The Sisterhood (14 page)

Alejandro was disconcerted to find a girl in the schoolroom, but was quickly reconciled to her presence by the same qualities that had appealed to her other tutors—her quickness of mind and her careful and considered answers to the questions he posed, her attention, and thoughtful application of what she learned. Gradually he began to notice Isabella’s small graces—her neat ways, her beautifully legible hand, her modest demeanor, and the kind attentions to the old lady by her side. Above all, he noticed the expression on her face when he addressed her, the blush of pleasure when he praised some piece of work, and the way she lowered her eyes bashfully, long lashes sweeping her cheeks.

He realized her presence illuminated the schoolroom each morning. He did not care that she had a limp. In fact, he had scarcely noticed it. Having no contact with young women in the seminary, he dreamed of girls constantly. Then he began to dream only of Isabella and her beautiful eyes.

To a shy girl who knew no men outside her family, Alejandro was as dazzling as Apollo in a fiery chariot, and Isabella was disconcerted when he spoke to her. Previously, she had never looked in the mirror longer than necessary to see that her hair was tidy, but she began to study her reflection more closely to see how she appeared to him. She began to dress carefully, deciding whether this or that color was becoming, completing her toilette with a few jewels, scenting her hair. Then she suffered agonies of nerves in his presence, in case he noticed her efforts.

Lodged in the tutor’s room next to the family chapel, Alejandro spent less and less time there, crossing back and forth across the courtyard to and from the count’s library, where he prepared his lessons. The courtyard was where Isabella liked to sit at her needlework each afternoon. As the duenna mumbled over her beads, they exchanged simple everyday pleasantries. Alejandro looked into Isabella’s eyes, tried to think of something interesting to say, and stuttered, “The weather is very fine today,” or “How loud the church bells sound.” To the despair of the gardener, he distractedly plucked the best blossoms from the carefully cultivated plants in the courtyard to present to Isabella. “The color of your embroidery thread,” he would say as his hand brushed hers.

Isabella would nod, accepting it, and give him a smile. It was sweet to be given a flower. Alejandro finally asked if he might read to her while she sewed—a devotional work of course. His choice was
The Divine Comedy
. “It is about love! An allegory of holy love,” he exclaimed enthusiastically.

Love! Isabella blushed, staring hard at her sewing as if she had never seen anything so interesting in her life as blue silk thread. “As you think best,” she murmured. “I have not read it. My Italian is insufficient.”

“Ah, exactly! Then you will benefit doubly—in addition to its instructive discourse, it will improve your Italian.” But its
instructive discourse was of love and adoration. And discussing these interesting topics did indeed give them a chance to practice their Italian, which the duenna did not speak. But had her hearing been as sharp as it once was, she would have had no need of Italian to notice the passion with which they compared courtly love, which looked for nothing beyond adoration of its object, and profane earthly love, which looked for a good deal more. In fact, so much was said on the topic of love and its ecstasy with Alejandro close by her side that Isabella found it difficult to confine her mind to love’s subliminal nature. Alejandro’s presence by her side made the air sweet and bright, and the sound of his voice threw her into a turmoil of emotion, made her heart pound and her trembling fingers snare her needlework into a hopeless tangle.

“
La gloriosa donna della mia mente
”—“the glorious lady of my mind”—as Dante had called Beatrice, rang in Isabella’s ears as she remembered how intently he had looked into her eyes when he said it. At night in her bed she whispered it over and over, at the same time reminding herself severely that Beatrice was pure and unattainable, and the phrase had to be understood chastely.

Then one afternoon in the middle of a highly charged discussion of the intensity of spiritual passion, the duenna went off to answer one of her frequent calls of nature and Alejandro exclaimed, “I must tell you or die!” He knelt at her feet and clutched her hands. “You are my angel and truly, the flower, the glorious lady of my heart. I will place my life, my soul, in your power and no longer conceal the truth from you. I am no Christian with celibacy in his heart but a Moor with blood in his veins. And I am not Dante, to live forever without Beatrice. I would prefer death to parting from you.”

“An infidel!” Isabella exclaimed in horror. Alejandro rushed on bravely. A Muslim’s love for a Christian was not dishonorable. Until the
Reconquista
, the Abenzucar family had intermarried with Christian
and Jewish neighbors, and had enjoyed a long friendship with a Christian convent—the Convent of the Swallows, Las Golondrinas, that stood above the valley where the Abenzucars had their estates. The Abenzucar women would travel up the mountain to visit the nuns with gifts of dried fruit, spices, and almonds for the Christian feast days, while the nuns offered prayers when the Abenzucars suffered illness or the women gave birth, and shared the medicines they made with great skill.

Though she could not imagine such cordial relations between nuns and the infidels, Isabella’s scandalized expression wavered.

“If you do not believe me, in your own father’s library is a book that proves the truth of what I say. It is the recollections of a venerable Christian hermit, a true Old Christian like your family, who lived in the mountains hundreds of years ago and who praised the nuns of the Convent of the Swallows for their learning and peaceable relations with their neighbors.”

“But you converted, and that changes everything,” Isabella said sadly.

Alejandro’s expression altered as he explained he had done so unwillingly. After the
Reconquista
, formerly powerful Muslim families like the Abenzucars were offered a stark choice—baptism, or exile and confiscation of their lands and wealth. But his elderly father had decreed some must go and some must stay. Several families of younger cousins fled to Portugal, but Alejandro’s parents, brothers, sisters, and their families had to become Christians and stay to preserve their estate. Baptism was only a formality. The Abenzucars would remain Muslims in secret and hope for better times.

A mass baptism of the family and all their servants and peasants had been held at his parents’ estate. A distressing matter of necessity, his father had thought, but one to which they need not give the slightest credence. How could they seriously embrace the
blasphemous practice of worshipping three gods instead of Allah, the one God?

But the Abenzucars had not anticipated the way in which the church authorities would seal their conversion. Alejandro’s eyes filled with tears and his voice faltered. After the ceremony, a large group of people from the valley, their friends and neighbors, men, women, children, and old people were herded together to a vast pile of wood and brush. Their crime was read out. They were apostates, baptized but practicing as Muslims in secret. The Abenzucars had been forced to watch the auto-da-fé that followed as the accused heretics were burned alive before them. Their screams and cries and pleas to Alejandro’s powerless father were a warning of what awaited false Christians. And to remind them that those enemies of the church would pay the penalty as enemies of Spain. And so, Alejandro had entered the church to allay suspicion of the Abenzucars’ conversion.

What was Isabella to do now? Alejandro should be the mortal enemy of any Christian Spaniard. But her heart overrode what her religion had drummed into her, and above all, Alejandro’s story inspired pity for him and the poor victims.

“God is great! I love you. Betray me if you must. My life is yours to do what you will,” Alejandro took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. Isabella thought she would faint.

The duenna returned muttering about her bowels and Alejando let go of Isabella’s hand. “Your secret is safe. I will never betray you,” Isabella whispered behind the duenna’s back, longing for the touch of Alejandro’s lips again.

In the schoolroom they hardly dared look at one another now, each felt so keenly the presence of the other. Alejandro found it more and more necessary to lean over Isabella’s shoulder to point out a passage in a book. Isabella would murmur, “Is this the one? Or this?” pointing to she-hardly-knew-where on the page to keep him close as long as possible.

Then one day when they were alone in the schoolroom save for the duenna snoring in the corner, Alejandro kissed her bent neck. She shivered, her lips parting, and looked up. Then before the two young people knew it, their lips met. Isabella broke away first, whispering they had sinned. Alejandro whispered that he did not care and kissed her again, so firmly that this time Isabella, transported, did not protest. The duenna stirred and they leaped apart.

“Will you come to me tonight?” begged Alejandro in a whisper.

There was no time for Isabella to do anything but whisper “Yes!”

Isabella’s duenna slept soundly in an alcove in her room, but in case she woke, Isabella took care to mound her pillows to look like her sleeping form. She donned an embroidered nightdress, scented herself with essence of roses from a little vial, then slipped soundlessly through an anteroom and quietly down the stairs through a servants’ entrance to the courtyard where Alejandro swept her into his arms, as if it was where she belonged.

They were young and passionate lovers, meeting every night sheltered behind the great pots of flowers in the corners of the courtyard or in Alejandro’s cell, where they huddled together on his narrow bed. Isabella’s gold hair cascaded over her naked shoulders as Alejandro recited Dante’s sonnets between kisses. But Dante’s love for Beatrice was nothing compared to theirs.

“Dante and Beatrice had barely spoken to one another, then she married another and died leaving Dante with nothing but her shade to mourn. What is the good of such love?” Isabella murmured into Alejandro’s shoulder, loving its warmth and strength, and pitying Beatrice.

Alejandro kissed the top of her head. “It begat a great work of literature.” He sighed. “But I do not want to write a great work of literature. I want only never to be parted from you.”

They risked everything for these moments of precarious happiness when nothing existed beyond the two of them, dreading the time when Alejandro would be obliged to return to the seminary and take his final vows, and Isabella’s fate would be decided, one way or the other. Isabella knew that her father was considering several offers made for her hand, but she suspected that the priest would not easily abandon his machinations to have her enter a convent. Whatever the outcome, a future without the warmth of Alejandro’s love seemed bleak and cold as death itself.

Then Isabella began to feel sick in the mornings, and one day in her bedroom she swooned while dressing for Mass. When she came to her senses she vomited weakly into her handkerchief. She sent her maid to fetch her a dish of lemons, sliced thin, which she suddenly longed for beyond all reason. Her maid brought them and said slyly that when she washed Isabella’s underclothes there had been no sign of her monthly blood for some time; perhaps soon it would be necessary to let out the seams in her gowns. When Isabella looked surprised the maid shook her head and muttered something about how interesting this discovery would be for Isabella’s future husband. Isabella remembered her mother’s violent sickness when pregnant and her fondness, too, for lemons at that time. A terrible possibility presented itself.

The maid rattled on, saying that was Muslim
conversos
for you, anxious only to get under the skirts of Christian girls. “Fr. Alejandro, such a handsome young man for a priest…So diligent with your lessons,” she simpered, and then mentioned that her uncle was a familiar of the Inquisition. The maid aspired to be one, too, and her uncle had set her a test, saying she must keep her eyes and ears open for anything to report and promised to have a word on her behalf. Only last week, the maid said dreamily, she had revealed to her uncle that the cook was a secret Jew and in league with the devil to kill the countess’s baby when it was born,
so it could be used in cannibalistic Jewish rites. The cook had been taken away, weeping with terror and protesting her innocence. A new cook had been hired. The old one was not expected to return.

Any day, the maid expected to receive her reward for this information. But how much greater the reward would be for the information that a
Morisco’s
bastard would stain the honor of an Old Christian family! What a pretty bracelet Isabella was wearing. Silently Isabella unclasped it and gave it to her tormentor, then turned her head away.

When Isabella told Alejandro, he put his hand on her stomach and exclaimed in wonder, “A child! Now we
must
be married! Our decision is made for us. God is great!”

But Isabella could think of nothing except what would happen when her condition became known. She would be handed to the Inquisition examiners who would spare her nothing to extract a damning confession and evidence to condemn Alejandro. Then she would be walled up alive while Alejandro would be turned over to the Inquisition until a full confession was tortured out of him, and he was burned at the stake as an apostate like the unfortunate Muslims on his family’s estate.

Alejandro said he had a plan. They would flee to his cousins in Portugal, before the maid tired of bribes and Isabella’s condition became obvious. “But how?” a tearful Isabella asked. “And when?”

“Hush, beloved! Soon, when your mother gives birth and the household is occupied with the christening.”

But it was the countess’s death that provided the perfect opportunity. The requiem Mass would be one of the few occasions Isabella could leave the palace, in the company of her duenna of course, but the old woman was a small hindrance. Alejandro would wear a workman’s clothes under his habit and Isabella would dress plainly under her cloak. Their plan was to slip away after the requiem Mass, to melt into the crowd when the
family left for the internment in their private crypt. The crypt was a confined space and neither Isabella nor Alejandro was important enough to be present, and the count’s palace was full of people on account of the funeral. It would be many hours before Isabella and Alejandro were missed from the throng. Alejandro’s wealthy father had provided a purse of gold pieces for expenses at the seminary, and with it Alejandro had made the necessary arrangements. A farmer’s humble covered cart, mules, and provisions for the journey would be waiting in a side street near St. Nicholas de los Servitas.