The Mapmaker's Daughter (4 page)

I go to stand in my parents’ doorway, but their forms under the blanket offer nothing to comfort me. I tiptoe backward to bed, wanting to trick time into reverse, so today will never have happened.

***

I am sitting with Susana in a sparsely furnished room lit only by faint winter sunlight, a small, ineffectual fire, and a candle by whose light a nun is reading. “The Lord said to Peter, ‘Whatsoever you shall bind on earth, shall be bound also in Heaven.’” Sister Teresa looks up at me. “Can you tell me what this means?”

“Does it mean if you die tied up, when you get to heaven you still have the ropes around you?” I don’t understand any of it, though I have been genuinely trying in the six months since the fight in the street. Afterward, my father ordered Mama not to light Shabbat candles anymore and told Susana to oversee my religious education at the convent. The servant was to see us having both meat and dairy on our table, and once a week, she and my mother were to prepare a dish containing ham or pork.

Mama watches me choke down the same kind of sausage I once threw in the grass and leaves the table uncleared for the servant to see cheese rinds floating in leftover meat stew. She lights one oil lamp upstairs as it grows dark on Friday, choosing a time when she thinks I will not see her mouthing the blessing.

My mother looks pale and her clothes hang on her. She says she doesn’t care if she starves to death and makes her supper from only cheese and bread if the soup has even a touch of anything forbidden by Jewish law. “The family is abiding by what you have decreed,” she says to Papa in a dull, cold voice, “but I will not.” More than once, I have heard her retching in our courtyard after serving food she never imagined in her home.

I hear Sister Teresa’s voice through my fog of thoughts. “Only through the church can you be redeemed. That’s what ‘binding’ means. Whoever is bound to God on earth will be bound to him in heaven.”

“But why aren’t the Jews bound to God? They believe in him too.” I avoid looking at Susana. She says I am difficult on purpose when all I really want are answers that make sense.

“Jews say they believe in God but they do not,” the nun says. She leans in toward me and I smell her rotting teeth. “Long ago, God was pleased with the Jews. They worshipped him as One, because they did not know his full nature. Then God made himself flesh through his son, Jesus Christ—King of the Jews!” Her voice grows shrill and her eyes flash. “And who rejected him?”

“The Jews,” I say miserably.

The nun takes my hands in hers. Her nails are split and ragged, and her fingers are chapped. “The devil wants to lure you back to your family’s cursed race, so you will be lost to God.”

I want to pull my hand away, but hers are too strong. “You’re scaring me,” I whisper.

“As well I should.”

The God Mama speaks to seems so different. That God scorns the proud, not the Jews. That God raises up the downtrodden and pours his wrath on those who persecute them. That God loves those who believe in him. Why does Sister Teresa think he doesn’t love me?

I look at a statue of the Virgin Mother in a niche across the room. My mother’s gentleness makes her a bit like Mary in my eyes, and when I told her that, she was pleased. “Mary was a Jew,” she said. “We could have been good friends, talking about our children and husbands.”

Susana’s and the nun’s pitiless eyes bore into me. Jesus was a Jew, and I don’t understand why he would hate me for being like him. I look away again toward Mary, hoping that maybe she knows me, maybe she understands. I wait for a smile, a wink, a nod, but if she responds, even the mother of the Hanged One does not have the power to penetrate the gloom.

***

My mother’s back is turned, but I can see she is holding the crucifix that usually hangs outside our front door. She startles when I come up behind her, and for a moment, she tries to cover up the hollow channel she is carving out of the wood. I unroll a curled paper on the table and see tiny Hebrew writing on it. “What’s this?” I ask.

“Get me a piece of tree bark from the courtyard and I’ll show you,” she replies. “And be fast about it. I have to finish this before anyone else comes home.”

When I return, she puts the rolled paper in the recess she has carved and tacks the bark over it to hold it in place. “It’s a mezuzah now, with the words of the shema inside,” she says. “I bought the paper from a rabbi. The Holy One commands Jews to put these words on their doors.” She picks up her handiwork and replaces it on the door, matching it up exactly with the faded outline on the painted stucco. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God,” she whispers. “The Lord is One.”

That night, Papa, Susana, and Luisa put their fingers to their lips then touch our new mezuzah as they come into the house. Mama and I exchange furtive grins, and I know that I will never trade such moments for anything Sister Teresa offers—even salvation itself.

***

I do everything I can to ease Mama’s misery, but it’s harder to know how to please my father. He makes maps for the Count of Medina-Sidonia, but he’s also his astronomer, astrologer, natural philosopher, and translator. Papa knows both Latin and Arabic, and though he won’t admit it, I’m sure he knows Hebrew too from having grown up with my grandparents.

He’s proud I have taught myself to read and write. “It’s time you learned to write on paper,” he says one day, spilling onto our table a bag of sheets spoiled by the count’s secretary. “Wax tablets and slates are fine for some things, but you should learn to do it well enough to keep.”

By my tenth birthday, I will have learned to read and write Castilian, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. I don’t know why languages pour into my mind so effortlessly, each one more easily than the last. I feel sometimes as if I am not learning them at all but remembering something I had forgotten. “It’s a gift from the Holy One,” my mother says. “He plans to use you for something. It’s too bad you’re not a boy.”

Would I please Papa then? He’s not home much now except to sleep and have his meals. My mother and he barely talk, and Susana and Luisa get his attention more easily than I do. Perhaps if I were a son…

I look down at my ink-stained overskirt. But I’m not.

Please Papa? I don’t know how. A lump rises in my throat. How can I please someone who hardly knows I’m there?

VALENCIA 1492

“I loved you, Amalia. You were my favorite. How could you not know that?”

Is my father here? It can’t be a memory, because he never once said such a thing.

“Not then,” I say into the quiet. “Not when I was little and needed it most.”

“I loved your spirit, your mind. The others were easier. They accepted everything, but I never knew quite what to make of you. You always gave me joy, even if I didn’t know how to show it.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” My heart still twists with pain at how much I wanted reassurance then.

“I didn’t know a father was supposed to. I was always working. That’s how I showed my love.”

“You didn’t love Mama. Not at the end.”

“I always loved your mother. I tried to stop her because I couldn’t have lived with myself if any of you were hurt by her Judaizing. I had nightmares.”

I know his nightmares. I’ve seen them now myself.

“You wanted a son. I tried to make it up to you.”

Susana was my parents’ first child, born a year after their marriage. In the six years before I was born, three baby boys preceded me. One was stillborn, one died in his sleep a month after his birth, and one was struck down by a fever around the time he began to walk.

I heard the laments of women who had borne only daughters. I heard the rejoicing over every birth of a boy. I heard what women always wished the pregnant ones—“Ijo de buena ventura ke te se aga.” May you have a son with a good future.

Three sons dead, and then there was me. How could I not feel I had failed?

All those years I spent reading every book in the house, huddled over slates, wax tablets, scraps of paper, trying with scratches of pen or stylus to cast a spell that would bring his love to me. All those copied bible verses and pages of scientific and philosophical treatises—were those my offerings to my father, to soften his disappointment?

He reads my mind. “It was never that way. I wanted a boy who would live—who doesn’t?—but I never wanted you to be anybody else. And look at all you became.”

Perhaps if I hadn’t believed I needed to atone for his disappointment, I might have settled for less from myself. But my mother was right. The Holy One had a plan, and in trying all those years to be something I wasn’t, I became the person I am.

3

SEVILLA 1434

The news from the court of Henry the Navigator in Portugal is so astonishing that my father is making the trip to my grandparents’ farm to share the news. I am eight, and in my years of weekly visits, I can remember only a few times when he has been sitting beside us in the cart as we leave Sevilla.

“Tell me again about Cape Bojador, Papa.”

Annoyance flickers in his eyes. He wants to be left alone, and I have been pestering him since he came home yesterday with word that Gil Eanes had finally rounded Cape Bojador on the west coast of Africa.

My mother intervenes to keep the peace. “Why don’t you tell Luisa and me what you remember? Papa will tell you if you forget anything important.” I sigh loudly, but this is so exciting, I don’t mind telling the story myself.

The first of Luisa’s teeth is coming loose now that she is nearly six, and she wiggles it solemnly. “Tell me!” she says in a voice muffled by the finger in her mouth. I could make up crazy details just to watch her eyes widen, but this story is so fantastic I can’t think of a way to embellish it.

“Everyone said Cape Bojador was the end of the world,” I tell her, “that a boat that sailed past it would never return.”

“The end of the world.” Luisa nods. “We would fall off.”

“We will not fall off,” I growl. “People thought the sea was boiling there like the mouth of Hell, but it turns out—”

“No one wants to go to Hell,” Luisa interrupts. “If I were on that ship, I would turn around.” She looks at Mama and Papa for approval, but they are both looking away.

“Well, if it really were the mouth of Hell, Gil Eanes wouldn’t have been able to come back, would he?” I retort. “The devil would have sucked him right in.” Luisa is starting to annoy me as much as Susana does, but she’s just a little girl and there’s no pleasure in baiting her.

“Sucked him right in,” Luisa repeats.

“But it turns out the ocean south of there is like everywhere else. He saw places where the people were black as night and they have piles of gold and treasure.”

“Jesus is the treasure.”

I sense my mother’s weight shift. She is only pretending not to listen, and she doesn’t like what she hears. I am so mad at Luisa I turn my back to her and cross my arms. “I was going to say more about the boiling water,” I sniff, and with a jolt, I recognize Susana’s tone in my voice. But I’m nothing like her. She’s always glowering about something, but it isn’t every day that a man sails beyond the end of the known world and comes back to tell the tale.

“Look, Mama!” Luisa holds aloft a little white pearl. Blood smears her fingertips, and she makes a smacking noise to keep the pink saliva in her mouth. Mama takes out a handkerchief and dabs the blood away. Luisa’s astonishment quickly gives way to fear. “I have a hole in my mouth,” she whimpers. “We have to bury my tooth right now!”

“We’ll do it at Grandmother’s.” Papa has been brought back from his thoughts by the commotion.

“No!” Luisa says. “I can’t grow another until it’s buried!”

“Look!” Mama takes Luisa’s finger and shows her that the stub of her new tooth is already protruding.

“No! Now!”

“We’ll be there soon,” Papa tells her, “and a few minutes won’t make any difference.”

“It won’t make any difference if we get there a few minutes later either,” Mama says in the clipped tone she now uses with him.

Papa sighs. “Stop the cart,” he tells the driver.

The wheat fields are dotted with oaks as dark as ink on a yellow page. A hawk circles, following something moving below. Papa and I stay in the cart while Luisa and Mama climb down. I see the outline of Mama’s pregnant belly as she stands watching Luisa cover the tooth with loose dirt. Soon, Mama tells me, she will be too big to make the journey, and our Shabbat visits will have to stop.

Luisa and Mama climb back inside, and we are off. I lean against the side of the cart, and my thoughts drift off again to Cape Bojador. I wish I had been on Gil Eanes’s ship, even if I quivered in my shoes the whole time. Papa told me that plumes of foam and mist shoot into the sky at the cape, and the breeze from the shore is so hot that the water roils and hisses. Even if the sky is blue, great clouds hug the coast and make the shoreline invisible, so any boat that comes too near is dashed to splinters.

There’s a ship painted off Cape Bojador in Grandfather’s atlas, with a mermaid following behind. It would be wonderful to be her. I’d have sapphire blue eyes, waving gold hair, creamy skin, and a tail I could flip and go off into the deep without worrying about drowning. I would be the most important thing any sailor had ever seen.

I sigh. Luisa looks more like a mermaid than I do. I have dark hair and muddy gold eyes. Over the course of the year, my skin goes through all the shades of honey, into a hue as dark as almond skins by the time summer ends. My nose is small and straight, but I know that when people praise your nose, there isn’t much else they can think of to say.

No, I think, casting a glum look to where Luisa has drifted off to sleep, snuggled against our mother. She’d get the attention in the ocean too.

***

As usual, Grandfather is waiting at the gate. His jaw drops when he sees my father, and then he breaks into a grin. Putting his arm over Papa’s shoulder, he starts toward the house, with Luisa and me trotting alongside as Papa shares the news.