A Venetian grandmother

by Hugo Pratt

English translation by Elizabeth Bell.

I was four or five, perhaps six, the first time my grandmother asked me to accompany her to the Old Ghetto of Venice. We went to visit one of her old friends, Signora Bora Levi, in her old house. To get there we climbed an outdoor wood staircase named variously the “Crazy Stairs,” the “Sewer Rat Stairs,” or the “Turkish Stairs.” Signora Bora Levi gave me an almond candy, a thick, steaming cup of chocolate and two saltless crackers that I didn’t like at all. Then she and Grandmother sat down to play cards, smiling and murmuring things to each other I couldn’t understand.

I had nothing to do, so I meticulously scrutinized each of the hundred medallions hanging on the dark red velour walls, which seemed to observe me from behind their glass ovals. I say they observed me because the medallions were portraits of severe-looking gentlemen in Hapsburg uniforms or rabbis with delicate black braids and broad-brimmed felt hats. Their gazes held mine with an insistence bordering on the indiscreet.

A bit disconcerted, I went to the kitchen window and looked down at the weed-choked courtyard below and its well ringed with ivy. It was called the Secret Courtyard, or Courtyard of the Arcane. To get into it, you had to open seven gates, each engraved with the name of a “shed,” demons from the caste of the Shedim, fathered by Adam when he was separated from Eve after their act of disobedience. Each gate opened to a magic word, the names of the demons. I still recall the terrible names: Sam Ha, Mawet, Ashmodai, Shibbetta, Ruah, Kardeyakos, Na’Amah.

One day Signora Bora Levi took me by the hand and led me to the Secret Courtyard, lighting our way with a menorah, or seven-branched candelabrum. Each time she opened a gate, she blew out a candle. The courtyard was full of sculptures and wall drawings: a king with bow and arrows wrestling with a god; a newborn baby; a huntress, also armed with her bow; a one-eyed cow; a six-pointed star; a naked young girl dancing inside a circle drawn on the ground; the names of the fallen angels, outcasts of God: Samaël, Sataël, Amabiel. The Jewess spoke of all these things and answered my questions. Then she opened a gate at the rear of the courtyard and led me through a passageway with tall weeds to another marvelous little square. I saw it again much later, full of flowers, in a house in Cordoba’s Juderia.

I remember that there was a very beautiful woman in the Secret Courtyard, always surrounded by children and teenaged girls playing around an enormous butterfly made of bits of colored glass. It was Aurelia, the gnostic butterfly. A gnosis presenting itself as an inexhaustible font of wisdom and offering, in its thousand colored reflections, what any person may desire.

These two diminutive squares, connected by this hidden alleyway called “The Narrow Passageway of Nostalgia,” were the legendary nexus where two secret worlds converged: one issuing from Talmudic disciplines, the other from philosophical, esoteric, Judeo-Greek-Oriental disciplines. This entire maze of stairways, alleys, courtyards and little squares was called the “Seraglio of Beautiful Ideas” or “Seraglio of the Hebrews.” In this wonderful place, I played with Jewish children who told me tales of ancient times and helped me scale the walls of the forbidden enclosure. The girls had impishly disconcerting smiles which I captured in their eyes bathed in the golden shadows of attics. They introduced me to the Abraxas of Basilides and the Pythagorean symbols, the crescent-moon serpents and the designs of Menander and Saturninus. There I first heard the names of Simon the Magician, Manes, Origen, Arius, Valentinus, Justin, Carpocrates, Epiphanius, Tertullian, Augustine, Hypatia and so many others. It was in this enchanted world that I also heard of Solomon’s Clavicle and Satan”s emerald, which, according to hermetic tradition, was separated from the angel ov evil’s forehead to become the symbol of the “Accursed Science” among men.

After a time, my grandmother decided it was time return home (we lived on the other side of the city, in Bragora), and it was with actual physical pain that I took leave of all these mysterious friends. I was still too young for my parents to let me roam by myself, and had to wait a whole week, sometimes more, to return to the ghetto. On the way home, we passed through Rio della Sensa to the Madonna dell’Orto, where statues of three Arab brothers (El Rioba, Sandi and Afani) were set into the walls of the ancient “Fontego of the Moors, or Saracens.” When I asked who these people dressed like Greeks were, my grandmother responded that they were Moors, Turkish Mamelukes. She made it quite clear that this was not an appropriate question to ask. Then grandmother went to play a number in the lotto according to the Venetian cabala of lotteries.

These unanswered questions about the Turks, Saracens and Arabs stimulated my curiosity to such a point that I began to demand explanations from many members of my family. Thus I learned that the Generos, on my mother’s side, came from Spanish Toledo and were of Sephardic-Marrano origin, converted to Christianity as a result of the bloody persecutions of 1390 in Spain. The Generos had family ties with the Toledanos, the Greggyos and the Azims; the latter were Byzantine glassblowers in Murano.

Among the family, one often spoke about Arab merchants or spies, come to Venice to seek what Venetian pirates had stolen from them. It was even a subject of daily comversation at our house. I remember one day one of my uncles accompanied me to a little tucked-away square close to San Marsial and showed me a marble bat in an alabaster alcove. He explained that it was the symbol of a sect of Saracen adventurers allied with the Templars and the Teutonic Knights. Time passed. I began to go to the ghetto by myself and spend more and more time with my friends from the two little squares and stayed in their houses.

Then events took me to Africa. In Ethiopia in Addis Abeba, I rediscovered the Venetian ambience in the Greco-Armenian-Jewish-Egyptian community. I discovered in the libraries of Dabra Markos, Dabra Ghiorghis, Dabra Mariam, and in books and Coptic images of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, that in the life of true seekers of knowledge there are always seven secret gates. I noticed that there were always seven magic formulae, that the devils are the same and the esoteric books closely similar (although the Copts have a few extra fallen angels). The Coptic literature contained ancient tales with some apocryphal additions. My new East African friends, a little older, recounted marvelous stories about the voyages of Enoch and the Gardens of Eden. The young girls had the same disconcerting smiles as the young girls of the ghetto, but the earthenware eyes of the former were quite different from the Venetian eyes of the latter.

Then came the war, and I spent some time in Danakil and Ogaden, among camels and smugglers. A Danakil camel-driver taught me that to enter into Al-Jannah al-Adn, you must open seven gates in the desert; to do so, you must know the names of the seven terrible angels of the Shaitan tribe or be accompanied by a poet with a gold key under his tongue. Then an Eritrean Arab taught me that the Adriatic was called Giun Al-Banadiqin, the “Venetian Gulf,” and that the Egyptians called Venice Al-Bunduqiyyah.

When I returned to Italy, the war still wasn’t over: the houses of the Venetian ghetto were boarded up, and the Jews who had fled them were hiding among the Venetians. At night, in low voices, people again told one another the ancient Arab-Spanish tales; they spoke about the cabalistic city of Safed in Palestine, where the tomb of Simon Ben Yohai, the presumed author of the Zohar, the “Book of Splendors,” was located. Once again, on holy days, I ate crackers without salt and didn’t like it.

The war came to an end. Since then I come and go throughout the world, almost aimlessly. But I always return eventually to Venice. I stroll its alleyways, cross the canals, pause on its bridges and note that the shore no longer teems with crabs lazing in the afternoon sun. They disappeared a long time ago. I search for places I knew as a child, but often I don’t recognize them. The “Crazy Staircase” is gone, and Signora Bora Levi is gone, too. The windows of her house are walled over; the neighborhood has changed. No one wants to answer my questions. The young don’t know and the old don“t want to remember.

One day, I found the name of the old Jewish woman who used to give me sugar-plums and piping-hot chocolate, engraved on a marble plaque near the front gate of the old Schola Espanola, along with the names of several other deported Jews who never returned. There weren’t too many names because Venice hid her Jews. She hid them in her “Secret Courtyards,” her “Arcana,” courtyards still hidden today behind jealous walls, whose street number change under the too insistent gaze of the uninitiated. The decaying names remain, wearing away, traced like funeral announcement on huge white rectangles bordered in black, and the striped cats remain, seemingly ready with a riddle, suggesting that everything is there as before: you just have to want to find it. Surely it can still be found on the other side of the Ebreo Bridge, in the bistros where card players still use the old Arabdecks to play Saracen, Mohammedan or Beautiful Jewess, games from the Orient and Spain. The Marrano Jews have preserved their cards and keep the old keys to Spanish houses above the frames of their Venetian doors like a promisory note to the diaspora from the Spanish Inquisition. In my house, too, there was a Spanish key from Toledo. I inherited it from my grandmother, along with her ironic fatalism and an Arab deck of cards that is surely magic.

On the Fondamenta leading to Madonna dell’Orto and San Marsiliano, there’s a palace with a Teutonic cross, a rose, and a stone camel. Perhaps it means nothing to most people, but if one is a Venetian at heart, on understands immediately that a Teutonic symbol surely hides an enigma; a rose entwined around a cross only adds to the mystery. The presence of the camel ends up completely captivating this Venetian’s soul, infinitely drawn toward intrigue.

(c) NBM for the English translation 1990