The staircase ended. Santángel walked forward several paces—hollow sounds, a pleasant smell of earth and parchment. He walked around the room, lighting ten thick candles, their wicks eight feet from the ground, not half the way to the top of the arched ceiling. Niche by niche, the cave brightened. Carvings into the rock, canopies within caverns, honeycombs within snailshells, more elaborate, more Moorish than the Mezquita in Córdoba, than the Hall of the Ambassadors at the Alhambra of Mohammed el-Hayzari. Forty columns supported ten arches, ten arches led to ten corridors. Between the arches, ten leather chairs. And at the center, below the hemisphere of the hall, a freshwater fountain, a pool of stone on the ten stone backs of ten stone lions. Room by room, the chancellor of the royal household led a thirteen-year-old boy from Córdoba by the shoulder, lighting tall lanterns along the way, guiding him through an underworld maze of mystifying objects. Cases of maps stood next to shrouds of Torahs. Astrolabes shared leather beds with tefillin. Notebooks and folios, registers of names and occupations, tax records and Talmudic commentaries rubbed shoulders on shelves that rimmed the walls of the ten tremendous rooms that shone off the central brilliance of the great hall. One room was devoted entirely to garments that could withstand long storage and inclement conditions, another to waterproof bedding.
“I will explain,” Santángel said, easing himself into a leather chair in the hall and motioning me to the floor at his feet. “But not too much.
“Within ten years, Esau, the Jews will be expelled from Spain. The crucifix will hang from the ark of the Torah, statues of saints will stand in the niches that once held candlesticks and tallitot. Kosher butchers will sell the hindmost portion of a pig. There won’t be a Jew or a Judería in all of Aragón, Castile, and Andalusia. The wrath of the Catholic Monarchs Fernando and Isabel will reach its melting point. They will see that the Jewish conversos, the New Christians, are reverting to their old religion. Worse, they will see that those who are refusing baptism are attempting to make Jews of the Christians around them. This will be more than the royal patience can bear. I know. I am the royal patience.
“Some Jews will convert, mostly the rich, whose property otherwise would be confiscated by the Crown. Others will choose expulsion. They will seek out a new homeland. It will not be in Europe. The English and the French hate the Jews more than Their Catholic Majesties. It will not be the African coast. The Muslim world is nervous within itself. It has no desire to swallow three hundred thousand Spanish Jews. The new homeland may be Palestine, if my friend Abravanel has his way.
“I think it will be elsewhere.” I followed Santángel’s gaze to the ceiling of the great hall. The flames of the candles shone strong and bright without sputtering, yet the shadows of the ceiling refused to stand still. For a moment, I had a sense of floating in a honeycombed bubble, a sense of lightness, of motion.
“We have ten years to find that elsewhere,” Santángel continued. “We, Esau—for I am counting on you. You found your way from Castile to Mariposa, from Mariposa to this hut at El Palo. You will find a home for the Jewish people, I am sure of it.”
I was not so sure. I was proud that I had found Santángel. But the dead heart of my rotting horse lay on the beach as a challenge, responsible in some measure for guiding me to this dreamworld below the sea.
Santángel rose.
“You understand, of course, Esau, that my responsibilities prohibit frequent visits. Abbas will cook for you. He will bring occasional messages from me. Meanwhile, read. There is much to do, and only ten years.”
He climbed the staircase. I did not see him again for four years.
At thirteen, I had not learned to question my heroes. That is why I feel fortunate to die and leave you this letter. It will crumble under the weight of questioning. Allow the mysteries of my story to work their magic, and the letter will last four, five, six hundred, one thousand years.
For four years I studied. In the morning, Abbas brought down fire for lighting, water for washing, and bread for breakfast. I ate half the bread with him, saving the other half for my solitary midday meal. Then he rose, his robes muffling his ascent up the seventy-three steps, and I turned to my books.
I read. From the Annales Francorum of Eginhard of Franconia I read the story of Yitzhak the Jew, whom the emperor Charlemagne sent to Harun-ar-Rashid, king of the Persians, and who returned home with many presents including the great, gray elephant Abulabaz. I read of the travels of the Radanites, the Jewish merchants who transported eunuchs, female slaves, boys, brocade, castor, marten, and swords from France to China.
I read the library of Hasdai ibn-Yusuf ibn-Shaprut, the vizier of Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III of Córdoba. I read Sir John Mandeville’s account of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, imprisoned between the mountains of Goth and Magoth by the Caspian Sea. I read the journals of Friar Odoric, The Voyage of Johannes de Plano Carpini Unto the Northeast Parts of the World in the Year of Our Lord 1246, and the journal of Friar William de Rubruquis, a Frenchman of the Order of the Minorite Friars.
Most colorful were the journeys of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who traveled to Greece and Persia, to the ruins of Nineveh on the Tigris, to the shining white palace of Caliph Mustanjid al-Abbasi in the city of Baghdad, which stretched for three miles along the banks of the river Euphrates. To Samarkand in the kingdom of Persia, to the forests of Tibet filled with musk. I read of the twenty-eight-day ride to the mountains of Nishapur by the river Gozan.
I read of Benjamin’s visit to the pearl divers of el-Katif near Bahrain, of the Duchbins of Ibrig, who worship fire. I read of his forty days’ journey across land to China on the Sea of Nikpa, where the hunter-star Orion predominates, and stormy winds prevail.
I read of Benjamin’s remarkable eye for trading—cloth for spice, animals for jewels, medicine for food. I read of Benjamin’s fascination with a kingdom ruled by a Jew, Rabbi Joseph Amarkala the Levite, who dwelt in harmony with the Kuffur at-Turk, a people who worship the wind and live in the wilderness; who neither eat bread nor drink wine but live on raw meat; who have no noses, but two small holes through which they breathe.
He traveled for trade. But he traveled also for his people. Benjamin of Tudela was seeking, three centuries before I descended below the shore of Mariposa, a homeland for the Jews.
Every day at sunset, Abbas knocked on the hinged panel, fifty feet above, and I joined him upstairs to pray to the east, he to Mecca, I to Jerusalem. We ate our meal in silence. Afterward, he taught me classical Arabic and told me stories of his childhood in Morocco and his life at sea. Once a week I was permitted to bathe off the far side of the pier, away from the sight of the beach. Abbas tied a rope around my waist and held the other end tight while I paddled about in the water. Even after I had learned to keep myself afloat, Abbas insisted on the rope. One evening I tried to swim around the pier to catch a glimpse of sand or tree, to yank Abbas from his station. The Moor stood firm as a rock. I was happy. I was too important to be allowed freedom.
And after my lesson, after my weekly bath, I returned to my cave, put aside my books to turn to my chief delights, my hazelnut tart, my maps.
I had seen contemporary maps in my father’s shop, modern maps, drawn with the latest techniques, with the most up-to-date instruments, on the most recent voyages. They were ancient history compared with the maps of Santángel. My father’s maps were variations on Egyptian maps a thousand years old. They were trading maps, drawn by merchants, not explorers. They were homecoming maps, threads tied to lintels, spooled out for the exploration, reeled in for the return. They were maps drawn by Europeans, who must always, by temperament, return to their native land.
Not so with Santángel’s collection. His racks held maps of Arabia fashioned by Arabians, maps of China by the Chinese. I covered the walls of three rooms with these originals. At the end of two years, I had combined the mixed contents of Santángel’s map cases into a map of Asia, from Palestine to Cipangu, complete with chalk annotations, in a variety of seaweed dyes, referring t
o the books and journals and diaries and letters in Santángel’s collection. I sent a short note through Abbas.
The reply came in the form of a crate—my first shipment of new maps.
Where I had been merely astonished by Santángel’s maps of Asia, I was struck dumb by the diamonds of Africa. To assemble this new collection, Santángel had done nothing less than form alliances, make personal connections and treaties among the indigenous tribes of the continent. He had traded their storehouses of tribal knowledge for the European sciences of astronomy and cartography. He had worked with them as colleagues, until they became sophisticated information gatherers, draftsmen, and ultimately mapmakers. Most important, Santángel’s men had produced charts inaccessible to the European mind, maps that were the morning residue of dreams, the treasure of adventurers following intuition to its birthplace, imagination to the magic chambers of the pyramids, to the source of the Nile.
Every four weeks or so, Abbas brought me a fresh shipment with my breakfast. I chose one of the ten chambers as my Africa room and, with chalk and seaweed, combined these maps, enlarged them in scale, refined them, erased them, made compromises and guesses, followed dream and intuition. And I read. I read the reports of Santángel’s African travelers; I read obscure tracts in Latin and Hebrew and Arabic. I read the account of Eldad ben Mahali ben Ezekiel ben Hezekiah ben Aluk ben Abner ben Shemaiah ben Hater ben Hur ben Elkanah ben Hillel ben Tobias ben Pedath ben Ainon ben Naaman ben Taam ben Taami ben Onam ben Gaul ben Shalom ben Caleb ben Omram ben Dumain ben Obadiah ben Abraham ben Joseph ben Moses ben Jacob ben Kappur ben Ariel ben Asher ben Job ben Shallum ben Elihu ben Ahaliab ben Ahisamach ben Hushim ben Dan ben Jacob, who had traveled to Spain from Ethiopia, where he had encountered the other lost tribes of Naphtali, Gad, and Asher on the far side of the river Sambatyon, which rumbles and runs with white water and great noise for six days of the week, but on the seventh day rests until the end of the Sabbath. To save his people, Eldad had flouted the Law. He had risked damnation by crossing the dry bed on the Sabbath. He was my kind of man.
I read and drew, drew and read. I covered the entire wall of my Africa room with a picture of a clump of grapes, heavy with fruit in the north, a single berry dangling in the deep south. The night I drew that final grape I lay down to sleep troubled, certain that I was on the edge of discovery, uncertain of its meaning.
I awoke to voices above, a great commotion. I slid from my bed and crept up the walls of the farthest honeycomb, curling my body into a niche I had previously tested for just such an invasion. I tried to pick apart the sounds. There were three voices that monopolized the discussion; one, I believed, hoped, belonged to Santángel.
The voices went away. Hours passed. My hunger drove me up the steps. I knocked. I waited. I knocked again. I put my shoulder against the panel. Nothing. I pounded on the door. I waited. I returned to my bed. I slept. I woke. I drank fresh water from the still splashing Fountain of the Lions. I slept again. The darkness penetrated my hunger. I could no longer tell whether I was awake or asleep, alive or dead.
But as my imagination grew accustomed to the blackness of the cave, my heart slowed down, I became calm. A moment’s concentration lit up the image of Africa in blazing colors. I turned my mind to the continent, to the tapering edge, the arrowhead, the southernmost grape of the bunch. Awake, I saw Africa. Asleep, it hung heavy and purple before my eyes.
Until one sleep, when the grapes tied themselves to a trellis in the courtyard of my mother’s father. My father sat at a table, drinking dark, sweet coffee with Abbas. Santángel sat on another stool under the arcade, disputing the philosophy of Maimonides with my mother’s father. I crouched at the paws of the lions, peering up at the bare arm of my mother that supported the viol, raising and lowering, heaving and sighing above the shelf of her breasts. She was playing a tune I had never heard, something long and slow, wistful and yet comforting in its regularity. A cool breeze drifted down to me from the strings, yet I felt myself sweat with the effort, the hot desire, to understand from where within the wood, where beneath her skirts, the music was born.
I felt a damp cloth on my brow. Another woman, a younger, copper-colored girl, neither Jewish nor Muslim nor Catholic, squatted beside me. Again and again, she lifted the hem of her garment and, dipping it in the pool of the lions, squeezed it dry against my brow until the drops ran cool down my nose and into my lips. The music ran with the whispers of the men, and the copper girl drew me down, beneath her garment, beneath the lions, beneath the steady bowstroke of my mother.
I awoke. I was certain that the echo of my mother’s viol still sounded in a distant room, that the murmurs of men at disputation had only just died away. My eyes ached, and slowly I realized that there was light once again in my cave, too much light for my neglected eyes. Abbas called my name. The shape above me fashioned itself into a torch, a face. I reached out a hand. He lifted me up. I stood at the Fountain of the Lions, the fountain in the cavern. The ten candles were lit. Beneath each candle, in each chair, sat a man.
“Esau.” Santángel’s voice rang above me, resounded throughout the hall. It had been four years since I had heard another voice in my cavern. I squinted my eyes, felt my swollen tongue in my cheek. It took me a moment to find him, among the ten bearded faces.
“Esau,” Santángel repeated. “I have brought some friends; they would like …”
But I had forgotten how to wait, how to speak, all the niceties of manners and society. I grabbed the torch from Abbas, rushed up to Santángel, yanked him from his chair, pulled this giant of a man to my Africa room, certain in the discovery of my dream. The men rose as a group and followed, as men must follow a madman.
“Africa!” I yelped, and my dry, caked voice barely broke through the weeks of my hunger, as the meaning of my dream broke before my eyes. “This is Africa.” I jumped up and down in front of my masterpiece of chalk and seaweed. “Africa!”
Santángel gently removed his hand from my grip. “Esau, you must be hungry.”
But another voice, a high-pitched voice full of kindness, stopped him. “Santángel,” it said. “A bunch of grapes. Look what the boy has discovered.”
“Yes, yes,” I croaked. “Below the grapes. Below the grapes.”
“What below the grapes?” Santángel was losing patience with his prize lunatic.
“The sea. The sea!” I shouted.
And that other voice, that high-pitched voice, rose triumphant. “The southern tip of Africa. The sea to the Indies, to Calicut and the Malabar Coast, to the spices of Ceylon and Goa. The boy has discovered the seaward passage to the Indies!” The man came forward, a man about the same age as my father, kind, delicate, gray hints of a beard around a soft face, and put his hand gently on my shoulder. The man smiled, the other men smiled, there was a murmur. And it was then that I remembered my copper girl, and felt that my own garment, below my own grapes, was cold and damp with something more than water from the Fountain of the Lions.
ESAU—COLÓN
Shortly after I was rescued from my two-week hunger, Santángel brought me the news that a Portuguese, Bartholomeu Dias, had rounded the Cape at the bottom of Africa and returned to Lisbon to tell the tale. My discovery had been verified. Santángel was impressed. So were his friends.
Who were these friends?
Luis de Santángel, of course, my patron, born Azarias Ginillo in the town of Calatayud, chancellor of the royal household and comptroller-general of the royal treasury, whose duties included registering the names and salaries of all employees of the royal palace; keeping a detailed inventory of the jewels, arms, clothes, and other contents of Their Catholic Majesties Fernando and Isabel; guarding the financial ledger of all salaries, all gifts, all expenditures paid. He held in his own hands the key to the royal purse and had amassed a considerable fortune as director of the Santángel Mercantile House of Valencia.
Abraham Seneor, supreme judge of the Jews of Castile, confidant of the queen. His son-in-law Meir Melamed. Two o
f the richest Jews on the peninsula.
Gabriel Sánchez, treasurer-general of Aragón.
The teachers of Talmud and Kabbala, Isaac de León and Isaac Abohab.
Isaac Abravanel, whose appreciation of my map of Africa drew me to him like a son to a father.
Myself.
Zacuto.
Others.
But always ten. Ten men. The Minyan. Enough men to say prayers. Enough to make decisions. Above ground, Mariposa lay in the hands of the king and queen, the Catholics. There were no Jews left in Andalusia. Soon there would be no Jews left in all of Spain. Time was running out.
Only I stayed in the cave, day and night. The others came and went. But always on Shabbat they found their way to my temple. Together we lit candles and prayed before the Fountain of the Lions, reading from our ever-increasing stockpile of Torahs.
They disputed Talmud, argued politics, planned the future course of the Spanish Jews, and pored over my maps. Some argued for Palestine, others for the Congo of Africa. Some urged an eastward trek to the Jewish kingdom of Crangadore on the Malabar Coast.
Others argued out of frustration and bewilderment.
The only man who approached our weekly sessions with composure and faith was my friend and early ally Abravanel. He was the philosopher, a believer in the providence of the Jewish God. He gave me folio after folio of numeric calculations, rows of numbers surrounded by arrows and references, footnotes to the Book of Daniel and the Zohar. Abravanel had established, with a genius that seemed more inspired than rational, that the Messianic Age would arrive in fifteen years, in the year 1503. In 1503, Abravanel told the Minyan, the Jews would have revenge on their enemies. The Jews in the Diaspora, those Jews who had been bullied and driven and scattered to the four corners of the earth, would return to Palestine for the Resurrection and Judgment. From that day forth, all Jews would live in peace in Israel under the Messiah, the Messiah whose rule would extend over all mankind. Half of Abravanel was absolutely convinced that nothing, not even the furious efforts of the Minyan, could forestall the expulsion of the Spanish Jews. The other half came to our meetings.
A Guide for the Perplexed Page 18