Conversos

By Rita Bova

CONVERSOS is historical fiction in which the main character time travels between 1492 and 1992. Follow lead character Margarita Arpa as she struggles against a 1992 coma that propels her back to the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Christopher Columbus and his world changing expedition to the New World adds to Margarita's journey between 1492 and 1992.

Fear, excitement, mystery, and terror makes CONVERSOS a must read for history buffs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781619845800

Book preview

29

PROLOGUE

June, 1987

Help me, help me, Margarita screamed into the darkness. That night she had a terrible dream in which she was running down a dark passage toward the sea where there were waiting ships. She was terrified of being caught. Hearing Margarita’s screams, her mother came in and comforted her.

The next Monday, Margarita Arpa squirmed in her chair at the college where she was soon to graduate with a degree in paramedic medicine. The professor was describing the cognitive states of a person felled by a coma in a sea attack during World War II, but all Margarita could think about was her wild destination wedding the week after graduation. She and David would have a family-style wedding here in Columbus the week after finals, but their private destination wedding afterward in the Canary Islands during July tantalized the two of them.

After her final exams were over, Margarita spent hours studying tourist brochures and magazines. Pictures of the red and ravishing pointsettia flowers, the Christopher Columbus Museum with its model rooms of his ship’s interior, and the skeletons of an extinct native tribe called The Guanches foreshadowed a haunting and exotic vacation trip.

Margarita and David had originally met two years earlier when she joined the Ohio Mensa Club, and then they fell madly in love at the intellectual and enthusiastic meetings. David’s family was both Jewish and Christian and hers Jewish, so both a minister and a rabbi had officiated their wedding in Columbus, Ohio. Before she met David, Margarita’s love life had been chaotic and unfulfilling. Marrying David was a true blessing for Margarita. Their formal wedding in Columbus, Ohio was such a joyous occasion, and David’s crushing of the fine wine glass added real spirit to the ceremony. Despite the joy, a little sadness filled a corner of Margarita’s heart because, by this time, her parents had been divorced and her father, who had passed away from years of regret, failure and disease, was not with her on this occasion.

CHAPTER 1

On the following weekend, Margarita and her new husband David departed for the Canary Islands, a Spanish enclave off the coast of Africa. Their private wedding here would be warm, wonderful, exotic, and mysterious because no one Margarita knew ever went to the Canary Islands from her home city of Columbus, Ohio. She and David had chosen this exotic locale because both of them had Hispanic blood and were enchanted by the islands, the prospect of their unique and fulfilling wedding, and their restless, foreign ancestral pasts. But when she and David were drafting their travel plans, Marguarita had been the more compelled to visit this island; its history and mystery attracted and repelled her at the same time. She looked forward to seeing the Christopher Columbus Museum because she was drawn to the controversy of the Expeditions to the New World. Christopher Columbus – his statue dominated the college from which she had just graduated as a paramedical student!

After ten hours in flight, they had a stop-over at Madrid Airport before boarding the final flight to Las Palmas, the capital of the Canary Islands. The cabin was hot and musky, and as Margarita and her fiancé David flew high in the clouds toward the mysterious land, they fell asleep in each others’ arms. Margarita dreamed about dark-haired, primitive-looking people running, rushing, and hiding in the tall grasses that rushed down to the sea. She awoke abruptly with her heart pounding, and her face sweating, and she wrenched herself free from David’s embrace, feeling smothered by her beloved, new husband. Seeing her frightened face, David asked, What’s wrong?

Nothing, Margarita responded, just too much excitement and stress.

Even though Margarita reassured David, she felt queasy. Still on edge from her frightening dream, she tried to recall it but all that remained in her memory were some disintigrating fragments accompanied by an eerie sense of deja vous. And there was something about Christopher Columbus in that dream...

July, 1987 – Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Margarita and David passed their first few days as liesurely as possible in this island paradise. They were pleasantly surprised to discover how cosmopolitan yet relaxed the city of Las Palmas proved itself to be. While the Canary Islands were as distant from mainland Spain as Hawaii from mainland USA, Las Palmas was actually the fourth largest city of Spain.

The second day on the island satisfied Margarita’s curiosity about the Christopher Columbus Museum. Located in the historic Vageutta District of the Old City, the Museo Cristobol Colon had been converted from a historic mansion where Christopher Columbus had stayed briefly as a guest of of the local governor immediately before setting sail on his historic first voyage to the Americas. Numerous rooms exhibited recreations of the interiors of below-deck rooms in Columbus’s ships, wall-sized colorful vintage maps of Columbus’s four voyages to the America’s, original and replicated navigational instruments used by the great explorer, and many of Columbus’s personal objects.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS HOUSE MUSEUM

File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Cesar Gonzalez 2007 http://flickr.com/photos/72166076@N00/1331714131

On the same afternoon, Margarita went with David to browse through the nearby Canarian Museum, a rich anthropological and archeological exhibition devoted entirely to the extinct aboriginal tribes of the Canary Islands, a people known as the Guanches. Margarita found it unexpectedly impressive yet quite eerie with its hundred of skulls and skeletons of a once living, proud people.

Margarita surveying remains of Guanche people in the Canarian Museum

The Guanches are believed to be the descendants of an advanced civilization from North Africa who became ship-wrecked on the islands during ancient times. Then over the course of many generation, they lost their navigational skills and regressed to a primitive neolithic level of technology yet developed a rich civilization nonetheless. After millenia of isolation, the invading Spaniards discovered them, warred with them, enslaved them, and exterminated them. Many of those who did not die in outright battle throughout the course of several wars committed suicide by throwing themselves over cliffs as they preferred this to enslavement or to being forced to convert to Catholicism. The final erasure of the Guanche race from the islands came about through the practice of keeping all of the Guanche women forcibly pregnant by Spaniard fathers.

Finally, the big day arrived. Soon after their personal and passionate wedding that Saturday afternoon, Margarita and David rushed down to the blue skied, blue-green ocean and dove into the deep, bright Atlantic water. In the swirl of a warm current below, Margarita thought she felt the firm capture of her lover’s arms around her. But then she realized that it was not David’s strong embrace but rather an overpowering grasp of the ocean’s undertow, yanking her down to the sea’s depth. A torrid underwater force shoved her down, down, down into a hot cauldron of waves.

Margarita felt as though she were splitting into two selves as she involuntarily sucked the cold water into her lungs. Suddenly she was caught in the present of each suspended second, feeling her body tumbling in the silence of thick warm and cool currents around her. But she could also hear the panicked thoughts, I’m drowning! I’m drowning! of another person within. Those words alarmed her, and time resumed its forward progress as she struggled to turn about and swim up for air, Then came the panic of not knowing which way was up or down, only to be relieved by blissful unconsciousness as Margarita’s head knocked against a boulder at the bottom of the sea.

The lifeguards pulled Margarita’s colorless, limp body from the murky waves. She was now in a deep coma, nearly dead. Moving down again into the water, the lifeguards struggled to save David. He was still and lifeless when brought back to the seashore that horrific day.

The rescue squad rushed Margarita into intensive care in a Las Palmas hospital. The hospital staff worked on her almost lifeless body to get her out of the almost drowned state. Suddenly, the moaning, sweating, and distressed Margarita’s eyes opened up and peered into the twilight between life and death. Then her wild-eyed trance broke into convulsions, her eyes opening and closing with rapid jerks.

Swaying from side-to-side in her seizure, Margarita appeared to be looking at something – experiencing a shocking memory or a strange vision of someone the medical staff couldn’t see. Breathing faster, Margarita’s lips were taut, her voice moaning incomprehensively, wildly chanting repeated, muddled words, now softer – then louder.

Titqabbal tzothon uva ‘uthon Margarita wailed. Por favor, que vos traxo para mi!

Margarita sat up and gazed feverishly into the space above her as thought looking at something or someone. Mumbling, she crashed back down against the hospital bed, appearing agitated or panicked.

What is she saying? asked the nurse on duty.

Sounds like some sort of ancient language mused Dr. Bernal, but it’s just disorganized speech created by a delirious brain.

The doctor ordered a sedative. Then as Margarita’s eyes and face grew calmer, she became more tranquil but continued breathing heavily. The nurse wiped Margarita’s sweating brow, and her body seemed to rest uneasily.

Margarita’s spirit was alive, but now inhabiting a state somewhere in the nether world of yesteryear.

July, 1487 – Tarragona, Catalonia, Crown of Aragon

Screams, shouts, and angry assaults woke Margarita Arpa from a deep sleep that morning. The frightened little girl ran to her mother who took her in her arms and held her while the chaos outside intensified. Soldiers in the street were pushing back a riot of protesters who were trying to obstruct their removal of a badly beaten man.

He is not a Jew! wailed a woman on the edge of the fray. He is one of the faithful!

He is a Crypto! retorted a stern-looking man on horseback gowned in clerical robes. The only thing worse than a Jew is a Jew who pretends to be a Catholic. That amounts to blasphemy on top of heresy.

The equestrian clergyman, conspicously in charge of the operation, was the new Deputy Inquisitor of Catalonia. His expressed sentiments were quite reflective of the emerging new civil order. Although the Inqusition had been in effect for almost a decade, Catalonia had thus far had been much less affected than most of the other provinces of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon. The social restrictions on Jews and Conversos alike Jews converted to Christianity) had been increasing gradually until, about two years ago, civil acts of violence like the event of this morning started to become more common.

First came King Ferdinand’s paranoia concerning the loyalty of Jews and their Converso bretheren. Now in the heat of his fervor to push the Moors out the Emirate of Granada and thus complete his war for the Reconquista (Catholic Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula), Ferdinand began enforcing harsher policies. He feared that the Jews (including pretending Christians) might throw their support to Muslim forces in exchange for special status within a victorious Islamic kingdom. The Jews, afterall, commanded a significant portion of the wealth, and so what might be their political ambitions? Of course, this was all of more relevant concern in the southern provinces bordering the Emirate Granada. But then eighteen months ago, a gang of hired thugs assasinated Pedro de Arbués, the Provincial Inquisitor of Aragon, in the Cathedral of Zaragosa. Allegedly, a conspiracy of affluent Jews and Conversos were responsible for the murder. Civil backlashes against subjects in the Provinces of Aragon and neighboring Catalonia and Valencia were almost immediate.

Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada, now resident at Queen Isabella’s court at Segovia, had previously served as Provincial Inquisitor of Catalonia. The Zaragosa conspiracy of 1485 gave