The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

by Richard Zimler

  The deal has been made.

  Queen Esther is not pictured in the panel. But her step-father, Mordecai, is there. He stands humbly in the corner, in the sackcloth of mourning with which he clothed himself upon hearing of the decree for his people’s destruction. His pose is one of pride, however, and his expression is wily, almost humorous. Undoubtedly because he holds in front of his chest the noose with which Haman will later be hanged. A spark of emerald passion in his eyes convinces me that Mordecai is modeled on Uncle himself.

  Farid squeezes my arm, points to the drawing and signals, “It’s you.”

  “What is?”

  “The man in the corner. The one with the noose. Mordecai.”

  The pounding of my heart comes wild and forlorn. Could Farid be right? It doesn’t seem possible that Uncle could illuminate me as the savior of the Jews. And the Mordecai pictured is simply too old.

  My hands clutch the vellum. Tears come to my eyes when I consider that he may have gifted me with the guise of a Jewish hero.

  So many questions I should have asked him will never be answered.

  My glance is drawn into the sky by a moonlit sea gull crossing the night. Mosquitoes buzz at my ears as if seeking entry to my thoughts. My Hebrew prayer for Diego’s peace, for the world’s peace, comes edged with the texture of Uncle’s hand squeezing hard at the back of my neck, then dropping away. His movement toward forever absence is so immediate that I gasp and turn around. My eyes survey the empty street until they reach the moist emerald light of two candles guarding over me from the highest window on the block.

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter XXI

  In the vacant world beyond Diego’s death, I slept for days on end. Behind the locked doors and sealed windows of my bedroom, inside a stifling atmosphere scented with my own rot. I got up from my bed again only when a vision of Joanna, the Count’s daughter, descended like a silk veil across my face. Her eyes shimmered with the reflective grace of pearls, and she whispered to me in a language beyond understanding. Summoned into the night, my feet took me along the lumbering walls of Lisbon until a destination became obvious. I found myself howling up at what I hoped was her window at the Estaus Palace.

  A dwarf with tufted hair opened his shutters. “I’ll have you castrated if you don’t stop your cock crows!” he cried.

  “I’m searching for Dona Joanna, the Count of Almira’s daughter,” I explained.

  “Not here!” he frowned. His shutters banged closed.

  The putrid stench of dungheaps stalked me all the way home. Craving the void of Ein Sof, I sought refuge in my bed once again. Days of wavering edges followed, of mossy light and dark, until Joanna’s voice pierced through my walls as if atop a winged prayer. When she entered my room, she was dressed in black. I was lying under my blankets.

  “I cannot stay long,” she said. Her eyes were glassy, as if tears might gush in them at any moment. “Have you been ill?” she asked in a hesitant voice.

  “Yes,” I said, sitting up. “I suppose so. Where have you been? I came looking for you.”

  “Here, in Lisbon, but I dared not come before now.”

  “I have never wanted a woman as much as I want you now,” I confessed. “It’s as if only you can heal me…or save me.”

  She sat at the edge of my bed and pressed the delicacy of her tiny, deformed hand to my lips. I was about to beg her to stay with me forever, but she shook her head as if I must not profane the silence between us. She began to unlace her dress. I was already naked. When she lay down beside me and opened her arms, I buried myself in her.

  Walled inside her warmth, defended by the softness of her body, a tautness akin to prison rope snapped inside me and I was crying in a voice from so deep in me that it seemed to rip at my bowels. Joanna whispered, “I cannot stay. I am betrothed to another. Do not wait for me. I leave Lisbon tomorrow. Forgive me and forget me.”

  When the balm of her fingertips dropped from my cheek, she said again, “Do not wait for me. Do not withhold your love from the next one…”

  In my hand, she left behind her pearl necklace.

  When loved ones depart forever, all that remains is the light from their eyes trapped in their jewelry. Beyond memory, it is the only souvenir we ever keep.

  Madness: if it doesn’t swallow you whole, it may one day loosen its jaws from around your neck. Yet something—or someone—must help tug you free.

  When I emerged in the morning, empty of Joanna, Farid read what had happened in my eyes. He dragged me to the Maidenhead Inn. For several months, I lived there, inside the warmth of Lisbon’s temptresses, waiting no longer, clawing and thrusting my way into their life in order to retrieve my own. Farid paid, though from where he got the money I do not know. Maybe he sold some of Dona Meneses’ sapphire and emerald beads; there were only three left when we finally bid goodbye to the Judiaria Pequena.

  The miracle, of course, is that none of the diseases of brothels erupted inside me. Perhaps it takes a heart willing to suffer love to know such illnesses.

  When I wasn’t nestling inside a woman or squeezing the liquid arc of a wineskin into my mouth, I walked. Once as far as the amber hills above Mafra. Along the scorched dirt roads, I stopped to recite to myself each of the five books of the Torah: Genesis before the temple of Mount Abraham near Belas; Exodus under the bridge of a fallen pine tree beyond Montelavar; Leviticus over a Roman mosaic in Odrinhas; Numbers while balancing on a limb of a carob tree in front of the Visigothic church of Igreja Nova; and Deuteronomy over a honeycomb gifted me by an Old Christian girl just inside the gates of Linhó. The rhythm of walking is good for prayer, I discovered. Sleep, as well. The stars welcomed me at night without protest or judgment. Arrows of woodpeckers hurtling from tree to tree awoke me in the mornings. For a fortnight, I was safe beyond the confines of Lisbon.

  Gradually, an energy akin to the rushed expectancy of chant began to surge in me, and I found it possible to work in our store during the day. Cinfa guarded me with fierce allegiance. She even lay beside me in my bed at night, looking up at me without criticism when I left for the ladies of the Inn in the wee hours of morning.

  Reza and my mother fought their moralistic battles against me in silence, their condemning eyes as locked as prison gates. As for the world beyond my borders…

  A flotilla of warships entered Lisbon’s port on Monday, April the twenty seventh, and secured the city for the Crown. No justice was really attempted, of course. King Manuel, our melekh hasid, good and gracious king, spoke of the pogrom as “certain negligences.” More to entertain the burghers and peasants than anything else, dear departed Manuel, may his name and his shadow be erased, ordered forty Old Christian rioters picked at random by his royal judge, João de Paiva. Before a crowd of several thousand basking in the sun-filled bleachers of the Rossio, the prisoners were garroted and burned.

  Does charring Old Christian flesh smell any different than that of a Jew? I admit that I could tell no difference. “Ah, but if you’d been at the Rossio…” more than one New Christian told me with a caustic smile on his face.

  As for the ecclesiastics of the São Domingos Church and Convent, King Manuel ordered the good friars dispersed throughout his kingdom at the end of May. Have no fear for their broken hearts and nostalgic members, however; they were back in their mistresses’ arms in Lisbon by the end of October thanks to the intercession of Pope Julius II, may his name and its shadow be erased as well. Except for two of their number, I should add. Frei João Moucho and Frei Bernáldez, the two men who exhorted the rabble to mass murder that fateful afternoon before the São Domingos Church. Arrested and taken to Evora, they languished there for a time in the municipal dungeon. In October, when few people remembered anymore what they’d done, they were garroted and turned to ash.

  It finally rained again on May the ninth.

  But little of this do I remember. The first of March, fifteen and seven, is the only date that takes on hard edges for me. (Yes, for a time I learned to th
ink within the Nazarene calendar. I take it as a symptom of my madness. May I forever cast out the Christian from within me!)

  That morning, little Didi Molcho pulled me from our store as if toward treasure. “Run!” he shouted. We raced toward the voice of a crier on the steps of the São Miguel Church. He was reading a vellum decree from King Manuel: “Henceforth, New Christians will be allowed to leave my kingdom, and there shall be no…”

  Hope for another landscape pulled my head into the sun. I breathed into swelling lungs for the first time since the death of Diego.

  A barber shaved my beard while his daughter de-loused me. In her tiny hands, her comb digging my scalp, I began to consider for the first time how I’d paid for Diego’s murder. Should I have felt the claws of sin in my chest? I didn’t. And I don’t now. Maybe that makes me a man bereft of a higher soul. I don’t care. I look not in mirrors, and something in my face seems to elicit discretion from kabbalists who might be able to see a terrible absence in my aura.

  And yet, another sin I committed long ago does sometimes trouble me—even penetrates my prayers. That young nobleman whom I pushed from a roof in the Moorish Quarter. Did he survive? I doubt it. Occasionally, in dream, I see him staring up at me from the bottom of a putrid well.

  Mother and I gave all of Uncle’s books to Dona Meneses. She got away with her murder of Simon, of course. Not only was I not in any position to cast stones at her, but I knew that any accusations I made would have dire consequences for me and my family. Guarded by her retinue of blond Flemings, she continued to live her charmed Old Christian life above her marble balcony in the Graça. From what I hear, she died four years ago, in the spring of fifteen twenty-six, of an infection caused by an idiot bleeder with slippery fingers.

  After seeing my uncle in a dream, Father Carlos also asked Dona Meneses to smuggle to safety his part-Hebrew, part-Arabic copy of Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s Mekor Hayim, the Fountain of Life. As far as I know, it is now in Salonika.

  Will any of our books survive the centuries, or will Uncle’s fight have been in vain?

  With all the New Christians leaving Portugal, houses could only fetch a fraction of their real value. Rather than sell for a pittance, we offered our home to Brites, our laundress; she lived in a slum beyond St. Catharine’s Gate that wasn’t fit for a person of her spiritual grace.

  She stamped her feet when we told her and said, “I can’t accept it!”

  “You must,” Aunt Esther insisted.

  “No!”

  “Then on loan,” I suggested. “If Reza ever wants it back, she’ll come for it.”

  Tears gushed in her eyes. The deal was sealed with hugs. She ended up spending the rest of her life there.

  A few weeks later, just before leaving Portugal, while on a delivery of fruit to a store in the Bairro Alto, I spotted the boy in my drawing who had tried to sell Senhora Tamara my uncle’s Haggadah. He had a naturally kind face, closely cropped black hair. “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Diego,” he replied.

  I whispered, “My Jewish name is Berekiah Zarco. I need to know what they call you in the holy language.”

  “Isaac Belmira Gonçalves,” he said.

  “A man named Diego Gonçalves adopted you, didn’t he?”

  His eyes opened wide with surprise. “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I knew him well.”

  In a local inn, over steaming cinnamon bread and wine diluted with water, we talked of his adoptive father’s love of birds and ancient manuscripts. The boy lived with Senhora Belmira’s sister. He was shy, but a quick passion trembled his lips when he spoke of battle. He was going to be a crusader. I will never understand how it is that the young are so eager to die. Before we parted, I kissed his forehead and blessed him silently.

  Rabbi Losa, the willing convert and enemy of my Uncle’s, still lives in his house just below the São Miguel Church. He bowed and groveled his way into the Bishop of Lisbon’s heart and has even become one of his advisors in ecclesiastic law. Both his daughters are grown and married, living together in Santarém, I’m told.

  Father Carlos decided to stay in Portugal as well. “May God make me either a good Christian or a better actor,” he said when I last saw him, twenty-three years ago. His words reminded me, of course, of Zerubbabel, Isaac of Ronda, the Count of Almira. I have heard nothing of his fate. Maybe his real name was something else entirely. Maybe he wasn’t even Castilian or New Christian. Perhaps Joanna wasn’t even his daughter.

  Of course, I have heard nothing from her. Yet, on occasion, even today, she still descends into my dreams. The bitterness is gone from her lips, however, and I ceased forcing comparisons with my wife years ago. Even a Torah memory melts with tears.

  Neither have I had news from Helena, the girl to whom I was betrothed so many years ago and with whom I lost my virginity. It is better that way.

  In May of fifteen and seven, as we were making plans for departure, a merchant in scarlet and white robes came to our house with a letter from the New Christian beggar, António Escaravelho. Just after the riot against us, long before King Manuel’s decree allowed New Christians to leave Portugal, he was able to secure his exit permit to visit his beloved Pope Julius.

  “Do you know if he’s doing well in Rome?” I asked the courier.

  “Rome, what are you talking about?! He’s in Jerusalem. Already got himself a silversmith shop in the old Jewish Quarter.”

  I ripped open the letter’s wax seal: “Dearest Berekiah, I told you and Master Abraham that you should plan to come with me. This old donkey wasn’t so crazy after all, was he? Fuck Pope Julius. I spit on the whole Italian peninsula. May a plague of venomous serpents descend on Rome and bite all its Christian residents in their fat asses. You will always be welcome with me. Next year in Jerusalem.”

  Not next year, but perhaps soon. After all, we have moved closer. And I’m not getting any younger. If I’m ever going to go…

  In July of fifteen and seven, Farid took a boat to Constantinople, carrying the address of Tu Bisvat and what money we could spare. Mother, Cinfa, Esther, Afonso Verdinho and I followed him in August, our ship setting sail from Belem on the nineteenth of Av. To our surprise, a ramshackle two-story house in the small Jewish quarter was waiting for us; with help from Tu Bisvat, whose true name I am not at liberty to mention, Uncle had been able to make a small down payment on some property.

  Roseta remained behind with Reza; she was pregnant with her first child—Reza, not Roseta, that is—and moved with her husband and Aviboa up to a farm near Belmonte in the mountains in northeast Portugal. I haven’t seen them since the dock at Belem. They have three surviving sons, Mordecai, Judah and Berekiah, and a daughter, Mira. Aviboa is married to a farmer of chestnuts and wine. She lives nearby, has two surviving children. She never did grow a thumbnail or receive news of her parents.

  We pray that the fire of the Inquisition will pass over their valley when it spreads into Portugal from Castile. I fear that it is now only a matter of months. So little time for peace we have in this world.

  Judah. When I could get his trousers and shirts away from my mother, I buried them on the Almond Farm, by Uncle’s grave. We said a kaddish to ensure that his soul was set free from the Lower Realms.

  Twenty-four years have passed since his disappearance and yet, he’s still just a whisper away. Only three years ago, I believed I recognized his moonstone eyes in a man in Portuguese merchant’s garb sunning his face in the garden below the southeast minaret of the Hagia Sophia mosque. My heart boomed as if shot from a cannon. Dizziness swayed me. I thought: It’s all a mistake. He’s alive, been raised by Old Christians. And he’ll explain now where he’s been. I crept to him and said, “Is it you, Judah?” At his confusion, I took his arm. “Don’t you recognize me? It’s Berekiah. Your brother!”

  He patted me on the back as if I were a drunken old fool. “Better get home to your wife before she comes looking for you,” he advised. He laughed at me.

&
nbsp; Such is what the younger generation make of sorrow.

  Samir, Farid’s father, was never heard from again.

  I remember Rabbi Verga telling me in our courtyard that we must remember the dead and how they lost their lives. His words make me smile; are there really persons who can forget?

  It turns out that Samson Tijolo, who crossed out all of the names of God in his Old Testament, was right about Jews not being able to speak a future tense in Portugal. Had Uncle lived, could he have done anything about that? There are certain powers which great kabbalists have, and perhaps if he had concentrated…

  Or is that all a lie? So much of my faith flowed away with my master’s blood.

  Rana, Samson’s wife and my old neighborhood friend, still lives on her farm outside Lisbon. Miguel, her son, apprenticed to a silversmith. Late at night, behind locked shutters, he makes Torah pointers and other holy objects, I’m told.

  Our neighbor, Senhora Faiam, died in fifteen-twelve. Gemila and her family are living in their old house as secret Jews. Their dog, Belo, died without ever finding the bone for his missing leg, of course. Some vestiges of life can never be recovered. Although that doesn’t stop us from searching.

  I think often of the lemon tree growing above Senhora Rosamonte’s hand. So nice it would be to be tossed some of her fruit.

  How does Uncle’s almond tree grow? His death still carves deep furrows inside me in the early morning, when the dew sits on my forehead and my resistance is lowered. Lately, I’ve realized that I’m like a tree whose main limbs were cut with a shohet’s knife. From the scars, I succeeded in branching out as best I could. I flowered even. Many times. But the tree is just not the same as it would have been. How much more upright I would have grown had he…