The Coffee Trader (3 page)

So many risks. Miguel bit his lip, forcing back the urge to smirk. He could live with the risks if he could promise himself not to think of them too often.

Miguel began to tap the counter. He wanted to act immediately. He could begin at once to secure contacts and agents upon almost any important exchange in Europe. He could juggle coffee by the barrelful, moving it from this port to that. This was the true essence of Miguel Lienzo; he made deals and connections and arrangements. He was no coward to shrink from an opportunity because bitter and hypocritical men told him that they knew better than the Sages what was right and wrong.

“How shall we do this?” he said at last, suddenly aware he had not spoken for several minutes. “The coffee-fruit trade belongs to the East India Company, and we can’t hope to take control away from men of their power. I don’t understand what you’re proposing.”

“Nor do I!” Geertruid threw her hands into the air excitedly. “But I am proposing
something
. We must do
something
. I won’t allow the fact that I do not know what I am proposing stand in my way. As they say, even the blind may stumble upon Heaven. You worry about the twentieth—you owe money? I am offering you riches. A great new venture with which to rebuild and make your current debt seem trivial.”

“I’ll need time to think about it,” he told her, though he needed nothing of the kind. A man does not get many such opportunities in his life, and to ruin his chances out of impatience would be madness. “We’ll discuss these things again after the twentieth. In a week.”

“A week is a long time,” the widow said thoughtfully. “Fortunes are made in a week. Empires rise and fall in a week.”

“I need a week,” Miguel repeated softly.

“A week, then,” Geertruid said, in her amiable way. She knew not to push further.

Miguel realized he had been fidgeting with the buttons of his coat. “And now I must leave and tend to my more immediate concerns.”

“Before you go, let me give you something to help you consider the enterprise.” Geertruid signaled to Crispijn, who hurried over and set down before her a rough woolen sack.

“He owes me some money,” she explained, once her cousin had walked away. “I agreed to take a little of this as payment, and I wanted to give you something to think about.”

Miguel looked in the bag, which contained perhaps a dozen handfuls of brownish berries.

“Coffee,” Geertruid said. “I’ve had Crispijn cook the berries for you because I know a Portuguese hidalgo cannot be expected to roast his own fruit. You merely need grind them to a powder, which you mix with hot milk or sweet water, then filter out the powder if you like, or just let it settle. Don’t drink too much of the powder itself, lest you agitate your bowels.”

“You did not mention bowel agitation when you sang its praises.”

“Even nature’s greatest glories can harm if taken in the wrong dose. I wouldn’t have said anything, but a man with uneasy bowels makes a poor business partner.”

Miguel let her kiss him again, and then he squeezed through the tavern and stepped out into the misty cool of the late afternoon. After the stench of the Golden Calf, the salty air off the IJ felt as wonderfully cleansing as the mikvah, and he let the mist fall on his face for a moment until a boy, not six years old, began to pull on his sleeve and weep piteously about his mother. Miguel tossed the boy a half stuiver, already relishing the wealth coffee would bring: freedom from debt, his own home, a chance to marry once more, children.

In an instant he chastised himself for indulging in these fancies in light of the day’s setbacks. Another thousand guilders in debt. He owed three thousand already throughout the Vlooyenburg, including fifteen hundred to his brother, borrowed after the sugar market collapsed. He’d allowed the Bankruptcy Office at the Town Hall to settle his debts to Christians, but the Jews of his neighborhood ordered their own accounts.

High tide had begun to move in, and the waters had crept up beyond the Rozengracht to slick the streets. Across town, in his brother’s house, the cavernous cellar where Miguel now slept at night would soon begin its own flooding. That was the price of living in a city built in the water upon piles, but Miguel now thought nothing of the discomforts of Amsterdam that had troubled him when he had first arrived. He hardly noticed the dead-fish stench of canal water or the squish of walking on wet ground. Dead fish was the perfume of Amsterdam’s riches, the squish of water its melody.

The prudent thing would be to go home at once and write a note to Geertruid explaining that the risks of working with her were too great and might well lead to his ruin. But he would never free himself from debt with prudence, and ruin was already upon him. Only a few months ago his sugar had crammed canal-side warehouses; he had strutted across the Vlooyenburg like a burgher. He had been ready to set the loss of Katarina behind him, to take a new wife and have sons, and the marriage brokers had clawed at one another to gain access to him. But now he was in debt. His standing had collapsed to worse than nothing. He received threatening notes from a man who must be mad. How could he turn his fortune if not by doing something daring?

He had taken risks all his life. Was he to stop because he feared the arbitrary power of the Ma’amad, those men who, entrusted to uphold the Law of Moses, valued their power above God’s Word? The Law had nothing to say about Dutch widows. Why should Miguel avoid making his fortune with one?

He might have tried to conduct a little more business that day, but he suspected his agitation would lead to nothing productive, so instead he went to the Talmud Torah synagogue for afternoon and evening prayers. The now-familiar liturgy soothed him like spiced wine, and by the time he left he felt renewed.

As he walked the short distance from the synagogue to his brother’s house, keeping close to canal-side houses to elude both thieves and the Night Watch, Miguel listened to the click of rat claws on the wooden planks stretched over the sewers.
Coffee,
he chanted to himself. He hardly needed a week to give Geertruid his answer. He only needed time to convince himself that any scheme he embarked on with her would not complete his ruin.

from

The Factual and Revealing Memoirs of Alonzo Alferonda

My name is Alonzo Rodrigo Tomas de la Alferonda, and I brought the drink called coffee to the Europeans—gave birth to its usage there, one might say. Well, perhaps I phrase that too strongly, for coffee surely would have made its murky way without my efforts. Let us say instead that I was the man-midwife who eased its passage from obscurity into glory. No, you will say, that was not me either; it was Miguel Lienzo who did that. What role, then, could Alonzo Alferonda have played in the triumph of this great fruit? More than is generally believed, I assure you. And for those who say I made nothing but mischief, that I thwarted and hindered and harmed rather than advanced, I can only say I know more than my detractors. I was there—and you, in all likelihood, were not.

My true name is Avraham, as was my father’s name and his father’s. All firstborn Alferonda men have secretly called their firstborn sons Avraham for as long as Jews have had secret names, and before that, when the Moors ruled Iberia, they called themselves Avraham openly. For much of my life, I was not permitted to speak my name aloud except in dark rooms, and then only in whispers. Those who would question my actions should remember that. Who would you be today, I ask you who judge me harshly, if your own name was a secret whose revelation could cost your life and the lives of your friends and family?

I was born in the Portuguese city of Lisbon to a family of Jews who were not allowed to pray as Jews. We were called New Christians, or Conversos, for our ancestors had been made to take the Catholic faith or surrender their property—and often their lives. Lest we face torture and ruin and perhaps even death, we prayed publicly as Catholics, but in shadows and in cellars, in secret synagogues that moved from house to house, we prayed as Jews. Prayer books were rare and precious to us. In the light of day a man might measure his wealth in gold, but in the dark of those dark rooms, we measured wealth in pages and in knowledge. Few among our number could read the Hebrew of what few books we had. Few knew the right prayers for the holy days or for Shabbat.

My father knew, or at least he knew some. Having spent the first part of his childhood in the East, he had grown up among Jews unrestrained by the law from practicing their religion. He had prayer books that he lent out freely. He owned a few volumes of the Babylonian Talmud, but he knew no Aramaic and could make little sense of its pages. The Secret Jews in Lisbon came to him for instruction in the rudiments of reading the holy tongue, of the prayers for Shabbat, of fasting on fast days and feasting on feast days. He taught them to eat out-of-doors during Succoth, and of course he taught them to drink themselves to a merry stupor on Purim.

Let me be direct: my father was no holy man or sage or saint. Far from it. I admit this freely and think it no insult to his name. My father was a trickster and a cheat; in his hands, trickery and cheating were beautiful and marvelous things.

Because he was schooled in the ways of our faith—no scholar, mind you, but simply a man with an education—my father was tolerated among the Secret Jews of Lisbon in ways he might not have been otherwise, for he brought far more attention upon himself than was wise for any New Christian. Wherever merchants with a few spare coins might find themselves, my father would be there with his potions to lengthen life, improve virility, or cure any malady. He knew tricks with cards and balls and dice. He could juggle and rope-dance and tumble. He knew how to train dogs to add and subtract simple numbers and how to train cats to dance on their hind legs.

A natural leader of men, my father attracted to him others who made their living through countless deceptive and curious entertainments. He commanded an army of cardsharps and dice cheats, fire-eaters and blade swallowers. Those who could earn a living simply by displaying the shapes with which nature had burdened them also rallied to my father’s banner. Among my earliest childhood companions were dwarfs and giants, the monstrously fat and the horrifically gaunt. I played games with the snake boy and the goat girl. As I grew older I developed an unhealthy curiosity about a person my father knew who had the anatomy of both a man and a woman. For a few coins, this unfortunate would allow anyone to watch it fornicate with itself.

When I was but ten years of age my father received a late-night visit from an older boy, Miguel Lienzo, whom I recognized from synagogue worship. He was a roguish fellow, as much drawn to my father’s company of tricksters and oddities as he was to my father’s learning. I say he was roguish, for he loved always to defy one authority or another, and in the time I knew him in Lisbon those authorities he loved defying most were his own family and the Inquisition itself.

This Lienzo came from a line of relatively sincere New Christians. There was no shortage of these: men who, out of either genuine belief or merely a desire to avoid persecution, conformed entirely to the Christian way and shunned those of us who sought to live as Jews. Lienzo’s father was a successful trader and had, in his opinion, too much to risk the ire of the Inquisition. Perhaps for this reason alone, Miguel came eagerly to our secret prayer meetings and struggled to learn what my father could teach him.

More than that, young Miguel used his father’s connections with the Old Christian community to learn what he could of the Inquisition. He had a keen ear for rumor, and he delighted in providing warnings where he could. I knew of a half dozen families who had fled the night before the Inquisitors pounded on their doors—all because Lienzo had known where to lurk and listen. I believe he did these great deeds both from a desire to see justice done in the world and for the pleasure of treading where he had no business. Years later, when I saw him again in Amsterdam, he never recognized me or even remembered what he had done for my family. I have never forgotten his kindness, though some have insisted otherwise.

Miguel came to warn us after he had volunteered to help our priest scrub his private chambers in the church (he always volunteered for these thankless tasks in the hopes of gaining some intelligence) and had then chanced to hear a conversation between that wretch and an Inquisitor who had developed an interest in my father.

And so, in the dark of night, we left the only home I had known, taking many of our friends with us. We were Jew and Christian and Moor and Gypsy all, and we traveled to more cities than I can now enumerate. For years we lived in the East, and I was fortunate to spend many months in the holy city of Jerusalem. It is but a shadow of its former glory, but there were times in my unfortunate life when the memory of those days, of walking the streets of my nation’s ancient capital, visiting the place where the holy Temple once stood, have sustained me when I could find meaning in nothing else. If it be the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, I shall return sometime to that sacred place and live out my remaining days there.

In our travels we also traversed Europe, and we were in London when my father died of a brain fever. I was then five-and-twenty, grown to a man but not a man of my father’s disposition. My younger brother, Mateo, wanted to take command of the army of outcasts, and I knew he had the character to lead them. Though I had wandered for years, I was not myself a wanderer. I could perform card cheats and dice tricks, but not half so well as Mateo. I could get a dog to do nothing but show me its belly and a cat to do nothing but knead upon my lap. My father had always spoken of the importance of Jews to live as Jews and among Jews, and I recalled from a visit to Amsterdam some years earlier that in that city Jews enjoyed a degree of freedom unrivaled in the rest of Christendom.

So I crossed the North Sea and found myself embraced by the large community of Portuguese Jews who lived there. I was, at any rate, embraced at first. And that is why I write this memoir. I wish to make clear why I was unjustly exiled from a people I loved. I wish to tell the world that I am not the villain it thinks me. And I wish to set on paper the true facts regarding Miguel Lienzo and his dealings in the coffee trade, having been much blamed in that sphere, and blamed very unfairly too. It is my intention to describe my doings in Amsterdam, the conditions of my excommunication, my life in that city afterward, and precisely what role I played in Lienzo’s affairs.