A Secret (okay, not so secret) Well in Toledo
In my last letter to you, I talked about catching covid on the way to Spain this summer, and I briefly mentioned dragging my covid-negative-but-still-sickly ass around Toledo in the name of novel research. The book is mostly set in Madrid, a city I know very well and have visited a lot in recent years, but there are a few key scenes set in Toledo, where I had only been for maybe four or five daytrips when I lived in Madrid as a college student in the nineties. If I was going to get those scenes right, I needed to refresh my memory.
So I had covid (I don’t recommend it) and sweated it out in isolation in Madrid. A few days after testing negative, I took the 30-minute train ride to Toledo. I was trying not to push myself too much post-virus, and walking more than a few blocks left me feeling like a frail Victorian child, so I built lots of rest into my plan for the day: Visit the Ibn Shushan Synagogue, then sit in the nearby park to rest. Walk up the street to the Sinagoga del Tránsito and the Sephardic museum, then back to the little park to rest. Walk to the cathedral and find a pew to rest in, etc. That plan mostly worked well, but as I walked from the synagogues on the outskirts of town (of course they were) to the cathedral at the center of town (of course it was) in 97-degree heat, I found myself in need of an unscheduled break. I ducked into a souvenir shop along the way to get a bit of air conditioning and buy some little tchotchkes to bring home to my kids.
As I was browsing, a woman came in and asked to see the basement. She sounded nervous, and my novelist ears perked up. (Bilingual eavesdropping is one of my more mundane super powers.) She was told that she had to buy something first. She bought a bottle of water, and was escorted to a red velvet rope at the top of a set of stairs. The woman from the counter opened the rope for her, and she went down alone. She stayed down there maybe two minutes, tops. I asked the woman at the counter what was in the basement, and she said there was an ancient well. She rang up my little gifts for the kids, and then it was my turn to be escorted to the red velvet rope.
I descended two narrow flights from the fluorescent lights and tile floor of the very ordinary-looking souvenir shop into a strange space with incredibly old-looking masonry arches, a newish wooden bar and wine rack for some reason, and then this:
A little sign resting on a ledge read El Pozo de los Deseos (The Wishing Well). Also propped up on a ledge was a laminated article, from which I learned that the well’s water is potable and always remains at the same level (six meters deep). It’s apparently part of a spring that runs beneath the city. According to archaeological research it seems to be a Roman well. Per the article, a Muslim palace was built around it sometime in the 11th or 12th century. It’s only in recent years that the owners of the souvenir shop did the restoration work necessary to uncover the well and make it accessible to the public, along with a preserved column from the palace.
At the time I just sort of shrugged at the Star of David on the gate and chalked it up to an appeal to tourists. The article doesn’t mention anything about Jews in connection to the well or the building around it, and I can’t say I’ve stumbled across too many Jewish symbols in very Catholic Spain over the years. Poking around a bit to write this, I found a video interview with the owner—indeed, the very friendly woman whom I met in the store that day. In it, she says that the “Jewish culture” is telling them that the well was a purification bath. By “Jewish culture,” does she mean actual Jews, the local Jewish community? Or does she mean that she’s learned that ritual baths exist in the Jewish culture and she thinks that this could maybe be one? I don’t know. I suppose it could have been a Roman well that was turned into a mikvah, and then back to a well when a Muslim family built their palace around it. We’ll likely never know. It does seem strange to me that there would be a Jewish ritual bath outside of what had been the Jewish quarter, though. Either way...I mean...the more that Spaniards are made to contemplate the Jews who used to dwell in their midst in great numbers, and who still very much exist in the world, the better. I hope that weird Star of David helps her to sell many magnets and coffee mugs. And the fact is that Toledo is known for having been the “City of Three Cultures,” because Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived there together peacefully for centuries (until it all went to shit, as it tends to do).
Here’s the video. Even if you don’t understand Spanish, you can watch it to get a good view of the well and the rest of the basement. Note that the star of David wasn’t yet present in this video from 2018. Note also that the laminated article mentioned above said the palace was from the 11th or 12th century, but in the interview she says it was from the 10th or 11th.
Like the woman who went down to the well before me, I probably stayed in the basement for two minutes tops. It didn’t really inspire lingering. It was nice and cool down there, though. Refreshed, I continued on to the cathedral, poked around and took my scheduled rest there, and then on to a shop staffed by a nun to buy convent-made marzipan, and from there to an incredibly delicious pork stew for lunch because the pisto I’d been looking forward to was sold out. Such are the complexities of being a modern Jew in Spain. (I have never kept kosher, and I will swear to anyone that there is no greater marzipan on earth than the marzipan made by Spanish nuns.)
As much as I truly love it, Spain is more complicated for me as a Jew than just pork and candy-making nuns and grand, imposing cathedrals. Jews lived and thrived on the Iberian peninsula from the time of the Roman Empire, when we were expelled from Jerusalem, until the Alhambra Decree of 1492, in which the Catholic Kings, Isabella and Ferdinand, expelled all Jews from Spain. Well...I say thrive, because we lived there and built homes and communities and businesses; we wrote poetry and advanced the study of Kabbalah. Many of us worked for the very Crown that would later force us out. We did all of that, thriving, in spite of routine prejudice, in spite of bloody pogroms, in spite of the fact that Jews were considered to be the property of the Crown. We thrived in spite of the fucking Spanish Inquisition. And then we were expelled from Spain, as we’d been expelled from Jerusalem before that. Already in diaspora in Spain, the diaspora spread further.
When I visited the Ibn Shushan synagogue at the beginning of that day in Toledo, I surprised myself by weeping because I felt a connection to all of the Jews who had stood there and looked up at the same sunlight filtering through the same high, round windows centuries before. And then I went on to the Sinagoga del Tránsito and the attached Sephardic museum and cried because it felt like a dead place, and the museum a presentation of a dead people who lived and prayed in Toledo long, long ago. It did not feel like a celebration of my very much alive and vibrant people. When I took my scheduled rest breaks in the little park on the edge of town, near the synagogues, I marveled at all that we once had and wept for all that we’d lost. The history of the two synagogues in Toledo is both fascinating and maddening, and deserves its own post, which I promise I’ll write for you in the future.
If you find yourself in Toledo, which I recommend you do at least once in your life, and you want to check out the Pozo de los Deseos for yourself, you’ll find it in the basement of the R. Saavedra souvenir shop, Calle Trinidad, 5. It’s also a good place to stop if one of your kids wants a pocketknife from Toledo and the other wants jewelry, and you really, really need to get out of the Spanish summer heat.
Thanks for reading! I’m teaching two of my Catapult novel workshops this winter and spring. Check them out if you have a completed manuscript that’s ready for some fresh eyes.