Altai: A Novel (5 page)

10.

The brief slumber of the port was already disturbed by traders and stevedores. In the taverns that had just reopened, some people were already knocking back the first spirits of the day, while the whores sweetened their mouths with wine or mulberry syrup.

I walked past two big ships that were loading fabrics, and turned toward the fishing harbor, where I wouldn’t risk meeting Tuota, or guards or informers or Jews, who only hung around the merchant dock.

Piles of cases, full of giltheads and sea bream, obstructed the shore. An old man with only one leg was gutting the carcass of a swordfish. Cats and gulls were taking advantage of the fact to have their breakfast.

I wanted something to drink, but I knew that one wouldn’t be enough, and the second would demand a third, then a fourth, and so on until I was left without a penny, or sitting on the floor in a pool of vomit. I tried to distract myself and think, staring at hands and knives cleaning piles of mussels in the seawater.

It was no use. If I stayed there, outside the inns, surrounded by the smells of
rakia
and fish, nothing and no one would save me from drunkenness. I trusted my own legs, and my legs, without much hesitation, led me up an alley squashed between white stone houses and inn signs.

The first stretch was all offices of scribes and brokers. Further up, a young carpenter empted a bucket of sawdust at my feet and apologized in Albanian and Turkish.

“
Me falni! Affedersiniz!
”

I climbed three flights of steps, slippery with moss and salt. Past the church I turned left and through a gap in the wall, up some narrow stairs leading to a wide square terrace. It was the roof of a dye works, crisscrossed with lines where clothes were hung to dry, in a pattern as orderly as a spider’s web. I always remembered them full, sometimes with lots of different colors, others with an infinite range of blues, but that morning they were empty. Perhaps the gray sky and the half-risen sun had persuaded the dyers’ boys to put off their work. I didn’t have to push my way through the fabrics, or hold my breath to keep from inhaling the stench of indigo and pigments. After a few yards I reached the opposite side, facing a green door.

Knives had scraped from the architrave the carving of a seven-branched candelabra and the date: 5256. The mezuzah was still nailed to the right-hand doorpost. New owners had mistaken it for a flower bowl. A bunch of dry buttercups occupied the place of the parchment with the lines from the
Shema
.

The house of the Cardosos, built by Baltazar with the first money he saved.

Honeysuckle climbed on the wall, all the way up to the window of my room.

The house where I had been born and bred, before moving to the ghetto.

I’ve just turned seven, I’m old enough to recognize human malevolence, and I understand Sarah’s reputation. No one would ever say it to her face, but they see her as a woman not to be trusted. That summer day, I stop chasing lizards, take my courage in both hands and ask her why.

She’s sitting beside the front door, laying aubergines out to dry. The air is still, and droplets of kermes and saffron drip from the fabrics. Her answer leaves me baffled.

“Because I gave you life.”

All I know about my father is what she told me: a sailor, dead at sea a few months before I was born. A
goy
. A Venetian.

With time, as I grow up, I will understand the suspicion surrounding Sarah. She fornicated several times with a gentile, perhaps a good-for-nothing. She got herself pregnant, then was left on her own, without a husband, without a man by her side—“but with many men around her,” the old women of the ghetto sneered, including the hypocrite Abecassi. Besides, hadn’t she been impregnated by who knows who, years before Manuelito was born? And basically, isn’t she the daughter of who knows who herself? My mother is a devoted and observant woman, but she’s young, beautiful and alone, and such a combination is unforgivable.

At the age of seven, on this terrace, I don’t understand absolutely everything, but I absorb the acrid sap like a plant, a weed grown in a field of sulfur. So, even though I’m part of them, I start to hate the people of the Torah, from which my mother would never want to part. Each arm tied to a stout rope, two teams of mules pulling me in both directions: a child, about to be torn in two.

Shortly afterward, my mother dies and is buried close to my grandmother, in the Jewish cemetery just outside the walls.

Beyond the steeples of the city, the sun rose amidst the clouds, accompanied by a flight of storks. I walked on among the white stones, my eyes low, reading the inscriptions. I couldn’t remember the exact spot. I’d been there several times before, always dragged along by adults, in a ritual that had struck me as macabre and empty.

There’s nothing important about a grave, and hers was all I had left of her. I would have preferred a thousand times more one of the yellow kerchiefs she’d worn on her head, to plunge my face into it and smell once more the perfume of her hair. But Sarah’s few belongings had been sold, down to the last scrap, apart from a little ring that Abecassi had kept for herself.

I looked up at the ghost of the moon and spotted a magpie among the yellow leaves of a lime tree.

You wanted to turn me into a good Jew, so that I would live in the ghetto, among the people who blamed you for having given birth to me. Today my feeling is not very different from theirs. I despise the life you gave me.

Ragusa is full of converted Jews, who pray in the cathedral on Sunday and recite the
Shema
every evening in their bedrooms. They are rich brokers, merchants; they frequent the noble palaces and recite the great Italian and Croatian poets by heart. I could have become one of them. And instead?

Grandmother Raquel wanted you to be a good Jew, and you weren’t, whore of the gentiles. And yet you wanted the same thing for me. Guess what? I couldn’t do it either.

I denied you. I denied Tuota. I betrayed Consigliere Nordio and was myself betrayed.

Recantation and betrayal: Those are my real parents, the only ones I have never renounced.

I stared at the gravestones with a shiver and regretted that Manuel Cardoso wasn’t there too, buried in that ground, along with all the lies that had populated his life. The lies of Sarah, the lies of Old Abecassi, the lies of Emanuele and Gioanbattista De Zante.

My mother’s last words, now that I thought about it, might have been another trick. That stupid old woman had reported them to me, and I had believed her. Perhaps Sarah hadn’t actually wanted me to become a good Jew, and had asked instead that I be baptized a Christian.

Everything was possible, in the darkness that surrounded me, and I was nothing.

For that very reason, I had never hesitated to turn my back on myself. There was nothing true in me to turn it on.

11.

Old Abecassi is superstitious.

Almost a year has passed since my mother’s death, a year wasted coming and going between the old woman’s house and the temple, house and temple, house and temple, Abecassi and rabbi, Abecassi and her hag friends. Only every now and then a trip out of the ghetto, to the port, where I can breathe.

My rages are more and more frequent: I kick chairs over, I hurt myself by banging my head against a wall. It lasts for a few furious minutes, and then it stops, everything goes out, and I’m left in a state of lethargy.

One morning Abecassi consults our neighbors, an ancient couple who argue all day and even at night, because everybody knows you need less sleep as you get older, for one fine day you die and you’re going to sleep forever. The shrieks from those neighbors inflame my brain; each time I hope it will be their last quarrel, that they will die soon, but it doesn’t happen. Abecassi plots with them because, as I will discover later, she wants to cure me of my outbursts of rage, and she wants to do it as her mother did, and her grandmother and so on all the way back to the Babylonian captivity. She will cure me with the ritual of
indûlko
, because old Abecassi is superstitious. She will cure me with
indûlko
, and she needs the help of the neighbors. They were supposed to go away for a few days—perhaps to stay with the rabbi, their grandson. For
indûlko
, only two people may stay under the roof: the patient and the wise woman.

I’m the patient. And I’m scared. What does she want to do to me?

Old Abecassi announces her battle plan. She’s going to take my books, put them in a bundle and give them to a friend. For
indûlko
there must be no Scripture, nor any mention of the name of God. And I will have to stop praying. An easy one, that, I say to myself.

Old Abecassi already has all the things she needs: grain, water, salt, five eggs, honey, a jug of milk, candied fruit. A few minutes before midnight, she will mix a little of each ingredient into a blob that she will spread around my bed, on the threshold and in the four corners of the little room. While doing that, she will recite some formulas and beg the demons infesting me to leave me be. In exchange she will offer them honey to sweeten their tongues, grain to feed the livestock (demons keep livestock?), water and salt for I no longer remember what. After that, she will go to the cellar, where she will break the eggs, prostrate herself, kiss the floor and do who knows what else. She’ll do that for three nights in a row, and if necessary for seven, or even nine, until I’m cured of my rage.

Except that the neighbors refuse to leave. This produces a furious argument: Old Abecassi yells, the others yell, angry words are exchanged, dewlaps wobble.

Unnoticed by anyone, I slip outside.

“Worms, rats, that’s what you are! You’ve spent your lives running away, hiding, flattering the powerful. You’ve bought your flight in gold. You’ve lied and dissembled, all of you. I have nothing but disgust for you!”

Old Abecassi, feeble now, hunches on her chair. Perhaps she’s aggrieved about not having placated my demons, that day seven years before.

I yell my accusations in her face, in as loud a voice as I can muster. I shout at her, implicating my mother and with her all the other Jews. Guilty of so many things. Guilty of bringing me up with lies. I came back only for that. I’m almost fifteen years old and I’m with Tuota; the port and the sea have saved me from meanness, from narrow-mindedness, from the mold that coats the souls of the ghetto. But the separation has been long, and the road long and winding. I left Old Abecassi’s house shortly after my bar mitzvah, master of myself according to the Law.

Lies. Gioanbattista De Zante wasn’t an unknown sailor, but a Venetian
capo da mar
who one day, returning from a campaign against the Turkish pirates, cast anchor in the port and met my mother.

Perhaps they loved each other. De Zante stopped in Ragusa for some time, but in the end he had to go back to Venice, and when he did so he didn’t bring the Jewish woman with him. The woman pregnant with his bastard. Sarah Cardoso, who would be known as
puta de los goyim
.

Lies. My father isn’t dead. He isn’t dead, and he has sent money several times a year, even after Sarah’s death. He couldn’t settle with a Jewish woman without giving up everything, but he could provide for his son. I sometimes wondered where the money Sarah had left to Old Abecassi came from. I thought of Grandma Raquel’s jewels. The truth is that my mother didn’t leave very much, and most of the money has always come from Venice.

And now De Zante has returned to Ragusa, to take back his son. The captain of the fleet is here again. I’m nearly fifteen, and he’s offering me another life.

He sends someone to get me one morning in May. A boat takes me to Lacroma, the island that lies offshore from the city. Gioanbattista De Zante is a person of some standing, a guest at the Benedictine monastery there. It looks out on the Elaphite islands, on
Š
ipan and Mljet and Sr
đ
, the mountain that looms over Ragusa. My legs itch with excitement. Tuota doesn’t know where I’m going.

We look at each other in silence, my father and I, for a moment that I will remember for a very long time. He’s not a tall man, but his shoulders are broad. I have the same black hair, the same small and almost lobeless ears, the same cleft in my chin. The rest came from my mother. He is wearing a red cloak, fastened at the shoulder with five round buttons. Gold buttons. Gleaming. On his head he wears a wide velvet beret, also red. My cheeks must be the same color. I’m only a boy, and I find myself panting for breath. It’s the most important day of my life.

The captain knows many things about me, most of them dating back to when I was with my mother. Was it she who wrote to him, who kept him up to date? Did De Zante ever reply? Perhaps they exchanged letters filled with regret and remorse, but full of love, of unrealizable dreams. Or perhaps not; perhaps someone observed our life, our days, sending dispatches to Venice every now and then. I don’t dare to ask him, and I will never find out. After his death I will find no letters among his effects, nor anything else to remind me of my mother.

Of course, after Sarah’s death the glass grew cloudy. Of that part of my life he has only the vaguest information, episodes vaguely told to him.

“When I asked about you, I found out that you’d taken up with a gang of smugglers. You’re my son, and you deserve better. Perhaps I’ve found out late, but not too late, and perhaps there’s still time to start over again. In Venice.”

Venice. Everything he says leads in that direction. He doesn’t talk about my mother, or about why he abandoned her. He doesn’t ask me about myself, about Old Abecassi, about life in the ghetto. Those things no longer matter. He looks forward, always forward. His voice is low and gentle, but his tone is firm, his meaning peremptory. I am his son; I will go to Venice.

He is advanced in years and without descendants: his two legitimate sons are both dead. That’s the source of my new fortune: the void left in the heart of an old man.