Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) (2 page)

These things are not done, you just don’t do things like this. It is a serious attack on the logic of time, and there is no reason to get into those tunnels. I will pay for this, I told myself, I will pay.

And I waited for that voice of words in my writings to say something to me again; to tell me that this makes sense, or that it doesn’t, whatever. But I knew very well that that voice was not going to return in my life. I was alone, and now more alone, in knowing about Raquel’s existence. We were both completely alone in the world.

During those days I wrote:

I returned

Yes

and there was my love

looking for my footprints

leaving hers

unable to return to mine

that woman who always follows me

who is my shadow

always one street away from me

But I had left the streets, the parallel streets that never have corners on which to find each other. I had created a corner in time.

And now it would be my life.

That same week I told my wife I wanted a divorce. I told her she couldn’t come with me where I was going. She didn’t believe me, she didn’t understand me. I didn’t know how to leave, so I stayed.

And at that time I realized why I had started to write in Spanish after years of not writing in my mother tongue. It was necessary because Raquel was the reader. I was writing for her. It was for her.

Looking from the labyrinth to the heavens

“I had you in my hands but you were a bird.”

“Your hands filled with holes.”

“Your eyes watched me while you flew.”

“They weren’t watching you, they were watching you disappear.” “One day I will say, you were mine but I was never yours.” “One day you will say, I had her but she never flew.” “Give me your right hand, I will write a single letter on it.” “I cannot take even a letter of yours, they were always all yours.”

“Then give me your left hand and I will erase a letter.” “My left hand never wrote a single word.” “Then I will write a letter on the sun.”

“And that letter will reflect onto the moon.”

“And that letter will reflect onto the Earth.”

And every time you read it you will remember the pact we swore

to never break. The pact of our letter.

I
n which I explain how you can go from the age of eleven to thirteen without being twelve.

Raquel says there is a twelve-year-old boy who wants to speak and I don’t let him. There is a stifled voice there, she says. And when Raquel speaks, I listen. Or rather, I read. Every day Raquel writes me emails that I wait for impatiently. She always says something unexpected, illogical and out of place.

Then I think about books; I’m always thinking about words. Everything will have to end up in the form of words in a book. If not, nothing makes sense to me. The words live among the pages, and the pages among the words; and we poor humans live among the books. Words that move around the world and reach us or don’t, without having the slightest idea of who wrote them.

I think about that book, this book, about the twelve-year-old boy from so many years ago who I never really met. The worst thing about it is that he ended up without a name. He was born at age twelve and a half and died three months later, without leaving a mark on the world. He is still lost in parallel realities and paths that fork infinitely. I think that twelve-year-old boy is looking for Raquel. Or rather, he found Raquel and they live together with their two children. But parallel realities should never meet, or they will separate forever. That is logical, but it is only part of the logic.

I think that all of this, well, what will be all of this, began four months ago when, suddenly, without advance warning, the past came to meet the present. My neighbor, who always comes to my house on Saturday to have coffee, told my wife that Mr. Bernardo was coming to Israel, and my wife said that she wanted to see him. Bernardo, who my wife and I talk about a lot, was the last lover she had before we got married, around nineteen years ago. That’s a long time.

I didn’t like the idea much, but I didn’t say anything. The day she was going to see him I asked her where she was going. She said, I’m going to Tel Aviv to see Bernardo. I mentioned that I had something to do in Tel Aviv. That something was just to buy cigars. But I said, if you’re going to see Bernardo, I probably shouldn’t go with you. No, she said, come with me. I’ll see him and then we’ll go walk around. I’m only planning to have coffee with him. At that same moment something happened with the time. The date lasted five hours and I was waiting, but I didn’t call her. I waited for her to call me. Later came the pain, the pain isolated there and not experienced in its own time. I relived the month she went back to him, and I suffered a lot, wandering around the streets of Jerusalem aimlessly and without a goal, just looking for steps.

The steps were more books and more words. Raquel tells me I should be an editor, and she must be right. I should eat letters every day, to live on letters. Sometimes I think that I only exist in books, that I live in labyrinths of words that come to me without stopping, that appear without me calling them.

I get an idea, for example the one about the twelve-year-old boy that Raquel talks to me about, and I start to think. Then suddenly words begin to rain down and suddenly I see the entire books in front of me. This always happens to me at night, before going to sleep. At those times, if there were some way to transcribe exactly what was happening in my mind, entire books would fly out of the computer in mere seconds.  Yesterday, yesterday I saw the whole book about the boy, that stranger, Mois. That stranger, me.

But now, in front of my computer, things are a lot more difficult. Things don’t go as quickly and I lose track of an idea because of another one that wants to come out.

And you have to write the book in your language, Raquel told me. I write poems in Spanish, but prose is easier for me in Hebrew. That’s what I was waiting for, for someone to tell me to write in Spanish, like Raquel did, because she always tells me what I should tell myself. And now I realize that the topic should decide the language, and that Mois, lost in the strangest times of humanity, wants to speak in Spanish, or rather, as Raquel and I tell each other, in Tetuani.

Who is that Mois? When he was twelve they had his Bar Mitzvah, and at that moment the Jewish boy became an adult. At that moment, all the obligations of Judaism came to weigh upon him. But until that day I was Moisito, although my pride made me yell out from the age of seven, “MY NAME IS NOT MOISITO, MY NAME IS MOIS”, which didn’t make me any less Moisito or any more Mois. My childhood would never have been so sweet if they hadn’t called me Moisito.

But that Moisito who at twelve and a half suddenly became Mois was to become an emigrant three months later. His parents, with no advance warning, although it was something expected, decided on a summer day to wake up Mois and all his siblings and put them in a car that would bring them to Ceuta. From there Mois would reach the state of Israel, a transparent state, where Mois would become Moshe and where he was never really able to develop his personality. Moshe, yes, Moshe, was the name he had at the Tefillah and in the synagogue. It was the religious name. So Moisito, who had so wanted to become Mois, became Moshe. And from there a person went missing, Mois, and a stranger without a past was created, Moshe.

Raquel wrote a novel called
Leaving Tetouan
in which she describes how she left Tetouan. When Moshe read the manuscript, he felt as though he were the character traveling in the car towards customs, and since then he has believed that Raquel is a character from his novels and that he is a character in Raquel’s novels.

Raquel says that she wrote this novel for him, before meeting him. And I don’t quite understand why I talk about myself in the third person; I see myself leaving my body and watching myself from afar. But I know that I’m me, and that we are him, myself and that other him; we are two complete strangers, but we make one.

When I read
Leaving Tetouan
I understood why I always want to emigrate. It doesn’t really matter where, what matters is doing it in such a way that I cannot return (return, return, such a sweet lie). I say to my wife, let’s sell the house, the car, everything, and let’s leave; and she responds, alright, sounds good, if you want let’s leave, but first go to Madrid or Paris or London, or anywhere, find a job, and then the rest of us will come. My wife is right. Lately, there is a voice that keeps telling me I should listen to women.

“Where are you?”

“Looking for the exit or the entrance.”

“And what do you see?”

“I see a hall, a door leading to another door, that leads to another hall, that leads to another door, that leads to another hall.”

“And how long have you been there?”

“Since I left my house alone, without my footsteps and without my shadow; since I began to write poetry.”

“Yes, I know, I’ve also been here since I left my house.” “And do you also write poetry?”

“Yes, poems that are footsteps I don’t remember and memories without words.”

“And what do you see, my love?”

“I just see my footsteps, going from door to door, hall to hall, and poem to poem, and I want to leave, through the entrance or through the exit.”

“Do you see gardens, too?”

“Yes, I see gardens, but they’re not mine, they don’t have the same green color as my plants.”

“Listen, listen, you’re a voice.”

“Yes, finally there’s a voice, I hear your voice.”

“I always imagined your voice, but today I hear it.”

“Look, look, but not ahead like always, look up at last.”

“You see.”

“I see you, I finally see you, and you’re everything I imagined.” “Everything and much more.”

“Now I see, your labyrinth, I see how you can leave, it’s so easy.”

“So easy to see your way out.”

“I’m afraid to leave, years ago this labyrinth became my nest.”

“It’s fear of the sun.”

“No, it’s the fear of knowing that after leaving, we will only be able to see each other by looking up. We will never find each other.”

“Yes, my love, but we will finally both see the same sun. We will read the same book.”

I
n which I explain how time becomes heavier each day.

At the age of twenty I read the story by Borges called “The Garden of Forking Paths” and since then I have had a very strange habit. I always take at least two routes. If I have to go from A to B, I choose two possibilities, and when I begin to take one route I imagine I am walking down the other, and I imagine that my other ‘I’ is imagining myself walking down the first one. In two or three minutes I am no longer able to say which path I took. The thing is, I actually took both and I lived on both of those paths.

When Raquel talks to me I understand my books. In them appear French writers named Moise, and others who live in Madrid. Moshe, Mois, Moise; similar names, names lost from my life. I am not any of them, and none of them are unknown to me, but they are all strangers. That day in August, that hot summer day when we left Tetouan, we could have gone anywhere. To Mois it was all a mystery. We talked about Venezuela, the Canary Islands, Madrid, Canada and half the world that morning, that early morning, while slurping up a café con leche. For an hour, Mois was going everywhere. Until we reached Ceuta, I didn’t know we were going to Israel. Children, above all, were not allowed to say the word ‘Israel’ in Morocco. It was Eretz, land, nothing more, and it was dangerous for anyone to know that we were planning to emigrate, especially to Israel.

What happened during that hour? That was Mois’s hour, the true hour of his life, just as those lost in a cave explain how they experienced an hour that lasted a lifetime. That hour was an entire lifetime and during it Mois lived the most important time of his three months.

Raquel asks me if we are both crazy. I think so, but not those crazy people who live in asylums, we’re worse than them. We have entered a life where time weighs on us so much that we have pushed it aside. We live where only mystics can enter, and neither of us is very mystic. We are always looking for what is tangible, but we are really looking for that sure reality of a childhood in Tetouan, that reality that was nothing more than an illusion, an illusion like all realities.

Raquel says she thinks I am very seductive. I told her I am the least seductive person in the world. But I know she’s right; she’s talking about Mois and I’m talking about Moshe.

Mois liked girls, ever since he was a young Moisito. At age six he was already flirting like the older guys and he always liked to dance with girls, when the other boys were embarassed. He liked to touch the breasts that were beginning to appear, around age eleven or twelve. He remembers a party he organized with his cousin - it was all girls and the two of them. Mois danced with all the girls, and each of them got annoyed when he put his hands on them. They would say I’m not like the other girls, but they would always smile. Mois probably would have been very seductive, but when Moshe arrived in Israel he became a total prisoner. He never really had a relationship with a Sabra; on the few occasions he went out with women, they were always French or Spanish speakers.

Can someone change so much? Can a path fork to the point where it creates two completely different people?

Well that’s me. When I write in Hebrew, it’s as if the world began in 1972. It’s not that there aren’t earlier years, but those early years also begin in 1972.

At age forty I began to write in Spanish and suddenly earlier, far-off years existed, ones previous even to the year I was born. In Spanish I have a history, a long history lasting a millennium. I am a Sephardic Jew, I come from Granada or Seville, or Lisbon, and not just Tetouan. In Hebrew I come from the clouds and from the caves of Nebuchadnezzar, which is rather frightening and doesn’t make much sense.

Raquel says she has a fever this morning, and it’s because yesterday she saw the whole book with me, which would make a person dizzy. In one second there are pages and more pages, words that fight each other like sperm to reach the goal, thousands of words like an ocean storm.