The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (15 page)

Clara quickly shooed the children out of the room. She and her husband moved from the table to the couch to spectate, not believing what was happening before their very eyes: Gabriel daring to raise his voice to Mercada.

Mercada went on calmly eating her soup and asked, “Have you finished?”

“No, I haven't finished. You ruined my life and now
you're
complaining?”

She stopped eating for the first time since he'd started talking, and leaning on her cane, stood up and looked him directly in the face. “Listen to me, disobedient son that you are! If you hadn't killed your father because of the Ashkenazia, none of this would have happened. If your father hadn't died because of the catastrophe you brought down on our family, today you'd be married to a wife who's one of ours from a fine and respected home, a wife who would have brought respect to the family, not a cleaner of English people's toilets! You would have married like a king, not a pauper. Not only did you have
una boda sin cantadores,
a wedding without singers, you had
una boda sin novia,
a wedding without a bride, and it wasn't me, it was
you
who brought this curse and this bride down on yourself.”

Gabriel took a deep breath, leaned over the table, looked his mother in the eye, and said quietly, “You are my mother and I've respected you all my life. You were always the most important woman in my life, even when there was another woman who was as important to me as life itself,” he said, avoiding any mention of Rochel's name. “But listen and listen well: You chose the bride for me, you married me to Rosa, and she's the mother of my daughter, your granddaughter. She will bear me more children and she'll be the mother of my children. From here to eternity, until the day I or she dies, I shall care for her, provide her with food and clothing. If she dies before me, I'll say kaddish for her. If I die before her, she'll be my widow, and when her time comes, she'll have a place beside me in the Mount of Olives cemetery. From this day on, she is the woman of my house. She is the senora. You will live in her house, not she in yours. From this day on, you will treat her with respect, as if she is a queen, no less, a queen! From this day on Rosa is Senora Ermosa, wife of Gabriel Ermosa, mother of Luna Ermosa, and daughter-in-law of Mercada Ermosa, and you will treat her as a mother-in-law treats a daughter-in-law, just as I treat her as a husband treats his wife.”

Mercada didn't move, and Gabriel took another deep breath. Then, in a quiet, authoritative voice, he said to his mother, “And now, por favor, get up and collect your things. You're coming home with me.”

A few days later, when Rosa took Luna for their daily walk to the Mahane Yehuda Market, Mercada locked the door of the room that was hers and Raphael's. With great difficulty she dragged the heavy bed away from the wall, counted seven tiles on each side, and exactly in the middle of the room she lifted a tile and from a nook in the wall removed a pile of coins and gold she'd salted away for years. She gathered all the coins into a scarf and tied it into a bundle. Then she went to the wardrobe, took out a few dresses, kerchiefs, and her jewelry box, packed it all into a bag, kissed the mezuzah, and without a backward glance left the house and walked toward the taxi station on Jaffa Road, where she paid a driver to take her to her daughter Allegra's house in Tel Aviv.

When Gabriel got home from the market that day, he went into his mother's room and saw that the bed had been moved and that the space once hidden behind the tile was empty. Without a word he replaced the tile and dragged the bed back to its place, left the room, and from that day forth never entered it.

Gabriel couldn't go on living for another minute in the house where his father had died and in which his mother had abandoned him. But he was also unable to leave the house where he and his siblings had been raised. If only he'd had the courage, he would have looked for a house for himself and his family as far as possible from Ohel Moshe. If only he could have moved away from it all, left the shop in the Mahane Yehuda Market, and turned over a new leaf. But the burden of making a living and providing for his wife and daughter weighed heavily on his shoulders.

Gabriel had become a sad, silent man. The only one who could put a smile on his face was his daughter Luna. When the baby boy born after Luna died before he was a week old, Gabriel didn't shed a single tear and was glad that Rosa didn't either. They buried the child and went back to the routine of their life.

Once every few months he would visit his mother in Tel Aviv, but she'd still treat him like a stranger.

“Dio santo, Gabriel, why do you bother?” his sister Allegra asked him. “May God forgive me, she's my mother, but I wouldn't wish a mother like her on my worst enemy.”

He shrugged, and despite Mercada's cruel and hurtful behavior, he continued his trips to Tel Aviv.

On one such visit, his brother-in-law Elazar, Allegra's husband, suggested that he open a branch of Raphael Ermosa & Sons, Delicatessen, in Tel Aviv. “There's a good location on Shabazi Street. How about opening another shop there?”

Gabriel considered the proposition: Leon and Leito can continue running the shop in Jerusalem, I'll move to Tel Aviv with my wife and daughter, and perhaps, he hoped, I'll be able to regain a place in my mother's heart.

*   *   *

The young family moved to Tel Aviv into a small house on Hayarkon Street, walking distance from the new shop. Almost from the start the delicatessen became a grocery store, selling basic foodstuffs, as the residents of Shabazi Street couldn't afford delicacies.

Rosa hated every moment in Tel Aviv and dreamed of returning to Jerusalem, even daring to express her feelings to her sister-in-law Allegra.

“I miss it, I miss the Jerusalem air. I can't inhale the air of Tel Aviv. Everything here is dust and sand dunes and camels, basta. I miss Jerusalem, the Mahane Yehuda Market, my neighbors in Ohel Moshe. And the sea, leshos, keep it far away. It scares me. You can go into it, but God help you if you can't get out.”

Unlike Rosa, Gabriel liked the White City, and even though the shop on Shabazi Street didn't bring in the income he'd hoped, he wasn't ready to give up so easily and went on fighting for it. In order to survive, he fired his only assistant and every day cycled from Neveh Tzedek to Jaffa to buy stock from the Arabs. That was the straw that broke the camel's back, since he viewed the task as beneath his dignity. At the first opportunity he sold his share to his brother-in-law Elazar and prepared to return to Jerusalem. But then Nissim, Rosa's brother who had fled to America at the time of the Turks, returned to Palestine and made Gabriel an offer he couldn't refuse.

“The most successful thing in New York right now,” he told Gabriel, “is the shoeshine parlor. You need to rent a big shop, get hold of a few shoeshine boys, sit them in the shop, and they'll shine gentlemen's shoes.”

Nono Gabriel, who was both a gentleman and something of a dandy who liked his shoes shining like a mirror, enthused over the idea to the displeasure of Rosa, who thought it was terrible but didn't dare come between her brother and husband. They rented a big shop on Nahalat Binyamin Street, hired ten shoeshine boys, and waited for the first customers. But as early as the first week, it became clear that the business was doomed to fail. Unlike in New York, there weren't enough customers in Tel Aviv for whom polished shoes was so important that they'd pay twice the going rate of shoeshine boys on the street. Even the big ceiling fan that was supposed to cool customers from the scorching heat of the Tel Aviv summer didn't lure people into the shop, and the shoeshine parlor closed down after only a month. Nono Gabriel lost a lot of money, and his brother-in-law got out by the skin of his teeth and went back to America.

Gabriel's dream of finding his way back into his mother's affections didn't come true either. Throughout the time he lived in Tel Aviv with his wife and daughter, she wouldn't come to his house even once. Instead he'd visit her at his sister's and bring along his sweet little daughter, since at least Mercada didn't scowl at her and sometimes even spoiled her with candy.

Tired, depressed, and broke, Nono Gabriel and his wife and daughter returned to the house in Ohel Moshe, only to discover that the successful business of Raphael Ermosa & Sons, Delicatessen, was also on the brink of bankruptcy. Regretfully, Gabriel was forced to let Leon go and fired his brother Leito, who had proved to be a failure as a financial manager. Not only that, it was whispered that he had brazenly stolen from Gabriel.

Gabriel went back behind the counter and tried to return the shop to its good days. But it seemed that good times were a thing of the past. He barely eked out a living, and most of the time the shop was empty of customers and stock, for where could he find the cash to buy stock?

Then a miracle happened that restored the shop to its former glory and prosperity. The soldiers stationed in the British army camps in Jerusalem discovered Raphael Ermosa & Sons, Delicatessen, and they began coming to the shop to buy the various types of tea, especially the English tea that reminded them of home, which they drank with condensed milk that tasted like cream. Rosa, who had learned to cook in the English homes where she had worked, began making pies that reminded the British soldiers of home cooking, especially steak and kidney pie, which was the most popular. When Rosa began frying fish for them, the English asked Gabriel to make fried slices of potato to go with it, but he drew the line there. He didn't like the English, but business was one thing and liking was another, so thanks to “the cursed English,” the finances improved and Nono Gabriel was happy again.

*   *   *

Luna was playing in the yard with the dolls Gabriel had bought her on his last trip to Beirut. Whenever he traveled to Lebanon or Syria on business, he came home loaded with presents for his little Luna. Occasionally he even brought a present for Rosa too.

“Bonica, basta!” the child prattled, mimicking her mother when she got angry with her. She sat on a low bench, feeding one of her dolls, sticking the spoon between its eyes instead of into its mouth. Then she took the other doll from the pram, murmuring loving words into its ear the way her father did with her.

“Dio santo, give me strength,” Rosa said to her neighbor Tamar as they observed Luna. “Esta chicitica can talk to her dolls for hours,
avlastina de la Palestina
, she doesn't shut her mouth. And it doesn't help if I call her in, nada, she doesn't hear. What can I do with a child who never listens to me?”

“What do you want from the girl?” Tamar replied. “She's bored, the miskenica. It's time you gave her a brother, with God's help.”

Rosa sighed. “
Sano que 'ste
, may we be healthy.” For what else could she say to her neighbor? That since the baby born after Luna had died two years ago, Gabriel had not come to her bed even once? What could she tell her, that he slept on one side of the room and she on the other? How could she tell her neighbor Tamar that her husband hardly looked at her? That he hardly saw her? And that the only living creature that interested him was Luna, and she, to spite her just like her father, didn't see Rosa, didn't hear her, didn't talk to her. She laughed only with her father, kissed only her father, and her, Rosa, she rejected. Even on the rare occasions when Rosa tried to hug her, lift her up like every mother did with her child, her daughter eluded her and slipped from her arms.

“May you be healthy, you're raising the girl like a princesa,” Tamar said to Rosa. “And if you don't bring her a hermano or hermanita, she'll grow up into a hoity-toity little brat.”

“From your mouth to God's ears,” Rosa said, and nodded. “Even now she's busy all day with her dolls, that one, and nothing else interests her. She dresses them, undresses them, feeds them for hours on end. And I, her mother, call her and nada, she acts like she's deaf. But her father only has to step one foot into the yard and she drops the dolls and runs to him and jumps into his arms. ‘Papo! Papo! Papo!' She can't stop giggling.”

“And her laugh, praise God,” Tamar said and laughed, “you can hear it all the way from the market!”

And me, who hears
me
laugh? Rosa wondered. When was the last time
I
laughed?

For dinner that night Rosa made habas con arroz with a little sofrito, but before Gabriel ate, he put Luna on his knee and fed her. She covered her mouth on purpose, blocking it with her little fist, and he took the spoon, filled it, and brought it around in a big circle, saying, “Toot-toot-toot, where's the train?” It's unbelievable, Rosa thought. A grown man, such a serious man, making himself a troncho de Tveria, a cabbagehead, for his little girl. And when Luna opened her mouth and he pushed the rice and beans inside, he was as pleased as if he'd found a treasure trove of gold. Only when Luna finished eating, no more than a few spoonfuls—she didn't like eating, the flaca, the skinny one—did he eat his own food.

“Rosa, it's not hot,” he grumbled.

“Of course it isn't hot. How can it be hot if while it was sitting ready on the table you were busy playing with your daughter?” she murmured to herself.

Gabriel was different from other men. A man only had to step through the door and expected food to be waiting on the table. Gabriel wanted his daughter first, so what could she do? On her mother's honor, may she rest in peace, she sometimes felt like throwing the food in his face and going out the door to never return! But where would she go? To clean the Ingelish's toilets again? So she took the plate, put the food back into the pot, and relit the stove. While the food was heating, Gabriel querido got up from the table and went to ready his daughter for bed, his usual routine of changing her into her nightgown, brushing her curls, and tying them with a ribbon.