The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

courtyard.

The soles of my feet suddenly recorded three taps on the tile floor. One more. Then four. It was Farid, signalling pi from back in his house. I crept through his front room to the kitchen. A sweaty hand reached out for my arm. We kissed, and I held Farid until his silent sobs seemed to leach across my skin into my heart. I couldn’t allow him to peel me open to emotion and pulled away. “I can’t find anyone,” I indicated against the palm of his hand in our language of signs. I considered telling him about Uncle, but guarded the knowledge of his death as if it might not be true. Was my master a powerful enough kabbalist to cast such an illusion?

Farid started to signal in wild, frenzied movements. I was unused to reading his words inside my hands. “Slowly,” I begged.

“When the Christians came, I tried to escape the Little Jewish Quarter,” he indicated. “But there were too many. It was like a cloud of locusts. I came back and hid. I saw Judah for a moment. Only him. Father Carlos was running with him down the Rua de Sao Pedro. They disappeared into his church. I tried to call, but my voice…”

So Carlos was alive! Perhaps he was indeed in hiding when I knocked at his door! But what then of Judah?

Farid’s palm flattened and pressed against mine. His pulse raced. Space and time dropped away until there were only two presences meeting at a warm border.

I signalled, “I tapped pi for you once, this afternoon, an hour or two after nones, but there was no reply.”

“I was looking for Samir.”

“Any luck?”

He shook his head. “He was at one of the secret mosques in the Moorish Quarter when they came. I couldn’t make it there. I don’t know.”

“Two peasants with swords have breached the sanctity of our courtyard,” I indicated. “Let’s sneak out and get to St. Peter’s, look for Judah and Carlos.”

Farid stood, guided me through squares of light and darkness toward their back door. As we stepped outside, a long-haired man with a lance surprised us. His blade swept at me. I dove to the cobbles. My right forearm burned. A gash near my elbow dripped blood.

Farid tugged me up, and we ran like madmen toward the river. At the Jews’ Steps, I realized our nemesis was running after us, shouting for help, and would attract a mob if we didn’t silence him. I stopped, caught Farid, signalled to him my plan. He nodded, ran down the steps and cut into the alley past Senhor Benadife’s apothecary.

Dripping blood onto my left hand, I waited on the top step for my assailant. I kicked off my sandals so my footing would be better on the cobbles. He came to me panting. I could see now that he was younger than I, with a round, farmboy’s face, a mop of wild black hair. Yet for all his ferocity, he had frightened eyes. Dangling from his belt were human ears, and a filigree earring twinkled from a lobe by his hip. In another time and place, I would have depicted him as one of Saul’s terrified sons. So what sense did any of this make? It was as if Lisbon had thrown open its gates to a disease of ever-increasing lunacy. Yet my breathing came easy, from an eerie landscape beyond fear. “Go back to your millet and rye,” I told him.

“You stole my father’s best acres!” he answered. He crouched as if preparing to spring. “Don’t you move!” he warned. His lance blade bobbed awkwardly; he was unused to carrying such a weapon.

“I’m a manuscript illuminator and fruitseller. I’ve never stolen anything.”

Strange how humor can come to you at the worst moments; I thought, Hmmmn, that’s not quite true…a sponge cake once with a friend…

“Marrano—over here!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. In a voice of bound rage, he added: “Land that was ours for centuries! Your people… You live off of us, bring us plague, drink the blood of our children!”

“Your grievance is with whoever stole your land!” I told him.

“You do their bidding. You manage their estates, collect their taxes!”

Behind him, Farid dropped down from a rooftop like a cat and crept forward on cottony feet. I said to the boy, “Drop your lance and go. You won’t be injured.”

He lunged suddenly. I ducked away, but a wound burned open on my good shoulder as it was grazed. Watching my blood sluice, I thought: I will never again let an Old Christian hurt me.

Farid took him from behind. His powerful forearm locked around the boy’s neck, the arching blade of his Moorish dagger cut into his cheek. I grabbed the lance and said, “If you threatened the nobles as you threatened us, then all would be well!”

Bellowing cries from down the street turned us: “Hold ‘em son! We’re coming!”

I signalled for Farid to let him go; we had to trade him for our lives. As he was released, the boy spat into my face. “When we catch you, I’m going to slice off your ‘chestnuts’ and hang them on my belt!” he announced.

I slashed the lance across his thigh. He fell. Blood curtained his leg as if seeking to cover his agonized screams. Farid grabbed me and turned me. We raced down the Jews’ Steps to the river. I tossed the accursed weapon on which my blood had mixed with an Old Christian’s into the silver waters.

As we ran, I wondered about the violence which seemed to rise up in me so easily. Had I, too, not simply been wearing a mask of piety and gentility all these years? Was there a true Berekiah whom I’d only glimpsed during moments of rage and desperation?

Dawn rose in tones of pink and rusty gold. We were hidden on a sand bar inside a lagoon of rushes between Lisbon and Santa Iria. I slept without dreams, awoke into Farid’s arms startled, surprised by the return of the sun. As he wiped my brow and sat me up, I was struck by his unadorned beauty, in particular by the dark, youthful stubble bristling on his cheeks and standing out like ornamentation against his olive complexion. Thick ringlets of wild, coal-black hair framed his face like a mane, ribboned over his forehead, cascaded onto his broad shoulders. The look of a schemer, people used to say who feared his silence and the assessments of his light green eyes, who believed in their ignorance that the deaf were evil. But the only schemes Farid ever dreamed up applied to rhymes. A born poet, he was, and more often than not, his eyes were simply focused inward, judging only the curve of a phrase or contour of a rhythm. Now, his lips thinned to a thoughtful slit. He fingered the long lobe of his right ear as he always did when upset. He looked as if he were yearning to speak. But that, of course, was impossible.

For a time, prompted by Farid’s beauty, I stared at my own image in the gentle waters around us. In comparison, my form was graceless, and it seemed as if I couldn’t possibly know this reflective twin looking back at me with the hunted look in his eyes, the dirty stubble on his chin, the mean, knotted hair falling to his shoulders. The young scholar who shared his uncle’s probing profile seemed to have been swallowed by a gaunt, wild-faced youth of the forest, a Pan of vengeance. Had I become the half-human creature the Dominicans believed us all to be?

Farid tapped my shoulder, offered me bread from his pouch. I refused; it was only the third day of Passover and we were still celebrating the Exodus.

“Your fever broke in the night,” he signalled. “You feel better?”

My separated shoulder was stiff with that dull, knotted pain which I would forever associate with that Passover of death. The wound on my forearm was tender with crusted blood. My right foot stung; gashes scarred my toes. I gestured to Farid, “We’ve been abandoned by Moses and will have to get to the other shore of the Red Sea by ourselves. We’re all alone.”

As Farid ate, the reeds around us swayed in unison with the gentle tide. The waters made the lapping sound of fawns drinking. All was calm, as it should be. I began crying as if at the gates of God’s compassion, gestured to my friend, “Which is the real world? This or…?”

He signalled back, “Heaven and hell are the sea and sky. And you are the horizon.”

His words meant nothing then. It was the elegant dance of his powerful hands which was too lovely to bear. And when he caressed my face, the sobs knotted in my throat broke. Memories of the pyre cascaded, molten and furious, onto us both. Even so, I was still unable to talk of Uncle. Farid took Senhora Rosamonte’s hand from me. So frightened he was. Trembling. And yet, he touched its fingertips of bloodstained marble to his closed eyelids as he prayed. I noticed then the bruises and welts on his neck. “We will bury her in a lemon grove,” he signalled. “She will