At dawn I decided to go outside.
10
The brief slumber of the port was already disturbed by traders and stevedores. In the taverns that had just reopened, some people were already knocking back the first spirits of the day, while the whores sweetened their mouths with wine or mulberry syrup.
I walked past two big ships that were loading fabrics, and turned toward the fishing harbor, where I wouldn’t risk meeting Tuota, or guards or informers or Jews, who only hung around the merchant dock.
Piles of cases, full of giltheads and sea bream, obstructed the shore. An old man with only one leg was gutting the carcass of a swordfish. Cats and gulls were taking advantage of the fact to have their breakfast.
I wanted something to drink, but I knew that one wouldn’t be enough, and the second would demand a third, then a fourth, and so on until I was left without a penny, or sitting on the floor in a pool of vomit. I tried to distract myself and think, staring at hands and knives cleaning piles of mussels in the seawater.
It was no use. If I stayed there, outside the inns, surrounded by the smells of rakia and fish, nothing and no one would save me from drunkenness. I trusted my own legs, and my legs, without much hesitation, led me up an alley squashed between white stone houses and inn signs.
The first stretch was all offices of scribes and brokers. Further up, a young carpenter empted a bucket of sawdust at my feet and apologized in Albanian and Turkish.
“Me falni! Affedersiniz!”
I climbed three flights of steps, slippery with moss and salt. Past the church I turned left and through a gap in the wall, up some narrow stairs leading to a wide square terrace. It was the roof of a dye works, crisscrossed with lines where clothes were hung to dry, in a pattern as orderly as a spider’s web. I always remembered them full, sometimes with lots of different colors, others with an infinite range of blues, but that morning they were empty. Perhaps the gray sky and the half-risen sun had persuaded the dyers’ boys to put off their work. I didn’t have to push my way through the fabrics, or hold my breath to keep from inhaling the stench of indigo and pigments. After a few yards I reached the opposite side, facing a green door.
Knives had scraped from the architrave the carving of a seven-branched candelabra and the date: 5256. The mezuzah was still nailed to the right-hand doorpost. New owners had mistaken it for a flower bowl. A bunch of dry buttercups occupied the place of the parchment with the lines from the Shema.
The house of the Cardosos, built by Baltazar with the first money he saved.
Honeysuckle climbed on the wall, all the way up to the window of my room.
The house where I had been born and bred, before moving to the ghetto.
I’ve just turned seven, I’m old enough to recognize human malevolence, and I understand Sarah’s reputation. No one would ever say it to her face, but they see her as a woman not to be trusted. That summer day, I stop chasing lizards, take my courage in both hands and ask her why.
She’s sitting beside the front door, laying aubergines out to dry. The air is still, and droplets of kermes and saffron drip from the fabrics. Her answer leaves me baffled.
“Because I gave you life.”
All I know about my father is what she told me: a sailor, dead at sea a few months before I was born. A goy. A Venetian.
With time, as I grow up, I will understand the suspicion surrounding Sarah. She fornicated several times with a gentile, perhaps a good-for-nothing. She got herself pregnant, then was left on her own, without a husband, without a man by her side—“but with many men around her,” the old women of the ghetto sneered, including the hypocrite Abecassi. Besides, hadn’t she been impregnated by who knows who, years before Manuelito was born? And basically, isn’t she the daughter of who knows who herself? My mother is a devoted and observant woman, but she’s young, beautiful and alone, and such a combination is unforgivable.
At the age of seven, on this terrace, I don’t understand absolutely everything, but I absorb the acrid sap like a plant, a weed grown in a field of sulfur. So, even though I’m part of them, I start to hate the people of the Torah, from which my mother would never want to part. Each arm tied to a stout rope, two teams of mules pulling me in both directions: a child, about to be torn in two.
Shortly afterward, my mother dies and is buried close to my grandmother, in the Jewish cemetery just outside the walls.
Beyond the steeples of the city, the sun rose amidst the clouds, accompanied by a flight of storks. I walked on among the white stones, my eyes low, reading the inscriptions. I couldn’t remember the exact spot. I’d been there several times before, always dragged along by adults, in a ritual that had struck me as macabre and empty.
There’s nothing important about a grave, and hers was all I had left of her. I would have preferred a thousand times more one of the yellow kerchiefs she’d worn on her head, to plunge my face into it and smell once more the perfume of her hair. But Sarah’s few belongings had been sold, down to the last scrap, apart from a little ring that Abecassi had kept for herself.
I looked up at the ghost of the moon and spotted a magpie among the yellow leaves of a lime tree.
You wanted to turn me into a good Jew, so that I would live in the ghetto, among the people who blamed you for having given birth to me. Today my feeling is not very different from theirs. I despise the life you gave me.
Ragusa is full of converted Jews, who pray in the cathedral on Sunday and recite the Shema every evening in their bedrooms. They are rich brokers, merchants; they frequent the noble palaces and recite the great Italian and Croatian poets by heart. I could have become one of them. And instead?
Grandmother Raquel wanted you to be a good Jew, and you weren’t, whore of the gentiles. And yet you wanted the same thing for me. Guess what? I couldn’t do it either.
I denied you. I denied Tuota. I betrayed Consigliere Nordio and was myself betrayed.
Recantation and betrayaclass="underline" Those are my real parents, the only ones I have never renounced.
I stared at the gravestones with a shiver and regretted that Manuel Cardoso wasn’t there too, buried in that ground, along with all the lies that had populated his life. The lies of Sarah, the lies of Old Abecassi, the lies of Emanuele and Gioanbattista De Zante.
My mother’s last words, now that I thought about it, might have been another trick. That stupid old woman had reported them to me, and I had believed her. Perhaps Sarah hadn’t actually wanted me to become a good Jew, and had asked instead that I be baptized a Christian.
Everything was possible, in the darkness that surrounded me, and I was nothing.
For that very reason, I had never hesitated to turn my back on myself. There was nothing true in me to turn it on.
11
Old Abecassi is superstitious.
Almost a year has passed since my mother’s death, a year wasted coming and going between the old woman’s house and the temple, house and temple, house and temple, Abecassi and rabbi, Abecassi and her hag friends. Only every now and then a trip out of the ghetto, to the port, where I can breathe.
My rages are more and more frequent: I kick chairs over, I hurt myself by banging my head against a wall. It lasts for a few furious minutes, and then it stops, everything goes out, and I’m left in a state of lethargy.
One morning Abecassi consults our neighbors, an ancient couple who argue all day and even at night, because everybody knows you need less sleep as you get older, for one fine day you die and you’re going to sleep forever. The shrieks from those neighbors inflame my brain; each time I hope it will be their last quarrel, that they will die soon, but it doesn’t happen. Abecassi plots with them because, as I will discover later, she wants to cure me of my outbursts of rage, and she wants to do it as her mother did, and her grandmother and so on all the way back to the Babylonian captivity. She will cure me with the ritual of indûlko, because old Abecassi is superstitious. She will cure me with indûlko, and she needs the help of the neighbors. They were supposed to go away for a few days — perhaps to stay with the rabbi, their grandson. For indûlko, only two people may stay under the roof: the patient and the wise woman.