Sepharad (43 page)

I can still see that dark, rustic face and white hair, and suddenly an unexpected detail surfaces, the large iron rings the Romany translator wore on his fingers, adding to the force with which his two hands fell on my desk or on the bulging satchel he was always protecting from the world, from adversity, theft, indifference, and the administrative lethargy he encountered every day in the waiting room or wandering outside the main building with the hope of catching the manager or some superior with greater influence than mine and in that way, by assault in the middle of the street, achieve what patience never accorded: the interview in which he would be granted money to publish his masterwork or at least a part of it, maybe the
Romancero gitano,
which he recited to me first in Spanish and then in Romany, closing his eyes tight, holding up his right hand with the index finger extended like a flamenco singer in a trance.

I watched him from my window, as I watched so many people, men and women, known and unknown, figures that passed across the unreal diorama of my life in those days. I watched him at the pedestrian crossing, walking with a resolute stride, his satchel held in his arms as if to prevent a blast of wind or a thief from seizing it, and somehow that man was not the same one who a few minutes later entered my office and asked if I thought the manager would be in that morning.

I pretended to pay attention to him, and then I pretended to be very busy sorting papers on my desk or checking figures in a financial report. I wanted to be alone, to go back to the book or letter the visitor had interrupted, and my impatience turned to irritation, although I tried not to show it. No, the manager won't be in this morning, he called and had me cancel all his appointments, he has a very important meeting, and the man closed
his satchel again, stood up, pressing it between the huge stonemason's or smith's hands adorned with rings in crude Asiatic splendor, and a minute later he had left the office and I could see him crossing the street, deep in thought and walking a little more slowly, though no less decisively, not yielding to dejection, perhaps reciting in his restless imagination lines from Lorca and evangelical sermons in Spanish and Romany. But now, as I am writing this, I wonder how I would have appeared if someone observed me from a window without my knowledge as I walked through those same streets, as intoxicated with words and chimera as the Gypsy poet: a strange man who sees nothing around him, his city inhabited with the dark ghosts of desire and books. They didn't see Philip Marlowe, the Invisible Man, Franz Kafka, or Bernardo Soares, only a serious and ordinary thirty-year-old employee who left the office every day at the same time and read a book at the bus stop, and who once a week, always at the same hour, slipped a letter into the “Foreign-Urgent” slot of the mail drop on one side of the Post Office Building.

 

SOMEONE IS WAITING NOW
in the reception room, courteously asking permission to come into my office. I hide in the drawer the letter or book I was reading. Of all the names and faces from that time, one figure stands out, nameless now, and another I remember perfectly. Two images, like illustrations from two different stories, but both set in the same place and atmosphere, a gloomy waiting room where applicants wait hours or days. A man and then a woman, their accents not the same. I listen in a silence broken only by the keyboard. The woman has a child in her arms, no, seated on her knees, because he isn't a baby but a child of two or three. “What luck,” she is saying, speaking with a Montevideo or Buenos Aires accent. “I'm so happy that he can't remember.”

The man speaks a meticulous, slightly formal Spanish, which
he learned in his own country, I can't remember now whether it was Romania or Bulgaria, when he was a teenager and he thought of Spain not as a real country but a fabulous kingdom of literature and music, especially music, the pieces that he studied at the conservatory in his distant past as a child prodigy, when he astounded his professors by playing from memory difficult piano passages from Albéniz, de Falla, and Debussy, invocations of gardens in the moonlight and Muslim palaces with splendors of stonework and murmuring fountains. He read translations of Washington Irving and listened to and quickly learned Ravel's
Rhapsody Espagnole
and
Night in Grenada
by Debussy, who had never seen the city when he wrote that music, the pianist told me, and who in fact never traveled to Spain, though it was not far away and he had written music indebted to it. The pianist told me that the first time he walked through the Alhambra, after escaping from his country, Debussy's music played in his mind, and he seemed to recognize the things around him not from photographs or drawings but from the faint notes of a piano.

 

AT FIRST HE WAS
an applicant like any other, although somewhat better dressed and with better manners, which were as correct as his use of the Spanish language. In the half light of the reception room, he leafed through a magazine on the low table as if he were in a doctor's waiting room. He, too, had brought a dossier, his briefcase with clippings and photocopies, but his were better organized than usual, the pages protected in plastic sleeves, some with color photographs and programs of recitals in the cities of Central Europe, often with text in Cyrillic characters. On the cover of the album was a professional artist's photograph, somewhat dated, a younger and more vigorous version of the man before me; the pose was that of an impetuous, romantic concert artist, long hair, closely fitted tuxedo, elbow propped on the lid of a grand piano, hand on cheek with the index finger touching his
temple, a dreamer of consummate virtuosity. Or maybe I'm remembering the jacket of a recording of Spanish music published at the height of his career, which he insisted on giving me though earlier he told me that there were few copies left, because all his records and books, everything he owned—except his credentials as a musician—had been abandoned, left behind at the border that then divided Europe. “I didn't desert, didn't flee,” he said. “
Me fui,
as you say in Spanish: I went away, because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life toeing a line, afraid my neighbor or colleague was a spy or that there were hidden microphones in the dressing room.” It wasn't political, he assured me, sitting there in my office while I was willing him to leave so I could be alone again and he was lingering in the hope that the manager would come that morning. “I couldn't bear to live in my country any longer, because everything was always the same, the face of the head of government on all the posters and in all the newspapers and on television, and his voice on the radio, while things that for you in the West are normal, buying a bottle of shampoo or looking up a number in the telephone book, were difficult, often impossible. In my country there are no telephone books, and it is a major undertaking to get a permit for foreign travel. If you try to bring in a typewriter, they confiscate it at customs and put you on the list of suspicious persons. But what am I saying, my country? Now my country is Spain.”

He set his dossier to one side, first making sure the album was tightly closed so no photograph, program, or clipping could fall out, and felt for something inside his skimpy jacket—velvet, I remember now, with very wide lapels, a jacket more for an obsolete crooner than a piano player—and for a moment his expression turned to alarm as he patted all his pockets, looking at me with a smile of embarrassment and apology, as if I were a policeman who'd asked for identification. But then the anxious fingers touched what they were looking for, the flexible covers of
a passport so tenderly handled that it looked new, just like the identification card the pianist now showed me, his color photograph sealed beneath the smooth plastic along with his strange Romanian or Slavic name, which I've forgotten.

His long, pale fingers stroked those documents with reverence, with amazement that they existed, with the anxiety that they could be lost. So many years living in a country he wanted to get out of to visit another that he knew only through books and music, through the sonorous names in the scores he learned so well at the conservatory, all that tension on the eve of the final decision, when he climbed out the washroom window of his dressing room on the tour through Spain to avoid being seen by the agents watching him and his companions, all the waiting, giving statements in police stations and presenting papers, living in Red Cross shelters or filthy boardinghouses, with the fear of being expelled or, worse, repatriated, what a horrible word, he told me, with no money, no identity, in a no-man's-land between the life he'd left and the one he had yet to begin, divested of the security and privileges he had enjoyed as a renowned pianist in his country, uncertain about the chances of beginning a new career here, of being unknown.

The bewildered look of one who has nurtured a dream for years and actually accomplished it contrasted, on his face and in his eyes, with the melancholy of one who has gradually capitulated to reality. He had been a child prodigy in the conservatory at Bucharest or Sofia, and his collection of clippings and programs attested to a distinguished career in the concert halls of Eastern Europe. But now he was spending entire mornings in the reception room of my office, awaiting a decision on a contract that would guarantee him, at most, two or three performances in cultural centers on the outskirts of the city, in theaters with bad acoustics and mediocre, badly tuned pianos.

He wasn't allowing himself to be discouraged, and if he came into my office and I told him that the manager wouldn't be in
that day or that we hadn't even begun processing the forms for his contract, he would smile weakly, thank me, and bow as he left with a mixture of old-fashioned Central European courtesy and Communist stiffness: a timid deference toward any official that he would probably never lose. He was a young man, small: in my now-faded memory he looks something like Roman Polanski, a fleeting liveliness in the eyes and gestures that at a certain distance erases the signs of age.

He was giving private lessons, and he sought and accepted concerts anywhere, earning almost nothing, a fee sometimes so low that when he was going over the figures, he told himself, using one of those Spanish sayings he liked so much, “Minimum pay, food for the day.” He also told himself, “Better than stone soup,” and, “A bird in the hand is worth scores on the wing” in the painstaking Spanish so passionately learned in a capital with broken-down streetcars, long winters, and early nightfalls, practiced privately and with the dream of escape and rebellion, much as he learned to play the most difficult passages of Albéniz's
Iberia
or Ravel's
Rhapsody Espagnole.
Now, although the fruits of his dream were so meager, because in Spain his career as a piano virtuoso meant nothing and he had to perform in lamentable venues, wearing worn clothing and living under the constant strain of poverty, he refused to give in to depression and continued to show his gratitude and enthusiasm for his new country. It was a pathetic happiness, as of a man in love who knows he is scorned by his beloved but still gives her his boundless devotion.

 

ONE DAY THE PIANIST TOLD ME
—I don't know whether it was in my office or one of the bars on the side streets where we lower-echelon employees ate breakfast, possibly he had invited me to have a cup of coffee or a tot of rum to celebrate modestly, that he finally got a contract for a concert.

He told me how he was coming back to Spain from Paris on
a night train scheduled to reach the border at Irún by dawn. He had gone to play in a festival benefiting exiled artists of his country, and this was the first time he had traveled with his new Spanish passport. He couldn't sleep all night because of the discomfort of his second-class seat and the added aggravation of rude passengers, and at nearly every station the French conductors forced him to get up because his ticket, the cheapest available, gave him no right to claim a specific seat. And he was nervous: it was the first time he would enter Spain with the new identity papers, which he had been given only a short time before. In the darkened compartment, among the snoring passengers, he kept touching the pockets of his jacket and overcoat, checking again and again for his ticket, passport, ID, and each time it seemed that he'd lost them or that he had one document but not the others, and he kept putting them in a more secure place, inside a lining or in the zippered pocket of his travel case, and when he dozed off and his eyes jerked open, he would forget where he'd put them, this time sure that he'd lost them or that one of those thieves who roam the night trains had taken them. After hours of anguish at border posts in Communist countries, the laborious review of papers and the flash of alarm each time some bureaucratic flaw in a document held him up, he decided not to go back to sleep. He tried to see what time it was by the pale violet light in the car ceiling, and at the stops he noted the names of the stations, calculating how much farther it was to Irun, eager to get there but also increasingly afraid as the train neared the border. Meanwhile the Spanish and French passengers slept tranquilly in his compartment, sure of the order of things and perfectly allied with their world, unlike him, an intruder who took nothing for granted and always feared the unexpected.

Finally, exhausted, he fell into a deep slumber, only to be awoken by a great screeching of brakes. At first, still trapped in the web of a bad dream, he thought the train had arrived at his
native country and that gray-uniformed guards would arrest him because he was not carrying the proper identification, his old passport, which he also showed me, a relic of a dark past.

He got off the train, tightly clutching his travel case in one hand and in the other his Spanish passport. He had been told earlier to have all the documents relating to his naturalization easily available in his pocket, in case he needed to produce them. He took his place in the line, on the Spanish side of the border, in front of the guard post manned by two
guardias
looking bored or sleepy. “My legs were trembling, and when I tried to say good morning, my mouth was so dry I could barely speak.” Then, as he walked toward their booth, his palms sweaty and his knees weaker by the minute, something happened that he still remembers with amazement and gratitude. One of the guards came toward him, and he thought the man was returning his gaze with suspicion and distrust. But he summoned his courage, as he had the time he jumped out the window of the washroom, and, as naturally as he was able, held out his passport, carefully opened to his photograph, prepared to explain the discrepancy between his nationality and his name and to produce all the necessary papers. But the guard, without even glancing at the passport, without looking at his face, waved his hand and told him with a Spanish obscenity to move on, and that rude gesture and word seemed to the pianist the most beautiful welcome he had ever received. For my benefit he imitated the guard's wave with his slender, white, musician's hand, still stunned by a gift that none of the other weary passengers appreciated, repeating like a spell the guard's expression, “for shit's sake,”
joder
with a strong aspirated “j,” which he pronounced precisely and with pride.