Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected)

by Mois Benarroch

  What is the difference between a poet and a novelist? Poets don’t have driver’s licenses.

  And now you laugh again, you laugh again and you’re seven years old, you laugh again and you’re fifteen and the boys dream of you, the boys want to dance with you, but you want to write one poem and then another poem about the boys. You want to dance alone on the sand, on the beach, naked, at sunrise. You want to dance free of everything and everyone, and that’s why you write poems, but you keep the poems from everyone. You are writing them to me, and I grab them in the air. I send you other poems about the girls I didn’t dance with, and our poems dance together, but the two of us don’t.

  Next to the Tefillah in Tetouan, in 1996, there was a prostitute, a very young girl. Did you know that in Biblical Hebrew, prostitute and saint have the same root? Kdosha is saint and Kdesha is prostitute. Everything is already in that ancient and codified book. I saw her as I left the synagogue and then we ate fish with a Jew in the Spanish center, very good fish, of course. He told me he had stopped eating seafood, “we all become more religious with time”, and when I told them I was a writer his wife, suddenly and with pride, said, “One of these days you could win a Nobel prize”, as if the only thing people in the world do is wait for a person from Tetouan to show up. Well maybe the world is waiting, but in Israel no one was waiting for me.

  So I got your e-mail and a new smile. I’m going to Tel Aviv to the sea and I’ll send some sea to you up in heaven, heaven, which in Hebrew is called shamayim, which means “there the waters”. I’ll send you a smile from the maritime sky of Madrid. You are on the way to an interview with Saramago, the mago, the magician. I should read his books, I tell myself, it’s getting to be time. But that time doesn’t come. I can’t decide which translation to read, the Hebrew one, or the English, Spanish, or French, and these are very important decisions, it could take time.

  And I pass the time listening to Serrat, which always means that the trip to Spain is not so far away. ‘Oh, if I could be your coat to walk around with you!’, sings Serrat.

  Yesterday in Tel Aviv I felt you so far away and yet so close, outside the limits of time. You were at the same time both the girl playing on the beach and an old woman yelling into my ear because I could no longer hear anything, and it all seemed normal to me. I was talking to a friend about you and he told me I’m crazy, I’m reckless. He asked me how I can make love to my wife after getting an e-mail from you, and I told him there was no problem. He asked me if I think about you, if you’re present. I told him yes, you are present in everything I do. I also told him that I saw you in my future, I saw us together in the future, living together. I don’t understand how or why that was in my future, but that’s how I saw it.

  And then I tell myself, yes there were others before, you fall in love and you dream about those girls for two months, six, and then what comes from all that is a poem or a character for a novel. But this time, how many times have you said you see it differently, you say that this is indeed different. It surprises you that mutual understanding can be created without looking into each other’s eyes; it’s mutual understanding through words. Isn’t that every poet’s dream?

  To create a world, a relationship, just through words. Where do words touch us? Do they have their own life? No, they are our lives. We live not on land and not under the ozone but on words and under showers of words.

  In the beginning there was the verb.

  Damn he who invented the pronoun.

  Daydreaming of you in Mynonbeing

  It is Friday and he will Follow.

  There are two f’s, frets, friends, no fly, no eye, Friday, the last day of the week, when God created man, the groundlings, the glebeux, as André Chouraqui calls them, the roundlings, the ones who will fill the earthly globe and the cities.

  Today I live in the city, in Mynonbeing, the great city where for centuries everyone has been coming in search of gold. They stay because they don’t find it, or worse, because they find it, which doesn’t make very much sense, because in the city the gold is an illusion, a story the rich tell to fill the void, to believe that finding gold makes sense.

  Today, Friday, I live in the city and am a slave to the city. I read the late summer sunset, I read the last moments of fresh air before the sun burns and the people of Mynonbeing disappear from the city in search of better air. In August the city empties and no one can explain what the skyscrapers and the streets are doing in the middle of the trees. The few tourists that walk down the avenues seem to be in a movie after a strange bomb goes off, decreasing the number of inhabitants on the globe.

  But today I wait for him and he will come, he will follow.

  He will come because today is Friday and because I know he will follow. He will come because for a year he’s been doing nothing but come and he arrives today on the train. He told me he was taking the train this time, a slow train to experience the trip, because a plane seems too fast to come to me. Although months ago he did write me a poem in which he told me we would find each other in an airport, “blessed airport”, he wrote.

  And he will arrive in the next six hours, at two. In the next six hours, that’s a lot of hours.

  I’m not in a hurry, I’m not afraid, I know who he is. Even though I’ve never seen him. I know who he is, just like I know who I am and I know what he is thinking right now at this very moment when he couldn’t take the first train of the morning. He’s thinking about calling me but he thinks I’m asleep and decides to leave it for later. He’ll arrive later, a little later, and I’ll have more time to wait for him and fill myself with memories that will water my sunny afternoons when he leaves, in five days. He also prefers to think about me more, on the train, a few hours more before meeting me, although he already knows me and knows what I think.

  It is Friday and he will Follow.

  My husband woke up a while ago and I want to go to my computer and find Mois on the chat like I do every day. Something incredible has become everyday. Two people talking to each other, two writers writing each other sentences. They complete each other’s sentences, from one city to another, from one world to another. He calls me the end of his exile, and I call him the one who made me a writer. He gave me the confidence to call myself a writer; many had tried before. He changed languages, he left French to return to his mother tongue thanks to our contact. Although he had been trying for two or three years, our meeting brought him to take the definitive step. And that’s why today is Friday, and that’s why he’ll arrive on a Friday. Today both of us are going to be born, both of us are going to be born as one, like Adam, who was both man and woman. Today, and he’ll arrive late, before the end of the Jewish day, the day that just fell into night. At that time, right before completing the Creation, Elohim created man, as if during the six days he was either preparing for it, or was unsure of whether it was a good idea or not.

  On Tuesday he will leave, and to me it already seems like he left or didn’t come, because today is already Tuesday, not just Friday. Today is Tuesday as it is Friday, and when he goes, the city will completely disappear with him, the illusion of the city.

  Today I want the accordion to cry.

  And I write because I live to write. Mois says that as soon as you write the first sentence you’ve already entered the book and you live in the book, and you are different from the others who live in reality, or what is called reality. That’s why I love him and that’s why he is right now dialing my cell phone number to tell me he’ll arrive late.

  Good morning, I say to him, with my shyness wrapped up in the warm shyness that fills me and reaches him through my voice. We decided days ago while chatting on the first sentences we would say to each other this evening. It will arrive at three, okay, do you want me to go get you, no, my cousin is coming and if I tell him not to come he’ll get annoyed so I’ll see you at the hotel, yes, at the hotel. Both of us will dress in green, green pants and shirt, and no one will see us. We will be invisible to the other humans,
another two characters that came out of a book. I want to talk with him on the phone more, but it’s very expensive. He’s calling me from a cell phone from another country, but from the same city, Mynonbeing, the same large city everywhere in the world. I’d like to talk to you more, he calls me from the train. The line cuts out, he disappears, I send him a message. Overwhelmed by shyness I wait for our meeting in the hotel cafe. What hotel? Every hotel in the world, and in Mynonbeing. An entryway, a lobby, an exit, rooms, a restaurant downstairs, a bellboy, the receptionist in a bad mood and the Jew coming to the city. That’s him, and I’m the Jewish woman of the city. The small Jewish community that moves the world and the economies as if it were something genetic, moving from city to city and in the city from one place to another and moving everything that is sold and bought, transferring ideas, hoping everything gets worse.

  It’s Friday and I’m preparing the Shabbat meal, the bread. I knead the bread and think about his bread and the bread we make together all the time through our chat conversations. Suddenly both of us have to get up to see how the bread is coming along. It rose well this time, and this time again. You see, everything has its logic. I write and minutes and hours pass, but I don’t quite know whether I want them to pass by or to stretch out infinitely. I want to taste every minute of waiting, every second of knowing he’s going to come today, every step, every action, every movement of my body, every time my eyes look into nothing. He doesn’t respond to my message but he calls me again to tell me he’s trying, that he can’t send messages although he did receive mine. He’s in the train restaurant and he’s smoking a cigar, the last one in the box I sent him months ago. That’s what he tells me, and that it has a special flavor. My husband calls me and wants to eat something for breakfast. As I walk to the kitchen, I feel the lips of my sex rubbing together like they’ve never done before, thirsty and hungry to talk, just like the lips on my mouth that want to ask him many things. I would make a list of questions, but I already know the answers. I just want to see his face when I ask him about his lovers, about the last time we saw each other at school before my parents left Benxauen, the city where we were both born, the city where we attended the same school. I like the word attend. I want to see his eyes, blue or green, I want to see them responding, talking about me. At this very moment he’s thinking about me, about making love to me, but then he withdraws his thoughts. He knows there will be no sex between us, so he prefers not to think about it. He thinks about taking my hand, he thinks about my smile, about my face when he first sees it. He thinks about my lips, and he feels them, he feels them kissing him non-stop, over and over again, rubbing together and filling the void in our lives, in our encounters. Mois thinks it’s on Fridays like this one when the most important things always happen to him. On Fridays like today he always made the decisions that changed his life. Why on Friday and not other days? We don’t have an answer; the last day of the week, the last day before resting.

  I prepare the pants and the shirt. These two pieces of clothing will be connected to him from today on and I will no longer be able to wear them without thinking of him. This is the clothing of sin. In Hebrew the words ‘clothing’ and ‘cheat’ come from the same root. Mois told me and I immediately thought about my need to be nude, to be naked all the time, to get rid of the things that cheat and trick us. Clothing always lies. Of course it’s been years since I walked around my house naked. With two children who are getting older things are more difficult, but I remember the first years when my husband would tell me that women are prettier dressed than naked. They sure are, because they are artists of trickery, and I wanted my body to speak for me, at least in my home, after having left my parents’ house. I left it to create my home with my husband, without any step through independence, without any period of being alone. I was never alone, not even a month, a summer, a winter.

  I’m going to a cafe, I want to write there alone, at a table. I like to write alone at a table. The racket around the bar, those drinking quickly and those who have nothing to do because they’re unemployed. Those who are running to a job because they have no other choice, they’re the ones with the worst expressions, desperate like prisoners guilty of something they don’t know. For them, this society is an enormous jail, a life without life, running without stopping. They’re not always the poorest. Sometimes it’s the husband who always smiles, and only shows that expression in the cafe, a minute before stepping into the office and taking on the role of director, boss.

  I wait there. I despair. Wait there and despair, but.

  I always have a but for the end of a thought, I want to see Mois, but. But it sounds too much like the novel I wrote that was the reason he got to know me. Is he coming to see me or to read me? Is he coming to see me or what he imagines I am? But I always said I am what I write, that I only live through what I write, that I am my words, so who am I today, waiting?

  I sit in the plaza, in a place just like all the rest. It’s an ice cream shop, a Haagen-Dazs.

  Once again I’m in the whole world, in every city. I’m sitting where I did in the class where I met Mois, at the last table. From it I see the world, the whole world, those running through and those who really taste the ice cream, like the ice cream in Benxauen, from La Glacial. All of us kids would go there after class and we would buy ice cream, big or small depending on the coins our parents gave us.

  And I write.

  Who am I waiting for? Who is this Mois who writes me poems? Poems I feel in my heart, in my pulse, in my breasts, in my past. Poems that change my past.

  I am no longer the same woman I was before I discovered the existence of Mois. It’s like discovering the Americas, an entire continent changed. Mois has always been in this world, since I was born, but, once again but, the discovery of his existence changes mine. Discovering that everything experienced is a lie, because life, my life, cannot, could not have meaning without the existence of Mois.

  But I tell myself and I repeat that it is not Love, how could it be love? That very volatile and unsatisfying term that is the word love. It isn’t more than love, nor is it less than love. It is but. I wait there. I despair. It’s something so different than love, like a river is different than the sea. Yes, they both have water, but it’s the definition of a difference. The thing is that I don’t have a term for this meeting. I was looking for the Indies and I discovered America.

  More and more people come in. It’s twelve, they’re coming to drink something, a coffee, anything. Mois is trying to call me but he doesn’t have service, he can’t call me. I try but I can’t get him either. It’s twelve and the black train is approaching the city. It passes by forests and mountains, hills and sea, and it’s reaching me, it’s entering the city.

  I was born in Benxauen and I live in Mynonbeing.

  I would prefer to be once again in front of the screen, playing with words with Mois, continuing the game without reality appearing to get in the way of our relationship. And what if I don’t like him? What if we don’t get along? But I know that won’t happen, I know it will be just the opposite, but how do I know that? And I, someone who never knows anything, who always feels so indecisive, how could it be that today I know things so definitively and clearly?

  I’m waiting for you there. You there, but.

  “Un jour viendra où tout sera. (“The day will come when everything will be.”) I think Edmond Jabès wrote that, another who only knew how to live in books. Mois sent me Jabès’s book, Le Livre Des Questions (The Book of Questions), months ago. I read parts of it but felt intimidated by the writer’s way of seeing the world. I had always wanted to live in what others call reality, and now I’m waiting for a ghost, for someone who can only exist in my novels, for someone coming out of my novel, a character. “Nice to meet you ma’am, I just came out of your book.”

  Yes, of course, as if it were perfectly natural, a character comes out of a book and gives me his hand, caresses me, kisses me. It’s very normal and very natural. I could go to my
psychologist and tell him about it, with perfect clarity. For Auster it was a mistaken phone call, which is understandable, but this Mois is a character who comes out of my books. He wanders through my computer and suddenly says to me, from one day to the next, that he’s coming to see me, and right now he’s on a train headed toward my world, toward my castle, to break everything I have for sure, to undo my world, to create a new magical world, full of gold and reflections I’m unfamiliar with.

  This is the time when I would go into my computer to see his e-mails, his new poems. Sometimes there was a new one every day. After years in exile he was going back to writing in Spanish, going back to our city Benxauen, and feeling once again. Sometimes, not always, I would find him online and we could chat for half an hour before anyone bothered us. Now is that time. Then someone would come into my room or into his, into our world, and I would realize immediately, asking him if he was alone, if he didn’t feel uncomfortable, if he would prefer to talk later. We would plan to talk at a later time, more relaxed, after his daily siesta, or sometimes even later.

  Today I am sixteen, today I have started anew, today my life starts and I feel young and lost, the way I did at sixteen, waiting for someone, waiting without hoping for them to come or desiring them too much. Today I am the same age as my first-born and I’m going back to the starting point, the place where everything began. The place of long hair, sad skirts, desperate love, parties with little dancing, incomprehensible friends, repressive mothers, being Jewish and not going out with a Christian, kissing and dreaming. It’s the time to be a virgin.