The Last Jew (5 page)

His last patient of the day was an old man who was having difficulty breathing, although for a change the air was cool and fresh, a freak day of comfort in the midst of the season of heat. The thin body before the physician was depleted and worn, and there was more troubling it than the state of the weather. The skin of the chest was like thin leather; within, it was filled and clogged. When Espina put his ear to the chest he could hear a ragged rattling. He was reasonably certain the old man was dying but would take his time about it; and he was searching his pharmacopoeia for an infusion that would make the last days merciful when two slovenly armed men walked into his dispensary as if they were its new owners.

They identified themselves as soldiers of the alguacil, the bailiff of Toledo.

One of the men was short and barrel-chested and wore an officious air. 'Bernardo Espina, you will come with us now.'

'What is it you wish of me, señor?'

'The Office of the Inquisition requires your presence.'

'The Inquisition?' Espina sought to remain calm. 'Very well. Please to wait outside. I shall be finished with this señor in a very short time.'

'No, you will come at once,' the taller man said quietly, but with more authority.

Espina knew that Joan Pablo, his man of all work, was chatting with the old man's son in the shade of the dispensary shed. He went to the door and called to him. 'Go to the house and tell the señora I wish refreshment brought for these visitors. Bread with oil and honey, and cool wine.'

The bailiff's men looked at one another. The shorter soldier nodded. His companion's face remained without expression, but he made no objection.

Espina placed the old man's infusion into a small earthen jar and drove home the plug. He was finishing his instructions to the patient's son when Estrella hurried to him, followed by a servant woman bearing the bread and the wine.
               

His wife's features seemed to freeze when he told her. 'What can the Inquisition want with you, my dear Bernardo?'

'No doubt they have need of a physician,' he said, and the thought calmed both of them. While the men ate and drank, Joan Pablo saddled Espina's horse.

His children were at a neighbor's home, at which a monk weekly catechised a group of the young. He was comforted they weren't there to watch as he rode away flanked by the horses of the two men.

Clerics in black robes moved through the corridor where Espina sat on a wooden bench and waited. Others waited also. From time to time a white-faced man or woman was brought in under guard and was seated, or someone was escorted from the corridor and swallowed up by the building. None of the people who left the benches returned to them.

Espina was kept waiting until torches were lit against the encroaching dusk.

There was a guard seated behind a small table. Bernardo went to him and asked who it was he was waiting to see, but the man gave him a flat stare and motioned him back to the bench.

After a time, though, another guard came and asked the one behind the table about some of the people who were waiting. Espina saw them looking at him.

'That one is for Fray Bonestruca,' Bernardo heard the man behind the table say.

Toledo was becoming populous, but Espina was born there and had lived there all his life, and -- as Prior Sebastián had pointed out -- as a physician he had a good working knowledge of both the lay population and the members of the clerical communities.

But he had no memory of a friar named Bonestruca.

At long last a guard came for him and took him from the corridor. They climbed a stone stairway and traversed several ill-lighted corridors similar to the one in which he had waited, and finally he was brought into a small cell where a friar sat beneath a torch.

The friar was someone new to the Toledo See, because if Espina had but once seen him in the streets, he would have remembered him without difficulty.

He was a tall man with a very Spanish head that demanded attention; Espina fought the impulse to stare. His quick glance noted a mass of thick black hair, long and badly cut. A wide forehead, black brows, very large brown eyes. A straight, narrow nose, a wide mouth with thin lips, and a somewhat square chin with a slight cleft.

Each of the features, if found with different features in another face, would have merited no interest. But seen here in this one man they combined in an extraordinary way.

The countenance of the friar was nothing like the face of Jesus as Espina had observed the Savior's visage in statues and paintings. This was a face of more feminine quality emerging from features of masculine beauty, yet Espina's initial reaction was a kind of awe.

A saint's face, the old shepherd Diego Diaz had called it. Diaz had been talking about this friar, Espina knew without a doubt.

Bonestruca was beyond handsomeness; his face at first glance sent the viewer signals of reassurance and piety, the message that such complete and total comeliness must signify the essential goodness of God.

Yet when Espina looked into this friar's eyes, they carried him directly to a cold and frightening place.

'You have been about the town, asking questions concerning a reliquary but recently stolen from the Jew Helkias. What is your interest in this matter?'

'I... That is, Prior Padre Sebastián Alvarez...' Espina wished to look anywhere but into the knowing eyes of this strange friar, but there was nowhere else to look. 'He asked me to enquire into the loss of the reliquary and the... death of the boy who had carried it.'

'And what have you learned?'

'The boy was a Jew, son of the silversmith.'

'Yes, I have heard that.'

The friar's voice was gentler than his gaze... encouraging, almost friendly, Espina thought with hope.

'What else?'

'Nothing else, Reverend Friar.'

Friar Bonestruca's chest was hidden beneath the folds of his black habit, but his fingers were long and spatulate, with tufts of fine black hair between the second joints of his fingers and the knuckles. 'How long have you been a physician?'

'These eleven years.'

'Did you apprentice in this place?'

'Yes, here in Toledo.'

'With whom did you apprentice?'

Espina's mouth was dry. 'With Maestro Samuel Provo.'

'Ah, Samuel Provo. Even I have heard of him,' the friar said benignly. 'A great physician, no?'

'Yes, a man of renown.'

'He was a Jew.'

'Yes.'

'How many children did he circumcize, if you would suppose?'

Espina blinked at him. 'He did not circumcize.'

'How many babes do you circumcize in a twelve-month?'

'Neither do I circumcize.'

'Come, come, the friar said patiently. 'How many of these operations have you done? Not only to Jews but also to Moors, perhaps?'

'Never... A few times over the years I have operated... When the foreskin is not properly and regularly cleaned, you understand, it becomes inflamed. Often there is pus, and to rectify... they... Both the Moors and the Jews have holy men who do the other, along with religious rites.'

'When you made those operations, did you say no prayers?'

'No.'

'Not even a Paternoster?'

'I pray each day that I will bring no harm but only good to my patients, Reverend Friar.'

'You are married, señor?'

'Yes.'

'Name of your wife.'

'Señora Estrella de Aranda.'

'Children?'

'Three. Two daughters and a son.'

'Your wife and children are Catholics?'

'Yes.'

'You are a Jew. Is this not so?'

'No! I have been a Christian these eleven years. Devoted to Christ!'

The man's face was so beautiful. That made the gray eyes fixing upon his own even more chilling. They had become cynical eyes that seemed aware of every human failing in Espina's history, and all his sins.

The gaze worked its way deep within his soul. Then, shockingly, the friar clapped his hands, summoning the guard who waited outside the door.

Bonestruca made a small movement of his hand: Take him.

As Bernardo turned to go, he saw that the sandaled feet beneath the table were well fashioned, with long and slender toes.

The guard led him down the corridors, down the steep flights of stairs.

Sweet Christ, you know I have tried. You know...

Espina was aware that in the lower bowels of the building were cells and the places in which prisoners were questioned. He knew for a fact that they had a rack called a potro, a triangular frame to which a prisoner was bound. Each time a windlass was turned, more bodily joints were dislocated. And something called a toca, for water torture. The prisoner's head was kept low in a hollowed-out trough. Linen was thrust into his throat. Water was poured through the cloth, blocking the throat and nostrils until suffocation brought on confession or death.

Jesus, I ask ... I implore ...

Perhaps he was heard. When they reached the exit, the guard motioned him on, and Espina proceeded alone, out to where the horse had been tied.

He rode away at a walk, fighting to compose himself so when he arrived home he could reassure Estrella without weeping.

Part Two

THE SECOND SON

Toledo, Castille

March 30, 1492

5

Yonah ben Helkias

'I will take Eleazar down to the river, perhaps to catch our supper. Eh, Abba?'

'The polishing is finished?'

'Much of it is finished.'

'Work is not finished until it is finished. You must polish it all,' Helkias said in the bleak tone that always wounded Yonah. Sometimes he wanted to stare into his father's distant eyes and tell him: Meir is dead but Eleazar and I are still here. We are alive.

Yonah hated to polish the silver. There were half a dozen large pieces still to do, and he dipped his rag into the stinking mess, a thick mixture of powdered bird dung and urine, and rubbed and rubbed.

He had learned the taste of bitterness early, with the death of his mother, and it had been very hard for him when Meir was killed, because by that time he had been older, past thirteen years, and had better understood the finality of loss.

Only a few months after Meir's death, Yonah had been called to the Torah to recite the law and become a formal member of the minyan. Adversity had matured him beyond his age. His father, who had always seemed so tall and strong, was diminished, and Yonah didn't know how to fill the space emptied by Helkias's grief.

They knew nothing of the identity of his brother's murderers. Some weeks after Meir had been killed, word had reached Helkias Toledano that the physician Espina was about the town, asking questions regarding the event that had taken his son's life. Helkias had brought Yonah with him to call upon Espina and speak with him, but when they had reached his house they saw it was abandoned, and Joan Pablo, the Espinas' former servant, was taking away for his own use all that remained of the furnishings, a table and some chairs. Joan Pablo had told them the physician and his family had gone away.

'Where have they gone?'

The man had shaken his head. 'I know not.'

Helkias had gone to the Priory of the Assumption to talk with Padre Sebastián Alvarez, but on his arrival he had thought for a confused moment that he had made a wrong turn in the road. Within the gate was a row of wagons and tumbrels. Nearby, three women were treading purple grapes in a large vat. Through the open door of what had been the chapel Helkias could see baskets of olives, and more grapes.

When he had asked the women where the priory had been moved, one of them told him the Priory of the Assumption had been closed and the Hieronymite order had rented the property to their farmer.

'And what of Padre Sebastián? Where is the prior?' he had asked. The woman had smiled at him and shook her head and shrugged, without stopping her treading.

*

Yonah had tried very hard to assume the duties of the eldest son, but it was obvious to him that he would never be able to take his brother's place. Not as an apprentice worker of silver, not as a son, not as a brother, not in any way. The dullness in his father's eyes compounded his own sorrow. Although three Passovers had come and gone since Meir died, the house and workshop of Helkias still were places of mourning.

Some of the pieces before him, wine flagons, were especially dark with tarnish, but there was no reason for him to hurry, because his father seemed suddenly to remember their conversation of half an hour ago. 'You will not go to the river. Find Eleazar and make certain both of you stay close to the house.

'This isn't a time for Jewish boys to take chances,' Helkias said.