Yiddish for Pirates(12)
Soon the lanky towers of the royal palace, the Alcá?ova Castle, rose above the city.
Gotenyu, Moishe was gobsmacked. He’d never seen a city of such vastness.
Me, I’d travelled the sea from fort to raft and had seen much. Still, there is that excitement that builds at the approach of a city. The great hive buzzes with its citizens, the energizing mix of honey, work, romance, shtupping, horse dung and thieves.
The Tagus was filled with grand ships leaving, returning, bringing news of new regions of Africa, bringing gold, spices, textiles and slaves.
You know what they say about being a slave: it’s a terrible job, but at least you have job security.
We entered the city proper, guiding our mules through streets filled with a chaos of traffic. Then Columbus stopped. He began explaining to Moishe how to find his brother’s shop.
“You will travel elsewhere?” Moishe asked.
Columbus had a speech ready, in case history were listening.
“Convey my affectionate greetings and regrets to my brother. Though born a weaver’s son, I would be a man of the greater world and, by Jesu, have been granted this chance. Today, I trade weft for wharf and warp for wave. The gentleman met in the Dom Venéreo Inn has a brother who requires mariners for Iceland and Africa. He who wishes to find his way through the labyrinth of the western seas must first learn the winds of the whale roads and the warm waters of Africa. We sail this same day and so you must present yourself before Bartolomeo with this message: you will help him with his maps in my stead. Perhaps together you will chart the new lands I will find.”
And with that, Columbus turned down an alley and was gone.
We were marooned in the great ocean of the city with nothing but a mule and the empty net of Columbus’s words.
A shaynem dank dir in pupik, as they say. Many thanks to your belly button. Thanks for nothing.
Perhaps not exactly nothing. Mapless, Moishe had travelled in search of maps and those who read them. From the narrow river of his birth, he would soon enter a larger sea. And, takeh, it’s true: what was unmapped for Moishe was maps.
Maps did not lead one to navigate with the eyes only. Reading maps led to following them. Before long, you wanted to be aboard that tiny caravel inscribed on the goatskin sea, blown by the favourable winds of commerce and curiosity, looking with a miniscule telescope at the islands of ink and the monsters that swam about the vague shores beyond.
And the roots of mountains, friable with gold.
Whatever the path, maps led to mariners.
Columbus’s brother, Bartolemeo Colon, lived and worked in a small building bordering on the Jewish quarter of Lisbon. A dun-coloured globe hung from a gibbet sticking out above the door.
A knock and then we were inside the dim room cluttered with books and charts both rolled and laid flat, piled on shelves, tables and the floor. A white-bearded, bent-backed ancient was stooped as if davening—praying—before a large map, dipping the dried-out hook of his nose into the ocean of parchment.
“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.