Brown Scarf Blues (8 page)

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.

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.

O
f 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.

But he also wasn’t much interested in artists and didn’t have many friends who were writers, he knew a lot of them but he preferred to go to the souk to eat in cheap restaurants, and he preferred to travel by bus. “That’s where you’ll find life and people,” he used to tell me. “That’s where you’ll find stories, future novels. You can’t learn much from people who think they’re important, who think they’re rich, who think they have something. We have nothing.”

Dialogue between us was impossible, of course. He came from a moneyed, middle-class family, and was willing to lose what he had, or what he used to have, in order to write. I come from poverty and being a writer is a way of being middle class. Or that’s what he used to tell me though I didn’t agree. But today I realize he was right in a way, though things are never that simple. But we fought over that, because he told me he always risked everything with his words and that I wasn’t willing to take any risks at all. That was a massive lie. Fuck off, you lying bastard.

I
met him in Paris, and until today I didn’t know he had published all those books. When I knew him he never mentioned he was a writer or had been published. We studied natural medicine together at the IHMN - Institut d’Hygiène et de Médecine Naturelle, which was in Melun. He seemed very introspective and didn’t interact much with the other students. It was as though all he ever did was talk to himself about something very important. Sometimes he even did it out loud. During breaks between classes he would go for walks in the woods that surrounded the institute. Finally, thanks to the language, we started to talk a little, but he always counted his words. Then one day on the train back to Paris, he loosened up and from then on he would constantly speak his mind. We became good friends and I even made a trip to Israel once and stayed at his home. There I met his charming wife, who was French, and we later met in Paris. Once, I think he even suggested we make love. I said no. I’m not sure why, since I was definitely attracted to him. He talked a lot about vaccines, and that’s what he eventually wrote his thesis on. He was very much against them, more than anyone else, but he seemed angry and disillusioned at everybody because of those vaccines. It got to where he thought all his problems were a result of the ones he’d been given as a child, and even that vaccines had killed his little brother. In those days he was deeply in love with a French girl named Marlene, I remember that. And one day he showed up on her doorstep and told her. It seems she’d had no idea and said she was sorry but she didn’t share those feelings, that she felt nothing for him in fact. After that he shut down even more and went entire days without saying a word. He would listen to his classes, he would record them and then relisten to them on his Walkman on the train or while walking in the woods. I haven’t heard from him in years and if not for what happened to him I might have forgotten him by now. But despite everything, his friendship helped me very much. I think even his silence had a special aura that gave you the sense of not being alone in the world. At the time, I felt very lonely in Paris and he lessened that loneliness whenever he came to the seminars. Now I do want to read his books. It’s the next thing I’m going to do.

I
thought he was a special child, of course they were all special but the special thing in him was different, it was something that seemed to tell you he was right, as if his face was saying, “Yes, I know these things.” He cried easily, which is why I did not go to say goodbye to him, I thought he would take it very badly. I said goodbye to his mother, and to his elder sister who was at home, and I could have waited a few minutes for him to come back but I preferred to leave. I went to Belgium. I returned once and went to their house, and the wife, his mother, invited me to have some tea and I felt like a lady, it was something that had never happened before, now that I was back from Belgium it was like I was someone else, I acted differently and dressed better, I was no longer the nana, no longer the servant, no longer the fátima, that’s what they called us, and though he kept calling me Fátima, I was not the fátima anymore. That day he was, indeed, there and he had changed very much, he was three years older and I wasn’t sure whether he recognized me, his mother said to him, “Don’t you remember Fátima?” And he did not answer, he ate one of the cookies that were on the table, some very good sugar cookies, like the ones I had learned to make in the
señora
’s house and that now I made for my husband and my two children. For a moment, I felt he was about to stand up and come to give me a kiss, but he sat back down and then he left. I still loved him a lot, more than I loved the rest of the family since he was the only one who returned my affection, he would always hug me when I felt sad, he did that all the time before he turned two, like he could sense it, and he could also be happy with me when I was happy. Then I took out the gift I had brought them from Belgium, which today might seem silly, but in those days it was quite a gift, it was a box of chocolates, maybe Leonidas, maybe a more artisanal brand, I don’t recall, and he threw himself on them as if that was his way of thanking me for all the years past. He didn’t write, I don’t remember him as one of those children who write stories at age five, I never saw him write, and he never said anything about liking stories more than the other children did. What I do recall is that when he was one of the top students in his class they would give him a couple of books as a prize, they were in French and were color-illustrated adventures, very pretty, and then he was very happy with those books, they were his trophy, his way of being appreciated in the world. Maybe that’s why he became a writer. Ever since then—since 1970, I think—I have not seen him. I would like very much to see him again, but I doubt he remembers me or my last name. I don’t think they even knew our last names, to them we were all fátimas.

I
arrived in Jerusalem on a one-year program for Jewish students. To learn Hebrew and maybe study in Israel. Everyone saw it as a year off from their family and a time to reflect, but for me it was a way to get past the accident I’d had five years earlier. I saw him on the bus almost every day and he would look at me, I couldn’t quite understand what he saw in my broken, shattered body, but I was sure he was looking. I used to ride the 28 bus that ran between the two Hebrew University campuses, the one at Givat Ram and the one on Mount Scopus, almost always with a friend. I was afraid to walk alone, though I was used to my crutches and almost never fell. At one point, instead of playing coy I started looking back at him, and there were even times when I would sit directly behind or in front of him. I think that made him nervous. But he kept looking at me. Then one day I learned that his name was Charly, someone said “Hello, Charly” at the station. He just said “Hello” and did not chat with the other student at all. To me, he looked like someone in a post-traumatic state after a severe shock. Maybe an accident, I couldn’t hide my trauma, it showed, but his seemed much deeper and sadder. There was never a sadder teenager. Maybe I used to come off that way, but by then I had started laughing again, and though I found it hard to accept my broken, shattered body, I now tolerated it. And I had no shortage of lovers or suitors, because I laughed and, of course, I was young. I’m not clear what happened next but I think at some point we began talking, what makes me nuts is I’m not sure if it was him or another guy who looked like him, we began talking and suddenly he opened up, started telling me about his childhood in Morocco, we started talking on the bus around 2 p.m. and we stayed together until the middle of the night, usually he got out at Ramat Eshkol, a good neighborhood back then, about five stops from the dorm, but he didn’t get out that time and we wound up in my room, we both did that naturally, he asked if I found it hard to walk with the crutches, and if I needed help, a question I hated but coming from his mouth it seemed very sweet, and then we reached the room and, being young and without giving it much thought, we made love, and then I called him Charly and told him my name, he asked how I knew his name and then I kissed him on the mouth, his saliva tasted very sweet to me, to the point where it crossed my mind he might have diabetes and maybe that was a symptom, I don’t know why or if that had something to do with it, but I’ve never tasted such sweet saliva again in my life, he kissed badly, like someone with a cold, because I think he had a breathing problem, we made love, he didn’t say anything about my leg though he did stroke my stump very delicately, it was the first time I liked that, and afterwards it was something I asked for from all the men I made love with, they won’t all do it, most get scared. The first time was short and quick, or that’s how I remember it, then in the evening we made love again, in between he talked to me about his childhood, about the shock of arriving in Israel when he was fifteen, and especially he spoke about poetry, he said he wanted to be a writer and write novels but he spoke only of poetry. He told me about an American poet I’d never heard of called Mark Strand, I later read his poetry and liked it, I think I must have been one of his first readers, or one of his first readers outside the U.S. anyway, because he had only published a couple of books. I don’t read much poetry but I think he’s now a famous, well-regarded poet. Around four o’clock I fell asleep and I heard him open the door and leave. I said nothing. We never saw each other again. That’s how it had to end, we didn’t exchange addresses or phone numbers or anything. It took him so long to connect with me and I left less than a week after that encounter, and maybe the encounter even happened because I was leaving and sometimes two hearts must find each other in this world to exchange something, later I saw he had become a famous poet and I remembered him when I saw his photo, or was it someone else? Honestly, I’m not sure it was him. I think it’s awful not to be sure about something like that.