Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  I remembered all this as if I were reliving it when I unexpectedly ran into Mateo Zapatón in Chueca Plaza . . . and something else that until that moment I hadn’t known was in my memory. Once, as I was waiting my turn and reading a comic book my father had just bought for me, I felt thirsty and asked Pepe Morillo’s permission to get a drink. He pointed to a small, dark interior patio at the rear of the barbershop, through a glass door and down a dark corridor. When you’re a boy, the farthest places can be reached in only a few steps. As I pushed open the door, I think I was a little dizzy; maybe I was getting a fever and that was why I was so thirsty. The paving tiles were white and gray, with reddish flowers in the center, and they echoed as I walked across them. In a corner of the tiny patio, where a number of plants with large leaves added to the humidity, there was a pitcher on a shelf covered with a crocheted cloth, one of those clay water pitchers they had back then, a brightly colored, glazed jug in the shape of a rooster, made, I remember precisely, by potters on Calle Valencia. I took a drink, and the water had the consistency of broth and the taste of fever. I went back down the hallway, and suddenly I was lost. I wasn’t at the barbershop but in a place it took some time to identify as the cobbler’s shop, and the person I saw was the flesh-and-blood apostle Saint Matthew, although he was wearing a leather apron and not the tunic of a saint or a member of the brotherhood, and he was beardless, with the stub of an unlit cigarette in one corner of his mouth and a tack in the other. “Mercy, Sacristan, what in the world are you doing here? You gave me quite a turn.”

  JUST AS I HAD THEN, I looked at Mateo and didn’t know what to say. Up close he seemed much older, he no longer resembled the eternal Saint Matthew of the Last Supper. Neither his gaze nor his smile was directed at me: they stayed absolutely the same when I spoke his name and held out my hand to greet him, and when I clumsily and hastily told him who I was and tried to remind him of my parents’ names and the nickname my family had back then. Limply holding my hand, he nodded and looked at me, although he didn’t give the impression that he was focusing his eyes, which until a moment before had seemed observant and lively. His hat, more than tilted to one side, was skewed on his head, as if he had jammed it on at the last moment as he left the house or put it on with the carelessness of someone who can’t see himself well in the mirror. I reminded him that my mother had always been a customer in his shop—then shops had patrons, not customers—and that my father, who like him was also a great fan of the bulls, had often been present at his gatherings, and at those in Pepe Morillo’s barbershop next door, which communicated with his via an interior patio. Mateo listened to those names of persons and places with the look of one who doesn’t completely connect with things so far in the past. He bowed his head and smiled, although I also thought I noticed an expression of suspicion or alarm or disbelief in his face. Maybe he was afraid that I was going to cheat him, or assault him, like many of the thugs who hung around that area—you saw them all the time, kneeling in clusters beside the entrance to the metro and dealing in God knows what. I had to go, I was very late for an appointment that was probably futile in the first place, I hadn’t had breakfast, my car was double-parked, and Mateo Zapatón was still holding my hand with distracted cordiality and smiling, his mouth half-open, his lower jaw dropped a little, with the gleam of saliva at the corners of his lips.

  “You don’t remember, maestro?” I asked him. “You always called me Sacristan.”

  “Of course I do, man, yes,” he winked and stepped a little closer, and it was then I realized that now I was the taller. He put his other hand on my shoulder, as if in a benevolent attempt not to disappoint me. “Sacristan.”

  But the word didn’t seem to mean anything to him, though he kept repeating it, still holding the hand that now I wanted to get free, feeling trapped and nervous about continuing on my way. I pulled back but he didn’t move, the hand with the soft, moist palm that had clutched mine still slightly raised, the hat with the tiny green feather twisted around on his forehead, standing there alone like a blind man, in the middle of the plaza, supported on the great pedestal of his large black shoes.

  copenhagen

  SOMETIMES IN THE COURSE of a journey you hear and tell stories of other journeys. It seems that with the act of departing the memory of previous travels becomes more vivid, and also that you listen more closely and better appreciate the stories you’re told: a parenthesis of meaningful words within the other, temporal, parenthesis of the journey. Anyone who travels can surround himself with a silence that will be mysterious to strangers observing him, or he can yield, with no fear of the consequences, to the temptation of shading the truth, of gilding an episode of his life as he tells it to someone he will never see again. I don’t believe it’s true what they say, that as you travel you become a different person. What happens is that you grow lighter, you shed your obligations and your past, just as you reduce everything you possess to the few items you need for your luggage. The most burdensome aspect of our identity is based on what others know or think about us. They look at us and we know that they know, and in silence they force us to be what they expect us to be, to act according to certain habits our previous behavior has established, or according to suspicions that we aren’t aware we have awakened. To the person you meet on a train in a foreign country, you are a stranger who exists only in the present. A woman and a man look at each other with a tingle of intrigue and desire as they take seats facing each other: at that moment they are as detached from yesterday and tomorrow and from names as Adam and Eve were when they first looked upon each other in Eden. A thin and serious man with short and very black hair and large dark eyes gets onto the train at the station in Prague and perhaps is trying not to meet the eyes of other passengers coming into the same car, some of whom look him over with suspicion and decide that he must be a Jew. He has long, pale hands and is reading a book or absently staring out the window. From time to time he is shaken by a dry cough and covers his mouth with a white handkerchief he then slips into a pocket, almost furtively. As the train nears the recently invented border between Czechoslovakia and Austria, the man puts away the book and looks for his documents with a certain nervousness. When the train reaches the station of Gmünd, he immediately peers out at the platform, as if expecting to see someone in the solitary darkness of that deep hour of the night.

  No one knows who he is. If you travel alone on a train or walk along the street of a city in which no one knows you, you are no one; no one can be sure of your anguish or of the source of your nervousness as you wait in the station café, although they might guess the name of your illness when they observe your pallor and hear the rasping of your bronchial tubes, or when they notice the way you hide the handkerchief you used to cover your mouth. But when I travel I feel as if I were weightless, as if I had become invisible, that I am no one and can be anyone, and this lightness of spirit is evident in the movements of my body; I walk more quickly, with more assurance, free of the burden of my being, my eyes open to the incitement of a city or a landscape, of a language I enjoy understanding and speaking, now more beautiful because it isn’t mine. Montaigne writes of a presumptuous man who returned from a journey without learning anything: How was he going to learn, he asks, if he carried himself with him?

  BUT I DON’T HAVE TO GO far in order to undergo this transformation. Sometimes, as soon as I leave the house and turn the first corner or walk down the steps of the metro, I leave my persona behind, and I am dazed and excited by the great blank page my life has become, the space where the sensations, places, people’s faces, the tales I may hear, will be printed with more brilliance and clarity. In literature there are many narratives that pretend to be stories told during a journey, at a chance encounter along the road, around the fireplace of an inn, in the coach of a train. It’s on a train that one man tells another the story Tolstoy recounts in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” In Heart of Darkness, Marlow tells of a journey toward the unexplored territory along the Congo as he is traveli
ng up the Thames on a barge, and when he sees the still-distant glow of the lights of London through the night fog, he recalls the bonfires he saw on the banks of the African river, and he imagines much older bonfires, fires the first Roman sailors would have seen when they sailed into the Thames for the first time more than two thousand years ago. On the train on which he was being deported to Auschwitz, Primo Levi met a woman he had known years before, and he says that during the journey they told each other things that living people do not tell, that only those who are on the other side of death dare say aloud.

  In a dining car, traveling from Granada to Madrid, a friend told me of another trip on the same train when he met a woman he was kissing within the hour. It was summertime, in broad daylight, on the Talgo, which leaves every day at three in the afternoon. My friend’s fiancée came to see him off, but shortly thereafter he and the stranger had locked themselves in a rest-room, with a terrifying urgency and joy and desire that neither cramped quarters nor problems keeping balance nor the pounding on the door by impatient travelers could disrupt. They had thought they would say good-bye forever when they reached Madrid. My friend, who was fulfilling his military service, had no profession or income, and she was a married woman with a small child, a little unstable, given to both fits of reckless excitement and black spells of depression. My friend told me that he liked her very much although she frightened him, but also that he had never had such pleasure with any woman. He remembered her with the greatest clarity and gratitude because with the exception of his wife, whom he married soon after returning from the army, she was the only woman he had ever slept with.

  They continued seeing each other in secret for several months, repeating the sexual intoxication of their first meeting in boardinghouse rooms, the darkness of movie theaters, several times in her home in the bed she slept in with her husband, watched from the crib by the large, tranquil eyes of the child clinging to the bars to hold himself up. When my friend was discharged they agreed that she would not come to see him off on the midnight express that was to carry him back to Granada. At the last moment the woman appeared. My friend jumped from the train and as he put his arms around her felt such a surge of desire that he didn’t care if he missed the train. But he took it the next day, and they never saw each other again. “It frightens me to think what must have become of her, unstable as she was,” my friend said, his elbows propped on the bar of the Talgo diner, sitting before the coffee he still hadn’t touched and staring through the window at the desert landscape of the northern Granada province, or turning toward the slamming door that led to the other cars, as if with the impossible hope that the woman would appear all these years later. Listening to him, I was envious, and sad too that nothing like that had ever happened to me, that I had no memories of such a woman. She smoked joints, took pills, sniffed coke, he told me, and he was afraid of all those things, but he followed her through all her strange behavior, and the more frightened he was the more he desired her. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that she ended up on heroin,” he told me. “Some mornings I wake up remembering that I’ve dreamed of her. I dream that I meet her in Madrid, or that I’m sitting on this same train and see her coming down the corridor. She was very tall, like a model, and she had curly chestnut hair and green eyes.”

  TODAY’S TRAINS, whose seats aren’t arranged so we’re forced to sit face to face with strangers, are not conducive to travel stories. Instead, there are silent ghosts with headphones covering their ears, their eyes fixed on a video of an American film. You heard more stories in those old second-class coaches, which had the flavor of a waiting room or a room where poor families eat. During my first trip to Madrid, as I dozed on the hard, blue plastic seat, I listened in the dark to my grandfather Manuel and another passenger tell each other tales of train trips during the winters of the war. “In the battalion of assault troops I served in they marched us all up to a train in this same station and made us get on, and although they didn’t tell us where they were taking us, the rumor spread that our destination was the front along the Ebro River. My legs trembled at the thought all night, there in the dark of the closed coach. In the morning they made us get off and with no word of explanation sent us back to our usual posts. A different battalion had been dispatched in our stead, and of the eight hundred men who went no more than thirty returned. Had that train taken us to the front,” my grandfather said, “I wouldn’t be telling you this story,” and suddenly I thought, half asleep, if that journey along the Ebro hadn’t been canceled, my grandfather probably would have died and I wouldn’t have been born.

  Everything was strange that night, that rare and magical night of my first trip; it was as if when I got on the train—or earlier, when I arrived at the station—I had abandoned the everyday and entered a kingdom very much like the world of films or books: the insomniac world of travelers. Almost without leaving my home I had been nourished by stories of travels to far-off places, including the moon, the center of the earth, the bottom of the sea, the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific, the North Pole, and that enormous Russia that Jules Verne’s reporter named Claudius Bombarnac traveled through.

  As I recall, it was a June night. I was sitting on a bench on the train platform between my grandmother and grandfather, and a train, not yet ours, arrived at the station and stopped with a slow screech. In the darkness it had the shape of some great mythological beast, and as it approached, the round headlight on the engine reminded me of Captain Nemo’s submarine. A woman was leaning against the railing of the observation platform; I was instantaneously overwhelmed with desire, the innocent, frightened, and fervent desire of a fourteen-year-old boy. I wanted her so badly my legs trembled, and the pressure in my chest made it difficult to breathe. I can still see her, although I don’t know now whether what I remember is in fact a memory: a tall blond foreigner wearing a black skirt and a black blouse unbuttoned low. I looked at her windswept hair and the brightly painted toenails of her bare feet. A deep tan brought out the gleam of her blond hair and light eyes. She moved a knee forward, and thigh showed through the slit in her skirt. The train started off, and as I watched she moved away, still leaning on the rail and watching the disappearing faces observe her from the platform of that remote station. Midnight in a foreign country.

  In shifting tatters of dreams, the woman appeared again as I dozed and my grandfather and the other man kept talking in the darkened coach. Through half-opened eyes I could see the tips of their cigarettes, and when my grandfather or his companion took a drag, their country faces were visible in the reddish glow. Oh, the acrid black tobacco that men smoked then. As I watched those faces and listened, their words dissolved into sleep, and I felt myself on one of the trains they were telling about, past trains of defeated soldiers or deportees who traveled without ever reaching their destination, stopped for whole nights beside darkened platforms. Shortly before he died, Primo Levi said that he was still frightened by the sealed freight cars he occasionally saw on sidetracks. “I served in Russia,” the man said, “in the Blue Division. We got on a train at the North Station, and it took ten days to reach a place called Riga.” And I thought, or half said in my sleep, Riga is the capital of Latvia, because I’d studied it in the atlases I liked so much and because one of Jules Verne’s novels is set in Riga and his books filled my imagination and my life.

  Now I understand that in our dry inland country night trains are the great river that carries us to the world outside and then brings us back, the great waterway slipping through shadows toward the sea or the beautiful cities where a new life awaits us, luminous and true to what we were promised in books. As clearly as I remember that first train trip, I remember the first time I stopped at a border station; in both memories are the brilliant night, anticipation, and fear of the unknown that made my pulse race and my knees buckle. Scowling, rough-mannered policemen examined our passports on the platform at Cerbère Station. Cerbère. Cerberus. Sometimes stations at night do resemble the entrance
to Hades, and their names contain curses: Cerbère, where in the winter of 1939 French gendarmes humiliated the soldiers of the Spanish Republic, insulted them, pushed and kicked them; Port Bou, where Walter Benjamin took his life in 1940; Gmünd, the station on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria where Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenska sometimes met secretly, within the parentheses of train schedules, within the exasperating brevity of time running out the minute they saw each other, the minute they climbed the stairs toward the inhospitable room in the station hotel where the rumble of passing trains rattled the windowpanes.

  What would it be like to arrive at a German or Polish station in a cattle car, to hear orders shouted in German over the loudspeakers and not understand a word, to see the distant lights, wire fences, and tall, tall chimneys expelling black smoke? For five days, in February 1944, Primo Levi traveled in a cattle car toward Auschwitz. Through cracks in the wood planks where he pressed his lips to breathe he glimpsed the names of the last stations in Italy, and each name was a farewell, a step in the voyage north toward winter cold, toward names of stations in German and then Polish, isolated towns no one had yet heard of: Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz. It took Margarete Buber-Neumann three weeks to travel from Moscow to the Siberian camp where she had been sentenced to serve ten years. When only three had passed, they ordered her onto a train back to Moscow, and she thought she would be set free; the train, however, did not stop in Moscow, it continued west. When finally it stopped at the border station of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian guards told Buber-Neumann to hurry and get her belongings together, because they were in German territory. Between the boards nailed over the window, she saw the black-uniformed SS on the platform and understood with horror and infinite fatigue that because she was German, Stalin’s guard were handing her over to Hitler’s guard, fulfilling an infamous clause in the German-Soviet pact.