The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Finally, one spring night when chance, fate, and time happened to find themselves in auspicious alignment, the conjunction of those forces pierced directly through the yellowing document and the text opened its dark secrets to Salman. His heart was in his throat as he read the recipe for the elixir of immortality and the centuries-old admonitions that no one should ever consume even a drop of the potion and the secret should never be revealed to anyone except the eldest son of the family.

  SALMAN HATED DEATH. He considered himself to be its sworn enemy. Death had deprived him of all those he held dear: four brothers, his father, his mother, and Rabbi Tibbon.

  Why was death so cruel? What was it trying to tell him? He was perpetually amazed by the enigma, while at the same time understanding full well that death was the only certain thing in this life. All who are born must die one day, even if none of us knows when or how.

  But now that the elixir of immortality with its guarantee of eternal life was within Salman’s grasp, he was overcome with the desire to challenge and defeat death.

  IT WAS MUCH MORE difficult to cultivate the Raimundo plant than Salman initially had expected. One planting after another withered, and he suspected that this was due to the heat of the summer. When autumn and cooler weather arrived, Raimundo finally began to put forth leaves. It took Salman another three months to finish the preparation of the elixir.

  The taste was foul, but Salman was resolute in his determination to triumph over death. He quickly downed the seven drops. A wave of nausea swept through him.

  He awoke in the middle of the night in a high fever and suffering from sharp pains. His face was dark blue. Beads of blood stood out on his forehead. His cries awoke everyone in the house. They summoned a doctor, who poked and pressed every part of Salman’s body. The physician scratched his head and obliged the young man to get up from the bed and execute a series of peculiar movements. Following this, the doctor tickled the soles of his feet and his elbows. At last, with an encouraging but worried smile he gave his diagnosis. Salman was physically healthy, perhaps a trifle frail, but he was suffering from a spiritual affliction that arose from something difficult and painful buried in his heart. This hidden woe had inundated his body with bitter phlegm, causing the fever and provoking muscle spasms. The physician could not identify any definitive cause for the bleeding from the forehead. He thought some sort of process of inner cleansing might be underway, similar to that which women experience each month. He told Salman to consume three garlic cloves thrice a day to lower the fever and, other than that, to take no solid food for three days.

  The next morning Salman’s fever had disappeared. He felt wonderful.

  THREE YEARS LATER Salman married Gabriel Abudalfía’s youngest daughter, Esther. It was an arranged marriage, not a love match. Esther’s siblings were married and already had families. Esther had been yearning for the day when she would dress as a bride and know married bliss. One morning she asked her father to arrange things. That very afternoon Abudalfía remarked to Salman that perhaps the time had come for him to marry. What could be more appropriate than to wed a young woman whom he had seen almost every day for many years? After all, such regular encounters strengthen relations and friendships. He was careful to make it clear at the same time that Salman owed them nothing and was in no way obliged to acknowledge the debt of gratitude he owed the family for being allowed to share their quarters. However, if Salman should choose to accept the role of son-in-law in the household, he would be welcomed as a partner in the merchant’s flourishing firm.

  The wedding celebration was the most elaborate for many years in the judería. Everyone would have cherished warm memories of the fest if only the bride had not happened to suffer a tragic accident at dinner.

  When Esther leaned over to speak to guests on the other side of the table, a flickering candle touched her festively arranged hair. It suddenly became a flaming torch. Many of those present thought at first that this was a joke, carefully prepared and artfully realized; guests at the table burst into happy laughter. Esther’s face was severely burned, for it took several minutes to extinguish the flames. Their wedding night was not exactly what Salman had expected, and he had to wait more than six months for her to open her sex to him so that they could unite as husband and wife in the consummation of the flesh.

  The couple had five children—three sons and two daughters. Salman worked for his father-in-law and traveled frequently. The perpetual problems of ordinary life seldom left him the time to think of anything else. The secret formula in the fragrant little wooden box almost slipped from his mind.

  The only thing that from time to time reminded him of the elixir of immortality was the fact that he never felt any physical pain or showed the slightest signs of the process of aging that affects all humans. The inexorable march of time molded ever deeper wrinkles in Esther’s face, but Salman always looked exactly the same as he had that day beneath the wedding canopy when he pledged his eternal fidelity to her.

  IN THE YEAR 1391 Pesach happened to coincide with Easter week. The traditional evening Seder of the Jews commemorating freedom from slavery in Egypt was celebrated on Easter Friday. In one part of Seville people came together in a festive celebration with burning candles, a well-furnished table, their favorite delicacies, and gleaming chalices of wine. The rest of the city was plunged in deep silence as the folk devoted themselves to praying, remembering, and accompanying Jesus Christ along the Stations of the Cross.

  Under cover of darkness a nobleman slunk into the judería. Historical sources give his name as Diego de López Alba and describe him as incorrigibly addicted to whores and prostitutes. His aim was to wallow in the pleasures of the flesh, since that evening he had not found a single woman in the Christian sections of the city willing to sell herself to him.

  His venture into the Jewish quarter was due in no small measure to the fact that three days before this, in front of the Giralda bell tower by Santa María Cathedral, he had seen a broad-hipped, heavy-breasted Jewess with the face of an angel, long cascading hair, and eyes the color of ripe chestnuts. That handsome woman fixed her gaze on him for an instant as he walked past, a sign that he interpreted as an open invitation. Enchanted by the woman’s body, he trailed some distance behind her in hopes that she would show him the way to the place where she practiced her trade. The Jewess strolled along a narrow street that circled halfway through the Jewish quarter. Next to a couple of houses with barred windows it widened into a plaza with a market, stalls, shops, and workshops. Swarms of women with black shawls over their heads were doing their shopping, haggling at stands heavy with oranges, grapes, melons, dates, olives, and beans. López Alba was afraid of losing his beauty in the press of the crowd. But suddenly she left the marketplace, swung into Calle Moisés, and disappeared into a house with a stone facing that signaled the prosperity of the inhabitants. He found the door locked when he attempted to enter.

  On Friday evening the love-struck aristocrat took the same path back to Calle Moisés. He groped his way along the walls of the house and peeked through the windows in hopes of catching sight of the beauty whose flesh he yearned to embrace. She was inside in holiday attire at a lavishly set dinner table, her hair in a tight knot on top of her head, surrounded by several old folks, a slightly humpbacked man, and four children of various ages, all obviously members of her family. They were eating unleavened bread, drinking red wine, and joyously singing. López Alba saw immediately that as far as the woman was concerned, the only satisfactions he could hope for that evening would be those of his eyes and imagination, instead of the anticipated pleasures of grasping her buttocks as he thrust himself deep inside her. He felt sharply disappointed, and a sense of resentment flared within him. He briefly contemplated breaking into the house to assault her. What kind of Jewish cunt is this? he thought to himself. In the street by day she conducts herself shamelessly, like a hot-blooded whore, showing off her big tits and great rear to tempt Christian men, and by night she wraps h
erself in dark cloth from head to toe at home and pretends to be a dutiful Madonna and loving Jewish mother, then afterward wallows voluptuously in bed until the dawn with that cripple! The hotheaded nobleman threw a large rock through the window, howled insults, and fled.

  He sought out several friends who were idling that evening away by playing cards. He told them he had been on his way to mass at the cathedral, but because he was deeply immersed in religious contemplation he had lost his way and wound up in the judería. There with his own eyes he had seen the Jews profaning the sacrament of the holy mother church, butchering an innocent Christian infant and drinking its blood, singing praises to Satan, laughing at Christ’s suffering, and mocking his sacrifice by stuffing crucifixes up their asses.

  One of the cardplayers, the priest Alonso Adejo, slammed his fist on the table. “Basta!” he roared. “That’s enough of these Jews’ shameless behavior. How do they dare mock the Christian faith in these hours when our thoughts are with Jesus Christ on the cross? We can’t just sit here and accept that. We have to do something and do it right now!”

  ALONSO ADEJO was seen as one of the less-principled souls among the clergy of Seville. His name was linked to countless rumors. For example, it was said that in his younger days he had overpowered several teenage girls of respectable Christian families who had come to him for spiritual guidance, but no one dared to complain. Quite the opposite, in fact: the girls’ fathers did everything they could to hush up the matter, because they feared their daughters would not be marriageable if it became generally known that their hymens had been broken.

  The generally accepted story was that the person who finally put a stop to Adejo’s assaults was a fat whore of Jewish background. He had promised her payment in silver coins if she met him in the church. Once they were inside, he became violent, dragged her out to the choir, tore open her blouse, cruelly fastened his hands on her naked breasts, and obliged her to kneel. He stuffed his swollen member into her mouth and demanded that she suck it. As she started to work, he pulled out a leather whip and began to lash her. The woman screamed and tried to get up; he ignored her protests. He pushed her back down with one hand and tried to wield the whip with the other. She became infuriated, chomped down as savagely as she could on the glans of his penis, and bit off the extremity with a violent jerk. He screamed like a stuck pig and lost his grip on her shoulder. She stood up, spat out the bloody bit of flesh, told him he could keep his silver coins because she was providing him this relief at no charge, and then ran out of the church. The shocked priest fell to the floor in a swoon. The three choirboys who found him and saved him from bleeding to death were certainly not of the more discreet sort, for soon everyone in Seville knew that a fat Jewish whore with sharp teeth had cut off the seed-spouting faucet of Alonso Adejo and converted a lust no Christian maiden had been able to satisfy into impotence and bitter longing.

  That nameless whore had instilled into his heart undying hatred and animosity, and he considered it his priestly duty to annihilate all who did not believe in Christian teaching and refused to have their children baptized.

  THE KING and the archbishop of Seville were known for their cordial attitude toward the Jews. They took prompt action when word came to them that Adejo had incited strong anti-Jewish sentiments with his sermon. Even as the priest was busy in his parish readying a campaign to throw out the Jews, the archbishop stressed in his sermon at the cathedral that Christianity valued mercy and loving-kindness equally, and for that reason every Christian was bound by his faith to show tolerance for the Jews. As soon as the king heard the rumor that Adejo had assembled a mob of volunteers, an imposing, seething band planning to descend upon the Jews, he ordered his soldiers to take up defensive positions around the judería.

  Those measures were of little help. Adejo and his hatred had a far greater influence upon the people than the message of the Gospel did; the swords and lances of the protecting forces were not sufficient to protect the Jews of Seville.

  SALMAN COULD NOT SLEEP. His nights had always been thus. Every night of his life he had lain awake, overwhelmed with the fear of losing himself in the remote darkness of eternal night. He kept his breath shallow, lay there without moving, and listened fearfully to the street noises far off in the depths of night. He thought that he heard the distant murmur of troops in quick march. After a moment of silence, he heard more sounds. This time he could make out the words “fire” and “blood.”

  He positioned himself by the window and saw several black-clad figures in the street. Their hands held glistening sword blades, rapiers, stilettos, and double-edged knives. They began chanting, “With fire and blood, we’ll kill the Jews.” The noise from outside, the terrifying words, and the menacing rhythm of that chant shook him deeply. He had been through this before—the attack out of the dark by the mob howling battle cries. He suddenly recalled that night in Córdoba when masked men struck down old Jacobo Tibbon and set his house on fire. Salman had been only fifteen and had watched those events from his hiding place in the neighboring house of Luis Abudalfía. His helplessness as the rabbi’s house went up in flames had tormented him ever since that night.

  He knew instinctively what was about to happen. He felt completely exposed, and in his mind’s eye he could see how the dark shapes would grab him and send him tumbling, spit on him and kick him, beat him, and trample him, slash off his clothing and set fire to his body as he lay there already half dead.

  He rushed to awaken Esther, who was breathing deeply and wheezing in her sleep. At that instant he heard a violent pounding upon the door.

  WHAT HAPPENED that night in Seville was so horrific, so bloody, and so terrifying that I couldn’t bear to listen to my great-uncle’s description of it. His voice was mournful and desolate. It was evident that it cost him pain and great effort to put the gruesome details into words. I recoiled in disgust from what I heard, and I had the vision of sinking slowly into a hellish clamor of men crying out in pain, women weeping, and children screaming. My stomach turned and I had to cover my ears. I began crying and shaking. My great-uncle looked down at me in surprise, confused; he couldn’t decide if he should go on with his description of the first pogrom against the Spanish Jews, a bloodbath that was only the first of many over the following hundred years. He decided to stop there. He never said another word about that episode in the history of our family.

  That’s why I do not know exactly what Salman and his family suffered on the night of June 6, 1391, when the self-proclaimed guardians of the pure faith murdered men, slit the throats of women and children, plundered houses and set them on fire. Behind them they left the corpses of four thousand innocents.

  What I do know is that the next morning Salman and Esther found the corpses of their daughters and their families in the burned-out ruins of the Jewish quarter. The bodies were horribly slashed and badly burned. Salman could not hold back his tears. Esther did not scream; she did not weep. She stood there erect with a stony expression, overwhelmed by pain. She peered closely at the bodies of her children and grandchildren for a very long time, and the grief destroyed her will to live. She fell lifeless to the ground.

  ONCE AGAIN death had robbed Salman of all those whom he loved most: his wife, his daughters, five grandchildren, two sons-in-law, friends and neighbors.

  Once again he had stood in the valley of the shadow of death. What was death trying to tell him?

  He listened to death. He listened closely for a long time. Eventually he realized that he had already stepped past his own mortal limits and pushed out into the unknown, and he was now experiencing the rarest moment of grace, the unimaginable moment of perfect liberty, unknown to most, sought desperately by many, never before achieved by anyone. He was the only one ever granted the privilege of experiencing such a moment, perceiving the looming figure of death, looking him in the face and possessing something that forestalled death’s embrace.

  Salman examined his body. He was more than sixty years old, but his face
was that of a young man. Only the blindness of habit had prevented him and those around him from seeing it. It was even more peculiar that his body showed no signs of having been beaten, kicked, stabbed, and burned. He could not find even a scratch, not a single bruise, not the most trivial injury to testify to the brutality of the mob on that ghastly night. He recalled that a towering brute had broken his leg with violent blows of a hammer without eliciting a word of complaint from him. It was clear to him that he could withstand any physical torment at all, for he possessed an invulnerability that was all but divine.

  He was still, more than ever, the same person he had always been: a man nourished by the bounty of the world’s gardens and by its animals, a man who gave back to the earth all his surplus, a man who sorrowed because he had for all too long been without the close warmth of love. But he could not deny that he was experiencing everything with the vigor of a god. He felt self-confident, as close to perfect as he was willing to admit, and eternal. He was at one with God due to the simple fact that immortality was his destiny. He knew that he would have to bear that great truth all alone, because he could never tell anyone that he had discovered the perfect antidote to all illness, the elixir of immortality.

  SALMAN WAS STOCKY and resilient, a man with an unbelievably large nose; he had a lively curiosity and a joyous nature; he was erudite and eager to enter into discussions; and his stride was so energetic that the muddy earth splattered all the way up to his shoulders as he made his way in his wanderings across the world. He never rode a horse but always went by foot instead, taking pleasure in walking uninterrupted for twelve or fourteen hours without showing the least sign of fatigue. Perhaps that was why he was called “the wandering Jew.”