The Mapmaker's Daughter

by Laurel Corona

  Within a few days, angry red lines shoot outward from the wound, and her whole arm is hot to the touch. Mama says this is because she had put a ham bone in the stew that burned her. “Swine flesh is poison,” she mutters. “Do you need any more proof than that?”

  By the time her whole arm is discolored and swollen, she has taken to bed. She throws her blankets off, complaining she is too hot, and then moments later, she shivers with cold. By the fourth day, her body is raging with fever, and she vomits the elixirs the apothecary gives her to drink.

  Grandmother has come from the farm to tend to her. “I know what’s wrong with her,” she says. “We’ve been treating her arm, but it’s espanto that’s making her sick.”

  Espanto. The fright. It disturbs the blood as surely as witches’ spells do.

  “When Rosaura burned her arm, it gave her quite a scare,” Grandmother says. “The Evil Eye took possession of her when she was momentarily weak. We have to calm her blood before her burn can heal.”

  She sends me to the apothecary for a fistful of cloves, which she passes in circles over my mother’s head, chest, and shoulders. She takes the cloves to the fire and heats them in a large metal spoon. Their sweet aroma fills the air, and my grandmother nods. “The scent will discourage los mejores de mosotros,” she tells me.

  “I remove from you the ojo malo, the ayin arah,” she says in a stern, commanding voice as the cloves wiggle and puff from the heat. “In the name of the Temple in Jerusalem and all the prophets, such a woman should not experience harm.”

  She examines the cloves again. “I think it worked. When they popped, they took the Evil Eye with them. We’ll make your mother tea with these, just to be sure, and she should be getting better by morning.”

  She is no stronger the next day, and Grandmother takes a handful of salt and passes it over my mother’s body. “Pour some water in a bowl,” she tells me, and when I have done so, she rubs the salt from her hands into the water and puts it on the floor. “Piss into the bowl,” she commands. “The urine of an innocent makes the potion stronger.” I crouch over the bowl and do as I am told. Grandmother examines the pale yellow fluid. “The evil is dissolving,” she says. “Watch it.”

  She carries the water out into the courtyard and tosses it in three directions to confuse the spirits, then takes the remainder and throws it in the gutter outside the front door. “Al la undura de la mar ki si vaiga todu il mal,” she says. “It will make its way to the sea now, and the evil will sink into its depths.”

  We go back to sit by my mother’s bed. She groans and tosses her head, arching her back feebly in pain. “There’s one more thing to do,” Grandmother says. “We’ll change her name so the Evil Eye will think it is in the wrong place.” She incants the formula for changing a name, calling her Vida, while I stand by the bed trying to convince myself that no one named for life could be dying.

  The next day, Mama cannot be roused at all. As the day goes on, her moans grow softer and then disappear into a deeper sleep. Sometime that night, she slips away.

  When I wake from my makeshift bed on the floor, Papa’s face is slack and his eyes are unfocused and distant. Susana’s are nearly swollen shut with tears. I look at Mama’s closed eyes and peaceful expression, and I feel my whole body shudder. “Grandmother?” I ask in a tiny, pleading voice.

  She shakes her head. “She’s gone, Leah. Baruch dayan emet. Blessed be the one true Judge.”

  “No!” I scream. “Get more salt! We need more cloves!” I shake Mama’s shoulder. “Vida! Vida!” I cry out as I crawl in next to her. I lay my head on her chest as if nothing has changed, but her cold, still body is so unnerving that I jump up in horror and rush into my Grandmother’s arms.

  I feel my breath burning circles in her overskirt. Though my eyes are scalding, my sobs seem locked inside, and when I pull away, I am surprised to discover her skirt is wet. “Should I wake Luisa?” The question comes from the blackness enveloping me, and I barely recognize my voice.

  “It has to be done,” Grandmother says. “Help your sister braid her hair before you come back, and do your own as well. I want clean faces and hands.” Though I can’t imagine why it matters, I go off to do as I am told.

  “Luisa,” I whisper, going to the bed and jostling her shoulder. I want to crawl deep under the covers with her, to take in the breath of someone who hasn’t yet had her world turned upside down, but I know Grandmother is counting on me to get back quickly.

  I shake her again. “Wake up,” I say. “Mama is—” I can’t get out the word.

  Luisa sits up. “Mama?” she asks. Her eyes are sleepy but wide open. I nod my head, and she starts to cry.

  We return looking as presentable as I can make us. A lace on Luisa’s dress is undone because my fingers don’t feel as if they belong to me and I couldn’t tie it. Grandmother has been arguing with Papa and Susana, but they stop when we come in.

  “Very well,” Grandmother says, “I’ll do it then, if you won’t.” She motions to the two of us to come stand near Mama. Grandmother places Mama’s limp hand on top of first my head and then Luisa’s and gives us a last blessing.

  “We are conversos,” my father replies when she turns back to him. “She’ll have a Christian funeral and be buried in the Christian cemetery, and that’s the end of it.”

  My heart lurches. Her body will wait for the coming of the Messiah far from where she wants to be, next to the mementos of her four little sons, among the Jews of Sevilla. I imagine a cross on Mama’s grave, pounded deep enough to stab her heart, and I think my own will break with sorrow.

  ***

  Within hours of my mother’s death, Papa leaves with Susana to discuss Mama’s funeral with the priest, but Grandmother asks me to stay behind. She sends the servant off to get two buckets of water. “Find someone at the pump who can bring back two more,” she says as she hurries her out the door.

  “I’m not going to let anyone tell me what to do, especially not someone who once nursed at my breast, even if he is a grown man now,” Grandmother mutters as she bustles around our kitchen. “And if the church wants to tear me in pieces for what I’m doing, that’s my business, isn’t it?”

  Once she has her water, Grandmother sends the servant home for the day and closes all the windows and doors so no one can hear or see what is going on inside. Before Papa and Susana left, they laid Mama’s body out on the kitchen table, and Grandmother stands looking at the sheet-draped form.

  “I told my son that if his wife has to be buried as a Christian, she should at least have taharah first. It’s the ritual washing Jews receive when they die. I knew you would want to help.”

  She soaks a cloth in the water and twists it to release the water over Mama’s head. “In the beginning, God created the water and the land,” she repeats, continuing the prayer as she rinses Mama’s head seven times.

  Grandmother washes every bit of Mama’s body, removing the dirt from under her nails and sponging the folds of tissue in the private place between her legs. “Everyone should go from life unencumbered and pure,” she tells me. “I am anointing her for the beyond.” I follow her, moving the bucket as she goes, but I keep a respectful silence. When the washing is finished, Grandmother picks up a cloth cap. “Take one last look at your mother,” she says.

  Mama’s face is as dewy as a child’s. “She looks peaceful,” I say.

  “The dead are happier than the living,” Grandmother replies. As she covers Mama’s face, I look away so as not to see the moment I lose her forever.

  “You’re a good girl, Leah,” she says as she puts two eggs in a small pot on the hearth. “Very brave.” While we wait for the water to simmer, she tells me to strip down to the chemise under my dress. When I have done so, she takes the tip of a knife and tears the fabric over my heart.

  “It’s called kriah. Jews wear clothing torn this way as a sign of mourning. Don’t take this off for seven days, and the next time I see you, I’ll help you mend it, so no one ever has
to know.” She helps me wiggle back into my dress. “Normally we would tear your outer garment, but it’s obvious why we can’t do that.”

  The eggs rattle in the boiling water, and when they are done, she peels them and lays them on a plate alongside a few olives and a slice of bread.

  I go to the table, but she motions me to sit on the floor. “It’s part of our mourning. For the next week, I will do this at home and ask God to accept that I am also sitting shiva for you. But since we are alone now, you can do it properly at least once.”

  We sit on the floor and eat what she tells me is the traditional meal of eggs, olives, and bread. Through our tears, we share stories about my mother, and though I think my throat is too tight to eat, I manage to swallow my share. “You see, my Leah,” she says, pointing to my empty plate, “life does go on. Min hashamayin tenuhamu.” She pats my knee. “May you be comforted from heaven.”

  A thought comes to me, and I get up. “I know something that would please Mama.”

  I take the knife Grandmother used to cut my chemise and cut a small strand of my mother’s hair. Taking a piece of white cloth and colored ribbon from her sewing basket, I wrap the hair into a package.

  “What will you do with that?” Grandmother asks me.

  “Come with me tonight and you’ll see.”

  Then I think of something else. I run to the front door, take down the crucifix, and pull out the tiny scroll. I lodge it into Mama’s curled fingers and put the cross back on the wall.

  When my father returns with the coffin, Mama is placed inside, not in a shroud, as Grandmother had hoped, but in a dress, as if she is just off to market instead of returning to the Holy One’s earth. I check before the lid is nailed shut to make sure the scroll is still there, clutched in her hand until the Messiah comes.

  ***

  Within a few days, our future is decided. Papa says the pain of Sevilla is too great for him, and he will take his position with Prince Henry as soon as he can get his affairs in order. Luisa can’t go with Papa because he doesn’t know how he will take care of her in Raposeira, and he needs me with him at court rather than home with her. “May I board at the convent?” Luisa asks, grabbing Papa’s sleeve. “Please? Lots of girls do!”

  Susana is still getting used to running a house, and her belly is already beginning to swell with the baby she is expecting. She seems relieved not to have to take Luisa in, assuring my father how easy it will be to look out for her and bring her home from time to time for a visit. Papa balks at the idea of leaving his youngest child without a mother or father, but Luisa pleads with him. “She does love the nuns,” I remind him, and finally he gives in.

  I lay awake all night wrestling with guilt. I wanted to be the most important child to Papa and now I will be. The cost? The lives of the two people I loved most. Now, the only member of our family left to go with my father to Raposeira is me.

  4

  SAGRES 1436

  The sunlight makes a path across the covers of my bed as I sit up and pull a strand of hair out of my eyes. The air inside my room is cool, but I can feel the summer heat seeping through the window. I throw on a dress over my muslin undergarments and go out into the main room of the cottage.

  My father, heedless of how the incessant wind makes the window behind him rattle, is at a table positioned to give him the best light for his work. Two oil lamps add to the light streaming through the window, setting the table aglow. The whitewashed walls cocoon us in peaceful, still air but can’t entirely mute the sound of the waves slamming against the cliffs in cracking booms and the shorebirds crying overhead.

  Our servant, Tareyja, has left a breakfast of orange juice, bread, and a wedge of cheese. Papa has already eaten, I can see, by the crumbs on the breadboard. His cup is on the table, and I come over to ask if it needs filling.

  He looks up, his eyes watering from the intensity of the work. “Are you well this morning?” he signs.

  I nod my head. “Do you need anything?” He points to his cup, and I take it to the pitcher of orange juice and mix it with water, just the way he likes. When I bring it back, I come to his side to look at his work.

  This map is not nearly as big as the atlas. It’s one piece of vellum, weighted down at the four corners with smooth beach stones. At the top is the southern end of Portugal and Spain, and at the bottom is the land just beyond Cape Bojador. Papa has added details from Gil Eanes’s logbook about the land south of the cape, but most of the new information comes from sea raids on Moorish fortresses north of there.

  A few days ago, Papa painted a tiny gold-and-blue banner and crown at Raposeira to mark Prince Henry’s court, and just yesterday, he indicated the point at Sagres, where we now live, by a whitewashed stone tower like the one near our house. He hands me his magnifying lens, and I see a man and girl next to the tower. She looks like me, but so small he is using a brush with a single hair to paint her features.

  “I’m on the map!” I sign to him, grinning. He makes a sad face, our sign for “sorry,” and taps the map at Cape Bojador. I had asked him to put my face on a mermaid, but there aren’t going to be such creatures on this map, or monsters inland either. The prince isn’t interested in any of that.

  Prince Henry’s mind is occupied with only three things: what riches lie south of Cape Bojador, whether the Moors have gotten to them first, and if the people of those lands can be turned into Christians. He says he is sending his ships out to bring the word of God to the savages of Africa, confident that this will make them willing to trade exclusively with him, which will make him rich and starve out the Moors. The fact that all his goals work so well together, he says, is all the proof anyone should need of God’s will.

  I make the sign for horse and raise my eyebrows to ask Papa’s permission to go riding. There’s not much to do here out on our lonely point, since most of the books and papers I used to read belonged to the Count of Medina-Sidonia and were left behind in Sevilla. Papa doesn’t worry about me being out on my own though. I am ten now, and in the two years we have lived here, I have come to know every patch of the peninsula at Sagres as well as I know my own bed. If I should get into trouble, someone will see me home. It’s so different from Sevilla, where what I did had to be carefully considered in case the neighbors were watching. Here, the only prowling eyes belong to the sea eagles soaring in the glorious sky.

  He nods and goes back to his paint and brushes. When I go out the door, the wind finds me, and I lean into it forcefully in the direction of the stable. The sky is huge and blue, with a few low clouds hugging the horizon at sea. The cluster of buildings on the promontory—two cottages, a walled garden, a stable, a tiny chapel, and a watchtower—are so white they hurt my eyes.

  I can see Tareyja’s husband Martim in the corral. He is about my father’s age and small like him, but strong and light on his feet. He and Tareyja are serfs who came at the prince’s orders to live in the caretaker’s cottage and tend to the needs of the deaf mapmaker and his daughter.

  “Can I take Chuva out today?” I ask him. I named my Andalusian mare after the Portuguese word for rain, because her gray shoulders and haunches look like dust spotted with raindrops. A carriage transports Papa and me to Raposeira in bad weather, but I learned to ride when we first arrived, and we go everywhere we can on horseback.

  Martim saddles up Chuva and holds the bridle while I get on. The wind-scoured rock is uneven and slippery—too hard on Chuva’s hooves to do anything more than pick our way forward, but beyond the promontory the footing in the scrub flowers and low grass is better, and I ease her into a trot. “Do you want to run on the beach?” I ask her, sure she understands because she tosses her head and nickers.

  A gentle, sloping path leads to the water. The beach is a half-moon of sand, bounded on both ends by low cliffs and surf-carved rocks. The gentle breakers shimmer like strewn handfuls of jewels. I let out a laugh that comes from the deepest place within me. “Go, Chuvita!” I call out. “We’re the wind, you and I!”


  Chuva’s stride lengthens when she reaches the packed sand near the water’s edge. Back and forth we gallop, her hooves splashing through the edges of the waves. I sing loudly to the sky, because in these moments, I am so free nothing can stop me, not even the ends of the world itself.

  I dismount and leave my shoes and stockings on a rock while Chuva wanders over to a ragged patch of grass. Making my way to the water’s edge, I let the hem of my dress lift up as the surf hisses and crackles around my feet. It tickles my toes as it washes in and out, sinking my feet into the sand. The water is so cold it takes a moment to be comfortable enough to wade in up to my knees, soaking the back of my dress as I squint into the sun in the direction of the watchtower on the cliff top. Then, as always, I walk up the beach until I am too close to the cliff to be able to look up and see the buildings.

  If Papa or Martim or Tareyja were to come to the cliff’s edge to look for me on the beach, they couldn’t find me. I feel reborn in these moments, and my imagination runs wild. If a stranger came along, I could make up any story at all, because no one would expect me to be the Amalia people know. I could be a gypsy girl, or perhaps a Moorish princess washed ashore from Africa, or a mermaid who suddenly discovers she has lost her tail and must live in the world of humans.

  Even more than these stories, I love having nothing at all in my head except a feeling of comfort in the world. It’s not too hot or too cold, I am neither hungry nor uncomfortably full. I am out of the wind and the midday sun. Everything is perfect.

  I tip my face to the sky. “Baruch atah Adonai,” I whisper. Saying a blessing at such moments still feels natural to me, although I’m really neither Christian nor Jew now. Living our solitary life at Sagres, I rarely go to mass. I would not have known it was Passover a few months ago if I hadn’t been at Prince Henry’s court for the day and overheard a Jewish visitor refusing to eat leavened bread, or Eastertide if the prince had not spent most of his time praying in his private chapel.