Going north, there were fewer and fewer passengers on the bus, and almost imperceptibly the white Anglo-Saxon faces disappeared, and instead of pale old ladies with an air of fragility the passengers now were young mothers, black or Hispanic, holding babies in their arms or leading small children by the hand, fat ladies with the bleach-blond hair, long fingernails, and impudent mouth of the Caribbean, black grandmothers sitting in their seats with the majesty of Ethiopian matrons but moving with great difficulty when they got up at their stop, weaving from side to side in their untied sneakers, their bodies misshapen and twisted as if by a painful bone disease. And as the passengers on the bus ceased to be white, the city changed outside the window, it became wider, emptier, deteriorated. There was less traffic, fewer shopwindows along the almost deserted sidewalks, there were unpopulated spaces, perspectives of properties with wire fences and buildings burned or in ruins, lots with razed houses where maybe one wall still stood, its empty windows boarded up, sinister as blinded eyes. Occasionally we drove through a stretch of street where for some reason there remained a vestige of neighborhood life, a sidewalk, a row of houses spared from destruction, with a moderately prosperous store on the corner and solitary men sitting on the steps, with young mothers leading small children by the hand and pots of geraniums in windows. The last tourists had got off the bus many stops ago, the ones going to the uptown museums, the Metropolitan or Guggenheim, and we no longer saw the trees of Central Park on our left, topped in the distance by the towers of apartments on Central Park West with pinnacles like an expressionist film set: crests and gargoyles, ziggurats, temples of remote Asian religions, lighthouses, cupolas.
The nearly empty bus made much better time, and the conductor turned to look at us, or he studied our strangeness in his rearview mirror. We passed a square that featured a garden in the French style, with a bronze statue of Duke Ellington in the center. The pedestal was like the edge of a stage, and Duke Ellington, dressed in a tux, stood against a grand piano, also cast in bronze. It had been more than an hour since we got on the bus at the Union Square stop. But we’d come so far and moved so slowly that it seemed we’d been gone much longer, and there was no sign that we were near our destination: 155th Street.
Our stop was on the corner of a wide avenue lined with not very tall, widely spaced buildings, and its air of solitude and of being at the end of something was accentuated by the gray day and the low walls of the empty lots. There was no one around to ask directions of. Run-down houses, churches, closed shops, an American flag flapping above a brick building that looked both shabby and official. We were discouraged, afraid we were lost, maybe even in a dangerous area: two foreign tourists you could spot a mile away, who don’t know where they are and who realize with apprehension that among the few cars in the streets there’s no bright yellow of a taxi.
The two of us walk along the wall of a large cemetery, which at first we took for a park. To the west you can imagine the vast stretches of the Hudson, then on a corner, where the cemetery ends, we see on the other side of the avenue, like a mirage, the building we’re looking for, imposing and neoclassic, equally as strange as we are in this place, the home of the Hispanic Society of America, where we’ve been told there are paintings by Velazquez and Goya and a huge library no one visits, because who will come here, so far from everything and in a neighborhood that from midtown Manhattan can easily be seen as devastated and unsafe.
Behind a fence are a patio and statues between two buildings with marble cornices and columns and Spanish names inscribed across the facades. There is an imposing equestrian statue of the Cid, and on one wall a large bas-relief of Don Quixote on Rosinante, horseman and steed equally defeated and skeletal. Beside the entrance a woman with her white hair pulled back and with a rumpled look smokes a cigarette with that half-stubborn, half-furtive attitude of American smokers who have to go outside to fill their lungs with smoke, protecting themselves against the cold wind behind some column or in the shelter of a building, taking quick puffs from the cigarette and then hiding it, fearful of the censure of people going by. The woman looks at us a moment, and later we will both remember those eyes shining like coals in her aged face, the eyes of a much younger woman. She is an employee or secretary nearing retirement, who lives alone and doesn’t care how she dresses, who cuts her hair without fuss and wears dark sweaters, men’s trousers, and shoes between orthopedic and running gear, and hangs her glasses on a chain about her neck.
In the vestibule we look in vain for a ticket office. A burly old doorman sitting with indifference in a convent chair indicates that we can go on through, and from his face, attitude, and accent in spoken English we know he is Cuban. He wears a gray uniform jacket resembling that of a Spanish guard, but one from many years ago and threadbare after long service, after many terms of sleepy administrative laissez-faire. The minute we step into the lobby we notice, with misgiving, that there is practically no one there, and the whole place is dilapidated. A sign affixed to the glass of the entry door gives the museum hours; it is printed in an old typeface and badly yellowed, obeying the same principle of time as the doorman’s jacket or the framed photographs in a glass case that document the founding, in the 1920s, of the Hispanic Society: the large black automobiles of the Spanish and American officials who attended the inauguration, views of a building that doesn’t exist now, arrogant and white in the classicism of its architecture, its recently polished marble gleaming with the splendor of the new and up-to-date, and with the promise of a triumphant future. In the sky, above heads covered with top hats and stylish straw chapeaux, is an airplane that at the time would have been as dazzlingly modern as the cars of the ladies and gentlemen attending the inauguration. But the photographs have warped, and on the inside corners of the frames you can see the work of silverfish.
We enter a dark gallery reminiscent of the patio of a Spanish palace, with plateresque carved-wood choir stalls and arches of a deep red stone that is even darker in the faint daylight filtering through the skylights. The space defies identification: it could be the patio of a palace opening on several galleries, or the enormous desanctified sacristy of a cathedral . . . or a museum shop not organized according to any clear principle. At the beginning of the century, the millionaire Archer Milton Huntingon, possessed of a passion for all of Spanish Romanticism and a man of an insatiable and omnivorous erudition, wandered through Spain buying everything, anything, whether the choir of a cathedral or a glazed earthenware water pitcher, paintings by Velazquez and Goya, bishop’s cassocks, Paleolithic axes, bronze arrows, the bloody Christs of Holy Week, heavy silver monstrances, Valencian ceramic tiles, illuminated parchments of the Apocalypse, a first edition of La celestina, the Diálogos de amor by Judá Abravanel, called León Hebreo, a Spanish-Jewish refugee in Italy, the 1519 Amadís de Gaula, the Bible translated into Spanish by Yom Tov Arias, the son of Levi Arias, and published in Ferrara in 1513 because it could not be published in Spain, the first Lazarillo, the Palmerín de Inglaterra in the same edition Don Quixote must have read, a first edition of La Galatea, the successive augmentations of the fearsome Index librorom prohibitorum, the Quixote of 1605, and a multitude of Spanish books and manuscripts that no one valued and that were sold at ridiculous prices to the man who traveled the impossible roads of Spain by automobile and lived in perpetual enchantment and enthusiasm. Consumed by a prodigious acquisitive greed, Mr. Huntington traveled here and there with his wild American energy through the dead, rural villages of Castile, following the route of the Cid, buying things and having them shipped to America, paintings, tapestries, ironwork, entire altarpieces, the detritus of high Spanish glory, relics of ecclesiastical opulence, but also objects of the everyday life of the people, pottery plates on which the poor ate their wheat porridge and the water jugs that allowed them the luxury of cool water in the dry interior. He directed archaeological digs in Italy and in one purchase bought the ten thousand volumes in the collection of the dead-broke Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros.
And to house the outlandish booty of his journeys through Spain, he constructed this palace at one end of Manhattan, which was never to be blessed with the prosperity or speculative fever he anticipated.
Everything is on the walls, in glass cases, in corners, always with a yellowing label giving the date and place of origin: Roman mosaics and oil lamps, Neolithic earthen bowls, medieval swords, Gothic virgins, like a flea market where all the testimony and heritage of the past has ended, washed up here in the convulsions of the great flood of time, refuse from the homes of the rich and the poor, the gold of the churches, the credenzas of the salons, the tongs that stirred the fires, and the tapestries and paintings that hung on the walls of churches now abandoned and sacked and palaces that may no longer exist, gravestones from the tombs of the powerful now worn nearly smooth, and marble fonts that held the holy water in the cool darkness of the chapels. And names, the sonorous names of Spanish communities on the labels in the cases, and among them, suddenly, beside a large green glazed bowl that I recognize immediately, the name of my hometown, where when I was a boy there was a community of potters whose kilns hadn’t been modified since the times of the Moors, all grouped on a sunny street called Calle Valencia that ended in open country. I point out the bowl to you behind the glass in one of the freestanding cases in the Hispanic Society of America. From this remote time and place it has taken me straight back to my childhood: in the center of the bowl is a rooster in a circle, and as I look at it I can almost feel the glassy surface of the glaze and the raised lines of the design on my fingertips, a timeless rooster that looks like one of Picasso’s and is also replicated on the plates and bowls in my home, as well as on the belly of the water pitchers. I remember the large bowls the women used for mixing ground meat and spices to make fresh sausage, the pottery plates on which they chopped the tomato and green pepper for the salads—austere and savory food of the common people and a standard subject of still lifes. Those objects had always been on the tables and in the cupboards of our houses, and it always seemed as if they had the status of a liturgical constancy, and yet they disappeared in only a few years’ time, replaced by the invasion of plastic and commercial pottery. They have vanished like the houses in whose dark shadow the generous curves of that pottery shone, vanished like the people who once inhabited those houses.
“That bowl holds memories for me too,” says the woman we saw smoking outside. She apologizes for interrupting, for having listened. “I recognized your accent, I lived in that town a long time ago.” Her voice is almost as young as her eyes, unrelated to the age inscribed on her features and to the American carelessness of her clothes. “I work in the library, and if you’re interested I’ll show it to you. There are so many treasures, and so few people know about them. Professors come from time to time, very learned people doing research, but weeks can go by, even months, when no one comes to ask me about a book. Who’s going to come all the way up here? Who would think that we have paintings by Velazquez, El Greco, and Goya, and that being almost in the Bronx, we would have the first Lazarillo and the first Quixote and the 1499 La celestina? Tourists go up to Ninetieth Street to visit the Guggenheim, and they think that everything that lies north of that is darkest Africa. I live near here, in a neighborhood of Cubans and Dominicans where you never hear a word of English. Downstairs from my apartment is a little Cuban restaurant called La Flor de Broadway. They make the best ropavieja stew and most delicious daiquiris in New York, and they let you smoke in peace at the tables, which have checked oilcloth covers, like the ones they had in Spain when I was young. What luxury, smoking a cigarette as I drink my coffee after dinner. You know how rare that is here, that they let you smoke at your table in a restaurant? I love my cigarettes. They’re good company, and help when I’m talking with a friend or to pass the time when I’m alone. When I was young, I wanted to run away from Spain and come to America because here women could smoke and wear trousers and drive cars, all the things we saw in the movies before the war.”
The woman spoke a fluid, clear Spanish, the kind you hear in some parts of Aragon, but there were sounds of the Caribbean and North America in her accent, and the timbre of her voice became totally Anglo-Saxon when she said a word in English. She invited us to have a cup of tea in her office, and we accepted, partly because we felt that physical exhaustion you get in museums, partly because there was something hypnotic in her way of talking and looking at us, even more in that empty, silent place on the gray morning of the last day of our trip. She still hadn’t given us her name, yet she seduced us, speaking in that Spanish from so many years ago and examining us with eyes much younger than her face and figure. Her office was small, cluttered, and smelled of old paper, the office furniture was from the 1920s, like something you would see in a painting by Edward Hopper. She took three cups from a filing cabinet, along with three tea bags, set them on the papers on her desk, and with a totally North American gesture of apology went to get hot water. We looked at each other wordlessly, smiled at being in such a strange situation, and the woman returned.
Her glasses hang from a black ribbon. She looks like a university department secretary who is about to retire, but her eyes question me unabashedly, they are not the eyes of a woman pouring hot water into teacups. She regards at me as if she were thirty and evaluated men only by their looks or sexual availability; and she regards you as if to determine whether we’re lovers or married and whether there is desire or distance between us. And while those magnetic eyes study our faces and our clothes, her old woman’s hands are involved in the ritual of academic hospitality, serving tea and offering envelopes of sugar and saccharin and those little plastic stirrers that so disagreeably substitute for spoons in the United States. Her clear voice, ancient Spanish with influences of Cuban and English, recounts details about the megalomaniac millionaire who built the Hispanic Society on the corner of Broadway and 155th Street, believing that this part of Harlem would soon be in vogue among the rich, and about how strange it was to spend a life so far from Spain and yet be surrounded by so many things Spanish. She gestures toward the window from which you can see a common, ordinary sidewalk that is nonetheless Broadway, a row of redbrick houses crisscrossed by fire escapes and with water tanks on the roofs, and, in the distance, the gray of a horizon and the large blackened towers of public housing complexes in the Bronx.
“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.”
Sepharad Page 38
