Sepharad (49 page)

“I left Spain more than forty years ago and have never been back, and I don't intend to go now, but I remember some places in your city, some of the names, Santa María Plaza, where the wind blew so hard on winter nights, and Calle Real, wasn't that what it was called? Although now I remember it was called José Antonio then. And that street where the potter's studios were, I'd
forgotten the name but when I heard you talking to your wife about Calle Valencia, I realized you meant that street. There's a song we used to sing:

 

On Calle Valencia
The potters, each day,
Make cooking pots
From water and clay.

 

“When I was still young I took some Spanish-literature classes at Columbia University with Don Francisco García Lorca, and he liked me to sing him that. He would repeat the words for the class so we could see there wasn't one that wasn't ordinary, and yet the result, he told us, was both poetic and as informative as something out of a guidebook, just like the old
romances,
those ageless ballads.”

She is talking a lot, mesmerizing us, but we haven't really learned anything about her, not even her name, although we realize that only later, and not without surprise, after we've left. We wonder what the apartment is like where she lives, undoubtedly alone, maybe with a cat for company, hearing voices and Cuban music from La Flor de Broadway below, where she regularly goes to eat, where she orders beans and pork and rice and maybe gets a little tipsy from a daiquiri, alone at a table with a checked cloth, smoking as she finishes her coffee and watches the street, appraising with unwavering eyes the men and women passing by. What does she do during all those hours and days when no one comes to consult a book in her library, the buried treasures that she catalogues and checks with a look of severe efficiency on her withered face, her eyes half closed behind the glasses on the black ribbon? Unique books that now can be found only here, first editions, entire collections of scholarly journals, seventeenth-century folios, autograph letters—all of Spanish literature and all possible knowledge and research concerning Spain gathered in this one
great library that almost no one visits. But she doesn't need to open the poetry volumes of the Clásicos Castellanos collection to recite, because while she was studying with Professor García Lorca, she told us, she had acquired, at his urging, the habit of memorizing the poems she liked best, so she knew by heart a large part of the
Romancero,
and the sonnets of Garcilaso and Góngora and Quevedo, and especially of Saint John of the Cross, and almost all of Fray Luís de León and the Romantics Bécquer and Espronceda, who had been passions of hers during the fantasy and literary adolescence she shared with her brother, who was a little older than her and with whom she had read aloud
Don Juan
and
Fuente Ovejuna
and
Life Is a Dream.
Thanks to her professor, she devoted all the years she worked in the library of the Hispanic Society to memorizing Spanish literature, to reciting it silently or in a low voice, moving her lips as if praying, as she walked to work every morning along the Caribbean sidewalks of Broadway or traveled to lower Manhattan on slow buses or crowded subway cars, as she tossed nights in the insomnia of her solitary bed or walked through the rooms of the museum, almost without noticing the paintings and objects that were etched in her mind, as their layout was, and the names and dates typed on their labels.

But there was one painting she always stopped before and sat down to study with a melancholy that never lessened, that actually became stronger as the years passed and nothing seemed to change, sealed in time as if in a magic kingdom. The labels, posters, and catalogues yellowed, the toilets in the rest rooms became ancient relics, the thick curly hair of the Cuban and Puerto Rican custodians turned white, there were holes in the pockets of their Spanish-guard jackets and the cuffs of their sleeves were rubbed threadbare, and she herself was becoming more a stranger every time she saw herself in a mirror, except for the eyes, which sparkled as brightly as they had when she was thirty and found
herself in America, alone and mistress of herself for the first time, possessed of a fever for life stronger even than Mr. Huntington's uncontrolled and lunatic fever for collecting. “I like to sit before that Velazquez painting, the portrait of the dark-haired girl that no one knows anything about, what her name was or why he painted her,” she told us. “I'm sure you've seen it, but don't leave without going by again, because you may not be back this way again and will never have another chance. Over the years you don't notice things as much, you get used to them and don't look anymore, not out of indifference, but as a matter of mental health. The guards at any museum would go crazy if they looked at the same paintings day after day, at every tiny detail. I walk in here and after so many years I don't see anything, but that little girl by Velazquez is like a magnet, she's always looking at me, and though I know her face by heart I always find something new in it.”

Paintings, in any museum, portray the powerful and the holy, people puffed up with self-importance or crazed by saintliness or by the torment of martyrdom, but that child doesn't represent anything, she isn't the young Virgin or a princess or the daughter of a duke, she's just herself, a solitary little girl with a serious, sweet expression, as if lost in a daydream or some moment of childish unhappiness. She's lost, too, in that place, in the pretentious and somewhat shabby halls of the Hispanic Society, like an enchanted child in a storybook palace where time hasn't moved for a hundred years. She has a frank and at the same time timid gaze, and those dark eyes look straight into mine as I write this, although now I am very far from her and that cloudy day in New York, on the eve of our departure. Only a few months have gone by, and my memories are still clear and strong, but if I think hard about those hours in the Hispanic Society, about the face of the little girl in the Velazquez painting, about the voice and fiery eyes of the woman who never told us her name, everything has the shimmer, the fragility, of something you are not sure really happened. I have kept proof, material evidence, the stub from the bus that carried us there, the postcards we bought in that gift shop, where you can still find black-and-white postcards from a century ago, and guides and catalogs of publications that would be at home on the counters of those bargain bookshops where they sell the most dog-eared and maltreated publications. But this modest shop reminded me a little of a humble state shop in Spain—in contrast to the shops in other New York museums, those spectacular supermarkets of luxury. They occupy enormous rooms lined with large, dark wood counters like shelves of an enormous early-twentieth-century fabric showroom, or like the gigantic wardrobes you see in the sacristies of cathedrals for holding liturgical garments. This museum shop occupies one dreary corner of the hall and a section of the counter where an elderly woman sits, looking for all the world as if she will bring out her knitting at any moment, as soon as these two strange visitors who are thumbing through a collection of faded postcards leave.

Every wall, from floor to ceiling, is covered with enormous paintings, or by a single painting as if in a baroque delirium. Here is a jumble of encyclopedia illustrations representing every regional folk costume, the traditional occupations and dances and geographies of Spain, all the gems of folkloric Romanticism diligently painted by Joaquín Sorolla, like a Sistine Chapel consecrated to the glory of Mr. Huntington's Hispanic passion, celebrating in broad, colorful brush strokes every racial type, every dusty costume closet or ancestral headwear or anthropological peculiarity: Andalusian horsemen in their wide-brimmed hats, Basque villagers in their berets, Catalans in their typical caps and espadrilles, Castilians with furrowed, sunburned faces, Aragonese with red kerchiefs tied around their necks dancing
jotas,
along with orange groves and olive trees, and Cantabrian waters where the fishermen of the north ply their trade, Gallegan granaries and the windmills of La Mancha, Andalusian Gypsies in their tiered,
ruffled skirts and Valencian women in stiffly starched skirts and necklaces and with hairdos rigid as those of the ancient stone sculptures of the Damas Ibéricas, lush gardens and high, windswept plains, the violet skies of El Greco and the mellow, clear light of the Mediterranean, paintings by the square yard, a profusion of faces like masks and clothing like disguises that have all the vertiginous animation of a Carnival ball and also the grinding meticulousness of a catalog or rule book, each district with its folkloric characteristics and particular dress, along with its eternal customs and regional landscape, each individual categorized by origins and place of birth like birds or insects in their zoological taxonomy.

 

I HAVE BEFORE ME NOW,
in my study, beside the keyboard of my computer and the white, polished shell that Arturo found two summers ago on the beach at Zahara, one of the postcards we bought in the Hispanic Society gift shop, the portrait of that dark-haired, delicate, solitary girl painted against a gray background. She looks at me today as she did that day on the eve of our return trip, when we went to see her for the last time before leaving the museum, when we were not quite present in New York though it was still twenty-four hours before our flight to Madrid. Time was disintegrating in our hands with the flimsiness of burned paper, pages of ash, anxious minutes and hours, like the agitated and fleeting time of clandestine lovers who know that the countdown to their separation has begun almost as soon as they see each other. When you invent, you have the vain belief that you are controlling places, things, the people you write about. In my study, beneath the lamp that lights my hands and the keypad, the mouse, the shell whose grooves I love to stroke, the postcard of the Velazquez girl, I can entertain the illusion that nothing I invent or remember exists outside me, beyond this reduced space. But the places are there even though I am not and
even though I will not go back, and the other lives I have lived, and the men I was before I became who I am with you, may endure in the memory of others, and at this very moment, six hours and six thousand kilometers away from this painting, the girl who watches me from the pale reproduction of a postcard is showing the hint of a smile on a real and tangible canvas painted by Velazquez around 1640, taken to New York around 1900 by an American multimillionaire, and hung in semidarkness in a large room of a museum that few people visit. Who knows whether right now, when it is 2:40
P.M.
in New York and here near nightfall at the end of a December day, someone is looking at that girl's face, someone who notices or recognizes in her dark eyes the melancholy of a long exile?

I HAVE INVENTED
very little in the stories and voices that weave through this book. Some of them I was told and have carried in my memory for a long time. Others I found in books. I discovered Willi Münzenberg while reading Stephen Koch's
El fin de la inocencia
(
The End of Innocence
), and I followed his trail in
The Passing of an Illusion
by François Furet, a book as admirable as its title, and in the second volume of the memoirs of Arthur Koestler,
Invisible Writing,
and in a surprising number of Internet pages. I saw the beautiful name of Milena Jesenska for the first time in the amazing
Cartas a Milena
(
Letters to Milena
) by Franz Kafka, in an Alianza paperback that has been with me for a long time. It was that single name in the title of a book,
Milena,
that led me to discover its author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, whom I found a few references to in Koch and in Furet, as a kind of minor character in a footnote. The two volumes of her autobiography, the French version of which I tracked down in the Seuil catalogue—
Déportée en Sibérie, Déportée ä Ravensbrück
—was quickly sent to me from Paris by my editor Annie Morvan. It is curious that in this dark affair of the hells created by Nazism and Communism there are so many testimonies by women: they have been vital to me; among them are
Hope Against Hope
by Nadezhda Mandelstam and especially
Journey into the Whirlwind
by Eugenia Ginzburg, whose name I read for the first time in an extraordinary book by Tsvetan
Todorov that I discovered in English translation,
Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps.
I learned a great deal from Todorov by reading
El hombre desterrado.
I read extensively on the situation of the Jews in Spain in
The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain,
the tendentious and colossal study by Benzion Netanyahu, and from the much briefer and also more balanced classic by Henry Kamen,
The Spanish Inquisition,
not forgetting a book that to me seems extraordinary despite its extreme concision,
Historia de una tragedia
by Joseph Perez. My friend Emilio Lledó has read the extensive diaries of Professor Victor Klemperer in the original German: I know only the English two-volume version published under the title
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years.
It is sad to think that books of such depth are virtually inaccessible to readers in Spanish.

It is questionable whether this book would have occurred to me or that I would have found the state of mind necessary to write it without two of the most decisive writers in my education during recent years. I am referring to Jean Améry and Primo Levi. I discovered Améry's book about Auschwitz by accident, and without previous knowledge of its existence, in a bookstore in Paris in 1995. It was published under the title
Par delà de la crime et le châtiment,
and I have no indication that any Spanish publisher is interested in it. Thanks to Mario Muchnick, however, the Spanish reader has access to the great trilogy of Primo Levi:
If This Is a Man, The Truce,
and
The Drowned and the Saved.
What one learns in these three volumes about human beings and the history of Europe in the twentieth century is terrible but instructive, and I don't think it is possible for anyone to develop a full political awareness of the Holocaust or Holocaust literature without reading them.