Sepharad (44 page)

 

THE FACES OF THE PEOPLE
in the waiting room, or on the other side of the desk in my office, came and went, and I paid little attention to them, half listening to their petitions or demands for
things that weren't in my power to grant and that meant nothing to me, although I had learned to pretend to listen carefully, professionally, sometimes taking notes while I gave information about the necessary forms or explanations about delays of payments or the suggestion that a timely word to the manager might help, busy as he was with larger responsibilities. I was waiting, sheltered in my parenthesis of space and time as in a lair, but what I was waiting for beyond the next letter was unclear to me, and I made no effort to dispel the mist of my indecision. I sat quietly and waited, as one who has heard the alarm clock and knows he must get up but allows himself a few minutes more before he opens his eyes and jumps out of bed. Would the woman writing me come back or not? When she lived on this side of the ocean and in the same city, her interest in me did not last very long. I never felt more distant from her than those few times I held her in my arms. If I sought her out, she fled from me, but if I grew discouraged and gave up the chase, she came to me, always full of promises, erasing the resentment and uncertainty from my soul and making me want her again.

The truth is, she was no more tangible to me than the women in the black-and-white movies who seduced me into a kind of hallucinatory love: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Tierney, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth. In
Gilda,
which I saw many times, Rita Hayworth runs away from Glenn Ford and Buenos Aires, and in a cabaret in Montevideo, dressed in white, she sings and dances a song called “
Amado mío.
”

 

Amado mío
Love me forever
And let forever
Begin tonight.

 

In the film, Montevideo is just a name, not even a set or one of those false panoramas they use when the actors are pretending
to drive a car. But the woman who showed up one morning in the waiting room of my office with a child in her arms and a large bag filled with puppets had fled from Montevideo to Buenos Aires in 1974, and four years later from Buenos Aires to Madrid, pregnant, though she didn't know that yet, carrying the child of a man who had been taken away one night by the military or the police and was not heard from again. As we were talking, the child sat on the floor of my office playing with his mother's wooden dolls. She watched him out of the corner of her eye with an uneasiness that never lessened. A little over thirty, she had very dark hair and eyes; the hair was a silky mane, the eyes large and heavily outlined with kohl. Her nose and mouth suggested Italian blood. Her strong, slightly masculine hands were perfect for manipulating the puppets, a few of which she unexpectedly took and began to maneuver in front of me, after first starting a cassette player she also pulled from her peddler's pack. On the gray metal of the desk and atop the confusion of my papers, Little Red Riding Hood, skipping to the rhythm of the music on the tape, entered the forest where the Wolf lay in wait behind a pile of documents, and in her strong River Plate accent the woman narrated the story and reproduced all the voices, the high voice of the little girl, the big deep voice of the Wolf, the quavering, grumbling voice of the Grandmother. The little boy, as if mesmerized, got up and came over to the desk, which was about at his eye level. Bewitched but terrified, as if the Wolf were also waiting for him, he was completely unaware of his mother's hands or the strings dangling from her fingers.

The demonstration lasted only two or three minutes, and when the music reached its final flourish and the tape stopped, the puppets made a great bow together and collapsed, lifeless, upon my papers, but the boy kept looking at them with dazzled eyes, waiting for them to come back to life. “You saw,” said the woman, “that I can set up my little show anywhere.” She stowed the puppets
and cassette player in her bag, but the boy immediately took them out again, one by one, and examined them slowly, as if to solve the mystery of their extinguished vitality, so absorbed in them and himself that he didn't see me or his mother or the rather shabby office, though it probably was not as dreary as the boardinghouse where the two of them had lived since they came to the city. She had the constant worry, she told me, of not knowing how long they would be able to pay for it, and therefore she wanted me to organize a series of bookings for her in elementary schools and kindergartens.

She, too, had brought her dossier, and she spread out her photocopies and clippings, the credentials from another country that were of so little use here, diplomas from drama schools in Montevideo and Buenos Aires that wouldn't have helped her get a job scrubbing floors in Spain. I reeled off the usual explanation about applications and forms and waiting time. She stared at me with disbelief and possibly sarcasm in those dark, kohl-rimmed eyes, as if to let me know that she didn't believe what I was telling her but that it didn't matter. She asked for an appointment with the provincial commissioner, put her dossier on my desk, and on the first page wrote the telephone number of her boardinghouse, which I knew to be a gloomy place, since I had lived there in my poorer days as a student. She knew as well as I did that there was absolutely no point in her leaving her telephone number, that she would have to come back many times, fruitlessly, but we both also knew that there was no other way, she had to persevere and hope to maintain her dignity. Every day she called to see whether I knew anything, whether there had been any decision; every day she pushed open the door of my office and took a seat again in the dark waiting room, always carrying the child or holding his hand because she couldn't leave him alone in the boardinghouse and had no one she could trust to look after him.

Now he must be about twenty: he will look at the photograph his mother showed me one morning and see the face of a
man with a boyish air, with the horn-rimmed glasses, long sideburns, and thick curly hair typical of the 1970s, the ghost of someone his age and yet his father, legally neither alive nor dead, not buried anywhere, not listed in any administrative register of the deceased, simply lost, disappeared, and those who have survived and hold his memory dear cannot rest, not knowing when he died or where he was buried—that is, if he wasn't thrown into the River Plate from a helicopter with his eyes blindfolded and his hands bound, or already dead, his belly split open so the sharks would make quick work of the corpse.

 

THE WOMAN BEGAN CRYING,
and the child, playing on the floor and lost in an imaginary game, suddenly turned to her with a serious look, as if understanding what his mother told me in a low voice. She asked me for a tissue, and when she looked up I saw that a black line of kohl was trickling down her cheek. “I'm all right now,” she said, apologizing, pushing back the smooth black hair from her face. I lit her cigarette, and her large dark eyes smiled at me, gleaming with tears—not the usual courtesy or fawning in response to my administrative position, the smile was meant just for me, the person who had listened attentively and asked for details, who had offered her the temporary hospitality of his office, an uninterrupted block of time for her confidences. I thought with a touch of male cynicism that she was a desirable woman, that I might be able to go to bed with her.

She told me her name the first day, when I asked her for information to fill out one of the pointless index cards that gave me the appearance of being organized and that I later typed neatly, arranged alphabetically, and filed in a drawer of the metal cabinet on which there were small tags of different colors corresponding to the cards: “Theater,” “Classical,” “Rock,” “Flamenco Music,” or “Miscellaneous Artists,” a category that included the translator of García Lorca into Romany.

Maybe I have remembered the name because it didn't go with her Italian looks: Adriana Seligmann. Sometimes when you hear a name, the name of a woman or a city, a story resonates in its syllables like a key to an encoded message, as if an entire life could be contained in one word. Every person carries his novel with him, her story, maybe not the entire story but an episode in which that life is crystallized forever, summarized in a name, even if the name is unknown or may not be said aloud: Rosebud, Milena, Narva, Gmünd.

The desirable woman on the other side of my desk sat down again and told me the story of her name. I have often seen a sudden change in someone who decides to tell something that matters very much, who takes a step and suspends the present to sink into a tale, who even as she speaks, driven by the need to be heard, seems to speak alone. I am never more myself than when I am silent and listening, when I set aside my tedious identity and tedious memory to concentrate totally on the act of listening, on the experiences of another.

 

MY PATERNAL GRANDFATHER'S
name was Seligmann, Saúl Seligmann. As a little girl I knew vaguely that he had come from Germany, but I never heard him talk about his life before Montevideo. I remember holding my father's hand to go visit my grandfather in his tailor shop. He would leave what he had been doing and sit me on his knees and tell me stories in a voice that had a foreign accent. Then he retired and went to live outside Montevideo, on the other side of the river, as we say. He had bought a country place in El Tigre where he could be alone, which was what he liked, my father used to say, I think with a touch of resentment. After that I seldom saw him. When I was twelve, my parents separated, and for a while they sent me to live with my grandfather in the house in El Tigre. It was a wood
house
on a small island, with a high railing painted white and a dock, surrounded with trees. After the last months I'd spent with my parents, that retreat in my grandfather's house was paradise. I read the books in his library and listened to his opera and tango records. If I asked him anything about Germany, he'd tell me that he left when he was very young, that he had forgotten everything about it, including the language. But I discovered it wasn't true. One of the first nights I slept in his house, I was woken by cries. I was afraid that thieves had broken in. But I was brave enough to get up and go across the corridor to my grandfather's bedroom. It was he who was crying out. He was talking with someone, arguing, begging, but I didn't understand a word because he was talking in German. He screamed as I had never heard anyone scream, calling someone, saying a name so loud that he ended up waking himself. I was going to hide but realized that he didn't see me in the light of the corridor, although his eyes were wide-open. He was panting and sweating. The next day I asked him if he'd had a bad dream, but he told me he didn't remember any. Every night the same cries were repeated, the screams in German in the silent house, the repeated name, Greta or Gerda. When my grandfather died, we found a small suitcase under his bed filled with letters in German and photographs of a young woman. Grete was the signature on all the letters, which stopped in 1940. I didn't like my surname when I was a girl, but now I carry it like a gift my grandfather left me, like the letters I would have liked to read but couldn't. I brought them with me when I came to Buenos Aires, along with the photos of Grete. I told myself that I would give them to someone who knew German and ask him to translate them for me, but I kept putting it off. Life gets busy, and you think there will always be time for everything, then one day it turns out it's all over, you don't have any of the things you thought you had, not your husband, not
your house, not your papers, nothing but fear that claws inside you and never stops. I do not know what happened to her letters, what the people who raided my house did with them. I took only one thing with me when I escaped, though not knowingly: I'd just become pregnant.

I REMEMBER A JEWISH
house in a barrio in my native city called the Alcázar, because it occupies the location, still partially walled, where a medieval castle stood, an
alcázar,
a fortified citadel that belonged first to the Muslims and then after the thirteenth century to the Christians—after 1234 to be exact, when King Ferdinand III of Castile, who in my textbooks was called the Saint, took possession of the recently conquered city. To help us children remember the date, they told us to think of the first four numbers—one, two, three, four—and as if it were one of the multiplication tables we would chant: Ferdinand III, the Saint, conquered our city from the Moors in one thousand, two hundred, thirty, and four.

A mosque first occupied the elevated corner of the Alcázar that was nearly inaccessible from the south and east sides; the Church of Santa María, which still exists although it has been closed many years for a never-ending restoration, was built on the same base. It has, or it had, a Gothic cloister, the only truly old and significant part of the building, which has been restored many times without much thought, especially in the nineteenth century, when around 1880 they added a busy and vulgar facade
and a pair of undistinguished bell towers. But I could identify the tolling of their bells from the many heard in the city at dusk, because they were the bells of our parish, and I also knew when they rang for a death or a funeral mass, and on Sundays, at noon and dusk, I recognized the rich peals that announced high mass. Other bells nearby had a much more serious and solemn bronze tone—the bells, for instance, of El Salvador Church, and others had higher and more diaphanous notes, and then there were the bells at the nuns' convent, which rang in a fortresslike tower that was as forbidding as the rest of the church, with its huge main door that was always closed and the high stone walls darkened with lichen and moss because they faced the cool shade of the north side. From time to time that enormous black studded door would swing open and two nuns would come out, always in pairs, and so pale I thought they must have come from the tomb, in their dark brown habits and with their faces tightly framed in white beneath their wimples, their skin whiter than the cloth, and they always frightened me terribly because I thought they would kidnap me, and I held tighter to the hand of my mother, who had put a black veil over her head to come to church.