The Last Jew (45 page)

Within her a small lump of coldness was growing like an unwanted child. She had no means of escape but began to contemplate simply going away, walking higher and higher up the mountain until she could walk no more. She didn't fear death but hated the knowledge that she would be eaten by beasts.

She had learned it was folly to expect good things of the world. On the afternoon when the stranger had ridden out of the woods, like some cursed knight in his rusted mail vest and on his beautiful gray horse, she would have fled him had it been possible. And so she was less than pleased when Benzaquen knocked on her door the following morning to ask humbly if she could take his place in showing the visitor their valley. 'My sheep have begun to drop lambs prodigiously and some will need my tending today,' he said, leaving her no choice.

He told her what he knew of the man, who he said was a physician from Guadalajara.

39

The Visiting Physician

Yonah had slept snugly in Benzaquen's hayloft. Not wishing to be a bother to Benzaquen's wife, he stole into the house while still they slept and took a live coal from the cooking fire, then he made a small fire close to the stream that ran nearby and cooked himself a pease gruel from his own dwindling supplies. He was rested and fed when Adriana Chacon came and told him she would guide him about the village instead of Benzaquen.

She told him not to saddle the horse. 'Today I shall show you the eastern portion of the valley. We will do better to walk. Perhaps tomorrow someone will show you the other part and you will ride,' she said, and he nodded.

He still marveled that she was greatly like Inés in appearance, yet on reflection he recognized that she was different from Inés in a number of respects, being taller, broader in the shoulder, more delicate in the bosom. Her long body was as comely as her interesting face; when she had walked toward him, her round thighs had moved against the gray spun cloth of her garment. Yet she gave the sense of not realizing she was beautiful; there was no coy foolishness in her.

He took the small basket she had brought, covered by a napkin, and carried it as they walked. They passed a field in which men were working and she raised a hand to them but didn't interrupt their work in order to introduce him. 'That man doling out the seed is my father, Joachim Chacon,' she said.

'Ah, I met him yesterday. He was one of those who ran to protect you.'

'He didn't remember you from Granada either,' she told him.

'He had nothing to remember. While I was in Granada I was told he was traveling in the south, buying silk.'

'Micah Benzaquen told me you tried to marry my aunt.'

Micah Benzaquen was a damned gossip, he thought wryly; but truth was truth, after all. 'Yes, I tried to marry Inés Saadi Denia. Benzaquen was your grandfather's close friend. He served as a go-between, interviewing me for Isaac Saadi to determine my financial prospects. I was young and very poor, with little to hope for the future. I was wishing Isaac Saadi would teach me his silk business, but Benzaquen told me that Isaac Saadi already had a son-in-law working with him -- your father -- and that Inés must marry a man with a business or a trade. He made it clear that your grandfather had no need for a son-in-law who required financial assistance, and he sent me on my way.'

'And were you sorely wounded?' she said, speaking lightly to indicate that after all the years that had passed, his youthful rejection was not so horrible a matter.

'Indeed I was, and by the loss of you as well as the loss of Inés. I wished to marry her but I had become enchanted by her small niece. After you left I found a smooth red pebble that you had used as a plaything. I took it for a keepsake and had it with me for more than a year before it was lost.'

She gave him a glance. 'Truly?'

'God's truth. It is too bad Isaac did not take me into the family. I might have been your uncle and helped to raise you.'

'Or you might have died with Inés in Pamplona, in Isadoro Sabino's stead,' she said.

'What a practical woman you are. Indeed, that might have happened.'

They came to the stink of a piggery in which many hogs lolled in their mud wallows. Beyond the heavy smell loomed a smokehouse and a gaunt pig farmer named Rudolfo García, to whom Adriana introduced Yonah.

'I heard we had a visitor from outside,' García said.

'I am here to show him the valley's pride,' she told him. They took Yonah into the smokehouse where great, deep-colored haunches hung from the eaves. Adriana told him that the pigs were raised on acorns from the mountainside. 'The hams are rubbed with spices and herbs and slowly smoked, and the result is a lean, dark meat with its own rich flavor.'

García had fields where green shoots already thrust through the earth. 'His crops are always first to bear in the springtime, she told Yonah, and the farmer explained it was because of the pigs. 'I move their pens once a year. Wherever I put them, their sharp hooves and rooting snouts churn the sod into the earth along with their accumulated shit, making a rich field begging for seed.'

They bade him good-bye and walked again, following a stream through field and forest until they came to a log workshop, fragrant with wood shavings, in which a man named Jacob Orabuena made sturdy furniture, wooden implements, and sawn lumber. 'There is enough wood on the mountainside to keep me busy forever,' he told Yonah, 'but we are a small group and our needs for the things I fashion are quickly met. The remoteness of this valley, which we prize for our safety, makes it impossible to sell what we produce. The marketplaces are too far away. And though we might fill a wagon or two and make the difficult journey to bring them to Jaca or Huesca, we must not encourage people to come here looking for more of Rudolfo's fine hams or my furniture. We do not wish to call attention to ourselves. So when I have no work in my shop I help in the fields.'

He said he had a favor to ask of Yonah. 'Señora Chacon says you are a physician.'

'Yes?'

'My mother often gets the headache. When it occurs, terrible pain.'

'I will be happy to look at her,' Yonah said. He was struck by a thought.

'Tell her ... or anyone who wishes to see a physician ... that I may be found tomorrow morning in Micah Benzaquen's barn.'

Orabuena smiled and nodded. 'I will bring my mother,' he said.

They followed the stream and found a shaded pool to rest by. The little cloth-covered basket he carried for her proved to contain bread, goat's cheese, green onions and raisins, which they washed down with cold water from the stream, cupped in their hands. The act of their drinking startled trout of good size that darted into the shelter among the roots of the undercut bank.

'It is a wonderful place to live, this valley of yours,' he said.

She didn't answer but shook the sack, spilling bread crumbs into the pool for the fish. 'Time for a siesta, I think,' she said. She settled her back against the bole of a tree and closed her eyes, and he followed her wise example. The world intruded only with birdsong and water sounds, a lulling, and he dozed for a little while, a resting without dreams. When he opened his eyes she was still asleep and he stared at her with interest, at his leisure. She had the Saadi face, the long straight nose, the wide, thin-lipped mouth with its sensitive corners that revealed her emotions. He was somehow certain she was a woman capable of strong passions; yet she seemed to have little concern for enticing a man, flying none of the signal flags that indicate, however politely, a woman's availability. Perhaps it was simply that he didn't arouse her interest. Or it might be she still mourned the dead husband, he told himself, for a silly moment envying her vanished lover. Her body was slim but strong. She had very good bones, he thought; and in that moment her eyes opened and she was looking at Yonah raptly studying how she was fashioned.

'Shall we go on now?' she said, and he nodded and got up, giving her a hand to help her up too; her fingers in his were cool and dry.

In the afternoon they visited herds of goats and sheep, and he met a man who spent his days walking the streams, collecting and hauling likely building stones, which were piled like cairns or monuments near his finca, against the day when somebody wanted to build something.

They were both tired when Adriana brought him back to Benzaquen's finca late in the afternoon. They had said good day and parted, when she turned back. 'Whenever you are through being a physician, I will be happy to show you the rest of the valley,' she said, and he thanked her again for her kindness and told her he would like that.

Early the next morning, the first person to seek out the visiting physician was a woman named Viola Valenci. 'The devil is in my eyetooth,' she told him.

When he peered into her open mouth the problem was apparent at once, because a canine tooth was discolored and the gums around it were pale. 'I wish I had seen this earlier, señora,' he muttered, but he had forceps in his medical pack and the tooth clearly had to come out. Just as he feared, it was already rotten, and it splintered during the extraction. Though he had to struggle to make certain that the offending roots were plucked, in the end the pieces lay in the dirt at Señora Valenci's feet. Spitting blood, she sang his praises as she went away.

By that time, several people had gathered, and he worked steadily through the morning, dealing with one patient at a time, asking the others to wait a distance away so there could be privacy. He trimmed back the ingrown toenail in Durand Chazan Halevi's foot and then listened to Asher de Sogarra describe the choloric flux that periodically bothered his stomach.

'I have no medicines with me and you are distant from an apothecary shop,' he told Señor Sogarra. 'But soon roses will be in bloom. If you will boil a cupful of petals in water with honey, cool it well and beat into it a hen's egg, it will supply a drink that will ease your stomach.'

At midday Leah Chazan brought him bread in a bowl of broth, and he consumed it gratefully and then returned to lancing carbuncles, discussing digestion and diet, sending people behind the barn to void into a cup so he could examine their urine.

At one point Adriana Chacon appeared. She stood and talked with the others who waited. Several times she looked over to where he was treating somebody.

But the next time he looked up and wanted to see her, she was gone.

The next morning Adriana appeared on a mare the color of brown moss, named Doña. They rode first to the church, where she introduced him to Padre Serafino. The priest asked him where he was from, and Yonah told him Guadalajara. Padre Serafino pursed his lips. 'You have traveled far.'

The trouble with lying, Yonah had discovered long ago, was that a single lie engendered many other lies. He hastened to change the subject by remarking on the pleasant aspect of the small stone-and-timber church. 'Does it have a name?'

'I am thinking of suggesting several names to the congregants, who must guide me in that decision. I first considered the Church of Saint Dominic, but so many other churches have that name. What is your opinion of calling it the Church of Cosmas and Damian?'

'Were they saints, Padre?' Adriana asked.

'No, my child, they were early martyrs, twin brothers born in Arabia. They both became physicians and treated the poor without payment, healing many. When the Roman emperor Diocletian began to persecute Christians he ordered the brothers to recant their faith, and when they refused he had them beheaded by the sword.

'I have heard this morning of another physician who treated suffering people and refused all payment,' he said.

Yonah felt unjustly praised and had no wish to be spoken of in the company of martyrs. 'I customarily accept payment for my services, and gladly,' he said. 'But in this instance, I am a guest in the valley. It would be a poor guest who accepted payment from his hosts.'

'You have cast your bread upon the waters,' Padre Serafino said, not to be denied. He blessed them when they took their leave.

There were several fincas in the far end of the valley, the homes of herdsmen who had built up large flocks of sheep and goats. Yonah and Adriana didn't stop to knock on doors, however, but skirted the houses, letting their horses amble along in quiet harmony.

He had asked her to bring no food, certain he could catch a few trout to make a meal for them; but she had brought some bread and cheese and it satisfied them both, so he skipped the simple exertion with the fishline. They tethered the horses in shaded grasses nearby and spent the midday as they had the day before, asleep under a tree near the stream.

The day grew hotter and he slept on pleasantly for a long while. When he awoke he thought she still slept, but when he went to the stream and splashed the very cold water on his face, she came up and knelt nearby to do the same. They cupped water in their hands. As they drank, each looked over their dripping hands, directly at the other, but at once she averted her gaze. Riding back, he allowed her horse to lead slightly so he could glimpse her sitting sidesaddle with a perfectly straight spine, maintaining her balance easily even during a canter. Sometimes her loose brown hair blew in the breeze.

At her house he unsaddled her horse. 'Thank you for showing me about again,' he said, and she smiled and nodded. He didn't want to leave, but there was no invitation to stay.