Incantation (9 page)

But sometimes a hawk is a hawk and a dove is a dove and a nightingale is a bird that sings until morning. I decided to trust him.

You won’t change your mind?
I said.

He laughed and said,
Will you?

Let me tell you who I really am,
I began.

You don’t have to. I know you. I know your heart. That’s the only thing that will ever matter to me.

I told him anyway. Even though it was dangerous, even though I knew I must never tell. When I was done, he kissed me.

So I gave him my promise, and he did the same, just like that. No matter who we might be in the eyes of anyone else, we belonged to each other.

HUSKS

Who Betrays You

Blood

I
t was something small that made it happen. Small like the bite of a poisonous bug. That small thing was a kiss.

You would think a kiss could bring only good things into the world, but not this time.

Andres and I continued to meet nearly every night under the olive tree where the hawk had been. It was our secret place.

But secrets can be kept for only so long. I have learned that now.

Catalina caught us. She waited in her yard, and when we met she confronted us. It was a dark night, but there wasn’t enough darkness to make this right. Catalina wanted us to explain ourselves. She felt it was her right to accuse us because she was the wronged party.

We didn’t mean for it to happen,
I said.

Catalina laughed a hard laugh.

Andres tried to make her understand.
You and I are like brother and sister,
he told her.
My love for you is there,
he explained,
but it’s different than the way I feel about Estrella.

I don’t want your love,
Catalina told him. Then she turned on me.
I wish I’d never met you. I wish you’d never existed. Now I wonder what else you’ve lied to me about.

She closed her eyes as though I had already disappeared. When she opened them again I knew she no longer saw me. I was nothing to her.

T
HE OFFICIALS
didn’t come to Catalina. She went to them. She asked for an audience with the judge who was in charge of the court inside the Duke’s palace. She knelt before him and told him my grandfather had a secret life and a magic school; that we practiced witchcraft and Judaizing. She told them so easily, she might have been telling him the names of the pigs in her yard. She did it as though turning us in to the court was the simplest thing, a household chore, a recitation of a daily prayer.

Catalina said that she had seen my grandfather place a spot of blood on our door on the day when known Jews celebrated Passover. When I asked my grandfather if this was true, he said people from our church did so, but it was the blood of chicken, not, as Catalina had said, human blood, the blood of a stolen child.

Catalina told the judge she had never seen anyone in our family eat chorizo, and that brought on her initial suspicions. We refused sausage and roasts, and our pigs were our pets; she announced that we slept in bed with them. She had once heard my grandfather call my grandmother Sarah, when Señora deMadrigal went by the name of Carmen to the rest of town.

And that’s what the evidence came down to.

A name.

I
T WAS
F
RIAR DE
L
EON
who told us all of this. How Catalina had been escorted out of the old palace as though she were an important person, how she’d been dressed in silk, wearing new satin shoes.

The Friar told us we should leave our town, go without questions and leave everything behind, but the soldiers came so quickly we barely had time to catch our breath. When they arrested my grandfather, they made sure to take everything they needed as evidence for the trial. This meant anything that mattered to us. Our candlesticks, our silver, letters written from my father to my mother, even my box of trinkets from beneath my mattress, in which I kept my pearls.

Luckily, my mother had thought to hide her emerald ring in her shoe. The soldiers took almost everything else and nearly destroyed our house. Dishes shattered, furniture split in two, woven blankets torn apart. My grandmother came at one of the soldiers with a knife, but he just pushed her away and she fell to the ground. The soldier wasn’t afraid of her the way I always had been. He barely even saw her.

Don’t fight with him,
my grandfather said.

We obeyed my grandfather, even though we wept as we did so. At least the soldiers knew nothing about the hidden room filled with books and surgical tools, and they took only one member of our family, because he was the one who’d been said to be an enemy of the church.

The soldier in charge had the decency to let the great teacher Jose deMadrigal walk out the door a free man, but he remained so just until he reached the end of the yard. Then they put irons on him, the heavy sort, used for heretics and murderers.

We were crying and screaming for him, the family of a man for whom there was no hope. We cried so many tears the air itself had turned blue.
Grandfather, father, husband, dearest man.

The soldiers took our sheep from which my mother had made such fine yarn. The chickens scattered and hid under the house, but the pigs were herded together, out the gate, down the lane, following behind my grandfather. At the very last moment, one of the soldiers grabbed Dini, my pet, and carried him away over his shoulder. Dini was screaming and he sounded like a person. I tried to go after him, but my mother ran to me and held me back; she covered my ears. All the same I could hear what the soldiers were doing; I could see it even when I closed my eyes. My grandfather, my pet, my life, my world. I knew the monster on the Plaza had walked through our house, destroying everything.

We stood there, broken.

F
RIAR DE
L
EON
came again that evening to tell us we should leave. Leave my grandfather. Leave our home.

Now I began to understand why there were people who decided to stay. It was not so easy to abandon those you loved.

When we refused to run, the Friar told us we must stay away from the courthouse. I promised I would go no farther than the yard, but even while I said so, I had another plan entirely. I’d seen what had happened to the Arrias family; I knew my grandfather’s trial was to begin.

The next morning, I told my mother and grandmother I was going to the fields behind our house. Instead, I made my way to the Plaza, wearing a shawl over my head so no one would recognize me. I hid everything but my eyes. I sneaked in at the last moment, before the court doors closed, and sat in the back.

I recognized someone a few rows in front of me. I knew her from the shape of her head, from the rise of her shoulders, from the way she clasped her hands and rested them on the bench in front of her. Catalina.

How had I never noticed how hard Catalina was, how brightly she shone when something bad was happening to someone else? She had watched us: my beautiful mother, my strong grandmother, my brilliant brother, and she’d been dull with jealousy. So dull I hadn’t seen what was shining beneath her skin. She was green with it; I saw that now. She would not be called as a witness; only the judge would speak. All the same, Catalina was at the center of the trial, and she knew it; she was shining like an emerald. She had styled her hair carefully and put it up with tortoise-shell combs. I wondered if those combs had come from some Marrano woman who’d been stripped of everything she owned.

A long list of crimes was read out at last.
Heresy, judaizing, magic, medicine, murder, blood.

They called my grandfather a sorcerer. The greatest sorcerer of our town and of our times. The most evil, the most dangerous, an even bigger threat to the townspeople than the black fever had been.

The court decided to test my grandfather. I had heard of such tests. They were like holding a witch’s head underwater to see if she would drown. Only her death could prove her innocence; a circle of impossible, deathly judgment.

They brought out a sausage made of Dini, and they made this announcement: It had come from a pig that had lived for three years without being cooked. A pig that had slept in bed with the women of the family.

People in the courtroom let loose with their disgust, cursing us, damning us, we who had become less than human. Marranos. Pigs.

As for me, I felt something rise in my throat: the horror of the world of men.

M
Y GRANDFATHER
refused to eat the sausage. He said he was sick. He said he could not eat anything. He said he believed this court was unjust, and that the outcome of every trial would suit the judge and not the truth.

The guards opened his mouth and forced the sausage in. When my grandfather spat it out, they forced it back in, only this time they clamped his mouth shut with a metal mask. They tightened the mask until we could hear the bones in his face break, even in the back row. They told my grandfather he would be released when he’d finished eating the pig. After a while he nodded, but when they unlatched the mask, he spit it at them again. I saw the end of his life right there in that single moment. His pride, his decency, his secrets, his death.

The court officials had brought in a rabbi from the juderia in order to question him. I recognized him; he was the old man with the beard whose books had been burned. He still wore the red circle on his vest. In the back of the court were two women dressed in black with that same circle sewn to their clothes. I looked at them, then looked away. I recognized the language they spoke.
Ladino.
A mixture of Hebrew and Spanish; the language my grandparents spoke to each other when they believed no one was listening.

I felt the world that I knew tumbling away from me. The judge asked the rabbi if my grandfather was a Judaizer, practicing the rites of Jewry. Question after question came. Was he known to be a surgeon? Did he own books? Did he run a magic school? The rabbi said
no
to each question in a sharp voice. His voice was hard and seemed to be coming from a far distance away. He had raven eyes, dark and deep. He spoke with a raven’s voice, old and wise and far above the cruelty of the human race.

The rabbi did not want to answer the court; still, they questioned him. Was my grandfather a sorcerer, known to practice from books of magic and illumination? Could he take people apart and put them back together with a needle and thread? Did he chant during the new moon and during fasting times?

The rabbi looked at my grandfather. Over a hundred years earlier some had stayed and some had fled. Some had been forced into the juderia, where they’d been brutalized; others went to Portugal or Amsterdam; still others went underground and practiced their beliefs in secret. What difference did it make? There was no red circle on my grandfather’s clothes, true enough, but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not.

If this was true, what did it mean about Catalina—she who pretended to be my friend and was the opposite instead? When I looked at her, she appeared to be a different person from the one I’d known. My friend had disappeared into green smoke. And now I saw that the court had given her a gift for her betrayal.

Catalina was wearing my pearls.

She had rewritten everything, our history together, our friendship. Now I was the girl who’d stolen Andres; the girl who’d lied to her about who I was. Therefore, she owed me nothing.

T
O GET MY GRANDFATHER
to speak, they arrested my mother. Catalina’s mother had joined her daughter to offer the evidence against her; she’d told the judges that my mother laid eggs, like a hen. Blue eggs that were filled with human blood.

There had been a drought, and we had no rainwater in our barrel; because my mother would not allow me to go for water, the guards arrested her while she was at the well in the center of the Plaza. Where the water had come directly from heaven. Where my family had come to drink for over five hundred years.

They dragged her away by her hair. That is what our neighbor Señora dePaz had run to our house to tell us. When I went to search for my mother there were strands of her hair everywhere. Birds were gathering in the Plaza, a thousand fluttering doves, each with a strand of black hair in its beak.

The soldiers had dragged my mother over the cobblestones. My grandmother and I were both there, in the back row, when Abra was brought into court that same afternoon; there were still red bloody bands running down her face, her arms, her legs.

And there was Catalina—only one row away.

The judge first asked my mother if she could cure a cold. Like the rabbi with the red circle, she should have said
no
to everything. She should have become a raven. She didn’t understand that every word the judge said was a trap, and that every word she said could easily be a stone used to shut her into that trap.

My mother said it was a simple enough thing to cure a cold with a mixture of garlic and root teas. We could all tell from the judge’s face that this was the wrong answer. The next question came: Could she make a baby come before its time? She could do so if necessary, if the mother was ill or the baby so big it needed to enter into our world early—she made an elixir of roots and leaves and had the mother-to-be walk all around until dawn, preferably on the first night of a full moon.