The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (3 page)

Chapter I

When
I
was
eight,
in
the
Christian
year
of
fourteen
ninety-four,
I
read
about
the
sacred
ibises
who
helped
Moses
cross
an
Ethiopian
swamp
riddled
with
snakes.
I
drew
a
scythe-beaked
creature
in
scarlet
and
black
with
my
Uncle
Abraham’s
dyes
and
inks.
He
held
it
up
for
inspec
tion
.
“Silver
eyes?”
he
questioned.

“Reflecting
Moses,
how
could
they
be
any
other
color?”

Uncle
kissed
my
brow.
“From
this
day
on,
you
will
be
my
appren
tice
.
I
will
help
you
change
thorns
to
roses,
and
I
swear
to
protect
you
from
the
dangers
which
dance
along
the
way.
The
pages
that
are
doors
will
open
to
our
touch.”

How
could
I
have
known
that
I
would
one
day
fail
him
so
com
pletely
?

Imagine
being
outside
time.
That
the
past
and
future
are
revolving
around
you,
and
you
cannot
place
yourself
properly.
That
your
body,
your
receptacle,
has
been
numbed
free
of
history.
Because
I
feel
this
way,
I
can
see
clearly
when
and
where
the
evil
started:
four
days
ago,
on
the
twenty-second
of
Nisan;
in
our
Judiaria
Pequena,
the
Little
Jewish
Quarter
of
the
Alfama
district
of
Lisbon.

It
was
a
jeweled
morning
much
like
any
of
the
opal
beads
on
the
necklace
of
that
spring
month.
The
year
was
fifty-two
sixty-six
for
the
New
Christians.
April
the
sixteenth
of
fifteen
and
six
for
the
accursed
Christians
of
heart.

From
the
darkness
of
early
Wednesday
morning,
hiding
here
in
the
cellar,
I
remember
the
dawn
of
Friday
as
if
its
sunlight
heralded
the
first
notes
of
an
insane
fugue.

Concealed
behind
one
of
these
notes
of
melody,
camouflaged
in
memory,
is
the
face
I
seek.

The day of our first Passover seder began dim and dry, like all the dawns of late. We hadn’t been blessed with rain in more than eleven weeks. And would have none today.

As for the plague, it had been sending shivers through our bodies and souls since the second week of Heshvan—more than seven months now.

King Manuel’s half-made Christian doctors had resolved that cattle were perfect for soaking up the airborne essences which they blamed for the disease, and so two hundred dazed and overheated cows had been let loose to wander the streets.

Manuel himself had long fled our misery with most of the
aristocracy
. From Abrantes, three weeks earlier, he’d issued a decree
establishing
the construction of two new cemeteries outside the city walls for the scores who were taken to God each week.

The souls of the dead were beyond being encouraged by such a
gesture
, of course. And one could hardly blame the living for regarding the decree as simply one more indication of the King’s ineffectual
pragmatism
and cowardice. Was it a turning point? Certainly, daily life began to take on an edge of cruel and despairing madness. In the last three days, I’d seen a collapsed donkey blinded with his master’s dagger, his eyes spurting blood, and a girl of no more than five hurled shrieking from the rooftop of a four-story townhouse.

The poor, to dispel their hunger pangs, had taken to eating a mash of linen fibers and water.

I had just turned twenty years old. Proof that I was a little too devout for my own good was my belief that our city had been gifted generously with the stark significance of Torah. To me, there was a
terrible
, timeless beauty and horror to everything. Even the filthy feet of the recently deceased sticking out from the burlap of their
sour-smelling
plague carts possessed a sad and reverent grace. For they made our thoughts turn to Man’s mortality and our covenant with God.

Only Uncle Abraham had the confidence to disregard completely the goat-ribbed preachers roaming the streets screeching that God had abandoned Portugal and that the end of the world was but five weeks away (though it could be postponed, they noted, if we were generous
with our handouts of copper coinage). With an irritated frown, he had told me, “Don’t you think that the Lord would show me a sign if He were about to close the last gate upon the Lower Realms?”

Father Carlos, a priest and family friend, could not yet be counted among those unfortunates who’d succumbed completely to the insanity gripping the city. But it seemed only a matter of days. “Drought and plague … they are the Devil’s twin birth!” he told me in a conspirator’s whisper as we stood in the archway of St. Peter’s Church.

I had brought my little brother, Judah, to him that morning for
religious
instruction in the ways of Christianity. The three of us were watching a candlelight procession of flagellants whipping their backs with leather scourges whose ends trailed wax balls laced with filings of tin and splinters of colored glass. Behind them marched friars from Lisbon’s monasteries unfurling blue and yellow pennons sewn with images of the Nazarene crucified. At the rear, proud-postured guildmen in flowing, silken fineries hoisted up litters bearing effigies of saints.

Crowds had gathered to watch, lined both sides of the street, formed two ragged ribbons against the dusty white façades of the
town-houses
as far as the cathedral. Shouts for water and mercy rang up like antiphonal choruses. All the variety of our town was there: horsemen and peasants, whores and nuns, beggars and black slaves—even
blue-eyed
sailors from the north.

Waifs and barking dogs suddenly began running past Father Carlos, Judah and me to the west to keep up with the moving spectacle. The priest closed his eyes, murmured nervous prayers. I inhaled deeply on the chilly perfume of danger in the air.
And
tonight,
I thought,
into
the
unpredictable
currents
of
this
sea
of
madness,
we
will
be
launching
the
forbidden
ship
of
Passover.
Yes, our celebrations should have started exactly one week earlier. But most of the secret Jews, including our
family
, had postponed Passover in the hopes of sailing safely through the tainted waters of Old Christian gossip around us.

A filthy, mop-haired woodcutter standing near us suddenly screamed at the top of his lungs, “For heavenly rain, we must have more blood! Lisbon must be the Venice of blood!

Judah pressed back against my legs, and I gripped his shoulder. Father Carlos rubbed his hands over his domed forehead, as if in defense. He was a corpulent man, squat, with soft, pale skin, a bulbous nose, webs of red veins on both his cheeks from too much drink. Few
people took him seriously, but I found him a good friend. His droopy eyes settled on me. He said, “Men like nothing more than profaning the sacred, my boy.”

I was suddenly laden with sadness for our fate. The scent of Indian pepper turned me around, and blood splattered across my pants and Judah’s face. A shrieking initiate had pulled skin loose from his
shoulder
blade, was spraying spices over himself to capture the sting of God’s love. In my brother’s terrified eyes, I believed I recognized the look of a Hebrew child about to flee across the Red Sea. A fleeting
premonition
, unusual in its certainty, shook me:
We
Jews
of
Lisbon
have
waited
too
long
to
re-enact
the
Exodus,
and
Pharaoh
has
learned
of
our
escape
plans.

As I came to myself, Carlos hid his gaze in the wing of his cape, whisper-screamed, “That young initiate’s moans…you can hear the
wailing
of the Devil’s children in them!”

Judah was looking up at me with stunned, breathless curiosity. When tears caressed his eyes, I picked him up, wiped him, tousled the thick locks of his coal-black hair. He hugged his arms around my neck. “Thanks ever so much,” I told Carlos. “Between you and these
madmen
, I think we’ve had all the religious instruction we need for today.”

I lifted the woolen hood of Judah’s mantle over his head and patted him as he sobbed and sniffled. After the last penitent had dragged
himself
past our former synagogue, Carlos led us across the square. At the corner was our house, a single story of whitewashed stucco whose
rectangular
perimeter was traced with a rim of deep blue. An affinity between colors lifted my gaze to the gauzy turquoise of the dawn sky, then down to the spine of the roof, a horizon of mottled fawn-colored tile pierced near its center by our chimney, a soot-blackened white cone notched with air-holes. From its point rose the tin silhouette of a
troubadour
pointing east, toward Jerusalem. Thin scarfs of smoke from our hearth were wafting around him and unraveling into the southerly breeze leading toward the river. “Just as well we cancel our lessons today,” Carlos said as I pulled open the gate of iron tracery that served both our home and the house belonging to my beloved friend Farid and his father. “I’ve got some unhappy business I’ve been putting off with your uncle.”

We stepped into the secret landscape of our courtyard. Enclosed by white façades and walls, paved with gray slate, it was centered by a
venerable
lemon tree circled by oleander bushes. Farid was standing on his stoop in his long underwear, barefoot, combing his hands back through the black locks falling to his shoulders. To me, he had always seemed gifted with all the attributes of a warrior poet of the Arabian desert—a slim, muscular build, sharp green, hawklike eyes, soft olive skin and an agile, unpredictable intelligence. The stubble he always left on his cheeks made him look sleepy but seductive, and men and women alike were often captivated by his dark beauty. Now, he signalled good
morning
to me with a twist to the forceful hands he’d developed as a weaver of rugs. Though deaf and mute from birth, he’d never had the least difficulty making himself understood to me in this way; as toddlers, we’d developed a language of gestured signs, undoubtedly because we were born just two days apart and grew up holding hands.

Returning my friend’s greeting, I led Father Carlos to the kitchen door, an ogival threshold exuberantly marked with a rim of green and rust mosaic stars. In a doubtful voice, he said, “Might as well get it over with.”