“So what are you going to do if they close the academy, Hakham?”
“I’m not going to wait for them to close it … In two weeks, I leave for London. That is my mission before the Holiest, blessed may He be, and before Israel: to open the door through which the true Messiah will come and not a charlatan and heretic like that Zevi.”
As soon as the bell rang, signaling the departure, the two men distanced themselves from the port and walked toward the area of De Waag, where they took a table at the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, the same place where a few years before, Elias had seen the Hakham meet with the Maestro and had the certainty that Ben Israel could be his passport to the painter’s workshop. Taking refuge behind large, thick green glass goblets weighed down with a tremendous Portuguese red wine, Elias at last had the occasion to relay the concerns plaguing him to his advisor. The previous week, when the Maestro deemed the work on Pilgrims at Emmaus finished, the painter had touched on a subject that had been worrying Elias Ambrosius: that of his remaining in the workshop. The Maestro’s financial situation was fraught once again, with unpaid debts on his mortgage and with the compensation he owed Mme. Dircx, whose services he had decided to dispense with and who was going around the city accusing the Maestro of having violated a marriage proposal. The Maestro could not allow the privileged position of the young Jew in his workshop to jeopardize the source of guaranteed income that the students represented. Besides, Elias already possessed the necessary skills to start on his own path if, as the painter recommended to him, he obtained the approval of the Guild of St. Luke, crucial to selling his own work. Elias understood the Maestro’s motives, but the Maestro, in his desperation and enthusiasm, seemed to have forgotten those of the young man, who found it impossible to leave behind the secrecy surrounding his art—even more impossible in those turbulent times within the Sephardic community.
“I already have the rank of master printer,” Elias continued, speaking with his former teacher, “and although I do not earn very much, I could continue working with my father, or even look for another patron. With these salaries, I could marry Mariam, since it is about time.”
“I should say so,” the Hakham reaffirmed as he asked for his glass to be refilled.
“But is that the life I want?”
“I imagine it isn’t, judging by the way in which you ask me, or ask yourself. But your life is yours, as I have always told you.”
“Only you can help me, Hakham. Or at least listen … Think with me, please. Let’s see, think whether after having lived for years alongside the Maestro, of being present so many times for the miracle of seeing him reach a nearly divine perfection, of listening to him speak with you, with Anslo, with Jan Six, with Pinto, with Hendrick Uylenburg the merchant, with Steen the painter, and Vingboons the architect, many of the most educated and ingenious men in the city; after having had the privilege of learning with students who have already embarked on such successful careers; after knowing the secrets of Raphael and Leonardo, the tricks of the Flemish Rubens, the ways in which Caravaggio expresses greatness; after having suffered my own ignorance, of having lived on the edge of destitution in order to be able to hand over the florins that the Maestro demanded of me every month, but also of having lived the grace and the privilege of listening to him speak of art, of life, of freedom, of power and money, of having felt how my hand and the paintbrush grew in their understanding, of discovering that everything is in the eyes, at times beyond the eyes, and of being capable of inferring that mystery that others don’t even intuit … My Hakham, after having entered the fantastic world of being able to create … And then, you know a lot about this, after having lived with a secret and many fears, to one day be able to work alongside the Maestro and earn the invaluable prize that that same Maestro considers me a painter … After all of that, Hakham, am I going to renounce that marvelous experience and grow old behind some presses, printing flyers or receipts, like a decent man supporting a family through his labor, but who feels abandoned in his dreams of carrying out the work that—forgive me, Hakham, for what is surely my vanity—the work for which the Blessed One has brought me to the world?”
The former rabbi drank to the bottom of his glass and looked out onto the street, as if expecting the entrance, like that of the always-awaited prophet Elias, of the answer that his unruly former student demanded of him with his impassioned speech. The thoughts, nonetheless, did not appear to arrive from anywhere, and the man extracted his oak pipe from the New World in which he liked to burn and absorb his tobacco leaves. Only then did he dare attempt a response.
“You want me to tell you what you want to hear, as I can deduce from that passion … As such, there’s not much I will be able to tell you, my son … I can only remind you that in the whole range of human history, the Jewish maxim is to practice self-control and temperance, more than abstinence. And to achieve that would be a lot for you … For more than three thousand years, we Jews have been asking ourselves the same question you now ask yourself … What are we on this earth for? And we have given ourselves many responses. The idea that we are made in the image and likeness of God conferred to us the privilege of becoming individuals and, thanks to Isaiah and especially to Ezekiel, we received the idea that individual responsibility is the essence of our religion, of our relationship with the Holiest, blessed may He be … It was one of our ancestors who wrote the book of Job, a transcendentalist treaty about evil, so mysterious and visceral that not even the Greek tragedians and philosophers could conceive of something even close to it … Job expresses another variant of your question, much more painful, more overwhelming, when a man of solid faith is the one who interrogates the heavens aiming to know why God is capable of doing the most terrible things to us. He, who is kindness … And Job had his answer: ‘Behold, fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.’ Do you recall it?” The scholar placed his pipe on the table and locked eyes with the young man: “Take this verse as a response. Everything is there: Maintain your wisdom and always depart from evil. Your life is your life … And to not live it is to die in life, to anticipate death.”
* * *
Always in search of the dubious shelter offered by the eaves and walls of the lock house on Sint Antoniesbreestraat, again withstanding, his feet sunk in snow, the blades of damp air cutting the skin of his cheeks and lips as they ran over the Zwanenburgwal and sought out the North Sea, bearing the invincible stench that the breeze ripped from the canal’s dark waters, Elias Ambrosius was thinking of the future. As it had five years before, without ceasing to contemplate for an instant the house rising on the other side of Jodenbreestraat, Jewish Broad Street, his gaze focused on the green-painted wooden door that he had passed through so many times since the day on which he managed to soften the Maestro’s heart and entered, through a small crack, that world capable of changing his life.
A feeling of satisfaction and painful nostalgia were with him on this occasion, since for the first time he would cross that threshold not as a suitor, or as a servant or even as a student, but rather as someone close to the Maestro. As a remembrance of his former condition, in one of his pockets he carried three and a half florins that he had owed the painter since the previous month, an outrageous amount for his finances, but that, in light of what he had achieved, now seemed petty and ridiculous to him.
When he at last crossed the street, it was the restless Hendrickje Stoffels, owner and lady of the house and of the Maestro’s passions, who opened the door with the pleasant smile she always gave Elias, given the young student’s familiarity with the Maestro and with his boy Titus, whom he had seen grow from the time he took his first steps. Once in the kitchen, as he drank a steaming infusion, habit forced Elias to look at the peat and firewood pile and he offered to notify the Nieuwemarkt supplier.
With the woman’s authorization, Elias went up the steps leading to the Maestro’s studio, and, with a melancholy capable of imposing itself over familiarity, looked at the pain
tings, busts, and objects gathered in the dwelling. As in the days in which he ran around the house carrying a broom and mop, Elias knocked at the studio door three times, and heard the response that had become habitual. “Come in, kid,” the Maestro said, as he had said hundreds of times in those years of service, apprenticeship, and proximity.
The painter was seated in front of the panel on which he had begun to work a few weeks prior, and to his right rested the canvas of Pilgrims at Emmaus, awaiting the final touches to come after it dried and before the layer of varnish that he had decided to apply this time. The new panel, whose priming and preparation Elias had not participated in, would be a re-creation of the bath of Susanna at the moment in which the biblical heroine was being harassed by two elders ready to accuse her of adultery if the young woman did not grant them sexual favors. The characters, still sketched, made a spot of light falling from the upper right angle toward the bottom edge of the space, whose center would be the figure of Susanna. The background, already worked, offered a cavernous darkness in which deep brown carefully opened toward a greenish gray that, in the upper left corner, incorporated a robust architectural element, covered by a dome, more phantasmagoric than real.
Elias said hello and the Maestro muttered something as he added some more stains of red that, the young man assumed, would be the outfit Susanna was wearing before disrobing.
“Do you think Susanna should be nude, or do I cover her with a piece of cloth?” the Maestro asked, still without turning around and after spitting the hard candy he had in his mouth into a corner. Elias thought about his answer for a moment.
“It’s better to cover her. There are two men in the scene,” he said, just as the Maestro was placing his brush over the palette and putting it on the nearby table where the colors were laid out.
“You are right. Hendrickje thinks the same thing … But sit down, for God’s sake.”
Elias settled down on one of the stools without daring to move it from its place. He knew that even when the Maestro allowed him to enter the studio, the time he would devote to him would be minimal.
“I came to bring you the money I owe you, Maestro,” he said and began to dig around in his pocket. The painter smiled.
“Stop looking, you don’t owe me anything … Consider it payment for modeling for Pilgrims or an award for resistance … For everything you had to put up with these years.”
“Don’t say that, Maestro. I will never be able to repay you—”
“It’s okay like that,” the painter interrupted him, “forget about the damned money.”
“Thank you, Maestro.”
“Kid, my problems cannot be solved with three florins. That’s why I’m painting Susanna, who already has a buyer, and I’ve left Pilgrims here, which still doesn’t have any suitors; two possible customers have told me that the Messiah is too earthly. Both of them Catholic, of course.”
“So they saw what you wanted to show them.”
“Yes, but what I don’t see are the florins I have to pay for the debt on the house. How long will I have to work under this pressure, by God? It’s lucky that Jan Six loaned me some money to give me breathing room. An advance for the etching with which the printing of his Medea will be illustrated.”
“It is lucky to have friends like that.”
“Yes, it is … So, what are you going to do, finally? Are you going to Palestine with the Messiah, like Salom Italia?” he asked with a sarcastic smile.
“No, I’m not going, but I’ve been thinking and thinking and I don’t know what to do, Maestro.”
The painter, now serious, moved his body until he was in front of Elias.
“You know something? Sometimes I think I should have never accepted you in the workshop. You were too young to know what you were doing, but I was conscious of the problems this would bring you. Perhaps because of that, I did a lot to dissuade you, to make you think of the risks to which you were exposing yourself … But you put up with everything, because you have a strong will, like your deceased grandfather Benjamin. So much so that you have learned to paint as I never imagined was possible when I saw your initial sketches. Now there’s no helping it: you are infected to the bone, and it’s an illness without a cure. Well, yes, there is one: painting.”
“You changed my life, Maestro. And not only because you taught me to paint. My grandfather, Hakham ben Israel, and you have been the best things that have happened to me, because the three of you, each one in your way, have taught me that to be a free man is more than just living in a place that declares freedom. You taught me that being free is a war that must be fought every day, against all powers, against all fears. That is what I was referring to when I wanted to thank you for what you have done for me in these years.”
The painter, perhaps surprised by the young man’s speech, listened to him in silence, the work he had been doing seemingly forgotten. But Elias rose to his feet and the painter made a gesture as if he had come back to reality.
“You have work, Maestro. Do you know what the only thing I regret is? That I do not know if I will ever work with you again. The rest is profit. Goodbye. One of these days, I will come to visit you and put coal in the stoves.”
Then the Maestro stood up from his stool and, with his right hand, patted the young man’s cheek twice.
“Go with God, kid. May you have luck.”
The snow, which had been lying in wait for the city since daybreak, had started to fall when Elias went out to Jodenbreestraat, which, like other times, looked like a white carpet laid out at his feet. He walked along Sint Antoniesbreestraat, crossed before the Zuiderkerk, with its battery of bells in frozen silence, and headed toward the great esplanade of De Waag, where the most persistent or desperate merchants were withstanding the rain of white flakes behind their stalls. The young man’s mind, relieved by the conversation maintained with the Maestro, had at last found some of the answers pursued with special insistence in recent weeks, although engraved on his consciousness for several years. And the decisions taken, so essential for his life, demanded Mariam Roca’s understanding or denial, since they could affect her greatly if she decided to stay at his side in the midst of that war for which he would continue brandishing his weapons.
In front of the promised door, Elias again asked himself if what he was proposing to himself was fair. To drag others along with his decisions could be an egotistical act. But, what would love be about if not submission and understanding, commitment and complicity? In any event, the only choice was to show his cards and let Mariam, freely, as freely as possible, make her decision. Of that mind-set, he finally knocked on the door with the bronze knocker. He did not have to wait long for Mariam herself to open the door and for Elias Ambrosius to find himself looking at her upset face, which he would soon learn was from fear, as she delivered the news that would twist the young Jew’s fate: “By God, Elias, run to your house … Your brother Amos found your paintings and has denounced you as a heretic before the Mahamad.”
* * *
When some had forgotten what fear was like, how deeply it affected the essence of man, fear returned, like a giant avalanche, willing to cover everything. There had been many centuries of tense yet possible harmony, and the sons of Israel believed they had found in Sepharad—cohabitating with the caliphs of al-Ándalus and the fierce Iberian princes—the closest thing to paradise that one could aspire to on earth. Spanish cities and communities had become filled with famous doctors, philosophers, Kabbalists, prosperous silversmiths, businessmen, and, of course, wise rabbis. But with so much notoriety and success, they had at last brought about the cause of their perdition: they had become wealthy. And power never finds that the money it possesses is enough. Thus, fear returned with Catholic supremacy and, alongside it, to make it complete and irreversible, torture and death or a foggy exodus, which they could only undertake with the clothes on their backs.
For many years before the royal and Catholic solution was applied and the Jews’ expulsion from S
epharad was decreed, they had lived in tense times, with a more than justified fear of the processes of the Inquisition unleashed in a Spain that was almost entirely recaptured by the Catholic faith. Grandfather Benjamin used to tell Elias that in the first eight years alone of the functioning of that tribunal, more than seven hundred Jews, including his two grandfathers—before they were grandfathers—had been sentenced to die in the bonfire. (Whenever he heard him speak of that torment, the young man recalled the words of Hakham ben Israel, witness to several of those macabre spectacles during which, Elias could not shake the image, the blood of the condemned boiled for several minutes before he lost consciousness and died, suffocated by the smoke.) He also told him that, after the expulsion was decreed in 1492 (“And all of our goods were confiscated,” the elderly man stressed), many thousands of conversos, real and fake, had received all kinds of sentences. Any accusation before the Tribunal of the Holy Office or by the Holy Office itself was valid, so that an auto-da-fé would take place and the selected punishment be carried out in a public square. The most frequent charge tended to be, of all things, that of secretly practicing Judaism, but it could go all the way to having sacrificed Christian children to carry out certain Jewish cultural rites. For those condemned to the bonfire, if they recognized their sins and published their repentance and immediate adherence to the faith of Jesus, the Catholic clergy allowed them a generous relief: to die by the club instead of suffering the torments of the pyre. With those horrors, the invincible fear had been revived and had latched on to the memory of the Sephardic Jews like that miasma that, according to the wise inquisitors, emanated from the bodies of all Jews—a smell that disappeared with the act of Christian baptism. Fear had led them to take refuge in any place in Europe, Asia, or Africa where they were admitted, and although they were confined to ghettos, at least they weren’t threatened with being burned to death. Fear had made them end up in Calvinist Amsterdam, where it turned out that they were not only welcomed but where the miracle had also occurred that allowed the Jews to proclaim their faith without fear of reprisals from the believers in Christ. But fear, in reality, had followed them. Transfigured, transmuted, crouching in wait, but alive and present.
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