CHAPTER FORTY

ADRIANA CHACON

Adriana’s interest in him had grown when she had observed him treating the people at Micah’s barn. She was impressed by how absorbed he had been, and by the fact that he treated each person with respect. She saw that he was a tender man.

“Anselmo Montelvan is angry,” her father told her on Sunday. “He says you are seen too much with this physician. He says it dishonors his son, your betrothed.”

“Anselmo Montelvan cares little for his small son Joseph and certainly he cares nothing for me,” she said. “All he is concerned about is gaining control of the land that was his father’s.”

“It would be best not to be seen with Señor Toledano. Unless, of course, you believe his intentions are serious. It would be a very good thing to have a physician living here.”

“I have no reason to believe he has any intentions at all,” she said peevishly.

Still, her heart leaped when Yonah Toledano appeared at her door on Monday morning.

“Will you walk with me, Adriana?”

“I have already shown you both sides of the valley, señor.”

“Please, show them to me again.”

They retraced the path along the stream, talking lazily. At midday he took his hooked line from his pocket, and a tiny can containing wriggling worms he said he had gathered at the ditch being dug in the meadow. She went to her house for a live coal from her cooking fire, and when she carried it back in a little tin pail, he had already caught and gutted four small trout for each of them. He snapped dry wood from the trees for a fire, and soon they ate the sweet blackened flesh of the trout from their hands, licking their fingers.

This time when they napped he lay down not far from her. While she was falling asleep she was aware of his quiet breathing, the rising and falling of his chest. When she awoke he was seated nearby, a tall, quiet man watching over her.

They walked together each day. The villagers grew accustomed to seeing them strolling, utterly absorbed, deep in conversation, or merely proceeding in companionable silence. On Thursday morning, as though crossing a visible line, she told him they would go to her house, where she would prepare food for a midday meal. As they walked there, she began speaking of the past. Without offering details, she said that her marriage to Abram Montelvan had been difficult and unhappy. She told him what she remembered about her mother, her grandparents, and her aunt Inés. “Inés was more a mother to me than Felipa. To lose one of them would have been a catastrophe, but both died, and then also my grandfather and my beloved grandmother, Zulaika.”

He took her hand and held it tightly. “Tell me about your family,” she said.

He told her frightening stories. Of his mother who had died of illness. Of a murdered older brother, and of a father who had been slain by a Jew-hating mob. Of a younger brother taken from him.

“Long ago I reconciled myself to the loss of those who are dead. I find it harder not to continually mourn my brother Eleazar, because something within me feels he is alive. If so, by now he is a grown man, but living where in the great world? He is gone from me as completely as the others. I know that he exists yet I will never see him again, and that is terrible to bear.”

The men digging the irrigation ditch had reached a place quite close to her house, and the diggers watched the man and the woman pass them by talking and listening, walking closely together.

When the door of her house closed behind them, Adriana began to tell him to be seated in the common room, but the words died in her mouth because they had turned to one another without thought, and he was kissing her face. In a moment she was kissing him also, and their mouths and bodies met.

She was soon dazed by their mutual ardor, but when he raised her skirt and then lifted the inner garment, she grew faint. She wanted to flee when she felt his hand. It must be something all men did, not only Abram Montelvan, she thought in terror and disgust. But as his mouth paid her homage with small kisses his hand spoke to her and it was different. Loving. And a warmth rose within her, spreading most pleasantly to weaken her limbs until she sank down on nerveless knees. He sank to his knees too and continued to kiss and caress her.

From outside came the voice of one of the diggers shouting to others far away: “No, no. You must place some of the cursed stones back on the dam, Durand. Yes, back on the dam, else it won’t hold the water.”

Inside the house, she and he were lying together half-dressed, the rushes on the floor beneath them rustling and crackling.

When she arched to meet him, it was easily done. He had none of Abram’s difficulty, no difficulty at all; well, a physician, she told herself wildly … She knew it was dark sin to think it the most pleasurable moment of her life, but that thought, all thoughts, fled as gradually she began to feel fright again. Because something alien was happening to her. She became certain of impending death. Please, God, she begged, wonderfully alive till the end as her entire world began to convulse and shudder, and she gripped Yonah Toledano with both hands so she would not fall off.

*   *   *

For the next two evenings Yonah played a new kind of game when the light faded, bidding good night early to Micah and Leah, waiting impatiently for the full, plum-colored darkness that would allow him to slip from Benzaquen’s barn. He avoided the moonshine, moving in deep shadows when he could find them, making his way to her house with as much stealth as some savage determined to slit throats. Both nights her door was unlatched for him and she was just behind it, waiting to fall upon him with a wanting that matched his own. Each time she sent him out of her house well before light, since all the village folk were farmers who rose early to care for animals.

They thought they were discreet and careful. Perhaps they were, yet on Friday morning Benzaquen asked for Yonah’s company. “So we may have a discussion.”

The two of them traveled afoot to a place not far beyond the village church. Micah showed him a broad piece of verdant land stretching from the edge of the river to the rocky rise of the mountain.

“It is in the very center of the valley,” Micah pointed out. “A good site, easily reached by any villager who might need a physician.”

Yonah was thinking of an earlier time when he had been a suitor and Benzaquen had dismissed him out of hand. He guessed that now Micah was courting him for the village.

“This land was part of the property of the late Carlos ben Sagan, may his soul rest, but has been owned by Joachim Chacon since his marriage. He has seen your interest in his daughter and has asked me to offer it to the pair of you.”

They were using Adriana as their bait, Yonah realized. It was such a nice piece of wooded land, where a house could stand on high ground yet be close enough to the stream so its sounds would be heard. A family living here might splash in the pools during the warm days of summer. There was a small field in front, the wooded mountainside beyond.

“It is centrally located in the valley. Everyone could walk to your dispensary. The men of Pradogrande would build you a fine house.

“Our population is small,” Benzaquen said carefully, fighting to be honest. “You would have to treat animals as well as humans, and perhaps do a bit of farming, if you liked.”

It was a fine offer and deserved an answer. A gentle refusal was on his lips; he had seen the valley as Eden’s garden, but he had never considered that it was for him. Yet he was afraid to refuse until he was able to determine the effect his decision would have on Adriana Chacon’s life.

“Let me think on it,” he said, and Benzaquen nodded, satisfied that there had not been a refusal.

On the walk back, he asked Benzaquen to do something for him. “Do you recall when we met each other in Isaac Saadi’s house in Granada, at a Sabbath service of the old religion? Would you invite your friends to a similar service tonight?”

Benzaquen frowned. He looked at Yonah, perhaps seeing problems in him he hadn’t seen before, then gave a worried smile. “If it is something you strongly desire me to do…”

“It is, Micah.”

“Then I will spread the word.”

*   *   *

But that evening, only Asher de Segarra and Pedro Abulafin came to Benzaquen’s house, and from their abashed manner Yonah suspected they were there not out of piety but because they had grown to like him as a man.

Along with Micah and Leah, they sat and waited well after the third star became visible in the evening sky and signified the beginning of the Sabbath.

“I don’t remember very much of the praying,” Asher said.

“Nor do I,” Yonah said. He might have led them in the Shema. But the previous Sunday Padre Serafino had spoken in the church about the Trinity, telling his flock, “There are three. The Father creates. The Son saves souls. The Ghost makes the sinners of the world holy.”

It was what the New Christians of Pradogrande had come to believe, Yonah realized. They appeared to be happy as Catholics so long as the Inquisition left them alone. Who was Yonah Toledano to ask them to chant, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One?”

Asher de Segarra put his hand on Yonah’s shoulder. “It does not pay to be sentimental about what is past.”

“You are right,” Yonah said.

Soon he thanked them and said good night. They were good men; but if he couldn’t have a minyan of Jews, he didn’t want the reluctant participation of these apostates, praying as a favor to him. He knew he would gain more comfort from praying by himself, as he had done for a very long time.

*   *   *

That night at Adriana’s house, he touched a sliver of wood to her cooking fire until it flamed, and then he lit her lamp. “Sit down, Adriana,” he said. “There are things I must tell you.”

For a moment she didn’t speak. “… Is it that you already have a wife?”

“I already have a God.”

In spare language he disclosed that he was a Jew who since boyhood had managed to avoid both conversion and the Inquisition. She listened, sitting straight and still in her chair, her eyes never leaving his face.

“I have been asked to stay here in Pradogrande, by your father and others. But I would not survive here, where every man knows the daily life of every other man. I know myself. I would not change, and sooner or later someone would betray me out of fear.”

“Do you live in a safer place?”

He told her of the hacienda in which he lived on a secluded piece of land, close to the city yet away from prying eyes. “The Inquisition is strong there, but I am believed to be an Old Christian. I attend Mass. I make certain to tithe to the church from an excellent income. I have never been bothered.”

“Take me away from here, Yonah.”

“I want so much to take you home as my wife, but I’m filled with fear. If I am someday discovered, I will burn. My wife would face a terrible death.”

“A terrible death may come to anyone, at any time,” she said calmly: he saw that she was always practical. She got up now and came to him and held him in a fierce embrace. “I am honored that you trust me with your life by confiding in me. You have survived. We will survive together.” Her face was wet on his, yet he could feel her mouth turn up when she smiled. “I think you will die in my arms when we are very old.”

“We have to leave here without delay. People in this valley are so fearful. If they knew you are a Jew and sought by the Inquisition, they would kill you themselves.

“Strange,” she said. “Your people were my own people. When I was a babe my grandfather Isaac decided we were no longer to be Jews. Yet for the rest of her life my grandmother Zulaika prepared a fine meal for the family each Friday eve, and lighted the Sabbath tapers. I have her copper candlesticks.”

“You will bring them with us,” Yonah said.

*   *   *

They rode away next morning just as the blackness turned to gray light on the stony trail leading up from the valley. Yonah was nervous, reminded of a similar dawn ride he had made with Manuel Fierro, on a morning when an arrow had seemed to come from nowhere to end the life of the man he still thought of as the maestro.

No one tried to kill them now. He maintained an uneasy vigilance and didn’t slow their horses’ canter until they were off the mountain trail and had turned onto the road to Huesca, without a sign of pursuit.

Whenever he looked at her, he wanted to shout.

In Huesca he found that the Aurelio family had readied a large bundle of theriac of excellent quality, and in a short time he had reclaimed the packhorse and they were on their way again. From that moment on he didn’t hurry, looking out for her comfort, careful not to ride overlong on a single day.

As they traveled he revealed to her the things about him that were false—that they were not going to Guadalajara, and that she must become accustomed to being the wife of Ramón Callicó, the physician of Saragossa. Adriana understood at once the reason for the falsehoods. “I like the name Ramón Callicó,” she said, and it was what she called him from then on, in order to accustom herself to it.

When finally they reached Saragossa she looked at everything as they rode through the town, and when they turned into his own lane she was excited and eager. What Yonah yearned for was a bath, a bowl of gruel, a glass of wine, and Adriana in his own bed, followed by a long sleep; but she begged until, yawning, he led her forth to see what there was to see, walking with her over the land, showing her the olive trees, Nuño’s grave, the brook and its tiny trout, the fruit orchard, the neglected garden that had fallen into ruinous condition, and the hacienda.

When finally, then, he was able to have the things he wanted, they slept through half the day and all of the night.

*   *   *

The following day, they married themselves. Yonah lashed four straight sticks to chairs in the common room and hung a blanket over them, a wedding canopy. He lighted candles and they stood together, as under a tent.

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who has hallowed us with Thy commandments and has brought me this woman in marriage.”

She looked at him. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who has hallowed us with Thy commandments and has brought me this man in marriage,” she said, her eyes full and shining. He placed on her finger the silver ring his father had made for him when he had turned thirteen, and it was very large. “Never mind,” he told her. “You will wear it about your neck on a little chain.”

He broke a glass under his heel to mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, but in truth there was little mourning in their hearts that day.

“Mazel tov, Adriana.”

“Mazel tov, Yonah.”

For her wedding trip she went to the garden and pulled weeds and thinned the onions. Yonah went to the farm of his patient Pascual Cabrera and reclaimed the black horse, which he had boarded out to Cabrera’s care. Soon the black horse was running in the field with the Arab gray and Adriana’s horse, Doña. “Why do you call your horses the Black and the Gray?” she asked. “Why do they not have names?”

How could he explain that once long ago a youth had had and lost a burro with two names, and that since then he hadn’t been able to give a name to an animal. He shrugged and smiled.

“May I name them?” she asked, and he told her that would be fine. His gray Arab became Sultán. She said the black mare that had been Manuel Fierro’s looked like a nun, and she named that horse Hermana, Sister.

That afternoon she began to work on the hacienda. The house had grown a bit musty in his absence and she threw open the door and let in the air. She scrubbed and dusted and polished. She gathered fresh rushes to spread on the floor, moved the comfortable chairs a bit closer to the fire. Her grandmother’s candlesticks and the carved bird from Pradogrande went on the mantle.

Within two days, it was as though she had lived there always, and the hacienda was Adriana’s.