“The same nothing that is not stopping us is what we have to lose,” Moishe said.
We had no script. Moishe was already a pawn who’d stepped beyond the chessboard when he’d left the shtetl and went beyond the Pale. But nu, beyond the beyond is still the beyond: perhaps an antipodean world, a world turned upside down, not converso, but inverted, where even a pawn could be king, the Jew, a citizen, and where “the land’s the limit,” the tsitskehs-over-tuches birds would say. For Moishe had discovered this craven old world to be built on a foundation of blood and hatred, on power and suffering, on bile and gout. Was it possible that we could leave this world behind and all its kishka-twisting memories, nothing but the bitter taste of its language in our mouths?
“I won’t leave before I save Sarah, the Do?a and the hidden Jews who I promised to save,” Moishe said. A tree grows even after an axe is sunk into its young trunk. Sometimes it raises it high. Moishe, the boychik, the blade.
For now, we went with Columbus into a soldiers’ tavern—they were all soldiers’ taverns in Santa Fe—and turned, not the world, but the wine upside down.
He had a proposal. He would address the niggling matter of funding and we would retrace our route back to his brother. There we would receive maps from Bartolomeo and return with a package. What was it?
A book, but Columbus was vague.
Sha. What’s ever gone wrong with a book?
But he had been granted a small stipend from Isabella, perhaps only to dissuade him from seeking sponsorship from the King of France or Portugal. He offered to lighten our load with some of this silver.
Was it a good idea? Ach, ask the silver.
Our plan. First, steal a horse. Next, steal away to Lisbon.
Chapter Five
Several months later: returned from Portugal, we crept into Granada, prodigal rats skulking up a gangplank. Columbus would not be in the city until some weeks hence. He was tilting not at windmills but at moneybags, hoping that if he pricked them right, they’d plotz gold for the voyage.
Moneybags east and west:
Luis de Santángel, a converso from Aragon.
Francisco Pi?elo, a Genoese living in Castile.
And from the church: not blood from a stone, but gold from atonements: indulgences sold for profit could raise more than half the necessary millions of maravedis. Columbus also ran at full tilt toward friends who dealt not in Sunday goodness but in sundry goods, such as slaves.
So what had happened since we were away?
Gornisht. Nothing important.
Some months had passed.
So, nu. They passed. It’s a life.
In March, Ferdinand and Isabella had signed a decree. The Jews of Spain must leave by the end of July.
Or turn Christian.
As if that were as simple as converting from imperial to metric.
After their Catholicizing, Jew-spitting majesties had so decreed at the Alhambra, itself now converted, Don Isaac Abravanel, a Jew who had been both their advisor, tax farmer, money lender and treasurer, offered them more than a Shylock’s-weight in gold to rescind the law. They were considering the plenty of his plea, when the Queen’s own confessor, none other than the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada himself, strode in, a righteous and red-caped storm, a cross in his fist.
You should know: He was descended from Jews. So, nu. We all have our cross to bear.
Torquemada was unger bluzen angry and his brain boiled with the fury of a witch’s unbaptized brew cooking over hellfire. He looked at Abravanel, bargaining before Los Reyes Católicos and shouted, “I wouldn’t piss in his traitorous mouth if his soul was on fire.” Then he hissed at the Queen, “Judas sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Now you would sell him again?” He pitched the cross across the room. It hit Isabella in the head.
And so, the Queen bled blue, the Edict stood, and the Jews had to leave or change from Yiddishe maggots to Christ-fearing flies.
Did Abravanel change his tune when the piper refused his money?
“Don Isaac,” Isabella said, “since you have been of great service and are much loved, we would consent for you to remain in our kingdom as a Jew. We would allow nine others to remain with you to pray before your God as required by your faith.”
Bowing deeply before the Queen, Abravanel advised her of his intention to travel to Naples but, ever the wheeler-dealer schacher-macher, on the way out he bargained for two extra days for the Jews in Spain and then for lenience in what they could take with them.
The Great Expectorators, Ferdinand and Isabella. They were surprised how many Jews chose to leave. Certainly, many Jews converted, especially those who had a well-heeled leg up. Who would step down and walk away from such privilege?
Some.
Abravenel, for example.