A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  About everything else, they disagree.

  Long ago, the Jews were the most powerful. Then came the Muslims, who learned to live with the Jews, most of the time. Then came the Catholics, who hated everybody—the Muslims, the Jews. They even hated some Catholics.

  This is my story. Carry it with you.

  I was born a Jew in a city called Córdoba on the banks of the river Guadalquivir. My mother and father, their mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers were Jews of Córdoba. We traced our family back hundreds of years to one of the wisest Jews since creation, Moses the son of Maimon, called Maimonides, and back before him for thousands of years to the first Jews, a father named Abraham and a mother named Sarah.

  My father’s family were mapmakers. For generations, the boys followed a tradition. On the Sabbath of his thirteenth birthday, the boy went to the synagogue with the other men of the family, read from the Torah for the first time, and, at sundown, packed a small satchel and floated on a barge downriver to Sevilla, there to board seabound caravels and gonzalos of every shape and size, to pass his dangerous early manhood watching, observing, drawing, memorializing bays and inlets, river valleys and mountain ranges, drafts and currents, planets and stars, mapping the peaks and canyons of exotic women, eating forbidden foods in times of need.

  The girls of the family stayed at home, grew to a marriageable age, and waited for the maps to arrive. In neat, precise hands, they copied the maps onto parchment, onto scrolls, in charcoal or in gold leaf, depending on the wealth of the customer. As the only clients for maps were shipowners and traders, my father’s family became very wealthy. Where other Jews felt lucky to own two sets of clothing, my father’s family could change their linen three times a day, 365 days a year, and never wear the same outfit more than four times. Of the five hundred houses of the Judería, they owned two hundred of the finest, decorated in Moorish tile, gold leaf, and imported woods. Of the one hundred streets and alleyways, they owned one third. Fresh flowers filled their windowboxes throughout the year. They traveled, they drew, they did, and they were rewarded.

  My mother’s family were thinkers and musicians. My father’s mother called them the shame of the Jews. My mother’s family owned a tavern on the northeast hill, where on Shabbat the most pious men of the barrio gathered for a glass or two of Lágrima Añejo under the pretense of discussing the Mishnah. The tavern was a courtyard, open to the sky, smelling of bougainvillea and roast goat. An arcade of alabaster columns and broken tiles surrounded the courtyard, a puzzle of Moorish stars, sixteen-pointed impossible maps of the sun. A simple fountain defined the center, a shallow stone pool of invisible water, resting on the backs of ten lions. My grandfather told me that the fountain was five hundred years old and the lions even older. He taught me how to melt cooking grease off their manes with the gentle flames of a candle, how to blow the dust from the paws without eroding the ancient nails. He told me the story of the Jew who built the fountain for a nephew of the Caliph of Córdoba, Abd-ar-Rahman III, Protector of the Jews, Beacon of the Umayyads. He told me how the lions stood for the ten lost tribes of Israel, and the invisible pool on their backs the teaching of the prophet Mohammed.

  But it was my mother who drew music from the stone, who made the water dance from the spout, made the drops laugh in tiny ripples. I sat at the paws, hiding between two open-jawed heads. I watched her take the breath, I watched her breasts lift high under the coarse wool of her dress, watched them raise the viol up to meet the shaft of the bow. Dry-tongued and open-mouthed as my stone companions, I drank in the most perfect music and wondered when the lions would rise with me on their backs and wander back to Canaan.

  My mother was a miracle. A single note from her viol gave the lie to the disputation of a philosopher, the commentary of a rabbi. Starlings hung chirpless in the rafters. The bees in the bougainvillea raised their thoraxes in awe. The fat on the spitted goat caught on the melody and floated above the coals, lest its sizzle disturb the perfection. I could be playing loud, muddy games half a mile down the banks of the Guadalquivir, and a tune from my mother’s viol would guide my feet through the narrow alleys back home.

  Though her breasts and her arm figure warmly in my memory of that sound, my mother was only the half of it. The viol itself, or rather its silvery strings, were purely and simply possessed. On the day of my mother’s birth, her father discovered them, by accident, lying wrapped in a goatskin in a narrow channel under a loose stone beside the fountain. No one knew how old they were, no one knew how long they had lain there. But they fit my mother’s viol like the skin on a deer.

  There was no explanation.

  But let me tell you a story.

  ESAU—THE LUTE OF KIMA

  Long before the birth of my mother, in the days of the peacemaker Alfonso the Wise, the wife of the barrio apothecary died giving birth to a girl. The baby was born as smooth and as bald as any other child. But by the morning of her naming day, she had grown a full head of thick hair, as golden as late summer on the palmettos. She was named Zehava, “golden” in Hebrew, the holy language of the Jews. Golden and slender, she was admired and coveted by all the families in the barrio on behalf of their unmarried infant sons.

  But her father had other suitors in mind for the girl who had replaced his wife in body and spirit. As the date of her maturity drew near, he became increasingly certain that life without Zehava would lose all flavor. To have her nearby, within the walls of Córdoba, would make his thirst all the more grating. The apothecary resolved to visit a distant cousin, a wealthy olive merchant, in the hillside town of Ventas del Carrizal, a full seven days by horseback from Córdoba, with the aim of marrying his daughter to the merchant’s son.

  Zehava sang good-bye to the Córdoba of her golden youth, to the river Guadalquivir, to the orange trees of the mosque, the garlic and oil of the barrio. They set off eastward—on one side her father, on the other her late mother’s sister, the horse-toothed Penina.

  On erev Shabbat they arrived at the market town of Alcaudete and shared the evening meal with the rabbi’s family. The rabbi had many harsh things to say about the cousin in Ventas del Carrizal, particularly about his lack of piety. His wife was more realistic.

  “It is hard to be a Jew these days,” she said. “The Nasrids”—for they were the particular Muslims in power—“are less inclined than others to let the Jews of Alcaudete pray at the synagogue. Many find it easier to stay in the hills and pray at home.”

  “We know what that leads to,” said the rabbi. “Prayers get shorter and excuses longer—the cows must be milked, the hay must be stored before the rain, the merchant insists on paying me on Saturday. Lo and behold, you turn around one Shabbat and find yourself behind an ox, while your sons are throwing dice next to the cute little Moorish fountain you built to keep up with the ibn-Mohammeds on the finca next door. Before you know it, you are no longer a Jew.”

  “You are always a Jew,” the rabbi’s wife said, “before you know it and afterward, too.” The rabbi grumbled and poured more wine. The rabbi’s wife smiled at the apothecary. “Your cousin’s son is tall and handsome.”

  “As long as he has his health.” Penina pinched the virgin Zehava, with the grin of a fifteen-hand mare.

  Refreshed by a full day of rest, the three followed a Moorish servant up a narrow road cut into the purple hills to the olive groves of Ventas del Carrizal. As they climbed, the ground grew darker and richer, the trees older and more elemental. The road twisted up above the clouds, and the heavy-hearted apothecary thought truly he was carrying his only joy to join her mother in another world.

  As evening fell, they came upon the large stone farmhouse of the apothecary’s cousin, a gloomy rock, just shy of the top of a windy hill. A single light shone from the stables, and the servant soon established that the cousin and his son were on a ride about the estate and would return well after the guests were in bed. The apothecary, golden-haired Zehava, and the horse-toothed Penina took a quick cold supper—to th
e grumblings of the servant, who hadn’t counted on extra duty—and were shown to comfortable, if drafty, rooms at the top of the house.

  In the middle of the night, Zehava was awakened by the sound of hooves and rose from her bed, careful not to disturb the snoring Penina. In an olive-hued moonlight that made her golden hair sparkle and light up the courtyard, Zehava watched two men dismount, one large and irritable, the other the very description of youthful beauty she had heard from the rabbi’s wife. Joseph, for that was the son’s name, turned to the glimmer at the window and looked up full at Zehava. The light from his perfect smile, the brilliance of her golden hair, the spring glow of the moon—the apothecary’s trip was a success.

  It was customary for the fathers of both bride and groom to come to a mutual agreement before the first meeting of the young couple. And so, early the next morning, the apothecary sent Zehava and her duenna off on a ride through the olive groves in the care of the Moorish servant. Young Joseph, however, bred outside the orthodoxy of city Jews, was determined to speak with the golden-haired beauty he had seen so brilliantly framed the night before. Once his father and cousin were well into negotiations, he led the quietest gelding from the stable by the forelock and slid out of the courtyard.

  The trail was easy to follow in the deep purple of the olive groves—three fresh tracks, one considerably lighter, one considerably deeper. Joseph rode at a trot up the hill, circling around below the crest, hoping to catch an unnoticed glimpse of his betrothed before displaying himself.

  But the glimpse he caught horrified him beyond his darkest imaginings. There, at the top of the hill, half a dozen mountain ponies, topped by Muslim bandits from the neighboring kingdom of Granada, shuffled their hooves in the purple earth. His beloved Zehava lay bound and gagged in front of one bandit, her duenna trussed and flung across the saddle of her own horse like two jars of olive oil. His Muslim servant stood smiling, pocketing his reward from the leader of the bandits. With no thought of the numbers, Joseph charged. But the bandits, whose expertise was stealth, not swordplay, turned on their heels and galloped with their female cargo through the pass to safety, down into the lush green plain of Granada.

  At that time, Granada was ruled by a young Muslim prince who loved music more than war and beauty more than justice. He lived high on a hill in the great walled city called the Alhambra, the red fortress of the Moors—two dozen towers surrounding two magnificent palaces, fountains and pools leading into vineyards and gardens, gardens of grapes and flowers stretching to the horizon. His warriors were the bravest on the peninsula, his musicians the most tasteful. His harem, for he had more than one hundred wives, was an inspiration of fantasy. He had, in the course of his tender years, collected women, placed them under his protection, without regard to any classical ideal of beauty but as the God of the Flood chose the animals of the new world—one female of each type. There were, to be sure, strikingly tall and slender brunettes of the sort favored by the Moors. But there were also short girls, fat girls, blind girls, mute girls, girls lacking limbs, girls lacking hair, dwarfs, albinos, jug-eared, horse-toothed, birthmarked, cross-eyed girls with six fingers on each hand, girls with three breasts, webbed toes, mustaches and side-burns, girls of an age and disposition to suit only the most extreme tastes, and as many cross-combinations and permutations as the design of the Alhambra would allow. Mohammed el-Hayzari—Mohammed the Left-Handed, for that was his tragedy—lived within the walls of his fortress. His imagination traveled unbound.

  It was not by accident that the bandits brought the shaken Zehava and her thrashing duenna to the gates of the Alhambra. Spies along the road to Córdoba had sent word to Mohammed’s majordomo that a golden-haired Jewish girl was to be found traveling in the direction of Granada. The majordomo dropped a hint, through a zealous lieutenant who was anxious to make an impression on his prince, that this particular feminine type was missing from the harem of the Alhambra. The lieutenant, of course, was instructed to neither cross the pass into Castile nor use the soldiers of Mohammed to bring this girl—for Mohammed, aesthete that he was, would marry a girl only if she came to him freely. But this brand of transportation had been effected before, and no more than a nod of the head in a certain tavern was needed to assure deniability.

  When news of the girl’s arrival reached the perfumed ears of Mohammed, the king rushed from his harem to a hiding place between the marble columns of the Court of the Lions. Zehava was escorted into the courtyard, dignified and composed, surrounded by the triumphant majordomo and seven of his best men. The golden hair, the olive moon of a green-eyed face, the lightness and radiance of the girl, moved el-Hayzari beyond the momentary thrill of a mere collector. He fell in love. Beneath his beard he uttered a vow to his god, Allah, that should he be blessed with the love of Zehava, he would abandon his harem and divide his faith between his god and his wife alone.

  No sooner had the prayer left his lips than a wail rose from the depths of Zehava’s soul that sent all the doves of the Alhambra rising like a column of smoke from a burning field of cane. She had seen the famous Fountain of the Lions, ten lions supporting a stone pool. There before her, the ten lost tribes of the Jews confronted her misery, manes bristling and teeth bared.

  “O Israel,” she cried, “have you led me through the desert only to return me to Egypt?” for she could see no other reason for her seizure and transportation to the sultan of the Alhambra than a repetition of the biblical story of the enslavement of the Jews. So powerful, so piercing, was her wail that it drew the lips back from the gums of the stone lions and left the Muslim guards weeping, their hands over their ears to protect their delicate brains. Zehava seized that moment of confusion and leapt into the fountain, hoping to breathe the leonine waters into her lungs and find the freedom she had so recently lost.

  No one knows if it was Allah who heard Mohammed’s prayer or the God of the Jews, who was not yet ready to receive Zehava’s golden head. But no sooner had the girl jumped than the transparent waters evaporated. No sooner had her feet left the ground than she found her thighs and her back supported by the arms of Mohammed the Left-Handed.

  The king said nothing. Nor did he suffer the terrified girl the look of rattled astonishment that sparked from his eyes. He swept Zehava from the Court of the Lions before his guards had regained their feet, and spirited her to a private chamber in the ornate Tower of the Laurel, high above the ravine of the musical waters of the river Darro. He dispatched his harem straightaway and called for his majordomo to find a guide to the heart of the heart of his desires.

  The resourceful Hussein Baba was, as always, several steps ahead of his master. He had seen in the duenna Penina much more than the body of a cow and the spleen of an ox. She was the key to the manners of her golden-haired charge. If the key could be turned, the door would pivot on its hinge like a weathervane.

  Hussein Baba was a modern man. Arguments of faith and reason bored him. Take away the trappings of faith, the mosques and the synagogues, the cathedrals of the barbaric Christians, the names of Allah and Jehovah and Jesus Christ, the rituals, the diets, the wafers and the wines, and all that remained was a single god—Fear. Reason fared no better. Reason was merely another one of the thousands of unpronounceable names of God, and argument merely a way to ignore death. He knew with the certainty that comes of long service that manners were all. Lead the right cow down a flower-strewn path and the rest were sure to follow. Thus he wooed Penina, whose mouth was so well suited to grazing.

  Within the year, on a single, windless summer sunset, Sultana Zehava gave Mohammed el-Hayzari three beautiful daughters, born three minutes apart. Kelila was the name of the eldest, Hebrew for the laurel wreath that crowns those who win the race. Kadia was the second—“pitcher,” the vessel of water in the desert, wine in the temple. Last to emerge was Kima, whose full head of golden curls, dewy with the liquid of her elder sisters, sparkled like the Pleiades. Three girls, with three Hebrew names. For Mohammed, in the wonder of his love for Zehav
a, had named his daughters in the language of prophets older than Islam.

  Golden-haired Zehava did not survive the sun. To the melody of the river Darro, she died with an infant daughter at each breast, Kima in the arms of the husband she had grown to love with a passion that approached faith. Even the garrulous Penina was struck dumb by the beauty of her passing, and the radiance of the change of fate that had led her from the purple grove of olives to the Tower of the Laurel.

  It took a full year to dry the eyes of Mohammed and show him the beauty of his beloved wife in the three gifts she had left him. Kelila flaunted the boldness of the firstborn, pushing aside all obstacles, furniture, sisters, to reach a treasured toy on the far side of the room. Kadia’s beauty flowed gently from her mother’s green eyes, and sought out the most colorful flowers, the most brilliant gems, for her playthings.

  In the legends of the Jews, Kima—the Pleiades, the seven sisters of the sky—is wisdom itself. And behind the gentleness and timidity that allowed her sisters, older only by a matter of minutes, to crawl ahead or win the heavy breast of the wet nurse, shone a thoughtfulness, an intelligence that calculated the future before moving an inch.

  On the morning of the first birthday of the princesses, Hussein Baba reminded Mohammed that it was well past the customary time for the court astrologers to prophesy the future of the three precious daughters. Mohammed lifted his left hand in a way that neither forbade nor encouraged his majordomo. But within minutes, he found himself back in the dusty, uninhabited Tower of the Laurel with Penina and the three girls. Three soothsayers stood at the three windows, one for each girl, each bearing his own charts of the sun, the stars, the planets, each clothed in a flowing robe, an endless beard, and the scent of rare, fragrant essences and woods.