My Mother’s Roots
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.