The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (5 page)

He answered by filling my cup with water. “Keep drinking and you won’t get angry. The fluids will carry the white bile from your system.”

“Any more liquid and I’ll drown,” I replied.

“You’ll drown when you disappear in God’s ocean.” Lifting a finger to his lips, he requested silence. Turning back to Carlos, he said in a grave tone, “The
safira
could be lost, you know.”

“My responsibility.”

My master lifted Judah from his lap and sat him on one of our Persian pillows. “Off you go,” he said. To Father Carlos, he added, “Lost forever, I mean. Your position puts you in danger.”

As he spoke, I realized that we weren’t talking about a gemstone at all.
Safira
was code for
Sefer
,
Hebrew for book. He was undoubtedly negotiating to purchase a work of Rabbi Solomon Gabirol’s and
smuggle
it out of Portugal. But why talk in code inside our house, where we were safe from the spying eyes and ears of the Old Christians?

Father Carlos nodded with a gesture of excuse and stood up to take his leave.

“One warning—I’m going to keep trying to convince you,” my
master
said with fierce determination in his voice.

The priest crossed himself with a trembling hand. Trying to mollify Uncle Abraham, he offered a misguided effort at humor and replied, “Your kabbalistic sorcery doesn’t scare…”

My master jumped up from the table, glaring at Carlos. Motion in the room seemed suspended by his rage. “I never practice magic!” he said, using the Hebrew term,
kabbalah
ma’asit,
practical kabbalah, to designate this forbidden activity. “You should know that well, my friend.”

He was referring to the time Father Carlos had requested an amulet to kill a slanderer spreading rumors about the priest’s continued allegiance to the faith of Moses. Uncle had refused, of course, although he had personally appealed to Rabbi Abraham Zacuto, the King’s astronomer, to see that the evildoer was silenced. Now, he walked to the hearth and stared at the backs of his fingernails in the light of the fire. His topaz signet ring etched with the form of an ibis, symbol of the divine scribe, glowed with an inner sunset. “When Adam and Eve were born in Eden, they were covered with nail from head to toe as armor,” he said. Turning back to Carlos, he added, “And now, our fingernails are all that remain from this primal protection. A tiny border, don’t you think? Not much against the weapons of the Church.”

The priest shrugged off the implication and lowered his eyes.

“It won’t be enough to save you if they find out about the sapphire.”

“I need it,” Father Carlos said, a note of sadness in his voice. “Surely
you
should understand. It’s the last…” His words trailed away. He added dryly, “I should be going now. I’ve a Mass to prepare.”

“You bastard!” Uncle shouted. “Holding back a
safira
our children will need, that God will need!” When he turned the wall of his back to Carlos, the priest bowed his head as if to request forgiveness from the rest of us and left.

“You could be more understanding,” I said to my uncle. When he waved away my criticism, I added, “So why were you speaking in code with Carlos? There’s no chance Dona Meneses can hear us way back there. Besides, she must know we still practice Judaism. If it bothered her, she’d have reported us to the authorities by now.”

“The priest trusts no one. ‘Even the dead wear masks,’ he says. And the more I learn, the more I think he’s right.” He scratched his scalp and frowned. “I’m going to pay my respects to Dona Meneses.” He shot me a commanding look and marched out.

“How quickly people forget,” Aunt Esther sighed.

“What do you mean?”

She dabbed some rosewater on her neck, then tied a linen kerchief around it. “The plague. It disappears for a couple years and people think it’s something new the Devil’s conjured up.” She brushed a
trembling
hand over her forehead, reconsidered her words. “Maybe it’s a kind of grace that we can forget. Imagine if…”

“Not a word, not a gesture, not a single lesion do I forget!”

Aunt Esther grimaced; she knew I was referring to my father and elder brother, Mordecai. During the winter of fifty-two sixty-three, a
little
more than three years ago, the knife of plague had peeled them open to the moist northern winds of Kislev. My father, lost under running black sores and pustules, shivered to death on the sixth day of Hanukkah. A month later, the living skeleton that had been Mordecai was dead in my arms.

My aunt and I sat in silence. After a few minutes, Dona Meneses left our house with the large basket of fruit which she always took away from her visits. Esther said, “I’ll go to see if Cinfa needs help in the store,” then trudged out of the room with that stiff, forward-tilting walk of hers. I watched Judah playing in the doorway with his top until Uncle returned to me and said, “I need your help in the cellar.”

Below the trap door, we descended five coarse granite steps, one for each book of the Torah, to a small landing centered by a menorah in green and yellow mosaic. Passing through the next entranceway, we started down another stairway of twelve thinner limestone steps—one for each of the books of the Prophets. Since the forced closure of our synagogue in the Old Christian year of fourteen ninety-seven, this had become our temple. As we descended, I picked a blue cylindrical
skullcap
from a shelf and placed it atop my head. Uncle reached back to his shoulders and lifted his prayer shawl over his head, giving it the form of a hood. Together, we chanted, “In the greatness of thy benevolence will I enter thy house.”

The cellar was low-ceilinged, five paces wide, double that in length, floored with the same rough slate as the courtyard. It had witnessed at least a thousand years of chant, and its cool, musty air, guarded
hermetically
by walls shimmering with knotted patterns of blue and yellow tile, seemed scented with ancient memory. Window eyelets at the top of the northern wall—at the level of our courtyard paving stones—let in only a soft, dim light. From the bottom of the staircase, which flanked the eastern wall of the room, spread our circle of prayer mat. Around its circumference were seven verdant bushes in ceramic pots, one for each day of creation. Three were myrtle, three lavender and one,
symbolizing
the Sabbath, was an intermingling of both plants. The half of the room beyond the mat, facing sunset, was our realm of earthly work, where Aunt Esther scripted manuscripts and where Uncle and I
illuminated
them. Our three desks of the finest polished chestnut faced the
north wall, were spaced only a foot apart so we could view one
another’s
work. Each was gifted with its own high-backed chair. Opposite, against the south wall, were two granite bathtubs sunken into the floor. In between was our hulking storage cabinet of coarse-grained oak. It had lion’s-paw feet and possessed eight rows of ten drawers, each of them thin and long, like the receptacles for type in a printer’s studio. A last row, the lowest, had only two drawers. We kept our gold leaf and lapis lazuli in these.

The most unusual item in the room was undoubtedly the circular, platter-size mirror on the wall above the middle desk belonging to Uncle. Inside a chestnut-wood frame, the looking glass’ silver surface was concave, and hence reflected squashed and distorted images. We stared into it oftentimes at the start of meditation as a way of loosening the mind from its accustomed landscape, particularly from its
familiarity
with the body. The mirror was somewhat famous locally because on the sixth of June of thirteen ninety-one of the Christian era, it was said to have seeped blood at the death of tens of thousands of Jews killed in the riots then raging across Iberia. In fact, great-grandfather Abraham held that it shed an infinitesimal amount of blood—invisible to the naked eye—whenever even a single Jew died. He believed that the blood had become visible at the time of the anti-Jewish riots only because so very many of us had been murdered. From his time forward, therefore, it had been known as
O
Espelho
a
Sangrar
,
the Bleeding Mirror.

We all hoped it would never reveal its talents to us again.

As Uncle motioned me toward the sunken bathtubs, he said, “I need you to pee.”

“Now?” I asked.

From the rim of a tub, he picked up a jug. “In here. It’s spring. I need a virgin’s pee.”

Each year, just prior to Passover, my master made new dyes and
colors
for our manuscript illuminations. The acid in the urine ate at certain elements to create varying colors, particularly a fine rose when mixed with Brazil wood, alum and ceruse, and a brilliant carmine when mixed with the ashes of vine branches and quicklime.

“I’m no longer a virgin,” I said, picturing Helena as she had been in the hills overlooking the vast monastery being built just west of Lisbon. I’d waited so long for her decision. Until it seemed as if sex and life
would not happen to me as they did to other people. And then, when all was lost, when the ship set to take her to Corfu was already anchored in Lisbon, her arms opened to me like the gates of God’s grace.

“A whore at the Maidenhead Inn?” Uncle asked, awakening me from daydream. He had often recommended a certain house of ill repute outside the city walls.

When I answered, “Helena,” he raised his eyebrows like a rogue and said, “In any event, you’re the closest thing to a virgin I can get without revealing that we’re still illuminating Hebrew books. Judah’s too young and I’m too old, and women’s pee is too strong—especially your aunt’s. I tried it years ago when we were married. Turns everything black as Asmodeus’ soul.”

We shared a silly grin. “Now I know why you loaded me with
fluids
,” I said.

As my water cascaded hot and musty into Uncle’s jars, he shuffled to our desks with the modest, duck-like walk he adopted in synagogues and began to dust them.

After I’d peed in six different ceramic jugs and closed their lids securely, we placed them in the sunken bathtubs. Uncle washed his hands and brushed them through the Sabbath bush of myrtle and
lavender
. With a puzzled frown, he said, “Diego the printer is so late—I don’t understand.”

Diego was a family friend whom Uncle was initiating into his threshing circle, his group of mystics which met in secret to discuss
kabbalah
. Although a robust man with the graying beard and commanding brown eyes of a patriarch, he’d had his heart reduced to ash in the Inquisitional flames of Seville which had claimed his wife and daughter four years earlier and from which he’d barely managed to escape. Often, Uncle and I sought ways to renew his spirit, and we had
convinced
him to go for a walk today through Sintra forest so that we might sketch the great white cranes before their migration north.

“Perhaps Senhora Belmira’s family has kept him behind,” I said. A neighbor and friend of Diego’s, she’d been beaten to death in Xabregas, one of the city’s eastern districts, two months before. Diego had been spending a lot of time with her loved ones of late.

Uncle shrugged and cupped his hands around my nose. “Refresh yourself,” he said, and as I sniffed at his myrtle-scented fingers, he added, “If he isn’t here soon, we’ll go to his place and check. Oh, and
when we do go out, I’ll need to pass by New Merchants Street. I promised Esther I’d deliver the Book of Psalms she’s just finished.”

My master had a way of turning business transactions into
disputations
on the sex lives of angels and other esoteric matters. “You have precisely the time it takes Diego and me to down a cup of wine at the Attic Inn!” It was a tumbledown garret, but it served kosher wine on the sly.

His lips sculpted a dismayed but amused frown. “Look who’s giving orders!” he observed.

I met his challenge with the bored expression I used to practice to irritate my father when he spoke of Talmud classes. He nodded his agreement. “All right, no more than a half hour.” He motioned for me to bend so he could bless his hand over me. Then, as I picked dyes and colors from the storage cabinet, he unlocked the
genizah
,
the traditional hiding place for old books in a synagogue. Ours was a pit—three feet wide by four feet long—sunken into the floor at the western perimeter of the prayer mat. Its contents were constantly changing; books smuggled out of Portugal were soon replaced with others my master discovered and either bought or begged.

Uncle stepped one foot down into the
genizah
to retrieve our work. By the time he’d climbed back out, I was at my desk, arranging my brushes and dyes. Placing my manuscript neatly on the slightly inclined surface of the desk in front of me, he circled his hand around the back of my neck and advised me with a parable on the coloration for my most recent illumination, one of the tales from the famous collection of “Fox Fables.” As I began to offer an analysis of his words, his lips began to tremble and his hand grew cold against my skin. “What is it, Uncle?” I asked.

He rubbed his eyes with both his hands, like a child, took a long inhale of breath as if to ready himself for a challenge. “You’re so grown up,” he said gently. “Already my equal in so much. And yet in other matters…” He shook his head, smiled wistfully. “There is so much I’d like to tell you… Beri, God may soon demand that we take separate paths.” He reached into his pouch and took out a scroll of vellum. Handing it to me, he said, “Be so kind as to accept this little gift.”

The scroll unfolded into a vellum ribbon on which were scripted both our Hebrew names in elegant golden lettering. “Esther made it for me,” he continued. He gripped the back of my neck and, in an urgent
voice, added, “If ever you should need me, wherever you are, no
matter
how far or how desperate the circumstances, send this ribbon to me and I will come for you.” He placed his other hand atop my head, stared pressingly into my eyes. “And if, for any reason, you find me beyond your earthly reach, pray over it and I will make every effort to appear before you.”