This hidden stigma made him sensitive to the words he heard in church, equally condemnatory of Jews and Muslims, and by the time he turned fourteen he had developed a painful resentment of his family and its history of capitulation to the deadly ultimatums of the Castilian Catholic clergy.
Increasingly critical of what he perceived as an ignorant cowardice, he left home for the new world, cursed by his family for abandoning his obligation to subservience. As he walked the streets of Castile for the last time, he decided he would adopt the ancient Levi family surname and thereafter call himself “Marano,” which was a insulting term reserved by the Castilians for Jews who covertly maintained their heritage, despite the dangerous brand they had been given as Christ-killers.
The curse bestowed on him by his family increased his resolve to never return to the repressed, dark, and angry milieu of that small hilltop home.
He walked all the way to Barcelona, determined to make a new life for himself. After a year of enterprising hard work, he saved enough to buy passage on a trading ship to Veracruz, Mexico. There he applied his energy and bargaining skills, again saving carefully so that he might ultimately purchase his own land to farm north in the rich and fertile American Texas territory.
Before he could save enough to do so, however, he found himself conscripted along with thousands of less industrious but equally hapless men into Santa Anna’s new army. He could not buy his way out from the servitude.
Fortunately, because he had learned to cook in Spain and could do many other things well such as repair shoes, tame horses, and cut beautiful carvings from the abundant indigenous mesquite, he caught the attention of one of Santa Anna’s staff orderlies and became a valued member of the generalissimo’s officers’ camp.
That was a comfortable position, and within a few months, he had been promoted to the rank of corporal. The advantage proved short lived, for a few weeks later the entire army began a long, exhausting forced march to northern Mexico to confront Winfield Scott’s American army. Five thousand men perished in that brutal trek across the barren plains of central Mexico, and an exhausted army prepared itself for battle against a smaller but well-equipped and well-fed American force.
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In the 1847 battle of Cerro Gordo, as the result of a brilliant tactical exploration by a young captain named Robert E. Lee, Winfield Scott’s dragoons flanked Santa Anna, forcing the Mexican hidden artillery to fire prematurely, revealing their positions to Scott’s frontal assault forces. Scott thereby successfully flushed Santa Anna’s well-ensconced army from a high ground position, and panic turned to bloody pandemonium.
With his defeated army in disarray, Santa Anna narrowly escaped, leaving behind in his haste all his personal effects including his best wooden leg—one which Marano had been entrusted to repair.
Seizing this as his only opportunity to survive a merciless slaughter, Marano stripped off his uniform and, speaking in the wayfarer English he had taught himself while working in a Veracruz cantina, showed the ornately carved prosthesis to a young Illinois lieutenant. Thus, carrying the carving held high before him, Marano was escorted through the American lines to the headquarters of Scott, to whom he surrendered the trophy.
In the confused jubilation of the victorious American camp, Marano was able to make his way out of the territory, safely distancing himself from both armies.
A week later, riding a wild mustang he had lassoed, he crossed the Rio Grande and wisely kept heading north, thus avoiding the Comanche territory he knew many Mexican army refugees would attempt to transverse.
When he reached the Missouri River, he attached himself to a wagon train headed west for California, where gold had been discovered.
His luck changed there again—for while working atop a flag pole during a tempestuous San Francisco spring storm, he was struck by lightning. He remained in a coma for three weeks, cared for by two Irish Catholic Dominican nuns who saw the incident and, finding papers on him that identified him as Marano Levi, apostate Jew, baptized him back into Christianity.
When he awoke, he was mostly deaf and had forgotten all but his name and some of the native Spanish he had known as a child. Thus, at the age of twenty-two, he began his life anew as Marano Levi, Christian convert.
The nuns developed great affection for Marano and watched over him as best they could, providing him with tasks and an allowance that would sustain him. But they worried about his ability to survive on his own, for although he seemed intelligent enough when focused on a task, he was constantly distracted by small fits that left him for several minutes with a trance-like staring affect.
He never was observed in a conniption, but more than once he was robbed of all of his possessions, including his shoes, during the quiet seizure. None of their prayers, poultices, or incantations cured him. During such episodes, he just stopped functioning altogether.
The nuns even tried a concoction provided by a well-regarded Chinese herbalist, who told them it would work only if Marano took the expensive mixture twice a day for several weeks.
He did so but without success; in fact, the fits seemed to increase in frequency.
When their order reassigned them to move from San Francisco, the sisters arranged for Marano to be attached to the service of an aging, frail French Jesuit missionary who needed an assistant for a mission assignment to convert aborigines in the savage Vancouver territory.
Six months later, Marano Levi made his way north with the black robe. The pair travelled together for eighteen months, and during that time, Marano seldom spoke.
He observed carefully, however, and came to understand his master’s compulsive devotion to Jesus. The priest awoke every morning before dawn, said his Mass, prayed for an hour afterward, ate a meager breakfast, then proceeded
