The Last Jew (12 page)

A guard armed with sword and club sat sleepily on a chair in the corridor. The alguacil told Yonah, 'He is Paco,' and muttered to the guard, 'This one is Tomás.' Then he went into his office and closed the door against the powerful stink.

Yonah knew with resignation that any attempt at cleanliness in that place would have to begin with the slop buckets, filled to overflowing, so he asked Paco to unlock the first cell, in which a vacant-eyed female watched listlessly as he took her bucket.

When he tethered Moise behind the jail he had noticed a spade hung against the wall, and now he took it and found a sandy place where he dug a deep hole. He emptied the odorous contents into the hole and then twice filled the bucket with sand and emptied it. There was a tree nearby with very large heart-shaped leaves that he used to wipe out the sand, then he rinsed the bucket in the trickle of water in a nearby ditch before returning it to the cell.

Thus he cleansed the buckets in five cells, his pity growing as he witnessed the poor condition of their occupants. When the door to the sixth cell was opened, he went inside and paused for a moment before picking up the bucket. The prisoner was a slender man. Like the other males, his hair and beard had been allowed to grow long and untended, but there was something in the face that Yonah seemed to know.

The guard grunted, irritated to be kept standing by the open door, and Yonah picked up the slop bucket and carried it outside.

It was only when he reentered the cell to return the bucket, trying to see the prisoner's face as it may have been with barbered hair and a neatly tended beard, that he received a blow of memory. It was a picture of his dying mother, and the man who had come every day for long weeks to bend over Esther Toledano and spoon medicines into her.

The prisoner was Bernardo Espina, the former physician of Toledo.

14

The Holiday

At night Yonah slept on the flagstone floor of the interrogation room. Once a day he fetched food cooked nearby by the wife of the night guard, Gato, and fed the prisoners. He ate what they ate, sometimes feeding it to Moise to supplement the burro's slim fare of weedy grass. He was waiting for a propitious time to flee. Paco said there was to be a large auto de fé soon, with many people in the city. That seemed to Yonah a good time to leave.

Meanwhile he kept the jail clean and Isidoro, content with his labor, left him alone. In his first days at the jail the thieves were severely beaten by Paco and the night guard, Gato, and then they were released. The drunkard was released too, only to be returned three days later to a different cell, sodden and shouting wildly.

Gradually, from the muttered curses or conversations between Isidoro and his men, Yonah learned about the charges facing some of the New Christians. A butcher named Isaac de Marspera was accused of selling meat prepared according to Jewish rite. Four of the others were accused of habitually buying Marspera's meat. Juan Peropan was accused of owning pages of Jewish prayer, and his wife, Isabel, of willingly participating in Jewish liturgy. Neighbors of Ana Montalban had observed her using the seventh day of the week as a day of rest, laving her body each Friday before sundown, wearing clean clothes during the Jewish Sabbath.

Yonah began to be conscious of the eyes of the physician from Toledo, following him each time he worked near the man's cell.

Finally, one morning when he was working inside the cell the prisoner spoke to him in a low voice. 'Why do they call you Tomás?'

'What else should they call me?'

'You are a Toledano, but I don't remember which one.'

You know I am not Meir, Yonah wanted to say, but he was afraid. This physician could seek to trade him to the Inquisition in return for leniency, could he not?

'Ah, you are mistaken, señor,' he said, and he finished his sweeping and left the cell.

Several days went by without incident. The physician spent much of his time reading his breviary and had stopped staring at him. Yonah felt that if the man wished to betray him he would have done so.

Of all the prisoners, the butcher Isaac Marspera was the most defiant, at frequent intervals roaring out blessings and prayers in Hebrew, hurling his Jewishness in his captors' faces. The others accused of Judaizing were quieter, almost passive in their despair.

Yonah waited until he was once more within Espina's cell. 'I am Yonah Toledano, senor.'

Espina nodded. 'Your father, Helkias ... Did he go away?'

Yonah shook his head. 'Killed,' he said, and then Paco came to let him out and lock the cell, and they stopped talking.

Paco was a lazy man who dozed when Isidoro wasn't near, his chair tilted against the wall. At such times he was very irritable when Yonah asked him to unlock the cells, and finally he handed Yonah the key and bade him work the locks himself.

Yonah had returned to the physician's cell eagerly, but to his disappointment Espina showed no further desire to talk, keeping his eyes fixed on the pages of his breviary.

When Yonah entered Isaac de Marspera's cell the butcher was standing and swaying, his tunic pulled over his head like a prayer shawl. He was chanting aloud, and Yonah drank in the sound of the Hebrew words and listened to their meaning:

'For the sin which we have committed before Thee by association with impurity,

And for the sin which we have committed before Thee by confession of the lips,

And for the sin which we have committed before Thee in presumption or in error,

And for the sin which we have committed before Thee wittingly or unwittingly,

For all these, O the Lord of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.'

Marspera was shriving himself, and with a small shock Yonah knew it must be the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tishri, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. He wanted to join Marspera in the prayers, but the door to the alguacil's office was open and he could hear Isidoro's loud voice and Paco's submissive one, so he swept around the praying man and locked the cell door when he left.

That day all the prisoners ate the gruel he brought to the cells save Marspera, who observed the strict fast of the high holiday. Yonah didn't eat, either, glad of a means to declare his Jewishness without risk. He served his portion of gruel and Marspera's to Moise.

At night, lying sleepless on the hard floor of the interrogation room, Yonah asked forgiveness for his sins and for any slights or injuries inflicted on those he loved and those he didn't. Reciting the Kaddish and then the Shema, he asked the Almighty to care for Eleazar and Aron and Juana, and he wondered if they still lived.

He realized that if he didn't take steps to avoid it, he would soon lose the Jewish calendar, and decided that to prevent this he would recite the Hebrew date to himself at every opportunity. He knew that five of the months -- Tishri, Shebat, Nisan, Sivan, and Ab -- had thirty days, while the remaining seven months -- Heshvan, Kislev, Tebet, Adar, Iyar, Tammuz, and Elul -- had twenty-nine.

At certain times, leap year, days were added. He didn't know how to deal with that. Abba had always known what day it was ...

I am not Tomás Martin, he thought drowsily. I am Yonah Toledano. My father was Helkias ben Reuven Toledano of blessed memory. We are of the tribe of Levi. This is the tenth day of the month of Tishri, in the year five thousand two hundred and fifty-three ...

15

Auto de fé

A new phase began for the prisoners on a morning when guards came and shackled Espina and took him in a wagon to the Office of the Inquisition for questioning.

It was night when they brought him back with both thumbs bloody and splayed, ruined by torture with the screw. Yonah brought him water, but he lay on the floor of his cell with his face to the wall.

In the morning Yonah went back to him.

'How is it you are here?' Yonah whispered. 'In Toledo we knew you for a willing Christian.'

'I am a willing Christian.'

'Then ... why do they torture you?'

Espina was quiet. 'What do they know of Jesus?' he said finally.

The men kept coming with the wagon and took the prisoners away one by one. Juan Peropan returned from his interrogation with his left arm dangling, broken at the wheel. It was enough to unhinge his wife, Isabel. At her own interrogation she avoided torture by agreeing hysterically to everything her questioners suggested.

Yonah served wine to the alguacil and two of his friends to whom Isidoro was relating the details of Isabel's confession.

'She placed full blame on the husband. Juan Peropan never stopped being a Jew, she says, never, never! He forced her to buy Jew meat and fowl, forced her to listen to unholy prayers and participate in them, forced her to teach them to her children.'

One by one she had provided evidence against every prisoner accused of Judaizing, buttressing the charges against them.

Isidoro Alvarez said she even testified against the physician, a stranger to her, agreeing Espina had confided to her that he had fulfilled the covenant of Abraham by performing thirty-eight ritual circumcisions on Jewish babies.

The questioning of each of the accused took a number of days. Then one morning on the balcony of the Office of the Inquisition a red banner was displayed, indicating that soon capital punishment would be administered at an auto de fé.

Having abandoned all hope, Bernardo Espina suddenly became eager to speak of Toledo.

Instinctively, Yonah trusted him. Scrubbing the floor of the corridor one afternoon, he paused next to Espina's cell and they talked. Yonah related how his father had gone to the empty Espina home and then to the Priory of the Assumption, only to find that the priory was abandoned.

Espina nodded, showing no surprise to hear that the Priory of the Assumption had been discontinued. 'One morning Fray Julio Pérez, the sacristan, and two armed guards were found slain outside the chapel. And the relic of Santa Ana was missing.

'There are deep churchly currents here, young Toledano, cruel enough to swallow with ease the likes of you and me. Rodrigo Cardinal Lancol lately has become our new pontiff, Pope Alexander VI. His Holiness would not have suffered gladly a priory that allowed so sacred a relic to vanish. The friars doubtless have been scattered within the Hieronymite order.'

'And Prior Sebastián?'

'You may be certain he is a prior no longer, and that he has been sent to a place where he will serve out his priestly life in hard fashion,' Espina said.

He made a bitter face. 'Perhaps the thieves have united the relic with the ciborium fashioned by your father.'

'What kind of men would commit the sin of murder to steal sacred objects?' Yonah asked, and Espina smiled wearily.

'Unholy men who give the appearance of holiness. Throughout Christendom, the pious always have placed enormous faith and hope in relics. There is a vast and rich commerce for such objects, and deadly vying for them.'

Espina related how Padre Sebastián had charged him with discovering what had occurred in the murder of Meir. It was hard for Yonah to hear his observations about the scene of Meir's murder, and then Espina spoke of his own detention by Fray Bonestruca, the inquisitor.

'Bonestruca? I was told it was Bonestruca who enraged the mob and sent it to my father. I have seen this Bonestruca,' Yonah said.

'He has a strangely beautiful face, is it not so? But his soul must carry a heavy load.' Espina told Yonah that Diego Diaz had seen Bonestruca and a knight riding in the footsteps of Meir Toledano.

'Bonestruca was there when Meir was killed?' Yonah whispered.

'Almost certainly. And stole the ciborium your brother was seeking to deliver, Espina said. 'He is a man who would easily destroy anyone who learns something that might bring trouble to him. I knew when I was released after his questioning that I must go away or he would collect me again, the second time for good. I was trying to think where I could move my family when Padre Sebastián sent for me. When the prior told me the relic had been taken as well as the ciborium, it was as if he had gone mad. He wept. He ordered me to recover the relic, as though that were in my power if only I wished to do it. He ranted about the enormity of the crime, and he begged me to redouble my efforts to find those who had moved so terribly against him.

'But only hours later, as I was crossing the Plaza Mayor, Bonestruca and I passed one another. The friar stared at me. That was all it took.'

Espina shook his head. 'I was convinced that if I stayed in Toledo even a moment more, I would be seized. I bade my wife to take our children to the protection of kinfolk, and I fled.'

'Where did you go?'

'North, into the high mountains. I found hidden places, traveled between small settlements where they were greatly pleased to see a physician.'

Yonah could believe they had been pleased. He remembered the tenderness with which this man had treated his mother and recalled that his father had said Espina had prenticed with Samuel Provo, the great Jewish physician.

Espina had lived a noble life, serving others. This physician who had abandoned the religion of his fathers nevertheless was a worthy man, a healer, and yet he was condemned. Yonah wondered if perhaps these conversos could be saved, but he saw no way. At night their guard was Gato, a mean-spirited man who slept all day and watched the cells with malevolent wakefulness. During the day, when opportunity might arise for Yonah to kill the napping Paco with his sharpened hoe, neither the prisoners nor Yonah himself would get very far in Ciudad Real. The city was an armed camp.