Brown Scarf Blues

by Mois Benarroch

  Three hundred thousand descendants of Moroccans, especially from northern Morocco, live in Brazil. Three hundred thousand. Incredible. Of course neither Israel nor the Jewish people cares much about them, Jewish communities today care only about things Ashkenazic, as if other Jews’ existence were anecdotic. Two hundred years of Judeo-Moroccan presence in Brazil. We seek each other out. When we find each other we don’t know what to say. We talk nonstop but don’t know what to say.

  Spanish Jews around the world. All throughout the world. Jewish Morocco around the world, scattered over the globe. Who are we? Even after 150 years of separation we resemble each other, we eat the same dishes, celebrate holidays the same ways, there were tears at the conference. Emotions. Who are we?

  Perhaps woolen tassels, all attached to a single lost scarf.

  32.

  Let’s divide the trip into three parts. From Sunday (the first of three Sundays) to Wednesday, pre-scarf days. From Wednesday to Monday (with two Sundays in between), scarf days. From Monday to the Thursday when I went home, post-scarf days. Totals:

  Pre-scarf days: 4

  Scarf days: 13

  Post-scarf days: 4. And till the end of my life. At least for that particular scarf.

  Four at one end and four at the other. As if the world were structured with a logic we will never understand. Thirteen, an unlucky number for Catholics, but very good for Jews.

  So, as happens in life, everything seems logical, but nothing makes much sense.

  33.

  The restaurant was called La Cueva (The Cave) and we walked down narrow stairs, three and a half stories. The heat wasn’t working that Saturday night, it was chilly. I sat with Javier. A writer who is never chilly. A writer who gives others chills. We spoke of women, not the woman you marry and share a life with, but the other. Just as an electron has an antielectron, with every woman comes an antiwoman. Not her opposite, but one who complements and fuels her. As long as the antiwoman is a possibility, the woman gains in value. Mass, antimass. The antiwoman exists just like the antielectron, in a parallel world. But not the kind of parallel world that’s far away, it’s a parallel world at ground level, they almost brush against each other, they see each other and communicate, but never ever touch. One millimeter separates the world from the parallel antiworld. Neither can exist without the other.

  Javier is a big meat eater but we ordered a cheese platter and a vegetarian platter. He said if I don’t eat meat he won’t invite me to León, since in León they only eat meat, and he said he objects to fish. Objections to fish are more common than you’d think, my daughter can’t even smell it, even seaweed makes her nauseous. I love fish. But that’s because in Spanish we have one word for live fish (peces) and another for fish on a plate (pescado), as if they were two different things, parallel but unaware of each other. This is why Spain is one of the most fish-eating countries in the world, a fish-devouring country. They eat pescado, not peces.

  But I have to go to León, the next trip must include León. Because my brother who died when he was eight was named León, which means “lion,” and later I lived on Yehuda Street, whose symbol is a lion, and I live in Jerusalem, whose emblem is a lion. Yehuda, the tribe of Judah, is also called Lion. Maybe that’s even where the Spanish region of León got its name.

  We left the cave around twelve, icy cold, below freezing, almost everything closed or closing, finally an old-style tavern let us in, but they weren’t serving hot drinks, we ordered two rums, which warmed us a little. Taverns are elemental particles that travel at the speed of light.

  34.

  Most of the time I feel like a character written by some other writer, who might be myself. Not only is that writer writing me, he follows me, he wants to know how I will behave. That’s no metaphor, it’s an omnipresent feeling that’s hard to shake. Some days I tell myself I must live in reality, that I must awaken from that dream, that it’s a lie, that it cannot be, that life must be lived, but I keep following that character and that character is me. I can’t shake him. I can only be him. I can only follow him, and keep writing him. His story is not logical or linear, it is not coherent. It is whatever it is.

  35.

  I am the character, and for now I have no name. Maybe I’ll have one in a moment, maybe never. Maybe I’ll have more than one. Who knows? I am the character and the character does not know. The author knows. Does the author know? I don’t know, but I know there’s someone else who knows about my future, and things about my past that I don’t know, that I might never know.

  Characters don’t generally want anyone to know they’re characters. They pass themselves off as someone else, as a plumber, a husband or a stranger. The character is never just a character. No one would want to read a book about a character. That makes sense. But me, I’m just the character. I’ve been asked to talk about him. About me. About who I am and who I want to be, about my ghosts and my fears and my relationship to the author, to the writer, to the storyteller, to whomever, to the scribbler, to the plagiarist, perhaps the scriptwriter, the playwright. The one who’s writing me. The one who’s writing me.

  The great fear, so to speak, the great phobia is that the writer will get bored and leave me midstream, so the first thing I ask is for him to please not leave me, to keep writing me, to not tucker out at a thousand words and give up on my story before it begins, one wants to at least half-live one’s life, to be a full draft even if it’s later set aside, even if the story or book is never published, even if I exist only as a character.

  But then one doesn’t wish to be bad, not too bad, though I speak only for myself, not everyone, I’m just one character, not all characters, I don’t represent them all, I barely know myself. Now. Now I know that you’re thinking this is conceptual and I don’t really exist and what I’m writing is nothing but a parable about the human world. But I exist, a character has existence. Though I’m saying it now through the writer (or vice versa, verbosity) or the writer is saying it through me. I exist. I have my world and I exist. Even if you think it’s a dark world, a walled-in world. And it’s not the same as the human world, but it has its advantages.

  There is another fear, however, an earlier fear, fear that the author will lose the file before saving it and then get so upset that he won’t come back to you. Or worse, the fear of being left alone in the writer’s imagination, never reaching the computer. Many have disintegrated before ever becoming characters, they were just ideas for characters, hypothetical characters, I think of them often. But a character’s life remains filled with fears, with fast-fleeing moments, with the sense that overnight you will cease to exist for some reason or no reason at all, because of something you did, because of some sort of logic or for completely arbitrary reasons. I say “overnight” but that’s just an expression, it could happen right now, for instance if your writer has a heart attack and they take him to the emergency room, he might never return to you, or might die, that’s the dramatic option, there are worse things, the phone call from a telemarketer to pitch a new life insurance policy to the author can distract him so thoroughly he’ll forget all about you, especially if you’re a secondary character. Or a random character who only shows up for half a page. He can ditch you, even delete you, decide he doesn’t need you to be in the doorway of the bar where the protagonist will meet her boyfriend, and when she sees you, you’ll remind her of something, a long-ago love, a love that makes her think of happier times, which convinces her to tell him it’s over. And who will the author follow next? Both characters? Just one of them? The woman doesn’t know, much less the man, no one knows what will happen at that moment. But if your whole existence is concentrated in that moment when she sees you, if you have only existed and only exist for that key moment, for that encounter that will give your life meaning, or which will actually be your whole life, if that’s why you’re there, you want to be having your best day and your best moment so she’ll notice you, so she’ll realize you exist, so she really will think of those ot
her times she shared with that other man you don’t even know. How long were they together? A few weeks, a few days, maybe seven hours that ended in a cut-rate hotel and half an hour of bad sex, and yet, she, whose gaze gives you life, remembers better times with that other guy, maybe the first look they exchanged, which was the best, that look of love, of great love, that exists if only for a second, an eternal second, an essential second, maybe that look is what she sees in your eyes, and now she goes to her boyfriend, she has no time for you, and later you’ll no longer be in that spot and neither the writer nor the reader will know any more about you, won’t know if for instance you got an emergency call from your wife, or your husband perhaps, or your mother phoned and was dying, or more simply you had to go to work, you were on your way, you were merely opening the door, you were leaving the bar, heading back to your office, where you found an unexpected invitation to report to the office of your boss, who told you that you were fired effective immediately, no explanations, but you wanted that to appear in the book, for the author to leave behind those two boring, crazy lovers with their unremarkable stories, and instead follow you, if only to see you fired after fifteen years of good work, that’s what you would like, and then your day, your handful of hours, would mean something, and maybe if it ended up being a good book, a classic, people would even remember you for centuries, because even a minor character in a classic can be more important than the main character in an unpublished book.

  Or not. Of course not, it’s better to live a few years in the world of a book, to be thought, planned, to represent something, if only to one person, to that author who couldn’t resist you, who couldn’t help writing you, who wrote you for years, many years, and even if it was months, or days, since there are some authors who can write a novel in less than a month, who are super-fast once they get going, maybe that’s better, to be the center of attention for a time, better than being an anecdote in the life of a book even if that book is a classic.

  There’s something special about hearing someone say, “He’s a real character.” “What a character.” I doubt, however, that the people who say those things really grasp what it means to be a character.

  What the writer wants, and I know this first hand, is to become a character, to create a life worthy of being literary, worthy of being his own book. The apex for an author is to be considered fiction, especially after death, and thus live longer than necessary. And what the character wants is to be the narrator, and to be the writer, to be the same writer who is the character. And the absolute zenith is to be the narrator of an autobiographical novel in which the character becomes the narrator who is the writer, but even if it’s an autobiography we know perfectly well that it’s all fiction.

  A writer is aware of being written, that’s why he writes. It’s as though he could always hear somebody’s keyboard behind him, guiding him, or worse forcing him to do something or to have a destiny. There is no destiny. The world, the uni(verse) is just a series of beings who write one another. Even though most people don’t know it, even though most readers think literature is entertainment. It is entertainment, the way partridge hunting is entertainment. But there’s someone who’s going to suffer at the end of the line.

  36.

  2008

  A writer should be where his books are, should be where his readers are, near the bookshops that carry his books, in the countries his books reach, a writer is nothing more than his books.

  I never thought a book would take me so far and at the same time so close to what I am and to what I someday will be. That afternoon, I was in a literary café in Jerusalem called Tmol Shilshom, talking with another Israeli writer about the only book of mine that was translated into Hebrew, The Birthday Thief, also my only Jewish-themed book. A book about the Holocaust and children in the Holocaust, written for a writers’ festival at which I was the only Jew. For the zillionth time I spoke about the topic of the Shoah in Spain and how almost no one there was writing about it, and how people had attacked me for writing about past atrocities and not the camps in Gaza. Okay, so I said what I always say, which is what always happens at these conferences. Same words, same questions, same answers.

  Then I walked out into the alleyways of Nahalat Shiva on my way to a cocktail party for the Spanish press in Israel, where they had even more correspondents than they did in Budapest or Berlin. But on my way out, a woman in her seventies approached me and spoke to me in Hebrew, I said in Spanish that I didn’t speak Hebrew and she continued in Spanish. She called me Uri and said dinner was ready, and that I should go back up to the apartment with her. As she spoke to me in my language it reminded me of the warmth of my mother, who had died years earlier and whose face I’m not sure I could still pick out in a photo. Maybe she even was my mother. At least that’s what she said when I sat at the table and she served me a plate of paella. It felt like one of those situations where it’s hard, very hard, to tell if you’ve entered a novel or if you’re in real life. It was chicken paella, kosher. What I gleaned from her incoherent monologue was that her son had disappeared during the Lebanon war and now she was convinced that I was her son. She gave herself justifications for why I didn’t speak Hebrew, “Of course, it must have been a very difficult trauma” was her explanation. She was from Tetouan, like my friend Charly, and her speech reminded me of Andalusian Spanish mixed with years of disuse and of forgetting the language. Very different from how Charly spoke. Then she said she never doubted I was alive, or rather that her son was alive, Uri.

  “I always sensed it, I always sensed you were alive.”

  “Well, alive I am. Or at least I have that feeling of aliveness that people have when they’re alive.”

  “And I also knew that before I died, I would see you.”

  I didn’t contradict her, it didn’t seem moral or right. I let her talk.

  “Because a mother can’t lose two children in one lifetime, that’s something God would never do to a mother.”

  And then she started to tell me about her firstborn who she brought with her from Morocco and who died before Uri was born, “before you were born,” during the tinea era, that’s how she described it, and she said her son went on an excursion one day and came home that night with a high fever and the next day he didn’t wake up. Once or twice she hugged me and I felt loved like when my mother used to hug me. She gave me her phone number and asked me to call every day, or once a week, or from time to time. Whenever I liked.

  When I left I took out my phone and called Charly to ask about tinea.

  “Where’d you hear about that?”

  “I don’t know, a woman talked to me about it.”

  “It’s practically a state secret, everyone knows about it but no one says anything. In the 1950s they gave all the Moroccan kids excessive x-ray treatment, and now lots of them still get headaches, even thyroid cancer, and the Knesset, the Parliament, even passed a law giving them compensation. Nearly all the girls suffer hair loss. But it’s semi-secret, no one can access the government files about it, and it seems many of the files have been destroyed.”

  “But what’s tinea?”

  “It’s ringworm, a harmless skin condition that adolescents get that goes away on its own during adolescence, it mainly attacks the scalp. It’s no fun but it’s not deadly and has no serious lasting effects.”

  “And did any children die after the treatment?”

  “Apparently, hundreds or thousands. The number of people they irradiated was between twenty thousand and a hundred thousand. We can’t be sure. The plan was to irradiate all Moroccan children but since the nurses couldn’t tell the difference between a Moroccan and a Yemenite, they would come into the classrooms and say “You and you and you,” picking out whoever they thought looked Moroccan, and those kids got the treatment.”

  “'It sounds horrible.”

  “It is,” Charly said, and I think he even cried before closing his phone.

  2002

  Of course he was a frustrated writer.
What writer isn’t? And of course that doesn’t justify or explain what happened, I told him he was looking at literature the wrong way, but he would spend every September and half of October locked in his house preparing his great speech, as if he were the only candidate for the Nobel Prize. He even told me he was thinking of writing and publishing a book of all the speeches he had thought of or rehearsed or prepared. No matter how obvious it was that he wasn’t even in the running, or known, or famous, or even decently infamous enough to have the slightest chance at the prize. But that wasn’t the worst, it was that two days later he would get over it and become the most modest of humans, who hated for people to talk to him about his writing, and worse, it bothered him if anyone said how well he wrote. In this, he was indeed different from the other artists I met. I never understood whether it was true modesty, or if it was the exact opposite and was his way of feeling he was beyond other human beings. Many times he told me, “I have the ego, the huge ego, the ego of egos, the Porteño ego par excellence, I have it only when I write, when I’m writing I feel like a God, and not a small God as the poet Huidobro said, but like a gigantic God and maybe even a little greater, because God is God by nature, but I must elevate myself and make an effort to create a new world, but once I leave my computer I don’t consider myself better than anyone, and I don’t consider my daily life any more important than an ant’s.”

  He saw the world only through creation, for him, man was a sacred being only if he created. He saw no value in those who earned money or built a house, unless they created something new, unless they gave existence to something that did not exist before.