The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  AS I LOOK over what I’ve written to this point, I’m a bit ashamed at the lack of a clear chronology. But I take comfort in the knowledge that this account isn’t presented as a scientific inquiry, so it doesn’t need a rigid structure or require exacting research.

  I’m writing about Spinoza family history. My mother asked me on her deathbed to tell the world about the separate universe we inhabited on this earth. I can still see her pale face before me—the uncombed hair hanging across her forehead and the way her glazed eyes looked past me, fixed upon some invisible spot on the ceiling. Her breathing became shallower and shallower, until finally the room was completely still. I felt morally bound to fulfill her wish someday.

  My mother died in November 1989 in the sixty-eighth year of her existence, but nearly ten years passed before I set to work. The mere thought of sitting down to write for a week or a month was unbearable. I’d always felt a persistent urge to be somewhere else, anywhere else. Besides, all my life I’ve found it hard to express myself in writing; it’s terribly difficult for me to put my thoughts on paper.

  Only when I learned that I was really, truly dying did I come to terms with the fact that, as the last of the Spinozas, I was the only person who could still remember my great-uncle’s tales of distant family history. I was the surviving witness of those bitter but entertaining quarrels between my grandmother and grandfather. I was the only one still alive who remembered how my twin brother, Sasha, died. I realized suddenly and with great pain that my greatest failure wouldn’t be my death but the fact that my death will obliterate all memory of everyone who came before me. That sudden realization gave purpose to my final days, for it drove me to start writing this, my testimony about earlier generations.

  That’s why I’m not bothering to record my own thoughts and deeds. These memoirs have almost nothing to do with me or my life history.

  I CHERISH the hope that the people whose stories I first heard in my childhood days will come to life again here. I hope they’ll appear as immediate and vivid as they were for us back when my great-uncle told their stories to Sasha and me. With that aim I devote painstaking attention in every waking hour to evoking the different centuries, bringing out the colors and the flavors unique to each age, describing just how the tempests of history buffeted my ancestors, and showing how dismal, ordinary life roused their feelings, affected their lives, and drove them into frenzies.

  Sometimes their stories stand out against the tumultuous background of their times, and their private lives and small victories illuminate the great events and terrible catastrophes of history.

  THE REASON I come back to my great-uncle so frequently is that although he hadn’t even a single drop of our blood in his arteries, he nevertheless represented for me the very incarnation of the Spinoza family. In his own peculiar and amusing way he taught me everything I know of our history, traditions, and customs—all of our futile successes and ignominious defeats, all the events of deep significance and all the meaningless drivel. He succeeded more or less intentionally in bringing all that into harmony: the past and the present, family and Jewish identity, the universe and the world, spirits and morality, love and destruction. He made me believe in the existence of impenetrable mysteries and the possibility of communicating with the spirit world, and he convinced me that the changelessness and dreamy melancholy of the past was of far greater interest than our modern world with its ever-accelerating changes.

  More than anything, although we did not know it at the time, with his air of mystery he succeeded in implanting into my heart and into that of my brother, Sasha, the very meaning of life: the fact that fate—not God, for Fernando did not believe in such nonsense—had an overarching plan for all of humanity and our family line was playing an important role in it.

  THAT WHICH BOUND our great-uncle to us—this is something I did not understand as a child and grasped only much later in life—was his desperate love for one woman. All his life he loved Sara, my grandmother, with a passion that bordered on madness. In order to stay close to her, he abandoned his own history and replaced it with that of the Spinoza family, including Sara’s minor role and the overlooked incident of her unhappy marriage.

  FROMBICHLER SAT at his usual table. He hadn’t yet tasted the beer in front of him. He dreamily contemplated the foam and seemed not to notice when my great-uncle took a seat opposite him. He was waiting for the bubbles in the tankard to dissolve and reveal how much beer it contained.

  “Three-quarters,” he announced, bitterly. “A swindle,” he muttered, “a fraud with all that foam. Vienna is a den of fraud, lies, and deception. A man can’t even get a full tankard of ale in this city anymore.” A long silence followed. My great-uncle thought, What idle nonsense. Just as he was about to contradict his friend, Frombichler spoke.

  “I’m going to tell you something, Fernando, in confidence, of course, something that’s no fraud at all but God’s own truth.”

  He drained the tankard in one long swallow and belched loudly. My great-uncle heaved a sigh but was secretly amused.

  “You may think that this story is merely a tall tale,” Frombichler continued with an earnest glance. “But I swear by the memory of my sainted grandmother that every word is true. I hardly need to remind you that truth is stranger than fiction. When you know what actually happened, you don’t need to make up a story. That’s why it’s easier to catch up with a liar than with a lame dog.”

  Slowly and deliberately he began the story of Salman de Espinosa.

  BY THAT TIME, characters from the Frombichler family saga were as familiar to my great-uncle as his fellow artists at Circus Jack, and he willingly listened to tales of their strange destinies. He enjoyed each new Spinoza who emerged from the obscurity of the Middle Ages. The hours spent with Frombichler were a sort of theater performance; colorful figures from all over Europe appeared and disappeared, involved in a drama of great complexity. My great-uncle listened, fascinated, as Baruch used a poultice to resuscitate the eldest son of the king of Portugal and Chaim compounded the poison used to murder Sultan Muhammed II. He found these stories exhilarating.

  Occasionally he felt inclined to doubt somewhat the veracity of those stories. At other times he reproached himself for letting Frombichler stuff his head so full of those anecdotes—provocative to the imagination but hardly credible—that he got the Spinoza family on the brain. Sometimes he resisted his self-assigned role as the passive listener absorbing a family saga that was not his own. That’s when he would avoid Frombichler’s table, glancing furtively in that direction while seating himself elsewhere in the tavern to play chess with some Russian immigrant. His absences were brief, and soon he was sitting with his friend again. He couldn’t resist the fascination of the lingering splendor of vanished times. He had no connection with that world but in some strange fashion it brought him closer to Sara. At least that’s what he told himself.

  NONE OF FROMBICHLER’S EARLIER STORIES compared with that of Salman de Espinosa. My great-uncle’s feelings about it were mixed. He couldn’t decide immediately whether it was a complete invention or truth itself. On the one hand, much suggested that it was an old wives’ tale, pure and simple. On the other hand, he had heard tell of strange events, and he’d had a number of eerie experiences that the laws of nature could not explain. He was convinced that there are mysteries we humans cannot explain.

  He searched his friend’s face. At long last, after downing four large tankards of beer and listening without interruption for five hours, he got up to relieve himself of the inner pressures that had been building for quite a while. He hurried to the toilet and slipped off homeward without saying goodbye. Once on the street, he decided to get to the bottom of the story, whatever it might take. He would dig into old documents, find out the truth, and uncover everything there was to discover about Salman de Espinosa.

  I DON’T KNOW what’s gotten into me. Here I’ve gotten carried away by the flood of memories again and lost the thread of my story. Thi
s may make it difficult for any eventual reader to keep things straight, since any story without a clear chronology is likely to become confusing.

  This is a good place to take a break, since I’m sure that an overly scrupulous examination of the historical record would cast doubt upon this account of the Spinoza family.

  You see, the remarkable thing about my great-uncle’s stories, all of which Sasha and I absorbed with the due measure of good faith and enthusiasm, was the complete absence of a consistent framework. His tales—those that I am trying to reproduce here—were fragmentary stories plucked out of thin air. Nowhere were they firmly fixed; nothing tied them to anything. It was almost impossible to confirm any of the details. There was no chronological order other than that which I much later tried in my helpful fashion to impose. There were no beginnings and no ends. The past was there but its future was not.

  MY AIM here is to describe the events of a man’s life, from the fourteenth century when Granada was still ruled by enlightened Moorish rulers up until that man’s death in Freiburg im Breisgau one Friday evening more than three hundred and fifty years later. He put an end to himself after spending his final days with his relative Benjamin Spinoza—to whom he bequeathed all the knowledge and secrets he had carried with him throughout the wide-ranging wanderings of his existence.

  Salman de Espinosa was a thickset, vigorous man with an indescribably large nose. He was full of curiosity and joy, happy to engage in discussions and extremely erudite, and he had a stride so vigorous that the muddy ground splashed all the way up to his shoulders as he made his way around the world. He never traveled on horseback. He always went on foot, happily tramping twelve or fourteen hours a day without a break and never getting tired. Perhaps that was why he was called “the wandering Jew.”

  I ASSUME that my great-uncle would have had no objection if I were to begin by describing Salman’s complicated background, given the countless times he recounted to us every tiny detail of the unusual circumstances that obliged the wandering Jew to leave Granada, his place of birth.

  SALMAN’S FATHER was the renowned Jewish Cabalist Moishe de Espinosa. They lived in Granada, and Moishe enjoyed the protection and financial support of the sultan as he secluded himself to study the mysteries of creation and the universe. He left behind the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendor, a Cabalistic tome, with bold observations and poetic formulations envied by the mystics. It perplexed religious seekers the whole world over.

  Salman’s mother, Hasna, was the daughter of the revered Arabic philosopher Yussuf al-Rahman. She was a devotee of the study of virtue, righteous conduct, and conscience. She used an approach to rearing her children that was entirely contrary to the customs of the time: no pressures, no obligatory exercises, and no punishments. She provided them with ample doses of Jewish and Arabic learning along with her mother’s milk.

  The plague of Black Death robbed Salman of his parents, Moishe and Hasna, when he was only fifteen years old. Death was nothing unknown to him, for in his short life he had helped to bury all four of his infant brothers. But now everything had changed. He was completely alone, abandoned without family or relatives, with no one to take care of him. A gaping abyss stood before him. He despised death and raged in terrible anger at his inability to duel with it. He wanted to lead a powerful and victorious rebellion against death, but he had no arms to use against it. All he could do was protest. He was enraged by his impotence. Behind him stood the certainties of death, and before him stood the uncertainties of life.

  Whenever he recalled the disappearance of all those he had loved, he burst into tears. His grief was direct and unconstrained, the grief of an orphaned child. Then he would abruptly collect himself, not yet knowing that these were the signs of his destiny, the cruel foreshadowing of the fact that in the course of his several centuries of life he would always lose everything that was precious to him.

  I TURN once again to Philip Khuri Hitti’s classic History of the Arabs for help in describing the unfortunate circumstances that obliged Salman to leave Granada, the city of his birth. The Lebanese author offers the following version of Arabic chroniclers’ accounts of the death in Granada of Sultan Yusuf I, which occurred only a few weeks after the burial of Moishe and Hasna.

  The sultan was murdered in the mosque while deep in afternoon prayer. A madman clutching a dagger leaped upon the ruler and stabbed him in the chest. The sultan gave out a loud groan and collapsed on the floor. His cry alerted the guards, who found him bathed in his own blood. The sultan was still conscious and tried to say something to them, but weakened by the heavy loss of blood as he was, he could not articulate a single word. The guards carried him to his private quarters in the castle. He turned his dying eyes to those closest to him as they assembled and gave them sorrowing looks of farewell. Then he died. He was followed on the throne by his eldest son, Muhammed V, who was then sixteen years old.

  According to Hitti’s account, Sultan Yusuf I had been endowed by Allah with intelligence, perspicacity, and good judgment. He was spiritual, just, and highly respected; he had excellent relations with all the other rulers of the Iberian Peninsula. Art and poetry were greatly appreciated at his court, and he had a reputation as the protector of freedom of thought.

  Even so, surprisingly enough, Hitti does not mention that Yusuf I considered Moishe de Espinosa to be the most accomplished of contemporary mystics and generously funded his research, for the sultan hoped that the Jewish philosopher would be able to produce a work explaining the nature of the Divine and its ordering of all things.

  Nor does Hitti describe all of the strange events in Granada in the days immediately following the death of Yusuf I.

  ———

  MY GREAT-UNCLE told us that a howling night storm destroyed that part of the Alhambra inhabited by the new sultan and tore up the imposing fruit trees in the garden by their roots, ripping them into tiny pieces. The only one that escaped total destruction was a magnificent apple tree, under which the old sultan would often read during the heat of the afternoon. That tree was ripped up by the roots, blown over the castle walls, and flung down into the main plaza. As dawn was breaking, the people hurried to pick and hide its fruit, which had turned golden ripe overnight. The following night, all of the statues in the Alhambra disappeared without a trace, and the roof of the mosque was blown away. On the third night terrifying phantoms appeared in the sultan’s palace, and howling and lamentations filled the air. The sultan’s counselors sought to reassure the uneasy Muhammed V that these were mere illusions, until it was discovered that twenty-one graves—exactly the number of years that Yusuf I had occupied the throne—had opened and now lay empty.

  Muhammed V was inexperienced and scared out of his wits, more inclined to severity than to mercy, impatient, and easily annoyed if something was not to his liking. My great-uncle said his brown eyes were colored with the hues of suspicion and petty-mindedness. He was terrified that the end of the world was upon him.

  The court astrologer, the influential Ahmed Husseini, had always had an evil eye for Moishe, the far more knowledgeable protégé of the sultan. The envious Husseini declared that with his Cabalistic spells the Jewish mystic had called down upon them the demon Messias and with him the Last Judgment. “Only the blind refuse to see and the deaf refuse to hear,” Husseini proclaimed, further alarming the already deeply apprehensive young sultan. In a voice that scarcely concealed his poisonous hatred and envy, he added that even though Moishe now lay dead in his barren grave, no walls were solid enough to resist Espinosa’s Jewish demon; the fiend could blow them to bits with a wave of his hand. The court astrologer suggested summoning Salman to the palace at once to turn over all of his father’s manuscripts. Everything must be burned immediately. To make sure that the boy was not hiding anything, the sultan should not hesitate to have his belly cut open to see if it was crammed with dangerous magic spells.

  THE REALIZATION that he no longer had any home in this world made Salman quake with fear.


  The captain of the sultan’s bodyguard knocked at the door, flanked by two soldiers. When the young man opened the door, the captain explained in a mild tone that the unbeliever Salman de Espinosa was given two hours to deliver the full collection of his father’s works to the palace.

  Unbeliever? What did that mean? No one had ever called Salman an unbeliever. Astonished, he went to his neighbor Mordechai, a grave old Jew who had been his father’s closest friend.

  The elderly man invited Salman in for tea. He smiled thoughtfully as he prepared it. Salman had the feeling that the old fellow had something extremely serious to share with him.

  “Have you taught yourself to read the Koran?” Mordechai asked him.

  Salman nodded.

  “Ah-ha—but you are a Jew?”

  “I am, but my mother was a Muslim.”

  The old man gave him a melancholy smile and murmured, “Salman, the truth of the matter is that you are neither Jew nor Muslim. According to Jewish law, you must be born of a Jewish mother in order to be a Jew. And what does Islam require of a Muslim? A Muslim father. But you have neither. Your mother was Muslim, your father a Jew.”

  “So what does that make me?”

  “You are the Almighty’s finest creation, the measure of everything: You are a human being. If all Jews, Muslims, and Christians were that, if they had a human outlook toward life and moral views, then you would have no need to fear the morrow. Keep that always in mind and always be a human being, with everything that status signifies. Above all, always be full of care and compassion for others.”