Very soon, the rabbis began to dedicate hours of their prayers on Saturday—the day on which each Jew should enjoy Freedom as a right and benefit of being created in the image and likeness of the Lord—to warn the flocks about the ways in which the faithful should understand and practice that freedom. Willing to control the acts of licentiousness that propitiated heresy, including the actions or simple thoughts that went beyond the freedom conceded by the Law and administered by its vigilantes, the rabbis and leaders of the community, gathered in the Mahamad, encouraged fear. Trials followed and sentences were applied, from the lightest niddui to the terrible cherem. As had always been and would always be in human history, someone decided what freedom was and how much of it corresponded to the individuals whom that power repressed or guarded. Even in the lands of freedom.
By decree of the rabbinical council, the trial for the possible excommunion of Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila had been set to take place on the second Wednesday in January of 1648, in the Spanish synagogue, and the Mahamad urged the entire Jewish community of the city of Amsterdam to attend its sessions.
* * *
After hearing Mariam’s words, Elias Ambrosius had run to his house to find out what had happened. When he arrived, the first thing he saw was his father’s crestfallen face, which combined fury, fear, and indignation. Also, his mother’s face, weeping, crumpled into itself like a scared animal. Without stopping to ask for a report or giving explanations, the young man went to the small corner where Grandfather Benjamin’s desk had always been and looked at the catastrophe: the lock had been broken by force. A piece of wood from the furniture’s beautiful frame had been splintered, and all of its contents had been removed. On the floor, ripped from the files, were the drawings and linens painted by Elias (the portrait of Mariam Roca!) and by other students, like his good friend Keil the Dane—some marked by dirty boot prints. Before even beginning to rescue the salvageable, Elias noticed that there were two notable absences: his notebook and the canvas on which the Maestro had portrayed him. Without a doubt, those had been considered the greatest evidence against him.
Pained by the shame to which he would subject his parents, Elias Ambrosius returned to the living room to face them. His mother, her eyes swollen with tears, lowered her head when she saw him enter, and remained silent like the good Jewish wife she always was. His father, by contrast, dared to ask him if he had any idea what awaited him. Elias nodded and asked him, please, to tell him what had happened. Abraham Montalbo, after taking a few deep breaths, summarized the acts: after forcing the locked compartment of the desk, Amos had gone running out of the house to return, shortly after, with Rabbis Breslau and Montera. His father paused. “They were inside for more than an hour, and, when they left, they told me I had a heretic son of the worst kind. They carried some notebooks in their hands, and they showed me that portrait of yours in which you look like…” The man went silent again. “They’re going to open a case against you, Elias … But, how could you do what you have done?”
Elias thought of various responses—his responses—although he immediately understood that none of them would be good enough for his father.
“I don’t know, Father. But if you can, forgive me for making you suffer … And if it is not too much to ask, let me stay in the house for a few more days until I find some solution. Then, I will leave,” Elias said, and only at that moment did Abraham Montalbo de Ávila seem to grasp the true notion of what was coming for him and his family—that they would never again be the same family (a heretic son, another who was an informant, and what was he himself to blame for?)—and he, too, began to weep.
With the roll of canvases and posters under his arm, Elias Ambrosius had gone out to the street. As on other occasions on which he needed to think, he went to the area around the port. The premature winter night was coming quickly, and from the sea a frozen breeze was rising. Seeking out the poor shelter of the warehouses managed by the powerful East India Company, who governed commerce with the ports of those remote confines of the world to which Elias had once dreamed of traveling, he spent several hours weighing his possibilities. The absence of his former teacher, Hakham ben Israel, who days before had traveled to England, left him without the only person whose advice, at that crossroads, could clarify the situation for him, and without the only man in the Sephardic community who, perhaps—only perhaps—would dare to overcome fear and raise his voice in his defense. Elias knew that in all certainty what awaited him was a noisy trial in which he would be accused of idolatry, the gravest of all sins, and at the end, his excommunion would be decided and a cherem for life would be prescribed, similar to the one applied to Uriel da Costa or the one pending against the head of Baruch, the son of Miguel de Espinoza … Although the portrait that the Maestro made of him would be the most resounding proof, he had well-thought-out reasons to refute that charge. But his notebooks, where for years he had revealed his thoughts, doubts, fears, and decisions, and besides, relayed his experiences at the workshop, would not allow him any margin for defense: in the eyes of his judges, those papers were the insurmountable self-accusation of a heretic who violated the second commandment of the Law. All doors were closed to him and there was little he could do to open them … But, he then thought: Even if he convinced the Mahamad that he had not committed an unpardonable sin, what would his life be like from that moment on? What would he be willing to do to live as a forgiven man within the community? Would he disown what he thought, what he believed was fair, what he wanted to be, every day, in order to obtain a forgiveness that was always conditional and guarded? Was it worth kneeling this once, a submission that in reality equaled kneeling forever, to continue living among his people and in the place where he had been born, where his beloved were buried and where his parents, his friends, and teachers, the woman whom he loved resided? What freedom would he enjoy as a forgiven one in the lands of freedom? With those questions, he became enraged: he had not committed any crime so cruel as to be condemned, and he was not an idolater, but rather a Jew who had practiced his free will. What human being could grant himself the power of seizing everything that belonged to him merely because he had dared to think differently regarding a law—even if that law had been dictated by God? And what if he didn’t ask forgiveness? Would he have the courage to live forever like a pariah to everyone of his same origin? With some answers to his questions, he returned to his father’s house and, against expectations, as soon as he lay down in his bed (Amos’s bed, as in recent months, remained empty, and with more reason now given the repulsion that proximity to a heretic would cause him), Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila fell into the arms of sleep. In the face of what was imminent, for the first time in many months, he felt free of fear.
The following morning, again carrying his sketches and paintings, the young Jew headed to the only place that, he thought, he would be received and heard. He crossed De Waag without looking at the merchants or even at the sellers of paintings, sketches, and engravings that occupied the corner of the square where Sint Antoniesbreestraat begins, and on which he walked, as he had hundreds of times in those years, toward the house with the green door, marked with a number 4 on Jewish Broad Street.
Hendrickje Stoffels opened the door to him. The girl looked into his eyes and, without Elias having any time to react, caressed his cheek with her hand and then told him that the Maestro was waiting for him. Elias Ambrosius, moved by Hendrickje’s gesture of solidarity, went up the stairs, knocked on the studio door, and waited until he heard the painter’s voice: “Come in, kid.”
Elias found him standing before the canvas focusing on the story of Susanna, as he wiped his hands on the stained apron.
“Last night, Isaac Pinto came to see me. I already know that there’s to be a trial against you,” the man said, and pointed at a stool as he settled into the other one. “What are you going to do?”
“I still do not know, Maestro. I want to leave the city.”
“Leave? To where?”
the painter asked, as if a decision of this kind were inconceivable.
“I don’t know. Nor do I know how. Maybe I should go to Palestine, with Zevi. Perhaps Salom Italia is right and it is worth finding out if he is or is not the Messiah.”
The Maestro was shaking his head no, as if he could not admit something.
“I should not have accepted you in the workshop. I feel guilty.”
“Don’t, Maestro. It was my decision and I knew what the consequences could be.”
“So when does that useless Ben Israel come back? Something has to be done!” the man yelled.
“That’s precisely why I came, Maestro, because I dare to ask you to do something: Please, recover my portrait. The rabbis took it. But if you demand it, they have to return it to you. They are capable of destroying it.”
The man began to take off his apron.
“Who took it? Where do they have it?”
“Montera and Breslau took it, they have it at the synagogue.”
“I’m going to get Jan Six, he has to come with me.”
“Maestro…” Elias hesitated, but he thought he had nothing to lose. “They also took my notebooks. They are like your tafelet. Please, see…” he added, when the painter, already wearing his hat, was yelling to Hendrickje Stoffels to bring him his coat and his boots on his way out to the street.
* * *
Very delicately, Elias caressed the surface of the canvas recovered from the jaws of intolerance, and received in the palm of his hand the pleasant rough cut of the oil applied by the Maestro’s art. He looked at his face impressed upon the canvas, the gaze a bit above his own gaze. The beauty that invaded him convinced him that it had been worth it. With four small nails, he affixed the canvas to the wall of the attic he had moved into—the same one in which Keil the Dane had lived for three years—whose rent was now being paid by Jan Six at the Maestro’s insistence.
Two days before, he had left his parents’ house. As he gathered his most valuable belongings—two outfits, some sheets and toiletries, and the books that had belonged to his grandfather Benjamin—he had had a conversation with his father, during which, both of them more calm, he had explained the origins and motives of his supposed heresy. His father had asked him to remain in the house, but Elias did not wish to submit them to the reality that he himself was living: that of being marginalized. Even when there were still several more days before the trial against him would take place, the majority of the city’s Jews, aware of what had occurred, already considered him convicted and were already jumping ahead to condemning him to ostracism, exile, and contempt. Elias was not surprised to find the doors to Dr. Roca’s house closed to him and that Mariam herself, who knew all of his secrets and had even participated in them, refused to speak with him, fearful perhaps of her own implication in the heresy, a participation that in some way, or for some reason, had been left unaired. (Perhaps Amos and the rabbis had not identified Mariam Roca as the girl he portrayed in the small canvas? Was Elias such a bad portraitist? Or had the powerful hand of Dr. Bueno intervened to prevent mixing up the daughter of his colleague and assistant in the case?) Abraham Montalbo had not insisted on changing his son’s opinion, but before the young man left, he gifted him with precious certainty: “These days, I have been happy that your grandfather is dead. The old man would have been capable of killing Amos. He was always a fighter, a pious man, and what he most admired were fidelity and reason.”
“Yes,” Elias said, “and what he most hated was submission.”
In those days—during the Christian holiday of Christmas and the Jewish delight in the celebration of the eight days of Hanukkah—as he walked joylessly and aimlessly around the city, killing time and unease, Elias Ambrosius had acquired the feeling of being confined in a strange place. The many sites in Amsterdam holding meanings, evocations, complicities, now seemed distant to him, as if he were listening to declarations of war in a foreign language. But the certainty of that distance was multiplied when he ran into any of the Jews who knew him and these passed him by as if the young man had lost all physical form. Elias knew that many were reacting that way out of conviction, but others responded in that manner under the petty pressure of fear. In that hostile environment charged with ill humor, everything that for twenty-one years had belonged to him was beginning to run away from him, until it painfully pushed him from its heart. He then understood in all of its dimensions what Uriel da Costa had suffered when he was anathematized and turned into someone who was as good as dead to his brothers in race, culture, and religion. That state of invisibility in which he had been thrown, the condition of not being, of having disappeared to those who once loved him, differentiated him, accepted him, turned out to be the most painful of sentences to which a man can be subjected. He now even understood why Uriel da Costa had ended up giving in and had asked forgiveness, only to take his life a few weeks later: out of fear and out of shame, consecutively. But he, as Baruch Spinoza was doing, would not commit suicide or admit any blame, nor would he give them the pleasure of seeing him suffer no matter how much he suffered in reality, since the profit of freedom signified by living without fear was recompense for all of it. He would not submit, would not humiliate himself.
The decision that had been hazy at the beginning of leaving Amsterdam was becoming firm in his mind, and now he had only to find the way of concretizing the path by which he would depart, to anywhere. Because there were several things with which Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila had been born, raised, lived, and which he would not renounce, no matter how much the community’s powerful leaders pressured him. The first of those was his dignity; then, his decision to paint what his eyes and his sensibility demanded he paint; and, above all, because it equally implied his dignity and his vocation, he would not hand over his freedom, the highest condition the Creator had conceded him and the most valuable currency with which his grandfather had prized him even when he was so far from becoming his grandfather, or the grandfather of his brother Amos. That glorious possibility of exercising his freedom that Benjamin Montalbo had stoked in him during the twenty years in which they shared a part of their respective stays on earth.
* * *
The days went by, cloudy and windy although without snow, bringing the dates of the trial. Elias had discovered that deciding to go anywhere, far from Amsterdam, could be much more challenging than he had imagined. The greatest difficulty, he would painfully confirm, came from his complicated situation as a Jew in the process of being excommunicated, since some doors were closed that looked down on his condition as a Jew, and others were sealed off by Jews themselves.
Among the possible destinations, Jerusalem was one that did not cease to tempt him. Although Elias continued holding many doubts about Sabbatai Zevi’s messianic qualities, at times, perhaps moved by the same circumstance that he existed in vis-à-vis his community, the act of joining a messianic pilgrimage, of placing his faith and his will in a presumed Anointed One, of becoming a militant of the latest hope or getting lost with it, seemed almost appropriate. However, although the departure of a second boat chartered by the members of the Nação bound for the land of Israel was announced for the first days of the Christian new year, the simple possibility of boarding it, even if he had had the necessary funds to cover the ticket and the expenses of the journey, was unthinkable: those feverish members of the community would not admit him aboard.
The other path capable of seducing him was the one leading to any of the lively cities in the north of Italy, where he could perhaps live at the margins of the community and, even, as Davide da Mantova did in his day, devote himself with greater freedom to exercising his passion for painting. But in reality, the young man had weighed all the options, including that of signing up as a sailor on any of the merchant vessels that left daily for the West and East Indies, and found that a market filled with experienced men willing to set sail would cause the immediate rejection by ship owners and captains of a young man without the least expertise in
tasks relating to the sea. Meanwhile, the shorter journeys to Spain, Portugal, and England, so traveled in those times, remained outside the possibilities of a normal Jew, unless, before he attempted it, he exchanged his condition for a certificate of Catholic baptism, something he did not intend to do. Journeys by land, meanwhile, were impractical at a time when the country’s borders were on maximum alert: the imminent cementing of the awaited peace treaty with Spain, which would perhaps be signed in some German city, had turned those paths into military encampments weighed down by tension and nervousness, and by all appearances, it turned out to be less drastic to be considered a heretic by the Jews in Amsterdam than a traitor or a spy by those exasperated troops, often inebriated with the most ferocious alcohol consumed thirstily by some due to their certainty of victory, and by others due to their indignation over defeat.
The snow, as couldn’t fail to happen, had returned for Christmas. The festive atmosphere of the celebrations, multiplied by the announcement of the end of the century of wars against Spain, had taken over the city, and its inhabitants were putting wine, beer, and hot beverages distilled in the sugar refineries in danger of extinction. Elias Ambrosius’s solitude, by contrast, became more compact during prolonged stays in the attic that now seemed like a cell and where he couldn’t even count on a menorah to place eight candles and enjoy the celebration of one of the great landmarks in the history of the people who, as Hakham ben Israel insisted so much in his lessons (evoking the warrior David, the invincible Joshua, the bellicose Hasmonaeans), had once been combative and rebellious, more than contaminated by fear and addicted to submission.
Heretics Page 41
