The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (4 page)

Can a house possess a body, a soul? Ours was bent and fatigued from centuries of rain and sun, but fiercely protective of its residents.

As manuscript illuminators, Uncle Abraham and I had often
modeled
biblical dwellings on our home. For its walls we applied a milky ceruse, and to approximate the low and sagging chestnut wood ceilings which creaked alarmingly during the rains of Av and Tishri, we applied the rich brown made from vinegar, silver filings, honey and alum. The sandy floor tiles which scratched one’s feet were given a moderated vermillion obtained from a marriage of quicksilver and sulphur.

Cracked foundations sloped the floors toward Mother’s tidy
bedroom
at the sunset side of the house, little more than a corridor but with the advantage of an entrance to Temple Street for her sewing clients. Facing sunrise was my aunt and uncle’s cozy, light-filled chamber. Between the two were the kitchen, centered by the great oaken table around which our lives passed, and the bedroom I share with Judah and my little sister, Cinfa. Our fruit store, added on two centuries ago
judging
from the masonry, jutted out from this room toward Temple Street.

As Carlos and I stepped inside, he grimaced at the sour scent of fresh whitewash on the walls. While he and my little brother checked the cellar for Uncle, I went to my room to peer through its inner
window
into our store. Down the center aisle, beyond baskets of figs and
dates, raisins and sultanas, bitter oranges, filberts and walnuts, all
manner
of fruit and nut then to be found in Portugal, were Cinfa and my mother, Mira, spooning olives from wooden barrels into ceramic bowls for display. I leaned in and called out, “Blessed be He who has
illuminated
our Lisbon morning!”

Cinfa showed me a quick smile. A gangly, wild sort of girl, with a voice forever seemingly squeaked between knuckles jammed into her mouth, she’d been gifted with grace of late. Almost twelve she was, and an adult beauty was awakening in the secretive fullness of her lips, her high cheekbones and postures of reserve. The girl who had spent hours chasing hares and capturing tadpoles was giving way to one more
interested
in puzzling over the modest, hazel-eyed twin in the looking glass.

As Cinfa and I kissed, my mother offered me a dull, antagonistic look. A small, puffy woman of lowered eye and bent shoulder, her
contours
were concealed as always inside a loose-fitting olive tunic and black apron. Her deep-brown hair, streaked a brittle gray at the front, was crowned by a toque of gray lace and clasped into a bun at the back of her head. The bun was tied with a black velveteen ribbon from Jerusalem given her years ago by her elder brother, my uncle Abraham. Its stringent hold seemed to draw the color from her face, which, over the last few years, had swollen into an expression of wan defiance against any possibility of happiness; she would forever be grieving her long-buried husband and first-born son, my elder brother Mordecai. To all who knew the playful young mother she’d been, her wasted state was a reminder that life saved its sharpest arrows for women, the bearers—and mourners—of departed children.

“Either of you seen Uncle?” I asked.

Cinfa shrugged. Mother licked her cracked lips as if displeased by my interruption, shook her head.

Father Carlos and Judah met me in the kitchen. “No sign of him,” the priest said.

We sat together at the table to wait. Aunt Esther appeared suddenly at the courtyard door, dressed in a high-collared black jupe which seemed to light her tawny face. Her dramatic, darkly outlined almond eyes opened in horror. “What are those stains?!” she demanded,
pointing
to my pants. “Has Judah been crying?!” She clamped her jaw into an expression of judgment, glared at me while tucking wisps of
henna-tinted
hair under her crimson headscarf. Slender and tall, possessed of
a deeply lined and shadowed beauty, she could dominate a room with a single glance down the length of her elegant nose.

“Just a little blood,” I began to explain to her. “The flagellants were…”

She thrust out her hand and sucked in on her cheeks so that she looked like a Moorish dancer. “Don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear it! Dear God, can’t you even clean yourselves? And whatever you do, don’t let your mother see Judah like that. We’ll never hear the end of it!”

“Yes, go wash,” Father Carlos agreed with a dismissing twist to his hand. He turned to Aunt Esther and added, “I told him it’s the first thing he should do when we got back.”

I shot the priest a dirty look. He curled his lips into a wry smile and lifted his eyebrows as if we were rivals for my aunt’s affection. To her, he said, “Now, about my little problem…”

I took Judah with me to our bedroom and slipped off his clothes, then my own. As I cleaned him with the vinegar and water solution which my mother always insisted upon, his body went limp in my hands. A compact five-year-old, already muscular and possessed of seductive gray-blue eyes, he seemed destined to grow into a milk-skinned Samson.

Never one for bathing, he dashed back to the kitchen the moment I’d finished dressing him. When I entered the room, he was clinging to the fringe of Aunt Esther’s jupe while fingering his wooden top. She was preparing her beloved coffee with almond milk and honey the way she’d learned in her native Persia.

From outside, the sour rumbling and creaking of refuse carts was suddenly drowned out by a woman’s shrieks. Opening the shutters to listen, I spotted a familiar vermilion carriage careening down the street. As always, the horses were caparisoned in blue-fringed silver cloth. The usual driver, an Old Christian with pockmarks cratering his cheeks, had been replaced, however, by a fair-haired Goliath in a wide-brimmed, amethyst-colored hat. “Guess who’s coming,” I said.

Aunt Esther nudged me partially aside and peered out. “Oh dear, Dona Meneses. More work for Mira,” she grumbled. She squeezed my hand. “You shouldn’t stand here staring out at her.”

I rolled my eyes, turned away. The carriage pounded to a stop and the door squealed open. Dona Meneses’ pattering footsteps trailed toward the Temple Street entrance to my mother’s room. As she entered the house, she began to describe the qualities of the fabric
she’d brought in false, lyric tones. Her voice trailed away to a soft
murmur
as my mother’s door was closed.

Aunt Esther leaned toward us as if to disclose a secret and said, “It’ll be a miracle if Mira can turn that hideous puce velvet she brought with her into anything presentable!” Marching to the hearth, she carried our matzah to the table with a linen mitten.

“It pays our debts,” I said.

“True. And with the drought…”

“It’s the Devil!” Father Carlos exclaimed suddenly in a voice of warning.

“I grant you that Dona Meneses isn’t lovely, but she’s hardly from the Other Side,” I replied.

The priest squinted his eyes and glared at me. His tongue darted between his thick, soft lips. “Not her, you fool! It’s the Devil who’s behind the plague and drought!”

“You’re an absolute lunatic,” Aunt Esther told him in Hebrew with that frown of hers that could freeze bathwater. “And keep your voice down—we don’t want to scare her away!”

The bells of St. Peter’s began tolling tierce. Father Carlos mumbled to himself as if succumbing to the religious call, said a quick grace and picked on a piece of warm matzah with his chubby fingers. In a tone of disgust, he continued in the Holy language, so that Judah wouldn’t understand, “You mean to say, Esther dear, that the Devil doesn’t exist?”

“I mean to say that if you scare my little nephew one more time with your nonsense…” And here, Aunt Esther lifted her iron poker from the fire and aimed its red-glowing tip toward the priest’s bulbous nose, “…I’ll see to it that you meet your Christian savior sooner than you intended! Find someone else to scare!”

“Your aunt has always had a way with threats,” Carlos whispered to me with a lecherous smile. “Remember her the day they dragged you out to be baptized in the cathedral? She cursed them in seven
different
languages…Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Portuguese…”

“We remember,” I interrupted, holding up my hand in a gesture of disapproval so that we could all avoid the memory. Too late; Esther’s eyes, dimmed by isolation, were focused on an inner landscape. She had slipped her hand below her crimson scarf, was tracing the outline of the cruciform scar given her on the accursed morning of our forced
baptism
. Then, she had fought hardest of all against the bailiffs sent by the
King to drag the Jews to the cathedral. As an example, a guard had thrown her to the ground, pinned her legs and arms to the cobbles on the Rua de São Pedro. A Dominican friar had pressed a red-glowing iron cross vertically to her forehead. He’d shouted, so all could hear: “I hereby gift you with the sign of our Lord!”

As for me, I was covered with pig blood and sawdust by Christian children on my way home from the baptism ceremony. But they never learned of the gift they gave me; my burning humiliation summoned the grace of God to me, and I had the first ever of my visions.

This preternatural occurrence began when Farid saw me in the courtyard. Out of shame, I ran from him. As I reached the kitchen door, however, a presentiment of eyes watching over me forced me to stop. When I turned, a white light appeared to me in the sky, far away, above the Moor’s castle. As it drew closer, wings sprouted, and I saw that the luminescence had been but a supernal egg. A radiant heron of ruby red, black and white took form, and as it flew over the Little Jewish Quarter, wind from its flapping blew fiercely against me. When I looked down at myself, the blood and sawdust were gone.

Uncle told me that God had shown me my continued purity and had revealed the Christian stain to be simply an illusion. I answered, “It wasn’t God; it was just a bird.”

“But Berekiah,” he said, “God comes to each of us in the form we can best perceive Him. To you, just now, He was a heron. To someone else, He might come as a flower or even a breeze.”

Indeed he was right; at my darkest moments, the Lord has always appeared to me as a kind of bird, perhaps because I most easily see the beauty of creation in those creatures gifted with flight.

Recalling other words of Uncle’s wisdom, I said now to Aunt Esther, “The Devil is just a metaphor. It’s religious language. You can’t expect all words to have everyday meanings.”

“As God is my witness, it’s too early for kabbalistic philosophy!” she answered.

Aunt Esther’s harsh tone of voice moved Judah to climb up next to me on the bench. His lips were pressed together into that slit of forced silence which Mother’s shrieks and slaps had taught him. Of late, he’d learned to do everything he could to avoid being her last, impossible burden—to tiptoe, not run, through childhood.

The trap door to our cellar, located at the southwest corner of the
kitchen, suddenly opened. Uncle Abraham, my spiritual master, rose from the staircase, his forehead bathed in sweat and his hair waving off in a hundred different directions, as if he’d been caught in a spiritual storm. A small finchlike man of darting movements, his pointy face was centered by a long, angular nose that gave him an amusing look to strangers, but which connoted a probing intelligence to all those who knew him. His smooth dark skin, the color of cinnamon, seemed to highlight his wild crest of silver hair and tufted eyebrows. Graying
stubble
softened his cheeks, and where they looped inward, added a
shadowing
of sagely age to his face. Always, but particularly after prayers, his eyes burned with that secret green light, that piercing strangeness, that distinguished him at once as a powerful kabbalist. “Who’s that?” he asked squinting. “Ah, it’s our friendly priest!”

“Where’d you come from?” demanded Carlos, still unused to my uncle appearing out of nowhere. “We looked in the cellar not five
minutes
ago. Sometimes I think you’re a
lez
.”

“What’s a
lez?
” Judah asked.

“A ghost that comes back to play tricks—a spirit jester,” I answered.

Uncle grinned appreciatively and wiggled his right hand in the air to show his five fingers; in Jewish lore,
lezim
were reputed to only have four. “My movements parallel life’s mysteries,” he said with a dismissive wave. Raising his eyebrows, he nodded inquisitively toward the muffled voices coming from the back of the house.

“Dona Meneses,” I explained. “She’s brought fabric for another dress. Purple, this time.”

He took coffee and, after a quick blessing, wolfed down a
hard-boiled
egg. We’d already finished
shaharit
,
morning prayers, together, but he again wished me good morning with a kiss on the lips. Lifting Judah onto his lap, he assaulted him with little popping kisses and growling noises. Not usually demonstrative, the coming of the Passover made Uncle giddy with affection.

“I just came to tell you that I decided not to sell the sapphire,” Carlos said with a sigh that seemed to request forgiveness.

My master’s lips suddenly curled in that way that made him look menacing. He said, “I think you should reconsider.”

“You’re buying gemstones?!” I asked. I looked to my aunt for her protest. But she was busy tracing her glance over a Book of Psalms she’d recently copied for an Old Christian nobleman, proofreading carefully.
Turning back to Uncle, I added, “If we had that kind of money, we could close the store, leave this desert for a few weeks.”

My master gave me a challenging look. “A sapphire cut during the time of Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol,” he said. He spoke in Hebrew except for the word
safira
in Portuguese.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a master Jewish poet of the eleventh
century
from Málaga. “I’m afraid I’ve lost the trail of your thoughts,” I said.

“
Petah
et
atsmehah
shetifateh
delet.
Knock upon yourself as upon a door,” Uncle replied.

That was his condescending way of saying I was to keep quiet and look inside myself for an answer. “Way too early for your mystical advice,” I countered.