CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

THE HIGH MEADOW

Before the running field workers could reach them, a spare, robust man came from one of the nearby houses. He had aged, but not so much that Yonah did not at once know Micah Benzaquen, who had been the Saadis’s friend and neighbor in Granada. Benzaquen had been middle-aged when Yonah had met him; now he was still vigorous, but an old man. He peered at Yonah for a long moment, and when he smiled, Yonah saw that Benzaquen also recognized him.

“You have matured well, señor,” Benzaquen said. “When I knew you last you were an enormous and ragged young shepherd, all hair and beard, as if you had a bush about your head. But what is your name? It is like the name of a beautiful city.…”

Yonah saw that during the brief time he would remain in this remote place it would be impossible to insist he was Ramón Callicó. “Toledano.”

“Yes, Toledano, by my soul!”

“Yonah Toledano. Well met, Señor Benzaquen.”

“Where do you live now, Señor Toledano?”

“Guadalajara,” Yonah said, aware that he did not dare associate the name of Toledano with Saragossa. To his regret, the woman had lifted her bucket of water and made her escape as he and Benzaquen exchanged greetings. The running men had slowed to a walk, having noted that the stranger’s sword and knife remained sheathed. By the time they arrived, still carrying farm implements with which he could have been skewered and hacked, he and Benzaquen were standing at ease and talking amicably.

Benzaquen introduced Pedro Abulafin, David Vidal, and Durante Chazan Halevi; and then a second group, Joachim Chacon, Asher de Segarra, José Diaz, and Fineas ben Portal.

Several men tended to Yonah’s horse while he was led to the hospitality of Benzaquen’s finca. Leah Chazan, Benzaquen’s wife, was warm and gray haired, with all the virtues of a Spanish mother. She gave him a bowl of hot water and a cloth and brought him to the privacy of the barn. By the time he was washed and refreshed, the small house was beginning to fill with the scent of baking spring lamb. His host awaited him with a jar of drink and two cups. “Visitors to our little valley are extremely rare, so this is an occasion,” Benzaquen said, pouring coñac, and they drank to one another’s health.

Benzaquen had noted Yonah’s Arabian horse and the excellent quality of his clothing and weaponry. “You are no longer a ragged shepherd,” he said, and smiled.

“I am a physician.”

“A physician? How fine!” Benzaquen said. Over the excellent meal soon served by his wife, he told Yonah what had befallen the converts after they and Yonah had taken separate paths.

“We left Granada in a caravan, thirty-eight wagons all bound for Pamplona, the principal city of Navarre, which we reached after agonizingly slow and difficult travel.”

They had stayed in Pamplona two years. “Several of our people married there. Including Inés Denia. She became the wife of Isadoro Sabino, a carpenter,” Benzaquen said delicately, for both men had unpleasant memories of their discussion concerning Inés Denia the last time they had met.

“Alas,” Benzaquen said, “for those of us from Granada, our joyous times in Pamplona were vastly overshadowed by tragedy.” One out of every five of the Granada New Christians had died in Pamplona of burning fever and bloody flux. Four members of the Saadi family were among those taken cruelly and swiftly in the terrible month of Nisan. “Isaac Saadi and his wife Zulaika Denia died within hours of one another. Then their daughter Felipa sickened and died, and finally both Inés and her new husband, Isadoro Sabino, who had been married less than three months.

“The people of Pamplona blamed any newcomers for bringing death to their city, and when the pestilence had run its course those of us who had survived knew we must flee again.

“After much discussion we determined to cross the border into France and attempt to settle in Toulouse, although the decision was controversial. I, for one, was unhappy with both the route and the destination,” Benzaquen said. “I pointed out that for centuries Toulouse had had a tradition of permitting violent acts against the Jews, and that we were separated from France by the high Pyrenees, through which we had to take our wagons, a prospect that seemed impossible.”

But some of Benzaquen’s fellow conversos had scoffed at his fears, pointing out that they would come to France as Catholics and not as Jews. As for getting through the mountains, they knew that in the village of Jaca, which lay ahead, there were professional mountain guides, conversos like themselves, who could be hired to bring them through the passes. If the wagons could not get through the mountains, they said, they would take their most valuable possessions into France on the backs of pack animals. And so the chain of wagons had set out along the trail to Jaca.

“How did you locate this valley?” Yonah asked.

Benzaquen smiled. “By accident.”

On the long, wooded mountain slopes, good camping sites for so large a party were hard to find. Often the travelers slept in their wagons, the vehicles strung out along the side of the trail. On such a night, between their sleeping and rising, one of Benzaquen’s draft horses—a valuable animal, and needed—pulled its tether and wandered away. “As soon as its absence was discovered in the first gray light, with four other men I set out to search, cursing the beast.”

Following flattened brush and broken branches, an occasional hoof-print, and droppings, they found themselves on a kind of natural stony trail that dropped downhill alongside a rushing stream. Finally they emerged from the woods and saw the horse grazing on the rich fodder of a small, hidden valley.

“We were immediately impressed by the good water and grass. We returned to the caravan and led the others to the valley because it offered a safe and sheltered resting place. We had only to widen the natural trail a bit in two places, and move several large rocks, and then we were able to bring the wagons down.

“At first we thought to stay only four or five days, to allow humans and animals to rest and restore their energy.” But everyone was struck by the beauty of the valley, and by the obvious fertility of the soil, he said. It wasn’t lost to them that the place was wonderfully remote. To the east, it was two days of difficult travel to the closest village, Jaca, itself an isolated community that drew few travelers. And to the southeast it was three equally difficult days travel to the nearest city, Huesca. Some of the New Christians noted that people might live here in peace, without ever seeing an inquisitor or a soldier. It occurred to them that perhaps they should go no farther, but stay in the valley and make it their home.

“Not everyone concurred,” Benzaquen said. After a great deal of argument and discussion, of the twenty-six families that had left Pamplona, seventeen decided to stay in the valley. “Everyone pitched in to help the nine families who were going on to Toulouse. It took the morning and the better part of the afternoon to get their wagons back up to the trail. After the embraces and a few tears they disappeared over the mountain, and those of us who had refused to go on with them went down into the valley again.”

Among the settlers were four families whose members had earned their living from farming. In arranging the transfers from Granada to Pamplona and then to Toulouse, these farmers had been abashed, leaving the planning and decisions to the merchants whose travel experience and sophistication had stood the group in good stead.

But now the farmers became the leaders of the settlement, exploring and plotting the sections of the valley, determining which crops would be planted, and where. All over the valley grew rich, healthy fodder, and from the start they called the place Pradogrande, the High Meadow.

The men of each family worked together to divide the valley into seventeen equitable holdings, giving each plot a number, and drawing the numbers from a hat to establish ownership. Each man agreed to work cooperatively in planting and harvesting, the order of work to be rotated each year so no owner would have a permanent advantage over any other. The four farmers suggested where houses should be situated to take advantage of the sun and the shade and exist well with the elements. They built the fincas one at a time, everyone working together. There was plenty of stone on the slopes and the structures were solid farmhouses with stables and barns either in the lower level or attached to the living quarters.

The first summer in the valley they built three fincas, and the women and children huddled in them communally during the winter, the men camping out in the wagons. Over the next five summers they built the other houses and the church.

The four experienced farmers became the community’s purchasing committee. “They traveled to Jaca first,” Benzaquen said, “where they bought a few sheep and some seeds, but Jaca was too small to satisfy their needs and in their next trip they went the extra distance to Huesca, where they found a greater variety of livestock for sale. They brought back to us sacks of good seeds, a variety of implements, fruit tree seedlings, more sheep and goats, hogs, chickens and geese.”

One of the men had been a leather worker and another man had been a carpenter, both skills that were blessings in a new community. “But most of us had been merchants. When we decided to stay in Pradogrande we knew we would have to change our livelihoods and our lives. At first it was discouraging, and difficult to accustom tradesmen’s bodies to the ruder demands of labor, but we were excited about the possibilities of the future and eager to learn. Gradually, we toughened.

“We have been here eleven years, and we have broken the ground for fields and established crops and orchards,” Benzaquen said.

“You have done well,” Yonah said, truly impressed.

“Darkness is about to fall, but tomorrow I shall take you through the valley so you may see it for yourself.”

Yonah nodded absently. “The woman Adriana … Is her husband a farmer?”

“Everyone in Pradogrande is a farmer. But Adriana Chacon’s husband is gone. She is a widow,” Benzaquen said, cutting another slice of lamb and urging his guest to take advantage of the opportunity to eat good meat.

*   *   *

“He says he remembers me when I was a child,” Adriana Chacon told her father that evening. “How curious, for I don’t remember him at all. Do you recall him?”

Joachim Chacon shook his head. “I do not. But perhaps I met him. Your grandfather Isaac knew a great many people.”

It seemed strange to her that this newcomer in the valley could lay claim to memories about her that she couldn’t share. When she thought back to her childhood it was like trying to peer across a vast landscape from a mountaintop, the closer objects sharp and clear, the earlier ones fading into the remote distance until they couldn’t be seen. She had no memory of Granada and only a few memories of Pamplona. She remembered riding for a long time in the back of a wagon. The wagons were covered against the sun but became so hot that the caravan did most of its traveling in the early mornings and late afternoons, the drivers stopping their horses in the midday heat when they came to shade. She remembered the hard and constant jostling of the wagon over difficult trails, the creaking of leather harness, the sound of plodding hooves. The eternal gray dust that sometimes gritted between her teeth. The grassy smells of the round droppings that spilled out behind the horses and the burros, to be compacted by the wagons that came after theirs.

Adriana was eight years old then, desperately bereft as she rode alone and yearned for her loved ones who had recently died. Her father, Joachim Chacon, treated her tenderly when he thought of it; but most of the time he sat up front and drove his horses in silence, almost sightless with his own grief. Her recollections of what happened after they entered the mountains were muddled; she remembered only that one day they had come to the valley, and that she had been content to stop traveling.

Her father, who in another life had bought and sold silk cloth, did his share of the farming now, but in their first Pradogrande years he had worked at building their houses. He had become a creditable mason, learning to fit stones so they embraced one another and made sturdy walls. The houses, built of river stone and timber, were allotted in turn to the largest families. Thus, Adriana and her father had to live in the homes of others for five years, their house being the last one built by the community. It was also the smallest of the houses, yet it was as well built as any of the rest and seemed grandly private to her when at last they moved into it. That year—the year she turned thirteen years old—was her happiest time in Pradogrande. She was mistress of her father’s house and as besotted by the valley as they all were. She cooked and cleaned, singing much of the time, content with her lot. It was the year her breasts began to appear; that was a little frightening yet it seemed natural, because all around her things were growing and blossoming. She had gotten her first bleeding when she was eleven, and Leona Patras, an old woman who was the wife of Abram Montelvan, had been very kind to her, showing her how to care for herself in the monthly times.

The following year the community suffered its first death when Carlos ben Sagan died of a lung disease. Three months after Sagan’s burial, Adriana’s father told her that he would marry Carlos’s widow, Sancha Portal. Joachim explained to his daughter that the hardworking men of Pradogrande, afraid to seek immigration from the outside, were aware that in years to come they would need every pair of hands they could get. They were agreed that large families were the key to the future, and single adults were encouraged to marry as soon as it was possible. Sancha Portal had agreed to marry Joachim; she was still a handsome and robust woman, and he was decidedly cheerful about doing his duty. He told Adriana he would go to Sancha’s finca to live, but she had five children and her house was already crowded. So Adriana would continue to live in her father’s small house, joining her new family for meals on Sundays and holy days.

After a small church and a pastor’s house had been raised in the center of the valley, Joaquim had been among the delegates who traveled to Huesca and requested that a priest should be assigned to their new community. Padre Pedro Serafino, a quiet, diffident man in black, had accompanied them back to Pradogrande, staying long enough to marry Joachim and Sancha. When he returned to Huesca he had told his superiors about the new little church and the snug but empty rectory, and several months later the priest rode out of the forest and announced to the settlers his permanent appointment as their pastor.

The villagers were delighted to attend his Mass, feeling as Catholic as any bishop. “Now, if unfriendly eyes shall ever scrutinize our community,” Joachim had told his daughter, “even the Inquisition will have to note the prominence of our church and rectory. And observing our priest constantly riding his little burro about the valley, they will be forced to conclude that Pradogrande is a community of real Christians.”

*   *   *

In those days Adriana was glad to live alone. It was easy to keep the house neat and clean when there was only one person in it. She was busy, baking bread and raising food in her garden to help feed her father’s large family, and spinning wool from his sheep. In the beginning everyone smiled to see her, the women as well as the men. Her body underwent the last of the changes from girlhood; her breasts didn’t grow large but they were beautifully shaped, and her young frame was long and lithe yet very womanly. Soon the wives of the village noticed the way men stared, and some of the women began to sound cold and angry when they spoke to her. She was innocent of experience but not knowledge; once she had seen horses mating, the neighing stallion with a pizzle like a club climbing onto the mare’s back. She had watched rams with ewes. She knew human mating was done differently and wondered about the details of the act when women were with men.

She was distressed when Leona Patras took ill that spring. She visited her and tried to repay her kindness, cooking meals for Leona’s elderly husband, Abram Montelvan, setting pots of water to boil on the fire so steam might ease the sick woman’s breathing, and spreading goose fat and camphor on her chest. But Leona’s coughing increased, and just before summer, she died. Adriana wept at the funeral; it seemed to her that death took any woman who showed her tenderness.

She helped bathe Leona’s body before it was placed in the earth, and she cleaned the dead women’s house and brought several meals to the widower, leaving them on Abram Montelvan’s table.

That summer the valley was almost overblown in its beauty, the heavy trees and tall grass full of darting songbirds in bright coats, the air drenched with the scent of blossoms. Sometimes it made her almost drunk with its loveliness, so that her mind wandered even in the midst of conversation. So at first she thought she had misheard when her father told her she was to be married to Abram Montelvan.

*   *   *

Before she and her father had received the last finca that had been built in Pradogrande they had sheltered in the houses of several other families, among them the home of Abram Montelvan and Leona Patras. Her father knew that Abram Montelvan was difficult, a sour-smelling old man with bulbous eyes and a temper; but Joachim spoke bluntly to her. “Abram is willing to take you, and there is no one else for you. We are only seventeen families. Subtracting me and the late Carlos ben Sagan, whose family is now my family, there are only fifteen families from whose males you may seek a husband. But those men already are husbands and fathers. You would have to wait for some other man’s wife to die.”

“I will wait,” she said wildly, but Joachim shook his head.

“You must do your duty to the community,” he said. He was firm. He said if she did not obey she would shame him; and in the end she had agreed.

Abram Montelvan seemed absentminded at the wedding. During the nuptial Mass in the church he didn’t speak to her or look at her. After the marrying, the celebration was held in three homes, and it was a boisterous affair with three kinds of meat—lamb, kid, and chicken—and dancing until the early hours of the morning. Adriana and her bridegroom spent part of the evening in all three of the fincas, ending the wedding festivities in Sancha Portal’s house, where Padre Serafino sat with them and drank a glass of wine and told them repeatedly about the sanctity of marriage.

Abram was tipsy when they left Sancha Portal’s house to general cheers and laughter. He stumbled several times getting to the wagon, then they drove under cold moonlight to his house. Unclothed in his bedchamber, on the bed in which her friend Leona Patras had died, she was frightened but resigned. He had an ugly body, with a drooping stomach and skinny arms. He bade her spread her legs as she lay, and moved the oil lamp the better to see her nakedness. But evidently human mating was more difficult than for the horses and sheep she had watched; when he mounted her he could not enter her body with his limp pizzle though he bucked and cursed her, spraying her with his breath. Finally he had rolled from her and gone to sleep, leaving her to get up to extinguish the lamp. When she reentered the bed she lay sleepless on the edge, as far from him as possible.

Next morning he tried again, grunting with effort, but succeeded only to produce a spurtle of matter that clung to the fine hair of her loins until he departed the house and she could scrub away all traces of him.

He turned out to be a surly husband whom she feared. He struck her on the first day of their marriage, shouting “Do you call that an egg pudding?” That afternoon he bade her cook a fine meal for nine places next day. She killed two hens and plucked and cooked them, baked bread, and carried fresh water for cool drinking. Her father and her stepmother came to dinner, as did Abram’s son Anselmo and his wife Azucena Aluza, and their three children to whom Adriana was now a fourteen-year-old grandmother—two daughters, Clara and Leonor, and a little boy named Joseph. No one spoke to her as she served, not even her father, who was laughing as Anselmo described the antics of his goats.

To her distress her husband kept at her in bed, and the time came, some three weeks after they were wed, when he had enough stiffness to push his way into her. She cried out faintly with the pain of the tearing, and listened with resentment to his crow of triumph as almost immediately he made a sticky withdrawal and hastened to capture on a rag the small spot of blood, evidence of his prowess.

After that for a time he largely left her alone, as if having climbed the mountain he saw no need to make repeated attempts. Except that many a morning she would be wakened by his hateful hand beneath the undergarment in which she slept, probing between her legs in a manner that could never be described as a caress. Much of the time he ignored her, but he fell into the habit of striking her freely and often.

His mottled hands made hard fists. Once, when she burned the bread, he whipped her legs with a switch.

“Please, Abram! No, please! No! No!” she had cried, weeping, but her husband made no reply, breathing deeply each time he struck.

He told her father he was forced to beat her for her shortcomings, and her father came to the house to talk with her.

“You must stop being a willful child and learn to be a good wife, as your mother was,” he said, and she could not meet his eyes, but told him she would do better.

As she learned to do things in the manner Abram wished, the beatings were less frequent, but they continued, and with each passing month he was crankier. It hurt him to lie down. He walked stiffly and gasped with the pain of it. Where before he had had little patience, now he had none.

Her life changed one evening, when they had been married more than a year. She cooked dinner but didn’t serve it, for she spilled water on the table while filling his cup and he stood and punched her in the breast. Although it had never before entered her mind to do so, she turned on him now and attacked his face, slapping him twice, so hard that he might have fallen had he not been able to sprawl back into his chair.

She stood over him. “You are not to touch me, señor. Ever again.”

Abram stared up at her with amazement and began to weep in baffled anger and humiliation.

“Do you understand?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

When she looked at him through her own tears she saw he was a contemptible old man but also foolish and weak, not a creature to fear. She left him there in the chair and went upstairs. After a time he climbed the stairs himself, slowly removed his clothing, and entered the bed. This time it was he who lay on the edge, as far from her as possible.

*   *   *

She was certain he would go to the priest or to her father, and she awaited with resignation the punishment they might decree, whether it was whipping or worse. But she heard no condemning word, and gradually she realized that he would not complain of her because he feared the ridicule that might ensue, preferring to be viewed by the other men as a potent old lion who knew how to keep so young a wife in hand.

After that, every night she placed a blanket in the common room downstairs and slept on the floor. Every day she worked in his garden and cooked for him, and washed his clothes and kept his house. When they had been married a few days short of two years he began to cough and took to his bed, which he never left. For nine weeks she tended him, heating wine and goat’s milk for him, feeding him his food, bringing the chamber pot, wiping his bottom, washing his body.

When he died, there had swept over her an abiding thankfulness and her first adult feeling of peace.

*   *   *

For a time after that she was decently left alone, for which she was gratified.

But less than half a year after Abram’s death, her father raised the subject of her status as a Pradogrande widow.

“The men have decided that a property may be held only in the name of a man who will join in the work of the farms.”

She considered him. “I will join in the work.”

He smiled at her. “You will not be able to contribute enough labor.”

“I can learn to labor as well as a silk merchant. I am able to garden very well. I would work harder in a field than Abram Montelvan was able to do.”

Her father continued to smile. “Nevertheless, it is not allowed. To keep the holding you would have to be engaged to marry. Barring that, ownership of your land will be shared by each of the other farmers.”

“I do not wish to marry, ever again.”

“Abram’s son Anselmo desires to keep your holding intact and within his family.”

“How does he propose to do that? Does he wish to take me as a second wife?”

Her father frowned at her tone but exhibited patience. “He proposes that you accept a betrothal with his eldest son, Joseph.”

“Eldest son! Joseph is a little boy of only seven years!”

“Nevertheless, the betrothal will serve to keep the land intact. There is no one else for you,” her father said, just as he had spoken to her when telling her to marry Abram. He shrugged. “You say you do not wish to marry. Perhaps Joseph will die while still a child. Or if not, it will take years for him to grow. It may be that he will turn out well. When he has become a man, it is possible you will welcome him.”

Adriana had never realized how much she disliked her father. She watched him go through her basket of vegetables and remove the green onions she had picked for herself earlier in the day. “I will bring these home with me, for Sancha, who prefers your onions to all others,” he told her, beaming as he delivered the compliment.

*   *   *

The second betrothal had given her a period of time without harassment. Three planting seasons and three harvests had come and gone since Abram Montelvan’s death. The rich fields had been seeded each spring, the hay cut and stacked each summer, the bearded wheat harvested each fall, with only a few grumblings to be heard from the men. Some of the wives in the valley looked at Adriana with hostility again. A few of their husbands had gone beyond staring, indicating their interest in her with soft words, but the marriage bed still was unpleasantly fresh in her mind and she wanted nothing of men; she learned to turn them away with a quip or a little smile at their foolishness.

On occasion when she left her finca and walked, she saw the male to whom she was promised. Joseph Montelvan was small for his age, with a dark mop of curly hair. He seemed a likely little boy as he played in the fields. By now he was ten. How old would be old enough? A boy should have at least fourteen or fifteen years, she supposed, before being put out to stud.

Once she passed close by him and saw his nostrils flowing. Taking a rag from her pocket she stopped and wiped the nose of the astonished child. “You must never come abed bearing snot, señor. You must promise me that,” she had said, and was able to laugh at life as he ran like a startled rabbit.

Within her a small lump of coldness was growing like an unwanted child. She had no means of escape but began to contemplate simply going away, walking higher and higher up the mountain until she could walk no more. She didn’t fear death but hated the knowledge that she would be eaten by beasts.

She had learned it was folly to expect good things of the world. On the afternoon when the stranger had ridden out of the woods, like some cursed knight in his rusted mail vest and on his beautiful gray horse, she would have fled him had it been possible. And so she was less than pleased when Benzaquen knocked on her door the following morning to ask humbly if she could take his place in showing the visitor their valley. “My sheep have begun to drop lambs prodigiously and some will need my tending today,” he said, leaving her no choice.

He told her what he knew of the man, who he said was a physician from Guadalajara.