The Coffee Trader Read online

  Geertruid, however, never wanted anything more than to press her lips against his beard. She had long since made it clear that she had no interest at all in having her skirts lifted, at least not by Miguel. These Dutchwomen kissed anyone they liked for any reason they liked, and they did so more boldly than the Jewish women of the Portuguese Nation dared to kiss their husbands.

  “You see,” she told him as she gestured to the crowd, “even though you’ve been in this city for years, I still have new sights to show you.”

  “I fear your stock of the new may be running thin.”

  “At least you needn’t worry about that Hebrew council of yours seeing us in this place.”

  It was true enough. Jews and gentiles were permitted to conduct business in taverns, but what Jew among the Portuguese would choose this foul pit? Still, a man could never be overly cautious. Miguel took a quick look around for the telltale signs of Ma’amad spies: men who might be Jews dressed as Dutch laborers, conspicuous fellows alone or in pairs, eating none of the food; beards, which hardly anyone but Jews wore, cut close with scissors to resemble clean shaves (the Torah forbade only the use of razors on faces, not the trimming of beards, but beards were so out of fashion in Amsterdam that even the hint of one marked a man as a Jew).

  Geertruid slid her hand along Miguel’s, a gesture that came just short of the amorous. She loved freedom with men above all else. Her husband, whom she spoke of as the cruelest of villains, had been dead some years now, and she’d not yet finished celebrating her liberty. “That sack of fat behind the bar is my cousin Crispijn,” she said.

  Miguel glanced at the man: pale, corpulent, heavy-lidded—no different from ten thousand others in the city. “Thank you for letting me witness your bloated kinsman. I hope I may at least ask him to bring me a tankard of his least foul beer to drown the stench?”

  “No beer. I have something else in mind today.”

  Miguel did not try to suppress a smile. “Something else in mind? And is this where you have decided I might finally know your secret charms?”

  “I have secrets aplenty—you may depend on it—but not such as you’re thinking.” She waved over to her cousin, who replied with a solemn nod and then disappeared into the kitchen. “I want you to taste a new drink—a wondrous luxury.”

  Miguel stared at her. He might have been in any one of half a dozen other taverns now, speaking of woolens or copper or the lumber trade. He might be working hard to repair his ruined accounts, finding some bargain that he alone could recognize or convincing some drunkard to sign his name to the brandy futures. “Madam, I thought you understood that my affairs are pressing. I have no time for luxuries.”

  She leaned in closer and looked him full in his face, and for an instant Miguel believed she meant to kiss him. Not some sly buss on the cheek but a true kiss, hungry and urgent.

  He was mistaken. “I didn’t bring you here idly, and you will find that I offer you nothing ordinary,” she told him, her lips close enough to his face that he could taste her fine breath.

  And then her cousin Crispijn brought out something that changed his life.

  Two earthen bowls sat steaming with a liquid blacker than the wines of Cahors. In the dim light, Miguel gripped the lightly chipped vessel with both hands and took his first taste.

  It had a rich, almost enchanting, bitterness—something Miguel had never before experienced. It bore a resemblance to chocolate, which once he had tasted years ago. Perhaps he thought of chocolate only because the drinks were both hot and dark and served in thick clay bowls. This one had a less voluptuous flavor, sharper and more sparing. Miguel took another taste and set it down. When he had sampled chocolate, he had been intrigued enough to swallow two bowls of the stuff, which so inflamed his spirits that even after visiting two satisfactory whores he had felt it necessary to visit his physician, who restored his unbalanced humors with a sound combination of emetics and purges.

  “It’s made of coffee fruit,” Geertruid told him, folding her arms as though she had invented the mixture herself.

  Miguel had come across coffee once or twice, but only as a commodity traded by East India merchants. The business of the Exchange did not require a man to know an item’s nature, only its demand—and sometimes, in the heat of the trade, not even that.

  He reminded himself to say the blessing over wonders of nature. Some Jews would turn away from their gentile friends when they blessed their food or drink, but Miguel took pleasure in the prayers. He loved to utter them in public, and in a land where he could not be prosecuted for speaking the holy tongue. He wished he had more occasions to bless things. Saying the words filled him with giddy defiance; he thought of each openly spoken Hebrew word as a knife in the belly of some Inquisitor somewhere.

  “It’s a new substance—entirely new,” Geertruid explained when he was done. “You take it not to delight the senses but to awaken the intellect. Its advocates drink it at breakfast to regain their senses, and they drink it at night to help them remain awake longer.”

  Geertruid’s face became as somber as one of the Calvinist preachers who railed from makeshift pulpits in town plazas. “This coffee isn’t like wine or beer, which we drink to make merry or because it quenches thirst or even because it is delightful. This will only make you thirstier, it will never make you merry, and the taste, let us be honest, may be curious but never pleasing. Coffee is something . . . something far more important.”

  Miguel had known Geertruid long enough to be acquainted with her many foolish habits. She might laugh all night and drink as much as any Dutchman alive, she might neglect her affairs and tromp barefoot around the countryside like a girl, but in matters of business she was as serious as any man. A businesswoman such as she would have been an impossibility back in Portugal, but among the Dutch her kind was, if not precisely common, hardly shocking.

  “This is what I think,” she said, her voice hardly loud enough to rise above the din of the tavern. “Beer and wine may make a man sleepy, but coffee will make him awake and clearheaded. Beer and wine may make a man amorous, but coffee will make him lose interest in the flesh. The man who drinks coffee fruit cares only for his business.” She paused for another sip. “Coffee is the drink of commerce.”

  How many times, conducting business in taverns, had Miguel’s wits suffered with each tankard of beer? How many times had he wished he had the concentration for another hour’s clarity with the week’s pricing sheets? A sobering drink was just the thing for a trading man.

  An eagerness had begun to wash over Miguel, and he found his foot tapping impatiently. The sounds and sights of the tavern drifted away. There was nothing but Geertruid. And coffee. “Who now drinks it?” he asked.

  “I hardly know,” Geertruid admitted. “I’ve heard there is a coffee tavern somewhere in the city—frequented by Turks, they say—but I’ve never seen it. I know of no Dutchmen who take coffee, unless it be prescribed by a physician, but the word will spread. Already, in England, taverns that serve coffee instead of wine and beer have opened, and men of trade flock to them to talk business. These coffee taverns become like exchanges unto themselves. It can’t be too long before those taverns open here as well, for what city loves commerce so well as Amsterdam?”

  “Are you suggesting,” Miguel asked, “that you want to open a tavern?”

  “The taverns are nothing. We must put ourselves in a position to supply them.” She took his hand. “The demand is coming, and if we prepare ourselves for that demand, we can make a great deal of money.”

  The coffee’s scent began to make him light-headed with something like desire. No, not desire. Greed. Geertruid had stumbled upon something, and Miguel felt her infectious eagerness swelling in his chest. It was like panic or jubilance or something else, but he wanted to leap from his seat. Was this energy from the strength of her idea or the effect of the coffee? If coffee fruit made a man unable to keep from fidgeting, how could it be the drink of commerce?

  Still, coffee wa
s something marvelous, and if he could dare to hope that no one else in Amsterdam plotted to take advantage of this new drink, it could be the very thing to save him from ruin. For six dismal months, Miguel had at times felt himself in a waking dream. His life had been replaced with a sad imitation, with the bloodless life of a lesser man. Could coffee restore him to his rightful place?

  He loved the money that came with success, but he loved the power more. He relished the respect he had commanded on the Exchange and in the Vlooyenburg, the island neighborhood where the Portuguese Jews lived. He loved hosting lavish dinners and never inquiring of the bill. He took pleasure in giving to the charitable boards. Here was money for the poor—let them eat. Here was money for the refugees—let them find homes. Here was money for the scholars in the Holy Land—let them work to bring in the age of the Messiah. The world could be a holier place because Miguel had money to give, and he gave it.

  That was Miguel Lienzo, not this wretch at whose failings children and beefy housewives smirked. He could not much longer endure the anxious stares of other traders, who hurried away from him lest his ill fortune spread like plague, or the pitying looks from his brother’s pretty wife, whose moist eyes suggested she saw kinship between her misery and his.

  Perhaps he had suffered enough, and the Holy One, blessed be He, had put this opportunity before him. Did he dare to believe that? Miguel wanted to agree to anything Geertruid proposed, but he had lost too many times in recent months for acting on foolish hunches. It would be madness to forge ahead, particularly when he would be plunging with a partner whose very existence would make him vulnerable to the Ma’amad.

  “How is it that this magic potion has not swept through Europe already?” he asked.

  “All things must begin somewhere. Must we wait,” she added in a conspiratorial voice, “until some other ambitious merchant learns its secret?”

  Miguel pushed back from the counter and sat up straight. “Tell me what you propose.” He waited with startling hunger for Geertruid’s words; she could not answer quickly enough, and Miguel wanted to reply before the words had even been uttered.

  Geertruid rubbed her long hands together. “I have determined to do some sort of business with coffee, and I have some capital, but I have no idea how to proceed. You are a man of business, and I need your help—and your partnership.”

  It was one thing to call this high-spirited widow his friend when they were private together, to drink and gamble with her, to stand for her on the Exchange and make small trades now and again—despite the Ma’amad’s having forbidden Jews to broker for gentiles on pain of excommunication. It was another thing to take her as a partner in business. Some Jews might emerge unscathed from so unusual an arrangement, but Miguel could not count on his luck, not without money or influence to protect him.

  Once Miguel had scoffed at the council’s humorless censures, but the Ma’amad had begun to carry out more of its threats. It sent its spies in pursuit of violators of the Sabbath and eaters of unclean food. It cast out those, like the usurer Alonzo Alferonda, who broke its arbitrary rules. It hounded those like poor Bento Spinoza, who uttered heresies so vague that almost no one even understood that his words were heretical. More than that, Miguel had an enemy on the council who surely only waited for the flimsiest excuse to strike.

  So many risks. Miguel bit his lip, forcing back the urge to smirk. He could live with the risks if he could promise himself not to think of them too often.

  Miguel began to tap the counter. He wanted to act immediately. He could begin at once to secure contacts and agents upon almost any important exchange in Europe. He could juggle coffee by the barrelful, moving it from this port to that. This was the true essence of Miguel Lienzo; he made deals and connections and arrangements. He was no coward to shrink from an opportunity because bitter and hypocritical men told him that they knew better than the Sages what was right and wrong.

  “How shall we do this?” he said at last, suddenly aware he had not spoken for several minutes. “The coffee-fruit trade belongs to the East India Company, and we can’t hope to take control away from men of their power. I don’t understand what you’re proposing.”

  “Nor do I!” Geertruid threw her hands into the air excitedly. “But I am proposing something. We must do something. I won’t allow the fact that I do not know what I am proposing stand in my way. As they say, even the blind may stumble upon Heaven. You worry about the twentieth—you owe money? I am offering you riches. A great new venture with which to rebuild and make your current debt seem trivial.”

  “I’ll need time to think about it,” he told her, though he needed nothing of the kind. A man does not get many such opportunities in his life, and to ruin his chances out of impatience would be madness. “We’ll discuss these things again after the twentieth. In a week.”

  “A week is a long time,” the widow said thoughtfully. “Fortunes are made in a week. Empires rise and fall in a week.”

  “I need a week,” Miguel repeated softly.

  “A week, then,” Geertruid said, in her amiable way. She knew not to push further.

  Miguel realized he had been fidgeting with the buttons of his coat. “And now I must leave and tend to my more immediate concerns.”

  “Before you go, let me give you something to help you consider the enterprise.” Geertruid signaled to Crispijn, who hurried over and set down before her a rough woolen sack.

  “He owes me some money,” she explained, once her cousin had walked away. “I agreed to take a little of this as payment, and I wanted to give you something to think about.”

  Miguel looked in the bag, which contained perhaps a dozen handfuls of brownish berries.

  “Coffee,” Geertruid said. “I’ve had Crispijn cook the berries for you because I know a Portuguese hidalgo cannot be expected to roast his own fruit. You merely need grind them to a powder, which you mix with hot milk or sweet water, then filter out the powder if you like, or just let it settle. Don’t drink too much of the powder itself, lest you agitate your bowels.”

  “You did not mention bowel agitation when you sang its praises.”

  “Even nature’s greatest glories can harm if taken in the wrong dose. I wouldn’t have said anything, but a man with uneasy bowels makes a poor business partner.”

  Miguel let her kiss him again, and then he squeezed through the tavern and stepped out into the misty cool of the late afternoon. After the stench of the Golden Calf, the salty air off the IJ felt as wonderfully cleansing as the mikvah, and he let the mist fall on his face for a moment until a boy, not six years old, began to pull on his sleeve and weep piteously about his mother. Miguel tossed the boy a half stuiver, already relishing the wealth coffee would bring: freedom from debt, his own home, a chance to marry once more, children.

  In an instant he chastised himself for indulging in these fancies in light of the day’s setbacks. Another thousand guilders in debt. He owed three thousand already throughout the Vlooyenburg, including fifteen hundred to his brother, borrowed after the sugar market collapsed. He’d allowed the Bankruptcy Office at the Town Hall to settle his debts to Christians, but the Jews of his neighborhood ordered their own accounts.

  High tide had begun to move in, and the waters had crept up beyond the Rozengracht to slick the streets. Across town, in his brother’s house, the cavernous cellar where Miguel now slept at night would soon begin its own flooding. That was the price of living in a city built in the water upon piles, but Miguel now thought nothing of the discomforts of Amsterdam that had troubled him when he had first arrived. He hardly noticed the dead-fish stench of canal water or the squish of walking on wet ground. Dead fish was the perfume of Amsterdam’s riches, the squish of water its melody.

  The prudent thing would be to go home at once and write a note to Geertruid explaining that the risks of working with her were too great and might well lead to his ruin. But he would never free himself from debt with prudence, and ruin was already upon him. Only a few months ago h
is sugar had crammed canal-side warehouses; he had strutted across the Vlooyenburg like a burgher. He had been ready to set the loss of Katarina behind him, to take a new wife and have sons, and the marriage brokers had clawed at one another to gain access to him. But now he was in debt. His standing had collapsed to worse than nothing. He received threatening notes from a man who must be mad. How could he turn his fortune if not by doing something daring?

  He had taken risks all his life. Was he to stop because he feared the arbitrary power of the Ma’amad, those men who, entrusted to uphold the Law of Moses, valued their power above God’s Word? The Law had nothing to say about Dutch widows. Why should Miguel avoid making his fortune with one?

  He might have tried to conduct a little more business that day, but he suspected his agitation would lead to nothing productive, so instead he went to the Talmud Torah synagogue for afternoon and evening prayers. The now-familiar liturgy soothed him like spiced wine, and by the time he left he felt renewed.

  As he walked the short distance from the synagogue to his brother’s house, keeping close to canal-side houses to elude both thieves and the Night Watch, Miguel listened to the click of rat claws on the wooden planks stretched over the sewers. Coffee, he chanted to himself. He hardly needed a week to give Geertruid his answer. He only needed time to convince himself that any scheme he embarked on with her would not complete his ruin.

  from

  The Factual and Revealing Memoirs of Alonzo Alferonda

  My name is Alonzo Rodrigo Tomas de la Alferonda, and I brought the drink called coffee to the Europeans—gave birth to its usage there, one might say. Well, perhaps I phrase that too strongly, for coffee surely would have made its murky way without my efforts. Let us say instead that I was the man-midwife who eased its passage from obscurity into glory. No, you will say, that was not me either; it was Miguel Lienzo who did that. What role, then, could Alonzo Alferonda have played in the triumph of this great fruit? More than is generally believed, I assure you. And for those who say I made nothing but mischief, that I thwarted and hindered and harmed rather than advanced, I can only say I know more than my detractors. I was there—and you, in all likelihood, were not.