Yiddish for Pirates(46)
As the unicorn said to the griffin when Noah built the Ark, “See, I told you there’s nothing to worry about.”
After this, the Sultan was called el chico, the little, or el zogoybi, the unfortunate.
But not to his face.
The royal party returned to Santa Fe, leading a procession of people joyfully singing “Te Deum.” When they entered the central square before the church of Santa María de la Encarnación, the Royals dismounted, knelt, and kissed the torso of a huge cross. “Thanks, God. Let us snog the rood in gratitude.”
Nothing excites more than the potent ragout of power and religion, particularly when accompanied by the tart spices of conquest and expulsion. The gathered crowd wept with pleasure, as did the Cardinal and Master of Santiago and the Duke of Cádiz and all the other grandees who stood there. According to what the Bishop of Leon wrote later, there was no one who did not weep abundantly.
Feh. He wasn’t watching the eyes of the Jews, the conversos, the Marranos, and the Moriscos. They wept tears in disguise, the tears of the disguised, the tears of mourners as spadefuls of earth knock against the coffin, the hollow thud of regret, the sound of ending. Neither Jew nor Muslim, converted or hidden, wanted what they knew would be the inevitable next moves in this bullfight: tercio de muerte toward a Christian Spain.
What was abundant was the jostling of sound and colour, the cheering and kibitzing of the crowd. The streets of Santa Fe were alive with the vivid festival of its people, exuberant with change.
“Ech,” Moishe said. “It’s going to get bad before it gets worse.”
The crowd heaved and swelled like the sea, waves of celebrants frothing toward us then being washed away. Moishe and I began in the square on the far side of the church but soon we were close to its massive doors.
We saw him on the other side of the steps.
“Oy,” Moishe said. “Over there.” It was the unmistakable figure of Christopher Columbus, standing taller and straighter than most, proud and haughty despite the raggle-taggle ongepatshket clothes he was wearing, as if a prince and the shmatte cart of Moishe’s father had had a collision. His vivid blue eyes, his aquiline nose and high cheekbones were the same, yet he now had the wind-knurled face of a sailor. And, though it had been years since we’d seen him, his hair, long and silver, was surely white before its time. We pushed through the crowd and around the steps.
“We had not thought to see you still in this world, Admiral of the Other Side,” Moishe said to him.
“Soon I shall be in the palace of the Great Khan, looking back at you from across the ocean,” he said. “But I did not know they let parrots bring their servants here.”
“In this way, I can say that no man is my master,” Moishe replied. “You, it appears, are still looking for one that will pay you for your service.”
“None but a king or queen,” he said. “And that I hope for soon.” The crowd surged again and for a few moments, we were pulled apart.
“But Miguel Levante,” he said more quietly, “I was not able to thank you for what you did. For the rescue of my life. Since then it has been threatened many more times and I found few as ready to help as you. For that I am in your debt, if not your service.”
Moishe bowed slightly.
“Join me as I sail the Ocean Sea,” Columbus said. “To the Indies. To Cathay. To new worlds and the marvels beyond. To a choice land for the chosen. I wish to repay you with riches and adventure. You shall have gold in a land where gold is the common tongue and—ah—you shall spend it only in contented sighs.”
Certainly, Columbus had no trouble spending words with his gilded tongue. And emes, it was a good thing for it was his only means to worm through the royal earholes and into the moneyed vaults of their pride and imagination.
More than knowledge of the sea, his adventure depended on the guileless confidence and simple optimism that not only would he bump into solid land of one denomination or another—islands, continents, isthmuses, or Asia—but that his incontinent predictions allow him to discover financing.
“How shall we decide if we will go with Columbus on this non-quest to nowhere?” I asked Moishe.
“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?