A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  Nevertheless, I turned to your Guide, p. 299:

  LA ROSA NÁUTICA

  One of our readers writes:

  “La Rosa Náutica is properly approached on foot by a narrow pier leading from the parking lot on the beach of El Palo, approximately 4 km (2.5 miles) east of town. (There is also a small landing for private boats on the seaward side.) The building is constructed in the octagonal shape of its namesake, the Compass Rose, with the pier providing the traditional extra length of the Due North leg. A circular bar, reputed to feature the widest selection of Spanish brandies in the country, fills the middle of the restaurant. A spiral staircase at the bull’s-eye leads down to the subterranean kitchen, a structure that dates from at least the end of 1491, when, legend reports, Columbus huddled with ten advisers to plan his final assault on the purse of Ferdinand and Isabella.”

  The structure has been owned continuously since the early fifteenth century by the Santángel family, originally of Calatayud in Aragón. Though of Jewish origin, the Ginillo family moved from their ancestral town—Qalat al-Yahud, meaning Castle of the Jews—to Valencia, converted to Christianity, and changed their name to Santángel at the time of the Disputation of Tortosa. This did not prevent one of the family from conspiring in the assassination of the inquisitor Pedro de Arbués, and paying for his treachery at the stake.

  The present owner, Luis de Santángel, is named after the famous comptroller-general of Ferdinand and Isabella, the man who lent 1,140,000 maravedis to Columbus’s historic expedition of 1492. It was at La Rosa Náutica that Santángel assembled the team of navigators, cartographers, and scholars that advised Columbus. And it was to Santángel that Columbus first wrote with news of discovery. In recognition of his value to the Crowns of Castile and Aragón, Santángel received a coveted limpieza de sangre from Ferdinand, asserting that his blood was clean of any Jewish taint. Consequently, the Santángel family weathered the storms of the Inquisition, the reign of the Bourbons, the occupation of Napoleon, the Monarchy, the Republic, the Generalísimo, and landed in the late twentieth century in an ideal position to capitalize on the global fascination with travel.

  “She’s read the Esau Letter.” Carranque interrupted my study with an offhand nod to the taxi driver. It seemed to me that everyone had read it. I walked around to the driver’s table and sat at the edge of a sun-warmed chair. I disliked the man intensely; my letters were being pawed by strangers. But I was waking up.

  “What do you really want to know?” There was an edge of cruelty in the taxi driver’s question. But it was impossible that Carranque had relayed the story of my lost son to this man—I had been with both of them for the past hour.

  “My friend,” Carranque said, “is not a great believer.”

  “You’ve got me wrong there, my friend. I believe. I believe in Esau and Columbus and Pinzón and especially”—the taxi driver crooned toward Carranque—“I believe in Señorita Florida.”

  “But not in—”

  “Allow me to tell the lady what I don’t believe.” Señor Carranque raised a palm in surrender. The driver poured sherry and coffee into his bowl. “I’m happy to buy the story that a Jew from Córdoba named Esau Halevy was the first European to set foot on the North American continent. Why not? I’ve heard barmier. But you’re asking me to believe that a group of wealthy and otherwise educated Jews and conversos would pour the combined contents of their combined mattresses into the visions of a hairy little boy, on the off chance he would find a piece of real estate suitable for the relocation of three hundred thousand Jews?”

  “But certainly”—Carranque dipped another churro—“Esau’s success belies your skepticism.”

  “Success? How many Spanish Jews found their way to the New World? Ten. Ten boys like Esau, who could barely yodel their way through a bar mitzvah. And how many of them survived? Now, consider this—how many priests found their way, how many inquisitors? How many secret Jews were converted into New World bonfires over the next couple of hundred years? Thousands! Success?”

  “Your explanation?” I asked.

  “Failure. Simple, dismal, complete. Esau may have been a navigational Einstein and a regular Babe Ruth with a cane stalk. But at the end of the day, the only skin he saved was his own.”

  “What of the success of the Expulsion?” Carranque asked. The driver was momentarily silenced.

  “Success for the Catholics?” I ventured.

  “Certainly not, Señora.” Now it was Carranque who laughed. “The Expulsion of the Jews was an unmitigated disaster for the Catholics. For a brief time, Their Catholic Majesties feasted on the properties and treasures left behind by the running Jews. But after a very short while they awoke to the truth that their best and their brightest had fled. Gone were their merchants, their statesmen, their doctors, their artisans and their artists, their poets, their musicians, their singers, and their leatherworkers. Without its Jews, Spain dried up into the shriveled olive it is today.”

  “So the success?”

  “Was the success of the Jews—the Jews who fled to Morocco, to Italy, to Greece, to Turkey, to the Netherlands. They spread their art and learning across the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar and northward into Europe. They made a virtue of exile, found their greatest reward in exile, found their humanity, their lost identity, in exile.”

  “ ‘Your survival is in your motion,’ ” I quoted Esau.

  “Exactly.” Carranque smiled. I smiled back, pupil to teacher.

  “Waaaauuugh!” The taxi driver hit the top of his table with two large, flat palms. “You’re beginning to sound like a couple of Jews thanking God for Auschwitz because it gave them the State of Israel.”

  “I’ve never been to Israel,” I answered simply, unwilling to relinquish my allegiance to Carranque.

  “That’s not the point,” the driver said.

  “But I have been to the Holocaust.”

  “And I was in Berlin when the Wall came down,” he countered.

  “Picking up shards to sell to the tourist trade,” Carranque jabbed.

  “Give me some credit, Carranque. Those shards I sold came from a ruined Moorish watchtower a mile up the road.”

  “Having been to the Holocaust,” I pressed on, “I don’t thank anyone for the smallest part of it—not for Zoltan, not for my son, not for the life I have made since the Russians liberated Berlin. I may be the only Jew in Miami Beach who doesn’t thank anyone for the State of Israel or talk twice a day about moving to Jerusalem. But then I’m one of the few who don’t have full-blown Alzheimer’s.”

  “You are not alone, Señora,” Carranque said, and signaled for another pot of chocolate. “As a travel agent, some of my biggest commissions come from bar mitzvah charters to the Wailing Wall, singles weekends at Masada, honeymoons on the shores of Caesarea. But between you and me, I book more Jews to Rio and the Galápagos.”

  “Listen to me, Hanni.” For the first time I felt frightened by the gaze of the taxi driver. “I’ve worked the moving business for almost twenty years. I’ve seen how Ben operates. Back in ’80, I watched him charter fishing boats out of Bac Lieu and Dong Hoi, moving Vietnamese to Singapore and Hong Kong. When Castro opened the prisons and mental hospitals, I saw how quickly Ben could spread the word to every pleasure-boat owner from the Mouth of the Rat to the Tip of the Tit. When the Democratic Germans could not bear to cut short their Hungarian hols in ’89, Ben cobbled together hundreds of coaches and trains for a free side trip, transfers included, into Bavaria.”

  I laughed, as deeply and insincerely as the driver had only minutes before. I didn’t know what to believe, Benjamin. That you could do all that?

  “Last night’s airplanes—who do you think supplies them, who do you think moves them?”

  “Whose airplanes?”

  “French airplanes, Russian airplanes, bought by Iraq, by Libya; U.S. airplanes bought by Saudi and Israel. Theirs, ours. Conversion only costs a fresh coat of paint.”

  “You’re talk
ing about armies, about nations!” I shouted. Carranque looked down at his cup. The roadworkers walked out of the bar and slipped their fluorescent vests back over their heads.

  “Nations bicker, armies fight,” the taxi driver explained with a tension that I mistook only briefly for patience. “By nature they are stick-in-the-mud, static lumps of clay and plastic. They are dedicated to borders, to creating, maintaining, protecting, enforcing borders. I am talking about motion,” the driver said, “something neither nations nor armies desire nor understand. Motion, pure and simple. I haven’t even mentioned what the PLO owes Ben for the Beirut-to-Tunis run, or Israel owes him for forty jetloads of Ethiopian Jews.”

  “Owes Ben?”

  “Your a-gent”—with a working-class stress on “gent,” just to lay claim to both sides of the tracks—“believes he sits above the fray, consulting, doling out advice, guidance, on motion. Motion with consequence, he will admit. But motion without motive.”

  “And you work for Benjamin?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you know quite a bit about his methods.” He smiled and drained his cup. “Answer me this.” I stood and walked over to your steamer trunk, parked in the shade by the door to the café. “If Benjamin is such a mover of nations and armies, why would he bother with me?”

  In inarticulate answer, a barely controlled blue panel van flew off the coast road and shot gravel from the parking lot into the far side of your trunk. Three faded hippies fell out of the front seat, stomped across the terrace, and swallowed a table whole.

  “Jimi?” asked the skinny one.

  “Yep,” answered the leader, a bright-looking man, older than his haircut.

  “Janis?” asked the third, pulling a guitar out of a multi-labeled case.

  “Yep.” The leader turned and called for a pot of coffee.

  “Who?”

  “Yep.”

  “Stones?”

  “Not really.”

  “Beatles?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Doors?”

  “In spirit, yes, but Morrison’s a baritone, a tough call.”

  “Moody Blues?”

  “With all that orchestration?”

  “Iron Butterfly?”

  “Even more pretentious.”

  “Cream?”

  “Especially the drum tattoo at the top of ‘White Room.’ ”

  “Jethro Tull?”

  “Jethro Tull …” The leader mused for a moment, then turned to us. “Let’s ask the taxi driver.”

  “I was waiting to be consulted.” The driver yawned. “Dígame.”

  “¿Quién es más flamenco?” the guitarist asked. “Which rock groups are the true heirs to the flamenco tradition?”

  “Do you want the truth,” the driver asked, “or are you just trying to separate the screamers from the sophisticates?”

  “Wha-haay!” The leader nodded. “A real aficionado!”

  “I just asked about Jethro Tull,” the skinny one mumbled.

  “To begin at the beginning,” the taxi driver began. “True flamenco thrives only under fascism—the Spanish Jews before the Expulsion, the gypsies up to the death of Franco, American rock through Watergate. Forget about anything after that.”

  “What about punk under Thatcher?”

  “Latvian protest songs?”

  “Oum Khalsoum?”

  “Tania María?”

  “Black Stalin?”

  “Swedish C&W?”

  “That Japanese salsa orchestra,” the skinny one asked, “what’s its name?”

  “Like Jethro Tull,” the driver stood, “they have elements of flamenco in performance.”

  “A deep-felt tragic Weltanschauung sort of a thing?” The skinny one walked over to the driver.

  “Let me give you an example.” The driver took the guitar, propped one booted foot on a chair, wedged his cigarette between the strings up by the tuning pegs, and began to pick a slow series of arpeggios.

  I felt invaded. What about Benjamin? The army band was playing martial tunes.

  “Of course,” said the guitarist in admiration, “Led Zeppelin.”

  “ ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” said the skinny one.

  “Get my pipes, Vim,” the leader commanded. The skinny one, being Vim, rushed back to the van and returned with a case holding a soprano and an alto recorder. Placing both of them in his mouth, the leader, one Roger, began to play a lyrical descant above the guitar chords.

  “Ahh, mi Perú,” Señor Carranque sighed and explained, “The pipes of the Quechua, the pipes of the Inca.”

  “Better than that, Carranque,” the driver said, “try singing Kol Nidre over this.”

  “Kol Nidre,” I asked, “as if it were Yom Kippur?”

  “Just try it,” the driver insisted, “not the sanitized Ashkenazic way, but old style, the way the Sephardim, the Spanish Jews, used to sing.”

  And Carranque sang—the long “Ayyyy” that precedes the atonement of the Kol Nidre, in a Sephardic tune that was Greek to my ears and sounded so much more like one of Flamenco Halevy’s Greatest Hits that I was honestly not surprised when the Laurel-and-Hardy guitar and vocal duo of Halevys emerged from the bar of the café and joined forces.

  There I was, Benjamin. The taxi driver plucking a mildly pleasant tune on the guitar—something I’m sure I heard in Sonny’s record collection, or on the radio in my Mini over the years—the Halevy guitarist improvising, Roger tootling a mildly pleasant Incan harmony on two recorders, and Señor Carranque and the portly Spaniard singing Kol Nidre three months after Yom Kippur.

  What was the lesson? That Led Zeppelin was more flamenco than the Beatles? That the Incas sang Kol Nidre? Or was it simply the nursery school trick that “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” can be sung at the same time as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and no one gets lost? There were eight of us on the patio. The beach was empty. What was I doing? And where were my girls, my nighttime daughters?

  “We’re just jamming.” The taxi driver winked over to me.

  “Jamming”—Sonny’s word when he improvised violin solos above the rock and jazz records he played on Leo’s cabinet stereo in the green room. Weekends mostly, but occasionally during the week, when I thought he was expected at work or at school or at whatever mysterious project he’d come to London to complete, I’d return from the shops or from visiting friends to find him playing at medium volume, the classical violin strangely at home with the wild sounds of his electric playmates. The sound was inescapable, humming through the walls, even at the farthest reaches of the house. It was not unpleasant. It was company. At times, it caught me unawares, and I had to sit down at the kitchen table and cry for all the wanderers—Leo, my son, myself.

  So when the sound of a violin crept up on me with the gentlest of nudges, jamming along with the rest of the impromptu terrace orchestra, I was surprised only that it was 1991 and that I was in Spain. The sound, for it was the same sound, was the same green-room violin, the same apple-orchard Bach. I turned, knowing who it would be—the girl, the long-haired Isabella. She sat on the step of the open side door of the band’s blue van, as beautiful and composed as when she played in the early dawn of Sandor’s courtyard. The music—the second movement of the Bach Double Violin Concerto.

  “It all fits,” I murmured. The taxi driver smiled.

  “Of course. Gypsy flamenco, Jewish lament, baroque church music, all from a single source.”

  “Zoltan,” I whispered.

  “Zoltan, Sandor.” The driver smirked. “Let’s not give the old fart too much credit. He’s overstated it in that treatise of his—all music emanating from an original vibration. There’s plenty of stuff—good stuff, at that—that would grind all this into gazpacho.”

  “What he means to say, Señora”—Carranque took a break and let the flamenco singer take a verse—“is that the flamenco song to the Virgin, the saeta, was born from the Jewish lament of endless travel.”

 
“There you go again, Carranque.” The driver put down his guitar, as the music carried on without him. “Taking credit for the Jews.”

  “What about Eric Clapton?” Vim called over to the driver.

  “Of course,” the driver shouted back, “especially ‘Layla.’ ”

  “You know—the flamenco mordent?” Roger took the pipes out of his mouth for a moment. “Da-la-da-la-da-da-daaah.”

  “Also written by the Jews.” Carranque nodded.

  “ ‘Layla’?” The driver looked truly surprised.

  “Alf Layla Wa Layla,” Carranque said. “A Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights. At least one third of the tales, a good year’s worth of nights, belonged to the Jews.”

  “Give it a rest.” The driver scowled.

  “And,” Carranque added, “the final editor was a Jew who lived in the time of …”

  “Maimonides?” the driver groaned.

  “Of course.”

  The flamenco singer raised his hand and shifted from Kol Nidre into an Iberian-tinged verse of, presumably, Led Zeppelin:

  There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west

  And my spirit is crying for leaving.

  In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees,

  And the voices of those who stand looking.

  Esau, I thought. Esau, looking to the west, the spirit of the expelled Jews, the smoke of the Mayaimi, the voice of Florida, of Santángel, crying for leaving. Had they all read the Esau Letter, all these men, none of them still young, all of them Esaus, all of them more or less hairy? Had all these men read my Esau, been carrying my letter around with them in their male code, this rock-and-roll sema-meta-phore?

  Through the smoke of sun, hair, and music, another shape approached, with the trudge of a Sisyphean traveler struggling to catch a train through a rush-hour crowd, a departing caravan across deep sand, dragging wheels behind her.

  “Holland!” Vim was the first to call.

  “Vim!” she gasped as she set her wheels on the terrace.

  “Señora!” The mustachioed boy with Isabella stood and smiled at her with a width of patio between them. Holland’s mouth snapped.