The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (30 page)

“Well, the father was hardly cold in the earth when all hell broke loose, each one of the children declaring themselves the owner of the only real ring and thus deserving of being looked upon as the unquestioned head of the family. But no one could prove it.

“Terrible jealousies began, and the family was torn apart, each child seeking to degrade the other to prove his natural superiority, to prove that he, and only he, had inherited the true ring.

“Bloodied and depressed, they submitted their dispute to a wise judge, who told them the following: “Each of you shall continue to believe he has the real ring. Compete to make the ring’s power manifest by showing humility, tolerance, and piety. And if your children’s children’s children can achieve the love of G-d and man, then it makes no difference who has the real ring.”

He shook his head.

“Whenever I think of those hundreds of years in which Christianity was triumphant, there is this image I cannot erase: the hordes rampaging against the defenseless, holding the cross as their banner, and those who faced them wrapped in prayer shawls singing Psalms. It haunts me. And so, I make these objects. In homage, you might say. Or even envy.”

“Envy?” Francesca repeated, bewildered.

“Yes. Envy. There is a mystery hidden in your people, a riddle mankind has pondered for centuries. So many times, you’ve been like a tree pulled out at the roots. Instead of withering and dying, you somehow replant yourself, flowering in another place, at another time. Many peoples have been uprooted and dispersed. They simply merged into whatever culture they found themselves. Only the Jews remain stubbornly Jews. Why? How?”

She looked at him, puzzled.

She was a New Yorker. An American. Until this moment, the heritage she had been born with had always seemed like delicate, old lace wrapped in tissue paper in the attic: lovely and useless and quite irrelevant. Perhaps, she thought, the power, whatever it was, had finally disappeared.

She suddenly heard herself say:

Pany y bino beo

En la Ley de Muysen creo

Dios no a benido, mas Dios bendra

Dios que me hizo, Dios me salbara

Marius gazed at her in astonishment.

“I’m sorry! I don’t even know what it means.”

“‘Bread and wine my eyes do see/In the Law of Moses I do believe/The Messiah has not come but he will appear/And the Lord, my creator, this Lord will save me,’” Almazan translated. “It is a very old
converso
prayer. During the Inquisition, anyone heard uttering such words would have signed their death warrant.”

Francesca turned white. “I heard someone whisper it in my ear in El Transito…”

“Impossible! Only the most erudite scholars have ever heard of it!”

“I heard it!” she said stubbornly. “How else? I’m not a scholar. I don’t even know Spanish!”

Almazan stared at her curiously. “There was an old woman who worked for me as housekeeper. She said it was well-known that the souls of those burned at the stake often came back to Toledo to clothe themselves in corporeal bodies, to visit the places they knew and loved. El Transito, she always said, was full of such spirits.”

Francesca’s face turned pale as she picked the last gold threads off her dress.

Marius cleared his throat. “Don de Almazan, you are a remarkable man. And if I might say so, your city, Toledo, holds its history like a beautiful setting holds a fine jewel.” He picked up the spice box and turned it over admiringly in his hands. “As you know, we are searching for the manuscript of Doña Gracia Mendes. Francesca Abraham is one of the last of her descendants. We have found part of it…”

Señor Almazan held up a hand. “Do not go on. The story is well known to me. And, I’m afraid, it is not a pretty one.”

Marius looked startled. “In what way?”

“Please, sit down, both of you.”

He offered them tall, straight-backed chairs upholstered with antique, tooled leather.

“The manuscript in question was not the property of the person who sold it to you. It was stolen from the library of a church in the Extremadura, a small town called Cáceres, a few miles from the Portuguese border.”

“Stolen? And from Cáceres?” Marius exclaimed. “How would such an important document have wound up in a church in Cáceres? And more important, where is it now?”

Señor Almazan shook his head firmly. “I can tell you no more. I am a professor of history at the university. I am a respected antiques dealer. I can have nothing to do with such a dirty business. I’m sorry.”

“You mean…that is…you won’t help us?” Francesca said, devastated.

“Even were it in my possession, which it no longer is, I could not in good conscience have handed it over to you.”

“
No longer is…
” Marius said in a strangled tone. “Do you mean to say that you’ve seen it, the whole thing? That the manuscript exists and was in your hands, here?”

He nodded. “Yes, I have seen it, although I cannot be certain that what I have seen is all of it. I was only permitted to examine it for a short time in order to appraise its value. The person who brought it to me was a stranger. When I began asking him questions, he disappeared. That is all I can tell you.”

“Then how do you know it was from Cáceres?” Marius challenged.

“Ah, that is detective work! You are in rare manuscripts, are you not, Mr. Serouya? Then you know we are all quite a small family. Toward the evening of the very same day that the young man disappeared with the manuscript, I received a phone call from my colleague in Córdoba, Don Elonza, who wanted to consult with me over the value of a manuscript being offered him. When he described it—the watermarks, the color of the ink, the language—it all fit. I realized it was the same one I had seen just a few hours earlier. He said the fellow seemed desperate, saying he needed to return with the money to Cáceres, or he would be in terrible trouble.”

“What happened?” Francesca inquired anxiously.

“I preferred to refrain from asking too many questions. I merely stated that I thought the manuscript genuine and worth quite a bit of money.”

“What happened to it,
señor?
” Francesca half rose out of her seat in excitement.

Marius placed a calming hand over her arm.

“I really can’t say. That is, I don’t know, not for sure.”

“How long ago was this?” Marius asked.

“Last Thursday.”

“So, it might still be in Córdoba, if it was purchased. Or perhaps…”

“It could be anywhere by now,” Francesca groaned. She couldn’t believe it! They’d been so close.

Marius rose. “Señor de Almazan, thank you so much. Would you be kind enough to give me your colleague’s name and address in Córdoba?”

He wrote it down for them, and accompanied them to the door.

Francesca extended her hand politely. He took it warmly, pressing it to his lips. “What is the secret?” he whispered.

She lowered her eyes, ashamed.

23

Suzanne felt the sunlight on her back. She pulled the fragrant silk sheet around her shoulders, her arms warm and heavy with a kind of peace she had never known. She shifted slightly, resting her head on the clean skin of Gabriel’s broad chest, breathing him in. He had a unique scent, a combination of musk and rosemary. At first, she’d thought she’d imagined it. But it had turned out to be a special soap he used. An old family recipe.

My love, my love, my love, she thought, with unending wonder.

How was it possible, this connection, immediate and without any peer? I have been in love before, she insisted to herself. At least, I thought…

It was too painful, the comparison to Renaldo.

Nothing was the same.

Even the world was different, she thought, touching his sleeping forehead, her fingers smoothing his thick, bright hair, pale gold in the morning light. She felt like some worshiper at the shrine of a Greek deity, helplessly overwhelmed by the sheer depth of her devotion and vulnerability.

She thought of the moment when he must wake and lift his head, put his feet to the floor, and his arms to his sides. The moment when he would go to the bathroom and brush his teeth and take a shower; when he would dress and go outside, away from her.

It was almost unbearable.

I felt my heart ache with loneliness at the thought that my body should soon be separated from his
.

The words, unbidden, echoed in her mind. She wrapped her arms around him, listening to his quiet breathing and the sudden tightening of his long, gentle fingers around her naked waist as he pulled her toward him.

“
Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone
,” she thought, understanding for the first time the meaning of the story of creation. One creature, divided into two. Man and woman. And reunited, a perfect whole.

Perfect, she thought, taking in the silk-covered walls—color of the Mediterranean sky—the matching damask drapes, and the dustless antique furnishings. It made no difference to her, really. We could be out in the grass in a tent. On a mountainside in the Himalayas. In Brooklyn. Place had no meaning. Nor time. She wasn’t even sure what day it was anymore, or what week. Had it been only that, she thought, startled, just weeks since the chance meeting in the lobby of the Savoy? Such a long journey, in such a short time? How far she had come from her old life! So far that units of measure such as calendars and clocks seemed puny and hopelessly inadequate. She was traveling in light-years.

It cannot last. It never does. Not with me. Not with anyone, a small voice told her.

She felt frightened, but not panic-stricken. There was truth in it. Always other, competing passions had chipped away, demanding her devotion. Her work, her studies, her delicate sensibilities. Men never lived up to her expectations. Except…

She mouthed his name—
Renaldo
—then checked herself for damage. Nothing had happened, she realized, ashamed, exhilarated, and almost tearful with freedom. No wound had torn open. No blood gushed.

She thought of his big, dark, laughing face with a fondness that was almost nostalgic. With Renaldo there had been joy, and the endless stirring of frantic experience. There had been wonderful physical pleasure, and stimulating mental exercises.

But there had never been this; this peace, this overwhelming certainty.

Like hearing something you had always known was true, something that matched exactly all the information stored in your heart. There was no question of disagreeing, of finding reasons to resist
.

It was Gran’s voice, she suddenly realized, disturbed by its emergence, unbidden, into a private conversation. It made her want to resist. Perhaps you feel this way now because Renaldo is gone, she thought, because you were so lonely, so empty. Perhaps if you saw him again…

She felt Gabriel’s hands move slowly down her back, a long stroke of love, almost fatherly in its infinite tenderness. She reached up, touching his ears, the warm place in the back of his neck, bringing his lips down to hers with a neediness she could not help. He accepted her passion with a startled smile of joy, as if she had offered him a great and undeserved gift, and his pure happiness dissolved any shame. There could be no shame in partaking of the great, blessed abundance now rightfully hers, she told herself. No shame in reaching across the fleshy abyss that separated their souls. The body, as Gabriel was fond of saying, was always servant to the spirit.

For an instant, she thought of all those loveless acts she had committed so half-heartedly in years past, because of physical temptation, or laziness, or just plain having had too much to drink. The faked intimacy of the good-bye kiss, the embarrassment of seeing each other dress in the light of morning, and wanting, really, for nothing more than to see them leave. Worst of all, the degradation of peering into the soul of a stranger and watching it blink back at you without recognition.

She did not believe in sin or punishment. But she understood all at once that such acts had been a crime, a deep violation, against the core of her being.

I will explain this to my daughter, she suddenly thought, then stopped as she felt her lover’s body move once more in perfect rhythm with her own.

Eventually, he did get up, and so did she. It seemed almost impossible that such things as flossing and pouring milk into coffee still existed in the strange, exotic world they now inhabited.

They sat across from each other at the small, charming table, waiting for the maid to leave the covered tray with their breakfast: warm croissants and fresh strawberries, marmalade, and scones. A vase of fresh daffodils and freesia perfumed the air.

They had arrived late the evening before. Gabriel had dumped the luggage on the carpet and carried her up the stairs into a lovely suite.

She poured his coffee, measuring the milk exactly to give it the toasty-brown color she’d learned he liked best. He picked through the strawberries, choosing the largest and sweetest ones for her, touching her face as he handed her the plate.

“Gabriel, my love, can this go on forever?”