Brown Scarf Blues (9 page)

I
t was like a dream, my first book was translated into Hebrew, that was 1997, and it’s still my only translated title. I’ve sold hundreds of thousands of books in my country, but I’m not translated, I’m a local success. As part of that dream I arrived in Tel Aviv for my book launch and found that my publisher was completely insane, I was already used to half-insane publishers. But this one, as Charly later told me, was the one publisher who was crazier than the writers he published. The book launch is where I met Charly, a poet who didn’t fit in there, or anywhere, practically a different species from the human species. He had a way of seeing the world that always surprised me, when I would talk to him about the conflict he would always bring up unexpected points, from one side or the other, he seemed like someone unable to agree with himself. Just when he was talking like a right-winger he would say something that put him way over on the most anti-Zionist left. And vice-versa, of course. I think he liked to make everyone nervous. Which he often achieved.

I, with my Jewish son and my book
The Jewish Bride
, first came to Israel with my second wife, on our first of many trips to a country that seems to hide a genetic secret about the future of the world. A very western country, because the west is actually a Jewish project, but, as Charly tells me time and again, most of its Jews are not from Europe or the West, most are from Arab countries, plus many who have now been born in the Middle East, in Asia, for two generations. And despite everything maybe Israel is, in fact, a European project, and a European country. But I’m not so sure anymore.

On my trips we always go to good restaurants, Charly loves seafood but no matter how often I invite him to Portugal for a few days, he won’t come. He’s always severely short of cash, always broke. The only thing he truly knows how to do is write, though he’s done many other things and, for a time, like Kafka, he earned his living as a bookkeeper, in a dark, ground-floor office he once showed me in downtown Jerusalem.

If the point is to explain why he did what he did, well, I don’t understand it, but I, for one, will miss him if I go to Jerusalem or to Israel, maybe I won’t go back, because the city cannot be the same without him. People never really know why they do what they do, not deep down, and naturally the others, their friends, know even less. In any case, I think he felt so alien to everything and practically lived on an island in the middle of the world, in spite of the world he was an island. Islands are also part of the world. But I realize this explains nothing. Life is a mystery.

I
met him through the redheaded poet who won the mystical poetry prize, Fernando Rielo, who was a friend of mine, I had asked Fernando if he wanted to translate the Bible into Spanish under my supervision using the system I’d used in my highly successful French translation. Fernando said I would need another translator and suggested him.

Right from the start I didn’t particularly like him, and I didn’t think he knew much Spanish, or much Hebrew for that matter, or Biblical Hebrew, and I felt he lacked the qualities to delve into that world. It was also a bit weird that a Moroccan, from a people who always speak bad French, should know Spanish. But the redhead said Charly knew more French and more Hebrew than him, and that he could not do the translation on his own. I suggested we look for one or more other contributors. But we tried. The two of them translated two chapters of Genesis, and I kept in touch with the Spanish publisher. I think it was called Plaza Janes, or else Plaza y Janes, and I sent them what the guys had done. As the matter was being discussed, Opus Dei objected to publication of the translation, as did the Spanish Church and I think even the Vatican. I don’t know what would have happened today, but the dictatorship was not yet a memory in that year and the publisher canceled the project. I think we even had signed something and they paid me an advance or compensation, but I’m not sure. My memory isn’t what it was. Not anymore.

What happened next was weirder still, he offered to translate my only book of poems into Hebrew and to look for a publisher after doing the translation, and we agreed I would pay him a thousand dollars, it was in dollars because there was massive inflation back then, and though it was a 280-page book, it was well-paid work. He came to my home often and I even started to enjoy his company, and later he and his wife became friends with my daughter and her husband, so I saw him at some family gatherings, too. He would come over once a week and we would discuss the translation, in my minimal Modern Hebrew. As agreed, I paid him five hundred dollars during the work and I said I would pay the other five hundred on publication of the book,
The Blue Angel
. But the book never came out, no publisher was willing to publish the book, some for economic reasons, others because they didn’t like the translation or the poems.

And then one day I got a registered letter saying he was suing me. And of course then I realized who I’d gotten mixed up with and what kind of a guy he was. A poet who wouldn’t keep his word, a liar. A translator friend of mine said his translation was terrible, but I tactfully never told him. For the first time in my life I was the defendant in a court case, and naturally he lost. I was never an attorney, but I studied law and worked in the legal field. It was his word against mine, and mine won.

I
think it was in ’99, or maybe it was 2000, in winter. He convinced me to drive him to a book signing for Tahar Ben Jelloun’s
Le racisme expliqué a ma fille
.
It must have been before the Second Intifada. I drove him because he never found time to get a driver’s license, I don’t think he has taken a single lesson. Perhaps the steering wheel frightens him or maybe every time he intends to go for a lesson he writes a poem instead. That’s why he writes so many poems. The event was at a theater in Givatayim, a suburb of Tel Aviv, and the place was full. I’m hazy about what happened but I do recall my friend fidgeting in his seat incessantly, as if there were thorns on his chair. And I do remember the Q&A at the end, when an Israeli writer of a certain age stood up and said that colonialism wasn’t all bad, and then it was Ben Jelloun who started squirming in his seat like my friend, I think he was looking around for emergency exits, and the writer kept describing the positive sides of colonialism, especially the building of highways and infrastructure. His comments, which left the whole room astonished, lasted more than five minutes, and afterwards Ben Jelloun said something banal that was a very tactful way of saying “Why don’t you piss off?” and moved on to the next audience member, who said something about anti-Sephardic discrimination in Israel. My friend didn’t ask any questions. After the talk he approached Ben Jelloun and said a few words I couldn’t hear, and then he told me he had translated a long poem by Ben Jelloun called “La remontée des cendres,” I remember the title because it rises and falls, a long poem about the first Gulf War.

On the ride home he spoke at length about that writer’s colonialism and how insane it was to say something like that to a Moroccan writer who had lived under French colonialism, even if he does write in French. Then he explained why Ben Jelloun was so important to him. He said Ben Jelloun’s writings made him realize for the first time that he was a Moroccan writer, since they had many literary traits in common and agreed on many things. He said that reading them convinced him that he himself was not a Jew who happened to be born in Morocco, but that maybe he was a Moroccan who just happened to be born Jewish. When reading him he felt Moroccan, he said, and yet history, historical movements, had amputated his country from him. I think he was very disappointed that Ben Jelloun did not stay to have coffee with him and did not even give him his address or phone number in Paris, but merely said to send his publisher, Le Seuil, a copy of the magazine where the poem appeared.

T
he magazine had not received many stories, as we hadn’t published the first issue yet and few people knew about us, but then we received a short story through Jules, who was on the editorial team, he was a friend of the Sabra’s, I remember the story clearly, it was called “24 Hours in the Life of a Madman,” and I recall it was hysterical and the gist was that the Nazis were right and that the narrator had to be exterminated, that’s how he narrated it, I think it already put me in mind of Bukowski before I read it, it was that sort of thing, and none of the other three editors liked it, I think it even scared them but I liked it, I remember exactly what I thought, “Damn, this guy really is crazy!”, in those exact words, and I said I’d like to meet him, and he did turn out to be truly crazy, as you’d expect from a South American writer, like all those young people who went missing in Argentina, eccentric. Eccentric in a country where it seemed to me that all the artists were normal and bourgeois. I understand South American writers, being one myself, and we became instant close friends and for a time we even lived together in the Neve Yaakov district, we even wrote a collection of stories together. In the end, we published a poem of his in the first issue but his story never made it into print. He joined the editorial team starting with issue 2 and he was always arguing with the Sabra, calling him an idiot and a lousy writer and the Sabra said the same about him, and I defended them both, separately, until they became friends.

H
e arrived in Spain like a shadow, seemingly no longer the person I had last seen in Tetouan. He traveled by himself but was not himself. Then who was he? He was still the boy who had been my best friend until three years earlier, he left and I was left alone in that city, one more year till we went to Madrid, alone at school, alone in the streets, at the Hípica sports club, or at the club we had founded, alone with all the girls who showed up at our parties, me alone, where before it had been the two of us and the girls, lots of girls, girls who wanted to feel hands on their little boobs for the first time and girls who were off limits, jealous girls, funny girls, affectionate girls, girls trying to hold onto childhood and girls trying to grow up fast though they had no choice but to be thirteen. He left after his bar mitzvah, three months later, and before mine, he wasn’t at mine. And now that he was traveling, a month at my place. At first I couldn’t figure out what to do with him, he wanted to walk to synagogue while I preferred the bus, it was a long hike from the Calle Orense to Balmes, and I didn’t even want to go to synagogue, my father forced me to go, sometimes I went and sometimes I argued. He got religious after his brother died, which I didn’t fully understand at that age, and when a friend offered him a joint, he said he didn’t smoke, thinking it was a cigarette, which became our joke for more than two years, though he never caught on. And he was the same, he was still the same best friend, with his jokes and his good humor and good will and always a dreamer but always trying to get along with everyone, which was impossible. He told me he wanted to be a writer. He already knew that at an age when none of us knew for sure what we would do the next day, he wanted to be a writer but he made lots of grammatical errors, this seemed very strange to me, but he was my best friend. He came back to Madrid a few years later, in ’78 or ’79 or ’80, I believe, and by then I was already studying engineering, I didn’t have much time for him, for the new him, he had become an Israeli, he was very reserved and said very little, he looked bad, worse than in ’75 and it seemed like maybe he was a virgin, and I honestly didn’t have the energy to spend time with him. I had moved on.

H
e had a literary group, him and two friends, who all complained constantly about being ignored, they considered themselves the cream of Israeli literature and who knows, maybe they were, a group of exceptionally gifted poets, writers, novelists, but they were against everyone and everything, they were against European literature and at the time they thought that after many changes, people needed to write a new Hebrew literature, like the Midrash or Talmud or the Biblical prophesies, I was friends with the redhead and even slept with him occasionally though I wasn’t his girlfriend, we were also neighbors and sometimes got together for tea. Later I moved to Galilee.

That year they had a party to mark the magazine’s fourth issue, they wouldn’t publish my poems but they invited me to the party. One thing they didn’t lack was chutzpah. The party was in one of the halls at Binyané Hauma, where the Sabra worked weekends, in fact he became the master of tens of thousands of square feet and that was his empire. He did as he pleased there, and as far as I know he never got in trouble because no one found out what went on there on the weekends, or if he did I never heard about it. They generally gathered there along with three other poets in the group who took turns attending, and they would argue about poetry, but that Friday they decided to use the space to celebrate the publication of issue 4 of the magazine. To everybody’s great surprise, I think everyone who got the more or less secret invitations—so no one would find out—showed up, as did their friends. I guess there were thirty or even forty of us. First there were readings of poems and prose from the magazine, during which you could see looks of pain, especially on the face of the Sabra, who, though the poorest of the three, had put the most money into the magazine, and he began attacking all the critics who said nothing of their efforts, and then all his friends from college who ignored us, and his professors, he was very disappointed. Meanwhile everyone started drinking, I think they’d brought vodka, the cheapest drink in those days.

Suddenly the complaints became shouting and even weeping, two poets sobbing and the others soothing them, like in a nursery school, it seems someone criticized the pagination, and the Sabra’s and the redhead’s fraying nerves snapped and they burst into shouts and tears. Both were exhausted from the effort of publishing the magazine, besides three books written by the three editors, who were founding a publishing house called Marot, like the magazine, and the magazine’s writers were referred to as “The Men of Marot,” Marot means mirrors in Hebrew but also visions, men of mirrors and men of visions, both at once. The idea came from Borges, but even Borges never knew that Hebrew had one word for mirror and vision.