“I want to be a good Jew,” he said at last. “I’m not interested in bothering my people, or giving them any motive to become furious or to condemn me. I think that I want to paint only because I like it. I don’t know if I have a gift, but if God has given me one, there is a reason. The rest is my will, which is also a gift from God the Holiest, who gave me the Law, but also intelligence and the option to choose.”
“Think less about God and more about yourself and that will.” The Maestro seemed to be interested in the subject. He left the paintbrush on the palette and turned around to look at the young man: “Here in Amsterdam, everyone talks about God, but very few count on Him to make their livings. And I think that’s the best thing that could happen to us. We humans should resolve our human problems ourselves … Calvin, who read your Jewish Bible too much, also thought that doing what I do is a sin. But if I sin or not, that’s my problem, not that of other Calvinists. Because, at the end of the day, I have to resolve it on my own with God, and in the end, neither the preachers nor the priests nor the rabbis are going to help me … For an artist, all commitments are a burden: with his church, with a political group, even with his country. They reduce your space for freedom, and without freedom there is no art…”
Elias was listening, and although he had his own judgment about that opinion, he preferred to remain in silence: he was there to listen, to see, perhaps to ask, and only to respond if it was demanded of him.
“Pour me a glass of wine,” the Maestro requested, and when he received it, he took a loud sip. “Your people have suffered a lot for too long, and it is all the fault of the same God that some men see one way and others in a different way … If here in Amsterdam the people admit that each one believes in his God and interprets the same sacred words different ways, you should take advantage of that opportunity, which is unique in the history of man and, incidentally, I don’t think it will last for too long or that it will again repeat itself for a long time, because it is not normal: there will always be some illuminated ones willing to appropriate the truth and try to impose that truth on everyone else … I am not enjoining you to do anything, just to think: freedom is the greatest good man has, and not practicing it, when it would be possible to practice it, is something that God cannot ask of us. Giving up freedom constitutes a terrible sin, practically an offense to God. But you should already know that everything comes with a price. And that of freedom tends to be very high. For aspiring to it, even where there is freedom, or where they say there is freedom—which ends up being more common—man can suffer a lot, because there are always other men who, just as it occurs with ideas about God, understand freedom in different ways, and these men reach the extreme of thinking that their way is the only right one, and with their power decide that everyone else has to practice it that same way … And that ends up being the end of liberty: because nobody can tell you how you should enjoy it…”
“The rabbis say we are lucky because we are in the land of freedom.”
“And they are right. But I think that the word ‘freedom’ has lost a lot of currency … Those same rabbis are the ones who force you to fulfill the laws of God, but also the laws that they themselves have dictated, assuming that they are the interpreters of divine will. It is the rabbis, as they ponder freedom, who would mercilessly punish you if they knew you were here … Even if it’s just because you like painting and not because you aim to be an idolater…” He left the glass on the auxiliary table where he placed the jars of paint. “Think, kid, there has to be something more than desire to dare to do what you are trying to do … Listen well: if there is no supreme goal, it’s better to save yourself the thirty florins … Or spend them on one of those Indonesian whores who are rightly so coveted.” The Maestro looked to the side and, as if he were surprised, noticed a figure in the mirror. “At your age, that’s what I would recommend. Now go.” He recovered his paintbrush, turned around, and studied the lines drawn on the cloth. “I’m going to continue with the eyes. Remember what I told you: everything is in the eyes.”
“Thank you, Maestro,” the young man whispered and left the studio.
* * *
Everything is in the eyes, he told himself, and he looked at them in the surface of the mirror he had bought and taken up to the attic. On the improvised easel, where he had nailed a sheet of paper, the white surface was unsullied. Why was he going to attempt it? The Maestro was right: he must have a reason, a deep and elusive basis, as difficult to pinpoint as a convincing gaze on a virgin surface. Although that reason lay somewhere within that hunt for what was out of reach for the majority of men, in what was possible only for the chosen. Elias Ambrosius, looking at himself in the eyes through the polished surface of the cheap mirror, was asking himself questions, since he knew that, just at that moment, he was at the threshold and, if he crossed it, he had to do so with a response in his consciousness. Until that moment, his exercises with the charcoal on remains of paper had been part of a juvenile game, the manifestation of an innocent whim, the riverbed of a small, pleasant brook of a hobby without consequences. Not now: in his hands was beating a reason, an intentional possibility that, at the end of the day, did not care too much if it was made public or not. In reality, all that mattered was whether something was carried out before the eyes of He who Sees Everything. He would only transcend if he exercised that act that implied his free will and, with it, the fate of his immortal soul: the choice of obedience or disregard, of submission to the ancient letter of the Law, or the election of a freedom to choose with which that same Creator had gifted him. The submission could end up being comfortable and certain, although bitter, and his people knew that well; freedom could be risky and painful, but sweet; the peace of his soul, a blessing but also a prison. Why did he want to do it if he knew everything he would put in the balance? That Salom Italia who had engraved the image of Hakham ben Israel on a sheet, had he had the same doubts? And, what responses had he given himself to dare to sully the sheet’s purity and turn it into the basis of an image of a torso, a face, human eyes? Had he felt, like him, the crouching fear and so many, many doubts?
Elias always marveled at the series of circumstances and decisions that had brought him to that attic in a city considered by those expelled from Sepharad as the New Jerusalem and where those of his race were enjoying an unprecedented tolerance that allowed them to pray in peace each Saturday, gather by the lights of the menorah, read the rolls of the Torah at their ancestral feasts, and practice without greater fear the right of Brit Milah—circumcision—or the bar mitzvahs that initiated one into adulthood. And, at the same time, they could enrich their pockets and their minds and be respected for their wealth of gold and ideas, since ideas and gold, simultaneously, made the welcoming city shine. The good place, Makom. Amsterdam, a metropolis that was growing by the hour, where one could always hear the friction of a handsaw, the beating of a hammer, the scraping of shovels, the same city that just two centuries before was little more than a swamp full of reeds and mosquitoes and now took pride in being the world capital of money and commerce and where, as such, making money was a virtue, never a sin … So that that could happen and Elias could pose these piercing questions, a war had to occur that was still ongoing between Catholics and Christians divorced from the Roman pontiff, between monarchists and Republicans, between Spaniards and the citizens of the United Provinces before that unexpected door was opened in Amsterdam to tolerance and to some Jews who, in the name of God, some monarchs had expelled from what those Jews had already considered their land. The suffering and humiliation also had to erupt, and the blood of many sons of Israel had to run. Many other Jews had to reject their faith, deny their customs, lose their cultures with the conversion to the adoration of Jesus or of Allah to save their lives (and properties), so that a man like Elias could be in that place, enjoying the freedom to ask himself whether he should carry out the act of crossing the threshold or not to which his spirit, his will, and that elusive reason, still imprecise,
were leading him. His grandfather Benjamin Montalbo de Ávila, who was able to bring the family back to their faith, had to exist, and there had to exist the heartbreaking experience of that pious man who spent many years as a Christian without being so, tormented by the secret that each Friday, when the night’s first star shone, his father would whisper in his ear “Shabbat shalom!” and who lived disguised in a hostile environment … All of this so that Elias Ambrosius could receive, nearly through his bloodline, the conviction that, more basic than the social demonstrations of belonging, attendance at a synagogue, or obedience to the precepts of the rabbis, was man’s interior identification with his God: in other words, with himself and with his ideas …
But, above all, so that he could be there, fear had to exist. That permanent, oppressive, infinite fear, also inherited, a fear that even Elias, born in Amsterdam, knew very well. It was that invincible fear that what was his could end at any moment, and that repression, exterior or interior, could arrive once again. Or that there would be an expulsion and, any morning, the club would be used again or the bonfire would burn anew, as so many times had happened throughout the centuries. That petty and very real fear for him had to exist so that he, too, could be afraid of the extremes to which men could go, who, from the seats of power, proclaimed themselves pure, to be the shepherds of collective destinies, there, in Amsterdam, where all prided themselves on the existence of so much freedom.
Elias Ambrosius continued looking in the mirror, observing his eyes (light and shadow, life and mystery), and vowed that he would not allow himself to be conquered by fear. If he was there, if he was truly free, if all of the strength of seventeen years were with him, he should take advantage of that extraordinary privilege of having been born and still living in a city where a Jew could breathe in a freedom that for centuries was unimaginable for those of his line, and that, in his case, included the grace of the proximity of a rebellious man, a painter who was already predestined to be one of the great maestros, a giant on the altar of Apelles. Elias knew that, if he learned of his purposes, his grandfather Benjamin would not celebrate him but would not condemn him, either: the old man had lived in his own flesh all of the imaginable vexations for believing in something and, despite being a devout Jew, he was also a committed defender of freedom and of the respect for others’ choices that this demanded. Elias also sensed that his father, Abraham Montalbo, would suffer, would be sorrowful, but would not repudiate him, since his open mind, thanks to the books he read (with much discretion, he and his grandfather sent for the literature they most enjoyed from Spain and Portugal), to the books they printed and distributed around half the world, permitted him to have a tolerant relationship with everyone else, since he himself was tolerated and knew something of intolerance. At the same time, he was convinced that his brother Amos, saved by the decisions and risks of his elders from having suffered repression or violent contempt, and who perhaps due to that circumstance had been infected with the most orthodox ideas, could be the source of his misfortune. Like those parrots arrived from Surinam, Amos tended to repeat the words of the men who advocated that only the strict fulfilling of sacred Law and full obedience of the illuminated Talmudic precepts could save the sons of Israel in a world that was still dominated by Gentiles: the words that those same men capable of condemning a son with a niddui because he maintained a relationship with his father who was living in Portugal or in Spain—again the feared lands of idolatry of which, despite everything, so many Jews still dreamt, with which many of those same supposed Orthodox Jews, capable of condemning others, engaged in commerce and enriched themselves. Elias knew it: his own brother was the one who could come to accuse him before the council of the Mahamad, become his pursuer, perhaps even his prosecutor, sure that with his action he was fulfilling his responsibility as a good representative of his people.
In the mind of the entire Jewish community of Amsterdam—and beating like a drum in Elias Ambrosius’s mind each day—still floated the echoes of the process expelling Uriel da Costa, sentenced by the rabbinical council (including Hakham ben Israel!) to a lifelong cherem that implied the cutting off of all communication with the entire community, a true civil death. Da Costa had been sentenced for the sin of publicly proclaiming that the precepts of the rabbis gathered in the Talmud and the Mishnah, as far as men were concerned, were not the supreme truths that they proclaimed, since that privilege belonged only to God. Da Costa had demanded a separation of religious commandments from civil and legal ones, and had even dared to propose an individual relationship between the believer and his God (the same as was advocated in the heart of Elias’s family by his grandfather Benjamin), a communication in which the religious authorities had only the role of facilitators and not of regulators. And for that he had been accused of disqualifying the Halakha, the ancient religious law, as such, a code dedicated not just to regulating religious conduct, but also private and public conduct.
Then that man who was so daring had reached the extremes of his naïveté when he proclaimed, during the summary of his excommunication, the hope that his brothers, the same rabbis whose ancestral power he was attacking, would have “an understanding heart” and be capable of “wisely meeting with firm judgments,” as thinking beings, sons of a very different time to that of the primitive patriarchs and prophets, creatures who broke out of the darkness of the origins of civilization, nomads who adored idols and wandered through the deserts. The dramatic process, during which Da Costa was accused of being an agent of the Vatican’s powers, in which the rabbinical tribunal humiliated him and vilified him, had ended with the pronouncement of that lifelong cherem, read by Rabbi Montera, who among other horrors declared that “with the judgment of the Angels and the sentence of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse, and expel Uriel da Costa, pronouncing against him the anathema with which Joshua condemned Jericho, the curse of Elijah and all of the curses written in the book of the Law. May he be cursed by day and cursed by night; cursed when he goes to bed, rises, goes out, and comes in. May the Lord never forgive him or recognize him! May the Lord’s anger and disgust burn against that man from here on and rain down upon him all of the curses written in the book of the Law and erase his name beneath the sky … As such, we warn everyone that no one should address him by spoken word or communicate with him in writing, that no one should offer him any services, live under the same roof as him, or get any closer to him than four elbows’ distance…”
Elias could well remember how, as Rabbi Montera read the inquisitorial excommunication, the synagogue where the members of the Nação squeezed together had been inundated by the prolonged moan of a great horn that could be heard here and there, each time more hoarse and duller. With those eyes that now looked in the mirror, the adolescent Elias Ambrosius, clinging to the hand of his grandfather and trembling in fear, had seen how the lights of the ritual candelabra, intense at the beginning of the ceremony, had extinguished themselves as the reading of the cherem progressed, until the last one went out when the horn fell mute: with the silence and the agony of the light the spiritual life of the sentenced heretic was also extinguished.
The bombastic process, directed against Uriel da Costa but in many ways against all of Amsterdam’s disobedient and heterodox, had aimed to plant a seed of fear in those who could have the daring to think in a way that was not that decreed by the powerful community leaders, proclaimed by tradition as the owners of the only admissible interpretations of the Law. It was that pernicious and ubiquitous fear of suffering a similar fate, of course, that at that moment beat in the hand of young Elias Ambrosius, armed with charcoal, as he observed his eyes in the mirror and contemplated the formidable white paper spread out on a crude easel. Would he assume that risk merely because he liked painting? The Maestro knew it and now Elias Ambrosius, too, knew it: yes, something else had to exist, there had to be something else. Would Hakham ben Israel know what it could be? Salom Italia, who had gone through the mirror, had he discovered what that something
else was? Elias Ambrosius had a hint of the mystery when his hand, obeying a mandate that seemed to come from a source placed well beyond his conscience and his fears, grafted on the empty surface the first line of what would be the eye. Because everything is in the eyes. The eyes of a man who weeps.
The mystery, he knew at that moment, was called power: the power of Creation, the impulse of transcendence, the force of beauty that no legal authority could conquer.
2
New Jerusalem, Year 5405 Since the Creation, 1645 of the Common Era
Time moved quickly and, contrary to what he had imagined or predicted, Elias Ambrosius was far from feeling happy. Sometimes the feeling of misfortune brushed against him enigmatically, like a stab of guilty conscience, and the young man again asked himself: Is it worth it? Other times, it did so with animosity, forcing him to do his accounting in practical terms: money, time, results, satisfactions, risks, accumulated fears … He counted on his fingers, although many times he tried to keep money out of the equation, so that no one, not even himself, could accuse him of reacting from a perspective that was too Jewish, although there was more than enough proof that in Amsterdam not only the Jews lived obsessed with money. A French writer living in that city had said it well, a certain René Descartes, who had also been considered a heretic by those of his faith, to whom was attributed the phrase that, except him, everyone in the metropolis was dedicated only to making money …
Elias experienced a few disastrous days, full of that sadness, as he added up his doubts and convictions; the young man even arrived at the decision: no matter how much of a maestro the Maestro was, no matter how famous he had been a few years before, and despite the fact that he, Elias Ambrosius, believed him to be the greatest painter in the city and even in the known world—two years mopping floors, gathering shit and carrying peat, receiving more orders and reprimands from the scowling Mme. Dircx than advice from the Maestro (with the not negligible payment of thirty florins, because yes, it was pertinent to include money, which was firmly demanded when he fell behind on a payment), in contrast to the few conversations that the painter, when he was in a good mood, could gift to any visitor or buyer—made up more than enough reasons to consider the possibility of putting an end to that dangerous adventure.
Heretics Page 29
