Incantation

by Alice Hoffman

  Sorrow

  Over the next few days, there was so much looting that the streets became too dangerous to walk. My grandfather made a new lock for our door and nailed the windows shut. We did not go to the market or the dye vats or to the well in the Plaza. We took in the animals at night, letting the chickens lay their eggs on our rugs, the sheep shelter under our table, allowing the pigs to sleep beside the stove, all except for Dini, whom I sneaked up to my room at night.

  Dini was very well behaved and quiet; he slept on a pile of rags, curled up in a corner. I could hear him snuffling in his dreams while I fell asleep, happy enough just to be near me. I wished I could sleep as deeply as he did. I wished I could be so easily comforted.

  ONE EVENING, I went out for walk with Catalina. We were both restless, and we missed each other. Maybe I was wrong about the distance between us. Maybe we could be friends. Crow and Raven. Two girls who looked like sisters, with the same long black hair. Two girls who believed they could be anything they wanted to be.

  Remember when we used to pretend we were donkeys and run through the field? I asked.

  We were silly children, Catalina said.

  You were faster than I was, I said.

  I was. Catalina looked pleased.

  In truth, I always slowed down at the end of every race. I was the sort of donkey who didn’t need to win. Maybe that was why whenever Catalina wanted something of mine, I was only too happy to give it to her.

  But you were prettier, Catalina said.

  She had slipped her arm away from mine.

  A donkey is a donkey. I laughed. None are pretty.

  That may be, Catalina said, but some birds are called ravens and others are called crows. We’re too old to pretend anymore. Catalina stopped and gave me a hard stare. I don’t like the way you look at Andres, she said.

  I wanted to say I can’t help myself, but I didn’t say anything.

  Stay away from him, Catalina said. I won’t tell you again.

  ONE MORNING when we woke up, we found that a window had been pried open. Someone had broken in. My grandmother checked and made sure that her greatest treasure, her silver candlesticks, were still there. She searched through the rest of our belongings. All the robbers seemed to have taken was food. Olives, flour, a jar of honey. People were afraid to go to the shops or even to work in their own fields. These days it was not safe for a woman to venture to the market alone, lest she be taken by soldiers and questioned about her friends and neighbors. My grandmother decided that from that day forward she would leave a basket of food in the yard for anyone who might be hungry.

  After we’d set out some bread and feta cheese for passersby, my grandmother turned to me and asked where my pearls were. Could they have been stolen?

  I’m sure they’re here, I said.

  I went to my room and pretended to search for them, then returned and told my grandmother I had found my necklace, stored in a box where I kept trinkets.

  You should have put them on, my grandmother said. They would be safe around your neck.

  I said that the weather had been so hot I couldn’t bear the feel of anything against my skin.

  My grandmother narrowed her eyes.

  Pearls come from the sea. They’re always cool.

  My grandmother wasn’t an easy person to lie to. Still, I had begun; as terrible as it felt, I had to carry on.

  I’ll wear them to dinner, I told my grandmother.

  I went to Catalina’s house right away, even though I dreaded seeing her. I couldn’t believe I’d given something so precious away.

  I knocked again and again, but no one responded. I thought I heard voices from inside the house. Finally I called out Catalina’s name. It took a long time for her to come to see who was there.

  So a raven comes calling on a crow, she said.

  I need the pearls back, I told her. My grandmother asked me where they were.

  You gave them to me, Catalina said.

  Catalina stood behind the opened door. There were little black flies in the air, so tiny it wasn’t possible to see them; all the same, they bit. Even the chickens in Catalina’s yard were seeking refuge under the house.

  I know, I said, but now I need them.

  You made me take them. You told me to!

  I looked into Catalina’s eyes. I had known her so long, my whole life, and I’d never noticed they were green.

  I need them back, I told her, hoping my voice would sound stronger than I was.

  There was a pause, and then Catalina said, I need them more.

  Andres must have heard us talking. He came outside and called my name joyfully. He said the word Estrella as though it meant beautiful, and you belong to me, and shining star.

  I saw the look on Catalina’s face. Maybe I deserved it. Maybe I was at fault.

  Estrella is leaving, Catalina said to Andres.

  I need the necklace, I told Catalina.

  The way she looked at me was with the face of a different Catalina than the one I had known. Something inside me started pounding, as though I had a dove trapped inside my chest.

  Well, it’s not yours anymore.

  Catalina went inside and slammed the door.

  Andres and I stood there.

  Why is she so angry? he asked.

  I told him about the pearls, even though I knew it was something more. Catalina was mad that I was me and she was herself. She was mad that Andres was standing here talking to me; that he’d said my name as though it were a secret we shared.

  There was nothing I could do about Catalina. I thought my grandmother might have been right in what she once told me.

  You think you know somebody, but what do you know? Only what they want to show you. Remember, it’s what’s inside that matters.

  Catalina called from the house for Andres to come in for dinner.

  Wait here, he told me.

  Andres went in, and when he returned he had my pearls. I put out my hand, but instead he looped the pearls around my throat and fastened them. Andres walked me home. My heart was beating against my chest so hard it was as if someone were throwing stones at me. I felt that anything could happen. Anything at all.

  Andres did not look happy, and he did not walk close to me. Finally, I asked what was wrong.

  When I went inside to get your pearls, Catalina told me you’re in love with someone, Andres said.

  Maybe I am.

  She said it was someone named Philippe who works at the dye vats. She said you wanted the pearls back so badly because he gave them to you.

  My grandparents gave me these pearls. And that boy she’s talking about—I don’t even know him. He’s not the one. I said it so Andres would know the truth.

  Andres took my hand, and I let him. I tried to think about water in a bowl, about a river that is always moving and changing, about a garden that had ten gates, but all I could think of was him. We kissed beside the fence, in a way that left me dizzy. We laughed at the way we felt. At how dizzy we both were. We kissed again to make sure that the way we felt inside was real, and it was.

  Don’t let your grandfather promise you to anyone, Andres said.

  My grandfather doesn’t make my choices.

  It was a cool night, but I was burning. I felt the way I did when my mother taught me the whirling dance, the one only men are supposed to do, the mystic dance that makes the garden bright inside your head.

  Andres laughed. Then don’t promise yourself to anyone. Just to me. We don’t have to tell if you don’t want to. It will be a promise for us alone to share.

  How could I make a promise when I knew how Catalina felt about Andres? Still, how could I give him up?

  What about Catalina? I finally asked. I thought you were going to marry her.

  That was never going to happen. Not with her.

  I REMEMBERED what my mother had told me about the first time she saw my father. How when he turned around to look at her, she felt she’d been slapped. How she tried stop the way she
felt about him; how she pretended she didn’t care until she made herself sick to her stomach. Once she had seen him, it was as though she had swallowed a thousand knives. She tried not to feel it, but every time she saw him, there was that knife.

  I could feel it now stabbing me in the center of my chest. Maybe it was love or maybe I was pierced by the look on Catalina’s face as she watched us from her yard. She’d come back outside after Andres had left with me and she was still there, staring. She’d been watching all along. I wished she hadn’t seen us. I wished we were strangers. I wished I had met Andres hundreds of miles away from Encaleflora.

  No wonder Catalina’s feelings about me had turned into dark, night thoughts. Catalina had no idea of who I was. I was Esther, in love with her cousin and never once saying a word about it. Esther, the girl with a secret life. Esther, who had seen Catalina stealing silver and linen.

  I told Andres I could not promise myself to him so easily.

  I told him that because it was less difficult than telling him the truth.

  I wasn’t certain I deserved him.

  THAT NIGHT I couldn’t eat my dinner, and later I couldn’t sleep. I wondered how Andres would react if he knew I was a hidden Jew, not a Christian as he was. By law we could not marry; we could not even talk or share a meal; if we dared to do so, it was heresy, the worst offense imaginable.

  I unclasped the pearls and put them in my trinket box, where I kept little treasures, mostly things Catalina and I had collected when we went into the hills. There were blue bird feathers, pressed flowers, a note Catalina had written me on my last birthday with a silly poem that said we were like two trees growing in the same garden. I put the treasure box under the pallet on my bed. I slept on it. At first it was lumpy and I was too aware of it to sleep well. But after a few nights, I didn’t feel it at all, and by the next week, I forgot anything was there.

  THE RIOTS on the Plaza had quieted down; people came and went again, to the fields, to market, to the well where the water came directly from heaven. Still, in my house we were uneasy. One day my mother spread her cards out on a table to see what our future might hold. Right away, she made a face. She didn’t like what she saw before us.

  It’s a bad time to be in the world, she said.

  My mother tied a piece of red yarn around my arm, under my clothing, for luck, she said. It was a secret amulet. She then tied the red thread around her own arm as well.

  She reshuffled the cards again and laid them out once more. The letters were all the same.

  Something’s about to happen, my mother told me.

  I didn’t like how upset she seemed, so I tried to make light of what the cards told her.

  Something’s always about to happen, I said.

  This will be different. It will start with one sorrow and then build into a thousand. There will be so many sorrows, they will be like the stars in the sky.

  I KEPT LOOKING for an omen. But our lives went on as usual; the world began to feel normal again—no burnings, no arrests, just summer afternoons and deep blue evenings.

  And then, one bright day, I heard a nightingale in the fields. It was noontime, not the hour for such things. My mother had told me that birds and animals know the future before we do. They try to warn us, but we just don’t listen.

  I ran outside to try to chase the nightingale away, but I couldn’t spy it. It just kept singing a mourning song.

  My mother came outside and stood behind me. She placed a hand on my shoulder.

  Now we begin, she said.

  SOON ENOUGH, a Muslim boy appeared in our yard.

  Other than my mother, most people from our neighborhood would not go to the Muslim quarter. Perhaps some might venture to the shops, or, if they were very ill, they might visit the doctor. As for the Muslims, they did not come to our part of town.

  But there was the boy in our yard. He was the one we had seen doing yard work at the doctor’s house. The boy looked nervous; he held two very large wooden boxes. I wondered if they were treasure boxes; I wondered if this was a good omen that might prove my mother’s cards wrong.

  When my grandmother spied the boy, she hurried into the yard yelling, trying to chase him away. The boy stood his ground and yelled back at her in Arabic and Spanish, but neither understood the other. My mother came running out of the house. She shushed my grandmother—something she never did—and she listened to the boy. My mother’s hair was loose, and her feet were bare, and the boy looked surprised. Out of respect, he looked down at the dirt when he spoke. I could now hear there were chickens clucking like mad inside the boxes.

  Our own dusty chickens had scattered to hide under the house, where it was cool and protected. When my mother nodded, the boy set down the boxes and ran out of our yard. It wasn’t safe for him to be in this part of town, but he’d come here anyway.

  My mother went to the boxes and sank down beside them. She was hushing the chickens now. I went to stand near her and asked what had happened. The Muslim doctor’s wife had died. Before she passed, she’d told her husband to send the chickens to my mother as a gift.

  How can I take something from her? my mother said. I gave her nothing.

  She must have believed that you had.

  I remembered the look on the doctor’s wife’s face when she saw the yarn my mother had brought her. It had most certainly been a gift as well.

  I opened the boxes so the chickens could be freed into the yard. They squawked and scattered. These chickens weren’t brown like ours; they were a pale gray color, and the rooster was beautiful and fierce. When my grandmother waved her skirts at him, he didn’t hide under the house, but instead he faced her, a king of roosters, even though he was in a brand-new yard.

  Look, I said to my mother.

  There were eggs inside the boxes.

  My mother reached inside for the eggs. They were not brown like the eggs of our chickens, but a clear lake-colored blue. Something beautiful. A blue my mother had never used as a dye for her yarn because it could not be duplicated. A gift from a woman who was my mother’s friend in spite of the fact that they lived in different worlds.

  My mother covered her mouth with her hands. She did this whenever she was about to cry, so her spirit couldn’t escape from her body in times of sorrow.

  My grandmother grabbed my arm and nodded for me to follow her.

  Let your mother be, she said. In losing a friend, she is reminded of all she has lost and all she stands to lose again. There is nothing to be done to make it any easier.

  We all grieve alone.

  MY GRANDFATHER’S study was in the cellar, an old cave over which our house had been built. One night I heard cries from that room. I went down the stairs in my nightclothes. My mother and my grandmother were both asleep, but my grandfather was not alone. I looked through a crack in the wooden door that led to the study. I saw my grandfather and Señor deLeon, Friar deLeon’s father. There was another man on the table, and he was bleeding; my grandfather was stitching him up with a needle and thread, just as if the man were nothing more complicated than a shirt or a cloak.

  I tried to be as quiet as I could. Now I understood; my grandfather was not only a teacher, he was a surgeon, and that was not allowed. All surgery books and medical books had been burned. Having such volumes was almost as bad as having Hebrew books. I felt a shiver go through me and I hurried upstairs. I thought about questions that Catalina had asked me. Why did people come and go from my house in the middle of the night? What were the meetings my grandfather held?

  He’s a teacher, I had told her.

  Catalina had looked suspicious. Teachers don’t teach in the middle of the night.

  Now I wanted to find out the answer to that question myself. We were not just Marranos; everything my grandfather did and believed was against the church edicts.

  When my grandfather came upstairs, he had blood on his clothes. Señor deLeon and the other man had left through the garden door. My grandfather had expected a sleeping house, and
I startled him so badly that he dropped everything he was carrying in a clean cloth—knives, thread, needles, things that looked like little axes and little saws, a vial of the bitter liquid that was so strong a person’s life could end if he swallowed too much of this elixir for pain.

  Get me some water, my grandfather said to me, and I did what he asked.

  We stared at each other, and my grandfather said nothing. But when I went to leave, he nodded for me to sit down. My hands and legs were shaking. I pretended we had sat like this together every day of our lives. I sat there politely.

  You were downstairs? My grandfather said.

  I nodded.

  What did you see? he asked then.

  Nothing, I told him. Because nothing is what you wanted me to see, though the man on the table might disagree.

  My grandfather looked surprised. I had managed to tell the truth while admitting nothing.

  Good answer, he said.

  My grandfather got up and cleaned his hands with brown soap over the washing bowl. Then he came back to sit across from me.

  How much do you know about who you really are? my grandfather asked me.

  I know nothing because that is what I’m supposed to know, though my grandmother might disagree.

  My grandfather nodded. I had pleased him in some way, without even trying.

  Good answer, he said once again.

  We were silent for a while; then I told him what I thought.

  Maybe a hundred years ago our people should have run away from this place, I said. It was a bold, maybe even rude thing to say, but I had been thinking about this a great deal.

  And then run from the next place and the next place and the place after that? You run once, what makes you think you won’t have to run all the rest of your life?

  Good answer, I said.

  My grandfather threw his head back and laughed. That surprised me more than anything. That he could laugh. So I dared to say the next thing to him.

  But there are other answers.

  My grandfather looked at me as though he’d never seen me before, and maybe he hadn’t. He nodded and gave me another answer.