"Why do you say ‘digest’? Lacan could give you a good lecture on digesting. Eating a situation that you can't digest.”
"Don't start with that too now, it's just a manner of speaking."
"There are no manners of speaking. You know in French, to "take a look" you say jeter un coup d´oueil, literally throw an eye. It takes strength, power. Is that a coincidence? You know that there is a town in Spain called Matajudios, "Kill the Jews"? And you know what it means to "kill a Jew?" To drink a glass of sangria. But what does that say about the Spaniards? And why are beans called "judíos" too, how are they Jews exactly?
"I would have prohibited the use of these words, like in French to call a miser a Jew, take a look at Larousse and you'll see how many strange things the word "Jew" can mean, and they are all negative. This is all disappearing, the French are aware of their language and the meaning of their words.”
"The plane! The flight to Paris is leaving soon."
ALBERTO
When I got to Ceuta I suddenly had a terrible craving for calamari. I had seven plates in less than two hours, another one please, waiter, and I thought about how I could turn this trip into a story, although maybe it would be better to talk more about trees and landscapes and less about wills and boys that die when they are only 1 year old.
From a literary perspective, it is impossible for a boy to die at the age of one. It is impossible. You would have to invent something else, that he was adopted, that he never existed, that he wasn't the son, that the father thought it was his son but it was someone else's, that he thought they were in love, but she had another lover. I ask myself if it only happened once, or if he had been with Fatima for many years, months.
That doesn't make a book. There's no story there. There has to be some story there. I could make it more Moroccan, talk about memory, of longing, of pain, but the only thing I felt in Tétouan was the desire to leave, to get out as soon as possible, along with Fortu, who escaped as soon as he could. We stayed another three days, but every day was harder than the last.
I just wanted to leave already, I was tired of the trash in the streets, the poor asking for money, every person that knew three words in Spanish asking if we wanted a guide, each one trying to get 10 dirhams out of us, 10 dirhams that in the end you just give them so that you can walk in peace. Tell me, is this the paradise I wrote about my whole life?
And maybe this is the story to be told, that my father made this whole story up so that we would travel to Tétouan and see that we hadn't missed out on anything. He sent us here to explain what he couldn't before his death, because for ten years I wouldn't stop talking about Morocco. Maybe it was all the opposite, that it wasn't just Yosef, but that he had ten other children all over Morocco, with Fátima and other women. I don't know how we could find this out but he talked to us about a Morocco that he left behind...
On the other hand, the idea of the dead son could be a symbol of the lack of fertility in the Jewish-Muslim encounter in Morocco. When the Jew and the Muslim have a child, that child dies, and only in the Middle Ages could there have been fruitful relations between the Jews and the Muslims. As for the recent past, peaceful coexistence only exists in the minds of a few professors in Paris and New York. The closeness that Jews and Germans feel, as Gershon Sholem has already said, exists only in the minds of the Jews. And therefore, where is the skeleton in the closet? Where is the thread of this story? Where is it stuck? What makes this story one that can't be literary? What must be invented to make a story that the readers believe?
They wouldn't believe that we made this trip, the four of us, only to fail at meeting the fifth brother that doesn't even exist, and to receive one hundred thousand dollars.
I don't have an answer to this. I keep taking notes. The critics always say in the end that my books are just notes for a novel, taking notes, here in Las Campanas, in Ceuta, and waiting for an idea, I don't like these notes, shreds of something I can't see, I like it when the book pours itself onto the page, like in A Parisian Month, or Nobody's Dog, but not like Keys to Tétouan, which took me three years to write, or Madrid is a Nightmare, which I wrote in over a year. I like books, stories that are written in a month or two, thirteen hours a day, not stopping, in concentration. Lucena or Daydreaming, both took five years, incredible for me. And I would have gone on looking for solutions to thousands of problems if it hadn't been for finding that editor.
But I expected more, from that inheritance, that will, more than just out of optimism but rather that I don't see how to turn this into a book. I expected more, I thought that a will like that was a great coup. But all of this seems to be ending like a small, silent fart.
Soon after disembarking the boat in Algeciras I got on the bus to Málaga. In Málaga I caught the plane to Israel, that's how things went. On the bus I saw a book close to where I was sitting, with no apparent owner. I couldn't stop myself from going up to it, I saw that it was Operation Shylock, by Philip Roth. I had heard that this book had come out, but at that time I was very far away from Roth, what interested me was Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah. I remember having read Portnoy in the late seventies, and My Life as a Man, and here is this book about a crazy Ashkenazi who thinks that the Jews all need to go back to Poland. After everything that brought us? After they made this mess? Now that we're here trying to fix all of our problems! What do they want? To let us fix the problems they started? Another conspiracy from the old Zionists.
I read the book, and kilometer after kilometer I was more and more engrossed, that same eccentric humor I remembered, and also those same changes I couldn't stand, pages and pages of intellectual discussions and unrestrained self-esteem that makes Roth a very good writer, but not a genius.
There are not many geniuses, very few, and I'm not one of them. Fine, maybe some poems I wrote are nice, but not my prose. So when they tell me that my poetry is better than my prose I take it as a compliment. But two weeks ago, when I went to eat in Jerusalem at Zion Acatan and ran into an acquaintance that I had seen at the pool, he asked me, "What book did you write?" I told him the title of my novel was Keys to Tétouan and he exclaimed, "But that's a classic!"
I wanted to say "From your mouth to God's ears," but what I said was "Please don't exaggerate," if it hadn't even sold 500 copies, how could it be a classic? But it wouldn't be bad to be a classic, at least if one person thinks that it is a surprise.
Roth's book is set in the first Intifada, already so forgotten, as of Oslo, now we don't even remember it in Madrid. Here everything happens so fast, it is Messianic. But what I did like about the book is that it talks about the Jewish destiny from a completely crazy, ridiculous perspective, and that you never see in Israeli literature. Of course there are a few exceptions, but generally it is a literature that everyone is interested in except for the Jews, and that book started an internal dialogue within me. In a discussion with Roth, only the Ashkenazi Jews will go back to Poland and the Sephardim to Sefarad, to Spain, and the Moroccans will return to Morocco, the Iraqi to Iraq, but what Roth doesn't understand is that the Jews as a people never emigrated anywhere by their own decisions, it was always because of circumstances that they couldn't control. There were pogroms in Russia, they went to the United States. There were problems in Morocco, they went to Algeria. The Jews going to Israel were the only ones making their own decisions, not all but some of them, and some chose between the United States and Israel and decided upon Israel.
From there you could decide to go to London or Paris, if you found a better job, but only in Israel could you decide to emigrate yourself. Until that trip to Morocco I hadn't thought I was so Zionist. It surprised me. After that Roth book I wanted to scream out to all the Jews in the world that they should come to Israel, your lives are in danger, and if they told me that in Israel they would also be in danger I would say yes, and more than anywhere else, but two thousand years have shown us that it was better never to
have gone to Israel, because the diaspora is worse than the extinction of the Jewish people. Two thousand years of total insanity, not just our own but the whole world, and the way that the world sees us has dislocated us completely from any equilibrium. We went crazy. Three hours traveling and with my nose in this book, thinking about Morocco, Tétouan does not exist, and never existed, that's a sentence that one of the brothers would say in the book. "When we are not in Tétouan, Tétouan does not exist, but it doesn't exist when we do not live there either." Or something like that.
When you walk around Tétouan what you feel most is your absence from the city, like I wrote in some poem, you feel your own absence and the years that you haven't walked those streets. Do the Poles feel the same way? The goyim and the Jews?
I don't think so, I think that in Europe above all you smell the crematoriums, everyone, the Jews and the goyim, they smell it every day, it is like living beside a volcano that exploded fifty years ago, the lava is still burning, the dead still cry out, the reparations don't do much more than strengthen the smell of burning, we don't feel that bad here. But a good life, a good life like the one I described in Morocco is the Moon, that never existed. I tried to give reasons for all the negative things, the boys that throw rocks, the Jew that was stabbed every two years in the market by an Arab that afterwards they called crazy, reasoning that this happens everywhere, that everywhere there are people that kill others for many reasons, but that's not true, here they killed them because they are Jews, and it doesn't matter how bad we have it with the Ashkenazim.
In the Arab countries there was antisemitism, I'm surprised to read in the book by Tahar Ben Jelloun that the Jews lived in harmony with the Muslims, I thought that this idealization was just a Jewish one, but in Fez, Ben Jelloun's city, in 1600 they killed hundreds of Jews, half were forced to convert to Islam, and at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a pogrom in which hundreds of Jews died.
Fez is the city with the most victims. But all the big Moroccan cities had victims. It wasn't the same as the shoa, but it definitely wasn't an idyllic coexistence.
It isn't just us here in Israel idealizing a past that never existed, the Muslims do it too, because they feel our absence. In both cases we've lost all objectivity, because if it was going so well, then what did we flee from? But as bad as things were, what we didn't know is that here things were worse. It is better to be a Jew in Morocco than a Jew in Asquenaz, in Israel. But, another but, a Talmudic but, here we defend our country and our place in the world, and not our own skin, like what happened with the diaspora. The fight for equality is an important fight, but that is not a reason to warp our view of the past.
We arrive in Málaga. PickPick has just shown his dick to Philip Roth in Operation Shylock.
While I'm waiting for the plane, which was significantly delayed, I finished Roth's book. The epilogue pissed me off enough that I couldn't read the whole book, I skipped through the Demieniuk parts, the trashy philosophers, and where does this all take us anyway? The story of the Moroccan Jews, one in Paris, one in Madrid, another in New York, the one that turned religious, the frustrated author, that's what they'll say about any book I write even if I say a thousand times that I'm not frustrated.
They ask me why I'm frustrated in all the interviews, I only talk about the Jews that I know, while they talk about the Ashkenazi. The lies that they told to come to Israel and the money that they stole, if they had money. I don't understand, what do they want? That I talk about the Jews that I don't know, the Jews from Ukraine, Russia, Poland? Why don't you write about anything else? But I never knew what else to talk about, when I don't write about Morocco no one finds out about my writing, when I write about Morocco they tell me that I only write about Morocco, and when I ask them why there are so few books by Sephardim in Israel, they pull out three or four names, Shimon Balas, Dorit Matalon, Yisthak Gormezano Goren, Erez Biton, but then I tell them that that is the proof of the problem I'm talking about, no one can count all the Ashkenazi writers, but with two hands you can count the Sephardim.
How could it be that the editorials only publish Ashkenazi writers when there could be a Sephardic writer for each one, so that no one could be accused of discrimination? But that's how it is, the problem is the question, the question can be asked, and it doesn't matter what the answer is.
I'm getting wrapped up in this again. Let's get back to Yusuf, let's say that he didn't die, that he went to Casablanca, and there the police shot him when he was sixteen. The family found his friends, all drug addicts, sniffing glue, half-dead at twenty years of age, and they say that he was the leader of them all, the leader of the whole area at the age of sixteen, and the police killed him because he tried to rob a store, and was running away from the police, no one could catch him because he ran faster than anyone else.
Or maybe he went to France, to Paris, and there he became a pimp, had seventeen Moroccan prostitutes working for him. One of the brothers finds him in Paris, sits down with him in a bad cafe and says look, your father is a Jew, and he answers, "Don't fuck with me," and punches him in the face. He thinks the brother is police, and runs after him, shooting him. The police follow him and kill him. In the end he says, "Don't tell my mother that I love her!" A good American movie ending.
It could happen in Paris, in the center of the city, or in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, but then it would be too Moroccan. Why not New York, while the brother in New York passes by in his car and says something negative to those delinquents that don't let anybody go by in peace.
It's not a bad idea, maybe he converts to extremist Islam, the most extremist in the world, and plans attacks against Jews, and one of his brothers dies in an attack that he planned, in Paris or Israel. That could also happen.
The plane is delayed for another hour, security problems, they want to see all the suitcases again. All this while I search for a convincing role for Mr. Yusuf to play in my books. Ladies and gentleman: What does Yusuf Elbaz do? And why are all my ideas so dramatic and full of stereotypes? Why do I see Moroccans in such a negative light, as thugs, extremists, drug addicts? Maybe he was brought up by a rich family and went to study law in a European capital, where he gives lectures against Israel.
The problem is we can't imagine a Muslim in the world that supports Israel or is against the Arabs. That wouldn't be interesting. They say that Zionism is justified, that the Arabs don't understand anything about the twentieth century and that a Jewish country is the best that could have happened. But who would believe that? One can imagine hundreds of Jewish professors against Zionism, but not a single one Muslim in favor, not even I believe in it.
We, the Jews, we're the biggest critics of our people after the goyim, and before us, we believe that if we are critical they'll understand, but what happens in the end is that they cite us at anti-Semitic meetings as proof of how bad we are, it started with Jesus, and before, with the prophets... I'm coming back to the Jewish topic, I really need a logical idea for this Yusuf. Maybe he finds out he is Jewish, he goes back to see his mother before she dies and she tells him that his father was Jewish, and suddenly he feels that he can't stand his life in Casablanca anymore and decides to emigrate to Israel, he becomes a captain in the Israeli Armed Forces.
I wonder how many there are, how many half-Jews in Morocco, how many descendants of Jews? Most of them would have converted, if not how could there be so few, or maybe the Muslims exterminated entire communities, like in the Dar valley, where they say there was a Jewish kingdom that was destroyed?
Or maybe he simply died, that's it. None of us tried to see his grave, maybe not even his mother and grandmother know where the grave of the one-year-old boy is, or maybe they didn't have money for a burial and he's in a common grave, those things do exist in Morocco. Well, something about Tétouan, something about family, the Jews, but everything is in my head now, I have everything in there. I feel it, I feel the book, fro
m the expulsion of the Jews in Spain, from my grandmother who brought us all the Pessaj from Castilla, from which we drink our wine. I can remember how and who were are, we drink from the same pitcher in Spain, with the fear that there would be another story of a Christian boy whose blood we drink, we prayed that no Christian boys would die this week, we prayed for the children of our enemies, I remember everything, how we went to Lisbon, the easier years in Ladino and Portuguese, the journey to Tangier, escaping to Tétouan, I travelled those journeys, all of them, to Oran, I did that myself, trips to Brazil, Venezuela, Israel, Tanta, Madrid, I did them all and they are somewhere in my being, in my mind. But going to Israel? Whose idea was that? Who could think that things would go well there? What could follow the four hundred years of melancholy life after being expelled from Sefarad?
When we finally began to overcome this expulsion, Zionism arrived, and was such a blow - confronting a world that was so far away from us, understanding that we no longer had the strength to be a Jewish people, such that even now the Ashkenazim are the ones that define us. But, why do we keep giving in? Why do we keep going after they steal our children, our story, and our money? Is it that we don't know any other way, we can't conceive of rebelling, keeping the Jewish people together is so important to us that we are always ready to pay the price for this? Every time they ask for a finger we give it to them, and in the end we have no fingers to say here we are. We are mute now. They've amputated our memory and above all, our childrens' memories.
And so, what does Yusuf represent? The union between Jews and Muslims? And he died at the age of one. What would we say to that professor analyzing it from a psychological point of view, or sociological point of view? He won't be able to find any literary value in this writing, like what happened with Keys to Tétouan, in the end they'll like A Parisian Month best because that's when you showed them you could write.
Gates to Tangier Page 10
