The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (19 page)

“Are you a servant?” I asked.

“I’ve sent them away.” He peeled off his beret with the grin of someone revealing treasure. A cascade of silken amber hair dropped across his shoulders.
He
was most definitely a
she.
“I’m his widow,” she said with a great nod. She shrugged as if to excuse her previous disguise and unlocked the gate. She took my arm as if inviting me to dance. “Come!” she said.

So this boy was Damas’ child bride! She ran me into a bloodstained kitchen and tugged me through the larder into a courtyard shaded with orange trees thick with fruit. On the brick terrace by the back of the house, a raging pyre of clothing and wood was crackling. A colorful pile of shirts, coats and trousers was heaped nearby. Flakes from the flames were drifting up into the sky and falling back to earth like feathers. “I’ve been burning his things all night,” she said with an exhale of triumph. “The boots were the first to go. Eight pairs he had. One for each day of the week. And an extra one of sharkskin for Mass on Sunday. If he
didn’t
like my polishing, he’d change his water on them and make me start over. And let me tell you, that man’s pee smelled like a cat’s! Only
problem
now is that they stink when they burn! Just like he did!”

Tendrils of flame were jumping like tugged marionettes. “You threw Eurico Damas into the fire?!” I demanded.

“I think you’ll find his teeth if ya look hard!” she grinned. She licked her lips as if tasting a treat. “He had more than his share so I’m sure they’re there somewhere.” She fixed my stare with a bemused look, burst into laughter. “He went to kidnap your uncle, you know.”

“Did he find him?! What did he…”

“No, he came back all snarly. Couldn’t locate where Master Abraham was hiding. I heard him say so.”

So my intuition was wrong; Eurico Damas had not been involved. And Samson was dead. That left Father Carlos and Diego as the only threshers who could have betrayed Uncle; Miguel Ribeiro and Rabbi Losa as those who might have stooped to blackmail.

“He wanted to
pinga
your entire group of kabbalists,” the girl
continued
. “Force ‘em to admit it was all a lie. Lately, he was kind of obsessed with it. Getting old, I guess. He didn’t believe in that sort of thing, ya see.”

“What sort of thing? I don’t understand.”

She laughed as if to ridicule me, tugged with showy pride on the
ends of her silken vest. “An ever present God, stupid!” As she spoke, a black-haired, weedy teenager with wisps of mustache on his upper lip ran out of the house trailing a bloody sword. His eyes were targeted upon me.

“It’s all right, José,” she said. “He’s Master Abraham’s nephew.” To me, she whispered. “It was José who killed him. He’s not much good with a sword. But when a man’s as drunk as a pig in a trough of grapes, it don’t take more than one little skewer and…” She thrust her hands down in imitation of a swordsman delivering a deathblow, grinned, then left me to toss a cloak onto the fire. José acknowledged me with the serious nod of an adolescent who has assumed the role of a protector, and in an eerie, reverent silence, we three watched the garments smoke and twist and blacken. The girl’s expression hardened. She touched her cheeks as if blotting stains. She turned to me. “I’ve other marks on my back, you know. For a year, I was his whipping post. Used to flap his ‘bird’ himself while hitting me if ya know what I mean.” She grinned, “I want to erase the very memory of him.” She took my hand. “You can understand, can’t ya?” When I nodded, she looked at me gravely, pointed to her chest. “Do kabbalists really believe God resides in here?”

“There and everywhere else. And nowhere. God will come to you in a form which you can perceive—clothed as you can see Him. It depends on His grace…and your vision.”

“Then He won’t come to me as a man—I’ve no need for a male God. I’ve already had one, and I hated him! I’ll kill the next male god that shows his ‘purple head’ to me!”

“A female emanation then. Or neither sex. Or both more likely.”

“A woman. Yeah, I’d prefer a woman.” She made a fist, and with gritted teeth, shouted, “I’ll never have another man thrust inside me!” Her look became haughty as she twisted her beret back on. Tucking in her hair, she said, “Grab any of his clothes you want, then go!”

We stared at each other as if to take in the world’s cruelty. In a
trembling
voice, she said, “Once upon a time there was a happy girl who swam in the Tagus and who was spied from afar and sold by her parents into slavery.” She closed her eyes and folded her arms about her chest, as if comforting her own despair.

I replied, “And a young man who lost his uncle and little brother.”

Her eyes opened in understanding, and we nodded at each other
like siblings who must part. The weight of our solidarity held me in place another moment, then I turned and strode away.

Sunset had washed the sky with rosewater and copper. As I
surveyed
the massive crowd still assembled in the Rossio from afar, Uncle’s hand held the back of my neck. “If you dye your hands red, no one will bother you,” he whispered. I knew what he meant and pulled off the scab which had formed on my shoulder where the boy’s lance had caught me. The blood sluicing out came warm against my fingertips. I coated my hands and arms with it. “Now descend to the river,” Uncle whispered. “Walk along the bank, and to any one who hails you, tell them you are hunting
Marranos
!”

As I knew I would, I made it home without incident. The shit-stained rug over our trap door was still in place. Yet I descended into the cellar as if into imprisonment. I was young and proud, and such a hideaway only provoked shame.

Cinfa ran to me as I reached the bottom of the stairs and said that only a half-hour before men had stood in the kitchen above them,
offering
clemency for any
Marrano
who showed himself. “Don’t go out again!” she begged.

“Judah?” my mother asked breathlessly.

“Nothing,” I replied.

Farid and the little girl with no thumbnail were sleeping under blankets by our desks. Esther was sitting in silence, her profile that of a limestone sculpture.

After I’d comforted Cinfa, I lifted up the prayer rug over Uncle, and as I did, his putrid odor stung my nostrils.
Dear
God,
how
long
until
we
can
get
him
into
the
earth?
I thought. I painted him again with myrrh, told myself with each brush stroke:
Keep
looking
at
his
face;
you
must
remember
everything
in
order
to
take
revenge.

As I chanted to myself, my body, miraculously, began to shed its accumulated frustration, to vibrate and flex with a holy force. Such is the power of Torah—or so advanced were my powers of self-deception, perhaps—that I was growing convinced that it was I who had been
chosen
to save Israel from Lisbon’s Philistines and that by solving the
mystery
of Uncle’s murder, I would somehow be turning the key in the door of our salvation. What exactly the connection was between my master’s death and the survival of the Portuguese Jews, I hadn’t a clue at the time.

As I looked up at the leather blinds drawn down over the window eyelets at the top of the northern wall, I wondered again about the killer’s escape.
There
must
be
a
hidden
exit,
I thought,
a
tunnel
—
some
way
out
that
was
known
only
to
the
threshers.
That
was
why
Uncle
never
wished
me
to
enter
the
cellar
without
his
permission.
I
hadn’t
yet
been
initiated
into
the
secrets
of
our
temple.

“Did you bring any food?” Cinfa asked me suddenly. “She’s hungry.”

The little girl with no thumbnail stood by Cinfa, was staring up at me with yearning silence. “I’m sorry, I forgot,” I answered. “I’ll go up now and see what I can find in the store. There must be…”

“No. You sit!” my mother ordered. Her hands were balled into fists and her eyes were flashing. “We wait now until it’s over for good!”

Cinfa and the little girl nibbled on the one matzah I had left. It was blood-stained, but it disappeared all-too-quickly. So hunger
accompanied
us as well.

Needing something with which to busy my nervous hands, craving to learn the identity of the girl, I took a sheet of paper from our storage cabinet and began to draw her.

Farid awoke maybe an hour later, after I’d finished her face and was beginning the first lines of her hands. Cinfa tapped me on the shoulder and said he was asking for me.

I brought him a cup of water and held it to his lips. He gulped greedily. He was sweating profusely, and his fever had gone up. His pants were stained with flecks of blood and shit. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Something is peeling me open from the inside out. And I’m afraid I couldn’t hold back. My pants… I must stink so bad that even Allah is holding his nose.”

Despite his protests, I cleaned Farid’s behind and thighs, then covered him with his blanket again. We hadn’t any extra pillows, so I buttressed his head with several manuscripts from the
genizah.
What better purpose for Hebrew writing at this point could there have been?

As he descended into sleep, I sat by myself against the eastern wall, in the spot where I imagined that the girl had begged for her life. I brought my knees up by my chest into a position of self-sufficiency and solitude; something cold and calculating was drawing me away from my family. Was it my longing for vengeance? They talked in whispers now, but I could not. I needed to run, to shout for all to hear that I would
avenge my uncle. I could live no more enclosed in murmurs, enchained by coded conversations. My master had been right; the lion of
kabbalah
inside me would not let me live as a secret Jew any longer.

And so I learned that the spiritual journey for me that Passover would be an unveiling of my own true face.

I returned to my sketch, and for the rest of the hours of light,
disappeared
into the contours of first the girl, then Uncle. When darkness came, I found I was unable to say evening prayers. The little girl slept between my legs, using my thigh as a pillow. Cinfa huddled with us under a blanket.

In my sleep that night, it was my own screams which came to me; I was tied to the fountain in Rossio Square and baptized with a burning palm branch.

I awoke into darkness with the smell of smoke, thick with memory, permeating my clothes—an impossibility, I know, for the pants and shirt I was wearing had not borne witness to the pyre in the Rossio. From the viewpoint of kabbalah, however, illusions like this are not so easily
dismissed
, and later I understood the odor as an indication that some part of me had not advanced past Sunday. Now, however, I simply undressed and doused my clothes with fennel water from our storage cabinet. But the odor, stubborn as an engorged tick, clung tight.

I couldn’t get back to sleep. In the darkness, moonglow shapes of yellow and violet started folding around my family and me in icy sheets. Yet their touch was comforting. It was as if we were enveloped in a
blanket
that sealed our fates together. (How dearly I would have liked to have said,
a
blanket
bequeathed
by
God,
but such poetry was lost to me by then.)

And so, the world reached the early hours of Wednesday morning, the morning before the sixth evening of Passover.

Worry brought me back to Farid. His breathing rose against my fingertips, regular but shallow. I recalled how when we were children, he would cry at the scent of spring rain against the oleander bushes in the courtyard; the sweet smell, to him, was overwhelming.

Yes, he has always been more sensitive than me.

And I remembered then how when Judah was born, he and I had danced our prayers by the river.

Judah… Farid… Uncle Abraham…

Names… Are they arbitrary signs or something more meaningful?

When I was despondent over my forced name change from Berekiah to Pedro, Uncle covered my head with his prayer shawl. “God has many names,” he whispered. “So we who are made in His image should have many as well. And what is beyond your name will always be the same.”

My master told me many times that we were all God’s self-portraits.

Would that even include his killer?

Now that I’d seen a pyre of Jewish flame curling high above the steps of the Dominican Church, you’d think that one life—Uncle’s life—wouldn’t matter so much. Perhaps horror must be localized in a single soul, a diamond of pain.

As my thoughts reached a sudden impasse, I looked up to see dawn light beginning to filter through the window eyelets at the top of the northern wall. I took a sip of water from the jug on the storage cabinet, nodded good morning toward my mother who had just woken. Cinfa was lying asleep against her thigh. My mother’s hands were caressing her hair absently. Esther was sleeping on her chair, her head fallen to her right shoulder, her arms hanging limply. Farid, too, was still asleep. His forehead was burning. I wiped it with water, but he did not wake.

Lifting the prayer rug from the girl, I kneeled by her face and made some final adjustments to my drawing of her; the mouth which I had given her was too wide, too melodramatic.

A sketch of a person is a powerful thing; as I stared at it, her image took on the contours of a talisman bearing her unfulfilled hopes.

A few minutes later, while still engaged in correcting her lips, I heard Reza and her husband, José, calling to us from the courtyard. Mother sat up, and her mouth dropped open. Yet she did not get to her feet. It was as if she could not trust her ears. I ran to them. Cinfa
followed
.