The second time I encountered Gabriel, little more than a week ago, I’d been screaming again. This time I was the one pinned by his brute strength; he’d held me back from diving into the deep waters of the River Guadalquivir.
“I’m sorry,”
he had said. Those were the only two words he said to me before coming to ask my grieving father for my hand.
I fidgeted, fighting to repress memory and tears; by then, the priest had finished his prayer, and we were obliged to stand as he read the obligatory passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”
In a strong tenor belied by his feeble appearance, the priest began to sing an abbreviated liturgy. The three men accompanying me sang the compulsory replies, but I couldn’t lift my voice. Instead, I stood, face downcast beneath my dark veil, and tried to will myself to another, happier place and time, where the events of the previous week had never happened, where the events of today could never occur.
The priest began his homily, which he rattled off with the same enthusiasm a bored child might a Latin prayer learned by rote. Again, he invoked Paul’s words to the church in Corinth: “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”
I remembered my mother, Magdalena, and her constant love, whose perfection would have pleased even Saint Paul; I closed my eyes and saw her smiling beside me. She was more than a decade younger then, stronger of body and mind because she had yet to undergo much suffering. Eager for her company, I returned to her in memory.
Two
My earliest childhood recollection is that of my mother, Magdalena, praying in her bedroom every Friday just as the sun sank beneath the river. I would stand quietly beside her in front of her little wooden prayer bench and altar as she lit two fresh candles, each in precious gold holders brought out only for that occasion. A white shawl draped over her plaited hair, she held one hand reverently in front of her downcast eyes so that she wouldn’t see the blessed light too soon; with the other hand, she held a burning kindling-stick to each taper. In the gloom, shadows dappled her fingers, cheeks, and lips as each wick sputtered and caught, making her handsome profile radiant with its glow. To my young eyes, her face seemed as incandescent as the moon, her expression as beatific as that of the Holy Virgin. I would watch her pale gray silhouette loom and recede on the wall as the flames flickered, her shadow melding with that of the Madonna on her altar.
When she was satisfied that the fire had caught, she would cover both of her eyes and whisper.
“Baruch atah Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who has made us holy through His commandments and commanded us to kindle the Sabbath light.”
Then she would pray silently for a moment while I repeated inside my head the prayer she had taught me to secretly preface all others with:
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
For good measure, I usually added a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys.
Only then would my mother lower her hands and look joyfully at the light and grace me with her brilliant smile. Often I would reach for her, and she would put an affectionate arm around me, holding me to her as together we faced east and welcomed God into our home for another week.
My mother was more than pretty. She was beauty in its full perfection, with a face and form that sometimes made others gasp. Her shiny black hair glinted indigo in full sun; wavy and thick, it fell two spans below her waist, although she usually wore it in a single fat braid wound at the nape of her neck. Her eyebrows were fine and delicately arched because she plucked them each morning, and her eyes were light, clear brown flecked with gold, the outer edges tilted slightly upward, giving her a faintly exotic look. Her skin was light olive and quick to brown but flawless and smooth to the touch. Although she was short, small, and fine boned, her body could only be described as womanly, with ripe breasts, curving hips, and a honed waist.
I didn’t understand then that her black hair gave certain others cause to hate her, or that her olive skin, brown eyes, and prominent nose marked her as an object of derision, not admiration. I was too young to know that my hazel eyes and brown hair, several shades darker than my Old Christian father’s, marked me as well. Nor did I understand why, that Easter, the butcher had called her
marrana
—“pig”—and refused to sell her lamb instead of pork, or why she left his shop in tears and never returned, instead buying inferior meat from a less reputable man. I only knew that there was no lovelier sight than my mother leaning forward to light the candles.
No one else was allowed into her bedroom with us, not even her normally ever-present servant Máriam or my father, and my mother instructed me never to speak to them or anyone else about what we did on Fridays, saying that mentioning it would be a mortal sin. My father was a faithful Christian, and to all appearances, so were his wife and his daughter; we attended Mass often during the week and always on Sundays, and went to confession regularly.
My mother was an artist who painted ceramics for a glazer in the working-class neighborhood of Triana, on the opposite side of the river. As a married lady she had no need to work, but her talent was so great and her love of painting so keen that my father permitted her to continue it from home. Her workshop, on the ground floor of our house, was always filled with statues of bland, featureless saints waiting for my mother’s fine brush to bring them to life. The potter in Triana sent them to her tin-glazed, the surfaces glossy white. I’d watch in amazement as the Virgin’s golden eyebrows were created with two light, deft strokes, and as Mary’s eyes came alive with pinprick dabs of blue and black.
From the time I could walk, I watched as my mother crushed pigments in her marble mortar: lapis lazuli or cobalt oxide for blue, copper oxide for green, lead for brown, antimony for yellow, madder root for red. She mixed the powders with water, sometimes adding a pinch of gum arabic to help them stick.
One long worktable held the naked or drying statues, another her tools: stones, powders, thinners, gums, quills, and tufts of marten fur, which made the best brushes. My mother picked out individual hairs, sorting them by width, gathering up swatches, and binding them firmly to the ends of quills of carefully chosen length and width. She then trimmed the ends, leaving either sharp or gently rounded edges. My favorite brushes were for the finest work, made from the thinnest, softest hairs, of which only a dozen or so were fastened to the narrowest, shortest quills. These were for painting the saints’ faces.
By the time I was three, I was helping to sort the fur and quills; by four, I was crushing pigments in the mortar. One day when I was five, my mother introduced me to a small, unpainted Madonna set on a low step stool.
“Here,”
she said, handing me a brush and small wooden palette on which she’d mixed some cobalt oxide to the shade we called “Virgin’s blue.”
“Paint her mantle.”
Her request left me proud but unnerved; wisely, she showed faith by turning her back to me and busying herself with the application of red to Saint Catherine’s lips.
I flushed with anxiety at the start but soon discovered something magical in taking up the brush: the loss of self, and with it, all concerns, fears, and boredom. The focus required was complete, and no idle thought could intrude.
Before I knew it, I had finished. My mother turned to face me and clapped her paint-stained hands in approval.
“Look at you, Marisol! You’re an artist!”
I was never more thrilled. Blessed with my mother’s eye and dexterity, I had managed to keep the paint within the proper boundaries. Before long, I was applying lead oxide to John the Baptist’s wild tresses. After a year of practicing on pottery shards, I painted my first eyebrow. I soon mastered lips and eyes, but it took years before my painting was indistinguishable from my mother’s.
In my early years I saw no contradiction between Old Testament and New, between the Friday lighting of the candles and the countless saints, angels, and crosses awaiting my mother’s touch downstairs. I loved my mother fiercely and was thrilled to share a secret that was ours alone.
This sacred secret, she told me, was one that God Himself had commanded us to keep: Women were responsible for welcoming the Sabbath on Friday night, and we were to do it furtively, without telling another soul that it had been done. The priests at church never spoke of it, because, she claimed, they were men and therefore unaware. This duty was the women’s alone, and even they never shared it with each other outside the family, because Eve was responsible for the Fall into darkness, and therefore, only a woman could bring the light of Sabbath back into a home.
And then she would repeat the story of the golden land of Sepharad, about the struggle of Jews and
conversos
against Old Christians; when Isabel became Queen of Castile in late 1474, my mother added a message of hope that the queen might become the
conversos’
champion. As I grew a bit older, she began to explain the lighting of the Sabbath candles to me but assured me that we weren’t crypto-Jews; while our lighting of the Sabbath candles was never to be mentioned to others, she claimed that she was, herself, as devoted to the church as the Hojedas were, and just as beloved by God—even more so, because we had not forgotten His commandment. I believed her thoroughly; why not, when her downstairs studio was always cluttered with Virgins and Christ childs, penitents and saints?
I didn’t know much about my mother’s background then; she never spoke of her parents. I assumed that she’d never known them, since she’d lived in an orphanage, where the nuns taught her to paint ceramics. Nor did I ever question the lullaby she sang softly to me only when she and I were alone—a song I was never to sing aloud, or even hum, until I was alone with my own child. The melody was high, haunting, and Moorishly tremulous. The words sounded similar to the Castilian Spanish we spoke, but they had been altered to sound vaguely foreign:
“
Durme, durme, querido hijico
Durme sin ansia y dolor
Cerra tus chicos ojicos
Durme, durme, con savor.
Sleep, sleep, beloved child
Sleep without fretting
Close your little eyes
And sleep peacefully.”
Those were sweet, innocent days for us, when it was safe for any person of mixed heritage to walk Seville’s streets and for an Old Christian man like my father to give his heart to a New Christian woman.
Conversos
had a powerful voice in the city government and held prestigious positions; we were confident and feared no attacker. I was unaware of the simmering hatred that threatened us—my mother’s stories about violence against those of Jewish descent seemed far away, in the distant past—and I loved and believed my mother without restraint.
But on a day not long after my eleventh birthday, I finally learned the ugly truth.
* * *
My mother smiled at me on the first pleasant afternoon in April after an unusually wet March. Although the sun was strong and the sky the clear, intense blue I have come to associate with my native city, the faint breeze was cool and dry. Magdalena and I were sitting out on the tiny balcony off her third-floor bedroom, which overlooked the street. Our house—like the others on the narrow street named for the Hojedas—was situated in a small, wealthier neighborhood that straddled the city barrios of El Arenal, the shipbuilding district on the river’s east bank, and the crowded inland government district of Santa Cruz. The Hojedas were first to clear a street, a short cul-de-sac, in the center of what had been an ancient olive grove. There they built a mansion in the Islamic-Christian style known as
mudéjar,
of brick three stories tall, with a defensive wall around the ground floor, and an iron gate. The second story was exposed; like ours, it featured large rectangular windows that opened like doors onto tiny balconies with decorative stone railings and small tile awnings overlooking the street. In the center of the Hojeda’s second floor was a large patio sheltered beneath a flat orange tile roof trimmed with busy stone fretwork, where those relaxing in the shade peered out from between graceful Moorish columns with arches covered with bright saffron-colored azulejo tiles. Our second-floor patio was similar in style, with the ubiquitous colonnades and the flat roof, but our house was less than half the size of the Hojedas’ palace and featured worked stone instead of azulejo tile. Our house faced east, and the front of the Hojedas’ palace; fortunately, our street was wider than those in most other neighborhoods where residents on opposite sides of the street could stand on their balconies and easily touch their neighbor’s hand. Our house was set far back enough on our property to allow us to build a wall and a gated patio and to plant orange trees flanking the front entrance.
That day my mother, Magdalena, was wrapped in a light silk shawl, with her dark hair loose and combed out to dry; it hung in damp strands over her shoulders, falling half an arm’s length past the seat of her chair. The hair at her neck had been lifted so that it fell over the back of her chair, the better to expose it to the sun and air. In her hands—the fingers stained blue from the crushed lapis used to mix paint for the Madonna’s mantle—were a needle and an infant’s unfinished christening gown. Although she had just lost another baby, she was resolutely determined to finish the gown, which had grown increasingly elaborate after each lost child—as if by making the garment irresistibly pretty, she might lure the next unborn soul into surviving nine months in her womb.