The Mapmaker's Daughter (3 page)

Grandfather takes off the lid of a small carved-ivory jar, and the aroma of cloves and cinnamon wafts through the air. After massaging the dried spices between his fingers to release more of their scent, he puts the jar under my nose. “May you have a sweet week,” he says.

Susana inhales the heady blend next and holds the jar under Mama’s nose. When it has passed to everyone, we stand around a plate of membrillo, taking turns spooning out a morsel of the sweetened quince paste and sighing as it melts on our tongues.

Mama and the others start down the path, but Grandmother motions to Luisa and me to stay. She dips her fingers in the remaining wine from the silver cup. She touches behind our ears for health, in our pockets for wealth, and on the backs of our necks for the quick arrival of the Messiah.

As we walk to the gate, Grandmother picks a blossom from a quince tree and tucks it behind my ear. “Have a good week, my beloved Leah,” she says. Its fragrance fills the carriage all the way home.

VALENCIA 1492

I wake to the faint scent of quince blossoms and cinnamon, and I think for a moment it is Shabbat and I am in Grandfather’s lap. I feel his spirit breathing on my neck. “You kept it safe,” he says.

“Yes, Grandfather,” I whisper. “I showed it to my daughter, to my grandchildren, and my great grandchildren, just as you shared it with me.”

I don’t want to tell him I can protect it no further. Jews may take no more from Spain than they can carry. Take something useful, my daughter has told me. A little more clothing, or a piece of leather for new soles for our shoes. Sell the atlas and sew into my hem the few coins it will bring. I see the pain behind her resolve. The book is as much a part of her as it is of me, no easier to leave behind than an arm or a leg.

I don’t know what I will do when my grandson Judah arrives later today to take me to the boat. I could take the vial of poison I bought from a gypsy on the road to Valencia and pour it down my throat to save myself the decision of whether to go or stay behind, but the thought of Judah finding my body on a day already full of unspeakable loss restrains me.

“Go to the end,” my grandfather says, still behind me. I open my mouth to protest that I am already at the end. Go, stay, die, live—it’s all the same.

“I mean the atlas,” he says, annoyed at my incomprehension. “The last panel, the one that was your favorite.” I turn to the Asia of Kubla Khan, a lumpy circle, with people and places lining its perimeter. At the top, the figures are painted upside down, or so I thought when grandfather first showed them to me. “When people think there’s only one right place to stand, they say foolish things like ‘you’re doing it wrong.’ All you have to do is go to the other side and look again at how many ways there are to see the world.” I am not sure if the solemn voice I hear is a memory or a whisper. “You must act in their world, even when every choice seems as impossible as riding a horse upside down.”

I touch the empire of Magog, at the summit of Asia. “Behold a swarm of locusts were coming,” the prophet Amos said, “and one of the locusts was Gog, the King.” He could hardly be more fearsome than Isabella and Ferdinand. If a mapmaker painted Spain now, it would have boats sinking, refugees drowning, doleful lines of Jews on dusty roads, bonfires with black corpses hanging from stone pillars…

“Grandfather, help me,” I plead. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Go with your heart. You cannot do otherwise.”

“But I don’t know what my heart is telling me!” I want to protest that I am a confused old woman who can’t think straight anymore.

He cuts off my complaint. “It’s buried in your memories. Go find out.”

2

SEVILLA 1433

The windows of the cathedral admit little light on this blustery morning, and the sconces on each massive pillar give up their weak yellow glow into the looming gray overhead. The odor of tallow smoke, wet wool, and incense wafts through the nave as I stand with my family shortly after my seventh birthday, in the long line of people awaiting communion on Tosantos, All Saints’ Day.

Father hangs back to let us go first. Susana picks Luisa up so the priest can lay a wafer on her tongue and then puts her down to receive the host herself. They make the sign of the cross, and Luisa looks up at Susana for approval.

I stick out my tongue for the priest, but before the wafer can dissolve, I transfer it to the inside of my upper teeth, as my mother has taught me. When we return to where Susana and Luisa are standing in the nave, I see my mother run the knuckle of her thumb over her lips, and in a few seconds, she has managed to bury the unswallowed host in the folds of her underskirt.

I wiggle the host free from my own teeth and move it to the tip of my tongue. Feigning a cough, I deposit it between my curled fingers. Clasping the other hand over my fist in a gesture of prayer, I wait for the chance to paste the sticky blob inside the hem of my sleeve.

My mother has her own way of going to mass. She says out loud only the things she believes and mumbles her way through the rest. I do the same. The Lord’s Prayer is one of the things we both say with fervor. “It’s a Jewish prayer,” my mother tells me, “taught by a Jew to his own people.”

She finds it amusing that Christians hang on everything an ancient rabbi said. “I understand Jesus perfectly,” Mama tells me. “I just don’t understand Christians, and I don’t think he would either.” Indeed, my mother seems on quite friendly terms with the Hanged One, as if they are both shaking their heads in bewilderment at what is done and said in his name.

After mass, Luisa clamors for Susana to take her to see the nuns who live nearby. I’m not sure whether it’s the little cakes they lay out for visitors that make her so eager to go, or that the nuns create such a commotion over how pretty she is. Though I would rather not, my mother always makes me go too. “It helps us look like good Christians,” she tells me with a wistful smile.

Going home afterward, we skirt the edge of the neighborhood where the Jews live. Grandfather told me there used to be a Jewish quarter protected by a wall and a locked gate, but there were terrible riots a while back, and all but a few hundred Jews died or moved away. Christians moved into the vacant houses and shops, and the remaining Jews pay a neighborhood guard to watch over their houses, though all their protectors do is doze in the shade or tell jokes outside the tavern.

None of the guards are in sight when we hear the first screams. Without thinking, we run around the corner to see where the noise is coming from. A group of young men is beating up a Jewish merchant outside his shop, yelling something about how he’s defiling Tosantos by being open for business.

“This isn’t our holiday,” his daughter is screaming. “You want some wine? You want some bread? Who do you think we’re open for?”

People are spilling onto the street. A few come to the man’s defense, but most seem bent on a brawl. Susana pulls us into a doorway as people stream past. Seeing another Jewish merchant hurriedly closing his shop, two boys pick up fruit from the baskets he has not yet taken inside and stomp it to pulp on the cobblestones.

“Apples for sale!” one says, picking up the whole basket and marching down the street. “Apples for free!” he corrects himself. “Jew apples for free.”

Two of his companions drag the greengrocer outside and throw him against the wall so violently I hear his head hit the stones. They are so close we could almost be caught by the backswing of the clubs that suddenly appear in their hands. Luisa is screaming, and I am plastered to the wall of the doorway, my cries frozen in my throat.

Finally the guards arrive, but the crowd is howling for blood. One of them pulls up a man kneeling next to the limp body of the greengrocer and pummels him with his fists. The guard fighting near our doorway pulls a club from his belt, dealing his opponent a savage blow on the head. Blood spatters and the man falls, his splayed arm trailing across the front of my dress. He lies face up at my feet, his lifeless eyes staring skyward as a pool of blood forms underneath his head.

The guard’s sweating face is convulsed, and a noise like a wild animal comes from deep inside him as he turns to find someone else to fight. I feel Susana yanking my arm. Carrying Luisa and dragging me behind, she gets us out of the street and in the direction of home. I am sobbing so hard I can’t breathe as I hang onto her skirt, and Luisa is clinging so tightly that Susana cannot put her down. She is staggering with the burden of both of us by the time we reach our door.

“A man—” I say, barely able to speak through my sobs. “I saw a man die. He touched me, Mama.” I look at my blood-splattered dress, and I run to the kitchen just in time to spew the remains of the nun’s cakes in an empty bowl.

“Il Dio ke se apaide de mosostros,” my mother whispers, her face ashen. “May God have mercy on us.”

Father is heading out the door with a stout piece of wood. “Lock the door behind you,” he commands. “If the fight spreads here, hide in the cellar.”

“How will you get back in if I lock the door?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he says, and then he is gone.

Mama pulls us all to her. “Praise to the Holy One,” she says, “for keeping you safe.”

Susana breaks away, curling her lip in a way that bares her teeth. “It’s people like you that make these things happen,” she hisses. “Can’t you just call him Our Father? Do you have to give us all away?”

Her knees give out under her, and she falls to the floor sobbing. When Mama tries to put her arms around her, Susana shrinks into a ball, screaming at her not to touch her, not to touch her ever again. Luisa is clinging to me, and I can think of nothing to do but go in the bedroom and hide under the covers with her until the rage in the streets and inside our home has passed.

***

My father comes back unscathed from the brawl. He says he’s sorry he frightened us, but that he took the stick for protection on his way to the palace of his employer, the Count of Medina-Sidonia, to implore him to put a quick end to the chaos. A few of the count’s guards arrived on horseback, brandishing swords in streets too narrow to escape the slash of their blades. The crowd scattered in moments, and only the greengrocer and the man at my feet were killed.

“It’s fortunate only Jews are dead,” Papa says. “If Christians had died, the city would be ablaze. This way it’s over, at least for now.”

My mother shudders. “Fortunate that Jews are attacked?”

“Rosaura!” My father’s words snap the air. “That’s not what I mean. You know what Christians say. Jews tempt them to displease God. If shops are open, people will buy, God will be angry, and it will be the Jews’ fault.”

“And you believe this?”

“What does it matter what I believe? Why look elsewhere when the Jews cry out, ‘Here we are! Blame us for everything!’”

I think of the Jewish tailor who gives me leftover pieces of ribbon for my hair, the vegetable man who cracks a pea pod and drops the sweet green balls into my hand. “Papa,” I say, “I think Jews are nice.”

For a moment, he seems as if he had forgotten I was there, before he crouches down to look into my eyes. “Some are, some aren’t, just like other people,” he says. “Jews offend Christians. It isn’t logical, it isn’t fair, but it’s true. I don’t want to offend people. I don’t want anyone seeing me or my family as people it’s all right to harm.”

He brushes away a stray hair from my cheek, and the feelings I have been holding in come spilling out. “Papa, I’m scared,” I say with a huge, heaving sob.

“You have no need to be, if people believe you are a good Christian.”

I hear my mother weeping in the corner, but my father does not glance her way. “That’s why we go to church. That’s why I kiss the crucifix at the door. I don’t think about what I really believe. I don’t imagine most people do. All I know is that people have to change with the times, or they won’t be around to see them.”

He stands up and gives my mother a look so hard it sends a shiver up my spine. “You endanger us, Rosaura. I’ve told you that many times, but you haven’t listened.”

My mother cowers like a trapped animal in the corner. “What are you saying?” Her hoarse whisper doesn’t sound like her voice at all.

“I’m saying that I think what happened today isn’t over. I’m saying the time is right for some preacher to come along like Ferrand Martinez did forty years ago and convince Sevilla that every Jew is an offense against Christendom. I’m saying that there aren’t enough Jews left here to make one good bonfire, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try—”

“Vicente—los mejores de mosotros!” Mama says. “They should never hear talk like this.”

Papa scowls and puts on his hat. “I need some air,” he says, shutting the door behind him on a house stunned to silence.

***

That night, I hear my parents talking after I have gone to bed. Our house is big enough to have a sleeping nook for my sisters and me and a room with a door for my parents, but sound travels easily, and I can pick up their voices even over Susana’s light snoring beside me.

“You have to give up the old ways, Rosaura,” Papa says. Mother murmurs something I can’t hear. “Ancestors?” my father replies. “Why are you so sure they would want us to risk our children’s lives?” I strain to hear what my mother is saying, but I can’t.

“Always done things this way, keep the faith—what kind of foolishness is that if we’re all dead?” My father’s voice is getting louder. “We changed our ways when the Romans burned the temple and sent us into exile. All the rabbis do now is spout nonsense about holding to the things that make people hate us. I don’t call that wisdom, and I’m more than happy not to be a Jew.”

The noise from their room has stopped, except for the snuffling sound of my mother’s tears. Silence hangs over the house like a judgment, except for the scratching sound of a mouse devouring a piece of grain in the corner. Two cats yowl at each other in the alley, and something crashes to the ground as they fight.