Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected)

by Mois Benarroch

  The steps were more books and more words. Raquel tells me I should be an editor, and she must be right. I should eat letters every day, to live on letters. Sometimes I think that I only exist in books, that I live in labyrinths of words that come to me without stopping, that appear without me calling them.

  I get an idea, for example the one about the twelve-year-old boy that Raquel talks to me about, and I start to think. Then suddenly words begin to rain down and suddenly I see the entire books in front of me. This always happens to me at night, before going to sleep. At those times, if there were some way to transcribe exactly what was happening in my mind, entire books would fly out of the computer in mere seconds. Yesterday, yesterday I saw the whole book about the boy, that stranger, Mois. That stranger, me.

  But now, in front of my computer, things are a lot more difficult. Things don’t go as quickly and I lose track of an idea because of another one that wants to come out.

  And you have to write the book in your language, Raquel told me. I write poems in Spanish, but prose is easier for me in Hebrew. That’s what I was waiting for, for someone to tell me to write in Spanish, like Raquel did, because she always tells me what I should tell myself. And now I realize that the topic should decide the language, and that Mois, lost in the strangest times of humanity, wants to speak in Spanish, or rather, as Raquel and I tell each other, in Tetuani.

  Who is that Mois? When he was twelve they had his Bar Mitzvah, and at that moment the Jewish boy became an adult. At that moment, all the obligations of Judaism came to weigh upon him. But until that day I was Moisito, although my pride made me yell out from the age of seven, “MY NAME IS NOT MOISITO, MY NAME IS MOIS”, which didn’t make me any less Moisito or any more Mois. My childhood would never have been so sweet if they hadn’t called me Moisito.

  But that Moisito who at twelve and a half suddenly became Mois was to become an emigrant three months later. His parents, with no advance warning, although it was something expected, decided on a summer day to wake up Mois and all his siblings and put them in a car that would bring them to Ceuta. From there Mois would reach the state of Israel, a transparent state, where Mois would become Moshe and where he was never really able to develop his personality. Moshe, yes, Moshe, was the name he had at the Tefillah and in the synagogue. It was the religious name. So Moisito, who had so wanted to become Mois, became Moshe. And from there a person went missing, Mois, and a stranger without a past was created, Moshe.

  Raquel wrote a novel called Leaving Tetouan in which she describes how she left Tetouan. When Moshe read the manuscript, he felt as though he were the character traveling in the car towards customs, and since then he has believed that Raquel is a character from his novels and that he is a character in Raquel’s novels.

  Raquel says that she wrote this novel for him, before meeting him. And I don’t quite understand why I talk about myself in the third person; I see myself leaving my body and watching myself from afar. But I know that I’m me, and that we are him, myself and that other him; we are two complete strangers, but we make one.

  When I read Leaving Tetouan I understood why I always want to emigrate. It doesn’t really matter where, what matters is doing it in such a way that I cannot return (return, return, such a sweet lie). I say to my wife, let’s sell the house, the car, everything, and let’s leave; and she responds, alright, sounds good, if you want let’s leave, but first go to Madrid or Paris or London, or anywhere, find a job, and then the rest of us will come. My wife is right. Lately, there is a voice that keeps telling me I should listen to women.

  “Where are you?”

  “Looking for the exit or the entrance.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “I see a hall, a door leading to another door, that leads to another hall, that leads to another door, that leads to another hall.”

  “And how long have you been there?”

  “Since I left my house alone, without my footsteps and without my shadow; since I began to write poetry.”

  “Yes, I know, I’ve also been here since I left my house.” “And do you also write poetry?”

  “Yes, poems that are footsteps I don’t remember and memories without words.”

  “And what do you see, my love?”

  “I just see my footsteps, going from door to door, hall to hall, and poem to poem, and I want to leave, through the entrance or through the exit.”

  “Do you see gardens, too?”

  “Yes, I see gardens, but they’re not mine, they don’t have the same green color as my plants.”

  “Listen, listen, you’re a voice.”

  “Yes, finally there’s a voice, I hear your voice.”

  “I always imagined your voice, but today I hear it.”

  “Look, look, but not ahead like always, look up at last.”

  “You see.”

  “I see you, I finally see you, and you’re everything I imagined.” “Everything and much more.”

  “Now I see, your labyrinth, I see how you can leave, it’s so easy.”

  “So easy to see your way out.”

  “I’m afraid to leave, years ago this labyrinth became my nest.”

  “It’s fear of the sun.”

  “No, it’s the fear of knowing that after leaving, we will only be able to see each other by looking up. We will never find each other.”

  “Yes, my love, but we will finally both see the same sun. We will read the same book.”

  Second Chapter

  In which I explain how time becomes heavier each day.

  At the age of twenty I read the story by Borges called “The Garden of Forking Paths” and since then I have had a very strange habit. I always take at least two routes. If I have to go from A to B, I choose two possibilities, and when I begin to take one route I imagine I am walking down the other, and I imagine that my other ‘I’ is imagining myself walking down the first one. In two or three minutes I am no longer able to say which path I took. The thing is, I actually took both and I lived on both of those paths.

  When Raquel talks to me I understand my books. In them appear French writers named Moise, and others who live in Madrid. Moshe, Mois, Moise; similar names, names lost from my life. I am not any of them, and none of them are unknown to me, but they are all strangers. That day in August, that hot summer day when we left Tetouan, we could have gone anywhere. To Mois it was all a mystery. We talked about Venezuela, the Canary Islands, Madrid, Canada and half the world that morning, that early morning, while slurping up a café con leche. For an hour, Mois was going everywhere. Until we reached Ceuta, I didn’t know we were going to Israel. Children, above all, were not allowed to say the word ‘Israel’ in Morocco. It was Eretz, land, nothing more, and it was dangerous for anyone to know that we were planning to emigrate, especially to Israel.

  What happened during that hour? That was Mois’s hour, the true hour of his life, just as those lost in a cave explain how they experienced an hour that lasted a lifetime. That hour was an entire lifetime and during it Mois lived the most important time of his three months.

  Raquel asks me if we are both crazy. I think so, but not those crazy people who live in asylums, we’re worse than them. We have entered a life where time weighs on us so much that we have pushed it aside. We live where only mystics can enter, and neither of us is very mystic. We are always looking for what is tangible, but we are really looking for that sure reality of a childhood in Tetouan, that reality that was nothing more than an illusion, an illusion like all realities.

  Raquel says she thinks I am very seductive. I told her I am the least seductive person in the world. But I know she’s right; she’s talking about Mois and I’m talking about Moshe.

  Mois liked girls, ever since he was a young Moisito. At age six he was already flirting like the older guys and he always liked to dance with girls, when the other boys were embarassed. He liked to touch the breasts that were beginning to appear, around age eleven or twelve. He remembers a party he organized with his
cousin - it was all girls and the two of them. Mois danced with all the girls, and each of them got annoyed when he put his hands on them. They would say I’m not like the other girls, but they would always smile. Mois probably would have been very seductive, but when Moshe arrived in Israel he became a total prisoner. He never really had a relationship with a Sabra; on the few occasions he went out with women, they were always French or Spanish speakers.

  Can someone change so much? Can a path fork to the point where it creates two completely different people?

  Well that’s me. When I write in Hebrew, it’s as if the world began in 1972. It’s not that there aren’t earlier years, but those early years also begin in 1972.

  At age forty I began to write in Spanish and suddenly earlier, far-off years existed, ones previous even to the year I was born. In Spanish I have a history, a long history lasting a millennium. I am a Sephardic Jew, I come from Granada or Seville, or Lisbon, and not just Tetouan. In Hebrew I come from the clouds and from the caves of Nebuchadnezzar, which is rather frightening and doesn’t make much sense.

  Raquel says she has a fever this morning, and it’s because yesterday she saw the whole book with me, which would make a person dizzy. In one second there are pages and more pages, words that fight each other like sperm to reach the goal, thousands of words like an ocean storm.

  That’s why all these things about time don’t work well for me; I think that when it comes down to it, I’m living in reverse.

  Bernardo took me back to 1983, but things don’t end there. Raquel brings me to 1982, the year I traveled to Paris and Madrid looking for love, for a woman. And the question I ask myself is how I managed to not see Raquel in Madrid, since that’s the reason I went. It’s been exactly twenty years since then, twenty, and we’re going backwards. But, did I not see her then? I doubt it, I really doubt it. Surely we crossed paths several times, but how could I not notice her? Or yes, I did notice her, I remember that face well. Every time I see her picture it seems more familiar. If it wasn’t in 1982 then it was 1977, the years I traveled to escape from serving in the Israeli military. But in the end I returned to those three disastrous years of service. But I couldn’t see her because Moshe was looking for a woman, but the one who saw Raquel was Mois. And Mois those days, while Moshe wanted with his entire being to become a true Israeli and began to adopt the Sabra pronunciation, during those same days Mois would write poems in Spanish, sprinkling in Haketia words. When Moshe discovered this, it was a great disappointment. His whole idea of being able to become a Sabra someday, of the possibility of being accepted by his new society, fell into the void. A large void, but, like all voids, it was suddenly filled with poems in Spanish. At the beginning they were poorly written poems, poems that limped along, but that had something urgent about them, so urgent they almost seemed good. In a very short time I found a publisher that published a book of my poems in Spain. This, in comparison to the fifteen years it took me to find a publisher to publish my Hebrew writings. And very quickly, friendships were made with writers and poets all over Spain. Moshe remained even more isolated in Israel, but Mois came from the past to save me, to give me a name. Mois has always been the one who returns from a parallel world, crying over his premature death and telling me what steps I should take so the two of us can find each other one day.

  “We will fly.”

  “Yes, we will.”

  “Without planes.”

  “With words.”

  “We will create entire worlds without words.”

  “We will even create new words.”

  “And with them it will be easier to fly.”

  “Yes, easier than walking.”

  “And easier than living.”

  “And easier than dreaming.”

  “They will be words that will be said just once, only once

  ever.”

  “Only I will say them to you and only you will hear them.”

  “Or only I will say them to you.”

  “And all the others will become very jealous. They will realize that we have a secret that we ourselves don’t even remember.”

  “And that secret will be seen on our foreheads.”

  “And no one will be able to be the same anymore, nor will anyone be able to lie to us.”

  “Seeing our foreheads will keep them from lying.”

  “They will be very long words, with forty-two syllables.”

  “Or very short, words of half a consonant.”

  “And no one will remember them.”

  “But in oblivion their power will live.”

  “And in oblivion nothing dies.”

  “Memory is like the sun and not remembering is the night that awaits it.”

  “The sun has limited time, but the night is eternal.”

  Third Chapter

  In which I will discuss how the words choose the writer and not the writer the words, and other things that would prefer silence.

  Raquel says I shouldn’t stop writing in Hebrew. But it is the Hebrew language that is leaving me, little by little. Like with all my writing, this began with poetry; everything begins with poetry. In 1998, I suddenly felt the need to write in my mother tongue, the language of mine that had been nursed and fussed over. It was much stronger than I was. The words guided me in spite of myself, in spite of my spite. I remember an interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun in which they asked him why he didn’t write in Arabic, and I think he said in these words “la question est resolue” (“the matter is resolved”), and I said to myself in that moment, well no, nothing is signed and nothing is sealed. I wrote a poem in English, the first language I wrote in, in which I said that the words will never stop in any language. The poem was left in my notebook for months before I understood its real significance. It was the announcement of the Spanish poems that would come to follow.

  And now the thoughtful reader will ask why I began to write in English. Well, because Mois wanted to write in Spanish, but at age fifteen he couldn’t, and Moshe wanted to write in Hebrew, but he couldn’t either, he didn’t have enough knowledge of Hebrew, and Mois had died. There was also the possibility of French, that was Moise, the Moise from class, when the professor would read the names and make sure they were present, but French was always a foreign language; at recess everyone spoke Spanish, and at that very recess I saw Raquel for the first time, or perhaps it was earlier. Her mother and my mother were close friends, perhaps they even went out to walk the streets of Tetouan together, with the two of us. They would drink coffee while Raquel and I would communicate through strange pathways and the two of them wouldn’t notice. Pathways no stranger than the internet today, which seems so natural to us, but is actually nothing more than the realization of the dream of a fifteenth-century mystic. People talk to each other and send photos from thousands of miles away.

  What were those two babies talking about? Maybe they promised to meet each other after turning forty, and promised to write fantastic books about the city where they were born and that their mothers longed so earnestly to leave in order to discover a new world. They promised to remember, even when all the others wanted to forget. They promised to bring with them the memory of everyone buried in the old cemetery, called the cemetery of Castilla. The Corcos and the Castiels, the Ibn Danans, the Hachuels, the Taurels, the Bentatas, and the Ben Walids; the male and female descendants of converts who returned to Judaism to be able to breathe air where everything was smoke. Today I tell you, Raquel, I tell you, my darling, I cry for them, I cry from their pain that I carry on my back. They are the ones that pain me the most. Then came the protectorate and the money, and with the money we forgot our Haketia, but above all we forgot that simple and innocent Judaism, that Judaism where God was one of us and one of ours. That Judaism where the rabbis did not need to impose themselves and they understood the conditions in which each person lived. They understood that we were human beings, fragile and sinners. I live in them and they live in me. Those rabbis were the true intellectuals of
our lives, and they passed on to us that natural Judaism that no one will be able to change for hundreds of years. There, there is my pain and there is my happiness, that profound candle of happiness that no one will ever be able to put out. And thanks to them, everything always ends up as a smile in me. That smile is the truest thing about me. That smile that no one will be able to take from me.

  I arrived with that Judaism to Israel, where everything was different. There, all the Jews thought of another God and other rabbis, very different than mine, such that I couldn’t understand for more than twenty years that something here was not what I expected. It is more difficult for me to explain this to someone like Raquel who lives in Madrid and has never lived in Israel.

  It also makes me embarrassed to talk about the unbelievable discrimination, and on top of all that there will always be an anti-Semite who will use everything I say to kill me or my child, just as they always did with the prophets and with Jesus, or with Otto Weininger, because the worst thing about it is that, in spite of suffering from terrible discrimination, I am innocent enough to not accuse anyone of anything, and even to understand where things come from.

  Because of that, when Raquel tells me I should give classes at a university or be an editor, I don’t know how to respond. Here, people born in Morocco or their descendants are people who cannot, by definition, be intellectuals. They are people who should do manual labor. During the fifties and up until the end of the eighties, all the Jews from Arab countries were sent to vocational schools to become carpenters or electricians. In those days, no one could imagine that a Moroccan could be a writer or a university professor. In the end, today the success of the system is complete. Sephardic Jews themselves will tell you that their children have no business being history professors. The universities have become closed circles where only the Jews from European countries, the Ashkenazim, teach or lead. Yes, there are some exceptions, and if they ever say there is discrimination they will probably be let go in less than a year, for administrative reasons, of course.