The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (6 page)

So touched was I by his grace, by my master’s generosity, that my throat parched with a kind of desperate yearning. Tears clouded the room. I had to swallow several times just to whisper, “But we will never be separated. I will always…”

Uncle told me, “Youth is meant to be separated from age for a time. You will go your way as it should be, then return. But no demon,
however
powerful, shall stand in my way if you are in trouble!” He took his hand from atop my head and caressed my cheek. “Now come, let’s work together.”

“But is there nothing that I can…?”

He held up his hand and pointed to my manuscript. “Woe betide the kabbalah master who answers every question posed by his
apprentice
! Now get to work!”

A few minutes later, as I was highlighting the powerful legs of a young dog in my illumination with minute strokes of black, a shriek like shattered glass cut the air. “Go!” my master yelled.

I bounded up the stairs. The kitchen was empty. Harsh voices from outside pounded against the walls. I climbed through my bedroom window into the store, dashed out onto Temple Street. As I removed my skullcap, I spotted Aunt Esther kneeling over our friend, Diego the printer. He was moaning. Blood was spilling from a gash on his bearded chin into her hands.

Chapter II

Diego the printer was the first to contribute to the river of blood which would, over the next few days, lead us into a desert landscape bordered everywhere by grief. But at the time, this geography of death was still a secret from us.

Streams of sweat stained his temples and cheeks with a residue of the city’s endless dust. Blood sluiced over his neck from the gash at his chin. Coughing, he fought for breath. “I was walking here…just
walking
,” he said in Portuguese. “By the river, I stopped by the Kings Well to wash my hands.” Aunt Esther unbuttoned the top of his crusted
doublet
, cleaned his chest with fabric rent from her blouse. I noticed the brown line of an old scar on his chest, just under his collar bone, almost as if a worm had burrowed there.

Around us, neighbors were beginning to gather now, to whisper together. “Two boys…” Diego continued, “…they yelled that I was
poisoning
the well with an essence of plague. They ran after me. I fell. They threw stones. ‘Get the long-tailed rabbi! Get the long…’ A swarthy man in a blue cape saved me. Tall, strong…”

In Diego’s desperation, his last words sought the comfort of Hebrew. “Speak Portuguese,” I whispered to him as we laid him back onto the cobbles.

Diego’s turban slipped off, and I saw for the first time the wisps of thinning gray hair over his ears, the brown birthmarks dotting his scalp. A folded paper dropped free as well. Believing it might contain a
personal
message or a prayer formula which would incriminate him as a practicing Jew, I snatched it up, hid it in the large drawstring pouch I
keep around my neck and which functions as a kind of knapsack. Judah brushed against me, icy with fear, and I had to shake him to get him to run to Dr. Montesinhos. Uncle had joined us, and, after a rushed prayer, said, “I’m going inside to see what medication I can find.”

I tried to hold Diego’s gash closed by pressing my finger into Esthers makeshift bandage, but soon the linen was soaked crimson. Esther ran off for clean water as I substituted cloth ripped from my shirt. Uncle arrived with Farid. They carried extracts of comfrey and bayberry and geranium, sizings and bole, gum arabic and sulfur water. But none of the styptics could effect a clotting. “It’s his accursed beard!” Uncle grumbled. “I can’t get to the wound.” He told Diego, “Dr. Montesinhos is going to have to shave you.”

Diego, who was from the Jewish priestly caste of Levi, pushed us away when he heard that. “I won’t allow it!” he shouted in Hebrew. “I must have my beard. It is forbidden to…”

“There are Levites without beards,” I pointed out, but Diego
simply
moaned. I turned to Uncle, whispered, “An attack in daylight. It’s a bad sign. A few more weeks of drought and…”

“How can you be sure it wasn’t planned?” Uncle demanded angrily.

I began to ask what he meant, but a shadow crossing over us halted my words. Two horsemen leading a white and gold carriage glared at us from above. Silver morions and greaves gleamed in the sunlight. Scarlet and green pennons decorated with the King’s armored spheres flapped in the dry breeze. “What in God’s name is the disturbance?!” one demanded gruffly.

It was then that I noticed that my master was still in his prayer garb, a white and blue shawl over his shoulders, his left arm circled by the straps of his phylacteries, a leather prayer box on his forehead above his spiritual eye. For such an infringement, he could have been exiled as a slave to Portuguese Africa. Behind my back, I signalled to Farid in our language of hands to spirit him away. “A man has been hurt,” I said.

“Are you a New Christian?!” the horseman demanded.

My heart boomed as if to force a denial. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Farid tugging Uncle back through the crowd.

“I’ve asked if you’re a New Christian!” the horseman repeated menacingly.

The door to the carriage behind him swung open. Silence swept the crowd. Out stepped a thin, delicate man in a violet tunic and bi-colored
leggings, black and white. A ruffled collar of gold silk seemed to offer his gaunt, evil face to me as if on a platter. His black eyes surveyed the crowd as if in search of an innocent to punish. While dangling a hand weighted with twin rings of emerald cabochons the size of almonds, he said in imperious Castilian, “We’ll take him with us. There must be a hospital near the Estaus.”

The Estaus Palace, a turreted edifice of shimmering stone, played home to noble guests on official visits to Lisbon. “My lord, the new All Saints Hospital is right on Rossio Square,” I said. “Not a hundred yards from your destination.”

Diego was a bear of a man, over six feet tall, and it took a guard and one of the nobleman’s Moorish-looking drivers to help me lift him. Inside the carriage, a young woman with a peaked, violet tress and a rose-colored silk jupe sat opposite the Castilian nobleman. She was blond, fair-skinned, round-faced. She reached for Diego with stringent concern, looked at me with intelligent eyes burning for an explanation.

“Attacked by foreign seamen,” I lied.

Her sudden look of surprise, the impossibility of her desperation, the kinship of her face to my own banished time. A piercing of
meaning
it was—a
shefa
,
influx of God’s grace. Akin to a verse of Torah
suddenly
shedding its clothing and revealing itself in a sparkling of naked understanding.

By the girl’s side was a pug-nosed dog in a blue and yellow
troubadour’s
suit. A coffer of silver rested on the crimson floor of the carriage. These last details I only noticed as the Castilian called to his driver to make ready. I surveyed the scene as I often do to imprint life in what Uncle calls my Torah memory, backed away. When the door closed, the nobleman leaned out the window to me and whispered with a wine-scented voice, “Have no fear. Your friend won’t die on this
holiday.
” To his two drivers, he called, “Make haste! We’ve a wounded man here!”

A curiosity akin to dread tugged at my heart as the drivers whipped the horses. Who were these Castilians? Did they know we were secret Jews?! Was the nobleman mocking me or acknowledging his kinship? For a moment, I saw fingers as tiny as a child’s straining in the window of the carriage as it throttled down the street. A curtain lowered,
silencing
my questions.

I found Uncle in our courtyard, playing chess with Farid. His prayer
shawl was neatly folded in his lap and topped with his phylacteries. After I explained what happened with Diego and the Castilian
nobleman
, he looked up at me and said, “Before my forces are decimated by this heathen’s let us get to the hospital and make sure Diego is treated right.”

Farid read his lips and grinned. Uncle and I wanted to change into street clothes, and as we entered the kitchen I enquired about what he meant about the attack on Diego being planned. By way of reply, he asked, “What lives for centuries but can still die before its own birth?”

I rolled my eyes and said, “No riddles, just an answer.”

He frowned and marched to his room.

A week later, I came upon the answer to Uncle’s paradox. Had I understood earlier, could I have changed our leaden destiny to gold?

My master and I chose a route along the river because the shifting wind was now punishing us with the odor of one of the municipal dungheaps beyond the city’s crenelated walls. The public cemeteries were full, and as of late, dead African slaves had been tossed on top of the heaps. What the vultures and wolves couldn’t pick quickly enough putrefied and mixed with excrement into a nightmare smell that burned into your skin and bones like an unseen acid.

As we passed through the Horse’s Well Gate, I recalled the
metallic
shiver the gates to the Judiaria Pequena made when the Old Christian guards locked the Jews inside for the night. A shout from above turned us. Our former rabbi, Fernando Losa, was waving at us to wait from the top of the Synagogue Steps. He’d become a dealer in
religious
Christian garments since the conversion, outfitted even the Bishop of Lisbon, may his tongue turn to powder. “Oh no, not Rabbi Losa,” I moaned. “For what terrible sin are we being made to atone?”

Uncle laughed. A woman suddenly shrieked, “Water!” and we pressed against the wall as a rain of waste cascaded from her third-story window.

Losa joined us puffing for breath, an exquisite scarlet cloak
embroidered
with a collar of pearls draped over his narrow shoulders. Thin and beak nosed, with deep-set treacherous eyes, a shiny bald head and a frowning slit for a mouth, he looked to me like a vulturine golem
constructed
for hunting down subterranean rodents. As a boy, I expected him to have talons rather than fingers, and in my dreams, he never
spoke, always hissed. “Those wretched, filthy cows are everywhere!” he said now in a false, patrician voice.

“At least they’re kosher,” my master noted.

Rabbi Losa sneered and said, “This bad fortune of Diego the
printer
’s is what comes from talking to you about the
fountain,
you know.” He was referring in code to the kabbalah; it was no secret to him that Uncle wanted Diego to join his threshing circle.

My master made a deferential bow and whispered in Hebrew, “
Hakham
mufla
ve-rav
rabanan,
you are a great scholar and a rabbi of rabbis.” He glanced at me to be sure I’d catch his play on words; he was insulting Losa by accenting the letters h, a, m, and r. Together, they formed the Hebrew word for jackass.

Uncle turned to leave, but the rabbi said, “Wait one moment!” He licked his lips as if savoring a tasty sauce. “I’ve come to give you a
warning
. Eurico Damas says that should you ever so much as whisper his name in your sleep, he’ll chop you up and serve you inside sausage casing. Best keep your beak out of private affairs, little man!”

My heart sank; Damas was a New Christian arms dealer who’d won contracts from the King for spying on his former brethren and who had recently taken a child bride. Two weeks ago, Uncle had barged in on a secret meeting of the Jewish court and demanded to have him judged for drowning the newborn infant of a flower seller he’d raped and refused to marry. The investigation ended a week ago, when the flower seller herself mysteriously disappeared. Uncle’s name was to have been kept secret by the rabbinical court, but apparently someone—probably Losa himself—had given it to Damas.

“Is that all you came to tell me?” my master demanded.

“That should be quite enough. If it weren’t for my intervention, he’d have come himself.”

“Many thanks, oh great scholar and rabbi of rabbis,” Uncle answered with an ironic bow.

Losa pulled in his chin like a hen, watched us leave with the bitter but patient air of a man who has lost the battle but will continue to wage the war.

As we rushed toward the city center and the hospital, I daydreamed about protecting my master from a succession of kabbalistic demons and Biblical giants. Perhaps I’d never outgrow such fantasies. And yet, passing the clamor of Lisbon’s great fishmarket and port, they seemed
suddenly fitting. After all, Uncle had sworn protection over me as a boy in order to take over my mystical guidance. Did it imply a reciprocal promise I’d never before realized?

When we explained our mission to a bailiff at the All Saints Hospital, he informed us proudly that the nobleman who had brought Diego in had been none other than the Count of Almira. The name meant nothing to me, but I wrote it in gold in my Torah memory because of my attraction for his traveling companion. A girlish nun escorted us to Diego’s room. It was gloomy and low-ceilinged, stank of vinegar, amber and death. Over each of the twelve cots hung a bloody crucifix. Yellowing linen curtains opened to show men tied with leather belts to beds, peering white-eyed and hungry for life, encrusted in bandages, stinking like manure. Shutters were partially opened for a view of the Dominican Church across the square.

Diego was in the last bed. Recognizing his large sombre eyes and saffron-colored turban, I smiled with joy and nervousness. But he was wholly changed. His shaved cheeks were the white of marble, nicked here and there with blood. Jowls previously hidden gave his face a heavy, pendulous attitude. He looked suddenly like the kind of tender man who gave presents easily, who doted on children, but who paid a price for neglecting himself—the kind of man he may have been before exile and isolation.

The gash across his chin had been cauterized and stitched. When he spotted us, he gasped and sat up. Involuntarily, he turned his face to the wall as if preparing for death.

My uncle stopped, his penetrating emerald eyes seeking to exchange places with Diego’s. When I prodded him forward, he walked to his friend and offered an encouraging smile. From here, we could see he was feverish with sweat. I prayed it wasn’t plague. “You look well—the bleeding’s stopped,” my master said.

“You shouldn’t have come, seen me like this.” Diego faced the wall again and closed his eyes.