The Last Jew (13 page)

If God wished them to be saved, He would have to show Yonah some way.

'How long was it before they found you?'

'I had been abroad almost three years when they took me. The Inquisition casts a damnably wide net.'

Yonah was chilled, knowing it was the same net he must elude.

He saw that Paco was awake and the guard's hard gaze was on them, and he resumed his scrubbing.

'A good afternoon, Señor Espina.'

'A good afternoon ... Tomás Martin.'

The Inquisition was careful to place executions in the hands of the civil authorities, and in the Plaza Mayor the alguacil directed laborers to raise seven wooden stakes, next to a quemadero, a circular brick oven being hurriedly assembled by masons.

Inside the jail some of the prisoners wept, some prayed. Espina appeared calm and resigned.

Yonah was washing the corridor floor when Espina spoke to him. 'I must ask something of you.'

'Anything I am able ...'

'I have a son of eight years, name of Francisco Rivera de la Espina. Lives with his mother Estrella de Aranda and his two sisters. Will you deliver to this boy his father's breviary and blessings?'

'Señor.' Yonah was astonished and dismayed. 'I cannot return to Toledo. At any rate, your house is empty. Where is your family?'

'I know not, perhaps with her cousins, the Aranda family of Maqueda. Or perhaps with the Aranda family of Medellín. But take the breviary, I beg you. It may be that God will someday make it possible for you to deliver it.'

Yonah nodded. 'Yes, I will try,' he said, though the Christian book seemed to burn his fingers as he took it.

Espina thrust his hand through the grate of the cell.

Yonah grasped it. 'May the Almighty be merciful to you.'

'I shall be with Jesus. God watch over you and sustain you, Toledano. I would ask you to pray for my soul.'

A crowd gathered early in the Plaza Mayor, more thickly than for any contest with the bulls. The day was cloudless, a touch of autumn chill in the breeze. There was an air of suppressed excitement buoyed by the shouting of children, the rumble of conversation, the cries of food vendors, and the sprightly songs of a quartet: a flutist, two guitarists, and a lute player.

By midmorning, a priest appeared. He raised his hand for silence and then led the assembled in endless Paternosters. By now the square was dense with bodies, Yonah among them. Spectators had filled all the balconies of the buildings overlooking the plaza and were crowded onto all the roofs. Soon there was a disturbance in the plaza as the watchers closest to the stakes were driven back by Isidoro Alvarez's men to make way for the arrival of the condemned.

The prisoners were brought from the jail in three farm carts, two-wheeled tumbrels pulled by burros. They were paraded through the streets to the jeers of spectators.

All eleven of the convicted Judaizers wore the pointed hats of the punished. Two men and a woman wore yellow sanbenitos marked with diagonal crosses. They had been sentenced to return to their home parishes to wear the sanbenito for long periods of penitance and reconciliation, Christian piety, and the disgust of their neighbors.

Six men and two women wore black sanbenitos decorated with demons and hellfire, signifying that they would die by immolation.

At the Plaza Mayor the condemned were pulled down from the tumbrels, their garments taken from them, and the crowd reacted to their nudity with a rustle and a surge like the sea tide, everyone wishing to scrutinize the nakedness that was an ingredient of their shame.

Through his numb gaze Yonah saw that Ana Montalban appeared older naked than when clad, with long, flat breasts and gray hair between her legs. Isabel Peropan looked younger, with the round, firm buttocks of a maiden. Her husband was prostrated with grief and fear. He could not walk but was supported and dragged. Each prisoner was taken to a stake, and their arms were pulled behind the posts and tied.

The hairy body of Isaac de Marspera was free of bruises; the butcher had escaped torture because his rebellious and constant use of Hebrew prayer had made his guilt obvious, but now for his defiance they had selected him for the quemadero. The opening left in the wall of the oven was small, and three men pushed and crammed his large body inside, while people cast gleeful insults and Isaac roared back the Shema. His lips didn't stop moving while masons worked quickly to brick up the entrance.

Espina was praying in Latin.

Many hands piled the bundles of brush and wood around them. The fagots rose to provide a semimodesty, covering their lower trunks, hiding bruises and abrasions, scars and the shameful stains of fright, and building around the quemadero until it was no longer possible to see the bricks of the oven.

The quartet began to play hymns.

Chaplains were standing next to the four prisoners who had requested reconciliation with Christ. Their stake had been fitted with garrotes, bands of steel fastened about their necks, to be tightened by screws set behind the posts. For their piety the blessing of churchly mercy was now showered upon them and they were strangled prior to the burning. Isabel Peropan went first; she had been condemned despite pleas of guiltlessness and her dooming denunciation of the others, but the Inquisition had granted her the mercy of the garrote.

It was applied next to Espina and to two brothers from Almagro as Isidoro went down the line with a lighted torch, touching off each pile of dry fagots, which ignited with a great crackling.

As the flames rose so did the sounds of the people who responded according to their temperaments with shouts of awe and wonderment, exclamations of fear, or screams of merriment and glee. Men and women held up children that they might glimpse on earth the fiery hell from which the Lord God would save and protect them providing they obeyed father and priest and did not sin.

The fuel around the quemadero was burning with a great roar. Isaac the butcher was within, baking like a chicken in an oven except, Yonah told himself faintly, a fowl was not roasted alive.

The condemned writhed. Their mouths opened and closed but Yonah could not hear their cries for the noise of the crowd. Isabel Peropan's long hair went up in a burst, creating a yellow and blue halo about the purpled face. Yonah could not bear to look at Espina. Smoke billowed and blew, concealing all, giving reason for his weeping eyes. Someone was poking his shoulder, shouting in his ear.

It was Isidoro. The alguacil pointed to the dwindling wood, cursed him for a lazy lout, told him he must go help Paco and Gato load a wagon with fresh fagots.

When the wagon was laden he didn't return to the Plaza. In the silent and empty jail he collected his sack and the broken hoe and brought them to where Moise cropped peacefully in the shade.

Once mounted, he startled the good little burro with his heels and they departed from Ciudad Real at a brisk canter. He didn't see the trail or the countryside. The auto de fé was a foretaste of the cruel way he would die when he was caught. Something in him screamed that he must seek out a sympathetic priest. Perhaps it was not too late to beg for the chrism and lead a life of careful Catholic rectitude.

But he had made a promise to his father's memory, to God, to his people.

To himself.

For the first time, his hatred of the Inquisition was stronger than his fear. He couldn't erase the images, and he spoke to God not as a supplicant but in demanding fury.

What can be the Divine Plan that causes so many of us to be Hanged Men?

And, For what purpose have you made me the last Jew in Spain?

16

The Farm Woman

Yonah led Moise across the Guadiana River, the young man and the burro swimming a short distance when they encountered a deep hole midstream, allowing the water to remove the smoke stink from his clothing if not from his soul.

Then he slowly rode southeast through a farm valley, the hills of the Sierra Morena always in sight on his left. The tardy autumn was pleasantly mild. Along the way he stopped several times at farms, tarrying a few days at a time while he worked for food and shelter, pulling the late onions, picking olives, helping to tread the last wine grapes of the season.

As the year moved into winter, he traveled toward warmth. Far to the southwest, where Andalusia reached to touch southern Portugal, he passed through a series of tiny villages whose existence revolved about the presence of great farms.

In most of the farms the growing season was over, but he found hard employment in a vast farm owned by a nobleman named Don Manuel de Zúniga.

'We are making fields out of forest where there never have been fields. We have work if you wish it,' the steward told him. The steward's name was Lampara; Yonah found that behind his back the workers called him Lamperón, the grease spot.

It was the most demanding kind of labor, grubbing out and removing heavy stones, breaking boulders, felling and uprooting trees, cutting and burning brush, but inheritance had made Yonah large and constant labor on other farms already had hardened him. There was enough work on the Zúniga farm to make it possible for him to stay throughout the winter. A detachment of soldiers was assembled in a field nearby; at first he kept a wary eye out for them as he worked, but they never bothered him, occupying themselves with marching and drilling. The climate was soft, almost caressing, and food was plentiful. He stayed on.

The things he had seen and suffered kept him apart from the other peóns. Despite his youth there was something formidable in his face and eyes that kept others from trifling with him.

He flung his hard body into the labor, seeking to erase horror evoked by the brush fires. At night he dropped to earth near Moise and slept deeply, his hand on the sharpened hoe. The burro guarded him while he dreamed of women and acts of physical love, but next day if he remembered the dream he lacked the carnal knowledge to know if he had dreamed correctly.

He removed the silver ring he had worn hanging from his neck and placed it in the sack with his few other belongings, tying the bag to Moise and keeping the burro always tethered in his sight. After that he worked without a shirt, enjoying the sweat that cooled his body in the tender air.

Don Manuel visited his farm and while he was there even the most indolent workers labored as industriously as Yonah. The owner was an aging man, small and pompous. He toured the fields and barns, noting little and understanding less. He stayed three nights, sleeping with two young girls of the village, and then went away.

When Zúniga was safely gone, everyone relaxed, and the men spoke disparagingly of him. They called him el cornudo, the cuckold, and gradually Yonah learned why.

The farm had directors and overseers, but the strong personality that dominated the peóns belonged to an ex-mistress of the don's, Margarita Vega. Before she was fully a woman, she had borne two children by him. But when Don Manuel returned from a year in France, to the vast amusement of the onlookers who worked for him he found that in his absence Margarita had had a third child by one of the farm laborers. Zúniga had given her a wedding and a house as parting gifts. Her new husband had run away from her in less than a year. Since then she had experienced many men, an activity that had resulted in three new children by different fathers. Now she had thirty-five years and was large-haunched and hard-eyed, a woman to be reckoned with.

The peóns said Don Manuel returned so seldom because he loved Margarita still and was betrayed anew each time she took a man.

One day Yonah heard the sound of Moise's braying and looked up to see that one of the other workers, a youth named Diego, had removed the sack from the burro's back and was about to open it.

Yonah dropped his hoe and flung himself on the other, and they rolled in the dust, striking out. In a few moments they had found their feet and were landing looping punches on one another with work-hardened fists. Yonah would find out later that Diego was a feared brawler, and indeed, very early in the fight he received a smashing blow that he knew had broken his nose. Yonah was a few years younger than Diego but taller, and not much lighter. His arms had a longer reach, and he fought with the fury of all the repressed fear and hatred he had stored up for so long. Their fists impacted with the sound of mauls thudding into the earth. They were trying to kill each other with their hands.

The other workers came running, gathering to shout and jeer, and their noise brought in the overseer, cursing and striking at both combatants with his fists as he separated them.

Diego had a smashed mouth and his left eye was closed. He seemed content to pull away when the overseer commanded the onlookers and the fighters to return to their work.

Yonah waited until they were gone, then he carefully tied the cloth bag closed and fastened it securely to Moise's tether. His nose was bleeding, and he wiped the blood from his upper lip with the back of his hand. When he looked up he saw Margarita Vega with her babe in her arms, watching him.

His nose was puffed and purpled, and his bruised and swollen knuckles pained him for days. But the fight had brought him to the woman's attention.