The Last Jew (33 page)

They fell against each other then like a pair of long-parched travelers in a dry desert, as if each of them expected sweet water; yet the union brought Yonah only relief, and not the rich pleasure for which he yearned. Presently, lying in the dark room scented by what they had been doing, he explored with his hands flaccid breasts, sharp hipbones, and knobbly knees.

She put on her shift before reclaiming the lamp. Yonah was never to see her naked. Though he came back to her house to lie with her three more times their joinings lacked passion, as if he were committing an act of onanism with her borrowed body. They had almost nothing to say to one another; awkward conversation was followed by release in the fine bed, followed by spare and clumsy words as he took his leave. The fourth time he came to her house, when she answered his knocking she didn't invite him in, and he could see past her to where Roque Arellano, the Saragossa butcher, sat at her table with his shoes off, drinking wine Yonah had given her.

Several Sundays later Yonah was in church when the banns of Loretta Cavaller and Roque Arellano were read by the priest. After they were married Loretta Cavaller began to work in her husband's butcher shop, a prosperous business. Nuño kept chickens but didn't raise beef or pork and several times Reyna asked Yonah to go to the butcher's to buy meat or the fish which Arellano sometimes also carried. Loretta had become skilled; he admired the swift, sure way she cut and trimmed meat. Arellano's prices were high, but Loretta always greeted him cordially, her close-set eyes beaming, and often she gave him marrow bones that Reyna used when she made soup or potted a fowl.

Both Nuño and Reyna had come to live in the hacienda when the maestro of the house was Gabriel ben Nissim Sporanis, and it had been the Jewish physician's custom to bathe before sundown each Friday, preparing himself for the Sabbath. Nuño and Reyna had fallen into the habit of weekly bathing, Nuño taking to the bath on Mondays and Reyna on Wednesdays, so water would be needed to be heated for only one bath in the course of an evening. The bathing was done in a copper tub placed before the fire, where a kettle of additional water was kept heating.

It was great luxury for Yonah to bathe each Friday as Montesa had done, though he had to scrunch his large body into the confines of the tub. On Wednesday evenings sometimes he would walk outside while Reyna bathed, but more often he stayed in his room, playing his guitar or working on the Avicenna by lamplight. It was hard to concentrate on memorizing the drugs that had astringent uses on sores and those that warmed and did not purge, while trying to imagine how she looked.

When the water cooled, he could hear Nuño going to her, taking the kettle off the fire and adding hot water to the tub, as she did for the maestro on Mondays. Nuño also provided this act of courtesy for his apprentice on Fridays, moving slowly and with exertion as he lifted the kettle, warned Yonah to swing his legs out of the way lest he be burned, and poured the hot water, his breathing labored.

'He does too much. He is no longer young,' Reyna said to Yonah one morning when Nuño was occupied in the barn.

'I try to lighten his load,' Yonah said, feeling guilty.

'I know. I asked him why he must lavish so much of his strength in teaching you,' she told him frankly. 'He said, "I do it because he is worth it."' She shrugged and sighed.

Yonah could offer her no comfort. Nuño forced himself to ride out even when the cases were so ordinary that follow-up calls could be made by the apprentice alone. It wasn't enough for Nuño that Yonah had read Rhazes, who pointed out that superfluities and poisons were eliminated from the body each time urine was voided; the maestro must point out to Yonah at bedside the lemony colour of the void of the patient who had a long-lasting fever, the pinkish urine occurring at the start of malarial fevers that recurred every seventy-two hours, the white spumous urine that sometimes came with pus-filled boils. He taught Yonah to detect the varied stink of disease in piss.

Nuño also demonstrated an excellent grasp in the art and science of apothecary. He knew how to dry and grind herbs to powder, and how to make unguents and perfusions, but he sacrificed the convenience of making his own medicines. Instead he patronized an aged Franciscan, Fray Luis Guerra Medina, a skilled apothecary who also had provided medications for Sporanis.

'There is much suspicion of poisonings, especially when a member of royalty dies. Sometimes the supposition is well grounded, but often it is not,' Nuño told Yonah. 'For a long time the Church forbade all Christians from taking medications prepared by Jews, lest they be poisoned. Some Jewish physicians prepared their own remedies anyway, but a number of physicians, Old Christians as well as Jews, have been accused of attempted poisonings by patients who didn't wish to pay their medical debts. Gabriel Sporanis felt safer using an apothecary who was a friar, and I use Fray Guerra also. I have found that he well knows the difference between hemp agrimony and cassia fistula.'

Yonah saw what he had risked by supplying medicinal herbs to Loretta Cavaller and understood he must never do it again. Thus he learned from the older man and listened as Nuño Fierro sought to prepare him for life as a physician, both in professional knowledge and in the homely matters that composed a successful practice.

One day, when Yonah had been an apprentice physician little more than a year, he realized that in that time, eleven of their patients had died.

He had learned enough medicine to understand that Nuño Fierro was an exceptionally good physician and to recognize his good fortune to be in the hands of such a teacher; yet it weighed on him that he was entering a profession in which the practitioner so often failed.

Nuño Fierro watched his pupil the way a good horse trainer studies a promising horse. He saw Yonah fight bitterly against the gathering darkness when a patient lay dying, and noted the gravity that settled into the younger man's being with every death.

He waited until one evening when teacher and student sat by the fire in weary rest, mugs of wine in hand. 'You killed the man who slew my brother. Have you taken other lives, Ramón?'

'I have.'

Nuño took a sip of wine, studying him as the apprentice told of how he had arranged for the murder of two relic dealers.

'If these incidents could be lived again, would you behave differently?' Nuño asked.

'No, because all three men would have killed me. But the thought that I have taken human life is a burden.'

'And do you wish to practice medicine as a chance to atone for the lives you have taken, by saving other lives?'

'It wasn't the reason I asked you to teach me to be a physician. Yet perhaps lately I have had similar thoughts,' he admitted.

'Then you must see the powers of the medical art more clearly. A physician is able to ease the suffering of a small number of people. We fight their disease, we bind their wounds and set their broken bones and deliver their young. Yet every living creature eventually must come to an end. So despite our learning and skill and passion, some of our patients die, and we must not overly mourn or feel guilt that we are not gods who are able to grant eternity. Instead, if they used their time well, we must be grateful they had experienced the blessing of life.'

Yonah nodded. 'I understand.'

'I hope so,' Nuño said. 'Because if you lack this understanding you will be a poor physician indeed, for you will go mad.'

30

The Testing of

Ramón Callicó

By the end of the second year of Yonah's apprenticeship the way of his life seemed clear and determined, and each day continued to be an excitement to him as he absorbed what Nuño taught. Their practice extended widely into the countryside surrounding Saragossa, and they were kept busy in the dispensary and riding out to tend to patients who were unable to come to them. Most of Nuño's patients were the common people of the town and the farms. Occasionally he was summoned by a nobleman in need of a physician and he always responded, but he told Yonah that noble patients were imperious and apt to be reluctant to pay physicians for their work, and he didn't seek them out. But on the twentieth of November in the year 1504, he received a summons he could not ignore.

Late that summer both King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had been taken with a debilitating illness. The king, a robust man whose constitution was conditioned by years of hunting and warfare, had quickly recovered, but his wife had grown steadily weaker. Now Isabella had taken a precipitous turn for the worse while visiting the town of Medina del Campo, and Ferdinand had sent a frantic summons to half a dozen physicians, including Nuño Fierro, the physician of Saragossa.

'But surely you are not able to go,' Yonah protested gently. 'It is a ride of ten days to Medina del Campo. Eight days if you kill yourself.' He meant the words literally, for he knew Nuño was not robust and shouldn't attempt such a trip.

But the physician was adamant. 'She is my queen. A monarch in need must be attended no less faithfully than a common man or woman.'

'At least allow me to travel with you,' Yonah said.

But Nuño refused. 'You must remain here to continue to provide care for our patients,' he said.

When Yonah and Reyna united to plead that he must have someone to assist him along the way, Nuño conceded the argument and hired Andrés de Ávila, a man of the town, to accompany him, and the two of them rode off early the next morning.

They returned too soon, and in foul and wet weather. Yonah had to help Nuño from his horse. While Reyna saw that the physician immediately had a hot bath, Ávila told Yonah what had occurred.

The trip had been everything Yonah had feared. Ávila said they had ridden four and a half days. By the time they had reached an inn just beyond the town of Atienza, he had been concerned that Nuño was too fatigued to go on.

'I convinced him to stop for a meal and a rest that would allow us to proceed. But within the inn we found people engaged in drinking to the memory of Isabella.'

Ávila said that Nuño had asked hoarsely if the drinkers knew for certain that she had died, and other travelers from the west assured him that even then the monarch's body was being borne south to Granada for interment in the royal tomb.

Nuño and Ávila had spent a sleepless, louse-bitten night on the inn's sleeping floor, and in the morning they began to ride east, back to Saragossa. 'This time we traveled at a slower pace,' Ávila said, 'but it has been an ill-starred journey in every way, and the entire last day of the ride has been through the cold and driving rain.'

Despite the bath Yonah was alarmed to observe Nuño's weariness and pallor. He placed the physician into his bed at once and Reyna plied him with hot drinks and nourishing food. After a week of bed rest he was somewhat recovered, but the fruitless ride toward a dying queen of Spain had sorely sapped and limited his strength.

The time came when Nuño experienced a trembling of his hands that made it impossible for him to use the surgical instruments his brother had made for him. Yonah used them instead, with the physician standing next to him, instructing, explaining, asking questions that challenged and taught the apprentice.

Before an amputation of a crushed little finger, he had Yonah feel his own finger with the fingertips of his other hand. 'Do you feel a place -- the slight gap where bone meets bone? That is where the crushed finger should be severed, but you must leave the skin uncut higher up, well before the amputation. Do you know why?'

'We must construct a flap,' Yonah said, and the older man nodded in satisfaction.

While Yonah deeply regretted Nuño's misfortune, yet it was an advantage in his training, because throughout the entire last year of his apprenticeship he performed far more surgery than would otherwise have been the case.

He felt guilty because Fierro was channeling his strength toward teaching him, but when he expressed the thought to Reyna she shook her head. 'I believe the need to teach you is keeping him alive,' she said.

Indeed, when the fourth year of the apprenticeship came to an end, there was a gleam of triumph in Nuño Fierro's eyes. At once, he acted to bring Yonah before the medical examiners of the district. Each year, three days before Christmas, the municipal officers elected two physicians of the district to be examiners of candidates for medical licensing. Nuño had served as an examiner and knew the process well.

'I would have preferred that you wait for testing until the departure of one of the present examiners, Pedro de Calca,' he told Yonah. For many years Calca had envied and resented the physician of Saragossa. But Nuño's intuition told him not to delay. 'I cannot wait another year,' he told Yonah. 'And I believe you are ready.' The next day, he rode to the municipal building of Saragossa and made the appointment for Yonah's examination.

On the morning of the testing, the student and the teacher left the hacienda early and rode their horses slowly through the bright morning warmth. They spoke little in their nervousness. It was too late for priming Yonah's intellect; they had had four long years for that.

The municipal building smelled of dust and several centuries of human traffic, though that morning only Yonah, Nuño, and the two examiners were there.

'Gentlemen, I have the honor of presenting Señor Ramón Callicó for your examination,' Nuño said calmly. One of the examiners was Miguel de Montenegro, a small, grave man with silver hair, beard, and mustache. Nuño had known him well for many years and had assured Yonah that Montenegro would be serious and conscientious about his responsibilities as an examiner, yet fair.