The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (21 page)

After Reza and I wash our hands in a nearby creek, we leave the Almond Farm right away; I am afraid for Farid’s life. And the Old Christians could descend like locusts at any time.

Just before reaching home, I jump down from the cart to enquire about Father Carlos at St. Peter’s Church. There is still no sign of him, and his apartment remains locked. So I climb the streets and outdoor stairways of the Alfama to Diego’s townhouse. The cobbler who helped me avoid capture the day before hails me from his doorway, nods for me to come to him. “Don’t go in,” he whispers.

“Why?”

“A man came looking for your friend Diego. He left a little while
ago. But he’s been here before, watching. He may be here even now. Hiding, waiting. Just smile and nod at me, then go away.”

I do him one better and feign a laugh, then ask, “Who is this man?”

“I don’t know. A Northerner. Blond, strong.”

I bow my thanks and leave, my steps repeating the question:
Could
the
same
man
who
killed
Uncle
now
be
hunting
Diego?

At home, hard-boiled eggs are being prepared for lunch by Reza. Of course, cooking should be a neighbor’s duty during our initial mourning period of seven days, but there is no one left who isn’t grieving. All the ceramic debris has been swept from the kitchen into the courtyard, the floor mopped. Even the leg of our table which had been knocked off has been nailed in place.

“Brites did it while we were gone,” Reza explains. “She’s cleaning the store now with the others.”

“Esther’s with her, too?” I ask.

“No, she’s sitting vigil over Farid in your mother’s room.”

“And Aviboa?”

“Yes, she’s helping clean up, is sticking close to Cinfa.” Reza chews on the ends of her hair and sighs. “I’m going to have to adopt her, you know. I can’t leave her to fend for herself. Graça, her mother, was a widow and an only child.”

“Is she Jewish?”

Reza’s eyes flash. “A four-year-old girl? Who are you, Berekiah Zarco, to ask such a question about an orphan? You think kids are born knowing Hebrew or something? What difference could it possibly…”

“Reza, you misunderstand me. I don’t care. It’s just that it could
create
complications.”

“I live with nothing but complications.” She sighs again, brushes her hand against my arm as an apology. “Her father was a New Christian, Graça was Old.”

“It’s safer not to tell my mother that…for now, at least.”

As Reza nods, I kiss her cheek. Caressing open the door to my mother’s room, I find Farid lying on his side under two heavy blankets, shivering. Aunt Esther sits on her stool by the foot of the bed, still
staring
at nothing, her hands folded in her lap. I kiss her cool forehead.

A rumpled and bloodstained sheet has been pulled from the bed, is tucked against the wall.

Farid’s eyes open, but he does not smile or acknowledge me in any way. I take a woolen blanket from my bed and cover him with yet another layer, kneel beside him, move to take his hand. He waves me away. “It could be plague,” he signals.

“Your gestures are stronger,” I lie. We lock fingers, and his eyes close again. I sit picturing map-contours of Portugal, Greece and Turkey as if shapes on a chessboard where my family and I serve as pawns.

When Farid’s shivering subsides and he falls asleep, I caress his hair for a time. Grabbing the stained sheet and balling it up beneath my arm, I tiptoe out and across my bedroom to hide his incontinence from my mother, fearing that she may demand that the family abandon him because of his worsening illness. Reza starts when she sees me, but her subsequent stare denotes solidarity. Behind an oleander bush to the side of our outhouse, I hide the sheet. Later, I will tell Brites that it is there and to be careful of the evil essences it has absorbed when washing it.

Lacking vinegar, I clean my hands with black soap and water, go to the cellar and write my list of suspects—beginning with the two
remaining
threshers—on a piece of vellum in micrographic letters forming Uncle’s name:

Father Carlos.

Diego Gonçalves.

Rabbi Losa.

Miguel Ribeiro.

With my last stroke, I think:
the
girl
we
have
buried
will
point
like
a
vane
toward
the
correct
name.

I take my drawing of her, slip my hammer inside my pouch and walk to all the bakeries in the Alfama and Graça neighborhoods, sensing that she is the key, that if I can find her identity, I will also learn who it was who destroyed my future.

Now that calm has returned, my eyes see that Lisbon has become a city of staring Christian eyes, of garbage and dung, of splintered wood and bloody stone. None of a half-dozen bakers or their assistants whom I question knows the girl. I cut down past the cathedral and head into Little Jerusalem. Stores are closed, streets littered with refuse. Women sweep blood from their stoops. A burnt bed sits smoldering right in the middle of the Synagogue Square as if waiting for its owner. Simon Kol’s
bakery behind the Riverside Palace is boarded up. I slip around the side, past a pile of rotten cabbages and onions being picked through by feral cats, one of whom has furry testicles swollen to the size of lemons. When I pound on Master Kol’s personal entrance, he peers down from a window. His unshaven cheeks and bewildered eyes are the symptoms of the illness we all share. “Pedro Zarco?” he asks. When I nod, he points to his courtyard. I wait at the gate. As he lets me in, he hugs and kisses me. His chest heaves like a bellows as he sobs.

He is dressed in the coarse linen of mourning. “Kiri?” I whisper, naming his only living child with the same, trespassing fear as I would a secret name of God.

“Yes,” he answers. We hold hands. “How’s your family?” he asks.

“Uncle Abraham is dead.”

Simon gasps. “How could he have…”

His words trail off because we both know that in this world even a
gaon,
a genius, a man of wonders can be killed by a simple blade.

To my question about Judah, he shakes his head. “Many are
missing
,” he says. “And they will never be found. Swallowed by Leviathan. And mark my words,” he says in a prophetic voice, “the monster will only be sated when it has taken all of us. Wait and see!”

I hand him my drawing. “This girl…ever see her? I think she may work in a bakery.”

He squints. “Looks a little like Meda Forjaj when she was young,” he says. “Same sloping eyebrows that come together over the bridge of her nose. Like butterfly wings. But I don’t know her.”

“Who’s Meda Forjaj?”

“Fled Little Jerusalem about the time of the conversion. But she’d be about fifty by now. A widow. Couldn’t be her.”

“Where’d she move?”

“Out near Belem, I think.” Belem was the nearby town from which the Portuguese caravels left for Africa, India and the New World. “I think she was hoping to meet a rich explorer if you know what I mean,” Simon adds. He shrugs, gestures that he makes no judgment. “We do what we need to in order to survive.”

“A woman her age—she can’t earn a living just from that,” I say.

“Her husband imported woolens from Flanders. She helped out, kept the books. Maybe she takes in sewing like your mother.”

“Thanks.” We hug lightly, as if afraid to admit we may be parting
forever. “You won’t open your bakery again, will you,” I observe.

Simon shakes his head. “I no longer want to feed this country,” he says. “A bleeder,” he whispers. “Its a much better profession for Portugal.”

The collective gaze of the Old Christians massed at St. Catherine’s Gate chills the hairs at the back of my neck, but this readiness of my body to break into flight is unnecessary; their eyes are calm, their breathing easy. Their fear of plague and drought and all the myriad demons who rule their knotted thoughts has been purged, at least for the moment.

I reach the outskirts of Belem in less than an hour. Here, hundreds of Africans and day laborers ruled by the whip are hard at work
building
a monumental new monastery for King Manuel that should take well into the next century to complete.

A ragpicker in soiled pants points me to a local bakery. A lean woman with an accusing, bitter face meets me at the door. “Can I help you, Senhor?” she asks in harsh, Castilian-edged Portuguese.

From her accent, I know that she is a Castilian New Christian, one of the thousands who fled here after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled the Jews in fourteen ninety-two. In her fierce eyes, I see that she loathes being seen with a compatriot. I show her my
drawing
. “I’m looking for this girl.”

She turns her back to me and begins transferring buns from wooden pallets into sacks.

“Its important,” I add.

“If you’ve nothing to order, then leave.”

“She’s dead,” I say. “I’d like to tell her parents.”

She turns, and mistrust gives her a squint. “She’s Senhora Monteiro’s girl. Why do…”

“And Senhora Monteiro lives…?” I interrupt; I’ve no more patience for fear, even that which belongs to a Jew.

“Down the street, on the right. A house with yellow trim. But it might be better…”

“Tell me, does Senhora Monteiro have any relation to Meda Forjaj?”

“Her sister-in-law,” she replies. “How did you…?”

“Eyebrows like spreading butterfly wings. And the memory of an old Jew.”

Down the street, a dwarfish, fish-eyed woman with a scaly, leathery face glares up at me from her door as if I’ve interrupted a card game. She wears a ragged wig made from waxed, black-linen thread.

“Are you Senhora Monteiro?” I ask.

“Who wants to know?”

“My name would mean nothing to you.” I hand her my sketch. “Do you recognize this girl?”

“It’s Teresa. What are you doing with this?”

Her husband, a squat, rabbit-like man, appears at the back of the house. He is soiled with white powder, perhaps quicklime, and puffs rise from his bare fat feet as he strides toward us. Above his sleepy dark eyes sprout winged brows.

The woman says, “This man’s got a drawing of Teresa. Look.”

His jaw drops as if he’s never seen artwork—or as if he understands. When I force out clinging words about her death, fists raise to his cheeks. Tears gush in his eyes. When I reach for him, Senhora Monteiro intercepts my wrist. “What are you saying?!” she demands.

“She was killed in the riot in Lisbon. On Sunday.”

The Senhora’s hand muffles her gasp. Terrified eyes focus inside. Silence seals the three of us together till she screams, “I knew it would come to this! Killed with those Jews, wasn’t she?!”

Her husband shoves her, runs back into the house before I can answer. She crashes up against the wall and crumples to the ground. “You bastard!” she shrieks. She cackles, spits after him.

I help the Senhora to her feet, retrieve my drawing from the ground. She has no tears to give, so I say, “She was killed in the Judiaria Pequena. Do you know what she was doing there?”

She snatches my drawing from me and surveys it as if forming a criticism. “That’s her all right. You make this?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Artist, huh? Filthy goat should never have run off. But girls from mixed marriages…cause that’s what she was, you know…I’m not Jewish. Thank God.” She waves toward the back of the house as if shooing away a fly. “He’s a Jew…was, I mean. It’s the mixed blood. Makes girls want a man as soon as they start to bleed. The moon, it causes friction, they say, in the children of mixed marriages.” She rubs her filthy, callused hands together. “All that swirling of blood, the pure with the tainted.” She shakes her head. “You got talent, you know. You’re not Jewish, are you?”

“I was. Now I’m just trying to survive. Like pretty much everyone else in this dungheap.”

Her stare is fixed by inflamed contempt. I try to remember that she, too, is an emanation of God, a ripple from the sapphire of love he cast eons ago into our world. I see only the spittle on her lips and her
raven-black
wig. “Do you mind telling me what Teresa was doing in the Little Jewish Quarter?” I ask.

“Aren’t you listening? She was getting it between her legs! Wanted a bird that was circumcised!” She sees her tone bothers me, laughs, makes her hand flap. “Liked the way it felt when a big fat Jew-quail hopped all the way up her and began spreading its…”

“Who’s her husband?” I interrupt.

“An importer with lots of brains, big balls, too, they say. Furry…like wool. Only tasting like Moroccan dates.” She licks her lips greedily. “But no money. You don’t all have a talent for making money. Hah! I found that out twice in my life! That husband of mine… And now Teresa’s.” She shakes her head and frowns. “Name’s Manuel Monchique. You’d think she could at least have found one who…”

My heart seems to pound through my chest.
Of
course,
I think,
Uncle’s
former
student
—
Teresa
was
his
Old
Christian
bride!

We’d learned only a month before that Manuel had obtained a card of pure blood from the King, effectively erasing the “stain” of his Jewish past. Uncle had recently insulted him on Temple Street because of this seeming betrayal. Now, framed inside Senhora Monteiro’s revelation, this confrontation appears dyed with sinister colors.

Cold fingertips brush against my arm. I focus again into the present tense, see that Senhora Monteiro is grinning up at me, has lifted up her skirt and is pounding her hand between her legs. I tug off her wig, toss it to the floor behind her. Underneath, sickly tufts of gray hair sprout from a louse-infested scalp.

Her clucking laugh accompanies my escape. The streets of Belem, then outer Lisbon open to me, yet I seem to race only into the mystery of my master’s murder. Maybe Manuel had found Teresa with Uncle, taken his knife and…

And yet, a high barrier blocks my way toward an answer; how would Manuel have learned of the location of our trap door and
genizah?