The Hand of Fatima

by Falcones, Ildefonso

  ‘You will have to come to an arrangement about that with the duchess and the trustees appointed by Don Alfonso, may he rest in peace,’ the notary snapped coldly.

  Hernando grasped him by the forearm, forcing him to come to a halt. He pulled the old man round to face him.

  Two women passing by at that moment glanced at them in surprise, then continued on their way, whispering to each other. Pablo Coca’s two men came up.

  ‘Listen, Don Melchor, I have an idea. You settle things for me with the duke’s family. And do it quickly, do you hear me? Because otherwise I won’t give you the grace period you asked for. If you do as I ask, I’ll return your promissory note . . . for nothing.’

  57

  But the author of this tale, who has searched with great curiosity into the deeds that Don Quixote performed in his third adventure, has been unable to find any mention of them, at least in authentic writings. Only legend has reported, in the annals of La Mancha, that Don Quixote, the third time he left his house, went to Zaragoza, where he took part in the famous jousting tourneys held in that city, and things happened to him worthy of his courage and understanding. Nor could he discover anything relating to his end or destiny, apart from having the good fortune to find an old physician who had in his possession a leaden chest that according to him had been uncovered in the foundations of an ancient hermitage that was being demolished and rebuilt. In this chest were found parchments written in Gothic characters but in Castilian verses, which told of his feats, and told of the beauty of Dulcinea del Toboso, the figure of Rocinante, the faithful Sancho Panza, as well as the burial of Don Quixote himself, with different epitaphs regarding his life and customs.

  Miguel de Cervantes in the words of Cide Hamete Benengeli, Morisco. Don Quixote Part One, Chapter LII

  A house with a courtyard in the Santa María neighbourhood, near the cathedral in Calle Espaldas de Santa Clara, as well as several plots of land near Palma del Rio belonging to an abandoned farmhouse, which brought in an annual rent of almost four hundred ducats, plus three pairs of hens, five hundred pomegranates, as many walnuts and three bushels of olives brought to him each week by his tenants, plums and winter or summer vegetables too. This was the legacy, along with sums of money to pay the dowry of deserving but poor young women, or for the redemption of captive Christians, that Don Alfonso de Córdoba willed in favour of the person who had saved his life in the Alpujarra. Melchor Parra and the trustees of the duke’s will handed over the legacy without complaint, apart from the envy and insults that the notary, with a touch of sarcasm, assured him he had heard from the string of courtiers who had not received a penny – that was, all of them.

  ‘It seems that none of them likes you very much,’ said Parra, unable to disguise his satisfaction as the Morisco signed all the property deeds.

  Hernando did not respond. He finished signing and straightened up in front of the notary. He searched for the promissory note in his clothing and handed it over to him, with the trustees as witness.

  ‘The feeling is mutual, Don Melchor.’

  After settling up with Pablo, who had his heart set on the young noble’s sword and ring, and arranging to repay Don Pedro de Granada Venegas’s hundred ducats, Hernando still had a considerable sum of money left to keep him going until he could start to enjoy his new house and his rents.

  Life for him had taken yet another unexpected twist.

  ‘It’s rented out, your honour,’ Miguel complained as the two of them stood outside the property in Calle Espaldas de Santa Clara. Hernando had told him to get everything ready to transfer Volador and his mother to the new house. ‘You’ll have to wait until the contract ends.’

  ‘No,’ Hernando declared. ‘Do you like it?’ Miguel whistled between his broken teeth to show what he felt about the magnificent building. ‘Good, so here is what we are going to do. I’ll go back to the inn, and you stay here and ask for the mistress of the house. The mistress, Miguel: have you got that?’

  ‘They won’t allow me to. They’ll think I’ve come begging.’ ‘Try. Tell them you’re the new owner’s servant.’ When he heard this, Miguel almost lost his balance on the crutches. ‘Yes, that’s right. I don’t think either my mother or my horse could find a better servant than you. Try – I’m sure you’ll succeed.’

  ‘And if I do?’

  ‘Tell the lady of the house that from now on she will have to pay the rent to her new landlord: the Morisco Hernando Ruiz, from Juviles. Make sure she understands I’m a Morisco, one of those who took part in the Alpujarra uprising, and that I was expelled from Granada. And that in spite of all this, I am the new owner. Repeat it several times if necessary.’

  The tenants, a wealthy family of silk merchants, took less than a week to return the house to Hernando, once they had confirmed with the duchess’s secretary that he was indeed the new owner. What self-respecting old Christian could allow himself to have a Morisco as landlord?

  The sunny courtyard, with the scent of flowers and the constant sound of water from the fountain, seemed to breathe new life into Aisha. A few days after they had moved in, as Miguel was looking after her, telling her stories out loud while he picked flowers to put in her lap, Hernando saw his mother move her hand slightly.

  The memory of what Fátima had said the day he found his children taking classes in the courtyard of their first home came rushing back to his mind: Hamid has said that water is the source of life. The source of life! Could it be that his mother might recover?

  With this fresh hope he walked over to the odd couple. Miguel was almost shouting out the story of an enchanted house.

  ‘The walls rustled like reeds in the wind . . .’ the lad was saying when his master came up to them.

  Hernando smiled and looked down at his mother, slumped in a chair by the fountain.

  ‘She’s going to leave us,’ he heard Miguel say to him.

  Hernando spun round to face him. ‘What? But she looks better!’

  ‘She’s going, your honour. I know it.’

  They looked at each other. Miguel held his gaze, and then narrowed his eyes to confirm his premonition. Shaking his head slightly as if to share Hernando’s pain, he went on with his story.

  ‘The wall of the room where the girl was sleeping vanished as if by magic, Señora María. Can you imagine that? An enormous hole . . .’

  Not paying any attention to the story, Hernando knelt in front of his mother and stroked her knee. Was Miguel really able to foresee death? Aisha seemed to react to her son’s touch, and moved her hand again.

  ‘Mother,’ Hernando whispered.

  Miguel came closer.

  ‘Leave us, I beg you,’ Hernando said.

  Miguel withdrew to the stables, and Hernando took his mother’s bony hand in his.

  ‘Can you hear me, Mother? Are you able to understand what I’m saying?’ he sobbed as he squeezed her frail fingers. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. If I had only told you . . . if I had done that, none of this would have happened. I have never stopped fighting for our cause.’

  He told her all he had done, and explained the work Don Pedro had asked him to do: everything they were hoping to achieve!

  When he finished, Aisha made no movement. Hernando hid his face in her lap and gave in to his tears.

  Four days went by until Miguel’s prediction came true. Four long days during which, alone with his mother, Hernando recounted the details of his life time and again, while she gradually slipped away, until one morning she peacefully breathed her last.

  Hernando did not want to pay for any burial or funeral ceremony. Miguel grimaced when he heard his master telling this to the Santa María priest. He had deliberately only informed him when Aisha was already dead to come and give extreme unction and remove her from the list of Moriscos in the parish.

  ‘Even though she was my mother, she was possessed by the devil, Father,’ Hernando tried to excuse himself, giving him a few coins to perform ceremonies that were not going to take place.
‘That was what the Inquisition ruled.’

  ‘I know,’ said the priest.

  ‘I can’t explain,’ he told Miguel later, who was still shocked at what he had heard.

  ‘Did you say she was possessed by the devil?’ the lad protested, losing his balance on his crutches. ‘Even if she said nothing, your mother suffered more than I did when my family used me to beg with! She deserved a burial—’

  ‘I know what my mother deserves, Miguel,’ Hernando cut him short.

  He would not have achieved his aim if he had paid for Aisha to be buried in the parish cemetery, rather than in the common graves in the Campo de la Merced, where nobody looked after the bodies. Who cared about corpses whose relatives had not been able to give them a decent Christian burial?

  ‘Go home,’ he ordered Miguel after they had seen the gravediggers throw his mother’s body into the grave without the slightest respect.

  ‘What are you going to do, your honour?’

  ‘Go home, I say.’

  Hernando went to the royal stables in search of Abbas. He was allowed in, and presented himself in the forge. He found the blacksmith had aged since the last time they had spoken, when the Morisco community refused to accept his charity. The smith also saw how grief had left its mark on Hernando’s face.

  ‘I doubt if anyone will be willing to help you,’ Abbas said curtly when Hernando explained the reason for his visit.

  ‘They will do if you tell them to. I’ll pay well.’

  ‘Money! That’s all you’re interested in.’ Abbas stared at him scornfully.

  ‘You’re wrong, but I don’t want to argue with you. You know that my mother was a good Muslim. Do it for her. If you won’t do it, I’ll have to look for a couple of drunken Christians in Plaza del Potro, and then we run the risk of people getting to know how we bury our dead and of the Inquisition investigating. You know the priests would be capable of digging up the whole burial ground.’

  That night two strong young men and an old woman went with him. They would not accept any money, but refused to talk to him. They left the city for the Campo de la Merced through a derelict gate in the old walls. By moonlight in the deserted cemetery the two young Moriscos dug up Aisha’s body on Hernando’s instructions. They handed the corpse over to the old woman and began to dig a long, narrow hole in virgin ground to the depth of a man’s waist.

  The old woman had come prepared. She stripped the body and washed it. Then she rubbed it with soaked vine leaves. ‘Lord! Forgive her and have mercy on her,’ she recited over and over again.

  ‘Amen,’ Hernando responded. He was standing with his back to her, his eyes veiled with tears as he gazed at a darkened Córdoba. The law forbade anyone not washing the corpse from looking at it, and Hernando would never even have considered infringing the rule.

  ‘Lord God, forgive me!’ the old woman said when she accidentally touched the body after purifying it. ‘Did you bring the cloths?’ she asked Hernando.

  Without turning to face her, Hernando passed the woman several white linen cloths to wrap Aisha’s tiny body in. The two young men, who had finished digging the hole, came to take the body and bury it, but Hernando stopped them.

  ‘What about the prayer for the dead?’ he asked them.

  ‘What prayer?’ he heard one of them ask.

  They were probably twenty years old, thought Hernando. They had been born in Córdoba. All of these young people shunned study, knowledge of the revealed book or prayers. Instead they professed a blind hatred for all Christians, hoping in this way to appease their souls. They probably only knew the profession of faith, he lamented.

  ‘Put the body by the grave and leave if you wish.’

  Then in the moonlight he raised his arms and began the lengthy prayer for the dead: ‘God is great. Praise be to God, the giver of life and death. Praise be to God, who resurrects the dead. He only is great, He only is sublime, He has the power . . .’

  The two young men and the old woman stood behind him while he recited the prayer.

  ‘Is this the man they call the Nazarene?’ one of the young men whispered to the other.

  Hernando finished the prayer. They placed Aisha on her side in the grave, facing the kiblah. Before covering her body with stones, on to which they would shovel earth in order for the burial not to be visible, Hernando slipped the letter of the dead inside the linen shroud. He had written it that afternoon with perfect lettering in saffron ink, in close communion with Allah.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Ask your holy scholar,’ Hernando said gruffly. ‘You can go now. Thanks.’

  The young men and the old woman left with grunted farewells. Hernando was on his own at the graveside. His mother’s life had been one of great hardship. Memories of her came to his mind, but unlike previous occasions when they had flashed by chaotically, now they appeared slowly and clearly. He stood by the grave for a long time, tears alternating with nostalgic smiles. She was at peace now, he consoled himself before heading back to the city.

  When he had climbed through the opening in the wall, he heard a muffled but familiar sound behind his back. He stopped in the middle of a narrow alleyway.

  ‘Don’t hide,’ he said into the night. ‘Come out here with me, Miguel.’

  The lad did not obey.

  ‘I heard you,’ insisted Hernando. ‘Come on.’

  ‘My lord.’ Hernando tried to identify where the voice was coming from. It sounded sad. ‘When you took me on as a servant, you said you needed me to look after your mother and your horse. Now María Ruiz has died, and . . . I can’t even reach up to put a bridle on Volador.’

  Hernando felt a shudder go through his whole body. ‘Do you think I would turn you out of my house just because my mother has died?’

  A few moments went by until the clicking sound of crutches filled the silence that had followed his question. Miguel appeared out of the darkness. ‘No, your honour,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you would do that.’

  ‘My horse appreciates you, I know that, I can see it. As for my mother . . .’ Hernando’s voice failed him.

  ‘You loved her very much, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hernando sighed. ‘But she didn’t . . .’

  ‘She died comforted,’ said Miguel. ‘She died in peace. You can be assured that she heard your words.’

  Hernando tried to make out the features of the young lad in the gloom. What was he saying?

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked.

  ‘That she understood your explanations and knew you had not betrayed your people.’ Miguel spoke with his head bowed, not raising his eyes from the ground.

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘You must forgive me.’ He raised his sincere eyes to Hernando’s face. ‘I am nothing more than a beggar, a vagrant. Life for people like me depends on what we hear in the streets, round a corner . . .’

  Hernando shook his head.

  ‘But I am loyal,’ Miguel hastened to add. ‘I would never denounce you. I swear I wouldn’t, even if they broke my arms.’

  Hernando said nothing for a few moments. How could the lad be sure his mother had died comforted?

  ‘I have wished for death many times,’ said Miguel, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I’ve been at death’s door many times when I’ve been ill on the streets, all alone, scorned by people who stepped aside so as not to go near me. I have been in the same state as her, and in that limbo I have known dozens of souls like Señora María’s, all of them on the threshold of death. Some are fortunate and are allowed in; others are rejected and have to carry on suffering. I know it. I could hear them. I can assure you I know what she felt.’

  Hernando still said nothing. Something about the lad made him trust him, believe in his words. Or was it simply his own wish that his mother had died in peace? He sighed and put his arm round the boy’s shoulders.

  ‘Let’s go home, Miguel.’

  ‘I confirmed it, my lady.’ Back in Tetuan, th
e young Ephraim raised his voice when faced with the constant cries of disbelief from Fátima as he gave her Aisha’s message. His father, who had gone with him to Brahim’s palace, put his hand on his son’s forearm to calm him down. ‘I confirmed it,’ Ephraim said again, less agitatedly this time, while Fátima continued to pace up and down the luxurious room giving on to the palace courtyard. ‘When I had finished talking to Aisha, the blacksmith from the royal stables came looking for me—’

  ‘Abbas?’ Fátima blurted out.

  ‘A man called Jerónimo. He was the one who told me where the woman lived. He must have followed me and waited for me to finish with her before he intercepted me and assailed me with questions—’

  ‘Did you tell him anything about me?’ asked Fátima, interrupting him once more.

  ‘No, my lady. I told him what my father and I had agreed to say if things did not turn out well: that I was looking for Hernando because I had an excellent thoroughbred Arab horse I was given as payment for a shipment of oil, which I wanted him to train for me.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He didn’t believe me. He insisted on wanting to know about the letter he had seen Aisha tear to pieces and throw into the Guadalquivir, but I refused to say anything about it. I swear it.’

  ‘What did Abbas say?’ asked Fátima, coming to a halt nervously in front of the young Jew. She had just listened to him tell her about the state in which he had found Aisha: he had spoken of her obvious broken health, how old and ill she looked. Perhaps . . . perhaps she had gone mad? Fátima thought. But Abbas would not lie! He was Hernando’s friend. They had worked side by side, putting their lives at risk for the community. Not Abbas. He could not lie.

  Ephraim hesitated. ‘My lady, that Jerónimo, or Abbas as you call him, confirmed everything the mother had said to me. That night, he invited me to stay in the house of someone called Cosme, a friend of his held in great respect by the Morisco community in Córdoba. Both of them confirmed in greater detail what Aisha had said. Soon after they believed you were dead – because they think you are dead, my lady, both you and your children . . .’ Fátima acknowledged this with a sigh. ‘Well, less than a year after that, your husband went to live in the palace of the Duke of Monterreal. They oozed hatred for the Nazarene, my lady.’ His father stirred uneasily when Ephraim talked of Hernando in this way, but it seemed only to make Fátima more resolute: her expression hardened and she clenched her fists even tighter. ‘The entire Morisco community hates him for what he has done and how he has betrayed them. I could see that from several of Cosme’s neighbours. I’m sorry,’ the young man concluded after a few moments’ silence.