The Mapmaker's Daughter

by Laurel Corona

  Later, Isaac arrives at the Lisbon house, where Simona and I are staying to help Eliana prepare for the High Holy Days. His face is as grave as the pallbearers’ earlier that day. “The Duke of Braganza is preparing for a showdown,” he says. “King João is saying outrageous things, with his father’s body barely cold.”

  “He was saying them while Afonso was still alive,” Eliana reminds him. Indeed, since his father’s decline, João’s swaggering has been kept in check by the nobles, who made sure he understood that he had no authority they did not wish to grant him, at least while his father still lived.

  Isaac nods. “He’s been telling us how things would be different when he became king, but I don’t think anyone was expecting trouble to start so soon. He’s asking the nobles to show proof that lands and titles are legitimately theirs. He intends to strip them of what they can’t document, even after hundreds of years in their families.”

  “What about Queluz?” I hear the worry in Simona’s voice.

  “I have papers,” Isaac says. “This is really about the Duke of Braganza. He owns more than a third of the land in Portugal, and he tells me many of his possessions were never formalized.” He looks down, stroking his beard, as he always does when he is thinking. “João doesn’t stand a chance of toppling Braganza, or any of the other nobles, unless the Cortes backs him, and we all know that turning on the conversos and Jews is the easiest way to get their support.”

  “Look at what’s happening in Sevilla,” Simona murmurs, her voice so soft it can barely be heard. The first convictions for Judaizing have been handed down by the Dominican inquisitors, and dozens of people have been tied to stakes and burned alive.

  “There’s talk about inviting the inquisitors here.” Isaac’s voice trails off, and the room falls silent. No one notices the stew scorching to bitter black as we all look away so as not to have our own fears heightened by what we see in each other’s eyes.

  QUELUZ 1482

  The next year brings slow suffocation. The Holy One takes both Chana and Rahel, along with several of their children, when plague sweeps through the crowded streets of the aljama. Eliana and Isaac’s daughter Hadassah’s wedding to Reuben, a young rabbi and Talmudic scholar, is the only thing that raises our spirits. When she becomes pregnant within a few months, we hover in her radiance like moths drawn out of darkness to even the faintest light.

  At seventy, Simona’s health is failing. A few years ago, she scoffed at our worries, claiming she intended to live until she crumbled into dust before our eyes. Now she wonders aloud whether she will live to see Hadassah’s baby. We ask ourselves the same as we watch her steps slow to a painful creep.

  Isaac is suffering at court, and though he doesn’t talk about it much, it shows in the deepening furrows in his brow and a beard growing translucent and colorless. “João is greedy and deceitful, and one of the greatest tyrants ever to rule,” Isaac says, and for a man who knows history as well as he does, that is quite a statement.

  João’s father, King Afonso, was so generous in currying favor with the nobles that he gave away much of João’s patrimony. All that was left him were the highways of Portugal, the new king complains, and he intends to do something about it.

  “He thinks his father was weak,” Isaac explains to me one summer evening as we sit in the courtyard at Queluz. “He doesn’t see anything wrong in taking back what was given by someone else. After all, how is he to have power in a land other men control?”

  Isaac brushes away an insect buzzing around his head in the dimming light. “João thinks Braganza had a hand in his mother’s death. She was married at fifteen and dead of poison at twenty-three, so João lost his mother at what? Four or five? He has grievances to settle with the House of Braganza, and he can’t wait to start.”

  The situation soon darkens when one of the Duke of Braganza’s brothers is exiled from Portugal for a trivial insult. Our good friend, Gedaliah Yahya, the royal physician, having had enough of the new king, has decided to go to Constantinople to protect his family from what he fears are terrible times ahead for the Jews.

  “I was Afonso’s physician, so João despises me,” Gedaliah says at a farewell Shabbat dinner at Isaac and Eliana’s home. “I’m tired of the looks he gives me, as if his hangnails and headaches should be treated better than his father’s were. I removed a splinter last week, and he glared at me the whole time. A splinter! Is there an old way and a new way to deal with that?”

  “He wants to get rid of everything associated with his father,” Isaac adds. “None but the most blatant panderers have his favor now.” He hesitates, as if debating whether the peace of the Sabbath should be disturbed by thoughts that are too private, or perhaps too painful, to share.

  Finally he speaks. “‘He’s after the Jews too,” he says. “Not publicly yet, but that will come.”

  Gedaliah has had quite a bit of Shabbat wine, and he sets his cup down noisily. “Before Passover, one of João’s new favorites asked me where the Jews were planning to lay in wait for a Christian child to murder. He said they all wanted to know so they could keep their children safe.” Everyone exchanges glances. The blood libel, the belief that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in our Passover matzoh, would die if people understood that Jewish law requires us to throw away any food with even a speck of blood in it. But lies are hard to kill when they make a better story.

  “Last week, I overheard two of them discussing whether they could see the outline of my tail against the back of my robe or whether I walked with it between my legs,” Isaac adds. “They kept their voices just loud enough to be sure I couldn’t miss what they were saying.”

  He gets up from the table and retrieves a piece of paper from a book. “And then, there’s this.” It’s a sketch of Isaac and Gedaliah, each with one hand on a large bag of coins, while behind them lurks a horned devil. Its face is drawn with the same evil grin and narrow, sneaky eyes as the two men. Peeking out from beneath their cloaks, their hooves match the devil’s own.

  “What is this?” I ask, stunned.

  “Something I found lying on my desk at court,” Gedaliah says. “No one has claimed it, but that’s likely from embarrassment over the lack of artistic skills.” He tries to smile but fails. “Hatred is in the air, and I don’t intend to let it feed on me.”

  Gedaliah’s wife has been silent until now. “We’re rich. We’re Jews. How long until João sees how easy it would be to take everything from us?”

  Eliana stiffens, and a hush settles over the table. Of all the Jews at court, only Isaac would have more to lose than Gedaliah if the king were to turn on him.

  Isaac speaks first. “We are not honoring Shabbat,” he says. “We will worry enough about it tomorrow, but for now, I must insist we stop.” He turns to my grandson Judah, now a tall youth of nineteen. “Will you get the guitarra?” he asks. “It’s time to sing.”

  ***

  By the time the green hills hint of a new spring, Isaac has left the king’s service all but officially. He finally has the time he long dreamed of to write, and his commentaries on the biblical prophets spill out onto the pages. Some of the old joy returns to his spirit, and he, like the rest of us, lives happily in seclusion in Queluz.

  The courtyard is filled with the voices of children, and Eliana and Isaac preside over their home just as I remember Judah and Simona doing long ago. Simona has lived more than ten years without Judah now, but from the way she talks, it seems as if he has momentarily left the room. Perhaps to her he has. Perhaps they were so close he still lives in her.

  It saddens me that I never had such a partner, but I don’t think of Jamil very often now. When I do, I remember him as a friend more than a lover. Perhaps it’s been too long since my body cared about such things.

  Simona seems barely of this world. Her skin is as brittle and translucent as onion skins, and her hair is as light as tufts of dandelion drifting in the breeze. She sits without moving most of the day, a sweet smile on h
er face as she watches her great-grandchildren at their play. Sometimes, to their annoyance, she calls them by the names of her children, as if she were traveling back in time. She eats almost nothing. The nourishment she needs comes from somewhere else now, a place only she can see.

  Then one morning, she doesn’t come out from her bedroom. Eliana and I go to see if something is wrong, and we discover her body, as peaceful as if she were taken away in a beautiful dream.

  I mourn her with great abandon, as if every other death has been heaped on top of this one to be grieved afresh. At the end of shiva, the period of formal mourning, I go alone to the mikveh built into the courtyard wall. There, I examine my wrinkled thighs and arms, my sagging breasts, the soft folds of my stomach. “You’re next,” I tell myself.

  I am fifty-six years old. My daughter is a grandmother. Where once I might have found death a gloomy prospect, I don’t now. Though there is always something new I want to live to see, I understand how the old might feel that they don’t have the strength to face what lies ahead. Perhaps this is why we die, more than the failure of our limbs or heart.

  I feel the water lap at every inch of me, under my fingernails, into my eyebrows, and among the shrunken folds of my most private part. I feel Simona’s presence and sit down with her beside me in this place of changes, where so many times before, she and the living water helped me find the grace and wisdom to move on.

  23

  VALENCIA 1492

  I wake to find my body and face wet. I trace my finger across my arm and touch it to my tongue. It is pure and clean, not tasting of sweat at all. I catch in the air the faint odor of ripe pears and cloves. “Simona?” I ask. “Judah?”

  A puff of breeze brings the room to life. “We’re here. We knew you were afraid, so we came.”

  “You found me,” I whisper. Just like they did so many years ago. Found me, took me in, and loved me.

  I cast my mind over the ten years that have passed since Simona died. “I’m almost as old as you were when we buried you,” I tell her.

  I feel the radiance of her smile. “You are lucky indeed to have lived so long.”

  “Lucky? Here?”

  Judah is standing behind me, and his laughter ruffles my hair. “There are no books where I am.”

  “Or a mikveh,” Simona adds.

  I gesture around the room. “I have no books or mikveh either. I have memories—nothing more.”

  I am at the spring, washing the grease from my hands, racing across the beach with Chuva, climbing the green mountains of Sintra…

  A tattered boy drops his coin while Diogo leers behind him…my dead child baptized while I sleep on sheets red with my blood…Susana’s bitter voice and her children’s cold eyes.

  Sawwar falling…falling…

  Jamil is crying, Luisa is crying, Eliana is crying, we all are crying. Suddenly tears are all I can remember, and I feel as if I could fill this room with mine.

  “I want to die,” I whisper, surprised at the simplicity of it.

  “Amalia,” Judah says. “Go to the window.”

  The sky behind the rooftops is smeared with scarlet and orange so intense the remaining blue is tinged with green. “Can you still enjoy that?” he asks. I hear the same annoyance in his voice as when he thought one of his children was not trying hard enough to understand a lesson.

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “Now shut your eyes. Which do you like better?”

  There’s peace in the darkness behind my eyelids. Still, I open my eyes again, because who would not want more of that sight?

  I want to sit down, but Judah’s power holds me where I stand. “You don’t want to die. You aren’t ready to say good-bye.”

  “You don’t know how things are,” I say. “You haven’t had to see all the suffering…”

  “Who says we haven’t been watching?”

  “You’ve seen Isaac grow old before his time.”

  “He would be this old if he lived in better times. My grandson is almost thirty. It’s his turn to lead now.”

  Judah. Our lion. Isaac and Eliana’s first child, bursting with talent beyond that of his father and namesake grandfather, with the personality of a diplomat, the mind of a scholar, and the soul of a sage. Why was such a man born when there is no Jew left in Spain to lead?

  Simona senses my question. “He’s living now because this is when he’s needed. The Holy One wants us to survive. We can’t do that here. This is the beginning of our journey home—the dead can see that.”

  Our. For a moment, that sounds odd, until I realize that Judah and Simona will be leaving too. All Jews, past, present, and yet to come, will be going with the exiles out of Spain.

  How could I ever have doubted that I will go too?

  Instinctively, I reach for the atlas. “I’d have to leave this behind,” I say. “I can’t bear that. It’s all I have left.”

  “Do you ever wonder why you have it?” Judah asks. “Why, after all these generations, it’s still in your hands? Why, despite your journeys, it has never been lost?”

  “I don’t know.” I sound like a frustrated child, ready to be fed an answer or give up trying.

  “Don’t ask me,” Judah says. “Maybe you should look at it again. Perhaps what you want to find out has always been there.”

  QUELUZ 1483

  The year that would change our lives forever begins like any other, with a family celebration of the High Holy Days at Queluz. My grandson Judah is twenty-one now and lives in the Lisbon house, near the yeshiva where he studies. Isaac writes endlessly over the course of that winter, pausing only to receive visitors like the beleaguered Duke of Braganza. Sequestered in Isaac’s study, they discuss the ugly turn João’s reign has taken, while Eliana preserves the peace in a bustling home.

  At thirty-seven, she is still robust and lovely, but a few white hairs spring loose from the dark tangle of her hair. I want to pluck them, more for my sake than hers. To have a daughter old enough to go gray is a shock. Has she noticed them herself? Women as busy as her have little time to wonder how they look.

  The situation in Spain grows more worrisome as well. Last year, Ferdinand and Isabella began a crusade to conquer Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in what they perceive as rightly their kingdom. I imagine Jamil and his family with a hostile army at their doorstep. What does he look like, nearing seventy? Would he choose to fight? When I lived there, I heard stories of heroes dying gloriously in battle when they were older than he is.

  Isaac’s relatives write to tell us about the chaos around them in Sevilla. When the Inquisition began two years ago, conversos left in droves, abandoning so many businesses that trade was disrupted for lack of sellers or buyers. Shortly after the executions began, plague broke out in the city, and of course it was blamed on us.

  Soon worse news reaches Queluz. Ferdinand and Isabella have ordered all the Jews of Andalusia into exile. Thousands of conversos in Sevilla and all over southern Spain are secret Judaizers, the Inquisitors claim, and since they say Jews encourage the baptized to return to the old ways, the only way to save new Christians is for all of us to leave.

  The Sevilla Abravanels are on their way to Toledo. Isaac arranges with a business acquaintance to find them a house in the aljama and pay for it with money he owes Isaac from last year’s sale of textiles. “I told him to find the largest house he could,” Isaac says after supper one evening. “There’s no telling how crowded the aljamas all over Spain will become when the Jews start arriving. For all we know, others in our family may need to be taken in as well.”

  Eliana thinks for a moment. “What problem does this solve? Don’t Ferdinand and Isabella think there are anusim practicing Judaism secretly in Toledo too?”

  “They must realize that,” Isaac says. “I think they don’t really want to convert all their Jews. They couldn’t gouge us with special taxes if they succeeded. They’re still new on the throne, and they may just want to look tough.” He shrugs. “Perhaps in a few y
ears, all the Jews will be back home. We’d best concentrate on what’s happening here. Our problems are bad enough.”

  ***

  Bad enough indeed. When disaster strikes, Isaac is in Évora visiting with Jewish scholars before returning home from his latest business trip. It is late May, and Eliana and I are weeding rows of beans. The day is hot, and the sounds of insects buzzing around our sweating faces is so loud we don’t hear the sound of galloping hooves until a rider pulls up in front of our stables.

  My grandson Judah, now twenty, is handing the reins to a groom. Dust from the courtyard swirls from his frantic arrival. Not expecting to see us yet, he does not have time to wipe the alarmed expression from his face.

  “Is Father back?” He gives a hopeful look in the direction of the house.

  Puzzled, Eliana studies his face. “We don’t expect him back for a week. What’s wrong?”

  Judah is more agitated than I have ever seen him. “Perhaps we’d best go inside,” I say, to get him away from the curious ears of the stablehands.

  Once inside the house, Judah drops onto a bench at the table. “They’ve arrested the Duke of Braganza,” he says, burying his forehead in his palms. “King João is accusing him of treason.”

  “Treason?” Eliana and I gasp together.

  “Spies intercepted correspondence between the duke and King Ferdinand, and João says the two are hatching a plot.”

  Eliana puts a hand on the table to brace herself. “Braganza visits here all the time. What if the king thinks Isaac was involved?”

  “I’ve heard talk that Father lent money to Braganza recently,” Judah says to his mother. “Is it true?”

  Eliana sits down heavily. “He gave Braganza a loan about six months ago, and again just before he left for Évora…”