Gateway to the Moon: A Novel by Mary Morris

Author:Mary Morris [Mary Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385542906
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Published: 2018-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

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Without a word Inez settles in. Her mother has her only servant, Amelia, lead them to two dark, windowless rooms off the courtyard where her uncle, a merchant, stored the spices that were his trade. It is Amelia who explains to Inez that her uncle slit his own throat rather than worship the Christian god and that his family fled to Antwerp on a ship laden with pepper and clove. In the past few years her mother has remained here, in seclusion and alone. Dona Olivia never asks about Benjamin’s origins or who his father is. But though she can’t acknowledge her daughter, she accepts this child as her grandson. Still Dona Olivia will not permit her daughter to inhabit the upstairs rooms where she dwells in solitude, but Inez doesn’t mind. She is grateful for the storage rooms and glad that she hasn’t been put out onto the street.

Inez sweeps out her rooms with a hard straw broom. She finds old bedding that isn’t being used. She sets up a small table with a lamp for herself. In a storage cellar she finds an old cradle that she cleans and polishes and stuffs into it a pillow she makes of goose down. She sleeps on a bed that smells of cinnamon with her son at her side. Then she begins to take charge of the house. In the kitchen she discovers bins filled with potatoes and rotting fruit. She throws most of it away. She goes to the market and brings home baskets of rice, tomatoes, and squash. She teaches Amelia how to roast a chicken in a pot with saffron and rice.

On Fridays she does the laundry by hand. She changes the sheets. She bathes herself and her son. At dusk every Friday she turns the portrait of the Virgin to the wall and follows her mother down the five steps—one for each book of the Torah—into her uncle’s secret cellar. Here the two women light the candles and say their prayers. It is often the only time that they are in the same room during the entire week. Beyond their prayers they never say a word.

Inez rarely talks to anyone and certainly not to her own mother. Her mother only speaks to her in curses. Or addresses her in the third person as if she isn’t in the room. Otherwise Dona Olivia will have nothing to do with the daughter who was dead to her four years ago as she watched her husband consigned to the flames. They live in a war of wills, locked in a hatred for which Inez does not blame her mother. But the silence between them does not bother Inez either. She has grown accustomed to silence in the years since her lover’s betrayal and her father’s fiery death. It is speech that is foreign to her.

In her mother’s house Inez devotes herself to one thing only: the raising of her son. His childhood is confined to the walled courtyard of the house.

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