The sea suddenly became choppy. The ship began to waltz up and down. The waves got bigger and bigger. Black clouds came down from the center of heaven, and a powerful wind whistled words that, even though no one understood them, cut off people’s breath and crushed their hearts. A pirate leaped toward Abravanel, waving his scimitar. An invisible hand threw him against the mast with such rude force that his split skull spit out his brains.
“Release my brothers or the ship sinks!” bellowed the old man, surrounded by a greenish mist and looking like a demon.
This part of the story, even though she heard it directly from her mother when she was small, always seemed incredible to Jashe. She wanted to know about the real life of her ancestors, not a fairy tale or a biblical story. But Sara Luz, smiling, explained that the past was a continuous invention, that every character in her family tree was like a stone that with the passage of years, from telling to telling, rose until it reached the sky and shone like a star to give a light sweeter than sugar.
“All the people in your family, my child, will, by the end of time, be converted into champions, heroes, geniuses, and saints. Treat them as if they were savings boxes and day after day deposit in them the treasure of your fervent imagination. Which would you like better, a miserable old man burnt to a crisp in a bonfire or a magician? Let him board the ship so that when the storm breaks, the Moors become terrified and beg for mercy on their knees! Accept the fact that the prisoners will disembark in Nice. Isaac the Wise, disenchanted with philosophy, will dress up as a clown and accept the wandering life of the lion tamers. Estrella will become pregnant and give birth to two boys. This time it’s no miracle: Salvador acquired the wisdom of the lions. When the red-hot blade touches him, he withdraws his testicles into his belly, so only the scrotum is burned.”
Doing their lion acts, card readings, with comic interludes by Abravanel, they traveled the Mediterranean coast from France to Italy. When they reached Padua, the plague robbed them of one of the twins. The little boy, who did not know how to read or write, whispered in perfect Hebrew before yielding his spirit, “Wisdom above all; acquire wisdom. Make it great, and it will make you great. It will confer an adornment of grace to your head, a crown of beauty will it yield you.”
Isaac closed his eyes and his mouth as he murmured with restrained euphoria, “He recited the last verses of the fourth chapter of the Book of Proverbs! This illiterate child died a saint! Hallelujah!” And with patient work, in short sentences and growls, he translated their son’s message to his desolate parents. “Do you understand, my friends? The child asked you to learn to read our sacred books. It’s time to leave off speaking like beasts. Recover your human intelligence.” After the lions ate the small body, Salvador and Estrella took their first Hebrew lesson. They stayed on for seven years, putting on shows in Verona, Bassano, Rovereto, etcetera. By the time they reached Venice, they knew how to read and write. Like them, the lions also spoke Hebrew correctly.
“Yes, Jashe,” said her mother with severity. “The lions learned to speak Hebrew. If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding light to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.
The Venice ghetto, which could only be entered by way of a bridge with guarded doors at both ends, looked from the outside like a great fortress with all its exits blocked and its windows sealed. The Arcavis and Abravanel entered that tenebrous neighborhood. They found clean streets populated by tranquil Jews, their heads covered with the obligatory yellow yarmulkes. The luminous color emerging from their tallises made them look like a field of sunflowers.
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.”