CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

BOOKS

As difficult as it was, before he rested or cleaned himself he recounted in detail for Nuño Fierro the events of the morning when Manuel Fierro had died with Angel Costa’s arrow in his throat, and how he had killed Angel. Nuño Fierro listened with his eyes closed. It was a difficult narrative for him to hear, and when it was finished he nodded and went off to be alone.

The physician’s housekeeper was quiet and watchful, a strong-bodied woman of perhaps forty years—older than Yonah had supposed from his first glimpse of her through the crack of the door. Her name was Reyna Fadique. She cooked well and heated his bath water without complaint, and for a day and a half he did nothing but sleep, waking to eat and use the chamber pot and then sleep again.

He found his garments laundered and fresh when he left his pallet on the afternoon of the second day. He dressed and ventured outside, and presently Nuño Fierro found him kneeling by the brook, watching small trout flying through the water.

Yonah thanked him for his hospitality. “I am rested and ready for the trail again,” he said, then he waited awkwardly. He didn’t have enough money to make an offer for the gray horse, but he thought perhaps he might buy the mule. He loathed the thought of wandering on foot.

“I have opened the leather chest,” the physician said.

Yonah detected something in the man’s voice that caused him to look up sharply. “Does something appear to be missing?”

“On the contrary. Something was there I had not expected to find.” Nuño Fierro held out a small piece of paper, torn raggedly from a larger piece. On it, in ink to which a few grains of the blotting sand still clung, was written, “I believe the bearer to be a New Christian.”

Yonah was stunned. So there had been at least one man he had not misled with his false name and gentile ways! The maestro had thought him a convert, of course, but he had known Yonah for a Jew. The note showed that he had believed Yonah would deliver the wealth to his brother in the event of his own demise. A compliment of trust from the grave, which almost had not been deserved.

Yet he was disappointed because Manuel Fierro had thought it necessary to warn his brother that a Jew was in his house.

Nuño Fierro saw the confusion in his face. “You must come with me, please.”

Inside the house, in his study, Nuño removed a tapestry wall hanging, uncovering a niche in the stone wall. Within the niche were a pair of objects wrapped well in linens that had been tied carefully with strips of fabric. Unwrapped, they proved to be two books.

In Hebrew.

“I apprenticed under Gabriel ben Nissim Sporanis, one of the most revered physicians in all of Spain, and then had the honor to practice medicine with him. He was a Jew. He had lost a brother to the Inquisition. Through the mercy of God he himself died naturally, a very old man in his bed, two months prior to the edict of expulsion.

“At the time of the expulsion his two children and his sister had few funds with which to travel to safety. I bought this house and land from them, as well as these books.

“I am told that one is A Commentary of the Medical Aphorisms of Hippocrates, by Moses ben Maimon, whom your people called Maimonides, and that the other is the Canon of Medicine by Avicenna, whom the Moors know as Ibn Sina. I had written to my brother Manuel that I had these books and how I yearned to discover their secrets. And now he has sent me a New Christian.”

Yonah picked up one of the books and his vision embraced the letters he had not seen in such a long time. They appeared strange and unfamiliar, and in his nervous joy they seemed to turn into serpents that writhed.

“Have you other books by Maimonides?” he asked hoarsely. What he would give for a copy of the Mishneh Torah, he thought; Abba had had that book, in which Maimonides commented on the entirety of Jewish practice, describing in detail everything Yonah had lost.

Alas, Nuño Fierro shook his head.

“No. There were several other books, but Gabriel Sporanis’s sons carried them off when they departed.” He glanced at Yonah anxiously. “Are you able to translate these?”

Yonah stared at the page. The serpents were simply beloved letters again, but … “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “Once I had the Hebrew language effortlessly in my grasp, but I haven’t read it or otherwise really used it for a long time.” Nine long years.

“Will you stay here with me, and try?”

He was stunned that he had been brought together again with the language of his father.

“I will stay for a time,” he said.

*   *   *

If the choice had been his he would have tried to do the Maimonides book first, because the copy was very old and the pages were dry and crumbling, but Nuño Fierro was eager to read the Avicenna, so Yonah began there.

He was uncertain he could do the translation. He worked with great deliberation, one word at a time, one thought at a time, and slowly the letters that once had been so familiar became familiar again.

“Well? What do you think?” the physician asked after the first day.

Yonah could only shrug.

The Hebrew letters unleashed memories of his father teaching him, discussing the meanings of words, how they apply to man’s relationships with other men, how they apply to man’s relationship with God, with the world.

He remembered the sounds of quavering old voices and strong young voices chanting raggedly together, the joy of song, the sorrow of the Kaddish. Bits of worship, fragments of verses he had thought gone forever began to spin from the depths of his memory like blossoms before a wind. The Hebrew words he translated spoke of lockjaw and pleurisy, shaking fevers, potions to ease pain; nevertheless, they brought him song and poetry and fervor that had been lost in the brutishness of his coming of age.

Some words he simply didn’t know, and he could do no more than retain the Hebrew word in the Spanish sentence. But once he had known this language very well, and slowly it came back to him.

Nuño Fierro hovered anxiously in the periphery of his existence.

“How goes the work?” he asked at the end of each day.

“I begin to show progress,” Yonah finally was able to say.

*   *   *

Nuño Fierro was an honest man and lost little time in warning Yonah that in the past Saragossa had been a dangerous place for Jews.

“The Inquisition came here early and harshly,” he said.

Torquemada had appointed two inquisitors for Saragossa in May of 1484. So eager were these clerics to destroy recalcitrant Jews that they held their first auto-de-fé without bothering to issue the Edict of Grace designed to allow backsliding New Christians to confess voluntarily, thereby seeking mercy. By June 3, the first two conversos had been executed and a dead woman’s body had been exhumed and burned.

“There lived in Saragossa good men, members of the Diputación de Aragon, the Council of the Estates, who were shocked and outraged. They approached the king, saying that Torquemada’s appointments and executions were illegal and his confiscations of property violated the fueros of the kingdom of Aragon. They made no objection to trials for heresy,” Nuño Fierro said, “but they petitioned that the Inquisition should function to bring sinners back to the bosom of Holy Mother Church by means of instruction and admonition, using milder penances. They said that aspersions should not be leveled against good and pious men, and insisted there were no notorious heretics in Aragon.”

Ferdinand had dismissed the councillors brusquely. “He said, if there were so few heretics in Aragon, why did they bother him with this fear of the Inquisition?”

On the night of September 16, 1485, Pedro Arbués, one of the inquisitors, was murdered while at prayer in the cathedral. There were no witnesses to the crime but authorities made the immediate assumption that he had been killed by New Christians. As they had done in the cases of several other imagined insurrections of conversos elsewhere, at once they placed under arrest the leader of the New Christian population. He was a distinguished and elderly jurist, Jaime de Montesa, deputy to the chief justice of the municipality.

A number of his acquaintances also were arrested, men deeply involved in Christian life, the fathers and brothers of monks, whose ancestors had been converts. They included men in high positions of government and commerce, several of whom had been knighted for valor. One by one each was declared judio mamas, “really a Jew.” Terrible tortures produced confessions of a plot. In December of 1485 two more conversos were burned at the stake, and beginning with February, 1486, monthly autos-de-fé were held in Saragossa.

“So you see that we must take care. Great care,” Fierro cautioned Yonah. “Is Ramón Callicó your true name?”

“No. I am sought as a Jew under my true name.”

Nuño Fierro winced. “Then do not reveal your true name to me,” he said quickly. “We shall simply announce, should we be asked, that you are Ramón Callicó, an Old Christian from Gibraltar, the nephew of my late brother’s wife.”

*   *   *

It proved not to be difficult. Yonah saw no soldiers or priests. He stayed close to the hacienda, which the Jewish physician Gabriel ben Nissim Sporanis had situated cleverly, far enough from the town and sufficiently off the trail to guarantee that only those in need of medical care would bother to come.

Fierro’s property covered three sides of a long, sloping hill. Whenever fatigue turned the letters to snakes again and Yonah could translate no more, he left the books and tramped over the land. It showed signs that once it had been a good farm, but it was obvious that Nuño wasn’t a good farmer. There was a planting of olive trees and a small fruit orchard, both healthy but desperate for pruning, and like the good peón he had been Yonah found a little saw in the barn and pruned several of the trees, piling the cut boughs and burning them the way he had done on the farms of earlier employment. Behind the barn was a trove of old horse manure and bedding from the stalls, and Yonah added the ashes from the fires and spread the mixture under half a dozen of the trees.

Over the crest of the hill and on its northern side was a neglected field Reyna called the Place of the Lost Ones. It was an unmarked cemetery for those unfortunates who took their own lives, because the Church said suicides were damned and barred them from interment in Christian burial grounds.

Just above the hacienda was the hill’s southern slope, the best part of the property, with deep, rich topsoil and full exposure to the sun. Reyna kept a small kitchen garden, but much of it had grown to weeds and brush. Yonah saw that if someone were serious about working this land there were many possibilities.

*   *   *

He wasn’t certain how long he would stay, but he was caught up in rediscovering the Hebrew language, and as the weeks passed it came to seem almost normal for him to be living in a house. It was a house full of the smells of cooking and baking and the warmth from the large fireplace. Yonah kept the wood box filled, for which Reyna was grateful, since that had been one of her many chores. The ground floor was one large room in which the cooking and dining was done, with two comfortable chairs by the fire. Upstairs, Yonah’s pallet was in a small storeroom between the large master bedchamber and Reyna’s smaller room, each of which contained a bed.

The walls were thin. He never heard her pray, but each of them was aware someone could hear when they awoke to piss into the chamber pot. Once he heard her make a small moan as she yawned and he could imagine how she looked, stretching, enjoying the luxury of a few hours spared from work. During the day he watched her surreptitiously, taking care not to be observed doing so, because from the start he knew Reyna was taken.

Several times, lying in the dark at night, he heard her door open and listened as she went into Nuño’s room and closed the door behind her. Sometimes he heard the muted sounds of lovemaking.

Good for you, Physician! he thought, caught in the prison of his own unreleased loins.

He noted that in their daylight demeanor Nuño and Renya were master and servant, pleasant to one another but devoid of intimacy.

Their sexual joining didn’t happen as frequently as Yonah would have expected. Apparently Nuño Fierro’s needs no longer were urgent. Yonah was a man who discerned patterns, and he noticed early that sometimes, after they had supped, Nuño told Reyna that on the morrow he would like a potted fowl, and she inclined her head. And always that night she came to Nuño’s room. Soon when Yonah heard their private code, the order for a potted fowl, he was unable to sleep until he heard her going in to the other man’s chamber.

*   *   *

Yonah first realized Nuño wasn’t well one afternoon when he left the small table at which he did his translating and saw that the physician was sitting quietly on the lower steps of the staircase. Fierro was pale and his eyes were closed.

“Señor, can I help you?” Yonah said, and hastened toward him, but Nuño Fierro shook his head and raised his hand.

“Allow me to be. A touch of dizziness, nothing more.”

So Yonah nodded and returned to his desk. And presently he heard Fierro get to his feet and go to his room.

*   *   *

Several nights later there were wild winds and a hard and persistent rain that broke a long drought. In the darkness before dawn the three of them were awakened by a hammering on the door and the loud voice of a man calling for Señor Fierro.

Reyna hurried down and shouted through the closed door. “Yes, yes. What is it?”

“I am Ricardo Cabrera. Please, we need the señor. My father has had a terrible fall.”

“I am coming,” Nuño called from the top of the stairs.

Reyna opened the door only a crack, because she was in her shift. “Where is your farm?”

“Off the Tauste road.”

“But that is across the Ebro!”

“I crossed it without difficulty,” the man said pleadingly.

Now for the first time Yonah heard the strange sound of the servant woman arguing with Nuño Fierro as if she were his wife. “Do not place instruments and medications in your bag so calmly! It is too far, and across the river. You cannot go on such a night.”

Presently there was another knocking, this time on Yonah’s door. She came in and stood over him in the dark. “He is not strong. Go with him and help him. See that he returns safely.”

Nuño was less sanguine than he had pretended, and he seemed relieved when Yonah threw on his clothes and came downstairs.

“Why not take one of your brother’s horses?” Yonah asked, but the physician shook his head. “I have my own horse, who has crossed the Ebro many times.”

So Yonah saddled Nuño’s brown horse and the gray Arab for himself, and they followed the shaggy pony of the farmer’s son through the driving rain. The brook had turned into a stream and the sound of water was everywhere as they made their muddy way. Yonah carried Nuño’s bag, allowing him to hold the reins with both hands.

They were thoroughly wet by the time they reached the river. There were no calm and shallow fords in this kind of a rain. The water was running hard and up over the stirrups when they crossed, but even the tough little pony made the crossing without mishap. They arrived at the farm wet through and chilled but were unable to see to their own comfort.

Pascual Cabrera lay on the barn floor while nearby his wife forked hay to their animals. He groaned when Nuño bent over him.

“I fell from the high rocks in the field,” he whispered. He appeared to have difficulty breathing, and his wife assumed the tale.

“A wolf is about and took a freshened ewe from us a fortnight ago. Ricardo has set snares and will kill the beast, but until he does so, we bring our few sheep and goats into the barn at night. My husband got all of them inside except that cursed goat,” she said, indicating a black cabra munching hay nearby. “She had gone up onto a high rocky place in a corner of our field. The goats love to climb it, and she would not choose to come down.”

Her husband said something faintly, and Nuño asked him to repeat it.

“… The cabra … our best milker.”

“Just so,” his wife said. “So he went up to the top of the rocks to get her, and she got down and went directly to the barn. But the rocks are slick from the rain, and he slipped. He fell all the way to the bottom. He was out there a while before he managed to get into the barn himself. I was able to get off his clothes and cover him with a blanket, but he wouldn’t let me dry him, for the pain.”

Yonah watched a different Nuño than the one he had seen at home. The physician was swift and confident. He removed the blanket and asked Yonah to hold one of the two lanterns close. The physician’s hands moved over the man’s body gently, assessing the damage while a pair of oxen watched from the stalls.

“You have broken several of your ribs. And perhaps you have cracked a bone in your arm,” Nuño said finally. He wrapped the moaning man’s upper body tightly in cloth bindings, and soon Señor Cabrera sighed, feeling a lessening of his pain.

“Oh, that’s something better,” he breathed.

“Your arm needs our help too,” Nuño said, and as he bound it for support he directed Yonah and Ricardo to tie the blanket between two long thin poles that leaned in a corner of the barn. When that was done they shifted Cabrera onto the litter and carried him to his own bed.

They were able to take their leave only after Nuño had given the señora powders for infusions that would allow her husband to sleep. It was still misting when they began their return ride but the storm was done and the river was quieter. The rain ceased before they reached home, and a sunlit dawn flooded into the sky. In the house Reyna had the fire going and hot wine waiting, and she began at once to boil water for the physician’s bath.

In the gloom of his small room Yonah shivered as he rubbed his cold body dry with rough sacking. He was thoughtful as he listened to the woman’s worried scolding, soft and urgent as the sound of a dove.

*   *   *

Yonah was willing when Nuño asked him to ride out with him again several days later. The following week they made seven visits to the sick and injured, and soon it was accepted that when the physician must ride abroad, Yonah was his company.

It was while visiting a woman stricken with sharp fevers and paroxysms of chills that Yonah received an account of further happenings in the lives of the Spanish Jews who had fled to Portugal. While Nuño attended to the woman’s ague her husband, a cloth merchant whose business took him to Lisboa, sat and passed the time of day with Yonah, speaking of Portuguese wine and food.

“As every place, Portugal has problems with its damnable Jews,” he said.

“I have heard they have been made slaves of the state.”

“They were slaves until Emanuel ascended the throne of Portugal and declared them free. But when he sought to marry young Isabella, daughter of our own Ferdinand and Isabella, our Spanish monarchs chided his overly soft heart and he made certain to be firmer. He had a problem, in that he wanted an end to Jewishness in his kingdom but could not afford to lose the Jews, who are cursedly good at trade.”

“I have heard they are,” Yonah said. “Is it really true, then?”

“Oh, yes. I know this to be true in my own cloth trade as in many others. At any rate, at Emanuel’s orders all Jewish children between the ages of four and fourteen were forcibly baptized en masse. In a failed experiment, some seven hundred of the newly baptized children were sent to live a Christian life on the isle of San Tomás, off the coast of Africa, where almost all of them quickly died of the fevers. But most of the children were allowed to remain with their families, and Jewish adults were given the choice of becoming Catholics or departing the country. As in Spain, some converted, though by our experience it is to be doubted that a man who has been judio mamas, really a Jew, may become a good and honest Christian, eh?”

“Where did the others go?” Yonah asked.

“I have no idea, nor do I care, so long as they never shall return to us,” the merchant said, and a burst of groaning from his wife drew him away from Yonah and to her side.

*   *   *

One day a pair of gravediggers led up Nuño’s lane a donkey laden with a recumbent form. When they stopped at the hacienda and begged water, Reyna asked if the physician’s services were needed, and the men laughed and said it was far too late. The body on the donkey was that of an unidentified man with black skin, a wanderer who in the broad light of day had slit his own throat in the Plaza Mayor. The gravediggers gave polite thanks for the water and continued their slow way to the Place of the Lost Ones.

That night, Nuño awakened Yonah from a deep sleep.

“I need your help.”

“… You have it, Señor Fierro. What can I do?”

“You should know it is a matter considered to be witchcraft and mortal sin by the Church. If you help me and we are discovered, you will burn as well as I.”

Yonah had long since decided that Nuño Fierro was a man worthy of his trust. “I am already wanted for burning, Maestro Physician. They cannot burn me more than once.”

“Then fetch a spade and bridle a burro.”

*   *   *

The night was clear but Yonah felt its chill. Together they led the burro to the cemetery of the suicides. Nuño had gone up there before dark to find the grave, and now led the way to it in the bright light of the moon.

He set Yonah to digging at once. “The grave is shallow, because the diggers are lazy louts and were partly drunk when Reyna spoke with them.”

It required little effort for Yonah to reclaim the shrouded corpus from the ground, and with the burro’s help they took the body back over the hill to the barn, where the shroud was removed and the naked man was laid out on a table surrounded by bright oil lamps.

The form and face was that of a man of middle age, with wispy curls of black hair, thin limbs, bruised shanks, a variety of scars from old injuries, and the unpleasant neck wound that had brought him death.

“The color of the skin is not a subject for conjecture,” Nuño Fierro said. “In climates of great heat, such as in Africa, men have developed dark skins over long centuries to protect them from the burning rays of the sun. In northern places such as the land of the Slavs, cold climate has produced skin of stark whiteness.”

He took up one of the fine scalpels his brother had fashioned for him. “This has been done as long as there have been healing arts,” he said, and made a straight and steady incision that opened the body on the table from the breastbone to the pubis.

“Both dark and light skins and the flesh beneath them contain different kinds of glands that are the agents of the functions of the body.”

Yonah drew a sharp breath and turned his head from the stink of corruption. “I know what you feel,” Nuño said, “because it is what I felt the first time I saw Sporanis do this.”

His hands worked skillfully. “I am a simple physician and not a priest or a devil. I don’t know what becomes of the soul. But I know for a certainty it doesn’t stay here in this house of flesh, this house that after death seeks at once to become earth.”

He mentioned what he knew about the organs he removed, and directed Yonah to record the dimensions and weight in a book with a leather cover.

“This is the liver. The nutrition of the body depends upon it. I believe it is where the blood is born.”

“This, the spleen … This, the bladder of gall, regulating the temperament.”

The heart … When it was removed, Yonah held in his palms a man’s heart!

“The heart draws blood into itself and sends it elsewhere. The nature of blood is perplexing, but it is clear the heart gives life. Without it, man would be a plant.” Nuño showed him it was like a house with four chambers. “It is in one of these chambers, perhaps, that my own doom lies. I think God erred here when making me. Though perhaps the trouble is in the bellows of the lungs.”

“Is it bad for you, then?” Yonah could not refrain from asking.

“At times it is bad. Trouble with respiration, it comes and it goes.”

Nuño showed him how bones, membranes, and ligaments supported and protected the body. He sawed off the top of the thin man’s head and showed Yonah the brain, then demonstrated that it was connected to the spinal cord and certain nerves.

It was still dark when all was put back and the incisions were sewn with the care of a seamstress. The shroud was replaced, and the two men led the burro back up the hill.

Yonah buried the thin man deeper this time, and they gave him the honor of a Christian prayer and a Jewish one. By the time the light of day drifted over the hill, each of them was in his bed.

*   *   *

In the week that followed, Yonah was enflamed by a curious unrest. He translated Avicenna’s words: “Medicine is the preservation of health and the cure of disease that arises from conscious causes which exist within the body.” When he went to see patients with Nuño he looked at them in a new way, seeing in each the skeleton and organs he had seen in the thin man.

It took him the full week to achieve the courage to approach the physician with his proposal.

“I would bind myself to you as apprentice physician.”

Nuño looked at him calmly. “Is this a sudden desire that may drift away like a fog before a wind?”

“No, I have given it much thought. I think you do God’s work.”

“God’s work? Let me tell you something, Ramón. Often I believe in God. But sometimes I do not.”

Yonah was silent, not knowing what to reply.

“Do you have other reason for your request?”

“A physician helps others throughout his life.”

“So. You would benefit humanity?”

Yonah felt Nuño toying with him and was irked. “Yes, I would do so.”

“Do you know how long such a clerkship might be?”

“No.”

“Four years. It would be your third apprenticeship, and I could not give assurance that you would be able to finish it. I do not know if God will grant me four more years to do his work.”

Honesty forced another admission. “I need to belong to something. To be a part of something good.”

Nuño pursed his lips and looked at him.

“I would labor hard for you.”

“You already labor hard for me,” Nuño said gently.

But in a moment he nodded. “Well. We shall try,” he said.