The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (12 page)

“It’s the New Christians’ fault—they caused the drought!” a crone in black kept shouting to anyone who would listen.

A group of peasants armed with the hammers and iron rods of a looted blacksmith’s shop suddenly marched out St. Anne’s Gate in search of
Marranos,
primping themselves with the good humor of hunters scenting blood. I pressed my chest to the ground and waited. The sun had already set, and the sky was pearly with dusk. Crows
flapped in the branches of the lone oak above me. I imagined death as an inky pool spreading from my stomach into my hands and feet. For what sin, I began to wonder, was God taking from us the best of Israel? Why was he using these Christians of Lisbon to punish us?

Soon, the voices of the Nazarenes were gone. Fear gripped me again only when I remembered Senhora Rosamonte’s hand in my pouch. Beside her fingers was the note that had slipped out of Diego the printer’s turban, stained now with blood. Reading its words again—
Isaac,
Madre,
the
twenty-ninth
of
Nisan
—I wondered if it didn’t have something to do with Uncle’s murder. Had his death, in fact, been
originally
planned by Diego for five days hence, on Friday the
twenty-ninth
? Could Isaac have been the name of a killer hired with a handful of coins taken from an ecclesiastical coffer, from the Mother Church, from the
Madre
?

I realized, of course, that I was weaving a complex story from mere threads of evidence, that such a scenario was but a remote possibility. I felt so alone, however, so free of my family and Lisbon and the love of God that I needed to believe in a tale—however unlikely—which placed the events of this most terrible day in a sensible order.

Such is the power of isolation. And I understood then that freedom, of the kind bequeathed to abandoned orphans and apprentices without masters, could be the most dreadful state of all.

Chapter IV

It was late Sunday, the third holy evening of Passover. Long after
midnight
. Master David had not met me, was either dead or in hiding. St. Anne’s Gate had become ever more clogged with Christian rabble. Not so the Monks’ Gate to the east. Past a few sleepy peasants slurping soup from wooden bowls, I strode across the fortified Visigothic bridge there back into Lisbon, my hand gripping my knife inside my pouch. A
crescent
moon was skimming over the stream below like a heavenly boat. Pricks of sound prompted me on like ivory needles. I realized with a
bitter
dread that I was fighting a fever. Yet had I ever been more alive? Every nerve in my body was craning into the present for the touch of sensation.

Was the city safe yet? The answer didn’t seem to matter; a dreadful longing in my chest as powerful as Uncle’s chanting of Torah was
pushing
me home.

Beyond the gate, a dim music of contrapuntal horns seemed to dance like shadows along the high Moorish walls surrounding the
oldest
part of the city. As I climbed, the Alcáçova Palace rose above me, its garlic-bulb towers beaming with an orange light that slid into the
darkness
as a mist. Hundreds of feet below me, seeming to protest against my movement, slept central Lisbon and our largest Jewish quarter, Little Jerusalem—twenty thousand moonlit homes reclining across the hillsides and valleys and nestling into a bend of the Tagus. As I prayed for my family, the downy gray moonlight behind my eyelids separated and coalesced as angels.

I descended through the steeply falling labyrinth of ancient stairs and alleys. By the Church of São Martinho, the smell of smoke chilled
me. I slowed, crept along whitewashed walls. Loios Square opened to me. In front of the brittle arcades of the convent, a raging bonfire was sending jagged butterflies of light and darkness across a crowd. At the center, a group of New Christians from our Little Jewish Quarter had their arms and legs bound with nautical rope. They stood in a ragged line, their clothing tattered, their heads hanging from exhaustion. No one spoke. Wan, hopeless expressions showed they’d been paraded around the city like this for hours.

Rugged men with swords and halberds fixed them in place. I crept back and hid around the flaking wall of the corner tavern.

“I beg you not to do this!”

“Kill me if you want, but save my children!”

A hundred supplications pounded me as I searched the caustic orange torchlight for the faces of my family. Blessed be His name, none of them was there. I recognized all of the linked prisoners, however, including Solomon Eli the surgeon, and I imprinted their faces in my Torah memory.

A monk with a beaked nose was swinging a smoking silver censer and cursing the Jews in Latin.

How many had already been dragged from our neighborhood and rendered ash? Little Didi Molcho, whom we all believed would grow up to be a great poet? Had his future been pried from his mother’s hands and…? Or Murça Benjamin, who gave me my first look at a girl’s dark place out behind St. Vincent’s? Was it her glorious body, within the crown of flames, that was beginning to…?
Please,
I chanted,
let
no
one
be
burned
tonight.
Yet into the breathing spaces of my prayer burst the
question
: why has He allowed any of His self-portraits to be so desecrated?

Samuel Bispo the blacksmith was tied to the monumental stone cross that centers the square and was about to be whipped. I drew away into the darkness without looking back. Empty streets returned my
hollow
heartbeats. What a coward of Biblical proportions I was to have abandoned him and the rest of our prisoners!

My chest and injured shoulder were aching with a revolving,
knotted
pain, and I was shamed by my terror. I squatted to catch my breath, prayed for deliverance. A sweet scent stung my nostrils. Reaching my hand up, I discovered my nose was bleeding. Men following? Jumping to my feet and pressing into a slatted doorway, I listened. The plunk of dripping water reached me. When a bat sliced through the air and dove
into an open window across the street, fear like violent Moorish
drumming
struck at me. I set off again. Paupers in rags were sleeping amongst sheep in
Praça
do
Limoeiro,
Lemon Tree Square. One was awake, watched me with idiot-curious eyes.

Cutting in front of our old neighborhood inn and hostelry, I descended the steps past the accursed house where Isaac Ibn Zachin murdered himself and his children after the conversion. I cut into the alley behind the Church of São Miguel. As if landing from a tumbling fall, I found myself trudging along the Rua de São Pedro. A thousand onions and garlic heads were scattered by my feet; a cart had been
overturned
. A tumbling island of black rats was forming over the opened gut of a headless man without clothes. I rushed toward home. Since I had last been here, half a day earlier, our neighborhood had been defiled. Shit had been smeared against all the walls, stores looted, doors and shutters smashed. At the entrance to our former schoolhouse hung a body: Dr. Montesinhos. A cross of blood was finger-painted on his chest. A gold sovereign peeked from his mouth; a daring Jew must have put it there to pay for his ferry ride across the River Jordan. One of his sandals had come free. A sprig of oleander peered over the lip of its heel. I took it.

I crept toward home, slipped through our gate. Two hens loosed from neighbors’ coops scuttled and cackled around the courtyard. Our lemon tree had been felled by an ax. In my mind, I chanted our
religious
injunction from Deuteronomy against the felling of a fruit tree even during a siege:
You
may
eat
of
them,
but
you
must
not
cut
them
down.
Out loud, I whispered: “Cinfa, Judah, Esther…”

I almost called Uncle’s name, but an image of him lying stiff and white pressed my lips toward silence. As I gripped the handle of our door, Roseta hopped gray and ghostly onto the low wall next to me. The cherries were gone from around her neck. “Wait,” I whispered to her. But she leapt inside as the door opened.

“Mother…Esther…” I called in a low voice.

The darkness of night held its breath.

The hearth in our kitchen was cold. I felt along the tile floor. It was wet. Blood? I lifted my fingertips to my mouth. Only water. I cut my hand on the tip of a fallen knife, cursed, then blessed He who gives power to iron. I held it in front of me as I groped my way to the
bedroom
which I shared with Judah and Cinfa. Caressing the cold, barren mattress where they slept, I whispered a prayer for their safety. I
balanced
on tottering feet to my mother’s room, whispered for her, felt the taut emptiness of her bed in my fingertips. I swirled her blanket over my shoulders to end my shivers.

Where could they all have gone?

Robbers had rifled through my chest again, but had still left behind most of the frayed hand-me-downs I’d inherited. Discarding the
blanket
from my shoulders and slipping out of Attar’s cumbersome aba, I put on a pair of my father’s linen pants and one of my elder brother’s shirts. In Uncles chest, I found his ancient woolen cape. Was I alone now, the inheritor of all his clothing, the narrator of his story?

Crossing the courtyard to Farid’s house, I whispered for his father, Samir. Heavy footfalls from outside made me duck. I peered out the window. Two men carried swords. They were swiveling their heads to survey the courtyard.

The soles of my feet suddenly recorded three taps on the tile floor. One more. Then four. It was Farid, signalling
pi
from back in his house. I crept through his front room to the kitchen. A sweaty hand reached out for my arm. We kissed, and I held Farid until his silent sobs seemed to leach across my skin into my heart. I couldn’t allow him to peel me open to emotion and pulled away. “I can’t find anyone,” I indicated against the palm of his hand in our language of signs. I considered telling him about Uncle, but guarded the knowledge of his death as if it might not be true. Was my master a powerful enough kabbalist to cast such an illusion?

Farid started to signal in wild, frenzied movements. I was unused to reading his words inside my hands. “Slowly,” I begged.

“When the Christians came, I tried to escape the Little Jewish Quarter,” he indicated. “But there were too many. It was like a cloud of locusts. I came back and hid. I saw Judah for a moment. Only him. Father Carlos was running with him down the Rua de São Pedro. They disappeared into his church. I tried to call, but my voice…”

So Carlos was alive! Perhaps he was indeed in hiding when I knocked at his door! But what then of Judah?

Farid’s palm flattened and pressed against mine. His pulse raced. Space and time dropped away until there were only two presences meeting at a warm border.

I signalled, “I tapped
pi
for you once, this afternoon, an hour or two after nones, but there was no reply.”

“I was looking for Samir.”

“Any luck?”

He shook his head. “He was at one of the secret mosques in the Moorish Quarter when they came. I couldn’t make it there. I don’t know.”

“Two peasants with swords have breached the sanctity of our
courtyard
,” I indicated. “Let’s sneak out and get to St. Peter’s, look for Judah and Carlos.”

Farid stood, guided me through squares of light and darkness toward their back door. As we stepped outside, a long-haired man with a lance surprised us. His blade swept at me. I dove to the cobbles. My right forearm burned. A gash near my elbow dripped blood.

Farid tugged me up, and we ran like madmen toward the river. At the Jews’ Steps, I realized our nemesis was running after us, shouting for help, and would attract a mob if we didn’t silence him. I stopped, caught Farid, signalled to him my plan. He nodded, ran down the steps and cut into the alley past Senhor Benadife’s apothecary.

Dripping blood onto my left hand, I waited on the top step for my assailant. I kicked off my sandals so my footing would be better on the cobbles. He came to me panting. I could see now that he was younger than I, with a round, farmboy’s face, a mop of wild black hair. Yet for all his ferocity, he had frightened eyes. Dangling from his belt were human ears, and a filigree earring twinkled from a lobe by his hip. In another time and place, I would have depicted him as one of Saul’s terrified sons. So what sense did any of this make? It was as if Lisbon had thrown open its gates to a disease of ever-increasing lunacy. Yet my breathing came easy, from an eerie landscape beyond fear. “Go back to your
millet
and rye,” I told him.

“You stole my father’s best acres!” he answered. He crouched as if preparing to spring. “Don’t you move!” he warned. His lance blade bobbed awkwardly; he was unused to carrying such a weapon.

“I’m a manuscript illuminator and fruitseller. I’ve never stolen
anything
.”

Strange how humor can come to you at the worst moments; I thought,
Hmmmn,
that’s
not
quite
true…a
sponge
cake
once
with
a
friend…

“
Marrano
—over here!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. In a voice of bound rage, he added: “Land that was ours for centuries!
Your people… You live off of us, bring us plague, drink the blood of our children!”

“Your grievance is with whoever stole your land!” I told him.

“You do their bidding. You manage their estates, collect their taxes!”

Behind him, Farid dropped down from a rooftop like a cat and crept forward on cottony feet. I said to the boy, “Drop your lance and go. You won’t be injured.”

He lunged suddenly. I ducked away, but a wound burned open on my good shoulder as it was grazed. Watching my blood sluice, I thought:
I
will
never
again
let
an
Old
Christian
hurt
me.

Farid took him from behind. His powerful forearm locked around the boy’s neck, the arching blade of his Moorish dagger cut into his cheek. I grabbed the lance and said, “If you threatened the nobles as you threatened us, then all would be well!”

Bellowing cries from down the street turned us: “Hold ‘em son! We’re coming!”

I signalled for Farid to let him go; we had to trade him for our lives. As he was released, the boy spat into my face. “When we catch you, I’m going to slice off your ‘chestnuts’ and hang them on my belt!” he announced.

I slashed the lance across his thigh. He fell. Blood curtained his leg as if seeking to cover his agonized screams. Farid grabbed me and turned me. We raced down the Jews’ Steps to the river. I tossed the accursed weapon on which my blood had mixed with an Old Christian’s into the silver waters.

As we ran, I wondered about the violence which seemed to rise up in me so easily. Had I, too, not simply been wearing a mask of piety and gentility all these years? Was there a true Berekiah whom I’d only glimpsed during moments of rage and desperation?