The Last Jew (20 page)

'Are you unable to hear?' César said irritably.

'What language do you speak?' Yonah asked, and Joan grinned.

'It is Catalan. We are all Catalonians. Everyone on this ship.' But after that they spoke Castilian Spanish to Yonah, which was a relief to him.

Before the end of the loading, a physician's boy brought word that the fallen seaman was severely injured and would have to remain in Cádiz for extended care.

The maestro had appeared on deck. He was younger than the mate, an erect man whose hair and short beard were still untouched with gray. The mate hurried to him and Yonah, working nearby, overheard their conversation.

'Josep must remain here for mending,' the mate said.

'Hmmm.' The maestro was frowning 'I do not like a short crew.'

'I understand. That one who takes his place with the loading ... He appears to work with a will.'

Yonah saw the maestro studying him. 'Very well. You may talk to him.'

The mate approached Yonah. 'Are you an experienced seaman, Ramón Callicó?'

He didn't wish to lie, but he was almost out of money and needed food and shelter. 'I have experience on a riverboat,' he said, telling a form of the truth. Yet at the same time it was a lie because he didn't mention he had served the boat so briefly. But he was hired, presently joining others to heave on lines that raised three small triangular sails. When the ship had been moved far enough from the shore, the deck hands raised a large mainsail that snapped loudly when it was unfurled and then bellied before the wind, taking them out to sea.

There were seven men in the crew -- after a few days he sorted them out: Jaume, the ship's carpenter. Carles, who knew how to repair ropes and constantly was working on the lines. Antoni, who cooked the meals and was missing the little finger of his left hand. And Maria, César, Joan, and Yonah, who did whatever they were ordered. The purser was a small man who somehow managed to have a pale face when everyone around him was dark from the sun. Yonah always heard him called Señor Mezquida and never learned his last name. The captain's name was Pau Roure. He was seen little, spending much time in his cabin. When he came above deck he never said a word to the crew, sending his orders through the mate, whose name was Gaspar Gatuelles. Sometimes Gatuelles shouted his orders, but no one aboard was struck.

The ship was called La Lleona, the lioness. It had two masts and six sails that Yonah soon learned to identify: a large square mainsail, a slightly smaller mizzensail, two triangular topsails above each of these, and two small jib sails that stretched over the bowsprit, which was a tawny lion's body with the alabaster face of a woman. The main mast was higher than the mizzenmast, so high that from the moment the ship was under way before a brisk breeze, Yonah dreaded that he might be ordered aloft.

His first night aboard, when it became his time to sleep for four hours he did not lie down. Instead he went to the rope ladder and climbed until he was halfway up the mainmast. The deck, far beneath him, was murky save for the feeble light from the running lamps. All about the ship was the limitless sea, dark as vino tinto. He was unable to force himself to climb higher, and he scrambled down.

He was told the ship was small for a saltwater vessel, yet it seemed enormous when he compared it to the riverboat. There was a damp hold that contained a tiny cabin with six bunks for passengers and an even smaller cabin shared by the three officers. The crew slept on the deck wherever they could. Yonah found a place behind the rudder post. When he lay there he could hear the water hissing as it passed over the curved hull, and whenever the course was changed he felt the vibrations of the shifting rudder moving below.

The open ocean was nothing like the river. Yonah relished the fresh slap of the air and its wet salt tang, but most of the time the motion under way kept his stomach queasy. On occasion he retched and spewed, to the amusement of those who observed. Everyone on the ship was more than ten years his senior and they all spoke Catalan. When they remembered they spoke Spanish to Yonah, but they seldom remembered, and they didn't speak to him often. He knew from the very start that for him it would be a lonely ship.

His inexperience was at once apparent to officers and crew. Most of the time the mate kept him occupied at menial tasks, a nautical peón. On his fourth day aboard, there was a storm, and the ship was tossed. Even as Yonah staggered to the leeward side to vomit, the mate ordered him aloft, and as he climbed the rope ladder, fright caused him to forget his nausea. He went higher than he had climbed before, beyond the top of the mainsail. The lines holding taught the triangular topsail had been released from the deck, but human hands had to pull down the sail and lash it to its spar. To get in position to do so, the men had to step from the rope ladder onto a narrow strand of rope, holding on to the spar. A seaman had already started to make his way along the rope when Yonah reached the spar. When Yonah hesitated he was cursed by the two men below him on the ladder, and he stepped out onto the swaying rope, clutching the spar as he slid his feet along the tenuous support. The four of them held to the spar with one hand and pulled the heavy sail as the masts shuddered and swayed. The ship heeled one way and then the other, and each time it reached the dizzying end of a long pitch the men aloft could see the white spume of the furious sea, far below.

When finally the sail was lashed, Yonah found the rope ladder and descended, trembling, to regain the deck. He could not believe what he had done. No one took notice of him for a little while, and then the mate sent him below to check the lashings of the cargo in the groaning hold.

Sometimes sleek, dark dolphins swam alongside the ship, and once they saw a fish so large its sight filled Yonah with terror. He was a swimmer, he had been raised next to a river, yet there were limits to how far he could swim. No land was in sight, nothing but more sea in every direction. And even if he could swim to land, he thought he would be a dangling lure to the monsters. Remembering the story of his biblical namesake, he imagined Leviathan moving up, up, up from the bottomless deep, drawn to surface feeding by the sky-lit movements of Yonah's arms and legs above, the way a trout is drawn up by the motions of living bait on a hook. The deck beneath his feet felt fragile and impermanent.

He was sent aloft four more times but never learned to like it, nor did he ever fully become a sailor, learning to live with nausea in varying degrees as the ship ventured north along the coast, making landfalls to unload and take on cargo and passengers at Malaga, Cartagena, Alicante, Denia, Valencia, and Tarragona. Sixteen days after they had left Cádiz they arrived in Barcelona, whence they sailed southeast for the island of Menorca.

Menorca, far to sea, proved to have a rugged coast and was an island of fishermen and farmers. Yonah liked the idea of living in such a cliff-bound place. It occurred to him that perhaps the island was sufficiently remote to escape watchful eyes. But in the Menorcan port of Ciutadella the ship picked up three black-cowled Dominican friars. One of the friars went directly to sit on a hogshead and read his breviary, while the others stood next to the deck rail and talked quietly for a time. Then one of them looked at Yonah and crooked a finger.

He forced himself to walk to them. 'Señor?' he said. His voice sounded to him like a croak.

'Where does this ship go when it leaves these islands?'

The friar had small brown eyes. They were not at all like the gray eyes of Bonestruca, but the black Dominican costume the man wore was enough to fill Yonah with terror.

'I do not know, señor.'

The other friar snorted, and looked at him sternly. 'This one is ignorant. He goes wherever the ship goes. You must ask an officer.'

Yonah pointed to where Gaspar Gatuelles stood in the bow, talking with the carpenter. 'He is the mate, señor,' he said, and the pair walked to the bow to talk with Gatuelles.

La Lleona carried those two friars to the larger island, Mallorca. The third friar stopped reading his breviary in time to debark on the smaller island of Ibiza, farther south.

Yonah realized that to survive he would have to continue to live in such a way as to deceive, because the Inquisition was everywhere.

22

Metalwork

When the ship returned to Cádiz, they had scarce begun to unload before the seaman whose place Yonah had taken reappeared, hale now, with only a livid scar on his forehead to show for his mishap.

He was greeted by the shouts of the mate and the crew -- 'Josep! Josep!' -- and it was clear Yonah's employment as a seaman on La Lleona was at an end. Truth to tell, that came as a welcome event. Gaspar Gatuelles thanked him and paid him off, and he walked away from the ship glad to be on firm land.

He wandered southeast along the coastal road, the weather hot by day and mild by night. Each evening before darkness fell he tried to find a haymow to sleep in, or the soft sand of a beach, but when there was neither he made do with what was at hand. Each morning he bathed in the gorgeous sea under the warm sun, never swimming out far because he feared that at any moment he might feel a monster's sharp teeth or tentacles. When he came to a brook or a horse trough he washed off some of the sea's salt that had dried on his body. Once a farmer gave him a long ride atop a load of straw in his ox-drawn wagon. Along the way he stopped his animals.

'Do you know where you are?' he asked, and Yonah shook his head, puzzled. It was just a deserted place along a deserted road.

'This is where Spain ends. It is the southernmost point of Iberia,' the man said with satisfaction, as if it were a personal accomplishment. Yonah received only one other ride along the way, in a cart full of dried cod that he helped the owner unload when they reached the village of Gibraltar, at the foot of a great rock mountain.

Handling the cod without tasting it had made him ravenous. There was a tavern in the village and he entered it and found a low-ceilinged room smelling of many years of spilled wine and wood fires and the sweat of its patrons. Half a dozen men sat drinking at two long tables, some of them also eating from a pot of fish stew that bubbled on the hearth. Yonah ordered a mug of wine that proved to be sour and a bowl of the stew that proved to be good, full of fish and onion and bits of herbs. The fishbones were sharp and plentiful, but he ate slowly and with enjoyment, and when he was finished he ordered another bowl.

While he was waiting for it an old man came into the tavern and took the empty place on the bench next to him. 'I shall have a bowl of wine, Señor Bernaldo,' he called to the proprietor, who grinned as he ladled Yonah's stew.

'Not unless you find a patron among these good men,' he called in reply, and the men at the tables laughed as if he had said something very humorous.

The old man was round-shouldered and soft-looking; his wispy white hair and the wounded vulnerability in his face at once reminded Yonah of Geronimo Pico, the old shepherd whose dying he had witnessed and whose flock he had inherited for several years. 'Give him a drink,' he said to the proprietor. Then, suddenly conscious of his limited funds, he added, 'A mug, not a bowl.'

'Ai, Vicente, you have found a spendthrift!' a man at the other table said. The words were spoken sarcastically and without humor, but they drew laughter. The speaker was short and thin, with dark hair and a small mustache. 'You're a miserable old rat, Vicente, never getting enough drink in your guts,' he said.

'Oh, Luis, close your mean mouth,' one of the other drinkers said wearily.

'Would you care to close it for me, José Gripo?'

That query seemed humorous to Yonah, because José Gripo was tall and broad, not young but obviously much younger and stronger than the other man; it seemed to Yonah that Luis would not have stood a chance in a fight.

But no one laughed. Yonah saw the man who sat next to Luis get to his feet. He looked younger than Luis, of average height, but lean and muscular. He was very fit. His face was all hard planes, even his nose made a sharp angle. He regarded José Gripo with interest and took a step toward him.

'Sit down or remove your arse from here, Angel,' Bernaldo, the proprietor, said. 'Your maestro has told me that if I have any more trouble from you and Luis, he's to hear at once.'

The man stopped and stared at the proprietor. Then he shrugged and smiled. He reached for his mug and finished the rest of his wine at a gulp, and set the mug back on the table with a bang. 'Let us be off, then, Luis, for I have no desire to further enrich friend Bernaldo this night.'

The proprietor watched them leave the tavern and then served Yonah his stew. A moment later he brought the old man his wine. 'Here, Vicente. Let it be free. They are a bad sort, those two.'

'They are a strange combination,' José Gripo said. 'I've seen it before -- Luis purposely provokes someone and then Angel Costa moves in and does his fighting.'

'Angel Costa fights well,' a man said at the other table.

'Yes, he is an old soldier and knows well how to fight, but he is an unpleasant bastard,' Gripo said.

'Luis is an unpleasant man, too,' Vicente said, 'but he is a marvelous worker of metal, I must say that.'

That drew Yonah's interest. 'I've done metalwork and I seek employment. What kind of metalwork goes on here?'