The Poetry of Secrets

by Cambria Gordon

  The guard was directly in front of the Cohens’ house. She walked right past him and placed the meat, still wrapped in cloth, in front of their door. She even waved to the policeman. For she was just a friendly Jewish neighbor, delivering food to a family in need.

  She wished she could have done more to help them.

  Though Isabel wanted to explore the cemetery, she decided to go home. She was rattled from her exchanges today. When she walked out of the gates, Isabel took off the sackcloth gown and folded it up into a small bundle she could carry like a parcel. She walked the rest of the way home as a New Christian. It lightened the physical weight, but the heaviness remained inside.

  Their spy was chatting with a second man, his back facing away from Isabel when she returned home. Unlike the spy, the other man was wearing the military uniform of a bailiff. They were chewing clay and not paying attention to her as she crossed the street and slipped through her gate.

  “Where have you been?” admonished Beatriz the minute Isabel stepped into the house. “Papá has injured himself.”

  Their father sat glumly on a chair, his thumb wrapped in rags, a piece of leftover willow bark in his mouth.

  Isabel knelt by him. “That blasted press. It was just as I feared.”

  “You’re wrong,” sniped Beatriz. “A barrel, half-full of unfermented wine, rolled over his finger. He didn’t hear it totter and when he turned it was too late.” She frowned. “He was all alone in there,” she added, as if it were Isabel’s fault.

  Isabel felt terrible about her selfish excursion. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here. You have done a noble job, Sister. I’m proud of you.” She gently unwrapped the rag on Papá’s hand. “His thumb looks broken.” Between this injury on his right hand, and the sling he wore to support the left arm, which the Inquisitors had broken, he would not be able to do any physical work at all. Isabel searched the room. “Where’s Mamá?”

  “In the cellar,” said Beatriz. “She’s trying to right the oak barrel.”

  “Alone?”

  “Do you see any able-bodied men here able to help?”

  “Mamá!” shouted Isabel from the top of the stone steps. “You’ll hurt yourself!”

  Her mother stopped, stood from her stooped position, and looked up at her daughter. “Everything is leaking out. I can’t stop it.” Isabel went down and turned the spigot closed. A simple fix, but clearly Mamá was too overcome to figure it out. “Come, let’s get you upstairs. Leave the rest for Pedro.”

  Abuela had been at the market and had returned just when the accident happened. Now she plucked threads from Isabel’s rose dress. “You look as if you walked through a fabric shop. Have you been to the Cohens’ studio?”

  Isabel glanced at her father. “Heavens no!” she exclaimed. Though there was no need to worry. Of course Papá couldn’t hear what Abuela said.

  Her grandmother continued to groom her as a baboon mother would, cleaning the fur of her charge. She held out her hand to show Isabel all the thick beige threads in her palm. The sackcloth must have shed.

  Beatriz watched them closely.

  Isabel whispered into her grandmother’s ear. “I’ll explain later.” Then she turned to the rest of the family. “I’m going to the vineyard to fetch Pedro. Then I’ll stop at one of the food stalls in the plaza and pick up some empanadillas for supper.”

  Mamá looked toward the kitchen, frowning. “The armico …”

  “Don’t worry about that, Mamá,” she said. Then she left the house for the second time that day.

  Isabel didn’t even bother checking if the spy had finished his socializing. This was legitimate business and she didn’t care if he trailed her. She ran the half kilometer to the Zuniga farm, their primary grape supplier. The vineyard stretched out for hundreds of hectares in perfect rows. Pedro’s distinct straw hat bobbed up and down in the field. She called to him, waving her arms. He looked up, his large brown eyes questioning. He wore typical laborer’s clothing, a sleeveless gray tunic made of frieze, a coarse woolen fabric, over loose pants. She wound her way through the grapevines. Knobby branches with tiny green leaves stretched outward on wire like arms.

  “Hola, señorita,” he said. Though only a couple of years older than Isabel, his face bore many creases from being out in the sun each day.

  “We need you in the cellar,” said Isabel breathlessly. “Papá’s had an accident.”

  “Right away.” Pedro carried his basket over to the donkey.

  She followed him down the hill, and when the road diverged, she turned right, into town, to get the empanadillas. The spy turned right as well.

  After Papá, Mamá, and Beatriz had gone to sleep, Isabel and Abuela went down to the cellar. Isabel told her grandmother the reason for the beige threads on her dress. Abuela turned white and looked as though her heart might stop.

  “Just when I thought you could not do anything riskier than studying Talmud in your own home, you go and do a foolish thing like that,” said Abuela.

  “I shouldn’t have, I know. But oh, Abuela! Being in the judería was frightening and wonderful at the same time! I met two girls coming home from the mikveh.”

  Hearing this, Abuela turned wistful. “The day my first monthly cycle ended was just a regular day for me. Conversos couldn’t go to the mikveh to cleanse. We might be discovered. I’ve always wanted to dip in the water.”

  “Then you don’t know what it looks like inside either?”

  Abuela shook her head. “Ornate mosaic tiles, probably. It’s a sacred space, and therefore a mitzvah, a good deed, to beautify it.” She gently closed the Talmud. “I’m glad you got to see the outside at least. Did you stop by the Cohens’?”

  “I didn’t have a chance,” Isabel told her. “There was an armed guard watching their house.”

  “For protection or for spying?” asked Abuela.

  Could it have been the aljama, the Jewish Council, watching over the family and not a spy sent by Don Sancho after all? Isabel certainly hoped so.

  “Abuela, have you heard of the poet Moses ibn Ezra?”

  Her grandmother shook her head, removing the Talmud from the hiding spot.

  “A man in the butcher shop told me about him,” said Isabel, taking a seat. “But I don’t know anything about the Jewish poets, just the Muslim ones. And of course, Qasmūna can’t be the only Jewish female poet. Do you think there’s any poetry in the Talmud?”

  “I honestly have no idea,” said Abuela. “I know the Torah contains religious poetry. My father used to sing Solomon’s Song of Songs to my mother.”

  Isabel turned the delicate pages, browned from hundreds of years of oily fingertips. There was so much here, it would take her a lifetime to go through it all.

  “Wait,” said Abuela, pointing at the bottom of a page. “What’s that?”

  Isabel gazed at a short paragraph, written with tighter lines and set apart from the rest of the scripture with more space. “Will you translate it?”

  Abuela read:

  “If the cedars have caught fire, what

  hope is there for the moss on the wall?

  If Leviathan has been hauled in by a fish-hook,

  what hope is there for the minnows?

  If the mighty river has been struck by drought,

  what hope is there for the waterholes?”

  “That certainly sounds poetic!” said Isabel, excitedly. “Is there a title?”

  “It just says the Aramaic word for lament,” said Abuela, “which means a mournful sorrow.”

  Isabel found a piece of torn parchment and asked Abuela to write down the lines in Castilian. She wasn’t sure what the writer was trying to say exactly, but she understood the sadness. Not being with Diego was a mournful sorrow indeed.

  Two days later, there was a loud knock on the Perez door. Isabel, Beatriz, and Abuela were in the kitchen preparing a simple supper, although it was mostly the sisters who were doing the work. Abuela had been sitting more and more each day and was currently on
a stool, supervising. Isabel wished she could sit as well. She was bone-tired, having taken over even more of Papá’s duties. Still, money was dwindling. She did not see an end in sight, for even when Papá gained use of his hands, without his hearing Isabel didn’t know how they could survive once she left the house to marry Don Sancho. Abuela would have to take over Papá’s ledgers and wine sales. The older woman’s stamina was diminishing daily, and the important clients would not do business with an aging grandmother. The entire situation was an impossibility. At the moment, Papá rested on the sofa, his unlit pipe in an ashtray while Mamá sat on a floor cushion beside him staring into nothingness. They were both suspended in time, even more so than before.

  Now in the kitchen, with the loud knock on the door, Isabel and Abuela exchanged worried glances. Had someone seen her go into the judería?

  “Let me,” said Beatriz. She removed her apron and went to answer the door.

  “Yuçe,” Isabel heard her sister say. “What are you doing here?”

  The knife Isabel was holding dropped to the floor, clanging on the tile. “Madre mía,” she whispered. “He’s come for the Talmud.” She rinsed her hands with a pitcher of water they kept near a washbasin. “Wish me luck.”

  “Yuçe!” Isabel smiled broadly. “What a nice surprise.”

  Yuçe’s mouth was a hard, thin line. This did not portend well.

  He waited until Beatriz had returned to the kitchen before he spoke. “Mother is dead.”

  Now Isabel saw that the boy’s eyes were red-rimmed, that his face was not full of anger toward her, but grief-stricken. She opened her arms to him. “Oh, Yuçe, I am so deeply sorry.” She allowed him to rest his head on her shoulder longer than was necessary, but he was so distraught.

  When he finally let go, he said, “Papá wanted your mother to know.” He looked inside the house toward Mamá, who did not react. It was as if she didn’t even know they had a visitor. “Señora Perez?” called Yuçe. “Did you hear what I said about my mother?”

  Finally, Mamá turned her attention to the door. “Yes? May I help you?”

  “Mamá, don’t be silly. It’s Yuçe Cohen,” said Isabel.

  Mamá looked at him blankly.

  “She hasn’t been herself, ever since—” Isabel stopped speaking. She did not want to bring up his father’s beating at the same moment he was mourning his own mother.

  Yuçe shifted his weight. “Papá is in a similar state. I hardly recognize him. His nose is crooked now.”

  Isabel ventured a smile. “Was his nose not crooked before?”

  Yuçe gave her a thin smile in return. “Actually, it was.”

  “Can he do any work at all?”

  Yuçe shook his head. “I’ve been making dresses and filling orders with the fabric we have, but soon we will run out of material.”

  “And Rachel?”

  “She will continue to do what she’s been doing. The laundry and the cooking. But Papá plans to send us upriver to Portugal, soon. We have a cousin there.” His eyes turned toward Papá. “Señor Perez?”

  “You need to stand directly in front of him,” explained Isabel. “He can’t hear you.”

  “I didn’t know …” He walked over to Papá and waved hello. Then he took a quill and ink from a small table and penned a note. “My mother is dead.”

  After Papá read the note, he took Yuçe’s small hands in his older ones. Papá’s eyes were wet with emotion.

  “Look at Papá’s damaged arm and thumb,” said Isabel. “It seems both our fathers are no longer the same vibrant ones they used to be. We are broken and whole at the same time.”

  Yuçe released his hands from Papá’s grip. He stared at her, his mouth agape.

  “What are you speaking about?”

  “When Moses shattered the ten commandments God gave him, the sages took the broken pieces of stone and stored them in the Holy Ark alongside the second set of tablets. The broken lay next to the whole. Even though there is sweetness, we all experience pain and suffering.”

  All the color drained from Yuçe’s face. “You’ve … you’ve been studying the Talmud, haven’t you?”

  God’s pustules! She had been so caught up in what she had learned that she forgot to be cautious. “Please don’t be angry. It has helped me through some dark moments.”

  “It’s my fault. I’m the one who lent it to you. I didn’t realize you would actually—” He put his head in his hands. “I’ve broken Mosaic Law, Isabel. I could get in trouble with the rabbi.”

  Isabel turned red.

  Papá watched the exchange between Yuçe and Isabel and must have sensed something serious, because he took Mamá’s hand. “WE WILL BE IN THE COURTYARD.”

  When they left the room, Isabel tried to make light of the situation. “It can’t be as bad as you say. No one knows.” She ignored the memory of the man in the kosher butcher looking at her like she was a witch.

  His small lips folded inward. “That might not be true. There’s been talk about a missing Talmud.”

  Isabel feigned surprise. “Really?”

  “I need to take it with me now, Isabel.”

  She was out of options. She nodded reluctantly. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  When she returned from the cellar, she handed the book to him. “I’m so sorry, Yuçe. About everything.”

  He left without another word.

  All at once, Isabel was desperately thirsty, as if she lived in the desert and needed to drink jugs of water because there would be no rain for another seven years. What was that midrash about Avram? What did the lament say about loss? She instantly forgot everything she had learned. She wanted to open the Talmud and check. But it was gone.

  Slowly, she made her way back to the kitchen. Within the half hour, another knock came at their door. Yuçe again? Perhaps he changed his mind. He was bringing back her beloved Talmud after all. She and Abuela could continue to read it!

  She lunged for the door. “Yuçe?”

  But there stood Mamá and Papá. And next to them Don Sancho. Did he see Yuçe leave? Sweet Yuçe in his beige gown with the red badge. Sweet Yuçe who had just lost his mother and wanted to tell his old family friends the bad news in person. Sweet Yuçe who was carrying a sacred Jewish text.

  This was it. They would all be arrested. Mamá and Papá would never survive it.

  Don Sancho’s lips opened, yellow teeth flashing. “Cariña, forgive the intrusion. I have wonderful news to share.”

  Wonderful news? “Please, please come in.” Isabel had never been so relieved to hear words come out of his mouth. “Abuela, Beatriz,” she called. “Bring vino. Don Sancho is here.”

  Everyone settled in the sala, oddly taking the same positions as when he had come to visit them that first Shabbat evening. The only difference was that Papá could not speak in a normal volume and Mamá was not uttering any sounds at all.

  Beatriz presented Don Sancho with a glass of wine.

  “Gracias,” he said, not giving her a glance. It was Isabel on whom he focused all his attention. He was not even pretending to be deferential to her parents like he had been the last time he was in their sala. His squinty eyes zeroed in on Isabel, making her squirm. “I’ve been called to the front in Granada.”

  Was this the good news he spoke of? “I didn’t realize the war had begun,” she replied.

  He swallowed a large portion of the wine. “Any day now. I’ve received a special commission from King Ferdinand to muster a tercio, an infantry unit.”

  He paused, waiting for praise.

  “A great honor indeed,” said Isabel.

  “Come January, I will be leading three thousand men, one thousand carrying the pike, the remaining wielding the arquebus. Quite a powerful weapon, that.”

  Papá sat mute, as did Mamá.

  Isabel watched her parents, wondering if she should make an excuse to Don Sancho for their silence. Before she could say anything, Don Sancho cleared his throat. “But the true good news, and the r
eason I am here, is to announce that we will be moving up the marriage date.”

  “Perdón?” asked Isabel in a small voice.

  “I don’t want to leave for the front without a wife waiting for me at home. It will give me solace in my challenge in the south. I will be in harm’s way, from the Muslim cavalry and their advanced artillery—from Jesús knows what. If I should perish, I will die knowing my wife is carrying my legacy in her belly. For I plan to have you with child as soon as possible.”

  Isabel looked to her mother, willing her to speak.

  After a few moments, Abuela said, “Why don’t you write your father a note, Isabel, explaining to him what Don Sancho is proposing?”

  Isabel nodded, grateful for the suggestion.

  Don Sancho held up his hand. “That won’t be necessary, dear Isabel.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I will take charge of you now. I am aware your father has lost his hearing.”

  Shame, red and hot, filled her. “I did not think it that obvious.”

  “Come now. Do you think I do not know exactly what goes on in my own municipality? I was there when your parents were questioned in the Holy Office, my dear.”

  He watched them being beaten? It was all Isabel could do not to charge at him and scratch his eyes out.

  “I have been handling Papá’s business for weeks now,” said Isabel icily. “Quite successfully.” While this was not quite the truth—aside from Duque Alba’s damaged order, there had been other mistakes as well—she would never admit that to Don Sancho.

  Don Sancho smiled indulgently. “That’s nice to hear, cariña. But as my wife, you will have other duties. You will stop these pointless tasks of adding up your little figures or stomping on grapes or whatever it is you do down in your cellar.” He swept his hand around the sala. “And how do you think your family will remain in this comfort? They will need my patronage. An allowance of six thousand maravedis a month should suffice. We would not want your aging grandmother sleeping on the street, now would we?” He looked at Abuela with pity.

  My grandmother is just fifteen years your senior, Isabel seethed silently. “The doctor said Papá may recover hearing in one ear.”