Brown Scarf Blues

by Mois Benarroch

  7.

  REINCARNATION

  When he woke up he realized he was dead and that his soul had migrated into the body of a cow. "AH! La vache!" he thought and said it just the way his anatomy professor used to say it in the natural medicine classes he took in Paris. Now all he was waiting for was to reach the slaughterer, and he regretted his years as a vegetarian in his previous life.

  8.

  On the third day of the conference, at night, tired, I wrote a story in Haketia. The story’s title means naked, specifically naked from the waist down, a word people would say about children or to children when they would take me for a walk without diapers or without underpants. I wrote the title, “Chumbel,” at the top of the page, and then: Cuando yo tenía quinze años me invito mi tío, que en buen olam esté, a pazar las vacancias en Madrid...

  Chumbel

  When I was fifteen, my uncle, may he be in the Buen Olam, invited me to spend my vacation in Madrid with my cousins. Back then there were still no direct flights between Israel and Spain and I went via Paris. It was my first time flying Iberia and since then, whenever I travel on Iberia I miss my dentist. When I reached the capital city of the Gauls, whom we had studied at school, the stewardess said I wasn’t booked on the next flight to Madrid, but she could put me on the one after that. So I waited alone, sprawled on the floor of the airport corridors. The Madrid airport is called Barajas, which usually means “decks of cards.” I could never figure out what decks they meant, unless it was the baccarat decks we played with on Purim or the decks at the Jewish casino in Tetouan. After we landed at Barajas, I went to collect my luggage. But no battered suitcase arrived, everyone else went off happily with their clothes and I didn’t see mine. I was a shy lad but eventually had to approach the company to ask for my socks. A nice lady came and went thousands of times till she told me my suitcase had wound up in Manchester. My grandfather. He was a tzadik who would travel by ship with all his food and provisions and with ten Jewish men so he would have a minyan for shacharit, mincha and arvit, and he never lost a thing, but the first time I fly on my own, my suitcase ends up in a city that even my father never visited. The lady told me, “We’ll send it to your home as soon as possible.” I understood perfectly, since at school we studied French and not Spanish, and I told her it would be better to send the suitcase to my uncle’s. I gave her the address and left.

  A day passed and another and I went from office to office and phoned every two hours, but there was no sign of the suitcase, none at all. On the third day my uncle found out and phoned the airline. He explained everything in detail, and eventually, he said, “Yes! But sir, I’m running around chumbel.” And my cousin and I rolled on the floor with laughter while he gestured for us to shut up. And he repeated the word chumbel five or six times, until both of us left his office and closed the door. I don’t know what they thought the word meant, but two hours later the suitcase appeared at my uncle’s home. It was the first suitcase to fly alone from England to Madrid on the Concord so that I would not be running around chumbel.

  9.

  “I confess that I am a mosque in disguise.”

  “And I am an imprisoned metronome.”

  10.

  Literature aside, if we analyze this case, we have here a frustrated writer who travels to Madrid and thence to Seville, where he finds, he says, a scarf, though perhaps he did not so much find it as rob it, a nearly perfect robbery as not even the robber is aware he robbed it, he has the scarf for thirteen days, and it disappears on the very day when he buys long underpants for twenty-eight euros at El Corte Inglés on the Paseo de la Castellana, along with the only copy of his book that they had in the book department. With his two new acquisitions he heads to the home of his aunt, where he is slightly afraid his family will learn that a few days earlier, he published a story he wrote about an imaginary aunt called Aunt Blanca, who has nothing to do with the aunt he is going to visit, but it is well known that readers tend to identify with characters and then tend to attack writers and condemn them to familial desertion in these cases. In his aunt’s home there works a young South American woman, perhaps from Ecuador, a country where the author is somewhat known because his work appeared in three anthologies edited by a good, longtime friend of his. The young woman is the first suspect in the case, because she is foreign, because she is the one who, when the writer arrived, collected his beret and very possibly the scarf, and because she had been using the writer’s aunt’s moisturizers. And besides, as everyone knows, outsiders are always the first suspects and the ones who always have something to hide. When the frustrated writer leaves his aunt’s, on his way to his cousin’s, after he rides down in the elevator the cold weather reminds him he forgot his beret, so he takes the elevator back up three floors while his cousin goes to get the car before it is ticketed. It is snowing in Madrid. The increasingly frustrated writer goes up and asks the young woman where his beret is, and she is rather nervous, maybe because the aunt’s daughter is wise to what has been happening with the moisturizers, and she says she can only find his beret and umbrella, and if she finds a scarf, she will notify the aunt. It is odd, the aunt and the daughter are chatting about something and when the writer enters, they give fake smiles and change the subject. Everything suggests they were talking about the scarf, but at the same time everything suggests they were talking about the weather or about something even weirder. The frustrated writer thinks his cousin is talking about her husband and is saying he’s having an affair. The writer writes things like that or worse, which is why he sells very badly and why his book is in only one Madrid bookstore. Sometimes he considers himself a cursed writer, and sometimes not. Sometimes he even considers himself a blessed writer whom the gods shield from an accursed fame that destroys those who write. And sometimes he is cold and buys long underpants for twenty-eight euros. The competing brand was thirty-three euros. That, yes that, is the sort of superfluous sentence that earned him a reputation as a sloppy writer.

  11.

  What was the writer thinking about at those key moments? In those moments when the scarf ceased to exist for him?

  Well, let’s ask him.

  The investigation begins.

  12.

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “When?”

  “During the scarf incident, well, before, when it started snowing.”

  “I was sitting in the Café Gijón with the writer Guillermo García Gasset, and it began to snow, he said he was going, and I said I’d pick up the bill, because he almost always pays and he’s considerate enough to realize I have much less money than he does, so I thought I should treat him for a change. They brought me the bill, which at that café consists of a bunch of slips of paper for the things you ordered, every time you order something they add a slip, I thought I saw nineteen euros on one and eight or nine euros on the other, and we’d only drunk two coffees and an orange juice and I’d had a croissant, and then I said to myself it was too much, so at one point I said we should split it, and I felt ridiculous, then I realized the nineteen was ten euros, the zero looked like a nine, but it was still an excessive sum, I figured that next time we should meet at a more normal café, since a few days earlier I’d had a whole breakfast on the same block for three euros, with juice and toast and coffee and all, and then he left. I told him I’d stay a few more minutes and smoke another Cohiba Mini and then I’d go, maybe I would wait for the snowstorm to subside.”

  “And did you say anything about the scarf?”

  “No, nothing about the scarf, though afterwards we made plans twice but never got together, he cancelled, saying he had builders and electricians coming and going at his house, which was very unusual for Guillermo. But we did talk about the book.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Not much, but I told him I’d seen a copy at El Corte Inglés and that I didn’t know whether to buy it for my aunt, because she’d asked me for some copies and my publishers were in Guadalajara and I couldn
’t buy them at the publishing house, I hesitated, wondering if El Corte Inglés would reorder it or if they would be content to have sold one copy, and he categorically said yes, I should buy it, so it would show up as a sale, and besides they had another book of mine on the shelves, maybe I sell well or maybe that book department accounts for all the books I sell and I didn’t even know it.”

  “Do you think he could have taken your scarf?”

  “Could be, since I don’t remember seeing it after that. I think on such a cold day I’d have noticed before leaving. I believe I left the house with it but I don’t remember seeing it after that, maybe Guillermo thought it was his and took it or maybe he’s a kleptomaniac and stole it when I went to the rest room, maybe he’s even a scarf kleptomaniac. He’s a bit odd.”

  “And after that what did you think?”

  “Let’s see, do you think this is important? It was just a scarf, it’s not the stuff of crime novels and investigations.”

  “A criminal can hide behind a scarf, and behind every criminal lurks a crime.”

  “That’s downright Twitter-worthy, that is, but these questions are boring me.”

  “But please go on...”

  “I was planning to walk up the Paseo de la Castellana, and that reminded me that a Hebrew translator once translated it as Castellana Street, which sounds even worse in Hebrew, and what I felt was that it was very cold out, so I crossed the street, which seems very wide when it’s snowing, and caught a bus that I was sure would go up the Castellana, but halfway up it took a left, so I got out, that whole time I was bundled up and can’t recall whether that included the scarf, but I think it did, I don’t remember, even though I liked my scarf, but I don’t remember, I do remember taking it off at the Gijón, after that I don’t know. So I hurried off the bus and kept walking, I thought I was almost there but I wasn’t nearly there, I saw the spot where I’d peed three days earlier and I thought that on a day like this your dick could freeze, ow! I think it was the 5 bus, and I kept walking quickly towards El Corte Inglés, I needed to pee and when I arrived I couldn’t find a bathroom, maybe I went up to the café on the sixth floor and had something to drink, or maybe that was a previous visit, and this time I held off. While I was there I bought a pair of black long underpants, and I put them on in the fitting room, for some reason I told the sales clerk that I came from a hot country where I never wear long underpants, I don’t know why I said that, but I remember thinking that as I said it, and I also thought that I didn’t say the word Israel for fear that he wouldn’t sell me the underpants, I thought of asking for a VAT refund, but I didn’t, it’s a tedious process, and I did it once and they never even returned the eleven euros they owed me, and for that pittance I felt rich for a few moments, the truth is that in those weeks I wasn’t short of cash, a rare occurrence in my life, rare in the life of a frustrated writer who finds scarves. Then I ate a tapa at the Bar Delfín, and another at the Cervecería Köln, on the Calle Orense, before going up to my aunt’s place. And I’m getting tired of this.”

  “Well, me too. We’ll continue tomorrow.”

  13.

  No.

  This business of turning the story into a crime novella is not going well. But what matters in literature is opening doors, opening doors and walking through the door you didn’t mean to. And such mistakes can make even better literature than entering familiar rooms. A scarf is a scarf and what’s needed here is a word in Haketia, the scarf hayea, or more properly Hhayea, which means “to warm” but at the same time “to caress.” Words now gone from the world, now lost in the volcanoes of history, languages smothered by time, notions that get lost, that is the scarf for me. The verb “hayear” is not just something that warms your neck, not just bundling that bundles you, but a caress, a mother garment, a lover garment, a friend garment, a garment given to you in a restaurant thousands of miles from home that stays with you in the cold, in the snow, that follows your path through life for a few days, difficult days, days of internal and external cold, that is a brown scarf for my throat, for my neck, for my steps through the world.

  14.

  “One can always kill oneself.”

  “The little that wasn’t killed already?”

  15.

  I came to say goodbye, I came to bury, I came to kill, I came to mourn that author who now will never exist. One of those writers I was going to be, a kind of rock star, the kind everyone asks their opinion, I came to say goodbye to that author who can no longer be. I came to say goodbye to his fame. At fifty, it’s too late to be an enfant terrible, or, of course, a wunderkind, that time is past, and you’re left with failure, a failure that immortality might someday rescue from oblivion, but only momentarily, oblivion is inevitable, even God and his Bible were forgotten for long periods, though of course He is better connected than the rest of us. And so I came to say goodbye to the man who was going to sell books, that writer always waiting for me on some corner that I dodged, like a thief who knows there’s a cop on that street. I don’t regret doing it, even if that’s who everyone wants you to be and who your friends wish you’d become, though I can’t see why. Japanese writers used to write seven books under a pen name before publishing under their own name, there’s nothing worse than being identified with your first or second book, before you’ve really become the writer you are, before knowing what you want and what you consider good or bad. Readers will find you eventually, and if not, it’s their loss. What matters is always to write what you want, long before anyone reads it. So, I learned from my publisher that I was an unsold writer, but despite that, he told me:

  “Just because your book’s not selling doesn’t mean we don’t want to see more manuscripts from you and publish them, though we understand if you don’t want to stick with us and decide to go with another house.”

  I told him to be careful what he says. But I laughed. “I’ve always had a good relationship with my publishers, but they all went bankrupt.”

  My publishers, the two of them, who are true publishers and run the whole operation themselves, started laughing.

  “Well, not all of them, one died at fifty-seven.”

  “Maybe we don’t want to keep publishing you then.”

  We laughed. The scarf there in my backpack. Trying to get out, trying to straighten itself like a cobra in a circus, to find out what is happening to the man who found it in Seville, and took it to the capital. The scarf that wanted to know what the publishers’ publishing house was like, what publishing houses in the capital were like, on that street, on the Calle Embajadores.

  There are many good writers but few good publishers.

  16.

  The world disappointed her. For very good reasons, the world disappointed her. For the world disappoints everyone in the world. Men always deceived her, stealing her last cent, even four days before she died, taking what little compensation she’d gotten from Social Security for her terminal illness. Her children didn’t understand her, and those who did steered clear of her, those she treated left as soon as they felt better, and they feared her. Cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings, parents, none of them could understand what she wanted. And no one could help her, at least not with money, because her money vanished into fantastical business schemes in which everyone who could cheat her cheated her. The banks came after her debts, great Biblical behemoths, like great torrents of salt, were coming for her money, bringing debtors and guarantors down on her, with the debtors waiting below, hoping something would drop to them. She needed great fortunes, which had disappeared from the family a generation earlier, otherwise she could have lived as a great squanderer, and she never forgave her mother for spending and living, though some of the expenditures were herself and her own divorces and businesses and infinite spending. She died young. If she hadn’t, she might have ended up in prison. Life itself can be the worst prison.

  17.

  Another tale in Haketia: Contan de un anciano que se halqueó de hadrear en todos las lenguas que conocía.
..

  They say there was once an old man who grew tired of talking all the languages he knew—French and Italian, English and Spanish—and started speaking only in Haketia, though from time to time he would throw in an Arabic word, such as hak or aj’i. All his children had become modern and spoke only Hebrew (that’s what modernity was like in his city of Netanya), and they wanted to be Israeli, so they asked their parents not to confuse them by speaking other languages. People were already saying Israel should be a democratic secular western country, and therefore they stopped speaking French and Spanish. No one understood this old man, so they took him to a Ladino language specialist, who said he understood many of the words but that the sentences were tricky, since he couldn’t understand verbs like wajshear and halquear, which sounded Spanish to him. Then they brought in an Argentinian professor from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and she was scared because she said that some of his speech sounded like Spanish but the rest sounded like Arabic words, and someone should alert the security forces because they might be coded messages about terrorist attacks. Next they took him to an Arabic teacher born in Baghdad, who said he couldn’t understand any of it, but he thought it sounded like a language spoken in Morocco that combines Old Spanish with Arabic, and he thought it was called something like Jankatia. So they asked around about that language and finally found a teacher in Beersheba who was the last person who spoke it in the Land of Israel. And he came and listened to this old man.