The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon sc-1

by Richard Zimler

  “He’s dead,” Farid replies with sure gestures. “He will wake no more.” He hugs me to him. The beats of his heart swell around me. His warmth encloses me in the darkness behind my eyelids.

  We wait together. I cry for a time. Then Simon’s death dries in my thoughts, shows me the present of Lisbon. A crowd closes in on us, all curiosity and speculation, for Christians are fascinated by nothing so much as the sight of a Jew’s misfortune. I gaze down the street, signal to Farid that I’ll be away only a moment. I retrieve the Northerner’s hat. A shirtless boy with Judah’s innocent eyes hands it to me.

  Back with Farid, I signal, “I’m going to see which way he ran. Can you brave these Philistines alone?”

  He nods his agreement. As if spun from a frigid top, I race away. At the opening of Rossio Square, I stop, paralyzed by the twisting conflux of men and woman, carriages and horses. The ridiculous life of the square has hidden him.

  An old barber in a tattered doublet calls out in a lazy Algarvian voice, “Senhor, you’re lookin’ a little scruffy. How ‘bout a shave and a haircut. Got hands so swift they could steal the black from a bat.”

  “A Northerner, blond, have you seen him?!” I demand.

  “Perhaps the drought will end with the new month,” he replies. He has the cheery disregard of the deaf, grips my hand and tries to lead me toward his chair. I break away. His wife is having her tufted scalp picked free of lice by a young girl. She points a hooked finger up toward the northern edge of the square. “Went that way,” she indicates.

  I ask shopkeepers there about him in vain until a carpet peddler with a jumpy, effusive manner, points to the left of the São Domingos Church.

  I race down the dirt road which we used to call the Rua da Bruxa—Witch’s Street—after the cat-eyed old hag there who used to repair a woman’s virginity for a price. A red-haired water seller playing cards by himself under an awning has seen the Northerner. “That way!” he shouts, pointing east. I enter the Moorish Quarter, continue racing ahead until the blue and white townhouses give way to wooden shacks. Where the street ends, granite steps lead up like a pleated ribbon toward the great limestone cross that marks the lower edge of the Convento da Graça. Two hundred feet up the scorched and worn hillside is the stone crown of towers and battlements that is the convent itself. I’ve reached an impasse.

  Ragged waifs with dirty, devious faces, more like dwarfs than children, are kicking around a stuffed leather ball by the stairs ahead. High above, on the crest of the hillside, a tiny nun, the runt of her religious litter, screeches at them in a Galician accent. “Shoo! Get away, you little rats! You’re going to burn in hell before you can beg God’s forgiveness!”

  Apparently, the objective of the boys’ game is to unceremoniously score direct hits into her beloved limestone cross.

  When he notices my presence, a weedy boy with pale-green eyes yells at her in a prideful voice, “Vai-te fader, vaca!, fuck off, cow!”

  The kids laugh. The nun keeps shrieking: “Your sins will lead you to marriage with the Devil’s whores! And your children will all be born eyeless and deaf, with horned tails. Then you will…”

  It appears to be a memorized litany, how she responds to this torture every day. Perhaps it is her penance.

  I grab the ball when it bounces down the hill my way.

  “Hey, give that back!” the kids yell. Their faces are full and furious with irritation.

  “Just tell me if you’ve seen a foreigner,” I reply.

  “Ain’t nothing but foreigners around here. Give us back the fucking ball!”

  “A man with blond hair down to his shoulders. A cape with…”

  One points a stubby, dirty finger. “Went up the hill like a spider,” he says.

  I drop-kick the ball toward the cross. A near miss. The kids cheer, then chase screaming after it as it rolls back down the scree.

  At the top of the hill, out of breath, I face the flying buttresses of the Convento da Graça as if at the Gates of Mystery. On the other side of the street blooms a marketplace. I ask tripesellers and sievemakers, combmakers and birdcageweavers, even a family of Castilian hunchbacks making a pilgrimage to Santiago, but no one has seen him.

  As a last resort, I dare to approach the screeching nun. She has one brown tooth that sticks like a rotten dagger into her bottom lip, eyelids like prunes, a scabbed nose. She pauses in her litany long enough to speak in a tone of wisdom offered, “Search for God, not Northerners.”

  When I repeat what one of the waifs told her to do, she shrieks like a Brazilian parrot.

  Back in Little Jerusalem, I discuss with Farid where to take Simon’s body. Unfortunately, we have no clear idea where his house is. Based on his occasional descriptions of views over the Tagus, we’ve always assumed that he lived on the escarpment crowned by the Church of Santa Catarina outside the western gates of the city. So we borrow a wheelbarrow from Senhora Martins, a friend of my aunt, and begin to trundle the body through the afternoon sun.

  Do people stare as we go? I don’t know; an inner world of questions and regrets gives me sanctuary. Farid leads us. All I feel is the drudgery of climbing uphill, a vague, distasteful sense of heat and sweat, sun and dust. I only awake to the jarring white angles of Lisbon when we hear Simon’s name called. To the east, the bell tower of the Santa Catarina church is arrowing into the blue sky. A stocky woman with a dull face, wearing a white headscarf, runs to us shrieking. She stares in horror at the blood on Simon’s clothing. She kneels vomiting. An old man tells me that she is the older sister of Simon’s common-law wife. He points to a sagging townhouse. “They live on the second floor.”

  My mood of disbelief deepens and seems to lower me from the scene. Simon’s lover is thin and olive-skinned, possesses a natural, precise elegance as she invites us in, is strikingly strong in profile for such a young woman. She has intelligent eyes, wears a loose-fitting rose-colored tunic. There is an understated regality about her which reminds me of Reza. But almost a girl she is. “This is Graça, Simon’s wife,” the sister says.

  Graça runs to the window to see Simon when I tell her of his fate. Her hands grip the sill. Her howls come animal in their intensity, as if she is calling for her missing cub in a language of the gut. She hugs her belly, and I realize in an instant of sinking despair that she is pregnant. When her first waves of horror have subsided, I say, “Yours was the last name sculpted by his lips.”

  We descend to the street. People back away. She falls to her knees and caresses Simon’s face, soothes him with talk of Christ and their child to be. I realize then what should have been obvious; she is an Old Christian.

  With a desperate, protective force, Graça is suddenly tugged by her sister toward Farid and me. “Tell us every detail of Simon’s death!” she demands.

  I explain in a voice belonging to another; Berekiah has fled deep inside the armor of my body.

  Graça is unable to speak. Her mouth drops open, and her eyes show a hollow despair. The sister asks with clenched fists, “Where do we get justice?”

  I shake my head. “When I find this Northerner, I will let you know.”

  Farid and I are covered in Simon’s blood. Kind neighbors help us wash, give us new shirts and pouches, feed us cheese and wine. Too weak to protest, we accept their offerings. Sluggish from drink, wavering in our walk, we slip down into central Lisbon as if leaving behind a Biblical landscape.

  After we’ve returned our wheelbarrow, we wander through Little Jerusalem like ghosts. In front of the dyer’s workshop where our Jewish courthouse used to be, I begin to spell “Abraham” in Hebrew with my steps. Then, “Judah.” Farid becomes restless after a time. He stops, faces east like a weather vane. “Let’s go home,” he signals.

  I turn to the west to follow the sun’s descent over this accursed city. Tonight, a week from the onset of Passover, we should be escorting the Zohar into the dawn with our recitations. But we no longer have a copy of the sacred text. And even if we did… “No, not home!” I
shout in my wine-scented voice. I trudge on until we are standing over Simon’s bloodstain on the cobbles of Little Jerusalem. “A short time ago, this brown crust was in his body,” I signal to Farid. He shakes his head as if this is obvious. But I simply can’t believe it, and I recall the day in reverse—as if reading a text from the wrong direction. Simon’s warning about the Count of Almira is spoken to me as if accompanied by a cadence played by Moorish tambourines.

  Farid says with his hands, “Let’s get back to the Alfama. We’ve got to somehow find Diego… warn him that the Northerner will surely kill him if he finds him.”

  “No, Diego won’t go near his home, and we won’t be able to locate him. We’re going to the Estaus Palace.” When he shakes his head, I take his arm. “I need you with me. No protests.”

  As Farid and I enter the Rossio, ash and wood flakes from the pyres in which the Jews were burnt blow around us. At first, it seems that this is the only vestige remaining from the mountain of Christian sin, and I think: Our murdered compatriots now reside only in our memories.

  Farid notices, however, that this is not quite true. “Look down,” he signals, and he points with his foot toward a seam in the cobbles. Human teeth. There must be thousands scattered in the square, trapped in cracks and edges. I look up and notice that women and children are kneeling everywhere, picking up these remains as if it were harvest time. Undoubtedly, they will save them as talismans against the plague.

  Ahead of us, at the northeast rim of the square, a regiment of royal footsoldiers has cordoned off the Church of São Domingos by forming a semi-circle in front of its entrance. Behind them is a row of cavaliers, perhaps twenty in all.

  “A compromise must have been struck by the governor with the Dominican hierarchy to let them into Lisbon,” Farid signals to me.

  “When all the killing is over, the Crown sends in troops,” I reply. “Very comforting to know that he supports us so courageously, no?”

  As we walk on, I see townspeople standing in poses of respect who only a day or two before would have called for King Manuel’s head. This passivity is deeply embedded in the souls of the Portuguese Christians, I think. No revolt will ever succeed here.

  A crafty-eyed old woman looking to make conversation as people do in the face of regal authority, stops us, says, “Two of the Dominican friars have been arrested. Isn’t it terrible?”

  I raise my middle finger over her and chant, “May your wicked soul wander the Lower Realms forever!”

  When she shows disdain for me with her Christian eyes, I spit at her feet. We rush on. At the front gate to the Estaus Palace, two burly crossbowmen stand flanking a dandified doorman in a feathered cap. Beyond the gate’s metalwork, in the shade of an orange grove, rest three carriages. One of them, painted white with gold, is the vehicle I remember from the day of Diego’s injury.

  “The Count of Almira will see me,” I tell the doorman. “Pray inform him that Pedro Zarco has arrived.”

  “Have you correspondence to this effect?” he asks, his face twisting as if he’s had a whiff of something rotten.

  I realize then that we look like peasants who’ve come from a day of labor in the fields. “I bear no letter, but he will see me.” As he sizes me up, I hold the Northerner’s amethyst hat to my chest and feign the supercilious posture of a gentleman farmer bored with ill-bred servants. I turn to Farid, grumble in my best Castilian accent about a coming banquet for a fictitious friend named Diaz; Castilians irritate but impress the Portuguese, particularly when they can afford servants. My effort seems forced, but out of the corner of my eye, I can see the doorman passing along my message to a footman inside the gate.

  We wait under the monstrous sun of Lisbon, watching slippery lizards streaking through cracks in the cobbles. With longing, Farid gazes east along the rooftops of the Moorish Quarter.

  “After we’re done here, we’ll ask again at the blacksmith’s workshop for Samir,” I signal. “Maybe we can find someone who knows something.”

  A footman with only one hand shuffles up to me. “I will escort Senhor Zarco to the Count’s rooms,” he says.

  “Come,” I say to Farid, and together we pass through the gate.

  Inside the palace, the scents are of must and amber. We march down a hallway floored with mosaics imitating Persian carpets. The walls are whitewashed, and every three paces give way to concave alcoves. Centering each alcove is pedestal hoisting aloft a great blue ewer brimming with pink and white rosebuds.

  Above us, the vaulted ceilings are painted with gold and white arabesques as a background to carefully executed figures of magpies, hoopoes, nightingales and other common birds. I have no idea what the footman makes of our florid hand movements as Farid and I identify the local names of the various kinds; his eyes betray only a passing interest.

  A gnarled tree occupies an immense wire cage at the end of the hallway. Upon reaching it, we discover that finches from Portuguese India and Africa have nested in it, are darting around like arrows of yellow and orange and black. I point to the mess of white droppings they leave in an attempt to spoil the beauty of such a display. Understanding my intention and finding it hopeless, Farid simply gestures in reply, “Even a king may understand something of beauty.”

  “If he did, then he would not keep them caged,” I say.

  “For a king, freedom and beauty can never mix!” my friend answers back wisely.

  The Count’s rooms are on the second floor. The waiting chamber for his apartments is parqueted in a chessboard pattern. A table of rose-colored marble centers the room, is surrounded by four chairs embroidered with the King’s armored spheres. We are invited to sit, but on the wall to the right of the entrance hangs a disturbing triptych which grabs our attention. It depicts a bearded, prostrated saint begging in a ruined city peopled by rat-headed priests and all manner of sphinxes. With a wry smile, Farid signals, “Someone who knows Lisbon well.”

  The door to the inner chambers suddenly opens. “Ah, I see you like our little painting,” the Count says to me in Castilian. He purses his lips as if awaiting an important reply. His beaked nose and thick black hair give him the wily, clever profile of an ascetic, a deceitfully youthful air as well.

  “I don’t know yet whether it pleases me or not,” I answer. “But the artist has talent.”

  “I like a man who doesn’t make his mind up too soon. Less likely to get swindled, no?”

  “I’ve no intention of bartering for it,” I say.

  He laughs with good humor. There is no hint that he recognizes me from our previous encounter. He leans into the main panel of the triptych after dismissing the footman with the slightest of nods. “Frightful what saints have to put up with,” he says. “Not worth it, I should think. It’s by a Lowlander named Bosch. King Manuel received it as a gift. But he hates it and hangs it here for me when I’m in Lisbon.” He smacks his lips. “We always enjoy the King’s leftovers.”

  He gestures for Farid and me to enter his sitting room like an elder inviting youths toward wisdom. The two emerald rings crowning the index and middle fingers of his right hand suddenly seem dyed by holy light.

  Inside, the girl from his carriage stands by a shuttered window at the far wall, her right arm behind her back. She wears a long gown of cream-colored silk which rises to a lace partlet and ruffled collar. A violet wimple draws her hair back into a cone ringed with silver filigree. Her face is pale and gentle, curiously girlish, centered by inquisitive eyes. Spurred perhaps by my stare of fond solidarity, she shows her hidden arm. It is short, stubby, reaches only to her waist. A quiver in her tiny fingers as she grips her pearls marks her anxious hesitation, but the longer I gaze upon her, the more solid becomes her expression of tenderness. I sense that she would like to caress the tips of her fingers across my lips.

  “My daughter, Joanna,” the Count says.

  With a mixture of gratitude and sexual desire, I think: praised be God for not making her his wife. I bow and offer my name. I extend my hand to
ward Farid and introduce him. “He is deaf and cannot speak. He will read your lips.” Farid bows with the deep Islamic grace he has inherited from Samir. It is intended to remind us that we are representatives of Allah and must meet together with a seriousness equal to our origins.

  “I’m overjoyed you’ve come,” the Count says. “You’ve saved me a trip out to that pestilent Alfama. Let’s make ourselves comfortable, no?” He takes the elbow of his daughter’s left arm and leads her across the room as if about to dance. Farid and I slip uncomfortably down into gold and scarlet brocade chairs around a table of marble marquetry. A pewter tray holds a rose-colored ceramic carafe and four silver goblets. Joanna pours us wine. The Count studies us with insistent eyes. The two of us seem awkward, hesitant, like sea gulls on land. Farid signals, “The sooner we leave, the better.”

  “I assume that when you gesture like that you are talking together,” the Count remarks. He twists his body to the side as the skeptical often do, stares at me above his nose with a mixture of curiosity and superiority.

  “We grew up together and developed a language,” I explain.

  “A language of the hands. And for obvious reasons,” he says, nodding toward Joanna, “I am fascinated by hands. Tell me, do you spell every word?”

  “A few. But most words have signs.”

  “And when you spell, is it in Portuguese or Hebrew?”

  The Count smiles cagily at my silence. A grin from a man who likes to pose and prosecute, to confuse his victims before… He laughs suddenly and claps his hands. “Watch,” he says. He leans forward and lays an invisible object onto the table, picks corners apart as if unfolding a piece of expensive material. Bowing his head and mouthing some words, he blankets his head and shoulders with an invisible shawl. Facing east, he chants the opening of Jewish evening prayers in a faint whisper. As his words fade, he turns with a gentle expression requesting patience. He says in whispered Castilian, “From our century forward, acting will be a good profession for Jews to study. I predict that we will be the best, in all countries, in all languages, until the Messiah comes, when we will take no more roles.” He smiles through pursed lips and nods as if seconding his own theory, straightens up and swirls his invisible shawl into the air like a magician. “No matter how lucrative those roles may be. So forgive my little play. An actor without an audience is nothing, and I must use all my opportunities.” He nods at me, then Farid. “I do indeed remember you both from the street. And your uncle of blessed memory, almost caught by the King’s guards in his phylacteries.” He leans across the table to take my hand. “It’s pointless hiding when amongst your own,” he observes.