Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected)

by Mois Benarroch

  All of this comes from Zionism being born in Europe, the same Europe of the nineteenth-century people who believed the people of the East were incapable of developing on their own.

  The Jews who until two hundred years ago were Europe’s ‘orientals’ finally became Asia, the Middle East, and Europeans, and here they created a hell that only makes the situation worse for anyone not born in Europe.

  Europe and its ghosts came with us. And its disdain. And its tutelage. And its eternal obsession with never letting the others leave childhood, always needing a snack and, once in a while, a slap in the face.

  “Where is the garden?”

  “It’s in my heart.”

  “And what is there in your garden?”

  “Three trees and a flower.”

  “What color is the flower?”

  “The color of your breasts.”

  “And what trees are there?”

  “There’s a cypress. And I don’t know the others.”

  “And who walks in your garden?”

  “You do, barefoot.”

  “And what do I see in your garden?”

  “You see a bird in a tree, but it already disappeared.”

  “And do you see me in the garden?”

  “I see you and I don’t see you. I watch you and then you’re gone. You go between the trees and continue to walk.”

  “And what fruit do your trees bear?”

  “I don’t know, but all the fruit is red and has the same flavor as your kisses.”

  “And why are you leaving now?”

  “It’s because I ran out of words. Without words, I disappear.”

  Fourth Chapter

  In which I talk about the little difference that really exists between literature, virtual reality and what we call real life.

  Raquel says she is afraid we will meet. So am I. For now it’s just e-mails, and we are actually finally both experiencing a relationship that is completely extraterritorial and extramundane; a literary relationship. The Raquel from the e-mails is the Raquel of words, and Moshe is literature. We stroll among the words and drink coffee in imaginary cafes. But for quite some time now I’ve been doubting everything they call material. I walk down the streets and feel as though I live inside a movie. I don’t know when everything changed and the world became literature. Sometimes I want to wake up from this dream, but what happens if the past was actually the dream and I am now in reality? Everything I see is intangible, none of it is exactly what I imagine I see. The whole world exists only in my imagination, in my books. No, there is nothing that could prove the opposite to me. Hundreds of philosophy books couldn’t convince me of it being the most logical possibility. Each of us is Elohim and each entity creates their world and manages it as they can, and maybe as they like.

  This is why Raquel and I live among books. We live among books the way words live among pages. We are two books that communicate the way a chapter of Finnegan’s Wake and a chapter of Le Livre Des Questions might communicate. Like them, they would talk to each other with words, they would send each other e-mails and they would create a world. Maybe they would send photos to each other in order to not get lost between reality and what seems to not be reality.

  Today they published an article about one of my books in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, another one against it, like the majority of them. But, you see, I just read it and even laughed a little, I was Mois. If every three months they write an article against me, one day I will become very famous. But the reason this article didn’t cause me to become completely depressed for three or four days is simply that I am writing this book. Because when I write, I no longer live in that world outside of the book. When I write I live in the book, and when I live in the book, I understand little about that other person named Moshe who walks along the streets between books. I understand neither what he wants nor how he lives. I don’t understand his bank account or what he does for a living. For a few months he becomes a complete stranger. Sometimes I see him on TV talking about my books, about the ones I’m writing, and I wonder what this guy is talking about and why he would think that because he wrote me he knows me better than others. Only Raquel knows me, and not the Raquel who is married and goes to the supermarket every day and prefers red skirts over brown ones. No, not that one, the Raquel from the novels about Tetouan, from the novels she has written and the ones she will write, the Raquel from the poems and the e-mails, the Raquel that exists and is created letter by letter. Her verbal essence and MINE are the ones that find each other.

  I was thinking about that while I was reading the article and checking to see if Raquel had sent me an email yesterday or this morning, but no, I am still waiting for my daily ration. I think she waits too, but I respond quickly, I want to know what she will write back. From there these words are created, from the virtual reality that creates a book, that later will travel through the streets and will be read by people in cafes with computers that can communicate with others in other countries. It’s amazing, being able to talk to the world through words that write themselves, words that go from one continent to another and never forget Tetouan.

  Raquel says that in novels the characters should change, but this is not a novel, this is a book. In books, the characters are words and they don’t aspire, like in novels, to give the illusion of being humans. In books, the humans want to be part of the book. Herein lie all the differences between Jewish mysticism and all the other mysticisms. In the Kabbalah man is made of letters and the letters form words.

  The words form books and the books are the cities where the men live. The Kabbalah never moves away from words to reach God, like other mysticisms do. I think the only way to reach God is through words. The word ‘page’ is more important that the page itself, and the word ‘page’, and the letters p-a-g-e, are what create the true page.

  For that reason, in this book the humans only aspire to one thing, to be words and letters, not a single letter, but two, two letters create a world. On Saturday writing is not allowed, like any other creation, but what is not allowed is writing two letters, one single letter is allowed. Two already make a word, and a word is the beginning of a world. Because of that, one day, today, we will all be Elohim, Elohim, the creative force of the world, “Elohim leads, created, the heavens and the earth.” Elohim is the creative force of the infinite, and we will be that creative force one day when we know how to join one letter to another, one word to another.

  Therefore, the true life, for Jews, is the letter, the word and the book. Without the book you cannot be Jewish, without the book you cannot conceive of Judaism.

  “There is no way out.”

  “There isn’t in yours either.”

  “But I didn’t want to tell you this. There are only doors and more doors, and more rooms. They are different but there is no way out.”

  “And why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “To not let you down, like you.”

  “There is only one exit, it’s towards heaven. If I lower my hands you can give me yours and come towards me.”

  “Yes, but then I will be in your labyrinth, or you will be in mine.”

  “Together we will be able to see a lot of rooms and a lot of doors.”

  “Yes, but then I won’t be able to see mine, I will only be able to see yours.”

  Fifth Chapter

  In which I will finally relate how Raquel and Moshe found each other.

  Raquel says that the first e-mail from Moshe arrived just when she had decided to choose to live. And Moshe, who was going through difficult days at that time, suffering from his wife’s reunion with her ex-lover, the loss of his job and months of unemployment, believed only in miracles. During that time Moshe had terrible back pain and went to a chiropractor, but he knew quite well that the pains in his sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae were feelings he could not express, pain that would not come out and tearful sobs that had not been cried.

  My mother was in the hospital after an asthm
a attack. One day I went to visit and she told me that Raquel’s mother was in Jerusalem by chance and was coming to bring her a book that her daughter had written. Raquel’s mother and Moshe’s mother had been close friends until the latter got married. They continued to be friends after as well, but things cooled off a little because Raquel’s father had previously been a suitor of Moshe’s mother. Moshe’s grandfather was opposed to the marriage, because he felt that Raquel’s father did not have enough money. This happened in the two years when my father (my mother’s boyfriend) and my mother fought and broke up, and later got back together and got married.

  So that’s how Raquel, namesake of my mother, arrived to me, in the form of a book. That was her first book. And when I read it, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was the very person who was writing it. They were the same characters as in my books, the same characters who traveled in search of a Jewish or converted family from the sixteenth century, and who traveled to Tetouan in search of the last Jews in our hometown.

  For days I was desperate looking for Raquel’s e-mail, an eternity of two weeks, until my mother told me that Raquel was the producer of a television program and she gave me the e-mail of the program, which led me to her.

  The strangest sensation from the book was being able to feel Raquel’s skin while I wrote. I told myself a thousand times that if I were to translate the book into Hebrew and present it to my editor, he would tell me that I wrote it myself and that it was not a book that had been translated. If I were to show him the original in Spanish, he would tell me I published it with a pseudonym, and if I kept arguing with him, I’m almost sure he would convince me he was right and that I wrote the book myself.

  The words traveled across us at that same moment when the two of us decided we wanted to live. It’s not like we were about to commit suicide, but it was one of those moments when you decide that this can’t be life, that life has to be more, that we want more from life, that we want more life.

  Later, the e-mails started, going back and forth across half the world, and it’s finally clear that before Raquel left Tetouan we found each other, when we were kids. Surely we saw each other in Madrid several times, but are we both so terribly shy? Do we look that much alike? That is probably the reason and the layer we have constructed to stay in this world, a layer made of the past and of the future. A layer that lives in the Jewish quarters of Seville and Toledo. A layer everyone attacks, telling us we have to live in the present, when we know very well that the future is the past and that the others don’t realize it. Not only do they not realize it, but it’s also impossible to explain to them why.

  And strange things happened. Raquel was born on the same day as my sister, her daughter has the same name as my wife, her husband the same as my brother-in-law, her son the same as me. We could talk about probability, but that has little to do with it. All miracles are probable, but in these names what you find in the end are two parallel journeys through the world and the tangent proof that two parallel lines can find each other if they look.

  Raquel says I read her thoughts with my poems. I say there isn’t any thought we haven’t thought together.

  “We are two islands.”

  “We are slowly moving closer together.”

  “Two islands never come together.”

  “Ours will come together.”

  “And then we will be one island.”

  “And the ocean will be our home.”

  “We will live off the sun and the salt, and the fish will be our poems.”

  “No one will want to read or listen to voices anymore.”

  “We will be voices of voices and from voice to voice we will be victorious.” “The waves will bring us books and stories of the world.” “They will carry our words to the cities of men.”

  “No one will know who wrote them.”

  “They will think the ocean writes poems and the islands tell stories. They will believe in all the sirens from all the stories.” “They will think the waves know how to write.”

  “I learned the best poems from the waves.”

  “One day we will be, one day we already are, an island.”

  Sixth Chapter

  In which technique, literature and hot-tempered birds from overseas are discussed.

  Raquel says I should learn more technique. And what I immediately think is that I want to go back in time twenty years, marry her, have three kids, and after ten years of marriage emigrate from Madrid to Jerusalem. I would like to know if there’s a technique for that. She says she learned a lot about how to write dialogue, about what a narrator is, and what I think is that she should read Jabès to find out that no one knows anything about dialogue. Throughout more than fifteen books, the dialogues by Jabès are distressing and marvelous at the same time. No one ever responds to or follows the thought of the person who spoke before. There is one single exception and it is at the beginning of Un étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book). Suddenly when talking about a foreigner there is dialogue.

  Does that mean that only when two people talk about a third person, an outsider, can a dialogue be created?

  But moving on to literature and technique, it’s something you have to learn to hate after learning it, like learning to paint. Once you know how to use all the techniques, the real hard work is finding your own voice. What I’m looking for is really something further from what we call literature, but it’s not antiliterature either, because it would end up being the same thing. I’m looking for vital writing that comes straight from the throat, like laughing or crying, like breathing or peeing. Something basic, something that doesn’t imitate life, analyze life, or escape from life. Writing that is life itself, part of life, nothing less and nothing more.

  Few books achieved that, and in the end the academics came and put them in a net until those books became literature. When Tristram Shandy became a classic, the charm was lost of finding a second hand edition in some house and discovering one of the only original writers in literature. Bukowski is one of them, and the good thing about him is that he is still hated by many, mostly serious writers. Buk, I hope they keep hating you for many years to come, because it gives your work more vitality. Kertész is the last in this group I discovered, and even though they gave him the Nobel, he is still amazing. Here, they teach you to repeat sentences twice, without any logical reason, except for the intimate voice that comes out of the writer. Who teaches you to repeat “evidently” three times per page, and where? That’s what I used to do years ago, and they criticized me so much for it that I stopped, evidently.

  Raquel asks which garden belongs to Moisito, where and when it was lost, what he knew of the world and what he did not know. I think the best thing is to ask him.

  Raquel says I’m a volcano. Sometimes I can’t control all the words floating in me that want to come out. I wonder where all those words come from. Are they an ancient call from all those who spoke to us? And why did they choose me?

  Voices that come from centuries of brutality, centuries of oppression, centuries without words; from the voiceless dead, from newborns silenced for life. All of those voices are floating in the stratosphere and I, I’m the one who captures them. They’re better than the voices that reach me from the living and speak to me. They always talk to me about things I don’t understand. But I do understand Raquel, she’s been hearing these same voices for a long time. The same voices of the same dead who continue to ask to be heard by the living.

  “We will find each other in an airport.”

  “Blessed airport.”

  “In Rome or in Madrid, in Tel Aviv or in New York.” “From afar your smile will slip out, and mine will laugh across the entire hall.”

  “And the tourists won’t know why they are so happy, where all that happiness in their hearts comes from.”

  “The blind will begin to see, the mute will begin to speak, and the paralyzed will begin to walk. From s
mile to smile, from chuckle to chuckle, the whole world will begin to laugh.”

  “Are you dreaming?”

  “Yes. That is my dream: that the sick recover and the paralyzed walk just by seeing me, without knowing that health is coming to them from my light. In my dream I am light.”

  “And I’ll leave my suitcases for whoever wants them.”

  “Because there will be no need for clothes.”

  “There will be no need for time.”

  “Or space.”

  “Or airports to travel.”

  “We will be in all the cities of the world together; we will meet each other in several places at a time, in several centuries at a time.”

  “I’ll see you in Lucena.”

  “I’ll hug you in Tetouan.”

  “I’ll kiss you in Granada.”

  “I’ll love you in Jerusalem.”

  “And never again will we say we are separated by time and space. Never again will we talk about barriers, all imagined

  by our demented and limiting minds. The mind that limits will be the mind that expands.”

  “And never again will we say we are man and woman, and never again will we say we are not one, and never again will we know the feeling of separation or longing.”

  “And the word ‘separation’ will disappear.”

  Seventh Chapter

  In which Moshe, Mois and Moisito find themselves outside the limits of time.

  I found them while I was taking a bath with essential oils, the two of them together, one big and the other small, through a pane of glass.

  Mois: Hello.

  Moshe: How are you?

  Mois: Well not very well, as you can see.