“He’s a Jew!”
Miguel shouted, in a tone that conveyed anger, scorn, and delight. With one hand, he pulled the black cloak from the man’s shoulders. Beneath it, his tunic—of the same worn, coarse black cloth—sported a red disc cut from fabric and pinned over the heart.
“A filthy Jew!”
Miguel bellowed again.
“One who breaks the law by trying to hide what he is!”
The latter statement was true; the old man should have pinned the badge of shame to his cloak, but I saw forgetfulness, not sinister intent, in the act.
“And worse, covering his face like a bandit!”
As the old man reached vainly for his walking stick, Miguel taunted him with it, keeping it just out of reach.
The other youths began to hurl insults and accusations.
“Stinking Jew!” “Christ killer!” “Did you come here to poison the wells?” “Look at him, sneaking around our neighborhood in disguise!” “He’s looking for a Christian baby to murder!”
I felt a sickening prickle of heat on my cheeks and neck. By then, I was well aware that Jews were an object of scorn—a fact that ashamed me, since I had overheard others call my mother a
conversa
and had realized that Jewish blood ran in
my
veins, too, and that the fact somehow made me different from the other children in our neighborhood.
Gabriel, who had been supporting the man’s elbow in an effort to keep him upright, let go and turned back toward the crowd, his expression reluctant and perplexed. Clearly, he didn’t want to do what his teammates expected of him, yet he was obviously swayed by their opinion.
“Get the Jew!”
one of the older Lions shouted at his captain.
“He cost us a goal! Uncover his face! What is he doing in this barrio on a Sunday, anyway?”
“Get the Jew! Get the Jew!”
the crowd began to chant. Gabriel squared his shoulders and hardened his expression.
At the same instant, Miguel gripped the base of the walking stick with both hands, swung it back over his right shoulder, then brought it down upon the Jew’s stooped back. The old man took a wobbly step forward and sank to his knees as the onlookers roared with approval.
For Gabriel, it was as though a sign had been given; he fell upon the Jew with his huge fists and knocked him to the ground.
I shrieked at him, as if he could somehow hear me over the roars and cheers and curses in the street below.
“Stop it! Gabriel,
stop
it! Leave the old man alone!”
At the same time, the childish part of me wanted to stifle my words and simply turn away. I was humiliated by the Jew’s presence; why had he come here to my street, reminding me of my unwanted heritage? Why couldn’t he have wandered somewhere else?
But I couldn’t bear the sight of his suffering, or the boys’ cruelty. I turned and ran into my mother’s bedchamber. She and Máriam were sitting on her bed, whispering with their heads together. Between them lay a thick bundle of uncarded wool, bound tightly in dingy cotton, which they were in the process of unwinding. Máriam—tall and lithe, with a dancer’s grace—was a Nubian, a slave whose intelligence and kind heart had prompted my father (at my mother’s insistence) to free her. Such was Máriam’s loyalty that she didn’t return to her homeland, which lay south of Egypt, but instead agreed to attend my mother for servants’ wages.
I was shocked when Máriam looked up at me—not by her amazing flawless skin, the shade of charred umber with blue undertones, a brown that verged on black and offered little contrast to the black silk scarf wrapped about her head like a turban, one end pulled through and hanging down between her shoulder blades; or by her remarkable features, which looked as though a long-dead Roman sculptor had taken a bust of an alabaster goddess and, with skilled fingers, had pressed the bridge of her nose until it was slightly broader and flatter, then smoothed and rounded the tip and made the lips voluptuously fuller. I was shocked because for once, Máriam didn’t smile at the sight of me. If anything, she looked startled and frightened and guilty, just like my mother, who immediately stopped her furious effort to unwrap the bundle.
“Marisol!”
Máriam snapped; it was not a greeting to me but a warning to my mother.
“A Jew,”
I wheezed.
“An old man—he can’t walk, they took his walking stick, and now they’re beating him!”
My mother glanced in horror at Máriam, who widened her eyes in dismay and pressed long, thin fingers to her rose-brown lips before giving a sharp, anguished nod. Years would pass before I understood what Máriam meant by the gesture.
“Bastards,”
my mother hissed; it was the first and only time I heard her use such language. She jumped to her feet and dashed through the open door onto the balcony, leaving the bundle in Máriam’s care. I followed her as she gripped the railing and peered down and to her left, at the cheering boys gathered at the end of the cul-de-sac.
By then Gabriel had seized the old man’s beard and collar and was lifting his frail, bony body off its feet. My mother and I watched as Miguel untied the scarf knotted at the back of the man’s head, then stripped it away to reveal his features.
Once again, the crowd stilled; shouts became murmurs. The elderly Jew’s chin and mouth were completely hidden by his thick yellow-white beard, but his nose …
The bridge of his nose rose from between his eyes and quickly grew very prominent. At its highest point—midway to his beard-covered lips—it abruptly dipped where the knife blade had exited, leaving behind a flat, pinkish white cord of rubbery flesh flanked by elongated, teardrop-shaped reddish holes where his nostrils had been.
My mother let go a faint moan and clutched the railing.
Gabriel turned his face away but didn’t loosen his grip on the Jew’s collar. For a moment, Miguel too was frozen but recovered himself and lifted the walking stick to deliver another wallop to the old man’s backside.
The crowd buzzed with speculation.
“A thief! He must have been a thief!”
“He was punished for something.…”
“Maybe we should cut something else of his off for coming into our barrio!”
“Let him go!”
my mother called, but she was too agitated to draw sufficient breath to be heard.
“Let him go…!”
I put my arms around her and helped her back into her bedroom. By then, the mysterious bundle had vanished from the bed and Máriam was on her feet, her chin lifted, her stance regal. I delivered my weeping mother into her thin, muscular arms, as Máriam said sternly,
“Marisol! Go to your father at once and tell him an old man is being murdered in the street.”
Her voice was as soft as ever, barely louder than a whisper, yet I heard the ferocity all the same. And while I was puzzled by Máriam’s behavior—she could have saved time by running to tell my father herself, instead of waiting in my mother’s bedroom—I obeyed her and dashed out her chamber door onto the
mudéjar
-style loggia, the covered, open hallway that connected all rooms on the middle floor. I ran down the half-open hallway, turning a corner where the north wing met the central, and again when the central wing met the southern, where my father’s chambers sat.
The door to my father’s study was open. He had invited no guests this Sunday but sat alone, surrounded by books and maps of the city as he squinted down at a well-worn tome of municipal code spread open upon his reading desk. Creases had formed above his golden brown brows, and his pale blue eyes held a distant, pensive look, which vanished the instant I ran up to him, gasping and panicked. Still sitting, he turned himself and his full attention toward me and caught my forearms.
“Marisol, calm down and tell me,”
he said. His grip was soothingly firm, his tone calm.
“It’s a Jew, an old man,”
I blurted.
“Gabriel and the others are beating him out in the street!”
I drew a breath, unable to hold back the most sordid detail.
“He has no nose!”
At the word
Jew
my father tensed.
“Your mother—where is she?”
His fingers dug deeper into my flesh.
“In her chamber, with Máriam,”
I said. I didn’t understand why he was frightened for her.
My father dropped his hold on me and rose at once; the fear in his eyes had transformed into a deep, smoldering fury.
“Go back to your mother and stay with her,”
he said evenly.
“I’ll see to this.”
But by then I was already halfway out the door, figuring that if I didn’t remain long enough to hear his command clearly, I couldn’t be held responsible for disobeying it. I ran back the way I had come and took the staircase down to the ground level. There I flew to the front entrance, past the unlocked gate, and out into the street.
The drama in the cul-de-sac had taken a fresh turn. The old man, his maimed face and head uncovered, clung with trembling arms to the trunk of the nearest olive tree. Miguel had gone in search of a knife sturdy enough to slice off a body part; while awaiting the spectacle, the kickball players and their fans had gathered in a semicircle, hurling pebbles at the Jew.
A giant compared to his victim, Gabriel swung the walking stick, clubbing the old man’s back and shoulders pitilessly. The man emitted only faint groans; with each fresh strike, his grip loosened and he slipped farther toward the ground.
I ran down the street toward them. Servants had wandered out of the surrounding houses to watch, most of them with honest dismay or faint disapproval, their hands to their mouths, but none of them demanded an end to the violence.
I was halfway down the street when I spied my strawberry-blond friend, Antonio, pushing his way through the crowd. It wasn’t until he ran directly up to Gabriel—who was preparing to take another swing with the walking stick—that I noticed Antonio’s right hand was clenched in a fist. My jaw dropped: Antonio was nimble and athletic for a fourteen-year-old, but he was no match for seventeen-year-old Gabriel’s height and was less than half Gabriel’s breadth. I watched in horror as Antonio’s fist went flying toward Gabriel.…
Three
In the Chapel of the Fifth Anguish, I opened my eyes, startled at the touch of Gabriel’s hand upon my elbow; the priest had finished his sermon and had just asked Gabriel and me to face each other. As I turned, I glanced through my filmy veil at the bits of brightness against the backdrop of overwhelming gloom—at the carved white tears of the Madonna, at her gleaming sunburst halo, at the pale, skeletal leer of the priest. Behind us, my father stepped forward and handed something small and shining to my desperate-eyed groom, who took it and turned back to me as if I were his executioner.
I looked reluctantly at Gabriel. Six years had passed since the elderly Jew had wandered into our neighborhood; I was seventeen now, old for a new bride, and Gabriel was twenty-three. He’d returned from university to practice civil law in Seville, reluctantly: He had badly wanted to join his older brother Alonso as a monk at San Pablo Cloister, but don Jerónimo had refused, saying that his offering of one son to the church was sufficient; it was Gabriel’s duty to supply him with grandchildren. Somehow Jerónimo had secured his youngest the post of civil prosecutor, a job many said was ill matched to Gabriel’s natural timidity and unimpressive intellect. Gabriel had lived with his father until the old man died, and afterward, continued to live alone in his father’s house.
No longer a lad, Gabriel was still taller, broader, and more pious than his peers. Despite his sedentary days indoors either at court or reading law books, he was still powerfully built and strong. He saw the sun twice a day now, when he walked from his house to the government building near the vacant Royal Palace and back; it had bleached his hair stark white and left his fair nose and cheeks tinged with pink. Candlelight glittered off tiny beads of sweat on his upper lip as he reached for my hand.
If I hadn’t been trapped within my self-made prison of grief and guilt, I might have pulled away from him and run down the altar steps to disappear into the darkness. But resentment—cold and burning as ice against bare flesh—made me hold my ground and glare into my bridegroom’s fear-filled, bovine eyes. I loved my father deeply, yet I was furious because he was sending me away when I needed him most, to live with a man I despised. For that crime, I was willing to be miserable for a lifetime as a reproach to him—and to myself. Fixing that thought in my mind, I listened patiently as Gabriel haltingly repeated the vows fed him by the priest, and when Gabriel reached for me, I lifted my hand to meet his halfway. I pressed my fingertips against his damp left palm and raised my right ring finger, enabling him to slip the thin golden band onto it.
Then it was time for me to make my promise. There would be no ring for Gabriel, just as there would be no fragrant flowers, no happy mother of the bride, and no new wedding dress, only mourning.
“I, Marisol, promise to take you, Gabriel, for my lawful wedded husband.…”
My tone was flat; I rattled off the words as quickly as I could. They sickened me, for though I’d often longed to utter them, I was addressing them to the wrong man.
* * *
I returned to the tableau frozen in my memory—of the terrified old Jew and his mutilated face, sinking as he clung to the olive tree; of Gabriel, swinging the thick walking stick to the cheering of his teammates; of Antonio, his red-gold hair catching the sunlight as he ran, his right fist raised, up to Gabriel. I called out Antonio’s name, fearing he meant to strike the bigger boy, a losing proposition—but at the last instant, as Gabriel turned his quizzical face toward Antonio, the latter’s fist opened abruptly to fling sand up into Gabriel’s face at the same time that he shouted at the bully and the crowd: