The Mapmaker's Daughter Read Free

puts it on our plate, and buy leavened bread during Passover even though we feed it to the chickens when no one is looking.” He shrugs, but his eyes flicker with pain. “We’ve left behind so much of who we are, perhaps it’s no longer worth the trouble to keep to our old ways.”
    “Jaume!” Grandmother is aghast. “Such talk coming from you?”
    “Such talk? I have spent my life paying the price for letting them splash me with their water when I was a young man living in Mallorca. Surely you should know where my heart lies.” Above his gray beard, his face is mottled with anger. “I was afraid—I confess to that! I did it to save my life, but I am not one of them. My knees may bend when they wave their crucifixes in front of me, but my mind never will.”
    He exhales with a snort so loud and horselike I might have giggled if the subject were not so serious. “Stupid fools if they think I believe that nonsense about their Hanged One and their sacred wafers and that wine they say turns to blood that he wants us to drink in his memory.” His lip curls. “Drink his blood? What kind of barbarians would do that?”
    He stops momentarily, but I know he isn’t really asking us to answer. “We live in a terrible place, a terrible time,” he goes on. “And if the Holy One means us to survive, how exactly does he mean us to do it?”
    I hate these conversations because I know, even at six, that a threat hangs over these afternoons. To Christians, we are Judaizers. To Jews, we are traitors to the faith of Moses, Marranos, swine. I fight back tears. “Can’t you unbaptize yourself?” I say, hearing the huskiness in my voice. “Can’t you say, ‘I’ve changed my mind and I’d rather be a Jew?’”
    My grandmother smiles wistfully. “I wish it were that simple, little one, but Christians believe that once they’ve wetted you, there’s no turning back.”
    My mother looks at me, and I know what she is thinking. Immediately after my baptism, she told me she took me to our spring to wash away the water and restore me to our people. The following year, the church burned down and the record of my baptism was destroyed. Mama says that makes me still a Jew in God’s eyes, but it’s not something we should mention to anyone.
    Cleansed with living water and my baptism purged by fire. I return Mama’s smile, warmed by our secret. If I should need to say I have never been baptized, no one could disprove it. If I said I was, no one could disprove that either. I don’t understand why this is important, but Mama says every secret Jew might need a story someday.
    “Best to marry Susana off quickly,” Grandfather is saying. “She has excellent prospects. She’s healthy, and the Riba family has the means—”
    “But she’s so young,” my mother protests. “She hasn’t the hips for childbearing yet.”
    “Perhaps you haven’t noticed,” Grandmother says gently. “I think she is growing them now.” She pats my mother’s hand. “And she’ll make you a grandmother all the sooner, if it’s God’s will.”
    To avert my mother’s darkening mood, we stand for the blessing after meals, after which we burst into song.
Bendigamos al Altísimo,
Al Señor que nos crió,
Démosle agradecimiento
Por los bienes que nos dió.
    I have practiced all the verses in bed so I know the song by heart. “Let us bless the Most High, the Lord who raised us. Let us give him thanks for the good things he has given us,” I sing, loudly enough to draw the smiles I crave.
    Grandfather unfurls his fingers in a loud and decisive strum of the guitar he has fetched from the corner, while the others pick up tambourines and flutes. Eventually Susana comes back inside and stands next to me, clicking castanets with my mother. Watching her, I wonder why Susana wants to be a Christian when Jews have afternoons as wonderful as this.
    Grandfather plays the first notes of Luisa’s favorite, and we jump to our feet. “Dance, Rachel, and