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

corner of my eye, I saw Farid tugging Uncle back through the crowd.
    “I’ve asked if you’re a New Christian!” the horseman repeated menacingly.
    The door to the carriage behind him swung open. Silence swept the crowd. Out stepped a thin, delicate man in a violet tunic and bi-coloredleggings, black and white. A ruffled collar of gold silk seemed to offer his gaunt, evil face to me as if on a platter. His black eyes surveyed the crowd as if in search of an innocent to punish. While dangling a hand weighted with twin rings of emerald cabochons the size of almonds, he said in imperious Castilian, “We’ll take him with us. There must be a hospital near the Estaus.”
    The Estaus Palace, a turreted edifice of shimmering stone, played home to noble guests on official visits to Lisbon. “My lord, the new All Saints Hospital is right on Rossio Square,” I said. “Not a hundred yards from your destination.”
    Diego was a bear of a man, over six feet tall, and it took a guard and one of the nobleman’s Moorish-looking drivers to help me lift him. Inside the carriage, a young woman with a peaked, violet tress and a rose-colored silk jupe sat opposite the Castilian nobleman. She was blond, fair-skinned, round-faced. She reached for Diego with stringent concern, looked at me with intelligent eyes burning for an explanation.
    “Attacked by foreign seamen,” I lied.
    Her sudden look of surprise, the impossibility of her desperation, the kinship of her face to my own banished time. A piercing of meaning it was—a shefa ,influx of God’s grace. Akin to a verse of Torah suddenly shedding its clothing and revealing itself in a sparkling of naked understanding.
    By the girl’s side was a pug-nosed dog in a blue and yellow troubadour’s suit. A coffer of silver rested on the crimson floor of the carriage. These last details I only noticed as the Castilian called to his driver to make ready. I surveyed the scene as I often do to imprint life in what Uncle calls my Torah memory, backed away. When the door closed, the nobleman leaned out the window to me and whispered with a wine-scented voice, “Have no fear. Your friend won’t die on this holiday. ” To his two drivers, he called, “Make haste! We’ve a wounded man here!”
    A curiosity akin to dread tugged at my heart as the drivers whipped the horses. Who were these Castilians? Did they know we were secret Jews?! Was the nobleman mocking me or acknowledging his kinship? For a moment, I saw fingers as tiny as a child’s straining in the window of the carriage as it throttled down the street. A curtain lowered, silencing my questions.
    I found Uncle in our courtyard, playing chess with Farid. His prayershawl was neatly folded in his lap and topped with his phylacteries. After I explained what happened with Diego and the Castilian nobleman , he looked up at me and said, “Before my forces are decimated by this heathen’s let us get to the hospital and make sure Diego is treated right.”
    Farid read his lips and grinned. Uncle and I wanted to change into street clothes, and as we entered the kitchen I enquired about what he meant about the attack on Diego being planned. By way of reply, he asked, “What lives for centuries but can still die before its own birth?”
    I rolled my eyes and said, “No riddles, just an answer.”
    He frowned and marched to his room.
    A week later, I came upon the answer to Uncle’s paradox. Had I understood earlier, could I have changed our leaden destiny to gold?
     
    My master and I chose a route along the river because the shifting wind was now punishing us with the odor of one of the municipal dungheaps beyond the city’s crenelated walls. The public cemeteries were full, and as of late, dead African slaves had been tossed on top of the heaps. What the vultures and wolves couldn’t pick quickly enough putrefied and mixed with excrement into a nightmare smell that burned into your skin and bones like an unseen acid.
    As we passed