Lucena (8 page)

LUNCH IN MÁLAGA

This time the girls Luisa and Muriel were there. Samuel pensively asked, “Can anybody live a thousand years?”

The father: “What you need to do is look for work. It is worth the effort for you to learn how to make a living. Money doesn’t fall from the trees.”

The mother: “He signed up at the university. He can rest a bit before the course starts.”

The father: “How can he rest when I can’t? I’ve been working since I was fourteen. I studied, I worked, and I finished high school. Kids of today are wimps.”

Luisa: “The bible talks about a guy named Methuselah who lived a thousand years. Adam too, didn‘t he? I learned that in school.”

“The father: “All that is no more than stories. What you all need to do is to sweat a little more instead of expecting that your father will hand it to you all ready.”

Samuel: “I’m not referring to now. If somebody existed who was a thousand years old, how would we know he’s that old?”

The father says to the mother, “You see? Didn’t I tell you not to pamper them so much? Look how they’re spending their time. Next they’ll be talking about flying saucers.”

Muriel: “That’s more interesting. I read that once a flying saucer fell to earth. Do you believe that?”

Samuel: “Of course we think a thousand-year-old would have wrinkles and look very old. Also if he lived so many years surely it is because he has the capacity to not age, and to look young.”

The mother: “How about somebody eating the squids I prepared. You can talk later.”

Samuel: “It’s not
kosher
.”

The father: “Now you want to eat
Kosher
, when last year on the day of
Tishá be-Av
, the day of the destruction of the Temple, you went to a party?”

Samuel: “Last year was last year. Now I have changed and I want to eat
Kosher
.”

The mother: “There is a
kosher
chicken in the freezer, if you want I can prepare it for you.”

Samuel: “No, that’s not necessary. I’ll eat vegetables and a little sole fish.”

Muriel: “The United States tried to cover it up.”

Samuel: “What did the United States cover up? The squid”

Muriel: “No, idiot. I’m talking about the flying saucer.”

Samuel: “A flying saucer full of squids.”

Muriel: “That’s enough! Stop! Papa, tell him to stop!”

The father: “Stop!”

The mother: “I’ve served the sole. Now let’s eat.”

Samuel thought he would never get a response from that table where everyone shouted, sure that they were right. Perhaps grandmother would know something but it seemed that she had forgotten more than Lucena.

“Have you asked what was in the box?”

“Who?”

“The one who claims to be Abraham Benzimra, my great grandfather.”

“Oh, Lucena! Look, I’ve brought you some issues of Playboy,” Samuel told her from a distance, but without the passion he usually displayed on pronouncing those words.

The grandmother looked at the magazines, happy to do something different, at this time without commentaries.

“Can somebody live one thousand years?”

“Anything can happen, believe me, if that, the Wahnish guy, the one who married a Christian millionaire, he, being the son of a rabbi, then anything can happen.”

“How can you know if he is lying? From a historical point of view, I have searched for him in the library. Nothing that is said, or nearly nothing, is exact, but Lucena is one thousand years old. It’s that old, but on the other hand, who can remember all the details that the historians talk about? It could be that he reads the books and recites them to me. How do I know?”

“Ask him about the vessel I take out every year for Passover. It is said the Jews brought it when they fled from Granada. Or Sevilla. From Sefarad, in any case.”

“My god grandma, they didn‘t come to Morocco from Granada. They weren’t really all that Jewish. They came from Portugal and they were all converts or “Marranos.”

“Who put those tales in your head? We are authentic Jews; the ones who didn’t convert were the ones who went to Tetuán.”

“Authentic, yes, I have no doubt. I’m not saying that we are not authentic, but we are also “Marranos. There is no shame in being that”

“Of course it is shameful because “Marranos” is a nasty word. A disgusting word.”

“It was the Christians who changed it into a dirty word. For them the Word
judios
, Jews, is, is nasty, So what? Aren’t we Jews?”

“This is a new one. My own grandson says we are “Marranos.” Where will this end?”

“OK right, let’s forget this. Let’s forget the “Marranos.” Tell me how I can investigate this Lucena. How can I prove if he’s telling the truth or not? Is it possible he could be one thousand years old?”

“Ask him about the vessel from Granada. Ask him about the keys, the keys. I remember one time my grandfather showed me some large keys like those from yesteryear. For the family it was like an obsession.
Save the keys
, look here, I have one. She opens a drawer, and another and keeps looking. “I don’t know where it is. Maybe our uncle got it. He takes everything thinking that I don’t notice. It’s one of those old keys for the antique doors. I’m sure you have seen one. Little by little they have been disappearing. Perhaps it could open a door here in Málaga, in Melilla or in Lucena. Before, Lucena was an important city. I have read that. You see, Samuel, I read books too. Do you need money?”

“This time I don’t want money. I want answers.”

“I remember when I was a little girl – How interesting that I hadn’t remembered it until today- once two aunts of mine were talking in the kitchen by the pots and pans. I remember they were talking about someone very old who always looked young and came to take one of the young Benzimra girls, would marry her and then would disappear leaving her with a lot of money to marry her. Sometimes they called him
el del sielo
and sometimes
el dembasho
, He who comes from heaven and he who comes from hell. They talked about one who came in from the mountains, he had a lot of gold and he wanted to marry her little sister and she was thirteen.

They debated between them whether to approve or not, because it was evident he would end up disappearing. In the end, he disappeared before the wedding. He left in the same way that he had arrived but he left her a box with some gold rings that were worth a lot of money. Maybe that was him, maybe not. The rings were the engagement gift.

“I don’t know, seriously, I don’t, know what to tell you. I have never known anyone who was a thousand years old, and if I have, I didn’t notice.”

“I am looking at you. You are ninety, and you look old. But how would someone one thousand years old look? Certainly they can’t look old because if they have arrived at such an exaggerated age it is because they can continue being young, because they have a certain amount of antioxidants which avoid ageing.”

“What are animoxilantes?”

“It doesn’t matter. The issue is that he has some substances in his body that avoid ageing, so because of that he looks young, that it‘s logical, and evidently he looks younger that he is. A lot younger, because it could be said that he looks to be under forty.”

“I would like to meet him.”

“Impossible. I can’t talk about him. I only say that if you tell anyone nobody will believe you so I advise you not to do it because if anyone knew about it, poor me and poor him.

––––––––

S
O YOU BECAME A PRIEST?

“It is my mission.”

“You know your mother died to avoid being a Christian, and you want to be a priest.”

“Jesus called me. Jesus let me live so I may be his servant.”

“That is worse than converting.”

“Repent and save your soul papa.”

“I converted to stay alive, not to see you dressed in this robe.”

“You have to repent to enter the kingdom of God.”

“If I don’t you will send me to the Inquisition?”

“I am the Inquisition.”

“You? Are you telling me that you are the one who submits your brothers, the Jews, your “Marranos” your peers, like me, like your brothers and sisters?”

“I do it to save them from hell. I do it out of love.”

“What kind of love burns children alive? What kind of love forces people to change religion?

What kind of love kills my wife, your mother, Sultana? What kind of love burns my house to the ground? Maybe she was right. That cruel night, it would have been better for you to have died, then and there, to not have to see you like this. How can I say that? How can I live the years left to me? I wish I had seen you dead, and not killing our own people.”

“Don’t talk about that. The hour has come for you to return to your God. I will take you to the Tribunal so you can demonstrate your repentance and be absolved.”

“To the Tribunal? With your own hands?”

“They wanted to send another priest. But I preferred to do it myself.”

“Yes, I did it. To save you.”

“No, my son. I’m not going. You can kill me here and now. I just ask one thing. Let me escape. Say that you could not find me. Let me disappear, become transparent, non-existent, leave this world, leave me in peace.”

THE THIRD DAY

“You are late. Do you think this is a school? Well, don’t ask questions. Yes, I know you have many. But you will have your answers to everything at the end of the seventh day. And if you don’t find one, perhaps it is because you don’t need it. The porcelain vessel, you want to know something about it. You spoke with your grandmother. It comes from Lucena, not from Grenada. It was the muezzins who drove us out of Lucena. Either we convert to Islam or abandon our homes, our strongholds, and our lives. From one day to the next. So we fled to the Christians and then we had to flee again toward the Muslims. There are those who say that in Islam everything was splendid, The Christianity which received us was also exceptional. However it was, we left there with only that vessel and what we had on. Since that day in 1141 Lucena would not be a Jewish city again, nor a city of rabbis and poets. It would be a dead city. The vessel came from there and from that moment it became memorabilia of our expulsion. Vessels and keys carried from city to city. You also took the key from your house in Jerusalem. I know.

Agreed, it is only a copy of a safety key, not like the huge keys from Grenada or Sevilla. And I’m sure your key can no longer open the door to your childhood house in Jerusalem. Keys and vessels.

There in Lucena, in Eliossana -Eli Hosanna, God protect us – began the hegemony of Judaism in Sefarad and ended that of Babylonia. For one hundred fifty years a Jewish city strong and prosperous, the city of faith and worship of God, truly, not like today the city of my ancestors and yours, a forgotten city. Not so important or dramatic, neither Toledo, nor Granada but back then, in the eleventh century, it was the city of Jews and nobody believed that it would not always be the city of Jews. It was the city of Ibn Daud and of Ibn Ezra, of Yehudá Haleví, Ibn Shaprut and Alfasi. You don’t know anything about it, nor who those persons were. When I left my wife I went South in Morocco. There I also found Jewish cities, even a Jewish kingdom in the desert, Dará. The Jews were dressed like Muslims. Those men with sabers were strong, and believers and their faith strengthened the kingdom for years. Today nobody knows anything about them. Out of there came the powerful Moroccans named Deri, Ederi or Aderi, all those surnames come from Dar’a, the country of the Jews. There I married four of my wives, who gave me twelve children which are my family named Deri, which at the same time moved to Sefarad and all over Morocco, the cities of Fez and Meknes. This happened when the people of Dará lost their power after the Saturday battle, or, rather, the battle that did not take place on Saturday. The Berbers offered a truce to the Jews because they had been at war for hundreds of years and they always lost. They proposed the pact take place on Saturday and hid arms at the site of the meeting. And when the Jewish elders arrived at the meeting, they took out their arms and shot them. That is how Dar’a ended.

I went back to Lucena. Fifty years later it was a city at the peak of wild abandon, a few years before the Jews were obligated to convert to Islam. This time my return was most strange. On the road I found a cadaver. Inside of it were poems and all kinds of things written in Hebrew. There were hundreds of poems. The man, who was called Jacob the Jew, in his time an unknown poet, was on the road from Tudela to Lucena. I buried him. He was nearly decomposed. I prayed the
Kaddish
for him and had a funeral. Then I took his name and went to Lucena. There I learned that he was known and in the city they were expecting him. So I was received with honors as a poet and they put me up and fed me. And the whole time I was asked about my poems. For several weeks I would dole out one or two poems until I ran out. Then I said I would do what was in my poems and I would go to the land of Israel. Everyone told me I was insane, even my wife told me I had contracted a grave illness. But the poems had run out and I felt that kind of life did not suit me well so I hit the road. I got to Egypt, but I was increasingly homesick so I returned to Sefarad.

If you think the road became my home you are wrong. I never liked being on the road. I am a home town guy, a man of Lucena. But every forty years I had to disappear. If they had seen me when my fever went up continually they would have buried me alive or burned, or tied to a stake like the witches. Those were always hair-raising days, and the last was the worst when I trembled all over and panted. And if they had seen me then, when my skin transformed into that of a twenty year old and I became full of vim and vigor, that would have been considered impossible and I would have been obligated to disappear.

Don’t think this is about a great deal of suffering. This is a great purification fever. Then I would just go take a bath in the sea, in a ditch or a river I would submerge in the water without caring if it was winter or summer, and after those two weeks I felt full of strength and energy like someone who is ready to conquer the world, and the vessel. Yes, the vessel, not the box. Yes in the box that I gave the grandmother of your grandmother in Tetuán there were twenty six five-franc French gold coins. With one of those coins one could support a family of six for two years. Remember that. Twenty six. Now leave. I am tired. Tomorrow I will tell you how once I became a very rich and renowned man in the sixteenth century, but there was no other option. I had no other option than to become a rich and famous man. I was called Yosef Ruti. Tomorrow I will tell you about it.