The Elixir of Immortality Page 7

  Soon every Jew in the city knew the story of the de Espinosa couple. Some of them merrily made fun of the idea that every day Baruch was being cuckolded by his wife. Others pitied him. One or two women felt a sting of jealousy at Marianne’s cavorting. No one doubted the truth of the rumor, given that it had come from a reliable source.

  THE MALICIOUS TALK reached Baruch’s ears. He turned gray in the face and felt unspeakable humiliation. So this was his reward for having founded a Jewish community. He spat on the ground and regretted for a moment that he had gone to the king to secure permission for Jews to live in Lisbon.

  Then his anger turned toward Marianne, for he suspected that she had complained to her uncle Montefiori, that hypocritical rabbi who was always serving up fat moral platitudes to his community while secretly running after whores. Baruch assumed that the rabbi had spread the rumors. At the same time he felt a touch of pity for Marianne, because it occurred to him that from that day forth not a single Jewish man in Lisbon would be able to look at her without recalling the whole story.

  For a moment he contemplated telling off the city’s Jews but he quickly saw that it was already too late. An angry outburst would only make the situation worse. At length he found no other resort for his own peace and position, for the safety of his family and their future, than to swallow his pride and pretend that nothing had happened. Despite the tales, their first child was growing larger and stronger every day within Marianne’s belly, on its way to birth at Lisbon’s royal castle.

  BARUCH FOUND it deeply unfortunate that he had lost his passion for Marianne, who as if in compensation became more fecund than ever. She gave birth to six children, all of whom sprang forth from the nights when Baruch managed to suppress the image of Raimundo that constantly haunted him and overcome his self-loathing so as to carry out with equal speed and reluctance his duty as a husband.

  The couple had three sons in a row, all of them sound and healthy. Marianne brought them up with loving care. Then arrived three daughters, triplets. They died within days. The first stopped breathing only a few moments after her arrival in the world, the second died of colic, the third of anemia.

  After the period of oppressive pregnancy with the girls and the difficult birthing, Marianne’s breasts were stretched full of milk for the dead triplets and she suffered a sort of toxicity that attacked her nervous system. She gradually lost her grip on reality. Baruch suspected that the disturbances of her brain were some sort of inherited dementia. With every passing week Marianne drifted farther away in the labyrinth of her confusion. Toward the end she had lost virtually all memory. The tenderness she had felt for her sons she transferred to small birds, and she spent her days hypnotizing chickens. As soon as she caught sight of Baruch—she was convinced that he was a wind-blown beggar getting ready to set insidious traps and steal the golden eggs laid by her hens—she hissed like a cat, wailed, and flung curses in every direction.

  Baruch felt shame at Marianne’s confused behavior. But instead of seeking a cure, he became ever chillier and displayed an almost total lack of sympathy for his wife.

  When the ladies of the court complained to the king that they could no longer put up with Marianne’s loud shrieks and vulgar tantrums, a chagrined Baruch begged their pardon and promised to deal with the problem without delay.

  He told two of the royal bodyguards to come with him. They tied her to the bed frame and then shut the door to the bedroom. He hired an elderly Jewish woman to come twice a day to clean Marianne, feed her, and speak with her. The two of them discussed chickens, since no other topic was of any interest to the distracted wife of the royal physician.

  During her hours of isolation Marianne was visited by a nightmare in which she stood up from the bed, opened the door, left the room, went out to the henhouse, and found that her darlings were no longer willing to talk to her.

  One morning two months after Baruch had arranged for his wife to be bound to the bed frame, the woman who cared for Marianne discovered that she had disappeared. In consternation she instinctively directed her steps to the henhouse. There lay a dozen headless hens in the dirt. It took a few moments for the woman to locate Marianne hanging under the henhouse roof, a thick rope around her neck. Three soldiers were required to get her rigid body down.

  Baruch felt almost a sense of relief when he heard the news of his wife’s death. He made no effort at any hypocritical pretense of grieving over her demise. Instead of paying attention to the children, he locked himself into his laboratory, leaving strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed. He slept there and took all his meals there. Sometimes he remained in the laboratory for days on end. On one occasion the children overheard him say that the only things that were important to him were the king’s life and his own search for the great secret.

  AFONSO HENRIQUES’S POWERS ebbed in the twilight of his age. He suffered from a mysterious illness that consumed him from inside, spreading out from his spine. His skin became as dry and frail as parchment. He lost his appetite and perspired profusely even at rest.

  The king was no longer capable of riding a horse, a fact that pained him greatly. He had a growing tendency to spend his days lying in bed. Bitter at his diminished capabilities, he spewed out threats against enemies both real and imagined and ordered severe punishments.

  Every morning and evening Baruch had him drink a secret potion made with the head of a turtle, lizard urine, the liver of a guinea pig, and chamomile leaves. But nothing seemed to help.

  One morning Afonso Henriques was clearly in a foul humor.

  “Do you think,” he said in an aggrieved tone, staring at Baruch, “that I’m going to allow myself to be poisoned with these evil-tasting potions? I suspect that you, my own personal physician, are the one who’s making me sick. What proves to me that you’re not in league with my son and my enemies lurking around here in the hopes of laying out my dead body in a coffin?”

  “His Royal Majesty,” Baruch answered with a deep bow, “is well apprised of my loyalty and truthfulness. I am not aware of any such things.”

  “You, Baruch de Espinosa!” The king sat up in bed. “You are either a fool or a knave, or both. You don’t merit the trust I have placed in you my whole life long. I don’t know why I named you my personal physician. You foul Jew, you’re nothing but a simple maker of poisons who wants me dead. But I want you to know that I won’t give you that satisfaction.”

  “Excellency,” Baruch sought to placate him, “I never lose the hope and belief that the king’s health will improve with the help of my medicines and especially of God who works miracles and does the impossible. His Excellency will live a long life, for there is no one who could take the place of His Royal Majesty.”

  “I don’t give a damn for hope and belief from someone like you,” the king bellowed. He ordered Baruch to leave him alone and never to come back.

  AT THE END, everything occurred with impressive suddenness. There was not even time for someone to fetch the cardinal who might have heard Afonso Henriques’s confession, given him absolution, and prepared him for his final journey. There was great consternation when the people were told that the king had died. The castle was full of lamentation, sobbing, and complaint.

  Even Baruch was surprised. But so it is with death. It seizes us with an enigmatic smile when we least expect it. It takes us human beings by surprise in a manner most treacherous.

  BARUCH GRIEVED for the king for a long time. It was as if he had lost a father.

  Until the end of his days, he continued to serve as the personal physician of Sancho, the new king. He supposed that his knowledge made him indispensable. In fact, the continuance was due more to the fact that the new monarch was softhearted, and once when Sancho was a child Baruch had saved the life of the little prince who had eaten too many wild chestnuts.

  THERE ARE CONFLICTING REPORTS of Baruch’s death.

  Amaral’s biography of the king records that Baruch died of a peculiar inherited genetic disease
of the bowels that he is said to have passed on to his three sons.

  My great-uncle was of a different opinion. “Everything goes along fine for a while but at the end madness sets in,” he commented. According to him, Baruch had become fat and sluggish in his old age. He spent all his time seeking some way back into the past. Wrestling with an inner resistance, often increasingly fatigued and disappointed, he sought to reconcile himself with what he had understood to be deadly sins: his deviant sexuality and his failure to love those closest to him. Nearsighted and dazed in his senility, one day Baruch confused two vials. One of them contained the medicine for his intestines and the other was a mixture of poisons requested by King Sancho to use on the unruly Prince Braga. The royal physician died in inexpressible agony.

  My own inclination is to believe my great-uncle’s version just as he told it to us. After all, all of the Spinozas born with the huge nose suffer tragic deaths.

  MY FAMILY HISTORY has been much in my thoughts recently. All of them are dead now: Mother and Father; my twin brother, Sasha; Grandmother and Grandfather; Aunt Ilona and Uncle Carlo. So is my great-uncle, that man who for years inflamed our imaginations with his stories and was the one shining light of our childhood home.

  It’s odd that life teaches us to treasure certain individuals we don’t really appreciate when they’re with us, but whose importance we understand only when we begin to miss them. Maybe I can take comfort in the fact that my indifference to others has diminished over the years—for as long as I can remember, I’ve been insensitive to the lives of others and I’ve been heedless of the needs of those closest to me—and suddenly I find myself focused more on my family than on myself. Now, as my last days on earth inevitably play out and I’ll soon vanish into the shadows, I have only one desire: to pass along the stories I’ve carried within me since childhood and to try to keep those who went before me from vanishing into thin air. I have no intention of accounting for all the generations and generations of the Espinoza family, who shortened their last name to Spinoza at the end of the sixteenth century after fleeing from the Iberian Peninsula to Amsterdam. Not only because I’m not a real writer, a lack of talent that sometimes distresses me deeply, but also because of something that our grandfather taught Sasha and me. Let me try to explain.

  ———

  GRANDFATHER KEPT himself strikingly aloof from the family. Whenever Sasha and I mentioned innocently that the grandfathers of some of our classmates had taken them to Gerbeaud’s for its elegant pastries, he would maintain an icy silence. If we ever brought the matter up directly by asking, “Grandfather, don’t you think you should spoil us just a little bit with some of those wonderful pastries?” then he might respond dryly, “Sugared treats aren’t good for children’s teeth.”

  No, Grandfather had no interest in having us close to him. My twin brother and I knew it all too well, even when we were small. Most of the time he seemed visibly annoyed by our presence; I think that he simply disliked us. Despite that, two things about him made us feel proud to be his grandchildren. Those two things left a deep impression upon me and even to this day I remain profoundly impressed by them.

  1) His elegant appearance: Grandfather took great pains with his personal appearance and was extremely punctilious about dressing correctly. He was a stylish man, clean-shaven, and he had a body of graceful proportions. No one could fail to be impressed by his glowing manly attractiveness. Even young women turned to watch him pass in the street, a gentleman of seventy years of age strolling along unhurriedly in his highly polished shoes, dark blue suit and vest, white shirt, and impeccably knotted blue bow tie with white polka dots. He always had a cane in hand—a malacca cane of bamboo, of course—and he held himself with dignified reserve. His gleaming bald head was hidden beneath a fashionable hat. He had a truly aristocratic air that made him stand out from the gray everyday crowds of socialism.

  I really don’t think that Grandfather would have been capable of neglecting his appearance even under threat of a firing squad. If he had been the last survivor on a desert island with no one to impress, his good upbringing would not have permitted the least touch of slovenliness. As they say in Paris, noblesse oblige. And after all, grandfather was the son of an Austrian princess.

  2) His gift for mathematics: My great-uncle sometimes maintained that only two people in the history of the world have been capable of mentally calculating the products of half a dozen numbers, each of them twenty digits long, in less than two seconds: my grandfather and Albert Einstein. He would offer that piece of information casually, in passing, but with a lightly mocking expression that seemed to imply that the Einstein fellow was really not of the same caliber as our grandfather.

  Only very rarely did Grandfather favor us with a demonstration of his ability to add and multiply with incredible rapidity. But I particularly remember one time toward the end of his life. He was leaning back in his armchair, newspaper in hand, and looked up just as my great-uncle closed the front door behind him. He said, “My boys, Fernando entertains you with a thousand and one tales, each more outlandish than the last. When it comes to storytelling it doesn’t matter if something actually happened or not; it’s the way the story is told. Fernando is entertaining—no one can deny him that—and he’s always telling fascinating stories about your origins. But has he ever said a word about exponential growth?”

  “Exponential growth?” Sasha and I exchanged a bewildered look.

  “Fernando, with all his prattle about the past, has he ever given you a notion of how many ancestors you have?”

  “Well, of course,” Sasha replied immediately. “At least thirty of ’em.”

  “Thirty of them,” Grandfather repeated with a laugh. “Listen to me, boys, and I’ll give you a lesson about exponential growth. Listen closely and think about what I say. I had four grandparents. When we go back five generations, in other words to the era of the French Revolution, the number rises to 120. And back around 1630 I had 16,382 ancestors. If I look even farther back in time to the beginnings of the fourteenth century, that means thirty generations ago, all together I had 1,090,125,824 ancestors. Are you following me? That means that the two of you have had at least 4,360,503,296 ancestors.”

  NO ONE can keep track of all his ancestors. Certainly I cannot, least of all, having so many of them, according to Grandfather. Besides, the great majority of my family members lived lives of no particular distinction. Therefore it’s best for all of us to leave them in peace. I propose to concentrate my efforts on describing a handful of individuals in the great pageant of history, remarkable men and women whose lives and deeds, thanks to the fragmentary accounts of my great-uncle, captured my childish imagination and whose fates at the same time offer new perspectives on the history of Europe.

  THOSE WHO HAVE READ this far in my family narrative will recall that in the year 1158 a rumor spread, reaching far beyond the boundaries of Portugal, that the royal physician Baruch de Espinosa, whose potions could transform spent old men into raging stallions capable of achieving ten orgasms a day, possessed a supernatural power that banished illness and had by careful cultivation produced a medicinal plant that frightened away death.

  ETERNAL LIFE, no less a mystery than love itself, has never ceased to fascinate and confuse humanity. Many doubt its very existence. I therefore intend to reveal to you the great secret, although in fact I am formally forbidden to do so.

  No Spinoza has ever revealed it to anyone—not to a wife, not to his friends, not to his king or his lord—other than his eldest son. Because Moses, the greatest prophet of the Jews, warned Baruch that the secret had to be safeguarded by his children and his children’s children for a thousand years, and as long as his descendants fulfilled their obligations, they would wander with righteous mien among the peoples of the earth and the Lord would watch over them. But should any one of them fail to carry out the Lord’s will, their generations would be obliterated from the earth.

  I have no children and no one to whom
I can entrust the great secret. I am the last of the Spinozas. Soon I will die. I have nothing to lose, for with my passing our family will disappear from the earth anyway, and I have no intention of taking anything with me to the grave.

  My great-uncle taught me most of what I know about the lives of my ancestors. But not even he was initiated in the great secret. It was revealed to me when I read the philosopher Benjamin Spinoza’s book The Elixir of Immortality, which I inherited from my grandfather. The book has been in our family’s possession for more than three hundred years and no outsider has ever been permitted to read it. I myself began the study of it all too late in life.

  Benjamin Spinoza describes the secret plant that holds death at bay. I cite here the philosopher’s words, as carefully chosen as the jewels in the setting of a ring, precisely as they were written:

  The secret plant—Baruch de Espinosa called it “Raimundo” in honor of his deceased friend—is produced by taking citronella, chamomile, St. John’s wort, snowdrops, and similar species and grafting these as close as possible to one another along the root of a Zamia acuminata.

  The site of the grafts is to be carefully watered once every third day with a potion compounded of the liver of a guinea pig, the urine of a lemur, the mixture of Mithridates (consisting of wild thyme, coriander, anis, fennel, and rue), along with theriac (a compound of poppy seed and Drimia maritima, known as sea onion).

  The new plants never live longer than eight months and cannot be transplanted or propagated.

  The plant is dried in the sun for a month, following which a tincture is prepared by soaking the dried leaves for thirty days in a medium containing alcohol. The tincture should be agitated twice each day at intervals of exactly twelve hours. At the conclusion of the month the tincture is filtered through a thick cloth and left to settle for eighteen hours.