Subscriber Bonus: Refuge, the Origin of Shylock, Chapter 1

Refuge: The Origin of Shylock
As read by the author

Chapter 1: Ghosts, Memories and Prayers in Venice

Synopsis: In 1512 Venice, Chilogo(Shylock) calms his young daughter Jessica after a nightmare, then tells her the story of how he and her mother Leah met in 1490’s Spain, became valued employees of Queen Isabella, and were later exiled in Spain’s 1492  purge of the Muslims and Jews. Their family friend Tubal and the family cook Damaris join into schemes with Chilogo to influence the local politicians of the Venetian Senate whom they know are considering setting a Ghetto policy to limit the freedoms and business activities of Venice’s Jews.

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Story by Rob Armstrong Martin, 
Based on his play: Refugios De España, or The Scribe of Grenada. 

Creative direction and video editing: Rob Armstrong Martin
Copyright 2016-2026, Rob Armstrong Martin

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 1:20

Chai Logo was unsettled, though he often sat up late in his study and fell asleep until morning. Today he was awakened by what at first appeared to be an apparition of his late wife Leia. He sat bolt upright as a candle began to float into the room. His late wife's red hair streaming from underneath a bedcap seized him with such sorrow and longing that his logic escaped him for some moments, until he realized the apparition was much too young to be Leia, and was only his twelve year old daughter Jessica. Why, Jessica, you are up so spared of dawn, Tylogo managed to utter. The child seemed to be half in a trance.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Father, I had a dream again of mother coughing, coughing, coughing. Only this time it seemed she had words to say, and could only point to a jewelled ring. I sensed a great portent. Never before has she seemed so disturbed and urgent. She seemed to bemoan the gating of our neighborhood and the declaring of a curfew hour upon us.

SPEAKER_04 2:29

Child, our people have been walled in many times, and yet we endure. Come. Sit close, my girl, and shake off the dark hours. Your hands are like ice. You mustn't leave your bed at night, for the canal vapors are at their most penetrating in darkness.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Father, I cannot shake off her pain lined face. Tell me the story of her happy days.

SPEAKER_04 2:54

How you two met. Oh I but remember no one but you may know this history. I know, I know, for your life depends on its secrecy. I do not jest, my dear. A change of name is not enough to conceal a history of flight. Promise to seal this tale, for your life and mine depend upon the remaining hidden. I swear, on this lock of my mother's hair, to ever hide this tail, now begin. Leia had the red hair of the Maccabees, and it would not stay tucked under her veil. Great unruly waves of orange, stubbornly curling toward her neck and mouth as if it were snakes, trying to sip the words from her lips. I met her in the village in the far north of Spain when I was visiting, and she begged me for a ride to the capital. Her father was a herder who tanned kid skin and vellum, and she tried to sell me his wares to pay for her passage, but I would take no payment.

SPEAKER_02 3:59

Leia had a smile that was enough for me for a lifetime. So I helped her father record his tithing.

SPEAKER_04 4:07

And I saw the great hits and vats he used for tanning and dying. You know, my child, all of us steep in the talents of two parents. Most of us favor either father or mother in our skills and chosen work. My father was a rabbi, and I was an early reader and writer of both Hebrew and Latin, but my Leia was blended of equal parts of her father's skill in tanning hides and her mother's hand with a needle. When first she came to Barcelona, she made slippers of goatskin, slippers with her own small hands, struggling to pierce the hide using thimbles and needles and tendons. Then soon she gave the hard stitching over to hired boys and began experimenting with brilliant colours, using her father's dying techniques and her own eye for decor. The Moorish women of Barcelona were the first to go mad for her jewel toned silks and woolens. Being accustomed to shroud themselves in public, they delighted in dressing their children in the brightest hues instead. Richly embroidered caps adorned every Moorish boy. Their baby girls were carried like garish spring bouquets. Layers wares adorned every child in the Arab quarter, and each Friday morning they came to gossip at her stalls, to advise each other which exact shade of rose colored floss might pest enhance little Kadija's black bodice, and which turquoise colored pocket patch could best house little Gamel's wooden toy coins. The Queen of Spain eventually discovered Leia's talents, and for a time made my wife the official tailor of the Spanish court. Until Leia said I need to lay off the tanning and the dying, because I have a bun in the oven, dear. And that bun was me. No, no, it was your brother, Jonah. But before he was born we left Spain, and that, my dear, is a story for another time. Now go you, get dressed, the day is young, and I have much business to conduct. Having sent his daughter back to bed, with a comforting kiss, Chalogo considered whether it wasn't too early to ring the cook for coffee, and decided better of it at that hour. The lazy fat yard cock had not yet crowed, and Damarus was often up betimes late, tending to Jessica, who in the absence of her mother needed a lot of womanly stories before sleep, from the musical voice of the big bodied Greek woman whom Chilogo employed. Damarus was often angry with him for sitting up late, burning an entire lamp's worth of olive oil. As he scratched away, she said, Perfectly good sheepskins with his pen and ink. Simple and illiterate as Damarus was when she first came to run Charlogo's household, Damarus could not at first understand why Charlogo wrote at all until he explained to her that it was a help to him to remember a vast number of details in his business, which could make the difference between he Charlogo making a good bargain or a bad, between their household breakfasting on fancy pheasants or dining on dog meat. Chilogo's colourful phrasing must have persuaded Damarus, for shortly after Jessica turned three, and Charlogo began to instruct her in reading and writing. Damarus then swallowed her considerable pride and pushed to be able to sit in on the reading lessons. To make the child attentive to you, she said. Some days later Chilogo found Damarus scratching her own rudely formed letters on the kitchen hearth using charcoal. And so he began to include Damarus in Jessica's reading instruction, and even to leave his cook some small written notes and lists on a smooth wooden tray in her kitchen. Damerus quickly took to making letters and words eagerly, as if each word learned was a jewel she collected, and she demanded to know many kitchen and cooking words, but Damarus repeatedly refused Charlogo's offer of books and manuscripts to read, and only seemed to want to learn words that would help her run their household and trade for its supplies. She was determined to get an edge on the merchants. Kindly, simple, gentile that she was, Damarus did not grasp the pressures Charlogo faced as a Jewish migrant. In his repeated dealings with the Venetian Senate, many of whose member senators had come to him seeking business arrangements as his banking clients, needing money conversions, merchant export lending, and financial advice as they sought to enlarge the shipping trade of the most serene republic of Venice, from beyond the Adriatic where they were now dominant, to the top and bottom of the stormy Mediterranean. Lately rumors had begun to reach Chilogo's ears that a new law was being considered that would limit and encircle the Jews of Venice into a walled ghetto in the unloved vaporous swamps of Venice's Canaregio district, where for generations waves of Turkish Jews and Spanish Jews, and Levantine and African Jews had settled, they buttressed their wet and swampy cellars, first with timber, then later with stone, until their many of their canal banks were fertile with flowers and soil, walkways, and fish and fowl to delight the eye, even benches, to sit and watch the sun creep over the lagoon. Chilogo regretted sharing the rumours of the coming curfew with Damarith in the hearing of Jessica, but it was not yet announced, and it may be that the reality would be more moderate than the rumor. A new law was being proposed that would circumscribe the ambit of Venice's Jewish citizens, despite their having lived in the least desirable neighborhoods of Venice for hundreds of years, having enlarged the marsh from a few rocky outcroppings and floating islets into productive trading territory, even able to support substantial houses. Thanks to the Jewish engineering of their homes and business districts, the buildings in the Jewish Canaregio district rose higher than any other dwellings. Having just concluded the war of the League of Cambrai last year in fifteen thirteen. Even he, as a court servant, employed by Queen Isabella herself, even he was exiled at the tender age of nineteen, with his expecting wife Leia, who was also a favorite of the rabid queen, a queen intent on converting the whole populace to her lately embraced official Catholic faith. Now safely in Venice, Chilogo hoped for and expected more moderation and tolerance of the many faiths to be shown by his business minded Venetian neighbors, before they instituted any show and tell policy to appease the Pope. After all, weren't they almost all immigrants and traders abroad themselves? Whatever policy Venice instituted for constraining the Jews, Chilogo felt sure that no senator of Venice could forget that Jewish import taxes fed and clothed their soft pated doge and provided access to critical trade goods from the East, which they could mark up handsomely before trading them onward to the northern Palatine and the Western Savoy. Tylogo's aim in sitting up late last night was twofold, to record various thoughts and projects which might protect his family from the excesses of a crackdown on the Jews, and which, in his thinking, resolved into two aims that he must put into play today. The first was to engage the young Corinthian monk, Friar Topaz, whom he had recently granted permission to live in the upper garret of his wife's warehouse, in exchange for the friar to tutor Jessica. While that moneyless exchange served adequately for both parties, Chilogo also felt there was instead a more robust and productive purpose to which the friar's tenancy in his warehouse could be put, and which could offer a commercial benefit to each. Chilogo wanted to strengthen his hand in negotiating with the various Venetian senators, as they considered the legislation of the Jewish ghetto. The talk of the law, including a sundown curfew, Chilogo did not mind, as he had no personal interest in being out in the streets and canals among the rowdy Venetians at night. Then five years in Crete before meeting a kindly Jewish shipping agent from the Black Sea named Tubul Calypolis. Tubul helped them migrate into Venice and introduced them into the community of Jewish refugees living in Canaregio. With Tubul's help, the site for the warehouse had been identified in a marshy swamp, which Tubal claimed was merely a thin, brackish covering over harder stuff, and contained no deep channels like much of the Venetian lagoon, where the tidal waters were liable to erode any structure. It turned out Tubul was correct, as he knew nearly everybody in Canareggio, and helped Shylock and Leia arrange for the transport of pilings of lumber and later marble and granite with which to erect their magnificent three story warehouse. In it Leah intended to set up her many vats for boiling and dyeing fabric and to ply the fashion obsessed Venetian ladies in their quest for more and more colour. Leah was also surprised to hear from Tubul that the Venetian gentlemen increasingly decorated themselves in their quest to outshine each other with startling tailored plumage like the birds of the wetlands. According to Tubul, the native Venetians were always dipping into this or that rivulet, coming up with some mud dwelling creature and gobbling it down their beaks before flying off to proclaim their prosperity from some perch. The trouble with these Venetians, they could never keep their good fortune quiet, but must always display and declaim how favored and well omened they were. Leia became pregnant during the construction of the warehouse and often remarked to Charlogo on the oddities of Venetian behavior, but it delighted her to know that their move to Venice now offered them ample opportunity in business to recover from the harrowing poverty of their exile. She entered her confinement in this pregnancy much earlier than in her first. Leah's second pregnancy was not an easy one. But Leah found a wet nurse, the big bodied Greek woman Damaris, to assist her with midwifing and later wet nursing Jessica. Leia was morose upon the birthbed and feverish and clammy, swelling up, raving about their son Jonah, whom they had lost to an infectious injury in Crete, and whose death spurred them to vacate at that hot, storm swept island. A few hours after Jessica's birth, Leah called Chilogo to her bedside. She insisted that the wet nurse Tamaris feed Jessica at the bedside, and did not want to let the baby out of her sight. Husband, said Jessica, I fear I have not long. My pulse slows, and my arms and legs feel as quicksand as if the Venetian swamp were sucking me into the mud.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Even breathing feels like it is underwater. You must make plans for this child, to keep her and preserve her.

SPEAKER_04 18:01

Now that we are among the Christians, you must educate her about the Christian lifestyle, so that she has perhaps the option to marry a Christian and hide from the inquisitors of Isabella. They still seek us, my darling. They still follow us. My dear, I have had a letter from Juana. That child I tutor, along with Catalina, her sister. Saying that her mother Queen Isabella is ill, and so of necessity her spies are no longer made to hunt for Spain's escaped Jewish conversals such as we. Juana also tells me that her sister Catalina, you remember how much she loved your fine needlework. Catalina married Arthur, the King of England, but only weeks later was widowed, it is said, and being childless and without a royal heir, her father in law stepped into the English regency, leaving her no longer queen of England.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

So short lived her crown was. Princess Juan also writes that Catalina feels she is endangered as a widowed childless queen in England, and wishes to return to her mother in Aragon.

SPEAKER_04 19:16

But her mother, Queen Isabella, has commanded her to remarry her young brother-in-law, Henry Tudor VIII. So you see, my love, the queen is much too distracted by her own children's fortunes and has forgotten us migrants of twenty years ago. These inquisitors no longer seek us with the fever that Isabella instilled in them. We are free here in Venice. Free Spartlea. We are not free, husband. Mark my words. They have a use for us merely. I know, Charlogo answered. Calm yourself, harbour your strength. You will get better, you will nurse this child, you will teach her to read and to sow, and you will train her on all the wonderful crafts, design and making that you so miraculously have achieved, both in Spain and here. Now rest, my wife.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Leah said Hush Listen, I must be clear. A girl must be educated as both a Jew and a Christian. You must seek to assimilate yourself with these Venetians in business.

SPEAKER_04 20:31

And possibly also through Jessica's marriage, or you will never be safe. These popish monarchs fall all over each other to outdo each other's Christian faith. And if we could be expelled from Spain, which we Jews settled long before the Christians appeared, then we can be expelled from anywhere. Husband, you must be prepared. Leia's face darkened.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

You must find business for yourself, for you will not have my gowns and slippers and embroidered goods to support this household. Turn your mind to something useful.

SPEAKER_04 21:14

You've always had a gift with numbers. Make yourself useful to the Venetians. The higher up in society the better. You serve a queen. Now you can serve a doge. Let him know that you were our tax collector, for he has an even more abundant population. And taxing imports is much more lucrative than taxing births, says Isabella did. Our good friend Tubal can help you get started. He knows everyone. Now bring the child. We shall call her Jessica. Her breathing became uneven. Chilogo waved Amoris over, who placed the child at Leah's shoulder. Leah's effort to turn her head to look upon the child's face. The doctor came in from the next room and attempted to quiet her, but he said, It is too late.

SPEAKER_03 22:17

She is afflicted with the clotting of all her blood which we call eclumpsia. We know how to recognize it, but there is no treatment. We can only keep her cool and quiet.

SPEAKER_04 22:29

Moments later the seizure stopped. Jessica's eyes lay staring at the ceiling beams. She was gone. Damaris took the baby Jessica into the warm kitchen to feed her. Then Tubel alerted their friends and neighbors of the need to come and sit Shiva. Chilogo perseverated over Jessica's final words to him, exhorting him to find a useful trade. Could he do it? Could he really do it? In looking back now, Chilogo realized that neither of them suspected, nor did any Venetian senator, that the new Delarovere Pope Julius I, elected later in that fateful year of fifteen oh three, would come to crave war and warfare and would drag all of Italy into its papal war against the Venetian Republic. Nor did the Venetian Signoria, its Senate, foresee the long decade of duress of being set upon in war by their own Catholic Pope. Most senators in the Venetian Signoria rose into fortune from sea merchant families dealing in exotic goods, and they desired to conquer the whole Mediterranean Sea by means of luxury trading, but even they did not at first see at the war's beginning, that their urge to unify the Mediterranean by trade would need to be postponed for ten years or more, while the warrior Pope Julius I beset them with his war of the League of Cambrai, causing them to defend their coastline trading ports for ten years or more. Chilogo was roused from his reveries as suddenly his candle sputtered, the hallway curtain was drawn back, and there was Damerus, now middle aged, bringing him a cup of wine and water. Master, you've done it again. You've stayed up all night over the oil lamp. You'll give yourself the croup staying down here on the damp ground floor at night. I looked for you to come to my bed where I could take care of you. It's been that long since we've had an embrace. Shilogo smiled at her forwardness. Hush. Do not speak of our weakness. We have both have needs which we can quietly meet together, but your position and mine in this society would be very perilous if our occasional love making were to be found out. I have a project I need your help with. Please send a message to Friar Topaz to come see me immediately. First thing after Cockrow, he must hurry, because I'm expecting a visit later on in the morning from Senator Mermonte of the Doges Privy Council with news of great import for us all. When Friar Topaz arrives, bring us strong coffee, but for Senator Belmonte, bring us mulled wine. He is like to bring several of his retainers, and we must seduce them with your sweet breakfast confections. Do you have any cream buns ready? Not many. The cream is scarce in the market this time of year as the carnivale cooks demand all of it. But I have a lovely almond and honey boklava which are sure to get them drunk on whatever schemes you may propose. Good woman, go to, I trust you implicitly. Damarus said. Would you like a basin of hot water? Your face appeared a much bedraggle. Yes, yes, but don't delay summoning the friar. As Damaris opened the curtain into the hallway, they both saw Jessica had been standing there listening. The child was wise beyond her years and betrayed no shock at all of any of what she heard. But she approached Chilogo with an unmoved purpose in her mien. What is it, Jessica? Dear father, you often spoke of that we were people of Crete and Malta. And yet you said just now you and Mother met in Spain. Have you been entirely truthful with me? Why, Jessica, of course I have not lied to you. I've been entirely truthful. We did not come to Venice directly from Spain. No, at first we lived in Malta. Five happy years we had there with three, your brother Jonah. This painting of your mother was done in Malta. She started with hair as deep red as yours, but the Malta sun plunged it to the pale copper of a cookpot. How far is it to Malta? I should like to lighten my hair like my mother's. Malta is a storm swept isle in the southern sea, halfway between Italy and We left Malta because of some difficulties with the Queen's soldiers employed by Queen Isabella as mercenaries. Malta was held by Spain, and so we jumped on any ship we could find late one night, and after some weeks we landed even farther south in Crete.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

How far is it? Crete.

SPEAKER_04 27:24

You cannot go on foot, my silly dear. Only in a deep drafted ship. Perhaps we shall someday return there, and I will show you our house in the hills. Your uncle Tubul is often there for trading. Did I hear my name, good friend? I have been awaiting you in your office, for an early errand dispatches me. Good morrow, Jessica, forgive my intrusion. Good morrow, Tubul. Jessica, go and dress yourself for the day. And could you tell Damers to bring us coffee? Shalogo, I brought your cook fresh rolls to atone for my early bell. Here, Jessica, take this basket to the cook. Atonement? They say gifts of penance are a Christian thing, Uncle Tubal. Have you turned away from the faith of Abraham? It was merely a jest, my girl. She is out of sorts today. Her mother visits in her dreams of late and disturbs her. I pray her dreams will cease. I shall bring some fine dressmaking stuff up later today. They've just come in from Istanbul. Perhaps that will lighten her mood. Now to my errand. I left a Gentile at the gate with his daughter and a blackamoor. Count Belmonte is his name. But he is known as the torpedo Venetian court. Hopes and is likely to be in the Senate chamber soon, they say. He wishes to mortgage a note with you. Belmonte, yes, I know of him. Go bring him hither and then stay to hear his brief. Delighted to help my friend. I smell coffee. I'll be back with these men anon. Finding himself alone for a moment, Charlogo reached into his jerk and pulled out a ring on a chain, bejewelled with a green agate, which Leia had proudly presented to him on their wedding day. Leia, my wife, if you must show yourself, I pray you will guide your girl and soften these knightly visits to her. How far we came together leaving Spain to save our little family. Jessica is all that is left now. Help me, Leia, help me to strengthen her for you, for me, for your parents, for Jonah. She will carry forward all our family.