The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

King doesn’t remove your heart!”

“I did speak to him about you. After we were so rude on the street. He said he would honor you the next time you met. Hate for the concept of pure blood carried him away. He knew that he had acted wrongly. You had his full blessings.”

Manuel’s eyes drip silent tears. He picks up the halves of his mother’s jug. “How did the Christians find him? Didn’t he get out with you?”

I consider trying to trick him, but decide that the truth is riddle enough. As I describe the bodies, he hides his face in his hands again. “It’s impossible!” he says. He moans the word over and over until his voice becomes a whisper disappearing into an ocean of silence.

I come to him and say, “We must find out exactly how she got to our cellar. Perhaps her brother can tell us.”

“If he’s still alive.”

As we walk toward Tomas’ apartment, Manuel whispers his wife’s name as if in incantation. He hides behind an expression of rigid control, grips his sword handle. It is all wrong for him. Instead of polished iron, Manuel should have gone out into the world brandishing a butterfly net and notebook.

Our destination is the third floor of a squalid townhouse in the poor neighborhood below the hillock crowned by St. Steven’s Church. Brittle bells are tolling vespers when we arrive, and Old Christians are shuffling inside. A caretaker is shooing away a pack of prancing dogs who want to join in services. Sunset has lit the horizon. The dark of the sixth evening of Passover is almost within reach.

Manuel’s brother-in-law, a pillow-maker’s assistant, is stuffing feathers into netting when we arrive. His garret smells like a chicken coop. He has no neck, red-veined cheeks like Father Carlos, a receding fringe of dirty brown hair. He wears a bull’s expression of unknowing, obsessive rage, takes the news without looking up. A brief pause in his hand motion is all.

“She said she was going out,” he says. “She was complaining of uncleanliness, the time of women’s pain.”

I motion Manuel outside; we have learned all we need to know.

“What do you know of that man?” I question.

“You need to ask? The half that is Christian has the manners and intelligence of a swine. You can imagine how crazy that makes the half that is Jewish. Teresa must have been adopted. It’s the only explanation.”

When I look up, Tomas is moving back from his window. Could he have followed his sister and killed them both out of some half-formed sense of religious righteousness bequeathed by his mother? Could he and a thresher entrusted with the secret of our genizah have come to kill my uncle at exactly the same moment? Was such a coincidence possible?

Two feathers float down toward us. I reach out for one. “I think Teresa considered herself more Jewish than you think,” I say, gripping it tightly. To Manuel’s puzzled look, I ask, “Where does a Jewish woman go who has just finished her rhythm with the moon?”

“To a bathhouse,” he replies.

“And where’s the nearest bathhouse?”

“On the Rua de Sao Pedro. Just down the street from your…”

“Exactly.”

Chapter X

Our synagogue in the Judiaria Pequena was built in the Christian year of thirteen seventy-four on a tiny hillock flanking the southern rim of Lisbon’s ancient defensive walls. At the bottom of this slope is a tiny square centered by a great pear tree, a brother to the towering giant which used to shade the yard of our central temple in Little Jerusalem. A staircase of polished limestone rises twenty feet from the tree’s octopus-tangle of roots to Samuel Aurico’s tannery on the first floor and another fifteen to the synagogue on the second.

On the other side of the synagogue runs the Rua de Sao Pedro. It was here that our ancestors put the entrance to our micvah, a series of cascading pools—two for ritual bathing—carved out of the rock below and gifted with an underground stream as a source. Some nimble negotiation by Rabbi Zacuto and other Court Jews spared it from the mass confiscations of fourteen ninety-seven and enabled our chazan, David Moses, to remain as manager. Of course, our men and boys were no longer expected to immerse themselves in its waters before the Sabbath. But I’ve persisted. After all, a bath is pretty much a bath, and presumably even the Pope cannot prove what’s in one’s head. Now, of course, all that has changed; Portuguese curses have been strung into rope around our wrists, and proof no longer counts for anything. Throughout Spain, bathing on Friday has been declared enough evidence to turn a man to smoke. That Lisbon has begun to welcome the heat of this Inquisitional fire has become only too clear over the last week.

Naturally, our women have been similarly proscribed since the time of the conversion from purifying themselves after the moon has summoned the red of their tides. But Teresa, Manuel’s wife, was apparently  more faithful and courageous than he ever imagined. Was she surprised by Old Christians as she bathed? Possibly, she slipped away without time to dress and raced down the street to find safety in our house; it is only four doors east of the micvah, at the triangular corner the Rua de Sao Pedro makes with Temple Street, the Rua da Sinagoga.

The bathhouse door is locked, and no one answers our knocks. “I don’t think Master David survived Sunday,” I tell Manuel, and I explain to him how the chazan failed to meet me that afternoon at St. Anne’s Gate.

Despite my words, Manuel calls to him in the crack of the doorway. The sixth evening of Passover has already descended gray and windblown over the city, and dust is kicking up from the cobbles in swirling sheets. Manuel covers his nose with his hand and kicks at the door with his foot. There comes no response. He asks, “Where to, now?”

“His apartment,” I answer. “I know where he keeps his keys.”

As we head off, he says, “I never understood why Master Abraham always treasured living so close to the bathhouse and synagogue. The way he and Rabbi Losa always fought, I mean. It seemed only to make things worse.”

“Uncle always said that our location was prime for disappearing into God. The Rua de Sao Pedro and Rua da Sinagoga come together at our house. He maintained that a kabbalist should try to live at an intersection of lines —‘where two become one.’”

“I suppose it’s a blessing to be sure that life’s made up of definite and discernable patterns,” Manuel notes with a wistful smile, and in his tone I can tell that he, too, is questioning God.

We climb up a side street to the chazan’s apartment and knock on his door. Perched on the eaves of his townhouse roof is an escaped hunting falcon, wary and fitful, a leather strap dangling from its right talon. When a gangly woman with a pointed chin hails us from upstairs, the bird takes wing. “We are all God-fearing Christians here,” the woman says in a trembling voice. “Old Christians, every one of us, with the Lord Jesus risen in our hearts.” She brings her hands together in front of her chest in a position of prayer.

Even from here, I can see that she has bitten her nails bloody. She must think that we, too, are on the hunt for Marranos. “We’re simply looking for Master David,” I say in a reassuring voice. “Nothing is wrong. We just want to know if you’ve seen him.”

“Oh dear, I knew it. But you won’t find him here. I haven’t seen him since Sunday. I believe that he was scheduled that day to warm the heart of God himself from the pyre in the Rossio.”

Scheduled that day to warm the heart of God? Often, in their effort to speak euphemistically, Lisboners gave voice to the most absurd and monstrous expressions. Was there any people on earth more capable of turning a scorpion into a rose with their tongues?

I ask, “Do you have the key to his apartment, by any chance?”

“Yes, yes, I do,” she replies.

“Can we take a look?”

“Give me a minute and I’ll help you.”