The Mapmaker's Daughter (6 page)

***

One day shortly before my tenth birthday, Abraham’s nose is running and his bottom is scarlet from watery messes. By the next day, his eyes and face are bright with fever. By the third, they seem drained of life, and he sags in our arms. No one sleeps that night. We cover his bed with amulets and sprinkle his bedding with rosemary and rue and dozens of cloves of garlic, but to no avail. All day, his breath is shallow and infrequent, and as quietly as if he were falling asleep, at nightfall, he dies in Mama’s arms.

She wants to bury him the Jewish way, in a simple shroud, but Papa will not hear of it. Benito Riba is buried in the Christian cemetery, his name carved onto the stone below my other lost brothers.

A day after the funeral, Mama wakes me after everyone has gone to bed. “Come with me,” she says.

She carries a cloth-covered basket as we make our way to the Jewish cemetery. Once there, she goes to the top of a rise and crouches under an almond tree. In the moonlight, its blossoms look like hundreds of tiny, luminous angels hovering above us. Mama gets out a trowel, and when she has dug a hole, she pulls out something wrapped in a small white cloth.

“I cut a lock of his hair before we buried him. It’s inside.” She gives me a package so weightless it could drift away with the slightest puff of breeze. “I did this for my other babies too.”

I nod my head, silenced by a moment that feels too weighty, too sacred for words.

“On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement,” my mother goes on, “I ask the Holy One to have mercy on me for all the ways I have been unable to honor him—for food I was forced to eat, for the festivals I didn’t keep. And each time I lost a child, I’ve come here to bury a lock of his hair and ask for forgiveness that he sleeps with a cross over his head. I ask God not to be harsh with me, but…”

We are both crying as we place the packet of hair in the soft, cool earth under the tree. We sprinkle dirt until the cloth is heavy with it, then we push the rest of the soil back in the hole, patting it down as gently as when we held Abraham over our shoulders to coax the air from his stomach.

She brushes a fallen petal from my hair, and I pick one off her sleeve. “Is there a blessing for burying hair?” I ask.

She smiles. “There are many that will serve.” She raises her voice in a plaintive call. “Blessed art thou, Lord God, king of the universe,” she sings out, “who restores the souls of the dead.” I want with all my heart that he would do that for Abraham, but Mama has taught me that it is not proper to pray for what cannot be undone.

Day is breaking, and we will soon be missed. Hand in hand, we walk back to a home that seems no more part of the living than the tiny grave we left behind.

***

That summer is the hottest in memory, and the churches are full of people praying that the plague spreading across the country will spare our city, or at the very least that the Angel of Death will visit someone else. We don’t have the outbreaks they had a hundred years ago—the Great Mortality, when whole towns died overnight, when wolves came down from the hills to finish off the dying, when people spit up their lungs and smelled their own bodies rotting. The fluxions, agues, and poxes that have visited Sevilla in my lifetime are frightening enough, though they lay low no more than one neighborhood and sometimes just a few households.

No one in our family could imagine for whom the angel would come, and how.

An upturned pot of stew burns my mother’s arm, making it blister and weep, but Mama assures me she has seen worse. She applies a poultice of figs mixed with yarrow and chervil and then goes about her work, stopping from time to time to chew poppy seeds for the pain.

Within a few days, angry red lines shoot outward from the wound, and her whole arm is hot to the touch. Mama says this is because she had put a ham bone in the stew that burned her. “Swine flesh is poison,” she mutters. “Do you need any more proof than that?”

By the time her whole arm is discolored and swollen, she has taken to bed. She throws her blankets off, complaining she is too hot, and then moments later, she shivers with cold. By the fourth day, her body is raging with fever, and she vomits the elixirs the apothecary gives her to drink.

Grandmother has come from the farm to tend to her. “I know what’s wrong with her,” she says. “We’ve been treating her arm, but it’s espanto that’s making her sick.”

Espanto. The fright. It disturbs the blood as surely as witches’ spells do.

“When Rosaura burned her arm, it gave her quite a scare,” Grandmother says. “The Evil Eye took possession of her when she was momentarily weak. We have to calm her blood before her burn can heal.”

She sends me to the apothecary for a fistful of cloves, which she passes in circles over my mother’s head, chest, and shoulders. She takes the cloves to the fire and heats them in a large metal spoon. Their sweet aroma fills the air, and my grandmother nods. “The scent will discourage los mejores de mosotros,” she tells me.

“I remove from you the ojo malo, the ayin arah,” she says in a stern, commanding voice as the cloves wiggle and puff from the heat. “In the name of the Temple in Jerusalem and all the prophets, such a woman should not experience harm.”

She examines the cloves again. “I think it worked. When they popped, they took the Evil Eye with them. We’ll make your mother tea with these, just to be sure, and she should be getting better by morning.”

She is no stronger the next day, and Grandmother takes a handful of salt and passes it over my mother’s body. “Pour some water in a bowl,” she tells me, and when I have done so, she rubs the salt from her hands into the water and puts it on the floor. “Piss into the bowl,” she commands. “The urine of an innocent makes the potion stronger.” I crouch over the bowl and do as I am told. Grandmother examines the pale yellow fluid. “The evil is dissolving,” she says. “Watch it.”

She carries the water out into the courtyard and tosses it in three directions to confuse the spirits, then takes the remainder and throws it in the gutter outside the front door. “Al la undura de la mar ki si vaiga todu il mal,” she says. “It will make its way to the sea now, and the evil will sink into its depths.”

We go back to sit by my mother’s bed. She groans and tosses her head, arching her back feebly in pain. “There’s one more thing to do,” Grandmother says. “We’ll change her name so the Evil Eye will think it is in the wrong place.” She incants the formula for changing a name, calling her Vida, while I stand by the bed trying to convince myself that no one named for life could be dying.

The next day, Mama cannot be roused at all. As the day goes on, her moans grow softer and then disappear into a deeper sleep. Sometime that night, she slips away.

When I wake from my makeshift bed on the floor, Papa’s face is slack and his eyes are unfocused and distant. Susana’s are nearly swollen shut with tears. I look at Mama’s closed eyes and peaceful expression, and I feel my whole body shudder. “Grandmother?” I ask in a tiny, pleading voice.

She shakes her head. “She’s gone, Leah. Baruch dayan emet. Blessed be the one true Judge.”

“No!” I scream. “Get more salt! We need more cloves!” I shake Mama’s shoulder. “Vida! Vida!” I cry out as I crawl in next to her. I lay my head on her chest as if nothing has changed, but her cold, still body is so unnerving that I jump up in horror and rush into my Grandmother’s arms.

I feel my breath burning circles in her overskirt. Though my eyes are scalding, my sobs seem locked inside, and when I pull away, I am surprised to discover her skirt is wet. “Should I wake Luisa?” The question comes from the blackness enveloping me, and I barely recognize my voice.

“It has to be done,” Grandmother says. “Help your sister braid her hair before you come back, and do your own as well. I want clean faces and hands.” Though I can’t imagine why it matters, I go off to do as I am told.

“Luisa,” I whisper, going to the bed and jostling her shoulder. I want to crawl deep under the covers with her, to take in the breath of someone who hasn’t yet had her world turned upside down, but I know Grandmother is counting on me to get back quickly.

I shake her again. “Wake up,” I say. “Mama is—” I can’t get out the word.

Luisa sits up. “Mama?” she asks. Her eyes are sleepy but wide open. I nod my head, and she starts to cry.

We return looking as presentable as I can make us. A lace on Luisa’s dress is undone because my fingers don’t feel as if they belong to me and I couldn’t tie it. Grandmother has been arguing with Papa and Susana, but they stop when we come in.

“Very well,” Grandmother says, “I’ll do it then, if you won’t.” She motions to the two of us to come stand near Mama. Grandmother places Mama’s limp hand on top of first my head and then Luisa’s and gives us a last blessing.

“We are conversos,” my father replies when she turns back to him. “She’ll have a Christian funeral and be buried in the Christian cemetery, and that’s the end of it.”

My heart lurches. Her body will wait for the coming of the Messiah far from where she wants to be, next to the mementos of her four little sons, among the Jews of Sevilla. I imagine a cross on Mama’s grave, pounded deep enough to stab her heart, and I think my own will break with sorrow.

***

Within hours of my mother’s death, Papa leaves with Susana to discuss Mama’s funeral with the priest, but Grandmother asks me to stay behind. She sends the servant off to get two buckets of water. “Find someone at the pump who can bring back two more,” she says as she hurries her out the door.

“I’m not going to let anyone tell me what to do, especially not someone who once nursed at my breast, even if he is a grown man now,” Grandmother mutters as she bustles around our kitchen. “And if the church wants to tear me in pieces for what I’m doing, that’s my business, isn’t it?”

Once she has her water, Grandmother sends the servant home for the day and closes all the windows and doors so no one can hear or see what is going on inside. Before Papa and Susana left, they laid Mama’s body out on the kitchen table, and Grandmother stands looking at the sheet-draped form.

“I told my son that if his wife has to be buried as a Christian, she should at least have taharah first. It’s the ritual washing Jews receive when they die. I knew you would want to help.”

She soaks a cloth in the water and twists it to release the water over Mama’s head. “In the beginning, God created the water and the land,” she repeats, continuing the prayer as she rinses Mama’s head seven times.

Grandmother washes every bit of Mama’s body, removing the dirt from under her nails and sponging the folds of tissue in the private place between her legs. “Everyone should go from life unencumbered and pure,” she tells me. “I am anointing her for the beyond.” I follow her, moving the bucket as she goes, but I keep a respectful silence. When the washing is finished, Grandmother picks up a cloth cap. “Take one last look at your mother,” she says.

Mama’s face is as dewy as a child’s. “She looks peaceful,” I say.

“The dead are happier than the living,” Grandmother replies. As she covers Mama’s face, I look away so as not to see the moment I lose her forever.

“You’re a good girl, Leah,” she says as she puts two eggs in a small pot on the hearth. “Very brave.” While we wait for the water to simmer, she tells me to strip down to the chemise under my dress. When I have done so, she takes the tip of a knife and tears the fabric over my heart.

“It’s called kriah. Jews wear clothing torn this way as a sign of mourning. Don’t take this off for seven days, and the next time I see you, I’ll help you mend it, so no one ever has to know.” She helps me wiggle back into my dress. “Normally we would tear your outer garment, but it’s obvious why we can’t do that.”

The eggs rattle in the boiling water, and when they are done, she peels them and lays them on a plate alongside a few olives and a slice of bread.

I go to the table, but she motions me to sit on the floor. “It’s part of our mourning. For the next week, I will do this at home and ask God to accept that I am also sitting shiva for you. But since we are alone now, you can do it properly at least once.”

We sit on the floor and eat what she tells me is the traditional meal of eggs, olives, and bread. Through our tears, we share stories about my mother, and though I think my throat is too tight to eat, I manage to swallow my share. “You see, my Leah,” she says, pointing to my empty plate, “life does go on. Min hashamayin tenuhamu.” She pats my knee. “May you be comforted from heaven.”

A thought comes to me, and I get up. “I know something that would please Mama.”

I take the knife Grandmother used to cut my chemise and cut a small strand of my mother’s hair. Taking a piece of white cloth and colored ribbon from her sewing basket, I wrap the hair into a package.

“What will you do with that?” Grandmother asks me.

“Come with me tonight and you’ll see.”

Then I think of something else. I run to the front door, take down the crucifix, and pull out the tiny scroll. I lodge it into Mama’s curled fingers and put the cross back on the wall.

When my father returns with the coffin, Mama is placed inside, not in a shroud, as Grandmother had hoped, but in a dress, as if she is just off to market instead of returning to the Holy One’s earth. I check before the lid is nailed shut to make sure the scroll is still there, clutched in her hand until the Messiah comes.

***

Within a few days, our future is decided. Papa says the pain of Sevilla is too great for him, and he will take his position with Prince Henry as soon as he can get his affairs in order. Luisa can’t go with Papa because he doesn’t know how he will take care of her in Raposeira, and he needs me with him at court rather than home with her. “May I board at the convent?” Luisa asks, grabbing Papa’s sleeve. “Please? Lots of girls do!”

Susana is still getting used to running a house, and her belly is already beginning to swell with the baby she is expecting. She seems relieved not to have to take Luisa in, assuring my father how easy it will be to look out for her and bring her home from time to time for a visit. Papa balks at the idea of leaving his youngest child without a mother or father, but Luisa pleads with him. “She does love the nuns,” I remind him, and finally he gives in.