Sepharad (15 page)

 

THE ATENEO ESPAÑOL,
the Galerías Duna, the lights of the Spanish coast shimmering at night, so close it seemed they weren't on the other side of the Mediterranean but on the far shore of a very wide river, the Danube, the Duna that Señor Salama saw in his childhood, the river into which in the summer of 1944 the Germans and their lackeys threw the Jews they'd murdered in the street, in broad daylight, hurriedly because the Red Army was approaching and it was possible that the rail lines would be cut and there would be no way to keep sending convoys of the doomed to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, or to those lesser-known camps whose names no one remembers. Spain is a stone's throw away, an hour and a half by ship, witness those lights visible from the terrace of the hotel, but in a conversation with Señor Salama, in the Galerías Duna or in the Ateneo Español, Spain seems thousands of kilometers away, across oceans, as if one were remembering it from the Hogar Español in Moscow one waning winter day or in the Café Madrid in Washington, DC. Spain is so remote that it is nearly nonexistent, an inaccessible, unknown, thankless country they called Sepharad, longing for it with a melancholy without basis or excuse, with a loyalty as constant as that passed from father to son by the ancestors of Señor Salama, the only one of all his line to fulfill the hereditary dream of return, only to be expelled once again, and this time definitively, because of a misfortune that he no longer considered just another injustice of chance as the years went by, but a consequence and punishment
for his own pride, for the self-indulgence that had pushed him to be ashamed of his father and to reject him in his deepest heart.

If he hadn't been driving that car so fearlessly, he thinks day after day, with the same obsessive mourning his father had devoted to the wife and daughters he didn't save, if he hadn't been going so fast, wanting to get to the Peninsula as quickly as he could, to go up to Madrid not on one of the slow night trains that scored the country from south to north like dark, powerful rivers but in the car his father gave him as a reward for completing the two degrees he'd studied for concurrently and completed with such brilliance. By now neither father nor son maintained the fiction that these university diplomas were going to help the business on Pasteur Boulevard prosper. Tangiers, Señor Salama told his father when he went home after his last courses, would not much longer be the lively and open international city it had been when they arrived in 1944. Now it belonged to the kingdom of Morocco, and little by little foreigners would have to leave—“we first,” said the father with a flash of the wit and sarcasm of old. “I only hope they throw us out with better manners than the Hungarians, or the Spanish in 1492.”

That's what he said,
the Spanish,
as if he didn't consider himself one of them anymore, even though he held that citizenship and during a period in his life had felt such pride in belonging to a Sephardic line. Señor Salama realized that his father was calculating the possibility of selling the business and emigrating to Israel. But the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to change countries again. “I should have paid attention to my father,” he says now, in another of his episodes of repentance, “because Spain doesn't want to know about anything Spanish in Tangiers—or about those of us Spaniards who are still here. In Morocco there is less and less room for us, but they don't want us in Spain either. With the pension I'll get when I close this shop, from which I get next to nothing now, when I retire I won't have
enough to live on the Peninsula, so I'll stay here to die in Tangiers, where we are less and less Spanish and more and more old foreigners. I could go to Israel, of course, but what would I do at my age, in a country I know nothing about, a place where I have no one?”

If he had paid attention to his father then, if he'd had a little patience, if he hadn't been driving so fast along one of those Spanish highways of the 1950s, so full of himself, he says, his fleshy lips twisted in a sardonic smile, believing he could do anything, in control of his life.

A little before dawn, as he came out of a tight curve, his car drifted to the left of the road, and he saw the yellow headlights of a truck coming toward him. “I should have died right there,” Señor Salama says, and realizes he is reprising the words he heard his father speak so many times, the same desire to go back and correct a few minutes, a few seconds—if we hadn't left them at home alone, if we'd returned just a little earlier—an entire life shattered forever in one fraction of a moment, an eternity of remorse and shame, the horrible shame Señor Salama felt when he found himself paralyzed at the age of twenty-two, walking with crutches and dragging two useless legs, knowing he could never stand on his own again, that he lacked not just the physical strength but the moral courage to pursue the life he had wanted so much and thought he had right at his fingertips.

“I didn't want anyone to see me, I wanted to hide in the dark, in a cellar, like those monsters in the movies. It was years before I went outside with any feeling of normality, or walked through the shop on my crutches.” He noticed that gradually he was becoming deformed, the way his legs grew weaker and his torso more massive, his shoulders unnaturally broad and his neck sunken between them. He would fall in the shop in front of some customer—in those days when there were still a lot of them—and when the clerks came running to pick him up, he despised
them even more than he despised himself, and he would close his eyes as he had in the hospital and want to die of embarrassment.

“How can you understand—forgive me for saying so—when you have two good legs and both arms? When you don't, it is like having a grave illness, or a yellow star sewn to your lapel. I didn't want to be a Jew when the other children threw rocks at me in the park in Budapest where I went to play with my sisters, who were older and braver and defended me. At that time in my life, being a Jew gave me the same sense of shame and the same rage I felt after I was paralyzed, crippled—none of this ‘impaired' or ‘disabled' drivel, which is what those imbeciles say now, as if changing the word could erase the stigma and give me back the use of my legs. When I was nine or ten, in Budapest, what I wanted was not for us Jews to be saved from the Nazis. I say it now, to my shame: what I wanted was not to be a Jew.”

 

A WARM BREEZE WAFTS
through the open window of Señor Salama's small office, the breeze of a May afternoon, though the visit came in December and he can hear the clear call of a muezzin, amplified by one of those rudimentary loudspeakers dangling precariously from a few wires, as well as the hoarse blast of a ship's horn entering or leaving the port. With an expression of annoyance, he has called the shop to ask if there's anything he should know, and in French told someone who took a long time to answer the telephone that he can't come before closing time because the concert begins at eight in the recital hall of the Ateneo. Spanish Culture Week was inaugurated yesterday with a lecture on literature, and there was a respectable audience, but today Señor Salama is worried because the pianist scheduled to perform is not very well known and may not be very good either. If he were, why would he come to Tangiers to give a concert for so little money? It's frightening, and depressing, to picture the hall with only a few seats occupied, the Andalusian white stucco wall arching
above the stage, and the pianist in a travel-rumpled dinner jacket making an overly emphatic bow before an unenthusiastic public, the locks of a romantic mane covering half his face when he stands back up. There weren't funds to print enough posters or send invitations in time. Besides, it's Wednesday, and there may be an international match on TV. In the large, dark cafés of Tangiers, which assault the nostrils with the stale odor of male sweat and black tobacco reminiscent of Spanish bars thirty years before, you sometimes see a mass of dark faces raised toward a television screen, unshaved cheeks and unblinking eyes: a soccer match on Spanish television or one of those competitions of miniskirted airline stewardesses leaning against late-model cars. “That's the cultural contribution Spain is leaving here,” rages Señor Salama, “television and soccer, while the language is being lost and our Ateneo goes without any help, eaten up by debts while on the Peninsula thousands of millions are wasted on that Babylon of the Seville Expo. Look at the French, in contrast, compare our Ateneo with the Alliance Française, their opulent palace, the film series they organize, the exhibitions they bring from the Continent, the money they spend on advertising—which they paste over all our posters, the few we can afford. You've noticed that French flag on high, haven't you? I go there because they're always inviting me, and I die with envy. The French invite me, yes, but the Spanish forget, I don't matter, I'm no one. But the Ateneo itself . . . The people at the embassy and the consulate shove us aside every chance they get, as if we didn't exist.” Señor Salama breathes heavily, his elbows propped on the desktop, his broad torso spread over the papers, his hands searching among the disorder: concert programs, letters, unpaid bills, invitations. It's getting late, and he can't find what he's looking for; he checks his watch and verifies that it's only a few minutes before the concert begins: the piano recital performed by the acclaimed virtuoso D. Gregor Andrescu, works by F. Schubert and F. Liszt, open to the
public, please be punctual. Panic that almost no one has shown up, torture at the thought of being seated in the first row and seeing at such close range the disappointment and obligatory smile of the pianist, who according to Señor Salama was a figure of the first magnitude in Romania before escaping to the West and finding political asylum in Spain.

Señor Salama has found what he was looking for, an invitation written in French and printed on stiff, shining stock bearing the gold seal of the republic and, at the bottom, on a dotted line, his name written in exquisite calligraphy with China ink:
M. Isaac Salama, directeur de L'Athénée Espagnol,
the invitation unmistakable proof that foreigners have more consideration for him than his compatriots. “This exhibition was unforgettable,” he says, taking back the card, which he looks at again as if to check that his handwritten name and title are still there. “We will never be able to do anything like that: Baudelaire manuscripts, first editions of
Flowers of Evil
and
Spleen,
proofs with corrections and deletions made by Baudelaire himself. How strange it is, I thought, that these very personal things have survived so long, that they're here and I can see them.” And his eyes nearly mist over when he remembers the emotion of seeing, copied cleanly by the hand of the poet, the sonnet to the unknown beauty, “A une passante,” which of all Baudelaire's poems is the one Señor Salama likes best, the one he knows by heart and recites in the admirable French he learned from his mother in childhood, pausing with delight and a certain melodrama on the last line:

O toi que j'eusse aimé! O toi qui le savais!

He sits as if swamped in tragic silence, in an inscrutable pose of penitence. Eyes fixed and moist, he seems about to say something; he opens his mouth, taking a breath to speak, but just as he begins there is a knock at the office door. A thin older woman enters, eyeglasses hanging from a chain around her neck: the librarian and secretary of the Ateneo. “When you gentlemen want to come down, Maestro Andrescu says he's ready.”

 

ONE DAY THEY DISAPPEAR,
dead or not, they are lost and fade from memory as if they never existed, or have become something different, a figure or phantom of imagination greatly changed from the real person they were, from the real life they may still be living. But sometimes they rise up again, leap from the past, you hear a voice you haven't heard for years or someone casually speaks the name of someone dead or a character in a novel. Far from Tangiers, many years later in another life, at such a great remove in time that memories have lost all precision and nearly all substance, on a train where a group of writers and professors are traveling through green hills and mist, someone mentions Señor Salama's name, followed by an expression of mockery and a deep laugh.

“Don't tell me you knew him, too, old Salama? It's been years since I thought of him. What a mess the guy got me into. If someone had just warned me, I wouldn't have gone anywhere near Tangiers, especially for the shit they paid, the place was falling apart, you know. Very accommodating that Jew was, almost to the point of fawning, didn't you think? And an awful bore; he just kept at you. He'd pick you up at the hotel first thing in the morning and take you everywhere, practically to the bathroom too, and all the while the same thing, that song and dance about how no one in Spain paid any attention, and those long-winded stories about how he arrived in Tangiers, wasn't it in the forties? It seems he came from a moneyed family, from Czechoslovakia or somewhere like that, and they had to pay an enormous sum to the Nazis to get out. I can't remember the details, it was a thousand years ago. That was in the days when you had to travel, give performances wherever people asked you. Tedious as he was, he was very pleasant on the phone, lots of flowery talk,
right? What an honor it would be, although unfortunately the
emolument
couldn't be very generous, but on and on about how important it was to support Spanish culture in Africa. . . . What a drag, that Jew, all day long, back and forth with the crutches—from an automobile accident, I think. I am not disabled or impaired, he would say, I am crippled. And speaking of crippled, did he tell you about his train trip to Casablanca, when he met this dame? That's strange, he told everybody after he'd had a couple of drinks, and he always began the same way: some Baudelaire poem, didn't he recite
that
to you?”

Without your knowledge, other people usurp stories or fragments from your life, episodes you think you've kept in a sealed chamber of your memory and yet are told by people you may not even know, people who have heard them and repeat them, modify them, adapt them according to their whim or how carefully they listened, or for a certain comic or slanderous effect. Somewhere, right this minute, someone is telling something very personal about me, something he witnessed years ago but that I probably don't even remember, and since I don't remember I assume it doesn't exist for anyone, erased from the world as completely as from my mind. Bits and pieces of you are left behind in other lives, rooms you lived in that others now occupy, photographs or keepsakes or books that belonged to you and now someone you don't know is touching and looking at, letters still in existence when the person who wrote them and the person who received them and kept them for a long, long time are dead. Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you're a fiction, a secondary character in a book, a passerby in the film or novel of another person's life.