Where the Bird Sings Best (6 page)

The first thing Moishe did was feed them in the kitchen behind the shop. Then he left his wife in charge of the jewelry store and accompanied them to the Jewish neighborhood. After offering them a little money, which Alejandro accepted, kissing Moishe’s hands, he presented them in the offices of the Comité de Bienfaisance Israélite, founded in 1809. There they were treated with maternal care. They were housed for two days in a modest but clean and Kosher boarding house. From there they were sent on to Marseille, where they were put, along with other refugees, on a ship sailing for South America. They were given the only visas anyone could get—Chilean. Teresa knew nothing about Chile, but she was sure that in such a country, located at the end of the world, the citizens did not live in palaces and did not have gold-plated teeth.

If
Teresa got mad at God, it was God who got angry with Jashe, my mother’s mother. And along with God, all the Jews in Lodetz, in Lithuania. Her periods began—with mathematical precision—on the same day as those of Sara Luz, her mother, and of Shoske, her sister, revealing immediately the power to hold back such a sacred phenomenon, the pride of Hasidic women because it confirmed that their bodies were regulated by the same laws as the stars. Far away from the men, they would dance without underwear under the moon to allow the plasma to run down their legs and fertilize the land. Jashe confessed, amid tears and wails of joy, her love for the goy.

While her mother, breaking the law, sold plum brandy to the Jewish bankers, Jashe would stroll the streets of Vilna. For her, the smell of the city was like the most exciting of perfumes. Purely by chance, she ended up in front of the Municipal Theater, where
Swan Lake
was about to be put on by the Imperial Russian Ballet. She’d never seen any theater. Something irresistible made her buy a ticket, the cheapest. Feeling the lecherous stares of beardless Lithuanians with curled side-whiskers, she took her numbered seat in the last row without daring to raise her eyes from the floor. The music exploded, she heard the curtain go up, and then the pattering of steel taps like a confused rain. Little by little, among those uniform tapping feet, she distinguished different ones, coarse and at the same time delicate, in some strange way familiar to her.

A heatwave overwhelmed her belly and forced her to look toward the stage. She did not see the sets, the lights, the dance troupe, or the audience in their seats. All she saw was a gigantic male dancer with skin whiter than marble, with long golden curls, and blue eyes so potent that she could feel them near her face even though he was so far away—thousands of miles from the last row in the balcony, but nearer, much nearer than her own father.

Her sex palpitated with such intensity that, obeying its demands, she got up from her seat and, somewhere between a sleep-walking angel and a burning tree, whipped by an invisible tempest, she looked for the dressing rooms, entered the one that had a crippled Christ nailed to the door, caught the giant naked, and fixed on his member the miraculous gaze that comes only with total surrender. The Russian, himself enraptured, undressed her slowly. That small (Jashe was under five foot four), perfect body, that sex without labia—a docile line crowned by a triangle of savage shadow—engulfed him in such vertigo that for a few seconds the room turned upside-down, and he found himself hung like a chandelier on a floor transformed into a ceiling.

Alejandro Prullansky, without knowing it, had been waiting for this Jewish woman his entire life. Even though he had no experience, even though he had known only the love of men, he knew how to possess her, leading her many times to a state of frenzy on the flower-patterned sofa. Exhausted, he fell asleep in her arms. Jashe, observing his handsome, white foreskin with a tenderness that swelled in her like a river, and knowing she was a prisoner of the Law, ran away without leaving her name or address.

Luckily for the lovebirds, the success of the Imperial Ballet extended the season for several more weeks. My grandfather—first dancer, gold-medal recipient in every competition—was still there, circles under his eyes, desperate, waiting for her. Then Salomón, Jashe’s father, deposited her, pregnant, without luggage or money, right in front of the Municipal Theater. The traitor had been expelled from the village and symbolically buried in the cemetery, for which they filled a coffin with her clothes and personal possessions. Now for a week her family would toss ash on their heads, sit on the floor, and, with torn clothing, drink chicken soup. She would be wept over as if she were really dead.

Alejandro thanked the icon of the Virgin for such a prodigious gift and married Jashe in an Orthodox church, the bride dressed in white and the groom in black, like any Christian couple. With one difference: the groom wore boots of a gaudy red. When my grandmother asked him why he was wearing such scandalous footwear, she learned that the union of their two souls, which seemed like pure chance, had been in preparation for centuries.

As her husband told her the family saga that led him to wear red boots, Jashe too sought out the roots of her love. Led by the memory of her mother, she traveled through time and journeyed all the way to Spain, before the fatal year 1492, when because of that evil, ambitious, thieving witch, Isabel the Catholic—may she lose all her teeth in hell, all but one so it will ache eternally—Jews who did not accept conversion were expelled. Sara Luz, in the middle of the nineteenth century, listened to her father, Salvador Arcavi, lament his fate and curse the kings of Castile and Aragon every single day for depriving them of paradise.

Yes, Spain, before the marriage of those two anti-Semitic monarchs, before the State Police, before the Inquisition, was a paradise for Jews. Muslims and Christians tolerated them. Within the secret zones of their ghettos, free as never before, they practiced their religion. They sought out new paths to satisfy their thirst for that unreachable God. They entered into the text like virulent lovers, and they made it explode, moving vowels around, going mad over numbers, giving an terrible meaning to every letter. They became visionaries, mad men, magicians. They opened interior doors and got lost in the labyrinths of Creation, making their contact with the Torah a personal adventure, assuming the right to interpret everything as they saw fit.

In those good old days, Salvador Arcavi, the first of a long series of Salvadors—traditionally all his descendants had the same name—though respectful of the Holy Book, decided he was not to going to be a prisoner to its letters. Following the prophecy, Jacob made to his son (“Your hand will be on the neck of your enemy. Your father’s sons will bow down to you. Judah is a young lion.”), he became a lion tamer. His way to draw nearer to God was to study those beasts and to live an itinerant life, giving performances in which his union with his animals surpassed the limits of reality and reached the miraculous. The lions jumped through flaming hoops, balanced on the tight rope, danced on their hind legs, climbed up on one another to form a pyramid, spelled out the name of a spectator by choosing wooden letters, and, the greatest test, accepted within their jaws without hurting it the head of the tamer, then dragged him through the sawdust to draw a six-pointed star.

My ancestor had a simple method for making the beasts love him: he never forced them to do anything, and he made their training into a game. Whenever they wanted to eat, he fed them, and if they decided not to eat, he did not insist. If they wanted to sleep, he let them, and if they were rutting, he let them fornicate without distraction. He adopted the rhythm of the animals with care and tenderness. He let his hair grow into a mane, he ate raw meat, and he slept naked in the cage embracing his lions.

One day he found a Spanish girl, Estrella, who, drunk on his beastly aroma, abandoned the Christian religion and followed him so she could give herself to him, lying supine, whenever the animals went into heat. Cubs were born at the same time as human babies. At times, the woman gave her bosom to the tiny carnivores, while her own children crawled toward the teats of the lioness to slake their thirst.

They forgot Hebrew and used a limited Spanish of only a hundred words. The great cats learned most of those words and in turn taught their trainers an extensive range of growls. When rehearsals or shows ended, after dinner, at midnight, in the intimacy of the great cage, humans and animals would sit face to face to stare fixedly into one another’s eyes. In those moments, the lion was the teacher. It was he who was there, present, concentrating, with no interest in the past or the future, united with totality. In his animal body, the divine essence became palpable. The lion taught the Arcavis about economy of gestures, strength in repose, the pleasure of being alive, authenticity of feeling, obedience of oneself. Finally, seeing the nobility of the beast, his majestic inner solitude, they understood why Jacob compared Judah to a lion.

The Kabbalist rabbis of Toledo understood that a new form of biblical interpretation had been born. In silence, with the greatest respect, they entered the cage protected by the miraculous touch of Salvador’s hands. They meditated, staring into the lion’s eyes. They asked permission to bring their brothers in study, and with them came handsome old Arabs dressed in white and pale Catholic monks with sunken, burning eyes. The Koran, the Torah, and the Gospels were eclipsed by those imposing beasts, capable of standing so still that fireflies fleeing from the cold dawn rested on their warm skin, transforming them into phosphorescent statues.

When the first Salvador Arcavi began to die, he asked not to be buried. Instead, his body should be cut into pieces and fed to his lions. Estrella wanted to do it by herself. After the last morsel of her husband disappeared into the animals’ jaws, she went to the river to wash her reddened hands, undressed, stepped into the water, and let herself be carried off by the current. Her son Salvador kept the show going and soon married a good woman. On their wedding day, he changed her name to Estrella, his mother’s name.

The mystics from the three religions continued meditating opposite the lions. The years passed. The political situation changed. Hordes of fanatics began to burn the ghettos. The mystics stopped visiting. The wagons of the lion tamers passed through cities where converted Jews, sentenced to death by the Inquisition, were burning. The thriving communities became sad streets walked by dark rabbis, as circumspect as shadows.

An inexplicable instinct made the Arcavis go to Valencia. As they drew closer to the city gates, they came upon hundreds of families, guarded by soldiers, marching along the road in file upon melancholy file. They could carry little, just a few packages wrapped in embroidered cloth, nothing more. Why more, in any case? They’d been expelled from the country because they refused to convert, and when they reached the gates, the state police stripped them of most of their treasure. Ah, what a terrible year 1492 was! God was punishing them for wanting to plant roots in a land that wasn’t their own—these people whose mission was to wander and to plant the holy Word in all nations—by giving them thieves as their king and queen.

The gold they had honestly saved up for generations would flow into the royal treasury. The only wealth they could remove from the country, without fear of being despoiled, would be the Spanish language:

Holy language
It is you I adore
More than all silver
More than all gold.
Though my holy people
Have been made captive
Because of you, my beloved,
It has been consoled.

They reached Valencia. After painfully handing over their money, the Jews were in no hurry to board ships. As tranquil as a black lake, they slept all squeezed together on the docks and sea walls, ceaselessly praying for the Messiah to come and blast Isabel and Ferdinand. But God’s silence was the only answer they received to their mournful prayers. That multitude could have massacred the few soldiers present, but none of the Jews showed the slightest hint of rebellion. All they did was rock back and forth, chanting their prayers and staring at the heavens: to be humiliated and plundered was normal for them. They had to cut their beards and burn their Talmuds and Torahs. A mountain of burning books sent up sallow clouds.

The Arcavis, to open a path through the impenetrable mob, released the lions from their cages and walked ahead, leading them as if they were domestic dogs. They reached the dock, where the customs officials were shaving the expelled Jews before allowing them to set foot on the precarious boats. Nearby, in the garbage, lay a venerable old man: the officials thought it useless to cut off his beard because he was dying of fatigue, hunger, or sadness. Salvador recognized him. It was the Kabbalist Abramiel, leader of the group who had followed them throughout almost all of Spain, meditating at night opposite the lions. He brought the teat of a lioness to the old man’s mouth and squeezed in a gush of hot milk. Abramiel swallowed eagerly and then poured out a flood of tears that left white lines on his dirty cheeks.

“What sorrow, what shame, what despair! Sorrow because everything is gone with the wind. Even though we know our books by heart, it’s terrible to see them burn. Not for the words within, since we will someday write them down again, but for the pages we loved so much. For centuries, we washed our hands before touching them. They were our intimate friends, our real mothers. How can the flames devour those angels? Shame, because of those who chose to convert, to eat pork, to work on Saturday, not to circumcise their sons—those people are losing the meaning of life. Despair, because what we had achieved—peace among the three religions—has been destroyed, perhaps forever. The sacred books will become justification for murderers.”