Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected)

by Mois Benarroch

  Because the baby by my side treats me, he pays. The waiter sees the same thing I see and the two women seated to our right can say that I, Sarah, or whatever name you call me, am seated with a man. He therefore becomes a real and physical entity.

  But what does that mean, that when I sat alone at this same cafe last week and drank and felt that Mois was at my side, he wasn’t a physical entity... Yes he was, although the waiter would disagree. I felt him, even more than at this moment.

  I start to philosophize, but philosophy never gave me any answers. I read the texts and I like them, but they don’t give me any kind of answer. They don’t explain me to Mois. No one can explain me to Mois.

  It’s time to prepare food for Shabbat, prepare something more. I should return home and turn back the hours, to the Friday before Mois. It’s Friday and he Followed. I think about the wine at the kiddush, the wine of the holiness of Saturday, and Mois looks at me. He scratches his head again and asks me with his eyes how it could be that we didn’t see each other twenty years ago. How could it be that we didn’t meet each other on all the trips he took to Mynonbeing in the past. Yes, something has changed in this city, he tells me, since I came the last time, twenty years ago. The people laugh less, they almost don’t laugh. It must be the standard of living, the standard of living goes up in the cities and people stop laughing, they’re afraid of losing so much comfort.

  We go to the bookstore, temple of wisdow and of word pornography, and we look at books. I show him one by Jesús Mantova, one of my favorite writers. He shows me a journal called Ficciones that published a few of his poems. It’s very beautiful and impeccably edited. Then we go to see the poetry books. Mois is impressed by the amount of poetry books. In almost every city the poetry books have disappeared. It’s incredible that here there are still so many. Look, here’s your book, yes, look, here they have my book, but in my country you won’t find any poetry books, at no bookstore do you see more than one hundred. Mois thinks about buying it. He doesn’t have copies and the publisher won’t send him more, even if he pays. But if he buys it, it will no longer be in the bookstore, a difficult dilemma to solve. I’m going to give you this book by Guillén, I love it, he’s a great poet, he tells me, but I know he’s low on money. I tell him no, that I’ll buy it myself, another day. He wants to give me something and I say no. I don’t know how to accept gifts, you almost have to force me.

  We left and suddenly I felt that Mois was moving away from me.

  It was his way of telling me he had gotten too close.

  I tie myself to an illusion, once again, or is it the need to be loved, to test the others, my beauty, to see whether men would still love me, but am I playing or not, am I playing with Mois or is what I feel true...

  I want to go home and I want to stay here. I want to stay with him until nighttime, to see how the night conquers his face, to see how the night penetrates our thoughts.

  I am writing this because I am alone, and I am alone because I am writing this. But not with Mois, because in his eyes I see that he is writing the book, and he sees that I am writing the book. His eyes tell me that it’s the first time in my life that I’m falling in love, not with love, but with another being. But, is Mois real? Or is he a character from my book and am I a character from his book? In him I feel as though my reality disappears, my solitude disappears, and I feel part of him. His eyes tell me that the pain of love is more valuable than the happiness of solitude. And it’s for that reason, and in spite of it, that I decide to live in two dimensions. In the first one I bring Mois to his uncle’s house to have dinner. In the other one I stay with him. I don’t return, I don’t have a place to return to, the present has disappeared, the present doesn’t exist. This must be what it is to be a writer: living in two dimensions, at least, at once. Always living in what it is, if it is what it is, and in what it could have been, if it could have not been. Typical adolescents write poems, but they become writers when the poem is more important than the lover, than love, when writing love is more important than love itself.

  I must have been sixteen years old and I dreamed, like many girls, of that pure and innocent love that only exists at age sixteen, but every time it came near I chose instead to go to my notebooks and fill them with words. Each time his hand came close to me I watched it on my breasts, but I mostly thought about how that hand was going to appear in my poem. And my loves and lovers disappeared one by one, while the poems piled up.

  And the city slowly turns black and white. Only Mois and I stand out in exotic colors, fluorescent orange and green. We are so luminous that no one can see us.

  At home I do the same as always: prepare the food, set the table; but now Sarah is the one looking at me with strange eyes, a little surprised by the boredom I feel.

  I invented her, but she’s the one writing me now. Suddenly she tells me she’s leaving and she walks out of the house and goes to run through the streets. At the door waits Mois with his lively green eyes. He has changed his shoes and his shirt. It’s a burgundy shirt that doesn’t suit him well, but his smile takes me through the streets. I run but I’m flying and he follows me. For the first time a man is following me and I don’t feel like a shadow behind him.

  It’s now time to eat and we sit at the table. It’s late and the dear Lord husband of the dear Lady wife (we could just call them husband and wife) is making a face, but I don’t care. Someone says mom and I don’t even realize they’re talking to me. A long time ago they got used to me being absent-minded, but no one realizes that today things have changed, that today, this Friday, both unique and like all other Fridays in history since the creation of the world, my being and my body have been freed. That today, this Friday, it could be in this house and at the same time be with Mois celebrating through the streets of Mynonbeing that for the first time are mine, truly mine. Today I am not further from my city, today I am the city. I am the boulevards, the roads, the avenues, the sidewalks, the streets. I am all the restaurants in the city, I am all the cafes, I am all the men and all the women of Mynonbeing. Today I live for all of them. Today I give meaning to all their lives and to mine, today.

  Today was the day I returned to myself, the day I remembered the streets of my childhood where I ran. I remembered my house’s yard, the mountains, the girl who asked me to take off my shirt to put her breasts against mine when I was seven years old. I remember my sister crying and telling me we had to go, but I was paralyzed by the strength of this little girl, two years older than me, who knew very well what she wanted and knew how to impose her will over mine, or maybe it was what I wanted.

  Today I am the fountain and the water, the spring and the mountain, the river and the sea. Today I can see myself coming to the world, arriving from a clear and clairvoyant energy, from a white light that illuminates my path from this day on because today I am energy in the world and not material in the weariness of the world, energy in the light that brings us where we have to go. Today I am the bridge and the tourist on the bridge. Today I am the husband and the wife, I am the mother and the daughter, I am movement, I am the eternal rain.

  Today in my house I’m there and I’m not. In Mynonbeing I run with Mois through my streets, while I’m sitting at the table, because today I am what I always dreamed to be. I am energy, I’m in myself and outside my limits. Today I am enchanted, sung, I’m on the surface of the Earth without gravity scaring me with its unexpected gaze. Today I am my body, I feel my entire body in perpetual motion. I am simply flying around the center of a galaxy. I see hands that touch me, that come and go, hands that create us when we go to them, hands that see us for a second and leave to touch other hands. Today I am heaven and earth, I am tohu and bohu.

  Today I am the streets that are eternally engraved in me from my childhood. I am streets and corners, I am the girl who always runs and always comes to class late. I am her while still being myself, I am her, eternal and splendid. I am the girl who knows why she paints or why she draws a face, and I don’t ask que
stions about my existence. Today I exist in spite of everything, on a planet that is unknown even today, on the planet where Mois and I give each other our hands for an instant. Today I exist on that amazing planet where hands make sense and lives make sense. It’s a curious planet that revolves around the sun but is only seen by a small few, and they see it for just a second. Only those who have seen it can share it with others.

  This all sounds a little New Age, and that doesn’t bother me, but sometimes the sublime seems empty, it seems unimportant. We care more about the death of an elderly person than the birth of a baby. And more people are born than die, at least that’s what has happened since I was born. The cry of death seems important to us, but the cry of life is something that doesn’t have a place in our daily news. I often ask myself what the news is: a way of trying to impose a reality on us, a reality that doesn’t exist, a selection of facts that aren’t any more important than others? I remember once when they showed a strike on TV and the streets were full of trash. Later I went to take a walk with my daughter, who was six at the time, and she said look, mom, the streets are clean, I don’t see any trash, the television was lying. The next day we went out to take a walk again and she saw trash piled up in an alley, and she said well look at that, there is trash, so sometimes the television lies and sometimes it tells the truth. But then, which truth? On my last trip to Jerusalem I didn’t see any attacks or any bombs, but if we watch TV we’ll think that in Jerusalem exploding busses is all there is. They are there, but, like then, television creates a reality that is as partial as it is mistaken.

  We live in the visual era and what we see goes into our minds as if it were reality. We don’t have filters to give those events the relativity that is so necessary, that relativity that words give us. Our critical mind sleeps when it sees a photo, and is unable to ask questions. That’s why all the multinationals want to have their own television channels, in order to drum into our minds whatever they want, and that’s why Judaism (and Islam) prohibits any visual representation of God or of reality, and that’s why I’m here writing my dreams, my dreams that are more real than pictures, my dreams that no one can photograph.

  THE END

  Did you like it?

  You can keep reading the other 6 novels that make up this work, or buy the 7 novels of Love and Exile as a bundle from Amazon-Kindle or on Smashwords or Nook.

  Love and Exile is a cyclical work written by Mois Benarroch, poet and novelist awarded the Yehuda Amichai Prize and the Primer Minister’s Prize and the author of more than twenty books published by the best publishers in Spain and Israel, such as Destino and Hakibutz Hameujad. Love and Exile was published in 2010 by Escalera in Madrid, constructed in layers of seven novels. The novels complete each other and at the same time destroy each other to create new possibilities.

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