The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

“Was he killed during the riot against the New Christians?”

He shrugged. “Look, Master Eurico had lots of enemies. Did you really expect him to survive? He should’ve hidden himself like a bedbug in a mattress seam.” He nodded up at me. “Who are ya, anyway?”

“Pedro Zarco,” I replied, using the Christian first name I’d accepted under the sword of conversion. “I live in…”

“Ah, Master Abraham’s nephew!”

“How do you know who I am?!”

The boy approached me, slipped his fingers around the grating of the gate as if planning to scamper up. From here, I saw that bruises and scrapes were what reddened his cheeks. “Master Eurico hated your uncle,” he said. “Talked all the time about capturing him and giving him the pinga just to see what curses and drivel would come out. Strange, but in a way, I think he kinda liked him, too. In the way that he liked anyone. But he thought your uncle was a little crazy…and dangerous.”

Pinga, meaning “drop,” was a torture in which droplets of boiling oil were dripped one by one across your body. Sometimes they spelled the victim’s name with the burns; Portuguese appellations can be very long and most people will confess to just about anything before a boiling drop even touches their family name.

“Are you a servant?” I asked.

“I’ve sent them away.” He peeled off his beret with the grin of someone revealing treasure. A cascade of silken amber hair dropped across his shoulders. He was most definitely a she. “I’m his widow,” she said with a great nod. She shrugged as if to excuse her previous disguise and unlocked the gate. She took my arm as if inviting me to dance. “Come!” she said.

So this boy was Damas’ child bride! She ran me into a bloodstained kitchen and tugged me through the larder into a courtyard shaded with orange trees thick with fruit. On the brick terrace by the back of the house, a raging pyre of clothing and wood was crackling. A colorful pile of shirts, coats and trousers was heaped nearby. Flakes from the flames were drifting up into the sky and falling back to earth like feathers. “I’ve been burning his things all night,” she said with an exhale of triumph. “The boots were the first to go. Eight pairs he had. One for each day of the week. And an extra one of sharkskin for Mass on Sunday. If he didn’t like my polishing, he’d change his water on them and make me start over. And let me tell you, that man’s pee smelled like a cat’s! Only problem now is that they stink when they burn! Just like he did!”

Tendrils of flame were jumping like tugged marionettes. “You threw Eurico Damas into the fire?!” I demanded.

“I think you’ll find his teeth if ya look hard!” she grinned. She licked her lips as if tasting a treat. “He had more than his share so I’m sure they’re there somewhere.” She fixed my stare with a bemused look, burst into laughter. “He went to kidnap your uncle, you know.”

“Did he find him?! What did he…”

“No, he came back all snarly. Couldn’t locate where Master Abraham was hiding. I heard him say so.”

So my intuition was wrong; Eurico Damas had not been involved. And Samson was dead. That left Father Carlos and Diego as the only threshers who could have betrayed Uncle; Miguel Ribeiro and Rabbi Losa as those who might have stooped to blackmail.

“He wanted to pinga your entire group of kabbalists,” the girl continued. “Force ‘em to admit it was all a lie. Lately, he was kind of obsessed with it. Getting old, I guess. He didn’t believe in that sort of thing, ya see.”

“What sort of thing? I don’t understand.”

She laughed as if to ridicule me, tugged with showy pride on the ends of her silken vest. “An ever present God, stupid!” As she spoke, a black-haired, weedy teenager with wisps of mustache on his upper lip ran out of the house trailing a bloody sword. His eyes were targeted upon me.

“It’s all right, Jose,” she said. “He’s Master Abraham’s nephew.” To me, she whispered. “It was Jose who killed him. He’s not much good with a sword. But when a man’s as drunk as a pig in a trough of grapes, it don’t take more than one little skewer and…” She thrust her hands down in imitation of a swordsman delivering a deathblow, grinned, then left me to toss a cloak onto the fire. Jose acknowledged me with the serious nod of an adolescent who has assumed the role of a protector, and in an eerie, reverent silence, we three watched the garments smoke and twist and blacken. The girl’s expression hardened. She touched her cheeks as if blotting stains. She turned to me. “I’ve other marks on my back, you know. For a year, I was his whipping post. Used to flap his ‘bird’ himself while hitting me if ya know what I mean.” She grinned, “I want to erase the very memory of him.” She took my hand. “You can understand, can’t ya?” When I nodded, she looked at me gravely, pointed to her chest. “Do kabbalists really believe God resides in here?”

“There and everywhere else. And nowhere. God will come to you in a form which you can perceive—clothed as you can see Him. It depends on His grace…and your vision.”

“Then He won’t come to me as a man—I’ve no need for a male God. I’ve already had one, and I hated him! I’ll kill the next male god that shows his ‘purple head’ to me!”

“A female emanation then. Or neither sex. Or both more likely.”

“A woman. Yeah, I’d prefer a woman.” She made a fist, and with gritted teeth, shouted, “I’ll never have another man thrust inside me!” Her look became haughty as she twisted her beret back on. Tucking in her hair, she said, “Grab any of his clothes you want, then go!”

We stared at each other as if to take in the world’s cruelty. In a trembling voice, she said, “Once upon a time there was a happy girl who swam in the Tagus and who was spied from afar and sold by her parents into slavery.” She closed her eyes and folded her arms about her chest, as if comforting her own despair.

I replied, “And a young man who lost his uncle and little brother.”

Her eyes opened in understanding, and we nodded at each other like siblings who must part. The weight of our solidarity held me in place another moment, then I turned and strode away.

Sunset had washed the sky with rosewater and copper. As I surveyed the massive crowd still assembled in the Rossio from afar, Uncle’s hand held the back of my neck. “If you dye your hands red, no one will bother you,” he whispered. I knew what he meant and pulled off the scab which had formed on my shoulder where the boy’s lance had caught me. The blood sluicing out came warm against my fingertips. I coated my hands and arms with it. “Now descend to the river,” Uncle whispered. “Walk along the bank, and to any one who hails you, tell them you are hunting Marranos!”

As I knew I would, I made it home without incident. The shit-stained rug over our trap door was still in place. Yet I descended into the cellar as if into imprisonment. I was young and proud, and such a hideaway only provoked shame.

Cinfa ran to me as I reached the bottom of the stairs and said that only a half-hour before men had stood in the kitchen above them, offering clemency for any Marrano who showed himself. “Don’t go out again!” she begged.

“Judah?” my mother asked breathlessly.

“Nothing,” I replied.

Farid and the little girl with no thumbnail were sleeping under blankets by our desks. Esther was sitting in silence, her profile that of a limestone sculpture.

After I’d comforted Cinfa, I lifted up the prayer rug over Uncle, and as I did, his putrid odor stung my nostrils. Dear God, how long until we can get him into the earth? I thought. I painted him again with myrrh, told myself with each brush stroke: Keep looking at his face; you must remember everything in order to take revenge.

As I chanted to myself, my body, miraculously, began to shed its accumulated frustration, to vibrate and flex with a holy force. Such is the power of Torah—or so advanced were my powers of self-deception, perhaps—that I was growing convinced that it was I who had been chosen to save Israel from Lisbon’s Philistines and that by solving the mystery of Uncle’s murder, I would somehow be turning the key in the door of our salvation. What exactly the connection was between my master’s death and the survival of the Portuguese Jews, I hadn’t a clue at the time.

As I looked up at the leather blinds drawn down over the window eyelets at the top of the northern wall, I wondered again about the killer’s escape. There must be a hidden exit, I thought,