The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Salman was invited to the meeting and discovered to his horror that the conspirators were about to designate Ezra de Espinosa to carry out the deed. This deeply disturbed him. He did not want his great-great-grandson to risk his young life in such a despicable attempt to kill another human being, even if the target was the odious Torquemada.

  None of the conspirators in de Vera’s house—Ezra least of all—knew Salman’s true identity. But they all knew he was the wandering Jew, so they listened respectfully when he opened his mouth to speak. He told them he had followed the Grand Inquisitor over the course of many years and had seen that the man was driven by an inexplicable obsession with killing, an evil so great that it defied human understanding. He had also determined that Torquemada was protected by evil demons and would die only if one could stab him in the heart with a silver blade tempered in the blood of a dark gray peregrine falcon. Whoever delivered the killing blow would have to wear suspended from his neck an amulet fashioned from the beak of the same dark gray peregrine falcon. His listeners regarded Salman with increasing dismay. No one questioned his pronouncement. He told them that no extensive search was necessary to identify the right person. With that, he rose, took a knife from his pocket, and showed them the amulet that hung from a cord about his neck. Walking slowly around the great table where the others were seated, he declared that he—he alone—would be able to take Torquemada’s life.

  IT WAS A CHILLY TUESDAY MORNING. The air was clear and pure. The Grand Inquisitor was making the final preparations for an important sermon he would be delivering at Santa María Cathedral to the assembly of inquisitors, announcing his decision to institute tribunals in every inhabited place in the kingdom.

  The conspirators agreed that the best time to attack Torquemada was as he climbed the broad steps that led to the cathedral.

  Salman felt nervous. He lay curled up under a blanket on a wagon positioned next to the cathedral steps. He had never killed a man. Doing harm to a fellow human being was contrary to his nature. For that reason he tried to imagine Torquemada not as a man of flesh and blood who merited human sympathy but instead as the instrument of death. Salman was the sworn enemy of death. He had always hated death. He clenched his jaws and felt that hatred pounding within him. This was a feeling so strong that it was as if a live creature was stirring beneath his ribs. That hatred, that searing avalanche of human fury, distracted him. He failed to notice that the hundreds of soldiers stationed around the plaza before the cathedral had seized his confederates and were approaching the wagon where he was hidden.

  ON THE DAY BEFORE Torquemada’s great announcement, Clara de Monteforte was arrested at the market of the Plaza de España. The vigilantes of the Inquisition, whose duties included the secret monitoring of purchases in the market, had been watching her for a long time because they suspected her of being a Marrana who regularly prepared Jewish food at home. That suspicion was kindled by a report from José Almeida, the proprietor of a vegetable stall, who noticed that unlike other women of that neighborhood, Clara would regularly fill her wicker basket with great quantities of onions and garlic. The dates of these purchases corresponded remarkably closely with those of Jewish holidays.

  Clara wasn’t aware of anything unusual that early morning because she was intent on buying vegetables and meat for the upcoming Easter holiday. She did not notice the three men around her as she picked up a large bunch of garlic. They grabbed her. She screamed and tried to break away, overturning José Almeida’s vegetable stand. No one responded to her wild protests. She bit the arm of one of the muscular assailants, who swore and brutally struck her head, knocking her unconscious. The men carried her away to the vaulted cellar of Santo Isidro cloister. Then they and four soldiers went to Clara’s house to arrest her husband, the carter Pedro de Monteforte, and their three sons, who did not resist. The family was shoved brusquely into a cramped chamber with nearly fifty other prisoners. The narrow dark dungeon resounded with cries and lamenting. In a hurricane of protest, people screamed in each other’s faces, demanding to be released. Men proclaimed their innocence, women recited Catholic prayers, and children wept.

  That same afternoon several soldiers took Clara and Pedro de Monteforte to the torture chamber. Clara turned out to be a hard nut to crack. She resisted fiercely, screamed, spat, and kicked wildly. The torturer struck her in the head with an iron bar several times. She was bleeding heavily from the ears and could scarcely hear. The inquisitor screamed into her ear to make her understand. She didn’t say a word because she was completely bewildered; she stood there, stunned and weeping. She wanted to spit in the torturer’s face, but her mouth was too dry.

  Her husband, Pedro, one of the conspirators, was no match for her. He lacked her robust physique. He panicked. Trembling and drenched in cold sweat, he begged for mercy, desperately pleading for his life. The Inquisition’s experienced torturer made short work of Pedro, chopping off his left foot and extracting a full confession. The carter wept, cried like a baby, wept some more, and spilled every detail of the plot to murder Torquemada.

  THE GRAND INQUISITOR exulted. He felt fortunate he had exposed the wickedness of the Marranos and now had grounds to confiscate the wealth of several of the richest men of Seville; and perhaps most fortunate, he was alive and unscathed because the planned attempt on his life had been detected in time.

  The conspirators were arrested and subjected to horrific punishment. Their wives and children were tortured, mutilated, and then burned alive before them. Then they received the same treatment.

  TORQUEMADA CHOSE to preside personally at Salman’s hearing. He spoke gently—almost as if he felt a certain human sympathy for the accused—and promised that Salman would not be tortured if he divulged the whole truth, everything that he knew that could assist the Holy Office in its mission. First of all, his own identity: where he had come from, and why he was called the wandering Jew. In addition, who had conspired to have the Grand Inquisitor murdered, and why was he chosen to carry out the evil deed? Torquemada admonished him to leave out no detail if he wished his life to be spared.

  Salman was gripped by a feeling of unreality. For a moment he thought his senses might be betraying him. Perhaps this was not really happening.

  He sought to call to mind the hundreds—no, thousands—of Jews he had met, all those who had fallen to their knees in wild sorrow and pleaded for help after losing their families and possessions. Yes, he thought, I knew them all—artisans and peddlers, rabbis and physicians, courageous women and terrified children. All the members of the great legion of suffering.

  He collected himself, answered Torquemada civilly, and promised to be entirely truthful. He stated that his name was Salman de Espinosa, born one hundred and sixty years earlier in Granada. He was called the wandering Jew because he never traveled on horseback but always on foot. The murder of the Grand Inquisitor had been planned by every Jew throughout Spain and the task was given to him because he was immortal.

  Torquemada flew into a rage. He ordered the torturer to strip Salman, put him on the rack, and bind his arms and legs. He told Salman that he could still show mercy if Salman confessed the strict truth.

  Salman replied that his crime was not that of attempting to murder the Grand Inquisitor. His voice was firm. The crime for which he was about to be condemned was that of embracing his Jewish identity and observing Jewish tradition.

  Torquemada bellowed, “My holy mission is to send all you Jews to the stake and burn away every trace of your whole hateful tribe!”

  “Don’t be too presumptuous,” Salman replied, as if offering friendly advice. “Men and women like me will always exist. All of you, however, will eventually disappear. Time is short; soon the worms will feast themselves upon your flesh and flames will consume your remains.”

  Torquemada told the executioners to get to work immediately. He turned and left the chamber. Four men tortured Salman without interruption for eight days but they never broke his spirit. He remained consciou
s throughout it all and praised his tormentors for their able handiwork. On the ninth day they threw his slit-open body into the flames. Inquisition records state that he was sentenced to death as a heretic and practitioner of black magic. He had used consecrated communion wafers at the Jewish Passover meal to summon the dark powers of the cosmos.

  A MONTH LATER, Salman celebrated Shabbat with friends in Dubrovnik. Then he trailed his long dark gown along the roads that followed the Adriatic coast, wandering through compact little white towns sunk in their everyday somnolence and distributing to faithful Jews The Seventh Book of Moses, a very odd book that he had written.

  My great-uncle told us all of this. And he added, “Truth is stranger than fiction. If you know what actually happened, you don’t need to invent stories. Besides, it’s easier to catch a liar than a lame dog.”

  In the autumn of 1995 the Spanish television channel RTVE broadcast a miniseries about the life of Tomás de Torquemada. The renowned reporter Juan Cruz Ruiz had spent several months tracing the Grand Inquisitor’s travels across fifteenth-century Spain. I was vacationing in Madrid and happened to see the final episode in my hotel room late one night. No expense had been spared, and the program offered both in-depth analysis and dramatic reenactments. One could almost catch the whiff of human flesh roasting in the bonfires.

  From this program I learned that Torquemada died a natural death in September 1498. He was buried with great pomp in Ávila on the grounds of the Santo Tomás cloister where he had spent the last years of his life. The cloister had been constructed in 1494. It served both as the residence of the Grand Inquisitor and as the seat of the tribunal of the Inquisition. The Jewish cemetery previously at that site had been dug up at the command of the king and queen. Gravestones were used as building material for the towering cloister.

  Torquemada enjoyed 338 years of peaceful rest in the leafy gardens of the cloister of Santo Tomás. The Spanish Inquisition was formally abolished in 1834. Two years later a gang of unknown individuals dug up the grave of the Grand Inquisitor, broke open his coffin, removed his remains, and burned them.

  ON THAT WARM AUGUST MORNING in 1640 a contrite Uriel Spinoza trudged toward the house at 4 Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam. He did not know that he had only a few hours left to live.

  MEESTER WAS A MAN of generous spirit. Each time Uriel Spinoza called on him in his well-furnished residence, Meester bustled forth, proclaiming in a hearty voice that he’d been hoping the Jewish philosopher would come back for a visit. He sent his servants to fetch spiced brandy and poured out generous portions for both of them. Meester loved the pleasant feeling that spread through his body with a goodly dose of alcohol, but Uriel Spinoza’s head became uncomfortably hot when he drank.

  The painter and the philosopher got along splendidly. Their personalities were completely different, but both felt that opposites complement each other, while folk with too many similarities tend to bristle with envy, rivalries, and animosity. Their very differences gave them the impression of standing close together and at the same time enjoying their marked differences.

  The friends spent many an evening together before the hearth on the ground floor of the five-story house. They always discussed issues of great significance. Their discussions were usually conducted with calm and equanimity, and the painter considered the philosopher’s powers of logic beyond compare.

  Meester wanted to become a bit more enlightened, not better educated. Intellectual subtleties and dazzling flights of rhetoric were of little interest to him. He preferred a discussion of basic principles, since above all he wanted to understand how to employ his talents, devoting them with insight, reverence, and technical bravado to creating works that could provide a glimpse of heaven both to himself and to others.

  Uriel Spinoza tended to concern himself principally with questions of the vanity of human reason and the immortality of the spirit, much like other great thinkers of the past. He was a learned rabbi, but he did not rely solely upon the Talmud and the Cabala for insights into the great questions of our existence. He studied Aristotle and Pliny, Seneca and Cicero; he adapted their concepts and teachings, combining them with his own. He was careful to borrow only those ideas that helped advance his own thinking. He held that a righteous man never sought to conceal the shortcomings of his own thoughts by citing the authority of others, and he stressed as vital the view that every individual should be personally responsible for his own views.

  No one in the city listened with graver attention than Meester to the logic underpinning Uriel Spinoza’s bold assertions about the nature of the human spirit and his arguments that the world is not an impenetrable mystery accessible only to God but is in fact a reality that man can grasp.

  My great-uncle said that Uriel was a peculiar creature with a character not particularly suited to establishing close friendships. Even those of his own flesh and blood—his half brother, Michael, and Michael’s family—were of the opinion that other than his erudition, Uriel had little to offer. They turned their backs on him. The Jews of Amsterdam could not find it in their hearts to forgive Uriel for spreading extremely dangerous ideas. He lived out his days as a pariah, shunned by all of them.

  ONE NIGHT in a tavern discussion a textile merchant with regular contacts with Jewish colleagues suggested to Meester that perhaps he should spend less time with that fellow Uriel Spinoza. He warned that if their close acquaintanceship became generally known, it might lead to a drastic fall in the number of his commissions as well as misgivings among his patrons, especially those with good ties to prominent Jews who viewed the philosopher as a blasphemer.

  That friendly attempt to discourage him had no effect on Meester’s relationship with Uriel. Meester would never drop his friend for propagating revolutionary ideas; the merchant’s comments prompted him to listen to the philosopher’s reflections with even greater interest.

  That’s why Uriel was hammering frantically at the door of 4 Jodenbreestraat on that hot August morning. He wanted to report the ghastly thing that had just happened, and he knew that only one man in Amsterdam would be willing to listen. Meester was his only friend.

  MEESTER’S HOUSEMAID, Sjoukje, was a buxom young woman with delicate features who took her master into her bed to placate him whenever he noticed that she had been stealing from the household funds. She opened the door and told Uriel that Meester could not receive anyone. Her face was somber.

  “Mijnheer Spinoza will have to come back another time.”

  Uriel saw immediately that Sjoukje had been weeping.

  “It is absolutely vital for me to speak with Meester,” he said, turning away from the serving girl in an effort to conceal his distress.

  Sjoukje almost choked on her own words as she told him that early that morning a message had arrived from Leiden informing Meester that his mother had died. Her face twisted in misery. “And last night Heer Meester and his wife lost their newborn daughter. The little girl coughed up blood and stopped breathing. She’s the second child to die in this house in two years.”

  Uriel stood there aghast, staring at her. Through his work in philosophy he had come to terms with death and had accepted it, but in that moment he could not comprehend why death would snatch away an innocent infant. He saw the baby girl’s death as arbitrary and unjust; he felt as if someone had just carved out a piece of his own heart, for he knew how much the newborn meant to Meester. Sjoukje thought for a moment that the Jewish philosopher was going to burst into tears, but he did not. He staggered slowly away.

  MY GREAT-UNCLE never revealed the man’s real name to us. I have no idea why not, actually, but he surely must have had his reasons. He called him “Meester,” and for a long time I assumed that was his name.

  My twin brother, Sasha, and I often heard about Meester and the Spinoza family. That is why the story remains engraved deep in my memory.

  MEESTER WAS IN URGENT NEED of money. His wife, Saskia, would soon be giving birth to the couple’s first child, and no one was will
ing to extend any more credit to him. The palatial residence in Jodenbreestraat had cost thirteen thousand gulden. He should never have purchased it, considering the high cost of the monthly mortgage payments. Even though he had devoted all his energies to finding patrons who might commission portraits from him, no new orders were forthcoming, principally because he now had the reputation of treating his clients with arrogance and condescension. He had started work on several paintings, but they stood incomplete in his workshop because he had no money for paints, and no one was interested in buying any of his finished works.

  Hardest of all for Meester was the fact that his earlier patrons had turned their backs on him. Men whom he had considered his friends brusquely told him to look for help elsewhere. Most of the time his appeals were met with silence, indifference, and cold responses.

  In the midst of this financial crisis, one of Meester’s creditors demanded repayment of a debt that he had thought would not be due for another two months. That lender, a heartless devil who was an illegitimate son of the once-powerful Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the politician beheaded for high treason, was known to enforce his demands with the help of a gang of toughs armed with pikes. Meester had entreated the man to grant him a week’s delay, but the lender was threatening to break both of the painter’s arms and demolish his furniture and household goods if the money was not paid within forty-eight hours.

  THE NEXT DAY, unexpectedly, almost like an apparition, Michael Spinoza came to Meester’s workshop with the idea of commemorating his fortieth birthday in October 1638 by commissioning a family portrait of himself, his wife, and their three sons.

  Thank God. This can finally put an end to the terrible misery that has been tormenting me so long, Meester thought. Although overjoyed, he managed to keep his feelings under tight control and hidden from his prospective client. Prompted by instincts inherited from peasant forefathers with expressionless faces who had bought and sold livestock in the cattle markets of Zuid-Holland, Meester affected indifference. As a bargaining ploy, he explained in gloomy tones that he was extremely busy at the moment and the waiting list for his services was long; even if he were to make an exception, considering that the matter involved the highly respected president of the Jewish council, there would be one condition—one nonnegotiable condition—for him to agree to paint the family portrait. “Heer Spinoza must resist the temptation to specify anything about the composition of the painting and must accord the artist full freedom to conceive and execute the work. Only on that condition could I accept the commission.”