The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  So she thought until it happened that Ruth was heard one hot August night by a rich merchant of Toledo who bade her come to his palace in the cool hills above the town and sing for his guests. He dressed her in silks and a rich soft woollen cloak and set leather shoes on her feet, and she sang, and his guests were entranced. Especially a visit from Cordoba, a very rich goldsmith named Benjamin Da Montana. He was stirred deeply by the sideways glances of those round blue eyes and the way the candle light gleamed on that red hair, and decided he must have her. He was rich enough and powerful enough to outface the disapproval of his fellows in the synagogue at home in Cordoba, when he brought such a wife to them – and the girl was Jewish, after all! He would have had her even if she had not been, though perhaps not as a wife – but as it was a wife she became. Deborah felt she had at last some recompense for all her suffering; to the mother-in-law to so rich a man was bounty indeed.

  Which was how it happened that a child again changed from one side of Tamar and Susannah’s scattered family to the other? The red hair wove its way deeper and deeper into the spreading tapestry. It always would.

  Peace at last. There in noble, cultured Spain, where Moors lived tolerant lives and shared their minds with their Jews, peace at last.

  For a little while.

  6

  Black as had been the lives of the families which had spread throughout the world since Tamar and Susannah had left Jerusalem, it had not been all bad. For Susannah’s descendants, the Da Montana family, there were many tranquil years, during which they grew in beauty and wisdom and culture. Any enjoyed themselves hugely.

  The main trunk of the family lived always on their mountain; or so they called the hill which they had made their own. Looking down on the cluster of Cordoba roofs, a broad white walled villa built in the cool, airy Moorish style spread itself in every generation as extra rooms and patios were added, and the gardens grew – miniature groves of oranges set there the fragrance of their blossoms could drift across to the screened patios; water gardens, with their cunningly contrived rills and water falls and pools full of lilies.

  Doña Susannah Ad Montana, a formidable lady who wore a black lace veil over her grey head at all times, and who commanded her many servants in a soft whispering voice which yet struck terror into each and every one of them, was a hard task master and always expected perfection of service.

  She always expected – and received – respect as well as affection from her children, growing adults though they were. Her husband had died thirty-five years earlier when she was just forty, leaving her with four sons and two daughters to rear, the healthy reminder of the nine children she had borne. In this she had been like many of her ancestors of the long contented generations which had lived in this house; fecund and fortunate, rearing more children than they lost, unlike their poorer neighbours.

  Sometimes those neighbours whispered that the Jews had a special pact with the devil that allowed them to have so many healthy children. They saw no link between the ritual of bathing and rules of eating and their avoidance of disease. When their children died of the flux later eating gamba brought up from the fishing boats that came into Malaga, far to the south, they did not blame the bad shellfish, but suspected the Jews of putting a spell on them – for why else should they refuse to eat them? But such whispers did not touch the Da Montanas too much. Let the ignorant peasantry mutter. They were aristocrats and cared nothing for such things.

  In this year of 1390 Doña Susannah stood at the head of a large and powerful clan. Not all of them were rich by any means; the original family of the hill were still goldsmiths, and had amassed much property not only in gold and silver and precious stones, but in books and furniture, though they still preferred not to own land and buildings apart from their home on the hill. But they were not the richest either; one of the branches, a family that had spring off the main trunk more than a hundred years earlier, were bankers in Madrid, running a sophisticated network of trade, financing in Madrid, running a sophisticated network of trade, financing Radhnite merchants and other travellers all over the world. Nor were they the poorest, for there were many who bore the good name of Da Montana, who were small traders and had just modest workshops in the unimportant street of Cordoba. And some were the poorest of all in material needs, however rich they were in culture – the students and the rabbis and the poets and artists who lived on what their more practically-minded relations gave them. All happy and all linked by an awareness of their common ancestors. They had long proud memories, these Jews of Cordoba. Unlike their further flung cousins. They carried an oral tradition of their origins. It was imperfect, and often garbled, but in essence they remembered in their turn of the ancestress who had come so long ago to Spain from the Promised Land.

  ‘We were here before the Moors,’ they told their children with huge pride. ‘Before most of the Christians too. They were heathens when we came here, already knowing God.’

  Doña Susannah, who had been a second cousin of her husband’s and so had been a Da Montana before as well as after her marriage, was as punctilious as any of her predecessors when she told the flesh of her flesh of their past. It meant a lot of telling for she had fifteen grandchildren, and they in turn had already given her twenty-three great-grandchildren.

  At present she was very anxious indeed about telling them all of their history, for times were uneasy in her golden land. All those long years of peace which had brought her to this stage in her life were crumbling in fear and too many of her neighbours had become Conversos; Jews who, alarmed at the way the contagion of Jew-baiting had spread southward from France and Germany, chose the safer way of kissing the Cross and renouncing their past. What else could they do when news of massacres came to them? Like the one in Toledo, forty years ago, when, it was said, fully twelve thousand Jews had been put to fire and sword.

  Not all of them were as whole hearted about their new religion as they might be, however; for all their attendance at Mass on Sundays they were still reluctant to eat pork and shellfish, still lit candles on Friday evenings, still left their chimneys smokeless on Sabbath days. Some even managed to fast on Yom Kippur and read the Seder on Passover while conforming outwardly to Christian manners, a way of life Doña Susannah was swift to condemn.

  ‘For,’ she would say in her haughty whisper, ‘such creatures are an abomination in the sight of the Lord, Blessed Be He. To be both is to be neither.

  And she would try to strengthen her grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s love of their faith as much as she could, fearing for their future if they were to go the same way as those Converso neighbours.

  And oh, but she was right! Fortunately for herself, she died just before Ferrand Martinez, father confessor in the court of the King of Castile, caught fire and started on his campaign in 1391 to bring the infidel Jews into the Christian fold. Repeating the words that had so fired the Crusaders long years before, he took up his cross and followed by a mob went from one city to another, marching through the Jewish quarters, right into the synagogues sometimes, offering every Jew he met the choice between the Cross and a disagreeable and immediate death.

  That many chose the cross was not surprising; that some of them chose to be whole hearted about their acceptance the Catholic Church was not surprising either. What did perturb the Christian clergy was that some were so stiff necked as to pay lip service to the new faith, while sticking as stubbornly as ever to the old. The secret Jews, they called them, the Marranos. Pigs.

  Those who chose to become Conversos thought they were choosing a life. Perhaps they were, for themselves. Of those who put aside their phylacteries and prayer shawls and had their heads anointed in baptism many lived to die in their beds, in God’s good time unmolested if sneered at by both their new Christian brethren and their old Jewish ones. They might have died thinking all was well for their children’s future, for those born to Conversos were brought up as Christian children. They went uncircumcised, were taught none of the old ru
les about what they might and might not eat, and were given no Talmudic teaching. They should have lived for ever after, happy and secure Spaniards, and of course some did; the old Jewish families gave birth to some surprising sprigs. Two hundred years after her ancestor had converted from Star of David to Cross, Teresa of Avila was born to become a great Christian saint, a founder of convents.

  But not all did so well. Not by any means. For in 1476 a seed came into Spain from France and took root. It had first come to flower almost 250 years before in far away Lincoln in the windy cold island of England, far to the north. The archdeacons there had made an enquiry into the behaviour of the Jews in England. It was to spread, that inquiry. They called it the Inquisition.

  Led by Queen Isabella’s confessor, Tomas Torquemada, a train of priests and scribes and lesser and greater clergy, and not a few hangers-on ready to seize whatever fell from the skirts of the Inquisition’s robe, moved through the land. There was nothing dramatic about it, it really. Just a slow, methodical, even pernickety, process of law. Some cases lasted fourteen years or more. They would arrive in a town and set up their office in some convenient place – perhaps a shop loaned by local merchant eager to curry favour, sometimes in the market place itself, sometimes even building a special Palace of the Inquisition, if they intended to remain a long time – and start their enquiries.

  Who was there, they asked the local populace, among the new Christians, who wore clean linen on Fridays and Saturdays? Did any abstain from lighting fires on those days? Did they buy special wine or meat from known Jews? If there were such they must be brought before Torquemada and his minions and be questioned.

  What a great opportunity it all was for the people of these commercial towns. Did you owe a debt to a man whose father or grandfather had been a Jew? Splendid! Never mind that he sat next to you in church at very Sunday’s mass, or stood beside you to take his communion. Nod at Torquemada, and you could forget debt forever.

  Isabelle and Ferdinand benefited too: from the confiscated wealth of convicted Marranos, secret Jews. To be pious was very good business, and not bad politics either. Poor people with secret Jews to root out were much less likely to show any interest in what went on at court. It was a good time and a bad time, depending on which side you were.

  A confused time for the Da Montanas. About a third of the clan had converted. They came from a long line of survivors, drawing their determination to live from Susannah herself, that long ago fugitive from Roman cruelty who had brought them to this threat of Christian cruelty in Sepharad. What else should they do but convert?

  The more far sighted, like Doña Rachel Da Montana, did not. Doña Rachel was a formidable old lady of more than ninety summers – no one ever asked her age any more; it seemed insulting to do so, for she was so lined and se bent that she seemed as desiccated and eternal as al olive tree. Doña Rachel could just remember her own great grandmother, Doña Susannah, However views were clear and drawn directly from that long ago time when she had sat the old lady’s feet playing with a doll and listening to the words of wisdom, not really understanding them but storing them up all the same.

  ‘Remember always that God cares for you,’ Doña Susannah had told the infant Rachael and her brothers and cousins. ‘If you remain true to him, he will be true to you. Do not abandon his protection for the false protection of a different faith. Not just because it would be wicked. Because it would be stupid.

  Ancient Doña Rachel told her sons and daughters and grandchildren and great-grandchildren the same.

  ‘As long as we are Jews,’ she said in her cracked old voice, which scratched on the listener’s ear like a stone on slate, ‘the Christians can have no jurisdiction over us. They can rob us and harry us, but they do not own us. But become Christian and you give up the only protection you have – of not being one of them.’

  She was right, of course. Those of her kin who dismissed her words as the wanderings of an old fool, and what was worse an old fool of a woman, and converted soon found that their Christianity was their scourge. Never mind that in the early days after conversion they did well. Conversos had, in the past hundred years or so, spread themselves widely about Spain’s upper echelons. They were financiers and physicians, professors and courtiers, friends of princes and much sought after marriage partners by less rich families. There were few noble dynasties anywhere in the whole of Spain which had Marrano blood. Yen when Torquemada, his eyes on Isabella’s soul and coffers, started on his work their high connections were useless to them. They did not tell Doña Rachel of what happened to her brother’s great-great grandchild Catalina. She had been fond of the girl, in spite of her high handedness and her attempts to deny their relationship. Doña Rachel’s brother had been a Converso, and so his great-great-granddaughter Catalina regarding herself as very much a Christian.

  They took her to the offices of the Inquisition to face the Promoter Fiscal, after he had made his clamosa, the formal demand for the opening of the proceedings against her. She was just thirty years old, the mother of three fine sons and a plump daughter, the wife of a merchant of the city, a tall and handsome woman with her sleek dark hair and haughty black eyes. Because of the rule of secrecy which always surrounded Inquisition trials, none of the family knew that the charge was, who had laid it, what the calificadores, the lawyers who examined the charges, and presented in their calidad de officio, the justification for further proceedings.

  All the knew was that one morning while her husband Simão Da Montana was at his counting house, and she was sitting playing with her children in her richly appointed house in Cordoba, the arresting officers had come. Her servants had shrieked and run away. Not until her husband came home to find his house abandoned and his children screaming and alone in their nursery did he know anything was amiss. Even then, he could not find out what had happened. He went of course to his priest to ask his help, but that did him no good. As the priest told him and he knew perfectly well, everyone involved in a trial before the Inquisition was sworn to total secrecy. Even, poor devils, the accused –

  So, Doña Catalina, wife of Simão Da Montana, faced her trial. She did not of course know who her accuser was or what the accusations were. It was part of the complex rules of evidence that such facts should be withheld from the person before the court. She stood there, ice cold with fright, yet feeling the sweat trickling between her shoulder blades and breast and heard the intoning voices, and tried to think what she had done. If she could do that and then confess to it, then the torture would be less, and the pain diminished. She had heard enough of the tortures that were done to fear the coming days, for although secrecy was supposed to be the hallmark of the Inquisition, of course the stories came out of those dark cellars where the officers went about their business.

  Three times they asked her, each of the three Inquisitors in turn, to confess her crime. Three times she said, ‘I have committed no crime, señores. I am innocent of any sin.’ It was almost perfunctory, Catalina thought, staring up at the three men in red robes on their dais, seeing the clerks around the room with their heads together, chattering in whispers, laughing sometime, ignoring her. ‘I have committed no crime, señores. I am innocent of any sin … ’And no one listened or cared.

  ‘Strappado?’ one of the clerks in the court said, almost conversationally. ‘Strappado, senor? Cordeles?’

  They read the sentence of torture to Doña Catalina, starting with the promise of strappado, the rope, but she could not understand it. ‘I have done nothing, señores. Nothing at all. What is it you wish me to say? Tell me and I will say it – I do not wish to be in such trouble, señores. Just tell me what you want of me and I will freely confess and make my penance to save myself.’

  They carried her away to the cellar and stripped her and with modesty in tatters at her feet she thought that was hell. They hung her from a beam by a rope tied about her wrists and she cared nothing any more for her nakedness, not even when one of the jailers flicked his forefinger at he
r nipples and laughed to see her breast wobble as she slowly turned from side to side, for all the world like a beef carcass hung to be drained of blood after killing. They let the rope go loose and then pulled it tight just before her feet touched the ground so that her arms were pulled cruelly out of the sockets and she shrieked with the pain, forgetting her previous agony, and cried again. ‘I have done nothing – tell me what I have done and I will confess it. I did I did – I refused pork. I lit candles. Oh God, oh Christ, take my misery from me.’

  No one took her misery from her. They poured water into her throat through a great funnel until she thought she would drown, or burst, or both, and the pressed it out of her, in time to save her life, and again she shrieked, but this time in a hoarse croak for they had nearly ripped her throat out of her with the great funnel, that she had done nothing, but tell her what she had done, and she would do all the penances they wanted.

  They stopped at last, and threw her into a corner, naked, bleeding, in an agony of pain from her shoulder and her scarred throat and feet - for at one point in that long afternoon and they had anointed her feet with tar and then held them to the fire so that the tar caught fire. She lay therein own blood and vomit, naked and shuddering, and yet lived long enough to go through it all again three days later.

  Doña Catalina was lucky. She died that time, her heart leaping finally in her chest and giving up to release her from her agony, not for her the auto de fe, the public scourgings and burnings of the final Act of Faith that day after day filled the market place of the city with curling tendrils of smoke, scented with charred human flesh.