The Hand of Fatima Read online

  Hernando crossed the courtyard, passing the tubs, the tanning vats, the long tables where they were working on the hides with sharp knives or blunt ones as necessary, and the poles on which the hides were hung. He passed an apprentice in one of the tubs, and dragged himself reluctantly towards the dung heap. Several of the young apprentices smiled at each other: there was no more thankless task and the Morisco’s arrival meant they were freed from the dung heap. Vicente, who was near the tanning vat where they were tramping the cordovan, saw what was going on and let out a roar. The smiles vanished and workers and apprentices got on with their jobs, ignoring Hernando, who was already at the edge of the pit. The manure covering the hides was bubbling.

  On the first day he had almost fainted. He could hardly breathe; he gasped for air but the burning smell invaded his lungs, suffocating him. He’d had to get to the edge of the pit and lean out with his chin at ground level to search for air. He nearly threw up, but the worker in charge that day shouted at him not to vomit over the hides, so he shut his mouth and stifled his retching.

  Hernando looked at the manure and removed his shoes. He took off his clothes and jumped into the pit. Where was the Sierra Nevada now? Its clear, pure air? Its freshness? Where were the trees and the ravines with their thousands of streams running down from the snow-capped peaks? He held his breath. He had learnt this was the only way to endure the job. He had to lift the hides to let them breathe, so that they would not heat up any more than was necessary. He poked around in the manure where the hides were piled up until he found the first of them. He shook it and managed to get it out of the pit before it was impossible for him to hold his breath any longer. Then, at ground level again, he took another deep breath. The first hide was the easiest to lift. The deeper he delved into the pit, the higher the manure was piled up, making it harder and harder to lift the rest of them. He spent over two hours hauling them up, holding his breath, his hair and body covered in stinking filth. When he had finished, one of the workers came over and checked the state of the hides. He pulled out a pair of them, huge ox hides that he felt were already treated, then told Hernando to let the rest breathe and to use a spade to clear all the manure out of the pit. At the end of the day, he was to pile them all back into it: a layer of manure and a hide, another layer of manure, another hide and so on until they were all covered, so that the next day he could haul them up again.

  26

  IN THAT year of 1570, the population of Córdoba was somewhere in the region of fifty thousand people. As with all such cities, beyond the walls the countryside stretched uninterrupted since it was forbidden to build dwellings outside the walls that might block open access to the perimeter road or that might threaten the city itself. The river Guadalquivir ceased to be navigable from here, and meandered capriciously if impressively. To the north of the city was the Sierra Morena and to the south, on the far side of the river, stretched farmland, the rich ‘bread basket’. In the tenth century, Córdoba secured independence from the East and Abderraman III set himself up as Caliph of the West, successor to and vicar of Muhammad, prince of the believers and defender of the law of Allah. From then on, Córdoba became the most important city in Europe, cultural heir to the great capitals of the East, with more than a thousand mosques, thousands of dwellings and businesses, and some three hundred public baths. It was in Córdoba that the sciences, arts and letters flourished. Three centuries later, the city was conquered for Christianity by the holy king Don Fernando III, after a six-month siege laid from La Ajerquía on La Medina, the two parts into which the city was divided.

  The Christians did not work on a Sunday so, on the first holy day they spent in the city, Hernando escaped from the grim two-storey house on an alleyway leading to Calle de Mucho Trigo, where seven Morisco families, including his own, were cooped up.

  ‘Some houses have fourteen or sixteen families in them,’ Hamid had pointed out when he suggested that house to them. ‘The King’, he explained when they looked at him in disbelief, ‘decreed that the Moriscos share living quarters with old Christians so that the latter could keep an eye on them, but the city authorities decided not to obey this order because they thought no Christians would be willing to live with us. They therefore gave instructions that we live in our own houses as long as these are always located between two Christian-occupied dwellings. Besides,’ he added, clucking his tongue, ‘all the houses here are owned either by the Church or the nobility, who make good money by renting them out, not something they could do if we lived with the Christians. There must be at least four thousand of us Moriscos newly arrived in the city. It was not difficult for the councillors to reach their decision: they pay miserly wages but make a lot of money out of us: first they exploit us, then they steal our meagre income in the rent we pay for their houses.’

  As they were last to arrive, they had to share their living space with a young married couple who had just had a son, something that seemed to awaken fresh feelings of grief in Fátima. She confined herself to following instructions, which Aisha gave her all the time. Once she had carried them out, she retreated into silence, breaking it only to mumble some prayer or other. She looked up from time to time when she heard the little one cry. On the few occasions that he was in the house Hernando tried to work out what those black eyes, always dull now, were trying to say, but all he could read in them was a profound anguish.

  Aisha too stole some sad glances at the newborn baby. When the authorities were registering them all, they had seized Aquil and Musa as they had all the exiled children and handed them over to pious Córdoba families who were charged with educating them and converting them to Christianity. Aisha and Brahim, for once as powerless as his wife, found themselves obliged to watch as their children were taken away from their family in floods of tears and handed over to strangers. The muleteer’s face flushed with a savage fury: they were his boys! The only source of pride he had left!

  However, it was not Fátima or the prospect of having to share the living quarters with the young married couple and their baby boy for a long time that drove Hernando to get up before sunrise that Sunday and slip out secretly. That night, with everyone crowded into the same room, Brahim had sought out Aisha for the first time in many months and she gave herself to him as his first wife. Hernando, hunched and tense on his straw mattress, listened to his mother’s sighs and moans at his side. There was no room to do anything else! In the half-light, his eyes shut tight, it pained him to notice how she sought to give Brahim pleasure, devoting herself to him as Muslim women were taught to do: seeking closeness to God through the act of love.

  He did not want to see his mother. He did not want to see Brahim. He did not want to see Fátima!

  His distress did not ease even after he had fled the room and begun to walk through the streets of Córdoba beneath the sun that was beginning to brighten them. First he thought he would head for the mosque, so that he could get a closer look at the building that rose above all the others in the city and which he had seen so often when he crossed the Roman bridge, returning to the tannery laden with manure. There was no other mosque left in the city of the caliphs as King Fernando had ordered churches to be built on top of them. Fourteen or so were built at the expense of Muslim places of worship. The rest were razed to the ground. Although it was no longer the mosque of the caliphs, it was said that you could yet see lattices above the entrance doors, and the arabesques on the long rows of red ochre columns crowned with double horseshoe arches that were unique in all the world. It was also said that if you listened hard enough, you could still hear echoes of the faithful at prayer.

  Hernando abandoned the idea, remembering the insults the Christians had thrown when he arrived in Córdoba and the distrust with which people looked at him as he approached the mosque, laden with manure, after crossing the Roman bridge. Even children seemed to defend the church from heretics! So he walked aimlessly through the streets of La Ajerquía and La Medina and realized that the whole of Córdoba was one
huge shrine to Christianity. In addition to the fourteen churches built by the Spanish King, which made up the city’s parishes, another one had been added, together with close to forty small hospitals and sanctuaries, each with its corresponding church. Between the churches and hospitals were great tracts of land with glorious monasteries occupied by religious orders: San Pablo, San Francisco, La Merced, San Augustín and La Trinidad. There were also impressive nunneries like Santa Cruz, adjacent to Calle de Mucho Trigo where Hernando lived, and Santa Marta, plus many others that had been built since the Reconquest. All of them were hidden from prying eyes by dint of long, high, whitewashed walls with no openings other than at the entrance gates.

  Every street corner in Córdoba displayed paintings or sculptures of Ecce Homos, Blessed Virgins, saints or Christ figures, some of them life size, as well as countless altars, which the old Christians always kept lit with candles, the sole night-time lights in the city. Tiny hermitages, chapels and houses of penitents were scattered throughout the city, as were monks or religious brothers who continually asked for alms to the singsong of rosaries sung in the streets.

  How were they going to survive as Muslims in that huge sanctuary? thought Hernando as he stood staring at the façade of the church of Santa Marina, near the slaughterhouse, outside the cemetery which surrounded the church on three sides. This was where his footsteps had taken him, to the north of the city.

  Juviles! The sierra! he cried out inside his mind. Standing there in the first rays of sunshine, he felt dirty, reeking of rotten manure.

  ‘Don’t even think about washing yourself,’ Hamid had warned him. ‘That’s one of the things the Christians look out for; they think it’s a sign of heresy.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Bear in mind that they don’t do it,’ the holy man interrupted. ‘Sometimes they wash their feet, but most of them only have a bath once a year, on their saint’s day. The linings of their shirts are nests of lice and fleas. I should know: remember that one of my tasks is to change the sheets at the brothel.’

  Reluctantly Hernando had followed his advice and refrained from washing so that the stench was stuck to his skin; it happened with all the Moriscos . . . and with all the Christians. Sniffing himself, he looked at the burial places of the parishioners there at the doors of the church; noblemen and the wealthy who could afford it managed to secure a tomb inside a church or a convent or in the cathedral, but the shopkeepers and artisans lay buried there, in the middle of the streets of Córdoba, while the poor were buried on the outskirts.

  On Sunday he had to attend mass accompanied by Fátima, his lawful wife in the eyes of the Christians, who on Fridays went to the church for her catechism classes as she had promised to do on the day of their wedding. He returned to San Nicolás de la Ajerquía walking down next to the San Andrés stream. If Córdoba had more than enough of anything, besides Christian devotion, it was water, just as in the Sierra Nevada, but unlike the crystal-clear water of the ravines in the Alpujarra, the water here overflowed in the squares or ran polluted down to the river. Where Hernando was walking now, along the San Andrés stream, ran the waters that gathered up the waste from the abattoir and from the entire neighbourhood on its banks. Why was it so important to the Christians to keep the dyes off the streets when they allowed the passage of such putrid waters? he complained to himself, carefully crossing one of the planks which the council had ordered placed like bridges between the houses on either side of the stream. So deep was the bed of that stinking stream, which was lower even than the foundations of the buildings, that the Córdoba people had christened it ‘the cliff’.

  The church of San Nicolás had been built where Calle Badanas met the river. Its interior took Hernando by surprise when he joined Fátima and the rest of the Moriscos to take part in the religious service. When he passed it returning from the slaughterhouse he had noticed the low front of the church, which was no more than five yards high. This made it look very different from the rest of the churches built by King Fernando, which were much bigger and taller. Like the others, it had been built on top of a mosque, but San Nicolás retained the rows of columns complete with arches that were typical of places of Muslim worship, as the cathedral did. That fleeting sensation vanished, however, as soon as the sacristan began to take the roll call of the Moriscos. Some two hundred of them were registered in the parish but, unlike in Juviles, here they were in a minority among the two thousand or more old Christians who were gathered in the church, most of them artisans, merchants and workers – the nobility lived in other parishes – in addition to a significant number of slaves owned by the artisans.

  Men and women heard mass separately. There were none of the outbursts and threats they were used to from the priest in Juviles; here, the mass was for the Christians. The ceremony cost the Moriscos a maravedí a head. Afterwards, they went outside, and while they were waiting for the women, a well-dressed man approached them. Without thinking, Hernando glanced at the lace collar of his shirt, expecting to see a louse or a flea jump.

  ‘You’re the new Moriscos from the Mucho Trigo alleyway, aren’t you?’ he asked Hernando and Brahim arrogantly, without offering his hand. When they agreed, the new arrival turned to Hamid, staring contemptuously at him, his eyes lingering on his scarred face. ‘What are you doing with them?’

  ‘We’re from the same village, your excellency,’ Hamid answered meekly.

  The man seemed to make a mental note of that information.

  ‘I am Pedro Valdés, justice of Córdoba,’ he went on. ‘I don’t know if your neighbours have spoken of me to you, but be aware that it is my duty to visit you every fortnight to check your circumstances and ensure you are living in accordance with Christian precepts. I trust you will not cause me any problems.’ At that moment, Aisha and Fátima approached, but halted a few steps away from the group. ‘Your wives?’ he asked. He took it for granted that they were and, without waiting for a reply, turned his attention to Fátima, who looked tiny beside Aisha. ‘This one is gaunt and thin,’ he said, pointing to her as if she were an animal. ‘Is she ill? If so, I will need to have her admitted to a hospital.’ Hernando and Brahim alike hesitated and looked to Hamid for help. ‘Do you need a slave to answer for you?’ the justice chided them. ‘Is she sick or not?’

  ‘No . . . your excellency,’ stammered Hernando. ‘The journey . . . the journey was hard for her but she’s on the mend.’

  ‘Just as well. The city hospitals are short of empty beds. Take her for a walk through the city. The sunshine and fresh air will do her good. Enjoy the feast of Our Lord and be thankful for it. Sunday is a day of joy: the day on which Our Lord rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Take her for a walk,’ he said again, making as if to leave them. But: ‘Are you the slave from the brothel?’ he asked Hamid before turning away.

  The holy man said yes and the justice made another mental note. Then he headed towards a group of rich merchants and their wives who were waiting for him a little further off.

  ‘Home!’ shouted Brahim as soon as the justice and his companions had disappeared.

  Aisha and Fátima were already following behind him when Hamid intervened: ‘Sometimes they make surprise visits, Brahim. The justices, priests and the marshal amuse themselves with their friends by turning up at our houses. A few glasses of wine and—’

  ‘Does that mean you agree my wife should be paraded through the city displaying herself to all the Christians with this . . .’ He spat, without looking at Hernando. ‘. . . with the Nazarene?’

  ‘No,’ declared Hamid, ‘it’s not about showing herself to Christians. But nor do I agree that we should attend mass, or say their prayers, or eat their “cake”, and yet we do these things. We must live as they wish us to. It is only in this way, without causing trouble, by deceiving them, that we will be able to reclaim our beliefs.’

  Brahim mulled over this for a moment or two. ‘Never with the Nazarene,’ he said, his mind made up.

  ‘To Christian
eyes she is his wife.’

  ‘What is it are you trying to justify, Hamid?’

  ‘Call me Francisco,’ the holy man corrected him. ‘I’m not trying to justify anything, José.’ Hamid strained to pronounce Brahim’s Christian name. ‘It’s how things are. I didn’t make them that way. Don’t go looking for trouble for your people; we are all answerable for what the rest do. You insist that our laws regarding your two wives are honoured and we respect you, but you refuse to accept what is good for our brothers and you seek confrontations with the Christians. Hernando,’ he added, addressing him directly, ‘remember that according to our law, she is not your wife; behave like the relative of hers that you are. Go for a walk. Carry out the justice’s order.’

  ‘But—’ Brahim started to complain.

  ‘I don’t want any difficulties if the justice appears at your door, José. We have enough problems already. Go,’ he insisted to Hernando and Fátima.

  Fátima followed him as she might have followed anyone who had tugged on the crumpled dress she was wearing. This time with the silent, abashed young woman by his side, Hernando made his way through the streets of Córdoba again, trying to keep in step with her much slower pace.

  ‘I too miss the little one,’ he said to her a few streets further on, after discounting dozens of comments that were going round in his head. Fátima made no reply. How long was this going to last? he groaned to himself. ‘You are young!’ he burst out, at his wits’ end. ‘You can have more children!’