En route already to the Maestro’s house, where the broom and bucket awaited him, Elias Ambrosius crossed the Dam Square, where the fishmongers were fighting over the space with stone blocks, the sandbags, and the wood destined to form the scaffolding that would be used to grant the luster that, all said and admitted, the heart of the richest city in the world deserved. Following the fire at the Nieuwe Kerk a few months before, the Calvinists had decided to rebuild the temple, granting it crushing proportions, and the project included the erection of the city’s tallest bell tower, which should rise over the ostentatious cupola of the Stadhuis, since religious power should be imposed over civil power, at least in architectural proportions. Elias Ambrosius, always curious to know about those city happenings, this time barely paid attention to the movement of the master cathedral builders come from Lutecia—jealous owners of the secrets of their profession (more secrets for that city)—since his mind was still stubbornly focused on finding a possible path toward that individual who was an enigma. Because the great question, he had concluded, was not the man’s identity but rather his individuality, a concern that in one way or another obsessed all Jews. What agreement had he come to with his soul, that Salom Italia, to decide to throw himself down that path? Did he think, like Elias himself, that his freedom of choice was sacred for being, above all, a gift granted to him by the Holiest? Despite that, did he attend, as Elias attended, synagogue, did he pray accordingly and respect the Sabbath, as Elias did, and did he follow all the laws, except one, as Elias did? That individual must have already asked himself the questions that the young Elias still repeated, concerning the law and his obedience, and, it was obvious, he had found his own answers. Because while he hid behind an alias and worked clandestinely, his decision to make his work known was an open challenge to the thousand-year-old precepts and a clear choice for his freedom of thought and action.
The afternoon on which Isaac Pinto showed him the marvelous illustrated scrolls of the book of Queen Esther, that man whose fortune and contributions to the community gave the privilege of seeming so liberal had reminded the young Elias that the origin of the decisions of man was centered in the relationship between his conscience and his arrogance, both inalienable essences of the individual. “The more you follow your conscience,” Pinto had said, “the better the results you will obtain. But if you allow yourself to be guided by arrogance, the results will not be good. Following only arrogance,” he then gave an example, “it’s the same as the latent danger of falling in a ditch when you’re walking in the dark, since you need the light of your conscience, which illuminates the way.” Weren’t those words a variation on the relationship between the fullness, conscience, and dignity with which we should live our lives, about which Hakham ben Israel would write upon referring to death and the intangible great beyond? Those men, so skilled at making money or speculating with ideas, were they pushing Elias in his pretensions as a creator of images?
The words of Isaac Pinto, related without a doubt to Salom Italia’s artistic practice and with that of Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila himself, should point toward the concept of free will that had turned into the focus of discussion among the city’s learned Jews. The fact that, in Amsterdam’s permissive environment, more and more Hebrews were beginning to distinguish, or aiming to distinguish, between the terrains of religion and those of private life was—the Orthodox said—a gigantic sin tinged with the colors of heresy: yes, Judaism was a religion, although it was also a morality and an edict, and as such should govern each of man’s acts, no matter how minimally or how removed from religious precepts it appeared to be, since all of those acts, in one way or another, were regulated by the Law. And a confessed heretic like Uriel da Costa and others of his ilk could say whatever they wanted, but human acts, in one way or another, have cosmic significance, since they became part of the universe of the created, gave shape to history, and carried the weight of serving to anticipate or delay the saving arrival of the Messiah, who had been awaited by the people of Israel for so long.
Elias Ambrosius would then ask himself if in reality it was possible that an insignificant being like him, by personally and privately violating the toughest interpretation of the law that in its distant time responded to the need to discipline some lost tribes, without a homeland or commandments, in the desert, was causing an imbalance in the universe with his decision and even delaying the coming of the Anointed. The young man thought it wasn’t fair to make him carry that weight: he already had more than enough with the responsibility of playing with the destiny of his soul to then be forced to think about the fate of all Jews, even the fate of the created universe. Why did they associate his own freedom to decide the path of his individual life and his personal preferences with the collective destiny of an entire race, of a nation? What had been Salom Italia’s response before that dilemma? Elias Ambrosius didn’t know; perhaps he would never know. But he knew one thing: Salom Italia, whoever he was, had continued to paint. Clandestinely, under a mask, but he painted … Why shouldn’t he do so? What was moving Elias to make his decision: conscience or arrogance? Or the biblical option of choosing life? Why, O Lord, why did everything have to be so difficult for a member of His chosen people?
* * *
The news fell like a thunderbolt in the heart of Amsterdam’s Jewish community: Antonio Montesinos, barely disembarked from the brigantine that had brought him from the New World, appeared in the synagogue and, after asking that all members of the community gather there, made the devastating announcement. He, Antonio Montesinos, said before those congregated in assembly that he had reliable, irrefutable proof, confirmed with his own eyes, that the indigenous people of the lands of the Americas were the descendants, finally found, of the ten lost tribes. The businessman then narrated his journeys through the lands of Brazil, Surinam, and New Amsterdam in the north, displayed some sketches he had made, transcribed words, and, he declared, he had been able to prove that the misnamed Indians, by virtue of the confusion caused by Columbus, had to be the disappeared brothers from the distant days of the exile to Babylon. The fact that they would have crossed the Ocean Sea by a route that was unknown for centuries (as the Greeks conjectured, who well before had spoken of a land of Atlantis beyond the columns of Hercules) explained their disappearance. Their physical being, elegant and well built, confirmed a Semite origin. Their language, he said, and read isolated words from his notes, incomprehensible to all, was a corruption of ancient Aramaic. What other proof could be needed? The most important thing, the author of this colossal finding claimed, turned out to be that the presence of those brothers at the confines of the earth announced the most important condition necessary so that the awaited arrival of the Messiah would happen: the existence of Hebrews settled in all points of the universe, as predicted by the prophets, who considered planetary dispersion one of the inalienable demands for the Coming.
The sacred days of Passover that year were devoted to discussing the finding, qualified by some as a revelation, almost as marvelous as that received by Moses on Mount Sinai. Always divided into many factions, the community this time polarized itself in two groups: the Messianics, in reality less numerous, who supported Montesinos’s conviction, and the skeptics, captained by Hakham ben Israel, who considered the voyager’s presumed discovery a regrettable and even dangerous falsehood. The rabbinical council, gathered many times following the announcement, debated Montesinos’s arguments, but without arriving at a definition.
For Elias Ambrosius, the commotion and war of factions, so typical of Jewish nature, became, above all, the revealing of a delicate reality: the extremes reached by the religious fanaticism of his brother Amos, who immediately had supported the group of the most apocalyptic Messianics, presided over by their spiritual guide, the Polish rabbi Breslau.
To the surprise of Grandfather Benjamin and Elias’s father, Abraham Montalbo, more than skeptics, amused by what they considered to be an insane notion of that Montesinos, the young Amos ap
peared at the house one day announcing his enrollment in the party that, they said, would go meet the lost brothers to help them return to the faith, customs, and obedience of the Law. Elias, who was shaken as he listened to his brother’s decision, was not surprised when his elders tried to dissuade Amos, but he was alarmed, and very much so, when he heard his brother’s response, refusing to discuss the decision he had taken, as he regretted that his father and his grandfather maintained that heretical attitude before such a great event, a prelude to the revelation of the Messiah.
Elias, once again warned that he lived under the same roof as a fanatic so extreme as to dare to threaten his elders with divine condemnation, convinced himself of the reasons for which, even in a land of freedom, many Jews preferred to live under a mask, amid secrets, instead of living openly amid exposed truths. He understood, of course, the attitude of a man like Salom Italia and the decision to maintain his hobbies in the shadows. And, further still, he obtained the evidence of why he himself needed to cover his secret in the most hermetic way possible if he did not want to run a grave risk.
That same night, taking advantage of his brother’s absence, Elias Ambrosius, as if he were carrying out a theft, removed from the house with the greatest care the notebook, the folder full of drawings, and the small linens stained with the ditherings and searches of an apprentice painter. Among the possible places to keep them well hidden, he chose at that moment the attic of Keil the Dane, in whom, he believed, he could trust. And although it was painful for him, he had to accept that he felt more protected by a man of another faith than by many of his own. More sheltered by a tolerant stranger than by his blood brother contaminated by fanaticism and intransigency and, there was no other way to qualify it, full of hate.
* * *
Spring was delivering itself like a gift from the Creator to the city of Amsterdam. Everything was alive again, shaking off the lethargy of ice and the aggressive winter winds that, for months, had beaten the city and oppressed its inhabitants, its animals, its flowers. While the temperatures rose without too much hurry and the rain came down frequently, the colors stretched out, divesting of their starring role the near-absolute white of snow on the rooftops and the brown of the quagmires that the streets had become where the legions of municipal collectors had still not passed. With the recovered hues, noises were also reborn and smells came back to life. To the markets returned the dog sellers, with their packs of noisy hounds and shepherds; out came the shouting vendors of spices and aromatic herbs (oregano, myrtle, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg), as delicate to the touch and the sense of smell as they were incapable of withstanding winter temperatures without losing the perfumed warmth of their souls; the taverns opened their doors, gifting the fermented smell of malt beer and the laughter of their customers; and the purveyors of tulip bulbs returned to the city with shouts announcing promises of a flourishing of colors and later whispers of their over-the-top prices, as if they were ashamed—only as if they were ashamed—to exploit the fashion and ask exaggerated sums for a hairy onion that barely enclosed the promise of its future beauty. The voices of the traders, wagoners, barge drivers, and drunks clustered together on any corner (countless in the city where water was barely consumed, they said, to avoid certain dysentery), joined the penetrating noises of the weapon makers’ workshops beating like drums, and the monotonous song of the sawmills, to form a steady racket that many times per day turned out to be covered by the quick pealing of the city’s infinite church bells, which, loosened, seemed to ring more resoundingly in their mission of announcing any event. Solitary bells, towers with multiple bronze bells and musical chimes brought from Bern, announced the hours, half hours, quarter hours, the opening and closing of businesses, the arrivals or departures of boats and celebrations of Mass or burials, of baptisms and weddings delayed by the winter, and of some executions by drowning, to which the Dutch were so addicted, always as if the tolling of the metallic notification made real the fact that prompted it. In the Sint Antoniesbreestraat, on the way to the Maestro’s house, in front of the building where Isaac Pinto lived, Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila stopped that midday and shared his springtime good mood with the sound (a harmonious one, indeed) of the thirty-five bells, lined up like birds on a fence, hanging from the top of the tower of Hendrick de Keyser, over the cross of the Zuiderkerk.
The young man’s good mood had much to do with the season and the promising turn taken by his meetings with Mariam Roca, which had evolved from walks without any specific destination along streets and markets and from conversations that were increasingly full of deeper intentions, to the caressing of hands and whispering in ears, capable of provoking such ardor that it caused him to demand relief by rubbing himself, which led to a subsequent demand for understanding and forgiveness from the Holiest. But, more than spring and the throbbing of love and sex, the state of enthusiasm in which Elias Ambrosius lived was related to the tremendously special function that, for weeks, he had been serving in the Maestro’s workshop: he was a model for the very Jewish mohel at the moment in which he was getting ready to carry out baby Jesus’s circumcision, the Brit Milah ordered by Yahweh to distinguish all of the males of the chosen people.
Ever since the afternoon that the Maestro took Elias along to visit Isaac Pinto, the relationship between the painter and the apprentice had taken on a certain warmth—almost all of the warmth the Maestro’s standoffish nature was capable of generating with those who were not his most intimate friends—and Elias Ambrosius, without having freed himself of the bucket and broom, had not only been promoted in the workshop’s practical tasks, crushing the pigment stones with the heavy mortar and preparing colors with the precise proportions of linseed oil, but the Maestro had also devoted several conversations to him, monologues rather, in which, according to his mood, he sometimes became entangled as if losing all notion of time. Some days, he only talked about artistic subjects, such as (according to the notes of Elias Ambrosius, who was always insistent on writing down his lessons to later reread them and process them) his ideas about the need to break the established relationship between classical beauty and the feminine nude, which, in his opinion, did not need to be perfect to be feminine and beautiful, since the Maestro liked to capture wrinkled skin, cracked feet, flaccid muscles, in search of a tangible sense of authenticity that the rest of the city’s artists did not approach. Other days, he dove into laying out the foundation of his peculiar understanding of harmony and elegance as qualities serving the work and not as values in and of themselves, which was the way in which the devotees of classic painting understood it, including the Flemish Rubens. No, no: that deeper sense of harmony pursued by him turned out to be the great lesson that, according to the Maestro, the painter Caravaggio had left the world; not the control over cavernous darkness upon which his followers had insisted, he asserted, incapable of seeing beyond what was apparent, but rather the revelation that truth and sincerity must be placed above canonized beauty, supposed symmetry, or the idealization of the world. “Christ, with dirty feet and open sores due to the desert sands, preached among the poor and hungry, and sat. Poverty, hunger, tears are not beautiful, but they are human.” “There is no reason to shun ugliness,” he would conclude, and he illustrated those digressions with the study of a Christ Preaching, drawn on paper, in which the speaker, curiously, lacked a defined face.
There were days, by contrast, on which the Maestro preferred to become immersed in more mundane matters, given his lack of interest in public life and, above all, politics, which he considered a dangerous temptation for the artist who seeks to appear involved. And days on which he got caught up in the obsessions of a man always in great need of money, speaking of the importance and at the same time the burden signified by the painters of the United Provinces who had become the first artists in history who didn’t work for the court or the Church but rather for the type of customer who was completely different in his demands, tastes, and needs: rich men born of the benefits of commerce, spe
culation, large-scale manufacturing. Then he stated that those individuals, often of plebeian origins, always pragmatic and visionary, were increasingly less interested in history or mysticism. Their anxieties expressed themselves in their desire to see paintings in which their own material creations were represented: their country, their wealth, their customs, they themselves, with their jewels and clothing, satisfied at last with a fortune of which they were more proud every day. That reflection had to materialize itself on canvases of reasonable dimensions, conceived to adorn the wall of a welcoming family home instead of an overwhelming church or royal palace. And to adorn, they demanded what they considered beautiful, what they deemed to be theirs.
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