swings closer. A glint of metal. An arm raised. When it falls, Diego melts to the cobbles. A sound like the knocking of Simon’s gloved fist on our door is carried to me by the dry wind. It is unable to reach the gates of my compassion.
Farid, who has been running behind me, holds out a hand as I slow to a walk. He signals, “Who was…”
“One of Dona Meneses’ killers,” I answer. “He was waiting for Diego. He had orders not to strike until midnight just like we asked.” I take out a few of the sapphire and emerald beads left from Dona Meneses’ necklace. “But I changed the timing.”
“You paid for him to kill Diego?!”
“He would have anyway. But I couldn’t risk the wait. May God forgive me.”
I cup the noblewoman’s beads in my hand. “It only took one to convince him to kill Diego right away,” I say. “A Jew’s life, a man’s life, costs almost nothing.”
Approaching Diego on wary feet, we find him clutching his volumes of Plato. A line of blood runs from the corner of his mouth toward a speckled lizard asleep inside a crack in the cobbles. In his pouch is the vellum plate of Haman.
Inside a timeless silence, we watch the body as if we are facing an empty Torah ark that will never be filled. When I awake to myself, I step into the light of a candelabrum centering a nearby window and study Uncle’s drawing. Yes, Haman is Diego. There is no mistake.
A shiver snakes up my spine as I consider that Uncle’s last act of artistic creation was to illuminate the face of his own killer.
In the panel, Diego-Haman is a stooped and vulturine figure with an unmistakable line of scar across his chin. He is pictured whispering in King Ahasuerus’ ear of his desire to exterminate the Jews. In his left, claw-like hand, he clutches a shimmering portion of the ten thousand talents of silver which he has promised to give to the royal treasury in exchange for approval to carry out his monstrous plan. In his right hand, at the same moment, he is receiving the royal signet ring from the King, a sign of permission granted.
The deal has been made.
Queen Esther is not pictured in the panel. But her step-father, Mordecai, is there. He stands humbly in the corner, in the sackcloth of mourning with which he clothed himself upon hearing of the decree for his people’s destruction. His pose is one of pride, however, and his expression is wily, almost humorous. Undoubtedly because he holds in front of his chest the noose with which Haman will later be hanged. A spark of emerald passion in his eyes convinces me that Mordecai is modeled on Uncle himself.
Farid squeezes my arm, points to the drawing and signals, “It’s you.”
“What is?”
“The man in the corner. The one with the noose. Mordecai.”
The pounding of my heart comes wild and forlorn. Could Farid be right? It doesn’t seem possible that Uncle could illuminate me as the savior of the Jews. And the Mordecai pictured is simply too old.
My hands clutch the vellum. Tears come to my eyes when I consider that he may have gifted me with the guise of a Jewish hero.
So many questions I should have asked him will never be answered.
My glance is drawn into the sky by a moonlit sea gull crossing the night. Mosquitoes buzz at my ears as if seeking entry to my thoughts. My Hebrew prayer for Diego’s peace, for the world’s peace, comes edged with the texture of Uncle’s hand squeezing hard at the back of my neck, then dropping away. His movement toward forever absence is so immediate that I gasp and turn around. My eyes survey the empty street until they reach the moist emerald light of two candles guarding over me from the highest window on the block.
BOOK THREE
Chapter XXI
In the vacant world beyond Diego’s death, I slept for days on end. Behind the locked doors and sealed windows of my bedroom, inside a stifling atmosphere scented with my own rot. I got up from my bed again only when a vision of Joanna, the Count’s daughter, descended like a silk veil across my face. Her eyes shimmered with the reflective grace of pearls, and she whispered to me in a language beyond understanding. Summoned into the night, my feet took me along the lumbering walls of Lisbon until a destination became obvious. I found myself howling up at what I hoped was her window at the Estaus Palace.
A dwarf with tufted hair opened his shutters. “I’ll have you castrated if you don’t stop your cock crows!” he cried.
“I’m searching for Dona Joanna, the Count of Almira’s daughter,” I explained.
“Not here!” he frowned. His shutters banged closed.
The putrid stench of dungheaps stalked me all the way home. Craving the void of
“I cannot stay long,” she said. Her eyes were glassy, as if tears might gush in them at any moment. “Have you been ill?” she asked in a hesitant voice.
“Yes,” I said, sitting up. “I suppose so. Where have you been? I came looking for you.”
“Here, in Lisbon, but I dared not come before now.”
“I have never wanted a woman as much as I want you now,” I confessed. “It’s as if only you can heal me… or save me.”
She sat at the edge of my bed and pressed the delicacy of her tiny, deformed hand to my lips. I was about to beg her to stay with me forever, but she shook her head as if I must not profane the silence between us. She began to unlace her dress. I was already naked. When she lay down beside me and opened her arms, I buried myself in her.
Walled inside her warmth, defended by the softness of her body, a tautness akin to prison rope snapped inside me and I was crying in a voice from so deep in me that it seemed to rip at my bowels. Joanna whispered, “I cannot stay. I am betrothed to another. Do not wait for me. I leave Lisbon tomorrow. Forgive me and forget me.”
When the balm of her fingertips dropped from my cheek, she said again, “Do not wait for me. Do not withhold your love from the next one…”
In my hand, she left behind her pearl necklace.
When loved ones depart forever, all that remains is the light from their eyes trapped in their jewelry. Beyond memory, it is the only souvenir we ever keep.
Madness: if it doesn’t swallow you whole, it may one day loosen its jaws from around your neck. Yet something—or someone—must help tug you free.
When I emerged in the morning, empty of Joanna, Farid read what had happened in my eyes. He dragged me to the Maidenhead Inn. For several months, I lived there, inside the warmth of Lisbon’s temptresses, waiting no longer, clawing and thrusting my way into their life in order to retrieve my own. Farid paid, though from where he got the money I do not know. Maybe he sold some of Dona Meneses’ sapphire and emerald beads; there were only three left when we finally bid goodbye to the Judiaria Pequena.
The miracle, of course, is that none of the diseases of brothels erupted inside me. Perhaps it takes a heart willing to suffer love to know such illnesses.
When I wasn’t nestling inside a woman or squeezing the liquid arc of a wineskin into my mouth, I walked. Once as far as the amber hills above Mafra. Along the scorched dirt roads, I stopped to recite to myself each of the five books of the Torah: Genesis before the temple of Mount Abraham near Belas; Exodus under the bridge of a fallen pine tree beyond Montelavar; Leviticus over a Roman mosaic in Odrinhas; Numbers while balancing on a limb
