The Hand of Fatima Read online

  ‘Don’t insist,’ his mother counselled Hernando one day. ‘She is doing it for Humam, and for me. Brahim could kill the little one if he found out she was talking to you. He has threatened her with it! I’m sorry, my son.’

  Hernando took refuge in the communion they had celebrated in the church at El Padul; in that moment when he had felt he truly was Fátima’s husband. How ironic! In a Christian church! Perhaps one day . . .

  While they awaited the Prince’s decision, the Moriscos finally gave way to despair. Disarmed and subjugated, imprisoned on lands that had once been theirs, they finally appreciated the magnitude of their defeat. Where would they be banished? What would they live on? They were constantly assailed by fears for their future in distant, hostile kingdoms ruled by Christians who made no secret of their hatred for the vanquished. If anyone still had faith that Aben Aboo would return, the reports about him were not encouraging: the Knight Commander of Castile and the Duke of Arcos were fighting effectively against the King of al-Andalus’s scant forces.

  On 1 November, after the weather had turned for the worse and the wretched Moriscos were losing the battle for survival, Don John of Austria finally ordered their expulsion. The Moriscos from the plains of Granada were instructed to assemble near the Royal Hospital in a large clearing outside the walls of the city. The hospital, the old Elvira gate which led to the Albaicín and the Muslim quarter, the convent of La Merced, the mudéjar church of Saint Ildefonsus and many large walled gardens encircled the clearing.

  Thousands of Moriscos gathered in front of the hospital, guarded by soldiers of the chief magistrate Don Francisco de Zapata, while they waited for the clerks and scribes to finish registering them all and make careful note of their destinations.

  On 5 November, in the middle of a storm, 3,500 bedraggled, starving and sick Moriscos, the Ruiz family from Juviles among them, left Granada along the road past the Carthusian monastery. For seven days they were escorted along the thirty or more leagues between Granada and Córdoba. The stages of the journey were adapted to suit the comfort of the magistrate and his officials, who only wanted to stop in places where they could spend the night without forgoing food and a bed.

  During the first stage of the journey they walked as far as Pinos, nearly three leagues from Granada. Don Francisco de Zapata stayed in the village but the Moriscos had to spend the night outside in the rain, huddled together as best they could. They also shared what little food they had. The local inhabitants were reluctant to feed anyone who had rejected Christianity. At daybreak, they began the climb to Moclín, where a commanding fortress defended the entrance to the plains and the city of Granada. They covered the same distance as on the first day but this time uphill, feeling the cold of the mountains penetrating their rain-soaked clothes until it seeped into their very bones. They could not leave Moriscos on the road, so all the fit men had to help those who were not well or even carry the corpses, as there was not even a single cart for them. During the climb, Hernando, well away from Fátima and Aisha who were walking up ahead, had to carry an old man who was so emaciated he could not stand. He had a hacking cough that turned into a muffled rattle as the day wore on, grating on Hernando’s ears. That night, the old man died, along with seventy other Moriscos. The only consolation for the exiles was that after carrying them to the next evening’s camp, the lack of coffins meant they could bury them in fresh ground.

  In desperation, some people took flight, but the Prince had decreed that any Moriscos who tried to escape were to become the slaves of whichever soldier recaptured them. As a result any man, woman or child who went missing gave rise to a frantic search by the Christians. They branded their new slaves on the forehead or the cheek; their screams of agony echoed through the rows of exiles. Not a single Morisco succeeded in escaping.

  After Moclín they headed for Alcalá la Real, three leagues distant along the crest of the mountains. This time, Hernando had to carry a lame woman in place of the old dead man; he needed another youth his own age to help him. The night before he had noticed that Fátima was concerned about little Humam, whose coughing she tried to soothe against her breast.

  It was at Alcalá la Real, at the foot of a hill crowned by another fortress inside whose walls an imposing abbey was being built on top of an ancient mosque, that Aisha told her son about Humam’s death during that day’s march. As with the old man, his coughs had turned into a wheeze and the child began to shiver so badly that Fátima herself also started to shake uncontrollably, unable to contain her grief. They were not allowed to stop. Distraught, Fátima begged the Christians on her knees to help her, to allow them to stop for a little while so that she could find something warm for the child. Her pleas were met with contempt. The soldiers seemed more interested in the possibility that this young mother, beautiful even in grief, might take the reckless decision to flee to find help for her son. Fátima would fetch a good price at the market in Córdoba.

  ‘Nobody helped us,’ sobbed Aisha, recalling the looks of pity from the other Moriscos.

  They had kept going until, about a league from Alcalá, both mother and son stopped shivering. Aisha had to prise the child’s body from his mother’s grasp.

  As the girl’s Christian husband, Hernando appeared before the clerks, who took down the details and registered Humam’s death. Fátima did not say a word. At nightfall, Hernando, Brahim, Aisha and Fátima took themselves off from the Morisco settlement and, like many another Muslim family, buried the child under the soldiers’ watchful gaze. Aisha washed the body tenderly with cold, clear water from an irrigation channel. She found the hand of Fátima hidden in Humam’s clothes and kept it; now was not the time to give it back to his mother. Hernando thought he heard Aisha sing a song he remembered from the cradle. She hummed the tune quietly, the way she used to when she rewarded him with a lullaby. Brahim dug a grave near the spot. Fátima had no tears left. There was no holy man, no prayers, no shroud in which to wrap the little one. Brahim put him straight into the hole in the ground while the little boy’s mother, still stricken with grief, did not so much as approach the grave.

  After Alcalá la Real, the stages of the journey grew longer. They descended towards the countryside around Jaén. Brahim helped Fátima, who was falling behind. She did not say a word; she seemed barely alive. Hernando felt sick and shuddered every time he saw Fátima’s lifeless body clinging to his stepfather. Three days later, they reached Córdoba. Ragged, barefoot, the young and the sick in tow, they were lined up five deep and flanked by companies of pikemen and harquebusiers. They entered the city to the sound of music, with a crowd of city-dwellers looking on. Dressed in all their finery, the soldiers marched in alongside them.

  Of the 3,500 Moriscos who had set out from Granada, only 3,000 remained. Five hundred corpses were scattered on the gruesome road.

  It was 12 November 1570.

  PART TWO

  IN THE NAME OF LOVE

  I did not know what this was, otherwise I would not have allowed you to touch what was here before; because you are doing something that could have been done anywhere and have undone something that was unique in the world.

  Words attributed to the Emperor Charles V in the year 1526 on seeing the Christian cathedral built inside the mosque at Córdoba, work he himself had authorized, putting an end to the arguments between the civic and cathedral authorities regarding the advisability of its construction

  24

  THEY LEFT the fortress at Calahorra behind them, crossed the Roman bridge over the Guadalquivir and entered Córdoba through the Puente gate, which gave on on to the rear façade of the cathedral. In formation, watched over by the soldiers and gawked at by the locals crowded together as they passed, Hernando, like many of the other Moriscos, who recognized in the cathedral the wonderful mosque from the Córdoba of the caliphs, glanced at the temple. Lowly people from the Alpujarra, bound to the land, they had never had a chance to see the mosque, but they all knew of it and even though they were exhausted, their
faces were filled with wonder. Just behind that centuries-old wall, beneath the dome, was the mihrab, the holy place from which the Caliph led the prayers. There was some whispering among the exiles, who unwittingly slowed down. A man with a child on his shoulders pointed out the mosque.

  ‘Heretics!’ shouted a passerby when she saw these displays of interest. Immediately, the crowd joined in the harangue as if they wanted to protect the church from profane eyes:

  ‘Blasphemers! Murderers!’

  An old man made to throw a stone at them but some soldiers stopped him and urged the line of Moriscos onwards. When they passed by the back of the cathedral, the streets became narrower and the soldiers dispersed the crowd who could then only continue to watch the procession from the balconies of the whitewashed, two-storeyed houses. The Moriscos went along Calle de los Cordoneros, past the Corn Exchange and Calle de la Pescadería; they crossed Calle de la Feria and arrived at the entrance to Calle del Potro. The head of the procession stopped in Plaza del Potro, the city’s main commercial area, and the place the chief magistrate Zapata had chosen to keep them in custody.

  Plaza del Potro was a small, enclosed square, in the centre of the district of the same name, where they tried in vain to contain the three thousand Moriscos who had survived the exodus, although most of them finished up scattered through the adjoining streets. Few of them could find lodgings, let alone pay for them, in the Potro inn located in the same square, in the Madera inn, the Monjas inn or in any of the many others to be found nearby. The magistrate set up controls to the area and there the Moriscos remained, the responsibility of the civic authorities until King Philip decided on their ultimate fate.

  Night fell while most of them sated their thirst from large pitchers. When their turn came and while Brahim gulped down the water, his head under the stream, Hernando surveyed Fátima: her hair, unkempt and filthy, framed a face with scarred cheekbones, her sunken eyes were covered in bruises, and her features were so thin that her bones stuck out. He saw how her hands shook when she joined them in the shape of a bowl and tried to raise them to her lips; the water drained through her fingers before she could get it to her mouth. What would become of her? She would not survive another journey.

  Nobody dared to wash; even though the magistrate had shut off the streets, the measure only affected the Moriscos, so that travellers, merchants, cattle dealers and the artisans who lived and worked in the area – saddlers, sword-makers, linen merchants, needle-makers and tanners – moved freely and contemptuously among the throng of exiles, scrutinizing them in the same way as did the many priests who prowled around, or the crowds of idle passersby who haunted the place daily: beggars or rogues who made the most of the opportunity to sneer at them.

  The Moriscos were exhausted and starving. Suddenly, the Christians showed up with large copper pots of vegetable soup . . . and pigs’ innards! The priests made a point of stopping here and there to check that nobody was refusing to eat this food forbidden by their religion.

  ‘Why are you not eating?’ one of them enquired, pointing at Fátima. She was sitting on the ground leaning back against a wall of one of the buildings on Calle del Potro. The bowl of food sat untouched between her feet.

  Fátima did not so much as look up when she heard the priest. Brahim, engrossed in the bits of entrails floating in his bowl, made no reply. Nor did Aisha.

  ‘She’s unwell,’ Hernando hurried to explain on her behalf.

  ‘In that case, food will be good for her,’ argued the priest and, with a gesture, urged her to eat.

  Fátima did not move. Hernando knelt beside her, lifted the ladle and filled it with broth . . . and a bit of pork.

  ‘Please, eat,’ he whispered to Fátima.

  She opened her mouth and Hernando fed her some soup. Grease ran down the girl’s chin before she retched, coughing up the food at the priest’s feet. He jumped backwards.

  ‘Moorish bitch!’

  The Moriscos near them drew back and formed a circle. Still on his knees, Hernando turned to the priest and crawled towards him.

  ‘She is sick!’ he shouted. ‘Look!’ He scraped the piece of pork off the ground and raised it to his mouth. ‘She is . . . she’s my wife. It’s just that she’s sick,’ he repeated. ‘Look!’ He went back to the cauldron, filled the ladle with bits of pork and ate them. ‘It’s just that she’s sick,’ he stammered with his mouth full.

  The priest spent a good while watching how Hernando chewed and swallowed the pork, and took more, until he seemed satisfied.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said before turning away from them and facing the Morisco nearest him, ‘by which time I trust that she will have improved enough to do justice to the food which the city of Córdoba has so generously shared out among you.’

  Opposite Fátima and Hernando, on the other side of the street, there was a little dead-end alley scarcely wide enough for two men, which led from Calle del Potro down to the Guadalquivir. The wooden gate to the alleyway was open just then revealing a row of shops and small premises, some of them only one floor high, on both sides of the street. Standing at the gate to the alleyway, chatting to the clients going in and out of the brothel, the armed bailiff of the Córdoba whorehouse was watching the Moriscos. Behind him, not daring to venture out because of their forbidden clothes and jewellery, which could only be worn inside the brothel, some women leant their heads out; and there in the middle of them all, trying not to rouse the bailiff’s suspicions, was a man who was closely watching the young Morisco’s entreaties on behalf of the young girl. Did he say that was his wife? There was a hint of a smile, which was lost on his right cheek where the infamous letter ‘S’ had been branded into his flesh. Hernando! Almost two years had passed since they said goodbye in the castle at Juviles. He had thought of Hernando every day since; he was the son he had never had. Overjoyed to see him alive, he thought with pride that the young lad had grown and, despite his ragged appearance, it was evident he was now a man. What age would he be? Sixteen? Hamid wondered.

  ‘Francisco!’ roared the bailiff, noticing him at the gate. ‘Get back to work! And you others as well,’ he added, shooing the women back inside with his hands.

  Hamid gave a start and limped the length of the alley, trying hard to contain his tears. Hernando! He had thought he would never see him again . . . How many more neighbours from Juviles had arrived in that new crowd? He had not seen them but he knew there were several slaves from Juviles in the city; they had been taken prisoner before the amnesty granted by Don John of Austria; all the remaining free Moriscos to be found in Córdoba hailed from the Albaicín or from the countryside around Granada, and had come with the first wave of deportees.

  He offered silent thanks to the All-merciful for protecting the boy’s life and liberty. But what was happening to his wife? She looked sick; she was shaking convulsively. Hernando must love her given that he leapt blindly to her defence, crawling on his knees to the priest. Hamid stopped outside a little two-storey shop and put his ear to the door. There was no sound inside. He knocked.

  *

  ‘You have to eat.’ Hernando dropped to the ground beside Fátima. Brahim looked up from his bowl at once.

  ‘Leave her,’ he grunted. ‘Don’t go near her.’

  ‘Be quiet! Do you want her to die? Would you leave her to die and then kill my mother because I tried to help her?’

  Brahim looked at the girl: she sat hunched and trembling uncontrollably.

  ‘You see to her,’ he ordered Aisha, who closed her eyes every time she lifted the spoon to her mouth. ‘Make sure she doesn’t die.’

  ‘You have to feed yourself, Fátima,’ Hernando whispered into her ear. She did not reply or look at him, but just went on shuddering. ‘I know much you miss Humam, but not eating won’t bring him back to life. We all miss him . . .’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Aisha said, standing in front of him. Hernando raised his blue eyes, his face full of anxiety. ‘Leave it to me,’ she repeated tenderly.

/>   Aisha did not manage to get a response out of Fátima either. She tried to make her swallow the soup, herself eating the bits of pork in case any priest came back, but no sooner had she forced some soup or vegetable into the girl’s mouth than she brought it up again. Squatting beside them, Hernando watched his mother struggling to feed Fátima. He held his breath when she succeeded and despaired, hitting the ground with his knuckles, when he saw how the girl’s body rejected the food.

  ‘They say there’s a hospital on the square,’ a Morisco woman told him; she was watching the scene with concern.

  Hernando looked at her enquiringly, and the woman pointed to Plaza del Potro. He raced across it, but soon had to come to a halt. There was a crowd in front of what must have been the entrance to the hospital: a porch enclosed by a semicircular double arch. Despite this, he ran forward and pushed himself through, ignoring the protests.

  ‘I’ve already told you’, he heard the chaplain say, ‘that the fourteen hospital beds are occupied and over half of them have two people to a bed. Apart from that, admission to the hospital requires the order of the doctor or the surgeon and at the moment neither of them is here.’

  Hearing this, some of the crowd turned away and left the porch; others stood their ground, showing their injuries, coughing, or raising their arms imploringly. A child was in its death throes at the chaplain’s feet while the father wept inconsolably. What could he achieve? thought Hernando as he saw the chaplain shaking his head stubbornly. The image of Fátima shivering and vomiting drove him on, and for the second time that night he sank to his knees before a priest.

  ‘In the name of God and the Blessed Virgin . . .’ he implored, his hands clasped level with the chaplain’s stomach. Then he recalled the Christian nobleman’s words of entreaty in Barrax’s tent. ‘. . . by the nails of Jesus Christ, help me!’