“We’re going to see Margaret Santangel. She’s sort of a relative.” Jerry started to look at her aunt. “Keep your eyes on the road. You’re not that good yet. And shift. The grade gets steep here.” Jerry pushed in the clutch, shifted, and then eased up on the clutch. She was getting better. “Margaret—let me see. She’s a relative on your great-grandfather’s side, I think. There were some cousins—Navajo ones that married into some Pueblos. I can’t remember. Anyhow they’re having some corn dance or something up here. Lot of tourists come. So I’m bringing them up some bread to freeze. Tourists don’t know whether it’s been frozen or not. Give the fresh stuff to Margaret. She’s a nice gal.”
Gal! Jerry wondered. If Margaret Santangel was a gal, Jerry thought, she herself must be an embryo. Margaret was the absolutely oldest person that Jerry had ever seen. She was almost as dark as a prune and about as wrinkled. Her legs appeared to bow into a near O in her loose-fitting pants, and she wore a sweatshirt that said “Go Tigers.” Her house in the pueblo on top of the mesa was small and neat as a pin.
“Do you like Twinkies, dear?” the old woman asked. Jerry wasn’t sure what she meant, but she nodded, and Margaret went into her kitchen and brought out a cellophane package. Indeed inside was one of the small buns filled with cream.
“How can you eat that crap, Margaret, when I bring you good pueblo bread?” Constanza demanded.
“My teeth, they been hurting.”
“What teeth?”
Margaret giggled. “Well, it’s the gums in between the two I have.” She grinned and turned toward Jerry. Margaret’s gums were the exact color of blue corn.
“So you’re not going to eat my bread?”
“No, of course I will. I dunk it and it’s just fine. But youngsters like Twinkies. I keep them on hand for my grandchildren.”
There was a knock on the door. Margaret said something in a language that Jerry didn’t understand. The door swung open and another lady nearly as old as Margaret entered. Margaret began speaking in the strange language. Constanza seemed to know the lady and joined in. Then Constanza turned to Jerry. “They’re speaking Tewa—Old Tewa.” She then turned back to the woman who just arrived. “Grace, this is my niece Jerry.” Grace smiled and bobbed her head and then resumed talking in Tewa. Margaret brought out some more Twinkies and some of the bread that Constanza had brought and put on a tea kettle.
The women continued to babble away in Tewa. Jerry couldn’t help but wonder how, if Margaret was such a distant relative, Constanza had learned to speak this language. Margaret got up to get a picture of one of her grandchildren. The framed photograph rested on the mantle between a crucifix and two funny little figurines no more than four or five inches tall caught in some antic dance. “Ah, you like my koshare doll?” Margaret didn’t wait for Jerry to ask what a koshare doll was. “Everyone makes big fusses about kachina dolls. Me, I like the koshares—the mischief dolls, Delight Makers, some call them. They do everything we might want to do but are scared to try. See this one. The two are dancing and he’s trying to peek under her skirts and she’s about to kick him.” All the old ladies laughed heartily. “I got a golfer one too in the back room. He’s a cute fellow. But I don’t play golf. I might give it to a nephew who’s got the golf bug.” Margaret sighed. “I like the koshare dances at the corn festival. Those are the best. You know they do everything that is rude. Not real nasty. Not devil nasty—not white-guy religion—just rude and funny—old Pueblo religion. Here, let me get this one down for you so you can have a look.” As she walked by the table, she brushed against the plate with the Twinkies and bread on it and it fell to the floor and shattered. “Oh, my my my! So clumsy.” She went to get a broom and dustpan. Before she could really think, Jerry jumped up.
“I’ll do that.” The words slipped out easily. She took the broom and began sweeping the pieces into a pile near the door. She bent down and swept the pile into the dustpan, but then there were a few little bits and pieces of dust. Jerry put her hand on the door and began to open it to sweep out the rest.
“Oh no!” Constanza said, and then stopped herself suddenly. She began scratching the thin patch on her head.
“What’s the matter?” Margaret asked.
Jerry looked at her aunt. “Oh, just an old superstition. Never brush dirt across the threshold,” Constanza replied.
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes!” Grace batted the air with her hand. “I had an old aunt, over in Tucumcari. She did the same thing. Used to scold me all the time. Never sweep dirt out the door!”
“Margaret,” Constanza said suddenly. “Jerry’s been asking me ’bout old times.”
“What old times?” Margaret said, fiddling with the skirt of the koshare doll.
“Oh, you know, way back. You know any of those stories when those folks came up here from the Yucatán, that kind of stuff?”
“You mean real old times, them folk that came before New Mexico was even New Mexico—all just Mexico, I think. All Spanish. I dunno,” she said, still fussing with the koshare doll. “I get them all mixed up. You know they marry into this family and that, some go into pueblos, others with Navajos, others marry Spanish. You go up to the old cemetery. You see some of them stones.” She put down the doll and looked up. “Yeah, some of them stones got those six-pointed stars.” She touched her index fingers and her thumbs together to make a triangle. “You know a triangle right side up and one upside-down. What do they call them stars?”
“Star of Davis,” Grace said.
“Yeah, yeah, something like that, Star of Davis.”
“Star of David,” Jerry said softly.
“Yeah, maybe, maybe that’s it. Sounds more right, doesn’t it. Star of David.” Margaret nodded. Then she put her fingers to the side of her head and gave a little tap to her skull. “I’m trying to think. I recall having a koshare doll one time with one of them stars hanging off its neck. Think I traded it, though.”
They chatted on for a few more minutes, and then Constanza said they had better be getting along.
“You come back now, Jerry. I promise I’ll try and remember to talk more English.” Margaret Santangel stood in the doorway and waved. She waved the way a baby might wave, deliberately and slowly opening and shutting her hand.
Jerry smiled and climbed in the truck. Constanza was driving now and she turned to Jerry with her hand on the ignition key. “’Spose you want to go to the cemetery now.”
Jerry nodded. Then spoke. “I mean yes.”
Chapter 16
THE CEMETERY WAS at the crest of a hill, and even though the buffeting winds had blown off a good bit of the snow, many of the tombstones remained half buried in drifts.
“You get out and poke around,” Constanza said. “I’m staying warm in here.” She had put the truck in park and left the motor running.
Jerry began to walk around. It wasn’t a large cemetery, but it did look old. The tombstones seemed worn thin from scouring winds and weather. Many of the names were so faint as to be unreadable. She saw markings, some understandable—a crucifix, the bowed head of what appeared to be the Virgin Mary—but time had erased all the features so completely it was as if a ghost holy woman hovered over the grave of someone named Lopez, so worn by time and weather that only the trace of a smile was left. But then there were more inscrutable ones. They were designs, but none that she recognized. Among the twenty to thirty gravestones of the names that could be read, it seemed that they all belonged to one or two families, perhaps three. The most prominent last names were Gomez and Begay and Lopez. Nothing that Jerry recognized. The first names were barely visible and only a few letters of the middle names had survived.
On one there was a face, but it was too round to be that of the Virgin. It had the contours of a baby’s face, but again the features seemed to have been erased by time so that only a slightly blurred almost-smile remained. Jerry crouched down to see it better. She assumed it must have been carved to look like a cherub; perhaps a baby lay in this grave. She h
oped not. That was too sad. She scraped away some of the snow and saw the dim imprint of what appeared to be wings. There was a cross beside the left wing. She blew off more snow. The clear outline of a triangle appeared by the right wing, and then upside-down and interlocked was another. A star!
“Aunt Constanza!” she yelled.
Constanza jolted awake. Good Lord! She never dreamed the child had such a voice! She got out of the truck hoping Jerry hadn’t wakened a rattler from its winter sleep and been bitten.
As she approached, she saw Jerry crouching by the stone. She had thrown her mitten down on the ground and was pointing with her finger at something inscribed on the tombstone. “What is this?”
“One of those Davis stars?” Constanza asked in a bewildered voice. “I mean Stars of David.” Jerry nodded. “And a cross, and is that some kind of angel?”
Jerry nodded again and then spoke. “Who’s buried here, Aunt Constanza?”
Constanza shook her head back and forth slowly. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Why do they have crosses and stars and angels all mixed up together?” Once again Constanza shook her head slowly.
Jerry looked around in frustration. “There are only a few names. Lopez, Begay, Gomez.”
“There were some Begays in our family once, I think.”
“But there aren’t any Lunas—our name, Aunt Constanza.”
“Oh, Luna was mostly used as a middle name for girls in our family.”
“You mean it wasn’t your last name?”
“Oh no, child. I think it died out as a last name way long ago. But you know the Spanish tradition is that you include a mother’s last name by giving it as a middle name to your children. My mother was real keen on that. Both my sister, Jeraldine, and I had Luna for our middle name.”
“But what was your last name?”
“Morillo.”
“So why didn’t you keep it?”
“Liked Luna better,” Constanza said simply, and shrugged. “And see, isn’t it nice that kind of by hook or by crook it got passed on down to you?”
“By hook or by crook,” Jerry repeated.
“Come on, child. You’re looking awfully cold. Let’s go home.”
Jerry picked up her mitten and got up. “Look at that hand of yours raw with cold. You’ll be getting frostbite next thing. Then what good will you be to me?” Constanza grabbed Jerry’s bare hand and held it to her mouth and blew hard on it.
Chapter 17
“HELLO!” PADRE HERNANDEZ stepped out of his station wagon and waved as they turned into the drive. Jerry felt a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. Constanza switched off the ignition and gave her hat a fierce tug to set it firm against the wind that was kicking up whirls of snow devils outside. The wind whipped the black robes of the padre as he made his way toward the truck. Constanza and Jerry both got out. Jerry felt a compulsion to run inside and straight to the cellar.
“Jerry hasn’t been to Mass and I was out in this direction and thought I’d stop in to see if everything’s all right.”
“Everything’s fine,” Constanza said.
“Jerry all right?” the padre pressed. Jerry nodded and began walking toward the house.
“She’s just fine.” Constanza hesitated. “She’s just sorting things out. We all have to do that sometimes, you know.” Then she began walking toward the house. “I’d invite you in, Padre, for a cup of tea. But there’s a mess of orders to be straightened out.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Didn’t mean to intrude.”
“It’s never an intrusion, Padre,” Constanza said warmly. “Just caught us at a busy time—orders, Easter coming up, lots of things to sort out.”
Then she looked around at the mounds of snow in the yard. “Imagine this. Blizzard when spring should be around the corner. Well, you never know in New Mexico, do you?”
“Sure don’t. But it never stays around that long. Sun could come out tomorrow and burn all this off,” he said.
Jerry nearly tripped when she heard the word burn. Would she ever be able to hear that word again and think of it in a normal way? She just wanted to get inside—away from the padre, away from the whiteness of the snow-covered world. The cellar beckoned now like an old friend. The idea of the amber-tinged light, the dust, the smell of the earth, the sandstone, the spider that she only sometimes saw but whose presence had become a strange comfort—that was the place where she belonged. She wanted to think about the cemetery. She wanted to think about what her aunt had said about the name Luna and the Begays. Luna, she had said, was often used as a middle name. Luna was an old Spanish name. Miriam had married a man named de Luna. But Begay, she knew, was a Navajo name. It had nothing to do with the old world of Spain.
She stared down now at the lid of the trunk. SdL. She traced the intaglio of pinpricks with her finger. Sanchez de Luna. It was like a bolt of lightning had suddenly illuminated every dark wonder and dim question in her mind, and she knew now with absolute certainty that this was Miriam’s trunk. Of course it was. There might be things from other people in it. But it was Miriam to whom this trunk first belonged. For only Miriam would have those exact initials, the ones of her maiden name and those of her married name. The trunk had been made for her. Jerry lifted the lid now and peered in. She had replaced the piece of lace and the letter and the medal. But she knew that there was another silver piece, most likely made by Beatriz’s father. She felt her fingers touch something cold. Hah! she thought. It was slender and blackened and cylindrical, a tubelike thing not more than three inches long. She wet her finger and rubbed. She could feel a design and, after a minute or so of rubbing, the tarnished black surface lightened to dark gray. One end was open and it looked as if it might have had a lid or stopper of some kind. It could have been for oil, or perhaps perfume. If there had been a scent, it had long since vanished. And yet in her mind another scent came back, a familiar scent. Jerry rested her elbows on the edge of the trunk and closed her eyes and tried to place the scent. She saw the red hat once again.
“Señorita Miriam,” and with a flourish Don Solomon Ben Asher presented his hat into Miriam’s hands. There was the faint scent of limes when he removed his hat. Reyna said it was an oil that he used on his hair.
“Miriam!” Jerry spoke the name aloud in the cellar. The sound seemed to swirl and merge with the scent of the limes. But this was a different Miriam. An unimaginably old Miriam, older than Doña Grazia, with more years than a century. A woman in whom the accretions of age had amassed like sediments of time from the beginnings of the earth….
In the House of the Apothecary
ON THE STREET OF THE NASRID
GRANADA, SPAIN
JANUARY 1492
Esther
“Maria!” Mama keeps trying to wake up my great-grandmother. I don’t know why they don’t let this poor old lady rest. She doesn’t want to be wheeled out here in her roll chair to see this stupid spectacle from the balcony. She told me so herself. But Papa and Mama feel that she must be stimulated. I think she is stimulated. I think she pretends to sleep. I think she does not want to see this parade, this triumphant march of the king and queen arriving in Granada.
“Abuela, you want to go out to the balcony and see the king and queen arrive?” Mama says this, and then turns to me. “Esther, don’t you think Abuela wants to see the king and queen?”
“No, she doesn’t,” I answer fiercely. “What does she care? This is not such a wonderful moment. Look, they have already renamed the street. Did you see the sign go up yesterday?” It is now called the Calle de los Reyes Catolicos, Street of the Catholic Monarchs.
“Mama, will they rename our street?” my little brother Avraham asks.
“Who knows,” she says, and then bursts out impatiently. “Oh, take her out there. The sun is out. She needs some fresh air.”
Poor Abuela. I look at her. She is so ancient. She has over one hundred years. Mama says she is maybe one hundred and ten, but perhaps even older. T
hey think she is so old that she doesn’t care, or hear, or maybe even think. But she does. I know. She has told me that sometimes she pretends to sleep. She tells me that she doesn’t talk because sometimes she doesn’t want to tell people what she really thinks. And she does think. She told me that she hates her name. So now she has decided not to answer to it anymore. She talks to me of these things. She told me her real name. It was Miriam. Miriam Sanchez de Luna. De Luna is my middle name. It was the middle name of my grandmother Juana, who is now dead. So my mother gave it to me as my middle name. It pleased Miriam very much at the time. But now she thinks only about her first name. So I try to call her Miriam and told Mama and Papa and Avraham and the little ones and Luis to call her that, too. But they forget—all except for Luis.
Luis made Abuela’s special chair when he came here more than ten years ago. My life changed when Luis came. For years we had lived freely here as Jews in Granada. Maybe Mama and Papa had heard rumors of what happened in other places, but they protected us. We didn’t know. I think of those times and I think it was like living in a cocoon, all wrapped up and protected. But when Luis came, this cocoon of tranquility and safety was pierced momentarily. I shall never forget the day he came. He was no more than fourteen or fifteen. I knew he was special from the first. But he was strange. His eyes were too large for his face. It was as if he had seen too much, and he had. Mama gasped. “Brianda!” she said. “It is as if I am looking at Brianda.” Brianda had been Luis’s mother. I peeked out from behind Mama and saw his thin face, so pale that it appeared to me like a dim lantern in the dusk of our narrow street. Then he spoke. “My mother is dead, burned at the stake. My father is dead, burned at the stake. My sisters have been taken away. I have nowhere to go.”
In the space of one minute my world changed. At first I didn’t want to go near Luis. I felt that his parents’ death clung to him like the pox. I thought I would catch it. I know it sounds stupid. But Luis too did not really want to come near us. He told me that he felt that he was a freak, so different that somehow his differentness would touch us in some horrible way. That he would spoil our perfect world. So Luis hardly spoke when he first came here. Gradually he spoke a little bit more, and over time, in bits and pieces, his story came out.