Brown Scarf Blues (7 page)

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 behind 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.

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 other 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.