CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

DRAUGHT GAMES

When next Yonah appeared at the finca by the river for an evening of draughts, he saw that María Juana had a large, fresh darkening under her swollen left eye and covering most of her cheek, and he also noted bruises on the arms of the little girl named Hortensia.

Bonestruca greeted him with a nod and spoke little, concentrating so that he won the first game after a close battle. During the second game the friar was sullen and played badly, and soon it was apparent that the game was lost to him.

When the baby, Filomena, began to wail, Bonestruca leaped to his feet. “I want silence!”

María Juana picked up the baby and ushered her children hastily into the other room. The two men played in a quietness broken only by the clacking of the stone pieces against the wooden board.

Presently, during the third game, María Juana appeared to serve a plate of dates and fill the wineglasses.

Bonestruca regarded her moodily until she left the room. Then he looked at Yonah. “Where is it that you live?”

When Yonah told him, he nodded. “That is where we shall play draughts next week. Is it agreeable to you?”

“Yes, of course,” Yonah said.

*   *   *

It was less than agreeable to Reyna. She knew the visitor when he appeared at the front door. Everyone in Saragossa was aware of this friar and knew what he was.

She ushered him into the house and seated him comfortably, then announced his presence to Yonah. When she served them with wine and refreshment she kept her gaze down, and she withdrew as soon as possible.

It was obvious that it frightened her to see Yonah consorting with Bonestruca. The next day, he saw puzzlement in her face, but she didn’t ask him any questions. She was never the least bit unclear about their roles; she knew that it was his house and that she was a servant every place but in bed. But a week later, she went to her village for three days, and when she returned she informed him she had bought a house of her own and would be leaving his employ.

“When?” he said, dismayed.

“I don’t know. Before too long.”

“And why?”

“To return home. The money Nuño left has made me a very rich woman by my village’s standards.”

“I shall miss you,” he said truthfully.

“But not terribly. I am a convenience for you.” When he started to protest she held up her hand. “Yonah. I am old enough to be your mother. It is nice to feel tenderness when we share a bed, but more often I think of you as a son or a nephew of whom I am fond.”

She told him not to fret. “I will send a strong girl to take my place, a young girl who is a good worker.”

*   *   *

Within ten days a boy from her village drove a donkey cart to Yonah’s house and helped her load it. The belongings she had accumulated while working for three maestros made up a sparse collection that easily fit into the small cart.

“Reyna. Are you certain you want to do this?” Yonah asked her, and she made the only gesture that broke the servant-and-master convention under which they had lived. She reached out and placed her warm palm against his face, and the look she gave him contained tenderness and respect, and also an unmistakable farewell.

When she was gone there was a stillness in the rooms, and it seemed to Yonah as though the house had been emptied.

*   *   *

He had forgotten the bitter taste of loneliness. He threw himself into work, riding out ever farther to care for those in need, lingering in the homes of patients for a few more minutes of human contact, chatting at length with shopkeepers about business, and with farmers about crops. On his own property he pruned a dozen more of the old olive trees. He spent more time translating the Avicenna; he had already translated a major part of The Canon of Medicine, and that fact excited him and spurred him on.

True to her word, Reyna sent him a young woman, named Carla Santella, to serve him as housekeeper. She was a stocky girl who worked willingly and kept the house clean, but she never spoke and he disliked her cooking. After several weeks, he sent her away. Reyna sent as a replacement Petronila Salva, a widow with facial warts; she cooked well but distracted him by talking too much, and he kept her only four days.

After that, Reyna sent no one else.

*   *   *

He was fast coming to dread his weekly mock wars with Bonestruca over the draughts board, not knowing whether the friar would appear as a brilliant competitor or as the dark-tempered man in whom reason and stability were fast slipping away.

On a Wednesday evening when they were to play at the friar’s finca again, María Juana let him in and motioned him toward the inner room, where he found Bonestruca seated before the table, which held an open book instead of the draughts board. The friar was studying his own face in a hand mirror.

For a moment he didn’t acknowledge Yonah’s greeting. Then, still gazing into the mirror, he said, “Do you see evil when you look at me, physician?”

Yonah chose each word carefully. “I see a most comely face.”

“Gracious features, would you say?”

“Most handsome, señor.”

“The face of a just man?”

“A face that has stayed remarkably innocent and unchanged by time’s passing.”

“Do you know the long poem called The Divine Comedy, by the Florentine, Dante Alighieri?”

“No, señor.”

“Pity.”

He turned his eyes on Yonah. “The first section of the poem, called Inferno, is a portrait of the lower reaches of Hell.”

Yonah had no reply. “The Florentine poet has long been dead, no?”

“Yes … he is dead.…” Bonestruca continued to peer into the mirror.

“Shall I get the board and lay out the pieces?” Yonah suggested. He stood and walked to the table. Seeing the back of the mirror for the first time, he realized it was made of silver, greatly tarnished. He could see the silversmith’s mark, near the top of the handle: HT. And knew it for one of the mirrors his father had made for the count of Tembleque.

“Fray Bonestruca,” he said. He recognized the betraying tension in his own voice, but Bonestruca didn’t appear to have heard. His eyes were on the mirrored image but unfocused, like a blind man’s, the gaze of someone sleeping with open eyes.

Yonah was unable to resist rashness in an attempt to examine an object made by his father, but when he tried to take it from Bonestruca he found that the friar’s hands were immovable. For a moment he struggled to free the mirror until the thought came to him that Bonestruca was pretending to madness and aware of everything. Yonah abandoned him in terror and made his way through the door.

“Señor?” María Juana said as he entered the outer room, but in his perturbation he walked past her and fled the finca.

*   *   *

The following afternoon when he rode back to his own house after visiting patients, he found María Juana waiting for him near the barn, nursing her baby in the shade produced by her tethered donkey.

He offered her the hospitality of his house but she refused, saying she must return to her other children. “What is to be done with him?” she asked.

He could only shake his head. He felt great pity for María Juana. He could guess how she had been, a foolish girl, younger and prettier. Had Bonestruca calmed her terror and seduced her? The first time, had she been debauched? Or had she been a reckless young woman who perhaps had thought it wonderfully amusing to lie down with so strange a cleric, never knowing the kind of existence that lay ahead of her.

“When I first met him he beat me. But he did not beat me for years, after that. Until now. He becomes more and more unbalanced.”

“When did it start?”

“Several years ago. It grows steadily worse. What is the cause?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps it has something to do with the pox, which he has had for a long time.”

“He has not suffered from the pox for many years.”

“I know, but that is the nature of the disease. Perhaps now he has begun to suffer from it once more.”

“Can nothing be done?”

“In truth, señora, I know precious little of the cause of an unbalanced mind, nor can I refer you to a colleague more skilled than I in its treatment. Madness is mystery and magic to us.… Last night, how long did he sit motionless with the mirror?”

“For a long time, until just before midnight. I gave him warmed wine then, and he drank and fell on the bed and into sleep.”

Yonah had slept poorly himself after sitting up late, reading by candlelight about insanity. The year before he had added to the medical library Nuño had left him, spending two months’ income on a tract entitled De Parte Operativa. In it, Arnau de Vilanova had written that mania occurred when an overabundance of choler dried, heating the brain and resulting in restlessness, clamor, and aggression. “When the friar becomes … excited, you must give him an infusion of tamarind and borage in cool water.” For periods such as the previous evening’s, when Bonestruca had become stuporous—Vilanova said the French called such episodes folie paralitica—Avicenna had written that the patient must be warmed, and Yonah prescribed a powder of ground peppers, to be mixed with heated wine.

María Juana was in despair. “He has been acting so oddly. He is capable of … imprudent actions. I am so fearful of our future.”

It was a hard existence for a woman and children to be tied so closely to Lorenzo de Bonestruca. Yonah wrote out the prescriptions and bade her to take them to Fray Medina’s apothecary shop. Then, as he removed the saddle from his horse, he watched her donkey carrying her away.

*   *   *

He would have liked to have waited several days to return to the finca by the river, but instead he went there the next morning, impelled by fears that harm could come to the woman or her children.

But he found Bonestruca sitting passively in the back room of the house. María Juana whispered that he had been weeping. The friar nodded at him in return for his greeting.

“How do you feel this day, Fray Bonestruca?”

“Poorly. When I shit, it burns like fire.”

“That is the tonic I prescribed. The burning will go away.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Callicó the physician. You don’t remember me?”

“… No.”

“Do you recall your father?”

Bonestruca looked at him.

“Your mother?… Well, no matter, you will remember them some other time. Are you sad, señor?”

“Of course I am sad. I have been sad all of my life.”

“For what reason?”

“Because He was slain.”

“It is good reason to be sad. Do you perhaps grieve as well for others who have died?”

The friar looked at him but didn’t answer.

“Do you remember Toledo?”

“Toledo, yes…”

“Do you remember the Plaza Mayor? The cathedral? The cliffs over the river?”

Bonestruca was watching him silently.

“Do you recall riding out at night?”

There was silence.

“Do you remember riding out at night?” Yonah said again. “With whom did you ride?”

Bonestruca watched him.

“Who was your companion when you rode at night?”

The room was quiet. The time passed.

“The count,” Bonestruca said.

Yonah heard it clearly. “Vasca,” he said, but Bonestruca sank into silence once again.

“Do you recall the boy who carried the ciborium to the priory? The boy who was taken and killed in the olive grove?”

Bonestruca looked away. He was speaking to himself, so softly that Yonah had to lean forward to catch the words.

“They are everywhere, the fucking Jews. May they be cursed,” he whispered.

*   *   *

The next day María Juana came to Jonah alone and almost incoherent, riding the donkey that showed signs of having been whipped.

“They have taken him to the smaller prison, the place for madmen and paupers.”

She said she had left her children with a neighbor’s girl, and he told her to return to them. “I’ll go to the prison and see if there is anything I can do,” he said, and straightaway went to the stable to saddle his horse.

The prison for paupers and madmen had a reputation for exceedingly bad food and very little of it, and so he stopped on the way and bought two loaves of bread and two small rounds of goat’s cheese. When he reached the prison his heart sank, for the place assailed all the senses. Even before he walked under the raised portcullis at the entrance the prodigious stink—an essence of defecation and filth—caused his insides to churn, while the cacophony of screams and shouts, curses and imprecations, laughter and wailing, oration and babble, fed into the great united noise like streams contributing to the roar of a great river. The sound of the madhouse.

The Inquisition had no interest in this place, and once Yonah had made the gift of a coin to the guard there was no difficulty in gaining permission to attempt to see a prisoner.

“I wish to visit with Fray Bonestruca.”

“Well, you must see if you can glimpse him amongst the humanity,” the guard said. He was a middle-aged man with expressionless eyes and a pasty, pocked face. “If you give me the food, I’ll see he gets it. Give it to him, and it’s wasted. They’ll all pounce on him and take it away.”

He glared when Yonah shook his head.

There were no cells, only a wall composed of the same heavy grating that had been used to fashion the portcullis. On one side were the guard and Yonah. On the other side was a large open space, a world inhabited by the lost.

Yonah stood by the grate and stared into the huge cage of bodies on the other side. He could not distinguish the debtors, because everyone he studied appeared to be mad.

He saw the friar finally, slumped on the dirt floor with his back to the far wall.

“Fray Bonestruca!”

He shouted it repeatedly but his voice was lost within the greater bedlam. The friar did not raise his bowed head, but Yonah’s cries drew the attention of a ragged man who looked hungrily at the bread. Yonah broke a piece from one of the loaves and held it through the grate, where it was snatched up and quickly eaten.

“Bring me the friar,” Yonah said, pointing, “and you shall have half the loaf.”

The man went at once, dragging the sitting Bonestruca to his feet and leading him to where Yonah waited on the other side of the grating. Yonah delivered the half loaf that had been promised, but the ragged man did not move very far, his eyes on the other provisions Yonah held.

A sizable crowd of prisoners had gathered.

Fray Bonestruca looked at Yonah. It was not a blank stare. There was a certain intelligence within the gaze, an awareness and a sense of horror, but he showed no recognition. “I am Callicó,” Yonah said. “Do you not recall, Ramón Callicó, the physician?…

“I have brought you a few things,” he said. He handed the pair of small cheeses through a square in the grate, and Bonestruca accepted them wordlessly.

But when Yonah tried to carry on conversation with him, the friar looked away mutely, and Yonah knew it would be hopeless to question him.

“I can do nothing to secure your release unless your sanity should return,” he felt impelled to report. Witnessing, hearing, smelling the place, it was a hard thing for him to say despite the part of him that would always hate Bonestruca for his terrible crimes against the Toledano family and so many others.

He handed the half loaf of bread through the grate, and then the full loaf; in order to accept them, Bonestruca transferred the two cheeses from his right hand to his left and lost control of one of them. The fallen cheese was grabbed up by the ragged man, while a naked boy snatched the breads from Bonestruca’s grasp. Many hands turned against the boy; there was a heaving and thrashing among the bodies that brought to Yonah’s mind the feeding frenzies of fish in the sea.

A bald old woman threw herself at the grate, reaching through to grasp Yonah’s arm in a wiry claw, seeking food he didn’t have. Even as he leaped backward to free himself, to escape the stink and curse of the terrible place, Yonah was conscious of Bonestruca’s great fist striking out at the others about him until the friar stood alone with his mouth agape, while from him issued a scream of wolfish despair, part wail and part roar, that seemed to follow after Yonah as he fled.

*   *   *

He rode to the finca by the river and forced himself to tell María Juana of his instinctual feeling that Bonestruca’s madness would become worse and not better. She listened without tears, having expected the news even while she had dreaded it.

“Three men of the Church have been here. They will come for me and the children this afternoon. They promise to bring us to a convent and not to the workhouse.”

“I am sorry, señora.”

“Do you perhaps know of a home nearby where a housekeeper is needed? I am not afraid of hard work. The children eat very little.”

He knew only of his own home. He thought of how it would be to live with them, of time passing while he watched its effect, devoting his life to this poor doomed woman and her poor doomed children. But he knew he was not good enough, not strong enough, not saintly enough to make such a gesture.

He put the idea from his head and thought instead of Bonestruca’s collection of Jewish objects. The phylacteries. The Torah! “Perhaps you will be willing to sell me some of the friar’s belongings?”

“When they came this morning they took everything.” She led him into the next room. “You see?”

The only things left were the crude draughts board and the small stones that were the playing pieces. They had even taken the book of Dante’s poem, but too hurriedly, for several loose pages lay under the draughts board. He picked them up and read the top page, which he soon saw was a description of hell:

Here we heard people whine in the chasm, and knock and thump themselves with open palms, and blubber through their snouts as if in a spasm. Streaming from that pit, a vapor rose over the banks, crusting them with a slime that sickened my eyes and hammered at my nose. That chasm sinks so deep we could not sight its bottom anywhere until we climbed along the rock arch to its greatest height. Once there, I peered down; and I saw long lines of people in a river of excrement that seemed the overflow of the world’s latrines. I saw among the felons of that pit one wraith who might or might not have been tonsured—one could not tell, he was so smeared with shit.

Yonah understood suddenly that no punishment God or man might think of could possibly be worse than the existence faced by Lorenzo de Bonestruca. Filled with terror, he accepted the draughts game she pushed into his hands. He emptied his purse of gold and silver and left it on the table; then he wished the Lord’s protection on the woman and her children, and he rode away.