Джеймс Миченер - The Source

But Rachel was not honored. As a child in Portugal she had known Zaki as the fat one whom the others teased, and as an adolescent girl she had watched him grow even fatter, so that none of her friends looked on him with longing. Left alone, he had read Talmud and apprenticed himself to an Italian shoemaker, who had warned his parents, “You’re wasting your money. Zaki has such fat fingers he’ll not be able to hold the nails.” Still the amiable fellow had managed somehow to become both a rabbi and a shoemaker.

The Jews of Podi were never able to understand why a man like Avramo had agreed to give his daughter to such a clod, and when in later years Rachel herself raised the question, he explained, “When I looked at Zaki’s fat face and rolling eyes I knew that he was a good man, and good men make good husbands.”

The wedding had gone forward, and Rachel found herself tied to a man of no distinction who each March brought upon himself and his family an almost unbearable disgrace. “Why do you eat so much?” she screamed at him with increasing desperation as the years passed. “Does Meir eat like a pig, day after day? Tell me that.”

Zaki could only reply, “God must have wanted me to be fat.” He was an amiable hulk, a man who loved his shrewish wife, adored his three daughters and found joy in eating with his family and fulfillment in serving as a rabbi. Since he was a short man, enormously round, none need envy him and all could find amusement in him. What they saw was a kind of gelatinous good will, an oleaginous buffoon of the spirit. He did not consciously make himself ridiculous, but since he knew that he was so, he did not fight against his nature.

“God wanted someone He could laugh with in the afternoon,” he told his wife one day.

“He got someone the whole town laughs at each spring,” she stormed.

“I didn’t make myself fat,” he said weakly.

“You did, too!” she cried. “For years you’ve been eating like a pig.”

“Rachel,” he pleaded. “Not that word.”

“I withdraw the pig,” she snapped.

“But you are fat,” his unlovely daughter Sarah complained.

“I am the rabbi,” he said quietly. “Even if I were as thin as Meir, the Christians would still choose me.”

The idea—a new one that Rabbi Zaki had developed subconsciously at that moment—hit his wife with some force and she stopped feeling sorry for herself. She looked at her grotesque husband and for a fleeting second half understood the point he was making, but even as he spoke he had fish sauce on his jowls and his logic was destroyed.

“Go ahead!” she lamented. “Eat and grow fat and make us ashamed of you.” The girls wept.

In humiliation Zaki listened to the grieving, then said, “They will choose me again, and again you will stand in the sun and watch me, and there is no escape. But they choose me because I am the rabbi, and I think it is better that I am fat and that they laugh at me because of my fatness and not because I am the rabbi. Would you have it otherwise?”

Of course they chose him. For several hundred years the dukes of Podi had provided sport for the community by assembling, at the spring equinox, a carnival of mountebanks, jugglers, fools and dancers. There was gaiety for one day, even if it fell in the midst of Lent, and in recent years the climax was reached by the race between the fat Jews and their next-street neighbors, the town prostitutes. For this race, which had grown famous in eastern Italy, the six fattest Jewish men were chosen, stripped down to a pair of thin underpants and driven barefoot to the starting line, where they took their places among the frowzy, boisterous whores.

The excitement of the race, which drew thousands of people from towns as far distant as Ancona, arose not only from the joy of seeing the fat Jews puffing nearly naked through the streets while the populace threw things at them—not hurtful things like rocks, for that was forbidden, but harmless items such as eggs and chicken feathers smeared with honey—but also from the fact that the little pants which the fat Jews had to wear were so constructed that along the route there was always a chance for the Christian women to get a fleeting glance at what the mysterious rite of circumcision did to a man.

To the Jews, nakedness in any form was humiliation, but to run in the Podi pants, with the penis popping in and out, was abhorrent. Not only Rachel, but the other wives as well, and Jewish men who did not run, wept for Israel.

In 1541 the twenty-first of March was a hot, bright day, and during the morning hours the mountebanks and jugglers did good business. Members of the ducal family moved austerely through the crowd, nodding somberly as townspeople assured them, “This year it’s to be a fine race.” In the mid-afternoon there were games of football and the offering of free drinks, ending with a horse race through the streets and across the public square. It was a day of relaxed festivity, much relished in the midst of Lent.

But it was the late-afternoon spectacle that the people wanted, and toward five o’clock the town constable aroused cheers by bringing from the jail six notorious prostitutes, assuring them that any who finished within the first three places would have the remainder of their jail sentences remitted. “But to win,” he warned them with broad winks, “you must pull and trip the fat Jews or they will finish ahead of you.” The six bawds said they understood.

The crowd cheered the girls and began betting on them, but everyone waited for the real contestants; and at five, when the first sunset of spring began to throw gold on the cross of the cathedral, the duke ordered a bugler to sound the trumpet. Now the crowd roared and formed a path which led to a roped-off section of the piazza. A hush fell over the rabble as the Duke of Podi signaled to the cathedral, out of which issued a stunning procession of clergy dressed in the vestments of the Christian Church. Impressive both in detail and mass the body of clerics moved in regal fashion across the piazza, taking its position beside the improvised ducal throne. Again the trumpeter blew, and again the crowd cheered, for from a narrow lane leading to the Jewish quarter came a motley crowd led by six men in long brown robes, each marked by a bright yellow star.

In the lead was Rabbi Zaki, ridiculously fat, a man not over five feet three inches tall and weighing at least two hundred and twenty pounds. His bare feet padded across the stones and his dunce’s cap, tall and red, bobbed in the late sunlight. The mere sight of him caused the mob to shout with joy. Behind the racers, each sick with apprehension, even though the brown cloaks still covered them, came the entire population of the ghetto, for each Jew unless he were near death and excused by a Dominican friar was required to witness the humiliation of his people.

The contestants were led to where the six prostitutes waited, and one of the girls elicited shrieks of approval when she pulled Rabbi Zaki’s robe apart, peeked at his trousers and screamed, “I saw it.” She made an indecent gesture to the crowd. Rachel and her three daughters, who had been herded into the front ranks of the Jewry, kept their eyes on the ground, but a barefooted friar in charge of the Jews shouted that they must look up. The girls did so in time to see their ridiculous father stripped of his robe, so that he stood almost naked in the fading sunlight while the crowd shrieked with delight.

The duke himself addressed the contestants: “This is to be a fair race, three times around the piazza, down the Corso and back to the cathedral. Any girl who finishes in the first three will have her sentence excused.” At this the crowd cheered. “But if any Jew finishes in the first three he is granted privileges for one year. Race well. Ignore the crowd. And I shall wait for you at the finish.” He bowed handsomely to the racers, signaled the trumpeter and retired.