A Conspiracy of Paper (10 page)

I tensed with a boxer’s preparedness when I saw my uncle at the other end of the room, metal bar in hand, ripping open crates for a fat, misshapen, pockmarked toady whose income depended upon finding violations and accepting bribes from violators. The look on his face told me that he had encountered neither. My uncle had always been a cautious man. Like my father, he believed that it would not take much for the Jews to be expelled from England as they had been from so many other countries—indeed, as they had been from England long ago. He therefore obeyed laws where he could and disobeyed carefully when he could not. It took no ordinary inspector to locate his contraband.

I stood watching him, admiring his poise and the respect he commanded. At my father’s funeral, Uncle Miguel had looked not much older than I remembered. His hair had begun to turn a speckled color, his closecut beard had grayed almost entirely, and the lines upon his face bespoke his near fifty years, but there was still youth in his eye and an energy in his motions. He had hardly taken his turn in the ring, but he was a fit man of sinewy muscle, and he indulged himself in well-tailored clothing that showed his shape to advantage. He shied away from the French fashions he surreptitiously imported, but his clothes were of the finest cloth, immaculately clean, and dark in color so as to recall the sober fashions of the Amsterdam business world in which he had come of age.

As I stood there, a darkish man of some middle years approached me with an obvious caution. I could see he was a Jew, but clean-shaven and dressed much as an English tradesman might have been—boots, sturdy linen pants and shirt, a protective but not decorative topcoat. He wore no peruke, and his real hair, like my own, was pulled back to resemble a tieperiwig. As I looked at this man, English in dress and manner, but Jewish in face—at least recognizably so to other Jews—I wondered if this was how I appeared to the Englishmen around me: unassumingly dressed, properly groomed, and for all that, quite alien.

“Can I be of some service?” this man asked me with a practiced smile. He paused and looked at me again. “Good Lord. Strike me dead if it is not Benjamin Lienzo.”

I recognized the man then as Joseph Delgato, a longtime assistant to my uncle. He had been employed in my uncle’s trade since I was but a boy. “I did not at first know you, Joseph.” I held myself nervously as a long moment of uncomfortable silence passed between us. There was much that we both thought, but I think we separately concluded that there was little to be said. I grabbed his hand warmly. “You look well.”

“And you too. I am glad you are come home. It is a terrible thing about your father, sir. A terrible thing.”

“Yes. Thank you.” I wondered if he thought that I had been reconciled with my family since the funeral. He appeared confused, but I suspected he merely considered himself to be excluded from private family matters.

“Mr. Lienzo will be done soon. The customs man has grown weary of trying to catch your uncle in an infraction of the law, so he now settles for the performance of an inspection, to be followed, naturally, with a polite acceptance of a bribe.”

“Why must he be bribed if he has found no violation?”

Joseph smiled. “There is as much feigning and dodging in the world of trade as there is in the world of fighting,” he told me, pleased with himself for having honored me with a pugilistic reference. “Were we not to offer him a token of our respect, shall we say, he would surely invent an infraction, and that would be far more troublesome and costly for us than a simple bribe. For then we would need to involve lawyers and judges and Parliamentarians and the Common Council, and all other manner of bodies you can think of. It is prudent to pay him. This way he becomes our employee rather than our persecutor.”

I nodded and watched my uncle hand the inspector a small purse. The inspector bowed and walked off with a contented look upon his face. And well he should have been content. My uncle, I later learned, gave him twenty pounds, far more than he could have received of any native-born businessman in my uncle’s trade—at least one who had not been caught with contraband. Their fear of prosecution made Jews useful to such men.

When finished with the inspector, my uncle turned in my direction and recognized me with what I took to be agreeable surprise—as though a visit to the warehouse was a recreation I engaged in regularly. He strolled over to me and shook my hand warmly, in the manner he would a friend with whom he was on regular terms.

“Uncle,” I said simply, for I wished this encounter to be upon business alone.

My uncle was not an easily startled man, so I considered it something of an accomplishment that he arched one eyebrow as he turned to me. “Benjamin,” he said, nodding, quickly regaining his composure. It was more a look of satisfaction, as though I had proved him right by appearing before him. I saw he wished to measure me, to determine what I did there before he chose how to react to my presence. I smiled briefly, hoping to put him at his ease, but his expression changed not at all.

“If I trouble you at an awkward time, I can call on another occasion.”

“I think that no time can be less awkward than another for such a meeting,” he answered after a moment. “Let us retire to my closet that we may talk in private.”

My uncle led us to a comfortable room with an impressive oaken desk and a few hard wooden chairs, softened with pillows upon the seat. There was a bookshelf lined not with poetry, or works of antiquity, or religious books, but with ledgers, atlases, price guides, and records. This was the room in which my uncle conducted the greatest share of his official business, a business that had served him well since he and my father had come to the country some thirty years earlier.

After ordering his servant to prepare us tea, he settled into his desk chair. “I can only assume you have not come out of family feeling, and there is some crisis that brings you here. No matter, I suppose. Your father once said to me that, should you return for any reason, he would listen to you and weigh your words carefully and fairly.”

We were both silent. My father had never said any such thing to me. Of course, I had never given him a chance, yet it did not sound like the father I remembered, the man who always demanded to know why I was not as studious or dedicated or clever as my brother José. I recalled that once when I was eleven years old I ran home, fairly trembling with excitement, my stockings torn and my face smeared with mud. It was a Sunday—a market day for the Jews at Petticoat Lane—and my father vaguely supervised while the servants put away the goods they had purchased, for my father was a man who wished every servant in the house to know that they might, at any time, be subject to scrutiny. I ran into the kitchen of the house we rented on Cree Church Lane, and I all but collided with my father, who stopped my progress by placing a hand upon each shoulder. But this was no gentle gesture; he looked down upon me with his most unflinching gaze. He appeared something comical, I was beginning to realize, beneath his absurdly large, fleece-white, full-bottom wig, which only emphasized the growth of black beard that began to sprout within three hours of his taking a shave from his barber. “What has happened to you?” he demanded.

It occurred to me, with a certain amount of indignation, that as I looked rather ruffled, he might inquire if I was hurt or no, but pride squelched indignation as I recalled the victory still fresh in my mind.

I had been wandering from stall to stall in the crowded market, for Sunday was the busiest shopping day for the Jewish community, and the best merchants were out to peddle their foods and clothes and all manner of goods. The air was thick with the smells of roasted meats and freshly baked pastries and the stench of London that drifted east to our neighborhood. I had no particular needs at the market, but I had a few pence in my pocket, and a quick hand beside, and I only sought an opportunity to spend my coin or grab something tasty and disappear into the crowd.

I’d been eyeing a pile of jellies that were too deep within the stall to filch, and I had not yet decided if they looked delicious enough for me to surrender my precious coins. I had all but determined to buy a dozen of the sweetmeats when I heard the raucous cry of boys forcing their way through the crowd. I had seen their kind before—little rogues who liked to push the Jews about because they knew the Jews dared not push them back. They were not a villainous lot, these boys of perhaps thirteen years, sons of shopkeepers or tradesmen by their look—they took no delight in torturing their victims, only in creating mayhem and avoiding punishment. They barreled through the crowd, pushing down this man here, or knocking over that table of wares there. Such antics filled me with rage, not because of the mischief itself, for I had been guilty of much the same and far worse in my day, but because no one dared give these fellows the whipping they deserved and, though I should not have known how to express this notion then, because they made me yearn to be an Englishman and a Jew no longer.

They moved in my general direction, and I stared hard, hoping to catch their attention even as everyone about me continued with their purchases, attempting to make the boys disappear by ignoring them. They grew close to me, shouting and laughing, and plucking sweetmeats from stalls and daring anyone to stop them. They stood perhaps fifteen feet away from me, when, backing off from a stall where he had knocked over a display of pewter candlesticks, the tallest of the boys slammed hard into Mrs. Cantas, a neighbor and the mother of a friend of mine. This lady, a stout woman of late-middle years, her arms full of cabbages and carrots, fell to the ground, her vegetables scattering like dice. The fair-haired boy who had slammed into her spun around, already in mid-laugh, but stopped in something like shame when he saw the spectacle before him. He might have been a troublesome fellow, but he had not yet reached the stage of maliciousness wherein he could attack women and feel no remorse. He paused for an instant, some sort of regret creeping along his face, which, streaked though it was with dirt, still revealed a base coloring of milky whiteness.

He might have apologized; he might even have recruited his fellows to help collect the scattered purchases, but Mrs. Cantas, red-faced with rage, let out a spew of the most insulting epithets I’ve ever heard escape from the mouth of any female but the most callous of jades. She formed these insults in our Portuguese dialect, so the boy and his companions merely stared, not knowing how to respond while their victim shouted in what to them was an incomprehensible gibberish. I, for one, silently praised Mrs. Cantas for at least having the courage to say her piece, if only in a language these fellows could not understand. And her piece was most colorful, and I listened with only vague amusement until she called the boy a “whoreson of one-legged poxy slut, a stinking rascal who needs to push about women because his own uncircumcised manhood might be taken for the shriveled parts of a female monkey.”

Without even meaning to, I burst out in a laugh, and I saw I was not the only one. Around me men, and women too, stood laughing, stunned into amusement at the hyperbole of this lady’s rage. The fair-haired boy’s milky face had become crimson with anger and humiliation, for he stood laughed at by a crowd of Jews for an insult he had not even understood.

“I damn you for a bitch,” he shouted at Mrs. Cantas in the tremulous voice of an agitated boy who wishes to be taken for a man, “and I spit upon your gypsy curse.” And, indeed, he did spit upon her, directly into her face.

I am ashamed that no one but myself moved to give this urchin the pummeling he deserved, but the crowd only looked on in shock, and Mrs. Cantas, who had invigorated herself with her insults, now appeared to me on the precipice of tears. For my part, I had been raised to show a much greater deference to women, and for whatever reason, this lesson was one that I had taken to heart while so many others had received only my contempt—perhaps because my own mother had died when I was but an infant, so other folks’ mothers held a special place in my heart.

I cannot even now explain my reasoning, only describe my actions: I struck this boy. It was a clumsy, poorly planned blow. My hand clenched into a fist, I raised it above my head and pounded downward, pummeling his face as though with a hammer. They boy fell to the ground, only for an instant, and then picked himself up and ran off, his friends following closely in tow.

I expected the crowd to cheer for me, Mrs. Cantas to proclaim me her savior, but I saw only that I had caused embarrassment and confusion. My actions had not been those of a protector, but of a troublemaker. Mrs. Cantas nervously pushed herself to her feet, but avoided my gaze. Around me I confronted the backs of those I had known all my life—shopkeepers crept back into their stalls, their patrons moved hurriedly away. All tried to forget what they had seen and to hope that their forgetfulness would make others forget as well and that my violence would not bring upon us an Inquisition here in England.

I would not have my joy so easily sabotaged, however. I ran home, hoping that someone in our house would hear the story and praise me as I thought I deserved. As my father was the first person I saw, he was the first to hear the tale, though the version I gave him showed a certain lack of narrative imagination.

“I was down at the market,” I said in a panting voice, “and a nasty, ugly boy spat upon Mrs. Cantas. So I beat him,” I proclaimed. I broke away from my father’s grip and swung my fist through the air by way of illustration. “I felled him with one blow!”

My father hit me hard in the face.

He made no habit of hitting me, and I fully admit I was the sort of boy who wanted hitting from time to time. This was the hardest he had ever stuck me—indeed, it was, at that time, the hardest I had ever been struck; he hit me with the back of his hand, curled almost into a fist, aiming, I believed, to hit bone with the bulky ring he wore upon his third finger. The blow had come unexpectedly, lashing out like a serpent, and the force of it reverberated through my jaw and down my spine, until my limbs felt light and tingly.