A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  What of the lute, the lute Mohammed found in the arms of his only remaining Kima, mournfully playing that song of hope and despair “Al Naharot Bavel”? Mohammed’s right hand embraced his daughter, praising Allah or Jehovah or whoever might listen that he had spared him one of his treasures. But his left hand, his cursed hand, throttled the silver lute by the neck and flung it into the darkness of the unawakened day, until it lit up the sky like a shooting star. In an instant, that fatal mistake wrought such amazement and contrition upon him that he didn’t feel his daughter slip from his arm and fly after the lute until she was halfway down to the ground, halfway up to grasp the soft hand of his beloved golden-haired wife, Zehava.

  The band of musicians camping by the river Darro, separated from their horses by Hussein Baba’s wedding party, were also awake when the silver star fell with a musical splash just outside their tent. My mother’s mother’s mother’s mother retrieved the lute from the rocks among which it floated, crushed and bent by Mohammed’s rage, and carried it back to the fire, where the band quickly determined that its value as molten silver was greater than its value as art.

  But try as they might, they could not melt the silver into a smooth liquid. The lute gave up its original shape quite readily but insisted on taking the form of four silver strands of four thicknesses, as if in memory of Zehava and her three daughters, who had finally escaped their own tragic histories at the Alhambra.

  It was, of course, those four magical strings that my mother’s father removed from their stone case in the courtyard of his tavern. No one knew for certain how long they had lain there, who had hidden them, how they had made the journey to Córdoba. Ten Mohammeds ruled from the Alhambra in the two hundred years before Isabel and her Fernando drove Islam out of Granada. Which of the ten was left-handed? Who were the traveling musicians? What happened to Joseph, and what of the apothecary?

  I believe that, left-handed though he might have been, it was Mohammed and not Hussein Baba who effected the escape of the princesses. I believe that his greatest grief was the secret he had kept of his bottomless love for his youngest, his golden-haired daughter, a secret he had kept too long, until she had joined her mother in a red fortress he would never see.

  And I believe that there was a magic in the silver of the lute, of the viol, a charm that made one long for the impossible—to gather loved ones, to sing songs of people long dead, to celebrate, conquer, triumph.

  And I thank God, the God of Mayaimi and Calusa of Jerusalem and Mecca, that the strings lie at the bottom of the sea, in the grip of my poor, poor brother, who may finally have learned where the music and the musician part company.

  ESAU—MY BAR MITZVAH

  The morning my father returned from sea, his leather bags held enough charts and reckonings to make his fortune thrice over. He had left Córdoba a boy. He stepped off the half-sprung boat into the freshwater mud of Córdoba—eight winters frozen, eight summers baked since he’d smelled it last—a scientific man, a man of calculation, of reason.

  The silver strains of my mother’s viol caught him off balance, one foot in the mud, another still bent over the gunwale. The noseless ferryman cast off and drifted back into the current, downriver to Sevilla, oblivious to the scent of music. My father caught a boot heel in the mud, his brain of mathematics and observation rocked by the tremolo of the strings. But the melody grabbed him by the armpits and set him gently upon the solid bank. It cleared his eye, it freshened his shirt. It patched his trousers, it rinsed his mouth, it broke his fast. It trimmed his beard in the latest fashion. Three hundred and twenty-eight members of the Halevy clan had prepared a banquet on the Calle de las Flores in honor of my father’s return. But the melody hurried him past the trestles of pickled meats and fried fish, the baskets of flowers and smiling, dark cousins, and up the broken cobblestones into the bad part of the barrio, to the Fountain of the Lions. My father was so driven by the single commandment of those four strings that no one dared block his way. By dinnertime, my mother’s father had given his blessing, by sundown my father had announced his intention to the Calle de las Flores, by moonrise he had carried my mother across the threshold of his father’s house, by midnight I’d been conceived. And all the while, the strings traced a song of welcome—to the sailor, to the maps, to the pen that had written eight years across the waters in order, finally, to return to dry land.

  My poor father. By tradition, his life’s work was done. He had added to the family wealth with his maps of the coastline of northern Africa, his charts of the sandbanks and the seasonal floods of the Nile, his curlicued sketches of the bays and rocks of southern Italy. He had fathered two sons. Enough, certainly, to hope that one would grow up to his own bar mitzvah and sail off to replenish the Halevy family fortune with maps of new seas, new worlds.

  But in an instant, the sound of my mother’s viol had changed my father into a man who would sooner wish upon a star than calculate its distance from the earth. While he should have been selling maps, he sat at the table of my mother’s father, listening to mystical tales spun by wild-eyed uncles and bearded rabbis. While his pen should have been copying the rocky face of the Gulf of Cádiz, it traced the timbre of my mother’s viol, drawing spheres and wheels and fanciful whorls, mapping the mystery of the strings of Kima.

  He neglected his trade, let his charts of the outer world grow brittle and blow away in the afternoon breeze. He passed his evenings drawing maps of Córdoba for small merchants of the pueblos, tiny guides to the shortest route from the Alcázar Gates to the Market; the best plaza to park a wagon when praying at the Mezquita; the shortest route to the tavern that served the freshest chicken, the strongest aguardiente; the secret passage to the most expensive, the most creative, the most exhausting bordello.

  My mother never left her viol. Both Lorenzo the sun and Catalina the moon would find her either at practice or, with a goatskin cloth and a polish of olive bark and palm oil, burnishing the wood, shining the strings, until they produced an absolute reflection of herself. She found a willing assistant in my brother, Yehuda, whose arm was as welcome to the instrument as mine—try as I might—was rejected.

  I had a brother, son. A twin brother born within minutes of my birth. A brother now dead, I am certain of it, dead by the hand of a Genoese named Colón. But a brother then as alive as you, as smooth as an eel, with the laugh of a seagull on a windy day. I loved my brother, protected him in his hairless innocence from the boys of the Judería, from the barefoot Muslim Mezquita boys, from the wrath of my grandfather Halevy, who spit twice on the ground when Yehuda passed, after he followed the path of my mother and learned to play the viol.

  It fell upon me—the golden boy, the one to bring back the golden age to the kingdom of Halevy, the great hairy hope of the next generation—to sell my father’s guides. I labored with the enthusiasm of a son who adored his father and worshiped his mother. The farmers loved these guides—those that could read. For those that could not, I roughed out graphic symbols in place of my father’s Castilian prose.

  I also developed a sideline for the New New Christians of Córdoba. The Old New Christians had fled the city after the rioting that plagued the year of my fourth birthday. Among these Old New Christians were some of the great Jewish families of the city, who had given in to the will of the throne and embraced Christianity. They were ambitious people who had exchanged not so much gods as manners, in order make a better living in the professions closed to Jews. They tried harder, worked harder than the Old Christians, the ones who had passed directly from their dark prehistoric practices to Christianity without dallying for Judaism. The Old Christians lost business, lost property, lost promotions, lost face, took revenge. For sixteen days my father hid the four of us under a bed until the cries of the wounded and the stench of the burning dissolved in the breeze.

  Two years of peace followed between Old Christians and Jews, until ambition reared its two heads, and New New Christians began to appear, eager to make their way in the Gentile
world. These were my first clients.

  I was a wild success. By the age of seven, I had developed a facility for dead reckoning. My early practice came with finding my way home by the sound of my mother’s viol. But later, crowds would gather to watch me—dropped blindfolded anywhere in the precincts of the city—walk the shortest, most direct route to a specified target.

  But I owed my juvenile fortune to a secret. These New New Christians were devout Jews. Their obsession with power in the Christian world was matched only by their obsession for devotion in the Jewish. None of them believed in the myths and magic of the Catholics, in a life of kneeling on cold stone in front of a wooden sculpture of a bloody man, of whispering in a language you didn’t understand. They were far more pious than the Old New tribe, more pious than many Jews, certainly more than my immediate family.

  They spent the morning in the Catedral in public show. They spent the afternoon scurrying to secret meeting places, begging forgiveness of the Jewish God for the hypocrisy of the morning. They ran a perilous middle course that required absolute secrecy and terrific stamina. The sixteen days of riots that their predecessors had braved would be the blinking of an eye compared with the new horrors of the Inquisition should these New New Christians be discovered engaging in their ancient practices. More than anything, they needed a navigator. They needed a guide.

  I told them where discreet Jewish services could be provided, I found them quiet men to make up a minyan of ten qualified Jews for prayers. I had kosher meat delivered to their homes in unmarked sacks. Most important, I drew them the shortest route to their most secret destination, and drew the officers of the Inquisition the longest. I saved them time. By thirteen, the age, by rights, when I should sail off to make my fortune, I was already a wealthy man.

  Then came our bar mitzvah.

  We were Jews, I told you that before. To the shopkeepers of the Mercado we were Jews. To the Alcalde in the Town Hall, to the King of Castile, we were Jews. But to my Halevy grandparents, the parents of my father, we were a sniff and a scowl. Jews, hah! Not Jews in their image! Their Jews prayed in the morning, prayed in the evening, spent one entire day per week, and many more throughout the year, praying in a synagogue, honoring events that otherwise would be forgotten, in a language they themselves could not understand.

  How could we come close to that image? How could we change skins into their kind of Jew? Our parents were betrothed by the string of a viol. Our family was enriched by the sale of maps drawn for the pleasure trade. For our parents, for me and Yehuda, God’s very existence was a subject of desperate mystery. Why did we need prayer when there was music, why a synaspeech, there wasn’t a soul left in the courtyard who didn’t understand that I would leave that courtyard a Christian or a corpse.

  What could I do? My parents on one side, my grandparents on the other, the congregation was obviously divided, but I couldn’t tell how. My eyes were clouded, but my nose was open, and the smells of the bar mitzvah feast filled the courtyard—roast lamb marinated with raisins, chicken massaged with olives, goat stuffed with peppers and glazed with Moroccan figs. There was a music in my ears that no one else seemed to notice, a rumbling in my stomach as enticing as the sound of Kima’s silver lute.

  Do you remember, Eliphaz, the first time I took you hunting in the scrub pine? How I strapped an old deerskin over your shoulders, draped that silent head over yours, covered you in a smell, a disguise? That is how to hunt deer. It is a lesson I learned in Córdoba.

  “I’m hungry,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Santángel scooped a handful of water from the fountain, said a few words in Latin, splashed my face. “You need a new name,” he said, “a Christian name for your baptism in Christ.”

  “Esau,” my father’s father said. I turned and saw the wrath, the hatred twisting his tongue against his lips. “Esau, that’s his name, his new name.”

  “But, grandfather,” Santángel went on, “Esau is a Jewish name, Esau was a Jew.”

  “And Esau sold his birthright because he was hungry,” my grandfather said. “ ‘Let me swallow, I pray thee,’ Esau said to his brother Jacob, ‘some of this red, red pottage, for I am faint.’ And Jacob said, ‘Sell me first thy birthright.’ And Esau said, ‘Behold, I am at the point to die, and what profit shall the birthright do to me?’ And Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils, and he did eat and drink, and rose up and went on his way. Esau despised his birthright.” My grandfather looked out over the congregation, over the soldiers. “No self-respecting Jew would name his son Esau. It’s the perfect Catholic name. Tell that to your queen.” And reaching down inside his throat, my grandfather collected the larger part of his frustration and terror and hatred into a gob of spittle as red and thick as any mess of portage and, with a mighty effort, baptized the other side of my face.

  So I became Esau. Esau Benavides. I had to wait only one week to discover why Santángel had chosen me. My parents were grateful it wasn’t longer. For in that week, the Jews turned away, the New Christians turned away. All income from the shop dried up, all patronage at the tavern crossed town. My brother sang alone, the lions stood silent.

  Friday evening at sundown, a royal courier knocked on the door. I was forbidden to bring anything with me, neither map nor hat. Only my brother kissed me good-bye. It was the first time I had traveled on Shabbat.

  On the eve of the third day, the courier pointed to the castle of Zahara de los Membrillos, the gateway to the Muslim kingdom of Andalusia. Wheeling his horse around, he galloped back the way we had come. I turned my head back to the pass. I fell calm and clear. Though I had never seen the sea, I knew where to go.

  I rode through the night, resting my horse during the day. Cloaked in a skin of invisibility, I passed easily by the Muslim sentries. At noon of my sixth day out of Córdoba, made bold by the smell of salt water, I rode into the Muslim port of Mariposa. The muezzin was calling the faithful to their midday prayers, singing a tune my mother had often played. I thought how delighted she would be by the music of the city, so open and alive after the walls of the Judería. There was no pain in the memory, only the thrill of discovery as the streets emptied before me. My horse found his way to the beach. I was thirteen. I was a man of my family. I was off to the sea.

  The sea. We never spoke of the sea, Eliphaz. I wonder—and there are many things I wonder—whether you remember the first time you laid your eyes upon the sea, touched it with the soles of your feet, let it ride up over your hips and dampen your face. You will tell your children to tell their children that your father came from across the sea. That he left a crumbling old world to travel to this fresh new land. That it was the sea that taught him, the sea that carried him, the sea that fed him without ever slaking his desperate thirst—the crackling, bursting, ever-dividing, indivisible sea. The sea that falls like the veil before sleep, that separates history from fantasy, faith from reason, life, perhaps, from death.

  For five thousand years, the Jews lived on the other side of the sea. For two months I traveled. When I am dead, you will lead our people into the heart of this new land, to found a new nation. You will turn your back on the sea.

  ESAU—THE CAVE

  One hour’s ride east of Mariposa, my horse dropped dead. I sat on his flanks and looked out at the water. A hot wind blew down from the hills. By the time I stood up, the horse was half-buried.

  A stone’s throw away, a round wooden hut squatted at the end of a pier, barely six feet above the surf, on stilts draped with barnacles and weed. Smoke rose from a chimney hole, scanned the shore in confusion, and bolted for the sea. I hadn’t eaten in three days.

  A Moor as dark as burnt cane answered my knock. The gray glow of the smoke hole gave off more light than the embers of the fire. The walls were smothered with blankets and rugs, heat and the smell of coffee. The Moor sat me down along the wall and brought me a cup, strong and sweet, with a wedge of hazelnut cake. Each sip, each bite, accustomed my eyes to the light. By the end of the first cup, I
could make out the intricate designs, the star patterns of the carpets. By the end of the second, the stars had broken free of pattern and grouped themselves randomly around the hemisphere of the room. It took me months to unravel the mysteries of these stars. But at that moment, with two cups of strong, sweet coffee, and a hazelnut cake as delicate as any Penina baked for Hussein Baba, I felt more at home than in my thirteen years in Córdoba. For, Eliphaz, I was sitting at the center of a map of the universe.

  “I will explain.” Luis de Santángel, chancellor of the royal household and comptroller-general of the royal treasury, stood at the door. His full robes, the streak of white lightning in his dark beard, the heat on his face and hands, so filled and illuminated the lintel that I could not tell whether he had entered quietly or had been crouching patiently within the hut while I drank my coffee. Two precious candles appeared, pregnant with the wax of their ancestors. The Moor moved slowly. He twisted away the star-shaped stone at the center of the hut, the stone that supported the firebox that cradled the pot of dark, sweet coffee. An iron ring was revealed, lying heavy and flush with the floor, star-shaped, rough-hewn as the stone. The Moor grasped the ring with both hands and pulled up. A panel revealed itself, star-shaped as the rest, hinged somewhere, on something of mystery. Above the raised door, the Moor’s face smiled in my candle. Below, shadow, darkness, a staircase.

  I followed Santángel. Ten steps, twenty, thirty, fifty, seventy-three steps. Down below the pier, down a stone passage, impervious to the salt sea, a rocky tunnel pushed and pulled in a lullaby I learned to trust. Down, down, into the rocky floor of the beach, Santángel leading the way without a thought to explanation or weariness. And I followed, thinking, If I could leave my religion, my family, my river Guadalquivir without so much as a backward glance, why raise questions now, fifty feet and more below the sea? My nose told me I was going in the right direction. My skin was dry and cool.