Where the Bird Sings Best (8 page)

The arrival of the albino lions was taken as an announcement of the arrival of the Messiah. Isaac Abravanel suggested that they might hasten that arrival by adding the voices and magic of the beasts to their daily prayers. They were given lodging, and after midnight, when the doors at both ends of the bridge were locked so that no Israelite could leave the ghetto, in the secret space of the synagogue, the rabbis, in a trance, rocked back and forth more and more rapidly while the lions repeated in their cavernous and powerful voices the invocations and entreaties of the philosopher disguised as a clown. This ceremony was repeated for nine months.

The fortress seemed to sleep, but in reality and without the guards realizing it, it escaped from Venice. Through the power of Kabbalistic words, its matter was frozen, and the astral substance arose out of the stones and human bodies. Invisible, the ghetto traversed the sky like a fleeing star and came to rest next to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

“Yes, Jashe, my daughter,” Sara Luz would say. “May that which we call God bless you. I beg you to believe this and tell it to your future husband, to your children, and to your grandchildren. Every night, for years, the Venice ghetto visited the Holy Land, demanding the arrival of the Messiah. At dawn, when the Marangona, the largest bell in San Marcos, rang, the spectral neighborhood rejoined its empty stones and its cataleptic inhabitants. When the two doors on the bridge were opened, life recovered its normal state.”

Isaac never lost hope and communicated his enthusiasm to the men and the animals: “Tomorrow the world will be fixed.” The divine messenger would unite all religions, impart justice, give them peace, work, health, and felicity. He would lead them back to Israel.

One night, he made so many efforts to hasten the great event, invoked it with such exaggerated fervor, demanded so much of the superior planes, employed such potent enchantments, that an angel appeared before him flashing rays of fury: “Isaac Abravanel, you have upset the equilibrium of the angelic choruses, you have opened in your time and world the door of madness. Just look at what you’ve done!” The magus was transported to the heights, and from there he could see Jewish congregations invaded by divine madmen: David Reubeni, Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, Asher Lämmlein, Mordecai Mokiah, Yankiev Leibowitz Frank, Jacob Querido, Sabbatai Zevi, Miguel Cardoso, and many more. Armies of messiahs spread like the plague, demanding (though they were caught between fervor and rapacity, pride and fear of death) holy wars and betraying their followers.

“Your punishment will be lucidity,” said the angel, just before abandoning him. Isaac collapsed on the pews in the synagogue as if struck by lightning.

“Magic is useless,” he said. “I’ve opened the Fifteenth Arcanum and let the demons loose in our world. I searched using the wrong road. The only hope is for us to reach ourselves, because God is hidden in our hearts. What isn’t done here will not be done in the beyond. No miraculous messenger will come to offer us a homeland. We were expelled from the land so that we would transcend it and inhabit pure spirit, not so that we go on clinging to the roots, to childhood, setting up the past as an ideal future. One day, all humans will be wandering angels who dance through the Universe in luminous freedom. Estrella, Salvador, you two were right, forgive me. I’ve led you away from the true path; I interpreted the words of your dying son badly. He wasn’t addressing them to you but to my madness. Forget about the books, go back to being lions, go on voyaging ceaselessly through all worlds.”

Abravanel, making a superhuman effort, awoke from the illusion that is life and entered the reality of death, bursting into a laugh that was heard many miles away. He died the way all true clowns die: standing on his head.

The Arcavis went back to their old ways, slowly forgetting Hebrew. As her only souvenir of Abravanel, Estrella kept the Tarot deck, while Salvador held on to the wise man’s red shoes. From then on, he and his son and his son’s son and all his descendants used them during performances as an important part of the lion tamer’s costume. They traveled for two centuries through Italy and Greece, Sicily, Egypt, and Turkey. They did it surreptitiously, generation after generation, staying poor, using only their one hundred Spanish words as a language. And in that way, as social outcasts, they could live in peace.

At first, Estrella’s Tarot readings were answers to practical questions: Where is the stolen cow? Will the boyfriend be a good or bad husband? Will the harvest be affected by the weather? Will family members get sick? She kept silent about the rest. After so many years studying the cards, it was easy for her to see when and how the client would die. She hid that power. It was painful and useless to know the future, because nothing could be done to change it.

But despite knowing that, she read her own fortune. When the Thirteenth Arcanum turned up next to the Wheel of Fortune, Power, and The World, Estrella felt a chill. The moment they feared so much, that of the lions’ deaths, had come. She turned over one more card: the House of God. It would be in an earthquake! They were in Smyrna. They fled to Constantinople. There was no earthquake in Smyrna, but there was in Constantinople, and a crevice swallowed the lions. It had been time. Their bodies had stretched, and their hides were almost transparent. Each time they breathed it was so deep the lions seemed to sob. They had practically no animal nature left. They were aged nobles with the humble serenity that comes with the acquisition of self-awareness.

Without lions, the Arcavis had to become merchants, to transport cinnamon and camphor over seas infested with pirates. They had to sell furs, swords, eunuchs, export and import textiles, salt, wine, rice, honey, sheep, horses, pickled fish, perfumes—just about anything. The years went by, as did the births and deaths of Salvadors and Estrellas, but they could never free themselves from nostalgia for their lions. The red shoes, which the men never stopped using, aroused mistrust in their business associates. That outlandish footwear showed them the Arcavis were not normal Jews, and little by little they stopped dealing with them.

The Arcavis found themselves obliged to transport a cargo of prostitutes to China. They sailed from Constantinople intending to cross the Black Sea, disembark on the Caucasus coast, and march across the continent to Shanghai. Unfortunately a storm wrecked them. Salvador did not know how to swim, but since Estrella was a strapping lass of 280 pounds, he simply floated on his back and let her swim, pulling him along by the hair.

To keep despair at bay, Estrella mentally reviewed the seventy-eight cards, which she knew by heart. She swam for two days without stopping. Finally, they washed up on a Crimean beach. Salvador left the water with a thirst for God. He went down on his knees in the sand and tried to pray, only to realize he knew no prayers, that money was occupying Adonai’s space. There was nothing Jewish left in him. He had no definition, no race, and the world was fading away around him to such an extent that his penis was nothing more than a useless bit of skin: he’d been with his wife for more than ten years without a child resembling him being born. Recognizing his sterility, he wept so passionately that he seemed to vomit his liver.

Estrella, tossed among some rocks after her monumental effort, almost dying of fatigue, saw her husband drowned in himself, scrutinizing himself with the anguish of a castrato, not even bothering to find out if she was alive. She used a remnant of energy to extract the violet leather bag from between her bosoms and throw the Tarot, with perfect accuracy, at Salvador’s head. The jolt restored him to reality. He compassionately ran to his wife, his homeland, his identity. He took her in his arms, licked the sand off her face, kissed her hands, caressed her icy body. She did not try to react. She let herself slip, sighing with relief, toward death.

“Now that you have been saved, Salvador, understand that I have to die. God made me enter your life with the sole purpose of showing you how deeply you’d sunk. You were an absurd repetition, a bone without marrow, a man without traditions. Study, seek the Truth, and when you find it, you will see next to it the woman who befits you, the mother of your children.”

He buried the voluminous dead woman right there and with her what little money he had left. Without knowing why, he traveled on foot, to Lithuania, as if pulled by a magnet, begging for food in Jewish communities. One dark night, covered with dust after having walked hundreds of miles, he knocked on the door of Gaon Elijah of Vilna, a great teacher of the Talmud and of Kabbalah.

No one opened the door. He waited five minutes and knocked again. No answer. For half an hour more he knocked. A strong wind was blowing, rustling the leaves of the trees with a metallic whisper. Salvador could hear through all that noise another murmur, also continuous, coming from within the school. It was the sound of human voices lamenting. He pushed the door, which opened easily, and made his way along a frozen corridor. The lamentations grew louder. He passed through several rooms with clean hearths, as if no one, despite it being winter, wanted to use them. The collective sobbing became intense. He went up a staircase and entered a vast salon with pews arranged in synagogue style, where a hundred or so rabbis, seated with their bare feet submerged in pails of icy water, were praying, weeping, tearing their black vestments. In the center of the classroom, so cold that vapor clouds came out of every mouth, on top of a pedestal made of books, there was an open coffin where the body of the great master reposed, as if in sleep.

While they were moaning, the disciples enumerated again and again the merits of the Vilna Gaon or sage:

“You who were a teacher starting at the age of seven.”

“You who in order to study more only slept two hours a day.”

“You who in order to obviate laziness never lit a fire and kept your feet in a pail of icy water.

“You who protected us from the Hasidim, that lying sect that believes in ecstasy and visions, you who studied seven thousand books and taught us to reason.”

Salvador, without anyone’s stopping him, made his way to the dead man; echoing in his ears was not the desolate chanting of the students but Estrella’s last words: “When you find the Truth, you will see next to it the woman who befits you.” Next to Elijah Ben Solomon Zalman, wearing a dress so white it seemed silver to him, was his daughter. Once and for all, even beyond the day of his death, his pounding heart revealed to him, repeating it myriad times, the girl’s name: Luna, Luna, Luna, Luna. Queen of night, essence of all the Estrellas, from woman to woman, the Salvadors had moved toward her, and now, he, face to face with the incarnate dream, could do nothing but give thanks to God for leading him to the end of the road. He walked toward her, clasped her hands and removed them from the casket to draw them to his chest, which was bursting with each heartbeat. Luna immediately knew his name, and when she said it, erasing the pain caused by her father’s death, there arose within her a tremendous joy that brought heat for the first time to that cold world: “Salvador!” In a single glance, they fused their souls, and that meeting, sought after for a thousand years, made the world change.

Another chorus of voices flooded in from outside, bringing with it a jubilant song mixed with laughter and ecstatic shouting. More than two hundred Hasidim, smelling of alcohol and tobacco, followed by robust women and their children, made their peasant boots echo in the lecture hall. The glow from their torches chased away the shadows, and the gray walls became golden. A warm air dissolved the clouds emanating from the open mouths of the rabbis, who were paralyzed by this sacrilege.

The euphoric horde was led by a small but muscular old man crowned with a huge fur hat. Smoking a pipe and staggering, he stopped opposite the Vilna Gaon, waved his arms around, guffawed so loudly the pews shook, rolled back his eyes, and, leaping up, made a kick that sent several of the coffin boards flying.

“Enough with this comedy, Elijah! Through my mouth the voice of Israel Ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, he who knows the secret name of God, speaks to you! I can do nothing; he can do everything. Riding on me, his mount, he has come to show you that you’re mistaken.”

This possessed man raised his hands: the coffin rose in the air and stuck to the ceiling. The peasants applauded, but a painful sigh shook the rabbis. The chief of the drunken mystics paid no attention whatsoever to them and went on hectoring the dead man.

“You anathematized us by having the horn wail as you put out the candles in your school so that our spiritual life would be extinguished along with them. You decreed us cursed by day and night, when we retired and when we got up, when we entered and when we left. You asked God not to pardon or know us. You asked Him to erase our names from the Earth. You forbade people to speak to us or write to us, to help us, or to live under the same roof with us. You insinuated that we should be denounced to the Christian authorities so they could eliminate us. You forgot that we were brothers. You locked the windows and submerged yourself in cold and sleeplessness. You murdered the language of dreams. You gained intelligence, but you lost love. For a month now, you’ve been lying here pretending to be dead. You don’t rot because you are alive but overcome by boredom. Breathe again! Awaken and come dance with us! Joy! Joy! Joy!”

The coffin fell from the ceiling onto the floor and shattered. The Vilna Gaon opened his eyes, looked at his audience, suffered an attack of laughter, stood up, and ran to give his daughter a long embrace, gave Salvador another, blessed them both, danced with the old man and his Hasidim, dragged the rabbis by the beard and made them join in the round. Violins and tambourines were played. Vodka moistened throats. The women brought a white veil and the men a tent and a velvet hat. They covered Salvador’s head with the hat and Luna’s with the veil. The Gaon, seconded by the drunken old man, paused in front of the couple and offered the Bible to the future groom.