The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  That story about Moricz affected me profoundly, particularly since our grandfather was never one to tell us children funny stories. But at the same time it reinforced my suspicions that Avraham, Moricz, and I had something ominous in common, something written in our genes.

  AVRAHAM SET OUT to wander. He trudged the dusty roads that ran this way and that across South America. He mumbled French words backward for his magic spells and advised people that in exchange for a trifling sum, gratefully accepted, he could work miracles. They listened to him in disbelief. He tried to overcome their doubts with good works, promises, and threats. He also sold small heart-shaped charms inscribed with the names of Catholic patron saints that he claimed would protect the bearers against sickness, deformities, jealousy, and black magic. But those he met in the noisy streets lived in great poverty, and his enterprise yielded him little. In the evenings Avraham would go to sleep hungry most of the time.

  THAT ITINERANT EXISTENCE might have been his whole life if the wife of a rich mestizo in Caracas hadn’t given birth to a monstrosity with bat wings instead of arms and two horns protruding from its hairy forehead. This happened after she had paid Avraham the fee of fifteen silver pesos to visit her at twilight every day for a week to stroke her abdomen and chant an ancient blessing to protect the child from the evil eye. Her husband had Avraham arrested, charged with heresy, and remanded to the city’s Dominican tribunal, feared for the severity of its sentences. The prison warders found that Avraham was circumcised, clear proof of heresy and criminal intent. The prosecutor from the Holy Office found this evidence entirely sufficient to establish the guilt of the accused. He declined to investigate further and called no witnesses.

  Avraham listened meekly as the verdict was read out. The court condemned him to death for profaning his baptism by accepting circumcision, eating meat on days when the church prohibited it, working on holidays, observing the Jewish Sabbath and other Jewish holidays, conversing with the devil and serving the powers of hell, and, last but not least, for defrauding Christians by pretending that he could cure illnesses in exchange for payment in silver.

  Avraham admitted his crimes and stoically accepted the verdict, even pledging that in hell he would assiduously observe the holy faith and Christian traditions. In return the authorities promised he would not be tortured or locked in chains.

  Before dawn on the same morning he was scheduled to burn at the stake, he persuaded a fellow prisoner—a humpback condemned to spend a year in chains for raping two women mourning in a cemetery—to chew the rope off his hands and ankles. He escaped from the prison while the warders were occupied elsewhere, and fled northward, turning up three months later in Louisiana, a colony on the southern coast of North America where most of the population spoke French.

  HE GAVE HIS NAME as Armand Seigneur and claimed he had been a celebrated Parisian physician at the court of Louis XIV. Along with his many other accomplishments, he had cured the king’s gout. Avraham had a confident air about him. No one questioned his education or asked if he had a license to practice medicine.

  Without a penny in his pocket he rented a large house in the center of New Orleans. He had the living room equipped as an office, consultation room, and laboratory. Smoke rose from pots, liquids bubbled, and a faint odor of quicksilver lingered in the air. He put the word about that he was a specialist in unusual afflictions. He declined to treat open sores, for the simple reason that he had an absolute horror of the sight of blood. He won his patients’ trust by eloquently describing the brilliant successes of his treatments. His inspiring and fantastical tales of Versailles duped everyone. The royal court physician’s reputation spread rapidly throughout New Orleans. The demand for his unusual methods of medical treatment was enormous.

  Patients with well-filled purses were welcome at any hour of the day, and he always treated them with consideration and elaborate courtesy. The doctor was not the least interested in taking charity cases. He received the poor with suspicion and dismissed their illness as delusions.

  ONE DAY the mayor arrived for an appointment. Gaspard Gorell was generally despised and known to be thoroughly spineless and corrupt. Everyone in New Orleans knew he regularly took bribes from the slave dealers who for all practical purposes governed that lawless city.

  Gorell shrieked in pain. His eyes were inflamed, and he suffered from gout. In quest of relief from his afflictions, he regularly went to the mud baths in the nearby hamlet of Jefferson. But this time nothing had relieved his suffering.

  “The last attack was five days ago,” he told the doctor, “and I still haven’t recovered.”

  Avraham assured the mayor that he could help and might even be able to cure him, using secrets of alchemy that were all the latest rage in Paris. The mayor had to promise under oath that he would not utter a word about the details of the treatment. Avraham then read out Hebrew incantations and lit a mixture that gave off a copious quantity of smoke. He took a quick astrological reading and announced that the pains were caused by demons that had taken up residence in Gorell’s body.

  He chalked out a magic circle around the mayor, swung back and forth a censer that stank of camphor, and sought to conjure away the malign ethereal presences. He heaved deep sighs, perspired, muttered disjointed phrases, and obliged the patient to drink half a glass of red wine in which three ounces of crushed poppy seeds had been soaked overnight. Tottering with fatigue, Avraham announced that Egyptian plague demons named Selbebuth and Osirusis had abandoned Gorell’s afflicted body. He concluded the session with several Hebrew prayers, pronounced backwards: “Churab ata janoda, unjehole chelmen mal.”

  “The doctor is so wonderfully eloquent,” exclaimed Gorell, amazed by the energy suddenly filling his body. The results were more astonishing than any he had experienced during the five years he had been visiting the mud baths in Jefferson.

  AT THEIR NEXT APPOINTMENT Avraham blindfolded Gorell. He advised the mayor that the treatment he was about to carry out was not to be found in any book of medicine. It was a secret intended only for royalty.

  “It is based on the study of a hitherto unknown part of our organism,” Avraham explained, “and it has to do with the heavenly bodies’ influences upon the hidden inner structures of the human being.”

  He carried out a series of slow movements—he called them magnetic strokes—above the mayor’s back. He spoke of rendering the muscular structures amenable to the healing forces of the powers of the planets.

  Gorell didn’t understand a word of the physician’s prattle, and he experienced no alleviation of bodily pain. But he was flattered that he, a man of simple origins, a peasant’s son from Bordeaux who in his youth had come to the colony of New France, should receive the same treatment as the crowned heads of Europe. He felt particularly honored.

  Acting as if it were a precious gift, Avraham gave the mayor a handwritten note. “These two sentences should be read aloud ten times a day—five in the morning and five at bedtime.”

  Gorell examined it expectantly. “My name is misspelled,” he exclaimed, somewhat indignantly. “There should be two l’s in Gorell, not three.”

  Avraham gave him a piercing look. The mayor realized he had gone a touch too far. “It sounds promising, Doctor,” he replied anxiously in an effort to smooth over his blunder.

  THE VARIOUS TREATMENTS became more intense. Gorell visited him every day. Exorcism of demons required time and patience. Often the mayor would sit blindfolded for as long as three hours at a time, while Avraham carried out and further elaborated the patterns of strokes, his hands hovering just behind the mayor’s back, never actually touching him. They carried on lively conversations during their time together, exchanging views and discussing market conditions while sighing at the unbearable heat and the mad decisions of French politicians that had allowed lands east of the Mississippi to fall into the hands of the British. Avraham praised all of the mayor’s opinions, no matter how simpleminded.

  Gorell was always in an excell
ent humor during these sessions, smiling, laughing exuberantly, and enjoying the respite from his burdensome duties. Over time he initiated Avraham in his shady political affairs and even into details of his own financial dealings. He also confided that he was still in mourning for his wife, five years after her death; she had choked on a fishbone. Gorell felt—even though he was still tormented by gout, almost as much as before—that he had made a loyal and trustworthy friend.

  BY JULY 1779 the treatments had gone on for more than six months. Avraham told Gorell not to come for a consultation on the following Thursday and counseled him to visit the mud baths instead. He explained that he needed a day to himself to work undisturbed and test a new treatment method. The mayor respected the physician’s wishes and spent all of Thursday in Jefferson. He was completely enervated when he came home that evening. He went to bed early, because the mud baths had drained him of all energy.

  On Friday morning Gorell went to the doctor’s house as usual, but Avraham was not there for the appointment. The house was empty and the doctor had vanished. A general search turned up nothing. Someone claimed to have seen him in the vicinity of the mayor’s house shortly after Gorell’s departure for Jefferson.

  Late that evening Gorell discovered why the physician had left the city so hastily. The scandal was huge. Avraham had gotten into Gorell’s house, opened the safe, emptied the secret compartments in the desk, stolen every cent he could find, and made off with the mayor’s daughter Claire, a little seventeen-year-old redhead who was as innocent as she was charming.

  Gorell pulled out his hair in desperation; he screamed and cursed for all he was worth. The next morning he hired an experienced half-breed bounty hunter to track down the pair. The bounty hunter searched diligently for them for more than a year, but they always kept one step ahead of him, forging their way into more and more inhospitable territory.

  AVRAHAM AWOKE one morning, three days after they’d spent the last of the stolen money, and discovered Claire was gone. She had abandoned him.

  A note inscribed in her childish script lay on the table:

  After a year of constant travel, going from one horrible place to another that was even worse, I think I’ve learned my lesson about the temptations of the flesh. But worse than all that for me was the feeling that in your company I was losing my soul.

  Bon voyage!

  C.

  Avraham was furious. But the truth, the cruel and inevitable truth, gradually dawned upon him after a number of additional setbacks, misfortunes, and unexpected events: a man cannot live his whole life as an outlaw fleeing justice.

  Seized by despair, he lamented his choices in life, bleating like a sheep: His father had never cared for him, his mother was weak and had never bonded with him or offered any affection, and from early childhood his heart had been as heavy as lead. Voltaire hated him and had refused to provide him with any education. Now he would reach the end of his life as an ignorant failure, never having tasted the glories of success, never having conquered the world, with none of the honors due to a man of buena famiya.

  He thought of Hélène and wondered where she might be. Was she still with her husband? Had they gone their separate ways? He imagined her just as beautiful as before, or even more beautiful than in fact was humanly possible. She was the most splendid creature he had ever seen. He would willingly give up everything, even die if necessary, just to be in her company again, even if only for five minutes.

  ———

  AFTER CLAIRE’S RETURN home to New Orleans the hunt for Avraham continued for another couple of months. The bounty hunter’s efforts turned up nothing.

  Avraham ended his days on this earth a few weeks after Claire abandoned him. He lost his way in the Everglades swamp in Florida and wound up as a tasty dinner for two greedy alligators.

  THE EUROPEAN CUSTOM that the family name is passed from father to son was completely in line with Moses’s stipulation to our ancestor Baruch of how he was to safeguard the great secret. That may be one explanation for the fact that women have always been seen as less important in the Spinoza clan.

  For a long time I thought that no girls at all had been born to the family over the course of its thirty-six generations. Of course I was mistaken, even though I learned almost none of their names. When I think back to my childhood, I recall that at least one woman stepped forth from the obscurity of history: Shoshana. Though she was never physically present, my great-uncle’s stories always kept her close at hand.

  MY GREAT-UNCLE told Sasha and me that few things make such deep impressions as the first stories that touch our hearts. They follow us all our lives and constitute islands of memory that summon us back to them.

  Shoshana inhabits one of my islands. The first time my great-uncle spoke of her—explaining that although she was dead, her spirit still hovered over us and one could communicate with her through a medium—she seemed as real to me as the air I breathed. I was swept away and enchanted by her story. I imagined myself living back in those days, and I often dreamed of her. In the same way, I was influenced by the magical atmosphere my great-uncle cleverly created with his tales. I was sure that Shoshana could see me and was smiling at me from her heaven.

  WE WERE QUITE YOUNG when my great-uncle told us of his secret relationship with Shoshana. He had regular contact with her through a well-known medium at Ad Astra, the mysterious company of spiritualists he visited every Wednesday evening at the residence of Adalbert Nagyszenti, a Freudian psychoanalyst who because of his bourgeois background and political opinions had been interned for four years in a Stalinist reeducation camp in northeastern Hungary. Upon his release, Nagyszenti was banned from his profession. He got by as best he could by working as the night watchman for a scrap yard in a grimy workers’ suburb.

  At first my great-uncle asked to contact his twin daughters who had gone up in smoke through the towering chimneys of Auschwitz. The silence at the first séance of his life became almost unbearable. Just as he was about to get up from the table to leave the room in disappointment, Shoshana turned up and conveyed a greeting to him from his daughters on the other side. The contact with her was of great significance in my great-uncle’s life.

  Tears appeared in his eyes whenever he spoke of Shoshana. His face shone with delight at the hidden truths she reported from the spirit world, stories that he often shared with us.

  But did I ever see him express any doubt about the messages he received from her? I cannot remember any. Perhaps I was blind to it.

  THROUGH SHOSHANA my great-uncle had access to stories that exist in the obscurity beneath what we call history. They were never recorded in books. Throughout all time there have existed persons with access to the pure and un-distorted truth, persons who knew things that no one else did. People who remembered forgotten miracles. Individuals who bore our suffering on their shoulders. As a child, I was convinced that Fernando was such a man.

  IN HIS CAPACITY as guardian of the Spinoza children, Voltaire put five-year-old Nicolas into a convent school and fourteen-year-old Avraham into a boarding school reputed for its strict discipline and locked gates. Shoshana alone was allowed to stay with him at his château in Ferney.

  The philosopher set her difficult tasks and was very demanding. He considered it his duty to give the girl the care and education normally provided only to boys. Ten hours a day, every day of the year except her birthday, various tutors instructed her patiently in Latin, Greek, philosophy, literature, and mathematics.