Yiddish for Pirates(14)
“They were the centre of the compass. Where I was travelling from. What do I have left—an accent and a memory of my father’s book?”
Moishe described a shul ceremony. On the bima, the dais, the Torah was passed hand to hand and embraced from dor l’dor, generation to generation. He recalled his father telling him that Jews were “the people of the book”—books were akin to blood, something that allowed them to live forever.
“So what did I do? Pitched my father’s book into the sea. Zay gezunt, eternal life. Hey, sea cucumbers and shiksa mermaids, here’s all you need. I might as well have dropped my parents into the sea. Never mind eternal life, they have no life and where was I?”
Near Andalusian territory, a shlemiel with a stringy beard stood by the side of the road and invited us to kick his tuches for the price of a few small coins. I suspect he was often compelled to give away his service for free. We stayed overnight in a selection of inns or, to tell the emes truth, in their barns. Each night, after an evening observing the rich variety of human knots becoming unravelled at the inn, we found our way to the sweet scuttling of the barns. Sometimes there were others there: a variety of the bedless and transient, those shlumpers left trailing behind the promise of their own better futures. I encountered no other parrots, but we’re not usually companions for those bound inland, unless they’re buoyed by the jewelled palanquin of privilege and can afford feathered marvels.
Moishe paid with Don Abravanel’s coins, never allowing more than one to be visible at a time. He kept some in his shoes, some strapped to his leg, some beside his own family jewels.
Outside the city, with the sun still seeping like a wound over the Andalusian mountains, we came across what we thought to be a festival procession, loud with bright colour and the wailing, singing and shouting of thousands. Enormous crosses held high, a parade of priests, monks, and the powerful riding in carriages and on huge horses dressed in silks and resembling cantering four-poster beds.
A bright and horrifying line followed. What appeared to be a troupe of clowns savagely beaten and now muttering, weeping, mad, or silent.
They trudged barefoot, arrayed in red, yellow or black sacks covered in a bestiary of demons emerging from amid the lewd tongues of painted flame, pointed and insane. Each clown surmounted with a peaked hat emblazoned with still more fire. Some robes were drawn-and-quartered by a gash-red cross, as if Father-Son-and-Holy-Ghosted by sword. Man, woman and child, each carried a green or yellow candle, and walked with a noose around the neck, macabre neckties dressing them with a grim and dark formality. At the end of the procession, several men, beaten until barely more than stew, carried in cages pulled by mules.
An auto-da-fé, part of the newly created made-in-Spain Inquisition. Bartolemeo’s master had warned us about this, but, oy, a broch, this was persecution dressed like the birthday party of the boy Satan.
People lined the streets bawling religious songs.
“The Jews,” a man shouted. “Those vermin caused the plague.”
We pushed our way into the crowd, wishing and not wishing to see more of this demonic circus. A girl, but a season older than Moishe—dark curls beneath a coloured scarf—sobbed beside us, tear-soaked face half-covered with a handkerchief.
“My father,” she whispered. She gestured toward a rickety man in one of the cages. He gripped the bars, held himself in a crouch. His frail head with its wispy beard and sallow face bobbed as the cage moved forward. He was saying something, singing weakly, but in the din we could not understand.
Moishe turned from the procession, looked steadily at her, but said nothing.
Ach, what could you say?
Sorry?
As long as you have your health?
I lost my father, too?
Men, women, children. All threw rotten food and dreck that dripped from those in the cages. The girl’s father did not respond but kept muttering, clinging to the bars.
The crowd walked alongside the procession and Moishe, the girl and I followed. We arrived at a large square outside the city walls. On a large platform, the rich, the aristocratic, the clergy.
Four huge statues of Old Testament prophets stood mutely at each corner, their blind eyes staring grimly into the crowd.
The quemadero. The place of execution.
“The architect for this place,” the girl said, indicating a tall man in a black robe. “But a Jew first.”
A priest in red robes climbed the few stairs to a raised dais on the platform, and began to proclaim, “If a man does not keep himself in Me, he becomes dead and is severed like a dry branch; such branches are taken up and put in the fire and burned. John, chapter fifteen, verse six. We know what should become of these heretics.”
“Laudamus Te” from the choir. The crowd joined in. All around us: “We praise, we bless, we worship, we glorify.”
Several of the condemned fell to their knees, weeping.
Perhaps they did not like the musical selection.
Then they confessed their heresy, the secret Judaizing of their deeds and hearts, their repentance.
“We accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our saviour for the wages of sin are death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
They collapsed before the platform, watering the ground with their tears.
Soldiers strode toward the centre of the quemadero.
“Stand,” a sergeant ordered. The penitants staggered up or were hauled. Then briskly, the soldiers reached around their necks with a red silk cord and strangled them.