A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  “Now don’t answer and just listen to me for a moment, Holland. You are a documentary filmmaker. You keep your eyes open, your ear to the ground for subjects, histories, stories, things, things that might keep a couple of million people awake on a Monday night. I’m not asking you to accept the Esau Letter with the same unquestioning spirit that I and thousands before me have. I’m asking you only to ponder the answer to the following question:

  “Here we are, you, I, this child, on the last day of the four hundred and ninety-ninth year since the Columbus expedition to the New World, since the Expulsion of the Jews, somehow thrown together, somehow finding, after a disappearance of almost fifty years, in the villa of a man who may be the incarnation of the thieving corpse, a missing letter, the missing history of that discovery. If my kipferln are not enough to keep you awake, then certainly that miraculous coincidence must jolt you into consciousness.”

  “What did you put in those kipferln?” I was awake, but more from the irritation of being lectured on my profession.

  “What did I put in the kipferln?” Hanni laughed. “Read.”

  ESAU—LA RÁBIDA

  The rule at La Rábida was poverty and abstinence. Our cowls were threadbare, our belts thread itself. Our beds were boards until the boards wore out, and then we lay on straw until our nocturnal restlessness ground the chaff into the cold stone. Our daily meal was soup, our soup thinner than water. On the rare day when a farmer brought us a chicken, it was more gristle than skin, more bone than gristle. We ate it undercooked. I had tasted sherry for the last time.

  The few books at the priory were Bibles, with the accent on the New Testament of the Christians. Where Jews were mentioned in the text, colorful illuminations left no doubt as to the dim view Catholics took of the people they accused of killing their God, Jesus. One Bible pictured a dark-haired Cain drinking the blood of his blond brother, Abel. Another showed a group of Jewish moneylenders nailing Jesus onto the Cross. Another clothed a snake, the original Satan, in the skullcap of a rabbi.

  The few other books the priory possessed were little better. Jews raping Christian women, Jews drinking the blood of Christian children, Jews converting to Christianity to rise to power and rule the world for the Jews. Books of hatred and pornography, by Franciscans, Dominicans, even Thomas Aquinas, the Aristotle of the Christians, which only proves, Eliphaz, that stupid people have no monopoly on stupidity.

  I never felt more Jewish than when I read these books. And make no mistake, I devoured them. I was so hungry for knowledge of any sort, for novelty, that I made letters out of the clouds and read them frontward in Spanish and backward in Hebrew. Cloaked in my Franciscan cowl, surrounded by books that mocked and attacked my ancestors, I felt safe in a foreign country, safer even than when I sat at the feet of my mother in the courtyard of the lions.

  I loved the stories of the old men in my grandfather’s tavern, the biblical stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors; Ham, Shem, and Japheth; Joshua, Judith, and Job. I loved the lute of Kima, the endless nights of Scheherazade, the songs of the troubadours. But whenever the subject turned to Law, the Law of the Jews, the rituals, the prohibitions, whenever the old men of the tavern or the ponderous Talmudists of my cavernous Minyan chewed over the do’s and the don’ts of the Jews, whenever lively talk would give way to unthought, to mumbled prayer, I would walk, run, lose myself in the alleys of Córdoba or the secret passageways of the cave, until a thumb and forefinger homed in on my ear and dragged me back.

  In my cowl, I didn’t have to be a Jew. I didn’t have to feel bad about not saying prayers, about not keeping the Sabbath holy. I could mumble the litany of the Catholics as easily as I could tie my belt and pull on my sandals. I felt as safe as I do hunting with you, tracking deer, the freshly skinned hide of a buck draped on my shoulders. No guilt, only the good hunger of a cold, clear morning.

  My few free moments were spent on the beach, searching for my broad-shouldered mermaid. Nights tumbled by with desperate, unsatisfied dreams. I was bursting with knowledge, more swollen by the day. I longed for my cave.

  Two more years were to pass before I saw Santángel again. The Inquisition had not yet reached our little corner of Spain, but elsewhere it was raging out of control. Stories of confiscations, water tortures, hot pincers, execution by fire, ran into our priory weekly, often sung with glee by my fellow friars. The Catholic Church was intent on financing the war against the Muslims with the funds of backsliding New Christians. Abraham Seneor and his son-in-law Meir Melamed, respected members of the Minyan, had become pet projects of the queen. Despite their generous donations, Isabel finally put her lien on their souls. They were baptized.

  Even the Santángel empire was in imminent peril. Already rumors had percolated up through the grinds of the Inquisition that Santángel had been dressed by the court in the variegated sambenito of a practicing Jew. I knew he was running the delicate ridge, currying favor with Their Catholic Majesties, and planning for Colón’s trip to the Indies. For it had been clear to me, since our arrival at La Rábida, that Santángel had chosen Colón to lead the expedition for a homeland.

  I thought it was a big mistake. After our first conversation, Colón and I spoke very little during his infrequent visits to La Rábida. Friar Juan even let me know, in a most politic, thoughtful way, that I would do better to avoid contact with Colón’s little boy Diego, a boarder at the priory. Colón had gambled his entire career on there being nothing but open sea between the Canaries and Cipangu. I was a nuisance.

  But amiability was not my goal. I stopped arguing because it was clear that Colón wanted neither what Santángel wanted (a homeland for the Jews) nor what I wanted (satisfaction). Colón wanted spices, gold, the Indies. But he knew neither the mystery of the spice nor the beauty of the gold nor where the Indies might be. And let me tell you, Eliphaz, there is nothing more pointless than drawing a map for a man who doesn’t have the slightest idea where he’s going. You might as well give him a blank sheet of paper and a kick in the pants.

  Also, I believed that the first voyage of exploration was in the offing. The Muslims had retreated to Granada and were making their last stand in the towers of the Alhambra, where Kima wept at the flight of her sisters. The Umayyads had withstood a siege for several months, but no one believed that the day was far off when Fernando and Isabel would control Castile, León, Aragón, and Granada. Isabel had assured Santángel that once the war was over, the peace dividend would fall to Colón’s expedition.

  He had not counted on the Grand Inquisitor. Tomás de Torquemada, whose hooded eyes had sent thousands of New Christians to their deaths, spent just as much time at the side of the queen. When Santángel told me he was the conscience of the queen, he was admitting only half the story. The queen’s soul was hardly Terra Incognita. And Santángel’s flag did not fly alone on its shores.

  On January 2, 1492, the Muslim siege ended. On January 6, the Feast of Epiphany, when the Three Kings of the Orient first saw the innocent baby that was to cause so much pain and suffering in the world, the last king of the Muslims handed over the keys to the city. Fernando and Isabel rode into the Alhambra.

  That afternoon, as a hundred cooks prepared a great feast of celebration outside the Palace of the Abencerrajes, Santángel led the king on a tour through the gardens of the Generalife, gardens in which he had passed countless days as ambassador for Castile to the Moors. The subject, as always, was the king’s pocket-book, emptied past the point of promises by the long siege of Granada. The two men were resting in the shade of a large cypress when the queen approached, with Torquemada at her side. “My dear,” the queen murmured to her spouse in tones as placid as the river Darro, “I would like to make an announcement at the banquet this evening.”

  Torquemada cast his bushy eyebrows across the two monarchs to his opponent. The king nodded to Santángel, who hurried off in search of a horse. He didn’t have to stay to hear the words “Expulsion of the Jews.” He only
needed to reach Isaac Abravanel and Abraham Seneor before dinner.

  Fortunately, both men were in residence at the elaborate tents they had erected in Santa Fe during the prolonged siege. In a matter of moments they dressed and mounted. By sunset, Santángel had arranged an audience with the king and the queen in the Courtyard of the Lions. While Abravanel spoke with the queen, pleading the long history of the Jewish people on the Iberian peninsula, antedating the Moors, the Visigoths, the Romans, Seneor placed three bags of ten thousand ducats apiece in front of King Fernando and promised much more if he would revoke the planned Expulsion. It was a piece of theater that had played with great success many nights before. Listening from the shadows of the hundred columns, Santángel fully expected another standing ovation.

  But his antagonist was also in the theater, and his lines proved stronger. “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver,” Torquemada cried, in a gravelly voice that sounded like Death himself. “Your Majesties would sell Him afresh for thirty thousand: here He is,” and he held a magnificent jeweled crucifix above his head that could easily have fetched the price in the gem bazaars of Mariposa. “Take Him away. Take Him away and barter Him!” With that, he threw the crucifix into the Fountain of the Lions—the same fountain into which the golden-haired Zehava had so unsuccessfully dived—and stormed from the court.

  If Fernando had been the oak seat and the mahogany back of the throne, he would have pawned the cross for another thirty thousand then and there and given the Jews another five years remission. But he was merely the cushion and the tassels. He was so compromised in front of the queen, in front of these sophisticated Jews and his friend and adviser Santángel, that he could do nothing but suggest that the announcement of the Expulsion be delayed a few months, lest it dilute the glory of the conquest of Granada.

  The queen acquiesced. The monarchs prepared to go in to dinner. But Santángel was not finished. He handed a document to Their Majesties for their signatures.

  Why on earth would Their Catholic Majesties sign such a document when they had refused Colón for seven years?

  “Timing,” Santángel told me, “the secret to all negotiation. It had been a long day. They were hungry.”

  And that is how Colón received the royal charter for his voyage of discovery, the likes of which had never been seen before. He was to be named Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was to retain one-tenth of whatever he discovered. He could invest directly in the voyage and reap the resulting benefits. And his heirs would continue as governors and viceroys of any new lands he discovered.

  In Santángel’s language, this translated into royal approval to outfit as many boats as he could, to transport the Jews of Spain to a new home. Colón was merely a cover. Santángel had agreed to lend Fernando and Isabel over one million maravedis, the Crown’s entire investment. Abravanel and Seneor would bankroll Colón’s ten percent. Colón would set sail immediately, establish an initial colony by the end of the summer, and ready a second expedition by the beginning of 1493 to transport the three hundred thousand Jews of Spain.

  This at least was the story that Santángel brought to me on the beach of La Rábida, one miserable twilight at the end of January, when loneliness and the Franciscan diet had blinded me to the import of Santángel’s plan.

  “I am sorry, Don Luis,” I said to him, staring down at my big toe, tracing a crescent moon in the wet sand. “Colón will not find the Indies. You will be throwing away a fortune.”

  “Look at me!” he shouted. His nose was no more than a foot from mine, his eyes shining with the last of the day’s light. “I have thrown far more than a million maravedis after gambles that matter less.”

  I looked down at my toe. In the beginning, there was a boy and a girl …

  “Ten years ago, Colón decided he wanted to sail west to the Indies. Why? Because no one had done it. No matter that a seaward passage south of the African continent is closer, easier, quicker. That challenge became Colón.”

  “But there is land in the way, Don Luis!”

  “Shh, shhh!” Again the pat on my shoulder. “Colón told me about your cosmic orgasm, your pet theory of the male continent of Europe and Africa and the prehistoric female continent drifting apart.” I shrugged his hand from my shoulder and began marching up the beach to the priory. There is nothing worse than being mocked for your first love.

  “I believe you, Esau!” Santángel shouted after me. I stopped. “Why do you think that I have risked one million maravedis?” I turned. I walked back down to him.

  “You are as obsessed as Colón, my boy.” He laid his hand, more kindly now, on my skinny shoulder, a lesson from Abravanel. “But you are obsessed with knowledge, with an unfillable desire to know, to learn. You search out new experience, feast greedily on new books, new maps, new ideas. You are always ready to listen, because you are always ready to change your mind. You draw exquisitely, Esau, because you know how to erase.

  “I am a New Christian, Esau. But I am also an Old Jew. I am a rationalist, but I am also a believer. I believe that everything on earth and in the heavens can be explained by physical law and reason. But there are too many questions and too little time for me to demand a logical proof for each one. So I have cultivated the faith of a gambler.

  “I have cultivated you, Esau, because there are things that you have discovered that I know are true. I have watched you work for nearly ten years, in the silence of the cave at El Palo, in the poverty of the priory of La Rábida, and I have never once had cause to doubt the results of your investigations. I am perhaps not as perfectly ready to gamble my life away on your dreams. But time presses. I throw the dice.”

  “Thank you, Don Luis,” I stammered and knelt on the sand to ask forgiveness of this great man I had so completely misunderstood. He pulled me up short.

  “Listen to me, Esau, there is no time. There is a shipowner in Palos, six miles up the road. His name is Pinzón, Martín Alonso Pinzón. He will provide two of the three caravels for the voyage. You will sail with him as navigator. Wait for him, he will contact you.”

  Six months later, Abbas knocked on my door. I hadn’t seen him in the two years since I’d left El Palo.

  “Three presents, Esau,” he said in a whisper. He handed me a brass astrolabe and a book of navigational tables. “From Zacuto. He says he wishes he were going.”

  “What’s the third, Abbas?” I looked around for a wandering friar and slipped the gifts into the sleeves of my cloak.

  “Bad news, Esau. I’ve been to Córdoba. They’re gone.”

  “All of them?”

  “What’s left of your grandfather’s tavern is a warehouse of olive oil.”

  “My family?”

  Abbas shrugged.

  The next night, while I was trying to raise myself from the deep water of a dream, two pairs of hands grabbed me and bundled me into an empty barrel, along with Zacuto’s gifts. I cried out. A voice told me to hush—I believe it was Santángel’s. I was loaded onto a horsecart and bumped the six miles to the port of Palos. Through a chink in a barrel staff I saw three ships at anchor in the river Tinto. The Santángel voice gave orders to handle me with care. The other voice, a sturdy big-bearded man, kissed a woman good-bye, and then a girl, long-haired, broad-shouldered, could it be? I was hoisted up and onto a rowboat, out and into the hold. As the sun rose, I felt the wood of the ship creak into motion under the wood of my barrel, heard the sounds of a crew, sounds I had only imagined before, a crew at sea.

  And faintly, very faintly, the sounds of a viol, mixed with the voices of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jews singing “Al Naharot Bavel,” “By the Rivers of Babylon.” It was Tisha B’Av, in the Hebrew year 5252—August 2, 1492. I was twenty-one years old.

  ESAU—ADRIFT

  Spacious enough that I could stand at the center, wide enough that I could lie on the bottom in a not-too-uncomfortable curl. None of my prisons had prepared me for ten weeks in a barrel. Abbas, my warden of Mariposa, brought me a meal o
nce a day, waited patiently while I disposed of my previous one. I lacked nothing. I lacked everything.

  I had seen and heard enough my final night on shore to scribble a rough sketch. I was on a boat, one of three; three boats were planned for Colón’s expedition; I was on Colón’s expedition. That much was easy. My imagination could draw more precise hypotheses. I was on Pinzón’s boat; that was Pinzón kissing the woman and girl good-bye; the girl I made love to on the beach of La Rábida was Pinzón’s daughter.

  But my guesswork came up short against the hundreds of questions that remained. Why was I taken at night in such secrecy? Why the barrel? Was I the only member of the crew barrel-bound? What were the voices I heard in lamentation the night of our sailing? Why the sound of my mother’s viol? With so many questions, bound and blinded, could I possibly be the navigator?

  We sailed for ten days, dropped anchor for two weeks, sailed again for a few days, dropped anchor, began again in earnest. From time to time I heard voices close by, other barrels, other men. Abbas said nothing and held a knife to my throat when I threatened to speak.

  At night, I wrapped my body at the base of the barrel, my head oriented in the direction of the ship’s motion, secure in the knowledge that Colón’s expedition was headed west. I curled into Africa and dreamed clear, precise, wonderful dreams of Pinzón’s daughter on the beach.

  Two weeks out, Abbas spoke to me for the first time.

  “A question from the captain.”

  “Who’s the captain?” I asked.

  “He wants to know how long.”

  “How long what?”

  “Till we reach land.”

  “Let me up on deck.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Then let me sleep.”

  I dreamed my dream. As always, I came to her unsuspecting in the surf, our hips drawn together by the motion of the waves, entwining her, arms, legs, fingers in hair, entering her, floating, if possible, the lightest millimeter above the spray, pulled by the tide onto the gentle sand. Then the drifting into a first dream-sleep, me curled, Africa head in her lap, her surrounding breasts on my back, above—mystery. Then the second dream-sleep, somehow dividing, drifted apart, eyes opening. But this time, instead of meeting her gray storm-eyes, instead of letting my dream move the girl to her wonted bittersweet disappearance, I grabbed the half-consciousness, took control of that half-sleep of my dream. Gently, I reached forward from the coast of Africa, stretching my fingers fanlike across the sand, trying to touch any part of my dream-love, how far, how far?