This year here, and the next year in the land of Israel.
This year here, thanks to Don Seneor and Don Abravanel, may their names be inscribed for a blessing, who have dazzled the eyes of Ferdinand with gold, and kept the royal ears closed to the hateful murmuring of jealous burghers.
This year slaves…
Ben Shoushan thought of the slave who had served the mute youth. How he wished he had been able to speak with him, to find out something of the history of those marvelous paintings. The sofer’s hand moved from ink bottle to parchment as his imagination conjured a lean black figure, walking with a staff along a dusty yellow road toward a settlement of mud-brick houses where a family waited who had imagined him dead. Well, likely he was dead, by now, or chained to a galley oar with a bloodied back.
He went on so, all day until the light failed, battling the distractions of his busy mind to set down letter after careful letter. At dusk, he asked his Sparrow to bring him a clean robe, and he walked to the mikvah, hoping that by a ritual immersion he might clear himself of the daily clamor and open his mind fully to his sacred work. Returning refreshed, he bade Sparrow fill a lamp so he could work on into the night. When Miriam smelled the rich scent of the lit wick, she came flying from the house like a wasp, scolding about the price of the oil. But David spoke to her with unaccustomed sharpness, and she retreated, muttering.
It was in the still of the early hours, when the stars blazed in the black sky, that it happened. His fasting, the chill, the brilliant flare of the lamp: suddenly the letters lifted and swirled into a glorious wheel. His hand flew across the parchment. Every letter was afire. Each character raised itself and danced spinning in the void. And then the letters merged into one great fire, out of which emerged just four, blazing with the glory of the Almighty’s holy name. The power and the sweetness of it were too much for Ben Shoushan, and he fainted.
When Ruti found him in the morning, he was slumped unconscious under the scriptionale. A light frost whitened his beard. But his script, every letter and word of it perfect, covered more pages than a sofer could complete in a week of constant labor.
Ruti put him to bed that morning, but in the afternoon he insisted on rising and getting to his work again. His hand was once again an ordinary sofer’s, his mind the usual unruly tangle of mundane thoughts, but his heart remained touched by the night’s mystical bliss. The feeling stayed with him the following day, and the text progressed steadily and well.
On the fourth day, when the work of what should have been weeks was nearing completion, a light tapping came on the outer door. Ben Shoushan hissed with exasperation. Ruti, skittering in her silent, birdlike way through the clutter of the courtyard, flung back the crossbar and opened the door. When she recognized the woman who stood there, Ruti straightened, her hands fluttering to adjust her head cover. Her eyes, when she turned to her father, were wide and frightened.
As the woman moved to step across the threshold, Ben Shoushan flung down his quill, outraged. How dare she, whom he would not name, how dare she come to his door? His anger acted on his empty stomach like acid, sending a searing pain through his gut. Ruti, startled by his expression, fluttered back from the street door, heading toward the house.
The woman was speaking in that mellow, whorish voice of hers.
Determined not to hear her, Ben Shoushan muttered in Hebrew: “The lips of the strange woman drip honey, but her rear end is bitter as wormwood.” They were the last words he had said to his son—his son! his Kaddish, apple of his eye and root of his heart!—before he left through that very door to go to the baptismal font and then to the altar. David Ben Shoushan had rent his coat that day. Two years gone and still, wherever he turned, the memory of his boy was there, vivid and searing. And now here she was, source of his heartbreak, speaking a name no longer uttered in his house.
“I have no son!” he shouted, turning his back and following Ruti toward the inner door.
Two paces and he stopped. What had she said?
“The alguazil came with the bailiff in the night. He struggled, so they beat him, and when he cried out, they forced a metal gag into his mouth—one of them held him while the other turned the screws to make it widen until I thought they would break his jaw.” She was weeping now. He could tell because her voice was no longer mellow, but ragged. He still had not brought himself to look at her. “They have him at the Casa Santa—I followed them there, begging to know the charges, to know who has accused him—but they turned on me then, and said I was guilty of polluting Christian blood by carrying the child of a Marrano heretic. I am a coward, for I left the place, ran away. I can’t bear the thought that my child might be born in the dungeons of the Inquisition. I come to you because I do not know where else to turn. My father has no money for a ransom.” Her honey voice, as she mouthed this lie, sounded thin and reedy as a child’s.
David Ben Shoushan did look at her then, at her swollen belly. She was very near her time. The mixture of love and loss he felt at that moment seemed to melt the marrow of his bones. His grandchild, who would not be a Jew. Reeling, as if he had drunk too much wine, he traversed the small courtyard toward the heavy wooden door and closed it in her tear-streaked face.
The young man spoke with difficulty. When they had unscrewed the gag and pulled the metal bulb from his mouth, four fractured teeth had gone with it. His lips were torn at each corner, and when he opened them to speak, a fresh spurt of blood trickled down his chin and dripped onto his stained smock. He tried to raise a hand to wipe his mouth, but the manacles prevented him.
“How can I confess, Father, when you do not tell me of what I stand accused?”
They had brought him here in his nightdress, and he shivered. The room inside the Casa Santa was windowless, its walls hung with black cloth. The only light came from six candles set on either side of a picture of Christ crucified. The table, also, was draped in black.
The Inquisitor’s face was invisible in the recess of his hood. Only his pale hands, fingertips pressed together beneath an unseen chin, were discernible in the candlelight.
“Reuben Ben Shoushan…”
“Renato, Father. I was baptized Renato. My name is Renato del Salvador.”
“Reuben Ben Shoushan,” the priest repeated, as if he had not heard. “You would do well to confess now, for the sake of your immortal soul, and…” He paused for a long moment, the fingertips lightly tapping. “And for the sake of your mortal body. For if you will not declare your sins freely to me, here, you surely shall do so in the place of relaxation.”
Renato felt the contents of his bowels liquefying. He clutched his manacled hands hard against his belly. He swallowed, but there was no saliva in his mouth. His voice was a rasp.
“I know not what it is you imagine that I have done!”
In the corner, a scribe scraped away with his pen, taking down every word Renato uttered. The sound carried Renato home, to the courtyard of the Kahal and the sound of his own father’s stylus on parchment. But his father wrote only words of glory. Not like this man, whose job it was to note down every desperate plea, every moan and cry uttered by the accused.
An exaggerated sigh came from within the hood. “Why do you do it to yourself? Admit, and be reconciled. Many have done so, and walked from here. Better, surely, to wear the penitent’s San Benito for a season or two than to forfeit your life to the fire?”
A groan escaped from Renato. He could smell the acrid smoke of the last auto-da-fé. It had been a humid day, and the stink of burning had hung low over the city. Six had gone to the fire. Three, confessing heresy at the last moment, had been strangled before the flames were lit. The others, burned alive, had uttered screams that haunted his dreams.
An exaggerated sigh came from within the hood. The white hands fluttered. A third man, tall, his head covered in a leather mask, moved forward from the shadows.
“Water,” the priest said, and the masked head nodded. The priest rose then and left the room. The huge man reac
hed for Renato, and roughly stripped his smock. Reuben Ben Shoushan had spent his boyhood as a scholar, hunched over the scriptionale, training to follow his father’s profession. But in the two years since he had become Renato, he had worked outdoors every day, doing hard physical labor in Rosa’s father’s groves, or at the olive press. He would never be a large man, but his arms were strong now, muscled and browned from the sun. Yet naked, with the hooded man looming over him, he looked vulnerable. There were bruises blooming on his shoulders from the blows of the alguazil.
The guard prodded him roughly forward, and they passed from the black room, down the stairs toward the place of relaxation. When Renato saw the ladder tilted over the large stone basin, the bindings still bloodied from the last prisoner’s writhings, the wooden pegs that would be stuffed in his nostrils, he could hold his sphincter no longer. A terrible stench filled the chamber.
David Ben Shoushan dressed with care. He put on his least frayed tunic and arranged the garde-corps so that the long hood fell gracefully over each shoulder. Ruti wiped away tears as she struggled to darn a small hole in her father’s only pair of hose.
“Here, give me that, you stupid girl,” said Miriam, snatching the stocking from her. Ruti’s hands, coarsened by her work with the skins, were not as skilled at fine work as her mother’s. Swiftly, Miriam caught the fabric together with stitches so small they were barely visible. “We have need of haste here!” she said, flinging the stocking to her husband. “Who knows what they are doing to my boy!”
“You have no boy,” said David, roughly. “Do not forget that. We sat shivah for our son. I go to do what I can for a stranger who has fallen into grave misfortune.”
“Tell yourself what brings you peace, fool,” said Miriam. “But stop your preening and go, I beg you!”
David walked the narrow alleys to his brother’s house with the bile rising in his throat. He had never felt his poverty weigh so heavily. Every Jew, and every converso, knew that the Inquisition was as much about filling the royal purse as purifying the Spanish church. For payment of a rapacious fine, most prisoners could walk—or hobble, or be borne on a litter, depending on how long they had been held—from the doors of the Casa Santa. But would Joseph wish to spend such a sum on an apostate nephew, one whose own father had declared him dead?
David was so bound up with his own shame and sorrow that he was before the gates of his brother’s fine house before he recognized the commotion under way inside. Joseph, who prided himself on his refinement, usually kept a tranquil home, his servants discreet and unobtrusive. But this day the courtyard rang with the sound of harried voices. David reviewed the date in his mind—the wedding was not until the following month. So this bustle could not be part of preparation for that celebration. His brother’s gatekeeper recognized him and ushered him within. He saw Joseph’s best gelding being brought from the stable, and the horses of guards and servants being packed for a journey.
Joseph himself emerged from the house at that moment, dressed for the road, deep in conversation with a weary-looking, travel-stained man. It took David a moment to recognize the traveler as the secretary to Don Isaac Abravanel. At first, Joseph was so engrossed in his talk that his eye passed right over his brother, where he stood amid the stir of busy servants. But then his glance returned to the still, hunched figure, and his face softened. Joseph Ben Shoushan loved and revered his pious younger brother, even though their relative importance in the world had placed a barrier between them. The older man held out his hand to the younger and drew him into a close embrace.
“Brother! What brings you here with a face like a funeral?”
David Ben Shoushan, having rehearsed his request all the way to the villa, suddenly found himself tongue-tied. His brother was clearly preoccupied with his own momentous business, and his brow, too, was furrowed with concern.
“It is my…it is a person who has suffered—that is, who has fallen into a misfortune,” he stammered.
A flicker of impatience, quickly stifled, passed across Joseph’s face.
“Misfortunes beset us from all sides!” he said. “But come, I am about to take bread before my journey. Come eat a hasty meal with me and tell me what I may do.”
David reflected that his brother’s “hasty meal” would have been counted a banquet at his own meager table. The meat was fresh, not salted, and served with fruit, hard to find in winter, and the lightest pastries. David could bring himself to taste none of it.
When David had unburdened himself, Joseph shook his head and sighed. “Any other time, I would ransom this young man. But his fate overtakes him on an evil day. This day, I fear we must think first of the Jews—forgive me, brother—and let those who have left our faith face the consequences that their own choice has brought upon them. I go now, in the greatest haste, to Granada, with every crusata I can scrape together. Don Abravanel’s secretary here”—he nodded to the gentleman, who was slumped, exhausted, against the pillows—“has ridden to me with the gravest news. The king and queen are preparing an expulsion order—”
David sucked in his breath.
“Yes, even as we have feared. They have taken the capitulation of Granada as a sign of divine will that Spain be a Christian country. It is, then, their intention to thank God for their victory by declaring Spain a land where no Jew may remain. The choice is to convert, or depart. They have hatched this plan in secret, but finally the queen has confided it to her old friend Don Seneor.”
“But how could the king and queen do such a thing as this? It is Jewish money—or at least Jewish money raising—that has secured them the victory over the Moors!”
“We have been milked, my brother. And now, like a dry cow, we are to be dispatched to the slaughterhouse. Don Seneor and Don Abravanel are preparing one last offer—bribe, let us be frank—to see if this can be gainsaid. But they are not hopeful.” Joseph waved his lamb shank at the exhausted man in the corner. “Tell my brother what the queen has said to Don Isaac.”
The man ran a hand over his face. “My master told the queen that the history of our people shows that God destroys those who would destroy the Jews. She replied that this decision did not come upon us from her or from her husband. ‘The Lord hath put this thing into the heart of the king,’ she said. ‘The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord, as the rivers of water. He turns it wheresoever he will.’”
“The king, for his part”—interrupted Joseph—“puts all the burden for this upon the queen. But those nearest the royal couple know that the very timbre of the queen’s words echo her confessor, may his name be rubbed out.”
“What can you possibly offer them more than what we have rendered up to them in the past?”
“Three hundred thousand ducats.”
David buried his face in his hands.
“Yes, I know; a staggering sum. More than a king’s ransom; ransom of a people. But what choice have we?” Joseph Ben Shoushan stood then and offered his hand to his brother. “You see why I have nothing to spare for you this day?”
David nodded. Together, they walked back out into the busy courtyard. The armed outriders and servants were already mounted. David accompanied his brother to his horse. Joseph mounted, then leaned down from the saddle and spoke into his brother’s ear. “I do not need to tell you, I am sure, to say nothing of our conversation. There will be panic when this news gets abroad. No need for tears and wailing if we are able to turn their majesties again toward us.” The horse, fresh and restless, strutted in place, fretting to be gone. Joseph tugged sharply on the reins and reached for his brother’s hand. “I am sorry about your son.”
“I have no son,” David replied, but his words came out as a quavering whisper, lost in the ring of iron on stone as the party passed swiftly through the gate.
For four days, Renato moved in and out of consciousness. He woke with his cheek pressed to a stone floor strewn with urine-soaked straw and rat feces. When he coughed, there were clots of blood, but also long ribbons of clea
r tissue that fell apart in his fingers. It was as if his insides were sloughing off; his body falling apart from the inside. He was thirsty, but at first he could not reach the water jar. Later, when he was able to grasp it between shaking hands and pour a trickle into his mouth, the pain of swallowing made him pass out again. In his dreams, he was once again bound on the sloping ladder, the water cascading into his mouth, his own involuntary swallowing pulling the narrow length of linen farther and farther into his gut.
Renato had not known that such pain was possible. Silently, for speech was impossible, he prayed to die. But his prayers went unanswered, for when he woke, he was still lying there, the red eyes of the rats glinting at him in the dark. By the fifth day, he was awake more than unconscious, and by the sixth, he could drag himself into a sitting position, propped against the wall. All he had to do now was wait, and remember.
It had been after the fifth ewer of water, when the linen was well down his throat, that the Inquisitor had come into the place of relaxation. They had set the ladder upright then, as he gagged and choked and writhed in panic. And then Renato saw it, at last, the evidence against him, and finally he knew what it was he had to confess. The priest held, between two fingers, as if it were a piece of ordure, a long brown leather strap, a small square box. Inside it was the word of God, inscribed in his father’s impeccable hand.
“You false conversos are a dry rot, eating away at the heart of the church,” the priest said. “You pray your filthy prayers in secret and then pollute our church with your lying presence among us.” Renato couldn’t reply, either to confess or to repudiate the charges. Speech was not possible with the cloth wadded tight in his throat. The priest stood there as they inverted the ladder, poured another ewer of water, and then finally, with sudden, shocking force, tugged forth the cloth, which had penetrated to his gut. Renato felt as if his entrails were being pulled up through his throat. He had passed out, and when he came to himself, he was alone again in the cell.