I covered my face in my hands.
When I finally looked up, I saw that the old man’s gaze had grown piercing. “Don Antonio says you have been summoned tomorrow to watch your father be tortured. It’s why we chose tonight to attempt to rescue him. If you cannot hold your tongue tomorrow … then we will all die. Not just your father. Do not make the mistake of thinking that confession will protect you or anyone else. They will use it to damn you, Marisol.”
My eyes burned with tears as I said, “On my mother’s soul, I swear to keep silent.”
“Good,” he replied. “The Santiago statue must be painted before daybreak, so that you can return to don Gabriel’s house without him being the wiser. The Torah shield is packed firmly inside with wadding so that the treasure cannot fall out. Once you have finished, don Antonio will bring it to us on the day of the auto-de-fé.” He paused, his expression grown sympathetic but still firm. “You cannot stay behind and expect to survive, Marisol, whether your father lives or not.”
“Don Francisco,” Máriam said respectfully, “there are two things that Marisol should have with her tonight as she paints the statue.”
He raised a brow, questioning.
In response, Máriam pulled the black silk back farther, revealing other religious relics as well as a neatly folded white prayer shawl and a pair of gold candlesticks.
I cried out softly at the sight of the last two: They had been my mother’s.
“Tonight is Shabbat,” Máriam said softly.
Don Francisco’s eyes grew liquid; so did mine. “Please,” I asked, “may I take them with me tonight? I won’t disrespect them.”
“Of course,” he replied huskily. “Of course, Marisol.”
Máriam reverently lifted the candlesticks—both with white, unused tapers in them—and wrapped them in the prayer shawl.
As she did, don Francisco took me aside and said in his sternest voice: “There is something I must tell you now that I share with all of my true friends. Remember it well, for it can save you in times of great danger. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I answered solemnly.
“If trouble befalls you, go to the river docks near San Pablo Street. Get there by whatever means necessary. If the danger is extreme…” He paused, eyeing me. “I had best let Antonio tell you when the time draws nearer. The less you know now, the safer you are.”
I didn’t want to hear more: It seemed as if he were mocking my mother’s death. I turned away, upset, just as I heard Antonio calling out my name.
The surgeon was just rising, carrying away with him a clean cloth on which the fishhook and bits of black thread rested, and a bloodied cloth.
“How is he?” don Francisco asked, referring to the patient.
“It was a deep cut, but I cleaned it well,” the curly haired barber answered. “With luck, he’ll survive.”
“Will he be able to fool them all tomorrow?”
“Probably. So long as he’s the kind the poppy doesn’t make too queasy. He needs rest and water now, and something to eat when he’s able.”
Don Francisco let go a grunt of relief. “Good. Don Antonio, you rest now. We need you strong so that you can pick up the statue the day after tomorrow. Carlos will take care of you tonight and see you back to your house when you are strong enough. Don’t worry.”
Antonio’s red-gold hair was still dark with sweat and stuck to his forehead, his complexion still chalky. His eyelids were half closed and his mouth stretched into a faint but decidedly inebriated smile. He said, “Oh, I’ll deliver the statue on time. And I can never worry about anything again! She’s not really married!”
I blushed as the others smirked.
“Drunk on wine and the poppy,” the curly haired surgeon said knowingly. “He’ll be feeling little pain for the rest of the night.”
“Come,” don Francisco said softly to all but the patient and me, “let’s give them a moment alone. They deserve it.”
The others didn’t leave the barn but instead went to the back, disappearing into the shadows so that it really did seem like Antonio and I were alone.
I went and knelt beside him on the straw; although he still seemed rather weak, his mood was decidedly better. His head was supported by a small bale that served as a pillow; his unwounded right arm was next to me, the freshly bandaged left arm mostly hidden from my view.
He caught my hand in his right one and squeezed admirably hard; I met his pressure with my own, and he grinned hugely.
“Marry me,” he said.
“You’re silly drunk,” I countered. “You probably won’t remember this conversation tomorrow.”
“Oh, yes, I will,” he retorted. “Just like I remember when I was fourteen. Hanging upside down on that old olive tree in your father’s orchard. Do you remember?”
I smiled, remembering Antonio at fourteen, his limbs gangly and long at that age, his voice beginning to deepen. I recalled too how comical he had looked that day, his straight strawberry hair hanging beneath his reddening face with its upside-down, toothy grin.
We could make a bunch of little Christians!
“I remember,” I said, a bit embarrassed that the others were listening. “How can you ever forgive me, Antonio? I thought you betrayed me.”
“It doesn’t matter, Marisol. None of it matters. There’s only right now.”
He grinned lopsidedly at me until I couldn’t keep from breaking into a full, affectionate grin myself. I finally said, “That day when you were hanging from the tree—you asked me to stay with you forever.”
“And I asked you to marry me,” he said, slurring a bit. “And you said…”
“That all our children would be considered conversos.”
He laughed weakly. “Where we’re going, Marisol, no one will care if our children are conversos or Christians or Jews. So. When you have this sham marriage-that-isn’t-a-marriage annulled … will you marry me? Only if you love me, of course.”
I drew a deep breath and let it out, deciding that I no longer cared who heard or saw. “Of course. Of course, I’ll marry you, Antonio. Of course. I love you.”
I bent down and kissed him, and he kissed me back with an enthusiasm unexpected of a frail, wounded man. Despite don Francisco’s promise of privacy, the other men in the barn roared their approval; even so, neither of us faltered, but kept our lips pressed together fast.
Eighteen
Máriam and I left Antonio, the surgeon, and don Francisco behind in the barn, while the small dark-haired man, Martín, drove us back toward town, while we were covered beneath a tarp in the wagon. Once we entered the city proper, Martín left us on a small side street not far from our neighborhood.
From there, we made our way to the western side of Antonio’s family property—through the scraggly remnants of an ancient olive grove. At last, we came upon the tall stone wall that enclosed the family house. Despite the darkness, Máriam had no difficulty finding the single large stone that came loose when she pulled on it.
We squirmed through the opening, and Máriam led me unerringly across the large property toward the house, pausing not far from the old tree where Antonio had first proposed marriage to me; I could see the dark outline of my parents’ now-abandoned house over the top of the fence.
Máriam began to brush the ground with her foot until she came upon a scattering of gravel; soon, I heard her boot heel connect with something more solid.
“Help me,” she whispered, bending down to touch the earth.
I reached down, my fingers sifting through earth and stone until they found the edge of something thick and wooden. Once we had pulled upward enough so that the outline of the trapdoor became clear, Máriam and I swept away enough of the heavy dirt and gravel so that we could get the trapdoor open.
I admit, I was terrified making my way through the narrow, airless tunnel—particularly after Máriam closed the door behind us, blotting out even the faint light of the moon and stars, leaving us in total blackness. But she
caught my hand firmly and dragged me onward, not pausing at the eerily silky sensation of spiderwebs on our faces and shoulders, or the muted squeal of rodents.
Soon we emerged through another trapdoor into my mother’s ceramic workshop, beneath one of the large worktables she normally kept covered with a tarp. By then, my eyes were so accustomed to the darkness that, even with all the parchment-colored shades drawn, the room looked sad and abandoned. There were no ceramic works left except the magnificent half-painted Santiago, sitting upon the largest worktable. Don Francisco had been right; his granddaughter Luz could never have finished the statue properly, because although the easier sections of the defeated, crushed Moor had been finished, Santiago’s windswept hair and fierce expression—and the fiery eyes of his mount—were still unpainted.
While Máriam hurried to cover the windows with black cloths to blot out any stray speck of light that might escape, I carefully undid the bundle tied to my waist, containing my mother’s prayer shawl, tapers, and golden candlesticks. I unfolded her prayer shawl and put it over my head and shoulders, grateful for the added bit of warmth, as all the fireplaces in the house had gone unlit.
I waited until Máriam finished covering the windows. Then I moved in the darkness to where my mother kept her flint and tinder wood and worked until I got a spark.
Máriam was quick to set the tapers in the candlesticks and place them on the worktable so that I had to face east in order to light them. Before I did, she brought over the Santiago statue and set it midway in front of the candles. At first I was surprised to see her stagger beneath its weight, given that the statues were all hollow. When it stood before me, I pushed against it and realized why my mother had never let me near it: The treasure had already been hidden inside. Clearly, the potter from Triana who had delivered it was part of don Francisco’s conspiracy.
I lit the first candle, then the second and stepped back; in front of them, the white of the unpainted statue glistened. I looked down at Santiago’s cape and the horse’s muscular flank, and saw my mother reflected there.
I blew out the tinder stick and smiled inwardly as the words of my childhood came back to me. They weren’t the right ones for kindling the Sabbath light, but I knew in my heart that they would do.
I raised my hands before my eyes, reverently blotting out the light as my mother had done before me, and whispered: “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.” Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, The Lord is One.
I looked upon the light and smiled. And on the shining white surface of Santiago’s unpainted features, I saw my mother smile back at me.
The work itself did not take long; my mother had already crushed the semiprecious stones and earth-based pigments to powder. All that remained was to mix them: dull gray for Santiago’s armor, brown for his hair and eyes, crimson for his flapping cape, real silver for his sword.
As I painted, I could see how the statue had been made precisely to fit the Torah shield, how extra room had been made for it by Santiago’s body leaning forward to press against his mount. And as I continued working, I began to sing—soft, low, and hushed—a song my mother used to sing to me long ago:
“Durme, durme, querido hijico
Durme sin ansía y dolor
Cerra tus chicos ojicos
Durme, durme con savor.
Sleep, sleep, beloved child,
Sleep without fretting
Close your little eyes
And sleep peacefully.”
And for the first time since childhood, I began to believe that it might be true: that even though my beloved mother had perished, I might yet live to see Sepharad with my own eyes.
* * *
Máriam left the tunnel uncovered by gravel so that Antonio could more easily retrieve the finished statue, and we stole back to the Hojeda house without incident. I lay exhausted in bed but couldn’t sleep, vacillating between horror over my father’s likely fate and the joy of knowing that Antonio had always loved me. But any joy failed to linger long before the dread and terror returned. Don Francisco’s honesty—that he and his men could not make another rescue attempt to save my father—had shattered my heart.
I finally dozed off toward dawn and woke sometime later with a start at the sharp rapping at my antechamber door. I bolted from bed and struggled into my dressing gown as I heard Máriam answer the door, and I listened to the short exchange between her and don Gabriel.
She returned with orders for me to dress as soon as possible. Within an hour, I was riding, bleary-eyed, next to my so-called husband, headed for the Dominican prison.
When we arrived, Gabriel remained at my side as we were ushered in, and led me not to the same room where I had spoken with Torquemada, but to a chamber deeper in the bowels of the prison, whose stink grew fouler with every step.
Gabriel finally stopped and opened a large wood-and-iron door. I moved past him and a pair of armed guards into a small antechamber of stone, with a single high, barred window.
As don Francisco had suggested, Fray Hojeda was waiting there. He looked on me with the delight of a glutton being presented with the next course of a feast, but immediately forced his owlish visage into a more threatening expression; his thick gray brows rushed together in a thunderous scowl.
“Doña Marisol,” he said, more a rebuke than a greeting. “Let me explain to you that I am now in charge of your father’s case, and my brother don Gabriel is here as witness for the court. Let me also make it clear that you are in command of the proceedings about to commence. At any point, you can make the activity stop simply by offering to tell the full truth of what you know.”
He turned and led me back to a larger inner chamber, one that smelled of piss and vomit. In one corner of the room stood what looked like a ship’s wheel bolted to the ground. Someone had firmly tied ropes attached to the gears on the wheel, then thrown the ropes over a metal rod on the ceiling; shackles had been attached to the end of each rope. In another corner sat a chair, from which more empty shackles dangled; beside it on the floor sat an assortment of gruesome pincers and pokers, not far from the hearth.
But what held my attention was a device the width of a small bed, though greater in length. In place of a mattress lay a number of barrel-shaped horizontal rollers, and atop those rollers lay my father, naked to make his humiliation complete. The flesh of his sun-browned face and neck turned white at the collarbone. A triangle of thick golden brown hair, the pinnacle of which touched the spot equidistant between his nipples—as if pointing to his heart—thinned just enough at his waist to reveal his umbilicus. There the triangle reversed to a delta, its base above his exposed genitals. His arms, the muscles straining, were extended over his head, his wrists chained to a movable bar with a long wooden handle that served as a lever; his ankles were tied to a fixed wooden bar at his feet.
“Papá!” I cried out, before I had a chance to hide the anguish in my tone.
“I am not ashamed, Marisol,” he replied weakly. “Or afraid. Nor should you be.”
Gabriel’s expression was timid and reserved; he lowered his eyes, clearly embarrassed by my father’s nakedness, and moved behind his brother, whose expression was openly gloating.
“I should remind you both, don Diego and doña Marisol,” Fray Hojeda said, “that the auto-de-fé takes place tomorrow morning. Don Diego will be marched through town wearing the mark of a heretic; he will be called on to repent and confess, then his sentence will be read aloud to the public. At that point, he will either be turned over to the church for rehabilitation or to the civil authorities for execution.”
I stared hard at Alonso Hojeda. And saw not a dedicated servant of God, one who regretted inflicting pain in order to save a soul, but rather the same sort of creature as Torquemada: soulless, heartless, rejoicing not in a sinner saved as much as one lost whom he could torment, whose life and happiness he could destroy simply because he relished doing so.
Hojeda addressed my father without a hint of compassion. “I c
an tell you, sir, based on the raid on the prison by your now thankfully dead cohorts, today is the last chance we shall give you, and to my mind, you do not deserve even that. Confess and spare your daughter the agony of watching you suffer.”
“I will suffer then,” my father said, “and die with honor. My daughter will not yield; I have raised her to be truthful and strong.”
With that, Hojeda turned to me and said with poorly hidden delight, “Listen carefully to what you are about to hear.”
A pale-faced young man with auburn hair stood with his hands resting atop the wooden handle attached by ropes to the shackles on my father’s wrists. The lad might have been pleasant looking, were it not for the deep numbness in his eyes.
Hojeda nodded meaningfully at the young man, who used both arms and a great deal of strength to pull on the wooden lever; the barrels rolled, and the wooden frame near my father’s head inched upward, along with his shackled wrists.
There came the most horrible combination of sounds: the muted twang of sinews pulling free from bone, the ripping of muscle, as if a butcher had torn meat from a beast’s carcass with his bare hands, the muffled cracking of bone—and, most awfully, the loud pop of thigh bones and arm bones being pulled from their sockets.
Added to that was my father’s involuntary scream. Stretched grotesquely beyond his bearing, he could not move.
I fought tears. For a single turn of the lever had brought not only pain—marked by the horrific rictus on my father’s face—but also suffering and deformity to last a lifetime. Sinew ripped from bone could not repair itself, and crippled joints could not easily mend.
Yet there was a wicked genius to it: The shredded muscles beneath my father’s skin were bleeding, his snapped bones weeping blood and marrow. He was torn up inside, as if some beast caged beneath his flesh had been freed to attack with tooth and claw. So much damage, all cleverly covered by his skin, so that the abominable crime of what was done to him remained his tormentors’ secret.