A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  “Aristotle,” said a voice at my shoulder. Señor Carranque, the Peruvian shoe-man, tipped his hat, bowed slightly. “He also said, ‘All men desire to know.’ You figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?” I asked. “Aristotle or architect?”

  “Men,” he said. “Or Man. Capital M, small a.”

  “Wouldn’t that Man feel more at home across the plaza?”

  “There is happiness and there is happiness.” He smiled, looking up at the inscription.

  “I was thinking of the desire to know.”

  “Are you a curious woman?” He turned and faced me, both hands in his trouser pockets, his fedora—its shiny ribbon and nylon feathers not quite Lubavitcher but unusual in a man young enough to be my son—pushed back to reveal a strong widow’s peak of blue, bear-oiled hair. A portly, smiling rogue, with just enough of the unobvious in his question, more snake than shark, more newt than snake.

  “Señor Carranque, I am a sixty-five-year-old woman out on a strange town for an evening of flamenco at a porno theater. If that doesn’t qualify me as a curious woman with a capital M, small a …”

  One of the ticket seller’s brats tugged at Carranque’s jacket pocket. Carranque’s smile vanished, his hat found itself quickly tightened on his head. Carranque barked something at the child in something other than Spanish. She ran back to her mother. The ticket seller gathered the herd under her skirts and spit in our general direction.

  “Come.” Carranque guided me by the elbow toward the double doors.

  “What was that?”

  “Ach, we have our beggars in Peru, much worse than Spain.”

  “But what did you say to her?” I allowed myself to be pulled away from the drama into the theater.

  “Nothing significant. I stepped on her foot. Hard. It’s a universal language.”

  Inside the theater proper, a few red bulbs defined the corridor behind the orchestra while respecting the anonymity of the audience. A voice and a guitar groped vaguely toward us from a narrow slit of light past the overhang of the balcony. From the front of the orchestra, shouts. In the back, shadows of dark wool jackets, a few turned faces, the smell of men, mumbling, shuffling. Señor Carranque moved me sideways, behind the backs of the standees, dark in the dark. We reached the last aisle. I squinted for a seat.

  Instead, Carranque opened a door. A long corridor, fluorescent tubes—hissing, crackling fandangos. I disengaged.

  “Come,” he said. “I have something to show you.”

  “I came for the flamenco,” I said, “if you will excuse me,” and I turned back to the door to the auditorium.

  “But you are a descendant of the Rambam, are you not?” I stopped. “The Rambam,” he repeated, “Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides.”

  A tube flickered, popped back to life. This was odd. Odder than being out and about with a shoe salesman at midnight. I remembered odd times past, other cold nights, cold corridors, cold lights. I remembered how to keep my mouth shut.

  “Come. It’s better if we don’t talk here.” He didn’t take my elbow. I followed. Women, indeed, desire to know.

  The corridor opened into a lounge, carpeted in Astroturf, wallpapered with newspaper and magazine nudes. At the far end, My Lady Journalist, bescarved back to us, talked into a pay phone. The stage manager kept one hand on the phone box and both eyes on her breasts. Acknowledging us with his other hand he pressed a buzzer on his desk. Carranque opened the door.

  “The proprietor is an associate of mine,” he whispered over his shoulder. We climbed a staircase to an office. A desk, a few chairs, a speaker delivering occasional flamenco sounds from the stage, a table with bottles. Carranque picked up a glass, wiped it once with his handkerchief, thought better of it, and switched off the speaker.

  “Señora Maraquita, you must know, is my informant,” Carranque said, removing his jacket and draping it neatly over a filthy stool. He was a heavier man without his jacket, I thought, conspiratorial only in the mode, say, of Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers. Sweat stains matched his yellow suspenders, hair oil beaded on his forehead. He gave off an odor of burlesque.

  “I barely spoke with Señora Maraquita,” I said carefully. I am never certain these days.

  “She mentioned the book.” Carranque nodded at your Guide tucked under my arm.

  “And?” I faced him, fighting a sudden urge to giggle.

  “Well …,” he said, and I couldn’t tell whether he paused because of my manner or from embarrassment at having to say what he believed obvious.

  “The Guide,” he began. “A Guide for the Perplexed. You know, it is the title of a book by Maimonides.”

  “And the title of a guide written by my travel agent as well, Señor Carranque.” I turned to the double doors. “Now, I would like to hear the Flamenco Halevy.”

  “Señora Hanni,” he said, and I wondered when I had told anyone my name. “You and I—we are not tourists. I know of your interest in Maimonides. I know you came to Spain in search of some letters.”

  Aha, I thought, here’s the shell game, the bait and switch, the three-card monte.

  “Señor Carranque,” I asked, “exactly what kind of a shoe salesman are you?” I, of course, already had an answer, a pocket-bio of this fortyish traveling peddler—a tiny, undemonstrative wife, two quiet teenage daughters just barely keeping the floors above the dust of urban Lima, and Papa moving around the potted highways of the country in a thirty-year-old American tank, one hundred different left shoes in the trunk, one hundred other novelties from swizzle sticks to girlie pictures when the shoes didn’t sell, one hundred packets of Bromo when nothing else did. Three steps up from a salesclerk, two steps from a coronary, one step from jail.

  “Salesman?” He looked perplexed.

  “Aren’t you a delegate or whatever they send from Latin America?”

  “Perhaps,” he answered, “but I have nothing to do with shoes. It is you who must have heard wrong.”

  Choo convention, shoe convention—Carranque smiled and waited until the second you-know-what dropped. “You mean you are here for a Jew convention?”

  “Partially,” he answered, “and partially on private business.”

  “Private business meaning Maimonides?”

  “I am no expert on the Rambam, not like your friend the travel agent,” and he nodded toward your Guide. It wasn’t that he was heavier without his jacket, it was that he was heavier, Claude Rainsier, more cinematic, more noir.

  “Señor Carranque,” I began, reading from a once-familiar script. “Since you seem to know so much about my reasons for being in Spain, it is useless for me to deny that I am indeed looking for some letters.” It was a delivery full of rust and fifty-year-old phrasing. I was embarrassed the moment it played back, and grateful that Carranque was examining his fingernails.

  “Señor Carranque,” I began again, trying to sound less coached. “I am looking for transcripts of a letter written by a Spanish ancestor of mine who sailed with Columbus in 1492. Maimonides must have died …”

  “Nearly seven hundred and eighty-seven years ago,” Carranque said. I smiled. “An invitation was sent to your mother some time back, I believe,” he continued, “to attend the eight hundredth birthday celebration in Córdoba.”

  “She never went.”

  “There was the question of funds.”

  “I give up, Señor Carranque,” I said. “What are you? A cousin, an attorney, a rabbi, a con man?”

  “I am certain that at some level we are related, Señora. At another level, I simply desire to know.”

  “What have you heard about the letter I came to find, the Esau Letter?”

  “Only that it is not yet in your possession.”

  “Yet?” I asked.

  “Please sit down, Señora.” He pointed to a vinyl sofa, and perched himself on a bare corner of desk. “Your mother, alehah ha-shalom, used to boast about her descent from Maimonides, through his daughter.”

  “To everybody an
d everything.” I sat down. Why not?

  “Have you ever read a biography of Maimonides?” Carranque stood up from the desk, lifted his hat, ran a comb through his hair, replaced his hat, sat down again.

  “I told you, Señor Carranque, my interest in my family has only gone back five hundred years. Perhaps if I live a little longer …”

  “But you are certain that Maimonides had a daughter?”

  Certain? She was my Jewish Cinderella, Louisa May Alcott of the Hebrews, my Esther, my Judith, my Ruth. One of my earliest memories was the voice of Mama telling the story of Kima. It was a New Year’s afternoon, it must have been 1931, ’32, a black-tie buffet in our building on Riverside Drive. Although the luxury travel business took on water for a year or so after the Crash, my father’s nose for budget excursions and cut-rate train travel for those who had to leave town in a hurry put us in an airy corner apartment near Columbia University, with a view of the Hudson and the brand-new George Washington Bridge. Mischa Elman lived upstairs, Pola Negri on the twelfth floor—it was with great satisfaction and a six-year-old’s pride that, when the jazz band took a break, I watched a small crowd gather around my gentle Mama as she quietly gave out the story of our illustrious heritage …

  Shortly before dawn, on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, in the Hebrew year 4925, corresponding to 1165 of the Common Era, in the grandest bedroom of the grandest house of the al-Funduk al-Yahudi, the Jewish quarter of the royal Moroccan city of Fez, a woman named Judith died in childbirth. Within a week, her father, the dayyan Rabbi Judah ha-Kohen ibn-Shushan, was also dead, burned alive at the stake by the Almohades, the fierce Berber warriors, who had embraced violence as fiercely as they had embraced Islam.

  When the month of mourning was over, Judith’s husband, Moses ben Maimon, known to many of you as Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages and perhaps of all time, fled the city for the Mediterranean coast, and packed his father, his brother, his sister, and his infant daughter onto a ship bound for the Holy Land. After thirty days of stormy seas and predatory sailors, the family landed, exhausted but safe, in the port of Acco. Sixty-five days after the death of his wife, Maimonides walked into the synagogue of Acco and solemnly named his daughter Kima.

  Kima—the Hebrew name for the constellation Pleiades, the seven sisters of the sky, the stars of the east that lit her father’s path away from the Spain of his birth and the Morocco of his persecution toward the promise, the hope, of the Holy Land.

  But Kima also signifies Wisdom. And it was Maimonides’ quest for wisdom that moved the family to the shores of Egypt, to the Academy of the Aristotelians outside Alexandria. There Moses studied, while his brother, David, sailed around the Mediterranean dealing in precious stones, providing the family with the wherewithal to build a comfortable home. As the years passed, the girl Kima grew in both beauty and wisdom, with a fine head of thick blond hair and a finer command of Arabic calligraphy than her father’s. By the age of eight she was fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Spanish, and had transcribed the whole of Maimonides’ celebrated commentary to the Mishnah.

  By seventeen, Kima was the most revered woman in the Jewish community of Fostat. Her father was sought after as a physician and authority on the stars and the Talmud. But it was to Kima that the ordinary Jew came with questions about the earth—why does the Nile flood, why are there tides, why does my husband beat my children, why am I so unhappy?

  Eventually Maimonides took a second wife—a sister of Abu’l-Ma’ali, private secretary to the mother of the heir-apparent. Within a short time, Kima’s father began to share his love with a new child, a son named Abraham. Kima sought comfort in the company of a slender, dark-haired young man, Joseph ibn-Shimon, a prize pupil of Maimonides’. Joseph’s love of poetry, of the outdoors, his hunger for the physical world, drew him on long walks with Kima. K’sil, Maimonides called him, the Hebrew name for Orion the Hunter, always searching for Wisdom, betrothed to the Pleiades.

  K’sil indeed became the husband of Kima, and, on her nineteenth birthday, moved her to Aleppo in Syria. There Joseph became a wealthy businessman and a respected physician in the community. Kima dispensed her brand of advice to men and women alike. A year passed, then another. Kima was happy with Aleppo, happy with her husband. But people were talking. Joseph and Kima were childless. Perhaps it was not proper for Kima to counsel men behind closed doors.

  Joseph wrote to Maimonides, a letter of complaint. He had married Kima in good faith and love, done everything proper, the way a good Jewish husband ought. And yet she had not borne him a child. It’s your fault, Joseph complained to his mentor. All this learning, this free-thinking, I wouldn’t be surprised if she were damaged goods. Come, take her back!

  Maimonides, of course, was upset by this letter. He made private inquiries through intermediaries in the Aleppo community and discovered that, as he thought, Kima was the model of discretion and propriety. His son-in-law, his disciple, was the problem. A man capable of deep thought, he was struggling to integrate his studies in the natural world into a life of faith with a loving wife.

  So Maimonides, in the bumbling way of all devoted fathers-in-law, sat down to write a letter and stood up, having written a book—the Dalālat al-Hāirīn, known by its Hebrew title as the Moreh Nebuchim, or Guide for the Perplexed.

  An Arabic copy arrived in Aleppo in 1190, on Kima’s twenty-fifth birthday. Nine months later, she put down her pen, the Hebrew version completed, and went into labor. For three days, Kima struggled with the child inside her. Joseph stood at her side wiping her brow, holding the damp cloth between her teeth when the contractions became too hard to bear. On the afternoon of the fourth day, it did not seem that Kima could survive another night. To save his wife, Joseph sharpened his scalpels, and performed a cesarean section. In those days, it was not so simple. By morning, Joseph’s son was nursing at a foreign breast.

  After six months, the friends of Joseph took it upon themselves to send the news to Maimonides. Joseph himself was incapable of motion, incapable of speech. He could bring himself neither to look at the child nor give it a name. It was left to the grieving grandfather to name the son of his lost daughter.

  “Eudaimon” was the answer that came back.

  “What about a Hebrew name?” Joseph’s friends asked with some consternation.

  “Eudaimon is enough,” Maimonides replied, “the Greek word for happiness. Our teacher Aristotle said, ‘All men by nature desire happiness.’ My daughter died desiring happiness. She was enough of a linguist to understand.”

  Joseph later named the child Benjamin, “son of my right hand,” the name Jacob gave to the child his beloved Rachel bore for him before she, too, died in childbirth. But for Maimonides, the boy was Eudaimon. And it is out of Happiness that our family has descended. “So you see, Señor Carranque,” I said, “I’m as friendly with Aristotle as I am with Kima.”

  “Ah, Señora Hanni.” Carranque looked at his left shoe for a long time, a half-smile, a memory. “You are a lucky woman. I would give up my beach house in Totoritas and half a year’s income to hear Mischa Elman play the violin.” He stood up, took my hand and, with the delicacy of a fat man, danced me around the tiny office while humming the second theme from Saint-Saëns’s “Rondo Capriccioso.” For the first time that evening I gave in to the urge to giggle. I took one edge of my skirt between two fingers and danced and laughed. There was something of the European Leo in Carranque’s exuberance, something of Sonny in his ability to surprise me. It had been a long time since I had been surprised.

  “Señora …” Carranque stopped, still smiling, one hand still holding mine, the other wiping sweat and oil from his forehead onto a handkerchief. “I don’t mean to keep you away from the flamenco with my poor excuse for dancing. I brought you here to give you something. A pair of letters.”

  “The Esau Letter?” I tried not to sound too excited, but he’d caught me wrong-footed.

  “Ah no, Señora, not yet. I am s
till thinking of Kima, your goldenhaired ancestor. You mentioned two letters in your Mama’s story—the letter of complaint Joseph wrote to Maimonides from Aleppo, and Maimonides’ reply.” Carranque opened a drawer in the desk and removed an oversized leather portfolio bound crosswise with leather straps. It too shook a memory out of my head, the shape, large enough to hold sheet music—the click of wheels, the shouts of soldiers, the orchards of the Auvergne.

  The telephone rang. Carranque put the portfolio down on the desk and spoke briefly into the receiver. “You will have to excuse me,” he said. And, with a short bow, he picked up his jacket, replaced the hat on his shining head, and was gone.

  Thinking back on the scene, I can’t help but believe that Carranque somehow buzzed himself on the phone to give the semblance of a natural exit, presuming that my native curiosity would lead me to peek at the letters of Joseph and Maimonides and arrive at an instant understanding. It didn’t. The sight of Zoltan’s portfolio of music lying on Carranque’s desk, the memory of the one piece of luggage Zoltan carried with his violin from Berlin, had not completely condensed into a recognizable image. I sat for a minute, stood, touched the portfolio, wandered around the room, a room without a face, without a plaque, an award, a book—only dirty glasses and a taste for the sweeter wines and brandies of Andalusia. I flipped on the speaker Carranque had turned off as we had entered, hoping to hear at least a snatch of the Flamenco Halevy.

  What sounded at first like static separated into the calls of human voices, no longer singing but shouting. I thought I had tuned in the wrong channel, but a twist of the knob only altered the volume. My Spanish is almost nonexistent—what little haggling I did among the booksellers of Sevilla was through the borrowed mouths of interpreters. But I recognized the husky mezzo in the foreground, a woman’s voice, a veteran of debates and microphones. A moment later I heard Carranque. He must have gone down to the stage, I thought. Gypsy problems, no doubt. I turned the volume up again, and found that the knob was also a latch, that the speaker was hinged. I pulled, and a panel of the wall opened onto a confessional bit of latticework. I looked through the screen, out from above what would have been the Royal Box had Juan Carlos a taste for Barbara of Seville.