The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (26 page)

Isaac fiddles nervously with the hair falling over his ears. “I was sorry to hear of your Uncle Abraham’s death,” he says. His Andalusian
accent is thick, his voice deep, slow and graveled like many of his kinsmen.

I say, “I have heard that you have a
safira
to sell that was cut by Judah Ha-Levi.”

He paraphrases one of the poet’s most famous verses: “‘I shall not rest until the blood of the prophet Zechariah finds peace.’” He gives me a probing look which seems to seek understanding of my own motives.

“My uncle was interested?” I question, wondering how to
categorize
this Isaac of Ronda.

“Very,” Diego says.

Isaac adds, “He said he would raise enough money to pay me for it over the next few days. But now I…”

“How did you get the
safira
into Portugal?” I question.

“It was always here. I bought it from a friend in Porto. He was about to burn it. I couldn’t let that happen. I’m sure you understand.”

“If you don’t buy it, Berekiah, I’m afraid another person may get it who doesn’t have your understanding of its importance,” Diego observes.

“So you’re no longer considering it at all?” Isaac asks Diego.

“I was really only interested in order to help Master Abraham until he raised enough money. I prefer Latin manuscripts, myself. Far safer. So I must defer to Berekiah.”

“Was anyone else interested in the book?” I ask.

“I have made several contacts,” Isaac replies. “But no one seems ready to make an offer.”

“Not even Senhora Tamara, the bookseller in Little Jerusalem?” I enquire.

“She wanted nothing to do with it. Isn’t buying anything in Hebrew at present—not even translations from Hebrew. After what happened, you understand.”

Diego says, “Simon, among others, seemed to believe it could fetch a large price elsewhere. In Genoa or Constantinople or Ragusa. Even in Morocco.”

“Simon Eanes, the fabric importer?” I ask.

“Yes,” Diego replies.

My heartbeat sways me from side to side. Were they in competition over books? Was that it?

A perverse desire twists in my gut and rises through my mouth as a
devilish prayer that the murderer not be Simon—that I may be granted the privilege of revenge.

Diego pats my shoulder and continues in a wistful tone, “Hard to believe so much effort for manuscripts that we once could take out from our libraries. Our heritage seems to be falling into private hands. One day, all our writings will belong to Christian nobles and be locked away in golden chests and glass display cases.”

“I’m willing to sell it cheap,” Isaac says. The pitch of his voice jumps in order to tempt me. “Or to make a trade even. A silver candelabrum at this point would be enough. I want no more delay in getting back to Ronda.”

“You understand that I can’t fulfill any verbal agreement my uncle may have made,” I explain. “We’ll need all our savings just to eat. But tell me this—did he say who was helping him buy his manuscripts and smuggle them from Portugal?”

“Don’t you know?!” Isaac asks.

“No. My uncle wouldn’t say in case he was ever exposed. The less we knew the better, as far as he was concerned.”

Farid suddenly shuffles into the room. With his hands, he says, “I didn’t realize…”

“Doesn’t matter,” I signal back. “Sit with us if you have the strength.”

Diego and Isaac stand, bow in Farid’s direction. He nods his head, drops next to me and rests a heavy hand on my arm. “My friend is deaf,” I say. “He will read our lips. There is nothing you could say to me that couldn’t be said to him.”

“I’m afraid we didn’t speak of your uncle’s methods,” Isaac
continues
. He rises to his feet. His smile seems practiced. “And if you’re not interested in purchasing the book…?”

“No.”

“Then I’m afraid our meeting is at an end. Thank you for the brandy.”

At the door, he hooks his arm in mine. In a delicate whisper, as if
trying
to enchant a child toward sleep, he recites verses of a poem by Moses Ibn Ezra: “‘My night is plunged into a silent, waveless sea of darkness, a sea that has no coast, no shore for those who voyage. I do not know if this night is long or short. How can a man oppressed with grief know such a thing?’” To my ear alone, he whispers, “Have courage!”

The peculiar gentleness of this stranger whom I doubted leaves me hugging my sorrow like a lonely widower. When Isaac and Diego are gone, I put Farid to bed. My mother is asleep in Esther and Uncle’s bed, curled into a ball, breathing fitfully. From her hand has fallen a stoppered vial. I snatch it up from the curls of the blanket, caress a
viscous
drop onto my finger. Bitter comes the taste of extract of henbane and mandrake. To escape both herself and Lisbon’s gates for a time, mother has summoned a twilight sleep akin to trance. Maybe it is for the best.

In the cellar, I find Aunt Esther still sitting at Uncle’s desk like a statue, Cinfa shivering at her feet. I bring down a blanket from upstairs, cover the girl. Her eyes connote separation, fear. Yet she bends away irritably from my touch. In my room, sitting on my bed, I pray for Judah’s safe return before daring to head again into Little Jerusalem to try to wake Senhora Tamara. But before I can summon my legs to help me, chant entwines with sleep and drops like a woolen quilt across me.

I awake in bed. Blind to my borders. The blackness all around seems a hiding place for evil. A hard warmth pushes against my ribs. I jump up. It is Cinfa, her face veiled by hair.

As I regain my composure, she wakes. “Where are you going?” she moans.

“To call on Senhora Tamara.”

“You mustn’t go!”

I caress her cheek. “Nothing will happen. Don’t worry.”

She sits up, ducks her head under my shirt and breathes hot against me. It is a refuge she sought as a child. “I’ll be back sometime after dawn,” I say. “You remember when I used to take you to Senhora Tamara’s bookstore to read ‘The Fox Fables’ while I made my dawn deliveries?”

She nods against my chest.

“We shall do that again soon. Now while I’m gone, will you look in on Farid for me?”

She squirms her head into the air, alert to the task, just as I’d hoped. “And do what?” she questions.

“Feed him more boxwood tea when he wakes. It’s in mother’s blue pitcher. And an egg if he can eat. Wash your hands afterwards with soap.”

She nods thoughtfully, stands up atop the mattress. Towering over me, she shows me the knowing eyes of an adult, the weighted stance of 
our mother. Does the girl secretly hate me for helping to take away her childhood?

Outside, the dawn of Thursday is upon us. The sun’s chariot has already begun to lift into the sky. When it reaches the western horizon, it will beseech the seventh evening of Passover to gift mankind with its holy descent.

On my way to visit Senhora Tamara, I stop by the New Christian workshops on Goldsmiths’ Street to see if anyone has tried to sell our gold leaf or lapis lazuli. My knocks are answered by the newly widowed and childless who kiss me and press their hands into mine as if I may be able to entreat God to bring back their loved ones. But no one has been offered any lapis or gold of late. They gift me with promises of help when I slip from their arms back outside. Numb, wary lest I be tempted to feel too much, I shuffle into sunrise.

When I ring Senhora Tamara’s bell, she shouts,”
A
tinta
est
á
quase
seca
,
the ink’s almost dry!” Its her antiquated way of saying that she’s on her way. Half a dozen locks clang open. A pale eye sitting above a deep pouch of skin peers through a crack of doorway. “Berekiah!”

Senhora Tamara shows her toothless smile, unhinges the last chain and pulls me inside as if a kid dragging a parent toward treasure. Silver hair frames her wizened face. “Let me look at you!” she exclaims. She takes mouse steps backwards, squints up at me, her heavy eyelids
wrinkling
. The wisps of dark hair on her upper lip bristle as she makes a puffing noise and says, “You need to go to a barber and get some sleep!” Her turned cheek invites me to proffer a kiss.

“Did I wake you?” I ask.

“Me? You kidding?! An old lady never sleeps soundly.” She flaps her hand bitterly. “The curse of old age—all those memories clattering keep you distanced from sleep!”

“Where were you then? I came in the middle of the night. There was no answer.”

“Next door,” she replies. “Sleeping with a neighbor. These days, a Jew who still dares sleep alone is putting one foot in the grave!”

We talk of my family. She gasps at Uncle’s death. “Come,” she says, beckoning me to the desk by her hearth. “Sit on the stool.” She shows me a stern but faraway look, as if she is wondering how to reconcile his murder with God’s presence.

With quivering hands, she lifts away a Latin treatise on flowers which she must have been reading. She motions me to my seat, lights two candles sprouting from the cups of a seven-armed silver menorah. Manuscripts in varying states of decay line shelves up to the ceiling, form rickety towers on the floor. She pulls a chair next to mine, sits with her hands on her lap as if squeezing into herself the strength needed to fend off tears. She and the room both reek of vellum and the special dust which rare books dispel; the Senhora keeps her windows closed to forestall the decay of her Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian and European volumes. How I used to love the hermetic otherness of this store as a child, as if it housed my inheritance.

“He was just a child,” she says with a pressing force.

“Who?” I ask.

“The boy who came to sell your uncle’s Haggadah.”

“Did he speak with any accent?”

“No, he’s from Lisbon.”

“Dark skinned?”

She leans into me, her jaws grinding. The bright scent of cardamon alights around her; she is chewing seeds. “Fair skinned,” she says. “Tiny, thin. With wild hair. Like a thistle. Wait.” She darts about the room like a hen, picks out paper, a reed pen and an ink well. She puts them down in front of me. “Start drawing, Beri,” she says, and she stands like a Torah teacher over my shoulder as she commands my sketch: “…No, no, his nose was thinner, with nostrils like the sound slits in a cittern, very elegant you understand. And the lips were fuller, as if he were pouting. More curve…more shape…” She presses into the taut muscle between my neck and shoulder when I’ve captured a feature correctly and whispers,
perfeito
as if drawing the word into a silken thread. After an hour, she has lifted her hand away in satisfaction.

“And his clothes?” I ask.

“Poor. A ragged little nincompoop. The kind of kid who hawks esparto grass by the quays. He said he was selling the Haggadah for his master. I handed him a fable to look at while I examined it. But the
little
beggar couldn’t even read.” She frowns as if illiteracy were a Christian sin too beastly to tolerate. She walks me to the door with her hand in mine, says, “I’m sorry. I should have bought it. But all of a
sudden
I was screaming like a parrot. You know how I get.” She motions for me to bend so that my face is at her level, speaks in a conspiratorial
voice. “Berekiah, after all this… When do you think King Manuel will come to his senses and allow us Hebrew books again?”

“Never,” I say.

“Then I must start smuggling, too,” she concludes in a hushed voice.

“When I find out how my uncle did it, I’ll tell you.”

I scroll up my drawing and slip it into my pouch. We kiss goodbye. On the street, gazing over tawny rooftops into the distance, I wonder who would be bold or foolish enough to send an illiterate boy to sell a stolen Haggadah to Little Jerusalem’s most experienced bookseller. The whisper of my uncle’s voice rises with a swirl of dust from the cobbles, bearing the name Miguel Ribeiro, the aristocrat for whom Esther recently scripted a Book of Psalms.

When I ask, “Why him?,” there comes the reply: “Precisely because the acts of a Portuguese nobleman cannot be questioned by a Jew.”

Chapter XII

The Rua Nova d’El Rei is a hell to cross, already a sweating stink of peddlers and animals and spices. I thread my way through the rabble to Goldsmith’s Street and turn up toward Miguel Ribeiro’s mansion. Two armored guards stand outside, halberds poised in gloved hands. The shorter of the two, a sickly looking man with a harelip, follows me with suspicious eyes. I plant myself in front of him and say, “Tell your master that Pedro Zarco wishes to speak with him.”

A black footman with a shaved head is called to carry my message inside. He returns at a trot. The guard opens the gate. On the front steps, a squat servant with oily, copper-colored hair and a sweaty,
pimpled
forehead rushes to me. He wears blue leggings too tight for his fleshy buttocks, and his green brocade doublet is ripped at the collar. He takes my arm as if escorting me from danger. Up close, I see that his fat neck is scratched raw and red. Is he riddled with mange? He stinks of metal, like an old coin. Perhaps he has been eating antimony pills—a cure-all freely recommended by half-made Christian doctors.

“Inside…inside!” he whispers, his hands waving wildly.

He ushers me into a vaulted waiting room painted with frescoes of roseate gods and goddesses in the Florentine style, then looks me up and down with rapt, jaundiced eyes. In a conspiratorial whisper, he asks, “Is your God really a bull?”

“What?”

“Is the Jewish God a bull?” Forming horns atop his head with his hands, he speaks as if I might not understand Portuguese. “You know, a male cow…a cow’s husband…bull…”

Of course, I’d heard of scholars at the University of Coimbra who believed we had prehensile tails; bishops in Braga who claimed we needed the warm blood of Christian children for Passover rituals;
doctors
in Porto who said that we possessed an odor similar to that of
rotting
whale meat—the
foetor
Judaicus.
But this belief that we prayed to a bull was a new slander. An understanding of the misconception involved only came to me weeks later, when I realized that the servant had confused the Portuguese word
touro
,
bull, with
Torah.
So in reply, I simply sigh and say, “Just let me speak with your master. He knows who I am.”

He wipes his forehead with his sleeve and says in an urgent voice, “Don’t you know where he is? He spoke of needing to find Master Abraham Zarco. He’s you’re uncle, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must know!”

“I assure you I don’t,” I say. “And my uncle can’t possibly be with him—he’s dead.”

“Oh dear.” He holds his head in his hands.

“What is it?” I ask.

He looks up imploringly, whispers, “Dom Miguel has been missing since Sunday. He had mentioned your uncle’s name. I thought…”

“Have you searched for him?”

“Leave?! Leave this house?!” The servant paces the room, curls his hands together, braids and unbraids his arms.

I ask, “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Oh dear…Sunday afternoon. The riot was starting. Some men came looking for
Marranos.
He spoke with them, then rode out toward Benfica. He has a stables there. But we’ve had no word. I don’t think he made it.”

“Who was with him?”

“No one. I’ve sent messages there. No one’s seen him.” He begins clawing at his neck, then swipes at a chaffed scar below his ear with catlike ferocity. He squats on the ground as if about to relieve his bowels right into the seat of his leggings, continues scratching. “If he were a Jew, I’d understand,” he groans. “But he’s innocent! Completely innocent!”

I remember Uncle’s comment about Dom Miguel’s covenant with the Lord. Apparently, not even his household staff knows that he’s a
secret Jew. “Go sing it to the goats, you ignorant peasant!” I say, turning to leave.

The servant jumps up and grabs my arm. I rip it away. His eyes bulge fish-like in anger, and he hisses, “Yes, you’re one of them! Right to the tip of your horns!”

Grinning cruelly, I say, “Have no fear. I won’t curse you to our
touro
god.”

He arches his back into a posture of command, peers up at me over his pug nose. “Begone,
Marrano!
” he shouts in an arrogant voice.

But I am beyond the contempt of mortal men. As I turn away, he calls after me in a terrified voice, “You’re not going, are you?!”

I look back for his beseeching eyes. He is squatting again, swiping at his neck, drawing blood now. I watch him from across a distance which, to my surprise, will admit no sympathy for Christian anguish.

The road to Benfica skirts the quarry pits at Campolide where hundreds of yellow-eyed Africans mine limestone from gouged hillocks. Two breeds of slaves they’ve become: the
portadores
or carriers, backs braced with baskets woven from vine, who grunt and trudge under their burden of stone; and the
picadores
or hackers, wide-shouldered and lean-muscled, whose rose-pink hands grip the wooden handles of the iron picks which remove the hills a little at a time.

A third breed lives on a lower level: small, darting Portuguese slave boys known as
lebres
,
hares, who scavenge scree and carry it from the worksite in reed baskets.

In Benfica’s main square, a droopy-eyed grandmother wrapped in a black mantilla is hawking quince marmalade from the steps of the São Domingos Church.

“Do you know where Miguel Ribeiro has his stables?” I ask her.

“Never heard of him,” she replies.

“The local blacksmith will know,” I say. “Be so kind as to tell me where he works.”

She points down the street to a dusty wooden shack and cackles, “So it’s the Basque you’re after, is it!” Her shoulders hunch and she giggles to herself as if a secret has been exposed.

A sorry-looking donkey is hitched to the shack’s door handle. Flies have formed a buzzing nimbus around an enraged wound on the poor creature’s snout. Inside, a pale-skinned giant with thick black hair and
oak-branch arms is pumping a bellows the size of a carriage. He wears only sandals and a long, leather apron, and from the side his thick,
muscular
legs and even buttocks are visible. The bellows’ cylindrical mouth glows red where it enters the forge. The air smells of smoke and metal and heavy toil. I cough to get his attention, excuse myself and ask, “Dom Miguel Ribeiro—do you know him? He’s said to have a stables very near here.”

He turns to me, and with a clipped Basque accent questions, “Who’s asking?” A thick cord of scar tissue runs from his left ear lobe across his cheek. Droplets of sweat cling to his chin, fall patiently, one by one, to the floor.

“My name is Pedro Zarco,” I say. “I’ve word from Lisbon for him. From his sister.”

He turns away from me and returns to his pumping. In an
irritated
voice, he says, “If you work for his sister then you should know where he lives.”

“She’s had thick cataracts since childhood and couldn’t describe the way.”

My failure to lie convincingly is implicit in the patient, resigned way he lowers his arms and wipes the sweat from his fingers on his apron. “She doesn’t need to see in order to describe the way to her brother’s stables,” he says.

“Look, she came down from Coimbra after the riot. She’s worried. All she knows is that he’s here somewhere in Benfica. Do you need to see my written pedigree to give me an answer? Or will checking my teeth be enough?”

He laughs from his gut, eyes me up and down. “You’re really quite a nice looking young man.” He thrusts out his legs, leans back and reaches his massive hand below his apron to his sex. As he fondles
himself
, his leering stare makes it obvious what he wants. “For a little price, I might tell you.”

“For a little price, I could buy the information from someone else.”

“My ‘bird’ is mighty nice,” he grins, showing the remnants of a few brown teeth. “Big as a raven. And the way it can kiss your ass cheeks! Young man, I think you’d like it.”

“I’ve a friend who’d love it. But I’m not interested.”

He unstraps his apron and tosses it aside. He’s completely naked underneath, all dripping, matted hair and muscle. His member sticks
straight out from his abdomen, big and round as a rolling pin. “I could take you without your permission,” he says, as if favoring me with a forewarning. His eyes are bright with seductive anticipation.

I show Farid’s dagger. “And I could cut it off.”

He laughs, steals forward like a stalking animal, runs his thumb enticingly across the length of his facial scar. “How do you know you won’t like it if you’ve never tried?” he asks.

My heart pounds a code of dread as I back up. “I have tried. Once, with that friend I mentioned. But I prefer other unions. And I’ve grown exceptionally fond of my ass in just one piece if you don’t mind.”

He doesn’t smile, but moves his hand to his lips for saliva. I back to the open doorway. Trying to seduce me with his lust, he begins pumping on his sex.

I chant, “Blessed be He who has given me an escape from satyrs,” and race into the street. Looking over my shoulder, I see him by his donkey, showing the poor animal and a good deal of Benfica his private manhood.

Back in the central square, neither a soap seller nor a basketmaker knows where Miguel Ribeiro keeps his horses. “Don’t you mind that your blacksmith shows himself?” I ask, pointing down the dusty street.

“It’s good for business,” the soapseller observes. “People come from all around to see it. ‘The Basque blacksmith who’s larger than his horses!’”

A gorse peddler joins our conversation and informs me that there are several stables along the road to Sintra, so I head through the town’s western gate. After a long row of sumac bushes, a dirt road opens to the north fronted by a chapel to the Virgin Mary. A mouse of a woman enfolded in black prays on her knees to the benevolent effigy. The Nazarene child, in Mary’s hands, looks fragile and solitary. The
supplicant
turns to me with a delicate face betokening warmth. “Saint Anthony once prayed here,” she says.

If you added up all the Old Christian claims for their Saint Anthony, you quickly came to the conclusion that he covered more territory on his knees than Dias, da Gama and Columbus in all their ships
combined
. “Then it is a very holy shrine,” I reply in a gentle voice, crossing myself. “Tell me,
senhora
,
do you know where Dom Miguel Ribeiro might have his stables?”

“I believe it’s just down this road,” she answers, pointing to the
north. “On the left after another two hundred yards. First you’ll pass the stream where the Melo boy drowned in the flood a few years back, then that series of granite boulders which Father Vasco says was a temple to witches in the time before He was born. A little ways after that.”

I cross myself again and thank her. The landmarks appear just as she said. A humid, putrid scent begins to waft toward me, however. It grows sickening just as I cross the gnarled shadow of a giant oak on which is carved the hollow-eyed skull usually painted above the doors of leper houses. A hare, quick as fear, suddenly darts across my feet. All my senses attuned to the present, I step over a cartwheel abandoned in the middle of the road. On the west side of the road, a grove of orange trees gives way to grasses, and I spot the stables—six arcades flanking a white and blue farmhouse. A low stone wall borders the property. The wooden gate which gives entry is unlocked, squeals open to my touch. Halfway up the dirt path, I call, “Dom Miguel! I am Master Abraham’s nephew. I mean no harm!”

My voice seems to cut dangerously at the rotting air. Only the dull, staccato rapping of a woodpecker from a long ways off dares enter the ensuing silence. I cross the dry field fronting the stables fighting the urge to retch, breathe as lightly as I can. All but one of the sheds is empty. In it is the source of the maleficent odor; an eyeless horse being eaten away by waves of squirming maggots.

The front door of the house is locked. A muffled voice comes to me just as I touch the knocker. My hand peels open my pouch, creeps around the base of Farid’s dagger. The door opens, and a gaunt, beak-nosed man in a rough linen cloak steps out. He points a crossbow at my heart. “Old or New Christian?!” he demands.

“Old,” I answer.

Two more men emerge from the house. Arms grip me from behind, tear open the ache in my shoulder. “
Filho
da
puta!
Son of a whore!” a voice spits in my ear.

Using the Hebrew for whore, I say, “If my mother were a
zonà
,
I’d be dressed a lot better than I am!”

“What was that?” The gaunt figure lowers his crossbow, steps to me.

The blue and white fringes of his prayer shawl dangle below his cloak. “Your
tzitzit
are showing,” I say. “You’re not going to fool many people that way.”

“I’m not aiming to fool anyone,” he says. “Jacob, let him go.”

Set free, we bless each other and exchange names. “I’m looking for Dom Miguel Ribeiro,” I explain. “Is this his stables?”

“Yes,” he answers, unfurling his arm toward the door.