Ildefonso Falcones - Cathedral of the Sea

“There’s nothing more I can do,” Dr. Sebastia Font said resignedly on the third night he came to visit.

Pale and drawn, Guiamona raised her hands to her head and burst into tears.

“But that’s impossible!” shouted Grau. “There must be some remedy!”

“There may be, but ...” The doctor was well aware of Grau and his dislikes. But the situation called for desperate measures. “You will have to call on Jafuda Bonsenyor.”

Grau said nothing.

“Call for him!” Guiamona said, between sobs.

“A Jew!” thought Grau. If you deal with a Jew, you deal with the Devil, he had been taught as a child. And as a child, Grau had joined the other apprentices to run after Jewish women and smash their water jars when they came to fill them at the public fountains. He went on doing so until the king bowed to a petition from the Jewry of Barcelona and prohibited all such attacks. Grau hated Jews. All his life he had harassed or spat at anyone wearing a badge. They were heretics; they were the ones who had killed Jesus Christ... how could he allow one of them to cross his threshold?

“Call him!” shouted Guiamona.

Her anguished cry was so loud that everyone in the neighborhood heard. Bernat and the apprentices shrank back on their pallets from the sound. Bernat had not been able to see either Arnau or Habiba for three days, but Jaume kept him up-to-date on what was going on.

“Your son is fine,” he told him when no one was looking.

Jafuda Bonsenyor came as soon as he got the message. He was wearing a plain black hooded djellaba, with the badge round his neck. Grau watched him from a distance as he stood in the dining room, hunched over as he listened to Sebastia’s explanations. Guiamona stood next to them. “Make sure you cure him, Jew!” Grau glared silently when their eyes met. Jafuda Bonsenyor nodded respectfully toward him. Jafuda was a learned man who had devoted his life to studying philosophy and the sacred scriptures. King Jaime the Second had commissioned him to write The Book of Sayings of Wise Men and Philosophers, but he was also a doctor, the most prominent in all the Jewish community. When he saw Guiamon, all he did was shake his head slowly from side to side.

Grau heard his wife’s cries. He ran to the stairs. Guiamona came down from the bedroom on Sebastia’s arm. Jafuda appeared behind them.

“Jew!” hissed Grau, spitting as he passed by.

Guiamon died two days later.

No SOONER HAD they all returned to the house, dressed in mourning, after the burial of the boy’s body, than Grau signaled to Jaume to come over to him and Guiamona.

“I want you to go to Arnau at once and make sure he never sets foot inside this house again.” Guiamona did not say a word.

Grau told him what Margarida had said: that it was Arnau who had led them on. Neither his youngest nor a mere girl could have planned such an escapade. Guiamona listened to his accusations, cursing her for taking in her brother and nephew. And although deep in her heart she knew it was only a childish prank that had led to fatal consequences, the death of her youngest son robbed her of the strength to oppose her husband, while Margarida’s blaming of Arnau made it almost impossible for her to bear the sight of him anymore. He was her brother’s son, and she wished him no harm; but she preferred not to have to see him.

“Tie that Moorish girl to a beam in the workshop,” Grau ordered Jaume before he went off in search of Arnau, “and make sure everyone gathers round, including the boy.”

Grau had been thinking it through during the funeral service. The slave girl was the one to blame: she should have been looking after them. As he heard Guiamona start crying again, and the priest droned on, he wondered what punishment he should give her. According to the law, he could not kill or maim her, but no one could object if she simply died as a result of the punishment he meted out to her. Grau had never had to deal with such a grievous problem. He ran through all the different tortures he had heard of: covering her body in boiling animal fat (would Estranya have enough in her kitchen?); putting her in chains or shutting her up in a dungeon (that would not be punishment enough); beating her, putting her feet in shackles ... or flogging her.

“Be careful if you use it,” the captain of one of his ships had told him once as he offered him the gift. “One lash can take all the skin off a person’s back.” Ever since, Grau had kept the whip hidden away. It was a fine Oriental whip made of plaited leather, thick but lightweight and easy to handle. It ended in several thongs, each of them tipped with jagged pieces of metal.

As the priest fell silent and the altar boys waved the censers round the coffin, Guiamona coughed, but Grau took a deep breath of satisfaction.

The slave girl was waiting, hands tied round a beam, her feet just touching the ground.

“I don’t want my son to see this,” Bernat told Jaume.

“This isn’t the moment, Bernat,” Jaume warned him. “Don’t go looking for trouble ...”

Bernat shook his head again.

“You’ve worked hard, Bernat; don’t cause trouble for your boy.”

In strict mourning clothes, Grau joined the circle of slaves, apprentices, and craftsmen surrounding Habiba.

“Take off her clothes,” he ordered Jaume.

When she saw Jaume tearing off her tunic, Habiba tried to raise her legs to cover herself. But her dark, naked body, gleaming with sweat, was soon exposed to the onlookers’ expectant gaze ... and to the whip that Grau had already laid out on the floor. Bernat grasped Arnau’s shoulders tight. The young boy began to cry.

Grau drew his arm back and cracked the whip against her naked upper half: the leather snaked across her back and the metal thongs wrapped themselves round her, digging into her breasts. A thin trickle of blood started to run down her dark skin. Her breasts were open wounds. Habiba lifted her face to the sky and howled as the pain racked her body. Arnau started to tremble uncontrollably, begging Grau to stop.

But he merely drew back his arm again.

“It was your job to look after my children!”

The whip resounded once more, forcing Bernat to turn his son round and press his face against him. The slave girl howled a second time, while Arnau’s shrieks of protest were stifled in his father’s body. Grau went on flogging the Moorish girl until not only her back and shoulders but her breasts, buttocks, and legs were one bleeding mass.

“TELL YOUR MASTER I am leaving.”

Jaume’s mouth drew into a narrow line. For a second, he was tempted to embrace Bernat, but he could see some of the apprentices staring at them.

Bernat watched the official walk toward the big house. He had tried to talk to his sister, but Guiamona had not responded. For several days, Arnau had not moved from the straw pallet he now shared with his father. He sat there without moving, and when his father came up to see him, he always found him staring at the spot where they had tried to cure Habiba’s wounds.

They had cut her down as soon as Grau left the workshop, but did not know where they could safely get hold of her body. Estranya ran in with oil and ointments, but as soon as she saw the bloody mass of flesh, she simply shook her head sadly. Arnau watched all this quietly from the back of the room, tears in his eyes; when Bernat tried to push him outside, he refused to go. Habiba died that same night. The only sign that she had breathed her last was when the low wail, like that of a newborn baby, that she had been making all day suddenly stopped.