagger.

Meanwhile, a secretary was caught trying to sneak out of the room, so the conspirators grabbed him and tossed him out the window as well.

All three men survived their defenestration. The height of the fall was insufficient to cause certain death. Explanations of their survival followed party lines. The Catholics declared that a miracle wrought by the Blessed Virgin had saved the falling men. The Protestants said the three men had landed on a pile of excrement (Flush toilets had not been invented yet).

When news of the defenestrations got around, there was widespread rioting, ransacking of churches, and murdering of monks. As with all religious wars through the ages, a mob marched on the Jewish town to kill Jews.

Part 3

If Inigo had bothered to read a guide, he might have learned a bit of the history of the Thirty Year’s War, but he had no interest in “old stuff”. He was not so much stupid as willfully ignorant, and at school was exactly the kind of student who would sneer at classmates who knew the answers to the teachers’ questions.

That the Villa-Real (not to be confused with Villareal) line would come to this, that generations of intelligent, accomplished women and men should culminate in this undistinguished specimen, was a tragedy that made the concept of a family curse seem plausible. As far as anyone could tell, Inigo did not believe in anything and aspired to nothing, other than to increase his following on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

Perhaps it was too much to expect him to follow in the footsteps of his great-great-grandfather Patrocinio, who had been a friend of Rizal and the Ilustrados. During the Commonwealth period Patrocinio had gone into engineering and construction, building some of the Philippines’ best-known landmarks and making a great fortune in the process. “Infrastructure is real and useful, unlike politics,” snorted the old man, who seldom missed a day of work unless it was spent with his beloved wife and children. Long after his contemporaries had retired, he visited building sites, tapping on walls and testing doors to make sure everything was in order.

On that day in 1935, Patrocinio was inspecting a ten-storey building in Binondo, Manila when he tried to open a window on the ninth floor. It was stuck. He gripped the latch and pushed, but it would not budge. The old man, never one to give up, put his weight on the recalcitrant window, which came off its hinges with a crack and plunged to the street below, taking Patrocinio with it.

This was not the first time a Villa-Real had been killed in proximity to a window. Patrocinio’s own great-uncle Eladio, a poet and an ardent admirer of woman, was reading romantic sonnets to the comely young wife of the lighthouse keeper when a shadow fell over them. It was not, as one might expect, the lighthouse keeper, but one of the many young women whom Eladio had dedicated sonnets to. Before Eladio and the lighthouse keeper’s wife had time to react to this intrusion, before Eladio could stand up from his perch on the lighthouse window, the young woman had pushed him to his death on the rocks below.

Part 4

Perhaps it was a family curse, because what other explanation could there be for the death of Patrocinio’s son, Lauro, who was brushing his teeth by a fourth floor window when he was seized by a heart attack, his fourth, that caused him to crash head-first through the glass? Or to Lauro’s son, Claudio, Inigo’s father, who was smoking a cigarette in his 35th floor office when the son of his most important client had a psychotic break and ran screaming down the hallway. Claudio, who went to the gym twice a week, attempted to arrest the skinny young man’s progress, but the young man’s momentum carried them both towards the hallway window and they fell out, enmeshed in a fatal embrace.

And now we get to Inigo Villa-Real, the second of four children, a young man who had never known privation in his life, who had gone to the best schools money could buy entrance to, who had never exerted himself or had need to, who was on a seven-day tour of seven European countries sponsored by an artisanal organic energy drink, and had exactly eighteen minutes to cover the entirety of the Prague Castle complex. His guide, whose edifying lectures on Czech history and culture he had managed not to hear, had led him to this large, mostly empty room. Inigo decided on a quick walk-through for his vlog, filming what he considered the only thing worthy of attention in that room: himself.

“I thought this castle would be cool,” he declared to his phone camera as he walked backwards into the room, past the warning signs, past the stanchions, past the arguing workmen, “But it’s like a bunch of old build…” and then he walked backwards through the window.

What happens next?

Chapter 2 (by a different author) begins on Monday.