I felt rather than saw Gabriel nod to the auburn-haired man.
The torturer opened the pincers, applied them to Antonio’s unharmed nipple, and twisted savagely. Flesh sizzled, giving off the smell of roasting pork. Despite Antonio’s bucking, the torturer held the pincers fast until the skin began to blacken, then pulled away a bit of charred meat.
Antonio screamed but focused his pain on attacking Gabriel. “Fucking coward! Great big fucking coward!” He gritted his teeth and lowered his head as the auburn-haired man displayed the smoking, bubbling bit of skin in the air like a trophy.
I retched, but nothing came up.
The torturer grinned with delight.
Gabriel asked me the same question about don Francisco, while the red-haired man went to reheat the pincers in the hearth. I refused to answer.
The torturer once again went over to Antonio, who strained against his shackles painfully; the former, still smiling, waved the pincers menacingly over the bare skin of Antonio’s torso and looked to Gabriel.
I felt Gabriel’s gaze on me; I closed my eyes and drew my lips tightly shut. I heard another sizzle and opened my eyes.
The torturer had seized another piece of flesh, this one from Antonio’s rib cage, where a blackened, still smoking wound the size of a coin had appeared; the skin around it was red and blistering. Antonio bowed, gasping with the pain. “Fucking idiot!” he screamed at Gabriel. “Fucking great brute of an idiot!”
Behind me, the muscles in Gabriel’s arm grew increasingly rigid. “Pull his leggings down,” he coldly ordered.
I looked away, to spare Antonio’s dignity. The leggings couldn’t come all the way off, of course, since his ankles were shackled to the chair. But when the torturer returned this time from reheating his weapon, I couldn’t keep from watching where the pincers were headed next.
Between Antonio’s legs.
“Don’t—” I began, my voice high-pitched with fear. I forced myself to break off.
A pause ensued while I wrestled with myself.
“What is that?” Gabriel asked behind me, his voice rising with glee.
“Don’t,” I repeated, my tone flat, disappointed. I looked at Antonio and he looked back at me sharply, questioningly.
“Do you confess?” Gabriel asked, as the pincers loomed perilously close to Antonio’s unprotected genitalia. The heat was singeing the hair on his naked thighs.
Antonio held my gaze solemnly, intensely; his eyes held the haunted look of a man surrendering. “The river docks, Marisol,” he said.
If trouble befalls you, don Francisco had said, go to the river docks near San Pablo Street … Let Antonio tell you when the time draws nearer.…
“Don’t tell them anything,” I said, regretting my weakness. But Antonio would not remain silent anymore; he looked away from me as if ashamed.
“The river docks,” he said. “The Guadalquivir, near San Pablo Street. Take us there, and they will come for us.”
* * *
If trouble befalls you, go to the river.
The late afternoon had turned cold, and the sinking sun stirred a breeze, causing the last coral rays to glitter like fire off the rippling waters. The larger ships—the great trading vessels from foreign lands—were beginning to weigh anchor and furl their sails, leaving their masts bared like spines at the docks near the brick armory. Its sulfur stink carried on the wind, along with that of fish, mixed with the sweeter fragrance of cedar from the lumberyard. Smaller ships were still afloat: skiffs and fishing boats and scows.
Antonio and I stood upon the dock nearest my house, I shivering in my soaked chemise, he shuddering with pain at the feel of a rough burlap tunic against his burns. My left hand was shackled to his right, but the manacle was small so that those watching from a distance would not see it.
We were not far from a trading vessel anchored at a dock perpendicular to ours, or from the patch of golden sand where my mother Magdalena had entered the water. Near the spot where Gabriel had held me back from diving into the river after her, a single guard in pedestrian clothing stood watching. Gabriel and Fray Morillo were not far off, accompanied by more guards, hidden out of sight behind the trading vessel. A pair of young boys fishing off the far end of the pier had each been paid a silver coin to intervene if anyone came onto the dock to rescue us. To make certain no one could, another guard, posing as a fisherman, was posted where the dock met the shore.
We were bait; while the Inquisitors believed nothing else we told them, they were willing to gamble that some converso would come to rescue us. This despite the fact that I was half naked and clearly the worse for wear, my hair damp and bedraggled.
I gazed out at the maritime scenery. Gulls flew overhead, their cries shrill and raucous; the occasional rat skittered across the dock and entered the water with a light splash.
The waters beneath me were clouded gray-green, as opaque as Fray Hojeda’s eyes. I contemplated the water; I could not believe I would be saved, any more than my mother was on the night of her death. Antonio had pretended to confess while in the prison, revealing a secret escape plan, and showed great shame while I feigned anger at him. Once we were out on the dock, he became silent, his gaze calm. He was looking down at the river with a fatalistic expression, and I thought I understood: It would be impossible, exposed as we were, with so many guards watching, for any of don Francisco’s men to rescue us. Perhaps don Francisco’s advice was the course my mother had taken: to dive into the waters, to take her own life before she yielded to the Inquisition.
If Antonio and I had to die, at least we would do so on our own terms, together, without enduring further torture. I far preferred water to fire.
If the danger is extreme …
The danger was extreme. But there was a score I had to settle before dying.
I turned and faced the place where Gabriel hid with Fray Morillo, on the dock behind one of the anchored vessels.
I started to shout, but my voice was raw and rasping. I cleared my throat and called out again, using all the strength left in my lungs to be sure my voice could be heard above the gulls and the lapping water.
“Gabriel Hojeda is a crypto-Jew,” I shouted, to the surprise of a dazed boy fishing with a net on the nearby shore. I hoped Fray Morillo was listening carefully. “Go to his house; you’ll find a mezuzah hidden in his apartments.”
No sound issued from behind the trading vessel. The boys on the dock stared at me as they would at a madwoman.
I turned to Antonio. “I love you,” I said.
He looked back at me, his eyes bright and loving. “I love you, Marisol,” he said. “Take a deep breath.”
Together we jumped.
The cold and the impact drove the air from my lungs as I hit the water. For an instant the manacle shackling me by my left hand to Antonio’s right pulled us down, but with great effort, Antonio thrashed and brought us bobbing to the surface.
I fought him. “Why?” I shrieked, though I could barely hear myself over the splashing. “Let me go.…”
“Marisol, trust me!” he shouted back. “Swim!”
The guard on the shore was shouting, too. He called out to the boys on the pier, to the fishermen nearby on the river. I did not wait to hear whether they answered him. My will took over where my body failed. Somehow I moved my aching arms through the water, struggling to work in tandem with Antonio.
The opposite shore of Triana seemed so very far away. Did Antonio think we could outswim the guards and reach it?
“Now,” Antonio shouted in my ear. Our legs grew tangled, kicking at each other; he held his still for a minute, sinking into the water until it was up to his ears, until only his face showed. “Now we dive under. Take a deep breath and swim.”
I managed only half a breath before going under. The heavy water drowned out the shouts of the guards and Inquisitors; the wake of Antonio’s strong strokes surrounded me with bubbles. His pale arms and dark legs cut through the water as he swam in the direction of a
large sailing vessel to the south of the pontoon bridge.
We’ll be rescued by a sea captain, I thought, remembering that my mother had no such refuge to swim to. But when we arrived at the barnacled hull and bobbed to the surface, Antonio gasped and waited until the guards caught sight of us and called out to the Inquisitors.
“There they are! At the ship!”
At that instant, Antonio tugged at me, drew a loud breath, and I did likewise. We went under the water again, and Antonio kicked his legs to propel himself downward, deep beneath the surface. I followed suit, our hands joined together, as we swam away from the vessel, back toward the pontoon bridge.
Somehow, we found the strength to keep the manacle from dragging us down. I swam until my arms and lungs shrieked from the effort, until my feet and hands went numb from the cold. I swam until I began to gulp water, and still I swam.
The water was gray-green and murky; I couldn’t make out Antonio’s face, only his thrashing arms. I realized that if I didn’t get air soon, I would drown, and my weight would drag him to his doom. Yet when I opened my mouth to cry out to him, I only swallowed more water.
I grew light-headed and soon unable to hold up my aching left arm, the one shackled to Antonio. Amazingly, he managed to pull me along, to keep going although I was of little help. I retched in the water, and became even more light-headed—then I could no longer paddle at all but felt my limbs grow weak and still. I closed my eyes to the deep and stopped struggling, and imagined I saw my mother waving to me from the shore.
Marisol, someone called from a great distance away. Marisol!
His hands clutching either side of my face, Antonio pulled me up where there was air; my head struck something wooden. I opened my eyes to gray twilight and the pervasive lapping of water. My left arm ached terribly; it was pulled over my head, and I was hanging from it, and Antonio was hanging beside me, both of us in water up to our shoulders. The dank, fishy smell told me we were still in the Guadalquivir.
I coughed, my teeth chattering from the cold. “Where are we?”
“Underneath the pontoon bridge. There are jutting beams under here.” He jangled the manacle binding us, and thumped wood. “Hurry, it’s only a matter of time before they start looking under the bridge.” He paused and his tone grew concerned. “You’ve got to be strong, Marisol. You’ve got to find the strength to pull yourself out of the water.”
Utterly confused, I watched as he braced his legs against the wooden pontoon. With a grunt, he swung himself up out of the water, his right arm still attached to mine. I yelped as he nearly pulled my left arm out of its socket; I was hanging from my left arm in the water, while he looked down at me from a wooden platform hidden inside the pontoon, its ceiling so low he could not even crouch but was forced to lie on his stomach.
“Give me your other hand,” he hissed.
I gritted my teeth as I raised my right arm overhead, joining my left; both ached from being bound tightly in the torture chamber, but my pain was nothing to what Antonio must have felt from his wounds.
“Crawl up, Marisol! Hurry! It’s only a matter of time before they realize we’re not on the ship and start searching the river.”
“Did they see us?” I asked.
“We sank like stones.”
“But won’t they look for us here?”
“Don Francisco had this platform secretly constructed. They don’t know it exists.” He paused. “I’m sorry I had to pull you under so deep. Now push with your feet against the pontoon. Push!”
I found the wooden scaffolding of the pontoon and pushed with all my might; my bare feet slipped against the slime. On the third try, both Antonio and I roared through gritted teeth as I wriggled upward and he pulled with impossible strength. My ribs hit the edge of the platform with bruising force, but I used my elbows to wriggle forward while Antonio kept pulling. Soon my waist was out of the water, and I was able to pull my trembling legs up.
Antonio and I lay beside each other on an algae-covered platform hidden at the top of the pontoon’s scaffolding. Slats of wood surrounding us kept us invisible from the outside—as well as kept the outside invisible to us. Only small cracks in the wood revealed light: They were using lanterns to look for us. Shouts echoed from the bridge, from the waters.
“My poor Marisol, I thought I’d lost you,” Antonio whispered. He put a hand to my face; I couldn’t tell which was colder, my skin or his.
“I saw my mother,” I told him, shivering. “On Triana’s shore.”
I heard the smile in his voice. “She’s not in Triana, Marisol. She should already be in Portugal by now.”
“Don’t be cruel,” I hissed, but broke off as footsteps crossed overhead; our pontoon swayed like a boat.
We remained silent as another set of footsteps joined them; the light coming through the cracks in the wood grew brighter. Antonio and I held our breath as the steps grew farther away. Even then, I dared not make a sound; swimmers were thrashing nearby in the water.
I lay motionless, trying to keep my teeth from chattering too loudly. Eventually, the swimmers headed away. We waited for what seemed like hours, until twilight became night, until the sweep of lanterns faded and eventually disappeared.
Silence came, and with it, greater cold. My body shook uncontrollably next to Antonio’s; I would have clung to him for warmth, but the platform we lay on was too low and narrow to allow it.
“How long?” I asked him. “Do we stay here forever?”
I could feel him shake his head in the darkness. “We have to wait. Only be patient.”
“My mother,” I said. “You were lying about her, weren’t you? You were only being cruel so that I would be angry, so that I would keep going…?”
“I would never lie to you, Marisol. Your mother knew about this place beneath the bridge.”
Tears came to my eyes. “Do you think she made it here? Do you think she actually escaped?”
Antonio let go a teeth-chattering sigh. “I don’t know. But she’s a strong woman, like you. I’m sure she tried.”
As time passed, Antonio and I jiggled our limbs to keep from freezing, and tried to stay alert by telling each other stories. Antonio spoke of Portugal and Lisbon, about the great Tejo River, about my great-uncle Isaac Abravanel and his charities. I told him the story of Máriam’s rescue of little Raquelita. But exhaustion overtook both of us, and we eventually grew silent. The cold was painful, and I knew we were in danger of freezing to death, but I could no longer keep moving; I let my eyes close and dozed.
And I saw my mother, veiled, her profile translucent in the light of Shabbat candles. She made a sweeping gesture.
Behind her in the distance lay Sepharad, golden and gleaming. Moor and Jew and Christian, the black eyed and the pale, at peace, tilling the rich rolling earth, marked by endless rows of orchards, fragrant and heavy with blossom. The waters reflected the blue of the sky and sparkled in the sun like a thousand jewels. And the sun kissed the spires of mosques and churches, the stones of synagogues, sweet as dates and honey, beautiful as heaven, peaceful as the sleep deep beneath the waters.
The river grew heavily silent, yet in my mind I heard the sound of lyres and my mother singing.
* * *
There was suddenly light—“Three blinks, it’s them,” Antonio said—and then the light grew glaring. There was movement. I was pushed and pulled and cradled, too frozen to move my limbs, vaguely aware of the lapping of water and the rocking of a boat. I was wrapped in something soft, and as my body warmed, the stabbing pain in my limbs made me groan.
“Marisol, can you hear me?” someone asked, but I was still too cold and too exhausted to speak. I shuddered against the growing warmth and let the rocking lull me back to sleep. Somewhere in my dreams, I heard the song of the plague driver, calling for the dead.
* * *
When I finally woke, the rattle of wheels caused my whole body to vibrate, my teeth to chatter. I was still cold, though warm enough to move, and I grew f
rightened at the realization that my eyes were covered by a stiff gray cloth: Was I back in the Dominican prison? Would the water come again?
No, I was in motion, lying between a pair of silent bodies, radiant with heat, and I was looking up at the tarp covering us.
Above me, the unseen man steering the wagon let go the chant of the plague driver: “Bring out your bodies,” he sang.
Had I been taken for dead and thrown in with those who perished from plague? I started to draw in a breath to scream, but a hand clamped over my mouth—one bearing a manacle connected to my own hand. “Marisol,” a familiar voice hissed, and I fell silent. The wagon rolled over cobblestones, the horses’ hooves clattering until they grew muted, echoing off a partially enclosed structure. A city wall.
“The bodies of the dead,” our driver sang again cheerfully, and the guard at the city gate replied in a far grimmer voice.
“Pass. And don’t tarry!”
The wagon rattled again; the echo of cobblestone faded, replaced by the duller, thumping sound of hooves against the unpaved earth outside the city. For several moments, we continued at a steady pace, and then the wagon moved faster and faster, as the driver gave the horses their heads.
The body next to mine reached for my hand and squeezed it; I squeezed back, in my weakness, reduced to tears.
In the distance came the approaching thunder of men on horseback, and I grew once again terrified. As they came alongside our wagon, those beside me did not cry out or scream; instead, they sat up, throwing off the tarp that covered us.
I was sitting beside Antonio—wan and smiling, exhausted from his wounds. Máriam sat beside him—and to my surprise, don Francisco’s granddaughter Luz was lying next to her, a newborn infant in her arms.
Flanking our wagon were men-at-arms on horseback. I remained uneasy until the captain smiled at us. “We’ll be escorting you to don Francisco today. You’ll join him and his family before you start your journey.”
“The Torah shield?” I asked Máriam.
“Safe,” she said, and I threw my free arm around her.