Until I reached Cuzco. The year was 1497. It would be thirty-five more years until Pizarro and his Conquistadors set foot in the Temple of the Sun.
I walked into the imperial city with the dawn, from the eastern forests of Antisuyu. It was the longest day of the year. The streets of Cuzco were empty. I wandered freely, past the beauty, the musical perfection, of the enormous stone walls, the lacy aqueducts, the temples and the houses of the city. I was ragged but clean, thin but not malnourished. My viol was safe and unrotted in a case of hardwood lined with moss.
I walk with Jacob, Benjamin, as I never could with Esau, into downtown Cuzco, into the center of the web. The sun rises in the plaza. Ten thousand Incas murmur morning prayers, stand on ten thousand feet, shake ten thousand ankles in the air. At their center, motionless, stands a man, a demigod, on a platform raised on the shoulders of twenty motionless priests. Jacob draws nearer. Other litters, carried by other priests, and on them, the mummified bodies of whom? Gods, children, mothers-in-law?
As I entered the plaza of the Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun, a sound, a music filled the skies above the prayers. My viol raised its voice from within its case, unbowed, unplayed, a miracle it hadn’t performed since the day Colón deposited me on the beach of Hispaniola.
All ankle-waving stopped. On one foot, the crowd pivoted. I walked the aisle. Hands gripped my thighs, and I was hoisted level to the Inca. I held my viol, still playing in its case, an offering. The Inca held out his arm, the little finger of his bow arm, and touched the case. The music stopped. The crowd stood motionless, hardly daring to breathe. I smiled. He smiled.
“Inca Huayna Capac.” He turned the little finger to his chest.
“Yacov.” I held the case in one arm and turned my own little finger upon myself.
“Huaca?” he asked. I nodded. It was a close enough approximation.
But with that nod, the people of Cuzco fell on their faces on the cobbled streets of the plaza. “Huaca,” the Inca word for God. I had my brother, and his choice of names, to thank for my career.
I became a high priest of the Incas. My viol was installed in the Temple of the Sun and named Huarneri, the living incarnation of Music. I had arrived at the beginning of the most holy festival of Inti Raymi. For the next five days, I joined the thousands and carried Huarneri in the procession to the fortress of Sacsahuamán.
There I feasted alongside the hundreds of other priests with their hundreds of other huacas. On the seventh day, I was asked to assist in the festival of the capacochas.
My aclla was a thirteen-year-old girl from the great lake Titicaca in the Collasuyu to the south. The fame of her extraordinary beauty had preceded her, and the plaza before the Temple of the Sun was filled to bursting with admiring humanity. In all my seventy-nine years, my beautiful daughter, I have seen only one other girl to compare with my aclla.
I hear music. Jacob, in his Inca vestments, with his violin beneath his chin, plays a familiar tune, the tune of departure from the Old World, the tune of arrival at Cuzco. “By the Rivers of Babylon.” A dirge in Andalusia, perhaps. But in the thin, siesta air of Cuzco, a lullaby to weigh down the eyelids of the young aclla.
The priests lowered my sleeping aclla into the dry cistern. I was told to keep playing. I waited to see them raise her up again, reborn, resurrected. Instead, they replaced the stone.
I played on, well into the night, alone in the plaza. My only comfort was the belief that, as long as I played, she would sleep, and as long as she slept, she would never know the panic, the suffocation of being buried alive, a gift to the Sun.
Oh, Benjamin, is it possible? The Lute of Kima, accessory to murder, and such a terrible, terrifying murder at that?
For thirty-five years, I guarded my Huarneri, living among the virgins, among the acllas and the mamaconas, the most beautiful women in the empire. For thirty-five years, I served the Inca, first Huayna Capac, and when he died, Huáscar Inca. For thirty-five years, I did not touch a woman. I did not touch my viol. I made a wide berth around cisterns and I was content.
When the pox broke out, scarring the faces of half of Cuzco, killing Huayna Capac and a third of the town in a single month, I knew that the Spaniards had landed on the continent. It was only a matter of time before they reached Cuzco. I dreaded their arrival. But I had not forgotten my brother.
“You wish to join your people?” Huáscar Inca asked me in his wisdom.
“I too have a brother,” I said. His face turned pale with sadness. His brother Atahualpa had turned traitor and run north to the Spaniards.
“There is a city,” the Inca continued, “six days’ march north of Cuzco, high on the mountains over the Urubamba River. Machu Picchu was once a place of great beauty. It is now a city of silence. Go, take your Huarneri. From there you may observe. From there you may make your decision.”
It is dawn in the forest. I walk with an older Jacob from the dense forest to an open gate, the vast terraced city of stone houses and thatched roofs, high jungle and high peaks, the guardian tower of Huayna Picchu before us. Utter silence, except for the roar of the Urubamba far below.
For one hundred days, I explored the ruins of Machu Picchu with a herd of llamas. I moved as softly as I could, listening for sounds of an army of Spaniards, or an army of Atahualpa’s Incas. I slept lightly, I lit no fires.
When one hundred days had passed, I could bear the silence no longer. I restrung my bow with hair from my animal friends. I picked up my viol, strings shining as brightly as on the nights my mother played in her father’s tavern. I walked at dawn to the Inti-Huatana, the Hitching-Post of the Sun, and gazed out as the snow up the valley caught the first rays of the longest day of the year. After thirty-five years of silence, the strings were still in tune, alive and vibrant with the soul of my ancestral aunt—Kima.
For six days I played, from dawn till dusk, dawn till dusk. On the seventh day, as the sun rose, in that invisible moment as my bow touched the string, the sound of voices came to me from the south. A woman’s voice. The voice of many women.
Not one woman. Not one voice. But a river, a flood, led by one distant beauty, drawn by the tune.
The Virgins of the Sun, one hundred of them, had heard the music of my viol six days’ march to the south and had followed it, invisible to the guards of Atahualpa and the Spaniard Pizarro, who had overrun the city of Cuzco and murdered my friend, my Inca Huáscar. One hundred acllas and mamaconas. As young as ten, as old as fifty-seven. One viol. Mine. One man. Me.
For five years, the Chosen Women lived with me in the city they called Machu Picchu, weaving and brewing, planting corn and coca. I did nothing but play my viol, from dawn to dusk. But they had come too late. The European diseases had swept down from the north into their virgin bodies. After five years, only one woman remained to keep me company—the midwife to the wives of the Inca, the mamacona they called Pachamama, the Earth Mother.
I can see the wedding, Benjamin, the wedding of Jacob and Pachamama. A wedding, Benjamin, according to the laws of Moses. Jacob holds the gourd for Pachamama to drink, Pachamama pours chicha into the mouth of Jacob. Jacob takes the empty gourd, holds it briefly up to the admiring rays of the setting sun, places it beneath his foot, and smashes it with one echoing thump. Mazel tov.
After fifty years of virginity and obedience, your mother gave of herself, so that we might continue a people. We had a girl. We have a girl. Three of us. For all we know, we are all we know.
And now I am on my way out. Your mother gave of herself, thirteen years ago, so that our people might live. And now she wants to sacrifice you, the thirteen-year-old fruit of our two worlds, in the Inca belief that such a sacrifice will make me live forever. Are our people so important, my daughter? Are they worth your sacrifice? I can neither persuade nor dissuade. But your mother sits beside you as you write down my words. She listens as you write down my words.
There, next to the altar stone, the open cistern, the weakened old man Jacob, his wife, and the young
girl. I know these people. I know these questions.
I have reached the age of seventy-nine, my daughter, well past the allotment for Jews and Incas. There is a legend, not among my people, but among other Spaniards, Catholics like Pizarro, about a man called the Wandering Jew. It is said that he lives forever, that he cannot die. That on the dusk of his eightieth birthday the years drop off him like mist from Huayna Picchu into the roaring Urubamba and he becomes a healthy youth of twenty once again.
I was a young girl once, Benjamin, kneeling at the deathbed of my mother. I was a young woman once, kneeling in the rain with my dying lover. Was I worth the sacrifice?
I am a musician. My brother, he was the wanderer. Find him, my daughter. You are young, you are of my blood. Take my viol and find my brother. Take my viol, it will play for you. It will lead the way.
Lead the way—down from the hand of Pachamama, ready to let her daughter down into the uncertain magic of the cistern. Down from the trusting eyes of the daughter, the tired Western eyes of the father, tired of wandering, but so in love with his daughter he would turn twenty all over again just to watch one last sunrise on her sleeping face. Down from the sun to the viol, the music playing, once more, unbidden and unbowed.
I can see, Benjamin, down the terraces of Machu Picchu, past the Temple of the Three Windows, I can see people—Incas and Spaniards of a bygone age. I can see down the terraces, past the Temple of the Condor, past the houses of the acllas and the mamaconas, now, nearly five hundred years later, bare of thatching, ruined, the grass well manicured to encourage immortality. Down the terraces, down toward the Urubamba, people, people, the throng of Jacob’s family, my uncle’s family, multiply and divide, branches of a family tree, names and dates resting in the short grass at their feet, shoes and costumes of the multitude increasingly modern with the drop in altitude, coachload after coachload of tourists in period dress, daytrippers from Cuzco, overnighters from Lima, all those thousands of inbred cousins of mine, filling up, clogging up the hillside, until, at the banks of the river, standing, as if posing for a portrait, on the final three terraces, like the final three grapes of the bunch of Esau’s Africa, stand a Father, a Son, a Granddaughter.
And I call to these words, these imaginings on the high chalky walls—“Zoltan! Sonny! Isabella!” I know these people, these faces, these children of Jacob. And my knowledge, the sound of my discovery, ricochets through the tunnels of the subterranean cavern and comes back to me in the no-longer-proper but desperate tones of My Lady Journalist—“Sandor! Hook! Isabella!”
A long night of echoes and reverberations, of resonances and overtones.
And you—Benjamin, Ben, ben.
You and Sonny and Hook. My son.
Our family—as strong and secure as the continents, as miraculous as the lute of Kima, the discovery of Florida, the meeting of three women on a dark winter’s night.
I dreamed this night would come, Benjamin. One long night ago, I curled up beneath the protection of a clump of olives and dreamed that your father would one day stand on the stage of Carnegie Hall, that we would be there, with him, together, palm against palm, applauding, palm in palm.
I am crying, Benjamin. At last, at the end of sixty-five years of nights, my body is melting into a tired, gray woman. Where are the palms to support me? Where are the stone lions to lift me up. I cry for myself, my son, my self.
My tears fall short of the stone floor.
Your steamer trunk stands open at my feet beneath the Letter of Jacob. The steamer trunk I’ve been schlepping around Mariposa all night for you, for you, as only a mother would for a son, open for the first time. A peach, an apricot, a nectarine, wet with the dew of my tears. Three pieces of fruit, all supported by a beach of Mediterranean sand. We have ripened, the three of us women—the message as clear as when horse-toothed Penina sent her fruit basket to Mohammed el-Hayzari.
But to the side of the nectarine, in case I failed to get the message, a letter. Oh, Benjamin.
Dear Mother,
Is any other revelation necessary? Do I have to bend down, read on, pick up the paper, dropped when? In the time of Esau, in the time of Jacob’s daughter, in the brief time while I read and tried to understand?
I call to you, my son. I want so badly, so badly, to see you, to touch your hair, to beg your forgiveness for all those lost years. The Urubamba roars, the music of the violin grows louder, the voice of Zoltan, the voice of Jacob, a voice, voices call from mountaintops and boxcars, “Turn around, Hanni Halevy, turn around”—and I feel you there, Benjamin, my son, as surely as Orpheus felt the breath of Eurydice on his shoulder, and I reach behind me. Take my hand in yours, my hand!
“All along I think Ben meant for us to come to this pass,” Holland murmurs. She has found me. The light in the room has turned yellow. I am no longer standing before the Jacob Letter, before your trunk, but before ten silent men, at the base of the Fountain of the Lions.
“All along, I think Ben meant for us to choose ourselves, for ourselves, to see or not to see. Santángel, Carranque, Sammy L., Roger and the boys—this Nouveau Minyan has nothing to do with our ability to choose.”
Ten chairs, ten men. Ten men, all with mothers.
“Esau’s story is compelling,” Holland whispers in my ear, “the torture of Jacob’s mother horrifying, the dilemma of Pachamama has a prehistoric power. But ultimately, I care more about you and Isabella. Whether or not you are my mother-in-law or Isabella my daughter, whether or not we share a history and tradition that spans thousands of years—the answers matter less than the prospect of passing a few brief decades together. Think, Hanni.” Her voice more urgent. “Don’t make the mistake of Esau and let the real Florida get away.”
The flesh of her hand, a second time, the way it felt just hours before, in the cool dawn of Zoltan’s villa as we stood listening to the perfect music of my granddaughter Isabella. Isabella, standing near, still apart. Now, looking up at her mother, smiling for the first time, understanding, a virgin of the sun.
What shall I do?
Let me tell you a story.
Do you remember, Benjamin, those months, after Leo died, when you, alias Sonny, rented the green room downstairs. The cereal and eggs sunnyside-up for your American breakfasts, the short drives in my Mini to Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, the late-summer concerts by the lily pond at Kenwood House. The autumn evenings in the front parlor by the gas fire, listening to Zoltan’s—your father’s—Tchaikovsky on Leo’s—my dead husband’s—phonograph. And the plans I had for the spring—day trips to St. Alban’s and Bath, a small Macbeth at the Young Vic. All for the days you made impossible when you disappeared.
Would those days have been different if I’d known you were my son?
Let me tell you a story.
Leo had an uncle, a man who ran a thriving family business before the war, selling kiddush cups and menorahs to the wealthy Jews of Berlin from a spacious store in the lobby of the Hotel Bristol. He sold the store for next to nothing after Kristallnacht and moved with his wife and daughter to a small apartment in Amsterdam. After the Nazis overran the Netherlands, the family went into hiding, much as Anne Frank’s family did. And, as with the Franks, the uncle’s warren was eventually discovered and the family shipped to Birkenau, where the daughter was shuttled off to the labor camp at Goleszow, presumably to perish, and the wife immediately gassed.
When the Red Army liberated Birkenau, Leo’s uncle made his way south to Odessa, and then by boat to Marseilles and England. Leo set him up with a flat in Golders Green and a stall in Portobello Road, where he sold tchatchkes and gave consultations on silver for a small percentage. Every year or so, he would put on his one good suit and trudge down to this town council or that community center for a meeting of Displaced Persons, less in the hope, especially as the years wore on, that he might meet some friend or distant relative from Berlin or Amsterdam, than in the strength it gave him to see that his loss was shared by others.
In 1969, s
ome society or other booked the Hippodrome, a large white backdrop to the cherry-red bus depot of the Golders Green Underground station. As always, Leo’s uncle put on his suit and stopped at Bloom’s Delicatessen for a brisket sandwich and an orange squash, nodding to the owner, to the librarian on his lunch break, to a young woman, not so young anymore, whom he recognized from the morning Underground platform, to Mr. Schay, a collector of silver Judaica.
He hurried off after his sandwich. At the door of the Hippodrome, he was met by a friend who claimed to have found someone who knew Leo’s uncle from Birkenau. The reunion was made. And when a few tears had been shed and the usual information had been exchanged, the man inquired after the health of the uncle’s daughter. The uncle cursed the man, enraged by his lack of sensitivity. But rage turned to bewilderment as he noticed the look of surprise on the man’s face. The man hurried off, demanding that Leo’s uncle remain where he was. In a minute, he returned with a woman. Your daughter, the man said.
There stood the daughter who had been taken to the labor camp at Goleszow, who had not died but had been rescued from a frozen boxcar by the famous Oscar Schindler. There stood a young woman, not so young anymore, the woman who had shared a train platform at the Golders Green Underground with Leo’s uncle, the woman he had nodded at for twenty-five years.
Would seeing your face, Benjamin, would putting my arms around your shoulders, mean more after a lifetime than clutching the tattered covers of your Guide to my chest. You were smarter than Leo’s cousin. In your few months in the green room, we were able to live together, free of guilt, obligation, history.
A Guide for the Perplexed Page 29