The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (32 page)

“You’re saying he was hanged first. But there was no rope, no…”

“Or garroted, even strangled. With a rope or hands. And…”

“It was with a rosary,” I interrupt. “I didn’t lie about the bead I found.”

“And then your
shohet
slit his throat,” Simon continues. “Out of habit, perhaps. Or to be certain. One can never be too sure with a
kabbalist
of such magnitude. There are ways…”

Farid signals, “It would have to be someone he’d allow to get close enough to harm him. Zerubbabel… whoever he is, must have come.”

Wanting to keep secret my knowledge that one of Uncle’s smugglers may have been involved in his murder, I refrain from translating the last sentence for Simon. He laughs in a single exhale. “A man like me, Farid means.”

Simon’s fawnlike hesitation has disappeared completely to make way for this new personality of his.

“Yes,” I say. “Like you.”

“Berekiah, I’m not going to defend myself. Your uncle ransomed me from Christian death. I would sooner have killed myself than…”

“And yet we found something that may belong to you,” I say.

“What?”

“Give me one of your gloves and I’ll tell you.”

He shrugs as if ceding to pointlessness, peels the ripped one free and hands it to me. I reach into my pouch and extract the thread. It is a match; the same black silk, not a shade of difference. “It was caught on one of Uncle’s fingernails. It’s yours.”

After Simon has examined the thread, he pushes up on the table to stand, gives me a sympathetic look. “It may be the same—I’m no expert. But it could have been obtained from my shop, from most any of the silk stores in Little Jerusalem. But of course, you’re wondering just how my glove was ripped.”

To my nod, he responds in a poetic voice, “When running on one leg, one has a tendency to fall. When falling on stone, one will rip silk. A wonderful material, this fabric of worms, but they who spin it for cocoons do not foresee the idiocy of men.”

He reaches for his crutches, inserts their leather pads under his arms. My shame at persecuting a man loved by my master mixes with a perverse desire to continue my assault until I have driven every last
possibility
of happiness from his soul. I say, “Simon, it’s a time of masks. And I don’t really know what’s under yours. Just like you don’t know what’s under mine. For all I know, the man you truly are is patting
himself
on the back for having fooled me.”

He hops in order to adjust his crutches. “My old mask was burned
long ago in the pyre that consumed my wife. My new one… I don’t even know what it looks like.” He slips on his glove with an air of resignation. “Maybe I did have a terrible fight with your uncle when no one was looking. That’s what would be assumed by an Inquisitor. But is that what you’ve become? A Jewish mystic turned Inquisitor?!” A bitter laugh rises from his gut. “You wouldn’t be the first, would you? Everything is possible in Spain and Portugal. God bless these lands of miracles.”

Is Simon’s the cynical defense of the world-weary or the sham of a killer? I ask, “Do you know who was smuggling books with Uncle?” When he shakes his head, I say, “Have you no suspicions?”

“None. I’ve become skilled at not thinking certain thoughts. In fact, not thinking is a special talent one develops in Castile and Andalusia. Go there someday and you will see how valued it is in the good citizens of those hateful provinces.”

I unscroll for him the drawing of the boy who tried to sell Senhora Tamara my master’s last Haggadah. “Ever see him?”

“Not that I know of,” he replies.

“And
Tu
Bisvat
?”

“What about it?”

“Not ‘it.’ There’s a man in Constantinople who uses that pen name… who was receiving Uncle’s smuggled manuscripts.”

Simon shakes his head, says, “There must be a hundred kabbalists in Constantinople. This
Tu
Bisvat
could be any of them. Master Abraham told us not to concern ourselves with these other activities of his. We respected his wishes. Just as you did, dear Berekiah.”

As he shows me his pitiful grin once again, the desire to slap him burns in my chest. “And Haman?” I ask gruffly.

“What of him?”

“Did Uncle tell you whose face was given to Haman in his last Haggadah?”

Simon shakes his head and walks with his crutches to the door. He turns to me with his hand shading his eyes. The jester has disappeared; he has the vacant look of a man whose hopes have been dashed. He whispers in an urgent voice, “Berekiah, I came to tell you something. A Spanish nobleman staying at the Estaus Palace is asking around town for Hebrew books, illuminated manuscripts in particular. The Sabbath before your Uncle’s death, I was approached about selling some. I don’t know where he got my name. He would not tell me. Beware of all of us
if you like. But beware of him in particular. It may be tempting to sell your uncle’s books to raise some money for bribes to escape Portugal. But I don’t trust this man.”

“And his name?”

“He calls himself a count, the Count of Almira—but I suspect it’s all a lie.”

After I explain to Simon and Farid that this is none other than the man who took Diego to the hospital after he was stoned, they both insist on coming with me to talk with him. We walk in silence, and slowly, so that Simon can keep pace on his crutches. All that remains now from the killing are the knowing eyes of the Christians; suspicious, as if marking territory, they inform us that we are not like them. As if we didn’t know that already. Then they begin their whispers and jerk their glances away from us as if we were the living dead. As if we didn’t know that, too.

In the slanting morning shade of the cathedral’s twin bell towers, Farid signals to me that he’s certain a man is tracking us. “Since we left the house,” he gestures. “And he’s a Northerner. But don’t turn just yet.”

We pick up our pace as we descend past the Magdalena Church into Little Jerusalem. Here, we do not walk so much as navigate past the drying cakes of shit hurled by Christians into the streets. Along the
cobbles
, brown lines zigzag and fade, bloody trails left by Jewish bodies dragged to the pyre. Flies swirl about, poke into our nostrils, feed from our eyes. My thoughts remain with the Northerner tracking us,
however
. An invisible cord seems to tie us together, to be tugging me back by my shoulders. By the old schoolhouse, I glance behind. Our stalker is striding past pushcarts of dried fish. He’s the blond giant whom I saw waiting outside Diego’s apartment, I’m sure of it.

Is he White Maimon of the Two Mouths because of his pale complexion?

I take Simon’s arm, tell him about our Northern shadow. “He must be after me,” I observe. “Something I may know about Uncle…about the plot to kill him. You must separate from me.”

Simon offers an accepting smile; he will fight fate no longer. But Farid signals, “Wouldn’t it be better to confront him? Three against one.”

I nod toward Simon’s crutches. “Bad idea. Alone, I’ll be able to lose
him in the alleys of Little Jerusalem. He’s not from here. He won’t know what he’s doing. I’ll meet you both at the Estaus Palace. Wait for me.”

They each nod their agreement and continue up toward the Rossio. I turn back for our spy so that I’m sure he can see me, then cut down past the lace-trimming stores toward what used to be the Jewish
hospital
. In a single jump, I nestle out of view into the limestone doorframe of the Inn of the Two Brothers. From here I will slip down the side alley back into the Rua da Ferraria, Blacksmith’s Street.

As I press back into the doorway, several cream-white butterflies flutter in falling angles down onto fresh horse droppings.

The Northerner suddenly stands in the intersection ahead. He removes his hat as he gazes after me. He has high, prominent cheek bones and treacherous eyes. He runs a hand through the front locks of his oily hair, replaces his hat. But his first step is wrong; he marches away from me toward Farid and Simon.

My mistake twists cold inside my gut. I creep forward with the silence of a cat. Yet this Northerner looks over his shoulder directly at me, as if gifted with the powers of a sorcerer. He stares at me with determined eyes, then begins to run. I race after him. His hat falls away. A glimmer of light slips into his fist as he pulls something from his cloak. Farid, too, has sensed danger. A hundred paces up the street, he is motioning in crazy waves toward Simon. They rush through Little Jerusalem’s Northern Gate, through the shade cut by the cupola of the Church of São Nicolau. Simon’s bobbing gait is awkward, hopeless. “Simon, run!” I scream. But it is impossible. He turns, drops a crutch. I see it as if through a honey-textured time: his face opening as the Northerner plunges into him; his last support flying away, his body crashing into a wall. Farid kneels over him, and the cape of the blond assassin whips behind as he flies ahead.

Chapter XVI

Simon is unable to speak. Or maybe it’s no longer necessary. He lays in Farid’s arms and says goodbye to the world with his eyes.

A stiletto with a blackwood handle inserted between his ribs is
separating
his body from his soul. To Farid, I signal, “Another who will not live to see tonight’s Sabbath.”

Simon’s gloved left hand grasps the handle of the knife. “Take it away,” he moans. Farid pulls it free. Like wine bursting from a spigot, blood spurts onto us. A sigh releases from the old thresher. “Thank you,” he whispers.

Farid holds up the blade as he nestles his arm under Simon’s head as a cushion. “Pointed,” he signals.

I nod my understanding; a
shohet’s
blade is traditionally
square-tipped
; this weapon comes to a ferocious point.

“I’m sorry for suspecting you,” I whisper in Hebrew to Simon. “I must have…”

He nods as if it isn’t necessary to give voice to my regrets, drops his delicate hand to my arm. He is looking across the sky and mouthing prayers. I recognize names of God, then those of his lost family. “Graça” is sculpted by his lips.

Simon’s fingers caress my arm as if to offer comfort. At the moment his soul departs, a gurgling issues from his chest and there is a quiver through his hands like a flutter of wings. I brush his eyelids closed.

Surely it is a sin for a man such as I to regard himself as a prophet, even for an instant. Yet I put my lips to Simon’s, my eyes to his eyes, my hands to his hands. I fall upon him like Elisha upon the Shunammite’s dead child. Then, inserting my thumb and forefinger into his mouth, I
pry him open to my breath. I fill him with life from my life seven times. A pain on my shoulder descends in waves as my bellows empties into him. Farid is pulling me away. His eyes connote displeasure. Yet he
kisses
my forehead. “No more,” he signals.

When I look at Simon, there is a flowing movement like an angel’s caress across his hair. “You see!” I say aloud.

“He’s dead,” Farid replies with sure gestures. “He will wake no more.” He hugs me to him. The beats of his heart swell around me. His warmth encloses me in the darkness behind my eyelids.

We wait together. I cry for a time. Then Simon’s death dries in my thoughts, shows me the present of Lisbon. A crowd closes in on us, all curiosity and speculation, for Christians are fascinated by nothing so much as the sight of a Jew’s misfortune. I gaze down the street, signal to Farid that I’ll be away only a moment. I retrieve the Northerner’s hat. A shirtless boy with Judah’s innocent eyes hands it to me.

Back with Farid, I signal, “I’m going to see which way he ran. Can you brave these Philistines alone?”

He nods his agreement. As if spun from a frigid top, I race away. At the opening of Rossio Square, I stop, paralyzed by the twisting conflux of men and woman, carriages and horses. The ridiculous life of the square has hidden him.

An old barber in a tattered doublet calls out in a lazy Algarvian voice, “Senhor, you’re lookin’ a little scruffy. How ‘bout a shave and a haircut. Got hands so swift they could steal the black from a bat.”

“A Northerner, blond, have you seen him?!” I demand.

“Perhaps the drought will end with the new month,” he replies. He has the cheery disregard of the deaf, grips my hand and tries to lead me toward his chair. I break away. His wife is having her tufted scalp picked free of lice by a young girl. She points a hooked finger up toward the northern edge of the square. “Went that way,” she indicates.

I ask shopkeepers there about him in vain until a carpet peddler with a jumpy, effusive manner, points to the left of the São Domingos Church.

I race down the dirt road which we used to call the Rua da Bruxa—Witch’s Street—after the cat-eyed old hag there who used to repair a woman’s virginity for a price. A red-haired water seller playing cards by himself under an awning has seen the Northerner. “That way!” he shouts, pointing east. I enter the Moorish Quarter, continue racing
ahead until the blue and white townhouses give way to wooden shacks. Where the street ends, granite steps lead up like a pleated ribbon toward the great limestone cross that marks the lower edge of the Convento da Graça. Two hundred feet up the scorched and worn
hillside
is the stone crown of towers and battlements that is the convent itself. I’ve reached an impasse.

Ragged waifs with dirty, devious faces, more like dwarfs than
children
, are kicking around a stuffed leather ball by the stairs ahead. High above, on the crest of the hillside, a tiny nun, the runt of her religious
litter
, screeches at them in a Galician accent. “Shoo! Get away, you little rats! You’re going to burn in hell before you can beg God’s forgiveness!”

Apparently, the objective of the boys’ game is to unceremoniously score direct hits into her beloved limestone cross.

When he notices my presence, a weedy boy with pale-green eyes yells at her in a prideful voice, “
Vai-te
fader,
vaca!,
fuck off, cow!”

The kids laugh. The nun keeps shrieking: “Your sins will lead you to marriage with the Devil’s whores! And your children will all be born eyeless and deaf, with horned tails. Then you will…”

It appears to be a memorized litany, how she responds to this
torture
every day. Perhaps it is her penance.

I grab the ball when it bounces down the hill my way.

“Hey, give that back!” the kids yell. Their faces are full and furious with irritation.

“Just tell me if you’ve seen a foreigner,” I reply.

“Ain’t nothing but foreigners around here. Give us back the
fucking
ball!”

“A man with blond hair down to his shoulders. A cape with…”

One points a stubby, dirty finger. “Went up the hill like a spider,” he says.

I drop-kick the ball toward the cross. A near miss. The kids cheer, then chase screaming after it as it rolls back down the scree.

At the top of the hill, out of breath, I face the flying buttresses of the Convento da Graça as if at the Gates of Mystery. On the other side of the street blooms a marketplace. I ask tripesellers and sievemakers, combmakers and birdcageweavers, even a family of Castilian
hunchbacks
making a pilgrimage to Santiago, but no one has seen him.

As a last resort, I dare to approach the screeching nun. She has one brown tooth that sticks like a rotten dagger into her bottom lip, eyelids
like prunes, a scabbed nose. She pauses in her litany long enough to speak in a tone of wisdom offered, “Search for God, not Northerners.”

When I repeat what one of the waifs told her to do, she shrieks like a Brazilian parrot.

Back in Little Jerusalem, I discuss with Farid where to take Simon’s body. Unfortunately, we have no clear idea where his house is. Based on his occasional descriptions of views over the Tagus, we’ve always assumed that he lived on the escarpment crowned by the Church of Santa Catarina outside the western gates of the city. So we borrow a wheelbarrow from Senhora Martins, a friend of my aunt, and begin to trundle the body through the afternoon sun.

Do people stare as we go? I don’t know; an inner world of questions and regrets gives me sanctuary. Farid leads us. All I feel is the drudgery of climbing uphill, a vague, distasteful sense of heat and sweat, sun and dust. I only awake to the jarring white angles of Lisbon when we hear Simon’s name called. To the east, the bell tower of the Santa Catarina church is arrowing into the blue sky. A stocky woman with a dull face, wearing a white headscarf, runs to us shrieking. She stares in horror at the blood on Simon’s clothing. She kneels vomiting. An old man tells me that she is the older sister of Simon’s common-law wife. He points to a sagging townhouse. “They live on the second floor.”

My mood of disbelief deepens and seems to lower me from the scene. Simon’s lover is thin and olive-skinned, possesses a natural,
precise
elegance as she invites us in, is strikingly strong in profile for such a young woman. She has intelligent eyes, wears a loose-fitting
rose-colored
tunic. There is an understated regality about her which reminds me of Reza. But almost a girl she is. “This is Graça, Simon’s wife,” the sister says.

Graça runs to the window to see Simon when I tell her of his fate. Her hands grip the sill. Her howls come animal in their intensity, as if she is calling for her missing cub in a language of the gut. She hugs her belly, and I realize in an instant of sinking despair that she is pregnant. When her first waves of horror have subsided, I say, “Yours was the last name sculpted by his lips.”

We descend to the street. People back away. She falls to her knees and caresses Simon’s face, soothes him with talk of Christ and their child to be. I realize then what should have been obvious; she is an Old
Christian.

With a desperate, protective force, Graça is suddenly tugged by her sister toward Farid and me. “Tell us every detail of Simon’s death!” she demands.

I explain in a voice belonging to another; Berekiah has fled deep inside the armor of my body.

Graça is unable to speak. Her mouth drops open, and her eyes show a hollow despair. The sister asks with clenched fists, “Where do we get justice?”

I shake my head. “When I find this Northerner, I will let you know.”

Farid and I are covered in Simon’s blood. Kind neighbors help us wash, give us new shirts and pouches, feed us cheese and wine. Too weak to protest, we accept their offerings. Sluggish from drink,
wavering
in our walk, we slip down into central Lisbon as if leaving behind a Biblical landscape.

After we’ve returned our wheelbarrow, we wander through Little Jerusalem like ghosts. In front of the dyer’s workshop where our Jewish courthouse used to be, I begin to spell “Abraham” in Hebrew with my steps. Then, “Judah.” Farid becomes restless after a time. He stops, faces east like a weather vane. “Let’s go home,” he signals.

I turn to the west to follow the sun’s descent over this accursed city. Tonight, a week from the onset of Passover, we should be escorting the Zohar into the dawn with our recitations. But we no longer have a copy of the sacred text. And even if we did… “No, not home!” I shout in my wine-scented voice. I trudge on until we are standing over Simon’s bloodstain on the cobbles of Little Jerusalem. “A short time ago, this brown crust was in his body,” I signal to Farid. He shakes his head as if this is obvious. But I simply can’t believe it, and I recall the day in reverse—as if reading a text from the wrong direction. Simon’s warning about the Count of Almira is spoken to me as if accompanied by a cadence played by Moorish tambourines.

Farid says with his hands, “Let’s get back to the Alfama. We’ve got to somehow find Diego… warn him that the Northerner will surely kill him if he finds him.”

“No, Diego won’t go near his home, and we won’t be able to locate him. We’re going to the Estaus Palace.” When he shakes his head, I take his arm. “I need you with me. No protests.”

As Farid and I enter the Rossio, ash and wood flakes from the pyres
in which the Jews were burnt blow around us. At first, it seems that this is the only vestige remaining from the mountain of Christian sin, and I think:
Our
murdered
compatriots
now
reside
only
in
our
memories.

Farid notices, however, that this is not quite true. “Look down,” he signals, and he points with his foot toward a seam in the cobbles. Human teeth. There must be thousands scattered in the square, trapped in cracks and edges. I look up and notice that women and
children
are kneeling everywhere, picking up these remains as if it were harvest time. Undoubtedly, they will save them as talismans against the plague.

Ahead of us, at the northeast rim of the square, a regiment of royal footsoldiers has cordoned off the Church of São Domingos by forming a semi-circle in front of its entrance. Behind them is a row of cavaliers, perhaps twenty in all.

“A compromise must have been struck by the governor with the Dominican hierarchy to let them into Lisbon,” Farid signals to me.

“When all the killing is over, the Crown sends in troops,” I reply. “Very comforting to know that he supports us so courageously, no?”

As we walk on, I see townspeople standing in poses of respect who only a day or two before would have called for King Manuel’s head.
This
passivity
is
deeply
embedded
in
the
souls
of
the
Portuguese
Christians,
I think.
No
revolt
will
ever
succeed
here.

A crafty-eyed old woman looking to make conversation as people do in the face of regal authority, stops us, says, “Two of the Dominican
friars
have been arrested. Isn’t it terrible?”

I raise my middle finger over her and chant, “May your wicked soul wander the Lower Realms forever!”

When she shows disdain for me with her Christian eyes, I spit at her feet. We rush on. At the front gate to the Estaus Palace, two burly
crossbowmen
stand flanking a dandified doorman in a feathered cap. Beyond the gate’s metalwork, in the shade of an orange grove, rest three carriages. One of them, painted white with gold, is the vehicle I
remember
from the day of Diego’s injury.