“The hour is growing late!” He shakes a clenched fist at the men. “Your days are numbered. Leave your dead faith behind, and embrace salvation!”
With a pleading smile, he holds out his arms, as if he wishes to embrace them all. “Why do you turn your back on God?” He sees the men’s impassive faces and sighs loudly. “How can you bear to live with his scorn?” he whines, as if he has been personally hurt by each of us. “Come to mass tomorrow and I will baptize you, for the sake of your immortal souls.”
He takes a deep breath and without warning raises his voice to a scream so loud it lifts the hair on my arms and makes one woman behind me burst into tears. “He has abandoned you just as you abandoned his son. There are no Jews—only heretics!”
He storms down off the tebah and heads toward the ark containing the Torah scrolls. As if they are sidestepping a runaway wagon, the men clear a path for him. He rips the embroidered velvet curtain aside and flings open the carved wooden doors of the ark.
The women gasp, and an angry murmur rises up from the men. The ark is never opened without ceremonies befitting the word of God. Torquemada swats at a silver filigreed crown that tops the scroll case. “Baubles! Do you think you can impress God with such things when you turn your back on him by your wickedness and lies? Do you think he will stand by and watch you lure Christian souls back to darkness?”
Torquemada makes his way back to the tebah as we watch in hushed silence. “My children,” he says, his tone again unctuous as he stretches out his arms. “Come to me. Come to the Savior who died for you. Come to the hope of eternal life.”
Eliana pulls her shoulders up tall beside me. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.” Her strong voice floats across the synagogue. “Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not.”
Everyone looks up at the balcony, and I see Isaac’s eyes lock onto his wife. Samra is pressing against the grille now too. “Be thou my judge, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation,” she sings. I recognize the words of the forty-third psalm and I join her.
“Deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.
For thou art the God of my strength…”
Leah, Hadassah, and Nita join us, and our rich women’s voices have a force so profound I am shaking. All Jews who ever suffered for their faith seem to be offering their strength to me, to my family, to the women crowding behind me, and to the men below. I feel our power bursting through the walls of the synagogue, like Samson breaking his chains.
What a small matter my old bones are, compared to the force of my heart. I will walk to Madrigal to see Isabella if I have to. I will crawl. I will put myself in God’s hands and let him use me as he wishes.
Torquemada’s face is scarlet with rage. “Who are those women?” he thunders.
“They are our wives,” Isaac says, “our sisters, our mothers, and our daughters.” His voice breaks, and as he looks up at us, I see tears streaming down his face.
“Bring them down here,” Torquemada growls in a low and menacing voice. Behind me, the women gasp. Does he not know what he is asking? Women do not mingle with men on the floor of the synagogue.
I hear the rabbi call up that it is necessary to obey. Our worried murmurs echo off the stone walls of the narrow staircase as we make our way down and assemble in front of the Grand Inquisitor.
“Who sang?” he demands.
“We all did,” Samra replies.
“Who sang first?”
“I did.” Eliana steps forward.
“And what did you mean by it?”
She looks confused. “We sing to the Holy One all the time. To praise and honor and thank him.”
“‘Deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man?’” Torquemada sneers. “You see, I know the words too.”
“You praise God with the words of our people then,” Eliana says. “The psalms are our prayers. Perhaps we have more to teach you.”
“How dare you?” Torquemada’s face mottles with rage.
Samra and the other women of our family have stepped up to stand with her, and Eliana slips her hand in mine. “We may fear the punishment of man for singing, but not of God,” she tells the glowering priest, “for he has not abandoned us and he will not, regardless of what you do or say.”
I hear Nita next to me, taking huge, gulping breaths. I turn to look at her ashen face. “He was there!” she gasps, staring at the Grand Inquisitor. “He was there when my parents—”
I wrest my hand from Eliana’s and cup it quickly over Nita’s mouth. “Don’t!” I tell her.
Torquemada steps forward. “Who are you?” His eyes narrow with menace as he looks from Nita to me. “What are you keeping her from saying?”
My eyes plead with Nita to understand that she mustn’t let him know she was a converso and we took her in. We’re dead if she does, I think. All of us.
“You can tell me,” Torquemada’s tone is unctuous as he comes nearer to size up his prey.
“I—” Nita gets no further. Her body heaves, and she covers his robe with the pink contents of her supper.
He lets out a cry of shock and indignation and steps back. The guards try to wipe the vomit from his robe, but he shoves them away. “This is how the devil speaks to the servant of Christ!” His shrieking is as shrill as that of his victims at the stake as he gestures to his soiled robe. “You are evil! The devil makes his home in you. You shall see what God has in mind for such enemies!” Without another word, he storms out of the synagogue.
Nita sobs in Leah’s arms as we leave. When everyone is on the street, Torquemada looms out of a darkened doorway. “Lock it!” he says to his guards, pointing to the synagogue door.
One of them brandishes a large padlock while the other throws the bolt. The lock closes with a loud click. Torquemada snorts in derision and walks away, leaving the Jews of Alcalá speechless in his wake.
26
MADRIGAL 1492
There’s not much to say on the road to Madrigal. We aren’t certain Isabella will see us, especially after she’s heard how the Grand Inquisitor was treated at Alcalá. In the emptying of her stomach, Nita had spoken with an eloquence surpassing language. “This is the mess you left when you murdered my parents,” she told Torquemada, “and this is what I think of you.”
We settle in the home of a rabbi to wait for the queen’s summons. To our surprise, she writes personally, saying she has time for us the following afternoon.
Eliana and I are escorted into a large room that, despite the tapestries on the walls and thick carpets on the floor, has the chill of disuse, for the king and queen have only recently returned from Granada.
“My goodness,” Isabella says. “Isn’t it a surprise how easy it is to recognize people one hasn’t seen for decades?” Her voice, though deeper, has the same lilt as it did when everyone in Arévalo stumbled over themselves to offer her cakes and hair ribbons.
“I am so happy to see you,” I say, and I mean it, brushing aside for a moment the doleful reason we have come.
“And you married well,” she says to Eliana. “One of the most influential men in the country, and your son is following in his footsteps.” Her words are gracious, but perplexing. What footsteps? Soon there will be no Jewish feet in Spain.
It’s worth a gentle reminder. “We are proud of what our family has contributed,” I say. “And we hope to continue for generations to come.”
The flush in her cheeks tells me she still catches nuances easily. “Ah yes,” she says, forming her face into one of those well-practiced smiles that are second nature to women at court. “I want you to know that it’s not me but the Lord who has put this thing into my husband’s heart.” She gives a casual glance away. “I don’t think there’s any more hope of swaying him than asking water not to follow the bed of a stream.”
I am stunned. Ferdinand told Isaac and Judah the opposite, that the queen’s will had driven the edict. Are Isaac and Judah, and the o
thers pleading for the Jews, being tossed back and forth in the hope that they will eventually give up and go away?
“You know,” Isabella says, “we truly don’t want all the Jews to leave. Nothing would please us more than to have families like yours accept baptism and follow the one true faith. That is all it would take.” She holds her hands palms up and arches her eyebrows to underscore just how simple it would be.
“If it please your majesty—” Eliana says, but before she can say more, a side door opens. Without requesting permission to enter, Tomás de Torquemada is standing by Isabella’s chair, scowling at us with his intense, reptilian eyes.
“Do I know you?” he asks. Isabella seems taken aback by the presumption with which he came into her quarters and took over the conversation, but she says nothing.
“We live in Alcalá de Henares,” I tell him, certain he will need no further help remembering us.
“Yes,” he says, drawing the word out with a hiss as he stares at Eliana. He crooks the corners of his mouth in a menacing smile. “And you,” he says, turning so suddenly toward me that I am momentarily startled. “Where are you from?”
His demand is bluntly personal, and I respond more out of surprise than anything else. “I was born in Sevilla,” I say, “but I spent much of my life in Portugal.”
“And what brought you there?”
“My father was a mapmaker. He worked for Prince Henry and King Duarte.”
“A mapmaker?” His eyebrows arch with curiosity.
“I am Amalia Cresques. My family is among the most renowned mapmakers in Europe.”
“Cresques—there were conversos among your family, were there not? You did not take your husband’s name?”
“I was married only briefly,” I say, hating myself for telling him anything at all. “My husband was a sea commander and drowned off the coast of Africa. I returned to my family name because I am proud of it, and I had his for so short a time.”
Torquemada is kneading the silver crucifix hanging from his neck. “That’s odd,” he says. “A Jewish commander? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
My heart stops. I have walked into a trap of my own making. “He wasn’t Jewish,” I admit disconsolately.
“Who would marry a Christian and a Jew? Certainly not a priest.”
I could say Diogo and I were married by a rabbi, but he won’t believe it. If I say I was married in a church, he will know I used to live as a Christian. I blurt out the only reply I think might save me from a charge of Judaizing and a trip to the stake. “We were never married. Not formally, I mean.”
The horror of what I’ve said dawns on me when Torquemada begins to cackle. “The wife of Isaac Abravanel a bastard child?”
Isabella’s face grows scarlet as his derision rises to a roar of laughter. “Stop it,” she says. “This is most unseemly. Leave me now.” The glee on his face is unmistakable as he strides out the door.
The world collapses in around me. I have dishonored my daughter, and there is no way—no possible way—ever to make this right.
***
We leave at daybreak and celebrate the end of Passover in a makeshift camp on our way back to Alcalá.
“The bread of affliction indeed,” Judah says, as we break the last of our matzoh. Isaac smiles wanly. “Perhaps our exile from Portugal was practice for this one,” he says. “After all, Moses had to escape to the desert when he killed an Egyptian, and what he learned in those years served him well when he led our people out of slavery.”
We try to take cheer in this, but there is little to be had. The only concession Isaac got from the king and queen is to let him get home before word comes that the edict of expulsion is final and again in effect.
He called my daughter a bastard…
If I could grab Torquemada’s crucifix, I might beat him to death for what he has done to the two of us, to Nita and his other victims living and dead, and to all the peaceful and loyal Jews of Spain.
Eliana doesn’t seem troubled by what I told that shriveled soul. “It isn’t true anyway, so why should I care what he thinks?” she told me as I wept in our quarters. “I wish I had asked him why, if his religion is right and true, he had to resort to such ugliness.”
Despite her casual demeanor, I could tell she was unnerved, and I spent much of yesterday torturing myself. By the time night fell, her patience had turned to annoyance and then to anger.
“We’ll never see him again, remember?” Eliana rarely snaps at anyone, and I couldn’t recall the last time she had been cross with me. “He won’t get far with such talk when every noble either has bastards in the family or is one. We have to leave Spain. It’s time to think about that.”
She’s right, I tell myself, as I watch the embers crumble and release their glow. Eliana and I huddle together in the damp, chilly air of early spring, while Isaac strokes his white beard, deep in thought.
“‘I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips,’” Isaac says in Hebrew.
Judah picks up the verse from Isaiah. “‘Then flew unto me one of the seraphim, with a glowing stone in his hand, and he touched my mouth with it.’”
The calming, luxurious sound of our ancient tongue makes a cocoon around us, and moved to tears, Isaac wipes his eyes. “The Holy One asks, ‘Whom shall I send?’ Isaiah says, ‘Here am I; send me.’ But I am no prophet. He sent me, and I failed.”
“You’ve done all you can, father.” Eliana’s voice cracks with emotion. None of us says aloud the words that follow, how people will continue to be blind and suffer until cities are without inhabitants and the land is laid waste. No one says what we all must feel, that we are in that time now.
We sit silently for a while. Finally Isaac speaks again. “It was not God’s will that the Jews be rescued with money. Much as I hate to say it, perhaps Torquemada was closer to the divine purpose than I was. We are a stiff-necked people, and I am among the worst. If God wills us to leave this land, I pray that the Holy One is not angry with me for trying to stop it.”
When Judah and he met with Ferdinand and Isabella yesterday, they saw that the pair had been toying with them by saying the other was in charge. When Isaac asked if his offer was irrevocably refused, Torquemada held out his heavy crucifix while the king and queen cowered. “Judas Iscariot sold our Savior for thirty pieces of gold!” he screamed at them. “Here he is! Barter him away again!” Any chance for the Jews ended with the clatter of that crucifix at Ferdinand and Isabella’s feet.
Judah’s voice is soft. “‘Depart, depart, touch not. They hunt our steps, that we cannot go in our broad places; our days are fulfilled, our end is come.’”
Silently, I continue the verses from Lamentations. The joy of our heart is ceased. Our dance is turned into mourning.
***
We arrive home the same day the news spreads through the aljama. We have three months to leave Spain. The only positive note is that Isaac has the queen’s permission to reopen the synagogue. All the Jews gather there that evening to hear Isaac and Judah speak about what is to come.
“Take what you wish, but the journey will be very long, and even your most valued possessions will become burdensome,” Isaac says. “Any mule or other animal you take with you cannot cross the border, and you will have to shoulder your load from there. The king and queen wish to keep all useful animals here for the Christians who remain.” A shocked murmur rises up from the crowd. Apparently their majesties have placed us lower than beasts of burden and are more prepared to lose us than one donkey or horse.
“Valuables will be confiscated at the border,” Judah adds, “but the roads will be thick with bandits, and you may already have been robbed of what is easy enough to carry.”
“Where are we to go?” one woman cries out.
“We are promised safe passage out of the country,” Judah says. “The King of Portugal has agreed to take in Jews, but only for six months, for a head tax that will be collected as you enter. And t
he ports will be full of boats willing to take you anywhere for money.”
“Money?” An angry voice rises. “Where do we get money?”
Isaac takes a deep breath and sighs. “Anything you cannot take, you should try to sell. It will be worth nothing to you if you leave it behind. May we hope that our Christian neighbors offer us fair prices, but…”
He doesn’t need to say what everyone knows. With desperate sellers, a house might go for the usual price of a cart, or a vineyard for an extra pair of shoes for the road.
“Better to convert and keep everything,” I hear a woman mutter behind me.
“How can you say that?” Samra wheels around to face her. “Now more than ever, we must not lose faith.” Her voice crumbles as she dissolves in tears in Eliana’s arms.
The air is silent except for a few muffled sniffs, as the synagogue empties and we go home to contemplate the tasks that await us.
The first weeks after the edict is enacted, the aljama is a mix of frenzy and torpor, as people are struck down with melancholy so deep they are unable to rise from bed, only to be overtaken by agitation, as if they are leaving tomorrow. Within a month, many families are gone, some heading for North Africa or Palestine, saying that even if the edict is rescinded, they are tired of living among people who hate them.
Most are going to Navarre or Portugal, because they can get there on foot. For our exiled family, Portugal is not a possibility, and Isaac rules out Navarre because he believes once Ferdinand and Isabella rid Spain of its Jews, neighboring countries are likely to follow. We will go by boat to Pisa, Genoa, or Naples and hope one or another of Isaac’s Jewish friends at court will take us in.
Priests roam the aljama, exhorting Jews to be baptized. One barged into the synagogue to preach last week, and the rabbi was jailed for shouting to those present to remain strong. When he was released, he was given one day to leave town.
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