Laurel Corona's Blog

Woven through my new novel is a passionate, sensual love story between my protagonist, Amalia, and Jamil, a Muslim poet and courtier. Now an old woman, Amalia feels the spirit of her now dead lover visiting her:



My body is too old and dry to waken as it once did at the thought of Jamil, but the hair on my arms rises so quickly I can almost hear it crackle as he comes up behind me.
“You’re here,” I whisper.
“Habibi,” he says. “Yes, my love.”
I rise to my feet, my heart aching with joy and sorrow. “I was hoping you might still be alive,” I say as his arms envelop me. “I wrote to your wife to ask, but she didn’t answer.”
He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t need to. Only the spirits of the dead can visit the living, and I knew the moment I sensed his presence in this room that he did not survive the last days of the Christian siege of Granada. Though ashamed of my selfishness, I am glad he is here.
“Your family too?” I whisper.
“Two of my granddaughters jumped from a tower to avoid being touched by Ferdinand and Isabella’s soldiers. The rest--”
It feels as if all the air in the room has been let out in one desolate sigh. “The poor had little to eat during the siege, and once disease found a ready supply of new victims among them, it found it had a taste for the rich as well. My wife....” He is silent for a moment. “I loved her, Amalia. She was a good woman.”
Tears spring to my eyes. “And your sons?”
“ Both dead.”
Ahmad. My heart floods with memories, and the cracks in the skin of my face sting with tears. The room hums with silence, as if some barely heard music has died.
“Allah in His mercy made me welcome death.” His breath is hot on my shoulders. “I am at peace now. I came to comfort you.”
The skin on my back prickles like a puff of breeze passing over water. “You are always here,” I whisper. “My love for you is written in my bones.”
[…] His finger is on my lips, stopping me from going on. “I would have found you,” he replies. “Didn’t you feel it in the air the day we met? The inevitability of it?”
I remember getting up, my book falling from my lap, as if I had just caught sight of someone long delayed for whom I had been keeping watch. “I was waiting for you.” I whisper.
“And I came. Perhaps your sighs were carried on the breeze to Granada and I heard you calling.” He teases the laces on my dress and I look down to see they are untied. “You told me to come, and I did.”
The brush of his lips on mine is as soft as the toes of angels dancing. “The barriers in life are false,” he whispers. “We have always been together, even before we met. Then, now, and forever, I am with you.”

Lady Lionor’s eyes flicker with concern. “You mount your horse astride?” she asks me.
“I’ve ridden that way since I was a little girl.”
“Oh dear,” Lady Violante says, looking down nervously. “Your maidenhead is a shield to prove you are a virgin.”
“I am a virgin.” I never knew I had some kind of shield between my legs, and I shift my weight to see if there is something hard and uncomfortable inside me I had failed to notice.
“Yes,” Lionor says, “but being jostled by a horse with your legs parted can break you open in a way that is not desirable.”
Break me open?
Lionor touches the bridge of her nose. “Imagine your maidenhead as something hard, but not solid like bone. It must be broken for your husband to enter you, and that must happen for your marriage to be consummated.”
Tears spring to my eyes as I massage my nose, imagining what it would feel like to have something forced up it so hard it broke the top. “It’s not that bad, dear,” Violante says. We all lived.” She smiles. “Although you will bleed.”
“Bleed?” I whisper. “How much?” I am shuddering, and Lionor puts an arm around my shoulder. “What men do, women must endure. You’ll find after the first few times it doesn’t hurt any more.”
“When I was married,” Susana adds, “the priest told me that if I found it unpleasant I should concentrate on becoming with child from it.”
“Now, it is true that some women find the encounter pleasant,” Violante says, ignoring her, “but I would suggest that if you are one of those, you don’t appear to enjoy it too much. Diogo might think you will look elsewhere for more, and since he will be away so often, perhaps it’s best to fight off any--excitement--you may feel.”
“Oh my goodness,” Lionor, says, looking out the window. “We’re almost in Lisbon!” My heart sinks even further. Much as I want to get out of the coach, away from the torment of this conversation, I know that when the coach stops, the inevitable will be one step closer.

The night Susana goes off to be the wife of Roberto Salas de la Cruz, I lie awake wondering if it will be different now that I am the oldest child in the house. When neighbors talk about what a good wife I would make because I am so devoted to my parents and the baby, sometimes I want to cry out that they don’t understand. I don’t care about making some man happy--all I want is for my mother and father to say what a good job I am doing, to notice how hard I try.
In any case, I am too important to Papa’s livelihood to consider letting me marry when I’m older. It’s Luisa whose future hips get talked about, how she will bear some man’s children and shop for his vegetables. Sometimes I glimpse pity when the neighbors look at me, as if it is already decreed that I will end up like the shriveled-up old crone at the end of our street, the one whose house Luisa and I hurry by.
Why doesn’t anyone ask me what I want? I catch myself grousing like Susana as I move through my days, annoyed that I get too much of the kind of attention I don’t want and not enough of what I do.
How could I forget that the sheddim are always lurking, listening to turn idle complaints into fateful wishes they can grant? “You think other people are happier than you?” the Evil Eye whispers. “You selfish child--just see what I have in mind for you.”

The night Susana goes off to be the wife of Roberto Salas de la Cruz, I lie awake wondering if it will be different now that I am the oldest child in the house. When neighbors talk about what a good wife I would make because I am so devoted to my parents and the baby, sometimes I want to cry out that they don’t understand. I don’t care about making some man happy--all I want is for my mother and father to say what a good job I am doing, to notice how hard I try.
In any case, I am too important to Papa’s livelihood to consider letting me marry when I’m older. It’s Luisa whose future hips get talked about, how she will bear some man’s children and shop for his vegetables. Sometimes I glimpse pity when the neighbors look at me, as if it is already decreed that I will end up like the shriveled-up old crone at the end of our street, the one whose house Luisa and I hurry by.
Why doesn’t anyone ask me what I want? I catch myself grousing like Susana as I move through my days, annoyed that I get too much of the kind of attention I don’t want and not enough of what I do.
How could I forget that the sheddim are always lurking, listening to turn idle complaints into fateful wishes they can grant? “You think other people are happier than you?” the Evil Eye whispers. “You selfish child--just see what I have in mind for you.”

That night I hear my parents talking after I have gone to bed. Our house is big enough to have a room for my sisters and me and another for my parents, but sound travels easily, and I can pick up their voices even over Susana’s light snoring beside me.
“You have to give up the old ways, Rosaura,” Papa says. Mother murmurs something I can’t hear. “Ancestors?” my father replies. “Why are you so sure they would want us to risk our children’s lives?” I strain to hear what my mother is saying, but I can’t.
“Always done things this way, keep the faith--what kind of foolishness is that if we’re all dead?” My father’s voice is getting louder. “We changed our ways when the Romans burned the temple and sent us into exile. All the rabbis do now is spout nonsense about holding to the things that make people hate us. I don’t call that wisdom, and I’m more than happy not to be a Jew.”
The noise from their room has stopped, except for the snuffling sound of my mother’s tears. Silence hangs over the house like a judgment, except for the scratching sound of a mouse devouring a piece of grain in the corner. Two cats yowl at each other in the alley, and something crashes to the ground as they fight.
I go to stand in my parents’ doorway, but their forms under the blanket offer nothing to comfort me. I tiptoe backwards to bed, wanting to trick time into reverse, so today will never have happened.

The windows of the cathedral admit little light on this blustery morning, and the sconces on each massive pillar give up their weak yellow glow into the looming gray overhead. The odor of tallow smoke, wet wool, and incense wafts through the nave as I stand with my family in the long line of people awaiting communion on Tosantos, All Saints Day.
Father hangs back to let us go first. Susana picks Luisa up so the priest can lay a wafer on her tongue, and then puts her down to receive the host herself. They make the sign of the cross and Luisa looks up at Susana for approval.
I stick out my tongue for the priest, but before the wafer can dissolve, I transfer it to the inside of my upper teeth, as my mother has taught me. When we return to where Susana and Luisa are standing in the nave, I see my mother run the knuckle of her thumb over her lips and in a few seconds she has managed to bury the unswallowed host in the folds of her underskirt.
I wiggle the host free from my own teeth and move it to the tip of my tongue. Feigning a cough, I deposit it between my curled fingers. Clasping the other hand over my fist in a gesture of prayer, I wait for the chance to paste the sticky blob inside the hem of my sleeve.
My mother has her own way of going to mass. She says out loud only the things she believes and mumbles her way through the rest. I do the same. The Lord’s Prayer is one of the things we both say with fervor. “It’s a Jewish prayer,” my mother tells me, “taught by a Jew to Jews.”
She finds it amusing that Christians hang on everything an ancient rabbi said. “I understand Jesus perfectly,” Mama tells me. “I just don’t understand Christians, and I don’t think he would either.” Indeed, my mother seems on quite friendly terms with the Hanged One, as if they are both shaking their heads in bewilderment at what is done and said in his name.

I have started a giveaway for each of my published books, which will run the entire moth leading up to the publication of novel number four, THE MAPMAKER'S DAUGHTER. I hope you enter one or all:

THE FOUR SEASONS
PENELOPE'S DAUGHTER
FINDING EMILIE
UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH (NON-FICTION)

The scent of cloves and cinnamon wafts up from saffron broth as grandmother fills our bowls with white beans, chickpeas, and cubes of beef.
For a while no one speaks as we enjoy Grandmother’s adafina, kept warm from yesterday, because cooking is work, and work is forbidden on Shabbat. We eat the first bites hurriedly but eventually slow down, because Shabbat meals are meant to be savored, and no one will be leaving the table until we have talked about our week, sung a few songs, and eaten all that our stomachs will hold.
A loud knock startles us. “Who’s there?” I hear the alarm in Grandfather’s voice as he goes to the door.
Grandmother hurries to hide the remainder of the bread, and my mother covers the pot of stew and takes it out the back door. A stew kept warm on a dying fire and a braided loaf means that we are observing the Jewish Sabbath, and no one must know. But it is just neighbors, Bernardo and Marisela, come with a flute and tambourine to be among their own kind making music on Shabbat afternoon.
The bread and stew are brought back to the table, and though we all claim to have had enough, the pot is soon emptied with small tastes, sopped up with the remaining bread. Susana has disappeared, using the excitement of the new arrivals to slip outside.
“You mustn’t be so hard on Susana,” Grandmother says. “Girls get moody when it’s their time to become a woman.”
“But she’s so scornful!” My mother’s eyes glisten. “She says, ‘I was born a Christian.’ What kind of talk is that? As if we can choose our ancestors?”
“Sensible talk,” Grandfather replies. “We are Jews who cross ourselves, eat pork when a Christian puts it on our plate, and buy leavened bread during Passover even though we feed it to the chickens when no one is looking. We’ve left behind so much of who we are, perhaps it’s no longer worth the trouble it causes us.”
“Jaume!” Grandmother is aghast. “Such talk coming from you?”
Grandfather snorts. “I will die having never swallowed that wafer at Mass or bent a knee of my free will to the Hanged One.” Above his gray beard, his face is mottled with anger. “I was a young man still living in Mallorca when I let them splash me with their water. I did it to save my life, but I have never thought of myself as one of them.”
I hate these conversations because I know, even at six, that a threat hangs over these afternoons. To Christians we are Judaizers. To Jews we are traitors to our faith, Marranos, swine. I fight back tears. “Can’t you unbaptize yourself?” I say, hearing the huskiness in my voice. “Can’t you say, ‘I’ve changed my mind and I’d rather be a Jew?’”
My grandmother smiles wistfully. “I wish it were that simple, little one, but Christians believe that once they’ve wetted you, there’s no turning back."