The Last Jew (49 page)

Yonah took the lamp and held it close to the face on the bed. Vasca, the count of Tembleque, had lost a great deal of weight. His eyes appeared to stare past Yonah. The left side of Vasca's mouth was pulled down in a permanent sneer.

'I need the illumination.'

Padre Guzmán went to the door and shouted harshly, but Padre Sebbo already was arriving, leading two men and a woman carrying candles and lamps, and after a period of arrangement and setting flames to wicks, the count was bathed in light.

Yonah leaned over the face. 'Count Vasca,' he said. 'I am Ramón Callicó, the physician of Saragossa.' The eyes stared up at him, the pupils of unequal size.

'As I said, he cannot speak,' Guzmán said.

Vasca was covered by a blanket, not clean. When Yonah threw it back, the stench was multiplied.

'His back is eaten by malignancy,' Padre Guzmán said.

Vasca lay stiffly, his arms held rigidly above his abdomen. His pulse was hard to compress, resisting Yonah's fingertips, signifying that the blood in the count's body was under great pressure.

The body on the bed was long, but Yonah turned it easily and grunted at the revealed sight, a panoply of ugly carbuncles, some suppurating.

'They are bedsores,' he said. He indicated the servants, who had been hovering outside the door. 'They must heat water over the fire and bring it here without delay, along with clean rags.'

Padre Guzmán cleared his throat. 'The last physician, Carlos Sifrina of Fonseca, made it clear there should be no bathing for Count Vasca, lest he absorb the humors of the water.'

'The last physician, Carlos Sifrina of Fonseca, doubtless has never been left to lie in his own shit.' It was time to establish himself, and Yonah did it quietly. 'Hot water in good supply, and soap and soft rags. I have a salve, but get me quill and ink and paper, that without delay I may write out what other unguents and medicines I will need, and send a rider to Santiago López, the apothecary of Toledo. The rider must wake the apothecary from sleep if necessary.'

Padre Guzmán looked pained but resigned. As he turned away, Yonah stopped him. 'Get soft, thick fleeces to spread beneath him. Clean ones. Bring me fresh nightshirts and an unsoiled blanket,' he said.

It was late before he was finished, the thin body washed, the sores dressed with salve, the sheepskins spread, the bed and the nightshirt changed.

When at last he turned to food to fill his growling belly it was bread and a piece of strong and fatty mutton, and sour wine. He was led to a small chamber containing a bed redolent with the bitter body scent of its last occupant, perhaps Carlos Sifrina, the physician of Fonseca, he thought as he fell into a weary sleep.

In the morning he broke his fast with bread and ham and a better wine, careful to eat the meat bountifully.

The morning light mostly evaded the patient's chamber, there being only one tiny window high in the wall. Yonah had the servants prepare a couch in the large outer sitting chamber next to a lower, sunny window, and moved Count Vasca out there.

By daylight Vasca's condition was even more daunting. Atrophied muscles had pulled both of his hands into a fully opened, exaggerated position with the inside of the knuckle bones at the apex of the arch. Yonah asked a servant to cut two small sections from a round tree branch; he curled Vasca's hands around the wood and tied them into place with cloths.

All four of the man's limbs appeared lifeless. When he scraped the blunt end of a scalpel over Vasca's hands, the backs of his legs, and his feet, there appeared to be a slight response in the right limb, but by any practical measure the entire physical being was stricken. The only things in the count's body that moved were his eyes and eyelids. Vasca could open and close his eyes, and he could look at something or look away.

Yonah addressed the eyes with his own, talking to him all the while. 'Do you feel this, Count Vasca? Or this?

'Is there any sensation when I touch you, Count Vasca?

'Are you in pain, Count Vasca?'

Occasionally a grunt of a moan issued from the supine figure, but never in answer to a question.

Padre Guzmán came at times to watch some of Yonah's efforts with undisguised scorn. Finally he said, 'He understands nothing. He feels nothing and understands nothing.'

'Are you certain?'

The priest nodded. 'You have come on a fruitless errand. He is nearing the divine journey that beckons to each of us.'

Presently a woman came into the sickroom, carrying a bowl and a spoon. She was perhaps Adriana's age, with yellow hair and very white skin. She had a pretty, feline face, a small mouth, high cheekbones, puffy little cheeks, large eyes that she gave the shape of almonds by extending their corners with dark paint. Her gown was very fine but stained, and she smelled of wine. For a moment he believed she had a strawberry birthmark on her long throat but then he concluded it was the kind of mark made by a sucking mouth.

'The new physician,' she said, regarding him.

'Yes. And you are the countess?'

'The same. Shall you be able to do anything for him?'

'It is too early to tell, Countess ... I am told he has been ill for more than a year?'

'Closer to fourteen months.'

'I see. How long have you been his wife?'

'Four years next spring.'

'You were with him when the illness struck?'

'Mmm.'

'It would help me to learn in detail what occurred to him that day.'

She shrugged. 'He rode and hunted early in the day.'

'What did he do when he returned from hunting?'

'It was fourteen months ago, señor. But ... near as I can remember ... Well, for one thing. He took me into his bed.'

'That was late in the morning?'

'Midday.' She smiled at the sick man. 'When it came to bedding he never cared about time. Daytime or the middle of the night.'

'Countess, if you will forgive the question ... Was he strenuous in his sexual activity that day?'

She looked at him appraisingly. 'I don't recall. But he was always strenuous at every activity.'

She said he had seemed normal enough most of the day. 'Late in the afternoon he told me his head ached, but he was well enough to go to table for the evening meal. As the fowl was being served I noticed his mouth pulling down ... the way it is. He appeared to have trouble drawing a breath. And he seemed to slip in his chair.

'His hounds had to be killed. They would allow no one near enough to help him.'

'Has he had a similar attack since that day?'

'Once more. He was not as you see him now, after the first attack. He was able to move his right limbs and he could speak. Though his words were clumsy and indistinct, he was able to give me instruction about his funeral. But another spell struck him two weeks after the first, and from then on he has been frozen and mute.'

'I thank you for telling me these things, Countess.'

She nodded, and turned to study the figure in the bed. 'He could be rough, as many strong men are. I have seen him act cruelly. Yet always he was a kind lord and husband to me ...'

Yonah propped up the patient with pillows and then watched with interest as she spooned thin gruel into his mouth.

'He has always been able to swallow?'

'He chokes on wine or broth. Nor can he chew meat. But when we sit him up and feed him gruel, he swallows it, as you see, enabling him to receive the nourishment that keeps him in life.'

She fed her husband in silence until the bowl was empty.

As she was leaving, she turned back to Yonah.

'You have not said what you are called?'

'Callicó.'

Her eyes held him for just a moment, then she nodded again and went away.

43

The Countess

His room was at the far end of a corridor, with the countess's apartment at the other end, and another bedchamber in between. It was the next night before Yonah saw the other guest in the castle. In the middle of the night, leaving his room to empty the piss from his night jug, Yonah saw a man come from the countess's apartment with something in his arms. There were two pitch torches burning in the hallway sconces and Yonah saw him clearly, a wide, naked man with a fleshy face, carrying his clothes.

Yonah would have been silent, but the man noticed him and stared for a frozen moment.

'Good evening,' Yonah said.

The other said nothing but went into the chamber next door to Yonah's.

The following morning, Yonah was moving the count to the sunny room again, aided by Padre Sebbo. He had found that the grizzled old priest was the only person in the castle with whom he could talk easily.

While they were settling the count on the couch, a man came into the room. Yonah recognized him as the man he had seen nude in the corridor a few hours before.

'Where the fucking hell has she gone?'

A brawler, Yonah thought. He had small, annoyed eyes in a round, fleshy face, a short black beard and a fringe of black hair around a mostly bald scalp. His body was powerfully muscular, but turning to fat. He had thick fingers; his hands were like a gladiator's, each adorned with a flamboyant and heavy ring.

'Where is she?' he demanded.

'I don't know, señor.' Yonah hadn't known Padre Sebbo long, but he could tell from the cool dryness of his voice that the old priest disliked this man, who ignored Yonah completely, turning and leaving them without another word.

Together Yonah and Padre Sebbo covered Vasca with a light blanket.

'Who is the rude gentleman who gave us the pleasure of his company?'

'That is Daniel Fidel Tapia, an associate of Count Vasca. Lately he has described himself as the count's partner,' Padre Sebbo said.

'Has she no name, the woman he was looking for?'

'He knew I understood he was looking for the countess. She and Tapia are special friends,' Padre Sebbo said.

Sometimes Vasca's pulse was full and rapid, while at other times it was like the skittering of a small, frightened animal. Padre Guzmán appeared once a day for a few moments, usually to look at the count's face and remark that his condition seemed more grave than the day before. 'God tells me he is dying.'

Why would God tell you? Yonah thought.

He doubted there was anything he could do to save Vasca's life, but he had to keep trying. The malady that was killing the count was not especially rare. In the time Yonah had been a physician he had seen other persons thus afflicted, some of them with deformed mouths and stiff and useless arms and legs. Often only one side of the body was affected; more rarely, both sides. He had no idea what caused the condition or if there was anything that might cure it.

Somewhere in the complicated human body there must be a center that governed man's strength and movement, he thought. Perhaps in Vasca that center resembled the blackened, damaged area Yonah had seen in Nuño's heart.

He wished that he could dissect Count Vasca's body when he died.

'How I would like to take you into my barn in Saragossa!' he murmured aloud.

The eyes, which had been closed, drifted open now and gazed up at him. Yonah would swear the count's eyes were puzzled, and a shocking suspicion came to him. He thought it was possible that at least some of the time Fernán Vasca understood what was happening in the world around him.

Yet, perhaps not ...

He spent a lot of time alone with his patient, seated by the bed or leaning over it, talking to Vasca, but the moment in which their eyes had made connection wasn't repeated. Much of the time Vasca appeared to sleep, his breathing slow and snoring, his cheeks puffing out with each exhalation. Twice a day Padre Sebbo came and read aloud from his book of devotions in a voice that sounded worn and hoarse, pausing often to clear his throat because of a chronic catarrh. Yonah ordered a spirit of camphor for him, for which the old priest expressed his gratitude.

'You must rest while I am here. Go and take a nap, señor,' Padre Sebbo urged, and sometimes Yonah escaped during the long sessions of prayer. He wandered through the silent chambers of the castle with little restriction, because it was vast and largely deserted, a chill and gloomy home, full of hearths that were devoid of fire. He was looking for the items his father had fashioned for the count, and for which Vasca had never deigned to pay. He would especially have liked to find the golden flower with the silver stem, to see if it could be as beautiful as his boyhood memory of it.

Count Vasca had made preparation for his own death. In a storeroom there was a great limestone casket, an enormous sarcophagus carved with a Latin inscription -- CVM MATRE MATRIS SALVVS. It had a stone cover heavy enough to keep out worms or dragons. But Yonah saw neither the golden rose nor anything else that was familiar to him, until he entered an armor room and was startled by a glorious knight girded for battle.

It was the suit of armor he had delivered with Angel and Paco and Luis, and with a sense of wonder he touched some of the chasing and hammering that he himself had put into the steel under the tutelage of Manuel Fierro, the armorer of Gibraltar.