Cathedral of the Sea (54 page)

THE CHILDREN WERE allowed in Arnau’s room only when Hasdai was visiting him and could see they did not disturb him. One day, when Arnau was beginning to be able to get out of bed and take his first steps, Hasdai appeared on his own. Tall and thin, with long black hair, a piercing gaze, and a hook nose, the Jewish man sat opposite him.

“You ought to know ... ,” he said gravely. “Well, I suppose you do know,” he said, correcting himself, “that your priests forbid Christians and Jews to live together.”

“Don’t worry, Hasdai; as soon as I can walk—”

“No,” the Jew interrupted him, “I’m not saying you have to leave my house. You saved my children from certain death, putting your own life at risk. All I own is yours, and I will be eternally grateful to you. You can stay here as long as you wish. My family and I would be very honored if you would do so. All I wanted to do was warn you, especially if you do decide to stay, to be very discreet about it. Nobody will hear about it from us—and by that I mean all our community; you can be sure of that. It’s your decision, but I repeat that we would be very honored and happy if you did decide to do so. What do you say?”

“Who else could tell your son of the battles I’ve seen?”

Hasdai smiled and held out his hand. Arnau took it.

“CASTELL-ROSSELLÓ WAS A
mighty fortress ...” Little Jucef sat opposite Arnau in the garden behind the Crescases’ house, legs crossed and eyes wide open. He loved to hear the bastaix’s stories—alert when he was listening to details of the sieges, anxious during the fighting, smiling once victory had been won.

“The defenders fought valiantly,” Arnau told him, “but we soldiers of King Pedro were too strong for them ...”

When he had finished, Jucef was desperate to hear another tale. Arnau told him both true and invented ones. “I attacked only two castles,” he almost confessed. “The rest of the time we plundered the land and tore up the crops ... except for the fig trees.”

“Do you like figs, Jucef?” he asked him instead, remembering the twisted branches rising out of a devastated landscape.

“That’s enough, Jucef,” his father told him, coming into the garden and hearing his son insist on being told yet another story. “Go to bed now.” Jucef obediently left his father and Arnau. “Why did you ask the boy if he liked figs?”

“It’s a long story.”

Without a word, Hasdai sat opposite him in a seat. “Tell me,” his eyes said.

“We destroyed everything,” Arnau said, after briefly describing what had happened, “except for the fig trees. It’s absurd, isn’t it? We laid waste to the land, but in the midst of all that destruction, a solitary fig tree still stood, as though it were looking at us and asking what we were doing.”

Arnau was lost in the maze of his memories, and Hasdai could not bring himself to interrupt him.

“It was a meaningless war,” concluded the
bastaix.

“But the following year,” said Hasdai, “the king regained Roussillon. Jaime of Mallorca knelt bareheaded before him and surrendered his armies. Perhaps that first war you were involved in helped to—”

“To kill peasants, children, and poor people of hunger,” Arnau cut in. “It may have meant that Jaime’s army had no provisions, but a lot of innocent people had to die for that. We’re nothing more than playthings in the hands of our nobles. They settle their affairs without caring how much death or misery they bring to other people.”

Hasdai sighed. “Don’t I know it? We’re royal property. We belong to him...”

“I went to war to fight, and in the end all I did was burn poor people’s houses.”

The two men sat for a while lost in thought.

“Well,” said Arnau at length, “now you know the story of the fig trees.”

Hasdai got up and patted Arnau on the shoulder. Then he suggested they go inside. “It’s grown cooler,” he said, glancing up at the sky.

WHEN JUCEF LEFT
them on their own, Arnau also talked to Raquel in the small back garden. Instead of talking about the war, Arnau liked to describe his life as a bastaix, and to tell her about Santa Maria.

“We don’t believe Jesus Christ was the Messiah. He still hasn’t come: the Jewish people are still waiting for him,” Raquel explained on one occasion.

“They say you killed him.”

“That’s not true!” she replied, upset. “It’s us who have always been killed and driven out, wherever we tried to settle!”

“They say,” insisted Arnau, “that at Easter you sacrifice a Christian child. You eat his heart and limbs as part of your rituals.”

Raquel shook her head vigorously. “That’s nonsense! You yourself have seen we don’t eat any meat that isn’t kosher, and that our religion doesn’t allow us to drink any blood: what would we do with a child’s heart, let alone his arms or legs? You know my father and Saul’s; can you imagine them eating a child?”

Arnau thought about Hasdai’s face and his wise words; he recalled his patience and the way his eyes shone whenever he looked at his children. How could such a man ever eat the heart of a child?

“What about the host?” he asked Raquel. “They also say you steal them to torture them and make Christ suffer again.”

Raquel waved her hands in denial. “We Jews don’t believe in transubs ...” She snapped her fingers in frustration. She always stumbled over that word whenever she talked about it with her father! “Transubstantiation,” she said quickly.

“In what?”

“In transubs ... stantiation. To you it means that your Jesus Christ is present in the host, that it really is his body. We don’t believe that. To Jews, your host is nothing more than a piece of bread. So it would be stupid of us to torture a bit of bread, wouldn’t it?”

“So nothing you are accused of is true?”

“Nothing.”

Arnau wanted to believe Raquel, especially when she stared at him wide-eyed, begging him to reject the prejudices the Christians held about her community and its beliefs.

“But you are usurers. That’s something you can’t deny.”

Raquel was about to respond, when they both heard her father’s voice.

“No, we are not usurers,” said Hasdai, interrupting them and sitting down next to his daughter. “At least not in the way it is usually meant.” Arnau waited for him to go on. “Look, until a little more than a century ago, in the year 1230, Christians also lent money and charged interest. Both Jews and Christians did so, until a decree from your Pope Gregory the Ninth forbade Christians to make money in this way. Since then, only Jews and a few other groups such as the Lombards have been able to do so. But for twelve hundred years, you Christians lent money with interest. It’s only been a little more than a hundred years that you haven’t been permitted to officially,” said Hasdai, stressing the word, “and yet you condemn us as usurers.”

“Officially?”

“Yes, officially. There are many Christians who lend money using us as intermediaries. But anyway, I wanted to explain to you why we do it. Throughout history, wherever we Jews have been, we’ve depended on the king. We’ve been expelled from many countries; first from our own lands, then from Egypt; later on, in 1183, from France, and some time afterward, in 1290, from England. Jewish communities were forced to emigrate from one country to another. They had to leave all their possessions behind, and to beg permission to settle from the rulers of the countries where they arrived. In response, the kings, as had happened here in Catalonia, took over the Jewish communities and demanded heavy contributions for their wars and other expenses. If we did not make any profits from our money, we wouldn’t be able to fulfill your kings’ exorbitant demands, and we would end up being thrown out yet again.”

“But it’s not only kings you lend money to,” Arnau insisted.

“No, that’s true. And do you know why?” Arnau shook his head. “Because the kings never repay our loans. On the contrary, they are always asking for more and more money for their wars and other extravagances. We have to make money somehow to lend them, or to make a generous contribution when it turns out not to be a loan.”

“You can’t refuse?”

“They would expel us ... or worse, they wouldn’t defend us from Christians attacking us as they did in this city. We would all die.” This time, Arnau nodded, bringing a smile of satisfaction to Raquel’s face when she saw that her father was succeeding in convincing him. Arnau himself had been a witness to how the enraged Barcelona mob had howled their anger against the Jews. “Anyway, remember that we don’t lend money to any Christians who aren’t either merchants or have permits to buy and sell. Almost a century ago, your King Jaime the Conqueror brought in a law that said that whatever commission or deposit made by a Jew to anyone who was not a merchant was to be considered false, invented by the Jews, which means we cannot make a claim against anyone who isn’t a merchant. We can’t place commissions or deposits with anyone but merchants—otherwise we would never see our money again.”

“What’s the difference?”

“It’s completely different, Arnau. You Christians are proud that you follow the dictates of your religion by not lending money for interest, and it’s true that you don’t do it; not openly, at least. Yet you do lend money, but call it something else. Before the Church forbade loans with interest between Christians, business went on much as it does now between Jews and merchants: there were Christians with a lot of money who lent it to other Christians, the merchants—and they repaid the capital with interest.”

“What happened when it was forbidden to lend with interest?”

“It’s simple. As ever, you Christians found a way round the Church’s prohibition. It was obvious that no Christian was going to lend money to another one without making money, as the Church intended. If that were the case, he might as well keep his money and not run any risk. That was when you Christians invented the idea of the commission. Have you heard about that?”

“Yes,” Arnau admitted. “In the port they talk a lot about commissions when a boat loaded with goods arrives, but the truth is, I’ve never really understood what it means.”