Today will be my final sitting for the Magdalen painting. As I wait for Enrique Rastro to join me in the shady cloister, I wonder if I will ever look upon this scene in the convento again.
The building constructions are continuing. It’s been ten years since the demolition of the old Mudéjar building and it will be dozens more before the renovations are complete. Some of the gardens in the vicinity have been uprooted to accommodate a Roman fountain and pond. Two artisans come stomping across the courtyard, leaving streaks of calcined lime and clay upon the grass. In spite of these contaminations, the friars still manage to find places for secluded reading beneath the trellises and remaining trees.
A tall boy I’ve seen a few times before wanders past. He stops abruptly when he sees me and casually drifts back, staring at my red dress as if it’s a peacock tail. ‘Hello,’ he says without any shyness.
I wish I could remember the child’s name. What did Enrique call him? Luis? That sounds right. I saw him on the gallery with Diego Velázquez. This boy seems to feel I’m a friend not a foe. He points to a person partly obscured by the shrubbery. He’s annoyed this friar has taken his own hiding-spot.
‘The man will vacate the space soon,’ I pacify Luis. ‘He’ll get up from there when they ring for the next Holy office.’ ‘Maybe,’ Luis concedes. ‘But he’s still stolen my place.’
He tells me he’s hoping to catch a glimpse of two new boys who arrived in the convento a week ago, but who haven’t been allowed to join the others yet. He’s pleased the new arrivals are Moriscos. ‘Our numbers will swell from four to six!’ he says and I’m very surprised. I guess he’s too young to want to hide his shame.
Luis gestures, ‘There they are!’
Two boys are indeed walking across the courtyard with Father Rastro. They look about ten and thirteen. Enrique has surely seen me out of the corner of his eye. But he ignores us as he enters the far cloister, returning the new Moriscos to the monks’ quarters perhaps.
Enrique and Harmen were discussing the new boys during yesterday’s sitting. The Moriscos are orphans of some boat tragedy. An Arab tartan capsized in rough seas off the Spanish coast. The family of deported Cordobans never made it to their destination of Tlemcen. The orphans have refused to speak since arriving in the convento. Enrique gave them a rosary and a statuette of Our Lady, and one of the boys strangled the figurine with the rosary beads. Harmen chuckled when he heard this tale.
‘They weren’t wearing habits, did you notice?’ Luis is saying to me grumpily.
‘Lucky them,’ I say with a wink, eyeing his white cassock.
‘I’ve got to find Benito,’ he says and dashes off.
Father Rastro eventually joins me in the courtyard and we make our way to the round tower for the final sitting. He doesn’t mention the Cordoban brothers. Upstairs, Harmen’s looking forward to leaving the convento and he dances through his remaining brushstrokes. I can’t stick to my pose but it doesn’t matter. Harmen finished painting me weeks ago. I keep swivelling round on my knees to find Father Rastro beaming at my heels. I won’t miss sitting for the painting, but I will miss this contrary priest.
The monk, whom I can always see out of my left eye, doesn’t keep his pose either. He’s supposed to be looking east into the future, but this afternoon he’s looking at me a lot, so much so that I think I must have wiped some ash on my face. At the end of the session I get up and hug the horse round the neck and sniff his clean, musty coat and whisper in the beast’s ear that I’ll miss him most of all. And that’s probably true.
Father Rastro waits until after we’ve said our farewells, and then, when he’s escorting me out of the building, he broaches the matter of the Cordoban brothers.
My initial reaction is one of amusement. ‘The Cordobans need a mother? Well what about me!’ But yes, I quickly add, I will try my hand at mothering. If he thinks I can manage the world, how could I not succeed? (So I’ll be returning, and soon!) I can’t manage this deluge of bliss; I grow as stern as a nun and scowl like I’ve just been beaten.
Enrique is walking me down the steep stairs at the back of the round tower so we can pass by the entrance to the church. He’s usually able to persuade me to step into the porch so that he can dip his hand into the basin of Holy water and sprinkle my hair in a parting blessing. ‘Merciful Mary, give your daughter strength.’ He appears to become another person when he enters the church. This has been his custom, but surely today will be different. I’ve never minded his use of the Latin (well I do a bit perhaps), but I usually find his admonitory tone hurtful. He’s pinching my mind the same way that my step-mama used to pinch my upper arm to make me do the household chores. Today, though, Enrique forgets to sprinkle the water.
‘They will warm to you, a woman,’ he says, and something about his choice of words makes my hopeful feelings immediately deflate.
But Enrique’s eyes have opened wide and he’s staring at me intently, drawing himself up at the chest as if preparing to say something more important. His lips open, but then he seems to lose confidence. He takes a step backward and searches about the porch. There is a wooden table near the door and he goes over and picks up a Holy Bible. As he leafs through the gospels I’m guessing, with a sinking heart, that he’s looking for the passage in Saint Luke about the woman who has a bad name, but who learnt to love Jesus after He’d absolved her huge sinner’s debt.
Enrique informs me that he’s going to read from Paul’s twelfth letter to the Corinthians. He speaks oddly, and in fragments. ‘You were baptised into Christ’s body…we are all part of Christ…but each of us is a different part of his body.’ He looks up at me.
I’m still preparing for that pinch.
‘It is just the same with your body, Paula.’
And here it comes. I look down at my body as though it might hold an answer I’m supposed to give him. Yes me, a woman.
Enrique doesn’t follow my gaze, but a deep-pink mark appears at the top of his cheeks.
‘The parts are many but the body is one. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I do not need you”, nor can the head say to the feet “I do not need you”,’ he reads.
I don’t remember this passage in Saint Paul and I’ve always found parables confusing, this one no less so, with its mention of hands, eyes and feet all supposed to represent different things.
‘I’ll tell the Morisco boys that then,’ I reply, deliberately misunderstanding. I know Enrique is saying these things with me in mind, not the boys. Anxiety darkens my perceptions and I feel that everyone is against me. In my own defence I wish I could ask him, ‘And Father Rastro, are you perfect in every way?’ No-one could answer ‘yes’ to such a question. But I’m not able to challenge Enrique Rastro because I’m in awe of him.
He seems to realise he’s coarsened our moment of intimacy. He shuts the book and puts it back on the table. We walk along the ground-floor corridors, through the arches to the vestibule. I can hear the sound of my shoes and Enrique’s rapping the tiles, and I hope we won’t start walking in step with each other. That would be an embarrassment given that he’s someone I might like to share my footsteps with in life.
When we come outside there’s a melting pink and orange sunset that takes us both by surprise. It would be almost rude to ignore the spectacle, almost an insult to the nature which created it. Well, stomp on that fire and put it out too, I’m thinking, for I imagine Enrique would prefer to farewell me in more neutral surroundings. When we reach the gate I turn to Enrique and say meekly that I will see him tomorrow. Catching my curtsey of a smile, Enrique can’t help himself; if I’m receptive to him he can reason with me again. As I reach out and swing the gate wide open, Enrique clutches hold of a bar to stop its swing. He clears his throat.
‘Saint Paul says, if one part of the body is hurt, all parts are hurt with it. That is the thing I most wanted to tell you.’
‘Oh,’ I say in dismay. Enrique’s blow has hit home. I avert my face and am gone without another word, wanting to make myself out of sight to him as quickly as possible. I hurry forward and fold myself into the crowd like an egg-yolk into batter, for protection, for dissolution. I save my tears until I’m far away. But I already know everything he’s told me. What purpose telling a sick person they are sick?
Back in my bedchamber I go about my evening toilet and find my body has a ripe fruity odour that I’ve rarely smelt before, or not for many years. The smell of sex divorced from unpleasantness? I’m breathing in a musky emulsion, but who does it belong to? Memories are preserved in thoughts, but also in our senses.
Much later I visit the small garden at the side of my house to pick some peaches and pears. Afterwards I stand in the darkness listening to the crickets vibrating. Here the scent of flowers is so strong it’s as though someone has pierced each of the stamens to release the perfume for my benefit.
Back inside, I drop the fruit from my apron straight onto the kitchen table. Bugs scuttle across the wood. I peel and cut a peach and share it with Violeta and Prospera. Three young women, sitting around a table, admiring the vases of each other’s bodies. When Violeta goes home, Prospera yawns and drops her head in her arms. I’ve sewing to do, I remember. There’s a new petticoat to hem. As I make my way upstairs, Father Rastro’s words rebound, ‘It’s not just the soul, but the body too, that matters to God.’ Did he really say that? And what was Saint Paul’s message again? All the parts of my body are deemed of equal worth, even the part that needs the most decorating.
If I turn Father Rastro’s words around, they become an acceptance rather than a judgement. Sipping orange blossom tea and drawing a needle through crisp linen, I imagine Enrique saying that he and I share the same body. He’s offering his hand and eye, in exchange for my ear and foot. That’s how babies are made, isn’t it. A bit of him plastered to a bit of me. But Father Rastro wants to impregnate me with the Holy Ghost, not his own emulsions. He’s giving me a second chance, I suppose. I’m to be forgiven my transgressions, and not just by Enrique alone, by Our Saviour above, venite exultemus.
And if I am able to change, would Father Rastro do so also? Would he be into decorating my parts? That is the big question. On a day when Father Rastro played his most tutelary role with me, I refused to believe what I plainly saw. We were at cross-purposes, him wanting my weak spirit to grow in fortitude and me wanting him to honour our loving union of flesh. Some kind of alchemy was afoot, I know this for sure, because when I went up onto my balcony to find the ladder-man and take my lessons in balance, the man who caught me when I fell had lost some of his hair-pin shape. And some of the hair on the top of his head as well.
I first visit the Morisco boys two weeks after they arrive in the convento, and three days after my final sitting for the Magdalen painting.
I see them sitting listlessly in their cell, and I lose ten years. I’m as young as they are, but they don’t know this yet. Telmo and Arauz greet me sourly, but at least they greet me, which is more than they do for Father Rastro. I offer the raisins I’ve brought, and the boys chew on the stems but they don’t eat the fruit. They won’t answer my friendly questions, but I’ve had some experience of being shunned, so I put a brave face on and begin telling them about the olive groves I tended when I was their age. I get a run-on like I do in the company of the ladder-man and, before I know it, I’m telling them about the time Hortense and I ran away to Seville and about the amazing dust-storm that happened in the terrible year of the drought.
I try to humour them as best I can. Being cooped up in a cell isn’t the best place to befriend these little chaps though. If we could muck around outside I’d have a better chance, but I don’t exactly have a free run of the place. Women aren’t supposed to be in the convento at all, unless they’re working in the kitchen. Father Rastro says yes, I can have some time alone with them as I request, but only if we stay in their cell. So here we are. Me and these Moriscos who won’t give me a fair go. The older boy Telmo has turned his shoulder on me. The younger one Arauz, has closed his eyes as if he’s sleepy, as if my chatter has put him to sleep. I feel a fool for opening up about myself, and don’t the boys know it. But this is the way it has to be. You’ve got to humiliate yourself before the humiliated to make them accept you.
‘Can I bring you something special next time?’ Please turn around or look up, little boys, even just once, I’m thinking. I don’t want to have to tell Enrique Rastro I’ve failed the task.
Just as I’m leaving, Arauz gets down on his hands and knees and begins to growl. Surprised, I try to make the best of what I sense is a hostile action.
‘You’d like me to bring you a dog, is that it?’ I obtusely backtrack. ‘I had a dog called Alanis when I was your age. I was very unhappy, you see, and he would make me laugh. He didn’t understand unhappiness. I would cry and he would lick the salt from my cheeks and wag his tail at the same time. He had a black and white fluffy coat. Can you picture him? I’ll see if I can bring you a doggy next time. So long, Telmo and Arauz. Keep well, won’t you.’
The boys look aghast when I say these things to them, but I don’t put two and two together. I’m already halfway out the door, clinging to an idea I think will make a difference to them, or at least will provide a distraction next time I call.
In the corridor I bump into Father Rastro, who must have been lurking around waiting for me to come out. I make my request but he says sorry, no dogs can be brought into the building. The next day he isn’t as stern in his mettle. I could twist him round my finger. I could force the issue.
My confidence is on the rise. A week later I smuggle a silky, golden-haired spaniel into the convento. The Morisco boys and I are going to play. A little forceful persuasion never did anyone any harm. When I arrive and triumphantly reveal the dog hiding in my basket, the Moriscos draw back in disgust. I put the dog on the tiles. It squeals and cavorts about the cell.
‘Dogs are dirty,’ Telmo mutters between gritted teeth. ‘We’re not allowed to play with them.’
I suddenly remember Moors don’t let dogs inside their homes. Oh, I’m so stupid. Now I’m in a quandary, with a dog to hide and time to kill. I’m going to have to change the boys’ minds.
‘But it is a little, indoor lap-dog and he isn’t dirty. I washed him only yesterday. He cannot harm you. Tickle him and you’ll see,’ I plead.
Telmo and Arauz watch me patting the spaniel. They smile scornfully, as if they think I’m an idiot. They aren’t interested in being converted to dog-love. The visit seems to drag on forever before I cut it short. The only fortunate thing that happens is that I’m not discovered harbouring the animal.
I’m not sure whether to bring the spaniel back, but when the next day comes round I think, oh well, I’ve nothing left to lose. I’ve had to get used to this little creature for their sake, so they can jolly well get used to it too.
The boys don’t recoil in horror at the spaniel again, but they shy away from touching it. After four visits I decide to keep the dog hidden in my basket. See if they notice or care that he’s missing. Curiosity indeed gets the better of the boys. They want to know where my dog is. ‘Here he is,’ I say, revealing the spaniel. The dog’s leaps and flurries across the tiles certainly hold the boys’ attention on this day. But when the golden-haired spaniel jumps up and licks their faces, Telmo and Arauz make ugly faces, say ‘yuk’, and push the dog away. It starts barking, instinctively offended. I pick it up and pat it. The dog nestles close to my bosom, ceases barking and starts panting. Hopefully Father Rastro hasn’t been alerted. But if he’s been eavesdropping outside the door, he’ll be pleased to hear what follows, as Telmo and Arauz have started chatting in Aljamiado, the Latinised version of Arabic that is their mother tongue. The boys are talking animatedly. They ask me the dog’s name. I give them the choice of name, so they choose Alanis, the name of my old dog. The first sign of acceptance. When the spaniel piddles on the tiles the boys rush to help me clean it up so the priests won’t find out. They’ve become my accomplices. We make fun of Father Rastro; we call him Father Fishface because of his limpid, watery eyes, and we mock some of the other priests that have big noses, big ears, fat lips, fat guts. And so I’ve changed sides, thrown my weight in with the boys, and with our combined strength we are able to pull a sunken cargo out of the sea.
‘This is propitious, Paula. They have taken a liking to you,’ says Enrique, a little miffed that I could do what he couldn’t. Still, he grants me my due.
As I strut down the street on my way home this afternoon, my high-heeled shoes clacking like castanets, I forget to cover an eye as I usually do. Who cares if they recognise me and spit? I’ve healed a boy! Not one, but two. I’m either a day closer to being embraced by Enrique Rastro or a day further away from being embraced by him. When I get home I drop a copper coin in a sealed jar on my dresser. There are now one hundred and twenty coins in the jug, one for each day I’ve visited the Mercedarian convento. I shake the jar and jangle the coins. I shake it and I shake it and I shake it. This is money I’ve truly earned.
One afternoon Telmo and Arauz start talking about the disastrous boat trip. They tell me about the rickety vessel with its flimsy sail. The wild storm. The last time they saw their mother and their father. While the brothers narrate their story, they continue to pat the spaniel that is lying on its side between them, delirious from the affection it’s receiving.
What he remembers most, Arauz says, was being forced into the hull with the animals. Arauz was sitting on a packing case, squeezed between his parents. There was so little room he had to sit hunched up, with his knees pressed against his chin. When the boat lurched, his knees would knock his jaw and his teeth would chatter.
‘Then the water came pouring down into the hull; it was like a bath filling up, wasn’t it Telmo? All the animals went swimming up on deck. Sheep and goats and mules. The animals knew what to do, didn’t they Telmo? I saw you riding on the back of a giant pig.’
‘I can’t remember that,’ Telmo replies grimly. ‘When I got up on deck, I couldn’t find anyone I knew. Then I saw Arauz and grabbed hold of his shirt. The boat tipped on its side and we slid straight into the sea. I didn’t let go of Arauz. A sailor dragged us onto a raft. There were a lot of people in the water, holding onto luggage and animals. Some people were tipped upside-down, weren’t they, Arauz?’
Arauz laughs and his body twitches. ‘I thought they’d lost their money and were searching for it down below. But they were drowned.’
‘Did you see any of your family again?’ I have to make myself ask this question. To my relief, the boys shake their heads.
‘We didn’t see them in the water. We thought they would be on one of the rafts and we would meet up with them when we got back to Tarifa.’
I’m glad the boys have told me their story. I was waiting for it to happen, knowing how important it would be, like vomiting after you’ve suffered an attack of nausea you felt like dying for. Afterwards, the three of us stay sitting on the tiles, stroking the spaniel. ‘Nice doggy,’ the boys say, and ‘he’s a slobberer’. I have to hand it to them for being so stoical. They look pale and shocked though, as if it all happened yesterday.
When I leave their cell I sit down for a while on a bench in the Aljive courtyard. I literally can’t walk any further. As it’s not possible to burst into tears with the friars coming and going, I keep blowing my nose into my handkerchief. The friars look alarmed to see me sitting out here in the open. A couple of them put their hands together in prayer as they pass. I’m too upset for Telmo and Arauz to care much about my own dishonour. I already knew the facts of the boat tragedy, so why was hearing it from the boys’ lips so distressing? The storytellers have carved their grief into my skin. When I was listening, all their feelings crossed over and became my feelings. It was my family who drowned and it was I who came so close to death.
When I recover my physical strength I get up from the bench, but I don’t seek out Enrique Rastro, as is my custom. I take myself straight home. I’m grateful to Bishop Rizi that I have a secure house to go to, that I need not consider propositions from slip-sliding sailors on the street. Tonight I will be recovering upstairs and Prospera will be minding the locks downstairs. And I won’t go out, not even if the ladder-man clinks his bell. I will light three candles and stare into the flames as I kneel in the dark. Maio will be purring on the rug, Alanis snuffling on the bed and I will be holding the porcelain doll that the widow in the shop that sells the miniature clothes and shoes repaired for me after I dropped it on the tiles and broke its head.