The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

he and the Dominicans are sending demons after us all. White Maimon. Gemila did see him! She was right!”

In his frantic eyes, I can see that the madness of Lisbon has finally overwhelmed the priest. “Carlos, please stop! I have no time for metaphorical speech.”

“Then look at this!” he shouts.

He takes out yet another talisman. Upon a square of polished vellum minute Hebrew letters form two poorly sketched concentric circles spelling out quotations from Proverbs: The outer circle reads, Violence is meat and drink for the treacherous; the inner, The embers of the wicked will be extinguished.

“I found it in the lining of my cape!” Father Carlos shouts. “In my cape! How do you explain that?! How?!”

“Shush!” I say. I take out from my pouch the talisman he gave me the other day. The writing on this new talisman is in the same precise script in some places and in others far less assured, as if executed by someone weakened by disease or too much wine.

When I hand it to Farid, he sniffs at it, then licks. “It looks like your ink,” he signals.

“My ink?!” The solution then descends to me and forces a groan from my gut. I’ve been avoiding the obvious answer. “Carlos, these scribblings have nothing to do with Uncle’s death,” I say. I turn the vellum in my hands, confirm from its texture the identity of the artist responsible. “Come,” I tell the priest.

He and Farid follow me upstairs. Mother is saying prayers in a fragile voice. She stops to glance at me with resigned, heavy eyes. Reza infuses the silence with her glare of righteous disapproval, an expression which Cinfa copies. We rush to my mother’s bedroom. In the secret panel above her door frame, I find the talismans she’s been working on. The micrographic writing is the same.

“I don’t understand,” Father Carlos says.

“She must have overheard your argument with Uncle. She thought she could help. Judgment clouded by worry and grief produces such monstrosities. This last one she must have slipped into your cloak while you were sleeping last night. She’s been taking extract of henbane, cannot write as carefully as normal—nor think with any rigor. I’m sorry. I’m sure she meant no harm. Only to get the book by Solomon Ibn Gabirol which Uncle wanted so badly. In her state, she may even think these talismans will bring her brother back. Two mysteries had woven together. We thought they were one and the same.”

If I had listened to my own words closely, then the mistake I was about to make would not have been made.

Farid, Father Carlos and I go to the store where my family cannot hear us to discuss how we should proceed. After I tell the priest of the identities given Zerubbabel and Queen Esther in Uncle’s personal Haggadah, Farid signals with certain gestures, “We go back to the Estaus Palace and confront the Count of Almira again, force an admission of guilt from him.”

When I translate for the priest, he says, “And if our Count should refuse?”

Farid lifts out from his pouch the most fearsome dagger from his collection, six inches of deathly sharp iron curved like a sickle. He swivels it menacingly under the priest’s nose. “The Count won’t refuse!” he signals. “And why? Because an actor needs his voice. I shall place the tip against his Adam’s apple and core it with a single twist unless he answers us truthfully.”

The priest leans back and pushes Farid’s hand away. To me, he says, “I don’t know what he just said, but I don’t like it. Dona Meneses… She’s more likely to admit the truth.”

“Why, because she’s a woman?” I reply scornfully. “If she’s a secret Jew needing to protect her identity, then she’d have no hesitation ordering her henchmen to chop off our heads!”

“Joanna, the Count’s daughter,” Farid signals. “She will help us.”

“If we can get to her.”

As I translate for Carlos, a knock comes from my mother’s entrance to Temple Street. We rush in, and I open the door to find a round-faced little boy with bulging eyes. He takes a note from his pouch, extends it toward me. “Message,” he says. When I take it from him, he runs off. The note reads:

“Berekiah, meet me on the King’s Road to Sintra, just before Benfica. I will be waiting by the twin water mills rising beyond the ruined Visigothic church. Come alone. Tell not a soul. And come right away. I found out something you need to know about Master Abraham’s death.”

The note is signed in Diego’s slashing script.

Father Carlos takes it from me. After he reads it, he says, “Don’t go, dear boy. It’s still too risky to travel around Lisbon alone.”

The obligation to warn Diego about the smugglers and inform him of their identities weighs on my chest. Perhaps, too, what he has discovered will help me trap Queen Esther and Zerubbabel. “No, I’ll go,” I say. “It’s night, and there’s little else I can do for now.” Turning to Farid, I take his shoulder and spell an apology for my earlier selfishness. I add, “I’ve no intention of going alone, if you’ll gift me with your presence.”

His eyes close and he offers me a bow of agreement. We leave before my family’s supplications become wailings and curses, before Cinfa can fix me fully inside her abandoned eyes.

Farid pauses at home to slip on his father’s sandals.

Friday night deepens with a fierce wind from the east, from accursed Spain. On the road to Sintra, beyond the exposed arches of the Visigothic church, we head down a foot-trodden path toward the abandoned water mills. Their forms are wild and spidery in the moonlight. Five leagues off, Sintra Mountain rises from the horizon like a fallen cloud pointing upward toward an answer beyond reach. Farid sniffs rabbit-like at the air, surveys the landscape. A white hawk circles overhead, ghost-riding currents of air, a creature free of land, beyond history. “Is the attraction of birds that they presage our liberation from this world?” I signal to my friend.

“Perhaps that they both share our journey and escape it,” he gestures. He sniffs around once again. “Deer have passed recently,” he signals. With pensive, cautious movements, he indicates, “And something else.” After a few more steps, he squats, runs his fingers across a streak his deaf-man’s eyes have spotted in the dirt. “Men,” he signals. He points to an impression my vision cannot perceive. “One walking with boots. Heavy, with stomping footsteps.”

“Maybe Diego,” I say.

“Two other men, as well. A small one who creeps. The other hesitant, turning constantly to face around.”

“Now that’s Diego,” I smile. “The others are probably his bodyguards.”

We rush on. A barrel-like shape on the path before the mills takes on angular contours, shifts suddenly. A fallen man condenses in the silver moonlight. Long-haired and broad-shouldered, he drags himself forward like a caterpillar, his right leg apparently wounded and trailing mercilessly behind. His grunts carve agony in the wind- sounds of night.

“The Northerner who emptied Simon from his shell!” Farid signals with a flurry of gestures.

From up close, the dull, thick features of his face are unmistakable. “Yes.”

We stand above him like towers. He is enormous, bulky, like a bull turned human. He lifts himself to his knees. We step back. Our daggers center our fists. A patch of dark wetness soaks into his thigh.

“You killed my friend,” I say. “Why?”

He answers in a foreign tongue which I don’t understand.

“English, French, Dutch…?” I ask.

“Flamenco,” he answers in rough Castilian. “De Bruges.”

Has he had training as a shohet amongst the northern, Ashkenazi Jews? I point to him and ask, “Nuevo Cristiano?”

He laughs in a single exhale. “Viejo,” he replies. He points to himself, whispers, “Muy Viejo Cristiano, very Old Christian.”

“Why did you kill Simon?” To his indecipherable shrug, I hold my foot and ankle to my rear to imitate the stump of a leg. “Porque el?”

A laugh bursts, becomes a cough. His eyes close and he tilts his head to indicate that it was inevitable.

“Dona Meneses?” I ask. “Do you know her?”

He smiles and nods. As I turn to catch a signal of Farid’s, the Fleming leaps for me. His oxen weight topples