“Lena!”
he hissed.
“What are you thinking, speaking of such things in front of—”
My mother’s sudden rage outmatched his; her eyes held a storm of unspeakable emotion.
“Marisol is a woman, not a child!”
she interrupted him, and abruptly lowered her voice, realizing the servants might overhear.
“I won’t let you keep secrets from her anymore.”
My father stood.
“You aren’t yourself, Lena. I won’t let you speak so to me.”
Magdalena ignored him and turned to me.
“We must leave Seville. It’s not safe for us anymore.”
“Papá,”
I asked,
“is she telling the truth?”
The thought of abruptly leaving Seville, the only place we had ever known, seemed insane.
Diego’s lips trembled with suppressed fury; he stared down at my mother as if she had utterly betrayed him.
“Her imagination is running wild, Marisol, nothing more. Nothing will happen to us, and your mother will be questioned, not arrested. The mayor is a
converso,
most of my fellow councillors are
conversos,
half the lawyers and priests and even the archbishop are
conversos
! And if they attack us, the queen has sworn to protect us. More than half of her courtiers are
conversos,
and the Duke of Medina will protect us, too.…”
“The Duke of Medina will do whatever Isabel tells him,”
my mother countered forcefully.
“And Isabel wants an Inquisition.”
“Only to get rid of Judaizers—which we are not!”
My father stamped his foot.
“How dare you frighten Marisol like this?!”
My mother jumped to her feet.
“Her innocence won’t protect her! I’m proof of that, Diego!”
She looked to me.
“It’s only a matter of time now, my daughter.”
I raised my voice to drown out hers.
“Papá,”
I demanded,
“what will happen to us?”
“Nothing
,
”
he answered hoarsely.
“Magdalena, hold your tongue! Enough of this madness!”
“They’ll take me away to prison,”
my mother said sorrowfully.
“They’ll interrogate me, torture me. And then they’ll come for your father … and you.”
“Lena!”
Diego hissed her name as if it were a curse.
“You’ll stop speaking of this
now
! We’ve done nothing wrong! We have nothing to fear.”
My mother’s lovely features twisted into a grimace.
“
None
of us did anything wrong! None of us … And yet that wasn’t enough!”
She looked to me.
“Marisol, just because you’ve never seen such horrible things, you believe it can’t happen to us. But you must know: The most unthinkable things in the world
can
and
do
happen, to innocent, well-meaning people. In an instant, no matter how good you are, or kind, no matter how much you pray to God to protect you and your loved ones…”
She choked and began to sob into her hands.
My father rose and caught my mother’s wrists.
“Lena,”
he pleaded,
“please be quiet.”
He looked up at me and gestured sharply with his chin for me to leave the room. I rose and headed for the door, but as I passed my parents, my mother pulled away from Diego’s grip and reached for me.
“No child of mine will endure what I have! Marisol, hear the truth!”
she cried.
My father struck her with the back of his hand. The force sent her staggering backward against the side of her chair, which toppled, causing her to lose her balance and fall.
I moved to my mother, too late to catch her. When I helped her back to her feet, she was wide-eyed, stunned into silence, and pressed a palm to her cheekbone and jaw. Her lower lip was split, and a ribbon of blood trickled down her chin.
In that instant, I hated my father.
Shaking with agitation, Diego stared down at us; a sheen of tears filmed his eyes. As I looked vengefully back at him, the first drop trickled down the side of his face.
“Go to your chambers and stay there until I tell you, doña Magdalena,”
he said, in a low, ragged voice.
“Go and think on what you have almost done. I forbid you to speak of this again; I can’t let your fear destroy us.”
Five
My mother lifted her skirts in fury and ran from the room; my father impatiently brushed his tears away and turned his back to her as he returned to his seat and the now-cold chickpeas awaiting him. I still stood in the open doorway, watching as my mother disappeared up the stairs.
“Marisol,”
my father said sternly.
I glanced back to see him sitting at the table, staring disconsolately down at his bowl.
“How dare you hit her!”
I was seething but kept my voice low, ever mindful of the servants in the kitchen.
My father continued staring down at the chickpeas, his pained expression slowly fading, his face gradually becoming as unreadable as stone.
“It’s my right as a husband,”
he said coldly.
“I forbid you too to ever speak of this again. Come sit in your chair. I won’t tolerate any more disobedience.”
I resentfully returned to my place at the table and sat, but my tongue couldn’t rest. Somehow, I stilled my anger and managed to speak softly.
“You wouldn’t be this upset, Papá, if Mamá’s fears were all imaginary.”
He ran his hands through his thick hair, a sun-bleached brown that was only beginning to show glints of silver, then pressed his hands together to keep from fidgeting. Even then, he wouldn’t look at me.
“Your mother’s nerves have bested her: She heard a foolish rumor and believes it to be true. Now she’s frightened herself so badly that I can’t reason with her.”
“What ‘truth’ is so horrible that I can’t hear it?”
I pressed.
He shook his head.
“Don’t go to her tonight. She’s not rational and will only upset you unnecessarily. I’ll try to talk some sense into her when she’s not so aggravated.”
“I’m an adult now, Papá,”
I reminded him.
“I don’t frighten easily.”
“Your mother was frightened terribly as a child,”
he said, sighing again and staring slightly above my head at the past.
“So terribly that now she always expects the worst thing possible to happen. I forbid you to see her until I give you permission; it’s bad enough that she’s upset. I don’t want two hysterical women in my house.”
I said nothing more but was obliged to sit and finish supper, both of us silent and keeping our gazes locked on our respective plates. When we had finally suffered through the full-course meal, don Diego gave me permission to leave the table.
I hurried at once to my mother’s chambers, to find the door closed but not bolted; this time, not even Máriam would answer my frantic knocking. I drew a breath, and for the first time, entered my mother’s room without permission.
I held my breath, not wanting to see what I already knew, as I peered around the corner of the antechamber. There stood my mother, her head covered by the fringed white shawl I hadn’t seen in a decade, one she’d promised she’d never wear again. On the little mantel where the crudely painted Madonna stood, two golden candlesticks—ones I believed until that moment she’d given away—sported two burning tapers.
She stood glazed in their light, her profile to me; her lips were moving in the prayer I still remembered:
Baruch atah Eloheinu …
I stepped from the antechamber, one, two, my boot heels audible against the wood. My mother cast the briefest glance over her shoulder at me, then returned to her praying as if I’d been nothing more than a fly. Máriam too must have heard, but she ignored me altogether as she sat, legs tucked beneath her, on a green prayer rug of Moorish design. She held her dark hands up, slightly cupped, in front of her face and whispered the few words in Arabic I knew, as they had been inscribed everywhere on buildings and artwork in the city:
Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim … In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful …
For a long moment, I stood gaping as the women prayed. I told myself I had seen defiance in my mother’s gaze—and I knew without doubt that she had lied to me all these many years in order to keep me silent. That Máriam was a liar, too.
Now that the Inquisition had come, she was silent no more.
As I stared, I was torn between affection and rage: How dare these two lie to me for so long? Worse, how dare they expose me to their secret, forcing me to choose between my immortal soul (or worse, my dream of being accepted by the Old Christian world) and my love for them? Did they not realize how they were endangering my father?
In the end, of course, there was really no choice. I’d known from the instant I’d looked on them what I had to do.
* * *
Confused, anxious, and angry, I retired early that night to my bedchamber. My mind was too agitated for sleep, so I sat at the little writing desk, lit the lamp, and tried to reread my father’s priceless copy of
The Song of the Cid,
skipping the battle scenes and focusing on the love of Rodrigo for his beautiful doña Jimena. The subject evoked a different sort of pain; I glanced up from my reading to stare at the winter shutters covering the window. Behind them, not far away, stood the tall stone wall that Antonio had dug through so that we could be together as children.
I didn’t read long. A quarter hour later, the first drenching storm of winter arrived with a roar. The rain crashed down so hard that, curious, I opened the shutters and stared out at the sheets of water dropping from the sky. They swallowed the sight of the Vargases’ house, including the wall; I could see nothing but windswept, watery darkness, and pulled the shutters closed. The wind caused my reading lamp to sputter, and the growing chill near the window finally prompted me to abandon reading for bed. Even then, I couldn’t sleep, but lay thinking of Antonio, who should have returned this past June to ask for my hand. I’d waited so long for Antonio, despite his lack of letters, that at seventeen I was almost too old for a bride.
I huddled beneath the covers and listened for an hour to the storm. When it let up quite abruptly, leaving in its wake a profound quiet, I was suddenly able to hear the soft knock at my chamber door. My mother stood on the threshold, still dressed in the blue-green velvet gown with its stiff
verdugado
; her fringed white shawl was gone, and her expression was calm, her tone reasonable.
“Marisol,”
she said,
“there’s something I must ask you, but you must swear to me that you’ll never tell your father.”
“Mamá,”
I countered evenly,
“you know that I can’t agree to that.”
“I’m not asking you to keep secret what you saw tonight,”
she said.
I let her in and silently closed the door. She looked up in frustration at a portrait above my mantel—one of me when I was only seven, an unsmiling, dark-haired, dainty child with too-large eyes, wearing a high collar and a long strand of pearls, like an
infanta
.
“God has cursed me,”
she said, only half teasing,
“with a daughter as stubborn as her mother.”
I didn’t smile.
“It’s true that I’ve drawn the Inquisition’s attention,”
Magdalena said,
“because of my appearance, if nothing else. I look like a Jewess. And I fear that you take more after me than your father. I can’t stay and bring harm to Diego—and I can’t leave you. You’re not safe in Seville anymore. You have to come with me.”
I recoiled.
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you just yet,”
she answered,
“but they’ll take good care of us there. We’d be with family. We wouldn’t be alone to fend for ourselves.”
Before she could finish, I began to shake my head.
“Mamá, this is crazy! Are you saying that you and I should just leave Papá and go to a strange country?”
“Yes,”
she said emphatically. Her eyes held a desperation that unnerved me.
“Your Old Christian father is too trusting of his peers. Do you know what would happen to him if we stayed in the city? Because of me, the Inquisition would take his property and burn him. I can’t allow it to happen by staying with him, do you understand? Only don’t make me leave you, my daughter. I can bear anything else.”
I stood up, completely undone by the fact that she could even speak of such a heinous end for my father.
“I can’t leave Papá!”
I caught my rising tone and forced myself to speak more gently, aware that Máriam was in the next room.
“You’re just still upset because he hit you.”
My mother caught my shoulders.
“It has nothing to do with that—I’m trying to save your life, do you understand? You’re the daughter of a
conversa,
Marisol, and the Inquisition has come here to destroy me and you and your father.”