by Mary Morris
Inez laughs to herself as she makes her way along the streets. After all the men who have touched her, raped her, sodomized her, come inside of her, not one has left her with a child. It’s true she had been careful, counting her days with the moon. She never let a sailor touch her during the new moon and she always rinsed with a vinegar douche. And she made sure that no man left himself inside her, though once or twice she feared someone had. Her first month at sea she did not bleed. After that she bled as she always had. This was her penance—to be touched by many and mother to none. Until now. As she makes her way through the streets of Lisbon, Inez Cordero vows that no other man, except for her son, Benjamin, will ever touch her again. She will devote herself to the boy she found orphaned on a beach and to her God. This is more than she deserves.
She stops to ask a woman for directions and learns that the street she is looking for isn’t in the Alfama. She must climb one of the hills of the city, heading into the wealthier, higher neighborhoods. It is there where the Jews make their homes. Her uncle, who left Spain before the expulsion, has obviously done well. But it is an old address and, for a moment, she wonders if he or his family still live there. Then she begins her climb. The hill is steep. Around her black slaves push carts laden with food from the markets up to the homes of their masters. One slip and they will slide back down the hill along with their carts. Many citizens of Lisbon have died in this way—being struck by runaway carts.
From windows above, chamber pots are emptied into the streets and the cobbled walks are slick with their filth. The heat and stench almost overwhelm her. At last in the darkness she comes to an inn. The Three Cocks Inn. She laughs again. Fitting place for a slut. She will spend her first night here where she will bathe and eat, then continue on her way to where she is headed. At the door she raises the large knocker. The innkeeper takes one look at her and shakes his head. He does not want a woman who is alone to stay in his lodgings. Then she shows him the child. “We have just returned from a long journey.” She touches her hair, her skirts. “I would like to bathe.”
The room is small but efficient, and the innkeeper finds an old crib that he dusts off. She is so touched by the gesture that she almost weeps. He tells her that he is heating the water for her bath. He hands her a gray cloth and a bar of soap. He leads her into the kitchen where a large tub stands off to the side. Steam rises from the water. There is a screen placed in front of it. And a linen cloth with which to dry herself and the child. “No one will bother you here.” Inez dips her finger into the water. It is too hot for the child. She will bathe first, then the boy. Besides, Benjamin is asleep. There is no point in waking him. She looks around her. The door is closed and a curtain drawn. No one can see her. The water is scalding hot, but she doesn’t mind. Her flesh burns, but she takes on whatever pain she can.
As Inez sinks into the water, and the heat rises; her skin is aflame. She takes the bar of coarse soap and begins to scrub. As she scrubs, she feels the hands of Javier when he first touched her flesh. Those loving touches that made her alive, and made her open up, and then left her alone with her unspeakable crime. The men on the ship grabbing her, the oily hands that tugged at her flanks, the dirty hands that caressed her thighs, the rough hands, the calloused hands, the salty hands, the smelly hands. The hands that stank of fish and the sea, others that smelled as sweet as the wind. In the dark she knows the men by their fleshy palms, their sweaty skin, their fetid smells, their dankness, their dryness, their softness, their harshness. Their names are irrelevant, their faces unknown. What she knows of them is their hands.
As Inez washes, she scrubs them away. The rough touches, the pinches, the tugs, the fingernails, the cruel jabs, the hair pulled, the nipples squeezed. She works the soap deep into her flesh until she thinks she will emerge raw, red as a cooked lobster, but bathes until Benjamin wakes. Then she takes him and gently dips him into the water that has now cooled. With the soap on her hands, not the rough bar the innkeeper has given her, she slides her fingers over his limbs that have grown plump on her milk, his blond baby curls. He stares up at her with his steady blue eyes, his small carefully pruned penis, his buttocks where there has been a persistent rash, his little nails and snotty nose and dirty ears.
He has never had a warm bath. He has only been washed in the cold brine of the sea. Now his little body relaxes. He gives himself over to her. His will be the last hands that will ever touch her, the last lips that will ever suckle at her nipples. The final pleasure she will feel. No man will ever put his hands on her body again. She bathes every inch of him and when she is done, she dries them both, and is surprised at what it feels like to be clean once again.
That night she feeds Benjamin rice cooked in sweetened milk and looks at the delight in his eyes. The innkeeper’s wife has prepared for her a mutton chop with a potato and a mug of red wine. She has forgotten what kindness is. In her bed that night she cannot stop weeping. In the morning at first light she is on her way. She does not have far to travel, only a few streets more and her journey is done.
The mezuzah on the doorpost surprises her. She assumed they were done with such things. But there it is. When she knocks, she expects a servant to open the door, but the woman who answers looks at Inez and gasps. At first Inez doesn’t recognize her because she has aged in a few short years, but her mother recognizes her. Without a word she slams the door in her daughter’s face. Inez waits, trying to catch her breath, and then knocks again.
This time her mother flings open the door and shouts at her. She calls her a murderess and a whore. She’s about to slam the door again when Inez opens her shawl, revealing the child and the purse filled with ducats of gold.
* * *
Without a word Inez settles in. Her mother has her only servant, Amelia, lead them to two dark, windowless rooms off the courtyard where her uncle, a merchant, stored the spices that were his trade. It is Amelia who explains to Inez that her uncle slit his own throat rather than worship the Christian god and that his family fled to Antwerp on a ship laden with pepper and clove. In the past few years her mother has remained here, in seclusion and alone. Dona Olivia never asks about Benjamin’s origins or who his father is. But though she can’t acknowledge her daughter, she accepts this child as her grandson. Still Dona Olivia will not permit her daughter to inhabit the upstairs rooms where she dwells in solitude, but Inez doesn’t mind. She is grateful for the storage rooms and glad that she hasn’t been put out onto the street.
Inez sweeps out her rooms with a hard straw broom. She finds old bedding that isn’t being used. She sets up a small table with a lamp for herself. In a storage cellar she finds an old cradle that she cleans and polishes and stuffs into it a pillow she makes of goose down. She sleeps on a bed that smells of cinnamon with her son at her side. Then she begins to take charge of the house. In the kitchen she discovers bins filled with potatoes and rotting fruit. She throws most of it away. She goes to the market and brings home baskets of rice, tomatoes, and squash. She teaches Amelia how to roast a chicken in a pot with saffron and rice.
On Fridays she does the laundry by hand. She changes the sheets. She bathes herself and her son. At dusk every Friday she turns the portrait of the Virgin to the wall and follows her mother down the five steps—one for each book of the Torah—into her uncle’s secret cellar. Here the two women light the candles and say their prayers. It is often the only time that they are in the same room during the entire week. Beyond their prayers they never say a word.
Inez rarely talks to anyone and certainly not to her own mother. Her mother only speaks to her in curses. Or addresses her in the third person as if she isn’t in the room. Otherwise Dona Olivia will have nothing to do with the daughter who was dead to her four years ago as she watched her husband consigned to the flames. They live in a war of wills, locked in a hatred for which Inez does not blame her mother. But the silence between them does not bother Inez either. She has grown accustomed to silence in the years since her lover’s betrayal and her
father’s fiery death. It is speech that is foreign to her.
In her mother’s house Inez devotes herself to one thing only: the raising of her son. His childhood is confined to the walled courtyard of the house. Inez knows what happened to the children of the Spanish Jews when they entered Portugal in 1492. How they were torn from their parents, dosed with holy water, and taken by ships to Africa. How the virgin girls were sold to the Arabs in Morocco, and the boys became slaves in Cape Verde. She’s heard tales of Jewish children shipped off to the island of São Tomé where they are left to languish or be swallowed by giant lizards that roam its hillsides. Housemaids warn Inez that when the children reach the age of four the soldiers come knocking on the houses of anyone they suspect to be practicing Jews. And that child will never be seen again.
She keeps Benjamin hidden in the inner rooms of the courtyard. During the day she plays games with him and when they both weary of this, she gets him a small, wiry puppy that they name Fury. Benjamin can spend hours running through the house with Fury nipping at his heels. Inez bribes Amelia not to mention the child to anyone. He spends most of his time in the kitchen, watching his mother preparing meals. Once a day he is allowed into the courtyard to play and be in the sun, then he is shuttled back into the darkness of their rooms.
When he turns three, she can barely contain her fear. For almost a year Inez struggles to decide. At night she tosses and turns, wondering when the soldiers will come. Though she never speaks of this to her mother, for they remain in their silent battle, they both know what she must do. Inez tries to prepare for the day. She goes to church. She prays. She begs for guidance. And then forgiveness. Because she does not know her son’s birthday, she has given it the date when she found him on the island, alone in the New World.
On his fourth birthday Inez gives him his bath. She makes it warm so that it reminds him of the first bath she ever gave him, and he grows sleepy. She adds almond milk to make his skin and hair soft. She dresses him in her favorite blue suit to set off his eyes. She makes the special cake he loves—custard with cinnamon in a fluffy pastry shell. She delights as he devours his cake—piece after piece, his fingers sticky with pudding. She does not tell him to stop or that he has had enough. When it is time, Dona Olivia kisses the boy good night, tears flowing down her cheeks. Then Inez takes Benjamin up to their room. She dims the lights and says her prayers. She holds him in her arms and rocks him as she sings his favorite lullabies. His little body grows warm and sleepy in her arms. She lays her head against his sweaty brow as tears slide down her face.
Then she places a pillow against her belly and eases him facedown onto the pillow. “Hug Mommy,” she tells him. As Benjamin wraps his little arms around her, she presses him to her, gently at first, then more tightly, until she is crushing his face into the pillow. Tears stream down her face as he begins to struggle in her final embrace. He tries to push away. With his tiny fists he pounds her arms. She hugs him more tightly even as he kicks and slaps her. She is stunned by the life force contained in this tiny frame.
And then, still weeping, she lets him go. She cannot do this. She cannot kill this spirit, no matter what fate awaits them. She will keep him at home. She will hide him. She will find whatever ways she can to keep him safe. He is limp, sobbing as she releases him, laying him back upon the bed. “Mami,” he says, touching her face, “I couldn’t breathe.”
“I know, m’hijo. I hugged you too hard.” She tells him she is sorry. It won’t happen again. In the morning she finds her mother, sobbing in a parlor chair. Inez leads the boy into the room with her, shaking her head. “I could not,” she says, some of the few words she and her mother have exchanged since Inez and Benjamin arrived. And, relieved, Dona Olivia looks away.
That afternoon Inez has the mezuzah removed from the doorpost of the house. The space it leaves is covered in cement. Everything that identifies them as Jews is put into a sack. A pair of candlesticks Dona Olivia brought with her from Seville, Diego Cordero’s old tefillin. For the next several years, Benjamin will not go outside. And Inez will rarely let him out of her sight until the day he buries her. All of her son’s tutors, his doctors when he needs one, which is rarely, for he is a very healthy boy, even his fencing teacher, come to the house. She monitors all of his lessons. Before he is ten he is fluent in French and Portuguese as well as Spanish. He reads Latin and Greek and understands higher mathematics. He can identify all the plants in the garden and the birds in the air. He takes a passing interest in the solar system and learns what is known of the moon and the stars. And she teaches him the secrets of chocolate.
Inez Cordero brought back with her from the New World a bag of these beans along with the knowledge of how to roast them and grind them into a fine powder. Columbus served them to the king and queen of Spain, who were unimpressed with the bitter brew. But Inez experimented. She added honey but found it too viscous. She tried guava juice, but it tasted strange. Then she added warm, sweetened milk to the concoction and brought it to her mother, whose eyes widened as she sipped. Every night from then on her mother could not go to sleep without it.
On market days Inez goes to the docks and purchases sacks of raw cacao. When Benjamin is older, she will bring him with her, teaching him to haggle for the best cacao seeds. And he will watch, amazed, that his mother can argue with the most hardened merchant. She teaches Benjamin what she knows of these beans that grow only in the warmest, wettest climates. She teaches him how to melt the fine powder in hot water and how to make it into a creamy paste. How to add nuts and cherries. How to put it into pastry shells. And she tells her son that he will become a rich man one day if he can import these beans. Already she’s heard that the Jews of Bayonne are making chocolate in France.
Inez loses track of time. The only way time seems to move isn’t through clocks but through her son. She watches as he grows taller. His eyes seem to become more piercingly blue. The years fly by. A thin mustache darkens his upper lip. He begins to sprout hair between his legs. Everything that her son does enthralls her. Inez thought she could never love anyone more than she once loved Javier. She didn’t think that love could run deeper than that, but now she has loved a hundred times more. Though she hasn’t thought of Javier in years, she recalls how her body shook with pleasure when he made love to her. How it had all seemed like a dream, being in love, being loved in that way. For a time it seemed as if she was made for love. And then for betrayal.
When Inez boarded the ship where the sailors would do whatever pleased them and she would do nothing to stop them, she never felt pleasure. She thought she would never feel the pleasure of being touched again. Then she took this child to her breast. And nothing has ever been the same.
* * *
The cows are taking over Lisbon. More than two hundred wander the streets, thirsty and confused. It is believed that they will absorb the spores that carry the Black Death. Instead they only add to the filth and misery of the streets. Inez must avoid the manure of the donkeys that carry the carts up and down the hills and the cod-oil slick on the paving stones and now the cows. She wraps her mantilla around her face. She has never gotten used to the stench of these streets and the raw sewage that runs along their gutters. Amelia, their only servant, trails behind.
It is a hot, dry April morning. Lisbon hasn’t seen rain for eleven weeks. King Manuel and the nobles have left the city for their villas in the hills. They have left the heat and the stink, the illness and desperation. Peasants whose fields wither in the sun roam the streets like the cows—disoriented, without purpose, and thirsty for rain. It seems as if Lisbon has been infected with the plagues of Moses. But today feels like a respite from all of that. For Inez Cordero, who now spells her name with an “s” when she must sign a document so that she’ll be less likely to be taken for a Spanish Jew, it is the time of Passover. At home her mother is dusting the house with a feather.
Despite the heat, Inez is enjoying her morning stroll. She has been cooped up for so long. She is content, w
alking down the sun-dappled streets. Never mind that the white-and-black-patterned cobblestones are thick with muck and slime. She is happy to be making her way along the winding alleyways of the Alfama to market. It is the first night of Passover and she must buy a spring lamb, salted cod, apples, honey, and walnuts, plus some sweet red wine. They are Christians in name only. But as always on the Jewish holidays they must pretend that it is like any other night. They must not open the door for Elijah. If the neighbors see their doors open, they will tell the authorities. As New Christians they always attend mass. But in the secret of their homes, in the basements and storage rooms where no one can see, they recite the Hebrew prayers.
At last Inez reaches the market but the streets are eerily calm. She hadn’t noticed as she was walking but she’s hardly passed any carts leaving the market. And certainly none are heading up to the Barrio Alto where the wealthy New Christians live. For a moment Inez wonders if it is the Christian Sabbath. If she has mistaken the day. Gazing up she is surprised to see so many of the houses shuttered and so many of the stalls not open, even though it is already ten o’clock in the morning.
The old man who sells dried fruits and nuts isn’t there. Neither is Mr. Samuels who sells spices. Still the butcher is open, and she can buy her spring lamb. Inside the stall many are hanging upside down, bleeding, their throats cut. Though they aren’t kosher, this will have to do. As Inez makes her purchase, there is an acrid smell in the air. It stings her nostrils and brings with it a swirl of memory. It has been many years since she smelled anything like it, and at first she doesn’t remember when or where. Gazing up she sees smoke swirling from the direction of the Rossio. She turns to the old butcher and asks, “What is that smell?”
And the man with his filthy hands and bristly chin hairs leans in to whisper, “They are burning the Jews.” Inez feels as if a knife pierces her chest. Now she knows that smell. Tears well up in her eyes but she struggles not to cry. She cannot bear recalling the day that her father was consigned to the flames.