A Rip in the Veil (12 page)

*

“Keep the change.” John got out of the taxi at the entrance to Magnus’ street. He had his hand on Magnus’ gate when a sudden movement made him stop. He peered into the shadows. There; something moved, leaves rustled. A cat? John squinted in an effort to see. No cat; a man was standing below the window to Magnus’ study, most of him hidden from view by the huge rhododendron. The man grabbed hold of the sill and heaved himself upwards, as graceful as a Russian gymnast. Light spilled out of the window to illuminate his face.

“Hey!” John broke into a run. Quick as a flash the intruder dropped back to the ground, rushing for the fence with John at his heels. The door banged open.

“John?”

John didn’t – couldn’t – reply, driving the man towards the wooden fence. He widened his arms and attempted to grab him. Hector Olivares sneered and kicked him straight in the gut. John folded together like a penknife, and Hector scaled the fence and vaulted over to the other side.

“Hector Olivares?” Magnus helped John to stand. “Are you sure?” John scowled in the direction of where Hector had disappeared.

“I’d know that face anywhere.” He straightened up and waved Magnus off. “I’m fine, perfectly capable of walking on my own, alright?” But he was glad to sink down into one of Magnus’ armchairs, a huge mug of milky coffee in his hands. “Thanks.”

Magnus sat down opposite. “Why would he do something like that? Why…” He broke off. “Perhaps it’s him! That’s my burglar!”

“You think?” John tried to match his indistinct memories of the burglar with Hector. Both of them slight, both of them agile and strong. Maybe. He sipped at his coffee, gave Magnus a concerned look. The tall man looked tired and irritated. He kept on looking out the window, as if expecting Hector to materialise there.

“So what was it you called me about?”

Magnus picked up a small, battered notebook and held it out to John.

“I found it, in the studio. It was hidden under one of the drawers in the broken cabinet.”

John took the book from him. Black waxed covers and rounded corners – the old-fashioned kind his gran wrote her recipes in.

“What is it?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t read it yet, I…well, I couldn’t.” Magnus’ voice creaked with emotion, eyes glued to the notebook.

John looked from Magnus to the little book and back again.

“Why not? It’s just a notebook.” He flipped through it; most of it was blank, here and there the odd sketch, now and then page after page filled with Mercedes’ distinctive, scrawled handwriting. Fountain pen, never ballpoint with Mercedes, and here the ink varied from a fresh black to a faded brown.

“Look at the first page.” Magnus’ eyes were extraordinarily blue in the lamplight.

John opened the book to the first page.
The Book of Ruth
it said, but Ruth had been crossed over in red, replaced by a wobbly
Mercedes
.

“Not that one! The next one.”

John turned the page. A family tree. Isaac ben Daoud, Jacobo ben Isaac, Isaac ben Jacobo, Benjamin ben Isaac, Ruth bat Benjamin.

“Strange names,” he said, “Jewish, aren’t they?” He frowned at Magnus. “Mercedes was Jewish? Is she this Ruth person right at the end?”

“I have no idea; I bloody well hope not, given the dates.”

John had to squint to properly see the numbers. “Fifteenth century? So not Mercedes then. Maybe this was just a new idea of hers – to write a book.”

“I don’t think so.” Magnus retook the book, turned a few pages, cleared his throat and read.

I am Mercedes Gutierrez Sanchez. My husband is Magnus Lind. And once I was Ruth bat Benjamin, but that was very, very long ago.

“Jesus…” John said. “What is she saying? That she used to be a Jewish girl born in the fifteenth century?” He quelled an urge to laugh; sophisticated, cosmopolitan Mercedes a medieval Jewess? No, totally impossible.

“It seems so.” Magnus handled the book gingerly.

“Should we read it?” John’s eyes hung off the notebook.

“I’m not sure.” Magnus fidgeted in his seat. “I need something to eat first.”

*

It was well over an hour later. No matter that Magnus had dragged out the cooking, done the dishes, wiped down the counters and insisted on more coffee, they were now back in his study, the little book a tantalising presence on his desk. Magnus wasn’t sure he wanted to read it, in fact he was regretting not having burnt it when he found it.

“So,” John said, nodding at the book.

Magnus made for the shelf where he kept his whisky. In silence he poured them both a drink, returned to where John was sitting.

“I can read it if you want,” John said when Magnus made no move to pick up the book.

“No.” Most reluctantly Magnus opened the notebook. He took a deep breath and began to read.

My brain is like a sieve these days. My memories, they dribble from me. I no longer remember it all – don’t want to remember. My fingers tighten round the pen. My story. Must write it down, before it slips away from me. Magnus always says to start at the beginning. The beginning? Let there be Light, He said. Well, no, not that beginning. My beginning.

I remember I was born in Seville. No; I know I was born on the third day of Pesach in 1461. Or was it 1462? I’m not sure. But my mother was Miriam, my father was Benjamin, and I, I was Ruth. The house we lived in was tall and narrow, squeezed into a corner of a small plaza in the Judería of Seville. Lovely, lovely ochre walls, like honey in the afternoon sun. Sheltered, green courtyards, trickling water, heat, always so much heat.

On the first floor lived my grandparents and…no, I don’t recall. Irrelevant. On the second floor I lived with my parents and my sister, the third floor was my grandfather’s workshop, and on the ground floor, in a little room off the storage rooms and the kitchen, lived Geraldo. Yes, I remember Geraldo.

Geraldo was old. He talked all the time, and most of it was nonsense, but some of it was not. My grandfather had taken him in one night very many years ago, pitying this man who walked the streets in charred, odd clothing, speaking of thunder and lightning, funnels of bright, bright light, and of falling and falling. If he hadn’t done so, grandfather would say, poor Geraldo would likely have burnt as a witch, and all for the sin of being out of his head.

My father was a doctor. He had but to taste a drop of his patients’ urine to be able to diagnose them, and mostly he cured them as well. My mother was a chameleon, a woman who shone like the sun when my father was close, but wilted and faded when he was not. My sister was younger, happier, prettier, but I was the chosen one – oh, yes I was.

I remember paint. Colours. Amber, carmine, beautiful sienna red, cobalt and vermilion. Brushes arranged by size, easels and half-primed canvases, laughing sitters and on his stool my grandfather, eyebrows pulled together as he concentrated.

He was no ordinary painter, my grandfather – in my family we rarely are. No; we have magic in our fingers, and my grandfather was a painter of things unseen, evoking desert storms out of canvases the size of a hand palm, waterfalls from painted walls. But these were hidden skills, things we never spoke of. I’m not sure my mother ever knew.

“What? Like a family of weirdly talented painters?” John laughed. “No one can paint like that.”

Magnus hitched a shoulder. There was a painting in his bedroom that was very much like that, in palest whites and greens, here and there a dash of yellow. At times, if the light was right, it glowed into life, and it was him and Mercedes naked in a long gone Seville afternoon. But he didn’t feel like telling John this.

I was three – only three? no, that can’t be right – when my grandfather decided it was I that had inherited his talent. Blood red squiggles and my sister cried, long strokes of greens and browns, and my mother nodded to sleep. I was the wizard’s apprentice. I was taught to see and capture all the things most people never notice. The imprint of a hand on a surface of water; the rush of air that precedes a rainstorm. He tried to teach me his own special trick – painting his way into people’s heads – but I never mastered that; perhaps I didn’t want to.

When I wasn’t painting, I helped my mother – all little girls helped their mothers. I baked and cooked, sewed and washed, and swept the house clean before Sabbath. And when I had a moment over, I was mostly with Geraldo, begging him to tell me one more story, one more time.

He told good stories. About girls that fell down bunny holes and boys that grew up with wolves. But my favourite was the one about the thunderstorm – the one that made the adults laugh and say poor Geraldo was truly out of his head. Geraldo would scream it was true, all of it. I believed him.

One day he was out walking, he’d say, and just as he was trying to decide which way to take in the crossroads before him, a huge storm broke above his head. Terrible, he’d whisper, lightning and thunder but no rain, just very, very hot. And then…he’d swallow, shake himself…and then rose around his feet bright bands of greens and blues, they wrapped themselves around him, and those horrible colours tightened into a vice around him, propelling him towards a hole in the ground.

Like the bunny hole Alice fell through? No, of course not! This was a bottomless pit, a hole streaming bright, bright light, and he didn’t want to, but there was no way to avoid it, and so he fell. He fell and fell – and landed here.

John made a strangled sound, looked as if he intended to say something. Magnus shook his head; no more interruptions.

So easy, no? Just like Geraldo described it. A swirl of blues and greens, a dot of burning white, and there I was, leaning expectantly towards this bright point of light. My grandfather yanked me away, screaming that what had I done, I had near faded away before his eyes. He burnt the painting. I didn’t paint one like it for very many years.

When I was eight, my grandfather choked to death on a plum stone. No more painting. Don’t know why. It made me angry. To distract me, Father brought me along to see a patient, promising he’d buy me a pet on the way. A magpie. I danced by his side. That was the day I met Hector Olivares – eyes like aquamarines, hair like gilded copper. He took my bird! He opened the cage and set it free, laughing at me when I cried. My father offered me a new pet but I shook my head. I wanted my bird.

At fourteen I was María de las Mercedes, no longer Ruth, no longer Jewish but Catholic. No choice. My father was Benito Gutierrez, not Benjamin ben Isaac, and my mother stopped shining at the sight of him – she cried. And died.

At seventeen I met Hector again, and I stuck my tongue out, still angry at him for my bird. But this Hector was not a nasty boy, he was a young, handsome man, and he laughed and offered me a white rose in compensation for the lost bird. To Dolores, my sister, he offered a red rose. She blushed.

Ay, ay ay! Dolores and Hector, always together, and Dolores grew secretive and smug, disappearing for hours on end. Two years, a few more months, and Dolores was bright-eyed and rosy, whispering to me that soon, yes very soon, Hector would ask for her hand.

He never did. He laughed, and said he couldn’t marry a marrana, a Jewish convert. But he liked his little mistress, his hot-blooded little Jewish bedmate. Dolores cried when she told me this. Never again would she see him, never, ever again!

But one afternoon she was out, sent by me to buy marzipan from the nuns, and it grew dark, and still she didn’t come. And when she finally did, there was something wrong with her face, with her eyes, and she smoothed at her skirts, all the time her skirts.

My father found out. He cornered Hector and dragged him off his horse, beat him, kicked him, leaving the young grandee covered in mud and chicken shit. People laughed. Hector got to his feet and promised revenge.

Despite this, the coming years were calm and peaceful. I married, an older man, a prominent Christian. He was kind to me, indulged my fascination with paints and brushes. Long, orderly days, no Hector, just a steady roll of weeks and months. Until the eve of Dolores’ wedding.

They scaled the walls, they came through the gate, and we were dragged into the patio, all of us – my father, Geraldo and me. And Dolores, God help me, Dolores as well. She was undressed by these men, and Geraldo might have been old, but he loved us, and he picked up a spade and hit one of the men. They killed him. And they laughed, forcing Dolores down on her back.

I recognised Hector behind his mask, and when they were done with her, I thought they might turn on me, and I almost hoped they would, because it was unbearable to stand and watch. But they didn’t. My pregnant belly and my husband’s name protected me. I was shoved into a room, tied and gagged.

Next morning the house was empty. No father, no Dolores. No Dolores! My father, I looked everywhere for him, for them, I knocked my way round all the houses in the neighbourhood but all I got was shaking heads and hastily hooded pity in their eyes. Hector; I…yes, I would go to the queen, to the Inquisitor himself, tell them what he had done. Geraldo dying in his blood, my sister ravished, and my father… My husband wouldn’t let me. What proof but my testimony?

Two months later, and we were standing on a balcony overlooking the plaza. A festive occasion – an auto de fé no less – and the square below was crowded with people, the air heavy with the scents of fried pork, of bread and too much sour wine. And there they came, the penitents, a straggling line of men and women that filed silently after the chief Inquisitor himself, Alonso de Hojeda. By his side rode Hector. And among the penitents… No! Dios mío, no! I don’t want to remember this, but I must, I must. My sister, my Dolores, but she was no longer a happy, pretty girl, she was a hairless waif, dressed in rags. And there was my father, and I wondered what they’d done to him to make him stagger along as he did – but I didn’t want to know.