The Passion Flower · I

One summer afternoon, in a garden in Toledo, a very good and very pretty girl told me this singular story.

As she explained the mystery of its special shape, she kissed the leaves and the pistils that she plucked one by one from the flower that gives its name to this legend.

If I could tell it with the soft charm and tender simplicity that it had on her lips, it would move you as the story of the unhappy Sara moved me.

Since this is not possible, here is what I remember of that tradition at this very moment.

In one of the darkest and most tortuous alleys of the imperial city, wedged and almost hidden between the high Moorish tower of an ancient Mozarabic parish church and the gloomy, blazoned walls of a manor house, a Jew named Daniel Leví had his room many years ago, as rickety, shadowy, and miserable as its owner.

This Jew was resentful and vengeful like all those of his race, but more than any other, deceitful and hypocrite.

Owner, according to the rumors of the vulgar crowd, of an immense fortune, he was nevertheless seen all day crouched in the gloomy doorway of his dwelling, repairing and trimming small metal chains, old belts, or broken harness straps, with which he carried on a great trade among the rogues of Zocodover, the female hucksters of El Postigo, and the poor squires.

An implacable hater of Christians and of everything that might pertain to them, he never passed by a principal gentleman or a canon of the Primatial without removing once and even ten times the greasy cap that covered his bald and yellowish head, nor did he welcome one of his habitual parishioners in his hovel without overwhelming him by dint of humble greetings accompanied by flattering smiles.

Daniel’s smile had come to become proverbial throughout Toledo, and his meekness, proof against the most heavy-handed pranks and the jests and jeers of his neighbors, knew no limits.

In vain the boys, to drive him to despair, threw stones at his hovel; in vain the pages and even the men-at-arms from the nearby palace tried to bore him with the most insulting names, or the devout old women of the parish crossed themselves as they passed his doorway as if they were seeing Lucifer himself in person. Daniel smiled eternally with a strange and indescribable smile. His thin, sunken lips widened in the shadow of his disproportionate nose, curved like the beak of a sparrow hawk; and although from his small, round, green eyes, almost hidden among his thick eyebrows, a spark of poorly repressed anger burst forth, he remained impassive, striking with his little iron hammer the anvil where he worked on the thousand moldy and apparently useless trinkets of which his trade was composed.

Above the door of the Jew’s hovel and within a frame of brightly colored tiles, an Arabic ajimez opened, a remnant of the old constructions of the Moorish Toledans. Around the fretted strips of the ajimez, and tangling along the marble column that split it into two equal hollows, one of those climbing plants rose from the interior of the dwelling, swaying green and full of sap and lushness over the blackened walls of the ruined buildings.

In the part of the house that received a dubious light through the narrow openings of that ajimez, the only one open in the mossy and cracked wall of the alley, lived Sara, Daniel’s favorite daughter.

When the neighbors of the barrio passed in front of the Jew’s shop and happened to see Sara behind the lattices of her Moorish ajimez and Daniel crouched next to his anvil, they would exclaim aloud, astonished at the perfections of the Hebrew woman:—It seems impossible that so vile a trunk should have yielded so fair a scion!

Because, indeed, Sara was a prodigy of beauty. She had large eyes surrounded by a gloomy fringe of black eyelashes, in the depths of which the pinpoint of light of her ardent pupil shone, like a star in the sky of a dark night. Her lips, flushed and red, seemed skillfully cut from a cloth of purple by the invisible hands of a fairy. Her complexion was white, pale, and transparent as the alabaster of a sepulchral statue. She was barely sixteen years old, and already there was engraved upon her face that sweet sadness of precocious minds, and already her bosom heaved and those sighs escaped from her lips that announce the vague awakening of desire.

The most powerful Jews of the city, captivated by her marvelous beauty, had sought her for a wife; but the Hebrew woman, insensible to the homage of her adorers and to the advice of her father, who urged her to choose a companion before she was left alone in the world, kept herself enclosed in a profound silence, giving no other reason for her strange conduct than the whim of remaining free. At last one day, tired of suffering Sara’s disdain and suspecting that her eternal sadness was a sure indication that her heart harbored some important secret, one of her adorers approached Daniel and said to him:

“Do you know, Daniel, that among our brethren they murmur about your daughter?”

The Jew raised his eyes from his anvil for an instant, suspended his continuous hammering, and without showing the slightest emotion, asked his questioner:

“And what do they say about her?”

“They say,” his interlocutor continued, “they say... what do I know... many things... Among others, that your daughter is in love with a Christian... Upon reaching this point, Sara’s disdained lover stopped to see the effect his words had on Daniel.”

Daniel raised his eyes once more, looked at him fixedly for a while without saying a word, and lowering his gaze again to continue his interrupted task, exclaimed:

“And who says that is not a calumny?”

“Whoever has seen them converse more than once in this very street, while you attend the secret sanhedrin of our rabbis,” insisted the young Hebrew, astonished that his suspicions first and then his assertions made no dent in Daniel’s mood.

The latter, without abandoning his occupation, fixing his gaze on the anvil upon which, after setting aside the hammer, he was busy burnishing the metal clasp of a harness with a small file, began to speak in a low and broken voice, as if his lip were mechanically repeating the ideas that crossed his mind.

“Heh! heh! heh!” he said, laughing in a strange and diabolical way. “So my Sara, the pride of the tribe, the staff upon which my old age leans, a Christian dog thinks of snatching her from me?... And do you believe he will do it? Heh! heh!” he continued, always talking to himself and always laughing, while the file screeched harder and harder, biting the metal with its steel teeth. “Heh! heh! Poor Daniel, the men of my tribe will say, he is already doting! What does that dying and decrepit old man want with such a beautiful and young daughter, if he does not know how to guard her from the greedy eyes of our enemies?... Heh! heh! heh! Do you perchance believe that Daniel sleeps? Do you perchance believe that if my daughter has a lover... which well may be, and that lover is Christian and tries to seduce her, and seduces her, which is all possible, and plans to flee with her, which is also easy, and flees tomorrow for example, which falls within the bounds of humanity, do you believe that Daniel will let his treasure be thus snatched away from him, do you believe he will not know how to take revenge?”

“But,” the young man exclaimed, interrupting him, “do you perhaps know?...”

“I know,” said Daniel, rising and giving him a light tap on the shoulder, “I know more than you, who know nothing nor would know anything if the hour to say it all had not arrived... Farewell; notify our brethren so that they may gather as soon as possible. Tonight, within an hour or two, I will be with them. Farewell!”

And saying this, Daniel gently pushed his interlocutor toward the street, gathered his tools very slowly, and began to close the door of the little shop with double bolts and bars.

The noise it made as it creaked shut upon its reluctant hinges prevented the departing man from hearing the sound of the jalousies of the lancet window, which at that very moment slammed shut, as if the Jewess had just withdrawn from her windowsill.