The Last Jew (44 page)

The following year the community suffered its first death when Carlos ben Sagan died of a lung disease. Three months after Sagan's burial, Adriana's father told her that he would marry Carlos's widow, Sancha Portal. Joachim explained to his daughter that the hardworking men of Pradogrande, afraid to seek immigration from the outside, were aware that in years to come they would need every pair of hands they could get. They were agreed that large families were the key to the future, and single adults were encouraged to marry as soon as it was possible. Sancha Portal had agreed to marry Joachim; she was still a handsome and robust woman, and he was decidedly cheerful about doing his duty. He told Adriana he would go to Sancha's finca to live, but she had five children and her house was already crowded. So Adriana would continue to live in her father's small house, joining her new family for meals on Sundays and holy days.

After a small church and a pastor's house had been raised in the center of the valley, Joachim had been among the delegates who traveled to Huesca and requested that a priest should be assigned to their new community. Padre Pedro Serafino, a quiet, diffident man in black, had accompanied them back to Pradogrande, staying long enough to marry Joachim and Sancha. When he returned to Huesca he had told his superiors about the new little church and the snug but empty rectory, and several months later the priest rode out of the forest and announced to the settlers his permanent appointment as their pastor.

The villagers were delighted to attend his Mass, feeling as Catholic as any bishop. 'Now, if unfriendly eyes shall ever scrutinize our community,' Joachim had told his daughter, 'even the Inquisition will have to note the prominence of our church and rectory. And observing our priest constantly riding his little burro about the valley, they will be forced to conclude that Pradogrande is a community of real Christians.'

In those days Adriana was glad to live alone. It was easy to keep the house neat and clean when there was only one person in it. She was busy, baking bread and raising food in her garden to help feed her father's large family, and spinning wool from his sheep. In the beginning everyone smiled to see her, the women as well as the men. Her body underwent the last of the changes from girlhood; her breasts didn't grow large but they were beautifully shaped, and her young frame was long and lithe yet very womanly. Soon the wives of the village noticed the way men stared, and some of the women began to sound cold and angry when they spoke to her. She was innocent of experience but not knowledge; once she had seen horses mating, the neighing stallion with a pizzle like a club climbing onto the mare's back. She had watched rams with ewes. She knew human mating was done differently and wondered about the details of the act when women were with men.

She was distressed when Leona Patras took ill that spring. She visited her and tried to repay her kindness, cooking meals for Leona's elderly husband, Abram Montelvan, setting pots of water to boil on the fire so steam might ease the sick woman's breathing, and spreading goose fat and camphor on her chest. But Leona's coughing increased, and just before summer, she died. Adriana wept at the funeral; it seemed to her that death took any woman who showed her tenderness.

She helped bathe Leona's body before it was placed in the earth, and she cleaned the dead woman's house and brought several meals to the widower, leaving them on Abram Montelvan's table.

That summer the valley was almost overblown in its beauty, the heavy trees and tall grass full of darting songbirds in bright coats, the air drenched with the scent of blossoms. Sometimes it made her almost drunk with its loveliness, so that her mind wandered even in the midst of conversation. So at first she thought she had misheard when her father told her she was to be married to Abram Montelvan.

Before she and her father had received the last finca that had been built in Pradogrande they had sheltered in the houses of several other families, among them the home of Abram Montelvan and Leona Patras. Her father knew that Abram Montelvan was difficult, a sour-smelling old man with bulbous eyes and a temper; but Joachim spoke bluntly to her. 'Abram is willing to take you, and there is no one else for you. We are only seventeen families. Subtracting me and the late Carlos ben Sagan, whose family is now my family, there are only fifteen families from whose males you may seek a husband. But those men already are husbands and fathers. You would have to wait for some other man's wife to die.'

'I will wait,' she said wildly, but Joachim shook his head.

'You must do your duty to the community,' he said. He was firm. He said if she did not obey she would shame him; and in the end she had agreed.

Abram Montelvan seemed absentminded at the wedding. During the nuptial Mass in the church he didn't speak to her or look at her. After the marrying, the celebration was held in three homes, and it was a boisterous affair with three kinds of meat -- lamb, kid, and chicken -- and dancing until the early hours of the morning. Adriana and her bridegroom spent part of the evening in all three of the fincas, ending the wedding festivities in Sancha Portal's house, where Padre Serafino sat with them and drank a glass of wine and told them repeatedly about the sanctity of marriage.

Abram was tipsy when they left Sancha Portal's house to general cheers and laughter. He stumbled several times getting to the wagon, then they drove under cold moonlight to his house. Unclothed in his bedchamber, on the bed in which her friend Leona Patras had died, she was frightened but resigned. He had an ugly body, with a drooping stomach and skinny arms. He bade her spread her legs as she lay, and moved the oil lamp the better to see her nakedness. But evidently human mating was more difficult than for the horses and sheep she had watched; when he mounted her he could not enter her body with his limp pizzle though he bucked and cursed her, spraying her with his breath. Finally he had rolled from her and gone to sleep, leaving her to get up to extinguish the lamp. When she reentered the bed she lay sleepless on the edge, as far from him as possible.

Next morning he tried again, grunting with effort, but succeeded only to produce a spurtle of matter that clung to the fine hair of her loins until he departed the house and she could scrub away all traces of him.

He turned out to be a surly husband whom she feared. He struck her on the first day of their marriage, shouting 'Do you call that an egg pudding?' That afternoon he bade her cook a fine meal for nine places next day. She killed two hens and plucked and cooked them, baked bread, and carried fresh water for cool drinking. Her father and her stepmother came to dinner, as did Abram's son Anselmo and his wife Azucena Aluza, and their three children to whom Adriana was now a fourteen-year-old grandmother -- two daughters, Clara and Leonor, and a little boy named Joseph. No one spoke to her as she served, not even her father, who was laughing as Anselmo described the antics of his goats.

To her distress her husband kept at her in bed, and the time came, some three weeks after they were wed, when he had enough stiffness to push his way into her. She cried out faintly with the pain of the tearing, and listened with resentment to his crow of triumph as almost immediately he made a sticky withdrawal and hastened to capture on a rag the small spot of blood, evidence of his prowess.

After that for a time he largely left her alone, as if having climbed the mountain he saw no need to make repeated attempts. Except that many a morning she would be wakened by his hateful hand beneath the undergarment in which she slept, probing between her legs in a manner that could never be described as a caress. Much of the time he ignored her, but he fell into the habit of striking her freely and often.

His mottled hands made hard fists. Once, when she burned the bread, he whipped her legs with a switch. 'Please, Abram! No, please! No! No!' she had cried, weeping, but her husband made no reply, breathing deeply each time he struck.

He told her father he was forced to beat her for her shortcomings, and her father came to the house to talk with her.

'You must stop being a willful child and learn to be a good wife, as your mother was,' he said, and she could not meet his eyes, but told him she would do better.

As she learned to do things in the manner Abram wished, the beatings were less frequent, but they continued, and with each passing month he was crankier. It hurt him to lie down. He walked stiffly and gasped with the pain of it. Where before he had had little patience, now he had none.

Her life changed one evening, when they had been married more than a year. She cooked dinner but didn't serve it, for she spilled water on the table while filling his cup and he stood and punched her in the breast. Although it had never before entered her mind to do so, she turned on him now and attacked his face, slapping him twice, so hard that he might have fallen had he not been able to sprawl back into his chair.

She stood over him. 'You are not to touch me, señor. Ever again.'

Abram stared up at her with amazement and began to weep in baffled anger and humiliation.

'Do you understand?' she asked, but he didn't answer. When she looked at him through her own tears she saw he was a contemptible old man but also foolish and weak, not a creature to fear. She left him there in the chair and went upstairs. After a time he climbed the stairs himself, slowly removed his clothing, and entered the bed. This time it was he who lay at the edge, as far from her as possible.

She was certain he would go to the priest or to her father, and she awaited with resignation the punishment they might decree, whether it was whipping or worse. But she heard no condemning word, and gradually she realized that he would not complain of her because he feared the ridicule that might ensue, preferring to be viewed by the other men as a potent old lion who knew how to keep so young a wife in hand.

After that, every night she placed a blanket in the common room downstairs and slept on the floor. Every day she worked in his garden and cooked for him, and washed his clothes and kept his house. When they had been married a few days short of two years he began to cough and took to his bed, which he never left. For nine weeks she tended him, heating wine and goat's milk for him, feeding him his food, bringing the chamber pot, wiping his bottom, washing his body.

When he died, there had swept over her an abiding thankfulness and her first adult feeling of peace.

*

For a time after that she was decently left alone, for which she was grateful.

But less than half a year after Abram's death, her father raised the subject of her status as a Pradogrande widow.

'The men have decided that a property may be held only in the name of a man who will join in the work on the farms.'

She considered him. 'I will join in the work.'

He smiled at her. 'You will not be able to contribute enough labor.'

'I can learn to labor as well as a silk merchant. I am able to garden very well. I would work harder in a field than Abram Montelvan was able to do.'

Her father continued to smile. 'Nevertheless, it is not allowed. To keep the holding you would have to be engaged to marry. Barring that, ownership of your land will be shared by each of the other farmers.'

'I do not wish to marry, ever again.'

'Abram's son Anselmo desires to keep your holding intact and within his family.'

'How does he propose to do that? Does he wish to take me as a second wife?'

Her father frowned at her tone but exhibited patience. 'He proposes that you accept a betrothal with his eldest son, Joseph.'

'Eldest son! Joseph is a little boy of only seven years!'

'Nevertheless, the betrothal will serve to keep the land intact. There is no one else for you, her father said, just as he had spoken to her when telling her to marry Abram. He shrugged. 'You say you do not wish to marry. Perhaps Joseph will die while still a child. Or if not, it will take years for him to grow. It may be that he will turn out well. When he has become a man, it is possible you will welcome him.'

Adriana had never realized how much she disliked her father. She watched him go through her basket of vegetables and remove the green onions she had picked for herself earlier in the day. 'I will bring these home with me, for Sancha, who prefers your onions to all others,' he told her, beaming as he delivered the compliment.

The second betrothal had given her a period of time without harassment. Three planting seasons and three harvests had come and gone since Abram Montelvan's death. The rich fields had been seeded each spring, the hay cut and stacked each summer, the bearded wheat harvested each fall, with only a few grumblings to be heard from the men. Some of the wives in the valley looked at Adriana with hostility again. A few of their husbands had gone beyond staring, indicating their interest in her with soft words, but the marriage bed still was unpleasantly fresh in her mind and she wanted nothing of men; she learned to turn them away with a quip or a little smile at their foolishness.

On occasion when she left her finca and walked, she saw the male to whom she was promised. Joseph Montelvan was small for his age, with a dark mop of curly hair. He seemed a likely little boy as he played in the fields. By now he was ten. How old would be old enough? A boy should have at least fourteen or fifteen years, she supposed, before being put out to stud.

Once she passed close by him and saw his nostrils flowing. Taking a rag from her pocket she stopped and wiped the nose of the astonished child. 'You must never come abed bearing snot, señor. You must promise me that,' she had said, and was able to laugh at life as he ran like a startled rabbit.