CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

THE FRIAR’S HOUSE

Fray Lorenzo de Bonestruca had not been transferred to Saragossa as a reward or a promotion, but rather as a rebuke and a punishment. The sources of his troubles had been the late queen, Isabella of Spain, and Archbishop Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. When Cisneros had become archbishop of Toledo in 1495, he recruited the queen to join him in a campaign to reform the Spanish clergy, which had fallen into a period of vice and corruption. Clerics had grown accustomed to an opulent style of living; they had vast land holdings under their private ownership, as well as servants, mistresses, and the trappings of wealth.

Cisneros and Isabella divided the units of the Church between them. She traveled to convents, where she used her position and persuasive powers, cajoling and threatening the nuns until they agreed to return to the simple living style that had characterized the early Church. The archbishop, dressed in a simple brown habit and leading a mule, visited each priory and monastery, cataloguing its wealth and urging its friars and monks to donate to the poor anything not essential to their daily existence. Archbishop Cisneros reinstituted the requirement for tonsure. He had emended Bonestruca’s head with his own hands, shaving off all hair but a close-cropped ring to form St. Peter’s tonsure, representing the crown of thorns worn by Jesus.

Fray Bonestruca had been caught in the web of reform.

He had spent only four years as a celibate friar. Once his body experienced the sweetness of fusing with female flesh, he had succumbed to sexual passion easily and often. For the past ten years he had kept as mistress a woman name María Juana Salazar, on whom he had sired children. María was his wife in every way save name, and he had not tried to keep her presence in his life a great secret; there had been no need, for he was doing only what so many others did. But a number of people knew about Fray Bonestruca and María Juana Salazar. First the elderly priest who had been his confessor for years was recruited to warn him that the days of laxness were over, and that contrition and genuine change were the keys to survival. When Bonestruca had ignored the warning, he was summoned to the chancery for an interview with the archbishop. Cisneros had wasted no time on idle talk.

“You must rid yourself of her. You must do it at once. If you do not, you shall feel my wrath.”

Now Bonestruca decided to try secrecy and subterfuge. He moved María Juana and the children to another village, midway between Toledo and Tembleque, and told no one. He behaved discreetly when he visited, and sometimes he stayed away from them for weeks. In this way he had gained six additional years in which he had enjoyed his little family.

Still, one day he received word that the chancery had called for him again. But this time when he went there he was met by a Dominican priest who told him that because of his disobedience he had been transferred to the office of the Inquisition in the town of Saragossa. He was ordered to depart for Saragossa at once.

“And alone,” the priest had said sardonically.

He had obeyed, but by the time he had finished the long journey, he understood that what others had considered a punishment for him was in fact an opportunity to achieve the privacy he required.

*   *   *

More than a double fortnight after he had met the inquisitor in the street, Yonah was summoned by a brown-robed novice who said that Fray Bonestruca wished the physician to come at once to the Plaza Mayor.

When he responded, he found Fray Bonestruca sitting in the shade of the plaza’s only tree.

The friar nodded to him as he rose from the bench. “I will take you to a place. No word of what you will see or do should be repeated to any person, lest you receive my anger. I promise you that my anger can be terrible. Do you understand?”

Yonah fought for equanimity. “I do understand,” he said evenly.

“You will come with me.”

He strode ahead, Yonah following on the horse. Several times Bonestruca looked back, his gaze going beyond Yonah to determine that they were not followed. But at the edge of the river Bonestruca didn’t hesitate, lifting the skirt of his black robe above the shallow, rushing water. On the far bank he led Yonah to a finca, small but in sound condition, the new wood in a windowpane showing evidence of recent repairs. Bonestruca opened the door and swept inside without knocking. Yonah saw several bags of cloth and leather, and a wooden crate that had not been opened and unpacked. A woman stood holding a baby, two other children standing behind her, clutching her garment.

“This is María Juana,” Bonestruca said.

Yonah removed his hat. “Señora.”

She was a plump woman, brown skinned, with a heart-shaped face, wide dark eyes, and very full, red lips. Her milk stained the material over her rounded breasts. “He is Callicó, a physician,” Bonestruca told her. “He will see to Filomena.”

The object of his concern was a baby, feverish and troubled by sores about the mouth. The oldest child, Hortensia, was seven, a pretty girl who appeared to be in good health, and there was a five-year-old boy, named Dionisio. Yonah’s heart sank when he saw the boy. He appeared feeble and slow of mind. One of his legs was markedly bowed, and when Yonah examined him he found that the boy had the perforated palate and distinctive, pegged upper front teeth that Nuño had taught Yonah to recognize. The child squinted because of poor vision, and Yonah could see areas of opacity in both of his eyes.

Bonestruca said that his three children were exhausted and out of sorts, having arrived from Toledo with their mother only two days before. “As for Filomena’s sores, I trust that eventually they will go away. I remember when the other children had them as well.”

“Even Hortensia?”

“Yes, Hortensia also.”

“You are the children’s father, Fray Bonestruca?”

“Of course.”

“When you were a younger man … did you have the pox, malum venereum, ever?”

“Do not many young men get a taste of the pox, sooner or later? I was covered with sores like scales. But after a time I was cured, and no symptoms have returned.”

Yonah nodded discreetly. “Well … you gave the pox to your … to María Juana.”

“That is true.”

“And she has given it to each of your children at birth. It is the pox that has twisted your son’s limb and dimmed his eyes.”

“Then why are my Hortensia’s limbs straight, and her eyes bright?”

“The disease affects people differently.”

“After all, Filomena’s sores will go away,” the friar said again.

“Yes,” Yonah said. But the boy’s crooked leg and pegged teeth will not, he thought. And who knew what other tragedies the pox might bring into their lives.

He finished examining the children and prescribed a salve for the baby’s sores. “I shall return to see her in a week,” Yonah said. When Bonestruca asked him what was owed, Yonah quoted his usual fee for a home visit, taking care to maintain a businesslike tone. He had no wish to encourage a growing friendship with Fray Bonestruca.

*   *   *

Next day, a man named Evaristo Montalvo led his elderly wife, Blasa de Gualda, into the dispensary to see the physician.

“She is blind, señor.”

“Allow me to look,” Yonah said, and he led the woman into the bright light near the window.

He could see clouding in both her eyes. It was more advanced than similar clouding he had seen recently in the eyes of Doña Sancha Berga, Don Berenguer Bartolomé’s mother, so ripe it made this woman’s lenses appear to be a yellowish white.

“Is it possible for you to help me, señor?”

“I cannot promise to help you, señora. But it is possible for me to try, if that is what you wish. It would require surgery.”

“Cutting on my eyes?”

“Yes, cutting. You have what are called cataratas in each eye. The lenses have become cloudy, and they block your sight the way a shade blocks the light from entering a window.”

“I wish to see again, señor.”

“You will never see the way you did when you were young,” he said gently. “Even if we are successful, you will not be able to fix your eyes on distant objects. You will be able to see only what is close at hand.”

“But that would allow me to cook. Perhaps even to sew, eh?”

“Perhaps … but if we fail, doubtless you will be permanently blind.”

“But I am blind now, señor. So I beg you to try this … surgery.”

Yonah bade them to come back early the next day. That afternoon he readied the operating table and the things he would need, and throughout the evening he sat next to the oil lamp and read, several times, what Teodorico Borgognoni had written about couching the eyes.

“I am going to need your help,” he told Reyna. He showed her, by lifting her own eyelids, how he wanted her to hold the patient’s eyes open and prevent her from blinking.

“I may not be able to watch a cutting of the eyes,” she said.

“You may turn your head away, but you must keep her eyelids raised firmly. Can you do it?”

Reyna nodded doubtfully but said she would try.

*   *   *

Next morning when Evaristo Montalvo came with Blasa de Gualda, Yonah directed the old man to take a long walk before returning, then he gave Blasa two cupfuls of strong spirits in which soporific powders had been infused.

He and Reyna helped the elderly woman to lie on the table and then bound her to it with strips of strong fabric that were wide enough not to cut into her flesh, tying down her wrists and ankles and forehead so she could not move.

He took the smallest of the scalpels in the Fierro collection and nodded to Reyna. “Let us begin.”

When the lids were raised he made tiny incisions around the lens of the left eye.

Blasa drew a shuddering breath.

“It won’t take long,” Yonah said. He used the small, keen blade as a fulcrum to tip the clouded lens until it fell back, into the eye’s interior regions and out of the way. Then he repeated the process on the right eye.

When he was done he thanked Reyna and told her to allow the lids to close, and they unbound Blasa and covered her eyes with cool, wet compresses.

After a time he removed the compresses and bent over her. Her closed eyes were tearing or she was weeping, and he wiped her cheeks gently.

“Señora Gualda. Open your eyes.”

Her lids unlocked. Blinking against the light, she peered up.

“… You have a very good face, señor,” she said.

*   *   *

How strange, to find that a man he scorned and hated as a murderer and a thief was so loving and concerned as a father!

He had hoped Bonestruca would be absent when he paid his next visit to the finca by the river, but he hid his chagrin when the friar greeted him at the door. The three children, rested from the rigors of travel, appeared to be stronger and in better spirits, and Yonah discussed their diet with their mother, who mentioned with offhand pride that her children were accustomed to meat and eggs in abundance.

“And I am accustomed to excellent wine,” Bonestruca said lightly, “which I shall now insist on sharing with you.”

It was evident that he brooked no refusal, and Yonah allowed himself to be led into a study where he had to fight to remain composed, because it contained relics of the friar’s war against the Jews: a set of phylacteries, a skullcap, and—an unbelievable sight to Yonah—a Torah scroll.

The wine was good. As Yonah sipped and attempted not to stare at the Torah, he regarded the host who was his foe, and wondered how soon he could flee this man’s house.

“Do you know how to play Turkish draughts?” Bonestruca asked.

“No. I have never heard of Turkish draughts.”

“It is a most excellent game that uses the mind. I shall teach it to you,” he said, and to Yonah’s annoyance he rose and took from the shelf a square board that he placed on the small table between them, and two cloth bags.

The board was marked with alternating light and dark squares, sixty-four of them according to Bonestruca. Each of the bags contained twelve small, smooth stones; the stones in one bag were black while those in the other bag were a light gray. Bonestruca handed over the black stones and told Yonah to place them on the dark squares found in the first two rows of the board, while the friar similarly placed the lighter stones on his side. “Thus we have made four rows of soldiers, and we are at war, señor!”

The friar showed him that play consisted of moving a stone forward diagonally, to an adjoining vacant square. “Black moves first. If my soldier is in an adjoining vacant square, with a space beyond, he must be captured and removed. Movement of the soldiers is always forward, but when a hero achieves the opponent’s back row he is crowned a monarch by placing on him another piece of the same color. Such a doubled piece may go forward or back, for no one can tell a king where he may not go.

“An army is conquered when an opponent’s soldiers all are captured or blocked so they cannot move.” Bonestruca placed all the pieces back into position. “And now, Physician, have at me!”

They played five games of war. The first two battles were over quickly for Yonah but they taught him that moves could not be made randomly. Several times Bonestruca lured him into making a foolish move, sacrificing one of his soldiers in order to win several of Yonah’s. Finally, Yonah was able to recognize a trap and move away from it.

“Ah, you learn quickly,” the friar said. “You will be a worthy opponent in the shortest of time, I can see it.”

What Yonah soon could see was that the game required a constant inspection of the board to review the purpose of the opponent’s moves and gauge the possibilities that might arise. He noted the ways in which Bonestruca worked constantly to lure him into traps. By the end of the fifth game he had learned some of the defenses that were possible.

“Ah, señor, you are clever as a fox or a general,” Bonestruca said, but the friar’s supple mind had defeated Yonah easily.

“I must go,” Yonah said reluctantly.

“Then you must return to play again. Tomorrow afternoon, or the day after?”

“My afternoons, I am afraid, are spent with patients.”

“I understand, a busy physician. Suppose we meet here on Wednesday evening? Come as early as you can, I shall be here.”

Why not? Yonah asked himself. “Yes, I shall come,” he said. It would be interesting to try to understand the way Bonestruca’s mind worked, as revealed from his play of draughts.

*   *   *

On Wednesday evening he returned to the finca by the river, and he and Bonestruca sat in the study and drank the good wine and cracked almond shells and ate the meats as they perused the board and made their moves.

Yonah watched the board and his opponent’s face, seeking to discern the way the friar thought, but he could learn nothing from Bonestruca’s features.

With every game they played, he learned a little about the game of draughts and a tiny bit about Bonestruca. That evening they played five games, as they had at their first meeting.

“The games last longer now,” Bonestruca observed. When he suggested that they meet Wednesday eve on the following week, Yonah assented so readily that the friar smiled.

“Ah, I see that the game has captured your soul.”

“Only my mind, surely, Fray Bonestruca.”

“Then I shall work on your soul as we play, señor.” Bonestruca said.

*   *   *

It took Yonah two more evenings of playing draughts before he won his first game, and then he didn’t win again for several weeks. But after that he began to win sometimes, and the games became harder fought and longer lasting as he came to know Bonestruca’s strategies.

He thought that Bonestruca played at draughts the way he played at life, feinting, faking, toying with his opponent. The friar usually greeted him with a disarming, sunny friendliness, but Yonah never relaxed in his presence, aware of the darkness that lurked only seconds away.

“You do not have a first-rate mind after all, Physician,” Bonestruca said contemptuously after winning an easy game. Yet each time they played he was insistent that Yonah play with him again, and soon.

Yonah concentrated on learning to best him. He suspected that Bonestruca was a bully, made more powerful by fear, yet perhaps vulnerable to one who would stand up to him.

*   *   *

“I have been in Saragossa but a brief time, yet I have unmasked a Jew,” the friar told him one Wednesday evening, jumping one of his soldiers.

“Ah?” Yonah said casually. He moved one of his own pieces into place to repel the attack.

“Yes, a backsliding Jew, yet who pretends to be an Old Christian.”

Would the friar now bring about his ruin?

Yonah kept his eyes on the board. He moved a soldier into a square where he was jumped, and then jumped two of Bonestruca’s pieces. “Your soul rejoices to catch a Jew. I hear it in your voice,” he said, and wondered at the coolness of his own voice.

“Think on it. Is it not written that they who have sown the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind?”

To hell with him, Yonah thought, and lifted his eyes from the board to meet the friar’s glance. “Is it not also written that blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy?”

Bonestruca smiled. He was enjoying himself. “It is so written, by Matthew. But … consider. ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’ Is it not then an act of mercy to save an everlasting soul from hell? For that is what we do when we reconcile Jewish souls with Christ before the flames. We end sorry lives of error and grant them peace and glory for eternity.”

“And what of one who refuses such a reconciliation?”

“We are admonished by Matthew, ‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body shall be cast into hell.’”

He smiled as he told Yonah that the Jew who pretended to be an Old Christian was about to be placed under arrest.

*   *   *

Through a sleepless night and the next day, Yonah was caught up in an agony of apprehension. He was prepared to flee for his life, yet he had learned enough about Bonestruca’s thinking to believe that perhaps this mention of a counterfeit Old Christian might be nothing more than a trap. Suppose Bonestruca was watching to see if the physician had taken the bait and would run? If all the inquisitor had was a suspicion, Yonah would do well to spend each day in his normal living.

That morning he attended the daily clinic in his dispensary. In the afternoon he called on patients. He had just returned home and was removing the saddle from the horse when a pair of soldiers of the alguacil rode down the lane to the house.

He had been expecting this moment and was armed. There was no point in surrendering to those who would wish to bring him in for the Inquisition. If they tried to take him, perhaps his sword would be lucky against the soldiers or, if he were killed, it would be a better death than the flames.

But one of the riders leaned forward respectfully.

“Señor Callicó, the alguacil asks that you accompany us at once to the Saragossa prison, where there is need for the skills of your profession.”

“What kind of need?” Yonah asked, not at all convinced.

“A Jew has tried to cut off his prick,” the soldier said baldly, and his companion snickered.

“What is the Jew’s name?”

“Bartolomé.”

It struck him an almost physical blow. He remembered the beautiful house, the aristocratic man who had talked with such intelligence in the gracious study that was crowded with maps and charts. “Don Berenguer Bartolomé? The cartographer?”

The soldier shrugged, but his companion nodded, and spat.

“The same,” he said.

*   *   *

Within the prison a young black-robed priest sat behind a table, probably assigned the task of noting the names of anyone who applied to see the prisoners.

“We have brought the physician,” the soldier said.

The priest nodded. “Don Berenguer Bartolomé broke his water mug and used a shard to circumcise himself,” he told Yonah, and motioned for the guard to unlock the outer door. The guard led Yonah down a corridor, to a cell where Berenguer lay on the floor. He unlocked the cell door to allow Yonah to enter, and then locked him inside.

“When you are ready to leave, shout for me and I will let you out,” he said, and went away.

Berenguer’s trousers were stiff with blood. A don and the descendent of dons, Yonah thought, a distinguished man whose grandfather had charted the coast of Spain. He lay on the prison floor, stinking of blood and urine.

“I am sorry, Don Berenguer.”

Berenguer nodded. He grunted as Yonah opened the trousers and pulled them down.

Yonah kept a flask of strong spirits in the medical bag. Berenguer received it eagerly and needed no urging to drink, in great swallows.

The penis was a horror. Yonah saw that Berenguer had cut away most of the foreskin but some remained, and the incisions had been done raggedly. He marveled that Berenguer had been able to carry it out at all, using a sharp shard on himself. He knew the pain was very bad and he was sorry to add to it, but he took a scalpel and trimmed the ragged tissue, completing the circumcision. The man on the floor groaned, sucking in the last of the strong drink like a thirsty child.

When it was over, he lay gasping as Yonah applied a soothing salve and a loose dressing.

“It will be a fortnight before it heals. Until then, you will have pain. Leave the trousers off. If you are cold, cover yourself, but keep the blanket away from yourself with your hands.” They looked at one another.

“Why have you done this? What does it gain?”

“You would not understand,” Berenguer said.

Yonah sighed and nodded. “I’ll come tomorrow if I am allowed. Is there anything you wish?”

“If you could bring my mother some fruit…”

He was shocked. “Doña Sancha Berga is here?”

Berenguer nodded. “All of us. My mother. My sister, Monica, and her husband, Andrés, and my brother, Geraldo.”

“I will do what I can,” Yonah said numbly, and called for the guard to unlock the cell.

In the entryway, before he could inquire about the condition of the other members of the Bartolomé family, the priest asked him if he would examine Doña Sancha Berga. “She sorely has need of a physician,” the priest said. He seemed a decent young man, and troubled.

When they took Yonah to Doña Sancha, the beautiful old woman lay like a broken flower. She gazed at him sightlessly and he saw that her cataratas had ripened; they were almost sufficiently developed to allow surgery, but he knew he would never couch these eyes.

“It is Callicó the physician, señora,” he said gently.

“… I am … injured, señor.”

“How did the injuries occur, señora?”

“… They placed me on the rack.”

He could see that the torture had dislocated her right shoulder. He had to summon the guard to help him pull the shoulder back into place while she shrieked. Afterward, she could not stop weeping.

“Señora. Is the shoulder not better?”

“I have condemned my beautiful children,” she whispered.

*   *   *

“How is she?” the priest asked.

“She is old, her bones are soft and brittle. I’m certain she has multiple fractures. I think she is dying,” he said.

Yonah was in despair as he rode home from the prison.

*   *   *

When he returned there next day bearing a quantity of raisins and dates and figs, he found Don Berenguer still in great pain.

“How is my mother?”

“I am doing what I can for her.”

Berenguer nodded. “I thank you.”

“How did all this come to be?”

“We are Old Christians and have always stated so. My father’s Catholic family goes back in time. My mother’s parents were converted Jews and she was raised with certain harmless rituals that became our family habit as well. She told us stories of her girlhood and always lighted tapers as dusk fell on Fridays. I am not certain why, perhaps in memory of her departed. And gathered her children each week on that evening for a bountiful dinner, with blessings of thanks for the food and the wine.”

Yonah nodded.

“Someone denounced her. She had no enemies, but … she had recently discharged a servant for repeated drunkenness. It is possible that this kitchen maid is the source of our troubles.

“I had to listen to my own mother’s screams while they tortured her. Can you imagine such horror? I was told afterwards by my interrogators that in the end our mother implicated all of us, my brothers and sisters—even the memory of our father—in a Judaizing plot.

“So I knew that we are lost, each and every one. My family, that has always known we are Old Christians. Yet a part of us is Jewish, so that we have been neither fully Catholic nor Jewish, adrift between two shores. In my despair I felt that if I am to burn at the stake as a Jew I should come before my Maker as a Jew, and I broke my drinking cup and cut myself with the shard.

“I am aware you will not be able to understand,” he said to Yonah, as he had said the previous evening.

“You are wrong, Don Berenguer,” Yonah told him. “I understand you very well.”

*   *   *

As he was leaving the prison he overheard a guard speaking to the young priest. “Yes, Padre Espina,” the man said.

Yonah turned and came back.

“Padre,” he said. “Did he call you Espina?”

“That is my name.”

“May I ask your full name?”

“I am Francisco Rivera de la Espina.”

“Is your mother, by chance, Estrella de Aranda?”

“Estrella de Aranda was my mother. She is gone. I pray for her soul.” He stared. “Do I know you, Señor Physician?”

“You were born in Toledo?”

“Yes,” the priest said reluctantly.

“I have something that belongs to you,” Yonah told him.