The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

by Richard Zimler

  “Don’t you know?!” Isaac asks.

  “No. My uncle wouldn’t say in case he was ever exposed. The less we knew the better, as far as he was concerned.”

  Farid suddenly shuffles into the room. With his hands, he says, “I didn’t realize…”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I signal back. “Sit with us if you have the strength.”

  Diego and Isaac stand, bow in Farid’s direction. He nods his head, drops next to me and rests a heavy hand on my arm. “My friend is deaf,” I say. “He will read our lips. There is nothing you could say to me that couldn’t be said to him.”

  “I’m afraid we didn’t speak of your uncle’s methods,” Isaac continues. He rises to his feet. His smile seems practiced. “And if you’re not interested in purchasing the book…?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m afraid our meeting is at an end. Thank you for the brandy.”

  At the door, he hooks his arm in mine. In a delicate whisper, as if trying to enchant a child toward sleep, he recites verses of a poem by Moses Ibn Ezra: “‘My night is plunged into a silent, waveless sea of darkness, a sea that has no coast, no shore for those who voyage. I do not know if this night is long or short. How can a man oppressed with grief know such a thing?’” To my ear alone, he whispers, “Have courage!”

  The peculiar gentleness of this stranger whom I doubted leaves me hugging my sorrow like a lonely widower. When Isaac and Diego are gone, I put Farid to bed. My mother is asleep in Esther and Uncle’s bed, curled into a ball, breathing fitfully. From her hand has fallen a stoppered vial. I snatch it up from the curls of the blanket, caress a viscous drop onto my finger. Bitter comes the taste of extract of henbane and mandrake. To escape both herself and Lisbon’s gates for a time, mother has summoned a twilight sleep akin to trance. Maybe it is for the best.

  In the cellar, I find Aunt Esther still sitting at Uncle’s desk like a statue, Cinfa shivering at her feet. I bring down a blanket from upstairs, cover the girl. Her eyes connote separation, fear. Yet she bends away irritably from my touch. In my room, sitting on my bed, I pray for Judah’s safe return before daring to head again into Little Jerusalem to try to wake Senhora Tamara. But before I can summon my legs to help me, chant entwines with sleep and drops like a woolen quilt across me.

  I awake in bed. Blind to my borders. The blackness all around seems a hiding place for evil. A hard warmth pushes against my ribs. I jump up. It is Cinfa, her face veiled by hair.

  As I regain my composure, she wakes. “Where are you going?” she moans.

  “To call on Senhora Tamara.”

  “You mustn’t go!”

  I caress her cheek. “Nothing will happen. Don’t worry.”

  She sits up, ducks her head under my shirt and breathes hot against me. It is a refuge she sought as a child. “I’ll be back sometime after dawn,” I say. “You remember when I used to take you to Senhora Tamara’s bookstore to read ‘The Fox Fables’ while I made my dawn deliveries?”

  She nods against my chest.

  “We shall do that again soon. Now while I’m gone, will you look in on Farid for me?”

  She squirms her head into the air, alert to the task, just as I’d hoped. “And do what?” she questions.

  “Feed him more boxwood tea when he wakes. It’s in mother’s blue pitcher. And an egg if he can eat. Wash your hands afterwards with soap.”

  She nods thoughtfully, stands up atop the mattress. Towering over me, she shows me the knowing eyes of an adult, the weighted stance of our mother. Does the girl secretly hate me for helping to take away her childhood?

  Outside, the dawn of Thursday is upon us. The sun’s chariot has already begun to lift into the sky. When it reaches the western horizon, it will beseech the seventh evening of Passover to gift mankind with its holy descent.

  On my way to visit Senhora Tamara, I stop by the New Christian workshops on Goldsmiths’ Street to see if anyone has tried to sell our gold leaf or lapis lazuli. My knocks are answered by the newly widowed and childless who kiss me and press their hands into mine as if I may be able to entreat God to bring back their loved ones. But no one has been offered any lapis or gold of late. They gift me with promises of help when I slip from their arms back outside. Numb, wary lest I be tempted to feel too much, I shuffle into sunrise.

  When I ring Senhora Tamara’s bell, she shouts,” A tinta está quase seca, the ink’s almost dry!” Its her antiquated way of saying that she’s on her way. Half a dozen locks clang open. A pale eye sitting above a deep pouch of skin peers through a crack of doorway. “Berekiah!”

  Senhora Tamara shows her toothless smile, unhinges the last chain and pulls me inside as if a kid dragging a parent toward treasure. Silver hair frames her wizened face. “Let me look at you!” she exclaims. She takes mouse steps backwards, squints up at me, her heavy eyelids wrinkling. The wisps of dark hair on her upper lip bristle as she makes a puffing noise and says, “You need to go to a barber and get some sleep!” Her turned cheek invites me to proffer a kiss.

  “Did I wake you?” I ask.

  “Me? You kidding?! An old lady never sleeps soundly.” She flaps her hand bitterly. “The curse of old age—all those memories clattering keep you distanced from sleep!”

  “Where were you then? I came in the middle of the night. There was no answer.”

  “Next door,” she replies. “Sleeping with a neighbor. These days, a Jew who still dares sleep alone is putting one foot in the grave!”

  We talk of my family. She gasps at Uncle’s death. “Come,” she says, beckoning me to the desk by her hearth. “Sit on the stool.” She shows me a stern but faraway look, as if she is wondering how to reconcile his murder with God’s presence.

  With quivering hands, she lifts away a Latin treatise on flowers which she must have been reading. She motions me to my seat, lights two candles sprouting from the cups of a seven-armed silver menorah. Manuscripts in varying states of decay line shelves up to the ceiling, form rickety towers on the floor. She pulls a chair next to mine, sits with her hands on her lap as if squeezing into herself the strength needed to fend off tears. She and the room both reek of vellum and the special dust which rare books dispel; the Senhora keeps her windows closed to forestall the decay of her Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian and European volumes. How I used to love the hermetic otherness of this store as a child, as if it housed my inheritance.

  “He was just a child,” she says with a pressing force.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “The boy who came to sell your uncle’s Haggadah.”

  “Did he speak with any accent?”

  “No, he’s from Lisbon.”

  “Dark skinned?”

  She leans into me, her jaws grinding. The bright scent of cardamon alights around her; she is chewing seeds. “Fair skinned,” she says. “Tiny, thin. With wild hair. Like a thistle. Wait.” She darts about the room like a hen, picks out paper, a reed pen and an ink well. She puts them down in front of me. “Start drawing, Beri,” she says, and she stands like a Torah teacher over my shoulder as she commands my sketch: “…No, no, his nose was thinner, with nostrils like the sound slits in a cittern, very elegant you understand. And the lips were fuller, as if he were pouting. More curve…more shape…” She presses into the taut muscle between my neck and shoulder when I’ve captured a feature correctly and whispers, perfeito as if drawing the word into a silken thread. After an hour, she has lifted her hand away in satisfaction.

  “And his clothes?” I ask.

  “Poor. A ragged little nincompoop. The kind of kid who hawks esparto grass by the quays. He said he was selling the Haggadah for his master. I handed him a fable to look at while I examined it. But the little beggar couldn’t even read.” She frowns as if illiteracy were a Christian sin too beastly to tolerate. She walks me to the door with her hand in mine, says, “I’m sorry. I should have bought it. But all of a sudden I was screaming like a parrot. You know how I get.” She motions for me to bend so that my face is at her
level, speaks in a conspiratorial voice. “Berekiah, after all this… When do you think King Manuel will come to his senses and allow us Hebrew books again?”

  “Never,” I say.

  “Then I must start smuggling, too,” she concludes in a hushed voice.

  “When I find out how my uncle did it, I’ll tell you.”

  I scroll up my drawing and slip it into my pouch. We kiss goodbye. On the street, gazing over tawny rooftops into the distance, I wonder who would be bold or foolish enough to send an illiterate boy to sell a stolen Haggadah to Little Jerusalem’s most experienced bookseller. The whisper of my uncle’s voice rises with a swirl of dust from the cobbles, bearing the name Miguel Ribeiro, the aristocrat for whom Esther recently scripted a Book of Psalms.

  When I ask, “Why him?,” there comes the reply: “Precisely because the acts of a Portuguese nobleman cannot be questioned by a Jew.”

  Chapter XII

  The Rua Nova d’El Rei is a hell to cross, already a sweating stink of peddlers and animals and spices. I thread my way through the rabble to Goldsmith’s Street and turn up toward Miguel Ribeiro’s mansion. Two armored guards stand outside, halberds poised in gloved hands. The shorter of the two, a sickly looking man with a harelip, follows me with suspicious eyes. I plant myself in front of him and say, “Tell your master that Pedro Zarco wishes to speak with him.”

  A black footman with a shaved head is called to carry my message inside. He returns at a trot. The guard opens the gate. On the front steps, a squat servant with oily, copper-colored hair and a sweaty, pimpled forehead rushes to me. He wears blue leggings too tight for his fleshy buttocks, and his green brocade doublet is ripped at the collar. He takes my arm as if escorting me from danger. Up close, I see that his fat neck is scratched raw and red. Is he riddled with mange? He stinks of metal, like an old coin. Perhaps he has been eating antimony pills—a cure-all freely recommended by half-made Christian doctors.

  “Inside…inside!” he whispers, his hands waving wildly.

  He ushers me into a vaulted waiting room painted with frescoes of roseate gods and goddesses in the Florentine style, then looks me up and down with rapt, jaundiced eyes. In a conspiratorial whisper, he asks, “Is your God really a bull?”

  “What?”

  “Is the Jewish God a bull?” Forming horns atop his head with his hands, he speaks as if I might not understand Portuguese. “You know, a male cow…a cow’s husband…bull…”

  Of course, I’d heard of scholars at the University of Coimbra who believed we had prehensile tails; bishops in Braga who claimed we needed the warm blood of Christian children for Passover rituals; doctors in Porto who said that we possessed an odor similar to that of rotting whale meat—the foetor Judaicus. But this belief that we prayed to a bull was a new slander. An understanding of the misconception involved only came to me weeks later, when I realized that the servant had confused the Portuguese word touro, bull, with Torah. So in reply, I simply sigh and say, “Just let me speak with your master. He knows who I am.”

  He wipes his forehead with his sleeve and says in an urgent voice, “Don’t you know where he is? He spoke of needing to find Master Abraham Zarco. He’s you’re uncle, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you must know!”

  “I assure you I don’t,” I say. “And my uncle can’t possibly be with him—he’s dead.”

  “Oh dear.” He holds his head in his hands.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  He looks up imploringly, whispers, “Dom Miguel has been missing since Sunday. He had mentioned your uncle’s name. I thought…”

  “Have you searched for him?”

  “Leave?! Leave this house?!” The servant paces the room, curls his hands together, braids and unbraids his arms.

  I ask, “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Oh dear…Sunday afternoon. The riot was starting. Some men came looking for Marranos. He spoke with them, then rode out toward Benfica. He has a stables there. But we’ve had no word. I don’t think he made it.”

  “Who was with him?”

  “No one. I’ve sent messages there. No one’s seen him.” He begins clawing at his neck, then swipes at a chaffed scar below his ear with catlike ferocity. He squats on the ground as if about to relieve his bowels right into the seat of his leggings, continues scratching. “If he were a Jew, I’d understand,” he groans. “But he’s innocent! Completely innocent!”

  I remember Uncle’s comment about Dom Miguel’s covenant with the Lord. Apparently, not even his household staff knows that he’s a secret Jew. “Go sing it to the goats, you ignorant peasant!” I say, turning to leave.

  The servant jumps up and grabs my arm. I rip it away. His eyes bulge fish-like in anger, and he hisses, “Yes, you’re one of them! Right to the tip of your horns!”

  Grinning cruelly, I say, “Have no fear. I won’t curse you to our touro god.”

  He arches his back into a posture of command, peers up at me over his pug nose. “Begone, Marrano!” he shouts in an arrogant voice.

  But I am beyond the contempt of mortal men. As I turn away, he calls after me in a terrified voice, “You’re not going, are you?!”

  I look back for his beseeching eyes. He is squatting again, swiping at his neck, drawing blood now. I watch him from across a distance which, to my surprise, will admit no sympathy for Christian anguish.

  The road to Benfica skirts the quarry pits at Campolide where hundreds of yellow-eyed Africans mine limestone from gouged hillocks. Two breeds of slaves they’ve become: the portadores or carriers, backs braced with baskets woven from vine, who grunt and trudge under their burden of stone; and the picadores or hackers, wide-shouldered and lean-muscled, whose rose-pink hands grip the wooden handles of the iron picks which remove the hills a little at a time.

  A third breed lives on a lower level: small, darting Portuguese slave boys known as lebres, hares, who scavenge scree and carry it from the worksite in reed baskets.

  In Benfica’s main square, a droopy-eyed grandmother wrapped in a black mantilla is hawking quince marmalade from the steps of the São Domingos Church.

  “Do you know where Miguel Ribeiro has his stables?” I ask her.

  “Never heard of him,” she replies.

  “The local blacksmith will know,” I say. “Be so kind as to tell me where he works.”

  She points down the street to a dusty wooden shack and cackles, “So it’s the Basque you’re after, is it!” Her shoulders hunch and she giggles to herself as if a secret has been exposed.

  A sorry-looking donkey is hitched to the shack’s door handle. Flies have formed a buzzing nimbus around an enraged wound on the poor creature’s snout. Inside, a pale-skinned giant with thick black hair and oak-branch arms is pumping a bellows the size of a carriage. He wears only sandals and a long, leather apron, and from the side his thick, muscular legs and even buttocks are visible. The bellows’ cylindrical mouth glows red where it enters the forge. The air smells of smoke and metal and heavy toil. I cough to get his attention, excuse myself and ask, “Dom Miguel Ribeiro—do you know him? He’s said to have a stables very near here.”

  He turns to me, and with a clipped Basque accent questions, “Who’s asking?” A thick cord of scar tissue runs from his left ear lobe across his cheek. Droplets of sweat cling to his chin, fall patiently, one by one, to the floor.

  “My name is Pedro Zarco,” I say. “I’ve word from Lisbon for him. From his sister.”

  He turns away from me and returns to his pumping. In an irritated voice, he says, “If you work for his sister then you should know where he lives.”

  “She’s had thick cataracts since childhood and couldn’t describe the way.”

  My failure to lie convincingly is implicit in the patient, resigned way he lowers his arms and wipes the sweat from his fingers on his apron. “She doesn’t need to see in order to describe the way to her brother’s stables,” he says.

  “Look, she came down f
rom Coimbra after the riot. She’s worried. All she knows is that he’s here somewhere in Benfica. Do you need to see my written pedigree to give me an answer? Or will checking my teeth be enough?”

  He laughs from his gut, eyes me up and down. “You’re really quite a nice looking young man.” He thrusts out his legs, leans back and reaches his massive hand below his apron to his sex. As he fondles himself, his leering stare makes it obvious what he wants. “For a little price, I might tell you.”

  “For a little price, I could buy the information from someone else.”

  “My ‘bird’ is mighty nice,” he grins, showing the remnants of a few brown teeth. “Big as a raven. And the way it can kiss your ass cheeks! Young man, I think you’d like it.”

  “I’ve a friend who’d love it. But I’m not interested.”

  He unstraps his apron and tosses it aside. He’s completely naked underneath, all dripping, matted hair and muscle. His member sticks straight out from his abdomen, big and round as a rolling pin. “I could take you without your permission,” he says, as if favoring me with a forewarning. His eyes are bright with seductive anticipation.

  I show Farid’s dagger. “And I could cut it off.”

  He laughs, steals forward like a stalking animal, runs his thumb enticingly across the length of his facial scar. “How do you know you won’t like it if you’ve never tried?” he asks.

  My heart pounds a code of dread as I back up. “I have tried. Once, with that friend I mentioned. But I prefer other unions. And I’ve grown exceptionally fond of my ass in just one piece if you don’t mind.”

  He doesn’t smile, but moves his hand to his lips for saliva. I back to the open doorway. Trying to seduce me with his lust, he begins pumping on his sex.

  I chant, “Blessed be He who has given me an escape from satyrs,” and race into the street. Looking over my shoulder, I see him by his donkey, showing the poor animal and a good deal of Benfica his private manhood.