“We should try! If I could only get Benji to calm down—”
“Do you want to die?” Simon snapped. “Benji!” He slapped the hysterical boy hard on one cheek, then the other. “Shut up! Do you want the crocodile to get you too?”
“Simon, don’t—”
“Shut up, Joanna. We have to go now. I’ll take Benji.” He pried the boy from her arms and hoisted him over his shoulder.
With a strange, dreamy detachment, Joanna thought, He will never be bar mitzvah, but he’s become a man anyway.
“Let’s go!” Simon said in an urgent undertone. “Run!”
As they neared the settlement, Joanna wondered sluggishly what she should tell Imaculada. Would the degradada believe her account of what had happened? Would she accuse her of conniving with Shmuel to escape? She might even beat both Simon and Joanna for failing to bring home the promised frogs. But she found Imaculada in a languid state, complaining of headache and nausea and in no mood either to eat frogs or to care how many children had gone to the swamp that morning and how many had returned. Joanna made broth and stayed at her bedside as she sipped it, the cup slipping from her hand as she fell into an uneasy doze. An hour later, she woke, tossing off her blanket with a petulant twitch of the hand.
“I am burning! Bring me water.” She put her hands to her flushed cheeks. “The night is hot.” Joanna cautiously laid the back of her wrist against Imaculada’s forehead.
“You have a fever,” she said. “Do you want me to get Yenenga?”
“The witch-woman?” Imaculada’s dry throat produced a cackle. “I don’t need a bruxa. Get me water and sit by me.”
Joanna obeyed. Half an hour later, Imaculada’s teeth were chattering, and she complained that she was cold. Her blanket failed to warm her. Joanna must fetch another. Felicidade had stolen Imaculada’s extra blanket a month ago. Ask her, the selfish sow. She thought the world revolved around her.
Joanna found Yenenga sitting with Felicidade, who was sleeping, her cheeks streaked with tears and her shift rucked up and bloody.
“What happened?” Joanna asked.
“She lose a baby,” Yenenga said. “Not so bad ting. She have dat pox.”
“The French disease?”
Yenenga shrugged.
“Her man he go wid Congo woman, Congo woman go wid sailor. I tole you, dey all get it soon. I hear you meet de dragon’s cousin in de swamp. Too bad about your boy.”
“How did you know?”
Yenenga fingered the grigri that lay between her breasts.
“I have fast ears, hear everyting soon. What you need?”
“I came for a blanket. Imaculada has chills and fever.” She shuddered. “The dragon’s cousin is an apt name for that monster. How do you know about dragons?”
“Blanket in dat corner. I know crocodile. Crocodile bad ugly beast, dragon ugly beast dat be worse. However bad is bad, dere be worse, and worse will come. You know dat.”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “I have seen bad, and I have seen worse come. What should I do for Imaculada?”
“Dat woman have chills dat come and go, den fever? Head and body hurt all over? She puke?”
“Yes, all of that.”
“Dat bad fever,” Yenenga said. “Come and go, you tink it finish, den come and go, come and go again.”
“Will she die?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no.”
“Will you come and see her?” Joanna asked. “Can you ease her?”
“Can’t do much,” Yenenga said. “I know a bark, but dere be none here. When she fever, you cool her down wid water. When she chill, you cover her up. She sweat, you wipe her dry. All dat come every tree days, dat be de fever dat I know.”
Within two weeks, two-thirds of the colony had the relapsing and remitting fever, including Simon and Benji. More whites were stricken with it than blacks, and their symptoms were more severe. Joanna felt achy and nauseated most of the time, but she had not yet shown signs of chills or high fever. Ill as she felt, she tended her brothers with devotion. Whenever she tried to catch a few hours of sleep, she found herself reliving Shmuel’s terrible death. She would wake to find she was grinding her teeth and muttering aloud, “I should have done something. I should have done something.”
When she could spare the time, she did what she could for Imaculada: fanning her with a palm frond, helping her change a sweat-soaked shift for a dry one, and bringing her water, for she complained constantly of thirst. Prolonged and debilitating illness had drained the degradada of her authority. She no longer intimidated Joanna, who ignored her threats and obeyed her orders when it suited her.
Yenenga tried to bring the fever down with various roots and barks, shaking her head and regretting the remedy she could not give, because the tree needed did not grow on the island.
“Dis island plants and animals all wrong,” she said. “Dis island too alone, she got she own ideas bout how tings grow.”
“They’re different from European plants and animals too,” Joanna said, momentarily interested, though she had not had a thought unconnected with Simon’s and Benji’s misery for weeks. “Maybe some of the living things on São Tomé exist nowhere else in the world.”
“Dat what I say,” Yenenga said. “Dis island too alone. Nuttin get on, nuttin get off.”
It was a bleak thought. Joanna dismissed it and turned back to Simon, who became delirious when the fever was upon him. In his ravings, he roamed with Mother in the gardens of the Alhambra, as Joanna had on the ship, but it brought him no peace. He constantly reproached her for leaving him alone.
Benji’s chills and fever were less severe, but his constitution was more delicate. Yenenga said they must try to build up his strength. She concocted broths for him that she gave to no one else. But he could not keep them down, retching till he was faint with exhaustion when he had nothing to bring up. On a night when the moon was halfway between new and full, Joanna sat holding his hand and humming a lullaby that her mother had sung to her, though she could no longer remember the words. He had just been through a round of fever and was catching what sleep he could before the chills began again.
Simon was feverish and moaning, begging her, or perhaps Mother, to make it cool. She had fanned him with a palm frond till her wrists ached. She could bathe him with cool water on a cloth. But Benji would not let go of her hand. It was late, and the settlement was quiet. This island is deficient in love, she thought. Who else in the Povoação cared for another human being as she did for Simon and Benji? The slaves who tended their masters slept whenever their charges did, unless an overseer was watching. But the overseers too were sick.
Was love enough to sustain her through years and years, a lifetime, in this dreary tropical prison? Simon’s illness had made him sweet and childish again, grateful in his dependence on her. But it would not last. Benji’s affection would wane as he grew up. When Portuguese sailors had first discovered São Tomé twenty-five years before, it had been uninhabited, completely bare of human life. It could have been the Garden of Eden. But the king of Portugal had chosen to populate it with slaves, guaranteeing that it would become a travesty of paradise. The sweetness of sugar, the innocence of children: the ingredients were there, but combined into a bitter brew, a taste of hell.
She came out of her reverie with a start. Benji’s hand lay slack on her knee. Simon still moaned and tossed. He paid no attention as she gripped Benji’s shoulders and shook them with increasing roughness.
“Benji! Wake up! Benji!”
He was dead. The bloom of fever had drained away. His face, once chubby and rosy, was gaunt and pale. She forced herself to touch him, to close his staring eyes, to kiss his cooling forehead. Then she laid her head upon her knees and wept.
“Mama?” Simon sounded fretful. “Why are you crying? Mama, I’m thirsty!”
Now she had only Simon. She tended him with redoubled watchfulness, forcing her heavy eyelids open when she longed for sleep. Exhaustion was preferable to nightmares in w
hich Shmuel’s dark blood spread on the slimy surface of the swamp and the crocodile, smiling, turned its gaze upon her. She left Simon only to fetch water, for unremitting thirst made him miserable, whether he was delirious or lucid.
One night, when Simon seemed to lie more quietly, she took up a bucket and stepped out of the hut, thinking that if she hurried, she could reach the spring and return before he became restless again. The air was cooler outside, and she held up her damp, flushed face to a passing breeze. The moon was almost full. Having filled her bucket, she walked quickly, water slopping over the sides as the bucket banged against her leg. When she reached the hut, she set it down, poured water into a drinking bowl, and hurried to Simon’s side.
She could not hear him breathing.
“No,” she whispered. “No, Ha’shem. Do not take him too.”
They were alone in the hut. The other children had been sent to work and live on the plantations or died of fevers, snakebite, and infected cuts. Joanna laid her ear close to Simon’s mouth. No breath. She felt his hands and forehead. Colder than flesh should be. He was gone. So was her anger. She searched within herself for grief and could not find it. She felt nothing.
As if in a trance, she left the hut where her brother lay and made her way to Belmiro and Imaculada’s hut. Belmiro had not spent a night there since Imaculada fell ill. He would be in the quarters of the slaves held in common by the settlement, getting drunk on palm wine and slaking his lust in the bodies of the slave women, who also felt nothing. Imaculada was flushed and snoring. Joanna could see that the sweating phase of the disease was upon her. But she would not wake. A jug that had held palm wine lay on its side under her hand. Yenenga said that spirits were an ill remedy for fevers. But Imaculada never listened to Yenenga. Joanna would miss Yenenga, who had offered to teach her midwifery and the art of poisons. But it was not enough. Yenenga did not offer love.
She moved slowly and steadily around the hut. Imaculada and Belmiro had made themselves comfortable, building up stores of all they would need when they rose to be fazendeiros, as they firmly believed they would. Imaculada had thrown off her blankets. Joanna spread them just inside the door and began piling upon them items she would need: flints to make fire, a pot to boil water, a coil of rope. An old pair of leather boots that Belmiro had discarded caught her eye. She threw them onto one of the blankets. A moment might come when going barefoot proved unwise. A bundle of net. Needles and fish hooks. A hank of linen thread. A fist-sized lump of wax. A small lantern. A sealed jug of oil. A whip. She wrapped a leather belt, also Belmiro’s, twice around her waist. She knew where he hid his knives. She snatched up several of different sizes and stuck all but one into her belt. With the remaining knife, she cut off a length of rope. She bundled up the blankets and knotted one end of the rope around each of them, making herself a rough pair of what might have been saddlebags if she had been a mule.
When she could carry no more, she left the hut. The moon shed its silver light on the path before her. No one was stirring. The huts and houses she could see were dark. She made her way down to the beach. She would walk along the shore as far as she could. When dawn came, she would seek the shelter of the forest and find a place to sleep. Then she would consider her options: the coast, the forest, the mountain. There were no ships in the harbor, no horses in the settlement. No one would come after her. She started walking. She did not look back.
Chapter 22: Diego
My hand trembled as I handed Mama’s letter back to Rabbi Gershon, who had tactfully left the room while I read it aloud to Rachel and Hutia. He returned, followed by his housekeeper bearing a tray laden with fruit, pastries, and wine, to find Rachel sobbing in Hutia’s arms and me so overcome with emotion that I could hardly speak.
“Please read it, Rabbi Gershon,” I said. “We would be grateful for your counsel.”
“It is good news, then?” He produced a device consisting of two round pieces of glass connected by metal wire and held them to his eyes, peering through them at my mother’s words. “I do not see as well as in my youth, but these spectacles make all clear, baruch Ha’shem. They make them in Firenze.”
“My mother writes that they planned to leave for the Balkans on a Turkish galley in November. It is a great relief to have certain news of them, but I fear they might have encountered storms on the passage at that season.”
Rabbi Gershon smiled gently. Stooped and shrunken with age, his hands white and wrinkled with but a thin layer of skin covering a network of greenish veins, his white beard falling almost to his waist, he had the kindest eyes I had ever seen.
“I believe the Turkish galleys, with their oarsmen and shallower draft—is that the correct term?—are bolder on the sea than Christian vessels. That is the sum of my knowledge on the matter. I do not remember hearing of any great storm last fall.”
Ask what questions we might, there was only one way to ascertain whether Papa and Mama had arrived safely at their destination.
“Whatever the risk,” I said, “we must leave for Istanbul as soon as possible.”
“That may not be as difficult as you fear. The Republic of Ragusa is Ancona’s ally. Once you get there, you must find a merchant caravan going to Edirne, as many do. Forty years ago, the sultan made the Greek Jews of Edirne resettle in Istanbul, but now our numbers there are growing again, as Jews from Spain and Portugal find their way there.”
“Might Papa and Mama have changed their minds and gone no farther?” Rachel asked.
“Not after telling us to look for them in Istanbul,” I said. “But if there is a Jewish congregation, it will surely have news of them, perhaps even another letter.”
“The distance from Edirne to Istanbul is no farther than from here to Bologna,” the rabbi said. “I have no doubt that your father will do all he can to make sure you find them.”
“Do you remember my father, sir?” I asked. “Efraín Mendoza of Seville?”
“I do,” the rabbi said. “An intelligent and well-read man. We had an interesting discussion about whether the Inquisition, in making the Spanish conversos—the convinced converts—the main object of its persecution, is pursuing Christian heretics, as it thinks, or rather Jews who have lost their way.”
I could not help grinning.
“That sounds like Papa. He loves a good debate. What did you conclude?”
“Only that the Inquisition is iniquitous,” the rabbi said. “And intelligence is hardly needed to come to that conclusion. I met your mother as well.”
“Really?” Rachel left Hutia’s side and linked her arm in mine, beaming at the rabbi.
“She invited me to dinner,” the rabbi said, with a reminiscent smile. “You look very much like her, my dear. And before we parted, I begged her to send my housekeeper her recipe for veal loaf cooked with eggs and white beans. It was quite delicious.”
Rachel laughed and clapped her hands.
“I am sure it was on your doorstep the next morning, with a packet of leftovers made up for your supper.”
“No, she pressed that on me before I left that very evening.”
“It does me good to hear these stories of Mama and Papa,” Rachel said, “behaving so very like themselves here in Ancona, in spite of the many hardships they endured before they got here. I cannot help believing now that we will reach Istanbul safely ourselves and find them well and safe when we arrive.”
“It will be as Adonai wills,” the rabbi said. “I will do everything in my power to assist you.”
“We must leave as soon as we can find a ship.”
“You must be properly outfitted,” the rabbi said. “Your host, young Bianchini, will help you there, I am sure. Since you travel among the Turks, you must leave your horse, which only Muslims may ride. They have many rules.”
“I will give the Bianchinis my horse,” I said, “to thank them for opening their home to us so unstintingly. We are grateful to you too, sir. How can we thank you?”
“Would you have any use for a mule?
” Rachel asked. “A galley captain might not want to transport mules.”
“My children,” the rabbi said, “every member of our community here in Ancona, so fortunate ourselves, is well aware it is a mitzvah to shelter a fellow Jew. Each small act toward reuniting a Jewish family is a mitzvah. Your need gives us the opportunity to perform mitzvaot, so pleasing to Adonai.”
“He has matu’m,” Hutia said in Taino. He had been silent throughout the visit except for the initial courtesies on our arrival and whispered words to Rachel once we knew the contents of the letter.
“Among the Taino,” I explained, “our friend’s people in the Indies, all they do is governed by generosity. It is their guiding principle.”
“A spiritual people, then,” the rabbi said, with a friendly nod to Hutia.
“So they were,” I said.
“Give me half an hour,” the rabbi said, “to write a few letters that you can present to certain people whom I think you will find helpful. If you wish no more refreshment, you might like to pass the time in the garden. It belongs to the synagogue, and all are welcome to enjoy it, but you will almost certainly have it to yourselves at this hour if you wish for privacy.”
The three of us did not speak as we filed down the passage the rabbi indicated toward an archway that gave onto the gardens. We stepped out into brilliant sunlight. Rachel drew a long breath. I realized that I too had been so caught up in emotion that I had barely breathed since we had learned Papa and Mama’s destination.
“We are going to find them!” Rachel exclaimed. “They are alive! We will see them again!”
“Did you not think you would, nanichi?” Hutia asked. “You have given no sign that you ever lost heart.”
“I tried not to,” Rachel said. “I did not want to discourage you, Diego, or make my worst imaginings real by speaking of them.”
“It has been the same for me,” I admitted. “Let us sit down. I don’t know why joy should be exhausting, but I feel drained and limp, like an empty wine skin.”
We sat on the nearest bench, its pink marble, veined in green, cool under us in spite of the heat of the day. Across from us, an elaborate fountain played, its waters providing pleasing splashing sounds that complemented the birdsong all around us. An occasional breeze sent a cooling mist our way. Formally clipped shrubs created ornamental screens and mazes. Columns and more fountains carved in stone were separated by the slender spears of cypress, trees of so dark a green they seemed almost black against the cloudless, burning sky.
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