A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  “Stay away from that girl!”

  “Holland!” I called to her.

  “Hanni.” She turned to me with a look that I first thought was relief but that paled into something outside the dictionary of expression as the taxi driver raised his cheek from the guitar, turned in his chair, and gave her a full-toothed grin.

  “Holland!”

  And from her mouth came a cry that was more flamenco than Led Zeppelin, Flamenco Halevy, or J. S. Bach.

  HOLLAND—SANTÁNGEL

  Oh Ben,

  They fled, of course they fled. Not only Sammy L., who retreated back to his taxi more gracefully than the others, always facing me, always grinning through beard and moustache, even his feet, his boots, toeing and heeling, backing over the sand, laughing at me, more infuriating in that he had deliberately placed himself a patio’s-width away in the bare-assed confidence that he could, being a man, always outflee consequences. But the rest of the pricks—Roger, Ivy, Fredo, of course, but even Vim, who would have won the thank-you of his Cantabrigian dreams had he the sophistication to don shining armour and stand up for me against the pack. They fled because they knew. They fled because they were ignorant. They fled because none of them had lived with emptiness and were damned if they would face it first thing on a Spanish winter morning.

  Hanni stayed. Hanni sat with me at the bar drinking hot chocolate, matching my Fundadors—no Carlos of any number here—cup for shot. Not since the honeymoon mornings with Foss have I resorted to liquor so early in the day—but to see the devil again after so many years and miles, so close to the daughter he snatched from me …

  I couldn’t tell Hanni. I could barely tell myself. I felt certain you’d have the answer, Ben. An answer.

  Would you have fled?

  “Señora. Señorita.” A tall black man stood in the doorway, backlit by the morning beach. I found my legs and stood.

  Abbas led our minicaravan across the sand, Hanni’s steamer trunk riding on one of his shoulders, the other arm encircling Spinoza, tapes, and wheels. The wind had cleared the beach of morning clouds. At the yacht club, farther to the east, three boys in pastel-sashed wet suits were jousting with surfboards. I shivered—my run, my rest, my brandy, the anticipation of seeing you, the knowledge, once I set foot on the pier, that your office and La Rosa Náutica were one and the same.

  The restaurant was empty and unlit, except for a grey, floating glow that seeped through the windows from all the petals of the compass rose. The tables were set for luncheon, but no clang of cutlery or shouted orders of preparation came from the kitchen below. Silence, and the smell of espresso.

  Two steaming demitasses sat on the counter of the bar. I left Hanni with Abbas and made a beeline for the coffee. The Fundadors had been a miscalculation. I had cheated on Carlos and was paying with Kabbalistic penance. The Moroccan coffee was strong and sweet. A few fishnets drifted from my eyes. For a moment I felt a clear equilibrium. Perhaps Hassan the Palestinian academic was right, all those years ago in Paris at the Battle of Trocadéro. It takes a balanced mixture of Catholic brandy, Jewish pastry, and Islamic coffee to achieve intestinal harmony.

  “Is this yours?” Hanni stood just behind me. I turned. Laid open on the maître d’s lectern was another copy, neither mine nor Hanni’s, of your Guide. I told Hanni I had written a favourable review of La Rosa Náutica. She told me she had read it, only half an hour earlier.

  I wrote that review last night, Ben, chez Conchita.

  “Read this,” Hanni commanded.

  EVENTS OF NOTE

  Tuesday, 31 December 1991

  Teatro La Rábida: ¡Adiós, Colón! (shows at 20.00, 22.15, 00.30, 02.45) Plaza La Rábida 10, tel: Mariposa 19 59.

  Plaza de Toros: Joey and the Arimatheans (21.30) res: Mariposa 33 35.

  Carnegie Hall: Sandor (23.30) res: 46 65 13. The final concert of the universally acclaimed violin virtuoso who put Mariposa on the map. The maestro writes:

  As you well know, I have been seeking, ever since the end of the War, the Perfect Sound. I have been searching for a way to produce a sound that glances off the history of the listener and refracts into images of music heard and unheard throughout the listener’s lifetime.

  In my childhood, in Peru and elsewhere, I was happy to study scales, impossible arpeggios in tenths, happy to tackle the minor challenges of the knotty bits of repertoire. I was happy to struggle for greatness, by playing great pieces in imitation of great men. But after the horrors of the War, I recognized that if perfection were to be reached, it must cleanse itself of Man. It must cleanse itself of virtuosi. The cults that surrounded Heifetz and Horowitz were nothing more than pagan fertility rituals. The Beatles telecast of the Ed Sullivan Show was no less horrifying than the Nuremberg Rallies. As far as I was concerned, Hitler was just another Paganini.

  I stopped giving concerts. I tried recording. I needn’t tell my most devoted followers how recording only concentrates the heat of the artist, leaving sound still full of the imperfections of imagined bodies and faces.

  Recently, the solution became clear to me—to achieve the Perfect Sound, the artist himself must disappear, without a murmur. He must capture the entirety of music in that split of a split moment before bow touches metal, breath crosses mouthpiece, hammer kisses string. That moment becomes the seed of ultimate creation, the infini-second before the Big Bang, when all possibility is stored up in a single invisible, unobservable point. It is a moment of silence, pure and antiseptic. It’s a moment easily destroyed by the infection of the artist’s personality. To play the Perfect Sound, I must disappear.

  At midnight tonight, I turn eighty years old. I have been rehearsing—if that is the word—for this anniversary concert for a more personal reason than the Perfect Sound. I will not disappear in order to play the Perfect Sound. I will play the Perfect Sound in order to disappear. I am tired of wandering. I no longer want to be twenty.

  “The Wandering Jew,” Hanni whispered. She knew as much as I had learned in my late-night lecture at the Santa María, and perhaps an extra stanza or two.

  Of all the magical drafts I’d been served in the previous twenty-four hours, Benjamin, this was the most difficult to swallow. Sandor, my Sandor, Zoltan, her Zoltan, the Wandering Jew? After all, if the story was to be believed, the Wandering Jew was a Christian myth, an anti-Semitic morality tale cooked up to show, one, how the Jews hocked their collective spittle on Jesus, and, two, that before the Boy on the Cross would set his bloody feet back on Earth, the Jews, Wandering and otherwise engaged, would have to convert to Christianity.

  “But it can’t all happen spontaneously,” Hanni argued with your Guide. “You need someone, something, to set the concert in motion, to introduce Zoltan, to sell the tickets, a Grand Promoter—” And she stopped. I saw teeth clicking into gears within the chaos of her grey hair. “Benjamin,” she said, smiling at the Guide on the lectern. “That’s where Benjamin fits in. He’s diversified with the knack of a modern Esau. He’s added to his business of guidebooks and bookings. Expanded from the business of Motion to ProMotion. And without a word to us, his best clients.”

  “I will explain.” Deep, masculine. You, I hoped at first, with the thrill of walking into a celebrity interview. But the tall Spaniard at the door, whose left hand guided Isabella gently by the elbow to our side of the circular bar while his right cradled a cut-glass snifter, was the proprietor of La Rosa Náutica.

  “Señor Santángel,” I said with a second chill, a recognition that carried with it a hundred unformed questions.

  “I was hoping it would not be long before we met again, Señorita.” The voice beneath the greying goatee was strong, soothing, not altogether trustworthy. Isabella stood at his side, holding her violin case with both hands, her eyes locked on the sawdust at her feet, her cheeks glowing with the light through the windows, through rope nets and glass orbs.

  “We want to see Benjamin. Immediately!” Hanni’s first command would not have been mine but would do for starters
.

  “Abbas!” Santángel spoke, and Abbas disappeared behind the bar with my camera and Hanni’s trunk, descending, presumably to raise you from your office. I swallowed the last of my coffee.

  “Leave the trunk,” Hanni called.

  “Señora Hanni.” Santángel soothed and ignored. “Perhaps I can answer some of your questions.”

  “Where is he, downstairs?” Hanni moved towards the bar.

  “If you would like to see Ben, nothing could be easier.”

  “Who are you?” she barked at him. Santángel turned his gaze to me. I turned it right back. It was time that the staff of La Rosa Náutica made their own introductions.

  “They call me Santángel.” He smiled. “You recognize the name?”

  “You work for Benjamin?”

  “You might say that.”

  “With Señor Carranque?”

  “Who?” My turn.

  “I know Señor Carranque quite well.”

  “And that man, the taxi driver?”

  “Sammy L.” I hissed. Santángel laughed. An all-too-familiar laugh.

  “Are these your questions?” he asked.

  “Why?” Hanni snapped back. “Do we run out at twenty?”

  “No, no, ask away,” he said. “Only I’d much rather give you more substantial information. Questions like these you could ask in many other, less …”—he searched for the proper word in his snifter. “Let me just say that La Rosa Náutica, and myself as its proprietor, were hoping to answer more fundamental, fulfilling questions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Señorita Holland,” he scolded lightly, “you can’t have it both ways.”

  “What about the strike?” Hanni asked.

  “Good question”—Santángel set his glass on the bar—“but not really what you want to know.”

  “I want to know whether Benjamin can get me a flight out of this confusion right now, this morning.”

  “I thought you wanted to find your son.”

  Hanni stopped breathing. The dusty haze froze in midair.

  “Then you must know my question,” I whispered, looking at Isabella’s downcast eyes.

  “If I might make a recommendation.” Santángel stepped away from the bar. “Yesterday afternoon, Señorita Holland, when you were lunching here with Señor Sandor, I expressed the hope that I might entertain you, at some convenient time in the future, with a modest exhibit I am preparing for the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of the Expulsion of the Jews. I feel, in fact, I am certain, that both you ladies will find many answers in the presentation.”

  “You have the film here?” I asked.

  “It is not exactly a film.” Santángel placed the tips of his fingers together. He knew he had caught me with my question.

  “I don’t have time for pictures,” Hanni said.

  “Not pictures, Señora—letters.”

  “I’ve come to see Benjamin. I don’t have time for your demonstration.”

  “I prefer to call it a Disputation.” Santángel spoke to Hanni but kept his eyes on me.

  “You heard me, young man.” Hanni, the imperious airport harridan.

  “All is prepared downstairs,” he said.

  “I don’t care where …”

  “In the Cave of Esau.” Another jab to the gut. Hanni had to pause. “Señora Hanni,” he continued gently, “surely I do not have to remind you of my estimable ancestor and his role in the survival of your family.”

  Santángel led the way. Behind him Isabella, then Hanni, then me. 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 Esau’s favourite lullaby. Down, down into the rocky floor of the beach. My nipples stiffened under my jumpsuit—I wished Abbas had left me my Issey Miyake jacket—my entire body told me that I was going in the right direction.

  The staircase ended. Santángel walked forward several paces in the dark—hollow sounds, a pleasant smell of earth, parchment, and water. In the light of the torch, I saw my camera. Santángel touched my arm with a long finger, and I stopped, at attention behind my trusty Spinoza. He led Hanni to her steamer trunk, Isabella to a third point with her violin. The three of us in a triangle, a spooky parlour game.

  Santángel walked away and made a tour of the room, lighting ten thick candles, their wicks eight feet from the ground, not half the way to the top of the arched ceiling. Niche by niche, the cave brightened. Carvings into the rock, canopies within caverns, honeycombs within snailshells, more elaborate, more Moorish than the Mezquita of Córdoba, than the Hall of the Ambassadors at the Alhambra. Forty columns supported ten arches, ten arches led to ten corridors. Between the arches, ten leather chairs. And at the center, at the center of our triangle, below the hemisphere of the hall, a freshwater fountain, a pool of stone on the ten stone backs of ten stone lions. The Cave of Esau.

  I was utterly confused.

  I had not expected the truth, or at least the description of the Esau Letter to be so immediately confirmed, or confirmable. For all I knew, the Letter could have been written earlier in the week by a writer standing at the spot where I now stood. I felt—and feeling is ultimately the most one can ask for after a night without sleep, a three-mile jog, and two shots of Fundador matched by two of café Maroc—that perhaps, as Hanni had tried to tell me, authenticity was not the point. That the date of the authorship of the Esau Letter was less relevant to the demonstration, or Disputation, of Santángel than our very presence. It was not that Esau had once stood on the spot we now stood, but that we were standing in his place—three of us—even if my daughter, my Isabella, refused to acknowledge my presence.

  Somewhere, above, around, I began to hear the sound. In the chairs, the ten chairs that ringed the cavern, ten men—Santángel, Roger and The Lost Tribes, the flamenco troupe from La Rábida, others. A new Minyan. For what, Ben? A new voyage of discovery? The murmur grew louder, the murmuring of men, the sound of jets, the violin, a gently rocking continuo, slow, but not too slow, a seabound second movement 12/8 that I knew, Hanni knew, Isabella knew so well.

  And across from me, across from my daughter, the slouching, sneering laugh of the devil himself, Sammy L.

  With that, there was no more light. Only the all-encompassing, all-defining, all-knowing Music. And I began to see.

  HANNI—THE CAVE OF JACOB

  Benjamin,

  When I awoke, or came to, or gathered my lost senses about me, I found myself wandering down a rocky concourse toward a distant light. I ran my fingertips along a dark forest of glass cases, the leather spines of tall books, velvet covers, parchment—seeing, without needing to see, the library Santángel had built for Esau. The tunnel ended. I stood in a large circular room. Above me, the ceiling tapered up into a long, thin chimney—an impossible bottle of Chianti reserved for the tourist trade. From the opening at the top, the sky, enough light somehow reflected to show that the walls of the cave were covered with writing.

  Not a map of Africa, Benjamin. Not Esau’s map. But a letter, yet another letter, from another survivor.

  31 December 1550

  My dear daughter,

  Once upon a time, far across the ocean, in the land of the Conquistadors who drove your mother from the House of the Chosen Women, there lived a boy named Eliyahu, who changed his name to Esau and left his brother standing in the middle of his bar mitzvah. This brother’s name was Yehuda, a boy born merely minutes, seconds, after his beloved Esau, a boy left behind to carry the burden of his parents’ love and the shadow of the departed Esau’s name.

  The name of Esau was the name of a dark god, the name of a son who turned from his father, a brother who turned from his brother. A hairy man. When Esau left, Yehuda became Jacob, Jacob the smooth-skinned brother of Esau.

  That boy, my daughter, was I.

  I am past surprise, Benjamin, past thought, past wondering how writing met wall. I stand in the Cave of Esau. I read the Letter of Jac
ob. Unknown, undiscovered, unperturbed.

  Within a year, I became an orphan of the Inquisition.

  Through the gaps in the letter, where the sea has overrun the chimney of light fifty feet above and selectively edited Jacob’s prose, I can see the charred ruins of the tavern in Córdoba, the fountain still bubbling, a young boy sitting in tears.

  In time, I inherited the estate of my parents.

  I can see a violin and a bow lying on the stone floor to one side of Jacob. On the other, half-cradled by her son, Jacob’s dying mother. Jacob touches his lips to her bloody hands, where the soldiers of the Crown cut off fingers that once held a bow, fingers that once held a violin.

  It was as Jacob, eight years later, that I left Spain. It was as Jacob, the night we sailed from Spain, that I awoke, curled up next to my mother’s viol on the bottom of a double hogshead. The instrument, snug in its case, played to me, played by itself, unbowed. Far from trying to dampen the strings, to keep it from disclosing my hiding place, I listened carefully for its message.

  Boards creak close to my ears, distant splashes, I can smell old wine and olives. Esau in his barrel, Jacob in his. Far away, music, a violin, a viol, Jacob, Zoltan.

  It sang to me, my viol. It sang to me a wordless song of my brother, a message that my brother, my long-departed, long-converted brother, Esau, was nearby, sailing, somewhere in our fleet. I fell asleep to the melody, happy in the thought that as long as the viol continued to play, as long as my brother was nearby, I would survive.

  When I awoke, all was silent. The viol kept its own counsel over many weeks at sea, until the morning before I was freed, when once again it sang the presence of my brother. By nightfall and landfall, truth had replaced hope. He was not among us, my brother Eliyahu, my brother Esau. I was beached with a small group of men for whom I had neither sympathy nor patience. By morning, I was gone.

  By the grace of my viol, I made friends with the native population at every step. I was fed, clothed, and above all, transported across the island. My questions, the answers I received, led me southward, back onto the water with native sailors, who asked no other payment than five minutes of melody. I landed on the coast of this great continent and followed the beckonings of my remarkable instrument inland, sometimes resting among the welcoming locals, sometimes traveling, for months at a time, out of sight of all mankind.