Lucena

by Mois Benarroch

  Agreed, it is only a copy of a safety key, not like the huge keys from Grenada or Sevilla. And I’m sure your key can no longer open the door to your childhood house in Jerusalem. Keys and vessels.

  There in Lucena, in Eliossana -Eli Hosanna, God protect us – began the hegemony of Judaism in Sefarad and ended that of Babylonia. For one hundred fifty years a Jewish city strong and prosperous, the city of faith and worship of God, truly, not like today the city of my ancestors and yours, a forgotten city. Not so important or dramatic, neither Toledo, nor Granada but back then, in the eleventh century, it was the city of Jews and nobody believed that it would not always be the city of Jews. It was the city of Ibn Daud and of Ibn Ezra, of Yehudá Haleví, Ibn Shaprut and Alfasi. You don’t know anything about it, nor who those persons were. When I left my wife I went South in Morocco. There I also found Jewish cities, even a Jewish kingdom in the desert, Dará. The Jews were dressed like Muslims. Those men with sabers were strong, and believers and their faith strengthened the kingdom for years. Today nobody knows anything about them. Out of there came the powerful Moroccans named Deri, Ederi or Aderi, all those surnames come from Dar’a, the country of the Jews. There I married four of my wives, who gave me twelve children which are my family named Deri, which at the same time moved to Sefarad and all over Morocco, the cities of Fez and Meknes. This happened when the people of Dará lost their power after the Saturday battle, or, rather, the battle that did not take place on Saturday. The Berbers offered a truce to the Jews because they had been at war for hundreds of years and they always lost. They proposed the pact take place on Saturday and hid arms at the site of the meeting. And when the Jewish elders arrived at the meeting, they took out their arms and shot them. That is how Dar’a ended.

  I went back to Lucena. Fifty years later it was a city at the peak of wild abandon, a few years before the Jews were obligated to convert to Islam. This time my return was most strange. On the road I found a cadaver. Inside of it were poems and all kinds of things written in Hebrew. There were hundreds of poems. The man, who was called Jacob the Jew, in his time an unknown poet, was on the road from Tudela to Lucena. I buried him. He was nearly decomposed. I prayed the Kaddish for him and had a funeral. Then I took his name and went to Lucena. There I learned that he was known and in the city they were expecting him. So I was received with honors as a poet and they put me up and fed me. And the whole time I was asked about my poems. For several weeks I would dole out one or two poems until I ran out. Then I said I would do what was in my poems and I would go to the land of Israel. Everyone told me I was insane, even my wife told me I had contracted a grave illness. But the poems had run out and I felt that kind of life did not suit me well so I hit the road. I got to Egypt, but I was increasingly homesick so I returned to Sefarad.

  If you think the road became my home you are wrong. I never liked being on the road. I am a home town guy, a man of Lucena. But every forty years I had to disappear. If they had seen me when my fever went up continually they would have buried me alive or burned, or tied to a stake like the witches. Those were always hair-raising days, and the last was the worst when I trembled all over and panted. And if they had seen me then, when my skin transformed into that of a twenty year old and I became full of vim and vigor, that would have been considered impossible and I would have been obligated to disappear.

  Don’t think this is about a great deal of suffering. This is a great purification fever. Then I would just go take a bath in the sea, in a ditch or a river I would submerge in the water without caring if it was winter or summer, and after those two weeks I felt full of strength and energy like someone who is ready to conquer the world, and the vessel. Yes, the vessel, not the box. Yes in the box that I gave the grandmother of your grandmother in Tetuán there were twenty six five-franc French gold coins. With one of those coins one could support a family of six for two years. Remember that. Twenty six. Now leave. I am tired. Tomorrow I will tell you how once I became a very rich and renowned man in the sixteenth century, but there was no other option. I had no other option than to become a rich and famous man. I was called Yosef Ruti. Tomorrow I will tell you about it.

  SATURDAY DINNER IN MÁLAGA

  After countless shouts the family managed to be seated at the table without anyone getting up to do something urgent. Finally the father blessed the wine, fruit of the tree, fruit of the earth, and the fish. For a few instants there was silence. Suddenly Luisa shouted at her sister:

  “Stop it! Now!” and things heated up.

  “Don’t start fighting,” said the father.

  “Well, tell her to stop!”

  “We are very worried Samuel. I think I heard you want to study philosophy? That’s what your mother told me. What would you do with philosophy?”

  “Not just that. Also English literature. Philosophy and English literature.”

  “I’m sure they haven’t accepted you anywhere else,” blurted Luisa.

  “What would you do? It would be better if you came to work with me at the store, wouldn’t it?”

  “I have decided what I want to do in my life.”

  “Fine. What do you want to be?”

  “A writer.”

  The father swallowed the food, turned red, looked at his wife and Luisa imitated him:

  “I told you, you pamper him too much,” but her eruption didn’t make anybody laugh. “Writer?”

  “I have already written some poems and a few stories. One will be published in a literary journal here in Málaga, in Cabeza, that’s what the magazine is called. I have also written an article about you, about Israel, about what you have told me. I even have a pen name: Samuel Murciano.”

  “What’s wrong with Benzimra?” asked Salomón, the younger brother.”

  “Nothing, but Murciano sounds more Spanish to me, and more Jewish, Toledano or Gormezano or Marciano, or something like that.”

  “A writer?” repeated the father. “And just how do you intend to earn a living? That is, what’s wrong with writing, but being a doctor, or an engineer? You had good instruction in all the materials. You could be a computer specialist, a programmer.”

  “A writer, just a writer. I already have the theme of a novel I want to write. I have met a thousand year old person who tells me a lot of things about Spain and the middle Ages.”

  “A writer... someone who’s a thousand years old... What do you think about that dear? Shouldn’t we take him to see a psychologist? I don’t really believe in psychological treatment, but Samuel is really beginning to say some very strange things, don’t you think? I warned you about this.”

  “You should be pleased that they are publishing my poem at such a young age. Maybe I’ll become a successful writer, even very successful. Didn’t García Márquez begin like me: taking pen to paper and starting to write? That’s how all writers began”

  “For every one of those, there are thousands who were unsuccessful. Your uncle, for example, also wanted to be a writer. He wasted twenty five years of his life and later went into business. But don’t talk to him about that although you could with grandmother. Maybe that is what killed grandfather. Write if you want, but do something else as well.”

  “Impossible.”

  “You are really hard headed like your uncle. His head is harder than a coconut. As a youth of seventeen you already know everything and you think I’m going to support you forever. Wrong! Beginning tomorrow you will start looking for a way to support yourself and to pay your university studies. I’m not paying for that. And I’m not paying for philosophy and I’m not going to feed you. If you want to study something serious ok but if you want to do whatever you please, it’s on your coin, not on mine. You’ll have to arrange it by yourself, son. You could always come home on condition you get the butterflies out of your head.”

  THE ALLERGISTS

  A SHORT STORY OF SAMUEL MURCIANO

  “Mister President, “said Professor Millman, “This is not a happy situation at all. We were able to isolate
the new problem but what you are going to hear is simply disquieting. It is a virus named “Alergum Montana” because it was identified first in the Alps and because it has symptoms similar to those of allergies, small red spots scattered over the whole body. Most of those affected are women, that is, ninety percent are women, but most surprising is that they can be healthier than the general population. They carry the virus but nothing happens.

  The problem occurs when they have contact with other persons because those who are not immunized are infected in less than twenty four hours, sometimes within the hour. At the moment of infection a cancer appears which quickly spreads throughout the body.

  “For now the allergic population is concentrated in some small villages in France and they live like the lepers of old. But any time one of them goes to the big city it causes an epidemic and hundreds, even thousands die. If they knew the power they have in their hands they could easily wipe out a whole city.”

  “It is unknown how contagion occurs, but it is known that contagion does not occur from one sick person to another, but only from one allergic to persons who have contact with them.

  The president stared at the professor for a long time, looked at the memorandum of hundreds of pages and looked back at the professor.

  “How many people know about the discovery?” he asked.

  Three. You, Mr. President, my doctoral student, and I.””

  “What do you advise be done?”

  “It would be best that nobody find out. That is all I can say. The rest I will leave in your hands. You are the gendarme of the world. I am only an investigator.”

  “Is there any way to cure the allergies?”

  “They aren’t sick. I don’t know how to cure them. Besides, they wouldn’t go to see a doctor.”

  “Do you have a theory to explain how the immunities are created?”

  “No, none. Maybe it is from a region where radioactive waste is housed without the public knowing. During the investigation I have found that one hundred years ago that was the region where the most immune population was received. They had come out of a genetic laboratory I’m not sure if these two things are related. At any rate it relates to a new gene which some individuals with a more potent immune system than we have. They could annihilate us only by us being in contact with them.”

  The president turned to look at him, thinking to explore the meaning of those words. To know if it would be better to seek a second opinion, or if the fact that others would be aware of the situation would only make more difficult the measures that must be undertaken.

  “There is something else. Like I said, the immune are primarily women and those are, in relation to the French population, the ones that procreate the most. Certainly religious motives could be the cause of it but it seems to me that these women act as though they were a race in danger of extinction and are trying to multiply as much as possible. Do you understand? When an animal gene is attacked with the intention of eliminating it, it will multiply as much as it can in the females being able to create a situation where the females are in the majority and the males only constitute two or three percent of the population, and they have only one object, breeding the females.”

  The president picked up the telephone to ask his secretary to set up a meeting with the president of France and the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “Tell them this is a high priority emergency matter and they need to arrive within the hour on a supersonic flight. Tell them they are not to discuss it by any electronic means, that the conversation must take place with both present.”

  “Professor Millman,” said the president, “I hope you have brought a detailed map of the location of the immunes.”

  “Of course. Here it is.”

  “Thank you for your service to the country and to the world, within forty eight hours the problem will be solved. I ask you to destroy the documents related to this matter and not to talk to anyone about what you have showed me. Thank you.”

  Professor Millman returned home and again examined, as he had done daily during the past months, the soles of his feet, covered with tiny red spots.

  DO YOU STILL REMEMBER THE COLOR OF THE SEA?

  -Don’t talk to me about that because it gives me the urge to convert.

  -When I was in love it was transparent.

  -It was always blue to me.

  -We thought it would always be there for us. And suddenly we found ourselves in this basement. No daylight, no sea.

  -At any moment they may come for us and they will ask us again why we don’t light candles, as if it were an obligation.

  -An ancient Christian obligation, like that of eating pork.

  -That is what I heard, that the “Marranos” eat pork in front of the Christians so as not to get turned in.

  -To tell the truth, I simply don’t like pork.

  -Don’t say that, even in jest.

  SHOAH

  I was born in 1947 and I am a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. No, I’m not a survivor of the Holocaust. The fact is, I was born dead. I was born dead in the extermination camp of my mother. Today, mama, I have to write you this. I have to write you this on the thirtieth day of your death because I have not done what you made me promise to do since I was under a year old. That I would cremate you and I would spread your ashes from the air over Poland. I promised you that many times but you know that in Israel it can’t be done and even if it could have been done, perhaps I would not have done it. You knew that. Maybe that is why you made me promise that again and again, and I think about Hitler. I think about what kind of a child was Hitler, maybe his mother put diapers on him, maybe his mother worried about him like you do me. What kind of human being was that man? Maybe he went down in history, maybe he was unique, and maybe he made decisions. But all that interests me less than the fact that inside of very little time there will again be six billion habitants on exactly the same day. And this worries me, mama. Time went by me while thinking about a bunch of things. Once I read a book about Kabala about the expulsion that there must be very few Jews and that is the reason that each generation exterminates them if it does not assimilate them beforehand so that perhaps it would be better to assimilate before they eliminate us again. And I was born in Cyprus, in Cyprus although I never set foot in that land nor Warsaw. Mama and you by your silence, asked me to go there, because you were always silent, never said a word about any of the ones of our family who disappeared. Nobody said anything. You didn’t talk about papa’s death of cancer either, the sixth of May 1948. You didn’t say anything about that either. You were only worried that I should live. For what, if I was already dead. That is why I don’t have, nor will I have any children. I am not capable of reproducing. I don’t think my genes are good enough for humanity. Besides, if they are going to wipe us out if we pass a certain number they should kill me. I’m already dead; exactly the same as when you died a month ago, as you died at age fifteen they say that was a marvelous sign. Who says that? The survivors can talk, not the ones who died in Hiroshima, Verdun, and all the marvelous wars of this century, of course.

  I was born in Cyprus but I have never been in Poland. Nor my mother, although she wanted her ashes to be spread over the Poles from an airplane. I don’t know if this was about nostalgia or vengeance. I don’t know, in Poland there is no lack of Jewish ashes, but it hasn’t changed the way they are. My father was from the Ukraine and now I laugh when I see on television a boat of illegal immigrant Ukrainians disguised as honorable Christian tourists or pilgrims who say they want to come to work in Israel. I tremble with joy, as if I knew what joy is. This is vengeance and triumph, not the structures of Tel-Aviv nor my two hundred employees, Ukrainians, willing to come to work here for a hundred dollars a month. This is our sweet vengeance, mama. You would be happy.

  But inside, it was impossible to know. It was impossible to know if you laughed so as not to cry, perhaps it was true laughter, the laugh of destiny, perhaps it was a laugh to replace sobbing
. I never knew. And now I must tell you that the lack of this fearsome understanding already formed part of my being when I was four. Since you revealed to me that one of your aunts lived in the United States. The day we went to the post office on Ben Yehudá Street to call her on the telephone we had put on our party clothes. Perhaps you would have preferred to know you were the only one who was left in the family. Perhaps that is what you wanted. Perhaps at the bottom of your heart, little girl, you hoped that all your locked up family had died. That family that tried to make you pass through the eye of a needle which is what happened, and now here is the aunt who can suddenly know about you. What’s going to happen?

  I am fifty years old and I am a very sought after bachelor. I always have to go to gatherings well-dressed. I manage a business that moves two hundred million dollars a year. In the end, mama, none of this matters to me. I am not even able to have descendants; I don’t want to have children to suffer as I have. Besides, for that one has to have sexual relations and I have never known how to do that. The women who get close to me reject me and the ones I approach detest me. It has never worked. I am used to it. It doesn’t even bother me anymore. This is my life this and the pages that I write you on the thirtieth day of your death. I have always been told I write lovely letters. And why don’t I write something else? I’m doing that now. I write about a sickness called living. What wouldn’t I give to be in your place? People always say of me that I show in my face the joy of living or they ask how is it that I always seem to be in a good mood. How is it that I look so good, but in my heart of hearts I wish I had never been born? I would have preferred to die so very many nights when I lay down in my bed with the hope I will not get up again; that the world will do me in. Because I constantly have the sensation that the world is at the point of being exhausted. I don’t know how, a big explosion in the day, unpredictable, BOOM! And the world no longer exists. Because if only I die there will continue to be people who suffer, but that way everything will end and God will be obligated to do everything possible to perfect His creatures. He would have to issue a better world. A Pentium 2000 edition world. Something that would be better, and abandon the previous one. It is said that God creates and destroys worlds so why not destroy this one? What’s in it that it is so interesting to him? After my mother was in Auschwitz, or in Treblinka, she never told me to go investigate so I would not see the humiliation that she came to. She was a very distinguished and sensual woman. She liked pretty dresses. I can imagine her in the cafes in Warsaw during the thirties or travelling through Paris and attracting the eye of all the young men. Civilized looks, not aggressive ones like those today. She was ashamed to be there. It was shameful for her to be there. She, and not the simple folk who were also there, nothing worked. No explanation, that the guilty ones were the executioners. They were the guilty ones but that did not matter. What mattered was her life. That she had suddenly disappeared and could not go back to being what she once was. After she had me and my father died she never went out with a man again. It seems that I was her man. I was her creation. And here I am before the recent tomb. The tomb you did not want. The dust you wanted to see flying through the air over your homeland, nevertheless, perhaps before they install a tombstone I can take your body where they can cremate it as you wished. Only I will know that you are not here. Who could care? An old lady, survivor of the Holocaust. A scandalous woman who drove the neighbors crazy. Once I had to come to talk to them and compensate them after the stupid thing you did so they would keep quiet. Perhaps they could have understood your pain but the majority of them were survivors of the Holocaust in the Rehavia neighborhood. It was difficult to live with your dementia, with your repeated screaming, with the oil that you poured on the stairs, and with the fights you started any time of the day and night.