Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,107
the sea was only a memory. You never know what you want or need until you are old, for old age is a mystery that is impossible to unwind until you step into its maze. Thorn, blood, earth, love—that was the riddle that Abraham Dias held in his hand.
Maria wept as he was dying. Her tears burned her and left red marks on her face, and Abraham asked her not to cry. Instead he asked for something else, a last wish that could not be denied, one he had been thinking about every minute of every day during his last months. He wished for her to take care of his son.
“Of course,” Maria assured him.
“I mean in every way,” the old man urged. “The way a man needs to be cared for. With all your heart.”
Maria laughed. “That is none of your business,” she told Abraham in a firm, gentle voice.
“Love is my business,” he insisted. “Long ago I was an artist. You didn’t know that, and why should you? You don’t know everything about me. That was what I did before I went to sea. I made the most beautiful marriage contracts that could be had. A bride-to-be would have her family pay any price for my work. I constructed them from a single piece of parchment that I cut into shapes and words with a small pair of shears. When the brides-to-be saw the documents, they wept. The grooms fell to their knees, grateful to be alive in the world. Believe what I say. I know about love.”
Maria was forced to lean close, for she could hardly hear him. His voice was a whisper; it was leaving him now. The light inside him was rising up. She opened the windows so his spirit would be free once it left his body. We are birds, Hannah had once told her. They sit inside of us waiting to fly away.
“No one can fall in love with me,” Maria told Abraham. “Don’t wish that on your son.”
“I know love when I see it,” Abraham Dias insisted. “I see it in you.”
He gave her his ring and told her the secret that he had learned about love during his time on earth. Then he closed his eyes. He had nothing more to say; he wasn’t even in the room anymore, not in Manhattan, not in the year of 1691, not in a house on Maiden Lane. He was with his wife when he first met her. How beautiful she was, with her straight black hair that was so long she could sit on it, or wear it wound atop her head so that she looked like a queen who wore a dark crown. When you fall in love like that, time doesn’t matter. This was the secret he told Maria, the last words he ever said.
What belonged to you once, will always belong to you.
Be grateful if you have walked through the world with another’s heart in your hand.
* * *
Abraham Dias was buried in the First Shearith Israel Graveyard near Chatham Square, wound in white linen, as he’d wished to be, placed into his grave without a coffin so that he might become a part of the earth without delay. He had belonged to a congregation of Sephardic Jews who had wandered the globe, searching for a safe place in which to live and die. They had found what they were searching for in Manhattan. The burial took place on a blue June day, and the achingly beautiful weather made the loss cut more deeply. It would have been more fitting had there been rain or hail or black storms blowing in from the sea, a world from which a man wished to escape, not this perfect day. The women stood on the fringes of the gathering, their heads covered, and the men wore prayer shawls that their wives and daughters had stitched. The men joined in the mourner’s Kaddish, the ancient Aramaic prayer Jews recited to honor the dead. Samuel Dias did not practice his religion, but with a borrowed prayer shawl over his shoulders, he, too, recited the Kaddish and sang laments in Portuguese, as his father had done on the night of their family’s murder. Then he got down on his knees at the gravesite and wept. He had refused to shave and his hair fell to his shoulders; he looked rough, but he cried more than any man the congregation had seen before.