Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  On the same day that Ben Israel arrived at that crucial point of his messianic analysis, the Maestro asked a question capable of driving the expert crazy: “So what about what Antonio Montesinos is saying in the taverns and synagogues about having discovered the descendants of the ten lost tribes in the New World?”

  “Nonsense! He’s a fraud! A trick that greatly pleases Rabbi Montera because it serves to control the people, but that not even he himself believes!” the teacher yelled. “How can that Antonio Montesinos say that some ugly, ignorant indigenous people are the heirs of the ten lost tribes? Who’s going to believe him that they speak a form of Aramaic if the Indians of one tribe can’t even understand their neighbors?”

  “But if it were true, that would mean that Jews live all over the world,” the Maestro replied.

  “Not even Rabbi Breslau believes Montesinos’s tale … Because the problem is not the New World, where there are already Sephardic settlements and even some of those Ashkenazi mules, even in the territories of the Spanish king, incidentally … The problem is in England, from where we were expelled three and a half centuries ago. England is the key to the arrival of the Messiah to occur … And I am going to focus my strength on nothing short of opening the doors of Albion: if I achieve it, I will have made a great step so that the kingdom of the Holiest, blessed may He be, can extend across the whole earth and the world will be ready for the arrival of the true Messiah and the return to Jerusalem.”

  One afternoon on which the Maestro relieved Elias Ambrosius at the same time that Ben Israel was taking his leave, the young man took advantage of the occasion to accompany the Hakham on his journey toward the house on Nieuwe Houtmarkt. It was already dark, but the temperature remained pleasant, and they decided to walk along the left bank of the Zwanenburgwal, until the roving foulness of the waste barges forced them to seek out an alleyway that would take them closer to Binnen Amstel. Each night, that load of human and animal detritus went up the canals toward the Amstel’s inner harbor, in the direction of Ij, to then sail to the strawberry fields of Aalsmeer and the carrot fields of Beverwijk, which in time would grace the city’s markets with their brilliant colors.

  Sitting in the Hakham’s jumbled study, with the windows closed to prevent the smells drifting in, the scholar prepared his pipe in which he liked to smoke the tobacco leaves that his friends gave him as he handed himself over to reflection or reading. Elias Ambrosius, lowering his voice, then told him about the Maestro’s decision to have him paint in the workshop. That marvelous opportunity of taking his apprenticeship to the next level signified, nonetheless, that his true relationship with the painter would become public, at least to the other students in the workshop and even the servants in the house. And that revelation could not help but cause justified fears in the young man. Although the Hakham was not the only one who could show his understanding as a Jew, he who was otherwise observant of his religion’s laws and commandments, Elias Ambrosius felt fearful of radical reactions, which were more and more frequently occurring in the city. It did not console him too much to know that men like Isaac Pinto and surely others in his circle were devoted not only to buying paintings, but paintings made by a Jew who had settled among them. Because it was also obvious to all of the members of the Nação that the rabbinical council, fearing the loss of control over the community, was becoming more inflexible every day regarding certain attitudes that were considered blasphemous. On each occasion when they were presented with a case of disobedience or laxity to be analyzed or judged, the rabbis repeated the harangue that the atmosphere of prosperity and tolerance was making the flock more licentious by the day. It was not a coincidence that, in recent times, the condemning cherems were coming down like rain for maintaining relations with converts living in the lands of idolatry and even visiting those lands, for keeping distance from the synagogue, for ignoring fasts or violating the prohibitions of the Sabbath as they met worldly needs or demands, or, in the worst of cases, for expressing ideas or carrying out acts considered to be heretical. What could he expect to happen if what constituted, for the majority of Jews, a flagrant violation of the Law was discovered? Didn’t Salom Italia hide his identity to avoid the rabbis’ punishment? How long could Elias keep living among painters, working in secret without his true intentions being discovered by his brother Amos, who, as fanatical as he was, would denounce him before the Mahamad?

  The Hakham seemed more amused than concerned by the fears of his former student. A nearly imperceptible, but permanent, smile tilted the pipe toward the left corner of his mouth.

  “But what do you really fear, Elias, God or your neighbors?” he asked at last, using the tongue of the Castilian Sephardic Jews, after leaving the pipe on his desk. Elias was surprised by the difficulty that responding to that simple question entailed.

  “I know I can expect it from God … And from my neighbors as well” was what it occurred to him to say, in the same language used by the Hakham, who barely nodded, now without the hint of a smile on his face.

  “To you, what is the sacred?” The interrogation continued.

  “God, the Law, the Book…” The young man enumerated and immediately knew he had made an error, because he added: “Although the Law and the Book have a human component.”

  “Yes, they do … And isn’t the human being, made by Him in His image and likeness, isn’t he sacred…? And what about love? Isn’t love sacred?”

  “What love?”

  “Any love, all loves.”

  Elias thought for a moment. The teacher was not referring to the love of God, or not only this. But he responded, “Yes, I think so.”

  “We are in agreement,” Ben Israel said after a pause, and added: “Perhaps you will remember this story, since I spoke of it at the school … As you know, on August 6 of year 70 of the Common Era, the armies of the Roman emperor Titus took Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple. Curiously, that same day of the year 586 before the Common Era, the First Temple had been destroyed—”

  “Tishah-b’Ab, the saddest day of the year for Israel,” Elias interrupted him as he asked himself why the Hakham was repeating that story that even the most ignorant Jews knew.

  “If you do not want to listen to me, you can go.”

  “I’m sorry, Hakham. Continue.”

  “The point I want to get to is to remind you that, beginning with the destruction of the Second Temple and Emperor Hadrian’s persecutions of any practitioner of Judaism, the history of Israel, as a nation, has continued for one thousand seven hundred years. But not built on a land whose last vestiges we lost at that time, but rather built on books written centuries before by the members of the people who never had great artisans, or painters or architects, but did have great narrators who made writing a sort of national obsession … Ours was the first race capable of finding words not just to define all of the complexity of the relationship between man and mystery but also to express the deepest human sentiments, including, of course, love … Shortly after the destruction of the Temple, amid Hadrian’s various persecutions, a great assembly of rabbis and doctors took place and the basic rules for the survival of the fate of the Hebrews were established; two rules that are still valid today … The first is that to study is more important than to observe the prohibitions and the laws, since knowledge of the Torah leads to the obedience of its wise prescriptions, while pure observance, without reasoned understanding of the origin of the laws, does not guarantee true faith, that faith born of reason. The second rule you will remember from Judah Abravanel’s story, which I told you so many times, has to do with life and death. When is it necessary to die before giving in? Those scholars asked themselves more than one thousand five hundred years ago, and responded to all of us that it was necessary only in three situations: if the Jew finds himself forced to adore false idols, forced to commit adultery, or forced to spill innocent blood. But all other laws can be transgressed under threat of death, since life is the most sacred thing,” the teacher said, and
moved his arm as if to recover his pipe, but he desisted. “I want to tell you just two things with this, Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila … One is that laws should be rationalized by man, because that is why he has intelligence, and faith should involve thought, not mere acceptance. The second is that if you do not violate any of the great laws, you are not offending God in an irreversible way. And if you do not offend the Blessed One, you can forget about your neighbors … Of course, if you are resolved to assume the risks of facing the fury of men, which, on occasion, can be more terrible than that of the gods.”

  * * *

  So then, were life and love sacred? What exactly is the sacred? Does it only refer to the divine and its works or also to what is most revered by the human being? And were life and love a gift from God to His creatures, and thus sacred?

  Elias Ambrosius could not help but ask himself these things as he looked at the blushing face of Mariam Roca, listened to the girl’s deep breathing, and felt a joyous beating between his legs, as urgent as he had ever felt.

  He did not have to insist too much, so that, instead of walking through the city, they went that day to wander through the pleasant fields extending beyond the new canals. It was a light-filled Sunday morning, with open skies like a flower in the summer heat, and they entertained themselves contemplating the Prince’s Canal’s palazzos, Amsterdam’s newest and most luxurious.

  “Would you like it if we lived in one like that?” the young man asked her as they passed before the nearly finished building where Isaac Pinto would soon live, and she blushed because of the connotation enclosed in that question. They later took the path that led to the solitude of the abandoned shed where Elias usually placed his easel and his linens to paint in oil. As they walked between locust trees and willows growing at the edges of the swamps, the young man asked himself how far he could go that day in his relationship with Mariam and thought of all the possibilities that his inexperienced mind was capable of offering him. But when he had sat down alongside her, their backs leaning against the worn walls of that shed in the shade, and almost by instinct begun an advance toward new territories, which she had not rejected (caresses on her neck with the back of his hand, a light touch of her lips with his finger), Elias did not hold back. He took the girl’s face in his hands and placed his lips atop hers, thus prompting the vigorous response that was incapable of conquering the questions besieging his mind before the certainty that the magic of that instant, Mariam’s beauty, and the beating, the hardening of his member, and the sensation of power that exalted it, were also the sacred. They had to be, since they led to the very essence of life, to the most sublime communication with the best thing God had given his creatures.

  Ever since he saw her for the first time at Hakham ben Israel’s house, almost a year before, Elias Ambrosius had had the feeling that that girl, barely sixteen years old, was predestined to enter his life. Mariam’s parents and grandparents, former Portuguese conversos, for years had preferred to settle in Leiden, where her father, a doctor by profession who took his degree in Porto, had obtained a discreet post as a professor of medicine at the city’s famous university. Later, when her father was called to work with the famous Dr. Efraín Bueno, they ended up in Amsterdam at last. The link with that doctor connected Mariam’s father with the scholar Ben Israel (friend of any doctor existing in the city, whom he compulsively consulted regarding his real and imagined illnesses) and, due to the closeness of the elders, also connected the two young people. Elias and Mariam’s outings, initiated under the pretext that the young man would show the recently arrived girl the city where she was now living, had placed Elias in the privileged circumstance of having the time and space to feed a sentimental relationship whose growth the girl’s family seemed to accept with good humor, despite the fact that the Montalbo de Ávila clan did not figure among, or come even close to, Amsterdam’s wealthiest, although they were among the most respected for their education and work ethic.

  That unforgettable morning, when Elias was getting ready to kiss Mariam Roca for the second time, he rested his gaze for a few seconds on the young woman’s eyes: clear eyes, honey-colored, through which he managed to contemplate the sources of desire and fear, of the decisions and the doubts of their owner. And also, without being able to help it, he thought that someday he should paint those eyes—since everything is in the eyes. And if his paintbrushes or charcoal managed to capture the beating life in that gaze, then he would have been capable of exercising the power of trapping a tangible glimpse of the sacred. Like a god. Like the Maestro.

  * * *

  The days, which tumbled forward in search of autumn, passed slowly over the scarce works to which the Maestro devoted himself around that time. In those months, two of the oldest students left the workshop, first Barent Fabritius and later Keil the Dane, who, before returning to his frozen lands, gave the Jew for whom he had bought so many beers a small canvas on which he had painted a marina, a work that, along with Elias’s folders and notebooks, had to return to the hiding place in the attic of his house. Shortly after, to occupy the vacancies, other apprentices joined them, such as a certain Christoph Paudiss, come from Hamburg with the express pretension of turning into his country’s greatest painter. In addition, week after week, Mme. Dircx’s face became visibly more hostile due to the youthful presence and rising role of Emely Kerk in the home … Everything moved, turned, ascended, or descended, but the weeks passed and the promised paintbrush did not reach the hands of Elias Ambrosius, who was plagued by an anxiety that not even his well-requited love could manage to calm. An anxiety that had been on the rise, when, in the most unexpected way, he had discovered with certainty the true identity of Salom Italia.

  For several months, on each occasion that arose and led by his obsession, Elias Ambrosius dedicated hours to again visiting the sellers of paintings in all of the city’s markets, jumping from the contemplation of the works to an interrogation about possible knowledge of a certain Salom Italia, engraver and illustrator, almost certainly living in Amsterdam. The street merchants, so in the know of what moved (and what didn’t move) in the city’s painting market, always denied having ever heard that name that, by all accounts, must be that of a Jew. And they added: A Jewish painter?, accentuating their suspicion of the inconceivable.

  At the synagogue, each Saturday, the young man devoted himself to observing the attendees, focusing on the sons of the affluent businessmen on one day and on the artists specializing in carving diamonds on another day; and on yet another, on the men who had arrived in recent years, as if the observation of their physical presence could open the door to the secret that was so well guarded by some of the Jews present there. He was convinced, besides, that not only Isaac Pinto and Hakham ben Israel had dealt with that ghost who even dared to decorate Queen Esther’s scroll. If the man was dedicated to making engravings, there must be several copies of each work, and someone must’ve bought them or, at least, received them. The work carried out on a roll of Scripture must not be, he thought, a unique effort, and there was no one better than another Jew to appreciate a work like the one Isaac Pinto treasured.

  It was the last Saturday in August when Elias Ambrosius finally found, at the very moment in which he was not seeking it, the clue capable of leading him, as he immediately realized, to knowing the identity of Salom Italia. It happened right at the synagogue, during one of the last morning prayers (the musaf, with which Jews are reminded of the sacrifices carried out in the temple), when, deep in prayer, he lowered his gaze and what he saw made him lose the rhythm of the words. On the other side of the main aisle, in the same row where he was praying, there was a boot on which a yellow dot shone that could only be a drop of paint. Slowly, without ceasing to move his lips empty of words, he began to run his eyes over the physical presence of the man dressed in that boot and found, at last, the face that was unknown to him. The man, a few years older than him, had a trimmed beard and mustache, in the new fashion, and below his tallith was wearin
g a finely woven shirt, without a doubt expensive. That man could be anything but a poor house painter who owned just one pair of boots. That stain had to be a splash of pigment diluted in oil …

  The close of the morning ceremony stunned him into a state of total excitement over what he sensed was the unquestionable discovery capable of leading him to the resolution of his doubts and fears. Without waiting for his parents and his grandfather (Amos had been attending a service for months that brought together the boring and very formal Germans in a small room turned synagogue), without looking toward the balcony occupied by the women where his beloved Mariam was, the young man left the temple, removing his kippah and tallith and, with the skill he had already acquired, posted himself behind the stall of some street vendors of fruits and vegetables in season to await the exit of the man with the stained boot. Who was that character? Why had he never seen him before?

  Before the majority of the faithful had left the synagogue, the unknown man, after trading his ritual kippah for an elegant, cream-colored felt hat, went out onto the street and, with evident haste, began to cross the Visserplein in the direction of Meijer Square. At a distance that he considered prudent to not risk discovery but not lose his target, Elias Ambrosius followed him over the new and wide Blauwbrug Bridge, over the Amstel behind him, and, after crossing the Botermarkt, he was fairly surprised when he saw the pursued man digging around in his pockets until he extracted a key with which he opened the door to one of the houses on the Reguliersdwarsstraat, quite close to the north shore of the Herengracht, the Gentlemen’s Canal.