by Sarah Bower
My mother’s behaviour towards me did not change. She remained, if not cheerful, then steadily optimistic. She oversaw my prayers at the correct times of day; she taught me songs and made me practise the fingerings for the dulcimer on patches of flat earth or a strip of decking marked out with chalk. She saw to it I had plenty of needlework to do, though now it was more patching and darning than embroidery, and reassured me my ears were so small the Corsair of Genoa would be sure to spare me, to throw me back into the sea like a fish too little for eating. When, at the beginning of our sea voyage, before I had my sea legs, I was sick, she hid her own failing health long enough to hold my head while I vomited over the ship’s rail and make me gargle seawater. The best cure, she said. I was sure she had no idea I now knew what she truly thought of me.
***
As my mother’s exodus had begun between light and dark, so it ended in the margin between land and sea, on the beach at Nettuno. It was hot, the sun at its summer zenith, a ball of white fire in a sky scoured of everything but the tense silhouettes of buzzards describing their waiting circles. The beach was striated with shrivelled bladderwrack; the dry white sand kept falling away beneath our feet as we struggled away from the sea with our bags and boxes. There was no shade. So many were sick the captain had panicked and put us ashore at the first sight of land, and his boats, as we rigged makeshift canopies over those too ill to go any further, were nothing more than giant insects crawling across the sparkling face of the sea.
I sat miserably beside my mother, waiting for her to get better and chide me for my bare feet and the tear in my dress which I had picked at until it was beyond repair. Nobody spoke to me or took care of me; they were all too busy checking over their possessions or looking after their own sick. Some boys were sent to look for fresh water, or a village where help might be obtainable, and I longed to go with them but I dared not. What would my mother say if she woke up and found I had gone roaming around the countryside with a group of boys? I wiggled my toes in the sand; I held my mother’s hand and imagined I felt an answering pressure; I believed the rasp and rattle of her breathing were attempts at speech.
After a while, with no daughter of her own to care for any longer, Señora Abravanel came to sit with me. She took a comb from her girdle and combed my hair. She talked to me about Rachel, which I found embarrassing, and I wondered why she did nothing for my mother, to help her get better.
Suddenly, my mother’s lips began to move, and she jerked her head feebly from side to side, as though trying to shake off a fly.
“Esther?” Her voice was as dry and powdery as the sand.
“Yes, mama?”
“Where are you?” She pawed at the sand until her fingers touched my bare calf, then she smiled, stretching the purplish cracks in her lips.
“I don’t think she can see you,” said Señora Abravanel.
“Why not?”
Señora Abravanel was spared the need to reply when my mother spoke again. “I lived for you, my darling, I was so proud. I’m sorry.”
Sorry? Sorry for what? Surely it was I who had to be sorry, because I had brought all these misfortunes down on us.
Señora Abravanel tugged gently at my hand. “Come along, Esther, there’s nothing more to be done here. Señor Abravanel and I will take care of you.”
Nobody ever actually told me my mother had died, and so I did not believe she was dead. Even when I saw the men say the prayers for the dead over her, and pass a coin over her eyes, even though she made no attempt at resistance when they cut her nails and pulled out a few strands of her hair and wrapped them in a cloth and gave it to me. They apologised that there was no bread to conduct the rites of food with, and wondered aloud if the casting out of water could be done with saltwater as well as sweet, but she did not seem to mind.
When the boys came back and reported they had found a village, and everyone was preparing to leave, I dragged behind so mama could catch up with me when she felt better. At the next bend in the track, I told myself, or the next time I saw a cow, or a seagull, or a lizard on a rock, I would turn round and see her striding towards us. So it was I left my mother on the beach with the tide nibbling her toes by stages, each backward look more despairing than the last, but bearable, taken one at a time. Señora Abravanel clung to my hand and in Nettuno they believed I was her daughter. She received their compliments on my fair hair without demur.
The people of Nettuno, fearful of disease, gave us food and water, and mules to speed us on our way to Rome. I sat up in front of Señor Abravanel, in a cradle of shifting bones, the mule’s and Señor Abravanel’s, hugging to my chest the leather satchel Señora Abravanel had given me, which smelled faintly of home. She said it contained our mezuzah and the key to our house, and my mother’s book of recipes which I would need one day, when I was married. Surely, I thought, Mama would have caught up with us by then.
We remained unmolested on the road, perhaps because He whom we cannot name is in the habit of keeping an eye on His people as they move from place to place, perhaps because the people on this coast had grown used to parties of homeless Jews, stinking of saltwater and rejection and riddled with the contagion of defeat.
Though Rome might consider itself the centre of the civilised world, it was then a smaller city than Toledo, and my father, whose Valencian Cardinal Borja had, with the aid of his own fortune and my father’s financial judgement, made himself pope, was not difficult to find in the Jewish quarter close to the Campo de’ Fiori. His was one of the largest houses, newly built and surrounded by gardens, just as he had promised my mother and I before he left Toledo.
I expect he was happy to see me, and I him, and that he was distressed by the death of my mother, whom I believe he cared for in his fashion, but I cannot remember. Somewhere on the road from Nettuno, swaying and jolting on the back of a mule, I had lost myself, and it would be a long time until that self would be rediscovered. To begin with, Eli, who was six years older than me, so almost a man, and should have known better, used to pester me. Where’s your fight, Esther? You’re such a pushover. Come on, hit me back.
I didn’t. I became a model of maidenly virtue. I caused my father no shame and gave him everything to be proud of as his star rose in the heavens commanded by Pope Alexander VI. Along with several well-born young Roman women, I practised music and embroidery under the supervision of the nuns of the Convent of Santa Clara, who seemed to see nothing odd in educating a Jewish girl. From the rabbi I learned Torah and from a young Greek scholar with hungry eyes and a tubercular bloom, my brothers and I learned Greek and Latin and geometry. And from the girls at Santa Clara I learned how to dress my hair, pinch a flush into my cheeks, and drop rosewater in my eyes to make them sparkle, and that the hunger in the young scholar’s eyes probably didn’t arise in his belly.
Though my father faithfully performed the proper rituals on what he calculated to be the anniversary of my mother’s death, and lit candles in her memory on Yom Kippur, he never spoke to me about her, nor I to him.
***
My father called me into his study one afternoon early in the month I had learned to call September, in the year after the Jubilee, when he had returned from doing business at the Vatican. The day meal had been eaten and cleared away, and the house was still, sleeping away the heat of the afternoon. Even the house slaves were resting, in their wooden dormitory opposite the stable block. Simeon was probably not in his own bed, and probably not resting, but this was just one of many pieces of intelligence my father and I shared yet did not talk about. He ran a successful bank; I kept an orderly house for him. The rooms were swept away from the door; we had separate kitchens for meat and dairy; we observed the fasts and feasts with their proper rituals, lit candles for Shabbat, and kept the mezuzah my mother had carried from Toledo and I from Nettuno fastened to our doorpost. It would be dishonest to say we loved one another; neither of us would admit an emotion as messy as love to our well ordered universe. We kept one another in balance, like
finely calibrated scales.
My father was sitting at his desk when I entered, staring at a space somewhere between the table’s edge and the doorway where I stood, fiddling a ring around one broad finger. I waited for him to speak, noting with annoyance that his copy of the padron real hung slightly crooked on the wall behind him. I had warned Mariam repeatedly about dusting that map. She was to leave it to me; the map was far too valuable to be handled by a slave. My father would have been better advised to keep it locked in a chest rather than exposed to air and dust and the covetous eyes of others.
“Shut the door, daughter, there’s a draught.”
I pushed the heavy, panelled door to, then dropped my father a curtsey.
“Sit down, Esther. No, here.” He rose from his desk and came to join me in the pair of cushioned chairs which stood either side of the porphyry fireplace. He gave a half-hearted slap at a mosquito which had landed on his cheek. “You are aware Donna Lucrezia is to marry again?” he asked. Had I but known it, the scales were about to tip.
“I would have to be deaf and blind not to be. The cannonade from Sant’Angelo when the news was announced nearly shook my teeth out.” Nor had the cannonade been enough for the jubilant pontiff, the upstart Catalan whose bastard daughter was about to marry into one of the foremost families of Italy, the Este of Ferrara. He had also caused the Capitoline bell to be tolled for most of the night and had bonfires lit in the grounds of the castle, laced with explosive charges which threatened to ignite the Sant’Angelo bridge. The following day, Donna Lucrezia had processed to the church of Santa Maria by the Porta del Popolo in the company of three hundred horsemen and four bishops, which must have felt more like three thousand and forty to anyone trying to go about his daily business in the cramped streets. When the Holy Father’s children had something to celebrate, the Holy Father made sure his spiritual children had no option but to celebrate too. There had even been a display of two clowns dressed in Donna Lucrezia’s cast off gowns, sashaying around the town proclaiming, “Long live the most illustrious Duchess of Ferrara!” Actually, they had been really funny, pursing their carmined lips and squawking in falsetto voices.
“Three husbands before she’s one and twenty. That’s quite a record.” I was fifteen, and my friends at Santa Clara and I were women of the world. We knew all the gossip, and much of it concerned Donna Lucrezia, the pope’s favourite daughter.
I did not wonder at the pope’s having a daughter. Our rabbi had nine sons, and it struck me as unnatural—if I thought about it at all, which I rarely did—for a priest not to have a family. A priest’s congregation is a kind of family, so surely he can minister to them better if he knows how families work. Nor did my Christian friends remark on Donna Lucrezia’s parentage; one or two of them were cardinals’ daughters.
“She has been unlucky in her husbands, it’s true,” said my father carefully.
I struggled to keep the smirk from my face. Even by Roman standards, Donna Lucrezia’s life was sensational. To begin with, she lived with her father’s mistress, the gorgeous Giulia Farnese, who was only three years older than Donna Lucrezia herself and married to one of her cousins. Donna Lucrezia had married her first husband at thirteen and divorced him four years later on grounds of impotence. Though according to Battista Farignola, whose older sister was being pursued by Donna Lucrezia’s brother, Don Juan, at the time, she was six months gone when she testified to her continuing virginity. No baby ever appeared, so who could know?
“His Holiness says she is much chastened since her widowhood,” my father persisted, staring at me until I stopped smiling.
Donna Lucrezia’s second husband, Alfonso of Bisceglie, who was a distant relation of King Ferdinand, and, said Lucia de Mantova, absolutely divinely good looking, had been murdered about a year previously, some said by Donna Lucrezia’s oldest brother, the Duke Valentino. The girls kept quiet about that; keeping quiet was the wisest thing to do where the Duke was concerned.
Only a week before, Little Haim had told me he had seen a man’s severed hand, with his tongue stitched to his little finger, hanging from a window of the Savelli prison, and that Duke Valentino had put it there because the man had written a public letter accusing the duke of living like a Turk with a harem of prostitutes. I had screamed and stopped my ears and thought, though I could scarce admit it to myself, of the Corsair of Genoa.
“And you should consider your betters with more respect,” my father added. As for being my better, Donna Lucrezia’s father might be pope but everyone said her mother was just an innkeeper, albeit a wealthy one, who had done well out of last year’s Jubilee, when the city was packed with pilgrims from all over the world.
“Yes, Papa.” I could see my father was struggling with whatever it was he had to tell me and had no wish to make it harder for him.
“Duke Ercole of Ferrara, her new father-in-law, drives a hard bargain by all accounts,” he continued, “and has put a high price on the hand of his son and heir. I am to help His Holiness with the dowry.”
What had this to do with me? I waited. My father cleared his throat. He looked at me, his hands steepled in front of his mouth, then seemed to come to a decision. “His Holiness very graciously suggested, Esther, that you might be considered as a lady-in-waiting to Donna Lucrezia, should she find you pleasing.”
“Me, Papa? Go to Ferrara? That’s right at the other end of Italy. I might never see you again. I can’t.” I was leaning towards him, fists clenched in my lap, shoulders hunched. My eyes raked his face to see if he really meant it. Perhaps this was some elaborate test of my loyalty.
“You would have to be baptised, of course.”
Once again I felt that fear of the unknown that had trickled between my shoulder blades almost ten years ago in Toledo, as I listened to my parents arguing about the Edict of Expulsion. I had not, I realised, ever been afraid since, not truly afraid. Until now, and now I was too old simply to pull my pillow over my ears.
“How could you even say such a thing?” My voice surprised me, so calm and steady despite the anger beginning to seethe inside me. I sounded like my mother. My father’s eyes told me he had noticed it too.
“Now before you fly into a temper, listen to me, daughter. You are fifteen years old. If we were still in Toledo, you would likely be married by now. But we aren’t, we are here and our people are scattered. I have to consider your future. There is no one else to do it.”
“Señora Abravanel will find me a husband, Papa,” I interrupted, though I, too, was not saying what I really meant. “She is a good matchmaker. You let her choose for Eli, why not me?”
“Eli will not marry for years. Josepha is still a child. And a son…well, it’s different. If you go with Donna Lucrezia, she will be able to find you a husband among the nobility, a man of standing and good fortune who will keep you…safe,” he finished lamely. “Duke Ercole apparently approves the idea that his daughter-in-law should have a reformed Jewess among her ladies to whom she can give religious guidance and instruction. He is a very pious man.”
Now I laughed, though my laughter was harsh and humourless. “Me? Receive religious instruction from Lucrezia Borgia? Have you any idea how absurd that sounds?”
“She takes communion every day, I’m told, since the death of the Duke of Bisceglie, and has taught their son his catechism herself.”
I was breaking myself against a wall. “My mother died because she was Jewish. How do you think such talk would make her feel?” I held my breath. I waited for the roof to cave in. I could not look at my father, but I heard the wincing intake of breath, as though he had cut his finger or stubbed his toe.
“Do you think it has been easy for me, all these years,” he asked quietly, “watching you grow up, becoming more and more like her? Because you are, you know, despite your fair hair and blue eyes. The way you looked at the padron real when you came in. Just like her. And if you’re thinking Mariam has been at it with her dustcloths again, she hasn’t. I brushed against
it when I came to my desk. You say your mother died because she was Jewish. If that’s true, do you think she’d want the same to happen to you? Because we’re never safe, you know, among Christians. They believe we gave up their messiah for crucifixion. Having done that, we’re no longer necessary to their salvation so they feel at liberty to take their revenge. The pope is nearly seventy. Who’s to say his successor will be as amenable as he is? Who’s to say there might not be another expulsion? Believe me, Esther, your mother would support me in this. Use your advantage; get away from us while you can.”
A war raged inside me. On the one hand, my father was asking me to betray my culture, my upbringing, the people I had known all my life. On the other, though I was conscientious in observing our rites and rituals, I had never paused to consider whether I actually had faith in the beliefs which lay behind them. They were marks on the calendar, historical remembrances, occasions for feast or fast, parties or vigils. It would not be that difficult to exchange one set for another, especially as many, like Christmas and Easter, fell close to our own festivals. My mother’s passion and my father’s pragmatism were doing battle for my soul.
“You may take the rest of the day to think, if you wish,” my father conceded with a tight smile.
“I will do as you ask, Papa.” I was suddenly certain, almost as though someone had whispered it in my ear, that I was not destined to die on a beach somewhere, barefoot and fever blind with a ragged child squatting beside me in the sand. I stood and awaited his permission to leave.
