Two days later, Elias Ambrosius had already accumulated all of the information necessary to and capable of confirming for him how a furtive drop of paint could reward the work of several months and revealed to him one of the best-kept secrets in the city of secrets. The dweller of the house around Herengracht was said to be called Davide da Mantova, and he was (as those who knew him proclaimed) a great-grandson of Spanish Sephardic Jews, although a native of that city in the north of Italy, to which he frequently traveled for long periods of time. In Mantova, the man maintained commercial contacts with the Venetian Jewish community, thanks to whom he imported to Amsterdam mirrors, glass, vases, and high-quality glass beads from the famous factories of the lagoon of Venice, with lucrative benefits that were possible to infer, and, further still, demonstrated by the clothing he wore and the door of the dwelling where he lived. Due to his financial position and the particularities of his business, Davide da Mantova—as young Elias already imagined him—when in Amsterdam, moved in the circle of wealthy Sephardic Jews and powerful local burghers whose doors were always open to that provider of exclusive marvels.
Elias Ambrosius did not doubt it any longer: that man had to be Salom Italia, and if he was not familiar with him before this, it was only due to the fact that his presence in the city tended to be sporadic, since he spent the majority of his time in Italy. But the identification solved only part of the problem, while the essential parts remained: how to access this man, would he reveal that he knew his secret, and, above all, how would he make him speak of his hidden vocation? The possible paths that he knew to approach Davide da Mantova had already revealed themselves to be impassable: neither Hakham ben Israel nor Isaac Pinto nor the Maestro were going to betray the man’s trust, and, to be fair, it would be petty of him to ask them for that infidelity when he owed them the preservation of his own secret, so similar to that of Salom Italia.
The feeling that he was before an inaccessible mystery so necessary to penetrate in order to calm his own unease made Elias Ambrosius feel all the weight of his double life, loaded with silences, concealment, and even lies, a mask that he had been dragging along ever since he made the decision to see through the realization of his forbidden vocation. Several times, as he followed the presumed Jewish painter around the city, moving like an otherworldly shadow, he tried to imagine how that Davide da Mantova must manage his life, always worried about not taking people into his confidence more than was recommended, showing the world only half of his face, reducing his artistic accomplishments to a circle of accomplices committed to silence—perhaps the worst punishment for an artist. He asked himself if his parents, over in Italy, or his wife, here in Amsterdam, participated in the arrangement or if they were, like Grandfather Benjamin, his own parents, and his beloved Mariam, asking themselves about the fate and origins of strange attitudes of a being who was simultaneously close and unknown, a grandson, son, and boyfriend whom they did not even know was spending every minute of his existence besieged by the fear of man and the most transcendental doubts.
It was then that Elias Ambrosius came to ask himself if it was worth living under those conditions: if it was what was best for his loved ones and for himself, if a permanent double life represented the only option that his time, race, and vocation allowed him, or if there was some way out that did not lead to disaster. Perhaps the most advisable, he came to think, would be to forget about a flirtation that, at the end of the day, still had not led him to anything, and, while he still had time to avoid greater disgraces, he could hand himself over to building a normal life, without any distress, in which he could open himself up, body and, above all, soul to everyone else. In that way, he would live a life without fears (always that damned fear), but also without ambitions or dreams; he would glide through the clamor of days that were increasingly the same, without ever again feeling that exciting desire, born in the deepest part of his being, to take up a piece of charcoal or a paintbrush and face the supreme challenge of aiming to internalize the gaze of happiness of the young lover, the fragment of a pleasant landscape, the power of Samson, or the faith of Tobit, just as his unrestrained imagination showed them, just as the Maestro had captured them. A normal man’s normal life with room for being even better.
One night, when his sickening obsession to penetrate the world of the man he pursued made him stand watch in front of the house on Reguliersdwarsstraat until the last candle in the dwelling went out, the young man, as he weighed his excruciating options, discovered that the problem did not lie in knowing how Salom Italia or Davide da Mantova thought and lived: the problem lay in knowing how Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila wanted to or could act on his desire.
* * *
“Drop that damned broom. Take this square palette … Grab this bunch of paintbrushes … Come on, we’re going to work!”
Elias Ambrosius felt his legs go weak, his voice falter, his breath escape his soul until he was left inert. But he also discovered the way in which an unknown, superhuman power came to his aid to help him obey the order for which he had been waiting for almost three years: the Maestro was inviting him to paint! His doubts and even his determination to end that juvenile flirtation that had pursued him in recent weeks as he followed the trail of Salom Italia’s enigma, where did they go? He didn’t even manage to ask himself, because the only possible response he could give at that moment, the only one he really wanted to give, was the one that finally came from his lips: “I am ready, Maestro.”
The painter, covered with a white bonnet under which he restrained his curls when he worked, sat down on a bench in front of which there were two small primed canvases. From there, he looked at the young man, palette and brush in hand, and smiled. He left his own brush and palette on the bench, to remove an apron from a hook. “Let’s see,” he said, and Elias lowered his head so that the Maestro could place the protective fabric, stained in a thousand colors, over him with the gesture similar to that of awarding a military decoration.
“Put ocher, yellow, vermilion, white, and sienna on your palette. With those colors, Apelles was able to paint Alexander taking a thunderbolt in his hand in front of Artemis’s temple. With those colors, you can paint everything,” the Maestro said, and, after pointing out the porcelain jars with the already diluted pigments, he turned toward the linen and looked at it, as if questioning it. Elias, in silence, awaited a new order and only then had enough lucidity to overcome his emotions and ask himself what they were going to paint. He looked around and understood the Maestro’s intention: by the placement of the mirrors, that of the easels, and the angle at which the painter had placed himself in relation to the light coming from the windows, the object to be worked on could be none other than the Maestro himself.
“I don’t have an outstanding commission,” the painter nearly whispered, without ceasing to look at the linen. “And today I have lost my best model … I had to throw Emely Kerk out of the house because I caught her fornicating with one of the students … You can guess who. And since I cannot do without the florins that the father of that apprentice pays me … That whore.”
Elias Ambrosius finally had the answer to the unusual pleasantness with which, just a few minutes before, Mme. Dircx had received him, as she was playing with little Titus in the kitchen. In some way, the old lioness had arranged things to take the young claimant out of the game.
“Are you really ready?” the Maestro asked him, pointing with the end of his brush at the other bench, placed before the second canvas. Elias did not delay in responding this time:
“I believe that I have spent my whole life waiting for this moment, Maestro.”
“So, do you now know why you are willing to risk everything and prove yourself as a painter?”
“Yes, I know now … Because…”
The Maestro lifted his paintbrush, asking him to stop. “That is important only to you … And do not worry if the answer seems too simple. Mine is extremely simple … Had I kept studying medicine at the university, perhap
s I would be rich now and living calmly … Today, my life is riddled with problems. And I do not regret my response.”
Elias Ambrosius nodded. Could there be anything more basic than wanting to paint because one feels the need to do so, an incorruptible need, capable of taking him to face all difficulties and risks?
“A few weeks ago, I discovered who the man is who painted the scroll of Queen Esther,” he then said, also because he needed to. “I know the name of that Salom Italia, where he lives, what he does for living…”
“But you didn’t do something as foolish as try to talk to him?”
“No, I didn’t know how to do it … But, why foolish?”
The Maestro sighed and looked at the challenging canvas awaiting him.
“Because you have no right to violate his privacy, just as others have no right to violate yours. Besides, whatever he would have told you would have been his response, not yours.”
“You are right … After following that man for several days, I thought about not going back to the workshop anymore, about forgetting all of this.” He made a gesture with his paintbrush to indicate everything surrounding him: a gesture he had copied from the Maestro. “But I know that that is impossible … At least now. And less still, now.”
The Maestro nodded, still looking at the linen primed in an earth color before him. “You don’t know how much what happened with Emely hurts me … But, it’s better for you: thanks to her, today you will paint with me.”
“I am glad, Maestro,” he said, and immediately felt the desire to bite his damn tongue. But the man seemed to have not heard him, absorbed perhaps in his thoughts.
“Before dipping your paintbrush, you should have an idea of where you want to go, although you may not know how you’re going to do it … Today, I would like to get to the sadness that’s in the soul of a forty-year-old man. I’d like to discover it, because it is a new sadness … Pain is not the same as sadness, did you know? I have a lot of experience with pain, as well as with fury, with disappointment, with frustration … And also with the enjoyment of success, even when others have not understood and have pushed me aside … Which is not strange, after all … But sadness is a deep feeling, too personal. Joy and pain, surprise and fury, are exultant, they change the face, the gaze … But sadness marks one inside. Where do you think I can find sadness?”
Elias Ambrosius responded immediately, satisfied with his wisdom: “In the eyes. Everything is in the eyes.”
The Maestro shook his head no.
“Do you still think that you know something…? No, not sadness. Sadness is beyond the eyes … You have to get inside his thoughts, inside the man’s soul, to see it and speak with those depths to try to reflect them…” The Maestro dipped his brush in the yellow pigment and started to mark the lines of what soon started to be a head. “Because of that, very few men have managed to portray sadness … A sad man would never look at the spectator. He would search for something beyond the person looking at him, a far-off point, lost in the distance and simultaneously inside himself. He would never look up, in search of hope; nor down, as if he were ashamed or fearful. He should have his gaze fixed on the unfathomable … His face lightly leaning inward, the light not shining too much on the cheek turned to the spectator, very visible lids … To make that face stand out and so that you can concentrate all the strength in it, it has always been best to use a dark brown background, but never black: the depth of the atmosphere corresponds to the depth of feeling, it would reiterate them and eliminate their mystery … Tell me, kid, do you feel capable of painting my sadness?”
“I’m going to try it, with your permission…”
And Elias dipped his brush in the same matte yellow used by the Maestro and placed the damp coarseness on the canvas to make it run down, softly, marking the first contour of the face. Then he looked at the mirror placed in front of him, in which were reflected, at a slight tilt, the Maestro’s head and torso. He looked at the well-known form of his face, his distinctive features—the flattened nose, the nearly fleshy mouth, the fleeting angles of the slightly leaning chin—he assessed the weights of the white bonnet and of the reddish curls falling over his ears, and stopped on his eyes, in that gaze of a man who touched the heavens so many times, whose fame was known in capitals across Europe, before whom The Hague’s stadtholder, after having offended him, had given in and agreed to pay him a fortune for two works that only that man was capable of achieving with the dreamed of mastery, the same man who, at that moment, had decided to make a self-portrait and offer himself to a pupil so that, between both of them, they could try to hunt his sadness over having lost something as mundane and, for someone of his position, so easy to replace, as a young and beautiful lover. Through those eyes, Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila was opening the path for himself toward his paradise or his Inferno, but without a doubt toward the luminous place at which, with all of his soul and consciousness, he wanted to arrive.
* * *
Yes, this is the sacred, he told himself when he felt, after briefly fighting her hymen, how his body slid into the deepest parts of Mariam Roca. Following the rupture, which caused her the annoyance of a pain she had already been warned about, she opened her eyes and swallowed air as she devoured in her deepest insides the circumcised penis now ambitiously occupying her favorable female space, giving her a greater sense of life. The unpredictable but visceral movement of the novice lovers’ hips acquired a rhythm and made the fit decisive and later, moved by runaway, dizzying, devouring, and still more dizzying grinding that later became slow, slow, slow … Until, trained by his readings of the Bible, Elias Ambrosius had enough lucidity to execute Onan’s strategy and disconnect himself, to ejaculate outside of the young girl’s well. He knew that before giving in to complete enjoyment it would be necessary to break the glass with which the matrimonial ceremonies celebrated by their ancestors in the demolished Temple of Jerusalem were recalled. For now, he had to resign himself to enjoying that revelation of the sacred, without aiming to internalize it with the miracle of procreation.
3
New Jerusalem, Year 5407 Since the Creation, 1647 of the Common Era
It is written: Immortality is the supreme privilege that only a select few will enjoy. Armed with the patience of incommensurate time, the souls of those fortunate ones had to wait in Sheol, an intangible territory, extended like a mass of water under the world inhabited by the living. There they would rest until the coming of the Messiah and the Day of Judgment, when the possible, only possible, resurrection of their bodies and souls would occur, decided at last by divine will. Of the many beings who would pass over the face of the earth, only select dwellers of Sheol would be chosen to participate in that last phase. Among them would be the men and women who in life were pious, children who died in their innocence, those fallen in combat defending the rights and the Law of the Holiest and of His chosen people. Elias Ambrosius treasured that personal image of the apotheosis that would come after the journey of souls through Sheol. His grandfather Benjamin Montalbo de Ávila had given him that on the day of his initiation into adult life and responsibility, celebrated in the synagogue and officiated by then still rabbi Menasseh ben Israel.
“I am happy for you,” the old man had said to him, after adjusting the kippah on his skull and kissing him on both cheeks. “You are lucky to have been born in the most propitious and longed-for time and place for a Jew since we abandoned our land and went into exile. You are going to discover for yourself that living in this city is a privilege, that Amsterdam is Makom, the good place. But never forget it: there is a place that is much better. Only the Messiah can take us there when he gathers the living and the dead and opens the gates of Jerusalem to us. Because of that, with our thoughts and actions, we should foster the arrival of the Anointed, so that we can enjoy this marvelous world where there is always light, where it is never cold, where one never feels hunger or pain, much less fear, because in the end, there is nothing to fear. For that place whe
re one is so at ease, the Eden that Adam knew before the Fall, we have to fight while we are in this other world, which, dealing with Makom, we must recognize, my son, is not bad at all.”
Grandfather Benjamin’s words and the sweet images they managed to evoke in Elias Ambrosius’s imagination had come to the aid of his mind to ease the painful moment of seeing himself forced to watch how the old man’s body—wrapped in the first tallith he used upon arriving in Amsterdam and initiated himself in the faith of his ancestors—was lost to the depths of the grave, in search of proximity to the dominions of Sheol, where that pious and steadfast man had every right to go. While Hakham ben Israel proclaimed the ritual prayers invoking resurrection, Elias Ambrosius could not help but wonder, worried about his grandfather’s fate, whether the news that had arrived from the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean (which his skepticism had not allowed him to devote too much attention to until then) referring to the wanderings in those lands of a self-proclaimed Messiah, a maker of miracles, and who had awoken so much expectation among Jews around the world, had any basis in fact and would allow him, perhaps, the best meeting, in the best of places, with that man of such an understanding heart, the person whom he had most loved in his life until his virility was won over by Mariam Roca.
The death of Grandfather Benjamin surprised them, although they expected it. Seventy-eight years already celebrated, the old man had lived much longer than the majority of his contemporaries (“almost as much as a biblical patriarch,” he himself would say, smiling, when he spoke of his extreme age), but in recent times, his frame had been diminishing at a visible rhythm, although without pain or loss of intelligence. The Friday afternoon on which he left them, he had even asked them to help shave him and seat him in the living room, to attend the ceremony of lighting the Sabbath candles and, as the true patriarch of that home, welcome the happy day, devoted to the Lord and to celebrating the freedom of man. But when the table was set, the candles lit, and the shadows of the night allowed them to see the shine of the first lights announcing the victorious arrival of the awaited day, the greeting that Benjamin Montalbo de Ávila was supposed to proclaim (“Shabbat shalom!”) was not heard by his children and grandchildren. Just like a star in the heavenly orbit: thus had his grandfather’s life gone out.
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