Cathedral of the Sea (11 page)

The four children stared at one another, then turned to Grau. Laughing, he pointed his finger downward, as if trying to hide his gesture from the tutor.

“Here?” all four of them chimed.

“Yes,” replied the tutor, “we’re standing on it. But that one disappeared too ... so Barcelona was left without a harbor, but by then we were a sea-faring city, with the best sailors, and we still are ... even though we have no harbor.”

“Well, then,” Margarida objected, “why is a harbor so important?”

“Your father can explain that better than me,” said the tutor. Grau nodded.

“It’s very, very important, Margarida. Do you see that ship?” He pointed to a galley surrounded by small craft. “If Barcelona had a harbor, we could unload it at a quay without needing all those people to unload the merchandise. Besides, if a sudden storm blew up now, the ship would be in great danger because it is so close to shore. It would have to leave Barcelona.”

“Why?” Margarida wanted to know.

“Because it couldn’t ride out the storm here: it might sink. Why, it’s even made explicit in the Ordinances of the Barcelona Coast. There it stipulates that in case of any storm, ships must seek refuge in either the harbor at Salou or at Tarragona.”

“So we don’t have a harbor,” said Guiamon sorrowfully, as if he had been robbed of something of the utmost importance.

“No,” said his father, laughing and putting an arm round his shoulder. “But we’re still the best sailors! We’re the lords of the Mediterranean! And we do have the beach. Here is where we ground our boats when they are not on a voyage, and it’s here that we repair and build them. Can you see the shipyards? There at the far end of the beach, where those arches are.”

“Can we go onto the boats?” Guiamon asked.

“No,” said his father, suddenly serious again. “Boats are sacred, my boy.”

Arnau never went out with Grau and his children, still less with Guiamona. He was always left at home with Habiba, but later on, his cousins would tell him all they had seen and heard. They had explained everything about the beach and the boats.

And there the boats were that Christmas night. All of them! The small ones: cockboats, skiffs, and gondolas. The medium-sized vessels: cogs, dromonds, gallivats, pinks, brigantines, galliots, and barques. And even some larger ships: naos, carracks, caravels, and galleys, which despite their size were forced by royal decree not to sail between October and April.

“Look at them all!” Guiamon exclaimed.

On the shore at Regomir they could see some fires burning, with watchmen sitting round them. Scattered along the beach from Regomir to Framenors rose the silent boats, lit only by the moon.

“Follow me, sailors!” commanded Margarida, raising her right arm.

Captain Margarida led her men through storms; they fought pirates, boarded ships, won battles. They leapt from one ship to the next, defeating Genoese and Moors, whooping in triumph as they regained Sardinia for King Alfonso.

“Who goes there?”

The three of them stood paralyzed with fright in the bottom of a skiff.

“Who goes there?”

Margarida poked her head over the side. Three torches were coming toward them.

“Let’s get away from here,” Guiamon whispered, tugging at his sister’s dress.

“We can’t,” she said. “They’re right in front of us.”

“What about over toward the shipyards?” asked Arnau.

Margarida looked over toward Regomir. Another two lighted torches were heading toward them from that direction.

“It’s not safe that way either.”

“The boats are sacred!” Grau’s words echoed in all their minds. Guiamon began to sob, but Margarida silenced him. A cloud covered the moon.

“Into the sea!” ordered the captain.

The three of them jumped overboard into the shallow water. Margarida and Arnau crouched down; Guiamon stretched out at full length. As the torches approached the skiff, the children moved out farther into the sea. Margarida looked up at the moon, praying silently that the clouds would keep it hidden.

The search seemed to go on forever, but none of the men looked out to sea, and if one of them did ... well, it was Christmas, and they were only three frightened children—frightened, and soaked to the skin by now. It was very cold.

By the time they reached home, Guiamon could hardly stand. His teeth were chattering, his knees trembled, and he was shaking uncontrollably. Margarida and Arnau had to lift him under the arms and carry him the last part of the way.

When they arrived, all the guests had already left. Alerted to the children’s disappearance, Grau and the slaves were on the point of setting out to look for them.

“It was Arnau,” Margarida said accusingly, while Guiamona and the Moorish slave girl plunged the little boy into a bath of hot water. “He talked us into going down to the beach. I didn’t want to ...” The little girl made sure she accompanied her lies with the tears that always worked so well with her father.

The hot bath, blankets, and scalding broth were not enough to revive Guiamon. The fever took hold. Grau sent for the doctor, but his efforts were in vain. The fever grew worse: Guiamon began to cough, and his breathing became shallow and wheezing.

“There’s nothing more I can do,” Dr. Sebastia Font said resignedly on the third night he came to visit.

Pale and drawn, Guiamona raised her hands to her head and burst into tears.

“But that’s impossible!” shouted Grau. “There must be some remedy!”

“There may be, but ...” The doctor was well aware of Grau and his dislikes. But the situation called for desperate measures. “You will have to call on Jafuda Bonsenyor.”

Grau said nothing.

“Call for him!” Guiamona said, between sobs.

“A Jew!” thought Grau. If you deal with a Jew, you deal with the Devil, he had been taught as a child. And as a child, Grau had joined the other apprentices to run after Jewish women and smash their water jars when they came to fill them at the public fountains. He went on doing so until the king bowed to a petition from the Jewry of Barcelona and prohibited all such attacks. Grau hated Jews. All his life he had harassed or spat at anyone wearing a badge. They were heretics; they were the ones who had killed Jesus Christ... how could he allow one of them to cross his threshold?

“Call him!” shouted Guiamona.

Her anguished cry was so loud that everyone in the neighborhood heard. Bernat and the apprentices shrank back on their pallets from the sound. Bernat had not been able to see either Arnau or Habiba for three days, but Jaume kept him up-to-date on what was going on.

“Your son is fine,” he told him when no one was looking.

Jafuda Bonsenyor came as soon as he got the message. He was wearing a plain black hooded djellaba, with the badge round his neck. Grau watched him from a distance as he stood in the dining room, hunched over as he listened to Sebastia’s explanations. Guiamona stood next to them. “Make sure you cure him, Jew!” Grau glared silently when their eyes met. Jafuda Bonsenyor nodded respectfully toward him. Jafuda was a learned man who had devoted his life to studying philosophy and the sacred scriptures. King Jaime the Second had commissioned him to write The Book of Sayings of Wise Men and Philosophers, but he was also a doctor, the most prominent in all the Jewish community. When he saw Guiamon, all he did was shake his head slowly from side to side.

Grau heard his wife’s cries. He ran to the stairs. Guiamona came down from the bedroom on Sebastia’s arm. Jafuda appeared behind them.

“Jew!” hissed Grau, spitting as he passed by.

Guiamon died two days later.

No SOONER HAD they all returned to the house, dressed in mourning, after the burial of the boy’s body, than Grau signaled to Jaume to come over to him and Guiamona.

“I want you to go to Arnau at once and make sure he never sets foot inside this house again.” Guiamona did not say a word.

Grau told him what Margarida had said: that it was Arnau who had led them on. Neither his youngest nor a mere girl could have planned such an escapade. Guiamona listened to his accusations, cursing her for taking in her brother and nephew. And although deep in her heart she knew it was only a childish prank that had led to fatal consequences, the death of her youngest son robbed her of the strength to oppose her husband, while Margarida’s blaming of Arnau made it almost impossible for her to bear the sight of him anymore. He was her brother’s son, and she wished him no harm; but she preferred not to have to see him.

“Tie that Moorish girl to a beam in the workshop,” Grau ordered Jaume before he went off in search of Arnau, “and make sure everyone gathers round, including the boy.”

Grau had been thinking it through during the funeral service. The slave girl was the one to blame: she should have been looking after them. As he heard Guiamona start crying again, and the priest droned on, he wondered what punishment he should give her. According to the law, he could not kill or maim her, but no one could object if she simply died as a result of the punishment he meted out to her. Grau had never had to deal with such a grievous problem. He ran through all the different tortures he had heard of: covering her body in boiling animal fat (would Estranya have enough in her kitchen?); putting her in chains or shutting her up in a dungeon (that would not be punishment enough); beating her, putting her feet in shackles ... or flogging her.

“Be careful if you use it,” the captain of one of his ships had told him once as he offered him the gift. “One lash can take all the skin off a person’s back.” Ever since, Grau had kept the whip hidden away. It was a fine Oriental whip made of plaited leather, thick but lightweight and easy to handle. It ended in several thongs, each of them tipped with jagged pieces of metal.

As the priest fell silent and the altar boys waved the censers round the coffin, Guiamona coughed, but Grau took a deep breath of satisfaction.

The slave girl was waiting, hands tied round a beam, her feet just touching the ground.

“I don’t want my son to see this,” Bernat told Jaume.

“This isn’t the moment, Bernat,” Jaume warned him. “Don’t go looking for trouble ...”

Bernat shook his head again.

“You’ve worked hard, Bernat; don’t cause trouble for your boy.”

In strict mourning clothes, Grau joined the circle of slaves, apprentices, and craftsmen surrounding Habiba.

“Take off her clothes,” he ordered Jaume.

When she saw Jaume tearing off her tunic, Habiba tried to raise her legs to cover herself. But her dark, naked body, gleaming with sweat, was soon exposed to the onlookers’ expectant gaze ... and to the whip that Grau had already laid out on the floor. Bernat grasped Arnau’s shoulders tight. The young boy began to cry.

Grau drew his arm back and cracked the whip against her naked upper half: the leather snaked across her back and the metal thongs wrapped themselves round her, digging into her breasts. A thin trickle of blood started to run down her dark skin. Her breasts were open wounds. Habiba lifted her face to the sky and howled as the pain racked her body. Arnau started to tremble uncontrollably, begging Grau to stop.

But he merely drew back his arm again.

“It was your job to look after my children!”

The whip resounded once more, forcing Bernat to turn his son round and press his face against him. The slave girl howled a second time, while Arnau’s shrieks of protest were stifled in his father’s body. Grau went on flogging the Moorish girl until not only her back and shoulders but her breasts, buttocks, and legs were one bleeding mass.

“TELL YOUR MASTER I am leaving.”

Jaume’s mouth drew into a narrow line. For a second, he was tempted to embrace Bernat, but he could see some of the apprentices staring at them.

Bernat watched the official walk toward the big house. He had tried to talk to his sister, but Guiamona had not responded. For several days, Arnau had not moved from the straw pallet he now shared with his father. He sat there without moving, and when his father came up to see him, he always found him staring at the spot where they had tried to cure Habiba’s wounds.