Gates to Tangier (14 page)

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 Span
­
ish 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 st
­
ory 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 fo
­
r 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 talke
­
d 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 lac
­
k 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 st
­
ory? 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, th
­
e 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 waitin
­
g 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 Nightm
­
are
, 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
Daydre
­
aming
, both took five years, incredible for me. And I would have gone on looking for solutions to thousands of problem
­
s if it hadn't been for finding that editor.

But I expected more, from that inheritance, that will, more than just out of optimis
­
m but rather that I don't see how to turn this into a bo
­
ok. I expected more, I thought that a will like that was a great coup. But all of this seems to be endi
­
ng 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 bo
­
ok 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
Ope
­
ration Shylock
, by Philip Roth. I had heard that this book had come ou
­
t, 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 M
y Life as a Man
, and here is this book about a crazy Ash
­
kenazi 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 reme
­
mbered, and also those same changes I couldn't stand, page
­
s and pages of intellectual discussions and unrestrained self-esteem that makes Roth a very go
­
od 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 wh
­
en they tell me that my poetry is better than my prose I take it as a compliment. But two weeks ago, wh
­
en 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 excla
­
imed, "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 bo
­
ok 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 fe
­
w 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 Moro
­
ccans will return to Morocco, the Iraqi to Iraq, but what Roth doesn't understand is that the Jews as a pe
­
ople 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 Moro
­
cco, they went to Algeria. The Je
­
ws 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 to
­
ld 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 extin
­
ction 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, think
­
ing about Morocco, Tétouan does not exi
­
st, 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 f
­
eel most is your absence from the city, like I wr
­
ote in some poem, you feel your own absence and the years that you haven't walked those streets. Do the Po
­
les 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 repara
­
tions 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 after
­
wards they called crazy, reasoning that this happens everywhere, that everywhere there are people that kill others for many reasons, but that's not tr
­
ue, here they killed them because they are Jews, and it doesn't ma
­
tter 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 liv
­
ed 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 exist
­
ed, 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 def
­
end 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 imp
­
ortant fight, but that is not a reason to warp ou
­
r 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 wri
­
te 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 w
­
ant? 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 Moro
­
cco 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 Gormez
­
ano 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 ans
­
wer 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-de
­
ad 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 st
­
ore, 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 pi
­
mp, had seventeen Moroccan prostitutes working for him. One of the brothers finds him in Paris, si
­
ts 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, Brus
­
sels, 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 tho
­
se 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 aga
­
inst Jews, and one of his brothers dies in an att
­
ack 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 gentlem
­
an: What does Yusuf Elbaz do? And why are all my ideas so dramatic and full of ste
­
reotypes? Why do I see Moroccans in such a negati
­
ve 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.