Blood Secret (13 page)

The queen passes by. Even from here we can see that the queen does not wear her years well. Stout and slightly bent, she raises a jeweled hand to wave at the throngs of people. The king looks much younger by comparison. Luis has been silent all this time. Then he speaks. “You see that man riding in
the carriage behind the monarchs?”

“Yes,” I say.

“That is the queen’s confessor—Torquemado.”

There is a thin smile on the man’s face.

Luis’s hand clasps my hand more tightly now. He begins to speak in a low voice. “It is Torquemado who tells the Muslims not to fear anything. He says that the queen gives them guarantees of full liberty to practice their religion. To protect their property and customs. He says that Ferdinand and Isabella took a solemn oath promising this. I don’t believe it. The queen and king are weak and stupid. Torquemado will turn them, despite their oath.” Luis’s face has turned deathly pale.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

He turns his dear face to me. “Would I kill them if I could, Esther? Would I kill the queen, the king, and their confessor, Torquemado, who are responsible for my parents’ deaths? I am a physician now. I am pledged through my oath to save lives at any cost. But I do hate.” His nostrils pinch together and I know what he is thinking, no, not thinking, smelling. He told me about it once. I had begged him not long ago to tell me all about what had happened in Seville. I felt that I must somehow share
his burden, the burden of his parents’ deaths. So he told me about the stench of those fires sizzling with the flesh of his parents. How the stench of the burnings every day for more months than he could remember finally drove him from Seville. He ran not simply to save himself but to escape the terrible fumes of burning flesh.

“How in God’s name do I heal myself of hatred, Esther? If it becomes like the life blood that courses through my veins, that pumps through my heart, how am I then any better than Torquemado?”

I cannot answer him. Then behind me I hear the clatter of a small object falling on the tile of the balcony and the sweet scent of lime oil fills the air. “Abuela!” I scream.

And then Abuela, in a very clear voice, almost that of a little girl, says a most peculiar thing. “Don Solomon!
Adecuado por
…” I do not even have time to wonder who this Don Solomon is, for the words die on my great-grandmother Miriam’s lips as the lime-scented oil spills from the vial.

Luis was right. No promises were kept, no guarantees respected. Indeed, my memory of our second-
to-last night in Granada was not that of Luis’s and my wedding held in the synagogue on the Street of the Jews, but of clapping my hands over David’s ears as the voice of a town crier called out the news: Six Jews and two Conversos had confessed to performing an “act of conjuration” by tearing out the heart of a Christian child they had crucified on Good Friday a week past.

Blood libel. So now it had come to Granada. Luis had told me some stories that he had heard in Seville and other towns he had passed through years before, on his way to Granada. The most famous case had been the Holy Child of La Guardia. A body was never found. A child was never reported missing yet eight people were arrested, tried, and executed for a crime that never happened. It was all part of a strategy, Luis said. When it could not be proven that Conversos were secretly practicing Judaism, the officers of the Inquisition, the tribunals, began to spread myths about Jewish religious crimes, such as ritual murder or the desecration of the host. And these accusations had the added benefit of not just striking at the Conversos but the professed Jews as well.

The first story of blood libel in Granada was
made public on March 28. Two days later, on March 30, in the council chamber of the captured Alhambra, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand signed the decree that drove into exile every Jew in Spain. We would have until the end of July to leave.

Now our family has been on the road for many days traveling west toward the frontier of Portugal. They say that there is no Inquisition in Portugal, that there are no tribunals. We must just pay a certain number of Portuguese
cruzados
for a tax and they will allow us to settle. I am tired of riding in the wagon next to Mama, who is still crying about Abuela Miriam. So sometimes I get out and walk. I cannot cry for her. I think she was an old lady of over one hundred years when she died. She had moved from Seville to Toledo, from Toledo to Granada—why in God’s name should she have to move to Portugal?

“Will we be allowed to settle anywhere in the country, Luis?” I ask.

“So they say,” Luis replies in a distracted manner.

We are approaching Guadalquivir River, the river that begins in Seville. I must keep talking. This part of our journey will be unbearably hard for my dear husband. Too many memories. Although it has been
hard for us to leave Granada, I believe with every step it takes me and Luis away from a vile country and two demon monarchs to a better place. The glorious kingdom of Castille, the jewel of Spain, to me is an obscene place. If Luis and I are blessed with children, I would never want them born on Spanish soil.

We climb to the crest of a hill now. Below, the sinuous river flows into the port of Palos. All the wagons are stopping, for the view is grand. The sight in the harbor below us is an arresting one. Three ships with royal banners flying bob silently on their anchor cables.

“So that is the grand enterprise,” Papa says as he walks over to us.

“Yes, the ships of Columbus.” Luis sighs. “He saved my uncle’s life.”

“Who, Columbus?” Papa and I both say at once.

“Christopher Columbus. He seeks to sail to the Indies. My Uncle Tomás was released from prison after he was arrested with my father because he, along with Luis Santangel, the king’s exchequer, had argued Columbus’s cause to the king and queen and raised much of the money. And Tomás’s daughter was to marry Santangel’s son.”

“So they seek a new world,” Papa says softly.

“A new world to make filthy,” I hiss.

The sound of tambourines swallows my words. It is the two rabbis who have been a half kilometer behind us. They refused our offer to ride in the wagons but insist on walking side by side with the people singing songs, chanting prayers, telling stories. Emmanuel and David have walked with them for several miles. I am suddenly ashamed of my bitter words. I must be like these two rabbis—cheerful and ready to encourage. I am a spoiled girl. There is no room nor time for spoiled girls now.

This world that I am leaving will begin to fade. Could there be some way of keeping the good parts and forgetting the bad? I will remember our Sabbath dinners, the light dwindling in the sky, my father’s mother lighting the Shabbos candles. In the summer there was the smell of the wax swirled with the scent of the jasmine that blew in from our walled garden. I remember the first time that Abuelo Cardozo told me that some believed that the Sabbath came as a bride, a beautiful bride, dressed I then imagined in a gown of lace like the lace of my great-great-grandmother Doña Grazia Sanchez. And I shall of course remember always
the splendor of the Alhambra, where we were sometimes invited by the court apothecary to come visit. There were the gardens, the pavilions, and the pools. But what had fascinated me the most was the filigreed stonework and plaster that made the palace and all the buildings seem as if they had been constructed from lace. I must think of these things now. They will take my mind away from the heat, the soreness of my feet, the tedium of this endless journey to Portugal. I remember how Papa would play a game with me and Avraham. We would stand in front of one of the stone walls that had been pierced to make a seeming infinity of designs—rosettes, entangled figures, a myriad of geometric shapes—and then he would ask us to find the patterns. It was like a treasure hunt. I was very good at it. Papa told me that I had a lace maker’s eye, just like my great-great-grandmother Grazia Sanchez.

I have with me in the trunk that was once Abuela Miriam’s some of the pieces of lace that Doña Grazia made so long ago in Seville. And in my pocket is the perfume vial. I run my fingers over the vial, and even without seeing find the patterns. I know the loveliness of the designs. How could God
create a human mind capable of conceiving such subtle and intricate patterns and one that could invent as well the atrocities of blood libel? How for that matter could the Inquisition have been invented, the
quemaderos
, the machines of torture that I have heard rumors and whispers about that lurk in the dungeon prisons beneath the great cities like Seville and Toledo and Madrid?

I must stop walking for a second. The sun beats down on my head, through my scarf to that patch I always scratch. The sun feels like a hammer on an anvil that is my head. My bad habit, that patch! How long have the women in my family been doing this? How many have scratched themselves bald? I don’t like to think about it. I press my hands to my eyes. Sunspots and little broken curly designs dance on the insides of my eyelids. A pattern…a pattern. I shall look for a pattern. In the trunk there is a small piece of lace, stained, but with a pattern like that of the scales of a dragonfly’s wings. I close my eyes tighter and try to picture its delicate design. But suddenly I know that the stain is blood. It is blood and it is spreading. The lace is becoming drenched in blood. Blood lace, blood libel. The words swirl in my head. An inconceivable notion
like a shadow crosses my mind: Is it possible that there is no God? Or worse, is it possible that God has simply left us, abandoned us on this dusty road? Has God really forsaken me? That is my last thought as I slowly crumple to the ground and breathe in the dust of the road.

I
T WAS
F
RIDAY NIGHT
. Jerry was dressing with care. She tied her hair back with a velvet ribbon and put on a pretty blouse that Constanza had bought her for Easter. She tucked it into some new gray wool slacks that she had bought on a recent shopping trip and thought were too nice to wear for school. There was a deep silence in the house. So deep that any little sound seemed to pop out with an exclamation mark. And what Jerry heard now was the rasp of a match being struck. Jerry paused. These were not Lenten candles. These were Shabbos candles, candles just like the ones Esther had watched her grandmother light in Granada. But Aunt Constanza didn’t know this. Her aunt spoke the truth. She simply did not know. And who did know, for when a custom, a tradition, is cut off from its roots or
practiced so long in secret, it begins to disintegrate. It becomes lost or turned into something it was never intended through some strange process of denial. Jerry imagined these things, these traditions like tattered remnants, unintelligible, or shattered pieces like fossils smashed on the desert of what once had been a rich faith, then picked up again, perhaps unrecognizable and patched into something else. A crazy quilt of faith and gods and ritual.

Constanza’s back was facing her as she came into the kitchen. Outside the light was dwindling in the sky. She could smell the wax, the wax as it mingled with the sagebrush. How far had they come? Why do I know, Jerry thought, why she lights these candles, and she does not? Why do I know why she throws the piece of dough in the oven, and she does not? Why do I know that this time between time, this holy time that happens every seventh day and arrives like a mystical bride veiled in lace to be welcomed on the Sabbath day, is called Shabbos, and she does not?

The light drained from the sky, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—minutes before red and feverish—turned violet and then a dusky blue. The first stars pierced the sky as Jerry and Constanza sat
down to the roast chicken.

Constanza looked out the window over the two flickering candles. “Ah, Estrellita.” She sighed, and a look of utter peace settled upon her face.

“What?” Jerry asked aloud.

“Estrellita—‘little star.’ You know
estrella,
that is ‘star’ in Spanish, but these first stars are called
estrellitas
. My great-great-oh, so many greats-grandmother’s name was Estrella. Lovely name. And when she was little, they sometimes called her Estrellita—little star. I liked that so much I had a dolly that I called Estrellita.”

“Estrella?” Jerry spoke the name softly. “Was there ever anyone named Esther?”

Constanza looked momentarily confused. “I don’t think so. Why would there be anyone named Esther?”

Should she tell her? There was so much to tell. Where to begin? She had no idea. “Well,” Jerry said finally. “As you told Padre, I am sorting things out. And last night I found this.”

“What’s that?” Constanza squinted across the table.

“A vial, a perfume vial. It belonged to a girl named Esther, and her middle name was de Luna.
Esther de Luna Cardozo Perez.”

“Yes, well, maybe Esther is close to Estrella. I told you,” Constanza said, dishing out some blue corn and mashed potatoes. “Estrella’s been a favorite middle name for many generations.”

“Yes, many. Esther de Luna Cardozo lived in Spain, in Granada, until she left in 1492 when all the Jews were expelled.” Constanza was holding the serving spoon midair, her eyes riveted on Jerry.

“Maybe your many great-greats-grandmother Estrellita was named for another great-great-grandmother named Esther,” Jerry said.

“Are you trying to tell me that we’re Jewish?”

“I’m not sure, Aunt. Does it bother you?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a shock. That’s all. I mean, I thought I was a Roman Catholic. I was raised Catholic.”

“I know. So was I.”

“Confusing, isn’t it?”

“Very,” Jerry replied.

C
ONSTANZA
L
UNA STOOD
over the sleeping form and watched the dim, flickering movements of Jerry’s eyes under her lids. It was three hours past midnight. In another half an hour she would have to start the fires in the hornos, but she didn’t know what to make of what Jerry had told her tonight. There were many things that were unexplainable to Constanza. Not everyone lit candles on Friday night, she knew that; but her own mother had, and not just during Lent. So she had just kept up the practice. And some things she did that might seem odd to others she just chalked up to superstition. There was some aunt on the Indian side of the family, which she guessed was the Morillo side, who had always done it, and she had just assumed it had come up from the Yucatán Peninsula. But she wasn’t sure
what Jerry was talking about here.

She knew Jerry often went to the cellar at night. That’s where she got these things—the vial, the letter. She hadn’t pried. She didn’t need to. She knew what the child did down there. What she herself had only dared to do once—open the trunk. It was too peculiar. Her sister, Jeraldine Luna Morillo, who was much older, had the trunk up until she died. She had called it a hope chest. Hope chest! Of all things. But Jeraldine was a little bit off—everyone knew that. Nice but off. She had a crazy daughter, Elizabeth—Betty, they called her then. Betty had Mildred, and Mildred had Jerry. The minute Constanza had opened the trunk that one time years and years ago, she knew there wasn’t anything like hope in it. Just awful musty things but each one with a kind of terrible dark little halo. She had picked up that same piece of old lace Jerry had shown her. She saw that stain—pale, brownish in color. She knew it was blood. Somebody’s blood. There was violence in that trunk and dark secrets and she did not want to know them. Yet at the same time she had been fearful to throw out the trunk. Superstitious, perhaps? Was she just turning into an old bundle of superstitions? She threw pinches
of bread in the oven, never swept the dirt out the door. Was her candle lighting just part of all that?

And then tonight Jerry tells her this thing about Jews in the family. Jews do things on Friday nights? News to her. She never knew, she never cared before Jerry came, and she could not answer Jerry for any of it except to say “just some old superstition.” And superstition had no place in her faith. God was not a superstition. Constanza was a good Catholic. She had been baptized in the church. Had become a communicant when she was what, eight, nine years old? There was no room for superstition in a true believer. But the truth was that she was superstitious of that trunk and she had been so fearful of it that she had never touched it in years and years.

As she looked down at Jerry, from the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of paper on the floor. She bent to pick it up. It appeared to be the corner of a map—a very old map. The map showed a landmass, or the fragment of a landmass, that vaguely resembled a horn that hooked into a sea—not a sea, a gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, and on the other side of the horn was the Pacific. The fragment of land that she was looking at was the Yucatán Peninsula. This
is where her people had come from. This was where maybe Estrella had been born. This is from where, it was said, the old bread recipes came, the bakers of the family. The Yucatán bakers. Her great-grandmother had told her that. Constanza’s hands began to tremble as she held the piece of paper. If the child can do it, why can’t I?