Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  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.

  sepharad

  I REMEMBER A JEWISH house in a barrio in my native city c
alled 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.

  I remember the large uneven stones in the Santa María cloister, some of which were gravestones bearing names of persons from long ago carved into a slab and nearly erased by the footsteps of centuries, and I remember a garden you reached through ogival arches, where there was a bay tree so tall that from a child’s perspective the top could not be seen. In the garden shaded by that tree and filled with ferns and weeds, there was always, even in summer, a strong scent of growing things and moist earth, and the garden rang with the uproar of the birds that nested in the thick branches and the long whistles of swallows and swifts in the slow summer afternoons. You could see the dark green thrust of the bay tree from a great distance, like a geyser of vegetation rising higher than the bell towers of the church and the tile roofs in the barrio, and it swayed on windy afternoons. When my mother took me by the hand into the cloister, it made me dizzy to peek out into the garden and see the tree. I always noticed how cool the dirt and the stone were, and I was always deafened by the clamor of the birds, which flew up in a cloud when the bells were rung.

  I was sure the tree reached the sky, like the magic beanstalk in the story that my aunts told me and that many years later I read to my oldest son, who from the age of three always begged for a story at bedtime, quickly restless when he knew the story was about to end, asking me to make it last a little longer or read him another or, better still, make up one he liked, and give the characters his favorite personality traits and magic powers, and the names he had to approve. Reading the story at my son’s bedside, I imagined his little hero climbing the branches of that prodigious bay tree at Santa María, up, up toward the sky, and coming out on the other side of the clouds, just as I imagined it when I was a boy. If you looked up, looked hard, the tree swayed slightly even when there was no wind. When a strong wind blew, the sound of the leaves was like that of waves on the shore, which I had never heard except in movies, or when I held a seashell to my ear.

  I WENT TO THE CHURCH of Santa María every afternoon during the summer I was twelve to say a few Ave Marias to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of my city, whom I asked to intercede for me so I would pass gym in September, because in the June examinations I had failed in a truly humiliating manner. I wasn’t good at sports, I couldn’t climb a rope or vault over a pommel horse, I couldn’t even do a somersault. I had a growing sense of being excluded that was bitterly accentuated by the loss of the comfortable certainties of childhood and the first confusion and fears of my transition to adolescence. Pimples were breaking out on my too round face, fuzz was darkening my upper, still childish lip, hair was growing on the strangest parts of my body, and I was suffering sharp and secret remorse about masturbation, which according to the grim teachings of the priest was not merely a sin but also the beginnings of a series of atrocious illnesses. How strange to have been that solitary, fat, clumsy child who all summer long, at dusk, as the heat was fading, walked to the Alcázar barrio and went inside the cool cloisters of Santa María to pray to the Virgin, stepping on the gravestones of dead buried five or six centuries before, devout but ashamed because that summer I had learned to masturbate and was always surreptitiously looking down women’s necklines and up their naked legs: the white breast, the large dark nipple, and the light blue veins of a barefoot Gypsy nursing her child at the door of one of the huts of the poor who lived at the edge of the barrio, beside the ruined wall.

  Sometimes from a distance I would see four or five of the toughest boys in our class sitting on a stone bench in the large plaza in front of the church. They already smoked and went to taverns, and if I walked by them, pretending not to see them, they made fun of me, the way they had jeered at my physical cowardice in the gym and schoolyard. They made fun of me even more when they realized where I was going, the fat little sissy who got good grades but flunked gym and now came to pray every afternoon to the Virgin and more than once went to confession and then stayed for mass and took Communion, with the remorse and anguish of not having dared confess everything to the priest, who asked the formulaic questions and in the dark traced the sign of the cross as he murmured the penance and absolution—that there was a further sin he couldn’t say the name of but only allude to using a vague euphemism: he had committed an impure act. The Catholic doctrine accustomed us to the solitary struggle with ourselves at an early age, to the contortions of guilt; an impure act was a mortal sin, and if you didn’t confess it then you couldn’t be absolved, and if you came to take Communion in a state of mortal sin, you were committing another, equally grave as the first, which was added to it in the secret ignominy of your conscience.

  My first marriage took place in the Church of Santa María, when I was twenty-six. Maybe because of the confusion and tension of the ceremony, and the dizzying number of guests, I didn’t take a good look at the great bay tree in the cloister, although now I am struck by the alarming thought that they may have cut it down, which wouldn’t have been unusual in a city so addicted to arboricide. The young man with the mustache and razor-cut hair, wearing a navy-blue suit and pearl-gray necktie, seems even more remote to me than the pious and ashamed boy of fourteen years before. Throughout that time, he had perfected the skills that he already glimpsed as his in early adolescence: the art of being what he was expected to be and at the same time rebelling in surly silence, the cleverness of hiding his true identity and nourishing it with books and dreams while presenting an attitude of meek acquiescence on the outside. Thus he lived in exile, at a distance as false as a perspective of open country painted on a wall, or as those cinematic backgrounds against which an actor is driving a convertible at top speed along a cliff without ruffling a hair of his head and the passing trees fail to throw a shadow on the windshield.

  THE BARRIO OF THE ALCÁZAR, bounded on the south and west by the road that
circles the ruined wall and terraced gardens, has narrow cobbled streets and small plazas on which it is not unusual to see a large house with a great stone arch and a few mulberry or poplar trees. The oldest houses date from the fifteenth century. The exteriors are whitewashed, except for the door frames, which have the yellow tint of the sandstone from which they were hewn, the same stone that was used for the palaces and churches. The white of the lime and the gold and blond of the stone create a delicate harmony that has the luminous elegance of the Renaissance and the austere beauty of vernacular architecture. High, narrow windows with heavy iron grilles thick as shutters, and gardens enclosed in tall adobe walls, recall the impenetrable look of Muslim dwellings that was adopted for the cloistered convents. There are large mansions with windows narrow as embrasures, in which we children sometimes hid, and great iron rings in the facades, so heavy that we weren’t strong enough to lift them; to these rings, we were told, the former lords of the houses tied their horses. The mansions were inhabited by the nobles who ruled the city and who during their feudal uprisings against the power of the kings dug in behind the walls of the Alcázar. In the shelter of those walls was the Jewish quarter; the nobles needed the Jews’ money, their administrative abilities, the skills of their artisans, so they had an interest in protecting them against the periodic explosions of fury from devout and brutal mobs stirred up by fanatic priests, by legends about profanations of the host and the bloody rituals Jews celebrated to dishonor the Christian religion: that they stole consecrated hosts and spit them out and ground them beneath their feet, and pierced them with nails and crushed them with pincers to repeat on them the tortures inflicted upon the mortal flesh of Jesus Christ, and kidnapped Christian children and slit their throats in the cellars of the synagogues, and drank their blood or with it sullied the sacred white flour of the hosts.