Nonetheless, the boy was circumcised and returned to the house within the hour, crying lustily and refusing to be soothed by the drops of wine fed to him. Right on the parlor table Constantina swaddled her son, and before turning him over to the nursemaid and seeking her own comfort in a wine bottle, she’d rocked him for a time with a tender grief, as if she held in her arms her own unsoothable spirit. Ester had witnessed all from the top of the stair—squeezing her eyes shut even after her mother had gone, so that she might continue imagining that she herself were the wailing infant held so tight.
And when Ester’s father first brought Rabbi HaCoen Mendes to their home, Constantina’s voice tore the air over Ester’s head. “I gave no permission for that man to come into my house.”
“That man,” said Samuel Velasquez slowly, “is a rabbi. He’s going to tutor the children.”
Her father. His thick brown hair and neatly trimmed beard only starting to gray. Broad palms smelling faintly of aniseed oil, coffee, and the barrels of spice he inspected at the docks; his fine white blouse and breeches pressed, his mild brown eyes wide with fatigue.
All through that first hour Ester had spent with the rabbi, her father had lingered on the perimeter of the room as though to protect them from the storm he knew was coming. In the hush of the parlor, the blind rabbi’s face lifting in her direction like a plant slowly turning toward the sun, Ester had answered Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s gentle questions—what did she know of Hebrew, which works had she read in Castilian and which in Portuguese? She’d read aloud from the volume the rabbi had brought, whispering apologies for her every hesitation or stumble.
Immediately upon the rabbi’s departure, the quiet shattered.
“Don’t speak to me as though I’m simple!” Constantina’s voice, breaking, tightened Ester’s own throat.
In her green gown with its deep bosom, Constantina closed her delicate hands on the carved back of Ester’s chair. “He’s a rabbi, yes! A poor, miserable creature who lost his eyesight for the priests’ satisfaction—and now he and all the rest of them want us to lock away our senses. No attending plays we like, or eating what food we wish, or heaven forbid letting our legs be glimpsed during a dance if it pleases us!”
The maid entered, head down, and closed the windows—although the thin glass could hardly keep such fury from the eager ears of neighbors.
“I’ll no longer discuss the matter of attending Spanish comedies,” Samuel said. “The Mahamad is against it.”
“The Mahamad,” she enunciated from behind Ester, “exists only to wallow in its own holy muck.”
“Constantina!”
“No! When my mother and I ran from Lisbon, we ran to save our lives. Not our Jewish lives. Our lives. We ran because even if we never said a prayer, even if my mother and aunts went to the dance hall after their Friday feast”—swiftly she stepped to her husband and jabbed her finger into his chest—“even so, the priests wanted to drag us into their torture rooms.” As her father edged back from the onslaught, Ester understood that Constantina had been drinking. He said nothing, but Ester felt him shut like a heavy door, leaving the room colder.
“You brought me to this place as a bride,” Constantina continued, at an even higher pitch, “and you decided we would be pious. But no one is pious in every single thought—no one, except you.” Constantina said the word with a glad viciousness.
Forearms on the table, face averted, Ester had closed her eyes. What, she asked herself, did the rabbi see behind his sealed lids? And what, she pressed silently, was the true meaning of the verse the rabbi had recited from Pirkei Avot? The rabbi’s lesson turned in her mind, pieces of a puzzle seeking their match. Something in them troubled her. She could not get the notions to align.
“You were content,” her father said, “when I arranged to educate our children in French and our son in Latin, as befits our standing. Yet you want me to shun our own people’s learning. Your grandfather didn’t die, Constantina, for us to shun it.” Her father’s voice too had risen. Ester cringed at what it might unleash. Yet she couldn’t help clinging to the sound of his words. “In Amsterdam, even a girl may study the faith. And if Ester may learn, then she ought. I’m in disagreement with many on this matter, I know. But Rabbi HaCoen Mendes is willing to teach a girl. And”—he pronounced the words softly but firmly—“as the master of this house, I have requested that he do so. I do not make it my habit to insist with you, Constantina, though some call me a fool for the degree to which I tolerate your whims.”
In the long silence that ensued, Ester shut her eyes. Behind closed lids, she forced her mind to the rabbi’s words. The saving of a life is equal in merit to the saving of the world. So it is said, he who saves one life saves a world. Yet if this was so, then what exactly was meant by world? Were there worlds of different size and merit? Or was the world of one soul as capacious as the world that contained all of creation—infinite, even? Was Ester’s world, peopled by her parents and her brother, equal to all the others God had created?
Yet if all worlds were equal, then each world the Jesuits murdered was equal to all God’s others. How then could one be certain God’s power was greater than that of the Jesuits?
The thought rang frighteningly, forcing her eyes open: Had she trod near the notions of heretics? Even in her studies, was she taking up her mother’s ways?
Her father was speaking. His voice was low but firm. “I need not remind you what could become of you in Portugal, Constantina. This Amsterdam congregation you hate, despite your rage against its rulings, is your protection.”
Constantina stood motionless. It seemed the fury was draining from her, hopelessness entering in its wake. “You trap me in a box full of Jews,” she said quietly.
Her father’s face was weighted with fatigue, yet instantly a tender sympathy rose there, and Ester saw that his love for Constantina was untouched, and should his wife but permit it he’d take her in his arms to comfort her. He said, gently, “It was not I who decided it should be a trap.”
A moment’s equipoise. Then Constantina’s face clouded. She waved vaguely at the open book in front of Ester. Then briskly. “Leave that nonsense.”
Ester didn’t move.
“I said leave it!”
Slowly, as though looking up from underwater, Ester met her mother’s dark eyes.
“Well,” Constantina said. A strange loneliness rippled in her voice. But she stood soldier-straight as she continued, braving whatever bewilderment had seized her. “You may indeed be a Jewess, Ester,” she said. Yet though the words were addressed to her daughter, all Constantina’s attention was on her husband. “But you, Ester, are a Jewess with Iberian blood and a coat of arms in your family.”
Samuel’s posture sagged, as though a melody he’d listened for had vanished. “It serves little,” he said quietly, “to put stock in purity of blood. Or in titles purchased by great-great-grandfathers that nonetheless failed to purchase safety.”
Whatever had stayed Constantina’s hand, it was gone. With a small smile, as though delivering a fatal blow, she said, “Perhaps I’ll tell her, why don’t I, that her mother’s bloodline also traces to a fine Christian Englishman?”
Samuel spoke quickly. “I should like to protect my family from your legacy of shame, as I protected you when I married you.” Without another word, he stepped around the table and toward the door. Before he reached it, Constantina was there. Ester heard her mother’s slap on her father’s face. Then Constantina’s sobs, receding up the stair. The slam of a heavy door, something smashing on the floor—then her mother’s sharp “Jesus Christo!” followed by a sob of drunken laughter.
When Ester next looked up, her father had left.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the empty air.
The house vibrated with quiet. The rabbi’s texts lay before Ester in the light from the window—the books he’d given her to study. She lowered herself into them, line by line—at first holding her breath so as not to dispel her fragile understanding. Then, gingerly, breathing.