Sins of the House of Borgia (2 page)

C
HAPTER 1

T
OLEDO,
O
MER 5252, WHICH IS THE YEAR OF THE
C
HRISTIANS 1492

There are days when I believe I have given up hope of ever seeing you again, of ever being free, or master of my own fate. Then I find that the heart and guts keep their own stubborn vigil. When we say we have given up hope, all we are really doing is challenging Madam Fortune to prove us wrong.

When I was a little girl in the city of my birth, when my mother was still alive, she would take me to the synagogue, to sit behind the screen with the other women and girls and listen to the men sing the prayers for Shabbat
.
Sometimes, out of sight of the menfolk, while they were preoccupied by the solemnity of their duty, the women would not behave as their husbands and brothers and fathers liked to think. There would be giggling and whispering, shifting of seats, gossip exchanged by mouthing words and raising eyebrows. Fans would flutter, raising perfumed dust to dance in sunbeams fractured by the fine stone trellis which shielded us from the men. And around me was a continuous eddy of women, touching my hair and face, murmuring and sighing the way I have since heard people do before great works of art or wonders of nature.

This attention scared me, but when I looked to my mother for reassurance, she was always smiling. When I pressed myself to her side, fitting the round of my cheek into the curve of her waist, she too would stroke my hair as she received the compliments of the other women. Such a beautiful child, so fair, such fine bones. If I hadn’t been there for her birth, added my Grand Aunt Sophia, I would say she was a changeling, possessed by a
dybbuk
. And several of the other children my age, the girls and little boys who had not yet had their
bar mitzvah
, would fix solemn, dark eyes on my blue ones as if, whatever Aunt Sophia said, I was indeed a
dybbuk
, a malign spirit, an outsider. Trouble. Rachel Abravanel used to pull my hair, winding it tight around her fingers and applying a steady pressure until I was forced to tip back my head as far as it would go to avoid crying out and drawing the attention of the men. Rachel never seemed to care that my hair bit into her flesh and cut off the blood to her finger ends; the reward of seeing me in pain made it worthwhile.

A year after the time I am thinking of, when Rachel had died on the ship crossing from Sardinia to Naples, Señora Abravanel told my mother, as she tried to cool her fever with a rag dipped in seawater, how much her daughter had loved me. Many years later still, I finally managed to unravel that puzzle, that strange compulsion we have to hurt the ones we love.

As it was, from before the beginning of knowledge, I knew I was different, and in the month of Omer in the year 5252, which Christians call May, 1492, I became convinced I was to blame for the misfortunes of the Jews. It was a hot night and I could not sleep. My room overlooked the central courtyard of our house in Toledo, and, mingling with the song of water in the fountain, were the voices of my parents engaged in conversation.

“No!” my mother shouted suddenly, and the sound sent a cold trickle of fear through my body, like when Little Haim dropped ice down my back during the Purim feast. I do not think I had ever heard my mother shout before; even when we displeased her, her response was always cool and rational, as though she had anticipated just such an incidence of naughtiness and had already devised the most suitable punishment. Besides, it was not anger that gave her voice its stridency, but panic.

“But Leah, be reasonable. With Esther, you can pass, stay here until I’ve found somewhere safe and can send for you.”

“Forgive me, Haim, but I will not consider it. If we have to go, we go together, as a family. We take our chances as a family.”

“The king and queen have given us three months, till Shavuot
.
Till then, we are under royal protection.”

My mother gave a harsh laugh, quite uncharacteristic of her. “Then we can complete Passover before we go. How ironic.”

“It is their Easter. It is a very holy time for them. Perhaps their majesties have a little conscience after all.” I could hear the shrug in my father’s voice. It was his business voice, the way he spoke when negotiating terms for loans with customers he hoped would be reliable, but for whom he set repayment terms which would minimise his risk.

“King Ferdinand’s conscience does not extend beyond the worshippers of the false messiah as the Moors found out. For hundreds of years they pave roads, make water systems, light the streets, and he destroys them on a whim of his wife.”

“And you would destroy us on a whim of yours? We have three months before the edict comes into force. I will go now, with the boys, and you and Esther will follow, before the three months is up, so you will be perfectly safe. Besides, I need you here to oversee the sale of all our property. Who else can I trust?”

“Here, then.” I heard a scrape of wood on stone as my mother leapt up from her chair. I dared not move from my bed to look out of the window in case the beam of her rage should focus on me. “Here is your plate. I will fill it and take it to the beggars in the street. If you go, you will die.”

“Leah, Leah.” My father’s conciliatory rumble. China smashing.

“Don’t move. If you tread the marzipan into the tiles I will never get them clean.” Then my mother burst into tears and the trickle of fear turned to a torrent of cold sweat, so when my nurse came in to see why I was crying, she thought I had a fever beginning and forced me to drink one of her foul tasting tisanes.

“I’m sorry, Haim,” I heard my mother say before the infusion took effect and sent me to sleep. My father made no response and I heard nothing more but clothes rustling against each other and the small, wet sound of kissing that made me cover my ears with my pillow.

***

A week later, my father and my three brothers, Eli, Simeon, and Little Haim, together with several other men from our community, left Toledo to make the journey to Italy, where many of the rulers of that land’s multitude of tyrannies and city states were known to tolerate the Jews and to be wary of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, whose approach to statecraft was not pragmatic enough for them. Even the Kingdom of Naples, which was ruled by relatives of the king, was said to be content to receive refugees from among the exiles of Jerusalem. My father, however, intended to go to Rome. The pope is dying, he explained, and there is a Spanish cardinal prepared to spend a lot of money to buy the office when the time comes. This Cardinal Borja will be needing a reliable banker. We were unsure what a pope was, or a cardinal, and Borja sounded more like a Catalan name than a Spanish one to us, and a Catalan is as trustworthy as a gypsy, but my father’s smile was so confident, his teeth so brilliant amid the black brush of his beard, that we had no option but to nod our agreement, bite back our tears, and tell him we would see him in Rome.

***

The days of Omer passed, and no news reached us. We heard rumours of ships taken by pirates in the Tyrrhenian Sea, of the legendary Corsair of Genoa who liked to cut off the ears of his victims and have them stitched into belts by his sailmaker. Some Jews attempting to leave Spain had been robbed and beaten to death by over-zealous subjects of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, particularly those who owed them money; some had died in the mountains, denied shelter or sustenance by the villagers. We heard of synagogues turned into warehouses and farmers grazing their pigs in our cemeteries.

Yet, as my mother repeatedly reminded me, there was no proof. Who had encountered a pig in our graveyard at the foot of the Cerro de Palomarejos? Had I noticed any bolts of cloth or barrels of salt herrings in the synagogue? Who had seen the Corsair wearing a sash of Jews’ ears? Who had seen the smashed bodies on the beaches or the frozen bones beside the mountain passes? No one, of course, because there was nothing to see. The king and queen had declared an amnesty until the end of Omer, and until then the Jews were as safe in Spain as they had ever been, and Papa and the boys were in Rome by now preparing a new home for us with brighter tapestries on the walls and a bigger fountain in the courtyard.

Our house seemed empty and silent, especially at night when I lay in my bed listening to the crickets and my mother’s soft footfalls as she paced the corridors waiting for my father’s summons, willing it to come, fearful of encountering ghosts, perhaps, as she passed by the places where her sons used to play: the stables of their favourite horses, the long chamber where they all slept and which still smelled faintly of boys’ sweat and flatulence. Then, late one afternoon, while I was still drowsy from siesta, my mother told me to get up and to put on as many of my clothes as I could, and never mind the heat. When I balked at my good winter cloak, she herself bundled me into it and fastened the clasp under my chin. Then we went to the stables behind the house, where I watched in astonishment as my mother saddled a horse, her fingers moving with rapid assurance among buckles and straps. I had no idea she was capable of such a thing. She slung a couple of saddlebags over the animal’s back then lifted me up also, then led it around to our front door, where she paused to remove the
mezuzah
from the doorpost. She wrapped it, together with the key to our house, in her
ketubah
, and placed the package in one of the saddlebags.

It was growing dusk by this time, and the link boys had long since stopped coming to light the street lamps in our district, so those who joined us as we rode towards the city gates seemed like shade fragments broken off from the deepening mass of twilight, walking or riding beside us with hoofbeats and footfalls muffled and breath held in that strange, portentous hour of everything turning into something else. Buildings looked like dreams, random glints of mosaic tiles or brass door fittings floating in a pool of dark. Faces occasionally emerged into clarity long enough for me to recognise people I knew, then disappeared again so I could not be sure whether I had seen them or dreamed them. Especially when Rachel Abravanel smiled at me; that must have been a dream.

Once outside the Jewish quarter, our party bunched together, the men forming a protective cordon around the women and children. We had heard talk of Jews being stoned in the street, being pushed into middens, or having chamberpots emptied over their heads. My mother and her friends spoke in whispers of a Jewish woman forced into some humiliation involving a pig though, strain my ears as I might, I could never find out what. We, however, were ignored, although I imagined I could sense eyes watching us through chinks in shutters, our old neighbours too ashamed to look us in the face as they calculated the value of our abandoned houses, our vineyards, and metal works and shops.

I felt, rather than heard, my mother speak from time to time, the vibrations of her voice running through my body pressed to hers, the comfortable contours of her breasts and belly cushioning my back.

“May the All Merciful forgive me,” she was saying to someone walking beside us, “but I should never have listened to Haim.” She paused, checking, I think, to see if I had fallen asleep. I stayed still and kept my eyes closed, so she went on, “At least, if they had to die, I could have gone with them.”

“Now Leah, what about your daughter?” came a voice from the darkness. I hardly dared breathe. Dead? Had my mother had news? Was that the reason for our sudden flight? Were they all dead, or just some of them? Please Lord, if any of my brothers had to be dead let it be Little Haim so I would not have to put up with his torments any more. How had they died? Where? What was going to happen to us now? I was suffocating beneath a shower of questions pouring like sand through a funnel.

“If it hadn’t been for my daughter, I would have gone with Haim. He said we could pass, with Esther being so fair and dainty. And now the amnesty’s run out, I’ve waited and waited and nothing. No money. Nothing. How is a woman on her own with a little girl supposed to get to Rome? And what if he isn’t there? Then what?” My mother too, it seemed, was foundering beneath questions.

I remember little more of that journey, only dark, then light, then dark again, I don’t know how many times. I remember dropping out of the saddle like a stone, and waking almost too stiff to stand from the bruises on the insides of my legs and my backside, and the knobbly earth I had slept on impressed on my skin and bones. To begin with, there were picnics, bread and apricots and little meatballs seasoned with cinnamon. Then hunger and thirst until I thought I could not bear it any longer and an angel of indifference came and took them away so I wondered if I had died and if paradise was just this nothing. We exchanged land for sea, the ridges of the earth for stumbling waves, the sway of the horse for the slant of a deck and the slop of ballast water. And always, like the chorus in a play, those words:
if it wasn’t for my daughter.

My mother’s behaviour towards me did not change. She remained, if not cheerful, then steadily optimistic. She oversaw my prayers at the correct times of day; she taught me songs and made me practise the fingerings for the dulcimer on patches of flat earth or a strip of decking marked out with chalk. She saw to it I had plenty of needlework to do, though now it was more patching and darning than embroidery, and reassured me my ears were so small the Corsair of Genoa would be sure to spare me, to throw me back into the sea like a fish too little for eating. When, at the beginning of our sea voyage, before I had my sea legs, I was sick, she hid her own failing health long enough to hold my head while I vomited over the ship’s rail and make me gargle seawater. The best cure, she said. I was sure she had no idea I now knew what she truly thought of me.