The Last Jew (39 page)

'Ah?' Yonah said casually. He moved one of his own pieces into place to repel the attack.

'Yes, a backsliding Jew, yet who pretends to be an Old Christian.'

Would the friar now bring about his ruin?

Yonah kept his eyes on the board. He moved a soldier into a square where he was jumped, and then jumped two of Bonestruca's pieces. 'Your soul rejoices to catch a Jew. I hear it in your voice,' he said, and wondered at the coolness of his own voice.

'Think on it. Is it not written that they who have sown the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind?'

To hell with him, Yonah thought, and lifted his eyes from the board to meet the friar's glance. 'Is it not also written that blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy?'

Bonestruca smiled. He was enjoying himself. 'It is so written, by Matthew. But ... consider. "I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." Is it not then an act of mercy to save an everlasting soul from hell? For that is what we do when we reconcile Jewish souls with Christ before the flames. We end sorry lives of error and grant them peace and glory for eternity.'

'And what of one who refuses such a reconciliation?'

'We are admonished by Matthew, "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body shall be cast into hell."'

He smiled as he told Yonah that the Jew who pretended to be an Old Christian was about to be placed under arrest.

Through a sleepless night and the next day, Yonah was caught up in an agony of apprehension. He was prepared to flee for his life, yet he had learned enough about Bonestruca's thinking to believe that perhaps this mention of a counterfeit Old Christian might be nothing more than a trap. Suppose Bonestruca was watching to see if the physician had taken the bait and would run? If all the inquisitor had was a suspicion, Yonah would do well to spend each day in his normal living.

That morning he attended the daily clinic in his dispensary. In the afternoon he called on patients. He had just returned home and was removing the saddle from the horse when a pair of soldiers of the alguacil rode down the lane to the house.

He had been expecting this moment and was armed. There was no point in surrendering to those who would wish to bring him in for the Inquisition. If they tried to take him, perhaps his sword would be lucky against the soldiers or, if he were killed, it would be a better death than the flames.

But one of the riders leaned forward respectfully.

'Señor Callicó, the alguacil asks that you accompany us at once to the Saragossa prison, where there is need for the skills of your profession.'

'What kind of need?' Yonah asked, not at all convinced.

'A Jew has tried to cut off his prick,' the soldier said baldly, and his companion snickered.

'What is the Jew's name?'

'Bartolomé.'

It struck him an almost physical blow. He remembered the beautiful house, the aristocratic man who had talked with such intelligence in the gracious study that was crowded with maps and charts. 'Don Berenguer Bartolomé? The cartographer?'

The soldier shrugged, but his companion nodded, and spat.

'The same,' he said.

Within the prison a young black-robed priest sat behind a table, probably assigned the task of noting the names of anyone who applied to see the prisoners.

'We have brought the physician,' the soldier said.

The priest nodded. 'Don Berenguer Bartolomé broke his water mug and used a shard to circumcize himself, he told Yonah, and motioned for the guard to unlock the outer door. The guard led Yonah down a corridor, to a cell where Berenguer lay on the floor. He unlocked the cell door to allow Yonah to enter, and then locked him inside.

'When you are ready to leave, shout for me and I will let you out,' he said, and went away.

Berenguer's trousers were stiff with blood. A don and the descendant of dons, Yonah thought, a distinguished man whose grandfather had charted the coast of Spain. He lay on the prison floor, stinking of blood and urine.

'I am sorry, Don Berenguer.'

Berenguer nodded. He grunted as Yonah opened the trousers and pulled them down.

Yonah kept a flask of strong spirits in the medical bag. Berenguer received it eagerly and needed no urging to drink, in great swallows.

The penis was a horror. Yonah saw that Berenguer had cut away most of the foreskin but some remained, and the incisions had been done raggedly. He marveled that Berenguer had been able to carry it out at all, using a sharp shard on himself. He knew the pain was very bad and he was sorry to add to it, but he took a scalpel and trimmed the ragged tissue, completing the circumcision. The man on the floor groaned, sucking in the last of the strong drink like a thirsty child.

When it was over, he lay gasping as Yonah applied a soothing salve and a loose dressing.

'It will be a fortnight before it heals. Until then, you will have pain. Leave the trousers off. If you are cold, cover yourself, but keep the blanket away from yourself with your hands.' They looked at one another.

'Why have you done this? What does it gain?'

'You would not understand,' Berenguer said.

Yonah sighed and nodded. 'I'll come tomorrow if I am allowed. Is there anything you wish?'

'If you could bring my mother some fruit ...'

He was shocked. 'Doña Sancha Berga is here?'

Berenguer nodded. 'All of us. My mother. My sister, Monica, and her husband, Andrés, and my brother, Geraldo.'

'I will do what I can,' Yonah said numbly, and called for the guard to unlock the cell.

In the entryway, before he could inquire about the condition of the other members of the Bartolomé family, the priest asked him if he would examine Doña Sancha Berga. 'She sorely has need of a physician,' the priest said. He seemed a decent young man, and troubled.

When they took Yonah to Doña Sancha, the beautiful old woman lay like a broken flower. She gazed at him sightlessly and he saw that her cataratas had ripened; they were almost sufficiently developed to allow surgery, but he knew he would never touch these eyes.

'It is Callicó the physician, señora,' he said gently.

'I am ... injured, señor.'

'How did the injuries occur, señora?'

'They placed me on the rack.'

He could see that the torture had dislocated her right shoulder. He had to summon the guard to help him pull the shoulder back into place while she shrieked. Afterward, she could not stop weeping.

'Señora. Is the shoulder not better?'

'I have condemned my beautiful children,' she whispered.

'How is she?' the priest asked.

'She is old, her bones are soft and brittle. I'm certain she has multiple fractures. I think she is dying,' he said. Yonah was in despair as he rode home from the prison.

When he returned there next day bearing a quantity of raisins and dates and the figs, he found Don Berenguer still in great pain.

'How is my mother?'

'I am doing what I can for her.'

Berenguer nodded. 'I thank you.'

'How did all this come to be?'

'We are Old Christians and have always stated so. My father's Catholic family goes back in time. My mother's parents were converted Jews and she was raised with certain harmless rituals that became our family habit as well. She told us stories of her girlhood and always lighted tapers as dusk fell on Fridays. I am not certain why, perhaps in memory of her departed. And gathered her children each week on that evening for a bountiful dinner, with blessings and thanks for the food and the wine.'

Yonah nodded.

'Someone denounced her. She had no enemies, but ... she had recently discharged a servant for repeated drunkenness. It is possible that this kitchen maid is the source of our troubles.

'I had to listen to my own mother's screams while they tortured her. Can you imagine such horror? I was told afterwards by my interrogators that in the end our mother implicated all of us, my brothers and sisters -- even the memory of our father -- in a Judaizing plot.

'So I knew that we are lost, each and every one. My family, which has always known we are Old Christians. Yet a part of us is Jewish, so that we have been neither fully Catholic nor Jewish, adrift between two shores. In my despair I felt that if I am to burn at the stake as a Jew I should come before my Maker as a Jew, and I broke my drinking cup and cut myself with the shard.

'I am aware you will not be able to understand,' he said to Yonah, as he had said the previous evening.

'You are wrong, Don Berenguer,' Yonah told him. 'I understand you very well.'

As he was leaving the prison he overheard a guard speaking to the young priest. 'Yes, Padre Espina,' the man said.

Yonah turned and came back.

'Padre,' he said. 'Did he call you Espina?'

'That is my name.'

'May I ask your full name?'

'I am Francisco Rivera de la Espina.'

'Is your mother, by chance, Estrella de Aranda?'

'Estrella de Aranda was my mother. She is gone. I pray for her soul.' He stared. 'Do I know you, Señor Physician?'

'You were born in Toledo?'

'Yes,' the priest said reluctantly.

'I have something that belongs to you,' Yonah told him.

35

A Fulfilled Responsibility

When Yonah brought the breviary to the prison the young priest led him down a dank stone corridor to a cubby where they could sit unobserved. He accepted the breviary as if it were an item bewitched. Yonah watched as he opened it and read what was written behind the cover.

'"To my son, Francisco Rivera de la Espina, these words of daily prayer to Jesus Christ, our heavenly Savior, with the undying love of his father on earth. Bernardo de la Espina."'

'What a strange sentiment, from one who was a convicted heretic!'

'Your father was not a heretic.'

'My father was a heretic, señor, and burned at the stake for it. In Ciudad Real. It happened when I was a boy, but I have been informed. I am acquainted with his history.'

'Then you are falsely, and certainly not fully, acquainted, Padre Espina. I was there, in Ciudad Real. I saw your father daily in the days before his death. When I knew him I was a youth and he was a man, a most skilled and tender physician. About to die, and lacking the presence of even one other friend, he asked me to try to find his young son, and to deliver his breviary to you. Everywhere I have traveled, these many years, I have searched for you.'

'You are certain about what you tell me, señor?'

'Absolutely. Your father was innocent of the charges for which he was killed.'

'You know this for fact?' the priest asked in a low voice.

'For firm fact, Padre Espina. He made his daily devotions from this book, almost up to the moment when he was put to death. When he marked it for you, he was leaving you his faith.'

Padre Espina appeared to be a man accustomed to controlling his emotions, yet he was betrayed by paleness. 'I have been raised by the Church. My father has been the shame of my life. My face has been rubbed into his supposed apostacy like a puppy's into piss, so it would not happen again.'

His appearance did not favor his father greatly, Yonah thought, except that he had Bernardo de la Espina's eyes. 'Your father was steadfastly the most believing Christian ever I have known, and one of the finest men of my memory,' Yonah told him.

They sat and talked for a long time, their voices low and steady. Padre Espina said that after his father's burning, his mother, Estrella de Aranda, had entered the Convento de la Santa Cruz to be a nun, leaving her three children to the charity of several families of cousins in Escalona. Within a year she had died of a malignant fever, and by the time her son had reached the age of ten years his relatives had handed him to the Dominicans, and his sisters, Marta and Domitila, had taken the veil. All three had disappeared into the vast world of the Church.

'I have not seen my sisters since we stayed with our cousins in Escalona. I don't know of Domitila's whereabouts, or if she still lives. I learned two years ago that Marta is in a convent in Madrid. I dream of visiting her someday.'

Yonah told him a few things about himself. He spoke of the fact that after he had been a jail boy in Ciudad Real he had apprenticed, first with the armorer Manuel Fierro and then with the physician Nuño Fierro, leading to his becoming the physician of Saragossa.

If there were things he held back from the young priest, he could sense that there were also matters about which Padre Espina could not allow himself to speak freely. But Yonah gathered that he had been assigned only temporarily to the Office of the Inquisition, and that he had little stomach for its activities.