Lucena (7 page)

Her tears were so beautiful and so luminous that one could say that they had their own light. So then, to break the ice, I told her that the chair would be repaired tomorrow. A tomorrow that would be eternal. She was not Raquel, but a great consolation for all the previous departures from her, and for those which were to come.

Seville, 1391. They attacked with the cry: “Christianize, or die! Christianize, or die!” When anyone doubted, they burned their house. And I shouted to Sara: “Woman, come on! Let’s live! It makes no sense to die for this.” But she stayed, sitting in her father’s chair that I had repaired for her, not wanting to move, and I tried to grab her by the hand to take her with me to the church.

“Don’t take the children!” she shouted. “Not the children. Better that they should die as Jews than to live as Christians. Death is better than to be slaves to the Bastard!”

And then the house began to burn and I pulled on her and the flames approach and quickly she says

“Grab the children so they can live!”

And while I was going to the church with the children, she went up in flames and became Saint Sara.

Perhaps she did the right thing. I can’t tell you. It may have been better to have had a righteous death there and not to have to live so many years and to put up with this perverted world for so long.

And 1391 was not the end either. Then there were the converted, the “Marranos” former Jews, and Jews, living all among each other and struggling against third parties. Maybe 1492 was the lightest with respect to the dispute between the the semi-Jews - the ones who converted- and those who were contrite who had lost everything. One hundred years, as though someone would think that the situation would again become what it had been, as if something could go back to being what it once was. There, in Seville, I understood that the Sefarad, Sephardic territory, (the Iberian peninsula) had been finished. There, Spain began but the Sefarad, where Jews had participation and inheritance, had disappeared. Among all the Diasporas, Sefarad was our territory. Only in Sefarad were we part of it, four hundred years, perhaps fewer. Later the situation calmed down a bit and up to 1492 perhaps it was possible to hope that something would change. But it was the new Christians who wanted to expel the Jews who had remained Jews. And the “Marranos”, since here and there some continued in their same positions and competed for the same royal duties and in the same commercial areas. “Were they Christians then?” The fact is, in Sevilla, almost everyone converted to Christianity, a few were martyred and another very few somehow continued being Jews. Sometimes the controversy occurred within the same family. Some felt very guilty.

From Brazil I went to Texas where I fought in the war against the Mexicans and where there was a large Jewish community. The Jews had already arrived there in 1880, from Poland and Germany. We fought against the barbarity of the Mexicans and that is how the Republic of Texas was born, which, for a decade existed as an independent state.

There I was very prosperous. I had a flourishing furniture business, since then people were again beginning to enjoy a comfortable economic situation.

It was hot in Texas. When they joined the United States, I decided to return to Brazil, and from there, to Spain. In that time, very few Jews were returning to Spain. I was among the first to arrive in Málaga. There was religious freedom but anti-Semitism was so entrenched that it could be felt everywhere. It was anti-Semitism by those who had formerly been Jews! That was the hardest. I worked with three Benarroch brothers, very well-established textile merchants. It seems that the son of one of them was the first of those from Tetuán to marry a Christian and convert. He kept his name and that is why today you can see Christian families named Benarroch. Evidently there are Benzimra Christians, too. There is everything. These guys, so very many years after fleeing, renouncing their countries and Christianity, to then see their sons marry Christians. An irony of destiny.

I wonder... my wife Raquel was martyred for this? But the worst is, that Raquel’s grandson had become a priest and tried to convince me to convert. And in 1450, more or less, he even got to the point of telling me that he would inform the Inquisition that I was a “Marrano”, that he would inform on me.

“For your own good,” he said.

“For my own good? Just what do you know about my own good?” I asked him.

“It is good to believe in God. Put your life in Jesus’ hands and you will feel redemption.”

“And then I will go kill those who don’t agree with me, like those who put their lives in Jesus’ hands and burned your grandmother alive.”

“They were wrong. People have to be convinced in a good way.”

“Do you mean to say that sending me to the Inquisition is a ‘good way’?”

“I mean to say that it would be better for you to convert to Christianity for your own good, so that I do not feel obligated, by my faith, and the laws of the church, to deliver you to the authorities.”

“You’ll give me at least a day to think about it, won’t you?”

“I will give you that because you are my grandfather, and because I take pity on your soul.”

“Perhaps Raquel was right, and I should have allowed your father to die in the blazes so I wouldn’t have to see you like this now...not to hear this conversation and the words that come out of your mouth.”

“In that way you saved my soul and that of my father who, unlike you, is a good Christian, not an old, recalcitrant Jew. What am I saying, old? You look younger than me, recalcitrant and obstinate. Haven’t you realized that Judaism is out? WE are the REAL Jews. The continuation of Moses, Look at the Jewish people. It has gone from grandeur to nullification, from gold to Shinola, from a shining light to darkness. Look at them, and look at us.”

“It would have been better to have died It would have been better to have been consumed in the fire than to see this.”

“You have time, until tomorrow.”

I remember this conversation Samuel, as if it had taken place yesterday. Evidently I immediately fled to the mountains and to Morocco. I understood that Portugal would not help us either. I understood that the Christians would never be our allies. Then I saw how the Jews were fleeing to Portugal, believing that there they would build a new Sefarad, but in fewer than ten years they realized that in the Christian world they were lost.

YEHUDÁ

One day I will get to Jerusalem. There my heart always beat. I learned it from my poems. Every letter I wrote in Hebrew, I saw myself distancing myself from this lavish land. But I know.

I know we Jews cannot live without Jerusalem. I know also that we will be thrown out of this Paradise. Today everyone says the road is dangerous, that we poets go insane, like Ibn Gabirol. Today they tell me it is inconceivable how I, a famous poet, with so many patrons, can want to leave. They tell me no exile was as good as that of Sefarad, that no country was as good for us as was Sefarad, not even Israel, not even Babylonia. That Sefarad is more ours than Jerusalem, and that the country could not exist without us.

Oh they tell me that there has never been such good poetry written, and knowledge begun to increase. And they tell me this and tell me that but my heart beats in Jerusalem, my heart is in the ruined Temple. I look East with my eyes, even when they are facing West. Oh, they tell me this and they tell me that, speaking of the end of our suffering, of the kindly life which awaits us.

But I know, my father, I know it is all false. I know it, my father. Tell me I am right. Tell me that I will live and die in Jerusalem.

To start this journey, I wrote my poems. The time has come for me to depart.

WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

I am going. This place, this city, has ended for me.”

“Where are you going?”

“I only know that I am going.”

JOSÉ MARÍA

Priest, son of a priest, I come to the end of the road. And I repent. Of what? Of not having been a good Christian. Of not having been a good Jew. Of not having accepted the destiny of my people. What do I repent of? Paco, my son, look at the name you also took on becoming a priest. Without knowing that your father is the son of “Marranos.” A thousand times I have said that it is over, that the obligations have ended, the debts, the sacrifices. I tried to be a good Christian but I saw my mother in my dreams, looking at me and crying, and when I ask her why, she is crying, she cries even more, and every time I say something she cries even harder. So I learned that when the dream appears, I simply have to stay seated in silence in front of her. She never stopped crying.

And if you were to ask me who will pray the
Kaddish
at my tomb? Worse yet, who will pray the
Kaddish
at my tomb? That is what I ask myself what I ask you, even though you are not at home, It frightens me that you will hear what I say, It frightens me that you know I am a convert, even knowing that you know it we both know it, but one doesn’t talk about that. How many priests have children? Only among the converts can there be three generations of priests. But if I don’t talk about this to you now, when will I do it? At least there is something good in that you are a priest. And that is that you won’t father more Christians. That you won’t have descendants. That with you the Christian line of the family ends. The shame ends with you. Others will continue on, others in other countries. Now I need warm contact with a woman, your mother. She died thirty years ago and I haven’t again had contact with a woman. I only gave myself hand-jobs. Like today, the old masturbator, priest who remembers his wife and expects an erection, the last one, the greatest one, at the moment of his death, with the one which no woman could enjoy. I have seen them confessing before me of the adulteries and fornications but at the moment of death, as though wishing to cling to one last moment of pleasure see the enormous erection as though to say I have won, I have beaten all the laws of all the gods and I have fornicated without end or without principles, I have died but I still hold up, I hold up with what I have. After an erection like that, who will pray
Kaddish
for me?

I remember, I remember my brother at age six. He went to Lisbon with an uncle. I was too old. Many years have gone by but only I only remember from when he was six, surely he has a son who knows how to recite the
Kaddish
at his tomb. Or maybe he died on the voyage. And now we are here in Vinaroz, at the end of this world, fleeing from the big city so I won’t be recognized, a priest for the simple people, Here at the end of the world, but my soul has no rest for me.

I cry and keep crying. Who will pray the
Kaddish
for me?

MIMÓN

I have to close the pharmacy and emigrate to Israel. Since Independence, Tangier is no longer what it was, there are increasingly more Moors with no money to buy medicine. Yesterday the cousins from Tetuán came, the Benarroch. The one who is my namesake comes frequently. He’s at the point of marrying the daughter of the Chocróns. He gave me an invitation so we’ll go to the wedding.

Here the strangest people are a group of Americans who come to buy all kinds of unusual medicines and hallucinogens. I think they’re all homosexuals and writers. The youngest is called Jack Kerouac or something like that, He speaks a bit of French with a strange accent. He is convinced that he will write the best books in the world. The oldest one is a Bowles. His wife also seems a little strange. One day I saw her in the alley hugging a Moor. There is a Williams who does heroin although I don’t sell it without a prescription, and another younger one called Gregory, perhaps his friend. Every day more writers and poets arrive. As though there were no places in the United States to write. There was even a Jew called Ginsberg who spent a few weeks here. What’s a Jew doing in Morocco?

Anyway, I must leave all this behind and go to Israel. Once the Moors take over, it’s all over. Everything will crumble and they won’t leave us anything. The Moors are more intelligent than the Spaniards or the Europeans. They have no need to throw us out or kill us. In a very educated manner they let us know there is no room for us. I have been told that close to Tel-Aviv there is a city called Ashdod where there are a lot of people from Morocco and Maghreb who speak French. I have to go. This city is filling up with Moors and crazy Americans. My cousin wants to go to Caracas but I finish my exile in Tangier. I’ll leave here only to go to Israel, not to another exile country. My cousin also talks about Canada, the Canary Islands, Madrid, France and Venezuela. He says he can’t establish himself in a backward country like Israel.

––––––––

W
HERE DO THE EAGLES SLEEP FATER?

-In the sky.

“How, mama?”

Sometimes.

“Why are the kids at school mean to me?”

Because you are different.

“How am I different?”

“You are Sephardic. You have darker skin than they do.”

“What is Sephardic?”

Many years ago my son, we lived in a country which at that time was called Sefarad and now Spain. In that country lived Moors, Christians, and many Jews. There we spoke Arabic and Spanish and we also wrote in Hebrew. And in that country my son, we were all friends. But since then so much time has passed that now we only know it from books.

“Why did you leave that country?”

I never lived there. I never left there, the Jews left that country because the Christians threw them out. The Christians wanted a country with no Jews.

“Papa, do they want to kick us out of here too?”

“No, here we are all Jews. You are only a little different because I am from Morocco and you have a Moroccan name.”

“And what if here they also want a country without Moroccans?”

“That will never happen. You’re just a little different.”

“Can’t we just go back to your country, Sefarad?”

“The land still is there but that country, Sefarad, is no more. It is a dream.”

“Like how we dream when we sleep?”

It is a dream we have while awake. In that dream those who return to the land of Israel were equal to those who lived there, nobody was less than another person. All were equal, even if the color of their skin or their names were different. I had that dream many times while awake, as I walked through the streets of Tetuán. I dreamed that never would they tell me, or you, that you are different.”