money changers and merchants he had worked with, including Hasdai Crescas. At first he was opposed to it, and made no secret of his position whenever Arnau opened his purse to lend money to one of the many workmen who seemed to need it.
“Don’t they pay? Don’t they return all our money?” Arnau asked him.
“But they don’t pay any interest,” Guillem objected. “That money could be making a profit.”
“How often have you told me we should buy a palace, that we should be living in more luxury than we do? How much would that cost, Guillem? You know it’s infinitely more than all the sums I’ve lent to these people.”
Guillem was forced to keep quiet. Above all, because it was true. Arnau lived modestly in his house on the corner of Canvis Nous and Canvis Vells. The only thing he spent money on was Mar’s education. The girl went to a merchant friend’s house to learn from the tutors there, and also at Santa Maria.
It had not been long before the commission of works of the church had come to ask Arnau for funds as well.
“I already have a chapel,” Arnau told them when they suggested he might like to dedicate one of the side chapels. “Yes,” he said when they looked at him in surprise, “my chapel is the Jesus Chapel, the one the
“How much do you need? How much could you make do with? Will this be enough?” These were questions Guillem had to get used to hearing. As people started greeting him on the street, smiled at him, and thanked him whenever he was on the beach or in La Ribera neighborhood, he came to accept Arnau’s approach. “Perhaps he’s right,” he began to think. Arnau was constantly giving to others, but had he not done the same with him and the three Jewish children who were about to be stoned, complete strangers to him? If Arnau had been different, he, Raquel, and Jucef would in all likelihood have been killed. Why should he change now, just because he was rich? So Guillem, just like Arnau, began to smile at everyone he met and to thank strangers who made way for him in the street.
Yet some decisions Arnau had taken over the years seemed to have nothing to do with that attitude. It was logical enough that he should refuse to take part in the slave trade, but, Guillem wondered, why did he sometimes turn down opportunities that had nothing to do with slaves?
At the beginning, Arnau simply announced his decision:
“I’m not convinced.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I don’t understand it.”
On one such occasion, the Moor’s patience was exhausted.
“It’s a good opportunity, Arnau,” he said as the traders left their countinghouse. “What’s wrong? Sometimes you reject things that would bring us a good profit. I don’t understand. I know I have no right to—”
“Yes, you have,” Arnau butted in, without turning toward him. “I’m sorry, it’s just that...” Guillem waited for him to make up his mind. “Look, I will never have anything to do with a deal that involves Grau Puig. I never want to see my name associated with his.”
Arnau stared straight in front of him, somewhere in the distance.
“Will you tell me why one day?”
“Why not?” mused Arnau. He turned to him and began to explain all that had happened between him and the Grau family.
GUILLEM KNEW GRAU Puig, because he had worked with Hasdai Crescas. The Moor wondered why, when Arnau was so adamant about having nothing to do with him, the baron seemed willing to do business with him. Could it be, after all that Arnau had told him, that he did not feel the same way?
“Why?” he asked Hasdai Crescas one day, after he had briefly told him Arnau’s story, confident it would not leave those four walls.
“Because there are many people who will not have any dealings with Grau Puig. I haven’t done so for some time now. And there are lots more like me. He’s a man obsessed with being somewhere he was not born to be. While he was an artisan, you could trust him, but now ... now he is aiming for something else. He did not really know what he was doing when he married a noblewoman.” Hasdai shook his head. “To be a noble you have to have been born one. You have to have drunk it with your mother’s milk. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, or trying to defend it, but that’s the way the nobility survives and succeeds in overcoming the difficulties of their position. Besides, if a Catalan baron is ruined, who would dare challenge him? They are proud, arrogant even, born to give orders and to feel they are superior to everyone else, even when they are ruined. But Grau Puig has managed to become a noble only through his money. He spent a fortune on his daughter Margarida’s dowry, and that has almost bankrupted him. All Barcelona is aware of it! People laugh at him behind his back, and his wife knows it! What is a simple artisan doing living in a palace on Calle de Montcada? The more people laugh at him, the more he has to prove himself by spending more. What would Grau Puig be without money?”
“You mean to say that... ?”
“I don’t mean to say anything, but I won’t have any dealings with him. In that sense, if for a different reason, your master is quite right.”
From then on, Guillem paid particular attention to any conversation where Grau Puig’s name came up. At the exchange, the Consulate of the Sea, in business deals, when goods were being bought or sold, or during general conversations about the trade situation, the baron’s name featured far too often.
“His son, Genis Puig... ,” he said to Arnau one day after coming back from the exchange, as they stood gazing at the sea, which seemed calmer and gentler than ever. When he heard the name, Arnau turned sharply to his companion. “Genis Puig has had to ask for a loan on easy terms in order to follow the king to Mallorca.” Were Arnau’s eyes gleaming? Guillem looked at him steadily. He had not said anything, but wasn’t that a gleam in his eye? “Do you want to know more?”
Arnau still said nothing, but eventually nodded. His eyes had narrowed, and his lips were drawn in a tight line. He nodded again as he heard the details from Guillem.
“Do you give me authority to take all the decisions I consider necessary?” asked the Moor.
