Perhaps due to the very weight of those impediments, Elias’s love for colors and forms became increasingly more feverish: it was the source from which flowed the energy that allowed him to withstand, like a condemned man, and during all of the time he could take from his obligations, the surveillance carried out on the square over the canal of Sint Antoniesbreestraat. The tremendous choice, which violated a mitzvah, and that, if made public, could cost him a niddui, even the greatest sentence of a cherem from the increasingly strict rabbinical council (a punishment capable of excluding him from his family and community and their benefits through excommunication) had so brutally but predictably turned into an irrevocable decision the afternoon of the previous fall when, the Sukkot celebrations barely finished and work at the printshop recommenced, his father, affected by pains in his waist that forced him to move as if he had sunk into his pants, had transferred to him the responsibility of handing over reams of flyers, still smelling of ink, at the Kloveniersdoelen, the new and imposing headquarters of the city’s militia society.
At the mere mention of the nature of the task, as he felt a barely contained explosion of joy, Elias Ambrosius thought of how inscrutable the paths of life outlined by the Creator are: those flyers would be the letters of safe passage that would allow him, the poorest of all of the city’s Jews, to enter Amsterdam’s most elegant and exclusive building and, however he could, observe the Maestro’s work destined to adorn the large reunion hall, the gigantic piece that some months before he had seen come out of the house on Jewish Broad Street, covered with some dirty rags and of which was spoken of (ill or well, but talk all the same) by all who, in the world’s city where the most painters lived and where the most paintings were made and sold, had some relation, interest, fondness, or vocation for that art.
Carrying that heavy load, the young man had flown through the streets that led to the headquarters of the arquebusiers’ society. He didn’t have eyes or ears to process what was around him, imagining only what the painting must be like in reality that had caused so much conversation and debate, to the point that it was discussed in churches, taverns, and plazas, and almost as much as business, money, merchandise. The building’s custodian, advised of the delivery of the flyers, pointed out access to the second floor, after shouting out to the caretaker tasked with receiving the printed copies and of leading the boy to the treasurer responsible for paying for them. Elias Ambrosius greedily took in the Carrara marble steps of the imposing staircase and found open before him the doors to the grote zaal, the great hall where the city’s most important meetings and celebrations were held. Then, favored by the light of the high windows overlooking the dikes of the Amstel River, he saw the canvas, shiny with varnish, still leaning against the wall where it would be hung at some point. Elias Ambrosius, already capable of identifying with just one glance the works by the city’s most important artists, but especially all of those coming from the Maestro’s paintbrush (although on more than one occasion, he had to recognize, he had confused his work with that of some outstanding student, like the now famous Ferdinand Bol), didn’t need to ask in order to know whether that outsized linen, more than thirteen feet long and almost six feet high, was the work that had the whole city in an uproar.
Before the young man, more than twenty figures, led by the very well-known and beyond opulent Frans Banning Cocq, gentlemen of Purmerland and captain of the city’s society of arquebusiers, and his second lieutenant, Mr. de Vaardingen, were preparing themselves to carry out their morning round toward immortality, which appeared to begin at that precise moment, when Mr. Cocq took his first steps and placed his left foot on top of the checkerboard tiles of the grote zaal over which the painting still rested and, without too much ado, asked Elias Ambrosius to step out of the way … Shaken from his stupor by the caretaker’s voice, the young man executed the handing over of the flyers and received, from the hands of the treasurer, the two florins and ten placke warranted by the work. Without even worrying about counting the money in front of the payer, as his father had indicated, he asked the treasurer for his authorization to look at the painting again, without immediately understanding the reaction of contempt that his request caused in the man.
Facing the enormous collective portrait, which still smelled of linseed oil and varnish, as he perceived a tremendous excitement overcoming him, Elias Ambrosius had taken delight in observing the details. He was determined to search for the imprecise but flashing sources of light and followed the dizzying feeling of movement that came from the painting, thanks to gestures like Captain Cocq’s, in the front, whose half-raised arm and slightly open mouth indicated that his marching orders were the spark destined to make the action dynamic. The captain’s proclamation seemed to surprise the standardbearer in the act of taking the flagpole, and alerted the other figures, several of them in the middle of conversations. One of those portrayed (wasn’t it Mr. Van der Velt, a contractor and also a customer of the printshop?) was raising his arm in the direction of the path indicated by the captain and, with that gesture, he covered more than half of the face of a character whom Elias managed to identify as the treasurer with whom he had just closed the deal, and he was easily able to understand the man’s reaction when he asked for permission to see the work. To his left, toward where Mr. Frans Banning Cocq proposed the march of the militia, the action sped up as a boy (or was it one of those midget buffoons?) raced by, carrying a drum of gunpowder and covered by a helmet that was too big for his stature; but, walking in the opposite direction, like an explosion of light, a golden girl (what was she doing there with the hen tied to the waist of her skirt?) was enjoying a privileged space and, with the unmistakable cunning of an adult, was watching the scene—or perhaps the painting’s viewer—as if mocking the pantomime set up around her with her daring presence. Meanwhile, in the center of the space, behind the white feather of the hat worn by the second lieutenant to whom the captain’s order was directed, there came from an arquebus a luminous flash, instantaneous, more than daring. The second lieutenant, on whose Naples-yellow uniform was projected the shadow of the captain’s raised hand, had not, however, transmitted to the rest of the men Mr. Banning Cocq’s order: Elias then understood that that entire representation constituted the beginning of something, alive and resounding like that escaped flash, a mystery about the future that was beyond the stone bridge on which the commanders were getting ready to march, a chaotic mobility prepared to break inertia. Something that exploded in several directions, but always pointing toward the future.
Alarmed by the vivid potency of that image of unleashed forces, insistent on challenging all logic and the most basic learned precepts (how was it possible that Captain Cocq, dressed in black, although wearing the exultant red-orange band across his chest, gave the impression of climbing on top of the spectator, in front of the second lieutenant who was outfitted in shining yellow, when everyone knew that light colors advanced and dark ones gave the impression of depth?), Elias Ambrosius barely had eyes to see the remaining six paintings charged with adorning the groote sael, all already placed in their spaces. The other pieces were group portraits (was the Maestro’s painting one?), respectful of the established laws, perfect in their way. But next to that spectacular whirlwind, full of implausible optical effects that, nevertheless, managed a patent feeling of reality and life, the young man felt that the other works seemed like mere playing cards from a deck: figures that, in their desired and perfect uniformity, were made to look rigid, basic, empty of life compared to the Maestro’s painting …
The caretaker’s voice, reminding him of the need to close the hall, was barely able to remove Elias Ambrosius from the enchantment into which he had fallen, the storm of disquiet in which he would live from that day on, when his decision to become a painter became irreversible and, with his sovereign or inevitable choice (only God would know the precise adjective), he placed his fate in the eye of the storm that would mark the greatest joys and sorrows in his life.
*
* *
It didn’t happen that morning. Or on either of the following two days. Just when the young man was starting to think of taking a break from his chilly surveillance for a while, of waiting for less crude temperatures, his expectations turned out to be compensated with the sound of the locks on the green door being opened to allow the cloaked Maestro out. At the mere sight of him, Elias Ambrosius felt a wave of satisfaction embrace him, capable of making him forget the cold, his fears, and even the hunger pangs.
An hour before, a little earlier than usual, Elias had seen young Samuel von Hoogstraten enter the building and, shortly after, his neighbor from Bethanienstraat, the Danish Bernhard Keil, in the company of the Fabritius brothers, all of them lucky students of the Maestro, and he congratulated himself, since he had the hope that on that morning they were coming earlier because they would surely go out shopping and he, at last, would break the frozen monotony of his waiting.
From Keil the Dane himself, who was lodging in an attic close to his house and was in possession of an exacerbated loquaciousness that multiplied when treated to a beer, Elias Ambrosius had learned of (besides the house’s and the studio’s routines) the Maestro’s discouraging demands when it came time to accepting new students and assistants. Although the apprentices guaranteed him a notable source of income (enrollment alone reached a hundred florins, before accounting for the other practical and commercial utilities they represented to him), the Maestro demanded that candidates come to his workshop with prior preparation and something beyond enthusiasm or basic knowledge of the art of painting. His job, he repeated, was not to teach them how to paint, rather to force them to paint well. (“‘My studio is not an academy, it is a workshop,’” the Dane said, citing the Maestro, and even made the attempt to appropriate the surly expression of the face that the painter must put on when speaking of the matter.) That demand, in and of itself, closed to Elias the green door that gave access to his aims: first, because of his condition as a Jew, it would be impossible to share his concerns with his parents such that they would even consider the possibility of breaking with convention to send him to train with any maestro of that art. And secondly—but of no less importance—because at that moment, due to his very tight finances, it was almost impossible for him to find another instructor who would also be discreet, cheap, and skilled, capable of showing him the basics so that he could aspire to a spot in the workshop of his dreams. But the Maestro’s favorable affinity with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter and Elias’s highly personalized knowledge of his methods (for months, Elias had memorized all of the Maestro’s pieces placed in public sites and even in various private ones throughout the city) turned out to be a magnetic pole toward which all of the young man’s expectations pointed, expectations that multiplied and burned into him on the afternoon on which he contemplated the march of Captain Cocq’s company. If he risked so much for his love, if he lived and should live part of his life in a kind of secrecy, he would do so in the best possible way. And for Elias Ambrosius, the path toward that obsession had just one name, and there was just one way of understanding the art of drawing figures: that of the Maestro. He would have the Maestro, or he would have no one. Which, the young man knew well, may be the most probable, in truth …
For all of those insurmountable reasons, as he waited for a way to fulfill his aspirations, the young man had had to resign himself to listening to his grandfather Benjamin’s digressions about the importance of a direct relationship between man and his Creator, and to dreaming of the works to come from his hands as he spent his nights drawing on humble pieces of paper. But he was also insistent on enjoying the discreet physical proximity with the Maestro obtained via pursuits through the streets and markets as he sought to pick up any of his words, carrying out his apprenticeship—thinking it would be useful at some moment—by learning the painter’s preferences regarding pigments, oils, cards, and canvases, about his obsessive enjoyment in purchasing ordinary or extraordinary objects (from a shell to African spears), and of the ecstatic contemplations to which the man handed himself over at times: of buildings, streets, common or singular men and women from the overflowing city in which there was a confluence of every race and culture.
Although it seemed strange to Elias to see that the Maestro was going out alone, adjusting his calfskin gloves, it surprised him more to see him cross the street, as if he were headed to the exact spot where he was standing. His heart leapt and he began to imagine possible responses to any of the man’s questions regarding his insistent presence before his dwelling, and in an instant he decided on just one: the truth. The Maestro, however, skirted a pile of snow and a muddy puddle, trying not to sully his outfit, and, without paying the least bit of attention to the smooth-faced young man, directed himself to the house of Isaías Montalto, the affluent Sephardic Jew who, like all who have reason for that type of pride, liked to announce his family’s noble and Spanish lineage, crowned by his father, Dr. Josué Montalto, a doctor in the court of Marie de Médicis, the Queen Mother of France. That Isaías Montalto, who had acquired the first and one of the most luxurious homes of the so-called—by people like him—Jewish Broad Street, had made such a considerable fortune since his arrival in Amsterdam that he had already ordered the construction of a wider dwelling in the area of the new canals, where a yard of land taken from the swamps reached dizzying prices. As everyone knew, the Jew had maintained a close relationship for years with the man who, after ringing the little bell, entered the dwelling’s interior from which he emerged just five minutes later, carrying around his neck one of the small, fragrant bags, weighed down with aromatic herbs and made of green linen, specially designed by Isaías Montalto, and in his hands another bag, this time made of brown paper, in which were wrapped the city’s penultimate whim: the tobacco leaves arrived from the New World, which Montalto was supplied with by Federico Ginebra the converso, who had them brought from the meadows of the Cibao, on the remote island of Hispaniola.
Instead of getting together with his students and going toward the Meijerplein, where he usually started his shopping, the Maestro went in the opposite direction, passing nearly in front of Elias (whose nose received a fleeting note of lavender and juniper emanating from the small scented bag), crossed the lock bridge and, after spitting a piece of hard candy over the rail, advanced along Sint Antoniesbreestraat, as if he were going to the city center. He left behind him the luxurious house of his friend Isaac Pinto and the warehouse containing the dwelling and art business that belonged to the merchant Hendrick van Uylenburgh, a relative of the Maestro’s deceased wife, the place where the latter had lived upon settling in the city. But when he arrived at the arch decorated with two skulls that opened onto the esplanade of the Zuiderkerk, the man stopped and uncovered himself, despite the cold. Elias knew that in the atrium of the old church rested the remains of his first three children, all dead just weeks after being born, and only at that moment did he asked himself why the man had decided to bury the children’s mother in the Oude Kerk and not at that site, which was already marked by his pain.
The Maestro took up his walk again and, after passing in front of the house where his instructor, the now deceased Pieter Lastman (Amsterdam’s best professor at the time, the maestro who turned him into the Maestro), had lived for years, he entered the New Market on the always noisy esplanade of De Waag, where just a century and a half before was Sint Anthonispoort, the door that marked off the now overflowing metropolis on the West. The frenetic activity of the traders and importers who certified the weight of their merchandise via municipal scales, the yells of the auctioneers and purchasers of existing and not-yet-existing products, brought from all confines of the universe, was joined at that moment by the metallic sound of the shovels with which the city government-employed work crew picked up the snow to then deposit it in the carts that would take it to be dumped into the closest canal. The cleaning was due, perhaps, to the circumstance that before noon, one of the executions so frequently carried out
in the Plaza could take place there, a sentence that, as usual, would occur as quickly as possible so as not to take precious minutes from the market. When he passed the corner where some paintings for sale were on display, made to the specifications of the most common taste, the Maestro barely glanced at them, and Elias thought that he was writing them off. And nearly all of them deserved it, the young man told himself, assuming the man’s supposed criteria.
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