Let me begin afresh. Perhaps, this time, to tell the truth.
Without a word to Aaron, she’d tucked the pages back into the folio. She’d told him, when he asked, that the paper was too damaged—knowing even as she said the words that she ought to tell the truth and permit him to make this last discovery with her. But wresting these treasures from Bridgette, all the while knowing she herself no longer possessed the stamina to study them in earnest—it had depleted her. To read this final document with anyone else—even Aaron Levy—required more steel than she possessed.
So she was alone in her flat when she read it—first carefully setting on the sideboard the letters they’d already studied together, then laying out the remaining sheets one by one upon her small kitchen table. The pages would not lie down peaceably, but rasped and buckled like living things, several dropping to the floor. As she labored to pick them up, they bent in her clumsy, pinching fingers, and she knew that in her refusal to accept help she was doing unforgivable damage. As she fought to control the papers with her hopeless hands, the verse came to her. Im eshkaheh Yerushalayim, eshkah yemini.
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning.
She had devoted her life to remembering. And yet she’d failed. She had, somewhere across the years, forgotten what she’d once understood. What Ester Velasquez had understood. That desire was the only truth worth following.
She’d arrived at the end of her own life too stunned to make her own confession. Was it wrong to want Ester Velasquez’s to speak for her?
She set the final piece of paper on her kitchen table and lowered herself into a chair. Whatever her flaws, she reminded herself, she was a woman without illusions, who faced what needed to be faced.
She sat under the steady light of the lamp, her feet in their bedroom slippers perched on the chair’s rungs like a schoolgirl’s. She traced an unsteady hand along the wavering lines, dropping caution and touching each word reverently, as though wet ink might yet rub off on the pads of her fingers.
She read.
June 8, 1691
11 Sivan of the Hebrew year 5451
Richmond, Surrey
Let me begin afresh. Perhaps, this time, to tell the truth. For in the biting hush of ink on paper, where truth ought raise its head and speak without fear, I have long lied.
I have naught to defend my actions. Yet though my heart feels no remorse, my deeds would confess themselves to paper now, as the least of tributes to him whom I once betrayed.
In this silenced house, quill and ink do not resist the press of my hand, and paper does not flinch. Let these pages compass, at last, the truth, though none read them.
My name is Ester Velasquez. I have lived fifty-four years and linger now at death’s threshold, life being tethered to body now by mere filaments. My death calls and I answer, and through pain make confession, though it shall not satisfy the formula prescribed by my people. Yet I wish now to shed the secrecy that has been salvation and millstone.
Let each forbidden truth speak once its own name.
My husband and his beloved are silver-haired with the long years of their love—the love of two men which I have witnessed with envy and wonder, for love is not my fate. Of them I ask forgiveness for only the daily unthinking sins of life, for they and I have not wronged but saved one another, and with them my conscience is easiest.
Seeing the depth of my illness, this household has silenced itself. All about me it braces to mourn, though my hand moves on the page still.
In the autumn of the year 1657 I arrived in London, being brought to that city by Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes in order to support his labors to bring knowledge to the Jews of London. That I did not do so, that I eroded the very foundation of his scholarship and peace—that I stood opposite him whose dearness was my world’s greatest solace and allowed him to give his thoughts into my hands under the illusion that I was true—this I here confess. Yet I would choose again my very same sin, though it would mean my compunction should wrack me another lifetime and beyond. And so I die confessed but unrepentant, and if all my thinking be in error and there be wages to pay in some world beyond this one, though they be fierce I shall pay without murmur. Nor do I fault my father nor the rabbi for permitting me acquisition of learning deemed unnatural for the female sex, for they did not foresee the creature I would become, the greed that would grow in me to learn and question and crack the foundations of the world I perceived. Yet though I saw myself straying ever farther from the path laid before me, I cried out then and still: why say woman may not follow her nature if it lead her to think, for must not even the meanest beast follow its nature? And why forbid woman or man from questioning what we are taught, for is not intelligence holy?
The world and I have sinned against each other.
Here I might end my own confession, for though there be other sins upon my conscience, my condemnation is accomplished in this one stroke. Yet a few lines more remain for the writing. For confession is a gift permitted to those with days or hours in which to foresee their own deaths. There are those I loved who were denied it.
The servants have shed shoes and muffle their steps, for they have been ordered not to disturb me. In this hushed house a dread settles on me—I fear it makes my reasoning waver.
I believe in no heaven or hell, nor any world to come, yet I know not whether life be snuffed wholly by death or merely assume some unknown form. It is perhaps vain to hope that some essence of what yet beats within me, though in a torment of pain, might endure past death. Yet I love it. I love the sweet labor of this heart in my chest.
Even the birds are silent today.
I do not believe my soul as I know it will be allowed a single footfall beyond the threshold of death. Yet for the sake of others who did so believe and could not confess, I endeavor now to lay down their burdens here beside my own. My father’s spirit I believe was at peace, for he was ever a man whose words and deeds were aligned with what he in his heart felt right and good. My brother, in turn, needs none to confess for him, for he repented unto giving his very life for a sin that was never his own. Dear Isaac. It was never yours. The deed was that of sparks and flame fighting for their own freedom, as do all things. My grief all these years has been that their will to leap and live robbed you of yours. Yet I wish you could know that you did not fail in your dream of saving another by your death. For though I would it were otherwise, your death paved the sole path my strange spirit could walk. I wish only, Isaac, that the one you saved had been more worthy than your sister.
It is my mother, Constantina Velasquez, whose regrets lay heaviest upon her heart. The unease of her spirit visits now and again in my dreams. Sometimes on the verge of sleep I hear her voice, though I’ve confessed this to none. It calls so simply, only one word: my name.
I write of her now to answer that call, though I know not of any help it be to any who exist today. Yet the unspooling of ink has brought me much comfort always, and often have I written what I would not speak.
I was ever ill-suited for this world and could not bend my nature to it. So, in her own manner, was my mother. Constantina de Almanza Velasquez had a nature that might have flowered in other climes, yet she was neither born nor constituted to be a matron of the Amsterdam synagogue.