forgiveness!”
Apparently, the objective of the boys’ game is to unceremoniously score direct hits into her beloved limestone cross.
When he notices my presence, a weedy boy with pale-green eyes yells at her in a prideful voice, “
The kids laugh. The nun keeps shrieking: “Your sins will lead you to marriage with the Devil’s whores! And your children will all be born eyeless and deaf, with horned tails. Then you will…”
It appears to be a memorized litany, how she responds to this torture every day. Perhaps it is her penance.
I grab the ball when it bounces down the hill my way.
“Hey, give that back!” the kids yell. Their faces are full and furious with irritation.
“Just tell me if you’ve seen a foreigner,” I reply.
“Ain’t nothing but foreigners around here. Give us back the fucking ball!”
“A man with blond hair down to his shoulders. A cape with…”
One points a stubby, dirty finger. “Went up the hill like a spider,” he says.
I drop-kick the ball toward the cross. A near miss. The kids cheer, then chase screaming after it as it rolls back down the scree.
At the top of the hill, out of breath, I face the flying buttresses of the Convento da Graca as if at the Gates of Mystery. On the other side of the street blooms a marketplace. I ask tripesellers and sievemakers, combmakers and birdcageweavers, even a family of Castilian hunchbacks making a pilgrimage to Santiago, but no one has seen him.
As a last resort, I dare to approach the screeching nun. She has one brown tooth that sticks like a rotten dagger into her bottom lip, eyelids like prunes, a scabbed nose. She pauses in her litany long enough to speak in a tone of wisdom offered, “Search for God, not Northerners.”
When I repeat what one of the waifs told her to do, she shrieks like a Brazilian parrot.
Back in Little Jerusalem, I discuss with Farid where to take Simon’s body. Unfortunately, we have no clear idea where his house is. Based on his occasional descriptions of views over the Tagus, we’ve always assumed that he lived on the escarpment crowned by the Church of Santa Catarina outside the western gates of the city. So we borrow a wheelbarrow from Senhora Martins, a friend of my aunt, and begin to trundle the body through the afternoon sun.
Do people stare as we go? I don’t know; an inner world of questions and regrets gives me sanctuary. Farid leads us. All I feel is the drudgery of climbing uphill, a vague, distasteful sense of heat and sweat, sun and dust. I only awake to the jarring white angles of Lisbon when we hear Simon’s name called. To the east, the bell tower of the Santa Catarina church is arrowing into the blue sky. A stocky woman with a dull face, wearing a white headscarf, runs to us shrieking. She stares in horror at the blood on Simon’s clothing. She kneels vomiting. An old man tells me that she is the older sister of Simon’s common-law wife. He points to a sagging townhouse. “They live on the second floor.”
My mood of disbelief deepens and seems to lower me from the scene. Simon’s lover is thin and olive- skinned, possesses a natural, precise elegance as she invites us in, is strikingly strong in profile for such a young woman. She has intelligent eyes, wears a loose-fitting rose-colored tunic. There is an understated regality about her which reminds me of Reza. But almost a girl she is. “This is Graca, Simon’s wife,” the sister says.
Graca runs to the window to see Simon when I tell her of his fate. Her hands grip the sill. Her howls come animal in their intensity, as if she is calling for her missing cub in a language of the gut. She hugs her belly, and I realize in an instant of sinking despair that she is pregnant. When her first waves of horror have subsided, I say, “Yours was the last name sculpted by his lips.”
We descend to the street. People back away. She falls to her knees and caresses Simon’s face, soothes him with talk of Christ and their child to be. I realize then what should have been obvious; she is an Old Christian.
With a desperate, protective force, Graca is suddenly tugged by her sister toward Farid and me. “Tell us every detail of Simon’s death!” she demands.
I explain in a voice belonging to another; Berekiah has fled deep inside the armor of my body.
Graca is unable to speak. Her mouth drops open, and her eyes show a hollow despair. The sister asks with clenched fists, “Where do we get justice?”
I shake my head. “When I find this Northerner, I will let you know.”
Farid and I are covered in Simon’s blood. Kind neighbors help us wash, give us new shirts and pouches, feed us cheese and wine. Too weak to protest, we accept their offerings. Sluggish from drink, wavering in our walk, we slip down into central Lisbon as if leaving behind a Biblical landscape.
After we’ve returned our wheelbarrow, we wander through Little Jerusalem like ghosts. In front of the dyer’s workshop where our Jewish courthouse used to be, I begin to spell “Abraham” in Hebrew with my steps. Then, “Judah.” Farid becomes restless after a time. He stops, faces east like a weather vane. “Let’s go home,” he signals.
I turn to the west to follow the sun’s descent over this accursed city. Tonight, a week from the onset of Passover, we should be escorting the Zohar into the dawn with our recitations. But we no longer have a copy of the sacred text. And even if we did… “No, not home!” I shout in my wine-scented voice. I trudge on until we are standing over Simon’s bloodstain on the cobbles of Little Jerusalem. “A short time ago, this brown crust was in his body,” I signal to Farid. He shakes his head as if this is obvious. But I simply can’t believe it, and I recall the day in reverse—as if reading a text from the wrong direction. Simon’s warning about the Count of Almira is spoken to me as if accompanied by a cadence played by Moorish tambourines.
Farid says with his hands, “Let’s get back to the Alfama. We’ve got to somehow find Diego… warn him that the Northerner will surely kill him if he finds him.”
“No, Diego won’t go near his home, and we won’t be able to locate him. We’re going to the Estaus Palace.” When he shakes his head, I take his arm. “I need you with me. No protests.”
As Farid and I enter the Rossio, ash and wood flakes from the pyres in which the Jews were burnt blow around us. At first, it seems that this is the only vestige remaining from the mountain of Christian sin, and I think:
Farid notices, however, that this is not quite true. “Look down,” he signals, and he points with his foot toward a seam in the cobbles. Human teeth. There must be thousands scattered in the square, trapped in cracks and edges. I look up and notice that women and children are kneeling everywhere, picking up these remains as if it were harvest time. Undoubtedly, they will save them as talismans against the plague.
Ahead of us, at the northeast rim of the square, a regiment of royal footsoldiers has cordoned off the Church of Sao Domingos by forming a semi-circle in front of its entrance. Behind them is a row of cavaliers, perhaps twenty in all.
“A compromise must have been struck by the governor with the Dominican hierarchy to let them into Lisbon,” Farid signals to me.
“When all the killing is over, the Crown sends in troops,” I reply. “Very comforting to know that he supports us so courageously, no?”
As we walk on, I see townspeople standing in poses of respect who only a day or two before would have called for King Manuel’s head.
A crafty-eyed old woman looking to make conversation as people do in the face of regal authority, stops us, says, “Two of the Dominican friars have been arrested. Isn’t it terrible?”
I raise my middle finger over her and chant, “May your wicked soul wander the Lower Realms forever!”
When she shows disdain for me with her Christian eyes, I spit at her feet. We rush on. At the front gate to the Estaus Palace, two burly crossbowmen stand flanking a dandified doorman in a feathered cap. Beyond the gate’s metalwork, in the shade of an orange grove, rest three carriages. One of them, painted white with gold, is the vehicle I remember from the day of Diego’s injury.
“The Count of Almira will see me,” I tell the doorman. “Pray inform him that Pedro Zarco has arrived.”
“Have you correspondence to this effect?” he asks, his face twisting as if he’s had a whiff of something rotten.
