The man, his features distorted with fatigue and excitement, leaned forward and kissed his hand. In my mind’s eye I can still see the image of his dirt-blackened fingers gripping Nasi’s white ones. “What they say of you is true,” the man said. “May the Lord allow you to protect us at all times.”
Nasi smiled at him and led him to the shore. “You’re safe now. Go and warm yourselves. Later you will be accompanied to your lodgings.”
In front of me was the Great Enemy, concerned about people he didn’t know, people he had never seen before, as if they were his children, parents, cousins.
Then I saw the woman and the child. Among the last to disembark; the little one, six or seven years old, clutching his mother’s skirts. They walked cautiously, and there was profound weariness in the woman’s eyes. The child was very fair, and looked around in terror. On the last step, just before they touched dry land, they stumbled.
I leaped forward and gripped the woman’s arm. The child hurried to hide behind her.
The words came to my lips unbidden: “No tened miedo, you are safe.”
The woman thanked me and was helped on her way. I stood where I was, looking out toward the sea, filled with a surge of emotion that swelled my chest and veins. I had just witnessed an ancient scene. I had played my part in a performance that had been going on for centuries, for more than a thousand years.
I felt tears trickling down my cheeks, all the way to my lips, and tasted their bitterness. A hand fell on my shoulder. I still remember the sound of Nasi’s voice, which brought me back to the present, amid all the noise of the ship’s landing.
“Welcome back, Manuel Cardoso.”
7
The window frames the roofs of Cannaregio. I’m sitting at the table, waiting for the servant to bring in the braised meat, but instead Rizzi comes in with his favorite kind of game: well-roasted Jews on a spit.
“They call them Aaron and Asser. They’re young, they’ve just entered the house of catechumens so they can become Christians. One of them’s from the ghetto; the other one’s from Poland.”
A report in tiny, neat handwriting. Rizzi hands it to me smugly. I swallow my mouthful and clear my throat. “Is there anything urgent, Sior Rizzi? Some Jews who have only just come to their senses want to become Christian and live in the grace of God. Nothing too dreadful so far. What else have they been up to?”
“That’s easy. It seems that it’s the fault of this guy, a porter they call the Cunt. He’s set the two catechumens to work and cursed the Madonna.” I nod. Rizzi goes on. “Then that one from the ghetto, on Saturday he gets on his clean Sunday shirt, and he goes around saying as how when he’s a Christian he’ll have a fine set of clothes, and it’ll get him a long way.”
“A cheeky fellow, then. But blasphemy and scandal is none of our business.”
But the cook Rizzi has saved his finest course for the end: “They’re both workshop assistants to a printer from the ghetto. His name’s Zanetti.”
I stand up uneasily; that meat will have to wait. Books and printers are always our business.
Facing Tavosanis and Rizzi, the two of them are on their best behavior. They deny the insults to the saints and the Madonna. They confirm their intention to have themselves baptized, although perhaps not right away. Tavosanis conducts the interrogation. Not badly, but all too predictably. The first boy has ready answers.
“So why did you change your shirt that Saturday?”
“It was dirty, so I put on a clean one.”
“They say that in the house of catechumens you’re always quarrelling with the prior, that you plague him with questions.”
“And where’s the sin in that? I ask him all those questions so I can understand the truth.”
He’s a clever young man; he defends himself well. You don’t need to press such people, you don’t need to keep on at them. Better just to let them talk. Scare them a bit and keep listening.
I tell Rizzi to warm his hands, and gesture to Tavosanis to say that’s enough.
A little while later, we know where the books are hidden. Zanetti didn’t present them to the Office for examination, and that’s enough for confiscation and a bonfire. Three hundred copies of the same text. On the frontispiece, Hebrew characters that I read instinctively, without noticing.
And now here they are, in front of my eyes, in the library of Palazzo Belvedere. Mahzor Sephardim. The collection of rites and prayers of my mother’s people.
In Venice, the name Sephardim had slipped away among my thoughts. Back then I was Emanuele De Zante, Venetian, member of the apostolic Roman Catholic Church, and these were Jewish books. “Sephardim” had a faraway sound, like the name of a remote population of the Caucasus.
“A very rare copy you’re holding in your hands,” said someone behind me. I turned around and recognized the Englishman, Ralph Fitch, dressed as he had been on the evening when I first saw him. He pointed to the shelves around us and said, “Many of these works escaped the flames, the fanaticism that is intoxicating Europe.”
Again I lowered my eyes to the Mahzor. Meanwhile Fitch went on talking, in his singsong, slightly gloomy Italian. I wasn’t listening to him, it was just a sea of syllables, but eventually he stopped and I became aware of the silence.
I looked up again. “Forgive me, you were saying?”
He laughed faintly. “I was saying that this place is precious,” and again he looked around, before adding, “It’s a refuge for runaway books.”
8
I read greedily, as if to satisfy an ancient hunger. Every day I spent in the library was a new apprenticeship on a long trajectory that urged me toward its conclusion.
I looked at the walls filled with books and they seemed to me a mountain I must climb, to glimpse from its summit a horizon I had never seen before.
I thought of my mother and heard in my ears the echo of her voice. Around me, lined up on the shelves, there were volumes that a good Jew should love. Some of them I had struggled through during my schooldays, others I didn’t know, but they all attracted me like treasures. Perhaps fate had chosen an intricate path to fulfill Sarah Cardoso’s last wish.
I soon found myself remastering the Hebrew letters, even if the meaning of what I was reading sometimes escaped me. I found a Hebrew-Latin dictionary, compiled by a Dominican friar, and this discovery helped me considerably.
I started studying the Moreh Nevuchim, the Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides. I realized that I knew the Torah as a donkey knows the carter’s whip. I plunged into the commentaries on the Zohar, which many people held to be equal to the Talmud. Speculations, visions. My mind opened.
I spent whole days in there, while outside it had started snowing again and the garden of the palace was reduced to a narrow passage between white cumulus clouds and icy fountains.
In the morning I was always alone, but during the afternoon, I often met other users of the library, and gradually I began talking to them about what they were reading. Apart from Ralph Fitch, I met a kabbalist called Meir, a poet of Azeri origin and a calligrapher of the Sultan’s, who was devoting his skill to copying out an ancient Mohammedan text.
One day the master of the house came to see me. I was concentrating so hard on the meaning of a sentence that I didn’t notice him entering and suddenly found him standing behind me.
“I see that you like reading, Manuel,” he said, peering at the pages from over my head. “My Aunt Gracia was a keen reader, too. She said that books have only two shortcomings.” He reached out his hand and tapped the cover of a big volume lying on the table. “They’re heavy,” he said. Then he looked up at the walls covered with shelves. “And they need space.”