“Bartolemeo Colon?” Moishe asked, though surely this rebbe was more like the brother of Columbus’s ancestors.
The alter mensch wheezed a sound between leaves and a handful of phlegm and a young man appeared from behind a tottering shelf. His clear blue eyes revealed him to be the true brother of Columbus and he took us to the small courtyard behind the building.
We sat at a small table and he poured wine from a clay jug.
We were not surprised to learn that Bartholomeo did not actually own the shop but was rather an apprentice to the old man, Angelino Dalorto, a much-celebrated cartographer in his day. We had suspected that Columbus’s art consisted of embellishment, confidence and poetry in equal measure. All codpiece and no cod. All chop with no liver, Indians without India.
A pirate tale without pirates.
Yet.
And Bartholomeo was not surprised that his brother’s path had veered to the sea, that he’d sent Moishe as his proxy.
“My ambitious brother. One day when he is famous, they will say he was a self-made man who loved his creator.”
Chapter Five
We were a week there, amidst the books and charts. Moishe did what he was asked. Sweeping, lifting, carrying. Drawing water, not on maps but only from the well, though he was taught to decipher portolans and to box the compass from Tramontana to Maestro.
We accompanied Bartholomeo on business, learning something of the alleyways of both the city and the language, the mapmaker’s world. The Jews of Lisbon were unlike any Jews that Moishe—Miguel—had seen. With their Moorish hats and bright flowing robes, they lived in their own quarter of the city. Through the Arco do Rosário was a new world: La Judería. Some were immensely wealthy, merchants and bankers living in grand big macher houses. Indeed some were mathematicians, physicians, cartographers, astronomers, or treasurers employed by the court.
What was familiar were the occasional snatches of Hebrew—prayers, oaths and chochma sayings—like flashes of colour from beneath slashed sleeves. But their Ladino language was an alluring and exotic spice, plangent and musical, russet red and nutmeg against the chopped liver and guttural blue breakers of Yiddish.
One Friday evening, Bartholemeo led Moishe into the shop. The old master and his older, more shrivelled twin were sitting in the unsteady light of the guttering Shabbos candles. The man waved for Moishe to sit down. His face was so abundantly cross-hatched with wrinkles, it appeared he had been shattered, the fragments only held together by a scaffolding of wispy beard. Still, there was a twinkling bemusement in his expression, and he spoke to Moishe in Yiddish.
“Bocher,” he said. “You like it here?”
Moishe nodded.
“See? One doesn’t forget the mamaloshen,” the old reb said. “Not like the foreskin.”
The rabbi made a scissors motion.
Moishe inhaled sharply.
“Sha. That’s language you don’t forget either. Now I know for certain you’re a Yid.”
“What made you suspect?”
“Words and how they’re said are maps also. But nisht gedayget—don’t worry—you’re safe. You’re a hindl, a chick, among chickens.”
Miguel had become Moishe again.
“A hindl with a feygeleh—a bird—on his shoulder,” the rebbe mused. “You’re just the boychik for us. We have a bisl job for you. A delivery.”
The mapmaker, sitting beside him, smiled wanly, though it wasn’t clear if he knew what was being said.
The rebbe explained about the Inquisition. “It’s like the old inquisition but worse,” he said. Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers of the combined kingdoms of Castile-León and Aragon, had created a made-in-Spain solution including threatening to withdraw Spanish military support in the war against Turkey—they had received the Pope’s blessing by way of a Papal Bull.
“Ach,” the rebbe said. “It’s still kosher to be a Jew in Spain, if you don’t mind an occasional pogrom. Or to be accused of blood libel or witchcraft, whenever anything goes wrong. Or—as in Seville—you’re ready for the foot-on-tuches invitation to leave your city and all you know.”
Many had converted to Christianity. “But you’d better make sure there’s smoke coming out the chimney on Shabbos, and on Friday, to eat a bisl fish. You want it to look like you’ve had a relapse? That’s heresy. But,” he said, “there’s a cure for that. It’s called death.”
Those converted were called conversos: “New Christians.” Some families had been Christian for over a hundred years, converting after a previous outbreak of pogroms and persecutions. They’d left their Jewishness behind like a distant and half-remembered homeland. Some were more recent graduates. At any moment, the Inquisition might ask you to produce a Limpieza de sangre—documentation of blood purity. It was how many discovered that they had a Jewish great-grandmother or grandfather. This was tantamount to discovering fatal traces of peanuts in your nut-free lunch.