Free Incantation by Alice Hoffman Page B

like holding a witch’s head underwater to see if she would drown. Only her death could prove her innocence; a circle of impossible, deathly judgment.
    They brought out a sausage made of Dini, and they made this announcement: It had come from a pig that had lived for three years without being cooked. A pig that had slept in bed with the women of the family.
    People in the courtroom let loose with their disgust, cursing us, damning us, we who had become less than human. Marranos. Pigs.
    As for me, I felt something rise in my throat: the horror of the world of men.

    M Y GRANDFATHER refused to eat the sausage. He said he was sick. He said he could not eat anything. He said he believed this court was unjust, and that the outcome of every trial would suit the judge and not the truth.
    The guards opened his mouth and forced the sausage in. When my grandfather spat it out, they forced it back in, only this time they clamped his mouth shut with a metal mask. They tightened the mask until we could hear the bones in his face break, even in the back row. They told my grandfather he would be released when he’d finished eating the pig. After a while he nodded, but when they unlatched the mask, he spit it at them again. I saw the end of his life right there in that single moment. His pride, his decency, his secrets, his death.
    The court officials had brought in a rabbi from the juderia in order to question him. I recognized him; he was the old man with the beard whose books had been burned. He still wore the red circle on his vest. In the back of the court were two women dressed in black with that same circle sewn to their clothes. I looked at them, then looked away. I recognized the language they spoke.
Ladino.
A mixture of Hebrew and Spanish; the language my grandparents spoke to each other when they believed no one was listening.
    I felt the world that I knew tumbling away from me. The judge asked the rabbi if my grandfather was a Judaizer, practicing the rites of Jewry. Question after question came. Was he known to be a surgeon? Did he own books? Did he run a magic school? The rabbi said
no
to each question in a sharp voice. His voice was hard and seemed to be coming from a far distance away. He had raven eyes, dark and deep. He spoke with a raven’s voice, old and wise and far above the cruelty of the human race.
    The rabbi did not want to answer the court; still, they questioned him. Was my grandfather a sorcerer, known to practice from books of magic and illumination? Could he take people apart and put them back together with a needle and thread? Did he chant during the new moon and during fasting times?
    The rabbi looked at my grandfather. Over a hundred years earlier some had stayed and some had fled. Some had been forced into the juderia, where they’d been brutalized; others went to Portugal or Amsterdam; still others went underground and practiced their beliefs in secret. What difference did it make? There was no red circle on my grandfather’s clothes, true enough, but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not.
    If this was true, what did it mean about Catalina—she who pretended to be my friend and was the opposite instead? When I looked at her, she appeared to be a different person from the one I’d known. My friend had disappeared into green smoke. And now I saw that the court had given her a gift for her betrayal.
    Catalina was wearing my pearls.
    She had rewritten everything, our history together, our friendship. Now I was the girl who’d stolen Andres; the girl who’d lied to her about who I was. Therefore, she owed me nothing.

    T O GET MY GRANDFATHER to speak, they arrested my mother. Catalina’s mother had joined her daughter to offer the evidence against her; she’d told the judges that my mother laid eggs, like a hen. Blue eggs that were filled with human blood.
    There had been a drought, and we had no rainwater in our barrel; because my mother would not allow me to go for water,