The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  Rosa saw how Gabriel’s eyes lit up every time he looked at Luna, how he took her in his arms with infinite gentleness, kissed her eyes, raised her in the air and exalted her as if she were a work of art. But she, she didn’t have room in her heart yet. She hadn’t finished mourning for baby Raphael, may he rest in peace, and now this one had come too soon.

  Deep down, she was also jealous of the special attention that Gabriel lavished on their daughter. To Rosa, he was distant and spoke only about the baby and the house. He never honored her with words or gestures of love. He always simply did his duty. He had come to her bed only a few times since they were married, and not once since Luna was born. Even when he did come to her bed, he did only what he needed and then got up and went back to his own bed at the other side of the room. Rosa never complained, as life with Gabriel was far better than her previous life. She had food and clothing and was able to provide for her young brother. She was very fortunate to have been married into the wealthy and respected Ermosa family. Who would have believed she could be so lucky?

  Although she blessed her good fortune, in her heart she hoped that her husband would eventually treat her lovingly and perhaps, just perhaps, touch her once the way she wanted to touch him, with pleasure, tenderness. Perhaps just once when he came to her at night, he would kiss her on the lips. He’d never kissed her, not even under the wedding canopy. She knew she’d disappointed him when baby Raphael died. He hadn’t uttered a word of consolation, laid a hand on her shoulder. He’d never said a word to her about it at all.

  * * *

  Mercada had daily conversations with Raphael. After Luna was born, she lifted her face to the heavens and told him, “Luckily the child came out looking like Gabriel. God help us if she’d looked like Rosa.”

  The insult she’d felt when Gabriel had not shown her the proper respect by naming the baby after her, as was customary, she didn’t reveal to anyone, and certainly not to the baby’s parents. Mercada had no doubt: This was Gabriel’s way of expressing his displeasure that she had forced him to marry Rosa. If it makes him feel better, so be it. I don’t need any favors, she thought, and she never raised the subject. And when her daughter Clara tried to comment, she cut her off and said, “Thank God, a healthy, sound child was born, and that’s what’s important. And you, sera la boca, shut your mouth, not another word about it, not to your brother and not to anyone else!”

  Mercada understood her son’s anger. In the evening, when all the women neighbors sat around the well on low stools and gossiped, Mercada would cast her eyes over them, noticing they all seemed worthier than Rosa. She also found herself visiting the homes of her other children more and more, especially Clara’s. “God forgive me,” she said to her daughter. “I thought I was punishing Gabriel, but I punished myself. I can’t stand his wife. I can’t stand her smell. I can’t breathe with her in the same house. I’m coming to live with you!”

  “With pleasure, Mama querida,” Clara replied. “But don’t forget that I, Yaakov, and the children live in the same room, so where will you sleep?”

  “I don’t care. If necessary I’ll sleep on the floor, but I’m not living in the same house as that gorda, that fat one.”

  The next day she packed a few belongings and moved into Clara’s house without informing Gabriel or Rosa. When Gabriel came home from work, he asked where his mother was. Rosa shook her head and said she hadn’t seen her since the morning, when Rosa had taken the baby for a walk in the pram.

  Gabriel didn’t pay further attention to his mother’s absence. He went to Luna and lifted her up. She was his consolation, the reason he loved coming home each night. He would take her out to the yard and chat with the neighborhood women as if he were one of them, admiring his daughter’s red hair and her clear eyes with their green and brown hue, her tiny hand and its perfect fingers. Each time she held his finger, he swooned, and when she smiled at him, his face glowed, and he’d give her little kisses and laugh. The neighbors were captivated by Gabriel’s great love for his daughter, sano que ’ste, may he be healthy.

  “He’s not like a man, he’s like a woman,” one of them said. “My husband was never like that with his children. Rosa’s lucky she’s got a husband like him.” When they saw him diapering the child, their awe reached new heights. Whoever heard of a man diapering his child? Nothing like it had been heard of in all of Jerusalem! When one of them revealed he not only diapered the child but also bathed her—she swore on her eyes that she’d seen Gabriel bathing the baby in a tin bath as if he were a wet nurse or its mother—Gabriel’s stock was never higher.

  And Rosa was quite happy to share child-care duties with whoever volunteered, all the more so if the volunteer was her husband. Before the baby was born, he’d go from the shop to the bagno and come home washed and clean, but now he came right home, washed himself in the water that Rosa heated for him, and quickly changed his clothes so the smells of the market wouldn’t cling to the baby, God forbid. He’d take her out of the cradle and return her only when it was time to feed her and put her down to sleep. He loved Luna with all his heart. For a moment she managed to banish the thoughts of his other love, the one he’d sworn to forget. For the first time since his father’s death and Rochel’s disappearance, he felt much happiness.

  It was only after he’d bathed Luna, diapered her, and dressed her in her pajamas, only after he’d handed her to Rosa to nurse, and only after he’d lain her down in her cradle and sung her a lullaby in Ladino, only then did he notice his mother’s continued absence.

  “Where’s my mother?” he asked Rosa, who suggested she’d gone to the neighbors. He went into the yard and from house to house. “Vizina, ’onde ’ste mi madre? Neighbor, where’s my mother?”

  They all said they hadn’t seen Mercada all day.

  “Perhaps she’s gone to the Western Wall,” one offered.

  “Maybe she’s gone to the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue,” said another.

  “Nobody came to her for livianos today,” a third told him. “There wasn’t a single person here in the yard.”

  Concern began gnawing at Gabriel. His mother didn’t usually just vanish. She was always at home or in the yard. Since Raphael’s death she had stopped visiting the shop and rarely exchanged a word with him, saying only what she had to.

  Although as time passed she had softened and her tremendous anger with him had dulled, Mercada hadn’t let her son sense it. Even when Luna was born, she didn’t lose control and fuss over the baby, though inside she was delighted when she saw how the baby had brought Gabriel joy. She had given him a lifelong punishment when she’d married him to Rosa, and had decided that was enough. She didn’t need him to suffer any more than that.

  And he, ravaged with guilt, had done everything he could to appease her. He married Rosa and went on managing the shop successfully. Although since his father’s death and the loss of Rochel he had distanced himself from his God and become a secular Jew, he continued attending the synagogue to honor his father’s memory and pray for the elevation of his soul. Gabriel was neither angry nor embittered. He named the child Luna not to punish his mother but because he truly felt that on the night she was born, the light of the moon had lit up his life anew. He had no doubt that he would name the daughter born after Luna after his mother.

  Worried and anxious, Gabriel hurried to Clara’s house in Sukkat Shalom and knocked on the door. When he saw his mother sitting at the table in the middle of dinner, surrounded by her grandchildren, daughter, and son-in-law, he heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Thank God, I’ve been looking all over Jerusalem for you.”

  “You’ve found me,” Mercada replied and carried on eating.

  “But why didn’t you tell Rosa that you were going to Clara’s? Why did you worry me like this?”

  “No more than you worry me,” she said with a sour expression.

  “Mother,” he pleaded, “has something happened? Did Rosa do something?”

  “She doesn’t need to d
o anything. It’s enough that she’s like a bone stuck in my throat.”

  “But she’s my wife. Where do you want her to be?”

  “In her own house, and I’ll be here at Clara’s. From now on I’m living with your sister.”

  “Why with my sister? You’ve got a home.”

  “I don’t have a home. It’s Rosa’s home now, and thanks to you, I don’t have a husband either, so I’m here,” she said, hitting the floor with her cane as if confirming a fact.

  “Mother, por Dio! Come home with me.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “What happened with Rosa?” he asked again. “What has she done? Did she not speak nicely to you?”

  “She didn’t speak to me at all. I’m not speaking to her, and that’s that.”

  Gabriel was silent. After a long period of suppressing his feelings and adopting a sort of numbness, he felt anger begin to roil inside him. He took a deep breath to dispel the sense of suffocation that gripped his throat, gritted his teeth, and clenched his fists, and when he could no longer contain himself, he roughly seized one of his sister’s children by the shoulders, hauled the child out of the chair, and sat down facing his mother.

  The frightened children stopped eating, his sister and brother-in-law looked in disbelief at his gradually reddening face, and only his mother went on slurping her soup as if what was happening had nothing at all to do with her. He felt he was going to explode at any moment. He hammered the table with his fist and said in a voice he didn’t recognize, “You, you’re not speaking to Rosa? You can’t stand Rosa? And what about me? Do I speak to her? Can I stand her? If it weren’t for you, Rosa wouldn’t be living in our house. It was you who was in such a hurry to marry me to the pesgada, the clumsiest of all the girls in Jerusalem and the whole country. It was you who turned my life into a living hell, and I accepted the punishment imposed on me by the Almighty and you. I agreed to marry a woman for whom I feel nothing, nada! A woman to whose bed I’ve gone no more than three times in the three years I’ve been married to her, and then only so you’d have grandchildren. A woman who is of no interest to me whatsoever, with whom I’ve nothing to talk about, and you, you’re not speaking to her?”

  Clara quickly shooed the children out of the room. She and her husband moved from the table to the couch to spectate, not believing what was happening before their very eyes: Gabriel daring to raise his voice to Mercada.

  Mercada went on calmly eating her soup and asked, “Have you finished?”

  “No, I haven’t finished. You ruined my life and now you’re complaining?”

  She stopped eating for the first time since he’d started talking, and leaning on her cane, stood up and looked him directly in the face. “Listen to me, disobedient son that you are! If you hadn’t killed your father because of the Ashkenazia, none of this would have happened. If your father hadn’t died because of the catastrophe you brought down on our family, today you’d be married to a wife who’s one of ours from a fine and respected home, a wife who would have brought respect to the family, not a cleaner of English people’s toilets! You would have married like a king, not a pauper. Not only did you have una boda sin cantadores, a wedding without singers, you had una boda sin novia, a wedding without a bride, and it wasn’t me, it was you who brought this curse and this bride down on yourself.”

  Gabriel took a deep breath, leaned over the table, looked his mother in the eye, and said quietly, “You are my mother and I’ve respected you all my life. You were always the most important woman in my life, even when there was another woman who was as important to me as life itself,” he said, avoiding any mention of Rochel’s name. “But listen and listen well: You chose the bride for me, you married me to Rosa, and she’s the mother of my daughter, your granddaughter. She will bear me more children and she’ll be the mother of my children. From here to eternity, until the day I or she dies, I shall care for her, provide her with food and clothing. If she dies before me, I’ll say kaddish for her. If I die before her, she’ll be my widow, and when her time comes, she’ll have a place beside me in the Mount of Olives cemetery. From this day on, she is the woman of my house. She is the senora. You will live in her house, not she in yours. From this day on, you will treat her with respect, as if she is a queen, no less, a queen! From this day on Rosa is Senora Ermosa, wife of Gabriel Ermosa, mother of Luna Ermosa, and daughter-in-law of Mercada Ermosa, and you will treat her as a mother-in-law treats a daughter-in-law, just as I treat her as a husband treats his wife.”

  Mercada didn’t move, and Gabriel took another deep breath. Then, in a quiet, authoritative voice, he said to his mother, “And now, por favor, get up and collect your things. You’re coming home with me.”

  A few days later, when Rosa took Luna for their daily walk to the Mahane Yehuda Market, Mercada locked the door of the room that was hers and Raphael’s. With great difficulty she dragged the heavy bed away from the wall, counted seven tiles on each side, and exactly in the middle of the room she lifted a tile and from a nook in the wall removed a pile of coins and gold she’d salted away for years. She gathered all the coins into a scarf and tied it into a bundle. Then she went to the wardrobe, took out a few dresses, kerchiefs, and her jewelry box, packed it all into a bag, kissed the mezuzah, and without a backward glance left the house and walked toward the taxi station on Jaffa Road, where she paid a driver to take her to her daughter Allegra’s house in Tel Aviv.

  When Gabriel got home from the market that day, he went into his mother’s room and saw that the bed had been moved and that the space once hidden behind the tile was empty. Without a word he replaced the tile and dragged the bed back to its place, left the room, and from that day forth never entered it.

  Gabriel couldn’t go on living for another minute in the house where his father had died and in which his mother had abandoned him. But he was also unable to leave the house where he and his siblings had been raised. If only he’d had the courage, he would have looked for a house for himself and his family as far as possible from Ohel Moshe. If only he could have moved away from it all, left the shop in the Mahane Yehuda Market, and turned over a new leaf. But the burden of making a living and providing for his wife and daughter weighed heavily on his shoulders.

  Gabriel had become a sad, silent man. The only one who could put a smile on his face was his daughter Luna. When the baby boy born after Luna died before he was a week old, Gabriel didn’t shed a single tear and was glad that Rosa didn’t either. They buried the child and went back to the routine of their life.

  Once every few months he would visit his mother in Tel Aviv, but she’d still treat him like a stranger.

  “Dio santo, Gabriel, why do you bother?” his sister Allegra asked him. “May God forgive me, she’s my mother, but I wouldn’t wish a mother like her on my worst enemy.”

  He shrugged, and despite Mercada’s cruel and hurtful behavior, he continued his trips to Tel Aviv.

  On one such visit, his brother-in-law Elazar, Allegra’s husband, suggested that he open a branch of Raphael Ermosa & Sons, Delicatessen, in Tel Aviv. “There’s a good location on Shabazi Street. How about opening another shop there?”

  Gabriel considered the proposition: Leon and Leito can continue running the shop in Jerusalem, I’ll move to Tel Aviv with my wife and daughter, and perhaps, he hoped, I’ll be able to regain a place in my mother’s heart.

  * * *

  The young family moved to Tel Aviv into a small house on Hayarkon Street, walking distance from the new shop. Almost from the start the delicatessen became a grocery store, selling basic foodstuffs, as the residents of Shabazi Street couldn’t afford delicacies.

  Rosa hated every moment in Tel Aviv and dreamed of returning to Jerusalem, even daring to express her feelings to her sister-in-law Allegra.

  “I miss it, I miss the Jerusalem air. I can’t inhale the air of Tel Aviv. Everything here is dust and sand dunes and camels, basta. I miss Jerusalem, the Mahane Yehuda Market, my neighbors in Ohel Mo
she. And the sea, leshos, keep it far away. It scares me. You can go into it, but God help you if you can’t get out.”

  Unlike Rosa, Gabriel liked the White City, and even though the shop on Shabazi Street didn’t bring in the income he’d hoped, he wasn’t ready to give up so easily and went on fighting for it. In order to survive, he fired his only assistant and every day cycled from Neveh Tzedek to Jaffa to buy stock from the Arabs. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, since he viewed the task as beneath his dignity. At the first opportunity he sold his share to his brother-in-law Elazar and prepared to return to Jerusalem. But then Nissim, Rosa’s brother who had fled to America at the time of the Turks, returned to Palestine and made Gabriel an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  “The most successful thing in New York right now,” he told Gabriel, “is the shoeshine parlor. You need to rent a big shop, get hold of a few shoeshine boys, sit them in the shop, and they’ll shine gentlemen’s shoes.”

  Nono Gabriel, who was both a gentleman and something of a dandy who liked his shoes shining like a mirror, enthused over the idea to the displeasure of Rosa, who thought it was terrible but didn’t dare come between her brother and husband. They rented a big shop on Nahalat Binyamin Street, hired ten shoeshine boys, and waited for the first customers. But as early as the first week, it became clear that the business was doomed to fail. Unlike in New York, there weren’t enough customers in Tel Aviv for whom polished shoes was so important that they’d pay twice the going rate of shoeshine boys on the street. Even the big ceiling fan that was supposed to cool customers from the scorching heat of the Tel Aviv summer didn’t lure people into the shop, and the shoeshine parlor closed down after only a month. Nono Gabriel lost a lot of money, and his brother-in-law got out by the skin of his teeth and went back to America.