CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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, 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 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.

It was impossible for Yonah not to notice her. It seemed to him that wherever he looked she had uncovered a large brown breast and was suckling her hungry baby. The farm folk nudged one another and smiled, noting that Margarita often managed to turn up where the big, silent young man was working.

She was friendly to Yonah, at ease with him.

She directed him to perform small tasks about her house, calling him to come inside to have bread and wine. It was only a few days before he was naked with her, incredulously touching a female body, tasting the milk that had filled the infant who slept nearby.

Her heavy body was not uncomely, the legs muscular, the navel deep, the belly only slightly convex despite all the childbirth. Her thick-lipped pudenda was a small animal with a wild brown pelt. She readily gave instruction and made demands, and he learned how to have a dream correctly. The first coupling was over for him quickly. But he was young and strong and she made him ready again, and he put the same fury into his efforts that he had used against Diego, until the moment when he and the woman were spent and gasping.

In a while, half-asleep, he was aware of her fingering hands, as if he were an animal she contemplated buying.

“You are a converso.”

At once he was awake.

“… Yes.”

“So. When were you converted to the true faith?”

“Ah … Several years ago.” He closed his eyes again, hoping she would desist.

“Where was it?”

“… In Castille. In the town of Cuenca.”

She laughed. “But I was born in Cuenca! I have been there within these eight years with Don Manuel. Two of my sisters and a brother are there, and my old abuela who has outlived both my mother and my father. At which church were you converted, San Benito’s or San Marcos’?”

“It was … San Benito’s, I believe.”

She stared. “You believe? You don’t know the name of the church?”

“A manner of speaking. Yes, San Benito’s, of course. A very nice church.”

“Beautiful church, no? And which priest?”

“The old one.”

“But both are old, yes?” She was frowning at him. “Was it Padre Ramón or Padre Garcillaso?”

“Padre Ramón.”

Margarita nodded but got out of bed. “Well, now you must not go back to work. You must sleep here like a good boy until I return from my chores, and you will be strong like a lion and we shall make much joy fucking, yes?”

“Yes, all right.”

But in a few moments he watched from the one small window as she hastened from the house carrying the child into the siesta-time sun and heat, her garment shrugged on so hurriedly that it was not completely pulled over one of her large hips.

Yonah knew that almost certainly there was no Padre Ramón in the town of Cuenca, and perhaps not even a church named for San Benito.

Dressing quickly, he went to the shady side of Margarita’s house where Moise was tethered, and in a moment he was under the hot sun himself. He rode past only two men in the midday heat and neither paid him any attention. Soon he and the burro were climbing a trail into the hills of the Sierra Morena.

On a height he paused and looked down upon the farm of Don Manuel de Zúniga. The small figures of four soldiers, the sun glinting on their weapons and mail vests, were following Margarita Vega, who was hastening toward her house.

High above and beyond them, he felt safe enough to regard Margarita with an astounded gratitude.

Thank you, my lady!

If it should be possible, he would like to know such pleasure again. To guard against betrayal by his circumcision, he decided, in the future he would tell women his conversion had taken place not in a small church but in a great cathedral. The cathedral in Barcelona, where there was an army of clerics, so many priests no one could know them all.

His nose still pained him. But riding away, he reviewed in his mind the appearance of each part of Margarita’s body, the acts, the scents, the sounds.

An incredible fact: His body had entered a woman’s!

He gave thanks to the remarkable Ineffable One. For allowing him to remain free and sound of limb and mind, for creating women as well as men with such wondrous skill that when they came together they fit like mated lock and key, and for permitting him to survive long enough to greet this day.

This has happened to me on the twelfth day of the month of Shebat.…

I am not Tomás Martín, I am Yonah Toledano, son of Helkias the silversmith, of the tribe of Levi.

The other months are Adar, Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Ab, Elul, Tishri, Heshvan, Kislev, and Tebet.…

He said the names of the months over and over again, between snatches of Hebrew verse or prayer, as Moise picked a careful way upward, into the brown hills.