CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

AN ORDINARY SEAMAN

The horse dealers stayed too long in Baena, where they left five horses with a gypsy dealer who gave them a feast, and in Jaén, where they left another half dozen animals. By the time they delivered the last nine horses to a livestock broker in Andujar they were almost a full day late. Yonah and the brothers went to the riverfront in full expectation that the African boat had come and gone, but the boat was still there, tied up at the dock. Macot was greeted warmly by the captain, a burnoosed Berber with a great, bushy gray beard. He accepted Macot’s package and explained that his boat was behind schedule also; he had brought a cargo of hemp from Tangier, selling it upriver, and would return to Tangier after taking on cargo at Córdova, Seville, the small ports along the Gulf of Cádiz, and Gibraltar.

Macot spoke earnestly to the mariner, turning to point at Yonah, and the captain nodded without enthusiasm after he had listened for a while.

“It is arranged,” Macot told Yonah. The brothers embraced him. “Go with God,” Macot said.

“And you go with God,” Yonah said. As they rode away, leading the horse he had ridden, he watched wistfully, wishing he could return to Granada with them.

But at once the captain made it obvious to him that he would travel as a laborer and not as a passenger, and he was put to work with the crew, loading olive oil that would be taken to Africa.

That night, as the Arab captain allowed the strong current to carry the shallow-draft boat down the narrow channel of the upper Guadalquivir, Yonah sat with his back against a great tun of oil. While the shadowy banks glided by, he played the guitar softly and tried not to consider that he had not the slightest idea where his life was going.

*   *   *

On the African boat he was the lowest of the low, for he had to learn everything about life afloat, from the raising and furling of the single triangular sail to the safest way to stow cargo in the open craft, lest a crate or a tun careen during a storm and damage the boat or even sink it.

The captain, name of Mahmouda, was a brute who struck with his fists when displeased. The crew—two blacks, Jesus and Cristóbal, and two Arabs who shared the cooking, Yephet and Darb—slept under the stars or the rain, wherever they were able to find a nook. All four of the crewmen were from Tangier, muscular peóns with whom Yonah got along because they were young and spirited. Sometimes at night, while he played the guitar those who were not on watch sang until Mahmouda shouted at them to shut their holes and go to sleep.

The work was not terribly hard until they reached a port. In the dark early hours of the third day Yonah had been aboard, the boat docked in Córdova and took on cargo, Yonah teaming with Cristóbal, each carrying one end of large and very heavy crates. They worked by the light of pitchy torches that gave off a fearsome stink. On the other side of the dock a group of dispirited prisoners in chains was being herded onto a boat.

Cristóbal grinned at one of the armed guards. “You have many criminals,” he said.

The guard spat. “Conversos.”

Yonah watched them as he worked. They appeared dazed. Some already had injuries that caused them to move painfully, dragging their fetters as if they were old people who hurt when they moved.

*   *   *

The boat’s lading was rope and cordage, knives and daggers, and oil, which was in short supply that year. In the eight days it took them to reach the long, wide mouth of the Guadalquiver River the captain had become anxious to obtain oil, which the Tangier merchants were eagerly awaiting. But near Jerez de la Frontera, where he had counted on a large consignment of excellent olive oil, there was only an apologetic trader.

“No oil? Fuck!”

“In three days. So sorry. But please wait. In three days, all you wish to buy.”

“Shit!”

Mahmoud set the crew to doing small tasks aboard the craft while they waited. In the foulest mood, he beat Cristóbal for not moving fast enough to please him.

Jerez de la Frontera was where the prisoners Yonah had glimpsed in Córdova had been taken, to join an assemblage of former Jews and former Muslims who had been convicted, in half a dozen river towns, of backsliding from their allegiance to Christ. A large detachment of soldiers was in the town. The red flag promising impending capital punishment had been displayed, and people had begun to come into Jerez de la Frontera to witness a very large auto-de-fé.

After the boat had been tied to the dock for two days, the ill-tempered Mahmouda exploded when Yephet, consolidating the cargo to make room for the expected oil, tipped a barrel of wine onto its side. There were no leaks, and the barrel was swiftly righted, but Mahmouda went berserk.

“Wretch!” he shouted. “Foulness! Scum of the earth!” He beat Yephet to the floor with his fists and then picked up a section of rope and whipped him with it.

Yonah felt the sudden, bitter anger building in him. He found himself moving forward, but Cristóbal siezed him and held him back until the beating was over.

That evening the captain left the boat to search for a riverfront stew that offered a bottle and a woman.

The crewmen rubbed a little of their precious cooking oil on Yephet’s battered body.

“I don’t think you need fear Mahmouda,” Almar told Yonah. “He knows you are under the protection of the Roma.”

But Yonah thought that in a blind rage Mahmouda was incapable of reason, and he didn’t trust his own ability to stand by and witness further beatings. Soon after night fell, he gathered his belongings and climbed soundlessly onto the dock, then he walked away from the boat into the dark.

*   *   *

He walked for five days, without hurrying because he had no destination. The road followed the coast and he enjoyed looking at the sea. Sometimes the road veered inland but always Yonah could see blue water again after traveling only a little way. In several tiny villages there were fishing boats. Some of the boats were more silvered by sun and salt than others, but all of them were kept in good condition by men who depended on them for a living. Yonah saw Andalusian men intent on homely tasks, mending large nets or caulking and pitching a boat bottom. Sometimes he attempted to speak with them, but they had little to say when he asked about employment. He gathered that the fishing crews usually were related by blood or years of familial friendship. There was no employment for a stranger.

In the town of Cádiz his fortune changed. He was on the waterfront when one of the men unloading cargo from a packet ship became careless. Unable to see because of the size of a bale of cloth he carried, he took a misstep, lost his balance, and fell from the gangway. The cloth bale landed in soft sand, while the man struck his head hard on an iron mooring.

Yonah waited until the injured crewman had been carried away to a physician and the onlookers had dispersed before he approached the ship’s mate, a grizzled, middle-aged sailor with a tough, scarred face and a kerchief tied around his head.

“I am Ramón Callicó. I am able to help with the cargo,” he said, and the mate saw the great muscular body of the young man and nodded that he should go aboard, where others told him what to lift and where to set it down. He brought cargo down into the hold, where because of the heat two crewmen, Joan and César, worked almost naked. Stowing cargo, much of the time Yonah could understand their orders, but sometimes he was forced to asked them to repeat their words, which sounded like Spanish, and yet were not.

“Are you unable to hear?” César said irritably.

“What language do you speak?” Yonah asked, and Joan grinned.

“It is Catalan. We are all Catalonians. Everyone on this ship.” But after that they spoke Castilian Spanish to Yonah, which was a relief to him.

Before the end of the loading, a physician’s boy brought word that the fallen seaman was severely injured and would have to remain in Cádiz for extended care.

The maestro had appeared on deck. He was younger than the mate, an erect man whose hair and short beard were still untouched with gray. The mate hurried to him and Yonah, working nearby, overheard their conversation.

“Josep must remain here for mending,” the mate said.

“Hmmm.” The maestro was frowning. “I do not like a short crew.”

“I understand. That one who takes his place with the loading … He appears to work with a will.”

Yonah saw the maestro studying him. “Very well. You may talk to him.”

The mate approached Yonah. “Are you an experienced seaman, Ramón Callicó?”

He didn’t wish to lie, but he was almost out of money and needed food and shelter. “I have experience on a riverboat,” he said, telling a form of the truth. Yet at the same time it was a lie because he didn’t mention he had served the boat so briefly. But he was hired, presently joining others to heave on lines that raised three small triangular sails. When the ship had been moved far enough from the shore, the deck hands raised a large mainsail that snapped loudly when it was unfurled and then bellied before the wind, taking them out to sea.

*   *   *

There were seven men in the crew—after a few days he sorted them out: Jaume, the ship’s carpenter. Carles, who knew how to repair ropes and constantly was working on the lines. Antoni, who cooked the meals and was missing the little finger on his left hand. And María, César, Joan, and Yonah, who did whatever they were ordered. The purser was a small man who somehow managed to have a pale face when everyone around him was dark from the sun. Yonah always heard him called Señor Mezquida and never learned his last name. The captain’s name was Pau Roure. He was seen little, spending much time in his cabin. When he came above deck he never said a word to the crew, sending his orders through the mate, whose name was Gaspar Gatuelles. Sometimes Gatuelles shouted his orders, but no one aboard was struck.

The ship was called La Lleona, the lioness. It had two masts and six sails that Yonah soon learned to identify: a large square mainsail, a slightly smaller mizzensail, two triangular topsails above each of these, and two small jib sails that stretched over the bowsprit, which was a tawny lion’s body with the alabaster face of a woman. The main mast was higher than the mizzenmast, so high that from the moment the ship was under way before a brisk breeze, Yonah dreaded that he might be ordered aloft.

His first night aboard, when it became his time to sleep for four hours, he did not lie down. Instead he went to the rope ladder and climbed until he was halfway up the mainmast. The deck, far beneath him, was murky save for the feeble light from the running lamps. All about the ship was the limitless sea, dark as vino tinto. He was unable to force himself to climb higher, and he scrambled down.

He was told the ship was small for a saltwater vessel yet it seemed enormous when he compared it to the riverboat. There was a damp hold that contained a tiny cabin with six bunks for passengers and an even smaller cabin shared by the three officers. The crew slept on the deck wherever they could. Yonah found a place behind the rudder post. When he lay there he could hear the water hissing as it passed over the curved hull, and whenever the course was changed he felt the vibrations of the shifting rudder moving below.

The open ocean was nothing like the river. Yonah relished the fresh slap of the air and its wet salt tang, but most of the time the motion under way kept his stomach queasy. On occasion he retched and spewed, to the amusement of those who observed. Everyone on the ship was more than ten years his senior and they all spoke Catalan. When they remembered they spoke Spanish to Yonah, but they seldom remembered, and they didn’t speak to him often. He knew from the very start that for him it would be a lonely ship.

His inexperience was at once apparent to officers and crew. Most of the time the mate kept him occupied at menial tasks, a nautical peón. On his fourth day aboard, there was a storm, and the ship was tossed. Even as Yonah staggered to the leeward side to vomit, the mate ordered him aloft, and as he climbed the rope ladder, fright caused him to forget his nausea. He went higher than he had climbed before, beyond the top of the mainsail. The lines holding taut the triangular topsail had been released from the deck, but human hands had to pull down the sail and lash it to its spar. To get in position to do so, the men had to step from the rope ladder onto a narrow strand of rope, holding on to the spar. A seaman had already started to make his way along the rope when Yonah reached the spar. When Yonah hesitated he was cursed by the two men below him on the ladder, and he stepped out onto the swaying rope, clutching the spar as he slid his feet along the tenuous support. The four of them held to the spar with one hand and pulled the heavy sail as the masts shuddered and swayed. The ship heeled one way and then the other, and each time it reached the dizzying end of a long pitch the men aloft could see the white spume of the furious sea, far below.

When finally the sail was lashed, Yonah found the rope ladder and descended, trembling, to regain the deck. He could not believe what he had done. No one took notice of him for a little while, and then the mate sent him below to check the lashings of the cargo in the groaning hold.

*   *   *

Sometimes sleek, dark dolphins swam alongside the ship, and once they saw a fish so large its sight filled Yonah with terror. He was a swimmer, he had been raised next to a river, yet there were limits to how far he could swim. No land was in sight, nothing but more sea in every direction. And even if he could swim to land, he thought he would be a dangling lure to the monsters. Remembering the story of his biblical namesake, he imagined Leviathan moving up, up, up from the bottomless deep, drawn to surface feeding by the sky-lit movements of Yonah’s arms and legs above, the way a trout is drawn up by the motions of living bait on a hook. The deck beneath his feet felt fragile and impermanent.

*   *   *

He was sent aloft four more times but never learned to like it, nor did he ever fully become a sailor, learning to live with nausea in varying degrees as the ship ventured north along the coast, making landfalls to unload and take on cargo and passengers at Malaga, Cartagena, Alicante, Denia, Valencia, and Tarragona. Sixteen days after they had left Cádiz they arrived in Barcelona, whence they sailed southeast for the island of Menorca.

Menorca, far to sea, proved to have a rugged coast and was an island of fishermen and farmers. Yonah liked the idea of living in such a cliff-bound place. It occurred to him that perhaps the island was sufficiently remote to escape watchful eyes. But in the Menorcan port of Ciutadella the ship picked up three black-cowled Dominican friars. One of the friars went directly to sit on a hogshead and read his breviary, while the others stood next to the deck rail and talked quietly for a time. Then one of them looked at Yonah and crooked a finger.

He forced himself to walk to them. “Señor?” he said. His voice sounded to him like a croak.

“Where does this ship go when it leaves these islands?”

The friar had small brown eyes. They were not at all like the gray eyes of Bonestruca, but the black Dominican costume the man wore was enough to fill Yonah with terror.

“I do not know, señor.”

The other friar snorted, and looked at him sternly. “This one is ignorant. He goes wherever the ship goes. You must ask an officer.”

Yonah pointed to where Gaspar Gatuelles stood in the bow, talking with the carpenter. “He is the mate, señor,” he said, and the pair walked to the bow to talk with Gatuelles.

La Lleona carried those two friars to the larger island, Mallorca. The third friar stopped reading his breviary in time to debark on the smaller island of Ibiza, farther south.

Yonah realized that to survive he would have to continue to live in such a way as to deceive, because the Inquisition was everywhere.