The Last Jew (31 page)

Just above the hacienda was the hill's southern slope, the best part of the property, with deep, rich topsoil and full exposure to the sun. Reyna kept a small kitchen garden, but much of it had grown to weeds and brush. Yonah saw that if someone were serious about working this land there were many possibilities.

He wasn't certain how long he would stay, but he was caught up in rediscovering the Hebrew language, and as the weeks passed it came to seem almost normal for him to be living in a house. It was a house full of the smells of cooking and baking and the warmth from the large fireplace. Yonah kept the wood box filled, for which Reyna was grateful, since that had been one of her many chores. The ground floor was one large room in which the cooking and dining was done, with two comfortable chairs by the fire. Upstairs, Yonah's pallet was in a small storeroom between the large master bedchamber and Reyna's smaller room, each of which contained a bed.

The walls were thin. He never heard her pray, but each of them was aware someone could hear when they awoke to piss into the chamber pot. Once he heard her make a small moan as she yawned and he could imagine how she looked, stretching, enjoying the luxury of a few hours spared from work. During the day he watched her surreptitiously, taking care not to be observed doing so, because from the start he knew Reyna was taken.

Several times, lying in the dark at night, he heard her door open and listened as she went into Nuño's room and closed the door behind her. Sometimes he heard the muted sounds of lovemaking.

Good for you, Physician! he thought, caught in the prison of his own unreleased loins.

He noted that in their daylight demeanor Nuño and Reyna were master and servant, pleasant to one another but devoid of intimacy.

Their sexual joining didn't happen as frequently as Yonah would have expected. Apparently Nuño Fierro's needs no longer were urgent. Yonah was a man who discerned patterns, and he noticed early that sometimes, after they had supped, Nuño told Reyna that on the morrow he would like a potted fowl, and she inclined her head. And always that night she came to Nuño's room. Soon when Yonah heard their private code, the order for a potted fowl, he was unable to sleep until he heard her going into the other man's chamber.

Yonah first realized Nuño wasn't well one afternoon when he left the small table at which he did his translating and saw that the physician was sitting quietly on the lower steps of the staircase. Fierro was pale and his eyes were closed.

'Señor, can I help you?' Yonah said, and hastened toward him, but Nuño Fierro shook his head and raised his hand.

'Allow me to be. A touch of dizziness, nothing more.'

So Yonah nodded and returned to his desk. And presently he heard Fierro get to his feet and go to his room.

Several nights later there were wild winds and a hard and persistent rain that broke a long drought. In the darkness before dawn the three of them were awakened by a hammering on the door and the loud voice of a man calling for Señor Fierro.

Reyna hurried down and shouted through the closed door. 'Yes, yes. What is it?'

'I am Ricardo Cabrera. Please, we need the señor. My father has had a terrible fall.'

'I am coming, Nuño called from the top of the stairs. Reyna opened the door only a crack, because she was in her shift. 'Where is your farm?'

'Off the Tauste road.'

'But that is across the Ebro!'

'I crossed it without difficulty,' the man said pleadingly.

Now for the first time Yonah heard the strange sound of the servant woman arguing with Nuño Fierro as if she were his wife. 'Do not place instruments and medications in your bag so calmly! It is too far, and across the river. You cannot go on such a night.'

Presently there was another knocking, this time on Yonah's door. She came in and stood over him in the dark. 'He is not strong. Go with him and help him. See that he returns safely.'

Nuño was less sanguine than he had pretended, and he seemed relieved when Yonah threw on his clothes and came downstairs.

'Why not take one of your brother's horses?' Yonah asked, but the physician shook his head. 'I have my own horse, who has crossed the Ebro many times.'

So Yonah saddled Nuño's brown horse and the gray Arab for himself, and they followed the shaggy pony of the farmer's son through the driving rain. The brook had turned into a stream and the sound of water was everywhere as they made their muddy way. Yonah carried Nuño's bag, allowing him to hold the reins with both hands.

They were thoroughly wet by the time they reached the river. There were no calm and shallow fords in this kind of a rain. The water was running hard and up over the stirrups when they crossed, but even the tough little pony made the crossing without mishap. They arrived at the farm wet through and chilled but were unable to see to their own comfort.

Pascual Cabrera lay on the barn floor while nearby his wife forked hay to their animals. He groaned when Nuño bent over him.

'I fell from the high rocks in the field,' he whispered. He appeared to have difficulty breathing, and his wife assumed the tale.

'A wolf is about and took a freshened ewe from us a fortnight ago. Ricardo has set snares and will kill the beast, but until he does so, we bring our few sheep and goats into the barn at night. My husband got all of them inside except that cursed goat,' she said, indicating a black cabra munching hay nearby. 'She had gone up onto a high rocky place in a corner of our field. The goats love to climb it, and she would not choose to come down.'

Her husband said something faintly, and Nuño asked him to repeat it.

'The cabra ... our best milker.'

'Just so,' his wife said. 'So he went up to the top of the rocks to get her, and she got down and went directly to the barn. But the rocks are slick from the rain, and he slipped. He fell all the way to the bottom. He was out there a while before he managed to get into the barn himself. I was able to get off his clothes and cover him with a blanket, but he wouldn't let me dry him, for the pain.'

Yonah watched a different Nuño than the one he had seen at home. The physician was swift and confident. He removed the blanket and asked Yonah to hold one of the two lanterns close. The physician's hands moved over the man's body gently, assessing the damage while a pair of oxen watched from the stalls.

'You have broken several of your ribs. And perhaps you have cracked a bone in your arm,' Nuño said finally. He wrapped the moaning man's upper body tightly in cloth bindings, and soon Señor Cabrera sighed, feeling a lessening of his pain.

'Oh, that's something better,' he breathed.

'Your arm needs our help too, Nuño said, and as he bound it for support he directed Yonah and Ricardo to tie the blanket between two long thin poles that leaned in a corner of the barn. When that was done they shifted Cabrera onto the litter and carried him to his own bed.

They were able to take their leave only after Nuño had given the señora powders for infusions that would allow her husband to sleep. It was still misting when they began their return ride but the storm was done and the river was quieter. The rain ceased before they reached home, and a sunlit dawn flooded into the sky. In the house Reyna had the fire going and hot wine waiting, and she began at once to boil water for the physician's bath.

In the gloom of his small room Yonah shivered as he rubbed his cold body dry with rough sacking. He was thoughtful as he listened to the woman's worried scolding, soft and urgent as the sound of a dove.

Yonah was willing when Nuño asked him to ride out with him again several days later. The following week they made seven visits to the sick and injured, and soon it was accepted that when the physician must ride abroad, Yonah was his company.

It was while visiting a woman stricken with sharp fevers and paroxysms of chills that Yonah received an account of further happenings in the lives of the Spanish Jews who had fled to Portugal. While Nuño attended to the woman's ague her husband, a cloth merchant whose business took him to Lisboa, sat and passed the time of day with Yonah, speaking of Portuguese wine and food.

'As every place, Portugal has problems with its damnable Jews,' he said.

'I have heard they have been made slaves of the state.'

'They were slaves until Emanuel ascended the throne of Portugal and declared them free. But when he sought to marry young Isabella, daughter of our own Ferdinand and Isabella, our Spanish monarchs chided his overly soft heart and he made certain to be firmer. He had a problem, in that he wanted an end to Jewishness in his kingdom but could not afford to lose the Jews, who are cursedly good at trade.'

'I have heard they are,' Yonah said. 'Is it really true, then?'

'Oh, yes. I know this to be true in my own cloth trade as in many others. At any rate, at Emanuel's orders all Jewish children between the ages of four and fourteen were forcibly baptized en masse. In a failed experiment, some seven hundred of the newly baptized children were sent to live a Christian life on the isle of San Tomás, off the coast of Africa, where almost all of them quickly died of the fevers. But most of the children were allowed to remain with their families, and Jewish adults were given the choice of becoming Catholics or departing the country. As in Spain, some converted, though by our experience it is to be doubted that a man who has been judio mamas, really a Jew, may become a good and honest Christian, eh?'

'Where did the others go?' Yonah asked.

'I have no idea, nor do I care, so long as they never shall return to us,' the merchant said, and a burst of groaning from his wife drew him away from Yonah and to her side.

One day a pair of gravediggers led up Nuño's lane a donkey laden with a recumbent form. When they stopped at the hacienda and begged water, Reyna asked if the physician's services were needed, and the men laughed and said it was far too late. The body on the donkey was that of an unidentified man with black skin, a wanderer who in the broad light of day had slit his own throat in the Plaza Mayor. The gravediggers gave polite thanks for the water and continued their slow way to the Place of the Lost Ones.

That night, Nuño awakened Yonah from a deep sleep.

'I need your help.'

'You have it, Señor Fierro. What can I do?'

'You should know it is a matter considered to be witchcraft and mortal sin by the Church. If you help me and we are discovered, you will burn as well as I.'

Yonah had long since decided that Nuño Fierro was man worthy of his trust. 'I am already wanted for burning, maestro Physician. They cannot burn me more than once.'

'Then fetch a spade and bridle a burro.'

The night was clear but Yonah felt its chill. Together they led the burro to the cemetery of the suicides. Nuño had gone up there before dark to find the grave, and now led the way to it in the bright light of the moon.

He set Yonah to digging at once. 'The grave is shallow, because the diggers are lazy louts and were partly drunk when Reyna spoke with them.'

It required little effort for Yonah to reclaim the shrouded corpus from the ground, and with the burro's help they took the body back over the hill to the barn, where the shroud was removed and the naked man was laid out on a table surrounded by bright oil lamps.

The form and face were those of a man of middle age, with wispy curls of black hair, thin limbs, bruised shanks, a variety of scars from old injuries, and the unpleasant neck wound that had brought him death.

'The color of the skin is not a subject for conjecture,' Nuño Fierro said. 'In climates of great heat, such as in Africa, men have developed dark skins over long centuries to protect them from the burning rays of the sun. In northern places such as the land of the Slavs, cold climate has produced skin of stark whiteness.'

He took up one of the fine scalpels his brother had fashioned for him. 'This has been done as long as there have been healing arts,' he said, and made a straight and steady incision that opened the body on the table from the breastbone to the pubis.

'Both dark and light skins and the flesh beneath them contain different kinds of glands that are the agents of the functions of the body.'

Yonah drew a sharp breath and turned his head from the stink of corruption. 'I know what you feel,' Nuño said, 'because it is what I felt the first time I saw Sporanis do this.'

His hands worked skillfully. 'I am a simple physician and not a priest or a devil. I don't know what becomes of the soul. But I know for a certainty it doesn't stay here in this house of flesh, this house that after death seeks at once to become earth.'

He mentioned what he knew about the organs he removed, and directed Yonah to record the dimensions and weight in a book with a leather cover.

'This is the liver. The nutrition of the body depends upon it. I believe it is where the blood is born.'

'This, the spleen ... This, the bladder of gall, regulating the temperament.'

The heart ... When it was removed, Yonah held in his palms a man's heart!

'The heart draws blood into itself and sends it elsewhere. The nature of blood is perplexing, but it is clear the heart gives life. Without it, man would be a plant.' Nuño showed him it was like a house with four chambers. 'It is in one of these chambers, perhaps, that my own doom lies. I think God erred here when making me. Though perhaps the trouble is in the bellows of the lungs.'