The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (40 page)

Roseta remained behind with Reza; she was pregnant with her first child—Reza, not Roseta, that is—and moved with her husband and Aviboa up to a farm near Belmonte in the mountains in northeast Portugal. I haven’t seen them since the dock at Belem. They have three surviving sons, Mordecai, Judah and Berekiah, and a daughter, Mira. Aviboa is married to a farmer of chestnuts and wine. She lives nearby, has two surviving children. She never did grow a thumbnail or receive news of her parents.

We pray that the fire of the Inquisition will pass over their valley when it spreads into Portugal from Castile. I fear that it is now only a matter of months. So little time for peace we have in this world.

Judah. When I could get his trousers and shirts away from my mother, I buried them on the Almond Farm, by Uncle’s grave. We said a
kaddish
to ensure that his soul was set free from the Lower Realms.

Twenty-four years have passed since his disappearance and yet, he’s still just a whisper away. Only three years ago, I believed I recognized his moonstone eyes in a man in Portuguese merchant’s garb sunning his face in the garden below the southeast minaret of the Hagia Sophia mosque. My heart boomed as if shot from a cannon. Dizziness swayed me. I thought:
It’s
all
a
mistake.
He’s
alive
,
been
raised
by
Old
Christians.
And
he
’
ll
explain
now
where
he
’
s
been.
I crept to him and said, “Is it you, Judah?” At his confusion, I took his arm. “Don’t you recognize me? It’s Berekiah. Your brother!”

He patted me on the back as if I were a drunken old fool. “Better get home to your wife before she comes looking for you,” he advised. He laughed at me.

Such is what the younger generation make of sorrow.

Samir, Farid’s father, was never heard from again.

I remember Rabbi Verga telling me in our courtyard that we must remember the dead and how they lost their lives. His words make me smile; are there really persons who can forget?

It turns out that Samson Tijolo, who crossed out all of the names of God in his Old Testament, was right about Jews not being able to speak a future tense in Portugal. Had Uncle lived, could he have done
anything
about that? There are certain powers which great kabbalists have, and perhaps if he had concentrated…

Or is that all a lie? So much of my faith flowed away with my master’s blood.

Rana, Samson’s wife and my old neighborhood friend, still lives on her farm outside Lisbon. Miguel, her son, apprenticed to a silversmith. Late at night, behind locked shutters, he makes Torah pointers and other holy objects, I’m told.

Our neighbor, Senhora Faiam, died in fifteen-twelve. Gemila and her family are living in their old house as secret Jews. Their dog, Belo, died without ever finding the bone for his missing leg, of course. Some vestiges of life can never be recovered. Although that doesn’t stop us from searching.

I think often of the lemon tree growing above Senhora Rosamonte’s hand. So nice it would be to be tossed some of her fruit.

How does Uncle’s almond tree grow? His death still carves deep furrows inside me in the early morning, when the dew sits on my
forehead
and my resistance is lowered. Lately, I’ve realized that I’m like a tree whose main limbs were cut with a
shohet’s
knife. From the scars, I succeeded in branching out as best I could. I flowered even. Many times. But the tree is just not the same as it would have been. How much more upright I would have grown had he…

Forty-four years have watched me pass. I am an old man, with
children
of my own. Yet how dearly I would love to be fixed in Uncle’s emerald eyes, to feel the protective wing of his white robe unfurl around me. To kiss his lips. Never will it be. Not even were I to chant the Zohar every night for an entire year.

Murça Benjamin persevered after her wish to fulfill the obligation of Levirite marriage was refused. She married a wealthy New Christian barrel maker from Porto—a good man, she wrote to me—and works as a translator for merchants in São João da Foz.

Manuel Monchique, whose wife, Teresa, died alongside Uncle, emigrated to Amsterdam and is one of the directors of a banking
institution
there. I hear that he has developed an interest in sea voyages and has even traveled to Brazil, where he has made lovely sketches of the native butterflies. He no longer lugs around a sword.

So maybe one can find one’s way home in another country.

Before we left Lisbon, my mother was kind enough to sew a new aba for Attar, the man who lent me his clothing as I fled through the Moorish Quarter on that fateful Sunday of Jewish death. He welcomed me with a hug. Before I left his home, I’d eaten an entire chicken bathed in prunes and lemon. We locked hands to pray in silence, then recited suras from the Koran together.

Isaac Ibn Farraj, the ascetic who rescued his friend’s head from the pyre in the Rossio, ended up in Valona and is a successful scribe. I met him by accident once in Rhodes after it was taken by the Turks, and he looked as if he hadn’t eaten a thing since he’d left Lisbon. Goat ribbed, he was. With a beard like a white fungus. Apparently he’d learned a thing or two about the new fruits arriving from the New World, because he kept repeating to me, “Beware of tomatoes!”

Dom Miguel Ribeiro, the nobleman who learned of his Jewish
origins
from Uncle, still lives in Lisbon as a secret Jew. He lost an eye in a hunting accident shortly after we left. I suppose that he simply could not give up one last Old Christian vice.

Oh, a curious thing happened to Didi Molcho. He rose through the ranks of the Portuguese court system to become a royal secretary. Then, as he recounts it, there appeared before King João, King Manuel’s heir, a swarthy little Jew with glowing eyes akin to my uncle’s claiming to be a representative from the lost tribe of Reuben in the desert wilds of Arabia. His called himself David Reubini, and he came to Portugal
hoping
to gain troops for a plan to win back Jerusalem from the Turks. Although King João soured of him, Didi was captivated. He embraced Judaism once again and circumcised himself. His study of the kabbalah brought on visions ending in prophecy.

Using his Jewish name of Solomon, Didi journeyed to Italy to preach, and the accuracy of his predictions earned him fame amongst Christians and Jews alike. In May of fifteen twenty-nine, after
exchanging
correspondence, I received him in my home in Constantinople and, over the next six months, helped him learn Abulafia’s techniques for untying the knots of mind. His book of sermons, based partly on our studies together, was published in Salonika that same year. He’s back in Rome now, following his visions, and has even gained Pope Clement’s favor. I fear for his life, however. Popes are envious of men with true faith and as devious as famished ferrets. And Didi, God bless him, has had his earthly vision clouded by higher landscapes.

Farid lives just down the street from us, has had his poetry
published
with success here in Constantinople. His lover of seventeen years is a blacksmith named Shamsi who plays the oud and sings with the voice of a rustic flute. He’s an outgoing, humorous man with lean
muscles
and eyelashes like black rose petals. Not gifted with the dimensions of a Basque, of course, but he seems to keep Farid satisfied. Years ago,
they adopted two orphan boys, Samir and Rumi. They were always good, if somewhat rough, playmates for my girl, Zuleikha, and boy, Ari.

We all eat together every night. It is a great comfort to me to be able to converse with Farid with my hands. Sometimes, when memory assaults me and I haven’t the will to hear my words…

When we were last in Lisbon together, all those years ago, I asked Farid, ‘Will God be waiting for us in Constantinople, you think? He’s disappeared without a trace from Lisbon.”

His hands twirled up and around, quoting Uncle: “You must knock upon yourself as upon a door. It is there where you will find Him if He still exists for you.”

I have waited for a reply to my rapping these many years. Apparently, one must play the ever-willing woodpecker to this
hard-of-hearing
God, and I simply haven’t the beak.

So maybe I have found that secular landscape I predicted so many years ago. The one toward which I sense the world is moving, with neither rabbis nor priests, populated only by mystics and non-believers. Which one of these groups will finally win the throne of my heart, I cannot say.

My daughter, Zuli, is eighteen now, wants to be a scribe like Aunt Esther. But I see more of Reza in her. Naturally aristocratic, with passionate eyes that dance when she talks. And when she’s angry, she intimidates me with the lambent glare she used to practice in looking glasses.

Ari, who is sixteen, has a strong build, my wife’s curly black hair, Uncle’s intelligent and penetrating eyes. He has studied to be an
illuminator
and could make a fine artist one day. But he’s dreamed of sailing off to adventure in the New World since he was a child.

“A Jewish manuscript illuminator in the jungles of Brazil would be like a matzah on the moon,” I’ve always told him.

The other day, he came up with this reply: “But some of the Indians there are circumcised. Tu Bisvat says they’re Jews.”

Sounds a little like me as a young man, no? I wonder what Uncle would make of him. I suppose that if he really wants to go to Brazil, maybe he should become a
mohel.

The loss of Judah and Uncle condemned my mother to a life on the margins of emotion. She began sewing garments for the Turkish
aristocracy
in Constantinople and took impeccable care of the fruit store
we opened here, but shied away from all gestures of approach. Conversation, even with Aunt Esther, came to her with difficulty. In the early morning, I caught her several times standing vigil over my bed with the inhuman stoicism of a sculpted goddess on a ship’s prow. Whenever I needed to voyage far from home, she would pat my hand, then turn quickly away, as if it were already too late to hope for my return. Prayers and chants only made her anxious. Henbane helped some. She died during Passover almost eight years ago.

As for Aunt Esther, she and I reconciled years ago, right after Diego’s death, in fact. Why should I have kept a grudge against her and Afonso Verdinho? Had I the right to deny her whatever companionship the world could still give her? Just before we left for Constantinople, he rode into the Little Jewish Quarter bearing a gold engagement ring. Just like a cavalier in some Arabian legend. They were married when we reached Turkish shores.

So, as my own life should prove, love is not always limited to a
single
object. And I’ve no doubt that Aunt Esther loved Uncle and would have given up her life for his. Once, while she was bathing, I opened the lid of her silver locket and found several of Uncle’s long gray hairs. I stole a single strand and ate it.

Esther’s a very old lady now, nearing seventy. But her work as a scribe in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Castilian and Portuguese continues to be without equal. She and I recently completed a copy of “The Conference of the Birds” for Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, may God bless him each and every day. No notes or drawings were left to me from my birdwatching expeditions back in the hills beyond Lisbon, but my Torah memory is still complete enough to gift me with the curve of a crane’s beak and the tone of an owl’s gorget.

The peacocks I included were of Uncle’s design. I like to think that he would be proud of our artistry.

Cinfa. Life has not been easy for her. No sooner was she gifted with a baby girl named Mira six years ago than did she become a widow. Her husband was an eye doctor from Alexandria. A lean and soft-skinned man, with the kindly look of someone who always forgives.

And yet, we soon learned that he drank anise seed aqua vitae like a Greek sailor. And that he didn’t like that I educated his wife in Torah and Talmud. None of this was evident before their marriage. I’d quite forgotten about masks after leaving Lisbon.

When Cinfa was seven months pregnant, he beat her with a cane across the face. “Your sister corrected my Sabbath prayers,” he told me after I’d seen the tender blue and yellow bruises puffing from her eyes and cheeks. His tone implied:
I
had
to
do
it.

“As well she should have, you lout!” I replied. “The Sabbath is more important than your skinny pride!”

He apologized because of my spiritual standing as an eccentric but learned kabbalist in the community, but I saw in his defiant eyes that he was hardly repentant. I’m not much of a fighter and resorted to
trickery
. While I blessed my hand over his head in feigned forgiveness, I kicked him so hard in the balls that he writhed on the ground for a good five minutes. I screamed, “And if you ever do it again…!”

When I explained what I’d done to Aunt Esther, she said, “That’s about as practical as the kabbalah ever gets! Good work!”

But maybe I shouldn’t have tempted him with my warning. The brute repeated his evil deed the next day.

Farid then accompanied me to their home. He held his dagger to the eye doctor’s chin and had me translate his signalling: “Ever touch her again with any intention other than love and I’ll cut your eyeballs out!”

Later, Farid told me, “Always threaten a man with something he knows the value of.”

It seemed like good advice. But brutes don’t change without God’s grace. In her eighth month, the Egyptian doctor kicked Cinfa down the stairs of their home. Broke her right leg and her collar bone. Cinfa had the baby while splayed on the ground. Her screams alerted Zuli and the neighbors. We would have lost little Mira except for their quick work.

I searched for the evil doctor with Farid. Couldn’t find him
anywhere
. A month later, he turned up dead outside a nearby brothel. Apparently, he got a little fresh with a prized Yemenite girl. As Aunt Esther observed, “Not much risk in beating a Jewish wife. But raise a hand to a high-priced Moslem whore and you won’t last too long.”