excerpt
“Why do you want me to baptize your baby again?” I asked her,
sipping from a cup of hot chocolate sweetened with honey. I knew
well enough that was the usual procedure, but she probably didn’t.
The house was not well located. It was on the perimeter of the
town, near the place where the Indians had made their temporary
encampment. We sat on rickety chairs at the table in her kitchen, her
slave minding the baby outside. I could see them through a window
that was nothing more than a squared opening in the wattle and
daub wall.
Josefa had aged since I last saw her; left behind was the young
woman that shivered every time the monkeys howled or a jaguar
roared in the mountains. This was a weathered woman with hands
reddened and swollen from work. But in her big brown eyes, the girl
lingered, and she could still make me shrink inside when she burst
into tears.
“What? What is it, Josefa?”
She sobbed and wiped her face with the edge of her apron.
“Nothing, really. I’m very happy to see you, Friar Salvador. I
missed you terribly.”
“So am I to see you, but tell me, why are you crying?”
I didn’t have time for this. I was tired from the time spent writing
the letter for Losada and worried by their content. I reached out and
held her hand.
“Josefa, is there something you wish to tell me?”
She stopped sobbing and looked at me, deadly serious, then
glanced through the window.
“Only if it is as a confession. All I tell you in confession is secret,
isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
I was not expecting her to speak so plainly.
“He circumcised my baby. He spoke in a strange tongue and he
circumcised my baby. He is a Jew! And now my baby is a Jew as
well! Am I damned?”
Manolis Aligizakis 