The Mapmaker's Daughter

by Laurel Corona

  “Well, well,” I say. “Is that the way to greet your grandmother?”

  I take him to a clean cloth we have laid out near the hearth and bathe him from head to toe while the midwife helps my daughter into bed. When I finish, Eliana asks me not to swaddle the baby. “I want to see him first,” she says. I bring him to her, and she puts him to her breast as she fondles the dark hair on his head and runs her hands over his tiny back.

  I know what she is thinking—that he is a healthy, beautiful child—but she will not say it while the Evil Eye is lurking. Nor will she say aloud the baby’s name, though she told me several months ago it would be named Joseph if it were a boy.

  I think of all the births I have witnessed, all the times I have helped say the incantations and prayers and spread the herbs and garlic that keep the Evil Eye away. Not that it helped my little brother much. It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been almost forty years since he breathed his last, forty years he has not shared with us. But there are happier stories as well.

  To great rejoicing in Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand had their first child, a daughter, a year ago. Elizabeth is a grandmother now, although I don’t suppose she realizes it, lost in madness in Arévalo.

  Noor and Jamil have three sons and one daughter, and he has several by a second wife as well. I know this because he comes occasionally to Lisbon on the caliph’s business. Out of sensitivity to me, he is never invited to break bread with us, but I hear from Isaac that he is well and that he always inquires after me.

  I’d like to tell him that I think he did the right thing in marrying Noor. I could not have borne him so many children, and perhaps his wives are not yet finished presenting him with sons to carry on his line. More than a decade after our parting, my mind is no longer wracked with pain, but my heart is still tender enough that I am grateful he stays away, even though I’d like to tell him how pleased I am for him.

  Eliana is dozing with the baby at her breast while I go ask one of the servants to run to Chana’s house with the news. Leaving, she collides with Isaac, who is responding to the message we sent to the palace.

  He’s a barrel-chested man in his mid-thirties now, with the same moon-face he had as a child. Though his beard is not yet gray, his brow is already furrowed. “My wife?” he asks. I tell him she has delivered and is doing well. “And the baby?”

  “A son. Besiman tov.” He sighs with relief, and his lips move in a private prayer of thanksgiving.

  I follow him into the bedroom. Eliana is sleeping but the baby’s eyes are open. Isaac leans over him, stroking his face. He looks at Eliana, and I see how much he loves her, even after a difficult nine years for both of them. His father is almost seventy now, and the mantle has passed to Isaac not just in business, but in advocacy for the Jews. “He needs a woman who can be as strong as he is, whatever comes,” Simona had said before he and Eliana were betrothed, and my daughter has become just that for a husband who seems to belong to everything and everyone else before her.

  Isaac leaves her bedside to go to his study to pray, and I wait for him outside the door. I want to know the latest news about the crisis that has alarmed the Lisbon aljama. King Afonso V, at the urging of his uncle Henry the Navigator, continued the effort to drive the Moors from North Africa, and the recent conquest of the fortress town of Arzilla resulted in the capture of several hundred Jews. The captives were given as rewards to the nobles who had supported the cause and our people are now slaves all over Portugal.

  Jews do not stand by while other Jews are enslaved. We were captives once in Egypt, and the Holy One took us from there with a strong hand and outstretched arm. It is now up to us to be the instrument of God’s command that our people be free.

  “What did the king say?” I ask Isaac when he has finished his prayers.

  “He says he can’t favor the Jews over other captives. The Cortes is already angry at how well we have been treated during his reign, and Afonso knows he can’t risk helping us by intervening now.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “He says he will not oppose private efforts to free the Jews. That will take money—a great deal of it—and time.” He thinks for a moment. “It’s getting to be fall already. Travel will be more difficult when winter sets in.”

  The words we say every Passover come to me. “This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people.” I turn grave eyes to him. “If anyone can accomplish that, it’s you.”

  ***

  Isaac pledges a small fortune of his own money for ransoms, his reimbursement to come from contributions by Portugal’s Jews. He probably won’t get it all back, but that’s a small matter. “I’m a wealthy man,” he says. “Perhaps the Holy One has seen to that because he wants me to be his treasurer.”

  A few of the nobles keeping Jewish slaves live close to Lisbon, so for the first months he is not gone more than a few days at a time. Then, the estates where the Jews are still held are at a greater distance, and Isaac is rarely at home.

  The toll on Eliana is clear, though the children have grown accustomed to his absences. Leah turns seven and Hadassah four without a father to tell them stories or to hear about their accomplishments. Judah, at nine, spends his days at the yeshiva studying the Torah and Talmud, where the son and heir of Isaac Abravanel has an entire community of men willing to put an arm around his shoulder.

  “The better things get for the Jews in one way, the worse they get in another,” Eliana says one afternoon at the mikveh next to the synagogue. Isaac has sent word ahead and she is expecting his arrival any day. She has been so busy with her four children that she has not made the time to end niddah, her ritual impurity, after her monthly flow.

  The Lisbon mikveh falls somewhere between the tiny pool at home in Queluz and the elaborate Arab baths at Ronda. There’s an entrance hidden from the street, because it is no one’s business when a wife is ready to resume sexual relations with her husband. Women usually come alone, to protect their privacy even from each other, but I’ve carried on Simona’s and my tradition by going to the mikveh from time to time with my daughter. Today, she is so distracted that our usual intimacy is lost. “You’ve been gloomy all day,” I say as we leave the water. “Especially for someone whose husband is on his way home.”

  She wraps a cloth around her body and tucks the end in above one breast. “Isaac is planning to use the papal election of a new pope to argue for better treatment of Castile’s Jews. He says he may need to travel to Rome with the envoy going to congratulate the new pope.” Tears well in her eyes. “It’s too much, Mama. He’d be gone so long, and what if—”

  “Every trip has its dangers,” I point out. “Even if he’s only going to Évora or Tomar.”

  “Sometimes I wish he weren’t so confident everything will be fine when he’s not here.”

  “Would you want to be weak, just to keep him home?”

  “Of course not,” she says indignantly, her voice echoing off the damp brick walls. “I just don’t want him to go to Italy. I have nightmares about it.” Her voice grows husky. “I see him standing on a boat sailing out to sea, and in the dream, I know he’s never coming back.”

  “Have you told him this?”

  “No.” She gives me a rueful smile. “I just try to be brave.”

  “You have to assert yourself,” I say, remembering Judah’s words to me long ago. “Don’t snuff out your own light.” I help her into her dress. “Isaac could be a better man. Don’t you think he would want to be if he knew how? When you don’t tell him how you feel, you deny him the chance for compassion toward you.” I give her what I hope is a reassuring smile. “Perhaps it takes a wife to help even a wise man understand the meaning of what he reads in the Zohar.”

  ***

  Power and love realign, and Isaac does not go to Rome. After a private talk I hear little about, he is still gone much of the time, but his trips are as short as he can make them. At Queluz, Judah and Simona move back into the small quarters they lived in when I
first met them, to make room for Isaac and Eliana to live year-round in the main house. “Now that consulting my husband takes a long ride here rather than a walk down the street,” Eliana says with a wry smile, “it’s interesting how much of the aljama’s business can be handled without him.”

  No one needs to say the other reason to be in Queluz. Judah is seventy now, and though Simona is ten years younger, not many people live even to her age. Judah’s beard is white, and he seems shrunken under his clothes. Simona is no more than a twig, and her gray hair frames eyes made narrow by drooping lids. They are still surprisingly strong, but they accept help now with things they used to do easily on their own. Though Eliana’s children assume their grandparents will live forever, we know better.

  In May, one week before Shavuot, Simona, Eliana, and I are sitting together mending the light summer dresses the girls will need now that the weather is getting warm. Isaac is away on what we hope will be his last mission to free the Jews of Arzilla, and my grandson Judah is in Lisbon at his yeshiva. I can hear seven-year-old Leah and four-year-old Hadassah chattering with their grandfather in the courtyard. Judah’s eyes are too weak to read, and he spends most of his day dozing in a chair and watching them play.

  Joseph fusses in his cradle, and Eliana lays down her mending to put him to her breast.

  Simona lays down her work as well. “I should see to dinner,” she says, getting up stiffly. The first steps pain her, and I stand up to give her an arm, though I know she will wave me off. “Don’t treat me like an old lady,” she tells us with a wink, “or los mejores de mosotros will turn me into one.”

  While Eliana nurses Joseph, Simona and I cut vegetables. “Shavuot’s coming up,” she says, breaking the silence. She knows it is my favorite of the Jewish festivals, for it honors the story of Naomi and her loyal daughter-in-law, Ruth.

  “‘Entreat me not to leave you or to turn back from following you.’” I repeat the familiar words. “‘For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.’” My eyes fill with tears. I put my knife down, and Simona hugs me.

  “You see? It’s made me cry again,” I say through the lump in my throat.

  “It’s just the onions,” Simona teases.

  “If it weren’t for you taking me in…” I don’t know how to go on. I wipe my eyes with the edge of my apron and fall silent, wondering where I would be if she hadn’t been Naomi to my Ruth.

  Eliana lays a sleeping Joseph in his cradle. The three of us continue with our work, but after a moment I stop. “It’s too quiet outside,” I say, just as Leah and Hadassah come through the door.

  “Grandfather fell asleep while we were talking to him,” Leah says.

  Hadassah giggles. “He fell out of his chair. He’s sleeping on the ground.”

  “Oh, no,” Simona whispers. Wiping our hands, we rush out into the courtyard, where Judah lies crumpled and still.

  ***

  The May sun hangs in the afternoon sky as the men of the village dig a grave on the flowering hillside. Judah will be buried with his feet pointing toward Jerusalem, where the Day of Judgment will begin, and he and all the dead will rise to face our Maker.

  Word has been sent to Lisbon and a rider dispatched to the town near Évora where Isaac is at work. He will not make it back for the burial. Rahel and Chana’s families will assemble before a full day has passed, so Judah’s body may be laid to rest according to our law.

  I take the first turn guarding Judah’s body, for it must not be left alone before he is buried. Sometime in the middle of the night, Eliana takes my place, and when I wake up, Simona is sitting by the body again, as serenely as if she has just slept by his side.

  When everyone has arrived, Chana’s and Rahel’s husbands carry Judah’s shrouded body on a litter up to the grave. When we get there, we tear our clothing near our heart in the ritual of kriah.

  A rabbi has come from Lisbon, and once we have lowered Judah’s body, he begins to chant. “O God, exalted and full of compassion,” he prays, “grant perfect peace in your sheltering presence to the soul of Judah, who has gone to his eternal home.”

  Eliana’s daughters are clinging to her skirt while her son, Judah’s namesake, bobs with the other men offering prayers. “The Lord is his portion,” the rabbi concludes. “May he rest in peace.”

  “Amen,” we say, amid sniffles and soft weeping. I hold my arm around Simona’s shoulder to keep her knees from buckling. “Blessed, glorified, honored, and extolled, adored and acclaimed be the name of the Holy One,” we pray. “Let he who makes peace in the heavens grant peace to all of us. And let us say amen.”

  22

  VALENCIA 1492

  I opened my eyes this morning and gave thanks to God for restoring my soul, which escapes to wander all night in the land of dreams. Modeh Ani was the first prayer, after the shema, that my mother taught me, and though I could no more forget to say it than to open my eyes, I don’t like the words anymore. If my soul leaves my body when I sleep, I would rather it stay away. Not to wake up at all would be something to praise God for.

  The afternoon shadows are deep now, and a breeze is rustling the curtains. It won’t be long until my grandson is here. I will sleep on the ship tonight, and when my eyes open tomorrow, I will say Modeh Ani into the stifling air of the hold and bend to God’s decree that a soul be restored to someone old and helpless in the middle of the sea.

  When Judah died, I ached not just for my loss, but from watching Simona go through her days without him. She managed to be contented again in time, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren to occupy her. Being Simona, even when she grieved, she praised God for the blessing of having had Judah so long, and her strength helped me find my own.

  In the ten years after Judah’s death, my granddaughters Leah and Hadassah were both married. My grandson Joseph reached his tenth birthday, and Samuel, who was Isaac and Eliana’s last child, grew into a stocky eight-year-old.

  My fingers stiffened by the time I was fifty-five, but I had lost interest in writing poetry by then, preferring to watch life flow past without plumbing its deepest meanings. A hug from tiny arms or a limp flower brought from the garden in muddy fingers was a poem of more value than any of mine.

  Isaac passed his fortieth birthday and became King Afonso’s chief financial adviser and a member of his inner circle. Wealth poured in from his businesses, investments, and gifts from the king. As a Jew, Isaac could never have a title granting him noble status, but Afonso considered him a true and trusted friend and those who tried to harm us paid the price. Those were good years for all the Jews—as good as it gets for people who, despite the king’s tolerance, paid exorbitant taxes and lived by decree behind the aljama’s walls.

  We felt somewhat secure, unlike the Jews in Spain. Ferdinand was crowned king of Aragon after his father’s death in 1479, and Spain was united, except for the throbbing thorn of Granada. Would conquering the Muslim caliphate lead to a crusade against the Jews too? Doomsayers said so, but most of us ignored them.

  We should have listened. From the time Ferdinand became King of Aragon, conquest fever brought anti-Jewish riots all over Spain. Then, a decade ago, the first inquiries were held at their behest by Tomás de Torquemada to determine whether Sevilla’s conversos were secret Jews. Like my mother. Like my grandparents.

  Is anyone alive who saw me wearing a crucifix? If so, who would recognize me after half a century? Still, can a church and its records burn down thoroughly enough? Ferdinand and Isabella will stop at nothing to get Isaac to stay in Spain, for some Jews are too valuable to lose. If they knew my story, would they tie me to a stake as a Judaizer, hold a lighted torch, and tell him the price of saving me was a trip to the baptismal font himself?

  I have no doubt they would.

  Families are coming out in the cool of the early evening. It’s calmer now, as if having made a feast of our belongings, they now want to work off the meal by taking a p
leasant stroll.

  I stare at the door, imagining my story is out and soldiers’ boots are pounding the stairs. Much as I don’t care about living, I don’t want to die the horrific way Torquemada thinks people like me should.

  I shake my head and tell myself I am a foolish old woman. I’m safe here in this room.

  Safe? My laughter sounds disembodied, so harsh and cackling that it raises the hair on my arms. I am almost the last Jew in Spain. Safe indeed.

  LISBON 1481

  The church bells of Lisbon peal a somber dirge as the funeral cortege for King Afonso V passes from the bright August sunlight into the gloom of the cathedral. As Jews, we cannot go inside, so I stand in the crowd with my family to pay respect to the king I knew as a little boy when I played with his cousins at the palace.

  Afonso, at forty-nine, was dead from loss of will to live as much as from the plague that struck him down. Six years earlier, he married his thirteen-year-old niece Juana, the girl known as La Beltraneja, born of the affair between El Impotente’s wife and the courtier Beltrán de la Cueva. His plan to bring Castile under the Portuguese crown did not succeed. His forces were defeated by King Ferdinand, and soon afterward, Afonso’s marriage to La Beltraneja was annulled by the pope. Even though he remained king in title, he faded away, dying in a monastery near Sintra.

  Such a sad end, I think, watching his coffin pass into the cathedral. Such a sad family. His cousin Elizabeth, mad at Arévalo. His sister Juana married to El Impotente, disgracing herself with other men. And La Beltraneja, married at thirteen to a man more than three times her age—who could not be moved to pity by the heartlessness with which she had been treated? Her marriage annulled and stripped of all her titles, she’s gone off now, before her twentieth birthday, to live in a convent, wondering how it could be that just a few years ago, she was fawned and fought over. Or did she grow up knowing, as Elizabeth did, that she would end up a pawn in a game played without a thought for her?