The Mapmaker's Daughter (33 page)

My fingers stiffened by the time I was fifty-five, but I had lost interest in writing poetry by then, preferring to watch life flow past without plumbing its deepest meanings. A hug from tiny arms or a limp flower brought from the garden in muddy fingers was a poem of more value than any of mine.

Isaac passed his fortieth birthday and became King Afonso’s chief financial adviser and a member of his inner circle. Wealth poured in from his businesses, investments, and gifts from the king. As a Jew, Isaac could never have a title granting him noble status, but Afonso considered him a true and trusted friend and those who tried to harm us paid the price. Those were good years for all the Jews—as good as it gets for people who, despite the king’s tolerance, paid exorbitant taxes and lived by decree behind the aljama’s walls.

We felt somewhat secure, unlike the Jews in Spain. Ferdinand was crowned king of Aragon after his father’s death in 1479, and Spain was united, except for the throbbing thorn of Granada. Would conquering the Muslim caliphate lead to a crusade against the Jews too? Doomsayers said so, but most of us ignored them.

We should have listened. From the time Ferdinand became King of Aragon, conquest fever brought anti-Jewish riots all over Spain. Then, a decade ago, the first inquiries were held at their behest by Tomás de Torquemada to determine whether Sevilla’s conversos were secret Jews. Like my mother. Like my grandparents.

Is anyone alive who saw me wearing a crucifix? If so, who would recognize me after half a century? Still, can a church and its records burn down thoroughly enough? Ferdinand and Isabella will stop at nothing to get Isaac to stay in Spain, for some Jews are too valuable to lose. If they knew my story, would they tie me to a stake as a Judaizer, hold a lighted torch, and tell him the price of saving me was a trip to the baptismal font himself?

I have no doubt they would.

Families are coming out in the cool of the early evening. It’s calmer now, as if having made a feast of our belongings, they now want to work off the meal by taking a pleasant stroll.

I stare at the door, imagining my story is out and soldiers’ boots are pounding the stairs. Much as I don’t care about living, I don’t want to die the horrific way Torquemada thinks people like me should.

I shake my head and tell myself I am a foolish old woman. I’m safe here in this room.

Safe? My laughter sounds disembodied, so harsh and cackling that it raises the hair on my arms. I am almost the last Jew in Spain. Safe indeed.

LISBON 1481

The church bells of Lisbon peal a somber dirge as the funeral cortege for King Afonso V passes from the bright August sunlight into the gloom of the cathedral. As Jews, we cannot go inside, so I stand in the crowd with my family to pay respect to the king I knew as a little boy when I played with his cousins at the palace.

Afonso, at forty-nine, was dead from loss of will to live as much as from the plague that struck him down. Six years earlier, he married his thirteen-year-old niece Juana, the girl known as La Beltraneja, born of the affair between El Impotente’s wife and the courtier Beltrán de la Cueva. His plan to bring Castile under the Portuguese crown did not succeed. His forces were defeated by King Ferdinand, and soon afterward, Afonso’s marriage to La Beltraneja was annulled by the pope. Even though he remained king in title, he faded away, dying in a monastery near Sintra.

Such a sad end, I think, watching his coffin pass into the cathedral. Such a sad family. His cousin Elizabeth, mad at Arévalo. His sister Juana married to El Impotente, disgracing herself with other men. And La Beltraneja, married at thirteen to a man more than three times her age—who could not be moved to pity by the heartlessness with which she had been treated? Her marriage annulled and stripped of all her titles, she’s gone off now, before her twentieth birthday, to live in a convent, wondering how it could be that just a few years ago, she was fawned and fought over. Or did she grow up knowing, as Elizabeth did, that she would end up a pawn in a game played without a thought for her?

Later, Isaac arrives at the Lisbon house, where Simona and I are staying to help Eliana prepare for the High Holy Days. His face is as grave as the pallbearers’ earlier that day. “The Duke of Braganza is preparing for a showdown,” he says. “King João is saying outrageous things, with his father’s body barely cold.”

“He was saying them while Afonso was still alive,” Eliana reminds him. Indeed, since his father’s decline, João’s swaggering has been kept in check by the nobles, who made sure he understood that he had no authority they did not wish to grant him, at least while his father still lived.

Isaac nods. “He’s been telling us how things would be different when he became king, but I don’t think anyone was expecting trouble to start so soon. He’s asking the nobles to show proof that lands and titles are legitimately theirs. He intends to strip them of what they can’t document, even after hundreds of years in their families.”

“What about Queluz?” I hear the worry in Simona’s voice.

“I have papers,” Isaac says. “This is really about the Duke of Braganza. He owns more than a third of the land in Portugal, and he tells me many of his possessions were never formalized.” He looks down, stroking his beard, as he always does when he is thinking. “João doesn’t stand a chance of toppling Braganza, or any of the other nobles, unless the Cortes backs him, and we all know that turning on the conversos and Jews is the easiest way to get their support.”

“Look at what’s happening in Sevilla,” Simona murmurs, her voice so soft it can barely be heard. The first convictions for Judaizing have been handed down by the Dominican inquisitors, and dozens of people have been tied to stakes and burned alive.

“There’s talk about inviting the inquisitors here.” Isaac’s voice trails off, and the room falls silent. No one notices the stew scorching to bitter black as we all look away so as not to have our own fears heightened by what we see in each other’s eyes.

QUELUZ 1482

The next year brings slow suffocation. The Holy One takes both Chana and Rahel, along with several of their children, when plague sweeps through the crowded streets of the aljama. Eliana and Isaac’s daughter Hadassah’s wedding to Reuben, a young rabbi and Talmudic scholar, is the only thing that raises our spirits. When she becomes pregnant within a few months, we hover in her radiance like moths drawn out of darkness to even the faintest light.

At seventy, Simona’s health is failing. A few years ago, she scoffed at our worries, claiming she intended to live until she crumbled into dust before our eyes. Now she wonders aloud whether she will live to see Hadassah’s baby. We ask ourselves the same as we watch her steps slow to a painful creep.

Isaac is suffering at court, and though he doesn’t talk about it much, it shows in the deepening furrows in his brow and a beard growing translucent and colorless. “João is greedy and deceitful, and one of the greatest tyrants ever to rule,” Isaac says, and for a man who knows history as well as he does, that is quite a statement.

João’s father, King Afonso, was so generous in currying favor with the nobles that he gave away much of João’s patrimony. All that was left him were the highways of Portugal, the new king complains, and he intends to do something about it.

“He thinks his father was weak,” Isaac explains to me one summer evening as we sit in the courtyard at Queluz. “He doesn’t see anything wrong in taking back what was given by someone else. After all, how is he to have power in a land other men control?”

Isaac brushes away an insect buzzing around his head in the dimming light. “João thinks Braganza had a hand in his mother’s death. She was married at fifteen and dead of poison at twenty-three, so João lost his mother at what? Four or five? He has grievances to settle with the House of Braganza, and he can’t wait to start.”

The situation soon darkens when one of the Duke of Braganza’s brothers is exiled from Portugal for a trivial insult. Our good friend, Gedaliah Yahya, the royal physician, having had enough of the new king, has decided to go to Constantinople to protect his family from what he fears are terrible times ahead for the Jews.

“I was Afonso’s physician, so João despises me,” Gedaliah says at a farewell Shabbat dinner at Isaac and Eliana’s home. “I’m tired of the looks he gives me, as if his hangnails and headaches should be treated better than his father’s were. I removed a splinter last week, and he glared at me the whole time. A splinter! Is there an old way and a new way to deal with that?”

“He wants to get rid of everything associated with his father,” Isaac adds. “None but the most blatant panderers have his favor now.” He hesitates, as if debating whether the peace of the Sabbath should be disturbed by thoughts that are too private, or perhaps too painful, to share.

Finally he speaks. “‘He’s after the Jews too,” he says. “Not publicly yet, but that will come.”

Gedaliah has had quite a bit of Shabbat wine, and he sets his cup down noisily. “Before Passover, one of João’s new favorites asked me where the Jews were planning to lay in wait for a Christian child to murder. He said they all wanted to know so they could keep their children safe.” Everyone exchanges glances. The blood libel, the belief that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in our Passover matzoh, would die if people understood that Jewish law requires us to throw away any food with even a speck of blood in it. But lies are hard to kill when they make a better story.

“Last week, I overheard two of them discussing whether they could see the outline of my tail against the back of my robe or whether I walked with it between my legs,” Isaac adds. “They kept their voices just loud enough to be sure I couldn’t miss what they were saying.”

He gets up from the table and retrieves a piece of paper from a book. “And then, there’s this.” It’s a sketch of Isaac and Gedaliah, each with one hand on a large bag of coins, while behind them lurks a horned devil. Its face is drawn with the same evil grin and narrow, sneaky eyes as the two men. Peeking out from beneath their cloaks, their hooves match the devil’s own.

“What is this?” I ask, stunned.

“Something I found lying on my desk at court,” Gedaliah says. “No one has claimed it, but that’s likely from embarrassment over the lack of artistic skills.” He tries to smile but fails. “Hatred is in the air, and I don’t intend to let it feed on me.”

Gedaliah’s wife has been silent until now. “We’re rich. We’re Jews. How long until João sees how easy it would be to take everything from us?”

Eliana stiffens, and a hush settles over the table. Of all the Jews at court, only Isaac would have more to lose than Gedaliah if the king were to turn on him.

Isaac speaks first. “We are not honoring Shabbat,” he says. “We will worry enough about it tomorrow, but for now, I must insist we stop.” He turns to my grandson Judah, now a tall youth of nineteen. “Will you get the guitarra?” he asks. “It’s time to sing.”

***

By the time the green hills hint of a new spring, Isaac has left the king’s service all but officially. He finally has the time he long dreamed of to write, and his commentaries on the biblical prophets spill out onto the pages. Some of the old joy returns to his spirit, and he, like the rest of us, lives happily in seclusion in Queluz.

The courtyard is filled with the voices of children, and Eliana and Isaac preside over their home just as I remember Judah and Simona doing long ago. Simona has lived more than ten years without Judah now, but from the way she talks, it seems as if he has momentarily left the room. Perhaps to her he has. Perhaps they were so close he still lives in her.

It saddens me that I never had such a partner, but I don’t think of Jamil very often now. When I do, I remember him as a friend more than a lover. Perhaps it’s been too long since my body cared about such things.

Simona seems barely of this world. Her skin is as brittle and translucent as onion skins, and her hair is as light as tufts of dandelion drifting in the breeze. She sits without moving most of the day, a sweet smile on her face as she watches her great-grandchildren at their play. Sometimes, to their annoyance, she calls them by the names of her children, as if she were traveling back in time. She eats almost nothing. The nourishment she needs comes from somewhere else now, a place only she can see.

Then one morning, she doesn’t come out from her bedroom. Eliana and I go to see if something is wrong, and we discover her body, as peaceful as if she were taken away in a beautiful dream.

I mourn her with great abandon, as if every other death has been heaped on top of this one to be grieved afresh. At the end of shiva, the period of formal mourning, I go alone to the mikveh built into the courtyard wall. There, I examine my wrinkled thighs and arms, my sagging breasts, the soft folds of my stomach. “You’re next,” I tell myself.

I am fifty-six years old. My daughter is a grandmother. Where once I might have found death a gloomy prospect, I don’t now. Though there is always something new I want to live to see, I understand how the old might feel that they don’t have the strength to face what lies ahead. Perhaps this is why we die, more than the failure of our limbs or heart.

I feel the water lap at every inch of me, under my fingernails, into my eyebrows, and among the shrunken folds of my most private part. I feel Simona’s presence and sit down with her beside me in this place of changes, where so many times before, she and the living water helped me find the grace and wisdom to move on.

23

VALENCIA 1492

I wake to find my body and face wet. I trace my finger across my arm and touch it to my tongue. It is pure and clean, not tasting of sweat at all. I catch in the air the faint odor of ripe pears and cloves. “Simona?” I ask. “Judah?”

A puff of breeze brings the room to life. “We’re here. We knew you were afraid, so we came.”