The Hand of Fatima

by Ildefonso Falcones

  ‘Do you want one, Grandfather?’ Hamid shook his head. ‘What then . . .?’ enquired Cristóbal.

  In that instant Hamid grabbed the frying pan with both hands. The hiss of burning skin and flesh as the red-hot pan scalded his fingers could be heard by all around. The old man did not even blink. Some of the crowd just managed to leap out of the way as Hamid hurled the boiling oil at Cristóbal’s face. The buñolero howled and threw up his hands, before falling to the ground writhing in agony. Still holding the frying pan, and with the smell of burnt flesh filling the air, the old scholar headed for the knife-seller’s stand. People stood aside to let him through and the knife-seller, seeing a madman still capable of throwing the remains of the oil at him, was quick to get out of his way. Hamid threw down the frying pan, grabbed the largest knife from the display, and returned to the screaming buñolero.

  Most of the crowd watched from a distance in stunned silence; one man ran to fetch the guards.

  Hamid knelt down next to Cristóbal, who was kicking and howling, lying on his back with his hands covering his face. Hamid slashed at Cristóbal’s forearms, and the sudden new pain forced the buñolero to uncover his throat. The old man drew the knife across the informer’s neck. The cut was deep and accurate, delivered with all the strength of an insulted and betrayed community. A stream of blood spurted out, and Hamid stood up covered in it, with the huge knife still in his hands. In front of him stood a guard, his sword held ready.

  ‘Christian dogs!’ Hamid shouted defiantly, finally venting all the resentment he had kept repressed throughout his entire life.

  The guard plunged his sword into Hamid’s stomach.

  The Alpujarra, the white peaks of the Sierra Nevada, the rivers and gullies, the diminutive terraces of fertile land won terrace by terrace from the mountain, the work in the fields and the night-time prayers . . . all of these appeared clearly in Hamid’s mind. He felt no pain at all. Hernando, his son! Aisha, Fátima, the little ones . . . Nor did he feel any pain when the guard pulled the sword out of his body. Hamid watched his blood gushing out: the same blood had been spilt by the thousands of Muslims who had decided to defend their law.

  The guard remained standing over him, convinced that the old man would fall to the ground at any moment. People stood round in silence.

  ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God,’ intoned Hamid.

  They must not capture him. They must not find out who he was. He would not put his family in danger for anything. He raised the knife and limped towards the river, which ran past the end of the Rastro. People hurriedly got out of his way, while the guard gave chase. He had to destroy himself! He left a trail of blood behind him, but no one tried to stop him. Everyone held still, as if entranced by the aura of the old man calmly heading for the riverbank.

  ‘No!’ shouted the guard, realizing Hamid’s intention too late, just as the holy man let himself fall into the Guadalquivir and disappeared beneath its waters.

  *

  Hernando could not take any more pain. He had just returned from the fortress, where the torture of Karim had become senseless cruelty. The old man continued in his stubborn determination not to disclose the identity of his accomplices, and even the torturer had turned to the inquisitors and gestured that he thought it was pointless to insist.

  ‘Continue!’ shouted Portilla, silencing his doubts.

  Hernando was forced to witness all the barbarity. Hamid’s words had confirmed him in his faith, in the spirit that moved the Moriscos to fight for their laws and customs, and he tried to go to the fortress in this positive frame of mind. However, once in the dungeons, when they tortured Karim and demanded the names of his accomplices, fear gripped him once more. It was his name that Karim was so tenaciously keeping to himself! Only two paces away from him, Karim was being savagely tortured. Hernando could smell his blood and his urine; he gazed at the convulsions of his muscles, contorted with the intense pain; listened to his muted cries, worse than the most terrible screams, and his gasps and sobs when they stopped to rest. Sometimes he felt proud of Karim’s victory over the inquisitors, defending his people and his law; but at others he felt an appalling sense of guilt . . . And at times a cold sweat merged with the stench of the dungeon at the mere thought that Karim could give in and point a finger: ‘Him! It’s him you seek!’ Petrified, Hernando huddled in the chair. His stomach clenched as he imagined how the guards and inquisitors would leap upon him. He could be next, and nobody would reproach a man, whoever he was, for breaking down under such a weight of torment and giving them what they wanted. Hernando was awash with pride, guilt and panic. His emotions tossed him hither and thither like a rag-doll, wave after wave enveloping him after a simple question, another tug on the rope, a stifled cry . . .

  Hernando had just returned home when a young boy sent by Jalil told him what had happened to Hamid. Fátima and Aisha curled up on the floor next to the wall and wept, embracing the children.

  He could not stand more pain!

  ‘The dead buñolero . . .’ asked Hernando, his voice hoarse. ‘Was he called Cristóbal Escandalet?’

  ‘Yes,’ the boy replied.

  Hernando shook his head. Perhaps Hamid had not told Abbas after all?

  ‘That man was a spy and a traitor,’ he declared, turning again to the young Morisco. ‘He was the one who denounced Karim to the Inquisition. Let all our brothers know why our finest scholar took such action! He judged this man, passed sentence upon him, and then he himself carried it out. Let the buñolero’s family know this too!’

  Once in his room, Hernando wept profusely, ready to give himself over once more to prayer and fasting. Now who would use the little ground-floor room? Now who would kneel down on the floor and pray before the mark of the kiblah on the wall? Hamid had shown him that mark, as proud and innocent as a child who has done something good and awaits approval. Hamid, from who he had learnt everything, from whom he had taken his name: Hamid ibn Hamid, the son of Hamid!

  A tear clouded Hernando’s vision, distancing him from reality. Then a spine-chilling cry rang out in the night across the whole district of Santa Mária: ‘Father!’

  The guards dragged Karim in by his armpits. His head was lolling to one side and his feet, destroyed by torture, dragged behind him along the floor, as if the person who had joined them by the ankles to be presented to the Inquisition had made some ghastly mistake.

  The guards tried to stand Karim up to face Portilla. The torturer grabbed what little grey hair Karim had left, and yanked his head up. The inquisitor clicked his tongue and flicked his hand in frustration.

  Hernando saw the old man’s battered eyes looking far beyond the walls of the dungeon; possibly seeing death, possibly paradise. Who deserved paradise more than that true believer? Karim’s dry lips began to move.

  ‘Silence!’ cried the inquisitor.

  Karim’s mumbling sounded like a distant echo in the large room. He was raving in Arabic.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ yelled the inquisitor at Hernando.

  The Morisco listened carefully, aware that Portilla was watching him.

  ‘He is calling to his wife.’ Hernando thought he understood. He was about to repeat the name: Amina. ‘Ana,’ he lied. ‘She seems to be called Ana.’

  Karim went on murmuring.

  ‘All this talk just to call to his wife?’ said the inquisitor suspiciously.

  ‘He is remembering a poem,’ Hernando explained. He seemed to be listening to one of the ancient ones, one of those that appeared carved on the walls of the Alhambra in Granada. ‘It describes the wife . . . the wife who presents herself to her husband, beautifully adorned to tempt him . . .’

  ‘Ask him about his accomplices. Possibly now . . .’

  ‘Who were your accomplices?’ Hernando obeyed, speaking Spanish, unable to raise his head.

  ‘In Arabic, imbecile!’

  ‘Who . . .?’ He began translating, then suddenly paused. No one in the dungeon apart from
Karim could understand him. ‘God’s justice has been done,’ he announced in Arabic. ‘He who betrayed our people has had his throat cut according to our law. Hamid of Juviles has taken care of it. You will meet the saintly scholar in paradise.’

  Portilla turned his eyes to the Morisco, surprised by the length of his discourse. At that moment an almost imperceptible gleam appeared in the old man’s eyes, and his lips contracted into a grimace that could have been a smile. Then he died.

  ‘His effigy will be burnt at the next auto-da-fé,’ pronounced the inquisitor when the doctor, after examining Karim, certified what everyone already knew. ‘What did you say to him?’ he asked Hernando.

  ‘That he had to be a good Christian,’ Hernando stated unblinkingly, sure of himself. ‘That he had to confess what you wanted to know and be reconciled with the Church to receive the forgiveness of Our Lord and the eternal salvation of his soul . . .’

  Portilla raised his fingers to his lips and rubbed them. ‘That is good,’ he finally conceded.

  40

  ON 15 APRIL 1581 the Portuguese parliament meeting in the city of Tomar declared Philip II of Spain as King of Portugal, unifying the Iberian peninsula under the same crown. King Philip ‘the Prudent’ gained control of all the territories and trade with the New World, which the Treaty of Tordesillas had divided between Spain and Portugal.

  It was also in Portugal where the possibility of a mass extermination of Spanish Moriscos was first considered. A meeting of the King, the Count of Chinchón and the aged Duke of Alba (restored to health but with a character even old age could not mellow) studied the possibility of loading all the Moriscos on to ships bound for Barbary. Once out at sea the ships would be scuppered, drowning all those on board.

  Fortunately, or possibly because the armada was otherwise occupied, this planned genocide was not carried out.

  In August of the same year, the King took another decision, also from Portugal, which was to directly affect Hernando. That summer the drought wreaked havoc in the Córdoba countryside. There was not enough grass in the pastures for the mares to eat, and not enough money to feed them costly grain, which was in any case needed for the people. Even the Bishop of Córdoba had found himself forced to purchase imported wheat. As a result the King wrote to the stable master Don Diego López de Haro and the Count of Olivares advising them that the stud should be moved to pastures in the royal territory of Lomo del Grullo in Seville. These lands were under the count’s jurisdiction and the horses would be able to graze there.

  Over a year had passed since Karim’s death at the hands of the Inquisition’s torturer and Hamid had disappeared into the waters of the Guadalquivir after avenging the betrayal of the Morisco community. Hernando spent this period in constant penance. Every time he remembered the torture chamber of the Christian monarchs’ fortress and Karim’s obstinate silence, he was overwhelmed by a sense of guilt which he believed only fasting and prayer could appease.

  ‘He would have died anyway,’ Fátima tried to convince Hernando, worried by her husband’s appearance. He was thin and haggard, the intense blue of his eyes dulled by dark shadows. ‘Even if he had confessed he would never have reconciled himself with the Church. They would have executed him just the same.’

  ‘Maybe yes,’ replied Hernando doubtfully, ‘and maybe no. We can’t know. The only certainty, the only thing I know for sure because I lived it minute by minute, is that for keeping my name secret he died a cruel and agonizing death.’

  ‘Everyone’s name, Hernando! Karim kept secret the names of everyone who still believes in the one God, not just yours. You can’t take all the responsibility on yourself.’

  But the Morisco rejected his wife’s words.

  ‘Give him time, daughter,’ Aisha advised a weeping Fátima.

  Don Diego announced to Hernando that he must travel to Seville with the stud and stay there until it returned to Córdoba. Fátima and Aisha were pleased, hoping the journey and the time in Seville would take Hernando’s mind off his guilt and rouse him from the despair into which he had sunk. He appeared unable to find solace, not even in his daily rides on Azirat.

  At the beginning of September, nearly four hundred mares, the yearlings and the spring foals set out for the rich pastures of the low Guadalquivir wetlands. Lomo del Grullo was thirty leagues from Córdoba, following the road to Écija, Carmona and then Seville. From there, once over the river, they had to head for Villamanrique, a town next to the royal game preserve. Under normal circumstances the journey could be done in four or five days, but Hernando and the other riders accompanying the horses soon realized it could well take them twice as long. Don Diego hired additional hands to help the keepers of the brood mares, who were walking with the animals and trying to keep together a substantial herd unused to travelling long distances. For the large flocks of sheep that moved between winter and summer pastures along the nearby drovers’ road, the Cañada real de la Mesta, such travels were nothing new. Added to the contingent of men and horses, a group of Córdoba nobles eager to please the King had also come along, as if they were on a pilgrimage. Their presence did nothing but hinder the work of keepers and riders.

  Hernando, as Fátima and Aisha had rightly predicted, managed to forget his worries. He concentrated on galloping Azirat up and down, rounding up mares or foals that strayed from the herd. He joined the rest in keeping the animals knotted even closer together whenever the way became narrow or difficult. The fiery red of Azirat’s coat stood out wherever he worked, and his agility, his caracoles and spirited jumps aroused admiration among all the travellers.

  ‘And that horse?’ an obese noble, settled into rather than mounted on a large leather saddle embossed with silver, asked two others who were accompanying him. They were some distance away from the herd in order to avoid the dust cloud whipped up on the dry road.

  Hernando had just frustrated a colt’s escape, pursuing, overtaking and wheeling around in front of it. Azirat reared straight up on his hind legs, hanging motionless in the air, forcing the unruly renegade to return.

  ‘Given the colour of its coat it must be a reject from the royal stables,’ speculated one of those questioned. ‘A real shame,’ he pronounced, impressed by both the horse and rider. ‘It’ll be one of the horses Diego gave to the workers in part-payment of their wages.’

  ‘And the rider?’ inquired the first noble.

  ‘A Morisco,’ the third man clarified. ‘I’ve heard Diego speak of him. He has great faith in his abilities and there can be no doubt that . . .’

  ‘A Morisco . . .’ repeated the obese noble to himself, paying no attention to further explanations.

  The three men now watched how Hernando galloped flat out to the head of the herd. As the Morisco passed by him the Count of Espiel stood up in the silver stirrups of his luxurious saddle and frowned. ‘Where have I seen that face before?’

  The King’s orders allowed them to requisition help from the officials and inhabitants of all the villages on their route. Nevertheless, before the end of each day the riders still had to find a suitable place to gather and feed that quantity of livestock and obtain grain or straw if the chosen grazing was insufficient. At the same time the nobles searched out the comforts of the nearest village.

  At night, after caring for Azirat, Hernando collapsed exhausted. He dined on soup prepared by the cook in a cauldron over an open camp fire and chatted a while with the other men. It was only when he took his turn on watch in those open pastures, as unfamiliar to the men as to the livestock, that he recalled the events that had marked the past year.

  It was during those moments of silence on watch, mounted on Azirat, that Hernando came to forgive himself. Astride his horse, as he listened to an animal’s snort breaking the silence or as he gently rounded up one that tried sleepily to move away from the herd, the Morisco regained his peace of mind. How different were those hours from the tumultuous time with five hundred animals on the move! The neighs and whinnies, the kicks and bites; th
e immense dust cloud that rose in their wake rendering everything invisible but for a few feet ahead. At night he could contemplate the vast, clear and starry sky, also very different from the one he could see from his house in Córdoba, boxed in between so many other buildings. Alone in the countryside he began to feel as he had in the Alpujarra. Hamid! The old scholar had devoted himself to them. Seeking contact with another living creature, he patted Azirat’s neck as the memory of the holy man made his throat tighten. He also thought of Karim. This time though he let the painful scenes he had lived through in the Inquisition’s dungeons play out one after another in his mind, without seeking refuge in prayer or fasting to escape the images. Time and again he relived the old man’s pain, feeling it in his flesh, seeing it and suffering it. It hurt as if he were there in the chamber where they had tortured Karim . . . and him. Little by little, the images of Karim’s bloody face, his stifled howls of pain as he struggled not to give in to his tormentors or allow them any satisfaction, and his body, more broken every day, appeared before Hernando with such intensity that he shrank back on the saddle. There in the vastness of Andalusia, alone in the night and unable to escape from all those memories, he began to learn to live with his pain and face up to himself.

  Hernando peered up at the sky, at the moon whose beams outlined the shapes all around him, and suddenly saw a shooting star fall, and then another . . . and another, as if the two old men were watching him and speaking to him from paradise.

  Brahim also saw the same shooting stars, but his interpretation was decidedly different from Hernando’s. Seven years had passed since he had armed his first pirate ship. After four seasons personally commanding the attacks on the coast of Spain, and several occasions when the militias had almost arrested him, he decided to assign his place in the boats to Nasi, now a young man who was as strong and cruel as his master. Brahim would concentrate on investing his money, running the business with an iron hand, and reaping the considerable rewards this gave him.