Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  Behind the Maestro, Elias, nearly strutting, entered the Meijerplein tavern, to his dismay much less crowded than the always overflowing ones in De Waag, the Dam, or the area around the port: See, gentlemen, here I am drinking dark beer with the great Maestro, he thought, looking at the patrons, the majority of them too inebriated at that point in the day to notice the recently arrived men. With the beer served in hammered tin pitchers and as he devoured a piece of salted herring, the Maestro sought to pick up the thread of his previous speech about the construction of his country’s mystic destiny, and explained to his near-student: “As I was saying…” He swallowed the herring, drank half a pitcher of beer, and went on. “It’s true that we have behind us a century of exodus from the Catholic South toward the Calvinist North and of wars with the greatest imperial power that has ever existed. We also have the relationship with a poor land that we have made flourish and, because it is a small but ambitious country, a very strong feeling of predestination. It is not strange then that we consider ourselves a chosen people … Perhaps by God or by history, perhaps by ourselves, but by someone. If not, how would you explain that this New Jerusalem, as your people call it, has been able to turn itself into the richest, most cosmopolitan, most powerful city in the world…?” He drank the rest of his beer in one gulp and lifted the pitcher to order another. “Ever since we broke with Rome, our Calvinist mentality has preferred to understand the messianic predestination of our history through the account of your people, the Jews, a nation through which the All-Powerful has made His will on earth and in history … According to the book written by you yourselves … We turn our exodus into the same thing it was for biblical Jews: the legitimization of a great historical rupture, a break with the past that has made possible the retrospective building of a nation. An entire lesson in pragmatism … But the truth, the truth,” the Maestro insisted, “is that this Republic constitutes the result of a combination of the incompetence and brutality of the Spanish crown with Calvinist pragmatism, but above all, the work of good business. And once the Republic that we like so much and enriches us so much was built, these conditions, the true ones, were hidden by us beneath the patriotic mythology according to which divine will was being carried out in these provinces … As will be carried out in Jerusalem…”

  More calmly, he downed the second pitcher, while Elias drank his in small sips.

  “Do you know why I’m telling you this whole story about well-manipulated mistakes…? Well, it’s to tell you the subject of the paintings that the stadtholder has commissioned … As you can imagine, they are two scenes related to your people and also to ours, that identify us and speak to each other: an adoration of the Messiah by the pastors, which, seen from history, can only be imagined as a Jewish picture, and a circumcision of Christ, who, at the end of the day—right?—was as Jewish and as circumcised as you are…”

  The Maestro dug around in his pockets and placed on the table the three plackes with which he paid for what he had drunk, and looked at his companion. “Now let’s go to the house of my friend Isaac Pinto. After what I have told you, what you’re going to see there could help you a lot.”

  “Help me? To what, Maestro?” The young man wanted to know and found himself facing the other man’s smile, ironic and stained by tobacco and cavities.

  “To find yourself, perhaps. Or to understand why the Jewish people have survived for more than three thousand years. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  In his nineteen years of life, he had never set foot—and never would again set foot in the years he had left to live—in a house with as much brilliance, as much luxury, with such a display of silver, of shining wood multiplied by mirrors polished to perfection that could only have been made in Venice or Nuremberg, of floors shiny as only the white marble ones coming from Carrara could shine, with yellows extracted from Naples and black flecked with green of the neighboring Flanders. Everything shone brightly between the heavy curtains, without a doubt made by Persian wool and hands, as if the dwelling were on fire with prosperity and fortune. Had it not been for his own paintings and those of others that hung on the walls and provided their own shine, the house of the Maestro, in comparison with that of Isaac Pinto, would have looked like a military barracks (although it did have much in common with that).

  That Jew, who had arrived to Amsterdam at more or less the same age as Elias’s father Abraham Montalbo was when he disembarked in the city and with more or less the same poverty, was the living proof of the success of the Sephardic mercantile genius that the New Jerusalem had fostered. Despite the limitations imposed by the city’s authorities so that the Israelites would not dedicate themselves to the traditional activities of the region and enter their most coveted guilds, Hebrew inventiveness had found unexplored spaces and, almost with a fury, exploited rubrics like the production of chocolate, the cutting of diamonds and glass, the incredibly prosperous industry of refining honey from the Americas. Soon, some of them, thanks to their centuries-old commercial wisdom and their intimate and efficient relationship with money, had begun to amass fortunes. That of Isaac Pinto, nonetheless, was of a more predictable origin: commerce with the past. Already possessing contacts and merchants on four continents—Europe, Africa, Asia, and the New World—in reality his great centers of operations were, above all, the lands of idolatry, Spain and Portugal, where he not only negotiated with relatives and friends of his family converted to Christianity and very well placed in the social registers of those territories, but also with very Catholic agents of the Iberian crowns, without other rectors from the community of Amsterdam, many of them also partners or beneficiaries of similar businesses, daring to anathematize him or even criticize him. As a requirement of his social status, Isaac Pinto dressed, wore shoes, and cut his hair and mustache like the patricians of Amsterdam with whom he socialized as an equal. And, like them, he also decorated his house with the indispensable paintings by Dutch artists, among which Elias Ambrosius made out a landscape with cows by Aelbert Cuyp; a windmill that screamed out its belonging to Ruysdael; a still life with pheasants by Gerrit Dou, a former student of the Maestro’s; and a delicate drawing by the Maestro himself, which looked more like a dream landscape than of a countryside of the real swampy Holland. At the end of the day, Isaac Pinto’s success—like that of the Pereiras, or that of Isaías Montalto—turned out to be the best example of what Hebrew pragmatism could achieve in somewhat favorable conditions. Or the worst, although nobody, not even Rabbi Montera nor the recalcitrant Pole Breslau, would have dared say it thus when speaking of the powerful Isaac Pinto.

  Moved by that panorama of pageantry and attracted by the smiling face of the owner of so much wealth, who, as he welcomed him in Ladino dared even to hug the famous painter, generally so standoffish, Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila better understood the speech that the Maestro had gifted him shortly before and, at the same time, explained why Isaac Pinto already felt closed in on the so-called Jewish Broad Street. As all of the members of the Nação commented in their little cliques, the businessman was having a bourgeois palace made for himself, designed by none other than the much sought-after Philips Vingboons, in the area of the new and aristocratic canals where, regardless of their particular relationships with the divine, the Jewish and Protestant owners of the world commercial routes were immigrating.

  When the Maestro introduced him to his young companion, Isaac Pinto smiled and switched to Dutch. “How is Mr. Benjamin? I haven’t seen him for ages,” he said and shook the hand of Elias, who had barely begun to thank him for his interest in his grandfather when Pinto was already turning toward the Maestro and asking him: “It’s not him, right?”

  “Yes, it is him,” the painter said.

  Elias Ambrosius perceived Pinto’s reaction of discomfort upon knowing that he was him. Surprise, opposition? Why did he doubt, the powerful Isaac Pinto? With the discovery of that attitude, it was the young man who perceived how a feeling of fear ran through him even when he thought tha
t the Maestro would not be capable of placing him in a situation of danger after having covered for him for almost two years. It did not even calm him down to know that that man and his many commercial agents in Spain were the ones who devoted themselves, behind the rabbis’ backs, to supplying suspicious literature, printed in the lands of idolatry, to people like his own grandfather Benjamin Montalbo.

  “You have my personal guarantee, Isaac,” the Maestro then said. And, without a small grimace of opposition abandoning his face, the magnate admitted, “If you say so, then it shall be,” and he made a gesture, inviting them to make themselves comfortable in the armchairs covered in lustrous Chinese silk.

  Elias Ambrosius knew that his role was to remain silent and wait, and he tried to fulfill this perfectly, despite the state of anxiety running through him. At that moment, a maid—a German Jew, by all appearances—came into that dazzling room, with a tray that was also dazzling because of its silver, on which was balanced a green glass bottle and three glass cups. She left the tray on the dark marble-topped table with ebony legs, and withdrew.

  “You have to taste this,” Isaac Pinto said to the Maestro.

  “Spanish?”

  “No, from Bordeaux. An exceptional harvest,” the Jewish man clarified, and served the coveted drink in the three glasses. When the host went to give him his glass, Elias Ambrosius wiped his palms on his thighs, as if his hands were not worthy of receiving the Venetian cup.

  “Cheers,” the Maestro said, and the two men drank while the young man devoted himself to breathing in the delicate aroma, fruity but firm, of that beverage that made the Maestro exclaim, “I am not a connoisseur, but this is the best I’ve had in years.”

  “Then I have a bottle reserved for you.”

  Their cups emptied, Isaac Pinto stood up and looked at Elias Ambrosius, who felt diminished in the deep stuffing of his chair.

  “My son, I already know your secret…” Pinto pointed at the Maestro. “My dear friend told me, to convince me to do what we are going to do now. But listen well, my son … In this Amsterdam that is so free, all of us live keeping one or several secrets. Yours is nothing in comparison to what I’m going to show you. As such, your silence is a condition that you cannot violate. If you mention it to anyone, perhaps that could force me to explain some things, but for you it would be the end of everything. And when I say everything, it’s everything. Let’s go. The Blessed One is with us.”

  Elias Ambrosius felt his fears rising before that presumed test of trust that came adorned with a clear threat. Already standing, he followed Pinto and the Maestro toward the stairs and they went up to the second floor, where a dark wooden door punctuated the room’s wall. Pinto dug around in his pockets in search of the key capable of allowing entry into a room that, Elias assumed, was his office, the place from where he managed his countless and powerful businesses. The young man was not mistaken: a table with drawers, bookcases with a few books, armoires to store papers, all done by the city’s best ebony workers and varnishers, occupied the space they entered. From the beginning, Elias’s gaze discovered on the table a wooden ark crafted with care, fairly similar to the Aron Kodesh, the receptacle to keep the scrolls, but more luxurious than even the most luxurious one at the synagogue. The Maestro looked at Elias and then said to him:

  “What you’re going to see is going to make you feel better … Or worse, I don’t know for sure, but ever since I saw it, I thought that you, too, should see it.” While the Maestro spoke, Isaac Pinto, with another key, applied himself to opening that kind of ritual ark that had captured the young man’s attention. To his first surprise, Elias saw that it contained, as could be expected, a roll of parchment gathered in the fashion in which the Torah was kept, although less bulky. Elias Ambrosius’s mind turned into a whirlwind of speculations: if all of that mystery was related to a scroll inscribed with biblical passages, without a doubt it was because its text contained some revelation that was perhaps devastating; but the parchment, like everything in that mansion, appeared to be of the highest quality, brilliant, which eliminated the possibility of it being an antique weighed down with disturbing secrets. Moved by his expectations, the young man watched how Isaac Pinto took out the scroll with great care to place it on the table.

  “Come, open it yourself,” he told Elias, who, almost mechanically, obeyed the order. When he touched the parchment, he confirmed the high quality of the material. He took the wooden handle on which the book was rolled and, part of its surface barely uncovered, he knew at last that he was in for something more awe-inspiring and resounding than he could have speculated: above the image of a typical Dutch landscape, drawn in the Dutch manner, he could read, in Hebrew, that it was the book of Queen Esther. A biblical episode, designed like the scrolls of the Torah but illustrated like a Catholic Bible? He kept pulling the handle and uncovering the parchment, on which there were drawn animals, flowers, fruits, landscapes, and angels in profusion, and with a quality in the lines, perspectives, likenesses that took his breath away. At last, he raised his eyes toward those of the two men. The Maestro was smiling and commented:

  “A marvel, don’t you think?”

  Isaac Pinto, with pride-filled seriousness, meanwhile, said, “You see why I demanded your discretion? Isn’t it more than you could have imagined? Isn’t it more than our rabbis would want to allow? A marvelous heresy.”

  As he agreed in silence, Elias Ambrosius studied several of the pictures illustrating the biblical passage and suddenly felt something like a new revelation forcefully.

  “May I know who drew it?”

  “No” was Isaac Pinto’s response.

  “He didn’t sign it?”

  “No,” his host repeated.

  “Because he’s a Jew, right?”

  “Perhaps. Well, let’s say yes,” Pinto admitted, and Elias heard a guffaw from the Maestro, who at last interjected, “You’re so complicated, dammit.”

  Elias nodded: the Maestro was right. And then the young man said, “I know how this man calls himself,” and he touched the parchment to say, “Salom Italia.”

  * * *

  Facing the sea, breathing in the fetid dark waters brought by the drainage and the Norwegian smells of labored wood from the shipyard (firs of penetrating aromas for the masts, oaks and beeches for the vessels), Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila seemed to be studying the flight of the seagulls who were insistent on getting some food out of the spots of shrimp and crawfish carapaces and the heads of the herring devoured by the city and dragged by the currents of the canals to that rotting bank. But the young man’s mind, in reality, was focusing great effort on the tenacious examination of possible (and even impossible) strategies to learn the true identity of that Salom Italia, who was determined to turn his life upside down.

  Even knowing that he was violating the promise he had made, his first step, several weeks before, had led him to the house of Hakham ben Israel, with the weak hope of getting some information out of his teacher that was capable of placing him on the path to revealing that ubiquitous and elusive character who signed his works as Salom Italia. To Elias’s surprise, the teacher’s first reaction was that of feeling offended when he learned that the painter was dealing with the most affluent members of the Sephardic community without even deigning to give him the opportunity to buy the piece described with so much awe and admiration by his former student: sure, he said, that ingrate Italia had considered him incapable of affording his prices. Nonetheless, not for a moment did he seem concerned by the fact that that Jew drew a scroll—more still, as an illustration of a much-loved book of sacred history—but rather that the commercial operation was carried out behind his back, as if the object of discord were the work of one more of Amsterdam’s many painters. But even so, he maintained his muteness and reiterated what he had said to Elias: Salom Italia was a nom de plume (or of a brush, in his case?) of a Jew whom, incidentally, he did not want to hear from at all again, ever again … And he concluded the conversation.
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br />   Sustained by tenuous hope, Elias turned to another front and dedicated many days to running around the city’s markets where artworks were sold, in search of some piece that would fit the Jewish painter’s style. On several afternoons, he carried out those pilgrimages in the company of the young Mariam Roca, with whom he was advancing little by little on the path of his amorous pretensions, but, he thought, with necessary and sure movements. Since he didn’t dare confess to this beautiful young woman his true intentions during those rounds, Elias pretended that his insistence on visiting the art markets, beyond a mere lovers’ outing, allowed them to enjoy the greatest exhibition of paintings, drawings, and engravings in the world. But, no matter how many landscapes and portraits he studied (he dazzled Mariam with his knowledge, fruit of an inherited fondness from his reconverted grandfather for the beautiful representations and literature of Gentiles, he told her), he was incapable of confirming whether any of those marked by unknown signatures could be, or not, the work of that Salom Italia. But, what if he sold his work under another name, or under the name of some maestro to whom he was linked, as was usual in the country’s workshops? Dealing with a person who behaved with so much impudence, any alternative seemed possible, including the far-fetched one of living with two names: one for Jews (Luis Mercado, Miguel de los Ríos) and another (Louis van der Markt, Michel van der Riveren) for the Dutch society in which he had inserted himself.

  Looking at the dark silver sea, Elias Ambrosius thought that, despite the failures he’d experienced, in reality he had made considerable advances in hunting down that elusive character. To his certain condition as a Jew, he could add the irrefutable fact that he was Sephardic, never a German or Polish Ashkenazi, such fanatics and retrogrades, since it was more plausible that someone of Spanish or Portuguese origin could have access to the cultural knowledge and the basic training that that artist displayed, which were, without a doubt, exquisite. He had to be, of course, a man of culture and healthy finances, with well-oiled links in order to manage moving in such complicated and simultaneously distant spheres (religious, social, economic) as those represented by Isaac Pinto and Menasseh ben Israel. But that refined Sephardic Jew, perhaps affluent and without a doubt well-connected, used his work and his name to leave other visible footprints, although these in turn were confusing: above all, the near-absolute certainty that he could not be one of the poor Jews—the majority of the community, many of them settled around Nieuwe Houtmarkt, on the island of Vlooienburg, where the Hakham lived—since his gifts, it was easy to tell, had been honed by a maestro and fed by the consumption of Italian art and by knowledge of the Dutch school. That reduced the number of possible candidates. Following that logic, the painter was either an Italian Sephardic Jew or had done his apprenticeship in Italy, because he wouldn’t have chosen that peculiar pseudonym without a reason so appropriate for an artist of his style (or was the choice part of the concealment?), and he lived or had lived for years in Amsterdam or in some neighboring city. Although, the more Elias thought about it, he could also be a Marrano Jew, learned in painting during his past life as a presumed convert in Spain or Portugal. Or, he could even be a true convert, of the many who, upon arriving in Amsterdam in search of a less dangerous environment, recognized themselves as Jews, without the need any longer of hiding their Hebrew origins but who nonetheless opted to keep themselves at the margins of Judaism and its heavy social and private restrictions, bonds to which they did not wish to return … He had to be, besides, a man of great personal courage, with enormous certainty in his beliefs in order not just to execute those works exuding heresy but also to do so with such mastery and so publicly as to gift and sell them to members of Amsterdam’s richest Jewish and Calvinist households. How many men like that could there be in the city? Elias Ambrosius understood that, with a little bit of dedication and intelligence, perhaps he would manage to meet him, because, it was obvious, there could not be many men like that ghost in the city, not even in the world.