The Last Jew (32 page)

'Is it bad for you, then?' Yonah could not refrain from asking.

'At times it is bad. Trouble with respiration, it comes and it goes.'

Nuño showed him how bones, membranes, and ligaments supported and protected the body. He sawed off the top of the thin man's head and showed Yonah the brain, then demonstrated that it was connected to the spinal cord and certain nerves.

It was still dark when all was put back and the incisions were sewn with the care of a seamstress. The shroud was replaced, and the two men led the burro back up the hill.

Yonah buried the thin man deeper this time, and they gave him the honor of a Christian prayer and a Jewish one. By the time the light of day drifted over the hill, each of them was in his bed.

*

In the week that followed, Yonah was enflamed by a curious unrest. He translated Avicenna's words: 'Medicine is the preservation of health and the cure of disease that arises from conscious causes which exist within the body.' When he went to see patients with Nuño he looked at them in a new way, seeing in each the skeleton and organs he had seen in the thin man.

It took him the full week to achieve the courage to approach the physician with his proposal.

'I would bind myself to you as apprentice physician.'

Nuño looked at him calmly. 'Is this a sudden desire that may drift away like a fog before a wind?'

'No, I have given it much thought. I think you do God's work.'

'God's work? Let me tell you something, Ramón. Often I believe in God. But sometimes I do not.'

Yonah was silent, not knowing what to reply.

'Do you have other reasons for your request?'

'A physician helps others throughout his life.'

'So. You would benefit humanity?'

Yonah felt Nuño toying with him and was irked. 'Yes, I would do so.'

'Do you know how long such a clerkship might be?'

'No.'

'Four years. It would be your third apprenticeship, and I could not give assurance that you would be able to finish it. I do not know if God will grant me four more years to do his work.'

Honesty forced another admission. 'I need to belong to something. To be a part of something good.'

Nuño pursed his lips and looked at him.

'I would labor hard for you.'

'You already labor hard for me,' Nuño said gently.

But in a moment he nodded. 'Well. We shall try,' he said.

Part Six

THE PHYSICIAN

OF SARAGOSSA

Aragon

February 10, 1501

29

The Physician's Apprentice

Now when Yonah rode out with Nuño to treat a patient he no longer waited idly for the physician to complete his task. Instead he stood at the bedside as Nuño spoke in a low voice throughout the examination and treatment. 'Do you see the dampness of the sheets? Do you detect the acidity of his breath?' Yonah listened closely as Nuño told the sick man's wife that her husband was stricken with fever and colic and prescribed a light diet free of spices, and infusions to be taken for seven days.

On the ride from house to house they kept their mounts to a businesslike canter, but on the slow ride home Yonah usually had a question or two that he had gleaned from the day's work. 'How do the symptoms of colic vary?'

'Sometimes colic is accompanied by fever and sweating, but other times, not. It may be caused by acute constipation, for which a good remedy is figs boiled in olive oil and honey until they are a thick paste. Or by diarrhea, for which rice may be parched until it is perfectly brown, and then boiled down and eaten slowly.'

Nuño always had a question or two of his own. 'How does what we have seen today match what Avicenna says regarding the detection of illness?'

'He has written that often illness may be recognized by what the body produces and expels, such as sputum, stools, sweat, and urine.'

He continued to work at his translation of the Avicenna book, which buttressed Nuño's lessons:

Symptoms are obtained through physical examination of the body. There are visible ones, such as jaundice and edema; some are perceptible to the ear, such as the gurgling of the abdomen in dropsy; the foul odor strikes at the sense of smell, for example, that of purulent ulcers; there are some accessible to taste, such as the acidity of the mouth; touch recognizes certain ones: the firmness of...

When he found a word he couldn't identify, he had to go to Nuño. 'It says, "the firmness of ..." the Hebrew word is sartán. I'm sorry, I don't know what sartán means.'

Nuño read the transcribed passage and smiled. 'It almost certainly means cancer. Touch recognizes the firmness of cancer.'

In itself the process of translating such a book was educational, but Yonah found he had limited time to devote to Avicenna, because Nuño Fierro was a demanding teacher who set him straightaway to reading other books. The physician owned several classical works of medicine in the Spanish language, and Yonah became responsible for the knowledge imparted by Teodorico Borgognoni writing on surgery, Isaac's work on fevers, and Galen on the pulse.

'Don't just read them,' Nuño warned. 'Learn them. Learn them so completely that you will not have to consult them in the future. A book may be burned or lost, but if you really have learned, the book is part of you and the knowledge will last as long as you do.'

Opportunities to perform additional dissections in the barn were rare and widely spaced, but they studied the corpse of a woman of the town who had thrown herself into the Ebro and drowned. When they cut into her womb Nuño showed him a fetus, not fully formed and the size of a fish that any angler would have thrown back.

'Life is engendered from the sperm, the issue of the penis,' Nuño told him. 'It is not understood what occurs in the woman's body to make the transformation. Some believe that seeds in the expelled male liquid are quickened into growth by the natural warmth of the female tunnel. Others suggest it might be helped by the additional heat of friction during repeated thrusting of the male member.'

They dissected a breast, Nuño pointing out that the spongelike inner tissue was sometimes the site of tumors. 'In addition to delivering mother's milk to the babe, the nipples are sensitive sexual areas. Indeed, a woman can be readied for intercourse by means of stimulation of several areas by the hands or mouth of the male, but it is a secret ignored even by many anatomists that the seat of female arousal is here,' he said, and showed Yonah the tiny organ, the size of a small pea, hidden in twin folds of skin like a wrapped jewel at the top of the vagina.

It reminded Nuño of another lesson he wished to teach. 'There are women in good number in the town, more than enough of them for any man's needs to be discreetly satisfied. But stay away from whores since many have the pox, a disease to be avoided for its terrible consequences.'

A week later, he fixed that lesson firmly in Yonah's mind by bringing him to the home of Lucía Porta, in the center of the city. 'Señora, it is the physician come to see little José and Fernando,' he called, and a woman shuffled to the door.

'Hola, señora,' Nuño said. She looked at them without greeting but gave them entrance. A thin, small boy stood against the wall, snuffling and regarding them dully.

'Hola, Fernando. Fernando has nine years,' he said, and Yonah felt a stir of pity, for the boy seemed four or five years old. His legs were underdeveloped and terribly bowed. He made no protest when they examined him. Nuño pointed out that he had a clump of dark growths on his scrotum and another on his anus, like small grapes. 'We sometimes see this, but not often,' he said. He led Fernando to the window where the light was better, and held the child's mouth open wide so Yonah could see that the palate was perforated. It was a strange mouth in other ways; the two upper front teeth were gapped like pegs, narrower at the bottom than at the top. 'The hole in the palate is very commonly seen, and so are the malformed teeth.'

A crying infant lay on a pallet, and Yonah and Nuño knelt over him.

'Hola, José, Nuño murmured. The baby had sores and blebs on his mouth and about his nose.

'You have enough salve, señora?'

'No. All gone.'

Nuño nodded. 'Then you must go to Fray Medina's shop. I shall tell him to expect you, and to give you more.'

Yonah was glad when they were in the bright sunshine again, and walking away. 'The salve will do very little,' Nuño said. 'Nothing will do much for them. The baby's sores will go away, but his front teeth no doubt will come in like his brother's. And there may be far darker complications. I have noted that several of my patients who have gone mad -- two men and a woman -- had suffered from the pox while younger.' He shrugged. 'The connection between the two diseases is nothing I can prove, but it is interesting that the combination appears,' he said, and for a long time that was all he taught Yonah about pox.

Nuño said his apprentice was required to attend church regularly, although at first Yonah struggled against this rule. It had been one thing to attempt an illusion of Christian piety in Gibraltar, where he was under constant scrutiny, but he rebelled against hypocritically performing the mechanics of Catholicism while living in Nuño Fierro's household, where he sensed there was no threat to a nonbeliever.

But Nuño was unyielding. 'When your apprenticeship is completed you will go before the town officials, a candidate for licensing as a physician. I must go with you. Unless they know you as a practising Christian, you will not be licensed.' Then he delivered his decisive argument. 'If you are discovered and destroyed, Reyna and I shall be destroyed with you.'

'I have been to some services of the church only a few times, when attendance was a necessity. I was able to mimic those who sat nearby, kneeling when they knelt, sitting when they remained seated. But church attendance is dangerous for me, because I am unskilled in the subtleties of churchly behavior.'

'It is easily taught,' Nuño replied calmly, and for a time along with the lessons in medicine there was instruction about when to rise and when to kneel, how to recite Latin prayers as though they were as familiar as the Shema, and even how to genuflect upon entering the church as if Yonah had done it all the Sundays and saint's days of his life.

Spring came to Saragossa later than it had arrived in Gibraltar, but eventually the days grew longer and warmer. The trees he had pruned and fertilized in the orchard bloomed prodigiously, and he watched as the fragrant pink petals fell and were replaced within weeks by the first small fruits, both apples and peaches, hard and green.

On a day of soft rain a widow named Loretta Cavaller came to the infirmary and complained that in the past two years her monthly flows had all but disappeared, replaced by severe cramps. Small and fair-skinned, with hair the color of a mouse's fur, she described her problems haltingly, her close-set eyes looking only at the wall and never at Yonah or Nuño. She had been to two midwifes, she said, and had been given salves and nostrums but nothing had availed.

'Are your bowels open?' Nuño asked.

'Sometimes they are not.'

For when they were not he prescribed flaxseed in cold water to be drunk seeds and all. Outside the dispensary her horse and cart waited, but Nuño told her that for a time she must leave the cart at home when she went on errands, and ride on horseback. For increasing her monthly bleeding he instructed her to boil in water cherry bark and purslane and leaves of raspberry and to sip the resulting infusion four times each day, continuing this treatment until thirty days after her flow became regulated.

'I am not certain where to find the ingredients,' she said, and Nuño told her they might be purchased at the apothecary's shop in Saragossa.

But the next afternoon Yonah collected strips of bark from a wild cherry tree and gathered purslane and new leaves from a berry bush, and that evening he carried them, along with a bottle of wine, to the woman's small house by the Ebro River. Her feet were bare when she answered his knocking at the door, but she invited him in and thanked him for the bark and the leaves. She gave him a mug of his own wine and poured a mug for herself, and they sat by the fire on two beautifully carved chairs. When Yonah complimented them she said they had been made by her late husband Jiménez Reverte, who had been a master carpenter.

'How long has it been since your husband died?' Yonah asked, and the woman said it was two years and two months since Jiménez had been stricken by the thrush and carried off, and that she prayed daily for his immortal soul.

They never knew ease with one another but conversed awkwardly, separated by silences. Yonah was aware of what he wanted to occur but unversed in the kind of conversation that might bring it about. Finally when he stood she rose too; he knew he would have to leave unless he acted, and he put his arms around her and bent to touch his lips to her mouth.

Loretta Cavaller remained very still in his embrace before she disengaged and took the oil lamp and led him across the room, to where he followed her bare feet up the steep, narrow stairway. In her chamber he had only the briefest opportunity to see that Jiménez had carved her bedstead more cunningly than the chairs, all oaken grapes and figs and pomegranates, and then she carried the lamp from the chamber and left it on the floor of the hall. When she returned there was the quick rasp of material drawn against flesh as they divested themselves of clothing and dropped it onto the floor