Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Now I see him much more clearly, isolated in that instant of immobility, encircled by sudden gestures, hostile looks, the rush of the crowd, tired after working in offices, hurrying to catch trains, driven by obligations and trapped by the spider webs of relationships he lacks, like a vagrant or a lunatic, though in his pocket he carries a valid passport and in his hands the train ticket and his suitcase, the battered yet still distinguished suitcase I can almost see as if through Ignacio Abel’s weary, avid eyes. I see the hand clutching the leather handle, feel the excessive tension of his grip, the pain in his joints from repeating this action for over two weeks, when the same figure of a tall, middle-aged man, now lost in the crowd, walked alone at night along a street in Madrid where the streetlights were out or broken or painted blue and the only light filtered through the closed shutters of a few windows. The same figure, cut out of the photograph of Pennsylvania Station and inserted in a Madrid street, Calle Alfonso XII perhaps (the name was changed and for a time it was called Niceto Alcalá-Zamora; now it has been changed again and is called Reforma Agraria), or walking past Retiro Park fifteen or twenty days earlier on his way to the train station, staying close to the walls, his suitcase banging against the corners as he tries to disappear into the shadows. In the silence of a curfew, an approaching car can mean only danger, even if all your documents are in order. He would have to know the exact departure date, but he hasn’t kept count of the number of days he’s been traveling, and time moves away very quickly in the past. A city in the dark, besieged by fear, shaken by the sound of battle, the engines of planes that approach but are still no more than an echo of distant misfortune. He looks at one of the clocks hanging from the iron arches and calculates that for several hours it has been night in Madrid, as the minute hand advances with an identical spasm in all the illuminated spheres, jumping from eight to seven, a stroke of time like an urgent heartbeat, the step one takes into the void on falling asleep: seven minutes to four; the train he’s supposed to catch leaves at four and he has no idea where to go, which of the paths intersecting in the crowd like currents on the ocean’s surface is the one that will carry him to his destination. As in a lucid dream, now that he has turned I can see his face, close, just as he saw it this morning after wiping the steam from the mirror at which he was going to shave in the hotel room where he spent four nights and to which he knows he’ll never return. Now the doors close forever behind him, and his presence disappears without a trace. He walks along the hotel corridor, turns a corner, and it’s as if he’d never been there. I saw him shave this morning at the mirror over the sink in the room he knew he was finally about to leave, thanks to the telegram he’d received a few hours earlier, the one lying open on the night table, next to his wallet and his reading glasses and the letter handed to him yesterday afternoon, the one he almost tore up after he read it. Dear Ignacio, I hope this letter finds you well your children and I are fine and safe thank God, no small thing these days though it seems you haven’t worried too much about finding out how we are. The telegram contains a brief apology for the days of waiting, as well as information regarding the train and its departure time and the name of the station where he’ll be picked up. The letter was written and mailed almost three months ago and reached him at this hotel in New York owing to a series of accidents he cannot quite explain, as if the very density of the rancor its words exhale (rancor or something else that for the moment he prefers not to name, or doesn’t know how to) guided it in its dogged search for him. Nothing is how it once was, and there’s no reason to think that after the upheaval things will go back to the way they were. A letter sent to Madrid from a village in the Sierra is lost en route and it takes not two days but three months to arrive after passing through Red Cross headquarters in Paris and an office of the Spanish postal service where someone stamped the envelope several times: Unknown at this address.

  Ignacio Abel has been away from his home in Madrid for so short a time and already he’s a stranger. I see the envelope in the light of the lamp on the night table in the gloomy room where the noise of an elevated train sounded regularly. Once again Ignacio Abel packed the suitcase lying open on the bed, and shaved more carefully than in recent days now that he knew people were expecting him, that at six this evening someone would be on a platform trying to make out his face among the passengers getting off at the station with the strange Germanic name printed now on his ticket: Rhineberg. He’ll get off the train and someone will be waiting for him. He’ll hear his name and a part of his suspended existence will be reimposed on him. It matters a great deal to him not to cave in, not to let himself go, to fight with small acts of resistance the entropy of solitary travel, to tend to every detail as one does when constructing a building but forgoes in the sketch of its model. He must shave every morning, though the shaving soap is running out and the razor is losing its edge and the badger brush its hairs, one by one. He must do what he can to keep his shirt collar from looking soiled. But he has only three shirts and they’re wearing out from so much washing. The cuffs and collars are fraying, the creases in his trousers are becoming threadbare, his shoelaces are unraveling. He was fastening his shirt this morning and discovered that one of the buttons had fallen off, and even if he could find it, he wouldn’t know how to sew it back on. I see Ignacio Abel as if I were seeing myself, with his maniacal attention to detail, his incessant desire to understand everything, his fear of missing something of consequence, his anguish over the passage of time, its crushing slowness when it becomes waiting. He feels his face after shaving, rubbing it with a little lotion from the almost empty bottle he brought from Madrid, and I feel the touch of my fingers on my face. On a journey things wear out or are lost and there’s no time to replace them, or you don’t know how or how many days are left before you reach your destination, how much longer you’ll have to make your increasingly meager funds last, the bills in your wallet, the coins in your pockets, the trifles kept for no reason and eventually lost: subway tokens or telephone slugs, a train ticket, an unused stamp, the ticket stub from a movie house where he waited out of the rain and watched a film not understanding a word of what was said. I want to enumerate these things just as he does on many nights when he returns to his room and methodically empties his pockets onto the night table as he used to empty them on the desk in his study in Madrid, his office at University City; I want to search Ignacio Abel’s pockets, the lining of his jacket, the inner band of his hat, with the touch of his fingers; listen to the clink in his raincoat pocket of the keys to his house in Madrid; know each object and each paper left on the night table and dresser in the hotel room, the ones he has kept as he hurried out to Pennsylvania Station and the ones left behind that will be tossed into the trash by the cleaning woman who makes the bed and opens the window to let in the October air that smells of soot and the river, laundry steam and cooking grease: transient things that contain a fact, an indelible moment, the name of a movie house, the receipt for a fast meal in a cafeteria, a calendar page that has a precise date on the front and on the back a hurriedly scrawled telephone number. In his study, in a drawer he always locked, he kept Judith Biely’s letters and photographs along with any small object that had something to do with her or had belonged to her—a box of matches, a lipstick, a coaster from the Palace Hotel nightclub with the circle made by Judith’s glass. People’s souls are not in photographs but in the small things they touched, in the ones that bore the warmth of their hands. With the help of his reading glasses he searched for her through the columns of tiny names in the Manhattan phone book and was moved when he recognized it among the names of so many strangers, as if he had seen a familiar face in the middle of a crowd or heard her voice. Close variants complicated the search: Bily, Bialy, Bieley. In one of the wooden phone booths that lined the back of the hotel lobby he asked for the number listed next to the name Biely and listened to the ring, his heart racing, afraid he would hang up the moment someone answered. But the operator told him there was no answer and
he remained sitting in the booth, receiver in hand, until someone’s banging on the glass pulled him out of his self-absorption.

  Extreme precision matters. Nothing real is vague. In his suitcase Ignacio Abel carries his architect’s diploma, signed by Professors Walter Gropius and Karl Ludwig Rossman in Weimar in May 1924. He knows the value of exact measurements, the calculations of the resistance of materials, the balance between contrary forces that keeps a building standing. What could have happened to the engineer Torroja, with whom he liked to talk about the physical foundations of construction, learning disturbing facts about the ultimate insubstantiality of matter, the demented agitation of particles in the void. The sketches in the notebook he carries in one of his pockets will be worthless if they’re not subjected to the illuminating disciplines of physics and geometry. What were the words of Juan Ramón Jiménez that seemed like the summary of a treatise on architecture? The pure, the precise, the synthesizing, the unambiguous. Ignacio Abel made note of them on a slip of paper and read them aloud at the Student Residence during the lecture he gave the previous year, October 7, 1935. Nothing occurs in an abstract time or a blank space. An arch is a line drawn on a sheet of paper and the solution to a mathematical problem, weight transformed into lightness through the interplay of contrary forces, visual thought converted into habitable space. A stairway is an abstract form as necessary and pure as the spiral of a shell, as organic as the arborescent veins of a leaf. At the top of a wooded hill, in a place Ignacio Abel has yet to visit, the white structure of a library already exists in his imagination and in the sketches in his notebooks. Beneath the iron arches and glass vaults of Pennsylvania Station, in the air flecked with dust and smoke, shaken by the din of concave spaces, the clocks mark a precise time: in a rapid spasm the eye barely perceives, the minute hand has just advanced to five minutes to four. The ticket Ignacio Abel holds in his lightly sweating left hand is for a train that leaves at four from a platform whose location he still doesn’t know. In the inside pocket of his raincoat he has the passport that was on the night table next to his wallet this morning, and a written, stamped postcard he forgot to mail in the hotel lobby is now in a jacket pocket next to the letter he didn’t tear into pieces. Two children growing up without a father at their most difficult age and in these times and my having to rear them all alone. The postcard is a color photograph of the Empire State Building seen at night, with rows of lit windows and a zeppelin moored to its splendid steel spike. Every time he traveled he sent daily postcards to his children. He’s continued to do so this time but doesn’t know whether they’ll reach their destination; he writes the names and address as if repeating an incantation, as if his obstinacy in sending the cards would be enough to prevent their being lost, like the impetus and aim with which one fires an arrow, or the meticulous resentment with which his wife enumerated each of her complaints in writing. Dear Lita, Dear Miguel, this is the tallest building in the world. I’d have liked to see New York from the sky, up in a zeppelin with you. In the ink-blue sky of the postcard a full yellow moon and conical reflectors illuminate the futuristic silhouette of the dirigible. Postcards and letters go astray now in the convulsive geography of the war. Adela’s letter and the telegram temporarily rescued Ignacio Abel from his gradual nonexistence in the hotel room, where for four days the telephone didn’t ring and no one said his name or even had the most incidental conversation with him. He also carries in a pocket the belated welcoming telegram from Professor Stevens, chairman of the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts at Burton College, the letter in which, through a hallucination of desire, he recognized Judith Biely’s hand, if only for a few seconds, as clearly as he heard her voice in Pennsylvania Station. Except he didn’t, and the writing doesn’t resemble hers at all. Last night, before turning off the light, Ignacio Abel read all of Adela’s letter and put it back in its envelope, leaving it on the night table next to his passport and wallet and reading glasses, resisting without difficulty the temptation to tear it up. In the room’s imperfect darkness, submerged in the hoarse vibration of the city that enveloped him like the incessant tremor of the ship’s machinery during his six-day voyage across the Atlantic, Ignacio Abel watched his wife’s old-fashioned delicate writing glide before his eyes, and in his wakefulness the words in the letter took on her monotonous voice with its simultaneous catalogue of reproaches and a sort of indestructible tenderness against which he had no defenses.

  After several days of waiting, time again accelerated in a disquieting way. It was almost three-thirty when he looked at his watch, and the train for Rhineberg left at four. It had become so late that he slammed shut the suitcase on the bed and realized only as he was opening the door that he had left his passport on the night table. He shuddered at the thought of leaving without it. An entire catastrophe can be contained in a moment’s carelessness. They were less than a minute away from killing him on that night in late July he often dreams about, when a voice saying his name in the darkness saved him: Don Ignacio, calm down, nothing’s going to happen. The blue passport with the seal of the Spanish Republic was issued in the middle of June; the year’s visa for the United States is dated early October (but everything takes so long, it doesn’t seem it’ll ever arrive). The photograph is of a huskier man, not exactly younger but less mistrustful, with a less insecure expression and eyes that will always have something furtive about them but rest on the camera lens with serenity, even with a touch of arrogance, accentuated by the excellent cut of his jacket, a crisply folded handkerchief and fountain pen in the breast pocket, the silky gleam of his tie, the obvious quality of his shirt. At each sentry post along the borders Ignacio Abel has crossed in recent weeks, the guards compared more and more slowly the face in the passport to that of the man who presented it to them with a docile expression that gradually grew more nervous. In this accelerated time, photographs don’t take long to become unfaithful. Ignacio Abel looks at his passport photograph and sees the face of someone who has become a stranger and ultimately generates no sympathy in him, not even nostalgia. Nostalgia, or rather a longing as physical as a disease, is what he feels for Judith Biely and his children, not for the man he was a few months earlier, and even less so before the war. Ignacio Abel’s eyes have seen things the man in the photograph, whose assurance is petulance, or worse, blindness, doesn’t suspect. A step away from the future explosion that will turn everything upside down, he doesn’t sense its proximity and can’t imagine its horror.

  Exact details: his passport has suffered the same deterioration as his clothes and suitcase; it has passed through too many hands, received the forceful impact of a good number of rubber stamps. The exit stamp from Spain has the badly printed red-and-black initials of the FAI, the Iberian Anarchist Federation, and the trace of dirty fingerprints. The hands of the French gendarme who inspected it only a few meters away were pale and bony and had shiny nails. His fingers handled the passport with the misgivings of someone who fears an infection. On the Spanish side, the Anarchist militiaman had stared at Ignacio Abel with a glint of threat and sarcasm, with contempt, letting him know he considered him a malingerer and a deserter, and though the militiaman let him pass, he didn’t renounce until the last moment the authority to seize the passport that meant nothing to him; the French gendarme, his head rigid above the hard collar of his uniform, had studied Ignacio Abel at length without ever looking him in the eye, without granting him that privilege (it requires training to examine someone’s face without meeting his eye). The French stamp, with a polished wooden handle, came down on the open passport with the crack of a metal spring. At every border someone will take his time studying the passport and any other document he feels like demanding, peer over his glasses with distrust, turn to a colleague or disappear behind a closed door, taking the suddenly suspicious document with him—someone who thinks of himself as a guardian, a master of the future of those who wait, admitting some, inscrutably rejecting others, taking his time to light a cigarette or exchange gossip with th
e clerk at the next table before turning back to the window and examining once again the person waiting, the one who knows he’s on the verge of salvation or damnation, of yes or no.

  Perhaps today the enemy is in Madrid and the passport is no longer valid. On the floor of the hotel room, beside the bed, Ignacio Abel left a rumpled newspaper that the cleaning woman will throw into the trash without looking at it. INSURGENTS ADVANCE ON MADRID. The news item is three days old. INCENDIARY BOMBS FALL ON BATTERED CITY. In the middle of a sleepless night he listened to a news bulletin on the radio, read without pause in a nasal, high-pitched voice; the only word he could catch was “Madrid.” Between the advertising jingles and the whistles of static, the name sounded like a remote, exotic city lit by the brilliance of bombs. Perhaps by now his house is a pile of rubble and the country to which his passport belongs and on which his legal identity depends has ceased to exist. But at least the words “Spain” and “war” and “Madrid” were not on the front pages of newspapers at one of the station newsstands he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He looks at arrows, displays; he listens in passing to bursts of trivial conversations that become transparent and seem to refer to him or contain prophecies; one by one he examines the faces of all the women, not because he expects suddenly to see Judith Biely but because he doesn’t know how not to look for her. The mellow afternoon twilight descends diagonally through the glass of the vaulted ceiling and traces its broad parallel streaks stippled with dust on people’s heads. He tries to ask a porter in a dark blue uniform and red cap a question, but in the confusion his effort isn’t noticed. A column of people hurries toward a corridor under a large sign and an arrow: DEPARTING TRAINS.