Then it happened. He found out the name of my Jewish family and where they live. Everything is now changed. As I sit here in the candlelight, the diary speaks to me. “Wake up, Vives. It’s time for action. The stakes are raised.”
“Stakes? Don’t talk of action? Let me wallow in words.” But the diary responds:
“Get to the house of the one you love, if it’s true you love her, and get there before he does.”
“Yes, diary, but first let me tell you how it happened.”
It was the holiday of St. Ansgar. We decided to get out of the city.
“Who is he, anyway?” Álvaro asked on that grey-skied morning. Muddy puddles dotted the street, cold water seeping through the cracks in my boots.
“Just the man who made the heathens here Christians,” I replied with a snigger.
“Perhaps he shouldn’t have troubled himself,” he said.
On the St. Ansgar’s Day, with the university in recess, we mounted two fine greys that trotted out of the cobbled city as if they knew exactly where they were going. We passed the muddy fields that had been frost-locked for months and two hours later came to the port city of Ostend. As we entered, he asked, as if trying to trip me up, “Must we attend mass even here, Juanito?”
“Of course,” I replied. “Why wouldn’t we?”
It was strangely quiet in the streets, usually bustling with salt seadogs, fishwives, and pickpockets. I breathed deeply and felt liberated by it. I decided, too rashly of course, that we should ignore Mass and go for a hearty drink instead. The sea-wall tavern was empty except for a pair of ugly dogs, scrapping for remnants of bones. A chandelier hung precariously by a single chain. The fire barely crackled as we huddled close together, our scarves and jackets still ruffled around us. After a minute or two, a balding, beer-fattened landlord arrived and sat down with us, breathing through blocked nostrils and oozing pus from a wound on his left cheek.
“So, you’re from the university, are you? Spaniards?” He had a thick guttural dialect. He scratched his wound and smelled his own fingers. “And you are paid for that? A waste of money.”
“Shouldn’t we bring the light of humanity to even the darkest corners?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, swallowing phlegm, “as for Spaniards, we had an interesting party the other week.”
I tried to laugh it off. Álvaro smirked and his eyes seemed to light up on cue.
“A family came from Bruges for a shipment of silks, and the old bugger’s daughters wore silver rings on their fingers and diamonds in their ears. You must know them if you’re from Bruges.”
I stood up and downed the last dram. “No, we do not know them, and we must go to Mass. Here, take a coin.”
The landlord grabbed the coin but continued. “There were two daughters with dark eyes to dazzle any man.” He glanced from Álvaro to me. “If you gentlemen like the womanly form, that is.”
Before I had a chance to speak or act, Álvaro jumped in. “What are these good Spaniards – if that’s who they are – doing in Flanders? What is their name and where do they live?”
I had to stop this but was unable to speak.
“Why they came here, I don’t know. But if you young men are seeking company from your own sort, head for the tallest house on the Verversdijk and make yourselves known.”
“And the family name?” Álvaro demanded.
“It is not our business to know!” I said.
It was too late. The landlord had already found his guest book. “A groat for the information, and another to keep my mouth shut.”
In an instant, Álvaro flung him three.
“You can read the name better than me,” he said.
Álvaro grabbed it. “It is Valldaura.”
The doors swung open and a rabble of men and women fell into the inn. Thoughts of my intimate Friday nights with the Valldauras flooded my mind – the secret prayers, lit only by two candles, with the windows boarded and the doors bolted. And the lovely girls with braided black hair and smiles that could surely warm the heart of even Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor. And there in my thoughts was my girl, lovely Marguerite. I could not put this family in danger, but how could I resolve this? The inn became louder by the minute, and my thoughts grew cloudy. A rowdy party of young sailors from England threatened to tear the place down with their laughing and storytelling:
“On dear old Bessie Blount, the good king took his mount,” one said.
An involuntary twitching overcame me, and I was on the floor. Then there was nothing.
Álvaro got me back here and laid me in my bed. A damp cloth dampened my brow. When I opened my eyes, I found a soft pillow had been placed under my head while the firmest one had been placed between my knees. I was lying on my left side so that the curve in my spine had the short side down so as not to strain my back. A Bible, open at the first psalm, lay on the bed. There was an apple chopped finely and steeped in honey on the table beside me, and as I lay there, I was aware that he sat in silence, watching as loyal as any parent or pet dog.
During the next few days, I was in torment. I was lost in thought, paralysed by the seizure. I couldn’t get out of bed to visit the tall house. On the fourth day, I felt my strength return. You’re right, diary: now is the time for action, so get back to your hiding place. I must go.
* * *
Like a monk, I dressed in a cassock and made for the tall house on the Verversdijk. I had always known that I’d be safe, for Señora Valldaura was my mother’s cousin, and her cool bony fingers had the same comfort as my mother’s hands. Bernardo of Toledo, her husband, was an expert in diamonds and a dealer in cloths. He was publicly baptised in Toledo at the age of ten. Still, fires were lit, the smell of burning flesh filled the air, and the screams of victims reciting Hebrew prayers were heard across the town.
On a moonlit night the family Valldaura locked the door of their house one last time, taking special care of the iron door key in case one day things changed, and they could return. On that night, they got past the city walls via a tunnel and passed through fields and forests and finally struck the mountainous road to Portugal. The road, they say, was shared with many a Nuevo, or a Morisco. All they had was what they wore and could carry, sacred possessions sown into their clothes.
“What sacred possessions?” I asked one Shabbat night.
Valldaura got them from the attic. There was a ruby rosary and a silver cross with pearls inset. There were diamonds and ingots that had been sewn into his wife’s dress until she was heavy, like a snow-laden cherry tree. “Not sacred to a Jew, these things,” I scoffed.
“Choose life,” he replied. “Don’t you remember that commandment?”
“Yes, but...”
“But nothing. If we must bargain for our lives, we will, so shut up.”
That was the way he spoke – quick, sharp, and always one step ahead.
Once in Lisbon, in a favela shared with rats and shit-strewn gutters, families still went missing in the dead of night. In the year known as fifteen hundred and six, three thousand Jews went to their deaths, and though they pledged loyalty to the king, his ears were not open. The Valldauras, who escaped by hiding in the coalbunker of a monastery, left on a sea that promised only a faint hope of survival. I have to think it was God’s light that directed them here, to Bruges, to save my lonely soul.
He is a little over five feet tall, with the big face and tarnished skin of a man who has truly lived life, and with the bulbous nose and sagging eyelids of a drinking man. It is not of Bernardo, though, that my heart sings, but his eldest daughter, Marguerite, my door marked “summer.”
She is nine years my junior. Her long-brocaded hair, black and shiny, tumbles down like waterfalls around her neck, and her dark skin glows by candlelight. Her pretty eyes do not betray the fear that has been the backcloth to her short life. When my eyes meet hers on those Fr
iday nights, she looks away. I hardly ever hear her voice.
We recite The Song of Songs, and she is allowed the part “Comfort me with apples.” I am lost in the magic of a safe land, and I promise myself that I will one day buy her a whole orchard full of apples. I always find an excuse to get up and brush past her, and as I do, I get a scent of wild poppies in a wheat field, for she is my future, my little bit of heaven on earth.
When I rapped on the door dressed as a monk, it was she who opened it. She peeled the door back and scanned me cautiously before she realised it was I. A deep dark male voice yelled, “Quiens es?”
“Father, its Señor Vives,” she called without taking her gaze away.
I bowed then took her hand and kissed it. Did she giggle? I think so, for surely, I am a gnarly branch on an old tree to her. But I can show her that with her loving hands I can be fashioned into a sleek arrow shaft to be prized, treasured, and loved.
Bernardo came out and took me to the long kitchen table, stained with six years of feasting, and asked Marguerite to bring me some bread. He put his thick hands around my shoulders as I sat, pinning me to my chair as he spoke. “Tell me where can I find a man to build Spanish looms. Which town is best to buy yarn by the hundred weight? Would it be Liege? Ghent?”
“There is a man here named de Castro. I’m not sure if he’s a friend or foe, but we have to be more secret than ever.”
The young whippet dog nudged his wet nose to my palm, and I give him my portion of bread, for how could I eat it in the presence of Marguerite? Maria, her younger sister, painfully shy and buried in her embroidery, balked at the name de Castro. Her father noticed it and, like a rabbi or great sage, cautioned us all.
“Spies are everywhere. Vives, keep your wagging tongue silent and do not falter.”
I told him of the fated trip to Ostend, the innkeeper, and the apoplexy. To ease my discomfort, Nicolas, his fourteen-year-old son, lunged down the stairs on a piece of sackcloth, making enough noise to raise the dead. In the distraction, I addressed Marguerite.
“What does your day bring, Señorita Valldaura?”
She looked at me and reached for an orange, a rarity in these lands, and a knife. She was silent for a minute before peeling it and looking for her father’s approval to speak, though he did not give it. There was silence. Finally, she said, “I haven’t yet had the day, have I? So how can I say what it brings?”
“Good answer, daughter.” Her father banged his fists on the table so that we all sat upright. He threw a scrap of bread at me, and all laughed as it hit me on the brow. He sipped something of his agua da vida and fought to keep it down. Yes, I was the object of derision. Yes, we were in upmost peril, but it was worth it just to see her smile and laugh. I saw in that moment that however hard the stony road and the burdens of the favelas were, they had not yet tarnished her smooth face with the bitter lines of vengefulness. Neither had they dimmed the spark of her pupils or sullied the whites of her eyes.
“But, if you had your perfect day, what would that bring you, Señorita?”
“Is there such a thing as a perfect day? For is a day not just a series of moments in the present.” She looked at me with a grin. “What are you talking about, señor?”
“Excellent, daughter. You have it!”
“Señor does not understand, does he, Father?”
“No, he does not. You can see that he is weak, daughter, not sharp like you.”
“I’m not sure if he’s weak, Papa, but I’ll find out one day and let you know!” She took off, kissed her fingers, and put them on to the door post as if saying a blessing to an invisible mezuzah. She was gone with a rapid, “Adios, señor,” and I was empty.
I departed, for I didn’t have the slightest interest in looms or yarn. I stumbled through the damp streets in my cassock. I realised we hadn’t spoken fully of the danger of de Castro, for he was the reason I had gone there, but the coward in me didn’t turn back. When I got back to my room to contemplate the smell of her, he stumbled up the stairs and knocked loudly. Entering, he shouted through with laughter in his wine-touched voice.
“How’s the day, Father? Never would have picked you for a Benedictine!”
He must have seen me in the cassock, even though it is heavy at the hood, and I had walked bent forward like a man twice my age. Did he see where I went?
The word “Father” brought me back to the greater task: I must get my father and my sisters from Valencia to here or to London. Why didn’t I go there? In his stubborn detachment, would push me away again? Is this a justification for my cowardice? Oh, my foolish and noble papa, if only you’d let me in.
He was baptised at the age of twenty-seven, in the terrible year before I was born. Yet he remained in every other sense a man of the golden age of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish concord. In fact, he was devoted to the study of the great Arab scholar Ala al-din Abu al-Hassan Ali ibn Abi-Hazm al-Qarshi al-Dimashqi. The Arab had compiled three wondrous works on anatomy and philosophy, and those books were what my father had a relationship with. The books had exquisite illustrations, and each vellum page became a family member. Father would turn them with all the respect of an angel dusting the throne of God. Every page was inked with brilliant gold, with blues and shining reds, and the colours flew off the pages to strike me, a child of six, like arrows. Each page described the intricate secrets of the mind and the metabolism, the complexities of the circulation. Each page inspired me to learn more.
From the profitable sale of woollen yarn, my father kept us safe in our whitewashed house in La Juderia, certain that the golden age was coming back as soon as the monarchs realised what they had lost. With his trusting mind, what else could he do? For time immemorial his forbears had walked these streets in peace, though it was impossible for him, when he became a man, to be who he was. So, he lost himself in study, and I lost myself in watching him. He would recite aloud, in Arabic, the wondrous words, as if by doing so he could keep the magic within himself. I didn’t know what he was saying, but I marvelled at the sacred voice and followed the shapes and the circles, the dropped spirals and raised verticals and the carefully placed dots of the Arabic letters. Those letters became entrenched in my soul long before the coarser Hebrew or Roman ones did. Even at that tender age, they raised my thoughts skyward to the heavens and to God.
The books disappeared as quickly as they were produced. To be found with those texts in the house would be enough to consign the whole family to the flames. They were the work of the infidel; knowledge in our kingdom was then, as it is now, considered satanic. And so my father would hide them every day, sometimes under a floorboard, sometimes between two walls, sometimes beneath a floorboard, and sometimes in a tin box in a secret ledge inside the grand fireplace, as if tempting and defying the very flames.
* * *
I take a sharp breath as I realise my new and difficult situation. Will Sir Thomas come for me soon, or should I just leave? There is a sudden tightness in my chest, close to where Father’s texts showed a beating heart. And I remember here, in my isolation, him comforting me with the words of the Ninety-First Psalm: “Together with him am I in distress, and I am safe again, sheltered beneath the angel’s wings.” Surely, Lord, he’s right, and one day soon this madness will be over? You’ll see to it, won’t you, Lord? That men will be allowed different truths as the world changes, and if you will not give it to us in Spain, say you will give it to us here in Flanders or there, in the place they call England.
* * *
There was a loud knock on my door.
“Let me in, Father Vives! Give me sanctuary!”
“Go away!” What could I do, though, but let him in. He marched through, picked up the brass astrolabe, and started playing with it. I could smell the red wine on his black beard.
“Your friends, these Valldauras, you must take me to them this Friday,” he said.
“I will not,
Señor de Castro, be given orders by you.” The hair on my neck bristled.
He walked to the front of me and giving me the astrolabe, said, “Nice Islamic piece, this. You’ll find you have no choice, Juanito—if you and your people are true to your commandments, that is.”
What was this some kind of blackmail? “I won’t be lectured on commandments. Leave me.”
He grabbed me by the shoulders, piercing me with his dark eyes. “Sir Thomas brought me to you for a reason, and he will know of your secrets. There will be grave trouble for you and for yours if you do not share them.” I could feel his warm breath on my face as he went on. “As will the Duke of Alba and Louis de Praet.” He turned to leave, but before he did so, said, “This Friday.”
What could I do? Murder him and make it look like an accident? Don’t laugh at me, diary! You know I’ve no stomach for a knife or a rope. I sat for a while and then knew what I had to do. I scribbled something, and when I could see beneath his door that his candles were extinguished, I went out in the cool of the evening and knocked again on the door of the tall house on the Verversdijk. In an instant, there she was: imperious, divine, dwarfing me as I stood on the step beneath her.
“Father’s has gone to Utrecht and won’t get back until Friday,” she said, giggling. “I’m not permitted to talk to you.”
I had to let them know that I would be bringing a strange guest this Friday and that we must not, under any circumstances, reveal who we are.
“Señorita, sweetness, you must give this to your father. It is imperative.”
She looked at me with doleful eyes.
“Our future depends on it,” I said.
She sensed my urgency as she grasped the note, making sure our fingers entwined, if only momentarily, and then turned away. Just before she closed the door, when it was too late for me to reply, she said, “I am not sure I can give it to him, for he cannot know that I have spoken alone with you.”
The door was shut and bolted; surely. Surely, she would pass this note on to her father so that we could have Friday night dinner safely.
The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives Page 5
