Bridge of fire, p.9
Bridge of Fire, page 9
“Yes, yes,” she breathed. “Oh, yes! Yes!”
“Then marry me,” she thought she heard him say.
They sat at a small table that had been brought in, drinking almond water and eating fried cakes.
“I have given our situation much thought through the night, Francisca. I did not speak in jest a while ago when I said, ‘Marry me.’”
Then it hadn’t been her imagination. “But how can I when you already have a wife?”
“One that I haven’t seen for five years. Listen, Francisca, we have no children; I can claim the marriage was never consummated, and have it annulled.”
“Your wife—her family would never permit it.”
“I will return her dowry. In addition, I will make a generous settlement on her. She will be happy to be rid of me and then she can go into her convent and be the nun she has always wanted to be.”
“But…you are certain she will make no objection?”
“As certain as I am sitting here. I love you, Francisca. I want you to be my wife. Your family will not refuse my suit.”
“I’m not sure…” she said hesitantly.
“What reason could they possibly have for witholding their blessing?”
You are not of our faith, she wanted to say. But her parents could not give that as their reason without revealing their true identity. Would they allow her to marry Miguel because not to do so might bring a hornet’s nest down about their heads And what if she did become Miguel’s wife? She must then live out her life with that secret buried inside her. Her family, of necessity, would keep their distance, be cool to her, always afraid that at some weak moment she might, by design or accident, betray them.
“The annulment might take a year,” Miguel said. “But I can wait if you will, my darling.”
Many things could happen in a year, she thought. But she knew by now how single-minded Miguel could be. He was a man who not only thrived on challenge, but one who invariably attained the goals he set for himself. He would get his annulment.
“First I must negotiate a formal betrothal with your father,” Miguel was saying, “and seal it by signing a marriage contract.”
Dear Lord, Francisca thought, he is serious.
“We will be wed in the Great Cathedral,” Miguel continued, smiling happily at Francisca. “The archbishop himself will officiate. It will be the talk of Mexico City; people will fight to get invitations. Of course, you realize that the pomp and circumstances mean little to me. I had all of that before. But you should not be denied. A woman’s wedding day is important. Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, yes, my love. Very much so. And you would do all this for me?”
“For you. But you haven’t said if it’s agreeable, if you accept my proposal.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Miguel, you do me an honor. I hadn’t thought…” She wiped a tear away. “With all my heart I accept.”
The notables of the city would attend, the viceroy, the Marquis of Medina las Torres, and the Count of Calderon, the old Jesuit, who himself was a converso.
She would be Doña Francisca de Silva del Castillo y Roche, living a lie for the rest of her life.
“Miguel…” She looked across the table, her eyes searching, half pleading. “How much do you love me?”
“You silly goose,” he answered, reaching out and taking her chin in his hand. “I’m delivering body and soul into your hands, and you ask such a question.”
“Would you feel you were marrying beneath yourself? My family are not connected to the nobility—and I myself was born in New Spain, which makes me a Creole.”
“I always thought it unjust for pure-blooded Spaniards to be called Creole because they saw the first light of day in Mexico City instead of Madrid or Seville.”
Francisca got up and moved to the window and stood looking out upon a small orchard of mango trees. A blue-feathered bird sat on one branch, pecking at the greenish-yellow fruit. She suddenly wished she were that bird with nothing on her mind but to sit on a branch eating sweet mangos.
“Francisca, what is it?”
She turned. “I don’t know if I can marry you. I want to— I love you—but I don’t know—”
“For God’s sake!” He rose to his feet, an angry flush on his face. “I have done everything but cut my heart open! Everything! And you stand there and tell me you don’t know!”
He came to her in two strides and, grasping her by the shoulders, held her, looking into her face, scanning it with hard, icy eyes. “There is someone else. There must be. You are in love with someone else.”
“No! I swear it!”
“Perhaps you have decided to marry Don Ruy after all.”
“No!”
“Then there is someone else.” He shook her until her hair fell wildly about her shoulders. “Who? Who is it so I can kill him, and you—you ungrateful wench—into the bargain? Who?”
“There is no one.”
“Swear by the holy cross.” He withdrew the crucifix he wore about his neck. “Swear!” He grasped her wrist cruelly.
“I cannot!” She glared back at him, stung by the pain of his iron hold, angry at his groundless jealousy. “The cross would mean nothing!” she spat at him. “I am a converso, a Jew!”
There was a stunned silence. “My God.” His hands fell to his sides. “But your family…”
“Also. We are all Jews.” She was suddenly terrified of the look of incredulity on his face, terrified because in the heat of argument she had given them all away.
“A Jewess. A member of the hated tribe of Christ killers.”
“Don’t say that! It’s not true!”
Stunned, he didn’t hear her. His entire upbringing, his mother’s teachings, his years as a student with the Dominicans, pledged to wipe out the scourge of heresy, his daily prayers, had instilled in him a scorn for this despised race. And he had to fall in love with one of them. He should have guessed. She did not wear a crucifix; her insistence on the bath; her refusal to eat pork at a meal they once shared—all signs that she observed the religious practices of a Jew. It was as though an abyss had opened before him. His Francisca…
Chapter VIII
The story Francisca told her parents was that she had been abducted by four masked men. Their purpose, she said, was to hold her for ransom, but by talking through the night, she had persuaded them to let her go. In return she had promised that there would be no reprisals, no search or arrest.
“You were not harmed?” her mother asked for the third time.
They were sitting in the sala on cushioned benches that ran along one wall. Don Pedro was smoking a cigarette, the smoke rising from it to mingle with the vapors of the votive candle kept lit day and night for show in front of the Madonna figure placed in a corner niche.
“No, Mamá. They did not harm me. I was treated with the greatest courtesy. They seemed to be gentlemen.”
“Gentlemen?” Doña Mariana asked in disbelief.
She’s getting old, Francisca thought with surprise. Her black hair has streaks of gray, and there are lines in her sweet face I have never seen before. Have I done that to her, aged her in less than twenty-four hours? And what of Leonor, who Papá says has taken to her bed to calm an attack of hysteria?
“They appeared to be gentlemen by their dress and speech, Mamá.”
“I don’t believe that gentlemen would do such things.” Don Pedro shook his head. “Mariana, my dear, you yourself have seen these young bloods. Sons of hidalgos who have gone through their patrimony, hanging about the square, dressed in their finery on their way to a cock-or bullfight or staggering home from a tavern. They are always short of money, always in debt. It’s no secret that many of them turn to vice.”
“Then we must go after them,” Mariana said.
“No Mamá. I promised.” Francisca was tired, bone-weary with a fatigue that was more than physical. Yet exhaustion had not numbed the pain in her heart. She wished that her parents were done with this interview. She wished that she did not have to sit there composed, as if nothing of much import had happened. Pretending that she had spent the night cajoling a few “gentlemen” to release her took an effort that seemed beyond her strength. But she did not want to think how ill her parents would be if she told them that her Christian lover had abducted her, that she had come close to rape and had seen a man killed, or that the assault had left her less distressed than Miguel’s rejection. (Rejection? she thought. What a pitiable way to describe a world that had crashed about her feet.) She longed to creep into some dark hole where she could nurse her mortal wound, yet she must go on answering question after question, piling one falsehood upon the other.
“Francisca is right,” Don Pedro was saying. “But it is more than her promise we must consider. Thus far we have confined the news of Francisca’s disappearance to servants and close friends. Thank God, Juliana is in Tacuba visiting her daughter, and knows nothing. The less people know, the better. To inform the constabulary would only publish this unfortunate incident to the entire city. Tongues will wag, and Francisca’s reputation will be ruined.”
“Well, I suppose that is true,” Mariana reluctantly agreed. “Go, child, get some rest. I will send Beatriz to you.” Francisca ascended the stairs feeling as though she were mounting a ladder to her own hanging. Now that she was away from the searching gaze of her parents, bitter tears pressed behind her eyes. But she would not let them come. To someone standing below watching, her carriage had the same grace: the straight shoulders, the lifted chin. Not even under the torture of hot pincers would she ever reveal what had happened, that she had had a lover who now despised her because she would not kneel to the same God as he. From the very start she had realized that Miguel must never know, yet in the innermost reaches of her heart she had hoped that their love would leap this barrier. She had somehow dreamed that if and when the time came for her to tell him, being a Jewess would not matter.
She had been a fool to dream and hope. She should have listened more closely to her rational mind, which told her that a member of the nobility had an obligation to uphold the church. Miguel’s devoutness was ingrained in him from birth. False tales of Hebraic rites of sacrifice and bloodletting were an interwoven part of his upbringing. He could no more cast them off than he could shed his skin.
But the terrible thing was that she had done more than damage herself by confessing her identity in a moment of heat. She had incriminated her family. And for that she would never forgive herself.
“Francisca…!”
It was Leonor, wrapped in a head-to-foot white rebozo, standing in the door of her room.
“Why, Leonor!” Francisca went to her. “Mamá said you were ill. You are shivering. It’s cool here on the gallery. You ought to be in bed.”
Leonor, her dark eyes enormous in an ashy face, grasped Francisca’s arm. “Were you taken by the Holy Office? Were you? Papá says no. He says that they would have arrested us all. He says—”
“Come inside, Leonor.” Francisca led her sister back into the bedchamber. “Your hands are like ice. Get into bed.”
Francisca pulled the coverlet over her sister, tucking her in, spreading another blanket across her feet.
“What did they do to you, Francisca?” Leonor’s mouth trembled as she spoke. “Did they torture you?”
“No, little pigeon.” She sat down beside her sister. “I was abducted.”
She told Leonor much the same story she had told her parents.
“You are certain?” Leonor asked anxiously. “You are not making it up for my benefit? I should die if…I couldn’t…” Tears appeared in her frightened eyes.
“It’s God’s truth. I am not lying. I was not harmed. The men who abducted me merely wanted money. Put your fears to rest. We are all safe, I promise you.”
But were they? Miguel, as a Christian of conscience, was duty-bound to inform the Holy Office that the de Silvas were conversos. What was more, he himself could be brought to trial for failing to disclose the damning fact that Francisca and her family followed the Jewish religion. Would Miguel, a man who had broken bread with Don Pedro, who had been willing to set his wife aside to marry his daughter, betray them? She did not think that fear for his own skin would move Miguel to such an act. She knew without having to be told that he feared nothing or no one. But would he feel impelled by his strong belief in the righteousness of orthodox Catholicism to give the de Silvas away? He might be doing so now, even as she sat here reassuring a trembling Leonor. At this moment he could be meeting with a familiar in the flat-roofed building of the Holy Inquisition, speaking in low, confidential tones…
But no. He couldn’t knowingly send her and her dear ones down the path that would lead to death at the stake. He had loved her, and though that love had changed, the memory of what they had meant to each other should be enough to seal his lips.
“You are sure we are safe?” Leonor asked.
“Very sure.”
Was she? I will never be sure, she told herself. And that is what I must live with hour by hour, day by day, year after year.
The nights were the worst. The constables acting in the name of the Inquisition or its agents, the familiars, usually came after dark, often in the wee hours of the morning, when least expected. Francisca would lie awake listening for the peremptory pounding on the door, the loud voices demanding entrance, the sound of heavy boots on the stair. Sometimes roused from a doze by the creaking of a board or the scurrying of a rat under the eaves, she would sit up, her heart in her throat, thinking they were already there, going from room to room searching each of them out. Staring into the blackness, she imagined the summoned servants, cowed and huddled in a corner while their master and mistress and she, Beatriz, and Leonor were pushed and prodded down the staircase and taken away.
Francisca lived this scene over and over as she went about her daily routine. She drank her morning chocolate, ate her noon and evening meals, chatted with Aunt Juliana, took walks in the garden, read or played her guitar, her ear cocked, her nerves stretched, waiting for that knock on the door. To her family, to her friends, she presented a tranquil face. She smiled, she laughed and gossiped. Looking at her, no one would guess that behind the high-held chin, the poised demeanor and charming smile, a terrible uneasiness gnawed.
Soon, however, Francisca had something else to worry about.
Mornings when she awoke, the smell of hot chocolate at her bedside turned her stomach sour. Food taken before noon made her ill. When a week went by without the onset of her monthly flux, she knew by the swelling of her breasts, the slight thickening of her waist, that she was with child.
What was she to do? She had heard tales of an Indian woman who dispensed a potion that would rid a woman of an unwanted pregnancy. But the idea repelled her. She could not do that to Miguel’s child. On the other hand, this was one secret she could not hide. In time, very shortly perhaps, the servants would notice the absence of her monthly cloths to be laundered; they would put their heads together and wonder. Though they might not speak of it to her parents, one day her growing girth would give her away. She would be sent to a convent, an order that was rigid in protecting its inmates from the outside world. There she would give birth to the infant, only to have it taken from her and placed with a family whose name would not be revealed to her. She would never see it again.
Or she could marry Don Ruy.
It was an agonizing choice to make
One afternoon she was sitting in the library with a book on her lap, not reading but gazing blankly into space. Her father sat busily writing in his ledger at a small desk near the window. They had not spoken for some time, and Francisca had almost forgotten his presence. She was daydreaming. In her mind she was traveling the high seas with Miguel, standing arm in arm at a ship’s rail watching a brilliant sunset. She had never been to sea, had never seen a larger body of water than Lake Texcoco outside the city proper, but in her imagination they seemed the same. Miguel was pointing out the shore and the thatched Indian huts lining it. In her reverie his arm went around her waist and she leaned her head on his shoulder. He pulled her closer, bending to kiss her hair, then her lips. “Are you happy?” he asked.
But the picture faded, and she saw the book-lined shelves and the dark oaken beams of the library ceiling, and heard the rumble of wheels along the street outside. She wasn’t aboard the Espíritu Santo, but in her father’s house. The other was fantasy, this was real. She was pregnant with the child who would never see, never know its father.
Her chest heaved with a deep sigh.
“Francisca.”
Her father’s voice gave her a start. He was looking at her with tender compassion. “What is it, Papá?”
“My child, you seem so downcast.”
“No, Papá, it’s just—just a little boredom.”
He got up from his chair and came to her, patting her head as he often did when she was small. “I know you well enough to guess that it is more than boredom. Is it because of Don Ruy?”
“Partly.” It was not entirely a lie. She had been thinking a great deal about Don Ruy these past few days.
“I cannot bear to see you so sad. You need not marry him if that is your wish.”
“Papá, I don’t know. I admit I was set against him when you first proposed our marriage, but since I have come to know him…” She broke off, seeking the right words. For now she saw with a sudden clarity there was no other way for her to keep Miguel’s child without branding it bastard except to marry Ruy. Yet she had to make her change of mind seem plausible.
“He is a kind, a good man,” she went on slowly, as if giving it thought. “And there is no one in our circle who is eligible, except Luis Méjor.”
“Luis Méjor is poor as a lepero. He lives in a house with a dirt floor and barely makes enough at his peddling to keep himself in tortillas. No. As good and faithful a Jew as he is, he is not a husband for you.”
