“Once upon a time,” he began. But at that moment Fredo punched open the double glass doors, and his grin looked, if anything, twice as diabolical.
“Hombre,” he said to the bartender, “are you bothering the lady? Can’t you see she is with our party?”
“Nada, nada.” The bartender returned behind the counter, outnumbered and outranked.
“Please, Fredo,” I said, “the gentleman wanted to tell me a story. You sang your song. I think equal time is only proper.”
“Then let’s get it on film.” Roger stood at the wall of casks, Vim over his shoulder, Spinoza over Vim’s.
“Turn that thing off,” I said, and Vim jumped to the command. But the bartender stuck out his chin, walked back around the bar, locked the front door, and poured a round of drinks for the assembly.
“I would be honoured, Señora, to tell my story to your camera. Then the television can decide who tells the truth.” He lifted the tray up on one palm and led us back to the far side of the bar. There, to my utter amazement, sitting back in her original position, was my girl with the violin. In the clearing of half-full glasses and the wiping of the table, no one else seemed to find her presence astonishing. I tried to sit in the seat next to hers, but the bartender took firm control of stage movement and corralled me into my original chair. Vim began to film.
“The story, Señora,” he began, “that the English boys were singing is based on a four-hundred-year-old fiction by an Italian who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, smoked hashish for three months, and found the need to create a fabulous tale to impress the father of his wife, who had financed the excursion. This is the story the Italian told the assembled guests”:
I was walking one day in the piazza of Jerusalem, the piazza that surrounds the Church of the Holy Sepulcher above the Western Wall, when I was confronted by a Turk who asked, in perfect Italian, “Do you know me?” I had my hand on my dagger, half ready for an adventure, half ready for a fight. But aside from his turban the man looked so harmless and transparent that I felt compelled to answer his question and admit that I had never seen him before in my life.
The Turk smiled and said, “But I know you! For I was a slave in your uncle’s house in Turin and I received many favours from you and from your parents.” He gave their names correctly and also those of many prominent people in Turin. “When I was released,” the stranger continued, “I went to Venice and soon gained the friendship of some Turkish merchants. They brought me in their ship to Constantinople. There I sought out my old master, whom I had served in the naval forces in 1571. He had recently been appointed governor of Jerusalem, and, upon the death of his police captain four months later, he did me the honour of selecting me for the post.”
“Congratulations,” I said to him, “that is quite a step up from scrubbing floors in my uncle’s house.”
“Service is service,” the Turk replied with a casual twitch of his moustache. “But kindness must be repaid, so I trust that you will do me the favour of dining with me tonight. We shall be alone.” He described his house and advised me to come at four in the evening, so as not to be seen. But if I was seen by any police, I was not to worry, for he was their chief.
I accepted the invitation and was received at his house with much display of friendship. After a splendid meal, he told me he would show me something which no other living man had seen, save his master, the governor of Jerusalem.
“But please,” he said firmly but without a trace of begging, “reveal this secret to no one. Should I be discovered, the penalty is impalement.”
The Turk took a ring of keys from an iron box, prepared a piece of wood for a torch, and lit a lantern, which he then carefully covered. He led me out of the room, shut the door, and gave me his hand to walk with him a good distance in the darkness of a narrow passage. In a short time we came to a large drawbridge, which led to another room. He shut the door from the inside and uncovered the lantern. Then he trudged an equally good distance to an iron door. It opened to reveal a corridor all worked in mosaic. Near the end we passed ten iron doors and entered a large hall ornamented with very fine marble and mosaic work in the vault.
At the left end of the hall there was a man, well armed in the antique style, with a halberd on his shoulder and a sword at his side. The man was continually marching from one side of the hall to the other without rest. The Turk said to me: “See if you can stop him.” I tried two or three times with all my strength, but it was impossible for me to hold him. He lighted the torch and gave it to me so I could see the man more clearly. I observed that he was of middle stature, thin and emaciated, with hollow eyes, black beard, and black hair. I asked the Turk who this man was and he answered, “I will tell you only if you swear by your Christ not to reveal it for three years.” This, I knew, was the extreme limit of office for a chief of police. Curious to know, I gave my solemn pledge.
“This man,” he said to me, “is the servant who struck your Christ before the high priest Annas. For punishment of his terrible crime, he was condemned by your Christ to remain here. We too believe in the old traditions. In this place he stays, never eating nor drinking, never sleeping nor taking rest, but always walking as you see him, and always—look, my friend—always the arm that struck, twitches!”
We left and returned to the room where we had dined. At my departure he tactfully reminded me of my oath. He trusted me to remember him to his friends in Turin and offered me money if I had need. I told him I lacked nothing and thanked him warmly for his kindness and, following his instructions, found my way to the inn. I returned to my native country, spent the past three years in Candia, Corfu, and Zara, and now I can tell what I saw without scruple, having observed the oath.
“Amazing,” Vim said, lowering the camera from his shoulder.
“Not bad,” Ivy allowed, picking a half-hearted tune on the guitar.
“Far fawking out, man! That’s the story!” shouted Fredo and let out a Turkish battle cry of his own composition.
“I am not finished,” said the bartender. Ivy stopped plucking. Fredo sat down. The bartender waited until Vim began to record. “What is the point of this story?” he asked, but like all storytellers I’ve ever interviewed, he sped on without reply. “The answer, of course, is that there is no point. The young Italian macho merely wants to impress his friends back home by displaying the ultimate trophy of the tourist, the unique. He tells a story that is unbelievable, yet bears the appearance of authenticity because his uncle himself is present and can attest to the character and bearing of the Turk, can assert that it is very probable that this man was made chief of police. Given one likelihood, it is only a short leap for the gullible listener to believe the most preposterous stories of endless dungeons and marching Jews armed with swords, halberds, and superhuman strength.
“Here in Spain, this Christ, who is just a minor character in the Italian’s story, is a very real, very central creature. There are those who believe He is God and those who are not afraid to fire rifles at His image and shit on His name. But everyone, every Spaniard, treats Him very, very seriously.” The bartender took a sip of his drink, let it roll around the inside of his mouth and trickle down the back of his throat.
“The true story”—he looked straight at me—“has a very real point, and that point is not about the Wandering Jew, but about God.” I tried to say something encouraging, but I was too dry to speak, and the moment too quiet to reach for my glass.
“This Wandering Jew,” said the bartender, “was a shoemaker who lived in Jerusalem in the Street of Bitterness. When the Saviour passed by bearing His cross, He was in so desperate a state, so exhausted, when He came to the door of the house, that He wished to rest and said to the owner: ‘Juan, I am suffering much.’ And Juan answered: ‘Go, go! I am suffering even more, I who labour here like a galley slave bound to his oar.’
“Then the Saviour, seeing Himself so cruelly rejected, said to the shoemaker, ‘Very well! Go yourself, walk. Until the end of Time!
’
“Immediately this man felt his feet moving. He began to walk. He walked from dawn to dusk, from dusk to dawn. He walked through towns and out, through deserts and over mountains. The man recognized this endless walking as a punishment from Heaven for his hard-heartedness and his cruel words ‘Go! Go!’ which he had hurled in the face of the unfortunate one who had asked to rest. As he walked, he repented with all his soul for what he had done, and he fell to weeping his offense and to despairing.
“Thus he walked until, at the end of a year, on Good Friday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he saw appearing on the distant horizon, mingled with the clouds of Heaven, three crosses. At the foot of the highest of these—the one in the middle—there was a Lady, as beautiful as she was sad, as sad as she was sweet. This Lady turned her face towards him and said to him, her face pale and tearstained, ‘¡Juan, espera en Dios!’ Juan, believe in God!
“And that is why we Spaniards call him Juan Espera en Dios, the man who has been walking ever since without ever stopping, who will walk until the consummation of Time, that the curse of God, which he drew upon himself, may be fulfilled!”
“I don’t understand,” I said when the bartender paused to empty his glass. “If the Jew repented, why must he continue to walk?”
“Because”—the bartender smiled calmly—“after our Civil War, we Spaniards discovered that none of us were right and that all of us were right. We discovered that Christ exists and that Christ is God. But we also discovered that we are doomed to worship the biggest two-timing, lying son-of-a-shit that ever lived, may his bones be ground to dust!”
“Madonna!” Fredo said. Ivy and Vim remained silent. A light bulb flickered at the far end of the room. I was never a churchgoer, even in my brief childhood. But early images—the blasted yew outside our deserted vicarage, the half smile on the face of my half-sleeping mother, the shadows of lace on the ceiling of my aunt’s bedroom—were enough religion to make me shiver at the ferocity behind the bartender’s blasphemy.
When I turned, I noticed that my girl with the violin had raised her eyes, perhaps out of appreciation for, or general interest in, the bartender’s story, but with a look of curiosity directed at Roger, waiting for, perhaps urging him on to, rebuttal. He, too, was looking at her, half smiling, sharing a joke, more likely just refuelling for the next lap.
“Gimme,” he said, taking the guitar from Ivy. In one stroke, he picked up the stumbling rhythm of the Ballad, but with a fiercer, less indulgent feel for the instrument, snapping string against wood, slapping palm against soundboard, more to shock an argument from the guitar.
“While you were phoning your travel agent,” he said—and I did wonder at the time how he knew whom I was phoning—“you missed the organic difference between the song ‘The Wandering Jew’ as written by Yours Truly of The Lost Tribes and the primitive Renaissance tale of Pablo over here.” The bartender jerked up his chin sharply, whether offended by the attack on his story or the presumption of his name, I couldn’t tell.
“In my version,” Roger continued, punctuating his words with attacks on the guitar, “the tourist does indeed go to Jerusalem and meet the Turk, in this case a young Palestinian Freedom Fighter named Abdul. But,” and his left hand slid up the neck in a dramatic glissando, “in my song, in the verses you missed, we discover that the Wandering Jew is not some old bearded codger buried beneath the walls of the city, marching a gutter into the earth, but he’s the young Palestinian himself!
“You see,” Roger continued, as Fredo supported him with a fresh tattoo on the bottom of his pail, “the bartender hasn’t taken his weak Iberian argument far enough. Cartaphilus, Ahasuerus, Malchus, Isaac Laquedem, Juan Espera en Dios, whatever you want to call him, the Wandering Jew was no dummy. Sure, he converted to Christianity. Maybe not at first, maybe he liked travelling, wanted to see the world, once, maybe twice. No planes, no trains, only ships, carts, horses, elephants, and camels, and all those most likely prohibited by the curse. Say he’s in Casablanca and has a yearning for Cádiz, he’s got to tramp across North Africa, up the Middle East, march around the Black Sea and then back west, around—never across—rivers, and over the Pyrenees:
I asked him for his favourite spot,
He smiled and answered: “Spain.
I was there before the Inquisitor,
And I’ll be back once again.”
“He’s in Jerusalem and hankers for a glimpse of the pyramids of the Mayans? He’s doomed to the polar route. Doesn’t matter how cold, he can’t freeze to death. Worse luck, since after a couple, three hundred years he wants to die, dreams of dying, tries it countless numbers of times.
“It’s after one of these heroic attempts, somersaulting down Everest, sunbathing in the Sahara, donating free periodontic service to the lions of Lake Manyara, that he sees the Lady and the Crosses, or thinks to himself maybe there’s something to all this Christ business. So he talks to the pope, tells him he’s sorry he told the Lord to fuck off, promises to build a shelter, a whole block of flats for homeless riffraff, gets himself sprinkled, immersed, whatever, gets himself a brand-new Christian-sounding name like Paul or Thomas, starts eating pork and shellfish, and waits to die.
“No dice. Maybe it’s the water, he thinks, not holy enough. Maybe it’s the pope, one of those Dark Age types who stole from the poor and buggered anything that couldn’t run. But after another few hundred years of walking and meditating, he thinks, maybe it’s the religion what’s worn down—the curse is still potent, but the antidote’s way past the expiration date.
“Along about this time, our friend happens to bump into a caravan of hapless souls in the middle of the Arabian desert. They’re all hot about this new prophet Mohammed, and though it sounds like the same old Adam, Noah, Moses, Jesus promise, the Wandering Jew wanders off to meet him. He finds Mohammed on the road to Medina and, over a cup of chicory, spells out his dilemma.
“ ‘I will tell you three things,’ Mohammed says straightaway. ‘First, there is no God but Allah,’ and he smiles as the Jew raises his eyebrows. ‘Second, I, Mohammed, am his prophet, which is why you must both believe everything I tell you and fundamentally doubt it. Third, and most important, you as a man have responsibility over your own actions. You are capable of distinguishing good from evil, free to choose and to act. Perhaps you need me to explain, to point, to guide you from time to time. There may be things beyond your control—the creation of worlds, the power over death, wind, rain, and the stars. But this wandering—you have the power to stop it, you have always had the power to stop it at any time.’ ”
“Like Glinda in The Wizard of Oz,” added Ivy, “telling Dorothy she could have clicked her heels together whenever she wanted and left Technicolor forever.”
“ ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,’ ” Vim whispered from behind the viewfinder.
“Well, the Jew sits and thinks about this for a while after Mohammed buggers off and founds Islam and gives good and wicked men alike the power to interpret his Koran any way they choose. And after one hundred years or so, he realizes that Mohammed was only half right. He does have power over his wandering. Hasn’t he been sitting and resting, after all, while his seven-hundred-year-old blisters peel off and turn to sand? But no matter how many times he clicks his tender, pink heels together, he cannot die. The morning of his eightieth birthday dawns, as it has ten times before, only to find him a young man of twenty once again. To Hell with this laying about, he thinks, and he trudges south to Yemen, where he catches a boat—because he can—and spends his next thousand years on the sea.
“In my song,” Roger said, “The Wandering Jew has become a Palestinian Freedom Fighter, just another manifestation of his wishy-washy Weltanschauung—one century he likes to wander, another century he wants a homeland, somewhere he can put his feet up, pop a cold one, and everyone on the block looks just like him. Most of all, he wants the power over creation and destruction, the one thing God or Jehovah or Allah won�
��t give him. So what does he do? He becomes a tourist, a critic, comparing this tower and that burger joint with this campanile and that sushi bar, home in no tradition, sans native land, sans native tongue, sans good homecooking.
“After all,” Roger said with a great Pete Townshend sweep of his arm, scattering the glasses from the table with a dominant seventh chord, “when you’re immortal, it’s just one mid-life crisis after another.”
The last time I saw Abdul,
His head was bended low,
He was shuffling away down the Great White Way,
With a sackful of Foucault.
The next time you pick up stone,
Or heft a piece of sod,
May your aim be keen, cause the guy you bean
Might turn out to be God.
He may make you immortal,
As he looks into your eyes.
But like Abdul, you’ll find that you’ll
Be doomed to criticize.
CHORUS
Oh, I’ve been wandering so long.
And that’s when I heard it, far off at first, a single bowed violin note, consonant with Roger’s key, then two, three, an inverted major triad, like a train whistle far off in the night. I looked at the girl, still smiling shyly at Roger, but her fiddle was well cased, and no one else was in the restaurant. It couldn’t have been a sympathetic ghost tone from Roger’s guitar, since, as the chord grew louder and nearer, Roger stopped strumming and we all, looking upwards, downwards, to the walls and windows, listened to its approach in amazement. Or not so much its approach because it was in the room with us all the time, but listened as some invisible hand turned up the volume to three, four, seven, an exquisite, perfect, disembodied violin pumped past the bursting point into our bodies.
The bartender was the brightest physicist. He was first under the table, followed by Fredo and the others, as the front windows exploded inward, smashing into the barrier of wine casks, raining glass over our heads to the back wall, as the triad turned into the roar of the jet fighters, the phantoms that had terrified me at the airport, coming, this time, in from the sea, this time only sparking my curiosity, introduced as they were by that heavenly chord that could only have come from Sandor.
A Guide for the Perplexed Page 9