The Last Jew (14 page)

It was impossible for Yonah not to notice her. It seemed to him that wherever he looked she had uncovered a large brown breast and was suckling her hungry baby. The farm folk nudged one another and smiled, noting that Margarita often managed to turn up where the big, silent young man was working.

She was friendly to Yonah, at ease with him.

She directed him to perform small tasks about her house, calling him to come inside to have bread and wine. It was only a few days before he was naked with her, incredulously touching a female body, tasting the milk that had filled the infant who slept nearby.

Her heavy body was not uncomely, the legs muscular, the navel deep, the belly only slightly convex despite all the childbirth. Her thick-lipped pudenda was a small animal with a wild brown pelt. She readily gave instruction and made demands, and he learned how to have a dream correctly. The first coupling was over for him quickly. But he was young and strong and she made him ready again, and he put the same fury into his efforts that he had used against Diego, until the moment when he and the woman were spent and gasping.

In a while, half-asleep, he was aware of her fingering hands, as if he were an animal she contemplated buying.

'You are a converso.'

At once he was awake.

'Yes.'

'So. When were you converted to the true faith?'

'Ah ... Several years ago.' He closed his eyes again, hoping she would desist.

'Where was it?'

'In Castille. In the town of Cuenca.'

She laughed. 'But I was born in Cuenca! I have been there within these eight years with Don Manuel. Two of my sisters and a brother are there, and my old abuela who has outlived both my mother and my father. At which church were you converted, San Benito's or San Marcos'?'

'It was ... San Benito's, I believe.'

She stared. 'You believe? You don't know the name of the church?'

'A manner of speaking. Yes, San Benito's, of course. A very nice church.'

'Beautiful church, no? And which priest?'

'The old one.'

'But both are old, yes?' She was frowning at him. Was it Padre Ramón or Padre Garcillaso?'

'Padre Ramón.'

Margarita nodded but got out of bed. Well, now you must not go back to work. You must sleep here like a good boy until I return from my chores, and you will be strong like a lion and we shall make much joy fucking, yes?'

'Yes, all right.'

But in a few moments he watched from the one small window as she hastened from the house carrying the child into the siesta-time sun and heat, her garment shrugged on so hurriedly that it was not completely pulled over one of her large hips.

Yonah knew that almost certainly there was no Padre Ramón in the town of Cuenca, and perhaps not even a church named for San Benito.

Dressing quickly, he went to the shady side of Margarita's house where Moise was tethered, and in a moment he was under the hot sun himself. He rode past only two men in the midday heat and neither paid him any attention. Soon he and the burro were climbing a trail into the hills of the Sierra Morena.

On a height he paused and looked down upon the farm of Don Manuel de Zúniga. The small figures of four soldiers, the sun glinting on their weapons and mail vests, were following Margarita Vega, who was hastening toward her house.

High above and beyond them, he felt safe enough to regard Margarita with an astounded gratitude.

Thank you, my lady!

If it should be possible, he would like to know such pleasure again. To guard against betrayal by his circumcision, he decided, in the future he would tell women his conversion had taken place not in a small church but in a great cathedral. The cathedral in Barcelona, where there was an army of clerics, so many priests no one could know them all.

His nose still pained him. But riding away, he reviewed in his mind the appearance of each part of Margarita's body, the acts, the scents, the sounds.

An incredible fact: His body had entered a woman's!

He gave thanks to the remarkable Ineffable One. For allowing him to remain free and sound of limb and mind, for creating women as well as men with such wondrous skill that when they came together they fit like mated lock and key, and for permitting him to survive long enough to greet this day.

This has happened to me on the twelfth day of the month of Shebat...

I am not Tomás Martín, I am Yonah Toledano, son of Helkias the silversmith, of the tribe of Levi.

The other months are Adar, Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Ab, Elul, Tishri, Heshvan, Kislev, and Tebet ...

He said the names of the months over and over again, between snatches of Hebrew verse or prayer, as Moise picked a careful way upward, into the brown hills.

Part Four

THE SHEPHERD

Sierra Morena

November 11, 1495

17

The Sound of Sheep

Yonah traveled north again on Moise, slowly wandering along the border with Portugal, keeping pace with the autumn browning of the green land. Half a dozen times he stopped and performed brief labor to earn money for food, but he stayed in no one place until he reached Salamanca, where workers were being hired for the repair of the cathedral.

He told the burly foreman his name was Ramón Callicó. 'What are you able to do?' the foreman asked, no doubt hoping he was a journeyman mason or a carpenter.

'I am able to work,' Yonah said, and the man nodded.

The oxen and huge draft horses used to drag the heavy stone were kept in a nearby barn. Yonah kept Moise in the barn as well, and at night he slept next to the burro, lulled by the sounds of the animals in their stalls.

By day, he became part of a small army -- laborers, masons, stone carvers, and drovers -- struggling to replace blocks of the dark stone that made up the cathedral's walls, which in places were ten feet thick. The work was sweaty and terrible, noisy with the complaints of the animals, the curses and shouted orders of foremen and drovers, the tapping of hammers and banging of mauls, and the constant, grinding growl of heavy stone being moved over resistant ground. Small blocks of stone were carried by laborers. When the larger blocks had been moved as far as possible by animals, men became the beasts of power, long lines of them straining to move the stone by hauling on stout ropes, or standing side by side as they pushed, leaning against their enemy, the stone.

Yonah was somehow pleased to work on the repair of a house of worship, even one designed for the prayer of others. He wasn't the only non-Christian helping to repair the cathedral; the master artisans were Moors who worked stone and wood with wondrous skill. When Yonah's father had been approached by Padre Sebastián Alvarez to design and fashion a reliquary to hold a Christian relic, Helkias had discussed the opportunity with Rabbi Ortega, who had advised him to accept the commission. 'It is a mitzvah to help people pray,' the rabbi had said, and he had pointed out that the delicate and beautiful work on the synagogues of Toledo had been done by Moors.

The labor on the cathedral was all-consuming. Like the others, Yonah toiled dully and without laughter, speaking only in brief utterances about the work, protecting his difference from them by keeping all thought to himself. Sometimes he was teamed with a bald peón who was built like a block of stone, squat and wide. Yonah never learned his patronymic but the foremen called him Leon.

One morning, when Yonah had been in Salamanca for seven weeks, he was working with Leon, wrestling stone into place. He looked up from their labors to see a procession of black-cowled men walking from the cathedral after their Matins prayers, which had begun before the workers arrived.

Leon stared at the friar at the head of the procession.

'That one is Fray Tomás Torquemada. Chief inquisitor,' he whispered. 'I am from Santa Cruz, where he is prior of the monastery.'

Yonah looked and saw a tall, elderly friar with a long straight nose and a pointed chin, and brooding, contemplative eyes. Lost in thought, Torquemada was quickly past them. There were perhaps two dozen priests and friars in the straggling column, and in their midst Yonah saw another tall man, with a face he would recognize anywhere. Bonestruca came almost within Yonah's shadow, deep in conversation with a companion, so close Yonah was able to see a scratch on his neck and a sore on his upper lip.

The friar glanced up and looked Yonah squarely in the face, but the gray eyes showed no recognition or interest as they flickered away again, and even as Yonah stood frozen with apprehension, Bonestruca moved past.

'What brings Fray Torquemada to Salamanca?' Yonah asked Leon, and the peón shrugged.

But later in the day Yonah heard the foreman tell another worker that inquisitors from every part of Spain had gathered for a meeting in the cathedral, and he began to wonder if this was why God had saved him and brought him here, this opportunity to kill the man who had murdered both his father and his brother.

*

Next morning, he watched again as the inquisitors passed from the cathedral after Matins. He decided that the best place for him to assault Bonestruca would be to the left of the cathedral entrance, close to where he worked. He would be able to depend upon striking only once before he was overwhelmed, and he thought that to kill Bonestruca he would have to use his sharp hoe like an ax, stabbing him in the throat.

That night he lay sleepless and anxious on his bed of straw in the barn. Sometimes as a boy he had had daydreams about being a warrior, and in recent years he had told himself he would enjoy avenging the deaths of his father and his brother. But now, brought to a situation where that might be possible, he anguished, not knowing if he could kill. He asked the Lord to grant him strength when the moment arrived.

In the morning he went to the cathedral as usual. When a friar came through the doors after Matins, Yonah picked up the hoe and went to the place near the cathedral entrance. Almost at once he began to tremble uncontrollably.

Five more friars followed the first, and then no one else came.

The foreman stared at Yonah, seeing him standing pale and idle. 'Are you sick?'

'No, señor.'

'Should you be helping to mix the mortar?' he asked, noting the hoe.

'Yes, señor.'

'Well then, go and be about it,' the man growled, and Yonah did as he was bidden.

That afternoon he heard that the meeting of the guardians of the faith had ended the afternoon before, and he knew he was stupid and foolish, unfit to be God's avenging arm. He had delayed too long and Bonestruca was gone, returned with the other inquisitors of Spain to the regions of their terrible responsibility.

The work in Salamanca lasted late into the spring. In mid-March a muscle in Leon's back tore while they moved a block of stone, and Yonah saw the peón roll on the ground in agony. Leon was lifted into the bed of a wagon and carried away, and Yonah never saw him again. Yonah was paired with others when there was need for two laborers, but they had nothing in common with one another. He turned away from them out of fear, and no one became his friend.

Not all the repairs had been made to the 355-year-old cathedral when the labor ended amid heated arguments about the structure's future. Many of the townfolk said their house of God wasn't large enough. Despite the fact that the Chapel of San Martin contained frescoes of the thirteenth century, the cathedral had little ornamentation and suffered in contrast to the distinguished cathedrals in other places. Already there were those who had begun to raise money to build a new cathedral in Salamanca, and further repairs on the old cathedral were postponed.

Yonah escaped into unemployment and drifted south again. On the seventh day of May, the birthday that made him eighteen years old, he was in the border town of Coria. He stopped at an inn and treated himself to a stew of goat meat and lentils, but an overheard discourse between three men at a nearby table ruined his celebration.

They were speaking of the Jews who had fled Spain for Portugal.

'In order to gain admittance to Portugal for six months,' one of the men said, 'they agreed to pay King John one-fourth of their worldly goods and one ducat for every soul allowed to cross the border. One hundred and twenty thousand ducats in all. The six months of their residency expired in February, and can you countenance what the whoseson king did then? He declared the Jews to be slaves of the state.'

'Ai ... May God curse King John.'

From their tone Yonah guessed they were conversos. Most Christians would not have been so wounded about the enslavement of Jews.

He had made no sound, but one of the three glanced over and observed him sitting still and stiff, and knew he had listened. The man said something to his companions quietly, and the three rose from their chairs and left the inn.

Yonah realized once more the wisdom Abba and Uncle Aron had shown in determining that the safer course from Toledo had been east instead of west into Portugal. His appetite gone, he continued to sit at the table while his cold stew congealed.

That afternoon he rode toward the blatting of many sheep. Soon he came to a flock spreading away from its center and presently saw the reason they were allowed to wander. Their old shepherd, gaunt and white-haired, lay on the ground.

'I am stricken,' he told Yonah simply.

His face against the grass was as pale as his hair, and he made a soft sibilance each time he struggled to breathe. Yonah turned him on his back, fetched him water and tried to see after his comfort, but the old man indicated that his greatest agony was the impending loss of the flock.

'I can get your sheep,' Yonah said, and he mounted Moise and rode away. It wasn't a difficult task. Many times he had worked with Aron Toledano's flock. Uncle Aron had had fewer animals, and as many goats as sheep, but Yonah was familiar with their ways. These sheep hadn't strayed far, and after some small difficulty he herded them into a tight group.

The old man managed to gasp that his name was Geronimo Pico.

'How else can I help you?'

The shepherd was in severe pain, his arms clasping his chest. 'The sheep must be returned ... to Don Emilio de Valladolid, near Plasencia,' he said.

'And so must you be returned,' Yonah said. He lifted the shepherd onto the burro and took up the old man's rude crook. They made slow time, for he needed to hasten over a wide area just to keep the sheep together. It was late in the afternoon when he witnessed the aged shepherd drop from Moise's back. Somehow, from the heavy fall and the nerveless sprawl of the body, he knew at once that the old man was dead.

Still, he spent time calling out to Geronimo Pico, patting the aged face and rubbing the man's wrists before acknowledging death.

'Ai, damnation ...'

Absurdly whispering the Kaddish for the stranger, he slung the body across Moise's back, face down and arms dangling, and made certain the flock was bunched before proceeding along the trail. Plasencia was not far; presently he came to a man and a woman working in a field.

'The farm of Don Emilio de Valladolid?'

'Yes,' the man said. He gazed at the corpse and crossed himself. 'Geronimo the shepherd.'

'Yes.'

He told Yonah how to find the farmhouse. 'Past the great tree split by lightning, across the stream, and on the right you will see it.'

It was a large, well-kept finca and Yonah drove the sheep into the barnyard. Three workmen appeared who needed no explanation when they saw the corpse; they slid the shepherd from the burro, making sad little grunts of regret, and carried the body away.

The landowner was a florid-faced, sleepy-eyed man who wore fine clothes that were covered with stains. He disliked the interruption of his evening meal, and he came outside and spoke to his overseer. 'Is there reason for all this noise of the sheep?'

'The shepherd is dead. This one brought him back with the flock.'

'Get the fucking animals away from my house.'

'Yes, Don Emilio.'

The overseer was a lean man of medium height, with brown hair that was turning gray, and steady brown eyes. He and his sons helped Yonah move the flock to a field, the sons smiling and shouting insults at one another. They were Adolfo, a lanky boy who was about sixteen years of age, and Gaspar, several years younger than his brother. The man sent them to fetch two bowls of food -- a thick, hot gruel of wheat -- and he and Yonah sat on the ground near the sheep and ate silently.