Consolaçam 5

By Ron Singer

Chapter Five.

Chani’s narrative went all the way back to the year 5239 [1478], when she was thirteen. The beginnings of the story shed light on her frequent absences from our household. Disgusted by our father’s plan to affiance her to a rich merchant, who was “at least forty,” she became romantically involved with a married man —also rich, also older— who owned a business (she did not specify what type) in Toledo. This, presumably, was the “somewhere up north” to which my parents were always alluding.

The man in Toledo kept his young mistress dangling for several years, with a promise to divorce his wife, and to marry her (Chani). When Granada fell to Isabella and Ferdinand, in 1492, and her lover and his wife became conversos, my sister finally abandoned her fantasy —and him.

At that point, she confessed, rather than return to the family, with its own uncertain fortunes, Chani took up with a string of what sounded like young adventurers. These men were a heterodox bunch, some, Christian, some, Muslim, and some, Jewish. What they had in common, as my sister gradually came to realize, was unreliability. One day, they would swear eternal love and the next day, disappear in pursuit of some new chimera, or other. The worst of these adventurers would return, live off my sister’s earnings for a time, then be off again.

Within another couple of years (Chani’s time sense has always been vague), having tired of undependable men, she somehow found the means to achieve financial independence. She was very vague about these “means.” When I pressed her on the point, her replies made me think that she may have been selling some kind of contraband, such as unlicensed imports from Asia, or Africa. Or could she have been a courtesan, or even a prostitute? As I knew, the caravanserai between Edirne and Selânik are full of loose women and their procurers (as are certain districts in Selânik, which I must admit to having frequented, myself, from time to time).

As Chani’s narrative approached the present, I guessed that her “business” in Edirne must have been either negotiating the sale of contraband, or a tryst with yet another rich businessman, or another young swashbuckler. This, despite her own explanation, which is the part of her long story that I remember well enough to quote:

I went to Edirne on pressing business. An associate who exports agricultural produce to Portugal urgently needed to send a shipment of soybeans, corn, and olive oil by caravan to Selânik, from whence it would proceed by ship to Lisbon, where his factor would be waiting to receive it. My part was to escort the shipment, to make sure that neither the camel drivers nor the sailors stole more than their permitted share of the cargo. Sadly, too, for the same purpose, I must travel on to Lisbon, starting tomorrow, at dawn.

This, then, was the second installment in the (fictitious?) account of her detour to Edirne. I found it insulting of Chani to claim that “business interests” would force her to curtail her postponed visit to Selânik. I mean, two days with her only brother, after a decade’s absence! Nor did I completely believe her stated reason for traveling to Edirne, in the first place.

A more likely reason was that she made the long, hazardous detour from Selânik to rendezvous with another married man. Then, tiring of his empty promises, here she was, at last, in Selânik, which she planned to leave quickly, before she tired of her uninteresting brother’s company.

One conclusion I drew from these conjectures was to abandon any hopes I might have entertained of a marriage between my sister and Demopoulos, my best friend. Chana Jael Abreu was not one to throw herself away on a common seaman!

You may be surprised by another of my responses to my sister’s tale of adventure. I felt a keen sense of envy! If Chani could do all of these things, as a female, then why not me, an unencumbered male? Instead of taking further umbrage at her lies and loose way of living, I determined to follow in her footsteps. But envy of my big sister was far from my sole motive in deciding, there and then, to change the course of my own life.

True, I was inspired by Chana Jael’s adventurous spirit. But I had other sources of inspiration. I had read several accounts of the lives of historical Jewish adventurers — Jewish men. For instance, there was the famed figure from the 6th century, c.e., Sarah'il Yaqbul-Yaz’an. This Jewish luminary was both a tribal chief and an officer in the army of the Yemenite king, Yûsuf ’As’ar. Furthermore, Yaqbul-Yaz’an had been not only a chieftain and a great general, but a savage persecutor of Christians!

Still another motive for shifting my life’s course was that I had grown tired, once again, of my sinecure with the shipping company. What with the comfort and idleness, I was beginning to feel like a concubine in a harem. With so many motives propelling me, I proceeded to map a more adventurous future life for Uzriel Abreu bey.