Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  The beneficent presence of Jan Six and of Hendrickje Stoffels greatly improved the mood of the artist, who was again—in Elias’s opinion—the man whom a few years prior, before the death of his wife, he must have been. Even more lively, perhaps, since, as he had declared, he now felt free from artistic and even social conventions, as demonstrated by that painting of Hendrickje in which he publicly aired, and with pride, his amorous relationship with a maid. The feeling of self-satisfaction radiated to everyone surrounding him—an exception made, of course, for Mme. Dircx, with whom he lived at war—including his students. The relationship with Elias Ambrosius had reached the point of being warm, and, thanks to it, the young man was able to sit in on the dialogues with Jan Six, through which he learned so much about the Republic’s political situation. And, likewise, their relationship would lead him to become the main model for the great work that the Maestro was handing himself over to (favored by the fact that his beard had grown out at last, a bit patchy, but a beard at the end of the day) with all of his abilities and rebellions at the ready then: an image of a resurrected Christ having supper after his encounter with his disciples on the road to Emmaus.

  His increasingly visible and important responsibilities in the Maestro’s workshop (as at other times had occurred with Carel Fabritius, now it was Elias who always accompanied him on his shopping expeditions and also served as his most recurred to canvas primer), his own progress as a painter, the public proclamation of his marriage engagement to Mariam Roca, and his promotion to the position of operator in the printshop overseen by his father filled every second of the young man’s life with brilliance while simultaneously leading him to the dangerous circumstance that his secret would be evermore exposed and could be revealed by people capable of complicating his existence, to an extreme degree.

  Luckily for him, people’s attention seemed to be focused on the great political conflicts of the moment, which could bring unpredictable consequences for the members of the Nação, and on more attractive events, such as the publication of a scandalous treatise on the relationship between Man and the Divine, written and distributed by the young Baruch, son of Miguel de Espinoza; or the material problems of placement posed by the arrival of an increasing number of poverty-stricken Jews from the East, a real plague; or the commentaries (loaded with commercial and familiar expectations, for many) on the possible opening of Spanish and Portuguese ports to commerce with Amsterdam. But, above all, the most active and militant part of the Hebrew community was spellbound by the news, increasingly disquieting, generated by the acts of the self-proclaimed Messiah, who now appeared to be wandering about Palestine, on the way to no other place than Jerusalem and announcing the arrival of the judgment in the nearby year of 1648. So one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who, in Amsterdam, would take special interest in the relationship between a painter and a Jew, and Elias Ambrosius was able to enjoy the benefit of some shadows amid which his heart enjoyed a peaceful space.

  * * *

  Young Elias had been living in a true state of ecstasy ever since the Maestro chose him to work with him on that piece that, before the first brushstroke, already had the only title it could have, the same one that on other occasions the painter had used, a title that was simultaneously so susceptible to and so complacent with the Maestro’s obsessions: Pilgrims at Emmaus.

  “I’m not interested in the mystical side of the story but rather in its human condition, which is inexhaustible. That is why I always come back to this passage until I manage to domesticate it, to feel it as definitively mine,” the painter explained to him the afternoon on which, just after the apprentice’s arrival, he communicated his decision to him. “I have been obsessed with the scene for almost twenty years. The first time I painted it, I made Christ a mysterious specter and of the disciple who recognized him, a shocked man … Now I want to paint some normal guys who have the privilege of seeing the Son of God resurrected as he carries out the most common and most symbolic of actions: breaking bread, a simple piece of bread, not the cosmic symbol that your Hakham ben Israel talks about,” he emphasized. “Some common man, full of fear of the persecutions they are suffering, at the moment in which their faith is overcome by the greatest of miracles: the return from the world of the dead. But above all, I want to paint a flesh-and-blood Jesus, a Jesus who has returned from the great beyond and has walked like a living being with those disciples toward Emmaus, and should appear as human and tangible as no one has ever painted him. More alive than the one by the great Caravaggio … But at the same time, possessing power. And that Jesus that I am going to reproduce as a living man is going to have your face and your figure…”

  Then the Maestro, to close in on his objective, proposed to the moved Elias that they carry out an experiment: he would paint a tronie of the young Jew in oil—those busts had been the Maestro’s foremost specialty, back in his distant days of trial and error in his native Leiden—since what interested him most was achieving a recognizable expression of humanity on the divine face. But, and here came the unexpected twist: they would do so with two hands. While he worked on the portrait of Elias, Elias would work on his self-portrait, and between both of them, they would seek out the earthly depths of the man marked by the transcendent condition of having returned from the dominion of death and experiencing a brief earthly transit before taking up his place alongside his Father.

  The greatest drawback that Elias immediately noticed about the tempting project that would put him to work side by side with the greatest painter in the city and perhaps the known world was the public resonance that that piece would achieve by being the Maestro’s work, and the presumable reaction it would provoke among the community’s religious leaders when they saw not that Elias had offered his services as a model for a painting but that he had done so for a painting of the greatest of heresies. And those patriarchs, who were increasingly more inflexible with the worldly reactions of a community over whom they could not lose control, seemed to have had enough already of real heresies or those assumed as such.

  It was, as always, his former professor who became the man he chose to seek clarity in his reasoning. The night on which he appeared at his house, Raquel Abravanel, uncombed and complaining, as usual, told him that her husband was at a meeting of the Mahamad, the rabbinical council, and if he wanted to wait for him, to do so on the steps outside, beneath the mezuzah. And, as usual, she closed the door.

  The spring evening was more temperate than usual for the season and Elias barely gave any thought to the rudeness of the woman, who long ago had ceased to repeat the old Sephardic sentence that summarized her dreams of greatness: “Jajám i merkader, alegría de la muzer.” As both a teacher and a wealth-generating businessman, her husband had proven to be a most resounding failure, and Raquel Abravanel blamed him for all of her misery.

  Although he was about to flee due to the stench of the excrement barges that, every evening, crossed the Binnen Amstel, the joy and fear amid which the young man was living since that afternoon were stronger. And with reason: he himself and his face, fortunately bearded already, would be the object of the Maestro’s art, which would place him in the arena of the most sublime earthly immortality, a condition for which Amsterdam’s richest citizens, including Jan Six, had to pay several hundred florins.

  The Hakham arrived at nearly nine o’clock on a night that took just a few minutes to cool off. From their initial greeting and exchange, the young man understood that the scholar’s mood was not the best. Sitting already in Ben Israel’s chaotic workroom as the Hakham served the first glasses of wine, Elias received a summary of the circumstances that had irritated the man.

  “To instill fear in people, those rabbis are capable of doing anything. Now they want the head of Baruch, the son of Miguel de Espinoza. And, on top of everything, several of them, like Breslau and Montera in the lead, say that they are convinced that the signs coming from Cairo and Jerusalem must be taken into account. That that crazy man wandering around ou
t there could well be the Messiah!”

  After his second glass of wine was in hand, Hakham ben Israel finally told him about the latest adventures of the enlightened one who introduced himself as the Messiah. Everything had begun in Smyrna, where that Sabbatai Zevi was born and, very precociously, had studied the books of the Kabbalah in depth. It was there that, drunk on mysticism or insanity—in Ben Israel’s words—he had launched himself on the most dangerous path toward heresy, willing to challenge all precepts: before the ark of the synagogue, he had pronounced God’s secret and forbidden name, the one that is written, but not said … The reaction of Smyrna’s rabbis was logical and immediate: they excommunicated him, as he deserved. But Sabbatai had more tricks up his sleeve: he left his city and went to Thessaloníki, where he began preaching and, at a meeting of Kabbalists, imitated a marriage ceremony with a scroll of the Torah and proclaimed himself Messiah. He had also been kicked out of Thessaloníki, as could be expected … But that crazy man (they said he was a beautiful man, tall, honey-colored hair, eyes that changed colors like a lizard’s skin, and the owner of an enveloping voice) had ended up in Cairo, where he was welcomed in the house of a rich businessman, the site where the city’s Kabbalists met. There, with his speeches, he convinced—and only the holiest knows how he did it—the city’s scholars and the powerful, who gave him their support and even money. Since then, he had wandered, preaching around Jerusalem, where he had arrived preceded by the fame of his acts, and he had devoted himself to distributing alms, practicing charity, and, they said, carrying out miracles. That entire circus, in the Hakham’s opinion, was rather similar to that of other “messiahs” that we have suffered (“One of those who was quite successful, you already know who”), had entered its most dangerous phase when a certain Nathan of Gaza, a young Kabbalist, supposedly the possessor of prophetic gifts, announced that the enormous truth had been revealed to him: Sabbatai Zevi was the reincarnation of the eternally awaited prophet Elias, and his arrival, coinciding with all of the disgraces suffered by the sons of Israel in recent centuries (“As if suffering disgraces were something new for us”), constituted the definitive announcement of the coming final judgment, marked for the year 1648, when still unimaginable misfortunes for the sons of the Chosen People would occur, the final, apocalyptic ones, prior to the arrival of redemption.

  “Right now, that fake is running around Palestine, followed by that Nathan of Gaza and hundreds of Jews so desperate that they are capable of believing in his sermons, and inviting everyone to ‘scale the wall’ and gather in Jerusalem,” he said.

  Elias Ambrosius, whose rebellion and rationality had never managed to stamp out the strong messianic feeling with which his grandfather Benjamin infected him, felt that there was something new, although difficult to pinpoint in Sabbatai’s story—perhaps not only the insanity of an unhinged man. The rabbinical prohibition against “scaling the wall” and entering Jerusalem to gather anew the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses represented a real challenge to which no other enlightened one had dared. Since the days of the founding rabbinical councils that served to establish the precepts and laws gathered in the Talmud and the Mishnah, it was well-known by all Jews in the world that that act of aspiring to a massive return to the Holy Land was considered a precise way of tempting the arrival of salvation and, as such, was absolutely prohibited, since exile formed part of the destiny of that people until the determination of the true Messiah.

  “With all due respect, Hakham … Why couldn’t Sabbatai be the Messiah? So many indicators, so much daring…”

  “He is not for the many reasons that I took care of reminding those fanatics with whom we live and who take advantage of everything to feed the people’s fear and thus control them at their will,” the scholar said, nearly yelling, losing his temper. “Because the prophet Elias himself warned that the Anointed would only come when Jews lived in every corner of the earth, and that still has not happened.”

  “Because the American indigenous people are not the descendants of the ten lost tribes?”

  “For starters, that … And to continue, because in England, as you well know, as I have said thousands of times, there have been no Jews for three hundred and fifty years … Because the Messiah will be a warrior. Because his arrival will be preceded by great cataclysms … But think, kid, think: Where did this Sabbatai of Smyrna come from?”

  With the revelation of that detail, Elias Ambrosius ended up understanding the Hakham’s position: to accept even the possibility of Sabbatai’s messianism would mean the loss of his signature struggle for the admission of Jews in England and, above all, the abandonment of the Abravanels’ aspirations that he, part of the clan, took so much responsibility in predicating.

  “It doesn’t matter what other members of the council say, nor that some rich Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam—along with many of the city’s poor—are throwing away their fortunes for a spot on the boats leaving toward Jerusalem, where they will all join the crazy man’s retinue. I am only concerned with what will be my life’s work from now on: opening the doors of England to the Jews, building the necessary bridge to open the path to the true Messiah and not to this new illuminated man who—you know something?—will only bring us more disgrace, as if we didn’t have enough. You live and you learn…”

  Elias, who had not managed to express the reason for his visit to his former teacher’s house, took his leave around midnight, weighed down by marvelous disquiet and new doubts. The revelations of the history and wanderings of Sabbatai Zevi had managed to move him and make him think. The fact that some Jews believed him to be the Messiah and that others rejected him was not at all an unprecedented attitude in the chronicles of Israel, in which credulity and doubt always went hand in hand. From the times of Solomon, the greatest and most illustrious of the wise men of his race, a fertile time for profits and great events (the creation of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, the construction of the Temple, the great wars and the decisive exile to Babylon of nearly the entire Hebrew population, including the ten tribes lost since then), Ecclesiastes had manifested a frank and free doubt over the Orthodox dogmas, as each of the chapters of his book reflected. Despite that, it was considered sacred because Ecclesiastes’s skepticism was not a heresy but rather part of Jewish thinking, and it demonstrated how difficult it was to sufficiently show capable proof of satisfying the vocation for questioning everything on the part of a people with such an accentuated critical nature. In reality, Elias thought, a people more incredulous than given to believe. The people who, paradoxically, had created, through the holiest revelations, the foundation of a religious faith capable of igniting the souls of the entire civilized world.

  So, in that environment that gave everyone a front-row seat to all kinds of anguish, struggles in which everything unnecessary would be tossed aside, was he going to rise to the challenge of posing as the supposed Messiah who introduced himself as Jesus, the Christ? That man had been the one who would cause the deepest divisions among the Jews, making dissidents out of those who would go on to become the forefathers of future oppressors of other Jews, the founders and practitioners of an anti-Semitism that, from the pulpits of the new religion proposed by Jesus, had brought so much suffering, pain, exploitation of goods, and, of course, so much death to their former confreres, solely for having remained true to the original faith and its laws. Elias felt his soul breaking as he pondered past and present stories of messianism, and each piece floated on its way without his being able to catch it and try to put it all back together. If Sabbatai Zevi was the Anointed and his invitation to “scale the wall” constituted a divine mandate, then there was nothing to do, only wait for the prodigious celebration of Judgment (and he again embraced the idea of a reunion with his grandfather). If he wasn’t, as his beloved Hakham stated and as he himself, in the back of his mind, felt more tempted to think, then the world would go on its path plagued by sorrows until the real Coming of the Messiah and of salvation. Then, as Ben Israel himself
would say, there would be no reason to hand over hopes, passions, and dreams to death, vegetating in life until the inevitable end of the flesh. Although his attitude entailed risks, and despite the fact that the usual Orthodox members could even accuse him of betraying those of his race and that fear would not leave him in peace, he would choose life … And he felt a hint of relief when he understood that, while each man could help the Coming with his actions, this essentially depended on the supreme will of the Holiest, whose decisions had already been made since eternity. His individual actions, as such, were part of a great cosmic balance but did not determine it. He, as a mortal being, had a territory that had been given him (by the Creator himself), and just one time: the space of his life. That space could be filled with his actions as a man, and he could do no better because his conscience, the most important source of decisions, advised him that with those actions, he himself was not violating the essence of a Law. His problem, he again felt, was with himself and not with his neighbors … The fate of the soul of the Maestro (who rejected any kind of interference by others in his personal life and, above all, in his religious life) was the Maestro’s responsibility, and the Maestro well knew what he wanted to do with it. Elias’s own, although tied to tradition and some rules, continued to be his own problem. His and his God’s; in other words, his and his soul’s.

  * * *

  When Elias Ambrosius entered the studio, he discovered that the Maestro, with his impulses unleashed already, had been laboring, perhaps with the help of some student, to achieve the work besieging his mind. Like the first time that they had painted together, he had set up two easels, with their respective stools, and placed the mirrors such that the stand and seat on the right, farthest from the window, would be reflected at three different angles on the silver surfaces. The looking glass placed just behind the easel would provide a frontal image and the other two, one placed on either side, a semi-profile and a full profile, the latter visible through the mirror that reflected the semi-profile. That was going to be, it seemed obvious, the place for the person drawing the self-portrait. The other stool and easel had been placed in such a manner that it would receive all of the light from the windows and at the same time would give a frontal view of whoever sat in the chair surrounded by mirrors. What surprised the young man was discovering that, on the small stands on which they would work, of unusual although similar dimensions (about three-quarters of an ell by a bit more than those three quarters high), were, nevertheless, different materials: that of the portraitist was a canvas; that of the self-portraitist was a panel, purchased a few months before by the Maestro, already primed in matte gray, and then, perhaps due to its seldom-seen size, forgotten in the studio.