The Hand of Fatima

by Falcones, Ildefonso

  There came a moment when Hernando was hesitating about how much to wager. He’d had a run of uninspiring hands and was getting bored, and he fingered his stake money. He looked over at the dealer. Pablo was standing behind him, erect and serious-looking, keeping a close eye on the game. Then the lobe of his right ear moved almost imperceptibly. Hernando tried not to show his surprise, and placed a large wager. He won. He smiled, remembering what his friend had once told him: they had it in their blood!

  ‘I see you finally learnt from the Marshal,’ Hernando said to him at the end of the game, when he and the valet were saying farewell to Pablo Coca. The Morisco had won a large sum; his companion had managed to recoup some of his previous losses.

  ‘What’s that about a marshal?’ José Caro wanted to know.

  The two old friends exchanged glances, but neither of them said a word. Hernando smiled as he recalled the young Palomero’s grimaces as he tried to move his right earlobe. He shook hands with him, and the valet did the same.

  ‘This money wasn’t honestly won,’ Hernando said to Pablo, feeling the weight of his purse.

  ‘Don’t torment yourself. Don’t imagine it was a fair game. They all tried some trick or other. The thing is, you’re as gullible as your friend. You didn’t even notice. Times change, and the tricks get more and more sophisticated.’

  ‘I can’t right now’ – Hernando looked towards the valet, who was already several yards away – ‘but some other day I’ll pay you your share.’

  ‘I hope so. That’s the rule in gaming, as you know. Come back whenever you like. The Marshal and his accomplice died a long time ago, and took the secret with them to their tomb. So now only you and I know about how I move my ear. I’ve never wanted to tell anyone about it or even to use the trick; I would never have been able to buy a gaming house. Nobody will spot us. It cost me heaven and earth to learn the trick.’ He sighed, pointing to the valet, who had stopped and was waiting for Hernando.

  Hernando said goodbye again, and caught up with José Caro. The two of them walked back to the palace together.

  ‘Will you go and see the weaver?’ he asked as they were crossing Plaza del Potro, which was just as lively as he remembered it.

  ‘The moment you show me how that pack of cards was rigged.’

  51

  Córdoba, 1587

  THAT YEAR Queen Elizabeth of England ‘permitted’ the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the Catholic Stuart monarch. Indignant, and seeking to defend the true faith, Philip II decided finally to put into practice his idea of equipping a great armada under the command of Álvaro de Bazán, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, to conquer England and punish the Protestant heretics. Despite the surprise attack that the intrepid pirate Sir Francis Drake made on the fleet in the bay of Cádiz, when he sank or burnt almost thirty-six Spanish ships, and then continued to harass the boats taking supplies out to the Spanish vessels, Philip II pressed on with his plan.

  The Great and Most Fortunate Fleet, which by God’s will, according to the Spanish ambassador to Paris, Philip II was to launch against the English, also stirred the religious fervour of the Spanish nobles and ordinary people. They were always keen to defeat their ancestral enemies the English in the name of God, especially as they had also become allies of the Lutherans in the Low Countries in their wars against the Spanish throne. Don Alfonso de Córdoba and his eldest son, who by now was in his twentieth year, made preparations to embark together with the Marquis of Santa Cruz on this new crusade.

  However, at the same time as the country was preparing for war against England, there was more bad news for the Moriscos. Ever since the meeting held in Portugal six years earlier, when Philip II had considered the possibility of putting them all on ships and then scuttling them on the high seas, several reports had been drawn up recommending the Moriscos be detained and sent to the galleys. And then in this year of preparation for war one of the most influential voices in the kingdom of Valencia, that of the Bishop of Segorbe, Don Martín de Salvatierra, made another proposal. With the support of several others of the same opinion, he sent a report to the Council of State proposing what to him seemed to be the only solution: the castration of all male Moriscos, be they adults or children.

  Hernando shuddered and felt a tightening in his testicles as he read the letter sent him by Alonso del Castillo from El Escorial, informing him of what Bishop Salvatierra had suggested.

  ‘The cowardly dogs!’ he muttered to himself in the silence and solitude of the duke’s library.

  Would the Christians really be capable of such an act of barbarity? ‘Yes. Why not?’ was the answer Castillo gave in his letter to that same question. Only fifteen years earlier Philip II himself, forever fomenting trouble and supporting the Catholic cause in France, had reacted enthusiastically to the news of the Saint Bartholomew’s night massacre, when French Catholics had massacred more than thirty thousand Huguenots. If King Philip could publicly express his joy and satisfaction that in a quarrel between Christians thousands of people had been killed (they might not have been Catholics, but they were still Christians) what mercy could mere Moriscos expect from him? Hadn’t the Spanish King considered drowning them all out at sea? Would the Catholic monarch so much as lift a finger if the Christians rose up and, following the new report’s advice, started to castrate all male Moriscos?

  Hernando read the letter over again before crushing it in his hand. Then he destroyed it, as he did with all his communications from the translator. Castrate them! What kind of madness was that? How could a bishop, a leading figure in a religion that prided itself on showing mercy and piety, advise such a barbaric course of action? All at once the work he was doing for Luna and Castillo seemed to him pointless: events were moving far too fast for them, and by the time that Luna had completed his panegyric about the Muslim conquerors, obtained the necessary licence to publish it, and finally managed to bring it to the attention of the Christians, the Moriscos would have been wiped out, one way or another. What if Abbas and the other Moriscos who favoured an armed revolt were right after all?

  Hernando got up from behind his desk and paced up and down the library. He was confused, and wrung his hands muttering oaths as he walked. He would have liked to discuss this latest news with the painter Arbasia, but he had left Córdoba a few months earlier to go and paint in the Del Viso palace, commissioned by Don Álvaro de Bazán, the Marquis of Santa Cruz. He had left behind a magnificent painting for the sacrarium chapel in the cathedral, in which Hernando was still intrigued by the enigmatic figure next to Jesus Christ at the Last Supper.

  ‘Fight for your cause,’ he recalled the master encouraging him from the mule he was leaving on, led by a muleteer.

  How could he fight against the proposal that they should be castrated?

  ‘Hypocritical dogs!’ he shouted in the silence of the library.

  A hypocrite! That was how Arbasia had described King Philip II during one of their meetings. ‘Your pious king is nothing more than a hypocrite,’ he had told him quite openly.

  ‘Only a very few people know that your King Philip owns a series of erotic paintings he personally commissioned from the great master Titian. I saw one of them in Venice. In it a naked Venus is clinging lasciviously to Adonis. Titian painted several more for the Christian monarch, all of them with nude goddesses in different poses. “So that they are more pleasant to look at,” the master wrote to your King. A Christian woman would never fling herself on her husband in the way Titian’s Venus does.’ For a brief instant, Hernando’s mind flew back to memories of Isabel. ‘What are you thinking?’ the painter asked, seeing his attention wander.

  ‘About Christian women,’ Hernando said by way of an excuse. ‘In their situation . . .’

  ‘You Muslims do not value your women greatly either. They are your prisoners, unable to do anything on their own account. Isn’t that what your Prophet said?’

  Hernando nodded. ‘Yes,’ he agreed after a few moments’ thought. ‘Both religions ha
ve dismissed them. They are alike in that. So much so that we even agree about the Virgin Mary: Christians and Muslims believe in her in a similar way. But it is as if the fact that they agree about a woman, even if she is the mother of God, is somehow unimportant . . .’

  Remembering the conversation he had had with Arbasia, Hernando paused in his agitated walk around the library. The Virgin Mary! She truly was a link between the two religions. Why try so hard to show the benevolence of the Arab conquerors of Spain towards the Christians, as Luna would have it, when there already was an undeniable relationship that both communities recognized? What better argument could there be? Even the gospel of Barnabas agreed with the distorted version put forward by the popes, which the Christians defended as the truth! Why not use the figure of the only person they all seemed to agree about as the starting point on the path towards a unity that would allow the two religions to co-exist? The whole of Spain was experiencing an almost fanatical period of devotion to Mary; there were constant demands that Rome declare the virgin birth a dogma of faith. Not even God, the god who was God for both religions, the God of Abraham, could produce such unanimity: the Christians had clouded that issue with their doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

  For several days afterwards, Hernando found he could not concentrate on his work. He had already sent his report on the killings at Juviles, and to his surprise – because he thought that when they read it the council would not ask him to do anything more – they now wanted information about what had happened at Cuxurio, where Ubaid had torn out little Gonzalico’s heart. How could he possibly excuse such butchery? No Morisco leader had halted the massacre there. Leaving aside his transcription of the gospel of Barnabas and what he was writing for Luna, Hernando concentrated on his calligraphy. He had found some excellent reeds to fashion quills out of, with their point slanting slightly to the right as Ibn Muqla recommended, and yet he was still not sure of exactly where he should cut the reed to achieve this. In the mornings, while Volador was grazing in the pastures, he would lean against a tree and start to cut the ends off reeds he tried out later on in the library.

  However, his exercises in calligraphy were not enough to calm his anxiety. He was not in a proper state of mind to find God through drawing characters. The day after he thought he had found the solution, thanks to Maryam, Hernando began to have fresh doubts. How could he do it? Was he right? How could he present this to the Christians so that it would have sufficient impact? How could he embark on such a project all on his own?

  His daily life was very different. Since the evening when he had visited Pablo Coca’s gaming house to talk to the valet, Hernando had been to gamble on several other occasions. The valet had kept his promise and visited the weaver when Hernando showed him the tricks the cardsharps used with the pack of cards: making tiny black marks on them, using cards that were almost invisibly different in size from the rest of the pack and so on. Sometimes Hernando took him along, at others he went on his own. He knew he was breaking the commandment that prohibited gambling, but what was one more among the many he was forced to break in this foreign land?

  One night he was trying to adjust the proportions of his letters to match an alif he had already drawn. He drew a circle round this first letter of the Arabic alphabet, using the height of the alif for the diameter, and then tried to fit all the following letters into the same dimensions. He had hardly been at the exercise half an hour when he realized that, however hard he tried, he could not make the letter ba, which was horizontal and curved, fit into this circumference or occupy the space it was meant to fill horizontally next to the alif.

  Hernando tore up the sheets of paper, stood up and decided to go and gamble at Pablo Coca’s gaming house, despite the fact that he knew he would lose. He had lost on the two previous nights, but according to his friend he’d have to do so once again.

  ‘You can’t always win,’ Pablo had warned him. ‘Although nobody might spot our trick, they are bound to think something odd is going on if you always win, and they would soon associate you with me. However much I go from one table to another, they know I am your friend. Let the money go where it will.’

  From that moment on, Pablo always told him the days when he would win, and the winnings always far outweighed the losses he had accumulated. Hernando enjoyed gambling, whatever the result. However much he learnt, he still played like a complete novice, betting indiscriminately until the instant he saw his friend’s ear moving. Also, whenever he left the gambling house he headed for the brothel, where he enjoyed the favours of a young redhead with an exuberant body and lusty appetite. That night, before leaving the palace, he enquired after the valet, because he liked having him for company when it was his turn to lose; at least it meant he had someone to talk to. The duke was still away, planning the invasion of England at the Madrid court, so José Caro was happy to accompany him.

  ‘You don’t seem in very good spirits,’ the valet commented after they had walked a good way in silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hernando.

  Their footsteps resonated through the deserted alleyways of the Santo Domingo neighbourhood. They were striding along; the valet allowed the sheath of his dagger to clink against his belt, to warn anyone who might be lurking in the dark corners that they would have to face two strong, armed men. Hernando had a small knife hidden in his tunic, as Moriscos were forbidden to carry weapons.

  It was true he was not in good spirits. The idea that he could use the figure of the Virgin Mary to bring the two communities closer was still going through his mind, but he had no idea what to do with it, or whom he could talk to about it. One of the multitude of altars that lit up Córdoba at night-time came into view at the end of the street they were walking along. Whereas during the day all the statues, niches and religious paintings attracted the prayers and pleas of devoted Christians, at night they became beacons that seemed to indicate the way through the surrounding darkness. This one was an altar on the front of a house, lit by candles and with flowers and ex-votos on the ground beneath it. Hernando came to a halt in front of the painting: Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

  ‘Our blessed Virgin,’ murmured José Caro.

  ‘Untouched by sin,’ whispered Hernando, unconsciously repeating the words of the Prophet contained in his teachings.

  ‘That is so,’ the valet replied, crossing himself. ‘Pure and spotless, conceived without sin.’

  They continued on their way, with Hernando still bound up in his thoughts. Could his Christian companion even imagine that his affirmation about the Immaculate Conception came from the Sunna, the collection of the Prophet’s sayings? What would he think if it were explained to him that the elevation to dogma that the Spanish Christians were fighting for so keenly was already contained in the Koran? What would the valet think if he were told it was the Prophet who maintained that the Virgin was never touched by sin? What would he make of the esteem in which the Prophet held Maryam? ‘You will be mistress of the women in paradise . . .’ Muhammad told his daughter Fátima when he saw the hour of his death was drawing near ‘. . . after Maryam.’

  Hernando quickened his pace. That was the path they had to take to bring together the religions and win the respect Don Pedro and his friends wanted to see accorded to the Moriscos! He had to do it!

  Still obsessed with his idea, Hernando learnt that in that same year of 1587 another conspiracy by Moriscos in Seville, Córdoba and Écija had been uncovered. The Moriscos had plotted to take advantage of the lack of defences to overrun Seville during Saint Peter’s night. The leaders were summarily executed; Abbas was not one of them, but various members of the Córdoba community were. Arms! They would never achieve anything through the use of arms apart from enraging the Christians and their King even further, thought Hernando. They wanted to castrate them! Did the Morisco community and the elders leading it not realize that?

  He had finally worked out a plan. The Christians of Granada were searching for martyrs and relics – they needed them to mak
e their city a cradle of Christianity comparable to the great centres of pilgrimage in the rest of Spain: Toledo, Santiago de Compostela, Seville – so why not provide them with what they wanted? That was what he wrote in a long letter to Castillo:

  We believe in the same God, the God of Abraham. To us, their Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the word of God and the spirit of God: the Koran affirms this often. Isa is the Sent One! as Muhammad, peace be upon him, said. But do the Christians know that? They take us for dogs, or ignorant mules. None of them has ever bothered to find out what our true beliefs are, while polemicists on both sides in their writings and debates concentrate on all that separates us rather than on anything that might unite us. We all know that three hundred years after his death, Jesus’s divine nature was distorted by the popes. He, Isa, never called himself God or the Son of God. All he did was defend the existence of one single God, just as we do. If Jesus’s divine nature was falsified by the popes, the same cannot be said of his mother. Perhaps her condition as a woman relegated her to a secondary role, so that they were not concerned about her; even today, despite popular fervour, they refuse to make the Immaculate Conception a dogma of faith. So it is in Mary that our two religions still coincide, and perhaps through her we can bring our two communities closer together. The arguments about the Virgin are concerned with her genealogy, not the esteem in which she is held. If the Christians and their priests who now see us as heretic dogs came to understand that we too venerate the mother of God, then perhaps they would reconsider their views. Devotion to Mary is second nature among the ordinary people; they cannot possibly hate those who share the same feelings as them! Could this be the basis of the understanding for which we are so desperately searching?