The Mapmaker's Daughter (17 page)

I picture myself in the throes of labor as rioters attack my home. I imagine delivering my baby by the side of the road as I flee Lisbon. I envision sticks, daggers, fists—anything a mob can do to harm me and my child—and I know I can’t risk staying in this house. Catellina helps me pack a few things, and I heave my huge body into the carriage to make the trip to Queluz.

Night has fallen as I leave the city, and though the driver must go slowly in the dim moonlight, I cry out with every bounce. I spend most of the journey moaning from grinding cramps in my back and from fear of who or what could lie in the road ahead. As we reach the first houses outside Queluz, fluid gushes into my underskirts. My back cramps again, and I realize that the jostling of the carriage has disguised the beginning of my labor.

My knees buckle as I get down from the coach, and Simona helps me into the house. She throws back the covers on her bed. “I gave my birthing chair to my daughter,” she says. “You’ll have to do the best you can.”

She straddles me from behind, holding me under my arms as the pains get closer together. When there is no time between them, Simona lays my head on a pillow and clears the garments from my legs. “I see its head,” she says. “With the next pain, push hard.”

“I can’t,” I moan. “I don’t have the strength.”

“Of course you do!” I bear down so hard I think I will rip in two as the baby’s head strains the entrance to my body.

“One more,” Simona says, and with everything I have, I deliver my daughter into the world.

I hear a loud, healthy wail. Simona holds up the tiny body for me to see, and then lays her down while she cuts the cord and delivers the afterbirth. Finally, slick with sweat and dressed with little more than a mane of matted hair, I hold my most cherished dream in my arms.

Simona covers me up and opens the door to the bedroom. Isaac and Rahel are standing wide-eyed outside.

Isaac gets to the bed first. “Would you like to see the baby?” I turn her so he can see her face.

“What’s her name?” Isaac moves closer.

I feel a wave of love for this sweet boy, and I pull him to me with my free arm. “I can’t say yet. I don’t want the Evil Eye to know she’s here.” Isaac nods, patting the baby on the head as if to reassure her it’s all right not to have a name quite yet.

But she does. The Holy One sent her to me when I was lost. I started this day full of doubts about myself, about my past decisions, about my future, but it’s as if his hand scooped me up in Lisbon and set me down here, as if he were saying I wasn’t listening well enough, that I hadn’t yet figured out what he has in mind for me.

Eliana. In Hebrew, it means “my God has answered,” and I know he has. We were both delivered today. He brought me to the Abravanels to have my child in a Jewish home, where we both belong.

I lie back and shut my eyes.
It’s settled then
, I think. No matter what comes, Eliana and I will face it all—joy, hope, pain, sorrow—reunited with our people.

I feel my parents’ and grandparents’ spirits hovering near me. “Our exile is over,” I whisper. “I’ve brought us home.”

11

VALENCIA 1492

I take the vial of poison I bought from a woman in an alley before we came to Valencia, and I pour it out the window, letting it run down the wall so it doesn’t touch anyone in the street. I haven’t come all this way to give up on life. I shut my eyes and thank the Holy One for the memory of Eliana’s birth and for the many reminders that he always answers, even if sometimes we can’t hear.

The room is full of ghosts of the Mallorcan family I never knew—of Abraham Cresques, who created the atlas with my grandfather, of the wives, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. “I was wrong about bringing my baby home,” I whisper to them. “Our exile will be over in God’s time, not mine.”

I know now that the Evil Eye can wait for years, and it is just now exacting the price for my arrogant belief that I could choose Eliana’s destiny and my own.

The air in the room shifts, as if the spirits have stepped back in surprise. “You’re in exile in Spain now,” they tell me.

“Here?” My incredulous tone echoes off the bare walls. “Spain is my home!”

I picture my people wandering through the desert, weeping by the rivers of Babylon, expelled from England, France, Aragon. “Anywhere you can be a Jew is home,” they remind me. “And exile is anywhere you cannot.”

“But—” I want to know what I should do today, whether I should sail from here with my family or stay and defy any mortal—even a king and queen—to keep me from being who I am. Whether I die in exile, at the stake, or alone in my bed, the one thing I am sure of is that I will die as a Jew, because I will not forsake myself or my people again.

QUELUZ 1450

Eliana lets out a sigh so long and slow she must be wondering if it’s possible to deflate completely and disappear. She rocks her body back and forth as if every minute were an eternity. “Isaac promised,” she whines. “No one keeps their word to me.”

Growing up as part of the Abravanel family, Eliana has seen nothing of the sort, and I say a silent prayer she may be so fortunate her whole life. Of course, I think with a smile, it’s not possible for a four-year-old girl to understand what the men huddled over the Zohar could possibly find more important and exciting than what she wants to do.

Newly a man under Jewish law, Isaac is studying outside with Judah and his guests, and I hear his husky thirteen-year-old voice drift in from the courtyard. “When you sit in the sukkah, the shade of faithfulness, the Shekinah spreads her wings over you,” he reads. “Abraham, five other righteous ones, and King David make their dwelling with you.”

I see Eliana’s downcast look and put down my quill. “I’ll do it with you.” Only the first two days of the fall harvest festival, Sukkot, require rest from all labor, but it’s not in the spirit of it to spend as much time as I have at Judah’s desk.

We walk into the dappled sunlight of the courtyard, the front half of which is taken up with our sukkah. It’s a temporary house with roof and walls made of leafy branches, where during the week of Sukkot we take our meals, spend our leisure time, and sleep if we wish. We build a sukkah every year not just in gratitude for the harvest, but to remind ourselves of both our displaced ancestors and those who live now without our comforts and security.

I call it our sukkah even though Eliana and I don’t live with the Abravanels. After Diogo’s death, I sold the houses in Lisbon and Lagos, never wanting to set foot in either again. I used the proceeds to buy my own home in Queluz and turned the rest of the money over to Judah to invest in his textile business. He says I am becoming quite the wealthy widow, but I don’t care, other than to be sure I have a good dowry for Eliana.

Judah doesn’t like that my house sits outside the walls of his new compound. In the years of Pedro’s regency, laws limiting Jewish rights and activities were not strictly enforced, and by the time Afonso became king two years ago, the people were angry enough to revolt. Last year, riots broke out in Lisbon, and a mob attacked the Jewish quarter, intending to burn it down. Afonso cracked down hard, claiming the Jews of Portugal as his personal property and saying he would show little mercy to anyone who damaged anything that belonged to him.

Remembering those frightening days still makes my heart race. Someone came from the compound to tell me to hurry to safety there. I carried the atlas in one hand and clutched Eliana’s hand with the other, for in my haste I could think of nothing else that mattered. We stayed together inside the compound for several days, and Eliana and I came home to find our house untouched, except for a shattered clay mug knocked to the floor by a cat that had gotten in through a window. Queluz, praise to the Holy One, is still a sanctuary.

Sukkot is too pleasant a time to dwell on bad memories, I remind myself, as I look around the courtyard. Some of the furniture has been moved outside, and Simona sits in her favorite chair, bouncing Chana’s eight-month-old baby on her knee. Chana stands over a flower bed watching her four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter giggle as they pick blasted flowers from wilted stalks and poke them in each other’s hair. Rahel, married last year, sits next to Simona, looking miserable in the final weeks of her first pregnancy.

“Grandmother,” Eliana says, “where did you put my basket?” Simona produces a small covered box woven from rushes and hands it to my daughter. She pulls her close and buries her face in Eliana’s brown curls, kissing her on the top of her head until they both are grinning ear to ear.

Eliana and I go to the place of honor in the sukkah, a chair covered with the finest Flemish cloth from Judah’s inventory, on which his most treasured religious texts are placed. The chair shows we are ready for the arrival of seven biblical guests, the Ushpizim, whose presence casts an aura of holiness over the sukkah. Eliana already knows their names and the attributes they represent. “Abraham for love and kindness,” she says, swinging my hand, “Isaac for serenity and strength, and Jacob for…” She scrunches up her face as she tries to remember. I make the sound of the first letter and her face lights up. “Beauty and truth!” she says, continuing through Moses, Aaron, and Joseph without faltering.

“And David, for the kingdom of heaven on earth,” Isaac says with her, having left the men to come over to us. He crouches beside Eliana. “I’m sorry I made you wait so long.” Eliana gives him a shy, pleased look, and I am amazed that my daughter already seems to know more about flirting than I’ve learned in twenty-four years.

“Let’s see what you have today,” Isaac says, opening the lid. I look inside as well, wondering what treasures Eliana will want to offer Jacob, the visiting spirit of honor today. There’s a small, pink pebble rubbed to a glow and a huge tuft of goose down. Of course there’s always a biscocho de huevo, a Sukkot cookie Simona bakes just for her.

I suspect she has kept to her ritual so diligently because she’s gotten so much attention from Isaac for it. I remember his wide eyes as he stood in the doorway the day Eliana was born, and I feel a rush of tenderness for him as I watch the two of them looking through her box.

Isaac’s quiet piety bears none of the marks of arrogance I find so annoying in many educated men. He studies at a yeshiva in Lisbon during the week, but he never boasts about what he has learned or insinuates that he is better informed than most people. Instead, he examines rocks and feathers with my daughter, as if he knows that the real connection with the Holy One comes in such moments. Perhaps the young see better than the rest of us, who clog our minds with knowledge we think will make us wise, but often brings nothing but greater bewilderment.

“Shall we do the blessing?” Isaac asks. This is what Eliana has been waiting for, the part she thinks an adult must do, although I’ve told her it isn’t so. She knows I used to say blessings when I was her age, but she still doesn’t know about the crucifix I wore or the sausages I threw into the grass. Someday I may tell her about living a lie, but that day hasn’t come, and I am glad of it.

“Blessed art thou, Lord God, king of the universe,” he chants. Every day, he makes up a different Sukkot blessing just for Eliana, and today his words bring a lump to my throat. “Who commands us to love all his people as parents love their children.” My daughter turns to look at me with a confident smile.

The sages say that the sukkah radiates such intense bliss that the seven Ushpizim are lured away from the Garden of Eden, where they await the arrival of the Messiah. They come to earth to dwell inside the sukkah, which is the closest the living ever get to Eden. Watching Eliana and Isaac, I see a special light radiating around them, and more than ever I see how deeply I, and all of us, are blessed.

“He was a fool!”

I hear one of Judah’s neighbors raise his voice, and I know the Zohar study is over. Eliana does too, and she runs to take Judah by the hand. “Grandfather! Come and look what I left for Jacob!”

Distracted by what the man has said, Judah doesn’t hear her. “A man is hardly a fool who weds his daughter to the King of Portugal,” he says, referring to the marriage of thirteen-year-old Crown Prince Afonso in 1445 to a cousin of my childhood friends Elizabeth and Beatriz. Their uncle Pedro finished his regency when Afonso was crowned king, but not before ensuring his legacy by marrying his daughter to the young king.

“And look at how he paid for it,” one man says. “All because he tried to be gracious to a rival who turned around and betrayed him.” It was the talk of the court for several years, how the Duke of Barcelos, Pedro’s half-brother, had worked his way into young Prince Afonso’s heart. Knowing that Barcelos might be working against him, Pedro used his power as regent to create a new duchy for his half-brother as a way of creating an alliance, however uneasy, between them.

Overnight, the first Duke of Braganza became one of the richest and most powerful men in Portugal. Despite this, he could never forget that Pedro had denied him the real prize, a daughter as queen and his own descendants as heirs to the throne. When the new king was crowned and Pedro lost power as regent, the Duke of Braganza was bent not on gratitude but revenge.

The uprising that caused me to scurry to safety at the Abravanels several years ago was sparked when Braganza persuaded King Afonso to overturn all the laws Pedro had established during his regency. The fact that the newly crowned king was unready to announce policies of his own made many think the time was right to settle old scores with the Jews.

Chaos reigned, and with the Duke of Braganza whispering in his ear, King Afonso became convinced that the unrest was Pedro’s doing. Declaring him a traitor and a rebel, the king dispatched troops to capture and kill the man who had served him loyally and well as regent. Pedro fought back and was killed, or as some whisper privately, murdered by an aide in his own camp.

“No one at court is a hero,” Judah tells me, especially when he hears me express sympathy for Pedro. For Judah, what matters is how those with power treat Jews. For generations, there’s been a struggle between the nobles and the king. For a ruler to undermine the nobility, he needs the support of the Cortes, the people’s assembly. To have this, he must show that he is the enemy of the people’s enemies. What better way to do that than taking aim at the Jews?