Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected)

by Mois Benarroch

  Moshe: Why are you so small, smaller than Moisito, who is laughing there in his corner?

  Mois: Well because I’m only four months old.

  My friend Moisito is already twelve and a half.

  Moshe: And would you like to grow?

  Moisito: I want to grow, too.

  Mois: Well yes, I would like to, although I’m already used to being small, to living this life, this no-life, or this

  half-life.

  Moshe: And how would you like to grow?

  Mois: I don’t know, most of all I like girls, they intrigue me. I love all of them, I want them to laugh with me. I want to go to the sea a lot. I like house parties, dancing. I really like to laugh, to play around with people and then laugh.

  Moisito: And who are you to ask him those things? Can’t you see he can’t grow anymore and that you’re just hurting him? Moshe: I’m Moshe.

  Mois: Ah, Moshe, the one from Tefillah.

  Moshe: Well yes, that too. I’m the Moshe who took your place, Mois, after you took the place of Moisito.

  Moisito: Yes, and he got over his asthma right at the age of twelve, but because of all those vaccines he remained really small, as you can see. Moshe: No, that’s not the reason. Within one day everything is going to change, Mois. You’re going to Israel and everything is going to change.

  Mois: Really?! To Israel. That’s amazing!

  Moshe: Not so much, you see. You stay small and Moshe is born, that’s me. When you stopped growing I was born. I don’t like to dance, I’m very shy, I’m afraid of girls, and instead of going to the beach I wrote poetry.

  Mois: You’re crazy! Totally crazy, why don’t you like girls? Are you gay or what? You don’t like girls, yeah, right, that’s what they told my great-great-grandfather who died and didn’t come back. You’re still messing with people, just like always.

  Moshe: Okay, well I do like them, but I’m very shy. Mois: You, shy?! My goodness, you shy, what a joke. You’ve got to be kidding.

  Moshe: It’s just that I don’t understand the girls here, even though I speak Hebrew very well. I don’t know what they want or where they go. They’re not like the ones you know in Tetouan, each saying she doesn’t want you to touch her breasts like the others, but they keep laughing.

  Mois: Except for Raquel.

  Moshe: Raquel, yes, she left five years ago.

  Moisito: Yes, but don’t you remember you promised to buy all the sea for her, only her?

  Moshe: So her name was Raquel, her name was Raquel, and she left after the Six-Day War. And what did she say? Moisito: She told you to bring the sea to her house when she’s eighteen.

  Moshe: Wow. And I forgot all that. Mois: You’ve forgotten too much. It must be that silly habit of writing poems. For what?

  Moshe: I want to understand, Mois, understand where all of this fell apart, where you disappeared to.

  Mois: But you know I can’t grow anymore. You have to live your life.

  Moshe: That’s the problem. How can I live my life without you, if you’re here behind that glass?

  Mois: Oh, that. If you can break the glass, there will be more air in here.

  Moisito: More air means less asthma, and sometimes the opposite. Moshe: My back hurts.

  Mois: It’s because you’re carrying my memory on it. Let me down, let my memory down.

  Moshe: Alright, step aside, I’m going to break this glass. Mois: But even without the glass you can’t come close to us. Those kinds of meetings are very dangerous if we touch each other.

  Moshe: But where’s Raquel?

  Mois: She’s looking for you.

  Moshe: Still?

  Mois: She wants her sea, and you promised it to her, so now you have to bring her the sea. You never used to break promises, what happened?

  Moshe: Oh man! Well that hasn’t changed, I still do everything I say, I just forgot that one about Raquel. I was really little, it was years ago. Moisito: Well you see, she didn’t forget.

  Moshe: She must have a better memory.

  Mois: Yes, she must, I don’t have a very good memory. I forget my vests everywhere and then my mother... Moisito: She yells no matter what, so it doesn’t have that much to do with the vests.

  Mois: Why does she yell so much?

  Moisito: Because that’s how mothers are.

  Mois: But I just can’t stand that yelling. Moisito: And you think I can, you think anyone can? Moshe: So why don’t you tell her to stop yelling? Mois: I get scared when she yells, you tell her, you’re older. You tell her to stop yelling.

  Moshe: Alright, I’ll tell her.

  Moisito: It’s really important for her to stop yelling, because of the asthma. At the soccer games they always put me in the goal or on defense, and I want to play up front, too. Do you understand why this is so important?

  Moshe: You’re still a goalie?

  Mois: Yes, and I’m still playing tennis.

  Moshe: You go to Restinga, to Kabila, to spend the summer.

  Mois: When things are going well and mom and dad have money. There are years when they don’t have any, but we always go for a bit, with our aunts and uncles, or with our grandparents.

  Moshe: See, all of that really did disappear in Israel. The long summers, the tennis matches, the ping pong. None of that existed in Israel at that time.

  Mois: And what do you do there over the summer?

  Moshe: We go to the beach, but there’s no tennis. And three years after leaving, my asthma came back, and it was even more difficult.

  Mois: The vaccines didn’t help you.

  Moshe: No, and the doctors didn’t help me or our little brother.

  Mois: What happened to him?

  Moshe: He died, one year after we left. Mois: And what about the miracles that cure everything in Israel?

  Moshe: No one understands God.

  Mois: And I was so excited about going to Israel and I dreamed that it was going to cure everyone, you, the whole family. Moshe: It was nothing but a letdown.

  Mois: But in any case, it was the right decision, you’ll see.

  It was the right and the only decision. These are things you know on the inside. That’s why the only thing we wanted was to go to Israel, mom was right. The last diaspora, the last exile, from here straight to Israel. Moshe: But here, too, it is exile. Mois: Yes. It is exile, but it’s the last one.

  “Do you remember the poor man wearing a djellaba who would beg for money next to the school?”

  “The one on the corner.”

  “Two corners and the school in the middle, the black metal door.”

  “I remember that you would run to give him a coin before they closed the door, always arriving to class last.”

  “I wanted to sleep a little more, you were always in my dreams.”

  “He would dance.”

  “Do you remember the rulers they used to hit our hands?”

  “And they would say ‘met la main’ (‘put out your hand’), but then your hand would automatically move back when the ruler came close.”

  “And once again, ‘met la main’, as if it were normal for a child to like being hit.”

  “And we still have good memories from that school.”

  “Who are we?”

  “We are the people from the memory.”

  “The past is that story that never stops changing.”

  Eighth Chapter

  In which the upcoming trip and my fear of making decisions will be discussed.

  Raquel says I should travel to Madrid. She says my Spanish will improve and that we have a lot to talk about. It was my idea. For years I’ve been thinking about a real trip, like in the old times, trips with lots of suitcases and long stays.

  Shelley and Byron, trips lasting a year. I thought of going for three months, which isn’t that long, but compared to two weeks, it’s a period of time in which you can get to know a city.

  When Raquel began to bring my idea to life, I backed away, like always. Like when I asked my wife to mar
ry me, and she said yes, but an emphatic yes, yes, and let’s get married in two months. And I said okay, not so fast, not so fast, we can wait a little.

  But she said, if we’ve already decided, why wait? Well we got married in three months, on the 25th of December, and yesterday we celebrated nineteen years of marriage at a seaside restaurant in Tel Aviv. I thought about Raquel and the sea she doesn’t see in Madrid. I sent her a little bit of the Israeli sea, which isn’t the Mediterranean clinging to the ocean we knew in Morocco.

  At these wedding anniversary dinners we are always very serious. I honestly don’t know why, I asked my wife but she didn’t answer. We were never a winter couple; we grew distant every December to bloom again in March. Maybe the date when we got married has something to do with it.

  Come on, two Jews don’t get married on the day Jesus was born. But that’s what happened. We focused on the Hebrew date and when we got to the hotel to pick the date we had to choose between three days, and we picked a sunny winter Sunday.

  Yesterday it rained a lot throughout the entire country.

  My wife says I should travel and meet Raquel, although it could be dangerous. Raquel hasn’t told her husband anything, she says he’s jealous. I tell my wife everything, even the lover of a week I had three years ago, but I told her six months after it ended. I must be crazy, but I thought that whatever happened, I had to tell her everything, because I felt I couldn’t stay with her if she didn’t know what I had done. She took it well, too well, I guess, I would have liked to see a little jealousy. A little, not much.

  Now I’m here fine-tuning things, although a little bird has been telling me for months that I should listen to what women tell me. But what I like is for things to happen.

  There is a fabulous verb in Haketia, ketbear. It comes from the Semitic root K-T-B, write, and it was made into Spanish by the Jews of Tetouan. It means what is written. My grandmother would always say that trips are when ‘se ketbean’, ‘people write’, and there is nothing more real in my life.

  All of the trips in my life were always unexpected. The more I planned them the less they turned out. The best were the ones decided by others, invitations, empty houses, irrational impulses, but here I am and we’re talking about conferences, about what things I could speak about. I don’t understand why people think a writer should be a good speaker. It’s not that I’m that bad. But what does writing in front of a computer alone have to do with speaking in front of fifty or one hundred people at a time? But I guess it wouldn’t be a bad idea to talk at a conference if it helps me in terms of money to be able to travel.

  But usually, at the few conferences I speak at, I get into serious messes.

  Most of the time there is someone who wants to send me to a madhouse, five or six think a good psychiatrist would be enough, and half of the audience is convinced I’m crazy but they don’t care what I do, they just want to leave the room and never see me again. Every time I give a talk I lose about thirty readers, so maybe it would be best for me to just keep quiet, but that’s something I don’t know how to do. And if someone tells me something, I always respond with what I think. It’s something I haven’t known how to do since I was really small, since I was very Moisito, and I would tell the teachers what I thought and often ended up in the principal’s office. The most intense place.

  Well if the trip is imminent, it will take place within the next two months, before the end of February. A bird tells me there is nothing more beautiful than spring in Retiro Park, and above all walking with Raquel at my right.

  “I want to hear that boy who laughs, I like that boy.”

  “Sometimes I see him walking along the streets, but often what he is is scared, scared of the shouts, the sticks, the shouts more than the sticks.”

  “I see him running on the sand and swimming in the sea, further out than the rest.”

  “There he does laugh, but still above his laughter he hears shouts.” “He hears them all around.”

  “But there weren’t that many.”

  “That could be, but he heard them more than the others, he was more sensitive to the shouts, that’s all. Some people are sensitive to the sun, and others to yelling.”

  “He plays at recess in the school’s courtyard.”

  “And it’s hard for him to run, it’s hard for him to breathe, and he goes back to class gasping for air.”

  “The teacher who told him the noise of his breathing bothered her.”

  “And why does he remember all that? Why does he remember everything that was unfair?”

  “He’s too senstive to injustice.”

  “Where does that come from?”

  “Who knows, that’s just how it is.”

  “One in a hundred, or in a thousand, are bothered by injustice.” “And that never changes anything.”

  “It doesn’t change anything, and it doesn’t leave things the same. It’s a statistic. One out of however many come out that way, like any other sensitivity.”

  “Yes, but I am that one.”

  “As am I.”

  Ninth Chapter

  In which I will discuss questions that have many answers, none of which make sense.

  Raquel lives in Madrid. I spend entire days, long days, wondering why my parents went to Israel and not to Madrid, not to Spain. And I have all the answers, I have all the reasons, from the most important to the most minor. But after all those answers, the question only grows. Once a moon, it becomes a sun. No, mom and dad, these are things you just don’t do. You don’t take your kids and decide for them that they will live on a different planet, in a culture totally foreign to all the education you have given them, in a country that you didn’t prepare them to take on at all. It’s been years of trying, of psychotherapy, of thousands of treatments, but I still haven’t found the key to this society, and it’s not for a lack of trying. It’s because what they’re asking of me is to cut my legs and my hands off to be one of them. They ask me to get rid of my past to be one of them, and it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t. You just don’t do things like that, dear parents.

  In 1994 I published my first book, Coplas del inmigrante (The Immigrant’s Lament), and for a second, for the time it takes a ray of sunshine to invade a dark room, for a moment I believed I had found a key, not an exact key, but a key that after a lot of use would manage to open a door, not even the door, just a door. I didn’t realize that those who read me saw me as a midget in a circus. They looked at me the way an anthropologist looks at a new tribe in Australia. A year after the book, which few read and few praised, I realized I was in the same hallway and that they would never open the door for me, except to tell me there’s no room. The second book, three years later, went by unnoticed, and that gave me the strongest feeling of exile I had ever felt in my life, which one year later brought me to write my first poems in Spanish. The Spanish of my grandparents became the only possible consolation for my desperate and incurable feeling of otherness. The worst of all was the mockery of the pain, the mockery and the laughter at the one-armed circus I had become. Yes, mom, I was strong to not show my tears, I was strong, like you raised me, and I said these lands, and this country, aren’t any less mine than they are yours, and let’s not lament them less in our exile. I sure was strong, but I’m not that strong anymore. Not now, now I cry, I cry for myself and for all of those who dreamed of a Jewish population, only in the city of Jerusalem.

  I accuse Zionism and its madness of sending messengers to convince my parents that here things would go well. What went well, what, I ask myself now. The only one who understood it was my brother who went to London at age twenty. But I didn’t understand, I thought it was all just part of the normal struggle of an immigrant and it was all a matter of time. But time only made me feel worse, more separate and further from everything the streets tell me, from everything the Israeli Jews tell me.

  The letters came, the letters that I threw away at the beginning. Letters making fun of my pain and accusi
ng me of all my problems. I’m the problem, of course I am, the one who brings the news of something going badly has always been the problem. Like the letter telling me what I have to do is get a sex change, and transform from a Sephardic Jew into an Israeli. I would wonder what need these crazy people have to write such letters, or to call me on the phone and talk to me for an hour about why I’m crazy. And I, very politely, would answer their questions instead of hanging up the phone. Sometimes I laugh about all this, but inside it hurts. Comedy is tragedy for the actor who lives it. Sometimes I’m above all this, most of all on days when I’m satisfied for having written a good poem, for having done something. But it doesn’t last long and the calmed west wind never lasts long. The waves come to hit the sand once again, and the sand gets cold again.

  But yes, by admitting five years ago my situation as an eternal immigrant, of being a country of one person, of being the eternal immigrant from that country, I found a room for me in this house called Earth. It’s a small room with no windows, but it has a door and a key.

  Someday I’ll have to learn to leave this room.

  “The swallows didn’t come back.”

  “And the promises from our mothers weren’t kept.” “The storks stopped bringing children.”

  “But I was mostly waiting for the swallows, whether they would come back or not.”

  “But the poem returned, the words returned.” “The words came back and never left again. More and more swallows came until they filled our lives, leaving no room for any other bird.”

  “They flew and they fly in our pages. They bring words from the sky and carry words to the dead and to those going to die.”

  “The last Tetuanis.”

  “And we are them, that’s the only thing we are, the last Tetuanis.”

  “No swallow will bring us back to Tetouan. Because Tetouan no longer exists. Jewish Tetouan has died.”

  “The eagles will celebrate our memories there. The eagles always end up with the remains, they end up with the best part.”

  “The same eagles that bring us to another land, the same eagles that attack the swallows who left and didn’t return.”