A Conversation with Spinoza

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A Conversation with Spinoza

My mother’s name was Hanna Deborah Nunes, and I never knew the name of the place where she was born. I knew for certain that she was born in Portugal, twenty-four years before bringing me into the world. Somewhat earlier she had given birth to Isaac and Miriam.
In the evening, before going to sleep, I could hear my mother’s warm voice singing psalms. Here are the first things I remember: my mother standing beside a window, the light coming in gives a silver glow to the contours of her figure, and she sings something I cannot understand. The next thing I remember is that I have learnt to ask questions. I am asking her all kinds of questions: what is blood, what is a temple, what is Jerusalem, what are servants? And my mother has all the answers. I continue asking her: what is Babylon, what is a willow, what is a harp? Slowly, with that voice, a dream unfolds, and in that unmarked territory between dream and reality, I can hear the voice of my mother singing of the heathens who have invaded God’s inheritance, defiled the holy temple and laid Jerusalem on heaps. In my dream I am beginning to see how the heathens give the dead bodies of God’s servants to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, and the flesh of God’s saints unto the beasts of the earth. I am dreaming how their blood is shed like water round about Jerusalem. Another evening her warm voice is singing about the rivers of Babylon, and once again the dream is rekindled inside me; I see men, women and children sitting beside the rivers of Babylon crying and hanging their harps upon the willows. The warmth of her voice is slowly turning into a warmth created by some kind of sinking, by a total fall into something that is bottomless, and is at the same time something that emerges, something that has no upper limits. My being seems to be turning into a dream that spreads continuously throughout a space with no boundaries.
The house with the orange paint peeling off is our house. There are carob trees in front of our house just as there are carob trees in front of all other houses in our street. In Springl and early summer I would wake up with the smell of carob trees: we, the children, slept in one of the attic rooms that the branches of a blossoming tree touched. Shortly before the carob trees finished flowering, my mother would come to our room, grab the branches and pick the blossom. During the winter she made carob tea for all of us. In wintertime all of us slept in one of the ground-floor rooms where, close to the large red canopied bed in which mother and father slept, there was a fireplace in front of which father often stood. He would move his fingers in a magical way, their elongated shadows projecting onto the wall, symbolizing the fight between David and Goliath, or the suffering of Job, the righteous man. But what we wanted our father to show us most of all through this play of shadows was the Flood — its announcement by God, the building of the arc, the preservation of a pair of every animal species, the rain and the flood itself, the search for land, the arrival on Ararat and their final salvation. Father was engaged in the wood trade, among other things. I remember barges pulling tree trunks along the canals of Amsterdam, later carried to his shop which bore the sign “Michael Spinoza” and which was situated in the street leading to the fish market. Sometime later he abandoned this business, saying it was much easier for him to sell dried fruits, spices and wine.
In the beginning I preferred to stay in the attic room rather than in any other room in the house. I never went out to play with the other children in front of the houses: I just wanted to watch, to be an observer. During the night, if the barking of a dog or a nightmare woke me up (and such nightmares woke me up frequently in my childhood: I saw my mother and father moving away from me, running away from me, but when I caught up with them, they did not recognize me), I would quietly get up, not rousing Miriam, Isaac and Rebecca from their sleep, open the window and look at the stars for a long time. I wanted them to be wormholes through which you could enter into another sky, and from there, from the top of that other sky, to see another city and another Bento wishing, through the window of his own room, he could reach a distant star. The thought of watching myself from above seemed both attractive and repugnant to me. I remember that the big mirror some people brought into our home one day, placing it near the fireplace, took me away from the window completely: instead of watching others, I began looking at myself. I stood bewildered in front of the mirror and became even more bewildered seeing my own bewilderment. I smiled and the smile would turn into laughter. As soon as my laughter subsided, I would touch my face as well as the face reflected in the smooth surface. Mother, lying on the bed even during the day as she was often sick, watched me all the time and told me to go out and play with the other children. I refused; I stood in front of the mirror from morning to night until one day mother told me that the mirror could charm me and swallow me up, and that I might remain imprisoned on the other side forever. After her warning, I would glance at myself in the mirror for a fleeting moment as I passed by, to make sure that I really existed, but for a very brief moment indeed, lest I disappeared into it.
I also remember the first time I visited the synagogue. It was situated in two connecting houses; in the first room there was a fountain where we washed our hands. I remember how the women separated themselves from us and went upstairs to sit on the balcony. I remember how I tried to see them when we entered the main room, and how father gave me a book and told me not to look upwards. Everyone wore white shawls over their caps that came down onto their shoulders and held books in their hands. Four men sat in the central section on a platform three feet higher than floor-level where all of us were sitting. I later learnt their names: Rabbi Mortera, Rabbi David Pardo, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel and Rabbi Isaac Aboab.
Coins were jingling, the scent of cinnamon, dried figs, dates, pepper, apples and quinces mingled together, and the voice of the man who asked for Algerian pipes mixed with my whisper while I was reading something, sitting in the corner of my father’s shop. When there were no customers, father would sit close to me on the floor and say to me:
“You are going to be a rabbi. In two years you’ll start going to school and one day you’ll be a rabbi.”
I turned the pages, I read them slowly but better than my brother, Isaac, who had been going to the Talmud Torah school every day and who had taught me the signs.
“You are going to be a rabbi,” repeated my father every day. One of the rabbis, Mortera, often came to our shop and bought mustard seeds, pepper and tobacco, but never any sweets. Then I would move slowly around him, make circles around the rabbi who twisted his beard between his thumb and index finger, watching me. I just wanted to see how I would look one day when I became a rabbi.
All of a sudden the event that would interrupt my existence and mark the start of my life occurred. It began with the heavy breathing of mother, her exhaustion evident, her whisper addressed to father in the darkness of the night, when they thought that we, the children, were asleep, but I could hear them:
“I’m afraid of falling asleep. I’m afraid that if I fell asleep, I might forget to breathe.”
At that moment all my dreams and my sleep lost their sweetness. I believed that if I tried not to fall asleep, I would help mother not to fall asleep. I was afraid that if I did fall asleep she might also fall asleep and forget to breathe. The fear in me was so strong that I grabbed only brief periods of sleep during the day, when mother was cooking or went to the market. When she returned, saying: “The carob trees have not flowered this year,” I slowly opened my eyes, forgetting what I had just dreamt. Indeed, I kept on forgetting my dreams for virtually the rest of my life.
Soon mother became too weak to go to the market or cook. Miriam took over most of mother’s domestic duties, as well as taking care of her: she made her tea, and put cold and warm compresses on her forehead and chest. Within a few months I saw how a shadow of old age was spreading over Miriam’s face. She was only nine at the time and, besides looking after the house and mother, she had to take care of little Gabriel as well.
“The carob trees have not flowered this year,” repeated mother between two bouts of coughing, between two periods of dozing off on her thick pillow, between two morsels of bread soaked in milk. Soon she began to black out; even when she was awake she looked as if she was sleeping. Her pupils would not remain still, they seemed to vacillate: as if she was staring at a pendulum somewhere on the horizon, following its movements to and fro, again and again. Her powerlessness saddened me in a peculiar way, as if something pungent was poking me inside my chest, and I wanted to cry. It was a pain very much like when you hurt your knee after running and falling, or bite your tongue eating. Something, however, prevented me from crying and froze my voice. I was constantly hanging around the large red canopied bed on which mother was lying. I tried to smile, but my lips trembled. I am still puzzled how a six-year old child like me could act in such a way, trying everything to cheer mother up by whispering parts of the Torah in her ear, or to make her angry by pinching her with my fingers or loudly stomping my feet on the floor close to where her head lay. But she remained motionless most of the time, breathing heavily — only her pupils were moving slightly, wavering to show that she no longer saw anything. One morning, following several days of silence and just after Miriam had given her some food, mother opened her mouth and asked:
“Have the carob trees flowered?”
“It is too late for them to flower now. They’ve skipped this year. Snow has fallen already,” said Miriam, looking out the window. When she turned to mother, she saw that her pupils, the only thing that gave a sign of life to mother’s face, remained still and calm. “Mother,” she cried, and tried to bring her back to life, shaking her arm and sprinkling her face with water. “I’ll go and fetch father. Stay here!” she told me and ran out of the house.

2018-08-21T17:23:25+00:00 July 1st, 2004|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 37|0 Comments