Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected)

by Mois Benarroch

  The phone rings again. It’s him, my voice changes, my timid voice, my voice shrinks. The train is delayed, maybe the train liked the coast too much, it wanted to see more of the sea. Let’s meet at five at the hotel, it’s hard to head, I say yes like a silly girl in the middle of her adolescence, the only difference being that I don’t care about being nervous anymore. I don’t care what they think of me, those around me or Mois. I don’t care what my husband or my children will say, I don’t care that I play nervously with the pen. It doesn’t bother me that I dressed in green ten times, as if everything were green, green like the color of his eyes. Today I want to wear all the greens of his eyes. Now I’ll go home and change clothes, I’ll shower again. No, what does it matter, I’ll come at five. I’m not busy, what I was planning on doing later I’ll do now. But I already did it all yesterday, everything, to only think about you today. If you want we can see each other tomorrow. No, today, at five in the hotel coffeeshop. What does he think, that I’m not going to see him on a Friday or that I didn’t know the trains aren’t punctual when they bring you to this city, that I don’t know all the trains. The trains teach us to be patient, to enjoy the wait more, to believe more in our meeting, to give it dimensions it cannot have. To make it a unique encounter, to create a man like a god today, but not like God, after twelve months of talking and thinking about this encounter that will be born today Friday, today Friday when you follow, today Friday you follow.

  It’s two and I go home to rest a little. The hotel is right next door, as if by chance, as if there could still be chance, or as if we could still talk about something random or not magical between us. Or no, I’ll stay at the cafe a little more. I take out a book by MM and read. It uses good language and I think I’ll pass it on to Mois, but it’s all fluff, it doesn’t say anything. Someone will have to explain to this author that waves are not made of foam only. But maybe this is modern literature: not saying anything, not hurting anyone. It seems like they’re writing to win the Nobel. They’re writing serious literature, but serious literature doesn’t come out of wanting to write serious literature, it comes from a profound need to read the world with words and to try to create it, not from a need to write good literature. That’s why the greatest of the greats are quite often considered bad writers at the beginning. I keep reading MM but I prefer to read Mois. I prefer his fire, his obsession with not reworking what he writes, or very little. His conviction that he is doing what he should be doing, his dance with the words, his desperation and his loneliness with thousands of words that are so well-written. I could savor this book by MM and then give it to Mois, so he could learn to write better in Spanish, but I already know what he would say to me, and how he would say it. But maybe, maybe what I’m saying is what he is thinking. Maybe we’ve been thinking everything together for a long time now.

  It’s two fifteen, he could already be here if he had taken the train at seven, but, as he’ll tell me later, he got to the ticket office at 7:02 and the train left at 7:03. It was on time, what a miracle. There were only two ticket clerks until seven and one hundred passengers who wanted to get on the train at 7:03, and the numbers three and seven will follow us around all day long.

  I’m going home, I’m not going home. I don’t feel like home, I don’t feel like getting dizzy. I want to be alone, I want the sea, and this city that is a mountain is far from the sea, but the sky is somewhat like our sea, the sea of Benxauen.

  I remember entire days spent logging on to the computer every half hour to see if he was connected, connected to our daily chat. Days, and at the end of the day the smile of someone who finds what they are looking for, a timid smile, not showing my happiness too much, thinking he could see me, feeling his look on me through the screen, through the words, through my clothing, through my skin. Feeling as though he sees me like no one has ever seen me before, telling me how I feel or what I think at that moment. What was magical has become everyday since I found Mois and now I can’t stand things that aren’t magical. I can’t stand anything everyday, like a car starting. To me it now seems normal for it to fly, it seems normal for the car to start to dance tango, to sing songs by Serrat, and it if doesn’t do that, I feel as though the world has gone crazy.

  Or am I the one who has gone crazy? One more turn and I’ll fall, or both of us will, Mois and I. We are going crazy, entering parallel worlds we don’t know how to navigate. Kabbalistic worlds, in all kinds of sefirot we don’t understand, although perhaps he understands more of that than I do. But if these worlds show themselves to us, it must be because we should go in.

  Today I have what I want. I want to keep writing so he doesn’t come, so this moment can last until the end of time, to plan every word I will say and not say to him, to stop everything that should be stopped. But I also write so that he will come, so the train will travel more quickly, so he can arrive already and end this indefinite wait.

  I go and I don’t go home, but in the end I’ll have to go take a shower and change clothes, get dressed. But I’d rather not see anyone at home. I’d rather be alone, something that I’ve never felt in my life. I order another coffee. I’d like ice cream but I drink an iced coffee and continue in my words, or did I already go home and is a different woman writing me? Either a different woman is the one who always writes me, or Mois is the one who is writing me today. Today, Friday, when I changed lives. A Friday like all other Fridays, but the Friday I entered another dimension.

  The color of the sky is beginning to change. It’s like a hallucination but I realize I’m seeing colors I’ve never seen before, and I’m not on drugs. The blue-gray has darts of red, and there’s sea green around them. The people begin to shine. Around them I see some gray colors, blacks and whites, and sometimes a more immanent color, like violet or green, that disappears the moment it appears.

  Today I need another name. I can’t go around with the one I have anymore. I’m sixteen and I need to call myself something different. I’ll call myself Sarah, with an h, an h you don’t pronounce, a mysterious h. I feel the h growing inside me. I pay for the coffee. Maybe it will be the last one I drink alone.

  My car is waiting for me with another ticket. It’s red and it calls me by my new name. In the car there’s a Serrat tape. El meollo del mal rollo, he sings, the heart of bad vibes. He moves on to a Cernuda poem, saying I love you more than anything else. Mois must be the one singing to me.

  At home my husband asks me why I didn’t make my kids anything to eat. Mois tells me they’re older now and they could make food by themselves, but I don’t understand him, I don’t listen to him.

  I have a very important appointment. You always with your very important appointments. I go to the shower and, finally naked, can feel where I’m going, on a date created day to day for almost a year through words. Every word brought us to another, without seeing each other, without our bodies being on the same land. Everything was through words, poems, letters, chats, e-mails, and sometimes phone calls. In less than half an hour everything will change. I’ll see him, he’ll see me, and we will never be the same again. That’s why this shower is the last of something.

  And suddenly fear arrives, what am I doing in this story, Sarah, and why Sarah?

  I am a married woman and I hate instability. I want clear days without surprises. What am I doing here? No, I’m not going, I’m not going. Anything could happen to me and I don’t want to break up my family. I don’t want my husband to think I don’t love him. I don’t want that, I’m not going, I’m not going. But I can’t not go, I can’t. Even if I decide a thousand times to not go, I know very well that my legs will take me there, they’ll take me as if it were an encounter with destiny. It’s as if all of this had already happened and I’m reliving the memory.

  What has happened to time these last few months? Why Sarah?

  She’s the main character in my latest novel, The Sacred Bark, for which many of my friends have accused me of selling out. But that’s Sara without an h, and she really doe
sn’t have much to do with the Sarah from today. The one from today is related to Mois’s first Sarah, a distant friend of mine who Mois wrote for two years, when they were between fifteen and seventeen years old. It’s possible that she was the first woman he loved, or at least the first to whom he declared his love. And I envy her, I envy her, because I would have liked to have received letters from Mois when I felt so alone, when I was fifteen years old, or sixteen. I think he would have also written better letters.

  But I won’t say that to him.

  And the last thing I want is to go back to that age, oh God, the last thing. Age fifteen for me was like hell. I want to go back to age sixteen, but not the one I lived, the one I should have lived.

  I should develop this topic more, but it’s five. The number that keeps us from the evil eye, the hamsa. I go down dressed in green, pants and blouse, and I know he’ll be dressed in the same green, a sea green.

  I park the car on the corner, poorly, and think for a second about the ticket and the face my husband will make if they give me another, and I go to the coffeeshop.

  I would like to know what happened in those two minutes, or was it three, or four. Just a few minutes, they went by very quickly and at the same time lasted an eternity. When I saw Mois I felt as though I had fainted and had been that way for days, hours, months, who knows. And then to wake up and see a familiar face, a face that caresses me, a face that tells me that’s right, I’m here, you’ve been in a coma for weeks but I was always here waiting for you. I didn’t sleep a single minute waiting for you to open your eyes. I’ve always been here, always waiting for you to open your eyes. Were they minutes? Were they hours? What has been happening to time lately?

  I see him, he’s seated already and waiting for me. How long have you been waiting, my love, how long did I wait for this moment? And everything is as natural as the water that falls from a well. Everything is as natural as the wave that breaks on the rock. Everything is as natural as the singer giving the best recital of his life. Everything is as natural as being born, as dying, as a baby’s first smile. Everything is as natural as the greatest miracles we live every day without realizing.

  The sentences were prepared, I had to say to him, “What a disappointment!” and he had to respond “Oh! Well that makes sense after so much confusion!”, but that’s not what we said. I said Hola, or ola, ‘wave’, it was a wave that was coming over me, it was him. I felt it in my body, in my vagina, I felt it was him. What, who, him, I, the one who is in me, the man I take with me wherever I go, the man that is behind me, my double, myself, the deep I that follows us. But no, this couldn’t be happening, it’s an enormous danger, doubles shouldn’t find each other, it’s a challenge to time, to logic, to the world, to creation. Only once did they find each other and life was impossible. They were called Adam and God had to separate them because the world was losing its destiny.

  After he left I spent hours thinking about where so much emptiness comes from, and at the same moment I felt that from now on, any day without seeing him would be a day when I’d feel great emptiness, the void of not being myself.

  “If you want we can go somewhere else”, I say.

  “Yes, they have terrible coffee at this hotel.”

  We both go to the car. The heat is melting the city and each day fewer people can handle it, the streets are empty. We don’t talk about the heat, we don’t care. We sit in the car and I put on the Beatles tape. That was the song I heard when I read your poem at the stoplight, “It’s been a hard day’s night”, the red light you ran. Yes, that one, the poem from our parallel lives, yes, that one. Where do you want to go, to a museum, to the park? No, I actually feel like seeing books, the largest library, the books from Mynonbeing. I also love looking at books, let’s go, but it’s on the main street and parking is very difficult, oh well, we’ll find a spot. I read your latest novel in the train on my way here, The Sacred Bark, very good title, very well written. I envy you, I would like to write as well as you do, but, but it’s too good, I’d rather you put more stains onto what you write, and use more than just pretty words, words from dictionaries. The words have to be words that have been lived, laughed, dreamed, suffered. Each word you write has to be yours, yours in your body, in your skin. He keeps talking, he keeps going, but I no longer hear what he says. I feel my skin and I’m on a deserted beach and two hands are covering me with oil and massaging my breasts. I smile, I know quite well why Mois keeps talking about stains, it’s because he doesn’t really like to review what he writes (“I hate editing, the reader should read what I wrote, without lies”). He wrote me that the first day, it’s a mantra for him, but he does edit, a little, he does when I tell him to.

  The boulevard and the wide city streets appear small today when I travel with Mois. It all seems like a little town, the town we never left. The large avenues...are they just an illusion? No matter how big the streets are, no matter how big the city is, we don’t grow and our space doesn’t get any larger and our brains don’t change. We create large avenues to believe we are bigger, to take on God, but we stay the same.

  357.

  That was the number of the parking spot, do you remember the number, I asked. Yes of course, and not only do I remember, I can’t forget it. It was July, the seventh month, the train was leaving at 7 and 3, the address of the hotel was 133, he came for 5 days, and these three numbers will continue to call out to us throughout his stay. Three, 5, 7; the third of May of year 7; what will happen on that date, or what happened, because with Mois everything seems to be the past. All of our future seems to have already happened. Oh my.

  I see him and I already feel his absence, his absence within a few days, because I feel everything he fills me with. He fills something in me that no one, no man, has been able to fill, something that goes beyond understanding, beyond words. I could be with him for hours even if he didn’t say a single word, even if he were deaf, mute and paralyzed. I don’t know, I think random things. I shouldn’t think those things but I do. He fills the emptiest parts of me that always existed in my relationships with others.

  He keeps talking, yes, you are a natural novelist, you know how to construct a character, the plot. You develop everything well and I admire you, but I just can’t do that, life isn’t like that. Now I’m talking to you about novels but I’m thinking about making love to you. Things aren’t going in a straight line. I’m here in Mynonbeing but in my mind I’m also with you in Madeira, or in Palma de Mallorca, or in Corfu, and the thing is, it would bore me if I wrote like you. I think the world needs something different, something magical, and it’s ready to read it. Maybe it doesn’t need it, no, who knows. I need it. Maybe I read your novels because you wrote them, although they are very well written, that’s for sure, but if you weren’t the writer maybe I...

  Alright, let him keep talking, I don’t care what he says. I like the way he looks toward the sky, the way he scratches his head thinking of a more precise term. What I’m saying doesn’t interest you much, no, me neither. Don’t forget about 357, don’t forget, and I propose that before we go into the bookstore we have some lemonade in front of the bookstore, right out in front. We’ll see who goes in and who goes out, who buys books and who just looks, but from a cafe with air conditioning, because this heat is killing me.

  You know yesterday, last night, at four, I made love to you, did you realize? I couldn’t sleep and suddenly there was no distance. I didn’t know things like that existed, it was so intense and I didn’t really know how these things are done. I have the impression that we got the planet wrong, that we were born on the wrong planet, or that we are finally discovering what life is. It’s a mystery. Yes I felt it, I did feel it. I couldn’t sleep but I didn’t realize what it was, and now I’m realizing many things. Your existence explains so many things from my past to me. This is delirium, it’s craziness. Now that we see the world we’re going crazy.

  And if it all sounds kind of mixed up in terms of who said what, it’s because I
don’t really remember who said each part. With Mois things get confusing. The limits of myself that I defended for so many years, creating borders with electric fences, those limits make little sense. He talks to me and I talk to myself. I talk to him and feel as though the sounds are going into me and don’t leave my mouth, like when we would play as kids and listen to each other through closed mouths.

  He drinks like a baby, lost in his lemonade, lemon nothing. He drinks and looks at me from behind the straw, and he smiles, the smile of a mischievous boy who is still growing. He already has three kids and he doesn’t know how to be married, how to make himself a man. He seems like a foreigner in every country.

  He is an eternal other, he is part of every city in his otherness, in his difference.

  Because cities need those different beings in order to be cities, vagabonds of thought, sons of Cain, but also nephews of Abel, men who don’t adapt to any city but are a part of them all.

  I remember a certain press conference. I was feeling terrible, I don’t really like those kind of things, but then right before it began, with the table full of microphones, I received a call on my cell, from Mois. I turned off the phone, but I felt better just knowing it was him. But it can’t be, it can’t be, this isn’t happening to me. It’s an illusion, a book, a story, I can’t be in front of Mois right now here in Mynonbeing. It can’t be that it exists outside my imagination, that it has its own life, that it is a physical reality. No, it can’t be.

  But it is.

  Or I think it’s what we call being.