Blood Secret (9 page)

J
ERRY LAY IN BED
. She had been trying forever to recall the sound of Beatriz’s voice, but for some reason it wasn’t working. And every time she tried to think of a question to ask, even if she had remembered the girl’s voice, for some reason she thought of her mother, her mother and the stupid veil she had concocted for Jerry’s First Communion. In her desperation she had even tried to imagine a conversation between herself and Beatriz about Communion veils. It would go something like this: If you think simple is bad, try silly, try looking like a cross between a desert Arab in a burnoose and a Hindu swami in a turban for your First Communion. Take your pick.

But Beatriz and Doña Maria and Doña Grazia and the rest seemed to recede into some misty region. Instead there was her mother,
Millie, so fragile, her toothpick arms, her darting glances, with her rapid-fire, breathless speech, always rushing up to you as if she had something desperately important to confide.

Jerry got out of bed now and went to the bureau drawer where she kept a few things in a small cedar box with writing on the lid that said “New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.” She opened the box and took out the linen card the nuns had given her at the Catholic Charities home and read again about the friars in Assisi and Padua who were praying, perhaps at this very minute, for her mother.

Outside she heard the rumble of thunder, then a crack of lightning peeled back the dark, and every object was limned in a hot white radiance. On the porch she saw the figure of Constanza. She saw the small bald spot, somehow shocking, like the eye of a hurricane as strands of Constanza’s white hair loosed by the wind whipped about her head. A few smudged stars wheeled in the sky and clouds chased after a lopsided moon. Everything was swirling in this night, but Jerry clamped her eyes shut trying to banish the image of those violets eddying around her mother’s ankles.

Jerry was still holding the card of the Franciscan
friars in her hand. Assisi! The word jumped out at her. That was the medal Beatriz’s father had made for her cousin Brianda as a gift for her Communion. She had seen that medal in the trunk. She was sure. So tarnished it was almost black. She had simply scraped it aside when she had replaced the Bible the first time she had ever opened the trunk.

Jerry waited until she was sure that Constanza had gone to bed. She then took a flashlight. The steady rain outside muffled her footsteps. The temperature had dropped and the air was cold. On the back of a chair was a shawl that she picked up and wrapped herself in. She opened the cellar door and began her descent. The stairs were familiar. She knew that the edge of the third step was cracked. She no longer needed the flashlight. Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness now and she knew the way. It was curious, but not only did the familiar shapes seem to dissolve into the perpetual dusk of the cellar, she also began to feel the slide of time itself.

Outside the stars swirled, and inside once more centuries began to bend. Time curved back as Jerry reached to lift the lid of the trunk. She pushed the
Bible aside. A small, dark disk glowered. She picked it up, licked it, then took the corner of her shawl and rubbed it. The figure of a man emerged. On one shoulder a squirrel was perched, on the other a bird, and the man’s head was tilted toward the sky where two more flew. Jerry rubbed a bit harder. The man’s mouth was open. It was St. Francis. He was preaching to the birds and all the animals that Brianda had loved. Brianda, who hadn’t even wanted the cook to kill a mouse in her pantry. Brianda of Seville…

In the House of the Doctor
O
N
C
ALLE DE
J
ERONIMO
S
EVILLE
, S
PAIN
A
PRIL
1480

Luis

I think it is an awful thing being twelve years old, especially to be twelve years old and the youngest and the only boy. I am left out of everything. I tell my friend Paco this and he says, “So you want to wear dresses and corsets and kirtles like your sisters and weave ribbons in your beautiful hair?” He
waves his fingers through his own hair as a girl does. He does not understand. It is not that I want to wear dresses; I just don’t like being left out. They all think I am too young, too young to understand anything. But I know a lot more than they think. I know, for instance, that Rosita is secretly seeing Juan Sebastian, a young gentleman of the court. But Juan Sebastian is an Old Christian and we are New Christians, Conversos, and we must marry other Conversos. So Rosita and Juan would be in big trouble if anyone found out. Of course my other sister, Elena, knows. Because girls, especially sisters, cannot keep secrets. Also she knows because Rosita needs Elena’s help to make meetings with Juan. I figured this out because I became suspicious when they kept going to the convent to help embroider the robe of the Macarena Virgin, which will be carried through the streets during the Holy Week procession to the cathedral. But Rosita does not work as long on the robe as she says nor as often. I cannot believe that my mother and father don’t suspect anything. But they don’t. This is why children can get away with a lot—because their parents are so unsuspecting.

But I am cleverer than my sisters. I don’t say stu
pid things like I am going to church to light a candle for Abuela Yolanda, who died last year. No. When Papa sends me on an errand to, say, the herbalist on the Calle de Hierba, I add on a few errands of my own. Papa is a doctor and he sends me often because he likes only the freshest herbs and compounds. Lately Papa has been sending me on lots of errands—errands that keep me away from our house for maybe two hours or more. Just yesterday I had to first go to the herbalist for some theriac. Then I had to go to the olive dealer several streets away for some unripened olives. Papa uses the oil of such olives to dissolve myrtle berries. This is a cure for worms. And every child in Seville, I think, has worms these days. You see them scratching their behinds. My sisters and I have never ever had worms because Papa treats us with what is called a vermifuge three times a year, made from the myrtle oil and some powders. We have to drink it and it makes us spend hours in the privy. I think having worms might be better.

Today I have to go on one of my least favorite errands—to the Convent of Santa Ines on Calle Doña Maria Coronel. I do not like this convent. Some of the nuns are really crazy there. And that is
why I have to go: to deliver the fresh pursalane and the aloe vera and then tell them about the egg whites for the blistering, although they should know all this by now. You see, these are the nuns who devote themselves to the memory of a noble woman, Doña Maria Coronel. They celebrate her chastity, for she deliberately disfigured her face with burning oil when King Pedro I demanded her as his mistress. To this day many of the nuns do the same. Their wounds become infected. The disfigurement is not required to join the order, but the new mother superior is said to encourage it. This woman, Mother Angelica, is a cousin of Friar Torquemado, the confessor to Queen Isabella. I once heard Papa say that Friar Torquemado was not quite right in his mind. So I guess it must run in the family, because since Mother Angelica came to this convent there are many more disfigurements. Papa has gently tried to speak to her about this, about how these young women could better serve Jesus if they were healthy. But she says it is a test of their faith. She is so proud in her disfigurement. Is not this kind of pride also a sin?

“Luis, dear boy.”

“I have the pursulane and the aloe vera.” I put
the package into Mother Angelica’s hands as quickly as I can. I try to look only at her hands.

“Bless you, child. Bless you.”

There is one very strange thing about the older nuns who disfigure themselves. Their skin never wrinkles in the normal way but is unnaturally shiny on the surface. But beneath I sense a withering. I do not know what else to call it. Mother Angelica’s face is so weird. I can see even hidden in the shadows of her wimple, that single eye peering out, the right eye, for the left is gone. The empty socket puckers into a pit of red crimpings like a seam in which the threads had been drawn too tight. Her face is all pulled to one side. Half of the upper lip is gone, melted away like tallow.

“Papa says if this does not work, he will send over a lotion of wine and myrrh.”

“Oh yes. How kind. Yes, my dear, yes.”

How can her voice sound so normal coming out from such a monstrous face? I turn and run down the street. And you know what? This is the strangest. I feel her eye following me—not the one that is there, not the right one. But the left one that was boiled out.

When I get home, I head for the cellar room where Papa grinds the herbs into powders. “Where are you going?” Mama shrieks. “Why are you back so soon?” Mother asks, and touches the St. Francis medal at her throat. “You can’t go down there yet,” she barks. “Go outside and play.”

I feel my face harden. I hate this. More and more they treat me like a baby; more and more I am having these feelings of being left out. Then I hear footsteps coming up from the cellar. It’s Papa who comes through the door first, Don Gabriel follows him, then José Catalan and Gaspar and Isaac Alonso. What is this? What is going on in the cellar? None of these men is a doctor, or an apothecary.

But when the last man comes, I nearly gasp out. It is my uncle Tomás Mendez, the repostero major, the king’s chief butler. What is my uncle doing here?

Mama starts to speak. “I am sorry—”

Papa breaks in. “I think the time has come, Brianda.”

“Yes,” says Uncle Tomás, and then in a lower voice, “he turns thirteen next month, does he not? He would be bar mitzvahed had he studied.”

Bar what? Studied what? I don’t know what they are talking about.

“All right, gentlemen.” Papa is brisk. “I think you should take your leave in the usual manner. Don Gabriel, you first from the front door. Remember the packet of theriac powders I gave you. Hold it prominently.” Don Gabriel is already on his way out. “José, from the back door, and Gaspar, you through the courtyard. Your brother Isaac from the front door in five minutes. Tomás, you will wait and take a glass of wine. I have a good new bottle of
tinto
. We shall explain together to Luis. Come, Brianda; come, Luis; come, Tomás.” I follow Papa to the cellar.

Everything looks just the same. Papa’s worktable where he keeps his mortars and pestles for the grinding is in place. The little coal brazier for boiling herbs still glows. On a shelf in jars filled with spirits, organs of various animals float, waiting for Papa’s dissection tools. Papa walks over to a cupboard where he keeps splints. He takes out a long, rectangular box.

“Come here, my son.”

I watch and am completely mystified as Papa takes from the box a small skullcap and puts it on.
Tomas also puts one on and then, to my surprise, they place one on my head. Then Papa begins speaking words in a language I have never heard.

“Baruch ata Adonai Elohainu melech ha’olam malbish arumim.”

“Papa, what are you saying?”

“Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, who clothes the naked.” Don Miguel pauses. “That is the language of our faith, Luis. I am just learning it. It is Hebrew, and I just said the blessing for wearing a new piece of clothing.” He taps the skullcap he has just placed on my head. “You see, I know so few blessings and words in Hebrew.” I look surprised. “You think because I am a doctor I know everything? Oh no, I am just starting to learn. Tomás as well, and look, he is the secretary to the king.”

“What do you learn, Papa?”

“We learn how to be Jews.”

“Jews? We are to be Jews?” I am completely confused.

“We were Jews once long ago—your great-great-grandparents—but we were forced to convert, and now as Conversos, as New Christians, they begin to treat us worse than when we were Jews. So many
of us think, what kind of religion is this where they now make laws against the New Christians, where they persecute us, often violently, and try to exclude us?”

My own father feels excluded. This very thought sparks like tinder in my head. I thought only kids felt excluded.

“How do you mean, Papa? Who is being left out?”

“Don Gabriel, an alderman. Fray Alonso Hoyeda says Conservos cannot hold office.”

“I know about him, Papa, but everyone says that friar is crazy.”

“He
is
crazy. And he has great influence with Friar Torquemado.”

“Queen Isabella’s confessor.”

“Yes. There were troubles three years ago. You might have been too young to remember. The
menudos
resented that the Conversos had many of the high-paying jobs in court. Pressure was brought to bear on the king, and the king agreed to write to the pope in Rome asking for permission to establish a council of inquisition.”

“What’s that?”

“The Inquisition is to be a group of men from the
church who would look into matters of faith to be sure that everyone practices the true faith, the faith of the Roman Catholic Church, because some Conversos were suspected of secretly practicing their old religion.”

“But Papa, you are practicing your old faith.”

Don Miguel nodded somberly. “But do I want to belong to a faith that preaches hatred?” He smiles reassuringly. “Don’t worry. We shall be careful.”

I touch the medal of St. Francis of Assisi just like the one Mama wears. She had given it to me on the occasion of my First Communion. “That is why,” Papa says, “you must continue to wear your medal. We must give appearances of our Christianity.” Papa pauses and looks troubled for a moment. “Besides, the medal was a gift of love and love does not change. St. Francis loved all things, and there is always more to learn from loving than hating.” He brushes his thumb lightly down my cheek. “But do not fret, Luis. So far the king has not appointed the men to the council of the Inquisition. It is Tomás’s feeling that the king wants none of this. But in the meantime, we men like Tomás and Don Gabriel and Don Gaspar and Isaac and Don José Catalan have indeed come back to the faith of our fathers.
We want to be Jews even if we must be secret ones. And so we plan a Seder.”