Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) (8 page)

But this is your book and you dream about it, and this one, like all books, is not mine, it is not my book. You inspired it through your words, through your book. For years I’ve wanted to write a novel in Spanish, but only poems piled up, more and more poems. My Spanish language only allowed for poems, but you opened that door for me and this is your book. But not a novel, or maybe so, Tabucchi calls everything a novel, although that’s for marketing purposes. Any book called a novel sells better than those called something else. “Ansina es”, “that’s how it is”, we would say in Tetouan. We’ll call it a novel but to me it’s a book, words, thoughts, but not a story. It’s about characters who cross paths once in a while and create a world that never convinces me. They don’t convince me that it’s truth, or even imaginary. Novels disappoint me so much that I almost never finish them and I open a book of poetry to the middle to breathe in some sincere air. That’s what’s missing for me in novels, sincerity. It seems as though the writer makes a lot of decisions with book sales in mind, either consciously or unconsciously, something that is almost ridiculous to do in poetry.

That’s what I’m searching for in this prose, sincerity, a road not taken, a path full of trees whose fruit no one has eaten.

And this is your book, but I don’t know you, while at the same time I have always known you.

You ask me if I remember the Arabic teacher. Vaguely, but who I do remember is the Arabic teacher who I think came after you left, Monsieur Sitbon, who really liked to caress the girls. I would always argue with him. He was very tall and handsome, but like the Hebrew teacher, he was always an outsider, coming from the French part of Morocco. The other Arabic teacher, whose husband was in jail; yes, I remember her, she was an Arab. I think she gave me private Arabic classes for a few months because I didn’t have very good grades. At school we studied Arabic, Hebrew and English, and the classes were given in French. But they didn’t teach us Spanish even though all of us spoke it, students and teachers. Were they ashamed of their mother tongue? At one time there were French thinkers who believed the world would be better off if everyone spoke French. In 1950, they did a study on the rate of illiteracy among Jews, and it came to fifty percent. When I read that I said it couldn’t possibly be true, all the men had to know how to read Hebrew to pray, at least a few lines. Then I read that only fifty percent knew French. There are ridiculous things in this world: at that time, only those who knew how to read in French were literate. The illiterate ones were actually the French people who created the study.

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T
hursday

ºººººººººº

Maybe on a Thursday like today

I’ll find you among some trees

the last trees of a great city, and you’ll ask me innocently in Spanish, where is Calderón street?

and when I hear your sweet Spanish

I’ll see the sea from my childhood

a couple of waves and a lot of clouds

and your words will caress me

My eyes will stay fixed on you

as if you had disappeared

inside my mind forever

and after a long while I’ll tell you

that’s the street I never stopped looking for and your smile will be the sea

But maybe

we will never find each other

all of our lives lost

in the forest of coincidences maybe

we are one street away from each other but we will never know

we exist.

A little air in the middle of so many words, half of a page left white, a poem I wrote you before knowing you, meeting you, or even imagining your existence.

Because today it’s cold out, the clouds are covering the sky and it’s raining, and I have to tell you that bad times are coming. It’s the law of the fat cows and the skinny cows, times without water and without food, times when the earth tires of giving us fruit and the cows die. We can’t do anything about this, and many will perish. It’s not a prophecy, it’s the logic of seeing. And it rains, but the suns always comes out in the end in these lands. It doesn’t hide for long, one day, two, sometimes three, but not like in Paris or London. My brother calls me saying he needs the sun, that he hasn’t seen the sun in six weeks. In Tetouan, the sun wouldn’t disappear for long either. I remember a cloudy day in 1996 when I went there on vacation to look for my footprints, and I asked the taxi driver if it was going to rain. He said “No way! There’s an easterly wind.” Okay, who could have known that in Tetouan it only rains with a westerly wind. It’s not like here, where there is hardly ever a westerly wind, the wind always comes from the sea, sometimes the desert, but not from the mountains. And this is your book, I’m writing it to you to in some way realize that dream of getting married and living with a woman from Tetouan, that genetic dream of all our great emigrants who returned from Brazil or Oran to Tetouan to find a woman who was “one of us” and then returned with her to their adoptive countries, telling their children they were from Tetouan, that they were the true Sephardic Jews, and they would teach them words in Haketia. Once I met one of them at a party full of French people. His great-grandfather had gone to Oran in eighteen sixty-something and they introduced me to him saying I was from Tetouan. He asked me over and over again if I was really born in Tetouan, “Ça veut dire, que tu es vraiment né a Tetouan?”, which made me wonder if I had done something wrong. Then he told me that it was the first time he had met someone who was truly from Tetouan, but that his parents and grandparents always told him about that mythical city, that in Oran they were called the Spaniards, and they didn’t marry local Jewish women. I hadn’t dreamed it; finally someone had told me I was really from Tetouan.  You see, I truly am from Tetouan.

You don’t laugh like you usually do, and all of a sudden you have a sad air about you, that air that goes through our hearts once in a while. It is also very Tetuani, just like our hearty laughs. It’s a memory of someone who left us on the way, those who converted to Christianity and later to Islam, and those who assimilated recently. It’s a sad feeling of what can we do? What could we have done? Nothing, we couldn’t do anything, and today we still can’t do much. More than nothing, but it’s not much. How can we undo so much injustice throughout history?

But you smile again and once again we are those two children playing at recess or in the sand at Río Martil. We are freedom and we run, we go into the sea and the sea is ours. And then the sandwiches that mom brought us, and then they tell us not to go back into the sea, that it interrupts digestion, but we want more sea, more waves and more water, more salt and more happiness. And where did all that happiness go? Or perhaps it stayed there, walking on the sand, like in the song by Serrat that goes ‘my childhood keeps playing on your beaches’. I could have written that a thousand times. Our footsteps are still there, kissed a thousand times, cried on a thousand times. It’s like traveling on a train when suddenly you change tracks, and you see the track you should have taken. And you are the new track that could bring me back to the same path, but I can no longer return to experience that trip. We lived another trip, a trip that was not our trajectory, but from here we can continue onward and imagine the lost miles. In your book you guide me to return to my track, although it is only a track, missing a lot of footsteps, but since I’ve been writing you your book, I feel as though these are finally my steps, these are my shoes, this is my street, and there is finally a corner without prostitutes where I can wait for you.

Talk to me, ask me more things, remember unknown memories for me. I want to know everything you remember, I want your memories to become mine, and mine to be yours. Write me books, I want to read everything you wrote, to find myself in them, I want to be a character maladjusted to life in your books. I want to be that boy who watches me from the window and disappears without ever telling me when he will return. I want to be your brother and your lover, your voice and your silence. I want to be the most beautiful words you’ve written, I want to be the most beautiful words you will write. Give me life in your words, give me life in your thoughts, without them I am no one. Give me a face by looking at me, your look is the creator of my face.

And once again Serrat, now that I’m crying, a man crying for a secret woman, who says to that woman undress me, undress me, now that I’m crying, crying over my life, my pants lost. And the vests I always forgot everywhere, just like my children do, and my mother would scold me because I lost so many things. It’s just that I’ve never liked things much. I collect looks, the lost looks of women lost on the street, in the metro, in the subway. I collect the looks of pretty women who have given me their love for a second and disappeared forever. I never liked things very much, I always give everything away. When someone comes over and they like a CD, I give it to them, they like a book, I give it to them. A friend of mine always told me to stop giving thing away so much, but I don’t need those things, I need warm looks in cold cities, in cities where everything human has disappeared.  A smile is more than a car, and I don’t even have a driver’s license anyway.

What is the difference between a poet and a novelist? Poets don’t have driver’s licenses.

And now you laugh again, you laugh again and you’re seven years old, you laugh again and you’re fifteen and the boys dream of you, the boys want to dance with you, but you want to write one poem and then another poem about the boys. You want to dance alone on the sand, on the beach, naked, at sunrise. You want to dance free of everything and everyone, and that’s why you write poems, but you keep the poems from everyone. You are writing them to me, and I grab them in the air. I send you other poems about the girls I didn’t dance with, and our poems dance together, but the two of us don’t.

Next to the Tefillah in Tetouan, in 1996, there was a prostitute, a very young girl. Did you know that in Biblical Hebrew, prostitute and saint have the same root? Kdosha is saint and Kdesha is prostitute. Everything is already in that ancient and codified book. I saw her as I left the synagogue and then we ate fish with a Jew in the Spanish center, very good fish, of course. He told me he had stopped eating seafood, “we all become more religious with time”, and when I told them I was a writer his wife, suddenly and with pride, said, “One of these days you could win a Nobel prize”, as if the only thing people in the world do is wait for a person from Tetouan to show up. Well maybe the world is waiting, but in Israel no one was waiting for me.

So I got your e-mail and a new smile. I’m going to Tel Aviv to the sea and I’ll send some sea to you up in heaven, heaven, which in Hebrew is called shamayim, which means “there the waters”. I’ll send you a smile from the maritime sky of Madrid. You are on the way to an interview with Saramago, the
mago
, the magician. I should read his books, I tell myself, it’s getting to be time. But that time doesn’t come. I can’t decide which translation to read, the Hebrew one, or the English, Spanish, or French, and these are very important decisions, it could take time.

And I pass the time listening to Serrat, which always means that the trip to Spain is not so far away. ‘Oh, if I could be your coat to walk around with you!’, sings Serrat.

Yesterday in Tel Aviv I felt you so far away and yet so close, outside the limits of time. You were at the same time both the girl playing on the beach and an old woman yelling into my ear because I could no longer hear anything, and it all seemed normal to me. I was talking to a friend about you and he told me I’m crazy, I’m reckless. He asked me how I can make love to my wife after getting an e-mail from you, and I told him there was no problem. He asked me if I think about you, if you’re present. I told him yes, you are present in everything I do. I also told him that I saw you in my future, I saw us together in the future, living together. I don’t understand how or why that was in my future, but that’s how I saw it.

And then I tell myself, yes there were others before, you fall in love and you dream about those girls for two months, six, and then what comes from all that is a poem or a character for a novel. But this time, how many times have you said you see it differently, you say that this is indeed different. It surprises you that mutual understanding can be created without looking into each other’s eyes; it’s mutual understanding through words. Isn’t that every poet’s dream?

To create a world, a relationship, just through words. Where do words touch us? Do they have their own life? No, they are our lives. We live not on land and not under the ozone but on words and under showers of words.

In the beginning there was the verb.

Damn he who invented the pronoun.

I
t is Friday and he will Follow.

There are two f’s, frets, friends, no fly, no eye, Friday, the last day of the week, when God created man, the groundlings, the
glebeux,
as André Chouraqui calls them, the roundlings, the ones who will fill the earthly globe and the cities.

Today I live in the city, in Mynonbeing, the great city where for centuries everyone has been coming in search of gold. They stay because they don’t find it, or worse, because they find it, which doesn’t make very much sense, because in the city the gold is an illusion, a story the rich tell to fill the void, to believe that finding gold makes sense.

Today, Friday, I live in the city and am a slave to the city. I read the late summer sunset, I read the last moments of fresh air before the sun burns and the people of Mynonbeing disappear from the city in search of better air. In August the city empties and no one can explain what the skyscrapers and the streets are doing in the middle of the trees. The few tourists that walk down the avenues seem to be in a movie after a strange bomb goes off, decreasing the number of inhabitants on the globe.

But today I wait for him and he will come, he will follow.

He will come because today is Friday and because I know he will follow. He will come because for a year he’s been doing nothing but come and he arrives today on the train. He told me he was taking the train this time, a slow train to experience the trip, because a plane seems too fast to come to me. Although months ago he did write me a poem in which he told me we would find each other in an airport, “blessed airport”, he wrote.