Blood Secret (12 page)

T
HE CEMETERY WAS
at the crest of a hill, and even though the buffeting winds had blown off a good bit of the snow, many of the tombstones remained half buried in drifts.

“You get out and poke around,” Constanza said. “I’m staying warm in here.” She had put the truck in park and left the motor running.

Jerry began to walk around. It wasn’t a large cemetery, but it did look old. The tombstones seemed worn thin from scouring winds and weather. Many of the names were so faint as to be unreadable. She saw markings, some understandable—a crucifix, the bowed head of what appeared to be the Virgin Mary—but time had erased all the features so completely it was as if a ghost holy woman hovered over the grave of someone named Lopez, so worn by time and
weather that only the trace of a smile was left. But then there were more inscrutable ones. They were designs, but none that she recognized. Among the twenty to thirty gravestones of the names that could be read, it seemed that they all belonged to one or two families, perhaps three. The most prominent last names were Gomez and Begay and Lopez. Nothing that Jerry recognized. The first names were barely visible and only a few letters of the middle names had survived.

On one there was a face, but it was too round to be that of the Virgin. It had the contours of a baby’s face, but again the features seemed to have been erased by time so that only a slightly blurred almost-smile remained. Jerry crouched down to see it better. She assumed it must have been carved to look like a cherub; perhaps a baby lay in this grave. She hoped not. That was too sad. She scraped away some of the snow and saw the dim imprint of what appeared to be wings. There was a cross beside the left wing. She blew off more snow. The clear outline of a triangle appeared by the right wing, and then upside-down and interlocked was another. A star!

“Aunt Constanza!” she yelled.

Constanza jolted awake. Good Lord! She never
dreamed the child had such a voice! She got out of the truck hoping Jerry hadn’t wakened a rattler from its winter sleep and been bitten.

As she approached, she saw Jerry crouching by the stone. She had thrown her mitten down on the ground and was pointing with her finger at something inscribed on the tombstone. “What is this?”

“One of those Davis stars?” Constanza asked in a bewildered voice. “I mean Stars of David.” Jerry nodded. “And a cross, and is that some kind of angel?”

Jerry nodded again and then spoke. “Who’s buried here, Aunt Constanza?”

Constanza shook her head back and forth slowly. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Why do they have crosses and stars and angels all mixed up together?” Once again Constanza shook her head slowly.

Jerry looked around in frustration. “There are only a few names. Lopez, Begay, Gomez.”

“There were some Begays in our family once, I think.”

“But there aren’t any Lunas—our name, Aunt Constanza.”

“Oh, Luna was mostly used as a middle name for girls in our family.”

“You mean it wasn’t your last name?”

“Oh no, child. I think it died out as a last name way long ago. But you know the Spanish tradition is that you include a mother’s last name by giving it as a middle name to your children. My mother was real keen on that. Both my sister, Jeraldine, and I had Luna for our middle name.”

“But what was your last name?”

“Morillo.”

“So why didn’t you keep it?”

“Liked Luna better,” Constanza said simply, and shrugged. “And see, isn’t it nice that kind of by hook or by crook it got passed on down to you?”

“By hook or by crook,” Jerry repeated.

“Come on, child. You’re looking awfully cold. Let’s go home.”

Jerry picked up her mitten and got up. “Look at that hand of yours raw with cold. You’ll be getting frostbite next thing. Then what good will you be to me?” Constanza grabbed Jerry’s bare hand and held it to her mouth and blew hard on it.

“H
ELLO
!” P
ADRE
H
ERNANDEZ
stepped out of his station wagon and waved as they turned into the drive. Jerry felt a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. Constanza switched off the ignition and gave her hat a fierce tug to set it firm against the wind that was kicking up whirls of snow devils outside. The wind whipped the black robes of the padre as he made his way toward the truck. Constanza and Jerry both got out. Jerry felt a compulsion to run inside and straight to the cellar.

“Jerry hasn’t been to Mass and I was out in this direction and thought I’d stop in to see if everything’s all right.”

“Everything’s fine,” Constanza said.

“Jerry all right?” the padre pressed. Jerry nodded and began walking toward the house.

“She’s just fine.” Constanza hesitated. “She’s just sorting things out. We all have to do that sometimes, you know.” Then she began walking toward the house. “I’d invite you in, Padre, for a cup of tea. But there’s a mess of orders to be straightened out.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Didn’t mean to intrude.”

“It’s never an intrusion, Padre,” Constanza said warmly. “Just caught us at a busy time—orders, Easter coming up, lots of things to sort out.”

Then she looked around at the mounds of snow in the yard. “Imagine this. Blizzard when spring should be around the corner. Well, you never know in New Mexico, do you?”

“Sure don’t. But it never stays around that long. Sun could come out tomorrow and burn all this off,” he said.

Jerry nearly tripped when she heard the word
burn
. Would she ever be able to hear that word again and think of it in a normal way? She just wanted to get inside—away from the padre, away from the whiteness of the snow-covered world. The cellar beckoned now like an old friend. The idea of the amber-tinged light, the dust, the smell of the earth, the sandstone, the spider that she only sometimes saw but whose presence had become a
strange comfort—that was the place where she belonged. She wanted to think about the cemetery. She wanted to think about what her aunt had said about the name Luna and the Begays. Luna, she had said, was often used as a middle name. Luna was an old Spanish name. Miriam had married a man named de Luna. But Begay, she knew, was a Navajo name. It had nothing to do with the old world of Spain.

She stared down now at the lid of the trunk. SdL. She traced the intaglio of pinpricks with her finger. Sanchez de Luna. It was like a bolt of lightning had suddenly illuminated every dark wonder and dim question in her mind, and she knew now with absolute certainty that this was Miriam’s trunk. Of course it was. There might be things from other people in it. But it was Miriam to whom this trunk first belonged. For only Miriam would have those exact initials, the ones of her maiden name and those of her married name. The trunk had been made for her. Jerry lifted the lid now and peered in. She had replaced the piece of lace and the letter and the medal. But she knew that there was another silver piece, most likely made by Beatriz’s father. She felt her fingers touch something cold.
Hah! she thought. It was slender and blackened and cylindrical, a tubelike thing not more than three inches long. She wet her finger and rubbed. She could feel a design and, after a minute or so of rubbing, the tarnished black surface lightened to dark gray. One end was open and it looked as if it might have had a lid or stopper of some kind. It could have been for oil, or perhaps perfume. If there had been a scent, it had long since vanished. And yet in her mind another scent came back, a familiar scent. Jerry rested her elbows on the edge of the trunk and closed her eyes and tried to place the scent. She saw the red hat once again.

“Señorita Miriam,” and with a flourish Don Solomon Ben Asher presented his hat into Miriam’s hands. There was the faint scent of limes when he removed his hat. Reyna said it was an oil that he used on his hair
.

“Miriam!” Jerry spoke the name aloud in the cellar. The sound seemed to swirl and merge with the scent of the limes. But this was a different Miriam. An unimaginably old Miriam, older than Doña Grazia, with more years than a century. A woman in whom the accretions of age had amassed like sediments of time from the beginnings of the earth….

In the House of the Apothecary
O
N THE
S
TREET OF THE
N
ASRID
G
RANADA
, S
PAIN
J
ANUARY
1492

Esther

“Maria!” Mama keeps trying to wake up my great-grandmother. I don’t know why they don’t let this poor old lady rest. She doesn’t want to be wheeled out here in her roll chair to see this stupid spectacle from the balcony. She told me so herself. But Papa and Mama feel that she must be stimulated. I think she is stimulated. I think she pretends to sleep. I think she does not want to see this parade, this triumphant march of the king and queen arriving in Granada.

“Abuela, you want to go out to the balcony and see the king and queen arrive?” Mama says this, and then turns to me. “Esther, don’t you think Abuela wants to see the king and queen?”

“No, she doesn’t,” I answer fiercely. “What does she care? This is not such a wonderful moment. Look, they have already renamed the street. Did
you see the sign go up yesterday?” It is now called the Calle de los Reyes Catolicos, Street of the Catholic Monarchs.

“Mama, will they rename our street?” my little brother Avraham asks.

“Who knows,” she says, and then bursts out impatiently. “Oh, take her out there. The sun is out. She needs some fresh air.”

Poor Abuela. I look at her. She is so ancient. She has over one hundred years. Mama says she is maybe one hundred and ten, but perhaps even older. They think she is so old that she doesn’t care, or hear, or maybe even think. But she does. I know. She has told me that sometimes she pretends to sleep. She tells me that she doesn’t talk because sometimes she doesn’t want to tell people what she really thinks. And she does think. She told me that she hates her name. So now she has decided not to answer to it anymore. She talks to me of these things. She told me her real name. It was Miriam. Miriam Sanchez de Luna. De Luna is my middle name. It was the middle name of my grandmother Juana, who is now dead. So my mother gave it to me as my middle name. It pleased Miriam very much at the time. But now she thinks only about her first
name. So I try to call her Miriam and told Mama and Papa and Avraham and the little ones and Luis to call her that, too. But they forget—all except for Luis.

Luis made Abuela’s special chair when he came here more than ten years ago. My life changed when Luis came. For years we had lived freely here as Jews in Granada. Maybe Mama and Papa had heard rumors of what happened in other places, but they protected us. We didn’t know. I think of those times and I think it was like living in a cocoon, all wrapped up and protected. But when Luis came, this cocoon of tranquility and safety was pierced momentarily. I shall never forget the day he came. He was no more than fourteen or fifteen. I knew he was special from the first. But he was strange. His eyes were too large for his face. It was as if he had seen too much, and he had. Mama gasped. “Brianda!” she said. “It is as if I am looking at Brianda.” Brianda had been Luis’s mother. I peeked out from behind Mama and saw his thin face, so pale that it appeared to me like a dim lantern in the dusk of our narrow street. Then he spoke. “My mother is dead, burned at the stake. My father is dead, burned at the stake. My sisters have been
taken away. I have nowhere to go.”

In the space of one minute my world changed. At first I didn’t want to go near Luis. I felt that his parents’ death clung to him like the pox. I thought I would catch it. I know it sounds stupid. But Luis too did not really want to come near us. He told me that he felt that he was a freak, so different that somehow his differentness would touch us in some horrible way. That he would spoil our perfect world. So Luis hardly spoke when he first came here. Gradually he spoke a little bit more, and over time, in bits and pieces, his story came out.

He had walked to Granada. That he had been able to thread his way through the inquisitorial police guards and leave Seville was a miracle; that he had walked all the way to Granada was unbelievable. Perhaps not. He seemed like a shadow of a child to all of us. So insubstantial as to be nearly invisible. The hollow look in his eyes, haunted by visions he could never express, he was more phantom than flesh and blood. But finally the hollowness began to leave his eyes. At first Luis could not grasp the safeness, the security of our beautiful city. He could not believe that Jews could go anywhere, practice openly their religion. He badgered Papa to
teach him more Hebrew. Indeed he reveled in the Jewish traditions of our household. My papa’s family, the Cardozos, had lived for generations in Granada and had never been forced to convert. When Luis told me how his family had given up the Catholic faith and returned to their old faith—begun to secretly practice Judaism—it seemed so bizarre and strange. They knew so little. They pieced together the traditions, but it was like a blanket with immense holes in it. It was unbelievable when he told us the story of his first Seder. He had never known what the fourth question was until my youngest brother, David, had spoken it in a clear voice: “On all other nights we eat either sitting or reclining, but why on this night do we recline?”

That was not all Luis learned. When my other grandmother, who is now dead, baked the bread for the Sabbath dinner, she always took a pinch of dough and threw it into the oven while murmuring a
brache
, a blessing. When he had asked what the blessing was about, she told him the story. She explained that the bread was offered to remember the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The small piece of dough, about the size of an olive, was
burned in the oven as a kind of sacrifice. “We diminish our joy,” she said, “in memory of the destruction of the Temple.”

Papa loved teaching Luis and not just about being Jewish. Papa said he had never seen such a quick mind as that of Luis, and he arranged for him to be apprenticed to our cousin Jacobo Cardozo, who was a court physician. But most important, Luis had impressed Yusuf Hassan, the court herbalist, who let him into the forbidden gardens of the Alhambra, where he cultivated his rare plants. Jacobo Cardozo said that Luis was the most extraordinary student he had ever had, and now Luis, who is barely twenty-four, has been called in to attend King Boabdil and the royal family. But here is the problem. King Boabdil and his Moors have been defeated by the imperial forces of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. And I can assure you that Luis shall never serve in the court of the monarchs who burned his parents.

“Abuela, can I touch your bald spot?”

“David!” Mama scolds.

But Abuela has wakened up. She blinks as if the sun is too strong. The little ones, Emmanuel and David, love to touch the bald patch on her head.
David tells her that it looks like a map he has seen in Papa’s cousin Jacobo’s house. Oh, now Jacobo is coming up to her to say something. She wrinkles her nose. He always eats lots of garlic. Poor Abuela out here on the balcony, hearing crowds cheer the monarchs she couldn’t care less about, waves of garlic washing over her, David patting her bald spot, his fingers still sticky with candy—no wonder she pretends to sleep.

Oh well, as long as I am out here, I might as well watch with the others. I’ll stand right beside Abuela and make sure she is all right. I bend down. “I am right behind you, Abuela Miriam,” I whisper softly in her ear. A ghost smile passes over her face, perhaps for the ghost girl who had to die when she left Seville those long years ago.

Although our own house is on the Street of the Nasrid, we still have a good view of the main avenue by which the monarchs will make their entry into our city. It has been just two months since King Boabdil, the last ruler of the Nasrid dynasty of Moors, capitulated to the Spanish monarchs. Ours was the last Islamic stronghold in the kingdom of Spain. And now it has fallen. The Moors who practiced the religion of Islam were
always our best friends. But they are no longer in power, so I wonder what will happen to us. My mama had to leave Toledo when she was a little girl on the day of her First Communion. Her whole family came here. It was one of the few safe places in Spain, and the royal family and the court promised it would always be safe in Granada. But it was a different king then. And Isabella was just a girl. Little girls change.

And cities will change. Our lovely Granada, perched on the edge of a beautiful valley, forever has insulated us from the ugliness of the rest of Spain, from the Inquisition, from the hatred. I am a spoiled rich girl. I know nothing of discomfort. I have never really feared, and now I fear coming out of this silken place I call a cocoon, this haven. I fear it terribly. I have seen nothing and yet in a sense I have seen it all—in the eyes of my dear cousin Luis. I am deeply in love with Luis and he with me. We had planned a life here, to be married in Granada, where I have lived my entire life. He was to be a physician in the court of King Boabdil. But all that is changing.

The crowd roars. I stand on my tiptoes to catch a glimpse of this queen. She is supposed to be very
tiny, but they say she rides on a high throne placed within her carriage. My eyes flinch. There is a blinding dazzle of sunlight and gold. I glance down. What is Abuela clasping in her hand? Ah, the perfume vial that King Boabdil gave to Luis the time Luis treated him for the gout. Luis gave that to me. But Abuela had so loved the scent of the lime oil that I gave it to her. She keeps it in the small reticule that always hangs from her wrist. A dozen times a day she takes it out to sniff the scent.

There is another roar from the crowds. In the distance I can see the white horses of the monarchs, clad in their golden battle carapaces. What must Luis be thinking, feeling? To see once more the monarchs who had sent his mother and father to the stake. My beloved Luis! I must go stand beside him. I can see that his knuckles grip the rail of the balcony so hard they are white. I lace my arm through his. “I am here, Luis. I am here.”