We live moment to moment, my grandfather told me. Everything changes. One minute we are part of the river, and the next we are joined with the sea.
If you can stitch a man together with a needle and thread, isn’t that magic?
It’s medicine. Surgery.
I’ve heard people say the Jews have magic schools.
It’s our way of reaching out to understand the mysteries of God. It’s called Kabbalah. It is the way to learning the way to be one with the world. The way of light and of knowledge.
The ten gates that lead to the garden, I said. The ten mysteries of the Tree of Life.
Who told you that? More than surprise now. Shock that I should know such things. Your mother?
I dreamt about them. I thought you might have books that dealt with such things in that room.
What room are you talking about? I thought you saw nothing.
My grandfather was hiding the fact that he had a smile inside him, but I saw it.
True enough. I was just thinking about what I could see, if I ever did see anything. I smiled right back.
You’re a smart girl, my grandfather said. Smarter than I thought you were.
He took me to see the room downstairs.
Just so you know, he said.
He opened the door with a metal key that was hidden under the last stair. The room was small and filled with books. From the floor to the ceiling. I had not known so many books existed, let alone in our house. This was where he taught his students. On a desk were notes concerning the Zohar, the radiant book, the Book of Splendour, the book of true knowledge, a guide to the gates.
What will you say if anyone ever asks you if you’ve been inside this room? my grandfather asked.
I thought of all the learning that had gone on here, right under my feet. I thought of the people who had been stitched together and healed. I felt something about my grandfather I hadn’t felt before. I understood why his students looked at him the way they did.
What room? I said.
I knew it was a good answer; I didn’t need anyone to tell me that. Good enough to make Jose deMadrigal, the greatest teacher our town had known, look at me with different eyes.
Sit down, my grandfather told me. We’ll start with the alphabet.
THERE WAS a quiet in town, but the quiet was like the silence before a torrential downpour. Too still. Too unnatural. Even the birds didn’t sing.
On Sunday, at mass, the Friar spoke about how we must have faith in heaven but how we also must be prepared to deal with the evil on earth. I looked around at the people in our congregation. I saw that we were all the same. Marranos. Our truest selves were hidden. And I saw more: We were all frightened. We knew that bad things came together, one after the other, and that some secrets could never be kept. My grandfather had begun to whisper some of these secrets. He taught me about el Diva del Pardon, the Day of Pardon, when we atoned for our sins, and about Queen Esther, for whom I had been named, a queen who hid her Jewish heritage to save her people.
I studied with my grandfather nearly every day. I’d always thought I was foolish, yet somehow I learned. There were basic prayers, and there was the radiant way. The way to clear the inside of your head; with chanting, it was possible to bring oneself closer to the all-knowing and all-powerful God. I began to understand that the deeper you looked inside yourself, the more you saw what was infinite and eternal.
One day my grandfather called me to him, there in his study beneath the house. He had been up all night, and his face was pale. His eyes were damp and red. He locked the door and took out some papers. I felt as though the books lining the shelves in his study were alive, breathing, fluttering like doves. I thought I was there to study, but my grandfather kept the books closed.
If anything happens, there are things I want you to know, he said. He handed me a piece of paper with a name and address. This man in Amsterdam can help you get onto a boat.
I nearly laughed. I don’t know where Amsterdam is. I’m here to learn Hebrew. Give this paper to Luis, or to my mother.
You’ll be the one who goes.
Right away, the feeling of laughter left me.
My grandfather was teaching me about the most powerful book, the way of All Light, the Zohar, ideas he said I would not begin to understand until I was a very old woman, and even then they would still be a mystery.
I have chanted all night long, and now I see what the answer is. It will be you, my grandfather said.
No, I said. It won’t be.
Nothing is easy in this world, my grandfather said. That’s why there are ten gates to pass through before you reach the garden. If life were easy there would be one gate. There would be no gates at all.
What are the gates made of? I asked.
Crown, Wisdom, Intelligence, Love, Judgment, Compassion, Endurance, Majesty, Foundation of the World, Kingdom.
In my dreams, they seem real, I told my grandfather.
They are made of whatever and however you see them. The gates are always different, but the garden is always the same. And the Tree of Life that grows there is truth. It’s joining with the force that is the heart of everything. You name the gates, then you go through them. You walk right through if you are able. He looked right at me. If you dare.
SOON AFTER, a letter came from my brother. I had never received a letter before. I had to go down to the Duke’s palace and officially sign for it. I paid the soldier in charge of posting letters a few coins to thank him. I went to the well and sat on the edge. My grandfather had sent Luis a coded message telling him that I was now my grandfather’s student, even if I was only a girl.
My brother could not write much in his letter; someone at the seminary or in the Duke’s palace might decide to open it up and read it. But he told me he was proud of me. He told me our path was dangerous and true and that the most important thing of all was to remember the history of our people.
Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears, my brother wrote.
When I finished reading his letter, I took it home and burned it in a ceramic bowl. That was the best way to keep a secret. Keep it inside your head.
The burning singed the white-and-blue design of the bowl, but to me the pattern looked more beautiful.
What have you done to my bowl! my grandmother cried when she saw the burn marks.
Those are my brother’s words burned into it, I told her.
Instead of punishing me, my grandmother used the bowl to serve our dinner. It was adafina, chicken and dumplings, my favorite supper and my brother’s favorite as well.
THAT NIGHT, I had a dream about Catalina. I was on one side of a gate, and she was on the other. She was looking for me, calling out my name, but I didn’t answer. She was falling; all I had to do was reach out to her to save her, and yet I didn’t. This time the gate was made of black feathers, and I knew if I moved, the entire gate might fall apart, that’s how fragile it was. So I stayed where I was, silent.
All that day I felt terrible about my dream. Catalina and I no longer went together to the well on the Plaza on Fridays. I decided to go look for her. Maybe I could make things right. I took the wooden buckets in the yard and went to the Plaza. It was not as crowded as it had been before the riots, but there were people coming and going. At the well there was a group of girls my age. Catalina was among them.
As I approached, Catalina spied me. She turned her face away. One of the other girls, Rosa, nudged Catalina. They both looked at me and laughed.
Did you want something? Catalina asked as I approached the well. There are no pearls to be found in this water. For that you have to go to the seaside.
I was looking for you, I said.
Well, don’t bother. Andres isn’t with me.
The girl named Rosa hid her face, but I heard her laughter.
Not him. You, I said.
Well, now that you’ve found me, you’d better run home. Otherwise I might slap your face. Andres is an idiot. You think you’re so m
uch better than I am!
I don’t think I’m better than you, I said as I let the buckets down into the well. I drew them up quickly, so that much of the waters splashed out.
Good, Catalina said. I don’t think you are either. I don’t know what you are. You don’t even cross yourself the way we do.
I looked up from the well and saw the way Catalina was staring at me. It was late in the day and the sun was huge. I thought about the man with the red circle on his clothes. I thought about the way things burned and disappeared into the air.
As I reached for the water buckets, I could see our reflections in the deep water, floating. There was my friend and there was I.
I saw quite clearly, we looked nothing alike.
WHAT IF I wasn’t who you thought I was? I said to Andres later when we met.
We were beneath the olive tree, the special one. It was late at night, and we were supposed to be in our houses, sleeping. Instead we were here, dreaming out loud. We had sneaked out, and it felt as though we were alone in the world. But we were not.
You are, Andres said. You’re the girl I’ve been waiting for.
At this hour, there were creatures in the field I’d never seen in the daytime. Bats, quick little mice, the nightingale I’d heard during the daylight hours, still singing a mournful song.
Maybe I’m not even who I thought I was, I said.
You can be anything at all and it won’t matter to me.
How many men had said that to how many women in this world? How many girls had believed such things, only to be left waiting in a doorway?
But sometimes a hawk is a hawk and a dove is a dove and a nightingale is a bird that sings until morning. I decided to trust him.
You won’t change your mind? I said.
He laughed and said, Will you?
Let me tell you who I really am, I began.
You don’t have to. I know you. I know your heart. That’s the only thing that will ever matter to me.
I told him anyway. Even though it was dangerous, even though I knew I must never tell. When I was done, he kissed me.
So I gave him my promise, and he did the same, just like that. No matter who we might be in the eyes of anyone else, we belonged to each other.
HUSKS
Who Betrays You
Blood
It was something small that made it happen. Small like the bite of a poisonous bug. That small thing was a kiss.
You would think a kiss could bring only good things into the world, but not this time.
Andres and I continued to meet nearly every night under the olive tree where the hawk had been. It was our secret place.
But secrets can be kept for only so long. I have learned that now.
Catalina caught us. She waited in her yard, and when we met she confronted us. It was a dark night, but there wasn’t enough darkness to make this right. Catalina wanted us to explain ourselves. She felt it was her right to accuse us because she was the wronged party.
We didn’t mean for it to happen, I said.
Catalina laughed a hard laugh.
Andres tried to make her understand. You and I are like brother and sister, he told her. My love for you is there, he explained, but it’s different than the way I feel about Estrella.
I don’t want your love, Catalina told him. Then she turned on me. I wish I’d never met you. I wish you’d never existed. Now I wonder what else you’ve lied to me about.
She closed her eyes as though I had already disappeared. When she opened them again I knew she no longer saw me. I was nothing to her.
THE OFFICIALS didn’t come to Catalina. She went to them. She asked for an audience with the judge who was in charge of the court inside the Duke’s palace. She knelt before him and told him my grandfather had a secret life and a magic school; that we practiced witchcraft and Judaizing. She told them so easily, she might have been telling him the names of the pigs in her yard. She did it as though turning us in to the court was the simplest thing, a household chore, a recitation of a daily prayer.
Catalina said that she had seen my grandfather place a spot of blood on our door on the day when known Jews celebrated Passover. When I asked my grandfather if this was true, he said people from our church did so, but it was the blood of chicken, not, as Catalina had said, human blood, the blood of a stolen child.
Catalina told the judge she had never seen anyone in our family eat chorizo, and that brought on her initial suspicions. We refused sausage and roasts, and our pigs were our pets; she announced that we slept in bed with them. She had once heard my grandfather call my grandmother Sarah, when Señora deMadrigal went by the name of Carmen to the rest of town.
And that’s what the evidence came down to.
A name.
IT WAS FRIAR DELEON who told us all of this. How Catalina had been escorted out of the old palace as though she were an important person, how she’d been dressed in silk, wearing new satin shoes.
The Friar told us we should leave our town, go without questions and leave everything behind, but the soldiers came so quickly we barely had time to catch our breath. When they arrested my grandfather, they made sure to take everything they needed as evidence for the trial. This meant anything that mattered to us. Our candlesticks, our silver, letters written from my father to my mother, even my box of trinkets from beneath my mattress, in which I kept my pearls.
Luckily, my mother had thought to hide her emerald ring in her shoe. The soldiers took almost everything else and nearly destroyed our house. Dishes shattered, furniture split in two, woven blankets torn apart. My grandmother came at one of the soldiers with a knife, but he just pushed her away and she fell to the ground. The soldier wasn’t afraid of her the way I always had been. He barely even saw her.
Don’t fight with him, my grandfather said.
We obeyed my grandfather, even though we wept as we did so. At least the soldiers knew nothing about the hidden room filled with books and surgical tools, and they took only one member of our family, because he was the one who’d been said to be an enemy of the church.
The soldier in charge had the decency to let the great teacher Jose deMadrigal walk out the door a free man, but he remained so just until he reached the end of the yard. Then they put irons on him, the heavy sort, used for heretics and murderers.
We were crying and screaming for him, the family of a man for whom there was no hope. We cried so many tears the air itself had turned blue. Grandfather, father, husband, dearest man.
The soldiers took our sheep from which my mother had made such fine yarn. The chickens scattered and hid under the house, but the pigs were herded together, out the gate, down the lane, following behind my grandfather. At the very last moment, one of the soldiers grabbed Dini, my pet, and carried him away over his shoulder. Dini was screaming and he sounded like a person. I tried to go after him, but my mother ran to me and held me back; she covered my ears. All the same I could hear what the soldiers were doing; I could see it even when I closed my eyes. My grandfather, my pet, my life, my world. I knew the monster on the Plaza had walked through our house, destroying everything.
We stood there, broken.
FRIAR DELEON came again that evening to tell us we should leave. Leave my grandfather. Leave our home.
Now I began to understand why there were people who decided to stay. It was not so easy to abandon those you loved.
When we refused to run, the Friar told us we must stay away from the courthouse. I promised I would go no farther than the yard, but even while I said so, I had another plan entirely. I’d seen what had happened to the Arrias family; I knew my grandfather’s trial was to begin.
The next morning, I told my mother and grandmother I was going to the fields behind our house. Instead, I made my way to the Plaza, wearing a shawl over my head so no one would recognize me. I hid everything but my eyes. I sneaked in at the last moment, before the court doors closed, and sat in the back.
I recognized someone a few rows in fr
ont of me. I knew her from the shape of her head, from the rise of her shoulders, from the way she clasped her hands and rested them on the bench in front of her. Catalina.
How had I never noticed how hard Catalina was, how brightly she shone when something bad was happening to someone else? She had watched us: my beautiful mother, my strong grandmother, my brilliant brother, and she’d been dull with jealousy. So dull I hadn’t seen what was shining beneath her skin. She was green with it; I saw that now. She would not be called as a witness; only the judge would speak. All the same, Catalina was at the center of the trial, and she knew it; she was shining like an emerald. She had styled her hair carefully and put it up with tortoise-shell combs. I wondered if those combs had come from some Marrano woman who’d been stripped of everything she owned.
A long list of crimes was read out at last. Heresy, judaizing, magic, medicine, murder, blood.
They called my grandfather a sorcerer. The greatest sorcerer of our town and of our times. The most evil, the most dangerous, an even bigger threat to the townspeople than the black fever had been.
The court decided to test my grandfather. I had heard of such tests. They were like holding a witch’s head underwater to see if she would drown. Only her death could prove her innocence; a circle of impossible, deathly judgment.
They brought out a sausage made of Dini, and they made this announcement: It had come from a pig that had lived for three years without being cooked. A pig that had slept in bed with the women of the family.
People in the courtroom let loose with their disgust, cursing us, damning us, we who had become less than human. Marranos. Pigs.
As for me, I felt something rise in my throat: the horror of the world of men.
MY GRANDFATHER refused to eat the sausage. He said he was sick. He said he could not eat anything. He said he believed this court was unjust, and that the outcome of every trial would suit the judge and not the truth.
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