I cannot emphasize enough how deeply clouded my judgment must have been by Uncle’s death; any Jew in my position should have realized that the Dominicans would close off all the exits to the city as their first religious calling of the morning.
It was also a mistake to run. The claps of my footfalls drowned out the sounds of the Old Christians and gave my position away.
A mob of one hundred or more was fronting St. Vincent’s Gate. When they spotted me, arms pointed toward me like arrows.
I had stopped, my gut clenched with fear. Even so, a sense of sliding toward doom made me extend a hand as if to seek the assurance of a railing or wall. I grabbed only air, of course, then instinctively sought the protection of my knife. For a breathless moment, I even wavered at the edge of taking my own life. It would have been easy; in those days, I still believed in a personal God and did not fear death. Dying, yes. But not the glorious journey back to the Upper Realms. A last prayer, a single thrust, and then I would have been released. The thought was:
Of course, they couldn’t have known for certain by my outward appearance that I was a New Christian. But if they’d stripped me, my covenant with the Lord would have made my allegiance obvious.
The urge for life is more powerful than thought. Or perhaps my need to find Judah was too strong.
I turned and ran as if there’d been no other choice. Were my enemies after me? I couldn’t tell; my senses had been dispelled by my quickened pulse. Imagine standing beside a leaden bell tolling madly during a howling windstorm. That was my heartbeat and that was my breath.
All that comes to me now is a general sense of descending outdoor staircases, the odor of my own terror. The next image that penetrates my Torah memory is of a bell tower. I was in front of the facade of the Church of Sao Miguel, not two hundred paces from home.
Without warning, the tower seemed to crash to its side. I had been shifted in space, was on my back against the cobbles.
Although I was fighting for breath, there was no sense of pain, only silent confusion. My head seemed imprisoned inside an amphora of glass. It was as if the hand of God, without warning, had simply moved me through space.
A fleeting image of a water lily surrounded by sand, bursting suddenly into flame, seared my gaze. Later, I understood that I had been unconscious for an instant, and upon waking, had caught a glimpse of the dream world flowing beneath the current of my usual thoughts. Even then, however, that image—of a lily in flames—seemed vital to me, a gift from God to which I needed to cling. (The clue to its significance came while illuminating a Book of Esther one day in Constantinople, when I realized that the Lord must have seen Lisbon as a burning flower that fateful Passover.)
To my left, six or seven feet away, I now noticed a man in a cape of polished hide kneeling, holding his shoulder as if he were wounded. I realized he must have lunged for me from a hidden doorway and knocked me flying, hurt himself in the process.
Two lanky men in ragged clothing were running toward me from down the sloped street. They appeared to be identical twins. Closely cropped black hair crowned their heads. They both held axes, and I sensed that they wanted to split me like a block of wood.
Behind them, a rampaging group of men and women was rushing toward me. Everything seemed a whirl of noise and wind, shadow and contour.
When the two axmen suddenly merged together, I simply could not understand. Then I realized the obvious: my vision had been distorted by my fall.
Cold iron glinting in the sun has a way of summoning one’s body to arms. I was up in an instant, gripping my knife.
The serpentine alleys and pathways of the lower Alfama had long ago been incorporated into my interior map, and I cut away to the west just as my wounded assailant struggled to his feet. I reached the steep staircase leading down to Cantina Square in seconds. From the highest step, one can jump easily onto the neighboring rooftops. I took the leap correctly, then spired up and down four rooftops to the next alleyway. Three men were following me. The two closest, perhaps twenty feet away, held swords. The third was a friar using his crosier as a staff. “Get the
By that, I assumed he wanted my sex for a personal trophy. Having been educated to view the world symbolically, I wondered, of course, if the Dominicans wanted to end our possibilities for reproduction once and for all.
The alleyway was empty. Dropping down, I scaled a low wall into Senhor Pinto’s courtyard. As I suspected, his kitchen door had been smashed in. The house was a shambles. I cut through his kitchen to the corner of the Rua de Sao Pedro and the Rua da Adica. Farid’s house was just across the street. I took his wall with a single leap to the top, then jumped to the courtyard and ran for our kitchen.
I did not descend to the cellar, however. After verifying that I hadn’t been followed, I lifted away the false frontpiece to the chest in Uncle Abraham and Aunt Esther’s room, took out a dried eel bladder containing a few coins to be used in an emergency. I waited a few minutes for shouts to disappear from Temple Street. Then, when all I could hear was my own heartbeat, I headed to the river. Near to shore, a fisherman whom I have seen since childhood but never spoken to was seated in his blue rowboat, cutting a braid of cheese with a rusty knife. He was old, perhaps fifty, squat, had a suntanned, leathery face and the gray eyes of illiteracy. When he met my gaze, I held up a coin and looked west, down river; once there, beyond the city gates, I planned to walk the five miles to Samson Tijolo’s vineyard.
The fisherman nodded, rowed toward me and maneuvered his boat alongside the riverbank.
“I need to get out of the city,” I told him.
With two of my copper coins sitting in his crawling bait, the fisherman rowed us out a hundred feet or so into the river, puffing and tossing away curses. Above the big toe on his right foot, an angry red sore had eaten into his grayish waterlogged skin.
“Bit by a crab,” he grumbled. “Never healed properly.”
Weaving through two large fishing boats and cutting around a galley flying the red Portuguese cross, he turned the boat until we caught the current. As his rowing gained rhythm, Lisbon’s defensive walls trailed behind and became but a ribbon threading through church towers and the tangle of the city’s outer districts. He dropped anchor beyond a rocky outcropping of beach and lifted his hand to bid me good luck.
I nodded my thanks, rolled up the legs of my pants and waded into the cold water.
On the beach, two Andalusian pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela wearing scallop-shaped hats approached me and asked me where a tavern might be. I made believe I couldn’t speak their language and walked away.
Chapter VII
Two hours later, Rana, Samson’s wife and an old friend from the neighborhood, answered my knock on her door with her newborn baby, Miguel, suckling at her breast. “Beri…oh my goodness, you’re alive! Come in!” She grabbed me and pulled me into the house, closed the door behind me and locked the dead-bolt. “I can’t believe it!” she smiled.
We kissed, and I reached out to rub the baby’s downy hair. So young he was that his eyes were shut tight as if never to be opened. “Handsome little thing,” I said, for who could tell a first-time mother that her baby would look like a squirrel until it was at least a month old?
Rana replied, “Handsome? Have you been meditating too much again?” She tried to smile, but tears trapped in her lashes. Her lowered glance showed a desperate isolation, and I understood that Samson, too, had been lost in the Christian storm.
We sat by her hearth. “How did you find out about the riot?” I asked.
“Some neighbors came to warn me.”
“Maybe we should leave here together. Go back to…”
“You know I can’t,” she interrupted.
