ESAU—A BRIEF RELIGIOUS HISTORY

 

Mayaimi
31 December 1506

My dearest Eliphaz,

When you were small, and I was agile enough to duck, you asked me many questions. Why was I a full head taller than any man in our village? Why did I have a beard when no other man had a single hair on his face? Why was your mother’s skin even and dark, while mine was rough and pale? Why was the penis of your uncle smooth like an eel, while mine was rough with the bumps of a lizard?

These are good people that we live among, the Mayaimi. They have shown me only kindness. They have allowed me to show them knowledge. They have accepted me like a brother, and you like a nephew.

But they are not our people.

You have heard me talk, on the warm full moons when the women and children gather with the men on the shore round the council fire, of a land across the water, a land almost as far away as the rising sun. I will not live to see that sun rise again. Listen to my story.

I was born in a land of three tribes. Not the Calusa, the Jeaga, and the Mayaimi of your homeland, but the Catholics, the Muslims, and the Jews. None of these tribes believe in the Fish Spirit. None of them believe in the Deer Spirit. None believe in the Spirit of the Hunt, the Spirit of the Fire, or the spirits of the thousand wonders your playmates and their mothers and their fathers worship. They believe in a single spirit called God, whose breath takes refuge in every thing that lives on land and in the sea, every pebble and every star.

About everything else, they disagree.

Long ago, the Jews were the most powerful. Then came the Muslims, who learned to live with the Jews, most of the time. Then came the Catholics, who hated everybody—the Muslims, the Jews. They even hated some Catholics.

This is my story. Carry it with you.

I was born a Jew in a city called Córdoba on the banks of the river Guadalquivir. My mother and father, their mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers were Jews of Córdoba. We traced our family back hundreds of years to one of the wisest Jews since creation, Moses the son of Maimon, called Maimonides, and back before him for thousands of years to the first Jews, a father named Abraham and a mother named Sarah.

My father’s family were mapmakers. For generations, the boys followed a tradition. On the Sabbath of his thirteenth birthday, the boy went to the synagogue with the other men of the family, read from the Torah for the first time, and, at sundown, packed a small satchel and floated on a barge downriver to Sevilla, there to board seabound caravels and gonzalos of every shape and size, to pass his dangerous early manhood watching, observing, drawing, memorializing bays and inlets, river valleys and mountain ranges, drafts and currents, planets and stars, mapping the peaks and canyons of exotic women, eating forbidden foods in times of need.

The girls of the family stayed at home, grew to a marriageable age, and waited for the maps to arrive. In neat, precise hands, they copied the maps onto parchment, onto scrolls, in charcoal or in gold leaf, depending on the wealth of the customer. As the only clients for maps were shipowners and traders, my father’s family became very wealthy. Where other Jews felt lucky to own two sets of clothing, my father’s family could change their linen three times a day, 365 days a year, and never wear the same outfit more than four times. Of the five hundred houses of the Judería, they owned two hundred of the finest, decorated in Moorish tile, gold leaf, and imported woods. Of the one hundred streets and alleyways, they owned one third. Fresh flowers filled their windowboxes throughout the year. They traveled, they drew, they did, and they were rewarded.

My mother’s family were thinkers and musicians. My father’s mother called them the shame of the Jews. My mother’s family owned a tavern on the northeast hill, where on Shabbat the most pious men of the barrio gathered for a glass or two of Lágrima Añejo under the pretense of discussing the Mishnah. The tavern was a courtyard, open to the sky, smelling of bougainvillea and roast goat. An arcade of alabaster columns and broken tiles surrounded the courtyard, a puzzle of Moorish stars, sixteen-pointed impossible maps of the sun. A simple fountain defined the center, a shallow stone pool of invisible water, resting on the backs of ten lions. My grandfather told me that the fountain was five hundred years old and the lions even older. He taught me how to melt cooking grease off their manes with the gentle flames of a candle, how to blow the dust from the paws without eroding the ancient nails. He told me the story of the Jew who built the fountain for a nephew of the Caliph of Córdoba, Abd-ar-Rahman III, Protector of the Jews, Beacon of the Umayyads. He told me how the lions stood for the ten lost tribes of Israel, and the invisible pool on their backs the teaching of the prophet Mohammed.

But it was my mother who drew music from the stone, who made the water dance from the spout, made the drops laugh in tiny ripples. I sat at the paws, hiding between two open-jawed heads. I watched her take the breath, I watched her breasts lift high under the coarse wool of her dress, watched them raise the viol up to meet the shaft of the bow. Dry-tongued and open-mouthed as my stone companions, I drank in the most perfect music and wondered when the lions would rise with me on their backs and wander back to Canaan.

My mother was a miracle. A single note from her viol gave the lie to the disputation of a philosopher, the commentary of a rabbi. Starlings hung chirpless in the rafters. The bees in the bougainvillea raised their thoraxes in awe. The fat on the spitted goat caught on the melody and floated above the coals, lest its sizzle disturb the perfection. I could be playing loud, muddy games half a mile down the banks of the Guadalquivir, and a tune from my mother’s viol would guide my feet through the narrow alleys back home.

Though her breasts and her arm figure warmly in my memory of that sound, my mother was only the half of it. The viol itself, or rather its silvery strings, were purely and simply possessed. On the day of my mother’s birth, her father discovered them, by accident, lying wrapped in a goatskin in a narrow channel under a loose stone beside the fountain. No one knew how old they were, no one knew how long they had lain there. But they fit my mother’s viol like the skin on a deer.

There was no explanation.

But let me tell you a story.