The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

by Richard Zimler

  Forty-four years have watched me pass. I am an old man, with children of my own. Yet how dearly I would love to be fixed in Uncle’s emerald eyes, to feel the protective wing of his white robe unfurl around me. To kiss his lips. Never will it be. Not even were I to chant the Zohar every night for an entire year.

  Murça Benjamin persevered after her wish to fulfill the obligation of Levirite marriage was refused. She married a wealthy New Christian barrel maker from Porto—a good man, she wrote to me—and works as a translator for merchants in São João da Foz.

  Manuel Monchique, whose wife, Teresa, died alongside Uncle, emigrated to Amsterdam and is one of the directors of a banking institution there. I hear that he has developed an interest in sea voyages and has even traveled to Brazil, where he has made lovely sketches of the native butterflies. He no longer lugs around a sword.

  So maybe one can find one’s way home in another country.

  Before we left Lisbon, my mother was kind enough to sew a new aba for Attar, the man who lent me his clothing as I fled through the Moorish Quarter on that fateful Sunday of Jewish death. He welcomed me with a hug. Before I left his home, I’d eaten an entire chicken bathed in prunes and lemon. We locked hands to pray in silence, then recited suras from the Koran together.

  Isaac Ibn Farraj, the ascetic who rescued his friend’s head from the pyre in the Rossio, ended up in Valona and is a successful scribe. I met him by accident once in Rhodes after it was taken by the Turks, and he looked as if he hadn’t eaten a thing since he’d left Lisbon. Goat ribbed, he was. With a beard like a white fungus. Apparently he’d learned a thing or two about the new fruits arriving from the New World, because he kept repeating to me, “Beware of tomatoes!”

  Dom Miguel Ribeiro, the nobleman who learned of his Jewish origins from Uncle, still lives in Lisbon as a secret Jew. He lost an eye in a hunting accident shortly after we left. I suppose that he simply could not give up one last Old Christian vice.

  Oh, a curious thing happened to Didi Molcho. He rose through the ranks of the Portuguese court system to become a royal secretary. Then, as he recounts it, there appeared before King João, King Manuel’s heir, a swarthy little Jew with glowing eyes akin to my uncle’s claiming to be a representative from the lost tribe of Reuben in the desert wilds of Arabia. His called himself David Reubini, and he came to Portugal hoping to gain troops for a plan to win back Jerusalem from the Turks. Although King João soured of him, Didi was captivated. He embraced Judaism once again and circumcised himself. His study of the kabbalah brought on visions ending in prophecy.

  Using his Jewish name of Solomon, Didi journeyed to Italy to preach, and the accuracy of his predictions earned him fame amongst Christians and Jews alike. In May of fifteen twenty-nine, after exchanging correspondence, I received him in my home in Constantinople and, over the next six months, helped him learn Abulafia’s techniques for untying the knots of mind. His book of sermons, based partly on our studies together, was published in Salonika that same year. He’s back in Rome now, following his visions, and has even gained Pope Clement’s favor. I fear for his life, however. Popes are envious of men with true faith and as devious as famished ferrets. And Didi, God bless him, has had his earthly vision clouded by higher landscapes.

  Farid lives just down the street from us, has had his poetry published with success here in Constantinople. His lover of seventeen years is a blacksmith named Shamsi who plays the oud and sings with the voice of a rustic flute. He’s an outgoing, humorous man with lean muscles and eyelashes like black rose petals. Not gifted with the dimensions of a Basque, of course, but he seems to keep Farid satisfied. Years ago, they adopted two orphan boys, Samir and Rumi. They were always good, if somewhat rough, playmates for my girl, Zuleikha, and boy, Ari.

  We all eat together every night. It is a great comfort to me to be able to converse with Farid with my hands. Sometimes, when memory assaults me and I haven’t the will to hear my words…

  When we were last in Lisbon together, all those years ago, I asked Farid, ‘Will God be waiting for us in Constantinople, you think? He’s disappeared without a trace from Lisbon.”

  His hands twirled up and around, quoting Uncle: “You must knock upon yourself as upon a door. It is there where you will find Him if He still exists for you.”

  I have waited for a reply to my rapping these many years. Apparently, one must play the ever-willing woodpecker to this hard-of-hearing God, and I simply haven’t the beak.

  So maybe I have found that secular landscape I predicted so many years ago. The one toward which I sense the world is moving, with neither rabbis nor priests, populated only by mystics and non-believers. Which one of these groups will finally win the throne of my heart, I cannot say.

  My daughter, Zuli, is eighteen now, wants to be a scribe like Aunt Esther. But I see more of Reza in her. Naturally aristocratic, with passionate eyes that dance when she talks. And when she’s angry, she intimidates me with the lambent glare she used to practice in looking glasses.

  Ari, who is sixteen, has a strong build, my wife’s curly black hair, Uncle’s intelligent and penetrating eyes. He has studied to be an illuminator and could make a fine artist one day. But he’s dreamed of sailing off to adventure in the New World since he was a child.

  “A Jewish manuscript illuminator in the jungles of Brazil would be like a matzah on the moon,” I’ve always told him.

  The other day, he came up with this reply: “But some of the Indians there are circumcised. Tu Bisvat says they’re Jews.”

  Sounds a little like me as a young man, no? I wonder what Uncle would make of him. I suppose that if he really wants to go to Brazil, maybe he should become a mohel.

  The loss of Judah and Uncle condemned my mother to a life on the margins of emotion. She began sewing garments for the Turkish aristocracy in Constantinople and took impeccable care of the fruit store we opened here, but shied away from all gestures of approach. Conversation, even with Aunt Esther, came to her with difficulty. In the early morning, I caught her several times standing vigil over my bed with the inhuman stoicism of a sculpted goddess on a ship’s prow. Whenever I needed to voyage far from home, she would pat my hand, then turn quickly away, as if it were already too late to hope for my return. Prayers and chants only made her anxious. Henbane helped some. She died during Passover almost eight years ago.

  As for Aunt Esther, she and I reconciled years ago, right after Diego’s death, in fact. Why should I have kept a grudge against her and Afonso Verdinho? Had I the right to deny her whatever companionship the world could still give her? Just before we left for Constantinople, he rode into the Little Jewish Quarter bearing a gold engagement ring. Just like a cavalier in some Arabian legend. They were married when we reached Turkish shores.

  So, as my own life should prove, love is not always limited to a single object. And I’ve no doubt that Aunt Esther loved Uncle and would have given up her life for his. Once, while she was bathing, I opened the lid of her silver locket and found several of Uncle’s long gray hairs. I stole a single strand and ate it.

  Esther’s a very old lady now, nearing seventy. But her work as a scribe in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Castilian and Portuguese continues to be without equal. She and I recently completed a copy of “The Conference of the Birds” for Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, may God bless him each and every day. No notes or drawings were left to me from my birdwatching expeditions back in the hills beyond Lisbon, but my Torah memory is still complete enough to gift me with the curve of a crane’s beak and the tone of an owl’s gorget.

  The peacocks I included were of Uncle’s design. I like to think that he would be proud of our artistry.

  Cinfa. Life has not been easy for her. No sooner was she gifted with a baby girl named Mira six years ago than did she become a widow. Her husband was an eye doctor from Alexandria. A lean and soft-skinned man, with the kindly look of someone who always forgives.

  And yet, we soon learned that he drank anise seed aqua vitae like a
Greek sailor. And that he didn’t like that I educated his wife in Torah and Talmud. None of this was evident before their marriage. I’d quite forgotten about masks after leaving Lisbon.

  When Cinfa was seven months pregnant, he beat her with a cane across the face. “Your sister corrected my Sabbath prayers,” he told me after I’d seen the tender blue and yellow bruises puffing from her eyes and cheeks. His tone implied: I had to do it.

  “As well she should have, you lout!” I replied. “The Sabbath is more important than your skinny pride!”

  He apologized because of my spiritual standing as an eccentric but learned kabbalist in the community, but I saw in his defiant eyes that he was hardly repentant. I’m not much of a fighter and resorted to trickery. While I blessed my hand over his head in feigned forgiveness, I kicked him so hard in the balls that he writhed on the ground for a good five minutes. I screamed, “And if you ever do it again…!”

  When I explained what I’d done to Aunt Esther, she said, “That’s about as practical as the kabbalah ever gets! Good work!”

  But maybe I shouldn’t have tempted him with my warning. The brute repeated his evil deed the next day.

  Farid then accompanied me to their home. He held his dagger to the eye doctor’s chin and had me translate his signalling: “Ever touch her again with any intention other than love and I’ll cut your eyeballs out!”

  Later, Farid told me, “Always threaten a man with something he knows the value of.”

  It seemed like good advice. But brutes don’t change without God’s grace. In her eighth month, the Egyptian doctor kicked Cinfa down the stairs of their home. Broke her right leg and her collar bone. Cinfa had the baby while splayed on the ground. Her screams alerted Zuli and the neighbors. We would have lost little Mira except for their quick work.

  I searched for the evil doctor with Farid. Couldn’t find him anywhere. A month later, he turned up dead outside a nearby brothel. Apparently, he got a little fresh with a prized Yemenite girl. As Aunt Esther observed, “Not much risk in beating a Jewish wife. But raise a hand to a high-priced Moslem whore and you won’t last too long.”

  Leci, my wife, is gifted with that ironic way of thinking as well. Didn’t start out that way, though. She’s the daughter of a shoemaker who became our first friend here in Constantinople. When I met her, she had long, henna-tinted black-red hair, green eyes of restricted longing that always seemed afraid to ask a secret question. Lips sealed to silence. Maybe it was the death of her mother when she was just five. Frightened she was when I met her, spiritually shivering. And yet, she had the sexual sleekness of a wet cat. When she moved, she seemed to drag the ground and air with her.

  I came to her one evening when her father was out of town. Appeared in silhouette in her doorway. She’d been reading. After sharing a look connoting secret adventure, she lay her book on her chest and blew out her candle. Without words, I lifted away my shirt and stepped out of my pants.

  When our desires rose beyond the explorations of our mouths and hands, she climbed on top. Bracing herself as if before an altar, she sheathed herself down upon me.

  Can the perfect fit of a couple’s sexual organs be symbolic of a spiritual correspondence?

  As she gyrated her wet warmth over me, I pictured my old friend Rana Tijolo suckling her baby, Miguel. I buried my head deep in the warmth of Leci’s breasts and thought: Here is the woman I will give myself to.

  And so it has been. More than my manuscripts, more than my studies of kabbalah, I consider my life’s accomplishment what I have given her and my children. It hasn’t always been good, or even enough, but I have offered what I’ve had without any mask.

  Which leads me to the reason I have taken up my reed pen once again and told you our story.

  As I said at the beginning of our tale, I had a visitor just yesterday, around midday: Lourenço Paiva, the son of our old laundress and friend, Brites. Before his mother’s death, she had asked him to come and offer me back ownership of our old house at the corner of the Rua de São Pedro and Rua da Sinagoga, to see if I wanted to return home.

  With our old house keys biting into my closed fist, I turned away into a vision of Portugal: Cork trees and poppies. Roseta and her collar of cherries. Mordecai and my father. Lisbon’s houses of white and blue. Rossio Square. The mirror of river beyond our old synagogue. The sweet scent of the oleander bushes in our courtyard. Judah and Uncle. The graves on the Almond Farm.

  Then, a vision opened inside me, one in which my master tossed me Portuguese letters knotted into a chain which read: as nossas andorinhas ainda estão nas mãos do faraó—our swallows are still abandoned to Pharaoh. As my gaze passed over these words of New Christian code a second time, they lifted into the air, then broke with a tinkling sound.

  When I came to, my chest was pounding a verse that said: I have a chance to go home.

  And that’s when isolated events in my Torah memory suddenly linked together into a reading of the past which I believe my uncle had counted on me to make so many years ago.

  I reached for my wine carafe and grabbed the vellum ribbon on which Aunt Esther had written my name and Uncle’s—the ribbon which he gave me just before his death, when he promised to come to my aid no matter what the circumstances. Alone in my prayer room, I remembered the terrible verses from Genesis about the sacrifice of Isaac which my master made me recite to Judah that fateful Passover… He had explained to us that in order to achieve the highest of goals, the self had to be extinguished. He had meant his self.

  Before his death, in our cellar, Uncle had posed questions to me about my willingness to leave Portugal. He spoke of his grave fears that my mother and Reza would never be willing to depart. These fears betray his motivation; he was implying that only the most terrible tragedy could sever my mother and Reza—his only living child—from Portugal.

  Even the words of my uncle’s which were quoted by Diego in the bogus suicide note he wrote for Solomon the mohel make reference to an occult reason for his death: “Your iron blade will anneal me to God and maybe even serve a higher purpose.”

  What higher purpose could his death have served? What was my master thinking?

  Over the last twenty-four hours, I have let my speculations mingle with my questions till they formed a knotted pattern which refused to release me. So I took down my ink well from its shelf and got out the manuscript which I had originally written in the Christian year of fifteen and seven and which—with a few minor alterations—has now become what I refer to as Book One. And that’s when I began to complete our story for you.

  Mesirat nefesh, the willingness to risk everything for a goal that will effect reparations in the Lower and Upper Realms. Only now do I believe that I understand how such unspoken courage lit Uncle’s emerald eyes, moved his hands to bless the world.

  “I swear to protect you from the dangers which dance along the way,” he had pledged to me when I was but eight. Yes, he had lived up to his words. For here I was, safe, in Constantinople!

  What I am trying to say, fitfully, hesitantly, because of my own failing strength and the effect of too much Anatolian wine, is that Uncle sacrificed himself. In part, probably, to try to save the girl, Teresa, who was murdered alongside him. But more importantly, I believe that he let himself be killed for the generations to come. To force my mother and Reza—our entire family—to leave Portugal. To enable our family tree to take root securely in another land. A land with soil willing to accept Jews without masks.

  Not that I’m theorizing that my uncle willed Diego down into his cellar or brought him there through practical kabbalah. No. But perhaps Uncle suspected that he’d receive a visit. Whatever the case, there came a moment—maybe only when Diego descended the cellar stairs—when my master began to understand the true meaning of the riot against us, when he saw the possibilities which would spring from his death at the hands of a murderer. For better or for worse, he concluded that our family, our people, had reached a terrible impasse, and that only hi
s violent death would compel us to break through.

  Is this theory insanity? Maybe so. Maybe only God knew that my uncle was going to be sacrificed that Passover.

  And yet there is more evidence to support my theory, a bit of proof which may convince you that what I say is at least possible.

  Years ago, Farid claimed that the drawing of Mordecai in Uncle’s last Haggadah was modeled on my face, that I was cast as the savior of the Jews from the Book of Esther. I didn’t think it possible; Mordecai appeared far too old in the drawing.

  I reasoned, too, that even if Uncle had modeled this hero’s face upon my own, it was because he had had a mystical inkling that I would later take revenge on his Haman—Diego.

  In examining this illuminated panel yesterday, however, I discovered something astounding. Mordecai looks very much as I do now, twenty-four years after Uncle drew him. We share the same closely cropped graying hair, the same weary eyes—both of us survivors, but witnesses to tragedy as well.

  You see, Uncle had so discerning an eye that he was able to paint what I would look like nearly a quarter of a century into the future.

  So only now do I begin to accept that my master had gifted me with a greater purpose, had divined that I, like this ancient Jewish hero, would one day fight to save our people.

  And I am convinced that this is the reason why—in the vision I had yesterday—my uncle called me “Mordecai.” He wasn’t using my older brother’s name, as I originally thought, but that of the Biblical saviour of our people.

  Yet how had he intended for me to rescue them—I, Berekiah Zarco, a man who no longer even believes in a personal God?

  Your hands are touching the answer; I suspect that Uncle sensed that only the nightmare of his death would compel me to write this very book which you are now reading. That only his violent departure from the Lower Realms would make me see that our future in Europe was finished. That only the most terrible tragedy could convince me to beg all the Jews—every last one of us, whether New Christian or not—to move to where we will be safe from the Inquisition and whatever other horrors the Christian kings will one day dream up for us.