The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler Read Free Book Online Page A

removed my skullcap, I spotted Aunt Esther kneeling over our friend, Diego the printer. He was moaning. Blood was spilling from a gash on his bearded chin into her hands.

Chapter II
    Diego the printer was the first to contribute to the river of blood which would, over the next few days, lead us into a desert landscape bordered everywhere by grief. But at the time, this geography of death was still a secret from us.
    Streams of sweat stained his temples and cheeks with a residue of the city’s endless dust. Blood sluiced over his neck from the gash at his chin. Coughing, he fought for breath. “I was walking here…just walking ,” he said in Portuguese. “By the river, I stopped by the Kings Well to wash my hands.” Aunt Esther unbuttoned the top of his crusted doublet , cleaned his chest with fabric rent from her blouse. I noticed the brown line of an old scar on his chest, just under his collar bone, almost as if a worm had burrowed there.
    Around us, neighbors were beginning to gather now, to whisper together. “Two boys…” Diego continued, “…they yelled that I was poisoning the well with an essence of plague. They ran after me. I fell. They threw stones. ‘Get the long-tailed rabbi! Get the long…’ A swarthy man in a blue cape saved me. Tall, strong…”
    In Diego’s desperation, his last words sought the comfort of Hebrew. “Speak Portuguese,” I whispered to him as we laid him back onto the cobbles.
    Diego’s turban slipped off, and I saw for the first time the wisps of thinning gray hair over his ears, the brown birthmarks dotting his scalp. A folded paper dropped free as well. Believing it might contain a personal message or a prayer formula which would incriminate him as a practicing Jew, I snatched it up, hid it in the large drawstring pouch Ikeep around my neck and which functions as a kind of knapsack. Judah brushed against me, icy with fear, and I had to shake him to get him to run to Dr. Montesinhos. Uncle had joined us, and, after a rushed prayer, said, “I’m going inside to see what medication I can find.”
    I tried to hold Diego’s gash closed by pressing my finger into Esthers makeshift bandage, but soon the linen was soaked crimson. Esther ran off for clean water as I substituted cloth ripped from my shirt. Uncle arrived with Farid. They carried extracts of comfrey and bayberry and geranium, sizings and bole, gum arabic and sulfur water. But none of the styptics could effect a clotting. “It’s his accursed beard!” Uncle grumbled. “I can’t get to the wound.” He told Diego, “Dr. Montesinhos is going to have to shave you.”
    Diego, who was from the Jewish priestly caste of Levi, pushed us away when he heard that. “I won’t allow it!” he shouted in Hebrew. “I must have my beard. It is forbidden to…”
    “There are Levites without beards,” I pointed out, but Diego simply moaned. I turned to Uncle, whispered, “An attack in daylight. It’s a bad sign. A few more weeks of drought and…”
    “How can you be sure it wasn’t planned?” Uncle demanded angrily.
    I began to ask what he meant, but a shadow crossing over us halted my words. Two horsemen leading a white and gold carriage glared at us from above. Silver morions and greaves gleamed in the sunlight. Scarlet and green pennons decorated with the King’s armored spheres flapped in the dry breeze. “What in God’s name is the disturbance?!” one demanded gruffly.
    It was then that I noticed that my master was still in his prayer garb, a white and blue shawl over his shoulders, his left arm circled by the straps of his phylacteries, a leather prayer box on his forehead above his spiritual eye. For such an infringement, he could have been exiled as a slave to Portuguese Africa. Behind my back, I signalled to Farid in our language of hands to spirit him away. “A man has been hurt,” I said.
    “Are you a New Christian?!” the horseman demanded.
    My heart boomed as if to force a denial. Out of the