Читать книгу The Velvet Doublet - James Howell Street - Страница 8

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And thus it was with me.

I applied myself zealously to my studies and other monasterial duties and conducted myself in a most exemplary manner to win favors from Fray Juan, particularly the fleeting surcease and liberty of Friday afternoons.

Then always I hastened to my father’s shop and always the ledger was on a corner of his desk, and I tarried only long enough to exchange pleasantries with him and old Mudarra, and was away for my hour of Paradise with my lovely Maraela.

It was always the same. I swung the clapper and Harana unbolted the door and peered at me and took the accounts, and I followed him into the hall and thence to the big room, and there she came to me and he went away, always bowing his leave.

Maraela and I sat on the couch under the poniard and near her tapestry, but her father was always nigh, either in the adjoining room, the room of the open door, or padding about the house in his velvet slippers. We talked, she and I, of things as they were and sometimes, in the desperation of my ardor, I dared whisper of things as I dreamed they could be. And always she listened and lowered her eyes, and said naught.

Once, to stem the flow of my fervor, she touched my hand and her fingers were cold and I seized them and held them until the fire of my blood warmed them, and then slowly she pulled her hand away and raised her face to me and drank deeply of the desire in my eyes and murmured tenderly, “We are young, Rodrigo mine.”

“I am almost sixteen,” I said. “A man’s age in Andalusia.”

“I, too, will soon be sixteen,” she said. “A woman’s age in any land.”

I felt for her hand and she moved it away, and I, calling on words I could not create, sought expression in an old Moorish poem that Mudarra had taught me, and whispered the sentiment:

“I come from fields of death, and in its sheath

My good sword rests; but thou, O glaive of Love,

Giv’st no repose; still thou dost wound my heart

With torments ever new. Afar, methought,

Were pain and woe that could not well increase,

Yet fiercer glow the fires within my breast

As I draw near thee, Love ...”

Impulsively she snatched my hand and held it hard in her lap, her fingernails biting into my flesh, and she closed her eyes and breathed the ode of Alhakem, the ancient elegy of the East:

“From thy sweet eyes, in that sad hour of parting,

There fell hot tears; but thine, they bathed thy cheek,

And lay upon thy loveliest neck, a circlet

Of pearls beyond all price. My tears were rubies

Of purple glow, and now, e’en now, sweet Love,

I marvel that the heart within me break not,

For fain would then my soul have ta’en her flight.

The tears that drowned my eyes were not from them,

But from my heart; and they betrayed their source,

By that deep tint which never comes but thence!”

Through my tears of love’s sweet torment her golden hair shimmered like the horizon halo of sun embracing sea and I leaned close to entreat her lips, but she drew away in fright as Harana moved in the next room and then joined us.

He returned the ledger to me and said, “Tell your father all is well and in order.”

Always he said that and then, after Maraela had excused herself, he always opened the door for me and bade me good day, and always it was before sundown.

At another time, a Friday soon after the New Year of 1485, Maraela’s restraint relaxed again for a brief minute and her thigh touched mine as we sat on the couch and heard her father’s footsteps move from the room of the open door into the rear of the long hallway. She made no effort to loosen the seal between her loin and my loin and I felt the warmth through her garment and, most tenderly, I stroked her cheek.

Again she seized my hand and buried it deep in her lap and, aroused by her transformation from maiden into nymph, I fumbled for her breasts and she tilted her head to the back of the couch and breathed rapidly in a spasm of elation. Then the footfalls again and she jerked erect, biting her lower lip into white pain as Harana came into our presence, the ledger in his hand and the bid of good day in his demeanor.

Thus it was in the bloom of my first love, the sap strong from the roots and the flower sensitive and tipped with gold, and then pink in its maidenly blush, and then deep scarlet in its Sybaritic glory.

The Andalusian winter lay calm on the land, and Christopher Columbus was at El Puerto in the home of Cerda, his patron, and together they planned an audience with Isabel and Ferdinand at the court here in Seville. Aye. Vincit qui patitur. Christopher Columbus, with the patience of Job and the dream of Jason, kept one eye on the court of Isabel, awaiting her call, and one eye on the Ocean Sea, awaiting its call, too.

But I had eyes only for Maraela.

The captains and the soldiers had departed Seville and were thrusting into Granada against the battlements of Boabdil the Moor, shouting the ancient cry of Andalusia, “Trust God and hammer on!” The bombards and now the lance! The crossbow and now the sword! And they died screaming fealty to Santiago and all the saints of Spain, and a salute for the Royal Banner of Isabel’s Castile, a prayer for the Golden Cross of Ferdinand’s Aragon.

My emblem was golden, too; gold and blue and red, her hair, her eyes, her lips.

The court had moved to Cordova, eighty miles up the Guadalquivir River, for the emblazoned retinue of monarchy had feasted too long on the pimpish largesse of Seville’s nobles and the earthen floors of the castles were strewn with bones from the royal board.

But I feasted on the beauty of Maraela Harana.

Torquemada had become Inquisitor-General for all of Spain and old Quemadero burned from the Pyrenees to the Ocean Sea, purifying the souls of converses by roasting their flesh.

My soul burned only for Maraela.

On February 2, the monastery celebrated Candlemas Day, the Purification of the Virgin, and then it was spring again and the little dog rose of Andalusia came to bloom and birds nested in the reeds along the river.

It was raining when I took the Wafer that Friday morning, and was storming tumultuously when Fray Juan came to my stall that afternoon, only a few minutes before my weekly respite, before my hour of Paradise with Maraela. He had a copy of Historica Rerum Ubique Gestarum under his arm and was eating dried beans again.

I feared a visit that might impose upon my leave and eyed the book suspiciously. Fray Juan laid it upon the bench and sat himself beside it with the resignation of a visitor who has no conception of time or his fellow man’s intent.

My breeding, nevertheless, compelled me to ask his health and other matters of polite trivia, including his opinion of the weather, which was discouraging. He answered in monosyllables, as though his mind and tongue were asunder, and there were long, infuriating pauses between his words as his jaw revolved malevolently and his teeth crunched the beans. I was fidgety because the minute for my freedom was nigh and I could not depart Juan Ruiz de Medina without his sanction. In nervous anxiety I snatched for a subject to interest him and asked the latest news of Christopher Columbus, not that I cared a copper blanca about Christopher Columbus.

“With Cerda,” Fray Juan said. “Still with Cerda.”

“And how is Benjamin Marino progressing with his map?” I reached for another subject.

“Slowly.” He clasped his hands around his knee and looked at the window and at the rain gushing against the stones, hiding the river while the sky lacerated the earth with lightning whips and the earth bellowed her protests in rolling thunder. For a long time he sat thus, and me straining, and then he said, “Ruat caelum! It is droll that Marino himself may be wrong. The earth is larger even than he thinks.”

“Aye?” It was amusing that my fray should challenge the great mapmaker. “That is droll.” I assumed he would not fathom the subtlety of my pun.

His eyes left the window and fastened on my face and he smiled. “Benjamin Marino is not the only learned cosmographer in the world.” I detected a yearning, a longing that I should know that he, too, was a man of letters, that this ugly specter and twisted Fury was one of God’s creatures and blessed in mind if denied in body. It was piteously sad and I was closer to him than ever before and could not leave him, even for Maraela, because he was so lonely.

“I was sent to the College of Seville——” The lie came easily. “I was sent to the Dominicans to profit by the knowledge of Fray Juan Ruiz de Medina.”

His fleeting pride, yea, sinful pride, was reward for my perjury and he smiled again. “Absolution for that lie is given of God and, therefore, I am spared the truth. And thou, little brother, will forgive my vanity.”

He was encroaching upon my time, stealing minutes from my hour of Paradise, but there was naught I could do and he betrayed no intention of going away. Another long pause and he said, “Aye. The earth is larger than Marino believes. Studious men have known since the days of Eratosthenes that the girth of our sphere is 26,000 miles. And Eratosthenes lived three hundred years before Christ.”

“A Greek?” My interest flared immediately.

“A Greek.” He nodded methodically. “A Western man, Rodrigo, and hence scorned by Semites. But all knowledge does not come from the East.” He stroked his chin and scratched his bare toe along the stones of my floor. “Eratosthenes measured the earth with a rod, a well, a pole, and a shadow.”

I leaned forward to catch every word and, seeing my heed, he spat out the bean hulls and wiped a trickle of saliva from the corners of his mouth. “This Greek was a librarian at Alexandria.” He arrayed his facts and recited them. “At Syene, 520 miles from Alexandria, was a well that was lighted to its bottom on the day of the summer solstice. So the sun was directly overhead.”

He peered at me, then continued. “Eratosthenes erected a pole at Alexandria and on the day of the solstice he measured the angle of the pole’s shadow. It was 7⅕ degrees. Know you that significance?”

“No,” I said truthfully.

“Then we will spend more time on mathematics and less on geography,” he mumbled, grating the words in obvious displeasure. “Aroint! Even a dullard should know that if Eratosthenes’ pole and Syene’s well were extended to the center of the earth they would meet at the same angle, or 7⅕ degrees. Now, how many degrees in a circle?”

“Three hundred and sixty.”

“Then the 7⅕-degree angle was 1/50th of a circle.” He bore in like a starving rat that has smelled food. “Hence, the distance between the pole and the well was 1/50th of the earth’s girth. Multiply the distance, 520 miles, by 50.”

“It comes to 26,000,” I said.

“Exactly.” He held out his left hand and it trembled as he extended his fingers rigidly for emphasis. “The Greek unit of measure was the stadium and we may have erred a trifle in changing the distance into miles. But let Christopher Columbus prattle of the Indies. Let Benjamin Marino scourge his brain for the secrets of the Ocean Sea. I tell you the earth’s circumference is 26,000 miles.” He clinched his fingers into a gnarled fist and struck his knee. “East by land, Cathay itself is less than one third that distance, even this far north of the Equator, and I am assuming a stingy figure. Hence, west by water, Cathay is at least 18,000 miles from Spain.”

The fires that Teacher Marino had kindled blazed again in me and time was without meaning. “Then Cathay is beyond our reach,” I said. “Westward by water.”

“Not at all, Rodrigo. Not at all.” He crossed over to the window and watched the rain, and the wind rustled his mantle and misted rain against his cheeks. “God commanded us to carry the sweet message of His Son to all men. Therefore, nothing is inaccessible, nothing impossible. There is land between here and Cathay and where you find land you will find men. And every man is your brother and his soul is your concern——”

This talk I did not relish. Geography, yes. Theology, no. And again I was vexed that he was poaching minutes from my hour of Paradise.

“The lands of the Unknown are a bridge to the Known.” He was mumbling again and his face was graven against the window and etched sharp by the lightning. “Marino speaks of islands to the west. And 700 leagues. Beshrew! There are masses of land out there or else God gave man merely a speck for his habitation. And that land is nearer than we dare believe. Ptolemy knew it and I shall teach it.”

His fervor was thoroughly Dominican, the zeal of Savonarola of the same order, who even then was shaking Italy into an ague of reformation.

“Eratosthenes,” I repeated the Greek’s name to remember it. “And 26,000 miles. Why has such knowledge been hidden from us, Fray Juan?”

“Nothing is hidden from those who seek.” It was spoken as though the opening of a parable and I resigned myself for a metaphorical harangue, and then he turned his back to the window and his face was in shadows while his head was lighted by the sky flames of the storm. “The tragedy of this age is man’s assumption of superiority and his scorn of Antiquity’s knowledge; our devastating conviction that we share the eldern earth and not its infancy. The Greeks, in many ways, were wiser.”

“And how?” I asked. “We have the blessings of Him dead and risen. They had only the promise.”

He left the window and stood by me and his artful eyes mapped my face in the manner of Inquisitors searching the conscience of man for one blemish of heresy. Was Fray Juan testing me? Were the fingers of the Inquisition feeling for a broken link in my Christian armor? The ears of the Inquisition against my breast to count the heartbeats of my conformity? I was bewildered, but I spoke out as an Andalusian and the son of the son of a Goth. “What is this meaning, elder brother? Why were the Greeks wiser? Is heathen ignorance the master of Christian wisdom?”

“What a Dominican you would make.” He muttered the dictum, but I heard it, and I heard clearly what followed and measured the dogmatism for its meaning; for he said, “The Greeks bound their gods to events and discoveries. We bind events to our God and suffer the stupefaction of the Philistines.”

These words from the Queen’s Inquisitor! This could be a mesh to ensnare me and immediately, aye, instinctively, I recited my remonstrance. “That is Dissension, Fray Juan. And I call upon you to witness that, at sound of the words, I invoked my protest.”

His answer was as calm as a summer dawn in the Sierra de los Santos. “Dissension?” He tasted the accusation and it obviously was insipid. “You retreat into mild expression, Rodrigo, for my words were heresy.”

I stared at him, my mouth gaping and my tongue cloven. This was no artifice of the Inquisition’s cunning. This man was speaking Truth as he knew Truth and was chancing his life to teach me that Truth, for in those days the voice of any accuser could indict at Quemadero’s tribunal; the voice of the turtle-dove had loosed the lions in the street.

It came to me then why Juan Ruiz de Medina was ever a friar and never a prior, why Torquemada was Inquisitor-General and my tutor was only a lance bearer in the Army of Purification. This man was a Dissenter, one of those Dominicans who, like Savonarola, dared cry repentance and reformation above the ashes of Quemadero’s wrath.

He had handed me a quill for his Doomsday Book and I pretended naïvete and wanted only to be away from that place of gloom and wormwood and into the sweet presence of Maraela. “My fray,” I said with measured dignity, “is a man of exquisite discretion whose prudence I pray to reflect. He also is a man of consummate justice and so, therefore, I presume to remind him that this is Friday afternoon and already much of my respite has passed.”

“On a day such as this?” He flung his arm toward the window and the storm outside. “Would you brave such weather for a brief recess?”

“It is my right,” I said.

“You may see your father tomorrow. I grant it. But not today——”

“It is my right,” I repeated firmly.

He drew closer to me as though there was something he would say and then, after cogitation, he drew away again and was stern and aloof. “Aye, Rodrigo of Triana. It is your right.”

One glance he gave to the Historia Rerum on the bench and another glance he gave to me, and was gone, leaving open the door between my stall and the grilled exit of the monastery. Quickly I pulled my jacket tight around my neck and dashed to the street, and raced to my father’s shop, hugging the walls along the way to shield myself from heaven’s anger of torrent and thunder.

My father was not there and the ledger was not on his desk.

And the gloom of evening was fast upon the land, and the sun going down into the riddle of the Unknown.

I hurried to the back room and old Mudarra was on his knees and scrubbing the floor and this, indeed, a mockery of his pride. He was startled by my sudden attendance, and to conceal his surprise he blurted his acrimony. “What here, Dominican scamp? Only fools and fish breast this weather.”

“Where is my father?” I was in no mood for his disdain and my voice bespoke my temper.

He straightened and hurled the scrub rag into a corner and under the cask. “He went out with Amerigo Vespucci and it is obvious that the storm caught him.”

“The ledger is not on the desk——”

“Then he does not want you to take it to Harana. That, too, is obvious, or should be.” He growled the judgment and sat his bench, pumping his wheel furiously and glancing about the floor and then at me.

I returned to the salesroom and sprawled in my father’s chair and was taken with a seizure of disgust and anger. The day was away and my liberty was up and, even if I chose to violate my monasterial duties, I had no acceptable excuse to disturb Harana in his own home and thereby see Maraela.

But urgencies always sharpened my wits and I opened the desk and there was the ledger and it was posted to that day. I assumed an oversight on my father’s part, that he simply had forgot to leave the book on the desk, yet knowing the assumption was only a balm for my conscience. A fie on conscience! Bell and book for the monastery and a candle for Fray Juan Ruiz de Medina! I shoved the ledger under my jacket and walked boldly out of the shop and was aware that Mudarra could not hear my departure above the gush and clatter of the storm and the whirl of his potter’s wheel.

The rain beat upon my hunched shoulders and I darted down the narrow alleys and along the riverway to the Street of Felicity. The cymbal shone yellow in the Furies’ celestial lanterns and I swung the clapper, but the clapper of heaven’s thunder drowned all earthly noises. Again I swung the clapper and again its echo melted into the thunder.

Instinctively, and without second thought, I felt for the latch and it loosened, and I stepped into the hallway to call Harana and announce my presence.

Mother of Mercy! My very guts quivered into a nauseous jelly of dismay and I was seized in a spasm of horror.

The dining table was adorned by a spotless white cloth and there sat Harana, the prayer shawl of Israel over his head, and Maraela with a taper, lighting the candles and shielding each with her hand in the tradition of Jewish women since the Babylonian exile.

Judaizing!

A gust through the open door flickered the candles and she looked up the hallway and saw me, and dropped the taper in paralytic terror. Then Harana saw me and shrieked his lament and snatched her hand. “The door! You did not bolt the door! We are lost!”

In his piteous bewilderment he bowed his neck and began chanting the Kol Nidre, the Atonement prayer, the plea for release from his vows; part wail, part psalm, and all sorrow.

Maraela yanked tight the drapes to the dining room and ran up the hall and flung herself on me, scratching and screaming. “Beast of cloven hooves! Vile seed of Haman!”

Her nails raked my face like the claws of Triana’s prowling cats and I threw up my arms to protect myself and all the while calling her to her senses. “Maraela! Maraela!”

“Swine and sperm of swine! Conception of iniquity! Filth of the Inquisition! Dominican spy!” She spewed the words at me and beat my chest with her sweet hands until I seized her wrists and made myself heard.

“Silence, Maraela! Silence this madness!” I shook her to free her from the devils that had possessed her. “Your secret is safe.”

She stared at me and her eyes were wide in the imploration of her hope and then her eyes were closed and she sobbed her rending anguish. “Rodrigo. Rodrigo mine.”

I held her head to my breast and stroked her hair. “Could I betray my love?” I asked in staunch resolution. “Could I behead my dreams with treachery’s foul sword and scatter them on the barren ground of my own perfidy?” My assurance comforted her and I felt the waning convulsions of her terror. “Better that I tear out my own heart and hurl it to the passion of Quemadero than that I should pain the heart of my beloved.”

She looked up at me, searching my face, and the panic was gone from her eyes and they were pleading. “Say you this?” she implored.

“This I say.”

“Then swear.”

“I swear.”

Like a frightened bird with a broken wing she darted into the big room and snatched the poniard and sheath from the wall and raised the hilt to my lips. “By this you swear. This, the Cross.”

“By this I swear,” I said and kissed the Cross and the words of its admonition: “Trust God and hammer on!”

She thrust it into my hand and rested her head on my shoulder and close to my ear, and whispered, “Then wear it, Rodrigo of Triana, that the Cross of your faith and the steel of your honor may remind you forever of your vow.”

And now I was as guilty as she and must share her guilt, for the secret of heresy was as heinous as its practice and the Inquisition tolerated no distinction between information concealed and apostasy done.

Her lips touched my ear in a caress of dew and she abandoned herself to my arms, suddenly whimpering and crushing my mouth and biting my cheeks and neck in frenzied bliss. The manliness of my breed scorned place and time and I imprisoned her in my embrace and looked from her to the couch, and she felt my resolve and slipped from the bonds of my rapture.

“You must depart.” She opened the door and the rain misted her hair in glorious adornment and the wind sealed her raiment to her thighs and belly. “I must attend my father, Rodrigo. Farewell.”

She encouraged me through the doorway, gently pushing, and closed the portal and I stumbled down the passageway to the Street of Felicity and the rain smarted my cheeks where her frantic nails had ripped my flesh before she kissed away the pain.

My first thought was of my father, to protect him from any knowledge that his associate was a Judaizing converso, and I concocted a story that Harana had not answered my knock and that I had taken refuge from the storm and had fallen on the cobblestones in my haste to return.

Woe the lies of youth. How foolish the conspiracies of heart and tongue.

My father was waiting for me at his desk and one glance dissipated my intent for deception; the haggard lines of his face and the indictment of his eyes. Besides, the poniard was at my hip and how could I pretend I had not entered the Harana home.

He motioned me to the bench and glanced quickly toward the back room to be sure the drapes were drawn between us and Mudarra. Some of the dread that I had first noticed on my father’s countenance began to disappear and he said impassively, “Now you know.”

I did not reply. I could not.

“This I would have spared you, my son, And the sin is mine.”

“Yours?” The poignancy of my question touched him and his visage changed to infinite tenderness.

“Aye, mine.” He nodded the verdict. “I have known all along that the Haranas are Christians by day and Jews by night. But I needed Luis and Luis needed me and it might have worked had not the heart of my son and the heart of his daughter become entwined in the mystery of youth’s first love.”

“I should not have gone there tonight.” I sought solace for him in my own condemnation. “The ledger was not here. I opened your desk.”

He got up and stood tall before me, he an Andalusian and the son of a Goth. “Never look back, Rodrigo, at the bridgeless chasm you have crossed. I should have been here to forbid your impetuosity. This day is the Feast of Purim, when Jews commemorate their deliverance from Haman, and the fealty of Esther, and the guile of their vengeance on their enemies.”

I stood, too, and my head was as high as his and my shoulders as broad. “I have sealed my lips.” The poniard was in my hand and I held it before him. “By this Cross I have sworn.”

“Reckless warrant of love’s duress.” He flung up his arms in a gesture of exasperation. “Now you have the stain of their guilt. Even as I.” He took the poniard and its sheath and put them in his desk and looked hard at me again and there was a glint of pride in his eyes. “But by the sky gods of your Gothic forebears, a man is born a man.” He clasped his hand on my shoulder. “Alert, my son! The eyes of your tutor, of your own confessor, are mirrors for the Inquisition.”

I nodded toward the back room and asked, “And what of Mudarra?”

“Mudarra has no tongue for Quemadero’s ears. Now to your monastery and we will choose our course on the morrow. Begone in haste, rash youth! before the tempest of my apprehension rises to the tempest of this night that bedevils us.”

I ran all the way to the monastery, panting and stumbling when I reached the door, and it was closed. Vespers had passed and the cloisters were still and I pounded on the door and Juan Ruiz de Medina clattered free the bolt and let me in.

Straightway I went to my quarters, pretending petulance and disgust, and straightway he came to me and put his candle on my bench and studied me in the yellow light of the revealing flame. Then he spake: “You were delayed by the storm, perhaps. It was most violent.”

“Yes.” I rubbed my hand across my face and the scratches were tender. “And very dark. The streets are slippery and the rose thorns sharp along the way.” Let him think what he would, that I had been brawling or whoring.

He reached for the candle and the yellow light was in his yellow eyes. “You will fast tomorrow and remain in your quarters all of next week. Even Friday.”

“Yes, my fray.”

He stepped into the corridor and there he paused and looked back at me. “Shall I confess thee tonight, little brother?”

“If you choose.” My eyes did not waver.

“It is for you to say, Rodrigo of Triana.”

“There is no sin on my soul, Fray Juan.” It was a lie to him and not to the Holy Ghost.

“Then good night, and peace attend you.”

His shuffling footfalls sounded down the corridor and I crept to my straw. The storm was rumbling its death and I lay wild-eyed and watched the lightning exhaust itself from fiery tongue into meek aurora; and then to sleep.