Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Confused again, he is on the verge of waking and doesn’t know where he is or who he is. Where am I if not in a Russian hut near the Leningrad front in the autumn of 1942? I’m wearing not a German winter uniform but lightweight pajamas, there is no rough cloth of a military blanket, no stink of manure or the rotted straw of the mattress I dropped onto a few hours ago, dead with fatigue, not roused from sleep by the stealthy sounds of guerrillas who came to kill me.

  Now, yes now he feels panic, lost somewhere in the tangle of unreliable memories and the chaos of time, and vertigo, because in a single instant his mind has leaped more than half a century and an entire continent. He is tempted to reach over to the night table and turn on the lamp, but he chooses to lie quietly, curled up as he did that night fifty-seven years before, a whole lifetime in one lightning flash, in that instant when you’re dozing but jerk awake as your head drops. He listens attentively to the quiet whir of the alarm clock, the distant hum of the refrigerator, the muted night traffic of Madrid. He looks at who he was as if watching a stranger, seeing himself from the outside, feeling curiosity and a certain tenderness, as well as the satisfaction of learning that he wasn’t a coward, and the surprise of having survived where so many perished. He knows that his lack of fear, like his lack of envy, is not something to be proud of but simply a part of his character. He sees the youth who was so passionate about philosophy and literature and the German language in a public institute in Madrid, the young man who wasn’t born in time to fight in the Spanish Civil War but enlisted in a fit of reckless, toxic romanticism to go to Russia. He sees himself leaping over a trench, at the head of a squad, shooting a pistol and shouting orders, all the while feeling invulnerable. He sees coming toward him, emerging from a mist, a platoon of Russians with upraised swords.

  But of all his successive identities the strangest, the most unreal, is the one he has experienced now, tonight, just awakened from a memory as vivid as a dream. Who is this eighty-year-old man turning clumsily in the bed, who knows he will lie awake until dawn, seeing the faces of dead men and places that don’t exist, the Russian woman and the benumbed child hiding in the folds of her ragged skirt, the flames of the fire glowing on the leveled plain of mud, the face of the executed professor without his eyeglasses? He wishes he could fall asleep and for a few minutes or seconds have now again become then.

  valdemún

  COMING OUT OF THE last curve of the highway, you will suddenly see all the things she never saw again, the last things, perhaps, she remembered and felt a surge of nostalgia for as she lay dying in her hospital bed, caged among machines and tubes in a room where the air was burning with July heat, the thin cloth of her sick-room gown clinging to her sweaty back. She was always thirsty, and she mumbled words, working parched lips that you moistened with a wet cloth, and she imagined or dreamed she was sitting on the bank of a river in the shade of large trees swaying in a breeze as cool as the current, the clean, swift water where she dabbled her bare feet one summer morning in her early youth. Irrigation ditches snaking through heavy shade, gurgling water hidden beneath thickets of blackberries and willows, scales of gold glittering in the sun, clean pebbles on the bottom shining like precious stones, and in the eddies, spongy masses of eggs brushed the feet with the same delicate feel as water or mud, and bubblelike protuberances, imperceptible to the untrained eye, betray the presence of half-submerged frogs. She swallowed saliva and her throat burned, and once again her mouth was dry, her rough tongue licking lips that you didn’t moisten because you fell asleep, overcome by the exhaustion of so many sleepless nights, now in the hospital and earlier at home, when they released her after her first stay and it seemed she would recover, would regain her health even though she was fragile and frightened. But once she was back home, it was obvious that she belonged in the hospital, for in those few days she had become a stranger to the place and things that once had formed the framework of her life. She would walk with a strange air through the kitchen or the living room in her bathrobe, as if she couldn’t find her way, get lost in a corridor or stand before an open closet, looking for something she didn’t know how to find, trying unsuccessfully to resume the domestic patterns of the time when she was well, the simplest tasks: preparing a snack in midafternoon, changing sheets.

  Then she was back in the hospital and growing worse, her heart weaker than ever, but her face, colorless against the sanitary white of the pillows, took on an expression of serenity and surrender, and she stopped asking when she could go home. At night she was delirious with thirst or fever, or from the tranquilizers and injections they gave her to calm her unruly heart, and she imagined or dreamed that she was looking down on the swift, transparent river, dipping her cupped hands into the water and lifting it streaming and sparkling in the rays that slipped through the trees. But just as her lips touched the water, it escaped through her fingers, and she was still dying of thirst, and some part of her that remained lucid accepted that she would never again see the stair-stepped houses on the hillside or the valley of orchards with the ever-present sound of water in the irrigation ditches and the breeze in the treetops and waving willows. She twisted and turned in the bed, in the tangle of tubes and straps, moaned, half sleeping, half awake, and then you sat up with a start in your synthetic-leather armchair, with a rush of anguish and remorse for having dozed off when she might need something, might ask and you wouldn’t hear, might die there beside you, gone forever without your knowing.

  YOU WILL SEE PERFECTLY, at a precise point in the distance, what you saw as a little girl when you arrived every year for your summer vacation, and what she saw before you were born, when her eyes began to look out on the world, eyes like yours, preserved in your face after her death, the way a part of her genetic code is preserved in every cell of your body. Dead twenty years, she still looks through your eyes at what you will discover with a thrill of happiness and sadness when the car takes the last turn and spread out before you is the landscape that was a paradise not only after it was lost to you but also in the time you enjoyed it with the rare clarity of a child, unaware how sensations from your mother’s childhood were being repeated in you, just as the shape and color of her eyes are repeated in your face, the hint of sweetness and melancholy in her smile. The fertile river valley was covered with green orchards of pomegranates and figs and crisscrossed with paths of loamy soil beneath the concave shade of the trees—poplars, beeches, willows—a water-saturated vegetation nourished by land so gravid that it welcomed with unique delicacy the tread of human feet, yielding slightly to the weight of a body, absorbing it with a welcome as hospitable as that of a river breeze.

  “I want to be buried here, I don’t want to be alone when I’m dead, surrounded by strangers in a cemetery as big as a city,” she used to tell you. I don’t mind dying, but I don’t want to be buried where no one knows me, among strange names, that would be like living again in one of those apartment buildings where I was an outsider, stuck in my house waiting all afternoon for my children to come home, and my husband after nightfall, reserved or talkative, bragging about his job or bad-mouthing the people in his office, superiors or subordinates, names I hear and get used to but then stop hearing and forget, just as I get used to the new cities where his work takes us and where I never have time to get completely settled, never have what I want most: my own things, furniture I’ve picked out, a routine, that’s what I miss the most, being able to settle sweetly into the passing of time, to get established, to occupy a secure place in the world, as I did as a child living in my small town, and although I always had a head for fantasy and imagined journeys and adventures, I enjoyed the safety of my home, my brothers and sisters, the presence of my father, the joy of looking out the window of my room and seeing the valley with its flowering almond and apple trees and, high above them, the bare tops of the mountains, with that color earth that’s the same as the houses on the road to the cemetery where I want to be buried.

  It makes me sad to leave life so soon an
d not see my children grow up or sit again with my sister to count and make a list of supplies in the large kitchen that looks out on the garden and the valley. Really it’s more sadness than fear I feel, but there’s something more, something I didn’t count on, a strong desire to be relieved of tormented nights, medicines, sudden crises, trips in the ambulance, hospital rooms, all the tubes and machines. I used to imagine that it all would end and I would get well, but now I know I won’t; even though they tell me they’ve found a new medication, I know that the time I have left will be exactly like now, or worse, a lot worse, as my heart grows weaker. I long to rest as I did when I was young and behind in my sleep. I would jump into bed and pull the covers over my head and close my eyes tight to get to sleep as quickly as possible. I would cover my mouth to hold back the giggles that burst out like the water in the public fountain when you pressed the copper or bronze handle down too hard. The water roared into the jar, cool and deep as the mouth of a well, all those years ago, before there was indoor plumbing and we women went with our water jugs to the fountain high on the hill, where there were always swarms of wasps. My sister would complain that since she didn’t have hips, the full jug always slid down her side. Oh, that summertime water, how I would love to wet my dry, cracked lips in it now, in the drops sweating through the cool belly of the jug, feel against my cheeks the cool beads of moisture, the pores breathing in the clay. That’s what I want, the only thing I want now, to fall asleep, to sink as I do when they give me a pill, or, better, a shot I can feel spreading through my bloodstream, through my whole body. Things fade: faces bending over me, beloved voices growing fainter, distant, and each time it takes a stronger effort not to let myself go along, as gently as closing your eyelids when you fall asleep.

  The voices of my two daughters, and their faces so alike and so different, blend into the same sensation of tenderness and farewell, their hands clasp mine, covertly looking for my pulse when I’m lying so still I seem to have died. I have an idea what my older daughter will think when she’s lived as many years as I have, “How strange, I’m as old as my mother was when she died,” and she will wonder what I would have been like had I gone on living. She will finish the courses she’s wanted to take ever since she entered college: she will be a teacher, marry her boyfriend, follow the path that she picked out when she was little and that she’s never veered from. But what’s to become of the younger one? Only sixteen and still amazed by the world, dazzled by the wealth and confusion of her imaginings. One day she wants to be one thing, and the next the opposite, one minute she’s taking in everything but then suddenly only one thing pleases her, and for her there’s no hurry or urgency, not about growing up or what to study or finding a boyfriend or getting married. She still lives as if she were floating, so weightless that any idea can sweep her away, the way I was when I was her age, full of dreams inspired by the movies, the novels I read behind my father’s back, every day painting a different future for myself, cities and countries I’d travel through, but I wasn’t bitter about being stuck in the village, I loved the house so much, though now I’ll never see it again, the paths in the country, the water in the ditches, the fun my girlfriends and I had on Sunday afternoons, the summer night dances, protected by my father’s kindness and my sister’s affection. At least she will live longer than I do, will look after my daughters, she who never had a husband or even a boyfriend, her hips so slight she couldn’t rest the water jug on them on the way back from the fountain.

  YOU WILL TRY IN VAIN to remember the sound of her voice, for she stopped visiting you in dreams years ago. Again you are only guessing what she would have thought, the words she wanted to say to you but didn’t have time, the advice that would have served you well, that might have kept you from making so many mistakes. Or maybe she followed you, protected and guided you without your knowing, present and invisible in your life, like the spirits your aunt lighted candles to, flickering lights floating in basins of oil on dressers and night tables and trembling like ghosts in the shadows. Maybe she came to you in dreams you didn’t remember when you woke, told you things that saved you from the greatest dangers in your life, the quagmires in which so many of your generation lost their way, neighbors, friends of your teenage years who ended up as living dead, numbed, with unseeing eyes and a needle in one arm, aged, wiped out in what should have been the best years of their youth. You could have suffered the fate of your cousin, who also visited you in dreams after her death, who shared childhood summers in your small town, the two of you almost like twins when your mother died, standing at her funeral with your arms around each other, but she was always wilder than you, more daring in everything: childhood games, then sexual explorations with the first boyfriends, the excitement of a speeding motorcycle, the vertigo of a joint, and later, daring in matters of greater danger, perils you easily could have fallen into yourself, even though you panicked when you saw the restlessness and trouble that never left her eyes.

  You will see the plain, green as an oasis, and above it the hillsides with houses clinging to steep streets, supported by vertical buttresses or rocks where ivy and brambles clamber and figs sprout. You used to climb there with your cousin, always behind her, frightened but spurred by her boldness, and both of you would end up sweaty and panting, your knees as raw as those of the boys. You will hear the gurgling of unseen water in the ditches, and your eyes will search out the cypresses that line the road toward the bare peak of the hill, ending at the walls of the cemetery, which are the same harsh brown as the naked earth that suddenly is like desert, though only a short distance from the water and the green of the valley: desert and oasis, the peaks scored by dry gullies, stained rust red, the highest house already eroded by the dryness, the other houses abandoned many years ago, their shutterless windows empty of glass, their roofs caved in, their walls the color of clay, like adobe ruins in a desert slowly returning to dirt and sand. And at the top, above the last almond trees and ruined houses, at the end of the winding cypress-lined road where an occasional light is visible at night, that is where I want you to bury me, with my family and lifelong neighbors, among names I’ve heard since I was a little girl, in a cemetery so small that we all know one another, with a sweeping view of the hillsides and the valley and the overhanging houses of the village that makes your head swim.

  You are on your way, and long before the name you loved so much when you were a girl appears on a sign at the side of the road, you will be excited, hypnotized by the pull of return, by the strong current of time that carries you back at a speed greater even than that of the car on the flat, straight highway, still barely out of Madrid, still near your present life and several hours and hundreds of kilometers from your destination but rushing toward it. Your face changes without your noticing, making you look like the person you were at four or five—the age of your first memories of that trip—and also the person you were when you were sixteen and your mother died. She pressed your hand on the mussed sheet of the hospital bed and said something you couldn’t understand, and with the words barely out of her mouth, her moist hand softly released yours, with a kind of delicacy, and then it wasn’t at all your mother’s hand, the one you’d known and stroked so many times, pressed during those nights of agony and sleeplessness, it was the hand of a dead woman, neutral and inert when you held it to your face. Exhausted and in tears, you called to her for the last time, refusing to accept that she had left with no warning, in a few seconds, like someone slipping away to avoid the pain of a long farewell.

  I keep sneaking glances at you, observing you. Driving, I turn toward you and see a new expression in your face, a look developing as we drive, and from that I get some hint of what you were long before I met you, a secret archaeology of your face and soul. I had handed you the telephone, which rang at a strange hour, almost midnight, and as you nodded and listened, your face became different from any face I’d seen in the years I lived with you.

  Your previous life is a country that you’ve told me
many things about but that I will never be able to visit: your past, your previous lives, the places you left behind, never to return, summer-vacation photos. The ring of the telephone broke the silence, the calm of the house, and when you hung up, after listening and nodding and asking questions in a low voice, the long ago erupted into your present, into mine, and enveloped us both—though I didn’t yet know it—in its mist of sweetness and distance, of loss and regret. “You remember my mother’s sister, who took such good care of us after Mother died? Now she has cancer, less than a week to live, a few days, he said, my cousin who’s the physician, the brother of that cousin of mine who died so young.”

  You are grateful for your sadness, because it atones a little for the remorse you feel over how long it’s been since you went to see her . . . really, since you even thought of her. It was enough for you to know that you loved her, that she had been the one warm, strong presence in your life for many years, your slender mother, or shadow of your mother, whom she closely resembled although without half her charm, a less attractive version of her younger sister. You didn’t have to go see her, even call her, because she was with you, planted almost as deeply as the memory of your mother, but it never occurred to you that she was receiving no sign of that love from you. You realized too late that you made no effort to be with her during the last bitter years of her lonely life, in the large house where no one came to spend the summer. In all the hustle and bustle of life there had always been other things to do, more demanding things, like creditors. As if she would always be there, in that house, which changed as little as she, always ready to welcome you no matter how much time had passed. She, the house, the town belonged to a realm unaffected by your forgetfulness and long absences. If you were careless about your job, some misfortune might overtake you; if you failed to see a friend, you might lose him; you left nothing to chance either in love or in looking after yourself, never let things become routine, in all your actions, feelings, desires there was an edge of anxiety. You had been stripped so bare when your mother died, and overnight the daily order of your house was broken, so you could no longer trust in the permanence of things. Even as you enjoyed what you had, you knew how temporary it was, how inevitable loss was; and when you succeeded at something—a job, a friendship, a house—you never believed it was truly yours or that you deserved to celebrate it calmly. Which was why you always did things with vehemence, as if it were the first and last time, why you liked to decorate the places where you lived with carefully chosen objects, so that wherever you were, it seemed you’d lived there forever, given their careful arrangement and intimate relationship to you, except you felt that you had just arrived and might leave at any moment. In you, and in everything that had anything to do with you, one saw the sure hand of carefulness as well as the fragility of all that could be shattered or lost, all that was subject to chance.