Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  But I don’t say anything, I just listen while he talks about how the legs get weak after a certain age and how names become hard to recollect because of the deterioration of the neurotransmitters. When we say good-bye at the door of the modern building where he lives (maybe the one before it was destroyed in the bombardments), I see him from behind as he walks through the entry hall toward the elevator, bent and diligent, with only a hint of hesitation in his movements. If she were alive, if she is alive, the woman my friend met and lost in the city called Narva, she would be ninety. And if she was saved and is still alive somewhere, I wonder if she remembers, now, tonight, as I write these words, the young lieutenant she danced with one January night in 1943.

  tell me your name

  I SAT QUIETLY, WAITING, killing time, observing things from my window for hours on end, in an office where it might be mid-morning before someone came in—an emissary from the outside world, usually a second- or third-rate artist, a poet from the provinces trying to set up a reading or get a subvention to publish a book of poems, people who knocked timidly at the door and who might sit for hours in the small reception room, waiting for a contract or a payment, a chance for an interview, to deliver a badly photocopied résumé that somehow, through my hands, might reach the manager I worked for, the man who made the decisions, judgments that were a long time coming, bogged down in the archaic lassitude of the administration, or held up by negligence or carelessness: the manager didn’t look at the documents I put on his desk, or I forgot to put them there. Sloth, isolation, estrangement, people always going out of focus, less real than the people in my mind or memories, in the fog between the invented and the remembered. In a letter Kafka wrote, I recognized the symptoms of my illness: ennui. I was like a dead man, having no desire to communicate, as if I did not belong to this world or any other; as if during all the years that led to this moment I had acted mechanically, done only what was required of me, while waiting for a voice that would call out to me.

  I wrote letters, waited for letters, and when one came, I answered it hastily, then let a few days go by before I resumed my attitude of waiting, because it would be at least two weeks before the next letter arrived, that is, if it wasn’t delayed like the decisions awaited by the applicants in the reception room of my office. I waited in both expectation and fear, but also out of mere habit, and if I saw the striped edge of an air-mail envelope among the letters and documents my assistant brought every morning, I would feel a senseless surge of renewed hope.

  I worked alone, not in the main administration building but on one of the floors rented for new offices, temporary quarters that always had something furtive about them and often lacked an official seal on the door. There might be just an improvised sign at the end of a narrow corridor or steep stairway, a location close to central headquarters but behind it, on a little street with old taverns, dark hangouts for drunks, and shops that not many years back sold condoms and dirty magazines under the counter. Those streets were so narrow the sun didn’t reach them, and there was always the hint of a sewer, and dank shadows gathered at the corners that faced the remnant of what once had been the red-light district, in other days a labyrinth called La Manigua. Now the last survivors occasionally emerged from those alleyways, old women, fat and heavily made up, or a few young pale ones hooked on heroin, with scuffed high heels and a cigarette stuck into the red stain of a mouth, specters loitering in lugubrious arcades.

  I sat quietly at my desk waiting, and hours could go by before anyone came. Some mornings there might be only one or two visitors beside the person who brought the mail, perhaps a clerk asking me to consult a file in my archives, in which I had arranged the dossiers that came in the mail or were handed to me by the artists alphabetically, and the records of past performances chronologically. I saved every piece of paper in manila folders: posters, tickets, press clippings, should there be any, the count of the house, a number that often was misleading, depending on the reputation and attractions of the acts I booked; they were not for the important theaters in the city but for community centers in the barrios, little more than halls for school plays, or open-air stages in plazas or parks during the summer months, where it was also my responsibility to organize some festival or other that always featured the adjective popular on the posters advertising it, shows with lights and local rock groups, and merry-go-rounds and puppet shows.

  My office occupied the narrowest angle of a triangular building that had a pastry shop on the ground floor and a small legal office on the first. Sweet, warm aromas wafted up from the pastry shop, and from the legal service came the sounds of voices and telephones and a lot of tramping back and forth that contrasted with the quiet prevailing in my office most of the time. There were two windows, one that looked out over the Plaza del Carmen and the other onto Calle Reyes Católicos, but the entry was on a narrow street with little traffic, so it was easy, when I came to work every morning, to feel that I was entering a secret observatory, as appropriate for spying as for getting away. I would come and go without being seen by anyone, and from the windows I could note who went by at that central crossroads of the city. The people I knew, who walked with no idea that they were being watched, looked different. Who is the person, really, when he is alone, temporarily free from others, from the identity others give him?

  LIKE MANUEL AZAÑA when he was a fat, nearsighted adolescent, I wanted to be Captain Nemo. Closeted from eight to three between those walls were Nemo in his submarine and Robinson Crusoe on his island, and also the Invisible Man and detective Philip Marlowe and Fernando Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares and any of Kafka’s office workers in that company in Prague for preventing workplace accidents. I imagined that I, like them, was a secret exile, a stranger in a place where I had always lived, a sedentary fugitive who hid behind an appearance of perfect normality, who, seated at an office desk or riding in a bus on the way to work, could conjure up amazing adventures that would never happen, voyages that would never be made. In his office at the water plant in Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy imagines the music Mark Antony heard the night before his damnation, the retinue of Dionysus abandoning him. In a cheap restaurant in Lisbon, or riding a streetcar, Pessoa pensively scans the lines of a poem about a sumptuous transatlantic voyage to the Orient. A bespectacled, self-absorbed man arrives at a hotel in Turin, peaceful, well dressed, although with a hint of oddness that prevents his being taken for the usual traveler; he registers for that one night, and no one knows that it is Cesare Pavese and that in his minimal luggage he is carrying a dose of poison that within a few hours he will use to take his life. I imagined the suicide in morbid detail. From a literary point of view, was shooting oneself or killing oneself slowly with alcohol a form of heroism? I watched the hopeless drunks in the dark taverns of the side streets with both admiration and disgust, for each hid a terrible truth whose price was self-destruction. I walked past men with scowling faces and unsettled behavior and imagined Baudelaire in the final delirium of his life, wandering lost in Brussels or Paris, and Soren Kierkegaard cast adrift in the streets of Copenhagen, composing biblical diatribes against his countrymen and friends, mentally writing love letters to Regina Olsen, whom he left behind, perhaps frightened to death when he found himself betrothed to her, though he never forgives her when she later marries another man. Closeted in my office, I read his letters, diaries, and notebooks, and learned in Pascal that men never live in the present, only in their memory of the past or in their desire or fear of the future, and that all our miseries outlast us because we are not able to sit quietly in a room alone.

  Did Milena’s letters reach Kafka at his home, or did he prefer to receive them at the office? He sent hers to general delivery in Vienna so her husband wouldn’t see them. Reading many books did not tell me that she was something more than the shadow to whom he wrote letters or who occasionally appeared in the pages of his diary: she was a real woman who obstinately, courageously shaped her destiny in the face of hostile circumstances and a tyra
nnical father, who wrote books and articles in favor of human emancipation. She passionately loved several men, and continued to write when the Nazis were in Prague. Arrested and sent to a death camp, she died twenty-two years after the man whose letters I read in my office.

  I surrounded myself with shadows that were more important to me than people, shades that whispered the names of cities I had never visited—Prague, Lisbon, Tangiers, Copenhagen, New York—and the place in America those letters came from bearing my name and the address of my office and written in a hand that became not the anticipation but the substance of my happiness. I kept Letters to Milena in a desk drawer, and sometimes I carried the book in a pocket to read on the bus. It nourished my love for the absent beloved, and for the failed or impossible loves I had learned of through films and books. Dispensing hand of happiness, Kafka writes of Milena’s hand.

  I LIVED IN WRITTEN WORDS, books, letters, and drafts of things that never saw the light of day, and in an office that was more in harmony with me than my own house and was, in a strange and oblique way, my intimate dwelling; the outside world was a blur, as if I didn’t live in it, just as I performed my job so casually that it might have been someone else doing it. My life was what didn’t happen to me, my love a woman who was far away and might never return, my calling a passion I did not devote myself to in real life, although I had begun to publish an article or two in the local newspaper, using a pseudonym, then felt they were letters not addressed to anyone except a few readers as isolated as I was in our melancholy province, so remote from anything reported in the newspapers of Madrid.

  I read in Pascal: Entire worlds know nothing of us. I read eagerly, with the same will for oblivion that makes Robert De Niro yearn for the opium pipe in the Sergio Leone film that was playing then, Once upon a Time in America. I emerged from books as muddled as from the movies, when you come out of the darkness of the theater into bright sun. Some evenings I took on work I didn’t need to, or invented an excuse to go to the office for a few hours, then sat at my desk staring at the door of the small waiting room, imagining I was a private detective, as childishly, though nearly thirty, as when at twelve I imagined I was the Count of Monte Cristo or Jim Hawkins, or when I would look down on the street, with no danger that anyone would see me from below or that any visitor would come to interrupt me. I had read in Flaubert: Every man guards in his heart a royal chamber: I have sealed mine. My head was filled with phrases from books, films, songs, and those words were my only consolation in the exile to which I was condemned. I read Pavese’s diary, poisoning myself with his nihilism and misogyny, which I took for lucidity, just as I sometimes took the effects of too much alcohol for clearheadedness and enthusiasm. Death will come, and she will have your eyes. To write and read was to weave a protective and airless cocoon, to drink a potion that would allow me to flee invisible, to take a tunnel that no one knew, to scratch the wall of my cell with the patience of Edmond Dantes. With a silken line of blue ink I spun a world filled with imaginary men and women who softened the harsh edges of reality. The light scrape of pen on paper, the tapping of the keys of the typewriter, which was manual and noisy like the machines of fabulous screenwriters, the ones Chandler and Hammett used, literary gods, drunk, original, solitary men who could not be bought. The alcohol fumes and tobacco smoke of the 1980s, in retrospect as embarrassing as most of my alienated life then, as distant as the memory of that office and the woman to whom I wrote the letters, not realizing that I loved her not despite the fact that she lived on the other side of the ocean and with another man but precisely because she did. Had she returned, leaving everything to go with me, I would have been paralyzed with terror, I would have fled as Kafka fled before the determined and earthy passion of Milena Jesenska, preferring the refuge of letters and distance.

  Everything at my office proceeded at an administrative crawl, and several months would pass before the Department of Internal Affairs installed the appropriate plaque beside the entrance and above the door, that is, assuming there was not an unexpected move to yet another place, another rented suite in the same area or a vacant office in the main building, and I would have to get settled all over again, the desk and metal filing cabinet with the documents and typewriter and folders with drafts that never reached final form, the books that filled the hours of waiting and daydreaming, the letters kept under lock and key in a desk drawer and judiciously reread.

  My life had only past and future. The present was a parenthesis, an empty space, like the spaces that separate written words, the automatic touch of thumb to the long bar of the typewriter, the line that separates two dates on a calendar, the pause between two beats of the heart. I lived from one letter, among the ordinary envelopes on my mail tray, to the next, recognizing it from afar, the moment the clerk came through the door with the large folder of correspondence under his arm, unaware of the treasure he was bringing me.

  Real life evolved on a distant plane, the space of separation between the remembered and the desired, a space as empty and neutral as the small reception room where someone occasionally waited, hoping for a part or an interview with one of my superiors, the manager if possible.

  He was the one who made the decisions and the one to whom I submitted my reports but who rarely appeared, since he was devoted to tasks of greater importance, such as public relations, over in the main building where he welcomed the eminent personalities visiting the city, the first-class artists whose performances were booked in the best theater, the largest auditorium: managers of Catalan avant-garde companies, celebrated soloists, orchestra conductors. First thing in the morning, I would read the arts section of the newspaper, looking for notice of the arrival of these personalities, their interviews and the photographs in which they often shook the hand of one of my superiors, especially the manager, who always wore a big smile and leaned toward the celebrity to make sure he wasn’t left outside the frame. I cut the photographs out and put them in a folder after I pasted the clipping onto a page with a typed notation of occasion and date.

  The artists I booked rated no more than a small box in some easily overlooked corner of the paper, pieces that were anonymous or signed with initials, sometimes mine, because more than once the editor on duty just reproduced the note I’d sent in. Thespians, many of them called themselves. The word made me think of limited talent, shabbiness of costumes and sets, the weariness of the itinerant ham actors of other days, except now updated with hippie schlock, improvisation, audience participation. They painted their faces and dressed in rags like clowns and played the drum or walked on stilts in their parades and street theater. The women wore sweaty tights, didn’t shave under their arms, and moved sexlessly. They were paid almost nothing, and that little money took a long time to reach them. Every morning they would show up at my office, listen to my explanations, not understanding much, probably not believing much. All the forms they had to fill out, the obscure progress of paperwork from office to office, from Administration to Auditing and then to Disbursements, the delays, the carelessness and neglect, which could mean more weeks of waiting, and the lies at which I had become expert: “They told me at Administration that today they’re sending the check request to be signed, and tomorrow without fail I myself will take that form to Auditing.”

  Like me, they lived in unfilled time, in the small waiting room of my office, as grim as that of a backstreet doctor or one of those private detectives in novels. They brought their portfolios, their sorry assortment of photocopies, their mediocre or invented résumés, and I cared nothing about them, indifferent to their lives and their art, though it was my job to give them hope, invent excuses for delays, confuse them with administrative procedures and administrative language. There was a Gypsy poet with sideburns and a thick head of white, curly hair who claimed he had translated the complete works of García Lorca and part of the New Testament into Caló, Gypsy Spanish, and as proof he brought the entire manuscript of his translation with him in a huge satchel, but he opened it only l
ong enough to show me the first page, afraid he would be plagiarized or the translation would be stolen, and he refused to leave the bundle of pages to which he was dedicating his life in my office, lest they get lost among all the other papers or lest a ire break out in the oven of the pastry shop on the ground floor and his Lorca in Romany go up in flames. I asked him why he didn’t make a photocopy, saying it would be a good idea for him to have a spare just in case, but he didn’t trust the employees at the copy shop either, they might carelessly scorch the pages of his book or make another copy without his knowledge, and sell it or publish it under another name. No, he wouldn’t part with his manuscript, clutching it in his arms as he sat across from me at my desk or waited in the reception room for the manager to arrive, because he couldn’t rest until it was published, with his name in large letters on the cover and his photograph on the back so there would be no doubt about the author’s identity, his Gypsy face recognized by everyone in the city.

  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.