Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  “If they sell it for five, it would be good, but seven would be better,” Carlos said.

  “Seven? Why so much money?” Rabbit asked.

  “It’s never so much, man, never,” interjected Yoyi, the most financially savvy of the group.

  “Seven, because then we’d each get a million, right?”

  “Seven, okay, seven million,” Conde granted. “But not a penny more, dammit. These rich guys are insatiable…”

  “Conde,” Candito wanted to know, “did you really tell the painter that his idea of donating the painting to the Jewish Museum was moronic?”

  “Of course I told him that, Red. How in the hell wasn’t I going to tell him that?! After everything his family had gone through for that painting, and is still going through, someone has to get something good out of it, don’t they?”

  “It seems to me like it would be nice if he gave a fair amount of that money to the doctor and his family,” Tamara jumped in with her trade unionist’s spirit.

  “Cuban millionaires! With half of that money, they could buy all of Luyanó,” Yoyi said, but corrected himself. “No, it’s better not to buy shit…”

  “What I still don’t get,” Dulcita commented, “is where that painting was all these years…”

  “One of the Mejíases,” Conde supposed.

  “It would be good to know,” Tamara opined.

  “All that is well and good, but … getting back to the money. I, just me, wouldn’t share any of it,” Rabbit said, shaking the sand from his hands. “I would keep it all, would buy myself an island, would build a castle, would buy a yacht, and … I’d take all of you there … and the doctor’s family. With Dr. Kaminsky and with Tamara, there would be free public health care; with the daughter who is a teacher, free university, and Conde would be the librarian; with the Kaminsky who is an economist, there would be central planning, and we’d put Yoyi in as a manager … Skinny would be the prince of the island, Dulcita, the princess, Candito, the bishop, and I’d be the king … And whoever misbehaves gets thrown the hell out.”

  “There’s a tyrant born every minute,” Dulcita declared. “But I like my job on Treasure Island.”

  “What about you, Conde? What would you do with seven million?” Tamara wanted to know.

  Conde looked at her intensely. He stood up and stumbled. As theatrically as he could, he looked over his captive audience.

  “How in the hell do you expect me to know that? Look…” He stuck his hand in his pocket and took out the six hundred dollars he earned for the job. “I don’t even know what I’m going to do with this.”

  He immediately started giving a hundred-dollar bill to each of his friends.

  “A little end-of-year gift,” he said.

  “In September?” Dulcita tried to impose logic on the nonsense.

  “Well, for Rabbit’s birthday, which is coming up in a few days…”

  “Forget it, girl, he’s completely crazy,” Yoyi said.

  “No, the thing is that he’s more of a moron than the painter,” Carlos—who, in the midst of his alcoholic haze, with a hundred-dollar bill in his hand, had a sudden spark of lucidity—corrected him. “Shit, look over there, the sun is leaving.”

  On the horizon, the sun was about to touch the polished surface of the sea.

  “Listen, asshole,” Conde yelled at the sun. “We came to see you and you’re leaving with no notice?”

  Using one foot and then another, Conde managed to take off his shoes and, balancing more than precariously, leaned his ass on Carlos’s body and took off his socks. Then he unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall on the sand. The rest watched him do it, intrigued. Candito’s wisdom, nonetheless, advised them of Conde’s intentions.

  “Listen, Conde, you’re a little old already for one of those…” Candito began, but Conde, as he lowered his pants and displayed his briefs, kept going, without paying attention to Candito, and undid his watch, which fell alongside his shirt. He took a few steps toward the coast and started to lower his briefs, showing the audience his skinny butt cheeks, barely lighter skinned than the rest of his body.

  “What an ugly ass!” Rabbit said.

  “You wait there,” Conde then yelled toward the sun, and after taking off his last item of clothing, took up his march again toward the golden star that, from the planet’s last visible curvature, was spreading over the ocean in order to die at the edge of the beach of dreams, memories, and nostalgia. From the vortex of the alcoholic storm devastating his mind—at just that moment and through unforeseeable mental paths—came the words of a dying man from the future: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.”

  The naked man entered the sea without ceasing to look at the sun, determined to interrupt its descent, the end of the day, the arrival of shadows. Insistent on stopping time and preventing all losses from destroying them.

  Book of Elias

  1

  New Jerusalem, Year 5403 Since the Creation, 1643 of the Common Era

  Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila withstood the blades of damp air that, in their search for the North Sea, ran freely over the Zwanenburgwal and cut across his cheeks and lips, the only parts of his anatomy exposed to the city’s aggressive weather. Up to his ankles in snow and cramps seizing his fingers, the young man maintained his determined watch for the fifth morning in a row as he sought relief by calling to mind his grandfather Benjamin’s dramatic life story and what he had learned from him, as well as the lessons from his turbulent teacher, Hakham ben Israel. Because, like never before in his life, Elias Ambrosius needed that support to dare make the leap obsessing him and, as such, to undertake the struggle for the life he wanted to live, willing to accept the consequences of an irresistible exercise of his free will. An exercise that, if he went through with it, would with all certainty change his life and, perhaps, even his death.

  The young man had heard the story so many times of his grandfather Benjamin’s escape and his joy at arriving in Amsterdam that he thought himself capable of imagining every detail of the adventure lived out alongside his grandmother Sara (who had been disguised as a man, despite being six months pregnant with what would be his aunt Ana) and his father, Abraham, who was then seven years old (he’d been wrapped up as if he were some kind of merchandise). The escape had occurred forty years prior, in the filthy hold of an English ship (“It stank of tar and salted fish, of sweat, shit, and the pain of Africans turned into slaves”), which had reached port at a Lisbon estuary en route to New Jerusalem, where the fugitives aimed to recover the ancestral faith of their forebearers. That episode, which took place at a time in which old Benjamin Montalbo didn’t even dream of becoming anyone’s grandfather, was the landmark in the creation of the fate of a family who, in that world, knew how to get what they wanted as they overcame adversity and understood that God more gladly helps those who fight than those who do nothing.

  But, above all, the young man owed Benjamin Montalbo de Ávila what he considered to be the most valuable of life’s guiding principles. The old man, a learned person despite his wandering existence, a man given to pronouncing statements, had repeated to him several times that the human being can be Creation’s best-made and most resistant tool if one has enough faith in the Holiest, but, above all, also has a sustained belief in oneself and the necessary ambition to achieve the loftiest or most arduous goals. Because, as his grandfather tended to highlight in the long monologues to which he so enjoyed handing himself over every Friday night, in the familial and joyous wait for his majesty the Sabbath—“Shabbat shalom!”—man can do very little without his God, and the Creator can do nothing, in earthly matters, without the will and reasoning of his most indomitable creation … The seasoned Benjamin maintained that, thanks to that belief, three generations of the Montalbo de Ávila line had been able to withstand the humilia
tions perpetrated by the most overwhelming earthly powers, determined to divest them of their faith and even of their own selves (“But first of our riches, don’t forget, my son, and then, only then, of our beliefs”). Only through the force of his own perseverance, he remarked, was it that he, born and baptized in the Christian faith as João Monte, that he—and he patted his chest to avoid any ambiguities—had managed to leap over the very high barriers raised by intolerance and throw himself into the search for freedom, a freedom that included his God and the existence that, in communion with the Holiest, he wanted to live. Then, at the age of thirty-three, he had been reborn as Benjamin Montalbo de Ávila, whom he always should have been.

  In contrast, thanks to his tutor, Hakham Menasseh ben Israel, the wisest of the many Jews who were then settled in Amsterdam, Elias Ambrosius accepted the notion that each action in the life of an individual has cosmic connotations. “What about eating some bread, Hakham?” Elias, who was still a small boy, once dared to ask when he heard him talking about the matter in his classes. “Yes, also eating some bread … Just think of the infinity of causes and consequences that there are before and after that action: for you and for the piece of bread,” the wise man had responded. But besides, he had acquired from the Hakham the pleasant conviction that life’s days were like an extraordinary gift, which he had to enjoy drop by drop, since the death of the physical matter, as he tended to declare from the bimah, means only the extinction of the hopes that already died in life. “Death does not equal the end,” the teacher said. “What leads to death are the exhaustion of our desires and unease. And that death ends up being definitive, because whoever dies that way cannot aspire to return on the Day of Judgment … The next life is built in this world. Between one state and another, there exists but one connection: the fullness, consciousness, and dignity with which we have lived our lives, seemingly so small, although in reality so transcendental and unique as … as a piece of bread.”

  But it wasn’t just to forget the cold and spur himself on that Elias Ambrosius had in those days succumbed to thinking again and again of his paternal grandfather’s convictions and of the teachings of his ever-unconventional professor: in reality, he did so because, despite his determination, Elias Ambrosius was afraid.

  As he sought the shelter offered by the eaves and walls of the lock house, withstanding the rank odors brought up from the dark canal waters by the wind, the young man, stubbornly enumerating reasons to sustain him, didn’t stop looking at the house rising up on the other side of the street for a single moment. He focused on the green wooden door and on the barely visible movements behind the leaded-glass windows, steamed up by the difference in temperature. Elias watched and calculated that, if the Maestro hadn’t left the dwelling in the last five days, then he should be leaving this morning, or the following. If it was true that he was working again (“He’s fulfilling some orders and also painting another portrait of his deceased wife”), according to what Hakham ben Israel told him, the provisions of oil and pigments that he used in great quantities would run out, and, as was his habit, he would go to his providers on the neighboring Meijerplein and around the De Waag market in search of supplies. On one of those stops, if the situation seemed propitious, Elias Ambrosius would at last approach him and, with a speech he had already memorized, would present dreams and desires that, with no other options, would have to pass through the Maestro’s hands.

  For several months already, the young man had devoted himself to practicing those secret pursuits to which he would subject the owner of the house with the green door. At the beginning, it was like the game of a bedazzled child who curiously follows an idol or a magnetic mystery. But, as the weeks and months passed, his surveillance turned into a frequent—and, recently, daily—practice, since it included even his free hours on Saturday, the sacred day. His growing obsession had been rewarded, in spades, with the pleasant coincidence of having been the witness to the exit of the enormous canvas (protected by old, stained rags, an operation the Maestro directed himself, all while yelling at and insulting the students chosen as stevedores), a work that was destined to move the young man, like an earthquake, the afternoon on which, at last, he had been able to contemplate it in the main room of the Society of Arquebusiers, Crossbowmen, and Archers of Kloveniersburgwal. But his standing watch had also received the retribution of the tragic circumstance of being a spectator (this time amid a group of the curious, attracted by the spectacle of death) of the beginning of the funeral procession that was taking the remains of the Maestro’s still-young wife to Oude Kerk. From the small square made by Sint Antoniesbreestraat as it crossed the lock bridge where the canal branched out in search of the sea, just at the point where the street changed names ever since everyone had started to call it Jodenbreestraat, Jewish Broad Street, Elias had followed the carriage on which rested the corpse, covered only with a simple shroud, as the precepts of Calvin’s humility ordered. Behind the deceased, he had seen pass by his Hakham, the former Rabbi ben Israel, as well as Cornelis Anslo the preacher, Vingboons the famous architect, the affluent Isaac Pinto, and, of course, the Maestro, dressed for the occasion in a rigorous display of mourning. And he had discerned—or so he thought—the dampness of tears on that man’s pupils, that man who was as loved by success and fortune as he was frequented by Death, who had already torn away three of his children.

  Also thanks to that vigilance, which had led to long walks when Elias was in luck, the young man had received what he considered to be some valuable lessons for his intellectual property, since he had learned of the Maestro’s obstinacy in not delegating the purchase of mounted canvases to any of his students. He had learned of his preference for linens that had already been treated with the first priming of dead color, capable of giving them a precise and malleable tone of matte brown on which he would continue the preparation work or, even, directly apply the paint. He already knew, besides, that for his engravings and etchings, the Maestro usually bought the delicate papers imported from the remote country of the Japanese and, even, that he didn’t trust anyone with the punctilious selection (bargaining included) of the necessary powders, stones, and emulsions to obtain the mixtures capable of achieving the colors and tones his imagination clamored for at every moment. Furtively listening to his conversations with Mr. Daniel Rulandts, owner of the most sought-out painting supply store in the city; with the German who had arrived a few months prior and was devoted to the importation of powerful mineral pigments brought from German, Saxon, and Magyar mines; and with the redheaded Frieslander, the seller of the most varied treasures from the Orient (among them, the coveted black oil known as Bitumen of Judea, the paper from Japan, and the valuable locks of camel hair that his students would turn into paintbrushes of different calibers), Elias had begun to penetrate the interstices of the practice of that art, forbidden by the second commandment of the sacred Law to those of his race and religion, that universe of images, colors, textures, and feelings for which the young man suffered the out-of-control and irresistible attraction of one who is predestined. The reason for which he was now stiff, from cold and fear, on the Zwanenburgwal.

  * * *

  Ever since his school days, as he took courses in the basement of the synagogue opened by the members of the Nação, attached to the house where the Montalbo de Ávilas lived around that time, Elias had felt that empathy, at first diffuse and then increasingly decisive, and finally overwhelming. Perhaps the attraction had been born in his handling of the illustrated and illuminated books that were the only material possessions that traveled with his grandfather Benjamin, his pregnant wife, and the oldest of his offspring from the lands of idolatry toward the land of freedom. Or perhaps the seduction had been forged by the very graphic histories of pilgrimages and travels to distant worlds taken by his most remote ancestors, the stories that the loquacious Hakham ben Israel would tell his students, journeys that were capable of firing up the imagination and feeding the soul. Many afternoons, for many years, inste
ad of going with his classmates and his brother Amos to play in the fields or in between the wood posts on which they would erect the magnificent buildings that were being constructed at a frenetic pace on the borders of the new canals, Elias had spent his time running around the many markets of a city riddled with them—Dam Square, the Flower Market, the Spui Square, the De Waag Esplanade, and the New Market, the Botermarkt—where, between market stalls, scales, and bundles of recently arrived merchandise, the aroma of Oriental spices and tobacco from the Indies, the stench of herring, Nordic cod, and barrels of whale oil, amid very expensive furs from Muscovy, delicate pieces of ceramic from nearby Delft or remote China, and those hairy onions, the chrysalis of future tulips of unpredictable colors, there were always for sale the works of the countless painters living in the city and gathered together in the Guild of Saint Luke. Night would come out to surprise him on some of those outings with the shouting of closing sales of etchings and drawings, the putting away of canvases and breaking down of exhibition easels, after having gotten lost for hours in the contemplation of landscapes that were always adorned by a windmill or by a current of water, of still lives that lent to one another their figures and abundances, of typical scenes at home and in the street, of dark biblical re-creations inspired by the warm Italian current in vogue throughout the world, images sketched or imprinted on linen, wood, and cards by some men gifted with the marvelous capacity of capturing on white space a piece of real or imagined life. And of pausing it forever through the conscious act of creating beauty.

  Stealthily, with charcoals and paper taken from the trash pile of the printshop where his father worked and where Elias had apprenticed ever since he was ten years old, the young man had handed himself over to the practice of his forbidden hobby. He had drawn (as he supposed the painters who sold their work at the market did) his cats and dogs, or the burning flame whose light cast shadows at whim around the edges of the apple he would later eat, or his grandfather, observed through the minimal separation of the door, more worn every day, pensive and biblical. He tried to reproduce the delicacy of the tulips of the neighboring balcony, the panorama of the canal with and without barges, the street viewed from the windows of the attic of the family house on Bethanienstraat. He had even given form, a face, and a background to the imaginings forged by his teacher’s stories and by accounts of the conquest of fabulous worlds that narrated the existence of Eden and El Dorado in volumes that, in recent years, his grandfather sent for from Spain. Of course, he had also been encouraged by readings of the Torah, the sacred book in which, in a precise and unmistakable manner, that very practice of representing men, animals, and objects from the sky, sea, or earth was anathema, according to the message transmitted by Moses to the tribes gathered in the desert, by virtue of the Maximum Creator of All Forms considering it improper of his chosen people, due to promoting idolatry. Because of that biblical reason, Elias Ambrosius Montalbo, grandson of Benjamin Montalbo de Ávila, the secret Jew who had arrived in the lands of freedom in 1606 clamoring to be circumcised and to return to the faith of his ancestors, saw himself forced to carry out his passion in secret, even from his brother Amos, and, before lying down on his cot, devoted himself to the meticulous and upsetting destruction of the sheets marked with his charcoal.