Brown Scarf Blues

by Mois Benarroch

  23.

  We say goodbye and say goodbye but we never let go completely. Something always remains, something that always triggers memories, people never end. Nor do things, often. While we’re alive, all kinds of memories live, to which we never fully say goodbye. We forget, but memory, that hard drive of memory, preserves them, and sometimes, when least expected, they leap to mind, and become the most real thing in the world.

  24.

  One cold, sunny morning I left my hotel and started walking up the Calle Toledo towards the Plaza Mayor, but thanks to my scarf I realized I was walking on two streets, the one I was on and the Rue du Temple in Paris, the two ends of the same scarf. Wearing it, I entered a record store, the kind that doesn’t exist anymore. It was like a late-eighties record shop, large, more than three thousand square feet, with shelves of LPs and shelves of CDs. Looking back I realize it was a festival, every store was a music festival. We didn’t know back then that after the imminent, even longed-for disappearance of vinyl, the CD would disappear, too, and that cities without record stores are sadder places. I was looking at albums there, Neil Young, Ryan Bingham, Jimmy LaFave, and in front of me was a pretty woman, a woman longing for other hands, she’d been married for years to the same husband, and she was touching the CDs and I sensed that what she wanted was other hands, and when she looked up from the discs I realized it was my wife, that she’d lied and was in Paris while I was hanging out with the king of Spain. I moved forward to tell her off but as I approached and nearly reached her I realized she didn’t recognize me, she gave not the least sign of connection, and then I was face to face with her and had to say something. Given how shy I am, especially when it comes to an opening line, I was bound to say something idiotic.

  “You still like the Beatles?”

  “Forever and ever,” she said in her French accent.

  Clearly she thought my comment ridiculous but her need for other hands was much stronger than her opinion of me. Honestly, I’ve never understood why a beautiful woman would want to marry a man, much less me. But my wife is beautiful and has been married to a man for a quarter of a century. So I understood why she needed other hands.

  “Then we must celebrate that.”

  She smiled and said, “With champagne.”

  “But first, I’ll buy you that CD you have in your hands.” It was the Bach Cello Suites by Paul Tortelier.

  “And I’ll buy you whichever one you want.” Since she was holding a double-disc set I also went and chose a double disc, the SACD reissue of Blonde on Blonde.

  We paid. We left. It was raining. We walked into the first bar we saw. It was like a corridor that got darker and darker the farther you walked.

  We sat.

  We ordered two coffees and croissants. No one mentioned champagne, I don’t know why.

  “Let’s see if you can guess my name.”

  She surprised me.

  I do know her name. I should have kept silent, or made one up.

  The coffees arrived. French waiters are fast, hollering across the bar, “Deux crèmes et deux croissants.”

  “Gabrielle,” I said.

  “Close, very close.”

  “Daniela,” I said.

  “Michelle.”

  But I knew she was lying, and was giving me the name of the lover I’d had years earlier. Maybe she was pretending to be her. Now I was sure she didn’t recognize me.

  I felt more confident, and uttered the worst line you can put in a romance novel.

  “Well, I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.”

  “Oh! Yes!” she smiled.

  “Yes, look. For example, I get the feeling you want to have new hands touch you all over your body.”

  To my surprise, she didn’t deny it. And she said, “It’s like an irresistible craving, not that I don’t love my husband, sometimes he seems like my only salvation, but I want to feel other hands envelop me, I can see them like a cobra, but not harmful, a very caring, very gentle cobra that envelops my naked body bit by bit and strokes all my limbs and finally his tail is the penis that penetrates me.”

  Okay. Wasn’t expecting that. This ever-good woman (ever good, like the cypress that in Latin is called sempervirens, ever green, ever luxuriant), had such ideas. I hardly knew how to respond, maybe I should have said nothing, just held her hand or stroked her body.

  “Women and serpents.”

  “Yes,” she smiled again, and like me, dunked her dry croissant into the coffee. “Serpents and their apples.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Three blocks from here.”[1]

  We started walking, sometimes I would put my hand on her back, but she would only smile. We reached her place, a tiny ground-floor studio with old furniture. We said nothing on the way there. It had all been said. We made love, and I asked her if now, naked, she recognized me, she said no, that it was all new and unknown. I smoked a cigarette. I walked outside. I continued along Madrid’s Calle de Toledo as before, nearing the Plaza Mayor. My phone rang.

  It was my wife.

  “Aren’t you at the hotel?”

  “No, I went out for a walk on the Rue du Temple.”

  “Oh, you did!”

  Her voice sounded different. I wanted to see what she was feeling.

  “Tell me, don’t you sometimes long to have unfamiliar, strange hands stroke your body?”

  Silence.

  “What? I can't hear you well.”

  “I said, don’t you sometimes long to have unfamiliar, strange hands stroke your body?”

  “No,” she replied, a bit sleepily. “I didn’t know there was a Temple Street in Madrid.”

  “There isn’t. I was in Paris. It’s a long story about a pale-brown scarf. I’ll tell you later. Are you in Paris?”

  “No, no, I’m at home.”

  “Oh, sure. Tell me another.”

  “You’re acting very strange. I'll call you later.”

  Like Columbus when he reached America, at that moment, I discovered the sun.

  25.

  Saying goodbye, on the one hand, to success and fame, but on the other, to the struggling writer whose books don’t sell. Both at once. I’m not a kid, I no longer have the stamina of young, struggling writers who wear themselves out writing twenty hours a day, who don’t know how to talk with the world, who write better than anyone else. I’m not him anymore, I’m not that writer anymore. Though I doubt I’ll become the other one, the one who knows everybody and is respected and recognized by a few people. It’s too late for that now. But I need readers. Maybe I even have them. A thousand in the whole world. What I don’t know is how to put my books where they can buy them. They’re out in different languages, different genres. Some prefer poetry, others prose, some read me in Spanish, others in Hebrew, others in Portuguese, others in English, and others even in Urdu. Who are those readers? Maybe new technologies, like e-books, will simplify things. Maybe the exact opposite.

  Also saying goodbye to those who die young. Even if I die today I’m no longer young. I can’t self-destruct in the flush of youth. And maybe I already wrote my best work, when I was trying to self-destruct. In the past.

  No, I’m not going to be a Kerouac, much less a Vargas Llosa. And I don’t need to be.

  So many people and things to say goodbye to.

  26.

  I reach the Plaza Mayor, in the middle I see an altar where they’re about to crucify a converso, a Jew whose family converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition. “Repent,” they yell all around him. And then they look at me, “Repent,” “I repent,” I say. “I repent. From now on I’ll start eating squid and ham like a good Christian.” “But that’s not what you’re supposed to repent for.” “Well, I’ll repent for anything.” The converso in the middle of the plaza starts singing a tango, about a stabbing, something about how he stabbed her thirty-seven times, he sings very well, the people are silent and he keeps singing as if it were a Bach cantata, it is a religious, profound chant. An
d I understand that that’s not what he’s singing, it’s just that his parents and grandparents were already conversos and he’s forgotten all the Hebrew prayers, he never knew them. And all that’s left to him is to chant a song as if he were praying to a God who does not want to save him, and who doesn’t care about his salvation.

  Then someone shouts, “We can’t crucify anyone who sings a tango that well.”

  Another person shrieks, “But he’s thirty-three, everyone gets crucified at thirty-three, the world belongs to the young.”

  The shouting continues.

  “Kill all the old people. We don’t want any more old people. They’re a bunch of loafers and freeloaders who we have to support.”

  “Kill the young people,” shouts an old woman, “we were here first.”

  “She’s right, young people are the new immigrants. All the young will be declared illegal and that’ll solve unemployment. And anyone who reaches fifty, well, we’ll see.”

  The converso is still lying on the cross. No one has yet dared to drive the nails into him.

  “And we’ve got to kill all the Jews,” shouts another.

  “But there are no Jews in this country anymore.”

  “Then kill the Muslims, they’re a lot like Jews.”

  “Or the Jews in other countries, why should we care which Jews we kill? We’re very liberated that way.”

  “I say Muslims. We can kill them here or in Egypt.”

  “Let’s kill Muslims. Kill Muslims and kill Jews.”

  Waiters emerged from the bars on the plaza, carrying glasses of sangria. “Time to kill the Jews,” sang the Cubans.

  The converso eventually got up on his own, very thin, very pale, his skin almost white, he got up and in the hubbub no one noticed, he sneaked down the Calle Mayor, and kept walking, I followed him, keeping an eye on what was happening in the plaza. The converso entered a small bar and I went in after him. He ordered a mini-omelet. “With bread?” the waiter asked. “I bake my own bread, I don’t eat other people’s bread, no bread baked by other people.”

  “Like a Jew,” said the waiter in the bar.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “But I do want a beer,” said the converso.

  Conversos don’t converse. Conversos don’t convert.

  He looked at me and said, “Madrid hasn’t changed.”

  “Not entirely,” I agreed.

  “Nothing changes.”

  He ate quickly. He went back outside. Everything seemed quiet. No sounds came from the plaza, but the converso returned to the plaza. We saw it was nearly deserted. It was lunchtime on a very cold day.

  “Nothing changes,” he reiterated to himself and disappeared from my life.

  27.

  An early sunset. On the Calle Mayor, on the terrace of the Sephardic Cultural Center, they lit a giant Chanukah menorah. I was afraid of a terrorist attack. I’m still a frightened Jew. They sang Israeli songs that are actually Eastern European tunes with Hebrew lyrics. What does this Zionist nonsense have to do with Sephardic Jews, with Hispano-Moroccan Jews, as they called us during the introduction? What would Maimonides or Ibn Gabirol think if they could see this? The same thing I thought. That this has nothing to do with Judaism, not the Judaism I know. Judah Halevi would agree. Neo-Judaism, Judeo-Christianism seeps in like a virus to destroy our Judaism and our religion. Maybe it would be better to hear a bomb. Sometimes, as Rafael Guillen says, what you need is an earthquake, the same way sometimes you need to drink. I need an earthquake. Often. I am a great consumer of earthquakes. Where do they sell them? Let them sell me earthquakes. When one of the conference participants, Oro Anahory, asked what I thought of “the situation,” I said I believe that in ten years the world will change completely, and it will be such a shift that we won’t recognize anything. Well, if we’re still alive.

  Another participant, Guershon, gave a talk that sought to explain why the Jews left Morocco (did they leave or were they thrown out? I don’t know) and explained that once the Jews started to have civil rights they couldn’t turn back. He spoke of the night watchman, the magnificent night watchman who guarded the street, as an important sign of civic-mindedness so that Jews could feel safe returning home at night. That was a huge revolution. I agree. A watchful revolution.

  But it doesn’t explain everything, it doesn’t explain why the Jews of Morocco moved to a country where they were unwelcome and have never had the same rights as Ashkenazim. And they already knew it, they knew it from letters and because quite a few people came back. I bet almost no one knows that in 1958 the number of Jews who turned around and went home exceeded the number that arrived in Israel. It doesn’t explain that. Because after leaving one country for another with fewer civil rights, the problem was fear of going back to being citizens with no civil rights at all, going back to being subjects of the king and not heirs to civil rights and the French Revolution.

  In Madrid we also saw the king of Spain, descended from Queen Isabella the Catholic. I don’t know why I didn’t tell the converso about it at lunchtime. Maybe it’s because it seems rather unreal, something I might make up in a novella and then delete it because it seemed implausible.

  What is a frustrated author doing at the palace of a Catholic monarch in Madrid?

  What is a Jew from Tetouan doing in the palace of a Catholic monarch in Madrid?

  What is a descendant of conversos who returned to Judaism doing in the palace of a Catholic monarch in Madrid?

  What is an Israeli doing in the palace of a Catholic monarch in Madrid?

  What is a Moroccan doing in the palace of a Catholic monarch in Madrid?

  What is one of the expelled doing in the palace of a Catholic monarch in Madrid?

  28.

  “Where do you live?”

  “In Paris, like all writers.”

  29.

  And now for all those who have read these sixteen-thousand-some words and haven’t figured out what’s going on, here’s a summary:

  A Spanish-Jewish writer from northern Morocco, a Sephard, born in Tetouan and living in Jerusalem, attends a conference of members of his race in Madrid, and weird things start happening to him, he lands at Barajas and no one meets him, he buys an Orange SIMM card for his phone so he can contact the organizers but can’t get the phone to work, and before he knows it, two things happen, he meets a descendant of Queen Isabella (is she Saint Isabella yet or not?)—King Juan Carlos—and finds or steals (it’s still under investigation) a scarf in Seville a few minutes after a short, perky tour guide gave the whole group a crash course on the Catholic Monarchs and their reconquests, as well as the monarchs’ failed attempt to build a castle resembling Moorish architecture, and Long Live the Jewish Ghetto! With the scarf, he wanders the streets of Madrid and one day finds himself in two places at once (Paris and Madrid) and commits adultery with his own wife. Though it is November, he does not buy a Christmas lottery ticket and, of course, does not win. Thirteen days with the scarf lead him into the temptation to buy long underpants (which for some reason he calls pantaloons) and, at that very moment, the scarf disappears. At that moment he enters an inexplicable melancholy state known as the Brown Scarf Blues.

  30.

  “And what are you?”

  “All poets are Chilean.”

  31.

  I’m saying goodbye to all the writers I was and was not, saying goodbye to my best friend, to a beloved woman, my sister, to a concept of Madrid, and a concept of family, of literature as I’d conceived it, and again I encounter all of these, transformed, yes, unquestionably different, but I run into them again, because you cannot really say goodbye to anything or anyone, not to what you were, not to the only thing you tried to be. Therefore it hurts, hurts the back, which carries a bit more each year, an increasing number of useless things, useless beings, useless concepts, useless implements, tons of junk we carry around like a homeless person from place to place, since it is all that we have, and there’s no way to leave it beh
ind or destroy it, because its destruction creates a metamorphosis that creates something different and similar, the same.

  I had severe back pain in Madrid, severe back pain that has zero to do with my back or spinal column, that fifth column, severe pain that is nothing but life’s blows, or more accurately a reaction to those blows, conditioned by previous blows. Coups. Coups d’état: blows at the state. The blows of infinite states. The whole world ganging up on one poor column. Against a poor column that barely, just barely, manages to keep one man upright.

  And I’m not who I was, I was never who I was, and yet I’m nothing but the sum of everyone I ever was, of those I wanted to be and especially those I would not or could not be. Everything in reality depends on a coincidence. My father could easily have gone to Gran Canaria if only his mother had died two years earlier. Or my parents could have settled in Canada, if only my mother had said yes or if she had bothered to find out about the country’s advanced heating systems, for she thought she would be too cold there. Or if they’d done nothing, we could have stayed in Morocco a few more years, a few, only four years longer. I’d have studied at a French or Spanish university, and now I would be someone else. Would I? Can you be someone else? Can you not be someone else? Would I be a writer?

  Probably.

  Maybe in Paris, I would write in French. Maybe in Madrid.

  Now I am everything and its opposite. Many readers in Madrid won’t read me because I’m Israeli, and in Israel many won’t read me because I’m Moroccan. When French publishers consider my books they ask for input from Israeli professors, who oppose publishing them. Why don’t they contact a Moroccan professor? Good question. Or Spanish? A better question. Or maybe I still need to change tracks and write a novel in French. Qui sait?

  At the conference we spoke a hodgepodge of languages, Hebrew, Portuguese, French, Haketia, Spanish from different parts of Spain, English, because everyone knew one language and not another, so you would talk to the Moroccans from Pará in Portuguese and someone else would reply in Spanish. Sometimes we understood one another, sometimes not. When people talk to me in Portuguese sometimes I understand every word and sometimes nothing. It is a mystery.