The Inquisitor's Wife by Jeanne Kalogridis Read Free Book Online Page B

of his surroundings. Forgetting all but my rage at his cruelty, I shoved my face in his and screamed:
    “Gabriel! Let him go!”
    My cry broke the spell. Gabriel looked up at me, startled, as if I were an avenging angel who had spontaneously materialized before him; I suppose it was the first time I’d ever called him by name. My gaze still locked with his, I placed my head between his fist and Antonio’s crown and watched in amazement as all anger drained from his homely features and was replaced by an odd, reverent tenderness. Yet beneath the tenderness lurked a guilty sensuality, the look of a penitent who finds himself lustfully beguiled by the Madonna’s beauty. His thick arm slowly uncoiled itself from Antonio’s neck and dropped.
    Antonio immediately rolled into a sitting position. “Marisol!” he cried. His bottom lip was cut and bloodied, causing him to lisp, and his red-blond bangs were now dark copper and stuck to his sweat-slicked forehead. His tone held no welcome or gratitude, only disapproval, as if to say, You might have gotten yourself killed! But he took the arm I proffered him, and I helped him stand just as the mob went silent.
    “Back to your houses!” a man cried sharply. I glanced up to see the kickball players quietly dispersing. The cul-de-sac began to empty quickly, as a commanding voice emanated from the gate of the Hojeda house.
    “Gabriel, come inside at once!” Don Jerónimo’s voice was thin and reedy yet conveyed such steely authority that every child in the street fell quiet, while Gabriel hung his head. I squinted at don Jerónimo’s figure, stark black, stooped and featureless against the blinding coral of the setting sun. The slightest exertion left the elderly Jerónimo winded, but he was not gasping and breathless, as he would have been had he been notified of the violence and rushed to quell it. Clearly, he had been watching the entire time.
    “Come away, Gabriel,” he repeated, in a voice that pierced the sudden quiet. “Come away from that filthy little marrana !”
    Marrana, he called me. A female pig, a sow. Although the term had been directed at my mother, I had never been called that name before—the ugliest name you could call a conversa in those days—and it cut to the bone.
    I stood, stunned and smarting, as Gabriel headed into the dying sun to join his father; as they disappeared behind the gate, Gabriel let go a sharp yelp.
    The instant don Jerónimo was gone, the children remaining in the square slowed and turned toward me and began to chant in a scathing singsong:
    “Marrana! Marrana! Marrana!”
    In their eyes was the same hatred I’d seen in the butcher’s eyes when he had refused to sell anything but pork to my mother.
    Sobbing, I batted away Antonio’s protective embrace and ran home, passing my father in the street as he shouted for the children to stop. Later I learned that a family servant saw Antonio home, while one of our drivers took the elderly Jewish man to the hospital. But I went straight to my lonely room and curled up into a ball, weeping. A few moments later, my father entered and tried to comfort me.
    “Those boys did terrible things,” he said, sitting down on the bed beside me; I wouldn’t look at him. “And what they said to you was horrible.”
    “But why do they say it?” I demanded. “Why do they hate me and Mamá so much? What did we ever do to them?”
    My father let go a long sigh and, for the first time, began to look old. “They hate what they don’t understand. They’re afraid, because your mother’s ancestors were apparently … Jewish.”
    “But why is that so awful?” I demanded.
    My father drew in a breath and looked away, toward the door. And then he began to explain to me that some Old Christians were afraid of New Christians because some of the monks—most notably, Gabriel’s older brother—preached that New Christians weren’t really Christians but were secretly practicing Judaism, and that, of