Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  On the small table where the old man—from the time in which he was still far from becoming an old man—used to write, study the sacred texts, and read the books that cheered him so, his son Abraham Montalbo found the sealed paper where the man, in foresight, had a few weeks prior written his last wishes. No one in the house was surprised that he would order each detail of his funeral; he even wrote some well-reasoned advice for each member of the family, and that he would leave the only material goods of value accumulated throughout his long life to his grandson Elias Ambrosius: that desk and those books were meant for him. And only when he received the news of the inheritance could the young man finally cry some tears that had seemed to have dried out. Later, seated behind the beautiful desk, as he caressed the leather spines and covers of the prodigious volumes that now belonged to him, Elias discovered how several of them seemed more worn by the intense handling to which their owner must have subjected them. Among the more worn ones were, of course, two works by Maimonides, Benjamin Montalbo’s favorite thinker, and Léon Hebreo’s Dialoghi d’Amore, but also several modern authors, not related at all to faith or religion, such as that Miguel de Cervantes, author of a thick novel called The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, and the so-called Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (incidentally, the translator of the Dialoghi into Castilian Spanish), author of La Florida del Inca, a chronicle of the frustrated attempts at conquest of that territory in the New World where, it was said, the Fountain of Eternal Youth had been found. The physical contact with those books—destined to keep his grandfather in communication with the lands of idolatry from which he had escaped to recover his faith, but whose language and culture he loved as his own—made Elias understand the real dimension of the conflict in which that unfathomable human being had lived: the dispute maintained by his spirit between belonging to a centuries-old faith, culture, and traditions, which he felt linked to through his blood, and the proximity to a landscape, a language, a literature, among which several generations of his ancestors had lived—ancestors who had arrived on the Peninsula with Berbers from the desert in a remote time, and amid whom he had spent the first thirty-three years of his life and whose products he had never been able to or wanted to renounce (as he had never renounced chickpeas, rice, and, whenever he could, the luxury of dipping his bread in olive oil). No, he never was able to nor wanted to renounce that belonging, not even after having lived in Makom and having learned of the rabbis’ precepts, aimed at cutting off all of those dangerous approximations to the past and what they considered to be hidden dangers of idolatry.

  Throughout the seven days of observing shivah, confined with his parents and brother in the house as the ceremony stipulated, Elias Ambrosius came to convince himself that he had been terribly small-minded by not having made his grandfather privy to his disquiet and his decisions. More than anyone else in the world, Benjamin Montalbo would have been in a position to understand him: because he was his grandfather and loved him, because he knew many of his secrets, and because he had lived for so many years with a divided soul. Perhaps, even, the old man would have marveled at the young man’s progress and asked him for one of the canvases that, rolled or folded, he now hid in a trunk at the Maestro’s house. Perhaps his grandfather would have reached out to him there, in front of the table where he enjoyed writing with his pen, that corner from where he traveled with his books and where, upon feeling death’s call, he had left his testament.

  Many times in the last two years, lived by Elias in a vertigo of overwhelming feelings, a vertigo of lessons and of increasingly less clumsy works, the young man had thought about the possibility of opening the physical and mental closet of his secrets to the old man. Of course, he was the only one of his relatives to whom he would speak of the beauty that the Maestro was capable of generating and of the obtuse reaction of the buyers of his paintings, who considered him a violator of precepts instead of a forger of unexplored paths. His grandfather had also been the first to whom he communicated his decision to become formally engaged to Mariam Roca, and then Elias received the most logical and sincere response from the old man: “I am dying of envy, son.” But, in contrast, he had never had the courage to cross the borders of his fears and tell him about his loves as a painter’s apprentice and speak to him of the moments of joy lived with the paintbrush that the Maestro had given him: moments such as the one dedicated to painting a bust of the beloved old man on a canvas.

  Because in those two years, Elias Ambrosius had had other opportunities to practice his presumed abilities following the Maestro’s guidance and orders, given to him specifically or obtained as a collective benefit during the process of some joint work with the rest of the students. Besides receiving the responsibility of priming the linens so that he could familiarize himself with the creation of those earthy backgrounds that the artist used so much, Elias learned to paint some of the objects and works collected by the man—a conch shell with its spirals, a bust of a Roman emperor, a marble sculpted hand, besides copying sketches by other artists and themes—which had served, alongside several live models, including nude ones, as didactic exercises through which the Maestro’s advice refined and confirmed the young man’s doubtless abilities. Meanwhile, in the attic of the house and in the shed in the field, Elias Ambrosius had tried to put that knowledge into practice and carried out several self-portraits, outlined landscapes, copied objects (always hearing in his mind the words of the painter) and, in a fit of daring, would make the decision to tell Mariam Roca his burning secret, since he wanted, more than anything in the world, to do an au naturel portrait of his lover and betrothed.

  The girl’s surprise at hearing Elias’s confession turned out to be as obvious as it should have been and had to be. They spent several days talking about the subject, and the young man had to dodge the abundant reasons accumulated in those years to justify an act that many could consider heretical. When the discussion stalled and the young man lost all hope of being able to convince Mariam that doing what he was doing was his right as an individual, and even feared that the young woman could inform on him, Elias consoled himself by thinking that, sooner or later, he would have needed to make that confession—and run all the implicit risks—to the person with whom he aimed to share the rest of his life. That was why, when Mariam, seemingly more used to the idea, had agreed to serve as his model, under the condition that her decision also be a secret, Elias knew that he had obtained an important victory and preferred not to ask the young woman if her acceptance was limited to her role as a model or if it also implied acceptance of the exercise of painting by her betrothed.

  The first portrait of Mariam, leaning on the window of the shed and looking out at the spectator, was in reality a painful exercise of copying the marvelous portrait that, some years before, with a similar composition, the Maestro had carried out of the beautiful Emely Kerk. The difficulties that the lights, anatomy, or proportions could present were overcome fairly easily by the young man, who had already learned so much about those elements. The use of the colors to create the skin and the hair, cut out against a deep background, was almost easy for him, after having seen so much skin and so many backgrounds painted, after having painted them with two hands with his companions and even with the Maestro. It was more complicated for him to achieve a reasonable likeness, to fix the woman’s beauty, although at one point, with much effort, he thought he had achieved it and Mariam, looking at herself in the mirror, confirmed it for him. But what he most pursued and what, nonetheless, remained evasive and uncapturable for his abilities as a portraitist, was the young woman’s soul. If he had been able to enter into possession of each of the girl’s feelings and thoughts, physically and through love, when he tried to bring her spirit to the small canvas, he discovered his inexperience and shortness of breath to reflect the expression of that face on which Elias could see vitality and unease, doubt and love, the enjoyment of risk and the fear that this caused. But he did not manage to capture them. Moved by his failure, Elias
reconsidered his intentions. He then began to work on a second portrait, a work that was his in every way. He placed Mariam in a complicated profile in which her face was turning, making a delicate downward diagonal with the line of her neck, while her eyes, visible, remained focused on an imprecise spot in the direction of the canvas’s lower corner. At that moment, he understood that—as the Maestro had said to him once, so it could not fail to be—all of the humanity in transposition lay in the challenge of the eyes. He thought that if he had failed in his purpose it was due to his determination to reflect the young woman with her gaze facing forward, with a direct, explicit, leading expression. When in reality what the best representation of Mariam required was a mystery. He then asked the girl to, without looking at him, speak to him with her eyes, as if she were whispering something in his ear … Carefully, in several work sessions, he went outlining the eyebrows, lids, pupils, and iris of that gaze as he avoided the obvious and sought out the unfathomable. And when he believed he had reflected the gaze, he let the paintbrush establish its own dialogue with the rest of the details of her face, to make believable the miracle of understanding a suggestion … The Sunday afternoon that he made that discovery and immersed himself in the struggle to express it was one of the fullest moments in the life of Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila, since he again had the feeling of discovering what the sacred was. Because there was, beating, on a small piece of canvas stained with pigments, a woman who, from her forced stillness, offered the illusion of life.

  How had it been possible for his fears to prevent him from showing his grandfather Benjamin Montalbo that small portrait in which he had succeeded in capturing something evanescent and opening the powerful doors of creation? The old man—dead now that Elias had that conviction—would not only have understood but would have encouraged him: because that man had not been more sensitive to anything than to the desire and human will to reach a goal despite everything. And on that linen was the ambition of a man and the will to meet the objectives with which the Creator had gifted him …

  Elias would end up consoling himself with the idea that if it was actually true that in the lands of the Turks, the Persians, and the Egyptians the Messiah was going around announcing his arrival (he seemed to wander through all of those regions at the same time, judging by the multiple echoes reaching Amsterdam of his wandering and even of his miracles), perhaps very soon he, Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila, would be able to approach his grandfather and, in the middle of the apotheosis of the Final Judgment, ask his forgiveness for his lack of trust. Because that was the true sin that he should be sorry for, in the eyes of God and in the face of the memory of the spirit of a pious man. And he hoped to obtain a pardon from both.

  * * *

  Amsterdam was a beehive, as was Elias Ambrosius’s heart. A few weeks after Grandfather Benjamin’s funeral, the news of the death, in The Hague, of the stadtholder Frederik Hendrik de Nassau, who would be succeeded in his dignity by his son William, increased the expectation in which the city’s inhabitants were already living because of, they said, the until then imminent signing of a peace treaty between the deceased stadtholder and the Spanish crown. That peace, which could put an end to a century of wars and would consolidate the independence of the Republic of the United Provinces of the North, would arrive as the deserved prize for the heated resistance of the country’s inhabitants but, above all, as a result of its economic success, such a contrast to the critical state of the Spanish empire’s finances, which were already incapable, as everyone knew, of maintaining Spain’s armies any longer in an encampment stranded at sea and unable to last for long in the swamps and winters of that inhospitable territory. But the joy inspired by the awaited political and military dénouement began to fade, dragged by the greater danger of William of Nassau’s ascension to stadtholder, a man whose monarchic aspirations were well-known and, with them, his opposition to the republican and federative system to which citizens attributed the country’s success in mercantile, political, social, and even military matters. Due to the economic bonanza, the Republic had been able to finance ground forces, made up in their majority not by Amsterdam’s burghers, The Hague’s noblemen, or Leiden’s scholars, but rather, above all, by mercenaries and warlords who had come from all over Europe to fight for a fair quantity of healthy florins. Only the republican regiment, it was also thought and said, had allowed the economic ascent of a great mass of merchants in the country, generators of wealth, inspired in their efforts by the fact of having freed themselves from dragging along the burden of a court, a nobility, and a parasitic bureaucracy like the ones bleeding Spain. And now, when they seemed so close to military and political victory, William of Nassau could annihilate that social balance thanks to the fact that many citizens had found a better life, with the pleasant benefits of freedom—a freedom that could soon be, as the crowning decoration, political as well if the new stadtholder signed the peace with the Spanish.

  If Elias Ambrosius was so up-to-date on the specifics of his country’s public affairs, it was not due to his wisdom but rather the privileged situation of his ears and his mind, which, because of the responsibilities and abilities he now enjoyed in the Maestro’s house and workshop, allowed him to be the witness (silent in his case) to some of the passionate conversations maintained between the painter and many of his friends, but especially the young burgher Jan Six.

  Since the previous year, when he arrived at the Maestro’s house to negotiate the making of a portrait, Jan Six had begun to establish a relationship with the painter that soon went beyond the fleeting and pragmatic limits of a pictorial commission. A current of mutual sympathy, which in Six’s case was fueled by his artistic aspirations—since he thought himself to be a poet and playwright—and for the Maestro by his commercial vocation and his constant need for money, had drawn together those two men, who were ten years apart in age and separated by the fortune of one and the never-ending economic binds of the other. Besides, the current of affinity had as its basis the fondness both shared for collecting, which would make of Six, who was a compulsive purchaser of art, a dazzled admirer of the paintings, books of engravings, and many incredible objects amassed by the Maestro.

  Despite his youth, Jan Six already held the position of auxiliary burgemeester, and served as one of the city’s magistrates, due to the circumstance of belonging to one of Amsterdam’s most affluent families. The Sixes were the owners of a dwelling in the exclusive Kloveniersburgwal, the so-called Houses of the Blue Eagle, next to the famous Crystal House, the property of Floris Soop, the very rich maker of mirrors and glasses, and a stone’s throw away from the citizen militia’s luxurious building displaying the Maestro’s great work that, like Elias Ambrosius, had also stirred great feelings in the young Six and generated a solid admiration for its creator.

  Since the first attempts and studies for Jan Six’s possible portrait, for a variety of reasons, the young Jew closely followed the Maestro’s strange creative process, which, two years later, had still not produced the great portrait that Six had at one point sought to have to feed his ego and his collection, and that the Maestro wished to carry out, for obvious monetary reasons and for the revaluation of his work in the world of the city’s great burghers. At times like one more disciple, at others as the painter’s assistant, Elias had watched the elaboration of two marvelous drawings, made as sketches, with which the Maestro resolved to define his customer’s tastes to fully satisfy them and avoid unpleasant episodes like the one with Andries de Graeff, which, should it repeat itself, would have been devastating for his prestige already in question as a portraitist.

  The burgemeester had welcomed one of the sketches with absolute enthusiasm. Not the one that highlighted his condition as a politician and man of action, but rather the one in which he appeared as a young and beautiful writer, armed with a manuscript on which he concentrated his attention, his body leaning against a window through which light entered to illuminate his face, the manuscript, and part of th
e room, until falling over the armchair where other books rested. That drawing gave Jan Six the image of himself that he most desired to give others. It satisfied him so much that he would ask the Maestro for something unusual: that instead of painting it in oil, he do so on an etched plate, so that he could make several copies for different purposes. And he would pay the price for an etched plate equal to the value of an oil painting.

  In that way, first as a generous customer, later as a pampered admirer and very soon as a friend, Jan Six became a habitual presence in the Maestro’s house and workshop at a time in which the painter was living one of his ecstatic moments, since just a few months prior he had managed to hire as his son Titus’s governess the young Hendrickje Stoffels—less beautiful, although by all appearances more intelligent than Emely Kerk—from a humble family like her predecessor, whom he had very quickly brought to his bed. And he had so enjoyed that awakening of his passions as a mature man, that he had made a beautiful and provocative painting on a panel that he titled simply Hendrickje Stoffels in Bed, in which the young girl, half-dressed, with no other adornment but a golden ribbon in her hair, is raising the bed’s curtain with her left hand and peeking out at the observer, covering her breast with a sheet and lying on a soft pillow … In the Maestro’s bed.