I couldn’t have been more confused.
“Mamá, what
is
it?”
But she cheerfully refused to answer. She dragged me out of my room, down the corridor, and into her bedroom. The lamp on the nightstand was lit. In its glow, Máriam stood gazing out onto the balcony, her back to us, her white lawn nightgown revealing the shape of her slender dark torso and legs. Her head was tilted, her hand pressed against the pillar as she listened to the sound wafting through the open door. As we neared, she turned to us smiling and stepped back to make way.
“Go on, go on,”
my mother hissed at me. She took the lamp from the nightstand and handed it to Máriam.
A man was singing to the music of a lute out on the street below. I stepped out onto the balcony and blinked as Máriam held up the lamp beside me—not so that I could see but so that I could be seen.
Antonio’s strong, unabashedly emotional tenor rose on the cool air, along with the perfume of flowers; I blinked again and saw him standing in the street as close as possible to my mother’s window, near the bougainvillea covering our outer walls. He was smiling, radiant, happy to embarrass himself for my sake. He wore a blue velvet tunic and cap with a white plume; beside him stood his father’s valet, the stoop-shouldered Joaquín, holding a torch at a safe remove from his young master. It cast a wavering arc of amber, painting Antonio’s face golden, while the silvery light of the half moon reflected off his hair, off the white jasmine blooms vining on the wall, off the pale orange blossoms on the tree just below the balcony. Sharp shadows obscured his neck and chest; the lacquered surface of his wooden lute flashed.
Delighted, I gripped the cold iron railing and leaned over its edge, laughing softly at the deliciousness of the cloying sweet fragrance of the blossoms mixing with the pungency of my mother’s geraniums, at the sound of Antonio’s voice, at the clear Sevillian night sky, with the spires of the cathedral and the turrets of the Royal Palace to the southeast.
“Seville mi alma,”
Antonio was singing.
“Sevilla, corazón.”
But at the sight of me, he broke off and gently tossed a bitter orange—it was harvest season and a pile of them littered the street—up onto the balcony, where it landed by my feet.
Grinning, he sang a very old, very traditional tune, one popular with the local troubadours.
“Take this orange, my love
Round and ripe with golden skin
With a knife do not dare part it
For my heart remains within.”
I couldn’t stop my delighted laughter—not until Antonio grew silent and solemn. He began to strum a tune I’d never heard before, one I soon realized was his own creation. The melody, in a minor key, was faintly Moorish, languid, full of aching desire.
“O fair Marisol
Will you come to your window
Will you come to your window
And grace my yearning eyes tonight?
O fair Marisol
How I’ve longed for this moment
How I’ve longed for this moment
Your face glowing like moonlight.”
I drew in a breath and realized this was a moment I would long remember, one I would recount to my children, a moment when I was consumed by a happiness so great it swelled to include the entire world, the flowers, the music, the light, Antonio’s ardent love.
This is real joy,
I thought, and felt no moment in my life could ever be better than this one, but then Antonio began another verse, and impossibly, my joy increased.
“O fair Marisol
Will you come to your window
Will you come to your window
And give your answer tonight?
O fair Marisol
How I’ve longed for this moment
How I’ve longed for this moment
Will you be my wife?”
Behind me, my mother let go a soft, girlish squeal; Máriam’s lamp swung as she shuddered with laughter.
Antonio played another verse, this one without lyrics. Then he hushed the strings and knelt out in the dusty street beyond the walls of my father’s house, the lute resting on one thigh.
“Marisol García,”
he called, in a voice so loud that my impulse was to tell him to be quiet, that he would wake all the neighbors. I couldn’t, of course; his extravagant love had touched me too deeply. He was
proud
of me, a
conversa
; he didn’t care if he woke the Hojedas, if he woke everyone in Seville.
“I’ve spoken with your father,”
Antonio called up to me.
“He has given me his permission to ask: Beloved Marisol, will you be my wife? May I call you my betrothed?”
I steepled my hands, covered my mouth with them, and nodded, giddy. I stood on the balcony, silent, the reverberation of the lute’s strings hanging in the air between us.
My mother’s elbow nudged me in the back and released a torrent.
“Yes, Antonio!”
I called out, though not in as loud and confident a tone as he.
“Yes. Yes, yes, yes!”
Across the street in the Hojeda house, a windowpane on the upper floor glowed with yellow light; I fancied I saw Gabriel’s silhouette in the frame.
* * *
We celebrated our betrothal the following week, at Antonio’s parents’ house. I gave him a fine, gilded statue of Saint Anthony of Padua, his patron saint, the finder of lost things. I’d painted it myself, making sure it was my very best work. He gave me a sapphire ring that made me think of his eyes.
“So even when I’m gone, you’ll know I’m watching you,”
he joked.
His parents, don Pedro and doña Elena, watched the exchange with tears filming their eyes. Antonio embraced don Pedro, who, like his son, was lavish with his emotions and did not hold back his tears. Don Pedro then hugged me, saying,
“You are our daughter now,”
and passed me on to doña Elena for an enthusiastic kiss and welcome. They gave me a necklace with a golden heart, and I put it and the ring on and refused to take either off, even when bathing.
Pedro and Elena embraced my father and mother as well. They admired my statue of Saint Anthony; doña Elena said,
“What talent you have, Marisol. You are just like your mother—accomplished and beautiful.”
My mother smiled proudly, but I averted my eyes and mumbled insincere thanks. I did not want to be like my mother; I did not want to look like a Jew, and my flicker of shame must have been obvious, because afterward, Antonio drew me aside.
“How cruel you are to doña Magdalena! If you are to be my wife, I can hold my tongue no longer. You have shamed her. Don’t you love your own mother? She is beautiful, she is talented, she is kind! Aren’t you proud to be like her?”
It couldn’t be said that Antonio had a bad temper; he was rarely angry, but when he was, he didn’t hide it. I recoiled, and he put a hand on my elbow, then drew it quickly away, as if afraid he might shake my arm.
“You don’t understand,”
I said stiffly.
“I don’t expect you to.”
“But what could possibly make you treat her so? Don’t tell me you’re ashamed she is a
conversa
!”
I averted my eyes quickly—an admission of guilt.
He stared at me in candid disgust.
“Still you hate yourself for what you are? Do you realize that this makes you no better than Gabriel, or even Fray Hojeda? Do you really believe the stupid things people say? Your own mother!”
“It’s easy for you,”
I countered.
“You’ve never been made to feel ashamed; you’ve never been taunted for what you are. Your people have never been murdered out of hatred.”
He let go a long sigh, and with it, his anger. But he was still unhappy.
“Marisol, when will you realize that the only way to have victory over such hatred is to love yourself? To love your mother and not turn in shame from her. I’ve seen you behave this way before. It’s unworthy of you. You’re a better person than that. Sometimes I think…”
He trailed off, unwilling to finish the thought.
“Say it,”
I said. By this time, my own temper was rising.
“Go ahead and say it. I’m marrying you just because you’re an Old Christian.”
He was silent for a long pause and put his hand on my arm tenderly.
“But then I dismiss it. Because no one could possibly feign the love you show me, Marisol. I just want you to be happy with yourself. With your mother.”
My anger withered.
“I don’t want to be unhappy.…”
“Then promise me one thing. That you’ll look on your mother and yourself with more love. Can you do that?”
“I’ll try,”
I said, and he kissed me.
It was only later that I realized: Antonio loved me more than I did myself.
* * *
Antonio left for Salamanca at dawn, on a day that promised to be brutally hot, as so many were in the late summer—cloudless beneath a blistering sun. Heat rose from the street outside the stucco walls of his father’s house, and the dry breeze held the brackish stink of the nearby river. As usual, it hadn’t rained a drop since March, the end of the wet season, and the waiting carriage was coated with dust.
Antonio’s pale cotton tunic clung to the sweating muscles of his arms and chest; the sparse golden stubble on his cheeks and chin glittered. He’d said his good-byes to his parents, and his trunk was already loaded onto the waiting coach. He held me by my upper arms, studying my face as if afraid he might forget a detail.
“I won’t be able to visit often,”
he said, his eyes filling but his smile determined.
“But I swear I’ll write you every day.”
“You won’t be able to,”
I reminded him; I couldn’t summon a smile, couldn’t keep my sadness from showing.
“Not with your studies.”
“Then once a week, at least,”
he vowed.
“I mean it. And will you write to me?”
“Every day,”
I answered. My small joke failed because I began to cry immediately after saying it.
He tried to stifle my tears by pressing his lips against mine, but my shoulders still shook. I threw my arms around him and held on tightly, but all too soon, he caught my wrists and gently freed himself.
Our faces almost touched as he whispered,
“I’ll be back soon enough. And I will marry you, Marisol, and never leave you again.”
His voice broke on the last word. As he pulled away, he tried to lighten the mood.
“Don’t put me aside for another man,”
he teased, and winked in the direction of the Hojeda house.
I quit weeping long enough to roll my eyes and snort softly at the thought of my ever wanting anything to do with Gabriel Hojeda.
“Don’t worry,”
I said.
* * *
Antonio kept his word and wrote often; I responded to each letter and waited anxiously for the next. He spoke of a different world—of a village smaller than Seville but crowded with students from all over Europe, eager to study at the three-hundred-year-old university. The winters were colder, sometimes killing the flowers; the summers were milder, but—and this he only hinted at—the atmosphere was far less temperate as far as
conversos
were concerned. Salamanca lay in the northerly province of León, where few Jews had settled, and the population was resoundingly Old Christian.
I paid it little attention; so long as I had Antonio’s letters, I was happy enough to believe his heart and mind would never change toward me. And indeed, when he returned to Seville after two years, for his father’s funeral, he was just the same and kissed me with just as much passion.
But sometime after he returned to Salamanca, his letters abruptly stopped coming. I wrote him again and again but received no reply. Months passed, and then a year; I finally penned a letter stating that if I did not hear from him within eight weeks, I would consider our engagement broken off.
No reply ever came, although others in Seville had heard from him and knew that he was well and still at the university. Bitterly, I took the sapphire ring from my finger, hid it away, and forbade my parents to speak of Antonio.
* * *
In the Chapel of the Fifth Anguish, I had finished my vows and stood with my hands steepled—the gold wedding band alien and cold upon my finger—and my head bowed, while the priest asked God to make me fertile in order to give Gabriel many sons. I silently informed God that I wanted no part of it. When the priest began to recite the Lord’s Prayer—
“Pater noster, qui es in caelis”—
I repeated it calmly along with the others, but I began to panic at the realization that the service was coming to an end. I was almost Gabriel’s wife, and while I’d submitted to the marriage out of pure spite toward my father and myself, my fury had ebbed to the point that I understood I was letting my fate take a stupid, wretched turn, one that couldn’t easily be undone. My voice began to shake, and I lowered it to a whisper.