Lisbon # 7: Liebres
Three
groups that don’t believe in coincidence: mystically bent fundamentalists, New
Age practitioners, and homicide detectives. In most regards I am a skeptic. Chance is chance
and effects have rational causes. Post
hoc does not imply propter hoc.
Or does it
. . . .?
A nice day.
We’re pretty well finished in the Torre de Tombo archives. Linda and I go for a
morning walk up to Lisbon’s castle and down through the old Aljama district.
Two o’clock, famished, we slip into a tiny restaurant on a tiny plaza, chosen
pretty much at random. It’s a poor neighborhood, picturesque only in a
borderline seedy sort of way. It’s two or three steep streets away from the
tourist track. Also, the street is under construction. Not the sort of place a
non-resident would be likely to come to other than by accident. For ten minutes
we are the only customers. Then a couple comes in, sits down, and, like we,
chatters away. For some reason, even though this is Portugal Linda and I
generally speak Spanish when we’re out and about. Turns out the ot
her couple is
Spanish, on vacation for a few days from Santander. They peer at our table and ask
us what we are having (smoked salmon with asparagus; lamb chops grilled with
rosemary). A couple of minutes and we are lunchtime friends.
“Are you here on vacation too?”
“Well, not entirely,” we answer. “We’ve
been doing some historical research at the Torre de Tombo.”
“What sorts of things?”
The recurrent dilemma: respond in
ten words that we’re trying to trace the antecedents of some Mexican families,
or tell them enough to understand why what we’re seeking is so fascinating.
Angel keeps asking leading questions, so I get drawn into it. Mexico, the Inquisition, mining towns, silver,
the mercury trade. It’s clear that they figure us for Mexicans.
“Azogue, right? Do you know that most of the mercury came from
Spain, from Almadén?”
“Yes,” I answer, “but then when the
deposits at Huancavelica were developed, a lot of azogue was shipped to Mexico
from the Andes. A little from Bohemia, too. The Hapsburgs controlled all three sources.”
“Four. Some of the mercury came
from Teruel, too: the Real Mina de Azogue.”
“I didn’t know that,” I told him. In
fact, I’d never heard of it, never seen it in the literature. I was dumbfounded:
how the hell had two aficionados of the Renaissance mercury network happened to
choose the same restaurant in the Alfama to have lunch in?
To make a long story short (“Hah!”
says Linda), we exchanged e-mails, and by nightfall Ángel Trujillano had
sent me fourteen files of his research notes on Potosí, Huancavelica, Bartolomé
de Medina (the guy who discovered how to refine silver by amalgamating the ore
with mercury), and similar matters. Donde
menos se piensa, salta la liebre (Where you least expect it, out pops the
rabbit).
Still shaking our heads at the
coincidence, we go home to find an email invitation for later that evening.
It’s from Roberto Bachmann, the President of the Portuguese Association of
Jewish Studies, who’d heard on the grapevine that we were in town and wanted to
meet us. Bachmann is a successful businessman (real estate), and his wife Graça
is a noted architect and designer. We had seen her name a couple of days
earlier on a monument in the Praza de São Domingos memorializing Lisbon’s Jews.
We had heard that Roberto was a passionate bibliophile, and that he and Graça
had the resources to make his collection significant.
At 9:30, in our nicer clothes (not
jeans, for a change) we take the elevator to the 15th floor of an
apartment building on the posh side of town. Roberto and Graça are charming
hosts, and over tea and almond-crusted marzipan crescents they pump us about
our interests and activities. He has read my Secrecy and Deceit, so he is not interviewing cold. Tea finished,
the preliminaries over, he leads us past inlaid antique furniture and
Renaissance paintings to his book room to tour us through some of the
highlights of his collection. It soon becomes evident why the room is secured
like a bank vault. His collection rivals those of the best research libraries
in which we’ve been privileged to work. On one shelf, bound in leather, are
first editions of every 17th- and 18th-century Portuguese
Auto-da-fe sermon that was ever printed. First editions of major literary works
crowd the shelves. That’s Major, capital M. Among them is a first edition of
Camões’ Os Lusiadas; if you don’t do
Portuguese, think Shakespeare, or Cervantes. There are rare books of Jewish
philosophy from Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Ferrara. The basic philosophical texts
of the era of the expulsions, most of them in 1st, 2nd,
and 3rd editions in Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish . . . Anti-Semitic diatribes, instruction books for
inquisitors, prayer books for proselytizing to Marranos, justifications of 16th-century
racial laws. Books for, about, and by converts. If it is rare, and the subject
matter is relevant to Portuguese Jews and converts, its first edition is in
that vault.
After a dazzling hour or so Roberto
takes us to a small private elevator for the ride to his bookroom on the 16th
floor. The building officially has only only15 floors, he’s had a penthouse
library, study, and bedroom erected on the 16th. The bedroom is for
scholars who come to work for a while in the collection. He names several
people I know and have great respect for, who have been his guests. Immediately
my mind fills with projects to which it would be fun to dedicate a year or two,
and how nice it would be to spend that much time in Lisbon, a city that Linda
and I have come to like very much.
Graça, who has to work the next
day, slips off to bed at 11:30. We make noises about leaving, but Roberto has
just a few more books to show us. At 12:15 their maid comes up in the elevator
to the 16th non-floor and explains that Graça has asked her to tell
him that . . . .
Reluctantly Roberto leads us toward
the elevator. But, of course, by a circuitous route.
“We’ll go right down. But you have
to see these engravings, first impressions, of all of the major Jewish
philosophers of the Renaissance.”
I recognize the portraits of
Menasseh ben Israel and Spinoza that I have often seen reproduced in books.
“And medals. Did you know that familiars of
the Inquisition, here in Portugal and in Spain too, used to wear these
identifying medals on their cloaks and around their necks?”
No, actually, I didn’t know that.
Probably because I’d never seen one or read about them before.
“This one,” he hands it to me: it’s
the largest of the bunch, and in gold, “belonged to the king.”
At 12:30 we finally bid our adieus,
promising to send each other book
s and information about publications during
the past few years that we each seem to have missed making note of.
There’s no money in scholarship,
but what with the thrill of discovery, the pretext for travel, the delight that
comes from spending an evening with people like Roberto and Graça Bachmann, and
that jumping rabbit, it isn’t a bad life.
David & Linda
